The Doctor and the Diva (51 page)

More trouble came. Rocks studded the stream. Rapids rushed everywhere. Only one bateau at a time could pass through. They eked by, only to find the launch soon wedged between rocks. The crew strained, shoved, and grimaced as they loosened it. Perspiration ran like rainwater down the black men’s necks.

Later, the launch jammed between rocks and would not budge. A cry came: “All men overboard!” Ravell and Peter jumped, their shirts rising like balloons in the water.

The shouting was continuous as the white water roiled. After a black steersman grabbed Ravell’s arm and helped him climb back on board, Ravell shook himself and spat out the taste of the river.

At six in the evening they reached more placid waters, and the sun fell behind the forest wall.

Night made the journey too difficult to continue, so they soon made fast to the banks and prepared to camp. While Peter disappeared through trees to relieve himself, Ravell moved stealthily toward Peter’s old leather valise, and carefully opened it. His nose filled with the sour smell of rumpled clothing. He searched for anything that might resemble an address book, but there was nothing.

Quickly he shut the luggage, his heart punching against his chest.
What has reduced me to this?
he wondered.
Rummaging like a petty thief through another man’s things?

Mr. Manthorne had sent two folding beds for Ravell’s and Peter’s comfort. The ingenious construction of these beds impressed them: each fit into a portable case, each case compact enough to be stored in the bottom of the launch. Mr. Manthorne had also provided mosquito netting for them. The boy Thomas hung his hammock at the foot of their beds.

After supper, Thomas built a small fire for them. The boy helped pull off Ravell’s boots, and then Peter’s. They dismissed the boy for the remainder of the evening so they could be alone.

From time to time, Peter had been taking out a portfolio filled with loose pages and making notes. By the firelight he scribbled a few more lines.

“Are you keeping a diary?” Ravell asked.

“I’m writing a letter to my son,” Peter said.

Ravell sat stupefied. His tongue went dry with the shock of this, and he struggled to continue speaking. “You have a son?”

“Quentin is eight years old,” Peter said.

“Why did you never tell me that you’d had a child?”

Peter sat on the side of the camp bed, his face orange in the firelight, and gave Ravell a look. “I think you—of all people—can guess how complicated that might have made everything.”

Ravell sat on his own bed. He held himself as still as an animal that senses danger, hoping that if he doesn’t move or breathe, and just plays dead, the threat will pass.

“You’ve never had anything to hide from me,” Peter said. “Whatever secrets you thought you were keeping, I always knew.”

Ravell felt his bones lock in place. His neck became a solid pillar, so that he could not turn his head if he tried. His breaths became thin.

In those seconds, Ravell feared that Peter understood even more—a sin far worse than those cuckolded husbands of the Back Bay ever guessed. Even when Ravell became intimate with Erika, he could not bring himself to tell her how profoundly he had deceived her and Peter. Ravell felt it unforgivable, what he’d done. The terrible result still returned to him like the grimmest dream—a dead daughter, a baby whose eyelids remained sealed.

Under the darkness of night in Guiana, down by the banks of the Essequibo, the crewmen had begun drinking. While Peter and Ravell sat facing each other on parallel folding beds, the crew made alarming noises in the distance. The black men laughed and insulted one another. Overhead in the trees, a howler monkey let out a voracious roar. While Peter talked, Ravell glanced at the dark sky, and tried to keep his heart calm.

After the baby girl died, after Ravell fled from Boston . . . Peter explained how he and Erika had consulted another doctor. When that specialist had proposed a semen examination, Peter found his previous resistance to the procedure gone. After all, he had fathered a child by then, hadn’t he?

When the physician shared the results with him, he’d been confounded.

“But how is that possible?” Peter had asked the specialist. “My wife and I just had a baby girl.”

The doctor had looked uneasy and stopped swiveling in his chair. The specialist asked if Peter had been ill, or if he’d experienced extreme fever in the past year or so. That could have brought on sterility.

