Matters of Choice Read online

  She spent the next couple of days investigating, gathering information, making lots of notes, scribbling figures and estimates. David Markus turned out to be a large, quiet man in his late forties, with rugged, somewhat battered features that were interesting in a Lincolnesque way (how could they have called Lincoln homely? she asked herself). He had a large face, a prominent, slightly crooked nose, a scar in the left corner of his upper lip, and gentle, easily amused brown eyes. His business suit was faded Levis and a New England Patriots jacket, and he wore his thick, graying brown hair in an improbable ponytail.

  She went to Town Hall and talked to a selectwoman named Janet Cantwell, a bony, aging woman with tired eyes who wore ragged jeans, shabbier than Markus’s, and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. R.J. walked Main Street from one end to the other, and studied the houses and the people she met along the way, and the flow of traffic. She went to the medical center in Greenfield and talked with the hospital director, and sat in the cafeteria and spoke with several doctors as they ate their lunch.

  Then she packed her bag and got into the car and drove toward Boston. The farther she got from Woodfield, the more she felt she had to return there. Whenever she had heard of someone who had received a “calling,” she had assumed the expression was a romantic euphemism. But now she saw that it was possible to be captivated by a compulsion so powerful that it couldn’t be denied.

  Better than that—this thing she was obsessing about made excellent, practical sense to her in terms of the rest of her life.

  She still had several days of her vacation left, and she used them to make lists of things she must do. And to formulate plans.

  Finally, she telephoned her father and asked him to meet her for dinner.

  12

  A BRUSH WITH THE LAW

  She had contended with her father from the time of her earliest memory until she became an adult. Then something sweet and good had happened, a simultaneous mellowing and blossoming of feeling. On his part there was a different kind of pride in her, a reevaluation of why he loved her. For her there was a realization that, even in the years when she had fumed at him, he had always been steadfast in his support of her.

  Dr. Robert Jameson Cole was the Regensberg Professor of Immunology at the Boston University School of Medicine. The chair he occupied was endowed by his own distant relatives. R.J. never had seen him embarrassed when that fact was mentioned by anyone. The original endowment had been made when he was a boy, and Professor Cole was so celebrated in his field that it would never occur to anyone that his appointment had come because of anything but his own accomplishments. He was a strong-willed achiever.

  R.J. remembered her mother remarking to a friend that the first time her daughter had defied Professor Cole was when she had been born a female. He had counted on a boy. For centuries, Cole firstborn sons had been named Robert, with middle names that began with the letter J. Dr. Cole had given the matter serious thought and had picked out a name for his son—Robert Jenner Cole, the middle name to honor Edward Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination. When the baby turned out to be a girl, and when it became clear that his wife, Bernadette Valerie Cole, never could bear another child, Dr. Cole insisted their daughter would be named Roberta Jenner Cole and would be called Rob J. for short. It was another Cole family tradition; somehow, to claim the child as a new Rob J. was to declare that yet another future Cole physician had been born.

  Bernadette Cole had submitted to his plan except for the middle name. Not for her daughter a male name! So she had reached into her origins in northern France and the girl was christened Roberta Jeanne D’Arc Cole. Eventually Dr. Cole’s attempt to call his daughter Rob J. also failed. To her mother, and then to everyone who came to know her, she was soon R.J., although her father stubbornly clung to calling her Rob J. in tender moments.

  R.J. grew up in a comfortable second-floor apartment in a converted brownstone house on Beacon Street, with giant antique magnolia bushes in the front yard. Dr. Cole liked it because it was a few doors down from the brownstone where the physician Oliver Wendell Holmes had lived. His wife liked it because it was rent-controlled and therefore manageable on a faculty salary. But after her death from pneumonia, three days after her daughter’s eleventh birthday, the apartment began to feel too large.

