The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (188 page)

“Well, I don’t want your pretentious house either. I never wanted it.” She was aware that her voice was rising and that she sounded waspish, but she didn’t care.

“What about the farmhouse?”

“I suppose it should be sold too,” she said.

“If you’ll handle the sale of the country place, I’ll arrange to sell the house here. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He said he especially wanted the cherry breakfront, the sofa, the two wingback chairs, and the large-screen television. She’d have wanted the breakfront, but he agreed she could have the piano
and a Persian rug, a hundred-year-old Heriz that she treasured. The other furniture pieces they divided by taking turns in choosing items. The agreement was swiftly and bloodlessly made, and the lawyer fled before they changed their minds and became ugly.

Sunday evening R.J. went to Alex’s Gymnasium with Gwen, who would be leaving for Idaho in a couple of weeks. Before their aerobics class, R.J. was telling her about Tom and his future bride when Alexander Manakos came in with a repairman and went to the other side of the gym, discussing a broken exercise machine.

“He’s looking over here,” Gwen said.

“Who?”

“Manakos. At you. He’s looked at you several times.”

“Gwen. Don’t be a fool.”

But the club owner patted the repairman on the shoulder and began to walk in their direction.

“I’ll be right back. I have to call my office,” Gwen said, and fled.

His clothes were as well tailored as Tom’s, but not from Brooks Brothers. His suits were freer, au courant. He was an extremely beautiful man.

“Dr. Cole.”

“Yes.”

“I’m Alex Manakos.” He shook her hand almost impersonally. “Is everything satisfactory for you here at my club?”

“Yes. I enjoy the club very much.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. Are there any complaints I can remedy?”

“No. How do you know my name?”

“I asked somebody. I pointed you out to her. I thought I’d say hello. You look like a very nice person.”

“Thank you.” She was no good at this sort of thing and was sorry he had decided to approach her. Up close, his hair reminded her of the young Redford. His nose was hooked, which made him look somewhat cruel.

“Would you have dinner with me some evening? Or drinks,
whatever you prefer. A chance to sit and talk, get to know one another.”

“Mr. Manakos, I don’t—”

“Alex. My name is Alex. Would you feel better if we were introduced by somebody you know?”

She smiled. “That isn’t necessary.”

“Look, I’ve startled you, coming at you this way, like a pickup. I know you’re here for an aerobics lesson. Think it over, and let me know before you leave.”

Before she could open her mouth to protest, and tell him it wouldn’t matter, he went away.

“You’re going out with him, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Why? He looks very nice.”

“Gwen, he’s gorgeous, but I’m not attracted to him at all. Honestly. I can’t tell you why.”

“So? He’s not proposing marriage or suggesting you spend the rest of your life with him. He simply asked you out.”

Gwen didn’t let up. During the lesson, between every set, she returned to the same subject.

“He seems to be very nice. When was the last time you had a date with a man?”

As she danced, R.J. considered what she knew about him. A former All-American basketball player at Boston College, he came from an immigrant family. In the lobby was an early picture of him on Boston Common, an unsmiling kid with a shoe-shine box. By the time he entered college he had rented a cubbyhole shoeshine stand in a building on Kenmore Square and hired several people to work there. As his athletic legend grew, Alex’s became the “in” spot to get your shoes shined, and soon he had a larger shine parlor with a refreshment stand. He wasn’t good enough for professional basketball, but he graduated with a business degree and enough publicity to get whatever capital he needed from Boston banks, and he opened the health club, full of Nautilus equipment and trained instructors. For old times’ sake, the club had a shoe-shine parlor, but the refreshment stand had become a bar
and café. Now Alex Manakos owned the health club, a Greek restaurant on the waterfront and another in Cambridge, and God only knew what else.

She knew he was unmarried.

“When was the last time you even had a conversation with a man who wasn’t a patient or a doctor? He seems very nice.
Very nice
.

“Go out with him
,” Gwen hissed.

After R.J. had showered and changed, she went into the bar. When she told Alex Manakos she would be happy to get together with him some evening, he smiled.

“That’s good. You’re a physician, am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I never went out with a woman doctor before.”

What have I gotten myself into?
she asked herself. “You go out only with men doctors?”

“Ho ho ho,” he said, but he was looking at her with interest. So they worked it out and they had a date for dinner. Saturday.

The next morning, both the
Herald
and the
Globe
published stories on abortion in Boston. Reporters had interviewed individuals on both sides of the controversy, and each paper ran several pictures of activists. In addition, the
Herald
reproduced two of the posters of “Wanted” abortionists. One was of Dr. James Dickenson, a gynecologist who performed abortions at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline. The other was the poster of Dr. Roberta J. Cole.

On Wednesday it was announced that Allen Greenstein, M.D., had been appointed associate chairman of the department of medicine at the Lemuel Grace Hospital, to succeed Maxwell B. Roseman, M.D.

For the next several days there were newspaper and television interviews with Dr. Greenstein about the fact that in a few years newborn infants would be genetically screened, making it possible
for parents to know the health dangers their children would face in the course of their lives, and perhaps what they would die of.

R.J. and Sidney Ringgold found themselves thrown together on Grand Rounds and at a departmental meeting, and passing each other several times in the corridors. Each time, Sidney looked into her eyes and greeted her warmly and pleasantly.

R.J. would have liked him to stop and talk. She wanted to tell him she wasn’t ashamed of performing abortions, that she was doing a difficult and important job, one she had taken on because she was a good doctor.

So why did she feel hangdog and furtive as she walked the corridors of her hospital?

Damn them!

