The Doctor and the Diva (17 page)

T
hrough the window of his kitchen door he saw her—blonde hair tucked under a trim hat, her dark plum suit with its fine tailoring. Caroline Farquahr carried a satchel of offerings—sherry, a baguette her French cook had baked, Stilton, dried pears and apricots. Ravell had not seen Caroline since that summer night when she’d appeared at his office six months previously.

“Amanda tells me you’ve been despondent,” Caroline said. “I’ve not come here to play Madame de Pompadour. I’ve come as an old friend.”

So he let her into his apartment. His boots drying near the fire, he moved about in his woolen socks and resumed his seat in a leather chair. “I’m here,” she went on, “because I’m concerned about your state of mind.” She set the bag on a round oak table and drew forth groceries, tearing a baguette into pieces and spreading Stilton on the bread, preparing a little plate for him.

“You don’t have to tell me about the case,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t divulge anything to Amanda.”

Caroline placed the platter and a glass of sherry before him. He left the food and drink untouched.

“No matter what happened,” she said, “don’t persist in blaming yourself. Infants die. Mothers die. Every physician loses some patients.” She sat down at the oak table and poured herself a glass of sherry and drank with a kind of frankness. “Let’s suppose it was a young mother. . . . Do you keep imagining you could have saved this person?”

Ravell had gone over and over that day in his mind, and could not see how he could have drawn a living child from Erika’s body. Yet his mind persisted with self-blame.

If only I had not gone to Amanda’s bed that night. . . . If only I had not forgotten that silly engraved pocket watch. . . .
The mind railed at itself. But even if he
had
arrived at Erika’s bedside sooner, as Doctor Markham had done, he would have been powerless to save his own child; that was the horror of it.

Such deaths sometimes happened during labor. He had seen it often enough. If he
had
been standing in Markham’s shoes, using a stethoscope to do a routine check on the baby every twenty or thirty minutes, the child’s strong heartbeat would still have disappeared—abruptly, inexplicably.

No instrument had yet been invented that could be used during labor to warn that a child’s heartbeat was about to falter. No physician could open a small window and peer into a womb to catch sight of a baby at that crucial instant when she turned, tightening the umbilical cord around her neck; or at that instant when a little girl suddenly clutched the cord with her own tiny fist, squeezing off her own air supply. He recalled once delivering an infant born with the umbilical cord clamped between her gums, as if biting it. In utero, a baby could suffocate in three minutes, before she ever opened her eyes and saw the world.

In his mind Ravell wanted to go back to that day and rest his ear against Erika’s navel, keeping a scalpel at the ready, braced for that sudden minute when the heartbeat was lost. But her labor had gone on for twenty-seven hours. No doctor could have kept listening to every heartbeat, without cease, for that long.

He had done all he could, and yet . . .

Caroline tilted her head and glanced sideways at him, trying to cajole him into talking.

“No,” Ravell answered finally. “There’s no one I could have rescued.”

“Then
why
—? If it was something hideous . . . certainly you’ve witnessed dreadful things before. The nightmare of it will wash away with time. Am I right?”

He gave a ceremonial nod.

“Look at you,” she whispered hard. Her eyes narrowed in their scrutiny of him. “You haven’t combed your hair. That’s so unlike you.”

She got up and rearranged his hair with her fingers, then resumed her seat. Caroline lifted her glass and swirled the sherry, admiring its translucent color.

Ravell loosened his cravat and pulled it off, then detached his starched cuffs and collar and placed them on the mantel. Words scraped his throat, but he spoke anyway. “I can’t tell you how hard it is for me these days,” he said, “to attend a normal birth. To hold a living baby.”

Caroline gazed at him, stupefied. “You need a rest. Go to Cape Cod—or take the waters at Baden-Baden. You must do something to relieve such feelings. How will you perform your functions, if you’ve been so badly affected?” She put down her glass and folded her arms, shaking her head at him.

Ravell closed his eyes, longing for just such a respite. He stretched himself across the tufted leather couch, and propped his stocking feet on the sofa’s fat arm.

“I can’t understand it, really,” Caroline said. “To be so vulnerable, so traumatized—after all you’ve seen. After so much experience, and so many years.” Though the platter of baguettes spread with Stilton remained uneaten, she busied herself with creating another serving of delicacies. From the satchel she drew a cylinder of Boston brown bread and sliced off a few thick rounds, then slathered each piece with cream cheese studded by chopped dates.

How long had it been since he’d eaten? she wanted to know.

Many hours, he admitted, so she urged the sweeter fare upon him. Ravell took the molasses-flavored bread she held out to him. He bit into it like a hungry boy. When he’d swallowed every morsel, he licked traces of syrup and chopped dates from his thumb and forefinger.

Smiling, she reached out to hold him like a mother, ready to cradle his head in the bends of her arms. She slid against him on the leather couch. As her blouse pressed against his face, he inhaled the scent of fresh ironing, the slightly burned aroma in the starched fabric. Her hair was the soft yellow of pineapples. For a moment he closed his eyes and sank into her, imagining Erika against him, Erika in the masses of Caroline’s blonde hair.

Then, abruptly, he wrestled loose and stood up. “Caroline,” he said. “I can’t—I can’t let this happen.”

