("A puss-y cat ...") David let go of R.J.'s hand.

"Yes, covered with hair ..."

("Curly black hair ...") "And split in two ..."

("Split right in two ...") "That's what they call ..."

("'At's whatta-they-call ...") "Sarah's ring-dang-doo!"

("My ring-dang-doo-oo-oo-oo-oo!") "Sarah," David said loudly.

"Oh, G.o.d," Sarah said.

"Get into the house."

There was a spate of intense whispering, then a giggle. The car door opened and closed. Sarah ran up the front steps and past them without speaking, as Bobby Henderson's car shot away, made a tight turn in the barnyard, and went past the house again and down the road.

"Come on, I'll take you home. Then I'll deal with her."

"David. Calm down. She hasn't committed a murder."

"Where is her self-respect?"

"So ... it's a mistake in judgment. A bit of teenage foolishness."

"Foolishness? I should say so!"

"Listen here, David. Didn't you sing dirty songs when you were her age?"

"Yeah. I used to sing them with the guys. I never sang them with a respectable girl, I'll tell you that."

"How sad for you," R.J. said, and went down the steps and out to his car.

He called her the next day to invite her to dinner, but she was very busy; it was the start of a five-day marathon for her, nights as well as days. Her father had been right, her sleep was too often interrupted. The problem was that the medical center in Greenfield to which she sent her patients, half an hour away by fast ambulance during emergencies, wasn't a teaching hospital. In Boston, on the less frequent occasions when she was awakened at night, she almost always had been given a house physician's a.s.sessment of the problem and could return to bed after telling the resident what to do with the patient. Here, there were no house physicians. When she received a call, it was from a nurse, often in the middle of the night. The nursing staff was very good, but R.J. came to know the twisting Mohawk Trail too well as it appeared by day, at night, and in the dying dark of early morning.

She envied doctors in the European countries, where patients were sent to the hospital along with their charts, and a staff of hospital doctors a.s.sumed full responsibility for their care. But she was practicing in Woodfield and not in Europe, so she made frequent trips to the hospital.

She had terrible premonitions about driving the Mohawk Trail when winter came and the road was slick, and that week during the most wearying of those exhausting trips she reminded herself that she had wanted to practice in the country.

It was the end of the week before she had time to accept David's invitation to dinner, but when she got to his house, he wasn't there.

"He had to take clients up to Potter's Hill to show them the Weiland place. A couple from New Jersey," Sarah said. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts that lengthened her long, tanned legs. "I'm cooking tonight, veal stew. Want some lemonade?"

"Sure."

Sarah poured. "You can have it on the porch, or you can keep me company in the kitchen."

"Oh, the kitchen, by all means." R.J. sat at the table and sipped while Sarah took veal chunks from the refrigerator, washed them under the tap, patted them dry with paper towels, and dropped them into a plastic bag with flour and seasonings. After she had shaken the bag and coated the veal, she poured a small amount of canola oil into a pan and put in the meat. "Now, into the oven for half an hour at four hundred degrees."

"You look and sound like a great cook."

The girl shrugged and smiled. "Well. My father's daughter."

"Yes. He's a terrific cook, isn't he?" R.J. paused. "Is he still angry?"

"No. Dad gets mad, but he gets over it fast." She took down a trug basket from a hook over the kitchen counter. "Now, while the veal browns, we have to go outside and get the vegetables for the stew."

In the garden, they knelt on opposite sides of the row of Blue Lake bush beans and picked together.

"My father is very funny about me. He would like to wrap me in cellophane and not unwrap me until I'm an old married lady."

R.J. smiled. "My father was the same way. I think most parents would like to do that. They want so desperately to protect their kids from pain."

"Well, they can't."

"No, that's right, Sarah. They can't."

"That's enough green beans. I'll get a parsnip. You pull about ten carrots, okay?"

The earth around the carrots had been hoed a lot and they came up easily, deep orange, short and broad-shouldered. "Have you been going out with Bobby a long time?"

"About a year. My father would like me to meet Jewish kids, that's why we belong to the temple in Greenfield. But Greenfield is too far away for me to have really close friends there. Besides, he's spent my whole life telling me that people shouldn't be judged by their race or religion. Does all that change when you start dating?" She glowered. "I noticed your religion didn't come into the picture when he started going with you."

