Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (14 page)

“But what’s supposed to be the effect of the meditation?”

“It’s hard to say, because it differs for each individual. You may feel that everything is connected to everything else, what I call the Universal Relationship. Or you may sense the basic unity of the universe. Or you may experience a great serenity.”

Dan Cohen experienced none of these. What he had experienced, he told himself grimly, was tasteless food, a hard lumpy mattress on a narrow cot with a too-thin blanket against the night chill and the constant dull companionship of Matthew Cham. Of Kaplan, he had seen very little outside the group sessions, for he had been largely preoccupied with a special circle, all of them members of the board of directors of the temple, who had kept apart from the rest, and this morning, when he came down for the first service, they were gone.

“Chet and some of the others had to return early this morning,” Rabbi Mezzik explained. “There’s an important board meeting they’ve got to attend. However, we still have a minyan, so it’s all right.”

No one seemed to mind, but for Dan Cohen it was one more annoyance to be added to those he had suffered during the weekend, as he stood there with the prayer shawl over his head, he asked himself just why he had come. Of course, he had wanted to get away from Barnard’s Crossing and from his practice. But why here, and why did he need to get away at all?

The death of a patient, while always traumatic, was to be expected in medical practice. Nor was he overly concerned about a possible malpractice suit; he was sure his treatment had been correct and certainly defensible.

The reaction of his colleagues, especially the two older men, had been unexpected and disturbing, but surely the way to deal with that situation was to stay and fight it out rather than to run away. Conceivably, it might get to the point where they might ask him to leave the clinic, that would be disturbing, he admitted. It would not happen immediately because he had a contract, and if he were to hold them to its terms, it would be a year or more before they could force him out. By that time, he might be able to build up a clientele and open his own office in Barnard’s Crossing, and he didn’t have to come all the way up here and stand with a prayer shawl over his head to arrive at that conclusion.

So why then was he here? Once again, he remembered his embarrassment during the telephone conversation with Kestler, all the more acute because it was overheard by Lanigan, he wondered uneasily if the police chief knew about the lawsuit over the fence, were the police notified of such things? It suddenly came to him that what really bothered him was the repetition of his failures, he had failed in Delmont, and again in Morrisborough. Was the same thing going to happen in Barnard’s Crossing? Was he failure-prone, as some people are accident-prone? Taking the experience in the three towns together, did it mean that he was unsuited to the practice of medicine?

Was he losing faith in himself as a doctor? An uneasy thought occurred to him which he tried to put out of his mind: was it possible that the first time he had prescribed Limpidine for Jacob Kestler, there had been an allergic reaction? He had not consulted his case records before going to see him the night of the storm, relying on his memory, he was sure there had not been but it had been months before and he might have forgotten, and now, standing there alone, he admitted that when he first heard of Kestler’s death, the idea had crossed his mind, he had not bothered to verify it, because he was so sure. Or was it because he was afraid?

Although the retreat program called for Sunday dinner and a meeting afterward, he decided not to wait but to leave immediately after the meditation, he must check his records; he would hesitate no longer.

To his roommate, he lied that he had a patient whom he had promised to visit before noon, and he used the same excuse in saying good-bye to Rabbi Mezzik.

“And how did you enjoy your experience?” Mezzik asked. “All right. I guess. I think the rest did me some good.”

“And the religious experience, did you profit from it?”

He was on the point of making polite acknowledgment, but he still felt aggrieved. “I’m afraid not, Rabbi. It didn’t touch me at all. To be perfectly frank with you, I thought it was a lot of nothing.”

Surprisingly, Mezzik was not offended, he even smiled. “That’s the way it frequently strikes people at first.”

“What do you mean, at first?”

Mezzik looked off into the distance, then he eyed the doctor speculatively and said, “When you treat a patient, Doctor, when you give him medicine, is he healed immediately?”

“Sometimes he is. Most of the time not immediately.”

“Well, that’s the way it is with a religious exercise. Sometimes there is a great and sudden cognition, a revelation, a sudden awareness as though someone had snapped on the light in a dark room, and sometimes it takes a little time, and of course sometimes, as with your medicines, nothing happens. Now you prayed and meditated. I watched you and I think – I have some experience in these matters – that you prayed honestly and sincerely. Believe me, something will come of it.

