After two face-saving days, Dr. Lucas fired Gavin Edwards. Tom had no illusions that this was anything other than a business decision. Edwards might have been a good golfing partner, but it was Tom who kept the practice humming. More than half the patients openly praised him as the best doctor Lucas had ever employed, and Lucas was too greedy to let a frustrated cocksman like Edwards hurt his bottom line.
Viola stayed home from work during those two days, and the clinic suffered mightily because of it. It was like an army company trying to get along without its top sergeant. Her absence quickly revealed just how much work she’d been doing during the course of each day. Patients constantly complained, despite Tom working the substitute nurse off her feet. The day after Edwards cleaned out his desk, Viola reappeared, looking more serene than she ever had. Within hours the clinic was back on keel. But late in the afternoon, as Tom was searching for a chart in the clutter atop his desk, she’d stepped into his private office and closed the door.
“I want to thank you for what you did,” she said softly.
Tom felt blood rush to his face. He couldn’t look her in the eyes. “It was nothing. Anybody in my place would have done it.”
“No,” Viola replied. “Nobody else would have done it. No doctor who ever came through here, anyway. I was sure I was going to be fired. Dr. Lucas told me what you said.”
Tom stared at Viola’s hands, which were folded in front of her white skirt. He couldn’t bear to look into her eyes. Perhaps, he thought guiltily, because he shared Edwards’s desire. And because of this, he deserved anything but gratitude. As he stared, he realized Viola’s hands were clenched so tightly that her skin was bloodless where her thumbs and fingers pressed into it.
“I just told the truth,” he said awkwardly, trying to speak around his seemingly swollen larynx. At last he looked up into her big brown eyes. “You’re a fine nurse. As good as any I’ve ever worked with.”
“Even in the war?”
“Yes. I wasn’t a doctor in Korea, of course. Just a medic. But I saw a good bit of work at the clearing stations, and at a MASH unit after I was wounded.”
“You don’t know what that means to me.” Her hands parted, and Tom saw that they were shaking. “Your next patient is ready in room four.”
“Thank you,” Tom said, and hesitantly started forward.
Viola stepped aside as if to let him pass, but as she did, she turned into him, buried her face in his chest, and wrapped both arms around him in a fierce hug. Though she was shaking badly, she must have felt his heart pounding. Stunned by the sudden intimacy, he encircled her in his arms and just stood there, holding her. After what seemed a full minute, she drew back, and he saw tears on her face. She wiped them unself-consciously, then smiled.
“Did I say room four or room five?”
“I have no idea.”
Viola laughed. “I’ll go find out.”
And that was that.
They spent the next three years pretending this moment had not passed between them. They were both married, after all. Of course, marriage didn’t stop people like Gavin Edwards, and in all truthfulness it might not have stopped them, either. The real barrier to any deeper relationship was simpler and more frightening: Tom was white and Viola black. That gulf could not be bridged in Natchez, Mississippi, in the 1960s, not without casualties. They both knew it, and they lived under the tyranny of that unwritten code.
Playing the role of objective employer with Viola was the hardest thing Tom had ever done. He soon learned the basic human truth that the more you try to put something out of your mind, the more difficult it becomes to think of anything else. Oscar Wilde’s dictum that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it quickly lost any humor it had once had. Five days a week, Tom worked within eight feet of Viola for most of the day, and within two feet for much of it. When they labored over an open wound in the surgery, their heads sometimes touched, and he almost couldn’t stand her proximity. He knew the tightly restrained curves of that white uniform more intimately than he knew his wife’s naked body. He came to think of Viola’s scent like the smell of the caramel candy his grandmother had made when he was a boy—unobtainable in the real world, but vividly, mouthwateringly alive in his mind.