The Doctor and the Diva (18 page)

She saw the little girl again, the weary half-moons under the baby’s closed eyes after her long day of being born and dying. The baby’s head fell back in surrender, her tiny lush lips parted.

Peter’s memory flared with similar scenes, and at night he molded himself protectively around Erika. Whenever she slid from the bed, his body jerked awake. His hands followed her waist and he whispered anxiously, “Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom,” Erika said. “Only to the bathroom.”

When her eyes opened in the dark on the second night, she sat up, startled by sensations her body had never known before. Milk spurted from her nipples, droplets wetting her midriff and her forearms. Milk soaked the sheets. She dabbed at the leakage and licked it from her fingers and found the substance strange—sticky and sweet.

She pulled the chain and snapped on the lamp next to the bed and woke Peter, knowing he would be as amazed by the sight as she was. “It’s the milk,” she said, staring down at nipples that wept and left her torso glistening.

Her breasts had never been so ripe, so enormous. She might have hired herself out as a wet nurse. “Do you want a taste?” she asked Peter.

A look of curiosity passed over his face. With one finger he wiped opaque drops from her arm, and he tasted. “Sugary,” he observed.

Papa came to visit while the fresh horrors of labor flashed through her still, and she spared him no detail. Her father listened with the tender interest he showed his patients.

Magdalena came to call, her arms laden with gladiolas and chocolates and Caruso’s latest recording, which she promptly set upon the gramophone. Magdalena had never borne a child. Every time Erika alluded to her ordeal, Magdalena interrupted with a funny anecdote.

“Have you heard that Dame Nellie Melba is suing a newspaper over a bad review of her singing?” Magdalena said. “This time I must say she’s got a good case. It turns out that the newspaper published a review of a performance that had been canceled. The critic had written his terrible review in advance!”

Erika had difficulty concentrating on Magdalena’s words.
How,
she wondered,
could Magdalena speak of such frothy things? Doesn’t she realize,
Erika thought,
that two days ago a dead baby was wrenched from between my legs and taken from my body?
Her mind was crowded with those visions, and her thoughts could not make room for anything else.

Her recollections were violent, and through the haze of scenes, Ravell moved unforgettably. A thousand times she watched the shock freeze his features as he rushed into the bedchamber and saw her lying there. Erika held the warm swaddled bulk of the baby against her chest, murmuring, “Oh, she was sweet—” Ravell went away wordlessly, not wanting to linger at the scene.

He had not become an obstetrician to pull dead, lavender-faced babies out of women’s bodies. Knowing him, she suspected that he went home, sat on the edge of his bed with elbows on his knees, and hung his head.

The next morning he entered her bedroom very early, as a father might do, and stared at the closed drapes.
In about two months I will examine you again,
he said.
By then everything will be clearer, and we can discuss the future and whatever decisions we ought to make.

All her life she had been curious to know what pregnancy and childbearing would be like, and now she knew. Her womb had held a baby who was perfectly made. That gratified her—to know that her body had given root to all the proper parts of a child.

A miracle to have grown her, even if the little girl did not live. What was missing? As the weeks passed, whenever Erika saw parents with baby carriages during a stroll in the Public Garden, she was baffled. What had sparked their offspring to breathe, to squirm? The daughter she and Peter had had looked the same as those infants, yet their daughter had no more life than the Chinese figurine on the mantel whose porcelain black hair required dusting.

Only three weeks after the delivery, Erika stood before a tall oval mirror and cinched a pink belt snugly, her waist as narrow as it had ever been. So this was to be her consolation, then: the little girl had been kind to her body. No one would have guessed that she had ever been pregnant.

She was free now to book her passage for Italy. (“You’ve got your chance back,” Magdalena pointed out. “Why not seize it? Just raise the sails, and get away.”) During the labor, when the baby’s death first became apparent, for a few shameful seconds relief had passed through her, because all the freedom she had loved so well had rushed suddenly, miraculously back. But the relief had lasted only that long—seconds.

Now that her womb had been emptied of the child that had kept her from all her plans, it was no longer Italy she thought about. Only the devastation of it filled her—the shock, like a rape. Fate had robbed her, left her reeling—not quite a woman until she got back what had been taken from her.

Now she wanted—as desperately as she had ever wanted anything—to go back and do it properly. She knew she had the power of it inside her, buried deep. Given another chance, she felt she could make it come out right. How could she devote herself to anything else until she had finished this, until her womb made a living, laughing baby?

As she walked down Commonwealth Avenue, about six blocks from her home, she paused on the frozen strip of land across from Ravell’s office. She envied the female patients who came and went.

It would not be proper for her to enter his office, not until her appointment in several more weeks.

She sat at the piano and sang Schubert’s “Erlkönig” over and over, like a madwoman, her fingers galloping over the keys like a horse scrambling at night through a storm. She sang about the terrors of a child who verged on being snatched by Death. She repeated it so many times that she expected the servants to enter the music room and make her quit, but nobody did. She played and sang until her vocal cords grew sore and her shoulders collapsed.

Perhaps the Lord was a Great Artist who designed the plots of people’s lives, she thought; perhaps when old age brought her a more aerial view of things, she would understand why this had happened. For now she could only guess.
Maybe this will enrich my voice, my art,
she told herself, after she’d pulled her fingers away from the ivory keys. That was the irony: for an artist, the worst and most painful thing could also be a gift.

F
our men waited on the sidewalk outside his practice as Ravell returned from attending a birth. It was just past seven A.M. and the office was not due to open for another half hour. He had been looking forward to ducking upstairs to his apartment for a swift change of clothes before the first patient arrived. He had hoped to enjoy a scone with honey, to rest his head against the back of his leather chair—just for a few minutes—and close his eyes.

The moment he saw the four men, he understood that something was amiss. One gentleman raised a cane and pointed it at Ravell, and the other three, all dressed in black overcoats and top hats, turned to face him. With their feet apart and their hands behind their backs, they blocked the sidewalk. White breaths issued from them like steam from the mouths of dragons.

An air of importance and high social position emanated from all four of them. Their hats and gloves were impeccable, and the smell of quality wool hung about their damp overcoats. The eldest of the foursome, a bald man nearing sixty, had hands that trembled. He appeared in need of a stiffening drink. Ravell recognized him as George Appleton, Amanda’s husband, but the man had never appeared so unbalanced, or so sickly, before. He could hardly look at Ravell. Next to him, a younger man whose hair was slicked with pomade glared at Ravell, the menace in his facial muscles unmistakable: the younger one was Caroline Farquahr’s husband.

“Doctor Ravell?” The tallest gentleman stepped forward. “We wish to have a word with you.”

Ravell unlocked the front door and led them through the stale air of the vacant waiting room into his office. His nurse had not yet arrived. As he went behind his desk, he motioned toward a coat rack and three chairs ranged along the wall. Ravell offered to bring another seat to accommodate the fourth man.