The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (137 page)

For her parents, each visit to Peoria was an opportunity to renew their Jewishness. They were sought after socially, because Lillian’s cousin, Judah Benjamin, had been elected United States senator from Louisiana—the first Jewish member of the Senate—and everyone wanted to discuss him with the Geigers. They went to synagogue at every opportunity. Lillian exchanged recipes, caught up on gossip. Jay talked politics with the men, drank a convivial
schnapps
or two, exchanged cigars. He spoke to them of Holden’s Crossing in glowing terms and admitted he was trying to attract other Jews there, so eventually there would be a
minyan
of ten men, allowing him access to group worship. The other men treated him with warm understanding. Of them all, only Jay and Ralph Seixas, who was born in Newport, Rhode Island, were native Americans. The others had come from abroad and knew what it was to be pioneers. It was hard, they agreed, for a man to be the first Jew to settle anywhere.

The Goldwassers had two plump daughters, Rose, who was a year older than Rachel, and Clara, who was three years older. When Rachel was a little girl she had enjoyed playing games (House, School, and Grown-up) with the Goldwasser girls, but the year Rachel turned twelve, Clara married Harold Green, a hatmaker. The couple lived with Clara’s parents, and that year when the Geigers came for the High Holidays, Rachel found changes. Clara no longer would play Grown-up, because she had become a real grownup, a Married Woman. She talked softly and condescendingly to her sister and Rachel, she waited upon her husband with sweet constancy, and she was allowed to say the blessings over the Sabbath candles, an honor reserved for the matron of the home. But one night when the three girls were alone in the big house, they drank grape wine in Rose’s room and fifteen-year-old Clara Goldwasser Green forgot she was a matron. She told Rachel and her sister all about what it was like to be married. She divulged for them the most sacred secrets of the adult sorority, dwelling with delicious detail on the physiology and habits of the Jewish male.

Both Rose and Rachel had seen the penis, but always in miniature,
attached to infant brothers or young cousins, babies in the bath—a soft pink appendage ending in a circumcised knob of smooth flesh dotted with a single hole so the pee could come out.

But Clara, draining the wine with her eyes closed, wickedly outlined the differences between Jewish babies and Jewish men. And, finding the last drops on the outside of the cup with her tongue, she described the transformation of sweet and inoffensive flesh when a Jewish man lay down next to his wife, and what subsequently occurred.

Nobody screamed in terror, but Rose had taken her pillow and was pressing it into her face with both hands. “This happens often?” her muffled voice asked.

Very often, Clara affirmed, and without fail on the Sabbath and religious holidays, God having informed the Jewish male that it was a blessing. “Except, of course, during the bleeding.”

Rachel knew about the bleeding. It was the only secret her mother had told her; it hadn’t happened to her yet, a fact she didn’t share with the sisters. But she was troubled by something else, a matter of the mechanics of measurement, of common sense, and she had been visualizing a disturbing diagram in her mind. Unconsciously she protected her lap with her hand. “Surely,” she said palely, “it is not possible to do that.”

Sometimes, Clara informed them loftily, her Harold employed pure kosher butter.

Rose Goldwasser removed the pillow from her face and stared, her face alight with revelation. “That is why we are always running out of butter?” she cried.

The days that followed were particularly difficult for Rachel. She and Rose, given the choice of regarding Clara’s disclosures as horrifying or comical, in self-defense opted for comedy. During breakfast and lunch, which usually were dairy meals, they had only to meet each other’s gaze to engender explosions of mirth so witless that on several occasions they were sent from the table in disgrace. At dinner, when the two families were joined by their men, it was worse for her, for she couldn’t sit across the table and two chairs down from Harold Green, and look at him, and make conversation, without thinking of him buttered.

On the following year when the Geigers visited Peoria, Rachel was disappointed to learn that neither Clara nor Rose lived in their parents’ home any longer. Clara and Harold had become parents of a baby boy and had moved
into a small house of their own on the river bluff; when they came to the Goldwassers’, Clara busied herself with her son and paid little attention to Rachel. Rose had been married the previous July, to a man named Samuel Bielfield, who had taken her to live in St. Louis.

That Yom Kippur, standing outside the synagogue, Rachel and her parents were approached by an elderly man named Benjamin Schoenberg. Mr. Schoenberg wore a stovepipe hat of beaver felt, a ruffled white cotton shirt, and a black string tie. He chatted with Jay about the state of the pharmaceuticals business and then began to question Rachel pleasantly about her schooling and the extent to which she helped run her mother’s household.

Lillian Geiger smiled at the old man and shook her head enigmatically. “It is too soon,” she said, and Mr. Schoenberg smiled back and nodded, and went away after a few more pleasantries.

That evening Rachel overheard snatches of conversation between her mother and Mrs. Goldwasser which revealed that Benjamin Schoenberg was a
shadchen
, a marriage broker. Indeed, Mr. Schoenberg had arranged the matches of both Clara and Rose. She felt terrible fear, but it was relieved by the memory of what her mother had told the matchmaker. She was too young for marriage, as her parents fully realized, she told herself, disregarding the fact that Rose Goldwasser Bielfield was only eight months older.

All that autumn, including the two weeks she spent in Peoria, Rachel’s body was changing. When her breasts developed, they were womanly from the start, throwing her thin body out of balance, so she had to learn about support garments, and muscle fatigue and back pains. That was the year when Mr. Byers touched her and made her life ugly before her father set things right. When Rachel examined herself in her mother’s looking glass she was reassured that no man would want a girl with straight black hair, narrow shoulders, a neck that was too long, breasts that were too heavy, skin unfashionably sallow, and undistinguished brown cow’s eyes.

