Rabbi Gabrielle's Defiance (36 page)

Though Kye assured Gabby that just about
everybody at his church knew of her exploits, Korean courtesy
demanded that they pretend ignorance. When Kye introduced her as a
business associate and friend, none revealed suspicions of
something more. She was happy to join Pastor Norman Woo in
distributing cups for aromatic iced tea and learn of his keen
interest in the biblical origins of Judaism. Questions he posed
were schooled and intelligent. Reverend Woo commented that many at
the picnic had watched her seder on television. Most were as
surprised as he to find Kye Naah seated beside her at the head
table.

The youngsters disappeared to explore the
C&O Canal paralleling the river. Teenagers broke out Frisbees
and footballs. Kye, a softball enthusiast, enrolled a half-dozen
adolescents in the infield to practice catching his fly balls.
Gabby felt useless around the older women preparing lunch and asked
to be excused from domestic work to join the baseball players. Once
in the field the kids marveled at her ability to throw from deep
centerfield all the way to second base.

Later, she preceded Pastor Woo before a
buffet-style selection of lunch foods, whose names resonated from a
wholly foreign culture, but whose aromatic smells made her
salivate.
Pibimpap
, bits of beef cooked
with vegetables and eggs and seasoned with
koch'ujang
fiery red peppers, buckwheat noodles with
chopped scallions, radishes, cucumbers, and sesame seeds. The women
serving over-estimated her appetite and piled large portions on her
plate. Word circulated that she was a vegetarian, which was
technically incorrect, but it was easier to let the myth go
unchallenged than correct the error.

"Do you think, Rabbi, that Jesus was
celebrating the Passover seder during the final supper?" Pastor Woo
asked as they moved in tandem toward a vacant picnic table.

While slipping onto a cedar bench, she said,
"That's not my area of expertise. I'm confused by what we Jews call
the Inter-testimental Period, years between the codification of the
Old and New Testaments. I know equating the Final Supper with
Passover is popular, but don't you think it odd that no women were
present with Jesus? That's not like any seder we Jews know today,
even for those celebrating it in the distant past. It's hard for us
to imagine such a festival without women and children in
attendance. After all, for us the main purpose is to teach our
youngsters."

A studious expression emerged upon his face
as he considered the point. Kye joined them. When it appeared that
most of the picnickers were settled Pastor Woo nodded toward Gabby.
"Rabbi, would you like to say Grace for us?"

"I'm afraid I don't say Grace, but we do have
blessings to recite before eating."

"That amounts to the same thing, don't you
think?" the Pastor asked.

"Absolutely," she answered while unraveling
her legs from the picnic bench to stand and be heard. To the
others, she raised her voice and bellowed over the sound of running
water in the nearby river. "In Judaism, we have blessings for just
about everything. Our custom is to single out the principle element
of the meal, say rice or bread or vegetables and praise God for
giving it to us. If it's impossible to determine which is the
principle food before you waste away from hunger, you simple say,
"
Baruch… kol minay mizanot
. Blessed is the
Lord who gives us a variety of species to eat." With that she
scooped up a wad of pickled cabbage with her chopsticks and brought
it toward her mouth. Only at the last moment, her grasp on the
chopsticks slipped; the wad sailed in a loop and dived onto Pastor
Woo's lap.

A howl of amused laughter erupted. Gabby
turned crimson with embarrassment.

"Not to worry," Kye consoled, a reprimanding
scowl trained on those laughing. "Some of the elderly here still
can't manipulate a fork."

The picnickers suddenly realized their
rudeness and immediately fell silent. Gabby rallied by snatching a
second pile of cabbage and holding it for others to see that she
knew how to use chopsticks. "Well now," she said, "let's see if I
can do it right this time," then moved it toward her mouth.

By the end of the afternoon, she was feeling
comfortable among Kye's friends. And he, too, displayed his comfort
by holding her hand in public.

***

"Sorry to impose upon you to drive," Stan
Melkin said as he dropped into the passenger seat of her Volvo with
a rectangular brief case on his lap, prepared for the early morning
trip to Baltimore. "This is a bad day for me. I must read this
brief before a meeting late in the afternoon and I haven't got an
extra moment. Afraid I won't be much company until we get
there."

