Clear And Convincing Proof

3

Three afternoons a week Erica walked to the clinic to read to the patients. Her audience changed from week to week, sometimes from day to day, but those who attended were almost excessively grateful.

Since she arrived so late in the afternoon, she had reflected during the first week, her chances of meeting many people were limited. Accordingly, she began to get there by four-thirty, sometimes earlier. She had met Dr. Boardman, a tall craggy man, with prominent bones, big hands and a kindly, somewhat abstracted manner that suggested he was paying little attention to those around him. A mistake, she had come to realize. He and Naomi were parents to the clinic and he was looked on as a mentor, a guru or confessor, to whom people—staff, as well as patients—took their problems, whether personal or medical. She had met people in the offices, nurses, everyone in the kitchen, a number of volunteers. She saw Annie now and then, but never to talk to her. Although she was apparently there every day, Annie always left at just about the same time that Erica arrived.

Erica made it a point to stop by the reception desk to chat with Bernie Zuckerman often. Bernie was a stout woman, dimply and cheerful, in her forties. Bernie was always the first to know anything happening at the facility, and although she might have been able to keep secrets, it had not yet been demonstrated. Most people at the clinic visited with her habitually, and that was where Erica had met the ones she knew. But she had not met many of the therapists yet. They were usually gone by the time Erica finished reading.

That day, the first of August, Erica stopped at the kitchen, as she always did, to get a glass of ice water and chat a moment with Stephanie Waters. When Bernie introduced her as the cook, Stephanie had said indignantly, “I am not a cook. I am a nutritionist.” She was fifty-plus, stately, with burnished copper-colored hair, a figure that was without a curve from shoulders to hips, and she was a dictator in the kitchen.

After leaving the kitchen, while passing a therapy room, Erica heard Darren’s low voice from beyond the door that was ajar.

“See, it’s like this. You already learned all this stuff once, and your brain said, that’s it, done. Then whap, the part of the brain that knows how you walk got zonked right out of business. We’re going to teach some other part to take over its job. Most of your brain, everyone’s brain, is just sitting there not doing a thing until there’s some learning to do and then lights go on all over the place. Let’s watch the video now. See that little fellow crawling around? He’s decided it’s time to get up and walk. That’s hard-wired in, to get up and walk, only the brain doesn’t know yet exactly how legs and feet work, or just where they are, or how to keep balance. Watch. There he goes…. Whoops. Wrong move.”

Erica hardly dared to breathe, listening. Darren’s voice was deep and low, not laughing, but amused and easy.

“Up again, try again…Whoops, down again. He’s starting to get frustrated. Don’t blame the little guy. That’s hard work he’s doing, and he keeps falling down. Whoops. Okay, he’s making progress. He’s learned not to let go of the chair, I see. That’s good…Too bad, down but not out…Uh-oh. A temper tantrum. Back to crawling…And up again. He can’t help it, he has to get up and learn to walk….”

Darren laughed, and after a brief pause a child laughed, too. “He’s got quite a temper, doesn’t he?” Darren said. “And a great throwing arm. Up again. What’s happening is that his brain is learning all the things that don’t work, and trying other things. Ah, he let go of the chair. One, two, three…and down he goes….”

Reluctantly Erica moved on. Bernie had said that Darren had magic in his hands; he knew exactly what the patients needed by feeling them. And magic in his voice, Erica thought, as she made her way to the broad staircase to the second-floor lounge, appreciating the many lessons Darren was giving that child: he was going to work hard; his brain could be reeducated; he had to learn to walk all over again; frustration and even a show of temper would be acceptable. And the most important lesson: he was going to walk again. Darren was a superb teacher, she decided.

In the Boardman residence that afternoon Naomi and Greg Boardman were having a drink with Thomas Kelso. Every week or so he dropped in for a chat, for a drink, just to poke his big nose in, he sometimes said. He was eighty-two, and his nose was indeed very large. It seemed that everything about him had become more and more shrunken except his nose. It was hard to imagine a more wrinkled face and he was stooped and inches shorter than he had been years ago. He had no hair left and wore a yachting cap indoors and out, year round.

He sipped wine and nodded. It was a good claret. “Joyce isn’t going to make it,” he said. “David will agree tomorrow to pull the plug. No point in his pretending otherwise.”

David McIvey’s mother had suffered a massive stroke a week before and had drifted in and out of a coma for several days, then she didn’t come out of it.

“I’m so sorry, Thomas,” Naomi said softly.

“There are worse ways to go,” he said.

She suspected he was thinking of his wife, trapped in the ever worsening dementia of Alzheimer’s.

“What’s going to happen,” Thomas said, “is that David’s going to push to change our charter as soon as he has Joyce’s shares. Next month, six weeks. He won’t wait long.”

