KINDRED SPIRITS
The Family Planning Clinic in Springfield was in a handsome old brownstone house on State Street, now a bit shabby but in good repair. R.J. had told Barbara Eustis that, at least for the moment, she preferred to come and leave unaccompanied, not believing that an escort offered any real protection. But now, as she parked a block away and walked to the clinic, she wondered about the wisdom of that decision. A dozen protestors were already there with signs, and as soon as R.J. started to mount the steps, the hooting began and the signs were jabbed in her direction.
One of the demonstrators held a sign saying “JESUS WEPT.” She was a woman who looked to be in her thirties, with long honeycolored hair, a narrow nose with sculptured nostrils, regretful brown eyes. She didn’t scream or wave her sign, she just stood there. Her gaze clicked onto R.J.’s, who knew they had never met but somehow felt that they knew one another, so that she nodded, and the other woman nodded back. And then she was up the stairs and inside the building, and the tumult was left behind.
First-trimester abortions were simple to resume, but the increased tension was back as a part of her life.
The horror was there every Thursday, the terrorizing took place all through the week. They identified her car almost at once. The telephone calls to her home began only two weeks after she started work at the clinic, and they came with regularity—the name-calling, the accusations, the threats.
Murderer, you’ll die. Die, die, in pain. Your house will burn, but it won’t be smoking ruins for you to find when you get home, because you’ll be in the ashes. We know the house well, on Laurel Hill Road in Woodfield. Your apple trees need pruning, your roof soon will need some work, but don’t bother to have it done. Your house will burn. You’ll be in it.
She made no attempt to get an unlisted number; the townsfolk had to be able to reach their doctor.
She stopped at the police station in the basement of the Town Hall one morning and had a chat with Mack McCourtney. The Woodfield police chief listened hard when she told of the threats.
“You have to take them seriously,” he said. “You must. I’ll tell you something. My father was the first Catholic to move into this town. Nineteen and thirty-one, it was. The Ku Klux Klan came at night.”
“I thought that happened only in the South.”
“Oh, no, oh, no…. They came at night in their Yankee bedsheets and burned a big cross in our pasture. The fathers and uncles of a whole lot of the people you and I know, folks we serve every day, burned a big wooden cross near my father’s house because he was a Chicopee Catholic who had dared to come here to live.
“You’re a wonderful woman, Doc. I know, because I’ve seen you in action and I’ve watched you closely when you didn’t even know I was looking. Now I’ll watch you even closer. You and your house.”
R.J. had had three HIV-positive patients, a child who had contracted the AIDS virus from transfused blood, and a man who had given it to his wife.
George Palmer’s son, Harold, came to the office one morning, accompanied by his friend. Eugene Dewalski read a magazine in the waiting room while she examined Harold, and then at her patient’s request she called Mr. Dewalski into the office while she discussed her findings.
She was certain that the things she discussed with them came as no surprise; they had known for more than three years that Harold Palmer was HIV positive. Just before coming to Woodfield he had been diagnosed with his first Coxsackie tumors, the onset of the full-blown disease. During the intake interview in her office, the two men sat and answered her questions with dry, expressionless voices. When they finished discussing his symptoms, Harold Palmer told her brightly that it was wonderful for him to be back in Woodfield. “You can’t ever take the country out of a country boy.”
“How do you like the town, Mr. Dewalski?”
“Oh, I love it.” He smiled. “I was warned about coming to live with a lot of cold Yankees, but so far the Yankees I’ve met have been warm. Anyway, they seem to be outnumbered by Polish farmers hereabouts, and we’ve already had two invitations to come over and sample homemade kielbasa and golumpki and galuska. We accepted them eagerly, too.”
“You accepted them eagerly,” Harold Palmer said, smiling, and the two men left amid badinage about Polish cooking.
The following week Harold returned alone for a shot. Within minutes he had collapsed into R.J.’s arms, weeping wildly. She cradled his head against her shoulder, stroked his hair, hugged him, spoke to him a long time—practiced the art of medicine. They established the relationship they would need as he entered the long, downward spiral.
It wasn’t an easy time for many of her patients. The newscasters on network television reported that the stock market index was rising again, but in the hilltowns the economy was bad. Toby became furious because a woman had made an appointment to have only her little girl examined, then had brought all three of her children for the doctor to look at. But Toby’s fury died when she realized there was no insurance and almost assuredly no money to pay for three examinations. That evening, on the television news, R.J. heard a United States senator reiterate smugly that there was no medical care crisis in America.
Sometimes on Thursday mornings she found a large group demonstrating in front of the clinic, at other times there were only a few people. R.J. noticed that they would show up to demonstrate during a single day of lousy weather, but they tended to dwindle away after several consecutive days of rain, except for the woman with the quiet eyes. She was there every Thursday morning no matter what the weather, never shouting, never waving her sign.
Every week she and R.J. nodded to one another, offering arcane, almost grudging concession of one another’s humanity. On a morning of heavy, lashing rain, R.J. came early to see the woman standing alone in the street, wearing a yellow slicker. They nodded as usual, and R.J. started up the stairs but then came back. Water was dripping from the woman’s rain hat.
“Listen, let me buy you a cup of coffee. In the coffee shop at the corner.”
They looked at one another silently. The woman made up her mind and nodded. On the way to the coffee shop she stopped to stash her sign in the back of a Volvo station wagon.
The coffee shop was warm and dry, full of the clatter of dishes and the ragging voices of men talking about sports. They took off their rain clothes and sat facing one another in a booth.
The woman smiled faintly. “Is this a five-minute truce?”
R.J. looked at her watch. “Make it ten minutes. Then I have to go in. I’m Roberta Cole, by the way.”
“Abbie Oliver.” After a moment’s hesitation she held out her hand, and R.J. shook it.
“Doctor, aren’t you?”
“Yes. You?”
“Teacher.”
“Of?”
“Freshman English.”
They each ordered decaffeinated coffee.
There was a moment or two of anxiety as they awaited the first unpleasantry, but none was forthcoming. Every fiber of R.J.’s being wanted to confront this women with facts—to tell her, for example, about Brazil, where as many illegal abortions are done annually as are done legally in the United States. The difference is that in the United States 10,000 women go to the hospital every year for complications of abortion, while in Brazil 400,000 women are hospitalized for the same reason.
But R.J. knew the woman opposite her no doubt was aching to present arguments of her own, perhaps to tell her that each blob of tissue she suctioned contained a soul screaming to be born….
“This is like a lull in the Civil War,” Abbie Oliver said, “when soldiers climbed out of the trenches and exchanged food and tobacco.”
“It is, isn’t it. Except I don’t smoke tobacco.”
“I don’t either.”
They talked about music. It turned out each of them had a passion for Mozart and admired Ozawa and mourned the loss of John Williams as conductor of the Boston Pops.
Abbie played the oboe. R.J. told her about the viola da gamba.
Eventually, though, the coffee was finished.
R.J. smiled, pushed back her chair, and Abbie Oliver nodded and said thank you. She went back out into the rain while R.J. paid. By the time R.J. came out, the woman had retrieved her sign and was walking in front of the clinic, and they avoided one another’s eyes as R.J. climbed the front stairs.