Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (18 page)

ARDEN McARTHUR

any random criticisms of Story by friends. They repeated some high school gossip. "People didn't talk to us about him," Meg reminded her mother. "We didn't let them." Yes, Arden said to herself, and what fool taught you to do that?

She'd given up trying to remember patients who'd quit him. She tried to recall his ex-employees. They might know some dirt. Who'd he ever fire?

The only one she could think of was Ina Welling, sixtyish, an LDS convert from Methodism who combined the stern moralities of both religions. She was a tall, stately woman, married to McKay Welling, the best heavy-equipment blade operator in Wyoming. Every time Arden saw Ina in church, with her tinted stepdown-frame glasses and her thick black eyebrows and wiry graying hair, she was reminded of an old-time school principal.

Arden reached her on the job at the sugar factory. "Ina," she said, "I need to talk to ya."

Ina drove down after work. It turned out that she knew a lot.

18

INA WELLING

"I worked for him from sixty-five to sixty-seven, near two and a half years," Ina Welling repeated later. "He saved my son's leg after a motorcycle accident, and we owed him six hundred dollars. I paid it off fifty dollars a month out of the two hundred he paid me. When I left I was making two eighty a month, but Story had a lot of little angles to cut down on the take-home.

"He had everybody's day blocked into hourly squares on a sheet of paper. If I worked late, it didn't count. He'd work me on my afternoon off and not pay overtime. I got docked for every little thing. He said we were all professionals and he would expect to be treated the same.

"He was so cheap—well, I guess some folks would call it frugal. In those years, Marilyn came down to do the bills. He always kept her separated from the rest of the staff. Whenever she got in a discussion, he found something for her to do. She was frugal, too. She used to separate the Kleenex leaves that we gave the patients. She used scraps of paper or old envelopes for our pay slips.' Here, look! I've saved a few.

"Women in jeans or pants, he'd tell me to give them a used sheet.

At the time, we were paying ten cents a sheet to have 'em laundered. Patients in nylons and a dress got a clean sheet. Some of the high school girls got no sheet at all. He'd let 'em sit there bare to the waist till he was good 'n' ready.

"He'd have the nurses turn the disposable rubber gloves inside out, wash 'em and autoclave 'em and use 'em over and over. And the throwaway plastic speculums, he'd put 'em in a strong disinfectant for reuse. Two drug detail men asked one day how come he didn't need more speculums.

" Well,' the nurse, 'we use 'em over again.'

"Those two men were just horrified! Then they found out about the rubber gloves. They said, 'That's one of the worst things a doctor could do! What if he had a hole in one?'

"But he had a fixation about neatness and the way things looked. He'd find a piece of tape on the floor and yell, 'Get that filthy thing outa here!'

"He always had Marilyn handle the collections, and she could be pretty blunt. One morning he grabbed me and said, 'Someone stopped Marilyn downtown and jumped all over her about the note on his bill. From now on, if somebody comes in and complains, don't tell 'em Marilyn writes the notes. Tell 'em it's you. No one talks to my wife like that.'

"He didn't want welfare patients. One of the first things I learned was I'd get in trouble giving an appointment to 'them'— Mexicans, Indians, blacks, any different race. Didn't like Germans either, or folks with German names. He'd say, 'I do not want
them
in this office.'

"Once I made a phone appointment for a very sick man, and the man's wife brought in his welfare papers. I went back to the lab and told the nurse, 'Boy, I'm in trouble. They're on welfare 'cause the husband can't work. You know how
he
feels about that.'

"Dr. Story grabbed the papers and took the couple into his office, and he was really nasty to 'em. Then he came out and lectured the nurse and me about welfare patients. He said the government was wasting
his
money. He said he had to take some welfare patients, but keep it to a minimum.