“If we lose the nonprofit status,” Greg said after a moment, “we’ll lose the volunteers and there isn’t enough money to pay new staff for the work they do. Christ, we don’t pay the staff we have what they could earn anywhere else. They’ll move on and we’ll have to drop half our patients.”

“I know all that,” Thomas said with a scowl.

“I heard a rumor floating around when David and Lorraine divorced, that part of the settlement she accepted was his shares in the clinic,” Greg said thoughtfully. “Anything to it?”

“Not just like that. The two kids got the shares with no voting rights until they reach majority. Until then David keeps control. Lorraine won’t object to changing the charter. It’s money in the bank for the kids,” Thomas said bitterly.

Upon his mother’s death, David would come into her shares of the clinic. Owning them, and with control of his children’s shares, he would control fifty percent of the vote.

The sudden catastrophic stroke and imminent death of Joyce McIvey had shaken Thomas Kelso profoundly, in a way that his own wife’s decline had not. He had seen that coming for several years. His grief and mourning had turned into dull acceptance, knowing that his wife was on the spiral that circled downward inexorably, with no hint of when it might end. He set down his glass and leaned forward in his chair. “Greg, I’ve made an appointment with Sid Blankenship for this coming Thursday. I want you there.”

“Why?” Greg asked.

“I intend to change my will,” Thomas said. “If you’ll agree to it, I’m leaving you my shares of the clinic, and Donna’s, too, if that’s legal. As you well know, there’s no money in it, just a lot of work and responsibility. We wrote our wills years ago, and I don’t know if my power of attorney is sufficient to override the provisions in her will. The way it’s set up now, her clinic shares will be divided among the kids when she dies. And if they inherit, those three kids will sell out in a minute to the highest bidder, which in this case would be David McIvey. I’ll see him drawn and quartered before I’ll let control of the clinic fall into David’s hands.”

“Amen,” Greg said softly. “Amen.”

After Thomas Kelso left, Greg returned to the clinic. Things to see to, he said vaguely, but Naomi suspected that he wanted time alone wandering about in the garden. She started to prepare dinner, thinking through the implications of Thomas’s visit.

If Greg and David both controlled fifty percent of the clinic, it meant that David could not sell out to one of the health organizations, for one thing. And he could not change the charter from nonprofit to profit making. But only if Greg could hold out against him. That was the sticking point, she admitted to herself. Greg had started his practice as a general practitioner, working alone, keeping his own hours. Naomi had been his office manager, bookkeeper, factotum. Early in their marriage she had delivered two stillborn daughters. They had struggled with grief, then had found solace in hard work. She had scolded him: he spent too much time with patients, talked too much with them, and he had too many. A killer schedule, she had thought, but a necessary one at that time. Then things began to change: bureaucracy, Medicaid, Medicare, HMOs, insurance companies, malpractice insurance…. The day his insurance agent told him bluntly that the company would no longer insure doctors in private practice working alone, he had threatened to quit medicine altogether. His colleagues were joining groups, joining HMOs, forming corporations, becoming more and more involved with paperwork, not medicine, and he was in danger of losing his hospital privileges, he had railed. Medicine was becoming just another big business, and if he had wanted to go into business he would have gone after an MBA, not a medical degree.

Then, Thomas Kelso and William McIvey had interviewed him and offered him the resident physician’s post, and her the job of personnel manager. Their salaries would be modest, not in the corporate six-figure category, Thomas had said, but the directors took no salary at all, and Greg and Naomi would not have anyone breathing down their necks or second-guessing their every decision.

Greg was the kind of doctor Robert Frost had had in mind. He let the patients talk, never rushed them, listened to whatever they wanted to talk about—medical problems, family problems, work or school, whatever. He explained everything to them. He might sit up half the night with a frightened child or hold the hand of an elderly patient who was suffering, until painkilling medication took effect.

What he seemed incapable of was dealing with mechanistic authoritarians, the law-and-order, rigid types who knew the rules and never strayed from them, and gave no quarter to anyone who did. Like David McIvey.

If David and Greg got into a conflict, and they would, Naomi was not at all certain Greg would hold his ground. She was not certain that he could hold his ground.

Years before, a patient of David’s had told her how David had nearly gloated over her X rays, how he had described where he would cut, what he would do. “It was the most terrifying hour of my life,” the woman had said. “I don’t doubt that he’s the brilliant surgeon people say he is, but he’s a monster, too. I think he lives to cut people. That gives him pleasure, that and frightening his patients. He knew he was frightening me, and he kept on and on about it. Never a word of comfort. He’s a monster.”

David was as implacable and unyielding as a glacier, moving steadily forward, crushing anything in its path, oblivious. And David had made it clear that the clinic could not survive as a family hobby in the face of the modern business climate.

