THE CONTENDER
There was no further word from the district attorney, no story in the newspapers. R.J. knew silence could be ominous. Wilhoit’s people were at work, talking to nurses and doctors at Middlesex, assessing whether they had a case, whether it would help or hurt the district attorney’s career if he tried to crush Dr. Thomas A. Kendricks.
R.J. concentrated on her work. She posted notices in the hospital and at the medical school announcing the formation of the publications committee. When the first meeting was held, on a snowy Tuesday evening, fourteen people showed up. She had expected the committee to attract residents and young doctors, the unpublished. But several senior physicians attended, too. It shouldn’t have surprised her. She knew at least one man who had become a medical school dean without having learned how to write acceptable English.
She set up a monthly schedule of lectures by medical journal editors, and several of the doctors volunteered to read their own papers-in-progress at the next meeting so they could be critiqued. She had to admit that Sidney Ringgold had anticipated a need.
Boris Lattimore, an elderly physician on the hospital’s visiting staff, pulled R.J. aside in the cafeteria and whispered that he had news for her. Sidney had told him the next associate chief of medicine would be either R.J. or Allen Greenstein. Greenstein was a hotshot researcher who had developed a much-publicized program for the genetic screening of newborns. R.J. hoped the rumor was wrong; Greenstein was daunting competition.
The new committee responsibility wasn’t difficult; it added to her schedule and nibbled away at her precious free time, but she was never tempted to sacrifice her Thursdays. She was aware that without sanitary, modern clinics many women would die trying to end pregnancies themselves. The poorest women, those without medical insurance, money, or enough sophistication to find out where help was available, still tried to end their own pregnancies. They drank turpentine, ammonia, and detergent, and poked things into their cervixes—coat hangers, knitting needles, kitchen tools, any instrument that promised to bring on a miscarriage. R.J. worked at Family Planning because she felt it was essential for a woman to have adequate services available if she needed them. But it was becoming harder and harder for the medical staff at Family Planning. Driving home after a busy Wednesday at the hospital, R.J. heard on the car radio that a bomb had exploded at an abortion clinic in Bridgeport, Connecticut, knocking out a portion of the building, blinding a guard, and injuring a staff secretary and two patients.
The next morning at the clinic, Gwen Gabler told R.J. she was resigning, moving away.
“You can’t,” R.J. said.
She, Gwen, and Samantha Potter had been close friends since medical school. Samantha was a fixture on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts medical school in Worcester, her anatomy class already a legend, and R.J. didn’t get to see her as frequently as they would like. But she and Gwen had spent time together regularly and often for eighteen years.
It was Gwen who had made it possible for her to continue to work at Family Planning, bolstering her when things became difficult. R.J. was not brave. She thought of Gwen as her courage.
Gwen smiled at her miserably. “I’m gonna miss the hell out of you.”
“So don’t leave.”
“I have to go. Phil and the boys come first.” Mortgage rates had soared and the bottom had dropped out of the real estate market. Phil Gabler had had a disastrous business year, and the Gablers were moving west, to Moscow, Idaho. Phil was going to teach real estate courses at the university and Gwen was negotiating for a job as a gynecologist-obstetrician with a Health Maintenance Organization. “Phil loves to teach. And HMOs are where it’s at. We’ve got to do something to change the system, R.J. Before long, we’re all going to be working for HMOs.” She and the Idaho HMO already had completed initial arrangements by phone.
They held hands tightly, and R.J. wondered how she would get along without her.
After Grand Rounds on Friday morning, Sidney Ringgold broke away from the gaggle of white coats and crossed the hospital lobby to where R.J. waited at the elevator.
“I wanted to tell you, I’m getting lots of positive feedback about the publications committee,” he said.
R.J. was suspicious. Sidney Ringgold didn’t usually go out of his way to deliver back pats.
“How’s Tom doing these days?” he said casually. “I heard something about a complaint to the Medical Incidents Committee at Middlesex. Is it apt to give him any real trouble?”
Sidney had raised a lot of money for the hospital, and he had an exaggerated fear of bad publicity, even the kind that rubbed off on a spouse.
All her life she had intensely disliked the role of job candidate. She didn’t give in to temptation, didn’t tell him: You can take the appointment and stuff it. “No, no real trouble, Sidney. Tom says it’s just a nuisance, nothing to worry about.”
He leaned toward her. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, either. No promises, mind, but things look good. They look very good indeed.”
His encouragement filled her with inexplicable gloom. “You know what I wish, Sidney?” she said impulsively. “I wish you and I were working to set up a family practice residency and clinic for Lemuel Grace Hospital, so the uninsured of Boston would have a place to get really top-flight medical care.”
“The uninsured already have a place to go. We have a drop-in clinic that scores high numbers.” Sidney’s annoyance showed. He didn’t like conversations about the medical inadequacies of his service.
“People come to the drop-in clinic only when they absolutely have to. They get a different doctor every time they come, so there’s no continuity of care. They’re treated for the illness or injury of the moment, and no preventive medicine is practiced. Sidney, we could start something if we turned out family practitioners. They’re the doctors who are really needed.”
His smile was forced now. “None of the Boston hospitals has a family practice residency.”
“Isn’t that a wonderful reason to start one?”
He shook his head. “I’m tired. I think I’ve done well as chief of medicine, and I have less than three years before retirement. I’m not interested in leading the kind of battle that would be necessary to set up a program like that. You can’t come to me with any more crusades, R.J. If you want to make changes in the system, the way to do it is to earn your own place in the power structure. Then you can fight your own battles.”
That Thursday, her secret backyard route into the Family Planning building was uncovered. The police detail that kept demonstrators pushed away from the clinic was late that morning. R.J. had parked in Ralph Aiello’s yard and was going through the gate in the fence when she became aware of people pouring around both sides of the clinic building.
Lots of people, carrying signs, shouting, and pointing their fingers at her.
She didn’t know what to do.
She knew there would be violence, what she had always been afraid of. She steeled herself to walk through them in silence, without visibly trembling. Passive resistance. Think of Gandhi, she told herself, but instead she thought of doctors who had been attacked, clinic staff who had been killed or maimed. Crazy people.
Some of them ran past her, went through the gate and into the Aiello yard.
An aloof dignity. Think peace. Think of Martin Luther King. Walk through them. Walk through them.
She looked back and saw that they were taking pictures of the red BMW, crowding around it. Oh, the paint job. She turned around and pushed back through the gate. Someone punched her in the back.
“Touch that car and I’ll break your arm!” she yelled.
The man with the camera turned and shoved it toward her face. The strobe lamp flickered again and again and again, nails of light piercing her eyes, screams like spikes driven into her ears, a kind of crucifixion.