The Doctor and the Diva (16 page)

For eighteen more hours the labor continued. Daylight came, then night again. Each time Erika felt the next round of pains burning through, like a match struck against her tailbone, she called out to one of them—the nurse, or Peter, or Ravell—to douse a cotton ball or a handkerchief with more chloroform so that she could sniff its vapors. If she dozed between contractions and waited too long, the burning match became a torch that raged inside her.

Doctor Markham hurried off to deliver other, living babies, but Ravell never left the house.

At seven-thirty in the evening, on the first day of the year 1904, Ravell announced to the nurse, “Dorsal position.”

They made Erika turn onto her back and brace her heels against the bed’s footboard as Ravell rolled his shirtsleeves above his elbows.

“Forceps?” the nurse asked.

“The low ones,” he said.

“Do whatever you need to do,” Erika cried, reaching toward him in surrender before she fell back against pillows.

Their faces were solemn as Ravell maneuvered, turning and angling his own shoulders and head as he brought forth those of the child.

What were they seeing? Erika wondered. A tiny demon? A monstrous confusion of organs and limbs? What sort of creature had died inside her? For a long moment no one made a sound.

“It’s a little girl,” Ravell said tonelessly.

Peter stood at Erika’s shoulder. “She has your nose,” he said with curiosity.

That gave her hope. Perhaps she was about to view a happy, living child who resembled an ordinary child, nothing hideous after all. Silently they carried the infant to a far corner where they ministered to her, swaddling the baby in a white blanket.
Oh, bring her,
Erika thought.
Just bring her to me.

“Here she is, a pretty lass,” the nurse said, planting the wrapped package of her into Erika’s arms.

“Ringlets like yours,” Peter said. “And like your brother’s.”

The little girl was dead, of course.
Dead,
Erika thought,
and yet she’s as perfectly formed and sweet an infant as any I’ve seen.
The baby made no sound, her scalp awash with waters from the womb, and dark squiggles of hair stuck to her head. Her eyes were shut fast, underlined by deep half-moons, and Erika saw her own nose, with its high, straight bridge and rounded nostrils. Ravell had lured the baby from the birth tract with expert skill; the child’s head was wondrously symmetrical and not damaged by the doctor’s instruments in any way.

“Lovely,” Erika said. “She was a lovely thing, wasn’t she?”

Already Erika found herself speaking of her daughter in the past tense, in an effort to become detached. The blanket held the nest of the newborn’s heat. She noticed the curl of the baby’s fingers, and there was a succulence in those fingers that Erika could almost taste.

When Ravell told Erika that she would need stitches, Peter took the infant in his arms and left with the nurse. Only Ravell remained in the room as he finished sewing her up like a tailor.

“Forgive me,” Erika said.

Ravell dipped his hands in a bowl of carbolic acid, disinfecting them for a final time. He held his fingers suspended over the bowl, dripping. “Forgive
you
?” he said.

“Forgive me for not wanting her at first,” Erika said. “Later I did want her; I did.”

“Of course,” he said. His voice sounded distant, his face expressionless, as he left the room.

When Peter returned, he and Erika sat alone with the baby. With the swaddling blanket unwrapped, they set her down on the mattress and had a look at her, with her skin still warm from Erika’s body. The baby’s head tilted back and her mouth opened in a flash of red gums. They examined the perfect knobs of her shoulders, the creamy substance that lined her left ear. Hidden inside her, a miniature womb must have already existed, a place to ripen babies she would never bear. Their daughter would never know a moment such as this.

Peter said, “I don’t think she suffered. Look how peaceful she seems.”

The baby’s sealed eyes lay in deep coves. If those eyes opened, Erika imagined they would be large. She wished she knew their color, but the baby looked so serene that Erika repressed any thought of pushing a lid upward with her thumb; she wanted to let the baby lie undisturbed.

Neither she nor Peter wept as they studied her; they were too full of awe. As the minutes passed, the baby’s bent legs and arms grew colder and tauter. Flecks of blood had dried on her temple.

A tap at the door. “Do you need more time?” the nurse asked. “Or shall I take her now?”

“You can take her,” Erika said.

The baby’s skin had taken on a lavender cast, but Erika wanted to remember her as a warm thing, almost alive. Already the tiny fists were tightening, hard as stones, and she did not want to watch the little body stiffen.

They had not decided on the name they would christen her, so Peter made one up. “Good-bye, Dorabella,” Peter said softly.

“Good-bye, Dorabella,” Erika said. Dorabella . . . a character in a forgotten Mozart opera, considered immoral. Dorabella’s arias were unknown, and yet exquisite.

