The Doctor and the Diva (35 page)

On a winter’s night in Boston, hot air rose from the heating register, the iron grill set into the floor. The windowpanes became opaque with steam. In the darkness of their bedroom, she and Peter danced, their bare feet moving across the creaking floor. He had just returned from a trip, and, as usual, they reached in greed for each other’s bodies. By day, she pretended that the baby was really Peter’s son. By night, when she and Peter could not see each other’s faces, she pretended that she was back at the Cocal.

It was not the low curve of her husband’s spine that her fingers stroked, but the fine fringe of hair that grew at the hollow of Ravell’s back.

When she and Peter fell against the bed, their bodies damp and recovering, she imagined that if she opened a window, she’d hear the rough whisper of palm fronds in the wind; she’d see phosphorescent streaks across the water—not brick sidewalks crusted with ice.

The trouble with having taken a lover was this: he never left your bed once he’d been in it. But she could never have remained at the Cocal with Ravell. How long could she have stood on a bluff and sung to the waves and the fish?

In the morning the baby sat upright in his crib and turned and stared at her with Ravell’s dark eyes. She wondered how her life had evolved into this: for the sake of her son, she must say nothing. Quentin’s happiness and his future depended on her silence, the weight of a solemn lie.

When she was alone at the piano, she leaned back her head and closed her eyes and heard it in her singing: the desperation that lay beneath everything.

Peter accompanied her to a concert hall one evening. Dressed in his tall silk hat and starched collar, he was as high-spirited as ever, waving to their acquaintances. And she thought:
On our honeymoon, he took me to see pyramids; thanks to him, I’ve walked through rain forests. He has given me everything. Now we even have a child, and yet . . .

In the bedroom they continued to approach each other with the eagerness of two tennis enthusiasts, their bodies limber and ready for the match. But almost from the moment their bodies separated, Peter looked past her. He pulled a sheet of paper from the bedside table, and jotted notes about appointments, or about matters of complaint regarding shipments of machinery that had not yet been delivered.

She lived in a world that did not matter to him. At the concert hall, he sat beside her with visible indifference. When the orchestra began an overture, his face looked numb, his expression dull. He slept with eyes wide open and waited for the performance to be over. He simply did not hear the music at all.

During the first year after the baby’s arrival, she rarely sang in public. The gorgeous gift in her windpipe felt smothered; like a painful lump in the throat, it swelled and grew. It hurt to feel the voice there, silenced and useless.

Then one afternoon while her son napped and she lay on her chaise, her vision blurred, and she could not tell the lace of her curtains from the snow-flakes that fell behind them. Squeezing her eyelids tightly, she held her breath against the deadness she felt. She threw off the light knitted blanket that covered her legs, jumped up from the chaise, and paced the room. How could she allow her small, sweet son to end everything? Had she given Quentin life only to find that he had taken what was most real to her?

She resumed her voice lessons with ferocious intensity. She gave a major recital. When Erika entered the stage to begin the performance, people stifled coughs and stopped rattling pages. As she sang, she noticed how the audience held its breath. These had always been her most passionate moments. Performing brought the deepest transport, a form of touching. Only during lovemaking had she felt anything close to the chill of pleasure sweeping through her as the audience listened.

“Your voice is richer than before,” Magdalena said afterward. “At your age, it has ripened to its fullest power.”

Peter brought her a newspaper, pointing to a review of her recital. The critic praised her technique and wrote that her voice was “like burning sugar in its sweetness and dark colorations.”

Buoyed by those words, she sprang up the steps to the nursery. Quentin had learned to walk by then. She knelt beside him and pulled her son’s tiny rib cage against her own. She hugged him in apology, as though the child could hear her thoughts.

Her own motherhood had been so long in coming that she was ashamed of her ungrateful feelings. Possibilities occurred to her that no mother was supposed to consider. She covered her son’s cheek in guilty kisses. How fresh a toddling boy’s skin was. How soft and new.

Impossible to leave him. Impossible to fly away on the wings of her voice.

“No, Mama, no!” Quentin snatched back the shoe she’d taken from him.

“You’re putting that shoe on the wrong foot,” Erika said.

“No!” At two years of age, he slapped her hand.

I am bored by the petty spats,
she decided.
By the fastening and refastening of small shoes. I am not alive; I am only marking time until he grows old enough to recognize his left shoe from his right.

It was a tedious thing to spend one’s day trailing after a small child, though nobody she knew admitted it. Most ladies she knew simply sighed, and handed over their young to nursemaids.

She became one of them, gone from afternoon into evening, rehearsing for other appearances and recitals. She attended countless performances at the Opera House. Sometimes she took supper with Magdalena, glad for the intimacy of their old tête-à-têtes. Erika often returned to the house long after Quentin had been tucked into bed.

Up late, she slept late, too. Whenever Peter was away, she asked the servants to place Quentin on a small bed in the room adjacent to hers. Mornings were her time with him. The little boy slept as late as she did. He did not climb from his pallet until he heard her stirring. Then he came with his teddy bear and plunked its fur down on her mattress and stood there, his breaths noisy while he waited for her to open her eyes fully. “Mama? My wanna milk,” he’d say.

“All right,” she’d say, pulling him into bed with her. She hugged his small, plump shoulders, and gave his nape loud, smacking kisses. He giggled and ducked his head as if being tickled, and then waited for her to do it again. After they both grew breathless and sore from laughing, she rang for the nursemaid to bring his milk and porridge.

One evening as Erika was changing her clothes before going out to the theatre, Quentin stood in her bedroom in soft pajamas, his feet encased in sheepskin slippers. She had just slipped a coral dress over her head. The driver would be coming around with the motorcar in fifteen minutes, and she was running late.

Her dress—donned at the last possible moment—became a hideout to Quentin. As she turned to reach for a hairbrush, he lifted her skirt and ducked under it, giggling as he held on to both of her legs.

“Quentin!” she said, laughing. “Get out of there!” In all her life, no one had ever darted under her skirt before. At two, he was short enough to stand upright between her legs. As she tried to walk forward, she saw his head protrude against her smooth skirt. “What do you think you’re doing under there? Being born?” She laughed again.

During a week when the nursemaid left to tend to her ailing mother, Erika took care of Quentin herself. On their way to the Public Garden one afternoon, she was stunned as her two-year-old reached out to examine dog excrement on the sidewalk.

“No!” she cried, amazed that she should have to explain why he must never touch such a thing.

At supper he took a fistful of bananas and flung it with exuberance toward the ceiling, saying: “BYE-E-E-E!” Erika choked on her own dinner, laughing at the sight. That got him pitching faster.

Quentin followed her into the parlor. Guests were expected soon, and the maids had filled silver bowls with salty nibbles. Quentin grabbed fast, knowing he’d be stopped. He shoved handfuls of crackers into his mouth, crushing the crumbs against his lips.