Maybe tomorrow, or next week, or even next year, but something will happen, I’m sure.”

As he drove home Dan Cohen thought of what Mezzik had said, and his face relaxed in a wry grin. It was the old hokum, the fakers who operated medicine shows probably used the same spiel. It gave them time to get out of the county before the wrath of their dupes caught up with them.

Home at last, he had no sooner parked his car when his wife called to him. “Dan? Telephone. It’s Chief Lanigan.”

Hello, Dr. Cohen?… My sacroiliac kicked up, but real bad. I was just able to make it back to my desk.”

“It’s happened before, has it?”

“I can count on an incident about once a year or so. But usually, it’s just a gnawing kind of ache like I’m carrying a hundred pounds of lead strapped around my waist. This time. I got a shooting pain and I just couldn’t straighten up. I’m down at the stationhouse, at home I got a special belt that I put on when it happens, but I sure can’t drive home now.”

“Maybe I’d better come and have a look at you. I could at least strap you up.”

“I’d appreciate it, Doctor. I know that about all I can do is live with it until the pain wears off, but I’ve never had it so bad before.”

“Well, maybe I can give you something. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

A little while later, the doctor was looking at the woebegone face of the chief and nodding as he explained, “I wouldn’t mind. Doctor, if I had done something foolish like trying to push a car out of the snow. I did that once and my back kicked up. I deserved that, and it was only a mild case as these things go. But here I just leaned forward to return a folder to the file cabinet and, wow! I couldn’t move.”

Dr. Cohen nodded. “It goes away after a while, doesn’t it? Two or three days?”

“It gets easier in a few days, but it lingers on for a couple of weeks usually. But I’ve never had anything like this. Usually, it’s a kind of ache, if you know what I mean. This was a sharp shooting pain, and I couldn’t move at all for the first few minutes, then I managed to work my way over to my chair by holding onto the cabinet and then the desk.”

“I think maybe I’d better give you something,” said the doctor, he fished in his bag and came up with a small bottle. “Luckily, I had some samples at home. This is a muscle relaxant. It may make you drowsy, so I wouldn’t take a long auto trip if I were you. I’ve had pretty good luck with these pills, although some of my patients said that they didn’t help at all.” He went to the little sink in the comer of the office and drew a glass of water. “Here. I’d like you to take a couple of these now, and then a couple every four hours. By the way, are you allergic to anything?”

“Not that I know of,” the chief replied as he took the pills from the doctor’s outstretched hand, he looked at them curiously for a moment and then popped them into his mouth, and swallowed them with the aid of the water.

“Why do you ask if I’m allergic to anything?” Lanigan asked. “My back problem couldn’t be the result of an allergy, could it?”

“Of course not. I was thinking of the medication, there’s always a chance of an allergic reaction, sometimes quite severe, from almost any medication you might take. It’s especially true these days when we use such highly sophisticated formulations.”

“Is that so? Say, is that what happened to old man Kestler? He got an allergic reaction to the pills you prescribed?”

The doctor shrugged. “It’s possible. My associate, Dr. DiFrancesca, was inclined to think so. Where there’s a known allergy to a particular medicine, of course we don’t prescribe it, that’s why we always tell patients what the medicine is and ask about their allergies, if any. Normally, for instance, I would have prescribed penicillin for Kestler, but I knew he was allergic to it, so I prescribed one of the tetracyclines, he could have been allergic to that, too, but it was a lot less likely. I mean, a number of people are allergic to penicillin, but not too many to tetracycline, and I’d had him on it before. But even there you can’t tell. Sometimes, it’s sort of cumulative.”

“Any chance the drugstore made a mistake?”

The doctor shook his head. “No, I shouldn’t think so, they’re terribly careful these days because of this sophisticated formulation I mentioned, a mistake on the part of the druggist is highly unlikely, and the manufacturers cooperate by putting out their pills in all different shapes and colors instead of just round and white the way they used to do years ago, the pill I prescribed for Kestler, for example, was kind of pink oval –”

“Orange, I’d say,” said the chief.

