Thorns of Truth (29 page)

“I have no doubt you and your clinic serve a useful function in our community,” she replied in a voice that was as frosty as it was labored. “But you overstep your bounds when you provide more than is strictly necessary. It is
you,
Dr. Rosenthal, who are a threat to our community’s youth. By encouraging girls like Elvie to practice birth control, you’re implying that you
approve
of their immoral activities.”

“In Elvie’s case, the barn door was already open,” Rachel informed her. “She was almost twelve weeks pregnant when we examined her.”

Sister Alice, for the first time, looked troubled. “I don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head. “She was such a good girl.”

Rachel bristled at the past tense. As if Elvie Rodriguez were dead—or might be better off that way. “Maybe it’s something in your holy water.” She couldn’t resist the dig.

Sister Alice’s face betrayed no emotion. There was only the odd whistling noise that accompanied each strained breath, and the harnessed fury in her voice. “Keep in mind. Dr. Rosenthal … that the Church … has been in existence for thousands of years.” She brought a hand to her heaving chest. “Misguided crusades such as yours … are merely ripples … on the ocean. Enough to rock the boat … but not capsize it.”

A bell jangled in the hallway outside. Sister Alice rose, and stepped out from behind her desk. Her breathing seemed to have calmed, as if saying her piece had loosened the tight girdle holding her emotions in. But there would be no miracle, Rachel saw; if she’d come here hoping for a change of heart, if not mind, what she’d gotten instead was a dose of dime-store piety. Even as she extended her hand to Rachel, a faint ray of sunlight made Sister Alice’s pale forehead gleam like that of a plastic Day-Glo saint.

“I’m afraid I must excuse myself.” The regret in her voice was the final blow—she sounded truly sorry to be missing this opportunity to educate Rachel further. She was even gracious enough to add, “Thank you for seeing to it that Elvie is in good hands at St. Bartholomew’s. Her mother is very grateful. We will include
you
in our prayers as well,. Dr. Rosenthal.”

With a rustle of gray gabardine—a modified habit that fell to just above the ankles of the diminutive nun—Sister Alice ushered Rachel out into the corridor, tiled in toothpaste-green linoleum. Down this she glided as if on an invisible current, without so much as a backward glance.

Rachel, her head pounding with suppressed fury, stalked past the front office’s poodle-haired secretary, and through the double doors to the street. As she paused on the steps outside, her gaze was drawn to the detached building on her left, which she assumed was the chapel. Young girls in dark-blue uniforms streamed across the concrete yard separating it from the school building, most of them dark-haired and amber-skinned, the daughters of working-class Hispanics.

Watching as they disappeared through the chapel’s side entrance, Rachel was struck by how many of the younger ones—nine- and ten-year-olds in ponytails—had already begun developing. Before long, they’d be having sex. And next thing you knew …

… they’d be showing up at the East Side Center. Pregnant.

And what would prevent the next Elvie Rodriguez from panicking and doing something equally misguided?

Rachel felt helpless, just another administrator—not so different from Sister Alice—spouting opinions and doctrine in the absence of real aid. Where had she been when Elvie Rodriguez, alone and afraid, had aborted her baby with a crochet hook? That day at the clinic, if Rachel had sat down with her, taken the time to draw her out, hear her worries, maybe things would have turned out differently.

That was what she’d never been able to communicate fully to Brian. How critical it was—the situation of the girls and women who drifted through the doors of East Side when they had nowhere else to go. How tenuous their existence, and their trust. And how one missed opportunity could mean the difference between life or death.

Sometimes, all it took was an extra minute.

The trouble was, all those minutes added up.

Starting down Fourteenth Street—back toward the clinic, two long blocks to the east—Rachel walked with her head low, her shoulders hunched forward, more miserable and tense than before she’d set out to see Sister Alice.

By the time she reached the corner of Fourteenth and Second—where the four-story building housing the East Side Women’s Health Center stood as solid and reassuring as a lighthouse amid the surrounding tenements—the pressure in her head had become a nonstop jackhammer. Oh, what wouldn’t she give for five minutes to stretch out in one of the examining rooms! Instead, she’d have to settle for a couple of aspirins gulped down with lukewarm water from the tap. That, and maybe half a minute in her office to put her feet up.

