The Doctor and the Diva (37 page)

When Quentin was cured of his diphtheria at last, Erika took him to the Boston Public Library with a friend of his. The boys got their books and raced ahead of her down the great marble staircase. At the place where the stairs turned, the boys patted the great marble lion’s backside, just as thousands of hands had done before theirs, polishing the lion’s bottom.

At the Public Garden, as Quentin and his friend skipped and ran far ahead of her, Erika felt her old restless yearning to move to Italy returning.
Why must I trail after my son for the next eighteen years?
she wondered. In the summer he would turn five; Quentin already needed her less. Soon school would take more hours of his day. In the end, a son grew tall and shrugged off his parents and went away.

Whereas music was hers, it would never part from her.

If only I had been born without this voice,
she thought.
It would have been simpler for everyone.

“Let me be frank,” Magdalena said. “If you are serious about achieving an international reputation, you shouldn’t wait. For a woman, the voice reaches its full glory in her thirties or early forties, but then—” Resting an arm across the back of the divan, Magdalena gazed through a window, perhaps recalling theatrical stages where she had sung in St. Petersburg or Milan, triumphant evenings that would not come again.

“The problem is this,” Erika said. “I can’t afford to wait all the years for my son to grow up, and Peter refuses to let me take Quentin along.”

“Can you survive by yourself? Financially, I mean?”

“I’ve got a small income from my mother’s estate—enough for one person. I haven’t the means to hire a servant or support a child.”

Magdalena sighed. “You’d never manage on your own. Not with a five-year-old child in tow.” The older woman sank against the plush burgundy cushions on her divan. She passed a box of marzipan to Erika, and then chose a piece for herself.

“What makes me desperate is knowing that this voice I’ve been given cannot possibly last.” Erika patted her throat.

“A great voice is like any other living thing,” Magdalena said. “It weakens and ages and develops breaks and loses its upper register—sooner for some of us than for others.”

Time, time. It was the press of time that pushed her and made frantic feelings circulate through her. If she waited ten years, any splendor in her voice might be gone.

An hour after she put Quentin to bed one evening, Erika tiptoed into his room again, just to stare at him. Nothing looked holier than a child asleep.

A coonskin cap hung from the bedpost. She took away the rabbit’s foot that her little son cupped in his hand, and set the trinket on the windowsill. She saw nothing of herself in his features, really. The twitch of his nose, the way his lips drew into a pucker as he made his mouth smaller—even his gestures were Ravell’s. At times she thought:
Peter must see it.
How could he fail to see Ravell in the black waves that fell, slightly uplifted, from the child’s temples?

At moments Peter studied their son with such sadness in his gaze that she thought:
He knows. He knows, but does not want to know.

She glanced around at the objects in the nursery. A thirteen-foot-long stuffed crocodile curved along the baseboards and encircled half the room. Peter had purchased the crocodile from an old Egyptian peddler on the steps of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo during a business trip. It was the first thing visiting children chose to sit upon, and it had soon become a tattered, mangy thing.

At the age of five, Quentin was very much Peter’s boy. No one in his life had proven quite as exciting as Peter, who returned from transatlantic crossings and opened trunks and pulled out treasures that made the boy hop back in awe. Peter read to Quentin, took him fishing, showed him how to capture frogs and hold them between his thumb and forefinger. At a soda fountain, after eating ice cream, Quentin would slide from his mother’s lap and climb onto Peter’s.

“He’s trying to get warm,” Peter observed, amused. “And I’ve got the larger body mass.”

Just before she left her son’s room, Erika drew the covers higher over Quentin, draping the sheet like a collar under his chin.

In her own bedroom she sat at the vanity table and leaned closer to the mirror, uneasy at what she saw. She took a pair of tweezers and plucked several silver hairs from her head, and then rubbed rouge onto her pale cheeks. These days when she performed in costumes and jewels, her face looked paler, aged. Yet the voice was resplendent, everyone assured her of this—the singing trumped all petty loss of beauty.

As she watched other things fade, the voice was growing better. The voice still soared.

Erika brought Peter into the music room, relying on its fine cream-colored upholstery and good light and airiness to keep him calm, but in no time at all, the volume of Peter’s response magnified. She felt the beating of her own blood rise behind her ears.