  R.J. had attended public schools, but with her mother gone, her father felt she needed more control and structure in her life than he was able to provide, and he enrolled her in a day school in Cambridge, to which she traveled by bus. She had studied piano from the time she was seven, but when she was twelve she began taking lessons in classical guitar at school, and within a couple of years she was hanging around Harvard Square, playing and singing with other street musicians. She played very well; she didn’t have a great voice, but it was good enough. When she was fifteen, she lied about her age and became a singing waitress at the same second-story club where Joan Baez, who also was the daughter of a Boston University professor, had gotten her start. That September R.J. had sex for the first time, in the loft of the MIT boathouse, with the stroke of the MIT crew. It was messy and painful, and the experience turned her off from sex, but not permanently. And not for long.

  * * *

  R.J. always thought the middle name her mother had chosen had done a great deal to shape her life. From childhood she was ever ready to do battle for a cause. And although she loved her father desperately, often it was Dr. Cole with whom she contended. His yearning for a Rob J. who would follow in his medical footsteps was a constant pressure to his only child. Perhaps if it hadn’t been there, her path would have been different. In the afternoons when she returned alone to the quiet apartment on Beacon Street, sometimes she went into his study and took down his books. In them she memorized the sexual parts of men and women, often looking up the acts about which her contemporaries whispered and sniggered. But she moved on to a nonprurient contemplation of anatomy and physiology; the way some of her contemporaries became interested in the names of dinosaurs, R.J. memorized the bones of the human body. On the desk in her father’s study, in a small glass-and-oak box, was an old surgical scalpel of beaten blue steel. Family legend said that many hundreds of years ago the scalpel had belonged to one of R.J.’s ancestors, a great surgeon. Sometimes it seemed to her that helping people as a doctor would be a good way to spend her life, but her father was too insistent, and when the time came he drove her to a declaration that she would take a pre-law course in college. As the daughter of a professor, she could have attended Boston University with a tuition waiver. Instead, she escaped the long centuries of medical Coles by winning a three-quarters scholarship to Tufts University, busing tables in a student dining room and working two evenings a week at the club in Harvard Square. She did go to law school at Boston University. By that time she had her own apartment on Beacon Hill, behind the State House. She saw her father regularly, but already she was living her own life.

  She was a third-year law student when she met Charlie Harris—Charles H. Harris, M.D., a tall, skinny young man whose horn-rimmed glasses habitually slid down his long, freckled nose and gave his sweet amber eyes a quizzical look. He was just beginning a surgical residency.

  She had never met anyone so serious and so funny at the same time. They laughed a lot, but he was humorlessly dedicated to his work. He envied her graceful scholarship and the fact that she actually enjoyed taking examinations, in which invariably she did very well. He was intelligent and had a good temperament for a surgeon but studying wasn’t easy for him, and he had achieved because he labored at it doggedly: “Gotta take care of business, R.J.” She was Law Review, he was on call. They were always tired and in need of sleep, and their schedules made it hard for them to see enough of each other. After a couple of months she moved from Joy Street into his converted stable off Charles Street, the cheaper of their two apartments.

  Three months before she finished law school, R.J. discovered she was pregnant. At first she and Charlie were te
rrified, but then they were filled with radiance at the thought of being parents and agreed they would be married at once. Several mornings later, however, while Charlie was scrubbing for the O.R., he was suddenly doubled over by a piercing pain in the lower left quadrant of his abdomen. An examination revealed the presence of kidney stones that were too large for him to pass naturally, and within twenty-four hours he was admitted to his own hospital as a patient. Ted Forester, the best surgeon in the department, performed the operation. Charlie appeared to sail through the initial post-op period, except that he was unable to void urine. When he hadn’t urinated in forty-eight hours, Dr. Forester ordered that he be catheterized, and an intern inserted the catheter and gave him relief. Within two days, Charlie’s kidney was infected. Despite antibiotics, the staph infection spread through his bloodstream and localized in a heart valve.