Peter had shaken his head, and the doctor became quiet. Together they had felt the implications hanging in the air. Peter inhaled and exhaled and knew that moment would be etched forever in his mind—the fortress of medical books on the surrounding walls, the specialist sitting motionless in his chair, the tufts of hair that grew along the man’s folded hands. The physician decided to say nothing else, so Peter rose and was gone from the office.

Ravell, he had realized at once. Ravell.

Peter remembered the delivery, those moments when the dead little girl was brought forth from his wife’s body. Even in his own grief, Peter had felt a sharp surprise at glimpsing Ravell’s face: never had Peter seen another man look so sad. Ravell’s glasses had been spotted with water until he pulled them off and put his fingers to his eyes. Ravell’s lips had grown wet and he bit down to stop them from quivering.

“Until I saw your grief over the first baby,” Peter said, “I never suspected that you were in love with my wife. I never realized that Erika was infatuated with you.”

“She wasn’t in love with me. Not when the little girl was born.”

“So why did she sleep with you? Because she was desperate for a child?”

Ravell sat up and swung his legs over the side of the folding bed. He went over to the fire the black boy had built for them and threw dirt to extinguish it.

“Don’t make me answer,” he said to Peter finally. “Don’t make me explain.”

Neither of them could sleep after that. The crew had shared their liquor with Thomas, and the boy was soon vomiting against a tree. Ravell and Peter helped the boy into his hammock that hung at the foot of their beds. Thomas fell into a heavy, drunken slumber but Ravell and Peter lay there, unable to rest, listening to the crew catcall and howl by the riverbanks.

“I’m afraid I shall have to assert myself,” Peter announced finally, as he prepared to head toward the smell of the whiskey.

Ravell felt it unwise to say anything. “Don’t go down there,” he called warningly to Peter. They were a long way from any settlement, a world away from other white men.

But nothing stopped Peter. As Ravell watched his old friend move down the slope toward the drunken men, he wondered at Peter’s sense of invincibility.

After Peter made his complaint and turned away from the crew, the unruliness only worsened. Near the riverbanks, a large object was hurled through darkness into the water. A great splash could be heard, and angry shouts. From his camp bed Ravell watched Peter slowly returning uphill. Behind him, men raised their fists as they dodged and shadow-boxed. In their drunkenness Ravell feared that they would lunge after Peter, and then him.

He realized they might die here together tonight. Had Peter brought him here as a kind of vengeful wish? A handful of inebriated men might leave them for vultures and animals, until nothing remained except the whiteness of their bones. Their bodies might vanish into the forest, disappear into the darkness of the soil, and feed the shrieks of hungry birds. No acquaintance of theirs would realize what had happened. Perhaps nobody would ever know the fear he felt, waiting there.

A
t dawn, like a mercy, the sun came up and the expedition continued.

Farther upriver a smaller stern-wheeler awaited them, allowing them to pass through shallower depths with ease. The engine resembled a toy. A broad-ribbed Negro fed wood into the miniature furnace. Each time they transferred into a new boat, signatures were exchanged for a receipt to be sent back to Mr. Manthorne.

By afternoon they reached Tumatumari, where a rest house sat on a hill overlooking the river. The front door had a pointed arch. Inside, Ravell and Peter shed their moldy clothes that smelled of fish, mud, sweat, and the river. After they took turns lowering themselves into a bath, they got up from the hot waters refreshed, and put on clean bush clothes.

Outside they went to inspect the giant bleached boulders that blocked the river. The grand cataract had dried up, reduced to nothing more than the force of a few bathtub faucets. In Tumatumari everyone told them that the Kaieteur Falls had waned, and now barely dripped.

Peter said, “I’m afraid our journey must end here.”

“Perhaps we could hire Indian carriers to help us reach the Kaieteur Falls,” Ravell said. Only forty miles remained.

“We haven’t got proper supplies for an overland journey,” Peter pointed out.

Ravell’s heart shrank in disappointment. What had been the purpose of having fought their way so far upriver, if they would never see the marvel they’d struggled to reach?