Clear And Convincing Proof

She sounded boastful, smug even, but when Erica glanced at her, she looked sad and averted her face. “On to the kitchen and lounge,” she said briskly. “You’ll like the lounge. It’s like an old country house parlor.”

She was wearing a diamond-studded wedding ring, her pantsuit was expensive, her nails manicured, her blond hair styled beautifully. Erica recalled what she had said, that she would be there until four-thirty. A volunteer? It seemed so. A wealthy volunteer, from all appearances. Mrs. Maryhill had been correct; Erica would meet the right sort of people here.

2

When Annie left, it was a few minutes past four-thirty, and she drove faster than usual, knowing there would be a traffic snarl at the entrance to Coburg Road and the bridge at this time of day. Normally the short trip would take no more than five to eight minutes, but because she was running late already, it took longer. She didn’t know why that was, but it seemed to work out that way every time. It was ten minutes before five when she entered the waiting room of the surgical associates, waved to Leslie Tooey at the reception desk and took a chair in the waiting room. Leslie nodded and picked up her phone to tell Dr. McIvey that she had arrived.

That was a bad sign, Annie knew. It meant that he was not with a patient, possibly that he had been waiting for her. He hated to be kept waiting. He sometimes was ready to leave at a quarter to five, sometimes not until after six, or even later, but whenever it was, he wanted her to be there.

Leslie slid open the glass partition and said, “You can go on back now.”

Annie forced a smile and walked through the waiting room to the door to the offices, paused for Leslie to release the lock, then walked to the office where her husband was waiting for her to drive him home.

He met her at the door. “I don’t want to hear about the traffic,” he said. “When will you get it through your head that it gets bad this time of day? Start earlier. Do I have to tie a note around your neck? And take off that stupid name tag.”

He strode out as she fumbled with the name tag. She had forgotten she was still wearing it. They left by the rear door.

David McIvey was forty-seven, at the peak of his physical attractiveness. Tall, well-built, with abundant, wavy brown hair, brown eyes and regular features, he impressed strangers who often mistook him for a ski instructor, or a model, or a sportscaster—someone in the public eye. He was also at the peak of his profession—the most sought-after neurosurgeon in town, and the most successful.

“Why did you marry me?” she had demanded one night, two years earlier, the only time they had ever really quarreled. “You don’t want a lover, a wife, a companion. What you want is an indentured servant.”

“I will not be drawn into an adolescent, fruitless discussion of relationships,” he had said, rising from the dinner table. “You have everything a woman could possibly want, and what I need in return is a peaceful, orderly home.” He held up his hands; his fingers were long and shapely. “I confront death on a daily basis. That requires absolute concentration, certainty and order, and I cannot be distracted by disorder when I get home. I cannot tolerate absurd, childish outbursts of temper or foolish, female hysteria. Call me rigid, inflexible, unyielding, whatever you like, but you have to give me what I need, and that is simply peace and quiet when I get home.”

“You don’t even realize how it hurts when you treat me like a slave.”

“You know where the box is that holds all the belongings you brought into this house. I won’t try to hold you here, or restrain you in any way. You are free to take that box and leave whenever you want to, but if you stay, you will accept that my needs are to be met with whatever grace you can manage.”

“And my needs?”

“You have no needs that involve me. We will not discuss this again. You know my schedule.”

What had set off the argument that day was the fact that she had been held up at the rehab clinic, helping restrain a teenager who had had a violent reaction to a medication. David had not wanted to hear about it, and had become an ice-man with a coldness that had persisted throughout dinner.

A week after the argument, she had talked to a lawyer, had shown him the prenuptial agreement she had blithely signed.

“You didn’t consult an attorney before you signed it?” the lawyer asked in disgust. He waved away her answer. “Doesn’t matter. You signed it and you were of age, and presumably in your right mind. You agreed that if you want out before ten years pass, you will take with you no more than you brought into the marriage. No settlement, no alimony, nothing. On the other hand, he can kick you out at any time if you fail your wifely duties, commit adultery, turn into a drunk or an addict…. Very generously, he agreed that if he’s the one to end it, he’ll give you severance pay, so to speak—three months’ living expenses. Mrs. McIvey, why did you marry the guy?”

