The Doctor and the Diva (48 page)

“An opera ought to be staged here,” Christopher said. “In this very room.”

“We’ve got to see that our prima donna is outfitted properly,” Mark said. “For future concerts and recitals.”

The three men took Erika to a dressmaker Mark had heard about. As one particular bolt of Italian fabric was unfurled, with bits of gold woven through its shimmering folds, they all lost their breath for a moment. It reminded them of a Byzantine mosaic. Mark walked in a circle around Erika, draping a length of the fabric against her. “Imagine Erika standing there in the footlights,” he said, “with the gilded bits reflecting.”

They danced around her, as though it made them half-drunk, the fun of costuming her.

While the men were out exploring and losing themselves in the labyrinth of Venice’s canals and streets, Erika got a chambermaid to fill a metal tub so she could bathe. She lolled for a long time in the warm water, a rolled towel cushioning her neck so she could gaze at the great room’s painted ceiling.

The men had not taken a key, knowing that she remained in the room. When they returned, they rattled the wrought-iron latch and banged impatiently. They could not fathom why she took so long to let them in.

Half-panicked, she dried herself with a fat towel and searched for her clothes. Over and over, like a chorus, they called her name, bending their mouths to the keyhole as they continued to thump on the thick door.

“Erika—ERIKA!”

“MADAME VON KESSLER, are you in there?”

When she finally opened the door, they fell into the room and Mark glanced around with wicked amusement. “What’s been going on in here?” He peeked under a bed, and playfully opened an armoire to check for a possible lover she’d taken care to hide from them.

“Where is he?” Mark asked. “Is he handsome? Would
we
like him?”

“I was having my bath.” Erika pointed at the tub.

“You were having a bath,” Mark said, “and what of it? You didn’t have to lock the door.” He lifted his nose and pretended to be miffed. “Listen,” he added jokingly, “if you happen to think that Christopher or Edmund or I have
any
interest
whatsoever
in seeing you—” He laughed.

At night a gondola carried them along the Grand Canal, and they glided past Venetian palaces that glowed from within. Through arched Gothic windows they saw how chandeliers gleamed above tables lined with candles and guests. Erika felt both close and distant from the lives they glimpsed.

The coolness of night rose up from the water and blew across their faces as the gondolier steered. On a passing boat a bass-baritone sang, “Se vuol ballare, signor Contino,” to the rousing delight of his friends. The other gondola wobbled with applause as he finished.

Not a bad voice,
Erika thought.

“Sing something back,” Christopher begged her, leaning forward.

He called to the bass-baritone across the water, prompting him: “Sing—‘Là ci darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì—’ ”

The bass-baritone launched into Mozart’s famous love duet from
Don Giovanni
, and Erika, to her own surprise, heard herself singing in response. Suddenly the bass-baritone’s gondola turned and headed in their direction, drawn toward the lady who sang in the dark. Several other boats followed his.

“My God,” Mark hissed in excitement. “It’s an armada coming after us!” He flapped his arms at the man who steered them. “Slip away—fast!”

To elude their pursuers, their gondolier maneuvered the boat into a smaller waterway. Erika, thrilled by the nearness of those who gave chase, let her head drop back and she heard herself laugh at the sky. As their gondolier wrestled the boat around another corner, steering them from sight, she opened her mouth and again announced their whereabouts to all of Venice as she sang another aria from Mozart, “Un moto di gioia.”

Along the smaller canal, shutters swung open and heads poked out. Listeners clapped and whistled. Someone tossed a flower that landed at her feet. When Erika and her friends turned to look behind, the flotilla of pursuers had found them—so many followers that they feared their gondola might soon be surrounded, tipped over in the heat of the chase.

As soon as she finished, Mark cupped his hand over her lips to shush her—just until they’d escaped through the silent canals.

Then she sang again. She could have sung all night, her head leaning back, her mouth opening wide. The stars and moon could have fallen on her tongue; she could have swallowed them.