“No, pink, well, maybe you could call it salmon-colored. How do you know?”

“I looked at them. I’ve got them right here. I’m sure they’re orange. Just a minute.” He pulled open a desk drawer and took out the envelope that contained the bottle of pills, he uncapped the bottle and shook a few pills out on the desktop, there was no mistake. Oval they were, but they were also unmistakably orange. “Now wouldn’t you call them orange?” he asked.

“Let me see that bottle.” The doctor read the label aloud: “J. Kestler, Limpidine two hundred fifty, one tablet four times a day. Dr. D. Cohen.”

“That’s what you prescribed?” The doctor nodded.

“And those are the pills? What did you call them – Limpidine?”

“I always thought they were pink. Look, I’ve got a book at home that the pharmaceutical industry issues every year to all doctors. It has all the information on the medicines they manufacture as well as colored plates of the pills. I could swear that Limpidine is pink but I’ll look it up as soon as I get home.”

“You do that, Doctor, and call me back. I’ll be here for a little while.”

Dr. Cohen managed to observe the speed limits all the way home, but just barely, he parked his car in the garage and then hurried to his study without bothering to take off his coat, he opened the Physician’s Desk Reference and stared at the colored plate, he was right! The Limpidine was pink, the orange pill was actually a form of penicillin put out by the same house. Somehow Aptaker had made a mistake and issued the penicillin pill, and of course the old man had reacted to it, since he was sensitive to the medicine. So the mistake was the druggist’s, and he was in the clear!

His heart sang within him. It had happened! He had gone to the retreat; he had prayed, truly prayed perhaps for the first time in his life; and the very next day, this great depressing weight had been miraculously lifted.

He reached for the telephone.

The problems of parents with their children, all seemingly requiring nothing less than a rabbinic decision or at least an opinion, were many and various. Rabbi Small saw each parent in turn while the rest waited outside on a settee near his study.

“… I know it isn’t terribly important, but kids are sensitive, and when Malcolm Studnick was given the part in the play, where everybody said my Ronald was so much better in the tryouts, he was hurt….”

“… You know how it is with girls, Rabbi. Being popular is important to them. It can affect their whole personality. So dancing class and tennis lessons, they’re part of her necessary development as a woman….”

“… It isn’t that my Sumner is not interested. Rabbi. It’s just that he hasn’t got the time….”

“… Right now, Rabbi, where he’s been sickly almost since he was a baby, my husband feels, and I do too of course, he should be outdoors as much as possible. I thank God for Little League. If it weren’t for Little League, he’d be moping around the house all the time, that’s why I was so interested in the camp when my husband came home and told me about it Wednesday night. Now if he could get his Judaism there during the summer –”

“What camp is that, Mrs. Robinson?”

“You know, the place up in Petersville, as I understand it, it’s to be used not only as a retreat for adults, but there’ll be opportunity for the children to go up there for a couple of weeks in the summer.”

“But that’s not for the immediate future. Mrs. Robinson, it’s just being discussed.”

“Oh no, Rabbi, according to my husband they discussed it thoroughly at the retreat yesterday, and they were going to vote on it today.”

“Oh, I see.” Rabbi Small managed to curb his impatience and gave no indication that he was anxious to get rid of her, but when the conference was over and he saw Mrs. Robinson to the door, he said to the woman who was about to enter, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kalbfuss, but I have to go to the board meeting.”

“But it’s over. Rabbi, they all left a little while ago.” He looked down the corridor, and sure enough, the dooa to the boardroom was open and the room was empty.

As he was driving home. Chester Kaplan spotted Dr. Cohen raking leaves on his front lawn and drew up to the curb. “Hi. Doctor,” he called. “Sorry I had to rush off this morning without saying good-bye.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Cohen, approaching the car, rake in hand.

“How was it? Did you like it?” Kaplan asked eagerly.

“It was fine,” said the doctor, his face expanding in a broad grin. “Real fine, kind of wonderful, in fact. Reminds me, I haven’t paid you yet. If you’ve got a minute, I’ll go in and make out a check, or come in if you like.”