As Rachel swept in through the plate-glass doors, skirting the waiting room with its usual crush of patients, the last thing she was prepared to deal with was her codirector, Kay, barreling toward her with a howling toddler in her arms.

“Mind holding him a sec? Mom’s in with Mary Ann having an ultrasound, and everyone else is tied up. I can’t seem to get him to stop crying.” Kay thrust the red-faced child at her. “You’re a mother.
You
know what to do.”

“You’ve had more practice with babies than I have,” Rachel protested, letting go with a weary laugh of any wild idea she might have had of snatching a moment to herself. She tried to balance the little boy on her hip, but he was wiggling so hard he kept slipping off. He couldn’t have been more than two, with a mop of dark curls and swooping eyelashes that twenty years from now would be breaking women’s hearts all over town. She sighed. “Hold my calls, Monique,” she tossed over her shoulder to the receptionist—a young Haitian woman with an elaborate weave of beaded braids, who had her own hands full at the moment, manning the phone lines and smoothing the ruffled feathers of patients who’d been waiting for hours, some of them all morning.

As Rachel lugged the little boy down the hallway to her office, the two-year-old’s howls downshifted into hiccoughing sniffles. Wide-eyed, he watched Carlene, one of their nurse-midwives, pushing a pregnant woman in a wheelchair who was obviously in labor. Thank goodness St. Bartholomew’s was only a block away, Rachel thought. Here, they weren’t equipped to deliver babies—but on at least half a dozen occasions in the past, the babies had had other ideas.

She felt a stab of longing. God, she missed it—the thrill of ushering a brand-new life into the world. The wondrous awe that accompanied each birth, in which her own role always seemed almost inconsequential. The wild whoop of joy all around when every toe and finger was accounted for.

She had to remind herself, again and again, of all that she and Kay had accomplished with this clinic—all the reasons she was more effective, in terms of scope at least, as an administrator than as a doctor. Since East Side had first opened its doors back in the early seventies, with a hand-lettered sign in the window, they’d made a real difference in this community. Infant mortality had dropped 15 percent. Abortion referrals were down as well. And the AIDS-awareness program they offered, along with free condoms, had been adopted by at least a dozen schools.

They’d weathered federal budget cuts, the let-them-eat-cake eighties, two major renovations, and the Christian Coalition. They would survive Sister Alice, too. Somehow.

In the office she shared with Kay, decorated in Early Salvation Army, Rachel plopped the sniffling toddler on the carpet along with the basket of toys she kept for just such emergencies. At once, he became absorbed in banging at the Playskool barn with a toy truck.

“See? I told you. It’s some kind of magic known only to mothers.” Kay parked herself on the shabby arm of an easy chair, donated years ago by a patient, which they’d never gotten around to replacing. It seemed there was always some other, more pressing expense—medical equipment in need of repair, computers to upgrade, a new fax or Xerox machine. Not to mention the cost of removing the graffiti that appeared outside the building as regularly as the garbage that littered the sidewalk.

“Magic? I wish I had a wand I could wave over Sister Alice that would stop her from circulating petitions, at least,” Rachel muttered. “That, or a voodoo doll.” She crouched down to help the little boy at her feet stack colored plastic rings on a post. “You should have seen her—it was unbelievable. I didn’t accomplish a single thing by going over there. If anything, I made it worse.”

Kay brushed absently at her baggy linen blazer, which was as hopelessly rumpled as the rest of her. “Good thing I wasn’t there. I have strict rules about decking nuns.”

“I came close to hitting her myself.” She lowered her voice. “Do you know what she said? That
we’re
responsible for what happened to Elvie.”

In Kay’s brown eyes, etched with wrinkles she made no attempt to camouflage with makeup, Rachel was dismayed to see a hint of hardened disillusionment where there had once been only fire. “It doesn’t surprise me,” Kay snorted. “The only thing I’d like to know is what the Sister Alices of this world expect us to
do
with all those unwanted babies.”

“I guess she hopes couples like Brian and me will adopt them.” She thought of her own home fires, dwindling to ash while she sat here, wringing her hands over the world’s ills … and for the first time felt so discouraged she didn’t know which way to turn. “Oh, Kay, I honestly don’t know
what
to do.”