R.J. nodded, bemused.

"Bobby Henderson is really nice, and he's been very good for me. I didn't have many friends at school until I started going with him. He's a football player, and he'll be co-captain next fall. He's very popular so that's made me very popular, you know?"

R.J. nodded, troubled. She knew. "One thing, though, Sarah. The other night, your father was right. You committed no crime, but your singing that song didn't show a lot of self-respect. Songs like that ... they're like p.o.r.nography. If you encourage men to think of women as s.e.x objects, that's how they'll think about you, as meat."

Sarah looked at R.J., no doubt rea.s.sessing her. Her face was very serious. "Bobby doesn't think of me that way. I'm lucky he's my boyfriend. It isn't as if I'm this raving beauty."

Now it was R.J.'s turn to frown. "You're kidding, right?"

"About what?"

"You're kidding me or you're kidding yourself. You are a knockout."

Sarah brushed the dirt from a turnip, added it to the basket and stood. "Don't I wish."

"Your father showed me a bunch of pictures, in those alb.u.ms he keeps in the parlor. A number of them were of your mother. She was very beautiful and you look exactly like her."

Deep within Sarah's eyes there was a subtle warming. "People have told me I look like her."

"Yes, you look very much like her. Two beautiful women."

Sarah took a step toward her. "Do me a favor, R.J.?"

"Of course, anything I can."

"Tell me what I can do about these," she said, covering her chin, on which there were two pimples. "I don't understand why I have them. I scrub my face, and I eat the right things. I'm perfectly healthy. I never need a doctor. I've never even gone to the dentist for a filling. And I use face cream until my fingers fall off, but ..."

"Stop using face cream. Go back to soap and water, and use a face cloth gently, because it's easy to irritate your skin. I'll give you a salve."

"Will it work?"

"I think it will. Give it a try." She hesitated. "Sarah, sometimes there are things it's easier to talk to a woman about than a man, even your father. If you ever have any questions, or just want to gab about something ..."

"Thank you. I heard what you said to my father the other night, sticking up for me. I appreciate it." She came to R.J. and gave her a hug.

R.J.'s knees felt weak; she wanted to hug Sarah back, to stroke the girl's shining black hair. But she contented herself with patting her clumsily on the shoulder with the hand that wasn't holding the carrots.

23.

A GIFT TO BE USED.

As a rule the hills were about ten degrees cooler than the valley, summer and winter, but that year the third week of August was sodden with heat, and R.J. and David sought the shade of the woods together. At the end of the trail they toughed it through the forest to the river, hard going, and made sweaty love in the pine needles on the riverbank, R.J. worrying about hunters. Then they found a sand-bottom pool and sat naked in the water, washing each other with their hands.

"Heaven," she said.

"At least, the opposite of h.e.l.l," David said thoughtfully.

He told her a story, a legend. "In Sheol, the fiery underground world to which all sinners go, souls are freed every Friday at sundown by the malakh ha-mavet, the Angel of Death. The freed souls spend the entire Sabbath soothing themselves by sitting in a cool stream, just as we're doing now. That's why in the old days some of the ultra-pious Jews wouldn't drink water all during the Sabbath. They didn't want to lower the healing waters occupied by the souls furloughed from Sheol."

She was intrigued by the legend but was having troubling thoughts about him. "I can't figure you out. How much are you poking fun at piety, and how much is piety part of the real David Markus? Who are you to talk about angels, anyway? You don't even believe in G.o.d."

He appeared to be mildly shocked. "Who says? It's just ... I'm not certain G.o.d exists, and if so, what he is-or she, or it." He grinned at her. "I believe in a whole order of higher powers. Angels. Djinn. Kitchen ghosts. I believe in sacred spirits that serve prayer wheels, and in leprechauns and elves." He held up his hand. "Listen."

What she heard was the complaint of the water, confident birdsong, the wind through megamult.i.tudes of leaves, the velvet bee-drone of a truck on a far-off road.

"I feel the spirits every time I come into the woods."

"I'm being serious, David."

"So am I, d.a.m.n it."

She saw he was capable of spontaneous euphoria, of attaining a kind of high without swallowing alcohol. Or was it without swallowing alcohol? Was he safe from alcohol nowadays?

