The Doctor and the Diva (4 page)

After the party, Peter would leave for Egypt, where he had dealings with cotton merchants. From Cairo he would head to England to purchase the latest textile machinery. He would be gone for two months. Erika would not be joining him because she had singing engagements at the Handel and Haydn Society, as well as at the new palazzo Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner had recently opened on the Fenway.

Since he would be gone for many weeks, Peter suggested that he might leave semen samples on ice, ready to be thawed and used on his wife in his absence. “Before I leave”—Peter leaned across the tablecloth and spoke in confidence—“perhaps you might be willing to come to the house? Perhaps on the night of my birthday recital, after the guests are gone? I think my wife and I might be more relaxed there. Things might go better at home, in our own bed, than they have gone at your office. Erika could drift to sleep afterward, and not stir until morning.”

The invitation to enter their home intrigued Ravell. The rooms that people inhabited, he’d found, always mirrored unseen aspects of their souls. He was curious to see the paintings they’d chosen, to hear his own steps creak along the staircase they descended every day. He pictured himself opening the lid of Erika’s piano and brushing his knuckles across the ivories. He nodded as Peter talked. Ravell agreed to everything, the way one humors a child. What harm could come from pretending—at least for now—that the ghost of Peter’s future son or daughter might actually become real? Why crush a man’s hopes just before his birthday?

And so Ravell let Peter go on speaking and imagining.

“All I am asking is for a lucky thing to happen once,” Peter said. “For one child, boy or girl—I adore small children, their spark. To me, they’re like puppies. They’re eager to know all they can about the world. Children are always staring,” Peter went on. “Have you noticed that? They may stumble, but they pick themselves up and charge ahead.”

Like you,
Ravell thought.

“If I had a child, I’d never stop teaching it things. . . . Last time I sailed to Europe, a tiny Italian girl saw me on the deck. She must have been about two. She left her mother and came right over to me. I held her in my lap and she opened her little fists and pointed upward. You know what she was after? She wanted me to grab a bird out of the sky and give it to her.”

“I have no doubt that you would make a profoundly good father,” Ravell said.

They left the Algonquin Club in separate carriages. Ravell headed toward the hospital, Peter toward his offices on Congress Street. Ravell told the driver to let him off early, a few blocks from his destination, so that he could stroll for a few minutes through a park.

On the icy path Ravell’s shoes slid against the glaze. A stout nursemaid in uniform wheeled a sleeping baby in a pram, mincing her steps to keep from slipping. Near the pond, two mothers kept watch over young boys who poked and pushed toy boats through the cold water with long sticks. Children ran in circles, their aimless zigzags serving to heat their bodies on this chilly March day. Seeing families on benches, he wondered why he had held himself apart from all of this.

Old dowagers sometimes patted his arm and asked, “Why isn’t a handsome young fellow like you married, Doctor Ravell?”

“How can I marry?” he would say, smiling, in response. “It wouldn’t be fair to a wife. I’d be up half the night, delivering other ladies’ babies.”

The truth was that he was fond of all women. He could never believe he had fallen in love for the last time; that was his failing. He looked forward to appointments with a patient so rotund that she barely squeezed through a doorway—because she blurted jokes that made him drop his stethoscope and laugh. Among his favorites were elderly ladies who no longer bothered to gaze at themselves in mirrors; they looked outward, gasping and rejoicing over lapdogs, children, blooming peonies. He missed young mothers whose deaths haunted him—patients whose wrists had gone limp in his hand as he’d searched in vain for a pulse.

How could he ever manage a wife, with so many patients? Their needs sometimes exhausted him. By day’s end, he could not have gone upstairs to his rooms and listened to a wife’s problems. At suppertime he occasionally took a book and carried his plate into his study just to escape the chatter of his housekeeper.

Still, he wondered if he kept himself from being fully alive by never marrying. At the park a boy held up a baseball glove to catch a ball and missed; the ball landed at Ravell’s feet and he reached down and threw it back. Would he never watch his own child being born? Would he remain an observer, in service to others’ lives?

He understood Peter’s longings more than he dared to say.

“I
t’s still a tad early, Doctor,” the parlor maid confided in a rough, splintery whisper as she opened the door. “The musicians are upstairs, rehearsing with Madame von Kessler.” In the entry hall Ravell took a seat on the velvet cushion of a carved bench. The maid put a finger to her lips as they both heard violins strike up overhead.

The stringed instruments soared in unison, in an exuberance of wings. Erika von Kessler’s voice swooped in and caught the air currents of the violins, leading them heavenward. Phrases of the aria she sang—Handel’s “Va col canto”—echoed down the wide black walnut staircase.

The thin parlor maid folded Ravell’s coat over her arm, her wiry gray hair pinned tightly against her head. Then, with a whimsy Ravell would never have expected from a woman her age, she smiled and rose up on her toes like a ballerina and danced into a dim corridor, out of sight.

It was a stately house—narrow and vertical like the other brick residences on Beacon Street. The entry hall was unusually spacious, with dark wallpaper that had the sheen of gilded leather, imported from somewhere exotic—Morocco, perhaps. While Ravell waited alone, he reached out and touched the wall’s leathery paper with its embossed filigree.