  Four days after the operation, R.J. sat by his bed in the hospital. It was obvious to her that he was very sick. She had left word that she wanted to see Dr. Forester when he came on rounds, and she thought she should telephone Charlie’s family in Pennsylvania, so his parents could talk to the doctor if they wished.

  Charlie moaned, and she got up and washed his face with a wet cloth. “Charlie?”

  She took his hands in hers and leaned over and studied his face. Something happened. A current of information passed from his body into hers, into her mind. She didn’t know how, or why. It wasn’t imagined, she knew it was real. In a way she couldn’t understand, she was suddenly aware that they wouldn’t be growing old together. She couldn’t drop his hands, or run away, or even cry out. She just stayed where she was, bending over him, gripping his hands tightly as if she could hold him back, memorizing his features while she still had a chance.

  He was placed in the ground in a large, ugly cemetery in Wilkes-Barre. After the funeral R.J. sat on the cut-velvet chairs in his parents’ living room and suffered the stares and questions of strangers until she was able to flee. In the tiny toilet of the plane taking her back to Boston, she was racked by nausea and vomiting. For several days she thought constantly about how Charlie’s baby would look. Perhaps grief did her in, or maybe what occurred would have happened even if Charlie were alive. Fifteen days after his death, R.J. miscarried his baby.

  On the morning of the bar examination she sat in a room full of tense men and women. She knew Charlie would have told her to take care of business, and she formed a woman-size ice cube in her mind and placed herself in its very center, cold-bloodedly putting grief and discomfort and everything else beyond her consciousness and turning her attention to the many and difficult questions of the bar examiners.

  R.J. retained the icy shield when she went to work for Wigoder, Grant and Berlow, an old firm that practiced general law, with three floors of offices in a good building on State Street. There no longer was a Wigoder. Harold Grant, the managing partner, was crochety, dried-up, and bald. George Berlow, who headed Wills and Trusts, had a paunch and a veined, whiskeyreddened face. His son, Andrew Berlow, fortyish and bland, was manager of major real estate clients. He put R.J. to work researching briefs and preparing leases, routine tasks that involved using lots of computer boilerplate. She found it tedious and uninteresting, and when she had been there two months she admitted this to Andy Berlow. He nodded and told her dryly that it was foundation work, good experience. The following week he let her accompany him to court, but she remained unenthused. She told herself it was depression, and she tried to bear down hard during her workdays.

  When she had been with Wigoder, Grant and Berlow not quite five months, she broke. It was not an emotional train wreck—more a temporary derailment. One night when she and Andy Berlow had been working late, she joined him for a glass of wine that turned out to be a bottle and a half, and they ended up in her bed. Two days later he took her to lunch and nervously explained that although he was divorced, he was “involved with a woman, living with her, in fact.” He thought R.J. was gracious in her reaction; actually, the only man who interested her was dead. The thought caused the ice cube to crack and fall away. When she began to weep she went home from the office, and she stayed home. Andy Berlow covered for her, believing she was prostrate with love for him.

  She needed to have a long talk with Charlie Harris. She ached to be his lover again, and she yearned for his phantom child, his might-have-been baby. She knew none of these desires could be fulfilled, but mourning had reduced her to basics, and there was one area of her life that she had the power to change.

  13

  THE DIFFERENT PATH

  Her decision to study medicine was what her father had always wanted, but Professor Cole loved her and approached it with caution.

  “Is it because you feel that somehow you have to take Charlie’s place?” he asked her gently. “Is it that you want to feel and experience the things he did?”

  “That’s part of it, I admit,” she said, “but only a small part.” She had given this a great deal of thought and had reached a mature decision, realizing for the first time that she had stifled any early desire to be a doctor because of her need to stand up to her father. Their relationship still had problems. She found it impossible to apply to the Boston University School of Medicine, where he was faculty. She was accepted at the Massachusetts College of Physicians and Surgeons with a deficiency in organic chemistry that she made up in summer school.

