The Doctor and the Diva (46 page)

I cannot afford such things,
she reminded herself, and resumed her walk home. Soon she would climb three stories and open a door to a room where nothing waited to welcome her. Christopher was off with his friends; even Donna Anna had gone to the countryside to visit relatives. In this ancient city where artists had been living and dying for centuries, she had no one to converse with. A completely unknown singer, perhaps she would always remain so.

The roses,
she thought,
will keep me company.
She wanted them beside her on this night. So she went back and bought an armload, carrying their weight and rich hue up to her room.

She placed them in a vase until the air thickened with their dark fragrance. Before leaving Boston, she had bought herself a crimson dress and matching shoes that she intended to wear one day for a recital. Now she put them on. She pinned up her hair and placed clustered diamonds on her earlobes. In the mirror she studied herself, trying to see the woman Ravell might find if he stood here now. Her earrings captured and reflected pinpricks of color—yellows, greens, and blues.

Alone in her room, she opened the long windows, and sitting at the piano, she sang her favorite arias—those that suited her voice best. She sang for only herself. She sang for the day when others—besides her blind landlady—would hear her. Although no man had touched her in months, her body burned, never more alive. Music streamed from her throat and fingers.

Sounds floated through the open windows and she went with them, over the Arno, across terra-cotta rooftops and the Duomo, across every beautiful thing that men long dead had created here in Florence. Someday she, too, would be dead, but for now that did not matter; for now she was as alive as every light that glimmered and reflected against windowpanes in Tuscany. As she sang, she was not sorry that she had brought herself here to add her voice to all the rest—her singing passed across frescoes and statues, across towers and all the architectural dreams that rose in giant silhouettes against the horizon.

No one in Florence—apart from her maestro, Donna Anna, and Christopher—listened to her with real pleasure yet, but Erika sang as if she stood in their theatres, as if the people of Italy were already hearing her.

She sang until eleven-thirty at night. Surprisingly, no sleepy neighbor begged her to stop. When cool drafts of air entered through the pair of open balcony doors, she realized it was raining. She couldn’t smell the roses anymore, only the odor of rain wetting the dust on the pavement. She closed the lid over the keyboard. When she went to latch the doors, she leaned over the balcony rail and noticed two women and a man huddling below in the rainy street.

When the man saw her at the window several stories above, he removed his hat and waved it high in the air, calling out, “
Eccolà! Here she is!”
The women, who had been covering their heads with shawls to fend off the rain, looked up in sudden surprise, tilting their heads to gaze halfway to the sky. Rain wet their faces. One woman danced in a circle, her skirt whirling around, while all three cried out, “
Brava! Brava!”
as they thrust their arms upward toward Erika.

Gerald must be behind in his bookkeeping,
she told herself, irritated that he had forgotten her.

“I’ll pay,” she said when Christopher hesitated outside a restaurant with brass lamps. “Consider it part of your salary.” Apart from their weekday luncheons, Erika worried that Christopher didn’t get enough to eat.

She did not want him to sense her concern about the delay in receiving her brother’s check. Although Christopher served as an accompanist for other singers, she suspected that they did not compensate him well because they were struggling themselves. Probably none of them had a brother like hers, who—at least until now—sent regular income from their mother’s estate.

For her birthday, Papa had sent a postal order—a generous sum—so she wasn’t low on funds yet. To celebrate, Erika invited Christopher and his friends to Doney’s busy
caffè,
where they all ordered
zuccotto,
a Florentine version of a trifle, and she licked the rich chocolate that stuck to her spoon.

From time to time Erika would leave a basket of citrus fruits and strawberries in Christopher’s room. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” she’d ask gently. He would say that he had coffee earlier, but nothing else. He’d reach at once for the fruit. With his thumbnail he would poke into an orange’s rind, his delicate hands turning the fruit and peeling back the skin, and he’d pop the segments into his mouth as eagerly and furtively as a squirrel.

Christopher’s family sent him nothing. He wore trousers that were frayed at the hems. One ghastly hot morning in May, while Christopher sat at the piano accompanying her, perspiration gathered on his forehead like moisture condensing on a windowpane. It flowed in tiny rivulets down his temples. Twice Erika begged him to take off his suit jacket, but he refused. Only when he could scarcely go on playing due to the heat did he remove it. Underneath, Erika saw what he had not wanted her to notice: the fabric of his shirt had grown thin after so many washings, and the back was torn.

The money from her brother had still not arrived ten days later. At that point Erika became alarmed. It occurred to her that Gerald and his wife, who had vigorously disapproved of her move to Italy, meant to exert leverage somehow.

After mailing this letter, she paused at a storefront window and stared at a mannequin elegantly buttoned into a moleskin coat. Such a coat—long and dark—might become her; it had a slimming effect. It was a coat she might have bought if she’d stayed with Peter. The mannequin’s shining silk hose and pumps were lovely, too. Now she stood before the window in worn-down heels in need of repair. She did not have the money to leave them at a cobbler’s shop.

The worst thing was this: she owed Christopher his fee, but could not cover the payment.

Just hours after she sent one letter to her brother, she began another.

She opened drawers, placing bracelets and diamond earrings and pearl necklaces across the surface of her bed, and thought about which jewels she might sell.
I could give voice and piano lessons,
she thought,
for the young daughters of British and American expatriates.

From the array of jewelry on the bed, she chose a pair of diamond earrings and felt their weight, one glittering cluster in each hand. The next day she took the earrings to a pawnbroker and sold them for a fraction of their worth.

There were a number of ways she might survive. Even without a husband and a brother.

The following morning she decided to write to her father about engaging a lawyer on her behalf; she could no longer allow Gerald to serve as executor of their mother’s estate. The worry of it unleashed unhappiness about everything, especially Quentin.

A crinkled envelope arrived soon after that, addressed in Gerald’s small, tight penmanship. He had mailed it several months previously. The letter looked as if it had fallen from a postman’s sack and blown into a gutter, or behind a bush. Perhaps it had remained there until someone noticed it, and placed it, for a second try, into a mailbox. The envelope remained sealed. It was dry now, though clearly it had been soaked—the paper rippled, the blue ink of the address blurry. The letter looked as if it had been dragged under the sole of a stranger’s shoe.

Inside she found the check her brother owed to her.When she opened it, she was aghast at herself.

All those withering, accusatory notes to him and Thea . . . Erika put the check for safekeeping in a drawer. She ran upstairs to Donna Anna’s apartment, where the blind woman sat calmly in a chair.

“Send a cable to your brother,” the landlady advised. “Maybe it will reach them before your letters do.”

Erika hurried off to arrange for the cablegram.

E
rika arrived at Christopher’s building on a Thursday afternoon carrying a basket of salami, prosciutto, provolone, and pears. The foyer and stairs were as dark as a church’s interior, and she groped for the banister, half-blinded by the sudden dimness. A box of newborn kittens had been abandoned on the bottom step, and one furry creature brushed her ankle, then slinked away. The old newspaper they nested upon smelled of cat urine.

A desolate quiet often ran through the building at this hour, when Christopher tended to be gone. But today she heard the sounds of a gramophone at the top of the stairs, the voice of a countertenor coming from Christopher’s quarters, under the roof.