by Noah Gordon
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.
7
VOICES
She called Nat Rourke right away and told him about the confrontation at the clinic.
“I thought you should know, so it wouldn’t be a surprise in case they tried to use my activities against Tom.”
“Yes. Thank you so very much, Dr. Cole,” he said. He had a very courtly manner. R.J. couldn’t tell what he was really thinking.
That evening, Tom came back to the house on Brattle Street early. She was seated at the kitchen table doing paperwork, and he came in and took a beer from the refrigerator. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
He sat down opposite her. She had an urge to reach out and touch him. He looked tired, and in the old days she’d have gone around and massaged his neck. At one time they were very touchy. He had massaged her often. Lately they had tended to demonize one another, but she couldn’t escape the fact that he had had many sweet traits.
“Rourke called me,” Tom said, “and told me about what happened in Jamaica Plain.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. He, uh … asked me about our marriage. And I was frank and truthful in my answer.”
She looked at him and smiled. Then was then, she thought; this was now. “Always the best way.”
“Yes. Rourke said if we’re going to be divorced, proceedings should be instituted at once, so that any controversy about your work at Family Planning won’t prejudice my defense.”
R.J. nodded. “It makes sense to me. Our marriage has been over for a long time, Tom.”
“Yes. Yes, it has, R.J.” He smiled at her. “Now
would you like that beer?”
“No, thanks,” she said, and went back to her paperwork.
Tom took some of his things and moved out at once, so easily she was convinced he had somebody’s place to move right into.
At first she could detect no change in the house on Brattle Street, because she was accustomed to being alone there. She returned each night to the same empty house, but now there was a sense of peace, an absence of the signs of him that used to annoy and aggravate. A pleasing expansion of her personal space.
Eight nights after he left, however, she began to receive telephone calls.
There were different voices, and they phoned all night at different hours, probably on shifts.
“You kill babies, bitch,” a man’s voice whispered.
“You cut up our children. You vacuum up human beings as if they were trash.”
One woman informed R.J. pityingly that she was under demonic control. “You will burn in hellfire for eternity,” the caller said. She had a throaty whisper and a genteel voice.
R.J. had her telephone number changed to an unlisted one. A couple of evenings later, when she came home from work she saw that large nails had been hammered into the expensively restored door of her heirloom Georgian house. They held a poster.
WANTED
WE NEED YOUR HELP TO STOP
DR. ROBERTA J. COLE
The picture showed her looking angrily into the camera, her mouth open unflatteringly. The text beneath the picture said:
Cambridge resident Dr. Roberta J. Cole spends most of each week pretending to be a respectable doctor and teacher at the Lemuel Grace Hospital and at the Massachusetts College of Physicians and Surgeons.
But she is an abortionist. Every Thursday she kills from 10 to 13 babies.
Please join us by:
1. Prayer and fasting—God is not willing that any should perish. Pray for Dr. Cole’s salvation.
2. Write and call her and share the gospel and your willingness to help her leave her profession.
3. Ask her to STOP DOING ABORTIONS! “Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them.” Ephesians 5:11
The base cost of an abortion is $250.00. Most doctors in Dr. Cole’s position earn 50 percent of the cost of each abortion. That would make Dr. Cole’s income from killing almost 700 children last year to be approximately $87,500.
The poster listed ways in which R.J. could be reached, giving her daily schedule and the addresses and telephone numbers of the hospital, the medical school, the PMS clinic and the Family Planning clinic. At the bottom of the poster was a line that read:
REWARD: LIVES WILL BE SAVED IF SHE IS STOPPED!!!!!
There was an ominous silence during the week that followed. One morning the Boston Globe carried a story quoting local political activists regarding the fact that District Attorney Edward W. Wilhoit was testing the wind for a run at the lieutenant governor’s office. That Sunday, a letter from the cardinal condemning abortion as mortal sin was read in all churches of the Boston archdiocese. Two days later, national media carried the story that yet another assisted suicide had been performed in Michigan by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. That evening, when R.J. turned on her television for the eleven P.M. news, there was a sound bite of Wilhoit addressing a convention of senior citizens. He pledged to “bring swift justice to the antichrist among us, who through feticide, suicide, and homicide seek to usurp the powers of the Holy Trinity.”
“I would hope that we can be civilized, no rancor or quarreling, and just split everything, assets and debts. Right down the middle,” Tom said.
She agreed. She was sure he would be kicking and screaming if there were real money to kick and scream about, but most of what they had earned had gone into the house and to pay his medical school debts.
Tom became embarrassed when he told her he was living with Cindy Wolper, his office manager—blond, bubbly, in her late twenties.
“We’re going to be married,” he said, and looked enormously relieved to have finally made the grade from marital cheat to one of the newly engaged.
Poor baby, she thought angrily.
Despite the declarations of civility, Tom brought a lawyer, Jerry Saltus, when they met to discuss the division of property.
