The Doctor and the Diva (23 page)

Erika scurried up the staircase and rapped her knuckles against the bedroom door, two sharp knocks of anticipation. When Peter opened the door, she whisked the rustling packages into the room.

“Don’t peek yet,” she warned. Her arms laden with bundles, she swept past him and arranged the goods, wrapped in paper, across the bed. How beautiful his gray eyes had just looked, all liquid, silver. . . . Then she realized there had been tears in them.

What had prompted those tears? It might have been a child’s toy he’d just seen lying on the stairs, or a glimpse of Gladys brushing her doll’s hair. In an instant Erika understood why he wept, even before she asked him. After all these months he—like she—still suffered these private, silent spells of sorrow.

She turned to him. “Were you thinking about the baby?”

He nodded. At such rare moments, she felt unspeakably close to him.

At the church christening a few hours later, Peter wore presents she’d given him: the ivory suit that would keep him cool in the tropics, a tie that shone like a textured silver fish. A long man with beautiful shoulders, he held himself well.

At the front of the church, families held their infants and stood in semicircles around the baptismal font. Seated side by side in the pew, Erika and Peter listened as one baby’s shriek carved into the air. Water rose in Peter’s eyes again, shining like his tie, though he stared straight ahead at the altar and nobody noticed except her. She folded a handkerchief into a square and slipped it into his hand.

All afternoon families drove up to the Eden estate in their victorias. Carriage doors opened and children spilled from them. Children swarmed on the lawn, boys dangled from limbs of trees, girls ran and hopped until their hair bows unraveled. In the garden Mr. Hartley held a lime drink in his hand and introduced Peter and Erika to everyone. Hartley insisted that Peter join him for a hunt in the northern hills the next day, with hounds hired to lead the charge.

Two ladies—Mrs. Hartley and a friend—were coming slowly down a path in Erika’s direction. No doubt Mrs. Hartley’s companion would soon shake Erika’s hand and inquire, “Do you have children, Mrs. von Kessler?” That was the question that every stranger posed.

Erika glanced at the sky, as though scanning for rain. Then she fled.

She went upstairs to the bedroom balcony and called Peter’s name, beckoning impatiently to him. As she paced the room, the floorboards creaked.

When he came upstairs, he looked at her with concern. She locked the door behind him.

“Are you ill? What’s wrong?” he said.

Through the open window she gazed down at the garden full of guests. “Look at them,” she whispered roughly. “Do any of them deserve children more than we do?”

Expressionless, Peter looked down at the party below.

“Mr. Hartley and his wife have four little ones—and now they’ve got another baby.
Five
of them.”

While Peter remained at the window, she slid behind him. Holding herself from view, she pressed her breasts against his back. She stroked the fine threads of his ivory suit coat, and dug her hands into the depths of his trouser pockets. She pulled him onto the bed. They shed their shoes. They lay on top of the bedclothes, her skirt rucked up, and to the eager sounds of children who hung from trees and squealed, she and Peter had more of the pleasure that made her want to squeal, too, though she kept it tamped down, like a stone stuffed in her throat.

“Promise me you won’t go hunting with Mr. Hartley tomorrow,” she said. “Tell him we need to leave. We’ve got to see Ravell.”

“All right,” Peter said. Before the mirror he patted his hair and shook creases from his ivory suit. Then he went back to the party.

E
rika could hardly believe that within hours, she would see Ravell again. During the train ride east to Sangre Grande, she took out a tiny mirror and straightened her pearl earrings; she folded a clean handkerchief and blotted the perspiration that shone above her upper lip. At the station, as she and Peter stepped onto the platform, she was disappointed to see that it was not Ravell who had come to meet them. Instead, the estate’s overseer, a man named Gibbs, welcomed them. Ravell, he explained, was still caring for a couple of fever victims.

Gibbs was thoroughly British, rather military in appearance. With his white mushroom helmet, riding breeches, and leggings, he carried himself as straight as a brass-tipped cane. To the station he had brought two buggies—enough for an extensive family—as well as a wagon for their luggage.

Along the coast they traveled south, enjoying an unforgettable drive on a beach so hard that people used it as a road. For fifteen miles, from Manzanilla Point to Mayaro, Mr. Hartley’s coconut plantation bordered the sea, its perimeter marked by a wall of cabbage palms. Coconut trees—thirty thousand of them—had been planted wherever the tropical forest could be pushed back and cleared.

The tide was high, so for much of the ride, the carriage wheels churned through water. Erika hung her arm over the side of the buggy so that the ocean’s drops wet her fingers. She tasted. Surprisingly, the sea was not very salty.

“We’re not far off the South American coast,” Peter observed, “and the Orinoco River is so powerful, its freshwater may dilute the sea.”

“What do you call those?” she cried above the noise of waves and water splashing under the wheels. She pointed toward what appeared to be blue and magenta jellyfish bobbing along the surface like balloons, with streamers floating beneath them.

“Portuguese men-of-war,” Peter called loudly back. “If you touch one, you’ll get a nasty sting.”

Finally they reached the estate, a place referred to as the “Cocal,” meaning a coconut plantation. Their buggy turned as they came upon a lagoon with a great forest behind it. Near the lagoon they noticed a man out with a gun. He, too, wore a white mushroom helmet, and at first Erika hardly recognized him, transformed in his white tropical clothes. Ravell had been out hunting ducks.

