A surgeon named Wendell Lucas had founded the clinic that once occupied this house. Over the years Lucas had hired a progression of young GPs to handle daily patients and refer him the appendectomies and gallbladder resections that gave him his living. Lucas was a better businessman than a surgeon, and the GPs who had good business sense moved on after three or four years, establishing their own practices in Natchez or other towns. But Tom had cared only about practicing medicine, and having the old surgeon take care of the business side of things freed him up for that, so he’d remained in the arrangement. He had always known the older man was taking advantage, but he was too embarrassed for Lucas to confront him about it. Peggy had ridden Tom about it sometimes, but after enough years even she had given up, and then in 1980 Lucas finally retired to play golf full-time. Tom abandoned the old clinic and moved into a modern new office complex beside St. Catherine’s Hospital, the same one he occupied now.
In many ways, this old clinic represented Tom’s growth into manhood. Here he had truly come into his own as a physician. He’d experienced great triumphs and made sickening mistakes. The triumphs had been silent for the most part, inspired diagnoses arrived at after deep study and research, and only after following the diagnoses of other doctors to demoralizing dead ends. That was in the days before nuclear imaging and complex lab screening, when all he had to go on was education, experience, and instinct. But the life-and-death intensity of the work Tom had done here was only part of the invisible web that tied him to this building. More than anything else, this was the place where he’d come to know Viola Turner.
As a rule, Dr. Lucas always kept two GPs working under him at the clinic. Most had been decent docs, with only a couple of bad apples over the years. But one of those apples Tom had never forgotten. Gavin Edwards had been at the clinic when Tom arrived in 1963. Viola Turner was Edwards’s nurse, but as soon as Tom was hired, Dr. Lucas had transferred Viola to him. Tom figured Lucas had made this change to ease him into the practice (and increase his production numbers), but before long Tom deduced that Viola had requested the transfer. The reason was simple: Gavin Edwards would screw anything in a skirt, and he devoted most of his waking hours to trying. Despite being married, he’d had flings with both receptionists and the lab technician, a full-blown affair with the insurance girl, and he’d possibly even molested some patients.
Viola was the only one of “the girls” Edwards hadn’t nailed, and he was clearly itching to do so. He often commented on her physical assets, even after Tom pointedly discouraged him. The irony was that Gavin Edwards was as racist as the average welder at Triton Battery, yet he still wanted to sleep with Viola. Of course, that particular hypocrisy had flourished in America since the seventeenth century. White men loved having sex with black women, so long as they would never have to treat them as equals. And in Mississippi in the early 1960s, there was no risk of that. Truth be told, there wasn’t much risk of it in New York, either. In Natchez, Edwards probably could have raped Viola and gotten away with it, but he didn’t have the guts to go quite that far. Viola took great pains to avoid being alone with him, but still he persisted. Eventually, Tom began to wonder what he would do if Edwards, who was senior to him, made an overt advance toward Viola. Dr. Lucas would undoubtedly support Edwards in such a circumstance. And if that happened … what would Tom do?
Fate soon answered the question for him. It was Viola’s duty to unlock the clinic every morning, then set up the examining rooms and the surgery for the day. The other girls came in thirty minutes later, and the docs a half hour after that, after completing morning rounds at the hospital. Dr. Edwards always arrived last, but not because of rounds. He was usually visiting a bored housewife whose husband left early for work. But one morning in 1965, Gavin Edwards was waiting inside the clinic when Viola arrived. He told her he’d come in early to catch up on his records, but within three minutes his hands were all over her. When he tried to pin her in a corner of an examining room, Viola pretended to cooperate just long enough to get a ceramic mug filled with tongue depressors into her hand. Then she cracked him across the face with it.
Tom’s first knowledge of the incident came when Dr. Lucas called him into his office. Viola had reported Dr. Edwards’s behavior, and the surgeon had already called Edwards in to question him. Edwards told Lucas that he’d been having consensual sex with Viola for a couple of weeks, and she’d only hit him when he admitted that he had no feelings for her and had simply wanted to find out what it was like to “dip his pen in ink.” Lucas believed Edwards, mostly because of his track record with the other female employees, yet something had made him ask Tom’s opinion. Almost before he knew what he was going to say, Tom blurted out, “Gavin Edwards is a damned liar.”
Dr. Lucas’s mouth dropped open as though he’d seen a pig start to dance. Then he drew himself up and gave Tom a stern glare. “That’s a pretty serious charge against a colleague, Tom. Not to mention the obvious.”
“What’s the ‘obvious’?” Tom asked, wondering if Lucas had the balls to say that Edwards was white and Viola black.
“Are you taking the word of an unregistered nurse over that of a fellow medical man?”
“Viola Turner is the best nurse I’ve ever worked with,” Tom replied, his chin quivering with fury. “Gavin Edwards is a lazy bastard who can’t keep his prick in his pants. Worse, he’s a lousy diagnostician. I don’t think he can even read an EKG.”
Dr. Lucas started to say something, but Tom cut him off with an ultimatum. “If you fire Viola, you’re firing me as well. Then you and Edwards can do all the diagnosing around here.” Then he walked out.