My Favorite Midlife Crisis (21 page)

These days Rolfe visited for Easter and once in the summer, which was all his wife would allow. Nadine and Rolfe had known each other since fifth grade, so she’d been exposed to the Swanson family soap opera in prime time. I didn’t blame Nadine for wanting Rolfe to keep his distance from his crazy clan.

“So it all falls on you,” my father said. “It’s not fair that you carry all the burden.”

“You’re no burden.” I kissed his paper dry cheek.

“I know what I am. Sometimes I don’t know
who
I am, but I know what I am.” Which made both of us laugh, but my father brushed away tears and I swallowed mine.

On the Stan front, boyfriend Brad asked to borrow a cut crystal punch bowl he had Stan cede to me in the settlement. I wasn’t only gracious during the conversation with a man I detested, I arranged to leave the bowl for him at the lobby desk with a recipe for Stan’s favorite champagne punch.

I returned Seymour Bernstein’s curt hello with a cheery one and complimented Bethany on her picking up an early stage ovarian cancer from some vague symptomatology. I asked after my patients’ families and made sure the speculum was warm. I tiptoed through each universe trying to be a better person, more loving, forgiving, understanding, in hopes that God or nature or whatever wielded the power over my fate would continue to smile down on me. A lot of this was Simon-inspired, of course. And I hadn’t even slept with him.

“You’re putting me on,” Fleur accused, after I caught her up. “All that hearts and flowers phone porno but no real sex?”

“Good God, when? Between the eggs and the scones? We only had breakfast.”

“You were in a hotel. Okay, the restaurant. But you had a room. Was the elevator broken?”

“It was a first date, Fleur. And not even a real date,” I protested.

“Oh, please. Should I sing a few choruses of ‘Havah Nagilah’ to remind you of a recent toss in the hay?”

“This is different.”

“This has the potential to be serious, right?”

“Could be.”

“Which means Harry Galligan is definitely out of the picture?”

She surprised me by remembering his last name.

“I’m not sure. Maybe. No.”

Which might not have been fair to Harry given my initial attraction to Simon, but it was early in the game and I wasn’t quite ready to count the Irishman out. My brain told me he was a better match for me than the Englishman and I was pushing for my brain to take over from my heart or my gizzard or whatever was driving this initial rush of feeling for Simon York.

Chapter 22

Thursday afternoon, Neil Potak popped into my office. Which alarmed me even before he opened his mouth because this particular partner, unlike the gregarious Seymour Bernstein, wasn’t big on socializing. Neil’s last pop-in had been the year before to tell me something had exploded in the autoclave in Examining Room Four.

“Any news on funding for the Clinic?” he asked now, gazing through my window where thunderclouds crowded the sky over the Inner Harbor.

I’d heard from the last prospect on my list. I said, “The Pearlmutter Family Foundation isn’t funding startup projects. I’m still digging, but there’s not much out there I haven’t approached. Still,” I tried to catch his eye, “I’m telling myself the pressure’s off a little with UltaMed buying Covenant. Maybe they’ll pitch in and get those patients on board.”

Neil examined his very clean fingernails. “Listen,” he said. “This is just a rumor so far, but I just got a call from a friend of mine at Covenant. The buzz over there is UltaMed is closing down the hospital. Giving it six months. They’ve called a staff meeting for,” he checked his watch, “about now.”

I’d been playing with a gel pen. Its extra-fine point glided perilously close to my wrist.

“That’s got to be a mistake,” I said. “There’s no other hospital in a ten mile radius. They can’t shut Covenant down.”

“Everything turns on the bottom line these days.” He shrugged. “Covenant’s been hemorrhaging dollars for years. So maybe UltaMed is amputating. Seems like a logical move to me. You have a gangrenous foot—you cut it off.”

I sent him a shocked look. “These are human beings we’re talking about, Neil, not mixed metaphors. If Covenant shuts down, where are these people going to go?”