Before surrendering the baby to the nurse, Erika kissed the soles of the child’s feet.

In the private library where Peter caged his boa, his parrot, and his toucan, Ravell waited.
Bring the baby to me,
he’d told the nurse,
when Peter and Erika have finished.

He had told the nurse that he wished to examine the infant.

The moment he had pulled the baby from Erika’s body, Ravell saw that the little one had his mother’s mouth. His mother had died when he was nine, and her mouth was one part of her face he could still remember.

When mourners came to view his mother in her casket, he’d asked his father: “May I stay?”

“If you’re well behaved,” his father had said.

His younger brother, pouting, had been led away almost at once. Ravell had not wanted the same to happen to him. All afternoon and into the evening he had hardly fidgeted, and he did not allow himself the release of a single sob. The bereaved, especially the ladies, had paused to admire him from time to time, seated in his chair.

Some mourners never spoke. The bones of their faces glistened, and they reached into pockets and shook out folded handkerchiefs, applying them to their eyes. Some ruffled the hair on his head, and an older man slipped him a piece of candy to make up for his loss.

At one point during a lull in the flow of visitors (had it been dinnertime?), he found himself alone in the room with his mother. He walked over and stood before the casket. To see her better, he stood with his shoes on the padded cushion where people knelt to pray. That made him taller. Balanced there, he placed his palms over her joined hands, and felt the chill of her.

Close to his mother’s casket, he studied her face. She’d been laid out in a blue velvet dress with a white lace collar, her hands folded over her chest, fingers interwoven. Her long, heart-shaped upper lip had been plumper than her bottom lip, her mouth curled at the corners. At some point they would close the casket lid and take her away, so he had stood there memorizing her features.

He’d leaned over as far as he could and put his lips against hers, thinking he might be the last person to kiss her.

The nurse tapped on the library door. She gave the baby to Ravell and went out again, closing the door with discretion.

He brought the baby over to the Turkish sofa, sat near the fire in the hearth, and laid the child across his thighs. He kept his face close to the little girl’s.

Speckles of black and blue appeared on the baby’s chest, signs of hypoxia; the child had died struggling for air in the womb. But why? Just for a few minutes, had the baby twisted too far to one side? Had the cord pulled too tight? He had delivered hundreds of infants with umbilical cords around their necks—loose, just as this baby’s had been—yet most of them had lived.

Peter and Erika would press him with questions, but he would have no answer to give.

The baby’s hair had dried since emerging from the damp womb, and by the firelight, her matted curls had glints of auburn, like Erika’s hair. Ravell held the child closer to the fire, and as he did so, her skin felt more warm and supple, as though she might be revived.

He held her small heels in his hands. He rubbed the creamy lobe of her ear between his forefinger and his thumb.

The nurse waited outside in the hallway, no doubt impatient for her duties here to be finished. She expected him to emerge. Ravell bent his brow over the child’s. And just as he’d done when he was a boy of nine, he kissed his mother’s mouth good-bye.

A
fter the doctor had gone home, it was eleven-thirty at night. The nurse brought a tray into the same bedchamber where Erika had labored, a roasted chicken dinner with mashed potatoes and sweet green peas and buttery rolls, the first meal she had eaten in thirty hours.

“You’ve been the strong one,” the nurse observed. “You’ve got to let yourself cry about this.”

How peculiar that sounded.
I am the one,
Erika thought,
who weeps onstage, or sobs in the bath.
But at this moment she did not have any impulse to cry. She grasped the drumsticks and gnawed at the crispy flavored skin, as glad as a woman who has crawled on hands and knees and gotten herself out of a burning, besieged city. She was eager for each swallow of milk, glad for the normalcy, glad for the food.

By midnight another nurse came to replace the first. The fresh starched sheets the nurses stretched across the bed felt cold against Erika’s legs. The nurses had advised Peter to let his wife sleep alone here tonight, undisturbed, so he collapsed into sleep downstairs on the library sofa.

The new nurse hovered over Erika, kneading her womb. “The doctor has ordered a sedative for you,” the black-haired nurse offered. “If you want it.”

“I don’t need it,” Erika responded. After the nurse left, Erika pulled the lamp’s chain and snapped off the light. Willingly, thickly, she slept. Around three in the morning, her eyes came open in the dark. She remembered the baby and how the little girl had died.

The child had lived closer to her than anyone. The baby had slept right under her heart. Erika recalled how she had not even wanted the child at first. The truth made her weep. But because it was all too much to consider then, she shut her lids and slept.