Loving Time

seventeen

All Monday afternoon Harold Dickey was flooded with memories of his affair with Clara Treadwell, begun nearly eighteen years ago when she was just a green resident. Then his job had been to follow her through her first cases and teach her the process she needed to learn to be a first-rate analyst. Each session she had with a patient had to be discussed, interpreted by him. He corrected her mistakes, watched her every step. It took hours every week. The Ray Cowles case had brought them together. Ray’s treatment had been their common interest, the beginning of their passion and her development as a gifted psychiatrist. With Ray between them as their beating heart, their love had blossomed. Then, only four years later, Ray was cured and successfully terminated. Clara presented a paper on his case. It was published. Her star began to ascend in the psychiatric firmament. And she left Harold far, far behind.

By six P.M., hours after his visit from the police, Harold Dickey could hardly contain himself. Anxiously, all afternoon he’d been checking his watch again and again, wondering what Clara was up to. How was she taking the terrible news? What was she doing about it? As the hours crawled by, he became more and more upset at her delay in calling him to set up a plan of action. They had a lot to do. She should have gotten in touch with him by now. She had a patient death on her hands. He’d had a visit from the police. She needed him now. Right now.

Harold’s watch told him it was way past six. In the old days he never had to wait for Clara Treadwell. In fact, it used to amuse him that he couldn’t get away from Clara. She was always there, flying to him in every free moment she had, teasing him, tempting him with her bright, eager smile. Sexy, sexy girl. Undoubtedly she’d been the brightest student he’d ever had. What a combination of brains and drive and high-voltage sexuality. Clara Treadwell had been like a shot of adrenaline for him every day. She’d pursued him relentlessly, and he had not been able to resist her.

Harold stroked his mustache, remembering. Before Clara, in all the years of his tenure at the Centre, he’d never been interested in a colleague. Of course he had dabbled with secretaries, psychiatric nurses, and occasionally a social worker, someone sweet and pliant like Sally Ann, the nurse he’d met in his first year of medical school back in Texas and married soon after. They were still married. They had stopped loving each other a long time ago but had never bothered to divorce.

Theirs was the typical story. Sally Ann had been important as the breadwinner for a number of years, then quit to have children. By then he was a doctor and she was no longer on the same social level as he, was no longer interesting or important. For thirty years now, they had been living in Hastings, sharing the same house. But there had been very little conviction on either side for a long, long time. He didn’t know or care what she did. He’d always had someone else on the side.

Harold never looked at any of his colleagues, though, never thought of becoming involved with a resident. He’d never even considered it. Those serious, homely women of the fifties and sixties who went into the field never appealed to him. Even in the early seventies when Harold’s star had risen and he was at the top, the very top, and the women began their invasion into the profession—first just a trickle of them, then a few more bright young things with longer hair every year until the number of girls was past the halfway mark—he didn’t think of them. And now there was a real crisis in the field. More women wanted to be psychiatrists than men.

And Harold had never looked at any of them. Only one had ever gotten his attention. Carmen—Clara. Clara who was Carmen the temptress and destroyer of men, though he didn’t think of her that way then. Clara Treadwell, who had been Carmen, had hung around and seduced him. Without meaning to get too deeply involved, he had helped her out. By the time she left, he was so deeply in love with her, he couldn’t imagine life without her. But Carmen/Clara had moved on to other men, another life, without giving him a second thought. And he’d had to endure living without her. Now she was back, the risen star while he was the falling one.

He sighed. Of course Clara had been very bright. She’d been destined to succeed. But Harold knew she could never have succeeded to this extent without his interference years ago. He had intervened on her behalf with Lawrence, the last chairman of the department, who died soon after retiring three years ago.

He tapped his watch with an impatient finger. Three years. It was hard to imagine that three years had passed since his old friend, his own mentor and supporter, was gone. It was impossible to believe that in Lawrence’s place, running his hospital, was Harold’s own protégée. Somewhere a beat had been missed. He, Harold, had been the meat in the sandwich between Lawrence and Clara, nestled between them in a wonderful harmony. And now one was dead and the other … Well, the other was keeping him waiting.

Harold looked around at the office he’d occupied for over three decades. Here he had done his great work in genetics, when Lawrence developed the genetics department and made him chairman. He’d kept this office all through the sixties and much of the seventies when the funds were rolling in and genetics was the wave of the future. By the eighties it was over. The explosion of molecular biology had eroded the genetics division of the psychiatry department, which was finally absorbed into the division of neural sciences and directed by an M.D.-Ph.D., a clinical psychiatrist and molecular biologist.

Harold wondered how he could make his point to Clara. He was angry now. He really should have immediate access to her at all times. There were vitally important things he needed to discuss with her. He glanced at the phone, willing it to ring. His life was a steady stream of students and patients and teaching. Why didn’t the phone ring? Okay, there had been changes in his field, big changes. But he’d always had his teaching and his residents and his patients and his role in keeping the hospital on track. He’d always had that. It was Clara no longer treating him with respect—no longer loving him the way he should be loved—that made him feel diminished, hurt. Since her coronation as Queen of the Centre, he’d wanted to stop the hurt, but he couldn’t find a way.

Every day he’d promised himself he wouldn’t think about it, wouldn’t feel lonely and betrayed by her. And every day when he saw her confident, glowing face, the pain hit him anew like a deep and anguished grieving that had no end. Her gifts were there in his office, in his closet at home, on his wrist. Before, they’d held the honored place in his life, trophies proving her great love for him, her gratitude for all he had given her. But now that she’d taken Lawrence’s place upstairs and was squeezing the love from his heart like water from a sponge, her gifts to him had become painful symbols of her ownership of him. Now when he saw the awards given him for his work so many years ago and the gifts from Clara now identified as his only true and enduring love, all Harold Dickey felt was the unbearable loss.

Brilliant clinician that he was, he could not find a way out of his own case.

He checked his watch again: 6:16. He couldn’t wait any longer. He reached for the phone and tried the Director’s office. No answer at reception. Harold tried her private line. No answer there either. He was stunned. He couldn’t believe that Clara had left without him. It wasn’t possible. Once again anger flooded the calm stream where he tried so hard to live in peace. Clara knew he hated to be ruffled. She knew he didn’t like to be challenged. Why did she deliberately humiliate him? No, surely it was an accident, a misunderstanding. It had to be.

He twisted on the hook, searching for an excuse. Maybe it wasn’t Clara’s fault. Maybe she was in a meeting with the lawyers about Ray’s death. He remembered that Max Goodrich had stopped him in the hall earlier and told him the police had been to see Clara.

“We have to protect Clara,” Max had told him, as if Harold might not be on the team of those deeply committed to protecting Clara.

“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” Harold had replied. But the truth was, an investigation into the ancient history of the Ray Cowles case would be very worrying indeed.

For the last three years, Harold had been convinced that Clara would come back to him if her troubles with the Centre ever got big enough. Now the trouble was big enough, but where was she? All afternoon he had tried not to think of her living up there in the ether, way, way above him, where the power was. At 6:20 he decided it was time to go looking for her.