She gave me a warm laugh and shook her head. 'Dr. Claiborne has three daughters, no sons.'
The surprise played across my face.
'He retired once, back when my mother worked for him. It didn't take so-' She stopped to leave a voice mail to tell Dr. Claiborne about me, then she drew me a map to his office.
I thanked her took the map, and hurried across the street, where a uniformed security officer directed me straight on back. I passed through a set of double doors guarded by another security officer and followed the hand- drawn map's zigzag along the fluorescent-lighted, tiled corridor to the first landmark, a lighted sign for radiology. Across the hall sat an unmarked wooden door with louvered vents in the lower panel. I stopped by the door and raised my hand to knock when it opened, leaving me to stare straight into the timeworn face of Dr. Giles Claiborne.
The wrinkled familiarity of the past froze me for another instant. I figured he must be at least eighty-five, but his cool, glacial blue eyes lit up his face and made him appear decades younger. Claiborne stood imperially straight and unbent by time and crowned with a full shock of white hair.
He wore a cotton broadcloth shirt with a weave as fine as silk and a three-letter script monogram instead of a pocket. A gold collar bar made sure the knot in his silk, regimental stripe tie remained perfect. His khakis had knife creases, where mine resembled tired aluminum foil someone had tried to press into respectability. His knife creases broke perfectly above stylishly comfortable and obviously expensive burnished leather loafers.
My old feelings of social insecurity rebounded with a vengeance. Even though I had been wellborn into a family with a distinguished Mississippi heritage, I had come along at a time when the family fortunes had slipped away in a latter-day Faulknerian crisis that had left too many of my relatives clinging to nothing more substantial than ancestral bloodlines. As a result, I had grown up uneasily among the privileged classes from the planter culture of the Delta and, later, the moneyed movers of Jackson. I had always felt from those classes but never of them. I tried to belong to those classes as a child, but never found a comfort level with their patrician attitudes and their casual, nonreflective acceptance of superior entitlement granted by the natural order of things. I'm sure that played no small role in my ultimate rebellion and rejection of my heritage.
Despite my professional and financial achievements, I had never completely exorcised my desire to be accepted by them. I didn't understand that flaw, but it played a major role in my avoidance of my home state and most of those with whom I had grown up. Clearly, I had rejected this culture but had not escaped it.
'Bradford! What an unanticipated pleasure!' Giles Claiborne extended his hand. I took his powerful, warm grip. It subtracted yet more years from my perception of him and made me feel almost like his child patient again.
'Dr. Claiborne,' I managed as I returned his handshake.
'Please call me Clay. You're an accomplished physician yourself now; I've run across your papers in the literature any number of times now, and I have to confess, a lot of what you have written sails right over the head of this old country doctor.' His broad, self-deprecating smile further rattled my emotional equilibrium. 'Of course… Clay.'
'Well, then, come on in.' He motioned me into a small, windowless room overstuffed with an Oriental rug, dark mahogany furnishings, and all the professionally decorated accoutrements that went with the look.
Broom closet indeed. I saw from a quick glance at the walls that he was on the hospital board and had been for a several decades.
'Here.' He motioned me in the direction of his desk, to an armchair upholstered in burgundy leather and studded with brass. 'Have a seat.' He closed the door and followed me, settling his tall, lanky frame into an identical chair facing me.
Claiborne gave me an intense silent stare that made me feel like a patient again.
Then he leaned closer to me, studied my face, then sat back in his own leather-upholstered chair.
'Lordy, Bradford, you do have the Judge's eyes,' he said finally 'You have that look that… demeanor he had which made people do what he told them to, made them instantly believe he was right about most anything.' He nodded to himself as he continued to fix my face with his gaze. 'Call it charisma or presence if you like, but it clearly made him such a successful lawyer and a political force that lives on today.'
Given the Judge's political leanings and the ways he enforced his power, I did not want to say 'Thank you,' so I nodded and asked, 'You really think so?'
I knew my noncommittal, equivocal response fell right in with how good people could stand by and let evil things like segregation happen. I reminded myself, I had not come to refight the Civil War, but to find a way to look at my comatose wife's brain scans. 'Lordy,' Claiborne said again. 'Why, I remember the last time I saw you, you were about this high.' He raised his left hand about three or four feet off the floor. I caught the gold Piaget on his wrist. 'Yes, yes,' he mused to himself. 'That would have been about the time you were in the first grade and we were giving everybody Salk vaccines. I remember one other time your mama brought you in bleeding like a stuck hog where you had stepped on some glass barefoot.' His eyes went distant for a moment and I sensed he was watching some version of the same memory in my own head where I'd played in tall grass down by Riverside Drive near Eddie Stanton's house, I thought for sure I had been bitten by a water moccasin and was going to die right there.
'Your mama had a cute little Nash Rambler and you lived in the Judge's house then. Lordy, your mama sure was proud of you.' His face went blank for a moment and showed me his professionally sympathetic gaze. 'I sure mourned her passing.' He nodded again, then returned to studying my face.
'Yes, yes, you certainly do have the Judge's eyes.' Then he laughed. 'Fortunately for you, you don't have his hairline.' He combed his aristocratic fingers through his white thatch. The Judge had been cue-ball bald.
Claiborne mined this particular historical vein for another eternal ten minutes before finally asking me what had brought me into his office. 'Got just the thing.' I followed Claiborne to the radiology department.
'We've got a terrific system allowing us to send digitized X-rays and scans down to the medical school in Jackson for consultation, or Ocshners or anywhere else for that matter.'
I followed him through the waiting room, smiling and nodding politely as he introduced me in glowing terms as a local boy made good, all the while letting everybody know I was the Judge's grandson and he had been my physician. Somehow that seemed to matter, and once again it astounded me how eagerly people here allowed their lives to be shaped by dead men.
We made our way to the back corner of a long, claustrophobic supply closet, where we found a young man in a white coat intently tapping at a keyboard. A giant, highresolution, flat-panel plasma screen dominated the room.
Claiborne cleared his throat. 'Tyrone?'
The young man turned toward us.
'Tyrone Freedman, this is Dr. Stone. He's one of my old patients, but he's from
California now.' Claiborne said nothing about the Judge this time.
When Freedman stood up and shook my hand, I tried not to look at a ragged scar that puckered its way from the corner of his left eye and made it across his temple before disappearing into his hair above his ear.
'Tyrone here is a surgical resident from the University Medical School, a local boy who proves Valley State can produce more than famous NFL stars. He wants to be a trauma surgeon.' Claiborne paused. 'We have plenty of practice for him unfortunately.' 'Pleased to meet you,' I said
'Likewise,' the young man said.
'Dr Stone wants to know if we can help him view some scans from back in
California.'
A smile broadened Freedman's face. 'Of course we can.'
'Tyrone's something of a computer genius,' Claiborne said. 'He was actually a programmer before premed.'
Freedman nodded.
'Well, that's beyond this old country doctor,' Claiborne said as he sidled his way out of the confined space. 'Tyrone, you take good care of Dr. Stone so he'll have nice things to say about us when he gets back to Los Angeles.'
Tyrone turned to me, 'Okay, Dr. — '
'Please call me Brad.'
The young man gave me an odd raised-eyebrow look, then nodded. 'All right, uh,
