The Doctor and the Diva (53 page)

On Sundays she asked her children to learn a psalm and repeat it to her, but they studied the verses half-heartedly and slipped away to the beach or the rowboat before finishing. He was the only one who stayed beside her on the porch until he got a whole psalm learned. When he was done reciting, she got up from the divan where she liked to sit with a book and an open box of chocolates. She let him choose a piece of candy, and then she pulled him against her waist and rubbed his head. People made jokes about her eating so many chocolates, and they called her fat, but he liked the feel of her. She had soft parts, like a bed with feather pillows you fell upon. He sniffed a sweet powder through her clothes.

She said it would not do for him to call her “Mrs. Talcott” anymore; he should call her “Mother,” like the rest of them.

One evening he sat on the porch swing with Mrs. Talcott. It was so dark they couldn’t see the lawn, but he smelled the grass; if he ran across it barefoot, the newly mowed blades would smear his soles green.

“Did something bad happen to my mother?” Quentin blurted suddenly.

“Something bad?” Mrs. Talcott said with hesitation, and used her heels to brake the swing. They stopped rocking.

At school a boy once said that he’d heard Quentin’s mother was dead. The rumor had startled him, and now he felt an odd urge to confront Mrs. Talcott with the same strange words.

“Heavens, no!” Mrs. Talcott sucked in her breath and exhaled quickly when she heard this. “Your mother is living in Italy, last I heard.”

He knew this all very well. But it still troubled him to think of his unmailed letters to her, hidden in his father’s desk. Quentin told Mrs. Talcott how he’d found them.

“Unless Mama died . . . why didn’t Papa send them to her?” Quentin asked. “After I’d gone to the trouble of writing them?”

“I can’t speak for your father,” Mrs. Talcott said. “But I would imagine that your mother’s absence has caused him a good deal of grief. Maybe—maybe he thinks it’s better for you to carry on, and not be frustrated by things that can’t be changed.”

Several nights later, after a game of freeze tag, Quentin flopped on the lawn, panting. He noticed how his heart hopped like a small animal caught inside his chest, until he had rested enough. After the others had scattered and gone into the house for card games and checkers, Quentin remained there, the ground cold against his back. Dew dampened the lawn, and stars glittered like the heads of pins.

He heard Mrs. Talcott on the porch, behind the bushes, talking to another lady. No doubt they were passing the box of chocolates back and forth, although it was dark so he couldn’t see the ladies, and they did not see him.

Mrs. Talcott was saying, “Everyone asks me: ‘You already have five children, so why would you take in another?’ The simple answer is that it tugs at my heart to see that little boy so alone. His father is always crossing the ocean, whether for business or pleasure or adventure. . . .

“Quentin hurt his knee the other day,” she went on. “I brought him into the bathroom to wash and bandage it, and when I saw that blood flowing from his knee, I thought:
Where is his mother? What can that woman be thinking? Where is she?
”

 

 

 

 

O
nstage at Montepulciano, Erika stood incandescent, the sounds of Bizet’s
Carmen
passing through her. Arms horizontal, she stood there with her tongue releasing beauty.

During rehearsals, members of the orchestra applauded and cheered her. They had been hired to play at her
prova,
and they owed her nothing apart from a decent rendering of their services, but thanks to them, anticipation had begun to spread through the ancient hill town. The new singer, they were telling everyone, has a beautiful voice,
una bella voce
. You must come to her debut.

The night Erika had first headed from the railway station toward the fortressed city where she was to make her
prova,
things had not seemed quite so promising. The train that delivered them was horrendously late, and she and Christopher discovered that the station was far from Montepulciano. Darkness and slanting rain had taken hold as they found themselves being jostled uphill inside a covered carriage. A steep embankment rose up on one side of the road, and the silhouettes of olive trees fell away on the other.

Lightning split the sky, close enough to touch. Erika watched the storm and worried. They would never reach the mountaintop city before restaurants locked their doors for the evening, and they were both famished. The ascent became steeper and the carriage moved in a cumbersome, treacherous way, on great waterwheels. She prayed for the horses not to lose their footing.

Beside her Christopher napped, as he often did when a situation felt overwhelming. The road’s angle became so sharp that his head fell back and his mouth opened, his thin nose tipped toward the carriage roof.

When they reached the inn at Montepulciano, only one room remained. The manager showed them to an odd corner chamber, hardly larger than its single, narrow cot.

“It won’t do for my sister and me both to stay here,” Christopher declared, and Erika turned her face away to hide the mirth that rippled her lips. How could anyone really believe them to be brother and sister? They did not resemble each other in the least.

“Surely there are other rooms available in town?” Christopher insisted, flustered. His sealskin coat dripped and water shook from his fingertips.

At such an hour? The inn’s manager doubted it. Christopher went out into the rain again and left Erika staring at her water-stained luggage. She removed her cape, suspended it from a hook, and watched a tiny pond form on the floor below the hem.

Twenty minutes later Christopher returned, having found no alternative. The innkeeper dragged in a spare mattress that consumed nearly all the small chamber’s floor space.

Erika took a towel from her bag and pressed moisture from her hair with it. “I don’t mind at all—really I don’t,” she told Christopher, but two prongs of irritation appeared between his eyebrows. Clearly he didn’t relish the prospect of spending the night on a pallet on the floor.

For their supper the portly innkeeper set down plates filled with long noodles. The aroma of the food improved their mood. The pasta sat pooled in a sweet and sour tomato sauce, thickened by red onions and currants, and flavored by hints of vinegar and red wine. “You have tasted our
vino nobile
?” the innkeeper inquired, and he filled their glasses from a big carafe.

The wine (“the king of Tuscan wines,” as the innkeeper called it) moved down their throats like a cleansing fire. Two things made Montepulciano famous, he claimed: its wine, and the grand vistas visible from this mountaintop by day.

The dining room was dim as a cave, with two gas jets like torches against the wall. While they ate, the proprietor told them about his city and its history.

After they’d finished dinner, Christopher opened a window and stuck his head out. The rain had ceased. “Go put on your coat,” he called excitedly to Erika. “Don’t you want to have a look around at the town?”

At midnight, after so many stormy hours, they found almost no one about on the slick black streets. Together they went out like children, giddy from the wine and the sense that this whole deserted, fortressed town was theirs to explore like a darkened stage.

As they climbed a stone staircase toward the piazza, they saw chasms of blackness between the houses and dripping ivy on walls. On the steps Erika stopped. “Don’t you just wonder what’s out there?” she asked.

By dawn a landscape of fifty miles would be visible from here. For the moment, darkness obscured the panorama of Tuscany. What exactly lay before them out in that abyss—other than a few lights, which they managed to discern like faraway stars? Were there also rivers, hills, towns, lakes—or endlessly terraced slopes of olive branches and vines?

At the piazza, they felt they’d reached the top of the world. By the glow of streetlamps, they saw that it was all here, surrounding them—the tower of the Palazzo Comunale, the Duomo, a fountain, the Renaissance palace that had once belonged to the Del Monte family. All hers now, and Christopher’s—only a backdrop for them.

Perhaps it was the
vino nobile
they’d drunk that made them feel playful and frivolous, or the hope that if her
prova
were a success, their lives might suddenly change. Christopher took a flamboyant leap over a wide puddle. Lifting her skirts, Erika swung around and around until she was dizzy. The pavement glittered where shallow depressions had been filled by water. Moisture seeped into her leather shoes. Her toes grew wet, but she didn’t care.

On this night, in this hill town, they were both unknown, and as free as they would ever be. In these silly, capering moments, Erika could almost imagine that it was not Christopher beside her but a lover who had accompanied her to Montepulciano.