"That's okay," she glanced to her right to
find him already coiled around his papers. "I'm used to driving by
myself. Sometimes I listen to the radio and sometime a
book-on-tape. But more often, I just use the quiet time to let my
thoughts roam."

From the synagogue, she headed north on
Wisconsin Avenue to pick up a ramp onto the Capitol Beltway, then
Interstate 95 to Baltimore. A light trickle of rain forced her to
activate the windshield wipers and headlights. Stan adjusted a
thick legal brief atop of his briefcase, aligned reading glasses
over his nose, preparing to jot down notes with an old-fashioned
brass point fountain pen. He was so engrossed that he failed to
notice a speeding motorcyclist weaving between vehicles in front.
The young man's antics triggered a sense of danger in Gabby, whose
foot moved back and forth from the brake pedal to the
accelerator.

Stan lifted his eyes to catch the cyclist's
bravado and exclaimed, "Damn fool. Did you know that bikes kill
more people every year than guns? "

"It doesn't surprise me – not when drivers
like this burn up the road."

Stan glanced at his lap, before moving over
to Gabby. "We'll probably arrive in Baltimore a bit early. This
will probably be the most important meeting of my presidency at
Ohav Shalom. That's why I invited the Board of Directors. Five have
agreed to meet us there."

She was about to respond when brake lights
ahead indicated slowing traffic. Her uneasiness about the cyclist
returned. Within an instant, cars in the right lane were slamming
hard on their brakes, while those in the center and left continued
to roll forward. Gabby swerved into the outside lane but was forced
to brake hard as cars bunched up below a ramp leading from the
Beltway. The sight of an upturned Harley Davidson bike, its forward
wheel spinning in the air, sent a chill of terror along her spine.
She assumed the driver had been thrown off his bike and was
somewhere on the ground amid a tangle of stopped vehicles. Perhaps
in the chaos one or more had run over him.

"Stan, my cell phone is in the glove
compartment. Call 911 for an ambulance!" she barked with no remorse
for the dictatorial tone. "We're only a hop-skip-and-a-jump to Holy
Cross Hospital." While he scrambled to find a place for his
briefcase and legal papers, she pulled on the parking brake,
switched on the emergency lights, then flung open the door. "The
motor's running. Move the car when there's room. The kid will be
lucky to be alive."

Stalled vehicles forced her to weave a path
to the accident site. A half-dozen other drivers joined her on the
tarmac to determine what happened. About thirty feet from the
overturned motorcycle, she observed a black figure motionless on
the ground – the same youngster who had been weaving recklessly
among the cars. The dark visor on the helmet shielded his face from
view. A quick survey revealed that other spectators were
bewildered, none willing to determine if the cyclist was breathing.
An instinct told her to blend into the crowd and let another take
this responsibility, but another instinct chided such inactivity. A
similar situation had occurred when she was a rabbinic student. It
was snowing in Cincinnati and she witnessed from her car a
pedestrian hit by a skidding automobile. Instead of leaving her
vehicle to offer assistance, she remained frozen behind the wheel,
waiting for others to step forward. Her humiliating passivity
resulted in a personal pledge – never again to remain a spectator
in an emergency.

She knelt on the asphalt over the biker and
called. "Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice?"

There was no response. She clasped onto the
wrist with one hand and probed under the chin for the jugular with
the other. If there was a pulse, it was impossible to feel. To the
motorists who had gathered around she said, pointing with the hand
she removed from the jugular, "See that there's a lane free for an
ambulance. He's probably in shock. Ask if anybody's got a blanket.
We'll need to get blood flowing back toward his heart."

"Don't touch him," she recognized Stan
Melkin's voice over her shoulder. "Gabby, this isn't a good idea.
You're not a doctor. People get sued all the time for impersonating
physicians. If anything goes wrong, they'll blame you for
interference."

"If we don't prevent him from going into
shock, there won't be anything to argue about," she growled back.
"Now, please. Let's see if he can raise his legs very slowly."