 

 

 

 

Q
uentin did not go for a walk with the other boys. All Sunday afternoon he sat in the window seat at the boarding school and waited for his father to come. Earlier that week he had sent his father a letter begging him to drive down from Boston in the Haynes Touring Car.
Dear Pappa
, Quentin had written.
Please bring your atomobile and kum to see me on Sunday. I want the other boys to see it.
Quentin knew the stir the sight would cause as his father motored through the school gates, riding upon the Haynes’s quilted seats and shiny wheels. Papa would step from the Haynes in goggles, cap, and duster, and when he pulled Quentin close—just for a moment—Quentin’s face would press against the cold crevasses of his father’s coat with its smell of crisp, decaying leaves. The other boys, who’d been waiting in the parlor, would rush out, too, and surround the car.

His father was so long in arriving that Quentin laid his head against the window seat cushion and closed his eyes until the matron came by and told him to straighten up. Lifting his head, he saw mothers drive up, their slender ankles stepping down from carriages or purring motorcars. Boys in short trousers and dark jackets flew toward doorways, and they were caught up and tossed into a blur of furs, hugs, perfume, skirts. From the bow-front window he watched them, thinking of his own mother until his throat went sore.

The roads beyond the wrought-iron gates of the school had been hard and frozen, and quite dry in the morning, but by late afternoon, the snow whirled as if the air thickened with white, battling flies. “Come away from the window,” the matron who had been monitoring the parlor said to Quentin. “Perhaps your papa will come to see you another Sunday.” She closed the draperies and led Quentin away.

The stairs to the alcove where he slept were so steep, his shoes felt weighted as he climbed. That evening he wrote:

Between sentences he put his head down on the desk and rubbed his eyes until his knuckles grew wet, smeared with blue ink. His cursive grew larger, the letters crossing the page in big loops, becoming more reckless.

For more than a year, this was the question he’d continued to ask. Sometimes during his vacations in Boston, he thought he heard her in various parts of the house. He expected that he might awake one morning to find her lifting the shades in his bedroom. His father said only, “Your mother has hopes of becoming a better-known singer. She has gone off to Italy to study opera.” This did not explain why she did not send him any letters while he was away at Mowgli Camp last summer, or why—after he wrote and told her about the mole he and another boy trapped—she did not reply.

Because he had been sent to the school not long after she left, it was possible that she did not know his address. On a fresh sheet of white paper he scratched a message with his pen:
My dear Mamma, I wish you would rite to me. My address is the Chadsworth Skool. . . .

During Easter vacation, behind a fourth-story window of his father’s Back Bay house, Quentin pressed his forehead against the glass pane and peered out. Below, cherry blossoms whitened the street. He pretended he could see his mother on the sidewalk, scurrying. Her lavender skirts swished past tall brick row houses, darkening and lightening as she moved under trees.

At the window he blinked twice; his mother’s lavender skirts were gone. Cherry blossoms still fluttered white in the sunlight; the sidewalks emptied, nothing there but dull red bricks. Quentin retreated from the window, a terrible and familiar tightness beginning in his chest. No matter how long he watched the street, no matter how acutely he remembered or imagined her, his mother did not return.

He walked from his bedroom into the hallway and leaned over the banister. He peered down four flights, staring into the spiraling loop of stairs where the abyss was frightening. What would happen, he had asked his father once, if somebody fell into the stairwell? Papa said that surely a neck would be broken; if you were lucky, just an arm or leg.

A wine-colored carpet covered the stairs, laced by a pattern of scrolls and flowers. The landing used to be a favorite spot of his for playing. Here on the landing, he used to make his little lead soldiers climb the steps and form barricades. From this position, sounds in the high, narrow house rose up to him—the tinkle of silverware being polished and replaced into drawers in the dining room. The high notes of his mother’s arias used to mount and glide up here until the walls shivered. He used to pause sometimes, listening to her. She sang in a foreign language—Italian—that he did not understand. But when she sang, something made him stop. The skin behind his ears tingled.