The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (142 page)

“This is not Europe. And they are not buying a cow,” Jason said thinly.

His cool note of refusal was answered at once by a conciliatory letter from Mr. Rosen, withdrawing the request and asking instead if Johann’s aunt could be invited to visit the Geigers. So a few weeks later Mrs. Ferber came to Holden’s Crossing, a small, erect woman with gleaming white hair pulled back against her skull and woven into a knot. Accompanied by a hamper containing candied fruits, brandied cakes, and a dozen bottles of kosher wines, she, too, arrived in time for the
Shabbat
. She took pleasure in Lillian’s cooking and in the musical accomplishment of the family, but it was Rachel she watched, and conversed with about education and children, and obviously doted upon from the start.

She was not nearly as forbidding as they had feared. Late in the evening, while Rachel cleared the kitchen, Mrs. Ferber sat with Jay and Lillian, and they acquainted one another with their respective families.

Lillian’s ancestors were Spanish Jews who had fled the Inquisition, first to Holland, then to England. In America they had a political heritage. On her father’s side she was related to Francis Salvador, who had been elected by his Christian neighbors to the Provincial Congress of South Carolina, and who, while serving with patriot militia only a few weeks after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, became the first Jew to die for the United States, ambushed and scalped by Tories and Indians. On her mother’s side she was a Mendes, cousin to Judah Benjamin, the United States senator from Louisiana. Jason’s family, established pharmaceutical manufacturers in Germany, had come to Charleston in 1819, fleeing the riots in which crowds
had coursed the streets looking for Jews and shouting “Hep! Hep! Hep!”, a cry that went back to the Crusaders, formed by the initials of
Hierosolyma est perdita
, Jerusalem is lost.

The Regensbergs had left Germany a decade before the Hep riots, Mrs. Ferber disclosed. They had had vineyards in the Rhineland. They didn’t have great wealth but enjoyed financial comfort, and Joe Regensberg’s tinware business was prosperous. He was a member of the tribe of
Kohane
, the blood of high priests in Solomon’s Temple flowed in his veins. If there was a marriage, she indicated delicately to Lillian and Jay, their grandchildren would be descended from two chief rabbis of Jerusalem. The three of them sat and contemplated one another with pleasure, drinking a good English tea that had come out of Mrs. Ferber’s opulent hamper. “My mother’s sister was named Harriet,” Lillian said. “We called her Hattie.” No one called
her
anything but Harriet, Mrs. Ferber said, but with such warm good humor that they found it easy to accept when she invited them to Chicago.

A few weeks later, on a Wednesday, all six members of the Geiger family boarded a locomotive coach at Rock Island for a direct five-hour rail trip, without changing trains. Chicago was large, sprawling, dirty, crowded, shabby, noisy, and, to Rachel, very exciting. Her family had rooms on the fourth floor of Palmer’s Illinois House Hotel. On Thursday and Friday, during two dinners at Harriet’s home on South Wabash Avenue, they met other relatives, and on Saturday morning they attended worship services at the Regensbergs’ family synagogue, Congregation
Kehilath Anshe Maarib
, where Jason was honored to be called to the Torah to chant a blessing. That evening they went to a hall where a touring opera company was presenting
Der Freischütz
, by Carl Maria von Weber. Rachel had never before attended an opera, and the soaring, romantic arias transported her. At the first interval between acts, Joe Regensberg led her outside and asked her to be his wife, and she accepted him. It was accomplished with little trauma, because the real proposal and acceptance had been accomplished by their elders. From his pocket he took a ring that had been his mother’s. The diamond, the first Rachel had ever seen, was modest but was set beautifully. The ring was a bit large, and she kept her fist clenched so it wouldn’t fall off her finger and be lost. When they slipped back into their seats the opera was resuming. Sitting in the dark next to Lillian, Rachel took her mother’s hand and placed it on the ring, and smiled broadly at the instantaneous gasp. As she allowed the music to carry her gloriously back into the German forest, she realized
that the event she had feared for so long might actually be a door to freedom and a very pleasant kind of power.

The hot May morning she came to the sheep farm, Shaman had worked up a heavy sweat mowing with a scythe for several hours and then had begun to rake, so he was covered with dust and chaff. Rachel wore a familiar old gray dress with dark heat moisture already beginning to show under her arms, a wide gray bonnet he hadn’t seen before, and white cotton gloves. When she asked if he could walk her home, he dropped the rake gladly.

For a while they talked of the academy, but almost at once she began to tell him of herself, of what was happening in her life.

Smiling at him, Rachel took off the left glove and showed him the ring, and he understood she was to marry.

“You’ll move away from here, then?”

She took his hand. Years later, thinking of the scene again and again, Shaman was ashamed he hadn’t talked to her. Wished her a good life, said what she had meant to him, thanked her.

Said good-bye.

But he couldn’t look at her, so he didn’t know what she was saying. He became like a stone, and her words rolled off like rain.

When they reached her lane and he turned away and started back, his hand ached because she’d held it so tightly.

The day after the Geigers went to Chicago, where she was to be married under a canopy in a synagogue, Rob J. came home and was met by Alex, who said he’d take care of the horse. “You better go see. Something’s the matter with Shaman.”

In the house, Rob J. stood outside Shaman’s room and listened to hoarse, guttural sobbing. When he had been just Shaman’s age he had wept like this because his bitch dog had turned savage and biting and his mother had given her away to a crofter who lived off by himself in the hills. But he knew his son was grieving for a human being and not for an animal.

He went in and sat down on the bed. “There are some things you should know. There are very few Jews, and they’re mostly surrounded by very many of the rest of us. So they feel that unless they marry their own kind, they won’t survive.