Kay eyed her thoughtfully. “Are we still on the subject of Sister Alice?”

Rachel fell silent. Kay was her oldest friend; they’d roomed together in college. They’d toiled side by side in Vietnam. Who else was she going to confide in?

“Things aren’t so great at home, either,” she confessed.

“Why does that not surprise me?” Kay crossed her arms over her plump chest, taking advantage of her perch to peer down at Rachel. “Iris?”

“It’s not just Iris.” Rachel became suddenly absorbed in arranging alphabet blocks into words. She spelled out
C-A-T
and
N-O-N-E
.

“Brian, huh?”

Rachel nodded, keeping her head low so Kay wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes. She hadn’t told her friend the whole story, only the part she could bear to talk about—her fight with Rose, and Brian’s leaving her in the lurch to take Rose home. “We’ve hardly spoken two words to one another since the party,” she said. “Tomorrow, he leaves for Michigan. Some writers’ conference. Every year they invite him, but this is the first time he’s accepted. It doesn’t take a genius to guess why.”

Kay fixed her with a curiously unsympathetic gaze. “What did you expect? Given the choice between cold sheets and cold weather, I’d do the same.”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“What? You think I was born yesterday?
Nothing’s
ever that simple. Especially with two people who’ve been married as long as you and Brian. But somebody has got to break the ice, and it might as well be you.”

Rachel thought of her mother’s garden, how every day Mama was out there, among her roses, weeding, clipping, trimming. A garden will tolerate anything but neglect, Mama liked to say. Turn your back, and it either dies or takes on a life of its own.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she said.

“Bullshit.” Kay leaped up, startling the little boy at her feet, whose face screwed up, as if he were about to start crying again. Rachel caught him just before he came unglued, and snatched him up onto her lap.

That didn’t stop Kay. Pacing the narrow strip of carpeting that separated their two desks, she ranted, “Rachel, I swear, sometimes you can be so dense. The guy is crazy about you. He’s over the moon, always has been. If you don’t see it—this cold war, or whatever you want to call it—for what it is, then I give up. You don’t deserve Brian.”

Rachel stiffened. “Since you’re such an expert, why don’t you tell me what it is I should be doing differently?”

Kay threw her hands up, blowing out an exasperated breath. Her outburst deflated just as abruptly, and she sank back onto the chair. “Look, I don’t have all the answers. The only thing I know is that nothing broken ever got fixed by sticking it up on a shelf. Why don’t you start by asking yourself why a husband who loves you would choose to see an old friend home when he could just as easily have put her in a cab?”

Rachel flinched, and thought,
If you only knew …

She hadn’t planned on dumping all this on Kay. Yet when Kay and Simon split up, Rachel recalled, hadn’t Kay cried on
her
shoulder more than a few times? Who was better equipped than her oldest friend to advise what to do if you think your husband might be cheating on you?

With a sigh, Rachel confessed, “Oh, God, it’s so hard for me to say this … but I think … I’m scared something might be going on between Brian and Rose. Or, if nothing’s happened yet, he
wants
it to.”

Suddenly. Kay was all ears, leaning forward, her eyes full of concern. “Have you talked to Brian about it?”

She nodded. “He denies it, of course. But …” Rachel drew the line at confiding what had happened
after
they’d talked. She felt too ashamed; telling Kay would only make it more excruciating.

“But what? You think he’s lying?” Kay pressed.

“If he is, then he’s lying to himself,” Rachel answered as fairly as she could. “I’m not sure he knows
what
he wants, at this point.”

“Well, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Kay said. “He wants
you.
From what you’ve told me, none of this would be an issue if you two were spending more time together.”

“Yeah, and if wishes were horses, beggars could ride.” Rachel shook her head. “Honestly, I wish for the same thing. But every time I think I’m a few steps ahead of the game, I get swamped all over again.”

“The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

“For someone who believes there’s a solution to every problem, I feel pretty stupid admitting I don’t have a clue.” Rachel aimed for a weak chuckle that fell short of its mark. “Some days, Kay, I swear, I wish I could just walk right out that door. Leave this place to run itself, and let everybody just look after themselves.”