The Doctor and the Diva (12 page)

R
avell removed his suit coat. On a humid July evening he sat finishing paperwork in his suspenders and shirtsleeves long after his practice had closed for the day. He’d just returned from attending the birth of a robust baby boy at a residence on Clarendon Street, and the effort had left his collar soaked, his hair separated into damp strands behind the ears.

The sky was dark as the window rattled behind him. He assumed at first that someone had seen the light and come around to the back alley with a medical problem. When he tugged the window farther open, Caroline Farquahr rested her arms on the sill and angled her face at him. Her lips looked painted.

It was the first time she had visited the premises after hours. Without any prompting from him, she walked around and let herself in through the screen door at the back.

“Well,” he said. “What brings you here?”

“Boredom,” she said. Her neck appeared to lengthen, her head rising higher as it swiveled and she peered around his office with interest.

Once again, she was back to haunt him. “You look as if you’re on your way to the theatre,” Ravell observed. Her dress was ice blue; it cooled him just to look at it. As she batted at her neck with an ornate Japanese fan, the blonde tendrils flew. Her small diamond earrings captured and refracted the light.

He slipped his suit jacket back on, like protective armor, to convey a certain formality. Then he escorted her into the rear hallway, where they would remain unseen from the street. “Actually, this isn’t the best time for you to have stopped by,” he said. “I’m expecting someone.” A small lie, but he felt uncomfortable remaining alone with her.

The dimness stirred her. She took hold of one of his suit coat buttons and tugged it gently. He backed away, but she sidled close again and gave a giggle. “That evening at Mrs. Gardner’s palazzo, you liked that young singer, didn’t you? What was her name?”

He stepped backward, appalled, and shook his head. “I don’t recall.”

“I thought I overheard you ask if she’d be coming to the office.”

He shrugged, reluctant to tell her anything.

With one fingertip Caroline touched his tie, and with a hint of a smile, she complimented him on its color. Then she placed both her hands on his shoulders, and brought her mouth close to his ear.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “You should give me a little tour. I’m always curious to see where people live.”

Ravell smelled sweet mint on her breath, and it alarmed him to realize that he felt tempted—just for a fleeting moment. “I’m not in the habit of taking patients upstairs to my private rooms,” he said.

“Why not?” Her head dropped to one side.

“Because I don’t want to be that sort of man,” he said, trying to sound firm.

She laughed, and said, “And what type of man do you intend to be? A man who lives without passion?”

“I didn’t become an obstetrician to ruin other people’s marriages.”

He felt a pang of hypocrisy, saying that, because of Amanda Appleton—but their affair, if anything, had helped her marriage continue, because it allowed her to overlook her husband’s loss of sexual appetite. She still felt loyalty toward the man.

When Ravell’s time with Amanda ended—as they both understood it inevitably would—he believed that they would part with grace. But his arrangement with Amanda was rare. He’d have to be half-mad to take up with Caroline. To juggle more than one mistress? His conscience and his nerves could never bear it.

The screen door at the rear of the building remained open. A light illuminated the back stairs. He and Caroline both turned their heads when they heard the crisp clack of heels as an unseen person (a neighbor’s servant, perhaps?) passed through the alley.

“Someone you know?” Caroline lifted her eyebrows in jest. “Another patient to whom you’ve given a private key?”

It was a Monday evening, the night when Amanda Appleton usually found herself free to visit Ravell, due to her husband’s regularly scheduled card game with friends at the St. Botolph Club. Ordinarily it might be Amanda crossing through the yard at this hour, heading for the back entrance to Ravell’s private quarters. Amanda did indeed have a key. But tonight Amanda and her family were away in Bar Harbor, Maine.

He made no reply. Caroline gave a rough tug to his right lapel and moved her nose closer to his. “Another patient?” she accused in a sharp whisper.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She rested one shoulder against the wall. “Women talk among themselves,” Caroline said. “That’s one thing a man like you never counts on. Amanda and I have become friends, you know.”

He suspected that Caroline knew very well that Amanda Appleton was away with her family, that this was the night of the week they usually met.

“Whoever would have guessed,” Caroline said, “that a lady of Amanda’s generation could be so . . . frisky?” Her shoulders twitched with mirth. From Caroline’s tone and airy manner, he realized that she was amused by the notion that he had become entangled with a woman so much older than himself.

He placed a hand lightly on Caroline’s arm and guided her toward the formal exit to his practice. If she lingered here much longer, would she brush her lips against his face, or nip his neck? He could not predict what she might do.

P
eter stretched out his arms as he stood and modeled the new boa constrictor he’d acquired during his travels. He’d coiled the snake around his neck and let it dangle the way a woman might show off her long pearls.

