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 c.o.xsackie 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 a.s.suredly 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 pa.s.sion 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.

42.

THE EX-MAJOR.

She had planted her garden during stolen half hours late in the afternoons, after returning home from her office. Several times she had worked through the dusk and into the darkness, and she had been forced to put her small tomato and green pepper plants into the earth during a misty rain, not good gardening practice for several reasons, but the only time she had available. It was catch-as-catch-can gardening, but something within her responded to the process, enjoying the gritty promise she felt whenever there was dirt on her hands.

Still, the garden thrived. She was harvesting greens from it late on Wednesday, bent over the raised beds, when a car with Connecticut license plates hesitated at the entrance of her driveway and turned in.

She stopped picking and watched as the driver left the car and walked toward her with a limp. Slim, but with a thick waist. Middle-aged, high hairline, iron-gray hair and brushy mustache.

"Dr. Cole?"

"Yes."

"I'm Joe Fallon."

For a moment the name meant nothing, and then she remembered David telling her of the rocket attack that had wounded him, killing a chaplain whose name she didn't remember, and hitting the third chaplain in the troop carrier.

Involuntarily she looked at his legs.

He was perceptive. "Yeah." He lifted his right knee and rapped his knuckles against his lower leg, a solid thunking. "That Joe Fallon," he said, and grinned.

"Were you the lieutenant or the major?"

"The major. The lieutenant was Bernie Towers, may he rest. But I haven't been a major for a long time. Haven't been a priest for a long time, for that matter."

He apologized for dropping in on her without notice. "I'm on my way to a retreat with the Trappists at the monastery in Spencer. Due there tomorrow, and I saw on the map that I could come by here with only a little detour. I'd like to talk with you about David."

"How did you find this place?"

"I stopped at the firehouse and asked how to get to where you lived." He had a nice smile, an Irish charmer's smile.

"Come into the house."

He sat in the kitchen and watched while she washed the greens.

"Have you eaten?"

"No. If you're free, I'd like to take you to dinner."

"Very few restaurants in the hills, and a long way to drive. I was about to make a very simple supper, eggs and salad. Would you care for some?"

"It would be very nice."

So she tore lettuce and arugula, cut up a store-bought tomato, scrambled eggs, toasted frozen bread, set the food on the kitchen table. "Why did you stop being a priest?"

"I wanted to get married," he said, so easily that she knew he'd answered the question many times before. He bent his head. "For what we are about to receive, we thank you."

"Amen." Ill at ease, she stifled a desire to eat too fast. "What do you do now?"

"College professor. Loyola University, Chicago."

"You've seen him, haven't you?"

"Yes, I have." Fallon broke toast, dropped it into his salad and pushed it around with his fork to soak up the dressing.

"Recently?"

"Fairly recently."

"He got in touch with you, did he? Told you where he was?"

"Yes."

She tried to blink back the tears of fury that sprang into her eyes.

"It's complicated. I'm his friend-maybe his best friend-but I'm just good buddy Joe. So he could let me see him in ... an emotionally frail condition. You are terribly important to him in a very different way, and he couldn't risk it."

"Couldn't risk letting me know he was alive, all those months? I know what Sarah meant to him. What her loss must have done to him. But I'm a human being too, and he showed no regard. Certainly no love."

Fallon sighed. "There's a lot you can't be expected to understand."

"Try me."

"It began for us in Vietnam. There were these two priests and a rabbi, like the beginning of a bigot's joke. David and Bernie Towers and me. All day long the three chaplains would try to offer comfort to the maimed and the dying in the hospitals. In the evening we'd write letters to the families of the dead, and then the three of us would go out on the town, tear up the pea patch. We lapped up a whole lot of alcohol.

"Bernie drank as much as David and me but he was a special priest, like a rock where his vocation was concerned. I was already having trouble keeping my vows, and it was to the Jew I turned for talk and understanding, instead of to my fellow priest. David and I became very close over there." He shook his head.

"It's strange, really. I've always felt I should have been the one to be killed instead of that wonderful priest Bernie, but ..." He shrugged. "A mysterious way. His wonders to perform.