“I loved him,” she said in a low voice. In a lower voice she added, “I believed he loved me.”

It had been more than that, and less, she had come to realize. At twenty-two she had been thrilled to be noticed by the older, brilliant and very rich doctor. And she had been infatuated, blind and deaf to the advice of her parents, Naomi, a few friends. David had been devastated by the divorce his first wife had instituted; she had cleaned him out, he had admitted. His child support payments were astronomical, with access to his two children severely limited. He desperately wanted a decent home life, a companion, a wife. Two months after they met, he and Annie were married.

The lawyer gave her some advice that day. Start a journal, write down the schedule you have to maintain and what happens if you are late. Keep a record of what you do every day for a few weeks, and after that, note any changes. Keep your journal in a safe deposit box, or under lock and key at home.

She listened and later followed his advice, but she didn’t get a safe deposit box. It was impossible to imagine David reading her private journal; he neither knew nor cared what she did as long as he was not thrown off his schedule. He wanted his breakfast to be ready at six-thirty, and then to be driven to the office. He could drive but he didn’t like to; she had become his chauffeur. She returned to the surgical offices at twelve-thirty to take him home for lunch—which she prepared—and then was back to get him at four-forty-five. What she did the rest of the day he never asked.

But the attraction of a never-ending vacation soon palled. They lived in a condo complex, where it appeared that the other women were professionals who worked, or had small children, or were a good deal older than she and played bridge. David’s schedule precluded day-long shopping with lunch outings. She could not take a run up to Portland for the opening of a museum show or art gallery. She could not spend all afternoon playing bridge, which she didn’t know how to play to begin with. Invitations from other women in the complex dwindled to nothing within a year. Since a housekeeper-cook came every afternoon to clean and prepare dinner for seven-thirty, she didn’t change sheets, dust books, scrub a bathroom, learn new cooking skills. Even Saturdays were rigidly scheduled, at least the mornings were. David jogged on Saturday morning; she took him to the Amazon Trail at eight-thirty and picked him up again exactly one and a half hours later.

They seldom entertained or accepted invitations, although they did go to an occasional concert or play, and once or twice a month they had dinner with his mother.

He could be tender, and even passionate, she also wrote in the journal. His passion during sex had excited her to an extreme. It was the passion and abandon of stories, of dreams, and she thought that was why she had been determined at first to make it work. She had felt certain that that passionate other would come to the surface all the time, that he would unfreeze, relax, that his rigidity was caused by fear that she would desert him the way he said Lorraine, his ex-wife, had done. After the second year she had abandoned that hope. Not Jekyll and Hyde, but rather Don Juan in bed and Cotton Mather out of bed. Medicine was his god, the operating room his church, the scalpel his scepter.

What she could do, she had decided, was spend time at the clinic, where she felt comfortable and relaxed, and where the only friends she had in Eugene could be found. In many ways being a volunteer was better than working full-time at a salary that barely paid subsistence wages. She had told Naomi years ago that she planned to work and save for a number of years, and then take time off, travel, see New York, Paris…. Working full-time, she had been able to save nothing.

Gradually she had come to realize that she was changing, not David. She was the indentured servant, she thought, a bonded servant whose reward would come after serving for a certain number of years.

She would be thirty-two when the ten years were up; she would still be young. Think of it as working and putting money aside to fulfill dreams later, or like being imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit, she told herself. You can endure anything for a limited time, if you know when the end will be. She endured and followed his schedule and rarely was late, and she counted the months ahead, the months already passed. She kept a faithful record of her days, which were blameless, virtuous, along with his deeds and words and her accommodation.

And when her servitude ended, she reminded herself now and then, she would make his first wife look like a piker.

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.