The Doctor and the Diva (25 page)

When Erika left the window and returned to bed, she realized that her throat and mouth were parched. She had no water by her bedside to sip. She had meant to ask Munga to leave a glass of water next to the bed every night, because she could not sleep when she felt thirsty.

From the bedside table she took a lamp and wandered into the corridor. Her feet were bare against the floorboards, but no matter how silently she tried to move, the old wood creaked underfoot. Her fingertips touched the dark wall with uncertainty as she made her way into the kitchen, closed up now, servants gone, kettles and skillets put away. A pitcher stood on a table. She filled a tin cup and tossed her head back, drinking, gulping, wetting her fingers with the glory of the water, wiping the spillage from her silk dressing gown. The tin cup made the water taste of metal.

A light moved closer and wavered against the doorway, brightening. Someone was coming. Ravell appeared, still fully dressed in the white clothes he’d worn earlier in the evening, when they’d strolled along the beach. He was still harnessed into his suspenders.

“Erika?” he asked. “Are you not feeling well?”

“I was thirsty,” she said. “I came for a glass of water to keep by the bedside.”

“Rainwater,” he said. “That’s what we have to drink here.”

He found a proper carafe and filled it, and gave her a clean glass. When he turned to leave, she stunned herself with what she did next. She lifted an arm and said, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done,” and—as simply and easily as if he were Peter—she flew against him and embraced him just as she had that day in the music room.

How natural it seemed to hug the doctor. . . . She pushed her nose against his cheek and gave his sideburn a kiss and sniffed musk on his damp and faintly perspiring face. His fingers—fleshier than Peter’s, and more fatherly—were suddenly entwined in her own. This man had endured the most awful sorrows with her, and they had hugged with wild sadness before.

In the doorway Ravell winced. He pulled back, and in that one grimace she saw a man struggling with himself. Violently he jerked away and hurried off.

Returning to her room, Erika closed the door. She set the lamp and the glass of water down on the night table. Revolted and confused by what she had done, she clutched her head.

Peter slept on, oblivious.

When Ravell took the two of them for a tour of the plantation the next morning, his manner was brisk and businesslike. He addressed his comments more to her husband than to her.

Ravell showed them the drying sheds along the beach where coconuts were cut open and their kernels dried in the sun. This was called copra, he explained, and the oil pressed from it was shipped to Denmark and sold as a replacement for butter.

Several times she asked for the buggy to stop so that they could step down. There were so many things she wanted to see. Coolie men wielding machetes climbed to the feathery tops of coconut palms. She watched in fascination as a man hooked a vine hoop around his waist and a tree. He proceeded to walk straight up the trunk, moving the hoop upward as he climbed. With a swipe of his machete, nuts rained down.

In the forest coolie men were cutting trees, clearing new lands for cultivation. Monkeys pestered them, and they had to pause in their work and throw stones to scare the monkeys away. In the buggy Erika’s shoulder jostled against her husband’s, and they laughed at the sight.

Giant balata trees grew in the forest, their dimensions unbelievably huge. Ravell said that balata wood never decayed. Their felled trunks would lie in the jungle for centuries, never rotting. The coolies, he said, believed it easier to remove a balata tree if they crept out with their saws and took it down by the light of a full moon.

The carriage drove on. Toward the southern areas of the plantation, Ravell showed them the new drainage system and an expanse of newly planted trees. When the buggy could venture no farther, the three of them hopped down and walked. Normally Ravell arose at four in the morning to supervise the work. He seemed quite proud of the improvements.

“If you come back in three years,” he said, “these trees will be bearing coconuts by then.”

Together she and Ravell walked ahead to view the saplings while Peter lagged behind, on the lookout for birds and butterflies.

“It’s a wonder Mr. Hartley does not live here himself,” Erika remarked. “He seems to regard the Cocal as the most beautiful land he owns.”

“He would live here, I expect,” Ravell said, “except for the distance from town and the Club, where he conducts his business affairs. Besides, his wife very much enjoys society. I imagine Mrs. Hartley would find herself isolated here.”

“And you don’t?” Erika asked.

“No,” he said. “The solitude pleases me.”

The sky changed from a pearly gray to a charcoal hue. When Erika raised her face, wet drops hit her cheekbones. The rain quickened and Ravell’s wire-rimmed spectacles became splattered with water. As they hurried back to the carriage, Erika picked up her skirts. By the time they reached the buggy, Ravell’s glasses were steamed and her white shirtwaist was streaked with rain, her shoulders quite wet.

“The marvel to me,” Ravell said, “is that the delicate orchids and plants of the forest aren’t crushed by the violent downpours here.”

She drew her shoes farther under the seat, away from the brow of the carriage roof, which was dripping. Ravell rubbed at his oval spectacles with a handkerchief, then tucked the glasses inside his shirt pocket. From the sides of his dark eyes he looked at her.