  Student aid was inadequate for medical students. R.J. was awarded a one-quarter scholarship, and she expected to fall deeply into debt. Her father had helped her through law school, supplementing her scholarship money and earnings, and he was prepared to help her through medical school, although that would have been a hardship. But the people at Wigoder, Grant and Berlow were intrigued by what she was undertaking.

  Sol Foreman, the partner who managed medical litigation, asked her to lunch, although they hadn’t met before.

  “Andy Berlow told me about you. The truth is, Miss Cole, you’re worth much more to our firm as a lawyer studying medicine than you have been as a law clerk in the real estate department. You’ll be in a position to research the facts of important cases from a medical viewpoint, yet you’ll be able to write briefs as a person educated in the law. We pay well for that kind of expertise.”

  It was a welcome gift to her. “When do you want me to begin?”

  “Why not try your hand at it straight off?”

  So while she studied chemistry in summer school, she had also researched the case of a twenty-nine-year-old woman dying from aplastic anemia as a result of being given penicillamine, which had suppressed the blood-forming function of her bone marrow. R.J. became familiar with every medical library in Boston, and she delved into card catalogs, books, medical journals, and research papers, learning a great deal about antibiotics.

  Foreman seemed satisfied with the result, and at once he gave her another assignment. She prepared the brief for the case of a fifty-nine-year-old male teacher who had had a hip replacement in which deep infection, from inadequate filtering of contaminated air in the operating room, had smoldered for three years before bursting forth, leaving him with an unstable hip and a shortened limb.

  Following that, her research led the law firm to refuse the case of a man who wished to sue his surgeon after a vasectomy had failed. R.J. noted that the patient had been warned by his surgeon of the possibility of failure and advised to use a contraceptive device for six months, which he had neglected to do.

  The people at Wigoder, Grant and Berlow were very pleased with her work. Foreman put her on a monthly minimum retainer with an override that she earned more months than not, and he was willing to assign as many cases to her as she would accept. That September, in order to make things still easier, she took another medical student as a housemate, a beautiful, serious black woman from Fulton, Missouri, named Samantha Potter. With only minimal help from her father, R.J. was able to pay her tuition and living expenses and run her car. The legal profession she had rejected now made it possible f
or her to study medicine without financial hardship.

  She was one of eleven women in her class of ninety-nine students. It was as though she had been lost and stumbling and had finally found a clear and certain path. Every lecture was a source of enormous interest. She discovered she had been fortunate in her choice of housemate. Samantha Potter was the eldest of eight children, brought up on a share-cropping farm that barely achieved subsistence in any given year. All the Potter children picked cotton and fruit and vegetables for other people, turning their hand to anything that brought in a little money. At sixteen, already a tall woman with broad shoulders, Samantha had been hired by a local meat-packing company to work after school and summers. The supervisors liked her because she was strong enough to lift the heavy frozen meat and was well-mannered and dependable. After a year of pushing an offal wagon, she had been taught to become a meat cutter. The cutters worked with power saws and knives sharp enough to slip through meat and connective tissue, and it wasn’t uncommon for a plant employee to be seriously hurt. Samantha sustained a number of minor cuts and grew accustomed to bandaged fingers, but she avoided a major accident. Working every day after school, she became the first member of her family to gain a high school diploma. She worked as a meat cutter for five summer vacations after that, while she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in comparative anatomy at the University of Missouri, and she came to the medical school’s first-year human anatomy class with impressive knowledge about animal bone, internal organs, and circulatory systems.

  R.J. and Samantha developed a close friendship with one of the other women in the class. Gwendolyn Bennett was a feisty redhead from Manchester, New Hampshire. Medicine was changing quickly, but it was still pretty much a men’s club. There were five female members of the faculty, but all the department chairs and the school administrative posts were filled by men. Male students were called on frequently in class while women tended to be overlooked. The three friends, however, were determined not to be ignored. Gwen had had experience as a women’s rights activist at Mount Holyoke College, and she mapped their strategy.