"This is stupid, Gabby," Stan persisted.
"That's how people end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars
worth of law suits. This isn't necessary. The ambulance will be
here soon."

She ignored him and spoke to the biker's
face, still hidden behind the dark visor. "Can you hear my
voice?"

"Yeah, yeah. It's ringin' in my ears." The
response was feeble but audible. And to Gabby's astonishment it was
female. She had missed the slight protrusion of the bust line and
the narrow hips.

"Good. Now just hold on. We've called for an
ambulance. Don't move because you could injure your spinal cord.
Can you feel my fingers squeezing your wrist?"

"Yep."

"That's good," she answered, aware of a
siren-like sound in the distance. Another siren cawed from a
different direction. Perhaps, she surmised, the police were also en
route.

"Is there enough room for the ambulance?" she
asked a spectator.

"There's a snarl of cars."

"Well then, get moving and unsnarl them!" She
snapped impatiently. "Work your way from the outside in."

A policeman in heavy leather boots and a belt
full of jangling paraphernalia arrived on the scene before the
Rescue Squad, his mobile radio bristling with voices. Before
tending to the injured biker, he surveyed the area and called into
his radio for support. "Anybody call an ambulance here?" he asked
in a throaty but confident voice.

"Yes, sir." Stan Melkin answered. "Can't you
hear sirens approaching?"

The officer addressed Gabby. "Don't move him,
Lady. He's breathing, isn't he?"

"Yes, but it's a woman. I want to roll her
over gently to lift her legs before she goes into shock."

"You can't do that, Lady. Wait for the
emergency people. They know what to do." He glanced through the
crowd of people." Anybody see how this happened?"

Dead silence. The short bursts of a siren
announced that an ambulance was making progress through the
congestion. "Okay now, everybody into your cars. I need people in
the rear to back up and make a path. Move onto side streets, over
lawns or anything, but just get off the road."

Alternating red and white strobe lights
indicated that the ambulance was still at some distance. Before it
could get close, two medics in navy-blue uniforms were running
forward hauling a stretcher. Seeing that there was nothing more for
her to do, Gabby eased back on her haunches. A second later, she
shifted to her knees, then onto her feet. After providing a newly
arrived police officer with her phone number, she looked around for
her car, which Stan had obviously moved. A spectator said to her,
"You should have been a doctor."

It took ten minutes for Gabby to find her
Volvo parked on a residential street. Stan was seated comfortably
in the passenger seat, studying his legal brief as if nothing
untoward had occurred. Without speaking, he exited to reseat
himself on the passenger side. Clearly, they were now going to be
late for their appointment in Baltimore.

He finally spoke as she navigated a secondary
Beltway ramp leading northeast on I-95. "I'm sorry for what I said
back there. I know you were trying to help. Only I've seen too many
Good Samaritans find themselves with hellish legal problems. Even
if the court exonerates them, they wind up with astronomical legal
fees. We've got enough trouble with the Morgensterns."

His caution annoyed her. "You're the lawyer,
Stan. It's a sad day when someone can't help a fellow human being
in trouble."

"It was probably her fault for reckless
driving. We saw with our own eyes how she was hot-dogging it."

"When a skier arrives at the bottom of a
slope with a broken arm, the doctor doesn't tell her that she
shouldn't have been skiing. You've got to fix what's broken first.
Then later, you might consider future prevention. I'm afraid I'd
make a poor attorney."

He fell back into a silence, but this time
did not return to his papers. At least five miles later, he said,
picking up the thread of the previous conversation. "On the
contrary, Gabby, I think you'd make an excellent lawyer. But I'm
certain you're a better rabbi. I wish like hell we could keep you
at Ohav Shalom."

"Now what does that mean?" she asked, knowing
exactly what he meant.

He didn't rise to her bait, and eventually
returned to his brief. That worked to her benefit because she
needed time to compose herself. During the accident, reflexes
governed her responses. Things had to be done in sequence. In such
circumstances she possessed the ability to put herself on
autopilot. But once the emergency was over, she was subject to
delayed emotion. Her fingers gripped the steering wheel tightly to
prevent her limbs from trembling.