“Gorgeous, isn’t he?” Peter said. “When I spotted him in a market in Tangier, I had to have him. I couldn’t resist.”

The snake delighted Ravell. When he let Peter drape the thing around him, he felt the reptile’s sinuous weight fall against his shoulders. Before the mantel mirror Ravell posed with the boa’s patterned skin twined around him like a royal decoration. In the mirror Ravell saw his own irrepressible grin.

“I want you to have him,” Peter said suddenly. “As a gift.”

“God, no. I couldn’t—”

“Please,” Peter said. “After all you’ve done.”

“You be responsible for his upkeep, and I’ll visit him,” Ravell said.

In his personal library Peter walked over to the wall where his collection of painted butterflies hung in fourteen individual frames. He selected the largest and most intricate one, a dazzling Morpho that Ravell had previously admired.

“Then, I want you to accept this instead.” Peter lifted the frame from the wall and handed the miniature painting to Ravell.

“But this must have taken you weeks to do!”

“Take it,” Peter insisted.

Someday, Peter said, he and Ravell ought to travel together to that island off the coast of South America, to that coconut plantation owned by Ravell’s friend. Ravell had described in ravishing terms the abundance of flora and fauna on the island. From there, Peter suggested that they might take a boat trip down the Orinoco River together, and explore the wilds of Venezuela.

“Yes,” Ravell said, “if I can ever steal away from my medical practice.”

“I’ll serve as your excuse,” Peter said. “Tell everyone that you’ve promised to make the trip with me.”

Returning home from a middle-of-the-night delivery, Ravell pulled a plate of cold lamb the housekeeper had left for him from the icebox. He ate, wondering with terrible unease if anyone else knew what he did—that Peter could not possibly father a child. Suppose another specialist whom Erika and Peter had consulted in the past had lapsed—just as he himself had done—and out of curiosity had slipped a slide under a microscope and peered at the truth?

Now that Erika was pregnant . . . how could such a thing be explained? Suppose another physician, driven by a sense of righteousness, were to confront him and make an oblique yet insinuating remark?

A pregnancy might arise from more than one scenario, of course. An unfaithful wife . . . A secret agreement reached between a couple and their doctor to infuse the wife with an anonymous man’s sperm . . . If accused, Ravell decided that he must remain aloof, noble, and silent—as if his patients’ confidentiality were sacred to him. He would stare at his accuser until the other man turned away.

Suppose someone told Peter, sent him an anonymous letter? The chance of that was very remote. No doctor would wish to be suspected of violating Peter’s privacy.

Ravell put his empty plate in the sink, ran a little water over it, and retreated to the parlor. He poured himself a glass of brandy and sipped, hoping to relax, or he’d never be able to sleep. He kicked off his boots and sank into a fringed chair, his ankles crossed, his stocking feet resting on an ottoman.

Nothing terrible would come of it, he told himself . . . only the sweetness of a small child. . . . He took a long swig and let the brandy run deep and warm his ribs, almost certain that he would be able to swallow the secret.

As dusk shadowed the bedroom, the two men hovered over the bamboo bed where Erika lay. Her white blouse had been raised like a curtain to expose her belly, and Peter and the doctor leaned toward her navel, their heads nearly touching. Doctor Ravell gave an eager nod, unhooked the stethoscope from his ears, and passed the instrument to Peter, who frowned at first, detecting nothing. Then he jumped back with a yelp and tore the tubes away from his ears.

“He just told me his name is Oliver,” Peter joked. “What a ghastly name.”

“Let me have a listen,” Erika said, reaching out.

Strangers and passersby on city streets would not have guessed just yet that she was with child. She herself could not completely believe that a living creature actually existed inside her, and that made her particularly curious to hear a heartbeat.

She heard nothing at first, and wondered if a hoax was under way. She felt like a skeptic at a séance. What signal, precisely, was she expected to perceive—a faraway moan, a rap behind a wall?

“Try here,” Doctor Ravell said, adjusting the stethoscope for her, moving it lower on her abdomen.

The sounds pumped through the bones of her own ears—the first message sent by a ghost from the future, an unseen person who floated and thrived in a netherworld.

“By God!” She laughed, her fingers fanned over her mouth to stifle her own surprise.

The thumps might have been her own heartbeats, only wildly quicker. The marvel of it raced through her.

The three of them listened, passing the stethoscope back and forth, over and over again. Even Doctor Ravell, who must have checked such heartbeats many times every day, appeared affected by hearing the rapid, underwater whooshes—the whip crack of the child’s heart. As he put the stethoscope back into his black medical bag, his eyes glimmered wetly.

“He’s a sentimental man,” Erika said, after the doctor had gone.

Peter nodded. “He’s in the right profession.”