On Saturday afternoon she made certain she came home early enough to shower at her leisure and dress slowly and carefully. At seven o’clock she entered Alex’s Gymnasium and walked into the lounge. Alexander Manakos was standing at one end of the bar, talking to two men. She sat on a stool at the other end of the bar, and presently he came over to her. He was even better looking than she remembered.

“Good evening.”

He nodded. He was carrying a newspaper. When he opened it, she saw it was Monday’s edition of the
Globe
. “Is it true, what this says? That you, you know, provide abortions?”

This wasn’t to be an accolade, she knew. Her head went up; she drew herself erect so she could look him in the eye. “Yes. It’s a legal and ethical medical procedure that’s vital to the health and lives of my patients,” she said levelly, “and I do it well.”

“You disgust me. I wouldn’t do you with somebody else’s dick.”

Very nice.

“Well, you certainly won’t with your own,” she told him calmly, and she got off the stool and walked out of Alex’s Gymnasium, passing a booth in which a motherly person with white hair was applauding, tears in her eyes. It would have been more comforting to R.J. if the woman hadn’t been drunk.

* * *

“I don’t need anyone. I can live my life by myself. By myself.
I don’t need anybody, get it?

“And I want you to get off my back, friend,” she told Gwen fiercely.

“Okay, okay,” Gwen said, and sighed, and escaped.

8

A J
URY OF
P
EERS

The scheduled April meeting of the Medical Incidents Committee of the Middlesex Memorial Hospital was postponed because of a springtime blizzard that covered the grimy snow and old ice with a clean white layer that would have been cheering earlier in the season. As it was, R.J. grumbled about still more snow. Two days later the temperature rose to seventy-four degrees, and the new spring snow and the old winter snow disappeared together, the gutters flowing with the runoff.

The Medical Incidents Committee met on the following week. It was not a lengthy session. In the face of clear evidence and testimony that Elizabeth Sullivan was dying and in terrible pain, they decided unanimously that Dr. Thomas A. Kendricks had not acted unprofessionally in heavily sedating Mrs. Sullivan.

A few days after the meeting Phil Roswell, one of the committee members, told R.J. there had been no debate. “Damn it, let’s be honest. We all do that to hasten a merciful end when death is close and inevitable,” Roswell said. “Tom wasn’t trying to hide a crime, he wrote the order honestly, right there in her chart. If we punished him, we’d have to punish ourselves and most of the doctors we know.”

Nat Rourke had a discreet chat with the district attorney and came away with the knowledge that Wilhoit did not intend to bring Elizabeth Sullivan’s death to the grand jury.

Tom was exultant. He wanted to turn a page in his life, anxious to get on with the divorce and begin his new marriage.

* * *

R.J.’s mood was exacerbated by the beggars who were everywhere. She had been born and raised in Boston and she loved it, but now she couldn’t bear to look at the street people. She saw them throughout the city, sifting through the trash cans and Dumpsters, trundling their few possessions in shopping carts stolen from the supermarkets, sleeping in shipping crates on cold loading docks, lined up for free meals at the soup kitchen on Tremont Street, taking over the benches in Boston Common and other public places.

To her, homeless people were a medical problem. In the 1970s, psychiatrists had lobbied to phase out the massive stone public asylums where the insane had been stockpiled under shameful conditions. The idea was that patients would be returned to freedom to live in harmony alongside the sane, as was being done successfully in several European countries. But in America the community mental health centers set up to serve the freed patients were underfunded, and they failed. Patients scattered. It was impossible for psychiatric social workers to keep track of someone who slept in a cardboard carton one night and miles away over a steam grate the next night. All over the United States, alcoholics, drug addicts, schizophrenics, and every variety of the mentally ill made up an army of the homeless. Many of them turned to begging, some soliciting on subways and buses with loud speeches and pitiful stories, others sitting against a building with a cup or overturned cap next to crude signs making their pleas: “Will work for food. Four children at home.” R.J. had read a study estimating that 95 percent of America’s beggars were addicted to drugs or alcohol, and that some begged up to three hundred dollars a day, money they promptly spent on substance abuse. R.J. thought with great guilt of the 5 percent who weren’t addicted, merely homeless and jobless. Still, she steeled herself against giving and was furious when she saw someone dropping a dime or a quarter into a cup instead of pressuring politically to get homeless people off the streets and into adequate care.

It wasn’t only the homeless; all the ingredients of her existence in the city got on her nerves—the ending of her marriage, the depersonalization
of her profession, the daily paperwork grind, the traffic, the fact that she hated to go to work now in a place where Allen Greenstein had beaten her out of a job.

Everything merged into a bitter cocktail. Realization slowly dawned that it was time for her to change her life drastically, to leave Boston.

The two medical communities where there were programs into which someone with her hybrid interests might fit were Baltimore and Philadelphia. She sat down and wrote letters to Roger Carleton at Johns Hopkins and Irving Simpson at Penn, asking if they were interested in her services.

Long ago she had arranged for her spring calendar to be clear for a week, dreaming about St. Thomas. Instead, on a warm Friday afternoon she got away from the hospital early and went home to pack a few things she could wear in the country. She had to dispose of the Berkshires property.

She had left the house and was getting into the car when she remembered Elizabeth’s ashes, and she went back inside and took the cardboard box from the top of the bureau in the guest room, where she had put it when she brought it home.

She couldn’t bring herself to put the ashes into the trunk with her suitcase. Instead, she placed the small box on the seat next to her and put her folded raincoat in front of it so it wouldn’t roll off if she had to stop short.

Then she drove to the Mass Pike and pointed the red BMW west.