"When we got back to the States, I knew I had to leave the priesthood, and I couldn't face it. I became a real lush. David spent a lot of time with me, got me started in A.A., straightened me out. And then when his wife died, it was my turn to help him, and now it's my turn again. He's worth it, believe me. But he's a man who is not without problems," he said, and she grunted in agreement. When she started to take the things away from the table, he stood and helped. She put coffee on, and they went into the living room.

"What do you teach?"

"History of religion."

"Loyola. Catholic school," she observed.

"Well, I'm still very much a Catholic. Did everything by the book, like an old soldier. Asked the Pope's permission to renounce my priestly vows, and the request was granted. Dorothy-my wife now-did the same. She was a nun."

"You and David ... you've stayed in close touch ever since the army?"

"In close touch most of the time. Yes, we're members of a small but growing movement. Part of the larger group of theological pacifists. After Vietnam we each knew we never wanted to see war again. We gravitated to certain kinds of seminars and workshops, and it became obvious that there were a number of us, clergymen and theologians of every religious stripe, who all felt pretty much the same." He broke off as she went to pour the coffee and bring it back. When she gave him the cup he took a sip, nodded and resumed.

"See, all over the world, and ever since humanity was born, people have believed in the existence of a greater power, and they have yearned desperately to break through to the deity. Novenas are said, b'rokhot are sung, candles are lit, donations are made, prayer wheels are spun. Holy men rise, kneel, prostrate themselves. They call on Allah, Buddha, Siva, Jehovah, Jesus, and a wide variety of weak and powerful saints. We each have our unique vision of G.o.d. We each believe our candidate is the genuine article and all the others are fakes. To prove it, we've spent century after century killing the followers of the false religions, telling ourselves we're doing the holy work of the one true G.o.d. Catholics and Protestants still kill one another, Jews and Moslems, Moslems and Hindus, Sunnites and Shiites. And on and on.

"So ... after Vietnam we began to recognize kindred souls, men and women in religion who believed we could each look for G.o.d in our own way without waving our b.l.o.o.d.y swords. We were attracted to one another, and we've formed a very loose group-we call it the Peaceful G.o.dhead. We're working to raise money from religious orders and foundations. I know of a piece of land and a building that's available in Colorado, and we'd like to buy it and set up a study center where people of every religion can meet and talk about the search for true salvation, the best religion, which is permanent world peace."

"And David is a member of ... the Peaceful G.o.dhead."

"Indeed he is."

"But he's an agnostic!"

"Oh. Forgive my impertinence, but it's obvious that in some ways you don't know him at all. Please don't take offense."

"That's true, I'm aware I don't know him," she said sullenly.

"He talks a great agnosticism. But deep where he lives-and I know whereof I speak-he believes that something, a greater being than he, is directing his existence and the world's. It's just that David can't identify the power in terms precise enough to satisfy him, and so he drives himself nuts. He's perhaps the most religious man I've ever met." He paused. "I'm certain, after talking to him, that he plans to try and explain his actions to you in person someday soon."

She felt sad, frustrated. She had felt that Sarah and David had offered her a warm and quiet life after a stormy and unhappy one. But Sarah was dead. And David was ... away, chased by demons she couldn't even imagine and not caring enough for R.J. even to contact her. She wanted to talk about it with this man, but found that she couldn't.

They carried their own cup and saucer to the sink. When he moved to wash the dishes, she stopped him. "Don't bother to do that. I'll do them after you've gone."

He was embarra.s.sed. "Well, there's something I'll ask you. I'm on the road all the time, telling the different religious orders about the Peaceful G.o.dhead, talking to foundations. Trying to raise money to establish the center. The Jesuits pay for some of my travel, but they're not notorious for lavish expense accounts. I've a sleeping bag ... I wonder if you'll let me camp in your barn."

She gave him a wary, searching look, and he chuckled.

"Rest easy, I'm safe as safe. My wife is the best woman in the world. And when you've already abrogated one important set of vows, you become very careful about the other vows in your life."

She showed him the guest room. "Heartrocks everywhere in your house," he said. "Well, she was a fine young person, Sarah."

"Yes."

She washed the dishes, he wiped. She gave him a bath towel and a washcloth. "I'm going to be in and out of the shower quickly, and to bed. You take as long as you wish. About breakfast ..."

"Oh, I'll be long gone by the time you wake."

"We'll see. Good night, Mr. Fallon."

"Sleep well, Dr. Cole."