The Doctor and the Diva (11 page)

Thirty years he’d been alive. Until now, he’d been prudent, careful to spill his own seed onto sheets or taffeta skirts. He’d wet his own hands with ghosts of children he’d been cautious never to father.

True, he had placed sparks for a child inside her. . . . But apart from that, he had never touched her or spoken to her with impropriety. He prided himself on this.

When she swept into his office, her rain hood lowered, drops of water glistened on the ridged folds of her cape. He could tell at once that she had something important to tell him. She paced and moved like a figure onstage.

“Let’s remove that damp cape, shall we?” he said. He came around from his desk and caught a whiff of lilac from her hair as he slid the cape away from her shoulders. He hung it on a coat rack.

She did have news to tell him, but it was not the announcement he’d counted on. “I’m completely serious about a singing career,” she said. “And I won’t be coming back.”

Her pupils were enormous, as large and dark as those of a lady who had ingested belladonna, and he wondered again if there were something unstable about her. She would sail for Italy in four more days, she announced. Her curls and her pearl buttons and the tiny turquoise bracelet at her wrist brightened before him like the markings of a flower. Even her speaking voice sounded like a song.

Yet something emanated from her—flashes of fire—that scared him and warned him not to come any nearer, not to object to a single phrase she was uttering.

Within five minutes she had thanked him and was gone.

Ravell sat for a long while in his oak chair and watched rain glaze the pavement in the alley. He had wondered, of course, if the imaginary child he might have given her would possess her talent for music. He had expected to observe his own child’s upbringing from afar—a truth that could never be told, or it would ruin him. He had expected a connection to her that he had never felt toward any woman—but to her, what had he been? Only a technician.

T
he endless preparations depleted her, as well as the strain of her father summoning her to his house twice to argue with her. (“I won’t live forever, Erika. . . . If you leave your husband, if your aspirations come to nothing—do you realize how
alone
you will be in this world?”)

She had to banish Papa from her concerns as she ran from the dentist to the shoemaker, and to the milliner to order more hatboxes. She filled half a trunk with heavy linen feminine napkins, as if Florence were not a civilized city, as if Florence were not a place where a modern woman could be assured of finding what she would require for her personal hygiene. Guidebooks were crushed into her overstuffed baggage. In the middle of the night, she rose from the bed to scratch a note to herself that she must order yet another trunk. What relief such extra space would bring—not having to cram more clothes into the impossibly small walls of her luggage. She felt an easing inside her chest at the prospect. Her own respiration had grown tight from planning what bordered on the impossible: to reduce her worldly possessions from what fit inside a five-story house into what might fit inside a pile of latched boxes.

At yesterday’s appointment, she should have asked Doctor Ravell about replacing a douche bag. . . . Suppose she visited a pharmacist in Florence but could not manage, with her limited Italian, to ask for such a thing? The servants understood that she had been studying conversational Italian with an old woman from the North End, but everyone presumed that Erika did this to fine-tune her pronunciation of librettos.

In the deep of night, she awoke again and her eyes roved in the darkness. Famished, she descended the servants’ staircase to the deserted cellar kitchen, an area of the house she seldom visited. Every servant was asleep under the eaves five stories above. No point in ringing any bells or rousting any of them from their dreams. Within two or three hours, the kitchen would become the noisy hub of deliveries from the iceman, the milkman, the grocery boy. Until the late morning, she would lie in bed three stories above this ground-level kitchen, trying to recoup the sleep that eluded her now, while dimly, at the edges of her pillow, she’d hear the ragman yelling as he peddled rags and bottles from his cart, and the laundress laughing to someone in the alley as the woman strung bed linens between posts.

The instant Erika flicked on the pantry’s electric light and saw the fruit bowl, she felt herself swoon. She lunged for a banana with mounting panic, ripping the skin from it and shoving its smooth flesh against the roof of her mouth. Greedily she bit down. After a few quick swallows, her stomach settled, and the terrible hollow feeling was gone. She relaxed then, convinced that she was not sick, and reassured that she would indeed embark on Friday morning and make the voyage as planned.

