The Doctor and the Diva (2 page)

Who is she?
he wondered. Later, when he learned her name—
Erika
—it made him think of the words
aria, air,
as if she breathed melodies.

After her singing ended and the minister had spoken, mourners adjusted their silk top hats and knotted their scarves and shuffled past the open gap in the earth.

“I don’t believe you’ve met my sister, have you?” Gerald von Kessler said to Ravell, and guided him toward the platform. The singer lifted her chin toward him and took his hand and smiled, the light on her face as radiant as snow. Almost immediately she turned to another person. Ravell knew that at that moment, he was nothing to her—only another doctor among scores of them.

R
avell watched from an upstairs window in his private quarters as Erika von Kessler and her husband made their way down Commonwealth Avenue. They would be his first appointment of the day. The husband, the one leading the charge to end their childlessness, walked several paces ahead of his wife. She lagged. The husband paused and waited for her to catch up, but when he spoke to her, she turned her head to observe the town houses on the opposite side of the avenue.

Ravell felt a tinge of excitement as he observed them. He was a man drawn to risk; nothing made him feel more alive than the nearness of a gamble. This might—or might not—become a storied case for him.

As the couple moved closer, Ravell saw that the husband, Peter Myrick, was a tall, elegant figure perhaps a few years older than himself. A sandy-haired man with pleasant features, Peter had a narrow face and a blade-thin nose. He looked like a young senator. Later Ravell would learn that on the way to their first meeting, Peter Myrick had urged certain advice upon his wife:
If you want this doctor to dedicate his best efforts to us, we must develop a special rapport with him.

Ravell had just finished getting dressed, the strands of hair at his neck still damp from his morning bath. Before going downstairs to the street-level suite of rooms that housed his practice, he shook a few drops of musk-scented pomade onto his palms and combed back the wings of his dark hair with his fingers.

When the couple entered, Ravell rose from behind his mahogany desk to greet them. Given his conversation with Erika’s brother during the carriage ride to the cemetery, Ravell had not expected to experience any particular warmth toward her husband. But from the moment Peter Myrick came into the room, he seemed lit by optimism, and Ravell felt fondness toward him. Peter was a man of refinement, and yet he had the air of an eager schoolboy.

Like a curious child, Peter glanced around the office. He recognized at once what interested him.

“I see you’ve got a Morpho!” he said in an accent that was unmistakably British. He lifted the magnifying glass from Ravell’s desk to examine three glass cubes. A different butterfly of exquisite colors and dimensions had been preserved inside each.

“Did you capture these yourself?”

Ravell nodded. “A friend has a coconut estate on an island off South America. The wildlife is magnificent there.”

“And that?” Peter Myrick pointed to a framed photograph of an anaconda entwined in a mangrove tree. “Is that from the same island?”

Ravell nodded.

“I’m an animal enthusiast myself,” Peter said. “Someday I’ll show you my collections and my little menagerie.”

Erika Myrick (or the mezzo-soprano Erika von Kessler, as she was known professionally) had stepped into his office with the same proud carriage Ravell recalled from the day she’d appeared at the cemetery. Yet she looked very different today, as if she’d been crying earlier, her lids swollen and her eyes small. As she settled herself distantly in a chair, Ravell recalled other things Gerald von Kessler had confided during the ride from the funeral. (“Peter has become fixated to the point of tormenting my sister. If she didn’t have such a glorious voice, all this might have destroyed her by now. It’s music that has saved her.”)

Peter Myrick offered a brief history of their struggles to conceive. They had been married now for six years. He mentioned obstetricians they had previously consulted—all mature gentleman, renowned specialists.

To reassure them that he might have something new to offer, Ravell spoke of his mentor from Harvard Medical School. Together they had designed a series of particularly elegant instruments that were beginning to yield interesting results. “Perhaps you’ve heard of the famous Doctor Sims? Some people call him ‘the Father of Modern Obstetrics.’ My mentor was a student of Sims.’ ”

“A figure of controversy, Sims—wasn’t he?” Peter said.

Ravell nodded. Sims had been brilliant, but far too invasive in the eyes of many. “Fertility work is still—” Ravell hesitated. “Well, let’s just say this must be handled with the utmost discretion. Few people should be aware of anything except the results.”

Peter and Erika nodded. They understood. In a quiet tone she responded to questions about her menstrual cycles. Every gynecologist who had examined her had apparently found her female system healthy and unremarkable.

Ravell put down his pen and turned to Peter to suggest an intrusion that made many men balk. “In such cases, it’s standard to inspect a sample of the husband’s semen as well.”

Peter gave a laugh, as abrupt as a cough. “I can assure you that virility is not of concern here.”

“It might provide insight.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Peter crossed one leg over the other.