“But that didn’t apply to you. You never, ever had a chance.” He reached over and brushed back his son’s damp hair with his hand, then rested his
hand on Shaman’s head. “Because she’s a woman,” he said. “And you’re a boy.”

During the summer the school committee, sniffing after a good teacher who could be paid a small salary because of youth, offered the job at the academy to Shaman, but he said no.

“Then what do you want to do?” his father asked.

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a higher school over in Galesburg. Knox College,” Rob J. said. “It’s supposed to be a very good place. Would you like more education? And a change of scene?”

His son nodded. “I believe I would,” he said.

So two months after his fifteenth birthday, Shaman left home.

41

WINNERS AND LOSERS

In September 1858 the Reverend Joseph Hills Perkins was called to the pulpit of the largest Baptist church in Springfield. His prosperous new flock included the governor and a number of state legislators, and Mr. Perkins was only slightly more dazzled by his good fortune than were the members of his church in Holden’s Crossing, who saw in his success clear evidence of their intelligence in having chosen him. For a time Sarah was occupied by a series of farewell dinners and parties; then, when the Perkinses had left, the search for a clergyman began again, and there was a whole new series of guest preachers to feed and board, and new wrangling and debate about the relative desirability of the candidates.

At first they favored a man from northern Illinois who was a fiery denouncer of sin, but to the relief of several who didn’t care for his style, Sarah among them, he was taken out of consideration by the fact that he had six children, with another on the way, and the parsonage was small. They decided finally on Mr. Lucian Blackmer, a red-cheeked, barrel-chested man newly come West. “From the State of Rhode Island, to the State of Grace,” was the way Carroll Wilkenson put it when he introduced the new
minister to Rob J. Mr. Blackmer seemed a pleasant man, but Rob J. was depressed to meet his wife, because Julia Blackmer was thin and anxious, with the pallor and cough of advanced lung sickness. While he bade her welcome, he could feel her husband’s gaze, as if Blackmer waited for reassurances that Dr. Cole could offer new hope and a certain cure.

Holden’s Crossing, Illinois
October 12, 1858

My dear Shaman,

I was pleased to learn from your letter that you have settled into life in Galesburg and are enjoying your studies in good health. All are well here. Alden and Alex have finished slaughtering the pigs and we are luxuriating in new bacon, ribs, shoulders, hams (boiled, smoked, and pickled), souse, head cheese, and lard.

Reports indicate that the new minister is an interesting fellow once he climbs into a pulpit. To give him his due, he is a man of courage, because his first sermon was on certain moral questions raised by slavery, and while it seems to have met with the approval of a majority of those in attendance, a strong and vocal minority (including your mother!) offered disagreement with him after the church had been departed.

I was excited to hear that Abraham Lincoln of Springfield and Senator Douglas were scheduled to debate at Knox College on October 7, and I hope you had an opportunity to attend. Their race for the Senate ends with my first vote as a citizen, and I scarcely know which of the candidates will be a worse choice. Douglas thunders against the ignorant bigotry of the Know Nothings, but he placates the slave owners. Lincoln fulminates against slavery but accepts—indeed, woos—the support of Know Nothings. Both of them annoy me very much. Politicians!

Your courses sound challenging. Keep in mind that along with botany and astronomy and physiology, there are secrets to be learned from poetry.

Perhaps the enclosed will make it easier for you to buy Christmas presents. I do look forward to seeing you during the holiday!

Your loving
Father

He missed Shaman. His relationship with Alex was more wary than warm. Sarah was always preoccupied with her church work. He enjoyed occasional musical evenings with the Geigers, but when the playing ended
they were confronted with their political differences. More and more, in the late afternoons after his house calls were done, he guided his horse to the Convent of Saint Francis of Assisi. With every passing year he had a clearer understanding that Mother Miriam was more courageous than ferocious, more valuable than forbidding.

“I have something for you,” she told him one afternoon, and handed him a sheaf of brown papers covered with small, cramped handwriting in watery black ink. He read it as he sat in the leather chair and drank his coffee, and saw it was a description of the inner workings of the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, and that it could have been written only by someone who was a member.

It began with an outline of the national structure of the political secret society. Its base was composed of district councils, each of which chose its own officers, enacted its own bylaws, and initiated its own members. Above them were county councils, made up of a single delegate from each of the district councils. The county councils supervised the political activities of the district councils and selected local political candidates worthy of the order’s support.

All units in a state were controlled by a grand council, composed of three delegates from every district council, and governed by a grand-president and other elected officials. At the top of the elaborate structure was a national council that decided all national political matters, including the selection of the order’s candidates for the presidency and the vice-presidency of the United States. The national council decided the punishment for dereliction of duty by members, and it fixed the order’s extensive rituals.

There were two degrees of membership. To attain the first, a candidate had to be an adult male born in the United States of Protestant parents, who was not married to a Catholic woman.

Each prospective member was asked a blunt question: “Are you willing to use your influence and vote only for native-born American citizens for all offices of honor, trust, or profit in the gift of the people, the exclusion of all foreigners and Roman Catholics in particular, and without regard to party predilections?”

A man who so swore was required to renounce all other party allegiance, to support the political will of the order, and to work to change the naturalization laws. He was then entrusted with secrets, carefully described in the report—the sign of recognition, the handshake grip, the challenges, and the warnings.

To attain the second degree of membership, a candidate had to be a trusted veteran. Only second-degree members were eligible to hold office in the order, to engage in its clandestine activities, and to have its support in attaining office in local and national politics. When elected or appointed to power, they were ordered to remove all foreigners, aliens, or Roman Catholics working under them, and in no case “to appoint such to any office in your gift.”