"He'd get a year behind with his welfare papers. He hated medical insurance, Blue Cross, Social Security. One time he had me fill out papers for twenty-some welfare people and mail 'em to Cheyenne, and he had me put every one of their names for a return address. He wanted the clerks in the Lovell post office to see who was on welfare.

"One night I had to leave for Mutual at seven-thirty, and the next day he told me I couldn't hold any LDS position as long as I worked for him. He despised the Book of Mormon, the
Doctrine and Covenants,
everything about our church. All I had to do was quote, 'As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become,' and he'd turn red. I'd ask him, 'Don't you think you've progressed in life?'

"He'd say, 'Yes.'

" 'How'd you get your medical degree?'

" 'Somebody taught me.'

" 'Don't you think maybe you'll progress some more?'

" 'Well, I never thought of it.'

" 'If you keep on progressing,' I'd say, 'don't you think you might progress toward godliness?'

"He'd say, 'That's blasphemy!'

"After a few conversations like that, he began to get on me about every little thing. He'd tell me to change a procedure. A few days later he'd bawl me out for changing it and deny that he'd ever mentioned it. Everything had to be perfect. If I drew a dividing line across the typing paper, he'd say, 'Who did this? Look at this.' He cut me to pieces with that soft voice, a terrible look in his eye, never cussed but made you feel like he was educated and you were nothing. Then he'd open the door and see a patient and his whole personality would change. 'Well, how are
you,
Mrs. Mayes? And how are those
beautiivX
children?'

"I'd go home and tell my husband the things that went on in that office, and he wouldn't believe me. I'd say, 'McKay, why would I make it up?'

"It got so the nurse and I couldn't do anything right. He was polite to men, but women were dirt. One day our pharmacist said, 'Ina, has Dr. Story made you cry yet?'

"I said no.

" 'He will. That's one of his things. He has to make his women

cry.'

"Well, that man knew what he was talking about. I was in the office alone one day, and Dr. Story was so vicious that I started to cry. I said, 'Well, Doctor, I didn't know I was so terrible.' When I started to tell him I quit, he took out the door and wouldn't listen. I swore to myself, You'll never do that to me again! Of course, Dr. Story never apologized.

"By that time I'd begun to notice a few things. The way some of the ladies looked when they came out of the examining room, flushed, flustered. He was very particular about having the music on and the water on. I couldn't figure out why. We weren't allowed in the room when he did a pelvic. When he did a Pap test, we'd hold the slide, then spray it with fixative back in the lab. After that, we weren't supposed to go back in. And we weren't allowed to knock on the door unless it was an emergency or a phone call from the hospital. He had the nurses so scared, they'd ask me to knock. He'd say, 'What do you want?' as if he was annoyed.

"Sometimes after pelvics I'd find spots on the floor at the foot of the table. I used to wonder why his examinations took so long, but then he was slow about everything. Some women used to get longer appointments than others. One morning he had Wanda Hammond come in when he had no other appointments. The nurse was gone and he asked me to prep her for a pelvic. I went in and told her to undress, and Wanda grabbed me and said, 'Ina, don't leave me!'

"I kidded her. 'Oh, Wanda, what's the matter? You've done this before.'

" 'No, no, Ina, don't leave me. Stay in here with me.'

" 'Wanda, you know I can't.'

" 'You can ask Dr. Story's permission.'

"I said,
'You
ask his permission, Wanda.'

"She said, 'I can't.'

"She had ahold of my arm and was hurting me. 'Wanda,' I said, 'what's the matter?'

"She said, 'I think he's gonna do something he shouldn't.'

" 'Wanda, what do you mean?' I was shocked.

"She mumbled, 'Well, things that he shouldn't do.'

"DOC"

" 'Wanda,' I said, 'don't tell me that. You're married and have six children. You should know—'

" 'Ina,' she said, 'I'm telling the truth.'

"She seemed
so
upset, I said, 'Well, you ask him if it's okay, Ina, and I'll stay with you till he's done.'