Then it occurred to her that any man who would accept such a girl would be ugly himself, and stupid, and very poor, and she knew that every day brought her closer to a future she didn’t wish to contemplate. She resented her brothers and treated them spitefully because they didn’t know what gifts and privileges they had been given with their masculinity, the right to live in the warm safety of their parents’ home as long as they wanted, the right to go to school and learn without limits.

Her menstruation came late. Her mother had asked her casual questions
from time to time, revealing her concern that it hadn’t happened yet; and then one afternoon while Rachel was in the kitchen helping to make wild-strawberry jam, with no warning cramps made her double over. Her mother told her to look, and the blood was there. Her heart had pounded, but it wasn’t unexpected, nor had it happened while she was off alone somewhere. Her mother was with her and spoke soothingly, and showed her what to do. Everything was all right until her mother kissed her cheek and told her that now she was a woman.

Rachel began to cry. She couldn’t stop. She wept for hours and was inconsolable. Jay Geiger came into his daughter’s room and lay down on her bed with her as he hadn’t done since she was little.

He stroked her head and asked what was the matter. Her shoulders shook in a way that broke his heart, and he had to ask her again and again.

Finally she whispered, “Poppa. I don’t want to be married. I don’t want to leave you, or my home.”

Jay kissed her cheek and went to talk with his wife. Lillian was very troubled. Many girls were married at thirteen, and she thought it would be better for her daughter if they arranged her life through a good Jewish union than if they indulged her foolish terror. But her husband pointed out that when he had been matched with Lillian she had been past her sixteenth birthday, not a young girl. What was good for the mother would be good for the daughter, who needed a chance to grow up and become accustomed to the thought of marriage.

So Rachel had a long reprieve. At once, her life was better. Miss Burnham reported to her father that she was a natural student and would benefit greatly from continuing her education. Her parents decided that she should stay in the academy instead of working full-time in the house and on the farm, as might have been expected, and they were gratified by her pleasure, and by the way life returned to her eyes.

She had an instinctive kindness that was part of her nature, but her own unhappiness had made her particularly sensitive to those trapped by circumstances. She had always been as close to the Coles as if they were related by blood. When Shaman was a toddler, once he had been placed in her bed and had lost control of his bladder, and it had been Rachel who had comforted him and eased his embarrassment, and protected him from the teasing of the other children. The illness that had stolen his hearing had unsettled her, because it was the first incident in her life that indicated to her the presence of unknown and unsuspected dangers. She had watched Shaman’s struggles
with the frustration of someone who wanted to make things better but was powerless to do so, and she witnessed each improvement that he achieved with as much pride and gladness as if he were her brother. During the period of her own development she’d seen Shaman change from a little boy to a large youth, easily outstripping his brother, Alex, in size. Because his body matured early, in the first years of growth he was often clumsy and bumbling, like a puppy with new growth, and she regarded him with a special tenderness.

She had sat undetected in the wing chair several times and marveled at Shaman’s courage and tenaciousness, listening in fascination to Dorothy Burnham’s skill as a teacher. When Miss Burnham had wondered who could help him, Rachel had reacted instinctively, eager for the chance. Dr. Cole and his wife had been grateful for her willingness to work with Shaman, and her own family had been pleased by what they considered a generous gesture. But she understood that, at least in part, she wanted to help him because he was her steadfast friend, because once, in perfect seriousness, a little boy had offered to kill a man who was doing her harm.

The basis of Shaman’s remedial work was long hours piled upon long hours, in which weariness had to be disregarded, and he was quick to test Rachel’s authority in ways he wouldn’t have tried with Miss Burnham. “No more today. I’m too tired now,” he said the second time they met alone, after Miss Burnham had accompanied Rachel through Shaman’s drills half a dozen times.

“No, Shaman,” Rachel had said firmly. “We’re not nearly finished.” But he had escaped.

The second time it happened, she’d given in to anger that had merely made him smile, and reverted to their playmate days, calling him names. But when it happened again the next day, tears sprang into her eyes and he was undone.

“Let’s try it again, then,” he’d told her reluctantly.

Rachel was grateful, but she never yielded to the temptation of controlling him in that way, sensing he would benefit more from a steelier approach. After a while, the long hours became routine for them both. As the months passed and Shaman’s capabilities were expanded, she adapted Miss Burnham’s drills and they went beyond them.

They spent a long time practicing how meaning could be changed by accenting different words in an otherwise unchanged sentence:

Sometimes Rachel held his hand and squeezed it to show him where emphasis belonged, and he enjoyed that. He’d come to dislike the piano exercise in which he identified the note by the vibrations he felt in his hand, because his mother had seized upon it as a parlor trick and sometimes called upon him to perform. But Rachel continued to work with him at the piano, and she was fascinated when she played the scale in a different key and he was able to detect even that subtle change.

Slowly he graduated from feeling the notes of the piano to discerning the other vibrations in the world around him. Soon he could detect somebody knocking at the door, although he didn’t hear the knocking. He was able to feel the footsteps of someone mounting a stairway, although they were unnoticed by hearing people nearby.

One day, as Dorothy Burnham had done, Rachel took his large hand and placed it at her throat. At first she spoke to him loudly. Then she moderated the sonority of her voice and dropped it into a whisper. “Do you feel the difference?”

Her flesh was warm and very smooth, delicate yet strong. Shaman could feel muscles and cords. He thought of a swan, and then of a tinier bird as the beat of her pulse fluttered against his hand in a way that hadn’t happened when he’d held Miss Burnham’s thicker, shorter neck.

He smiled at her. “I do,” he said.

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