Loving Time by Leslie Glass Page A

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 thetime 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