How healed was the weakness that lurked within his strengths? The errant breeze continued to move the leaves above them, and his forest imps nagged at her, pinched at the most sensitive parts of her psyche, whispered that although she was becoming more and more involved with this man, there was much she didn't know about David Markus.

R.J. had called a county social worker and reported that Eva Goodhue and Helen Phillips needed help. But the county authorities moved slowly, and before the call brought results, a boy came to her office one afternoon and reported that the doctor was needed at once in the apartment over the hardware store.

This time the door to Eva Goodhue's apartment opened for her and she absorbed the full blast of air so foul she had to fight against gagging. Cats were underfoot, rubbing against her legs as she avoided their excrement. Garbage overflowed a plastic container, and dishes bearing rot were piled in the sink. R.J. had supposed the summons was because Miss Goodhue was in trouble, but the ninety-two-year-old woman, dressed and spry, was waiting for her.

"It's Helen, feeling very poorly."

Helen Phillips was in bed. Her heart didn't sound alarming when R.J. listened with the stethoscope. She needed a good scrubbing, and there were bedsores on her back and b.u.t.tocks. She had indigestion, belched, broke wind, and was unresponsive to questions. Eva Goodhue answered every question for her.

"Why are you in bed, Helen?"

"She enjoys it, it's cozy. She likes to lie there and watch the television."

From the condition of the sheets, it was obvious Helen took all her meals in bed. R.J. was prepared to prescribe a new and stern regimen: out of bed early in the morning, regular baths, meals eaten at the table, and pharmaceutical samples for the indigestion. But when she took Helen's hands in her own, she was afflicted with a flow of intelligence that filled her with sadness and terror. She was shaken. It had been some time since she had experienced the strange and terrible understanding, the certain knowledge for which there was no explanation.

She reached for the telephone and dialed the town ambulance, willing the dispatcher to pick up the receiver. "Joe, it's Roberta Cole. I have an emergency and I need an ambulance fast. Eva Goodhue's, just down the street, over the hardware store."

They were there in under four minutes, a remarkable response time. Nevertheless, Helen Phillips's heart stopped when the ambulance was halfway to the hospital. Despite frantic resuscitation efforts by the ambulance crew, she was dead on arrival.

R.J. hadn't received the message of impending death for several years. Now, for the first time, she acknowledged to herself that she possessed the Gift. She remembered what her father had told her about it.

She discovered she was ready to believe.

Perhaps, she told herself, she could learn to use it to fight the dark angel whom David called the malakh ha-mavet.

She made certain she carried a hypodermic needle and a supply of streptokinase in her medical bag, and she contrived opportunities to hold her patients' hands every time she saw them.

Only three weeks later, making a house call to Frank Olchowski, a math teacher at the high school who was in bed with the flu, she took the hands of Stella, his wife, and felt the signals she dreaded to detect.

She took a deep breath and forced herself to think calmly. The chances were highest that it would come either as a heart attack or a cerebrovascular accident.

The woman was fifty-three years old, about thirty pounds overweight, and distraught and puzzled. "It's Frank who is sick, Dr. Cole! Why have you called the ambulance, and why must I go to the hospital?"

"You must trust me, Mrs. Olchowski."

Stella Olchowski went into the ambulance, staring at her doctor strangely.

R.J. rode in the ambulance with her. She fixed the mask over Stella's face and adjusted the flowmeter on the tank to deliver 100 percent oxygen. The driver was Timothy Dalton, a farmworker. "Make tracks. No noise," she told him. He used the flashers as the ambulance careened away, but he didn't sound the siren; R.J. didn't want Mrs. Olchowski any more perturbed than she already was.

Steve Ripley was troubled, too, after he took a set of the patient's vital signs. The medical technician shot a puzzled glance at R.J. "What's wrong with her, Dr. Cole?" he said, reaching for the radiophone.

"Don't call the hospital yet."

"If I bring somebody in with no symptoms and without submitting to the emergency room's medical control, I'm going to be in deep trouble."

She looked at him. "Go with me on this one, Steve."

Reluctantly, he put the phone back on the hook. He watched Stella Olchowski and R.J. with increasing unhappiness as the ambulance made its way down Route 2.

They were two thirds of the way to the medical center when Mrs. Olchowski winced and clapped her hand to her chest. She groaned and looked wide-eyed at R.J.

"Take another set of vitals, fast."