If Erica left the clinic promptly at six on those hot days, she still had a couple of hours of daylight to work on the outside of the house, which she had started to paint. She had scraped and brushed flaking paint off, had primed bare spots, and now she was putting on the final coat. Later in the year, when the season changed, she would concentrate on the inside, she had decided, and try to get as much done outside as possible now. In the mornings she worked on the west side, out of the sun. In the evenings she moved the ladder to the east side. Gradually the house was getting painted. That evening she set up her ladder, got her brush and paint and climbed up. It was a two-story house with high eaves, a stretch from as high on the ladder as she dared to go.

She had not yet hung the paint can on the ladder when she felt the ladder starting to shift, to tilt. She dropped the brush and grabbed a gutter for support. It wouldn’t hold her weight, she thought wildly, as the ladder shifted again. It wouldn’t hold her and she didn’t dare let go and start climbing back down.

Then she heard Darren’s voice from below. She recognized the voice instantly from listening to him at the clinic; the same easy cadence, not laughing, but not taking the situation very seriously either. They had not met, but she had seen him with patients, with the interns, talking to Greg Boardman, and she had stopped to listen to him more than once. Looking down she saw his broad face grinning up at her.

“Drop the paint and hold on to the ladder,” he said. “I’ll keep it steady for you.”

“The can’s open,” she said, hearing the words as inane. “You’ll be splashed with paint.”

His grin broadened. “Just drop it. Let it go.”

She dropped the can and it splashed paint like a geyser. Then she climbed down the ladder as Darren held it steady.

At the bottom, on solid ground again, she looked at him in dismay. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry! Thank you. I think you saved my life.”

He was spattered from his shoes up, with paint on his jeans, his shirt, arms and hands, and some even on his face. He laughed. “Maybe just your neck. You set the ladder over a hole in the ground. Got a hose?”

She shook her head. “Come on around back. You can wash up a little bit at least. I’m Erica Castle.”

“The book lady,” he said. “I’d offer to shake hands, but it’s probably not a good idea. Darren Halvord.”

She led the way around the mountain of trash to the back porch, where he hesitated. “I’d better leave the shoes outside,” he said. “I’ll track up your floor.”

He took off his running shoes, then followed her into the house, where she got out towels and a washcloth and pointed him toward the bathroom. “I could wash your clothes,” she said, “but I don’t have anything you could put on.”

“They’ll keep until I get home.”

When he returned, with a clean face, hands and arms, she held out a glass of iced tea. “It’s about all I have to offer. Or some pretty cheap wine.”

“This is good,” he said, taking the tea, then gazing about the kitchen. About five feet ten or eleven inches tall, he didn’t give the impression of being large, but his arms were corded with muscles and his shoulders were very broad. She had thought his eyes were black, but now saw that they were dark blue, with pale lashes, pale eyebrows. His hair was straight, cut short, probably a dark blond, sun-bleached. Laugh lines at his eyes looked as if they had been drawn with white ink on a russet background.

“How did you just happen to come by in the nick of time?” she asked, moving to the table to sit down. He sat opposite her and sipped the tea.

“I always come this way or a block or two over. My place is behind that mall on Coburg, four blocks from here. I didn’t know you lived in this house. I thought it was vacant, going to ruin.”

“Well, it was going to ruin, that’s for sure. I inherited it from my grandmother.”

She talked about the shape the house had been in when she arrived, about teaching in Cleveland, the trip out. He was easy to talk to, and, she realized, she had been starved for male company. That was a surprise; she had been so tired by bedtime day after day that her thoughts of men had been rare, easily ignored. The few times she thought of Ron, her former fiancé, she had felt only satisfaction of being done with him, done with that endless, go-nowhere engagement. After the first date or two, there had never been any excitement in that relationship. She had never felt the least bit threatened or exhilarated, but rather an unexamined acceptance of her role in his life, one of accommodation to his twice-a-week need for sex. They had been engaged for six years.

“After I start teaching in the fall,” she said, “fixing up the house will go faster. I’ll hire someone to help out, repair or replace the roof, do a number of things.”

“Will you rent out the apartment? It is a separate apartment, isn’t it? I noticed the outside stairs.”

“It is. That’s way down on my list of things to get to. I haven’t even started on it yet.”

“Can I have a look at the upstairs?” he asked then. “See, I have a three-room apartment over by the mall, and the traffic’s getting worse and worse. I suspect that the owner of the building will sell out to a developer for a big box store or something in the coming year. I’ll be house hunting then.”

“It might be that long before I get things in shape upstairs.” She started to say that her plan was to fix up the house and sell it as soon as possible, but she didn’t.

“Let’s have a look.”

