The Doctor and the Diva (14 page)

Regarding the baby’s gender: she savored the mystery and was glad not to know. For much of her life, she had longed for a daughter as a confidante, but ever since the pregnancy began, perhaps as a means of preparing herself, she had imagined it to be a boy. She envisioned sniffing his damp, salty scalp after a bath, her boy swaddled up and clean as she carried him from room to room. Her visions of him grew so real that she wondered at the loss she would surely feel if Doctor Ravell handed her a girl after the delivery: “But where is my son? That son, my son?”

Not knowing, she held all possibilities in her womb. To know would be a loss of something.

She grew fond of them both, the dream son, the dream daughter.

In her seventh month, a flicker of concern traveled over Doctor Ravell’s face.

He touched Erika’s abdomen tenderly, and with a shrug of dismissal he started to stroll off, but then he stopped, uncertain about what he had just seen. “Let me measure you again.” Since her previous examination, whatever was inside her had not grown.

“Unless you’re hiding it—” he said doubtfully.

Curving his palms around her belly, he kneaded a bit. “It feels like four and a half pounds, but I can’t quite tell how much the baby weighs by feeling.” A triangle of worry formed between his brows.

He suggested that Erika keep a record, a precise count of how many times the baby moved inside her during a given hour every day. Although Ravell did not speak his fears aloud, she knew that a baby could languish, fail to grow, or even die inside a mother.

At home she locked her bedroom door and stood in front of a full-length mirror, her clothes removed, and looked at herself. Facing the glass frontally, she tried to envision how a whole person could fit in there. On the bed she lay in a crescent shape, lifted her blouse, and found the creature stirring, the movements different now that the child was larger, the rolls and swivels slower and more deliberate. With her palms resting against her smooth flesh, her fingers opened, as sensitive as a blind person’s passing over a page. She tried to imagine what the child must be doing now. A heel (or was it a tiny fist?) circled her navel, but just as she touched the bony knob, wanting to grasp it, that part of the baby sank away.

“Twenty movements in one hour are very good,” Ravell had said. “Three or fewer would give us cause for alarm.”

The child’s vigor relieved her: fifty-eight motions in an hour. Fifty-eight.

In her ninth month, he came to the house to examine her. “This is reassuring,” Doctor Ravell said, glancing at the chart she’d kept. “A baby who isn’t doing well doesn’t move this much.”

Lying on her Japanese bamboo bed, Erika lifted her blouse to expose her midriff. The sight made him clutch the mound of her womb with such sudden intensity that her hips nearly jumped from the mattress.
“You,”
he cried, “are
not
going to have a small baby.” He kept his hands on her with a glee that said,
Eureka, I’ve discovered something here.
His eyes, dark as those of men in the doorways of Cairo, stared shockingly into hers and his grip was confident. Ravell was not shy about pressing his hard, strong palms around that unseen creature she and Peter were timid about hurting.

The doctor’s face loomed over hers. Her child’s body, her whole belly, was drawn up into his hands. Jubilant at his discovery, he looked as though he might lift that small ripe baby right out of her. The child was his to grab and to feel—her child, her center, the essence of her.

“There are at least six pounds of baby here,” Ravell declared. “A few weeks ago, I couldn’t be certain. Now I am. You are simply
all
baby.”

She tried not to notice the loving arrangements of his hands as they framed the baby. The doctor tilted his head with sentimentality—not because she was a favored patient, she reminded herself, but because she was a woman in her ninth month, ready to expel her infant, and that was the sort of tender, parting blessing Ravell felt an obstetrician should give. It was so similar to the sort of fatherly, proprietary adoration that Peter had shown during all those months of gestation—a breathing of affection over the full moon of her belly—that she dared not let herself think about it. The man had hundreds of patients and he probably offered those squeezes of love to the ripe wombs of every one.

Still, she wanted to be special to the doctor in some way. “My husband suggested that you might join us for dinner some night before my confinement. This Thursday, perhaps?”

“Thursday would be excellent.”

On Thursday, however, Ravell was delayed so long at a laboring mother’s bedside that they had to postpone dinner past nine-thirty. When he finally arrived, apologizing and stomping snow from his boots, the smell of icy air escaped from the crevasses of his coat, and the buttons squeaked with cold. His hat had crushed his hair, and he looked exhausted.

“Let’s have Erika sing a bit,” Peter offered, “and we can relax while the servants warm up our supper.”

As they entered the music room Erika asked Ravell: “How many infants do you deliver in a given year?”

“On average? I would say a hundred.” Ravell dropped into a chair, and looked as if he might slide into a thick slumber. Peter handed him a glass of port and the doctor took several thirsty swallows.

Peter settled at the piano to accompany Erika. “Mozart wrote this aria when he was still in his late teens,” Erika explained to Ravell as she took up her position next to the piano. She had found—as pregnant singers often did—that the pressure of the baby supported her diaphragm and actually strengthened her voice. The aria she sang was as tuneful and simple as a lullaby.

As she sang, Ravell turned his face sharply toward the wall. He spread one splayed hand over his eyes. She wondered if he slept or listened.

“Thank you,” he said when the aria ended. He slapped wetness from his face, laughing at himself. Peter laughed, too, at Ravell’s swell of emotion, and Erika smiled. Ravell shook his head tiredly, as though after his madcap day running from house to house, the brief song had provided a corner of peace.

The pork roast tasted dry and overdone by the time it was served, but Ravell ate ravenously, as if it were the first meal he’d paused to consume that day.

“Once our baby is born,” Peter declared from his end of the table, “I’m going to write a letter. The medical community ought to be apprised of your success in our case. Four doctors we consulted before coming to you—including two fertility specialists. And you were the first to have achieved any result.”

Ravell put down his glass of port, his face reddening, and pressed his napkin to his mouth. He shook his head hard and held up a hand in protest.

The telephone resounded through the house. Erika started in her chair, wondering if the rings might awaken those servants who had already gone to bed.

The maid who had stayed up to serve them announced: “It’s a call for Doctor Ravell.”

Ravell never tasted the pecan pie that had been baked for him. He shoved his arms through the sleeves of his overcoat and rushed down the icy steps, hastening toward another suffering woman on Boylston Street.

O
n the last night of the old year, as Erika’s labor began, the telephone rang and rang in Doctor Ravell’s office. The rooms were entirely dark except for a bright rectangle of streetlight that fell across the green blotter on his desk. The telephone shrilled in the darkness, and went unheard.

“I’ve tried his office,” the switchboard operator told Peter. “Now I’ll ring his residence.”

Next the operator said, “Let’s try him at the hospital.”

Later it was: “Doctor Ravell still isn’t answering. Shall I try his young assistant—Doctor Markham?”

Ravell could not be traced because at that hour, he lay spent and satisfied in his mistress’s bed, the mist of his own perspiration cooling him from scalp to toe. Amanda put her lips against his sternum in a finishing kiss, and gave his private parts one last, grateful pat.