Reddening and flustered, she got up, too. Leaning her back against a wall, she looked at him, a glint of bitterness in her stare. Many men must have melted at the sight of her prettiness; was he the only one who’d ever rebuffed her? A light rain tapped at the windows. She swaddled herself in her wraps and stabbed the air with her umbrella as she rushed off into the night.

“So Caroline came to visit you,” Amanda Appleton said. “She told me that she stopped by.”

Ravell said nothing. Amanda walked through his flat, looking around at the doorways draped by rope portieres, at the clawed feet of his oak table, and at the pillows plumped on his bed.

“She says she’s worried about you,” Amanda said, “but I suspect she has designs on you.”

Ravell shrugged. Amanda did not ask for an accounting from him. In fact, she appeared amused by the notion that Caroline had been here. Amanda turned on the glass Bordeaux lamp, and she stepped back to admire its jewel colors—the topaz and orange, and the royal purple of the stained-glass grapes. She asked if Caroline had noticed the lamp: had he told Caroline that the Bordeaux lamp had been a present from her, from Amanda?

When Amanda kissed him, there was an edge of spite to the kiss that had not been there the previous week. She locked her legs around him and pushed her bones against him with a kind of greed, as though she were sparring with somebody. She may have scrutinized the pillow next to his for extra creases made by another woman’s head. This only sharpened her lust.

“They must all want you,” Amanda said. “Your patients.”

“Hardly,” Ravell laughed.

“They lie with their husbands and think about you.”

“When they hear my name, they remember the agony of childbirth,” he said. “They hope I’ll never darken their doorstep again.”

After this, Amanda came more frequently to his private residence. She had a key, and whenever he came up the stairs, he could not predict if she would be waiting for him. One evening he arrived to find Amanda seated in his leather chair, wearing nothing but a corset laced so tight that her breasts seemed to swell and overflow from the top of it.

“I’ve been here for ages,” she said.

“I’ve got an infant to deliver in less than an hour,” Ravell lied. “I’ve just returned home to grab a couple of cold pork chops from the icebox.”

Amanda pulled at his suspenders, lowering them from his shoulders.

“Did you hear what I said?” Ravell brushed her hands away. “There simply isn’t time.”

She fell back, stung. “I’ve become tiresome to you, haven’t I? Is it my age—is that what bothers you?”

“Age has got nothing to do with it.”

One Monday evening when he expected that Amanda would be coming, he walked the streets of the Back Bay until it grew so late he knew she would need to leave. After nightfall pedestrians became anonymous; the row houses lit up from the inside like stage sets. No one noticed him as he strolled along the strip of parkland that divided Commonwealth Avenue. While passing Peter and Erika’s home, he slowed his gait, his breaths suspended as he gazed at five stories of windows that glowed from within. At a third-floor window he caught sight of Peter’s silhouette near the toucan’s cage. Peter lifted his elbow, his arm extended to offer a perch for the bird.

Ravell took care not to lurk; he moved past slowly but steadily. He wished the season were not winter, but summer. If it were July, their windows would be thrown open, and the vibrations of her voice might be heard.

Dear Hartley,
he wrote later that evening to his boyhood friend who owned the coconut plantation near the coast of South America.
Perhaps in November, I will embrace your long-standing invitation to visit your part of the world. Lately I have witnessed a good deal of sadness in my practice. It has become difficult to shrug off the sorrows I’ve seen. Besides, the needs of certain members of the fairer sex can exhaust a man’s spirit. . . .

A hand clattered against his back-door window. He dropped the pen, glanced up, and saw Caroline Farquahr flash a wave. She had no key, and he had not seen her since the evening she’d fed him brown bread sweetened by molasses and dates. Ravell snapped his head down, rereading what he had written to Hartley, sorry that he had glanced up and met her eye. Why had he not drawn the curtain over that window?

Caroline saw how he stalled, reluctant to open his door to her. She knew that he had not returned her smile with his own—she noticed how he had jerked his head away, and that only made her smack the pane harder.

Finally he got up to answer. As soon as he unlocked the door, she turned her body sideways to fit through the narrow opening, and she sliced past him. He closed the door behind her. She opened her lips, ready to spit flames.

“First you threw me over, and now it’s Amanda.”

He ran one finger under his tie, loosening it, not responding.

He heard a snag, a pause in her hard, enraged inhalations. Caroline paced for a moment and halted. “There’s somebody else, isn’t there?” She placed her palm on her jutting hip. “Could it be that singer we heard last spring at Mrs. Gardner’s palazzo? I remember how eager you were to run to the stage door for an extra glimpse of her.”

Stunned, he stared at the floor. With open hands he rubbed his face and wiped his features, as though to cleanse himself. “To be completely honest, I’d prefer to be alone at this time in my life. Celibate.”

“You?” she scoffed. “Celibate? From what Amanda tells me, you won’t be happy staying celibate for long.”

D
uring the days that followed the baby’s birth and death, memories replayed in Erika’s mind, spreading like fire across a night sky. The scenes burned through her sleep and woke her while the moon was still up. She watched the same nightmare hour unfold over and over—the one with a very young doctor yanking the stethoscope from his ears, declaring that he must be going deaf; the sound of Ravell’s tread on the stairs; the tie that flew like a long tongue around Ravell’s neck as he raced into her bedchamber.