Crackling sounds came from behind the buggy. “Is that Peter?” she asked. “Where has he taken refuge, I wonder—under a tree?”

Ravell made no pretense of being concerned about her husband. He continued to study her. “Peter tells me that you’ve stopped singing.”

“I’ve taken time off from performing so we could come here. I haven’t stopped singing.”

He had a face out of the Old Testament, she thought, and wondered if he knew how foreign and mysterious his eyes seemed. Most likely he did, and perhaps that was why he did not pull his spectacles from his pocket. He seldom wore them in her presence.

“Do you regret—” he began. “Do you ever wonder what might have happened if you had gone—”

He was referring to Italy and her dashed plans, she was nearly certain, but he did not know how to phrase it. If he hadn’t entered their lives with his instruments, with his face like a holy man’s, she’d be in a room overlooking the Arno by now. She’d be standing on a balcony, and arias would flow from her.

“I continue to train and sing,” she answered. “Back in Boston, with my piano in the music room.”

“What is the point of having such a voice
,
” he asked, “if you stay limited to one city . . . if that keeps your gift from—?”

“I’ll live in Italy someday,” she said. “
After
I’ve had another baby.
After
I’ve conquered this.”

A pause. He picked up a glove that had fallen. “I hope I’ll have the pleasure of hearing you sing,” he said. “You can’t imagine how lonesome I get for a fine voice sometimes, living here.”

A muffled yell came from the woods, whoops of greeting as the cries moved closer. The buggy bent to one side as the weight of a foot pressed down upon it. Peter climbed into the turnout, his clothes sodden, thin ribbons of hair wet against his forehead and scalp.

“One of the coolies was showing me a cabbage palm they just felled,” Peter explained, hard out of breath. “The top had decayed and they found a macaw’s nest in the trunk with a bunch of young ones about to fly. They offered me one.”

“And you didn’t take it?” Ravell hiked up an eyebrow.

“I didn’t dare, old friend. That bird could die during our winter voyage back to New England.” In the buggy Peter looked as if he were perspiring raindrops.

On the way back, the rain lifted, and they stopped at the plantation’s little village because Erika was curious to see how the coolie workers lived. Hanging hibiscus baskets festooned the outside of the huts. Ravell ducked his head and led them inside a cottage where two young sisters lived with their elderly grandmother. Erika recognized the young women as servants she’d seen in Ravell’s kitchen.

The grandmother had black hair with a streak of bright white running up the center of her head, like a rare pelt. The older woman slapped disks of white dough between her hands and fried the circles of bread for Ravell and his guests.
Na’an,
she called the bread, and when a piece grew puffy, she fished it from the pan and offered them delicious bites.

The hut was a humble place with a dirt floor, but it was extremely tidy. It pleased Erika to linger inside its walls, the air thick with spices she had never smelled before. When Ravell eased toward the door, nodding his thanks at the coolie women, she felt reluctant to leave. She would have preferred to remain there, listening to the clink of the women’s bracelets on their delicate wrists.

When Ravell took Peter and Erika to another building that served as the plantation’s hospital, she hesitated at the doorway, afraid to enter. “Isn’t there a risk of contagion?” she asked.

“You have more to fear from mosquitoes than from these men,” Ravell answered.

Inside two feverish men lay on cots. When Ravell appeared, relief washed over their faces. He set a cool palm on one man’s forehead; he took each man’s pulse. For one he prescribed quinine; for the other, Epsom salts. The wormlike lines of worry in the coolie men’s foreheads eased as he ministered to them.

As they exited the village infirmary, an elderly woman approached. She took both of Ravell’s hands and placed them on top of her head.
“Sahib,”
she said, calling him her master and bowing low.

The aged woman’s daughter had nearly been lost in childbirth, Ravell explained after they’d walked away. “For some reason, she credits me with saving her,” he said, and shrugged, his hands joined behind his back.

“Well, old friend,” Peter remarked, “I see that you’re held in rather high esteem around here.”

A
fter lunch, during the hottest part of the day, Erika sat on a wicker settee reading a magazine, and as she leafed through the articles, she hardly knew why she felt so agitated, or why a revolt was building inside her. It was a leisurely afternoon, but she wanted to leap from her chair and fling the magazine at Ravell.

At the opposite end of the front porch, Ravell sat with a sheet draped over his chest and shoulders while Munga shaved him. They’d brought Ravell’s small oak shaving cabinet outdoors where breezes cooled the air. Munga used a soft badger brush to work up lather in a shaving mug, and he honed an ivory-handled razor on a leather strap. As the servant scraped his master’s jawbone clean, Ravell lifted his head higher. Munga then slapped Ravell’s face with a musk-scented lotion from a blue glass bottle. For his master’s hair and moustache, Munga used pomade.