“It’s entirely possible,” she said, “for a child to have a happy life without a mother living in the house.”

“Is it?” Peter looked at her, incredulous.

“I grew up without a mother, didn’t I? After Mama’s death when I was seven years old, my father gave me all the love I needed.”

He glowered at her. “Quentin isn’t seven. He’s
five
.”

Peter paced the room slowly, with emotion heightening the color in his face and neck. “It isn’t as if your mother had a choice about dying, is it?” He paused to wipe a drop of spittle from his chin. “How do you expect a boy to live with the notion that his mother has decided to abandon him?”

Erika replied almost in a whisper: “I’m not abandoning him.”

“What do you call it, then?” Peter asked. “Moving permanently to another continent, with no intention of coming back?”

She told Peter that she meant to return, but he did not believe her. To go away just for a year, or two or three, to see how she fared—that was her plan, with a couple of long visits in between. If she flourished by her efforts, she might shuttle back and forth. In the meantime she would send her son gifts, and letters twice a week. He might come to stay with her in the summers. Anything was possible. Nobody she knew had lived the life she was prepared to embark upon, the route unmapped, the road unlit. It was all a great risk.

“If you desert us,” he warned, “I shall have to divorce you. And I’ll take custody of our son.”

Was he really speaking as loudly as she thought, or had her own distress turned up the volume? This could not go on much longer, because she sensed that her plans were pushing him toward being something he had never been—a man who verged on doing her harm. As Peter stalked across the carpet, his arms brushed the long draperies and she expected him to rip the hanging fabric from its rod.

“There’s nothing more to discuss, then,” she said, and ran upstairs to lock herself in the bathroom. She went to the tub and turned on the taps, welcoming the roar of water as she prepared the hottest bath she could stand.

As steam rose, misting the mirror, condensing on the wainscoting, Erika thought about all the years she and Peter had fallen asleep together, spines touching, and yet her husband hardly understood her. She thought of Ravell, the night they’d spent at the Esmeralda estate where they’d sat on the tall steps of the hexagonal house. As she sat on the stairs and sang, Ravell had listened more closely than anyone ever had. He’d heard what propelled her, what was now taking her away. He would not have fought her like Peter. Ravell would have nodded, knowing how long this had been in the making, and together they might have made a plan.

It was after that conversation that she stopped loving Peter. It had drained away gradually, of course—everything she’d once felt for him. Now silence stretched between them every evening as they sat opposite each other in the dining room. As she stared down into her plate, the air filled with sounds of him chewing a piece of beef, or sucking on a pear. Their lack of conversation made her want to writhe under her clothes.

Inside her, the discomfort was building like an illness. When she left the house, she dreaded returning in the evening and mounting the stairs to her own front door. If Peter was near, she chatted with the servants or escaped to the nursery, where she squatted beside Quentin, petting his dark silky hair while he opened his small fists to show her two cat’s-eye marbles he’d found on the grass at the Public Garden. If she passed Peter on the stairs, she turned sideways, so that her body would not graze his.

One evening Peter came into the music room and sat down on the davenport as if he had every right to be there. “You were in a frenzy to have a baby,” he said, “and now you’re in a frenzy to run off to Italy. You find motherhood tiresome.”

Peter leaned his head back. His eyes searched the ceiling, his Adam’s apple sharpening in his neck. “You gave birth to a little boy and now you don’t even love him,” he said.

She wailed then,
“I do love him, I do.”
On the carpet she walked in half-circles, and hit the sides of her skirt with her fists. “Why can’t we all move to Italy?” she cried out.

Peter reminded her—as though she were unaware of this—that for the past eighteen years, he had been cultivating a network of business interests among mill owners in New England, textile machinery manufacturers in Bradford, England, and cotton traders in Alexandria. “I don’t see how Italy fits into that picture,” he said coldly.

He pushed himself from the sofa and stood up. “Why can’t you sing here? Boston is a musical city.”

She made a face.

His tone softened as he pleaded. “I’ve given you this house,” he said. “A beautiful life. Your son will—”

“But it’s not what I most want,” she said.

For a moment he looked helpless, devastated by her words. Then his mouth tightened. “Am I supposed to let my business collapse because of your—your illusions that you’ll arrive in Florence and be
worshipped
? There must be a thousand foreign singers who land in Italy every year—”