Clear And Convincing Proof. Kate Wilhelm

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