The Doctor and the Diva (44 page)

As the singing began, Erika heard the old woman dragging a chair across the floor overhead in order to sit closer to her open balcony doors. It helped Erika vocalize with more hope and seriousness, just to know that
la padrona di casa,
the landlady Donna Anna, might be listening.

In the landlady’s apartment, Erika and Donna Anna sat together one evening, listening to Caruso on the Victrola. It was dusk. The watercolor skies washed above Florence, mauves that darkened into purples.

“You and I have both heard Caruso sing in person,” Donna Anna said. “This is hardly the same experience, but—”

As the great tenor’s voice swelled through the funnel of a Deluxe Talking Machine, the recorded orchestra sounded vaguely like a circus band; Caruso might have been shouting through a drainpipe.

“Still—” Donna Anna remarked with awe. “To be able to capture even a scratch of Caruso’s sound—”

“It’s a feat that stops one’s breath,” Erika agreed. Just to bring a trace of the great man into the room on a late spring evening—this was a God-like accomplishment.

Together they sat by the window. The moon came up and made the landlady’s lace collar a sharper white. Donna Anna did not notice the sky blackening, of course. All on her own, she walked over to the Victrola and changed the recording. After Caruso, they listened for a while to Nellie Melba, until no light was left in the apartment except that reflected from the street.

Erika made no move to turn on a lamp. She felt closer to Donna Anna in the darkness, sitting there as the old woman always sat. While they talked, Donna Anna explained that she had not always been blind. A fever had stolen her sight when she was twenty-two.

“Sometimes as I listen to you singing,” Donna Anna said, “the sounds that flow out of you are so beautiful, I can hardly believe they are real.”

Erika smiled, and then she frowned, thinking of an unrelated concern. Every day after the post arrived, a maid sorted the letters and packages and placed them into piles on the foyer table, where the various tenants retrieved them. Erika wondered aloud if pieces of her correspondence might have gotten lost in the blizzard of the Italian mail system.

“Have you been expecting a particular letter?” Donna Anna asked.

Erika was glad the landlady couldn’t see the look of distress that must have flitted across her own face. She confessed that she had expected her husband, Peter, to write at least one letter—if only to persuade her to return.

Not a single word had arrived from him. His silence, his rage of pride, surprised her. He had certainly not come to Florence, as she’d imagined he might.

“And your son?” Donna Anna asked.

Erika recalled singing Quentin to sleep, his hair like dark feathers against her hand. She explained how her son had just been learning to form letters of the alphabet with his pen when she left for Italy. “If he were older, I would have made him promise to write me letters,” she said. But Quentin was too young. Already her son must have half-forgotten her.

The blind woman listened, her head bowed as though she were studying Erika’s feet, and the unevenness in the tiled floors. Donna Anna rose from her seat and motioned for Erika to join her on the balcony. “Remember why you came here,” Donna Anna said as she pointed upward. Even if she couldn’t see the night sky, she knew what existed there.“You came here to reach the stars,” Donna Anna said. “To touch the moon.”

 

 

 

 

R
avell dropped Peter’s letter onto the desk, having reread it several times. He got his rain slicker and walked down to the beach. A late morning shower had just finished. The water looked dark, and the sand felt gritty as it sank underfoot. As he stared into the waves, he thought about what the letter meant.

Pulling off his shoes, Ravell tossed them onto the damp sand. During the months after Erika and Peter had left the Cocal, Ravell had waited and hoped for any news, but since the day the steamship had taken Erika from Trinidad six years previously, there had been not a single word from her—only a few rare letters from Peter.

With his trousers rolled to his knees, Ravell stood at the shore and let the coolness and foam wash over his feet. This was the Atlantic—part of the same sweep of waters that reached through the Strait of Gibraltar and licked the boot of Italy, only to reverse and mingle with this vast ocean, traveling thousands of miles before it rolled up here, all brine and breakers. The tide tugged gently at his ankles, and he suddenly felt closer to Erika than he had been in years.

Perhaps I should go to Florence,
he thought,
and search for her.

Before Erika’s departure from Trinidad, she had intimated that she might send him a safe address—perhaps that of a friend—where he could write to her, but she had never done so. The cold wake of silence she’d left behind had hurt and bewildered him. He had not been in a position to write any sort of private message to her—as she well understood. From a hundred street corners in the city of Boston, she could easily have slipped a brief note or a farewell letter into a mailbox. Once when an envelope arrived addressed by her husband, Ravell put the letter to his nose, hoping for a whiff of the lilac sachets she kept in her drawers, but the paper smelled instead of pencil shavings and stale tobacco.

About a year after Erika left, he had gone into the forest one day and reclined on the ground where he had made love to her. Lying on his back, he heard wind pass through palm fronds. He remembered her soaked white shirtwaist and her walking skirt, limp with rain.

On the veranda at Eden, Ravell sat one night with Hartley and his wife, Stella, sharing Peter’s news. The drama of it impressed them. In the darkness, dressed in their white clothes, they held themselves as motionless as the wicker chairs they sat upon.

“Does she plan to support herself by singing?” Hartley asked. “Or is her poor husband paying for her upkeep?”

Ravell had no answer for this. Stella Hartley’s tone became lofty and knowing. “Erika always struck me as fiery. Desperate.”

“Desperate?” Ravell said.

“Restless. You could call it that,” Stella said. “She’ll make a perfect prima donna.”

“They had no children,” Hartley said. “That’s always hard on a woman.”

Stella gave a start, remembering. “Didn’t they—did they never have another baby?” she asked with a lilt of sympathy, but that note of hope died before she finished the question, because the answer seemed already obvious.

“No,” Ravell said. “I don’t believe they did.” He puffed on his cigar and released a wreath of smoke into the air, obscuring everything.

At the coconut plantation, Ravell sat at his desk and began a letter.

He shredded the page. Such words—reminding her of her husband—were not a good way to begin. He dropped the torn bits of white paper into the wastebasket, and started again.

He wanted to praise her bravery, to applaud her for freeing herself from the judgments of gentlemen in starched shirts, and from the stifling opinions of Yankee matrons laced so tight they could hardly breathe. He wanted to laugh with her and say,
You’ve wrestled free! You’ve flung the weight of them from your shoulders like a great musty coat.

Then he pushed away from the desk, got up from his chair, and paced the room wondering where he would even send such a letter. He had no address for Erika. How could he ask Peter for his estranged wife’s exact whereabouts? The notion was ridiculous. Nor could he make inquiries to her father or brother about how to contact her—not after the disgrace of his last days in Boston—and he could think of no other way to reach her.

So Ravell crumpled that page and threw it away, too.

Now that she was a free woman, he wondered if she would write to him. Even after so many years, he was convinced that she had not forgotten him.

Months passed, but no letter came from Erika. Hartley and Stella brought their children to the plantation for a few days. The boys and girls had gone down to the lagoon hoping to catch tarpon in a net. On the front porch at the Cocal, Ravell sat with Hartley and his wife. They drank green swizzles. They rocked in chairs, they watched the surf.