Ravell knew when a man’s dignity must be respected, so instead of pursuing the matter he led Erika von Kessler down a corridor into an examination chamber. Normally a nurse placed a freshly starched sheet on the table, but today he made it up like a little bed for her. She removed her hatpin and set her dove-gray toque on a chair, and smoothed her pompadour.

“I heard you sing at your uncle’s funeral,” Ravell said. “Afterward, the sound of your voice stayed in my head for days. It was so—so—”

She turned to him with interest. “Do you enjoy opera?”

“My father trained to be a baritone, but he gave it up long before I was born. He managed a large farm in Africa. When I was a little boy, he used to sing from
Figaro,
and I used to dance around and bump against the walls.”

Erika von Kessler’s lips parted in a faint smile.

A nurse stood in attendance while he examined her. As he reached under the drape of skirts and palpated, he kept his eyes locked on hers, as he had been trained to do, so that a female patient would feel reassured that a doctor had no intention of peering at her private areas. Her eyes were blue-gray, deepened by lavender shadows beneath the lower lashes. Unlike many women, she lay completely relaxed. Her uterus was slightly small—not uncommon for a petite woman—and it tilted to the anterior. The ovaries were healthy, properly positioned. Ravell kept his eyes on hers until she arched her throat backward and switched her gaze to the ceiling, as if returning his stare felt too intimate.

When the examination was over, the nurse left the room. He took Erika von Kessler’s hand and helped her sit upright. Her hair had loosened from its knot, with a froth of dark curls sliding down her neck. He smelled whiffs of lilac soap.

As he turned to depart, Erika von Kessler called to him, “It’s useless, you realize. My husband doesn’t want you to know that every procedure you’re about to propose, we’ve done before—many times. This,” she declared gravely, “is the end for me. It’s the end for me
of everything
.” The anguish in her words made him uneasy.

Yet she did agree to come to the office, accompanied by her husband, for regular visits that winter. Ravell assured Peter that his privacy would be respected; the moment he surrendered a sample of his seed, it would be quickly injected into his wife’s body; no one would tamper with the precious substance.

And so, twice a week, Peter retreated into a windowless chamber where a book of photographs taken in a Parisian brothel had been left for him. When Peter Myrick finished, he covered the glass jar and left the specimen there. He then hurried out to the street where a carriage opened its doors and bore him away, wheels rumbling over cobblestones. An importer of textile machinery from Bradford, England, to the mills of New England—and an importer of Egyptian cotton as well—Peter traveled widely. He was a man in a hurry, with numerous transactions to oversee.

After Peter rushed off, twice a week Doctor Ravell completed the procedure on his wife. She was forced to lie for a half hour with her legs raised, knees and calves propped by pillows and bolsters, to allow her husband’s seed to flow into her.

“It’s hopeless,” she said to Ravell every time.

“I’m afraid that she plans to end her life.” The wife of Doctor Gerald von Kessler sat in Ravell’s office. The worried little woman wore the same crushed violets in her hat that she’d worn that day at the cemetery. “Something dreadful is going to happen to my sister-in-law, I’m certain.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Erika asked me, ‘If I did something that hurt the family terribly, would you and Gerald ever find it in your hearts to forgive me?’ She’s asked about wills; she says she wants all of her financial papers in order. She’s given away beautiful dresses from her closet, saying that she won’t be needing them. She’s worried about her maid losing her job. Erika asked me, ‘If something happens to me, would you promise to help find another position for Annie?’ ”

“Thank you for telling me,” Ravell said.

He left the room, shaken, and stood behind a door down the hallway to collect himself. He’d once known a patient who had harmed herself under similar circumstances. That had happened during his days as a medical student, while he’d served as an assistant to another obstetrician. Ravell had never forgotten how cheerful the lady had seemed the day before she’d died by her own hand. When he’d passed her on a staircase, she’d smiled and called him by name. As she was leaving the building, she’d thrust her arm upward and waved to him with a flourish, and he heard her calling exuberant good-byes to everyone—the nurse, the head doctor, other patients and acquaintances seated in the waiting room.

The odd cheerfulness. That is what stayed with him most. Later another physician explained to him that a suicidal patient might appear suddenly uplifted just after she’d made her decision, thinking that she’d soon be free from whatever was causing her agony and sorrow. In a last note to her husband, the poor woman had written:
Since I have failed to give you the children you so dearly wanted, it seems only fair to leave you free to remarry more happily, and fruitfully. . . .
If Erika lost her life over this, Ravell knew the news would blind him with regret. He’d never wash the darkness of it from his mind.

At Erika’s next appointment, Ravell stepped away after examining her. “So you’re having your period,” he said. That morning, Erika admitted, she had hidden her bloodstained bloomers from her husband.