In many ways, this old clinic represented Tom’s growth into manhood. Here he had truly come into his own as a physician. He’d experienced great triumphs and made sickening mistakes. The triumphs had been silent for the most part, inspired diagnoses arrived at after deep study and research, and only after following the diagnoses of other doctors to demoralizing dead ends. That was in the days before nuclear imaging and complex lab screening, when all he had to go on was education, experience, and instinct. But the life-and-death intensity of the work Tom had done here was only part of the invisible web that tied him to this building. More than anything else, this was the place where he’d come to know Viola Turner.

As a rule, Dr. Lucas always kept two GPs working under him at the clinic. Most had been decent docs, with only a couple of bad apples over the years. But one of those apples Tom had never forgotten. Gavin Edwards had been at the clinic when Tom arrived in 1963. Viola Turner was Edwards’s nurse, but as soon as Tom was hired, Dr. Lucas had transferred Viola to him. Tom figured Lucas had made this change to ease him into the practice (and increase his production numbers), but before long Tom deduced that Viola had requested the transfer. The reason was simple: Gavin Edwards would screw anything in a skirt, and he devoted most of his waking hours to trying. Despite being married, he’d had flings with both receptionists and the lab technician, a full-blown affair with the insurance girl, and he’d possibly even molested some patients.

Viola was the only one of “the girls” Edwards hadn’t nailed, and he was clearly itching to do so. He often commented on her physical assets, even after Tom pointedly discouraged him. The irony was that Gavin Edwards was as racist as the average welder at Triton Battery, yet he still wanted to sleep with Viola. Of course, that particular hypocrisy had flourished in America since the seventeenth century. White men loved having sex with black women, so long as they would never have to treat them as equals. And in Mississippi in the early 1960s, there was no risk of that. Truth be told, there wasn’t much risk of it in New York, either. In Natchez, Edwards probably could have raped Viola and gotten away with it, but he didn’t have the guts to go quite that far. Viola took great pains to avoid being alone with him, but still he persisted. Eventually, Tom began to wonder what he would do if Edwards, who was senior to him, made an overt advance toward Viola. Dr. Lucas would undoubtedly support Edwards in such a circumstance. And if that happened … what would Tom do?