Just as the aria ended, Peter appeared from a side staircase that ran five stories from top to bottom of the house. “Forgive me,” he said, breathless, pulling on his French cuffs before he clasped Ravell’s hand. “When I heard the bell, I put my head out the window and saw you standing on the front steps—but I found myself standing three stories above you with not a stitch of clothing on my body!” He and Ravell both laughed.

After all the guests had arrived, they took their cue and headed upstairs to the music room, where Erika stood near the piano singing “Voi che sapete” from
Le nozze di Figaro,
her shoulders half-exposed in a dress that shimmered like pale turquoise water. She placed one hand on the piano, welcoming everyone with her other arm outstretched.

The fashionable white woodwork made the music room feel larger and more airy than anywhere else in the high, narrow house. As she moved through more Handel and Mozart, to “Caro mio ben,” her eyes glittered and skimmed across the audience.
I always search for a face I can sing to,
Erika had told Ravell. Tonight he hoped that face would be his own. When she broke into a flirtatious “Havanaise” and “Près des remparts de Séville” from
Carmen,
she tilted her shoulders and swished her skirts at her husband, and then she glanced at Ravell, as if to say,
After the rest of the guests leave, it will be just us here—Peter, you, and me.
The giddiness in her expression was impossible to miss.

The enthusiasm of the audience was so great that they demanded encore after encore, until she finally refused to sing anymore. Rings of light shone on her half-bared shoulders. Her face was luminous, moist with exertion. How different she seemed here, Ravell thought, than when she sat in his consulting room. He imagined that if they extinguished every light in the house, her face would remain visible in the dark, incandescent. He wondered if she, like so many artists, suffered from periods of manic euphoria—followed by debilitating gloom.

They raised champagne flutes and toasted Peter’s birthday; they ate mint ice cream and hazelnut torte. As the party wound to a close, her brother, Doctor Gerald von Kessler, lingered in the entry hall with Ravell. It appeared they would be the last guests to go.

Erika had already declared herself exhausted and she’d bid her brother good night and gone upstairs. For the sake of appearances, she’d also made a show of saying farewell to Ravell, although their business for the evening was hardly finished.

“May I drop you somewhere?” Doctor von Kessler asked Ravell, opening the front door for them to exit together.

Ravell glanced at Peter. Peter stared at him. They had made no firm plan, no excuse for him to remain after the other guests had departed.

“My place isn’t far,” Ravell told von Kessler. “Just over on Commonwealth Avenue. I’m in the mood for a little brisk exercise.”

“I’ll walk with you,” Doctor von Kessler offered, clearly intent on further conversation. His wife had gone to New Hampshire to visit her sister, who’d recently given birth to a sixth child, so he was alone.

Ravell could think of no graceful way to refuse his company. Under a streetlight near the curb, von Kessler’s handsome brougham waited. The driver had dozed off. Doctor von Kessler nudged the man awake, and instructed the driver to meet them over at Ravell’s address.

As they walked, von Kessler adjusted his muffler. “So how is the treatment progressing? Are my sister and her husband—?”

Ravell avoided answering. At Clarendon Street, as a cart clattered past in the darkness, he put out an arm to caution his companion before crossing.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Doctor von Kessler said, “but it’s dreadfully hard on Erika, prolonging things.”

Ravell sensed the doubts and barely disguised judgments of the other physician.
If you don’t feel capable of handling the case—just say so,
von Kessler might as well have been saying,
and we’ll move on to another man in the profession who may be.

“What’s the prognosis? Is my sister able to conceive, in your estimation?”

“Your sister is as fertile as any woman in my practice.”

“Then
why—
?” von Kessler said, frowning.

“Confidentiality is at stake here,” Ravell said. “If you persist in conveying such impatience to your sister, it won’t help matters.”

Under a lamppost on Marlborough Street, von Kessler stopped mid-stride. A tall, large man, he loomed over Ravell in the darkness. “Are there techniques you haven’t tried? Is there any cause for optimism?”

With all the bravado he could muster, Ravell caught himself uttering words he knew he should not have said. “Of course. Absolutely.” At this, the other man’s shoulders softened and relaxed, and Ravell felt he had just made an awkward promise.

By the time they reached Ravell’s house on Commonwealth Avenue, von Kessler’s rig was waiting at the curb. Once again they had to rouse the driver, a man who clearly had a gift for dozing anywhere. The other physician raised his hat to Ravell as they drove off.

The telephone was ringing inside his office as Ravell unlocked the door. He hastened to catch it before the caller hung up.

“Are you coming back to the house?” Peter said. “We are waiting for you.
Knock softly
,” he added, “
so as not to wake the servants.
”

It was Peter himself who opened the stout front door as soon as Ravell’s knuckles grazed the wood. Peter tightened the belt of his silk dressing gown, which he wore over pajamas. “I thought we’d never be rid of my brother-in-law,” he muttered.

As they stole up the grand public staircase (the steps creaked less there than on the second, narrower staircase along the side of the house, Peter confided), Ravell wondered if he ought to be carrying his shoes in his hand. Peter led him into the family’s private quarters, careful to lock the bedroom door behind them.

Erika lay on a peach velvet chaise longue in her own silk robe and matching gown, reading a ladies’ magazine. “I see you’ve come to help us out,” she remarked, sounding amused.