“Not here,” Neil said much too quickly, his sharp amber eyes finally settling on me. “Bethany’s dragging her feet on getting out the final report, but I’ve seen her preliminary draft on our pro bono numbers. We can’t afford to absorb these uninsured patients. Not anymore. Not even a few. And you should know Seymour backs me up on this.”

“Sonofabitch,” I muttered after he closed the door. Then I phoned Dan Rosetti’s office. My father’s doctor was chief of gerontology at Covenant. If anyone could separate truth from scuttlebutt, Dan could. His receptionist said he’d been called to a 3 p.m. meeting of department heads. It was 3:15. Those hatchet meetings never lasted more than a half hour. If I hustled, I might be able to tag him on the way out.

I drove through West Baltimore under a steady drumbeat of rain. The famous white marble stoops fronting the formstone row houses were stained gray by the gloom, and a soggy mulch of early October leaves clogged the gutters. Everything looked as raw as I felt.

This neighborhood was a west side version of the one I’d grown up in across town. Working class. A tavern on every corner. A laundromat and a check cashing service flanked the storefront that used to house my women’s clinic. It was now the Beulahland Tabernacle of Joyous Prayer. Covenant loomed like Old Mother Hubbard over the neighborhood, its red brick skirts spread across two city blocks, its bonnet, a smaller silver replica of Johns Hopkins Hospital’s gold dome, washed dull in the dreary light. Just as my mother had hauled Rolfe and me to Hopkins for earaches and poison ivy, the folks around here used Covenant as their doctor’s office.

No more.

When I hit Dan Rosetti’s reception area in Covenant’s physicians tower, his appointments secretary said, “He’s still in the meeting, Dr. Berke. You’ve heard the latest?” She slashed two fingers across her throat.

I nodded. “Is it official?”

“Just came across on WBAL news.” She glanced at her desk radio. “I’ve been working here twenty-one years. As my kids would say, this really sucks. Not for me so much. I just keep thinking, what’s going to happen to our patients? All these poor seniors don’t take change easily. Especially the Alzheimer ones.”

I hadn’t thought about that. My dad took the same green chair on every visit. Picked up but didn’t read, couldn’t read anymore, one of the large-print magazines stacked on the side table. He’d be lost in a new place.

“Gwyneth?” Dan Rosetti’s voice rose behind me. I felt his hand light on my shoulder and turned to see a grim smile.

“Oh, Dan,” I said, emotion flooding, surprising me. “What the hell is going on?”

“My office.” He hitched his neck in that direction. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

***

What he knew was my worst nightmare realized. UltaMed had filed the legal papers to sell Covenant. More official in this day of media power, they’d already released the news to the press.

“Covenant’s a lost cause,” Dan said. He’d been with the hospital since his residency there, which added up to three decades.

“And what happens to you?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ll be fine. Union Memorial has been after me for years. They’ve got a first-rate gerontology department. The problem is Covenant has been eating the charges for a few patients of mine. Don’t ask me what’s in store for those folks now. Unless.” He pressed fingers to his forehead. “I was thinking about you in there. About your clinic.”

“My clinic,” I sighed. “There
is
no clinic and it doesn’t look like there ever will be. I’ve hit every foundation that sounded even remotely promising. I’m at a dead end, Dan.”

“Maybe not,” he said.

The phone rang. Dan peered at the caller ID. “One of my patients. Probably saw the bad news on TV. This shouldn’t take long.”

I took the moment to glance around his office. Awards from the Knights of Columbus, Polish Home Club, and Sons of Italy thanking him for his volunteer service shared the wall with his diplomas from Yale and Penn Medical School.

Sitting on his bookshelf was a mug painted with “#1 Dad” that had all the pixie charm of a kid’s summer camp crafts project. And beside the mug, the inevitable clutch of family photos. In one, a younger Dan with pure black hair stood straight and proud as a Roman soldier beaming down on his captured Saxon bride. The wife was fair and pretty. In her lap perched a child of six or so, hair as flaxen as the mother’s but bearing her father’s generous smile. A more recent portrait of Mrs. Rosetti revealed how well she’d aged into what I guessed were her early forties.