"I went back out front. Wanda came out an hour or so later and she looked awful. She whispered to me, 'It happened.'

"I guess I was dumb. I thought,
What
happened? But it never occurred to me it was sex. I thought maybe she was just afraid of the pain, or upset about taking her clothes off, some little embarrassment. LDS women are very straitlaced about things like that.

"After that, I watched more closely. Wanda came back a few months later and he locked the door again. And I noticed a few other things about other women. You could tell by their faces that something was going on. I mentioned to a couple of my friends, 'Dr. Story has problems. Don't go to him.' And then I quit.

"Later on, he put out word that he fired me because I was too dumb, and I heard tell that Marilyn was saying the same thing. After I quit, he called my house and begged me to come back—I guess I didn't turn dumb till after I quit."

19

ARDEN McARTHUR

After Arden heard Ina Welling's story, she phoned her friend Lanita Thompson, "Grandma" Thompson to her sisters in the church, a wise matriarch who knew everything that went on in

town.

Grandma revealed that her daughter Wanda indeed had been abused by Story and that she knew of another young female who'd been induced to undress and "bounce around" for the doctor when she'd come in with a sprained ankle in the seventh grade.

Arden knew Wanda Thompson Hammond as a gentle, friendly woman in her fifties, not five feet tall, as solid and round as a garden turnip. She worked as a checker at the Rose City Food Farm on Main Street, smiling and beaming at her clients. Everybody kidded her because her nose turned red when she smiled. Arden couldn't imagine terrorizing such a dear person.

She'd caught a hint in Grandma Thompson's voice that Wanda might be willing to help out, so she addressed an envelope to the Medical Board and took it with her to the Hammonds' one-story frame house across the street from Aletha and Mike Durtsche's home on Carmon Avenue.

DOC'

Wanda cried from the minute Arden entered till she left. The little woman played with her stubby fingers and looked everywhere but into Arden's eyes. Arden thought, I've never seen anyone so anguished.

"I'm sorry to upset you, Wanda," she said, cutting her visit short. "If you have something to tell the Medical Board, would you mail it in this envelope?"

As she drove off, she saw Wanda at the front window, poking at her eyes with a handkerchief. My laws, Arden said to herself, I'm making folks plumb miserable. It was one more burden to carry.

20

WANDA HAMMOND

I

It took Wanda hours to stop shaking. Now there would be more nightmares, just when they'd about ended. She looked at the envelope on the table. It was addressed to an office in Cheyenne. She couldn't imagine why anyone would want her to repeat such a shameful story.

She'd been brought up in rural poverty ten miles east of town. As a child, she'd warmed herself by a wood stove, read by kerosene lamp, cut thick slices of sugar beet for candy. For the Thompson children, popping corn and toasting marshmallows doubled as snacks and entertainment. For years the family had no electricity or radio, car or tractor. The barefooted kids hooked horses to a wagon and rode to the Shoshone River bottom to gather wood. They thought they were having fun.

The farm work was mostly stoop and crawl. They had a few milk cows and raised cattle, pigs, chickens, hay and barley. The cash crop was beets. They planted the tiny seeds, thinned the shoots on hands and knees, separated the rows, irrigated, and chopped out redroot weed, sunflower and bogweed with short-han-dled hoes. They worked till the last shadow disappeared. By the end of summer the fat beets would lie on their sides under their thick scratchy leaves. There were beets so big it took two hands to carry them—eight-pounders, ten-pounders. The biggest were shown to their parents for praise. Wanda had her own beet knife with a nick in the end for pulling them up by the tops. She slashed off the greens and threw the beets in the wagon for the ride to the sugar factory. She and her brother and three sisters thought that was fun, too.

All social connections were through the church. Sex wasn't discussed. Lanita told her children they would learn when they were old enough. Looking back, Wanda said, "I guess fifty-five isn't old enough 'cause she still hasn't told me. I spent my whole life with one man. You don't need sex education for that."