It was worse than the downstairs had been when she’d first arrived. She had cleaned out the refrigerator and left the door open, but had done nothing else. There were mats on the floor, rags and paper bags, fast-food boxes, pizza boxes, bottles, broken chairs and a wobbly table, and the whole place was horribly dirty. She was ashamed, humiliated to think that she owned it, more humiliated to think her mother had lived like this for years, until her death from a drug overdose.

Darren examined the apartment carefully, then nodded. They went back down to her kitchen. “Let’s talk rent,” he said.

“I told you, that’s last on my list.”

“Would $750 a month be okay? That’s more than I’m paying now, but it’s a lot bigger, closer to work and not being crowded by a mall.”

She poured more tea, got out ice cubes and shook her head. “Next year maybe.”

“I thought we might make a deal,” he said, accepting the freshened tea. He sat down again. “I could start cleaning it up and do some of the other things that need doing, like hauling away the trash, replacing the glass in those windows. In return I get a free month’s rent, and I get to park my truck in the garage. And have my son with me some of the time. He’s eleven and part of the reason I need more space.”

She stared at him, at a loss.

“I can furnish pretty good references,” he said, and then grinned.

“Oh boy, can you! I just hadn’t considered even trying to rent it yet, not for months and months.”

“Okay, think about it and let me know.” He drank more of the tea and put the glass down, then stood up. “See you at the clinic.”

“No, wait. What am I thinking? Of course, it’s a deal. It’s just so…so unfair for you. To have to clean up that filth, I mean.”

“My department. Don’t even think of it. Eventually I’ll want a key to the outside door. I’ll probably get started over the weekend. You just stay off that ladder, okay? I’ll get it painted along the way.” He held out his hand. “Deal,” he said. “We can get a rental agreement, whatever it takes, later.”

They shook hands, and for the first time in her life she fully understood the old expression: to touch a live wire. She knew that he went out to the porch, that he put his shoes on, waved to her and walked out of sight, but she had become immobilized by that touch. Abruptly she sat down and looked at her hand, opened it, closed it hard, opened it.

“Oh, my God,” she said under her breath.

4

“What it means,” Greg Boardman told Naomi on Thursday night, “is that it’s a legal tangle, a nightmare. When the court granted the power of attorney to Thomas, there was another document, a power of acceptance. Since Donna had a will, the court ruled that her intentions were perfectly clear, and the terms of the will had to be satisfied. Her shares will go to their kids when she dies. Thomas said that when they wrote their wills they were still trying to get the kids interested in the clinic, and had hopes that Lawrence, at least, would get involved. It seemed a good idea, I guess, to bequeath them shares. And now that old will is the determining factor in who will control the clinic.”

Thomas Kelso’s kids were middle-aged, and none of them, as far as Naomi could tell, gave a damn about the clinic. Lawrence was a molecular biologist at Princeton; the twin daughters were both married to well-to-do businessmen in Los Angeles.

“I thought Thomas had the authority to vote her shares, even to sell them,” she said.

“He does. But if he wanted to sell them, he would have to prove it was a real sale with a bona fide buyer. There would have to be an evaluation with a real market value, and then the proceeds of the sale would have to be used for her care, and when she dies, anything left over would go to the kids. He can’t sell them to me for a buck.” Very bitterly he added, “Thomas is beaten, and he knows it. He’s plenty pissed.”

“Not just Thomas,” she said after a moment. Greg’s craggy face was drawn and he looked tired. She knew he had not been sleeping well. His face always revealed his inner self: conflicts, concern, love, whatever emotion was uppermost was as visible to her as if written in script on his features. It was not only that he was close to his sixtieth birthday, she also knew, although that was a factor. Where he could go at his age was problematic. But he cared deeply about the work at the clinic. Everyone who went to work there and stayed cared deeply. Maybe that was a mistake, getting personally involved, caring so much. It was a disturbing thought. She pulled her attention back to what Greg was saying.

“He’ll try to get the power of acceptance changed, but it will take time, and if the judge doesn’t agree to the change, David McIvey will end up in charge.”

More and more often during the past few years Thomas Kelso had found himself pondering the unanswerable questions that he should have put behind him as a youth. When did life begin and, more important these past months, when did it end? Joyce McIvey had been brain-dead for forty-eight hours when they disconnected her life support; her body had resisted death for another forty-eight hours. When did she die? Brain-dead? Heart-dead? Which was the final death? When? If there was a soul, when did it depart? At the funeral service for Joyce, sitting apart from the family, he had regarded them soberly: David with his pretty little wife on one side of him, his two children on the other, Lorraine, his first wife, at the end of the row. The two wives and the grandchildren had all wept for Joyce, but David had been like a statue among them, untouchable, unmovable, remote.