By the time Dan hung up the phone, I’d already shifted my stare from the photos. There was not going to be a repeat of the debacle with Hank Fischman, the plastic surgeon, and the photos of his trophy family. Knowing too much about my colleague’s private lives, their younger wives, was a passport to depression.

“So, you’re having problems getting funding,” Dan said, eyebrows knit pensively. “But I think with Covenant closing, you may have a better chance. Especially if you expand your vision somewhat. Now don’t jump on me until you’ve heard me out. It’s a women’s clinic. No question. But now the need is even greater.”

I chewed a knuckle, listening.

“One day a week, you add a pediatric component. Many of the women who come to see you have children. So this is a natural. We bring in some volunteer docs.” He mentioned two of Baltimore’s best pediatricians. “I guarantee you, if these guys don’t sign on, I can find people who will. Or maybe we just do an open clinic one day a week. See whomever. Male. Female. All ages. Hell, I’m trained in internal medicine. I’ll give up a morning. Maybe a day.”

I shook my head, astounded at his offer. When the Clinic was operating, it was tough for me to squeeze one afternoon out of the practice. I’d added two nights a week on my own time and for the rest hired a couple of young physicians eager to moonlight. “This is very generous of you,” I said. “You really think you can give up a day?”

“Why not? I’m fifty-seven years old. I’ll be negotiating a new contract and I figure I can write my own ticket. I like to think I got into medicine to treat people, not their wallets. The Clinic will give me the opportunity to prove that.”

What an amazing man! For a moment, in the gloom that was both outside and inside, hope flickered.

Still, every silver lining has its cloud. I found mine. “What makes you think we can bring this off?” I asked. “A full-service clinic even for one or two days a week is going to take serious money for staff, equipment, insurance. If I couldn’t get backing for my little storefront…”

“Aha. But with a broader patient base, we might have a better shot at landing some grants,” he countered. “If you like, I’ll help you write the proposal. Anyway, think about it.”

I promised I would.

And I did. I even sketched out a revised mission statement. But then something came up and for the next few weeks I found myself preoccupied with a situation that was even more urgent and much, much closer to home. Kat was in trouble.

Chapter 23

No call from her in nearly a week and then when she surfaced, I wished she hadn’t. Not that way.

I was checking on my patient after a four-hour procedure Friday morning. My arches hurt, but I was still on my surgical high in the recovery room when my pager went off.

I located an empty cubicle and returned Kat’s call. I thought maybe she wanted to talk about her gallery show, which was scheduled to open in a few weeks. Or that she needed to vent about Summer or Lee. I forgot she never called during the workday except in an emergency. She’d phoned when her sister was diagnosed with cancer and when the police called about Ethan. Now, I heard her voice and it was hollow as bamboo.

“Gwyn, I’ve found a lump in my breast.”

Friday midday isn’t a good time to discover a lump. Many of our docs start their weekend early. When Kat called, Neil Potak, her gynecologist, was on the far nine at the Woodholme Country Club. At the hospital, the Breast Imaging Center wound down by midafternoon and the odds of getting someone to take a look or a feel were dicey.

Unless you had connections. I had connections.

I told Kat to sit tight and give me five minutes. I called Radiology four floors down and snagged the chief tech Renee Carson on her way out and turned her around. She tagged Leah Abramovitz, my favorite radiologist, and within a half hour we pulled a team together for an unscheduled mammogram.

I caught Ibrahim Sukkar having a late lunch at his desk. He was the doctor I saw for my own breast check and he had the discerning fingers of a blind man. “Abe, I would consider it a personal favor if you’d take a look at my friend.” I explained the situation.

“Of course,” he said.Twenty minutes later, Kat reeled into the radiology waiting room looking as if she hadn’t slept in days. Ashy complexioned and tangle haired, she’d thrown on one of Ethan’s salvaged windbreakers over jeans and a T-shirt. Watching her remove it with jerky preoccupied movements, seeing those frantic eyes, I was glad I’d rallied the troops.