“Do you plan to keep the Brattle Street house?” he asked.
R.J. stared at him in amazement. They had bought the house at his insistence and over her objections. Because of his obsession, they had sunk all their money into it. “Don’t you want the house?”
“Cindy and I have decided to live in a condominium.”
“Well, I don’t want your pretentious house either. I never wanted it.” She was aware that her voice was rising and that she sounded waspish, but she didn’t care.
“What about the farmhouse?”
“I suppose it should be sold too,” she said.
“If you’ll handle the sale of the country place, I’ll arrange to sell the house here. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He said he especially wanted the cherry breakfront, the sofa, the two wingback chairs, and the large-screen television. She’d have wanted the breakfront, but he agreed she could have the piano and a Persian rug, a hundred-year-old Heriz that she treasured. The other furniture pieces they divided by taking turns in choosing items. The agreement was swiftly and bloodlessly made, and the lawyer fled before they changed their minds and became ugly.
Sunday evening R.J. went to Alex’s Gymnasium with Gwen, who would be leaving for Idaho in a couple of weeks. Before their aerobics class, R.J. was telling her about Tom and his future bride when Alexander Manakos came in with a repairman and went to the other side of the gym, discussing a broken exercise machine.
“He’s looking over here,” Gwen said.
“Who?”
“Manakos. At you. He’s looked at you several times.”
“Gwen. Don’t be a fool.”
But the club owner patted the repairman on the shoulder and began to walk in their direction.
“I’ll be right back. I have to call my office,” Gwen said, and fled.
His clothes were as well tailored as Tom’s, but not from Brooks Brothers. His suits were freer, au courant. He was an extremely beautiful man.
“Dr. Cole.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Alex Manakos.” He shook her hand almost impersonally. “Is everything satisfactory for you here at my club?”
“Yes. I enjoy the club very much.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that. Are there any complaints I can remedy?”
“No. How do you know my name?”
“I asked somebody. I pointed you out to her. I thought I’d say hello. You look like a very nice person.”
“Thank you.” She was no good at this sort of thing and was sorry he had decided to approach her. Up close, his hair reminded her of the young Redford. His nose was hooked, which made him look somewhat cruel.
“Would you have dinner with me some evening? Or drinks, whatever you prefer. A chance to sit and talk, get to know one another.”
“Mr. Manakos, I don’t—”
“Alex. My name is Alex. Would you feel better if we were introduced by somebody you know?”
She smiled. “That isn’t necessary.”
“Look, I’ve startled you, coming at you this way, like a pickup. I know you’re here for an aerobics lesson. Think it over, and let me know before you leave.”
Before she could open her mouth to protest, and tell him it wouldn’t matter, he went away.
“You’re going out with him, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Why? He looks very nice.”
“Gwen, he’s gorgeous, but I’m not attracted to him at all. Honestly. I can’t tell you why.”
“So? He’s not proposing marriage or suggesting you spend the rest of your life with him. He simply asked you out.”
Gwen didn’t let up. During the lesson, between every set, she returned to the s
ame subject.
“He seems to be very nice. When was the last time you had a date with a man?”
As she danced, R.J. considered what she knew about him. A former All-American basketball player at Boston College, he came from an immigrant family. In the lobby was an early picture of him on Boston Common, an unsmiling kid with a shoe-shine box. By the time he entered college he had rented a cubbyhole shoeshine stand in a building on Kenmore Square and hired several people to work there. As his athletic legend grew, Alex’s became the “in” spot to get your shoes shined, and soon he had a larger shine parlor with a refreshment stand. He wasn’t good enough for professional basketball, but he graduated with a business degree and enough publicity to get whatever capital he needed from Boston banks, and he opened the health club, full of Nautilus equipment and trained instructors. For old times’ sake, the club had a shoe-shine parlor, but the refreshment stand had become a bar and café. Now Alex Manakos owned the health club, a Greek restaurant on the waterfront and another in Cambridge, and God only knew what else.
She knew he was unmarried.
“When was the last time you even had a conversation with a man who wasn’t a patient or a doctor? He seems very nice. Very nice.
“Go out with him,” Gwen hissed.
After R.J. had showered and changed, she went into the bar. When she told Alex Manakos she would be happy to get together with him some evening, he smiled.
“That’s good. You’re a physician, am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I never went out with a woman doctor before.”
What have I gotten myself into? she asked herself. “You go out only with men doctors?”
“Ho ho ho,” he said, but he was looking at her with interest. So they worked it out and they had a date for dinner. Saturday.
The next morning, both the Herald and the Globe published stories on abortion in Boston. Reporters had interviewed individuals on both sides of the controversy, and each paper ran several pictures of activists. In addition, the Herald reproduced two of the posters of “Wanted” abortionists. One was of Dr. James Dickenson, a gynecologist who performed abortions at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline. The other was the poster of Dr. Roberta J. Cole.