Upstairs in the master bathroom, just steps from her grand bamboo bed, she’d set a box of heavy linen napkins near the toilet. Twice in the past few weeks she’d felt aches and congestion in her lower abdomen—sure signs that her period verged on descending. Yet it had not come. The stress of planning for travel and for an unknown life, Erika reasoned, had upset her normal rhythms. The box she’d brought out she now tucked into a cabinet and packed away. How long had it been since she’d last menstruated? Before or after the concert at Fenway Court? She could not recall. . . . She could only remember how before she sang that night, she’d carefully strapped a linen napkin between her legs, just to be certain. Suppose she’d sat on a stone bench in Mrs. Gardner’s courtyard and stood up to feel mortifying scarlet drops across the back of her white diaphanous dress?

It seemed a blessing how that part of her body had shut down temporarily. Her mind must have begged her body to postpone the inconvenience of menstruating while she bustled frantically from the drugstore to the dressmaker to the shop where she stocked up on musical scores. Of course, the moment the White Star Line’s
Canopic
set sail, it would probably come, but she would have little else to worry about during the long ocean crossing. Already she saw herself rinsing her undergarments in the stateroom basin, her bloomers floating in water tinted pink. While the vessel tilted and leaned and drove through the waves toward Europe, she’d have plenty of time to fuss over such things. For days they’d see nothing except birds. For days the band would play to distract them all from raging boredom. The passengers would crowd the ship’s rail as the seaweed thickened at the Azores and they neared land.

On a Tuesday evening just three days before she was to embark, she took a sheaf of paper and filled up a pen and settled herself at Peter’s wide desk to write him a proper letter, a last letter, the only explanation she intended to leave for him. There was much to say. She gripped the pen and wrote the date. Then the pen fell from her hand and her head felt too weighty for her neck to hold upright.

The date. That was all she wrote.

She willed herself to go on, but it came over her then like a fever—a fatigue so extreme that she had to leave the desk and slide her body onto the Turkish tufted sofa, one cheek against its mohair upholstery, her left arm dangling loose over the side. What illness was this? A flu? A severe anemia? What was happening to her strength just when she most needed it? It was impossible to move from the sofa, impossible to raise her head. A tiny invisible bullet must have felled her, though she had heard nothing, had seen nothing, and could not recall being shot.

She groaned until the door opened. Call Doctor Ravell, she told the maid. If he is not there, call my father.

After he’d examined her, after he’d sent the maid away, Ravell drew his chair alongside the bed and pillows that bolstered Erika’s back.

“How long since you’ve menstruated? Weeks now, isn’t it?”

His face was close to hers. He was a slender man, his eyes deep-set and almost black, like a person from Persia, or Egypt.

“You don’t think—?”

“You’re pregnant.”

A cry broke inside her windpipe, a sound that splintered into many sounds. “A baby?” she whispered. “When will this baby come?”

“Next winter,” Doctor Ravell said. “Around the first of January.”

Erika clutched her head in her hands. The dreadful weakness had evaporated as suddenly as it came. She opened her eyes as wide as she could and gasped, “Why should this be happening now? Why, after so many years—why now?”

He receded from her then, saying nothing.

“Peter will be happy.” Her tone was loud and careless.

“What about you?” the doctor asked. “Does this make you happy?”

“Everything is ruined now. Everything I’ve planned for.”

He did not blink when she said this. He only watched her. His eyes, encircled by smoky shadows, held the history of all the homes and lives he’d entered during his career of doctoring. Nothing, it seemed, could shock him. He must have forgiven woman after woman for saying what she felt.

He fiddled with his cravat, loosening the knot, and drew a finger between his neck and collar. “Erika.” He brought his face close to hers again. “Only two people know what has happened—you and I. So I want you to tell me frankly: do you want to have this child or not?”

She stared back at his dark, unblinking eyes that dared her to say words no woman in her position was supposed to speak. She stared at his neatly trimmed goatee, his lush red mouth—a mouth almost like a woman’s—and at the faintly Semitic curve of his nose.

“Yes,” she said, her tone flat and steady. “I want the child.” Reason told her that for many years she had wanted a child, so she ought to be grateful that she’d finally been given one.

“All right, then,” he said. He pushed his hands against his knees and stood up. Then he went into the bathroom, folded back his shirt cuffs, and lathered his hands, rinsing them vigorously. He did not hear her as she tossed off the bedcovers and tightened the belt of her dressing gown and came up barefoot behind him, wanting to ask him something.

When she noticed his reflection in the mirror, she forgot what she had come to say. Bent over the washbasin, he appeared as slightly built as an adolescent—hardly taller than she was—and the abiding calm was gone from him. In the mirror his features twitched and he looked anguished.