He turned toward the carriage and put down his gun. He seemed like an apparition standing there. Under the helmet, his dark eyes went straight toward her—looking into her face with an intensity that she’d not seen prior to that day they’d embraced in the music room.

“Hello, old friend!” Peter leaped from the buggy to thump Ravell’s back. The two men grasped each other’s hands.

A great nervousness came over Erika as she descended from the carriage. To guard her composure, she turned toward the lagoon, admiring the mangroves with their great roots in the water. She looked everywhere except into Ravell’s eyes.

“You travelers must be hungry,” Ravell said to Peter. “Would you like oysters for dinner? They grow here on trees, you know.”

When Ravell offered to show Peter how oysters could be gathered from the mangroves’ roots, Peter was predictably willing. As Ravell led her husband away, he told the overseer, Gibbs, to drive Erika to the house and unload the luggage for her.

The one-story house was similar to others in the countryside. It was enmeshed in blossoms and vines. The rooms rambled one into the next, as though someone had kept adding to the maze of it. The front door was open.

“Munga!” Gibbs startled her by shouting. To her, the word did not sound like a person’s name at first. A reed-thin male servant with skin the shade of brown parchment came to the doorway and bowed to her. In the days that followed she learned that a whole coolie village lived here under Ravell’s charge, yet the cry most frequently heard at the Cocal was the name of this servant, “Munga!” It was Munga who served meals, cleaned boots, fixed doorknobs, did everything.

Munga hurried toward the wagon to remove steamer trunks and escort Erika inside.

Upon first entering Ravell’s house, she noticed that it did not have the sparse look of most bachelor abodes. The foyer had potted palms that brought the forest inside. Ravell had lived in many places in the world before this, and he had acquired unique and artistic furnishings. Besides the usual grandfather clock and rocking chairs, the parlor had a quilted Turkish leather couch. A mammoth turtle shell rested like a cradle on his dining table, with mangoes and bananas and alligator pears placed inside it. Instead of the predictable portieres, the doorways were draped in carved ebony and ivory beads, with African idols cut into them.

The room where she and Peter were to stay had French doors that opened onto a courtyard. The long curtains were white, the fabric so sheer that the room was extraordinarily bright even when the drapes were closed. Erika took a silver-backed brush from her bag, stroked her hair, and adjusted her crescent-shaped pompadour comb.

The ride had not tired her, and she felt no need for a rest. She was eager to explore everything.

Opening the twin doors, she stepped into the courtyard. Hummingbirds hovered around the flowering shrubs. They flew so rapidly their wings looked transparent. Like bees, they moved from blossom to blossom. Trinidad was known as “the land of the hummingbird,” and Peter said twenty varieties existed on the island. The ones she observed now were ruby-crested, and their silent, vibrating wings emanated different colors like fiery opals catching the light, now reddish flashes, now gold.

“No need to dress for dinner here in the hinterlands,” Peter reminded her that evening, as he opened his trunk.

Erika had already changed into a dusty-rose gown whose ruffled, low-cut neckline gave the illusion of petals draped over her bosom and shoulders. Standing before the mirror, she fixed a double choker of pearls around her throat, and then removed the necklace, not wanting to appear too formal. Her husband sat on the bed lacing his shoes. She went over and smoothed his collar with her hands.

Ravell met them in the parlor. He held his eyes on her a moment too long, as if the sight of her décolletage unbalanced him. Then he busied himself by pouring cocktails. “Would you care for a green swizzle?” he asked, handing her a glass

“Green swizzle?” Erika repeated cheerfully. She sipped hers and pronounced it delicious. “You’ll have to describe the ingredients to us.”

“I mix falernum and water with a dash of rum and Angostura,” Ravell said.

“Falernum?” Peter asked. “What’s that?”

Falernum, Ravell explained, was a sweet, tropical syrup he liked to concoct himself, blending the flavors of almond, lime, vanilla, and ginger. He let the falernum stand in wood for a month, then added milk to settle it.

The dinner began with the oysters that Ravell and Peter had harvested from the roots of the mangrove trees in the lagoon. The oysters were exceedingly tender. At every bite, their soft juices exploded with flavor and dissolved against the heat of Erika’s tongue.

During dinner Ravell spoke very little. Earlier she had overheard him chatting with Peter in the garden, and Ravell had sounded at ease then, but in her presence, a strange reticence came over him.

He seemed relieved when she talked, however—not so much because of her remarks, she sensed, but more to have the excuse to rest his eyes on her, her garnet ring, her ruffled neckline. She wondered how long it had been since he had spoken to an educated woman.

“Are you always so quiet?” Erika teased.

“Not always,” he said with a trace of amusement.

The oysters were followed by crab-backs, which Peter declared one of the most succulent dishes he had ever tasted. Other local delicacies followed—turtle steak and guinea fowl. Finally, the ever-present Munga brought forth finger bowls. The meal ended with a liqueur of peach brandy.

“My dear fellow,” Peter said to Ravell, “clearly you know
how
to live. Here we sit, fifteen miles from any habitation, and we’ve consumed the sort of meal one hopes to find in a good restaurant in Paris.”

Ravell appeared pleased, but said nothing.

“Mr. Hartley reminded us that you’ve lived on various continents,” Erika said.