The Doctor and the Diva (58 page)

“Not the sort of thing one comes to Florence to sample.” Mark caught sight of his reflection mirrored in the window, and his gaze lingered there as he studied his own smart looks. Legs crossed, he stroked his trousered thigh almost lovingly, and bobbed his foot.

Erika described to them how, for months, she had been approaching each new audition with senseless hope, preparing for it for days. Past disappointments hardly mattered, she tried to persuade herself—only reaching for the next opportunity.

The men had already wearied of her angst, she knew, and now that weeks and months had gone by, they barely listened. A slim-hipped waiter brushed past their table and Mark and Edmund stared after him.

“Another bugger,” Mark said. “Like us.”

“Nice-looking,” Edmund nodded.

“Take him.” Mark winked at Edmund. “He’s all yours.”

“I am running out of chances,” she cried to Christopher upon returning from yet another failed audition. She worried that before long, Pietro Palladino would give up on her and quietly cease his efforts on her behalf.

Her anguish grew so extravagant that Christopher bent under it, as if her gloom were a whip hitting him. One day he ran out of her room saying, “What is the point of talking? Nothing I say ever cheers you.”

Erika leaned her head over her third-story balcony and called to him in the street. He pretended not to know his own name. In his unpolished shoes he rushed along the Lungarno Acciaiuoli and disappeared into a tunnel of tourists buying fruit. She picked up an embroidered cushion and crushed her face into it.

“Why didn’t you answer?” she asked later, painfully.

Softly he replied, “Because I didn’t hear you.” But she knew otherwise.

A postman pulled the bell one morning. When Erika peered down from the balcony, he called out that she must sign for a registered letter. Her feet tripped down three flights, and her heart flew with the silly, impossible hope that an opera house manager had reconsidered and written to Pietro Palladino. Perhaps she was running toward the news that would save her.

She wondered, too, if the slow mail that crossed oceans might have finally brought Ravell’s response to the letter she had sent.

As she scratched her signature on the postman’s pink receipt, she saw that the large envelope had been sent from the States, from the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston. She passed the new charwoman in the foyer, a rough, unpleasant woman who twisted her washrag and gave long, suspicious stares whenever Christopher or Mark or Edmund ascended for a visit to Erika’s room.

The legal document notified her that three years had passed since she had “willfully and utterly” deserted her husband. Peter’s petition to divorce her had been finalized; custody of their one minor child had been granted to him.

It was hardly a surprise, but it saddened her. It marked a kind of death. Finally, irrevocably, her marriage was over; her son was gone.

She recalled what her brother, Gerald, had recently written to her:

Why did her brother feel the compulsion to tell her this?

If she threw her capes, dresses, slippers, and opera scores into a pile of trunks and went back to Boston, the court would not allow her near Quentin again—not without permission, not with any ease. She could approach her former door and hammer with the brass knocker, but if the servants peeked out and saw her on the step, they’d probably let the window drape fall. No doubt they’d been warned against opening the door to her.

The court did not know about her and Ravell, how their bodies had made that little boy, how Quentin belonged to them as much as to Peter.

She read the documents thoroughly, and then placed them at the bottom of a drawer. No judge knew how strangely exquisite Quentin had looked to her when he’d been ill with diphtheria, during those nights when she held him and whispered prayers into his sleeping face. Very softly she’d parted her lips and blown cool air across his feverish forehead, scattering his fine dark hair (
Ravell’s hair!
).
Let him live,
she’d prayed.

On the afternoon that Erika received the divorce papers, she walked for miles through Florence, covering much of the city.

She went to the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, and stood before the Hospital of the Innocents. Over centuries, until just thirty or forty years earlier, mothers had come here, shawls over their heads to obscure their faces, carrying infants in their arms. Some had hesitated, and turned back. Some had rushed boldly—desperately—forward before they could change their minds.

Erika glanced up above the nine arches where terra-cotta medallions pictured babies in swaddling clothes, their plump, outstretched arms imploring their mothers not to desert them.

She saw the window that framed the special wheel—the
ruota
—where mothers placed their infants, and with a spin, passed them anonymously to a stranger’s care on the wall’s other side.

And she thought:
Where are they now, those ghostly mothers who came here in centuries past?
At this hour she was the only woman who stood staring at the
ruota,
but she felt the spirits of those other mothers around her. Many of them, like her, must have returned here, sorrowful and regretting what they’d done.

The charwoman eyed Erika with wrath not long after Christopher paid a call to her room. Erika had gone out for lunch and come back. As she tiptoed up the cascade of freshly washed steps toward her room, lifting her skirts and smiling an apology for the spots her shoes might leave, the servant stopped her.

Holding a string mop aloft, letting it drip rivulets into a bucket, the charwoman said, “People tell Donna Anna the kind of woman you are, but she doesn’t listen. She is old and blind and she will stand for the worst, just to have a singer around to listen to.

“Your singing,” the servant said, “has gotten worse.”

“Dreadful woman,” Donna Anna said. “I will give her notice.”

A driver brought Donna Anna’s motorcar around and chauffeured them into the hills behind Florence. Erika and the landlady sat at the rear, swathed in tulle and veiled in chiffon to keep the dust away.

They parked at a curve overlooking a villa nestled in a dip of land. Soft hillsides ringed the house, and as they sat in the open-air automobile, Erika described the view of it to Donna Anna—the villa’s red-tiled roof and the walled gardens. Box hedges defined the estate’s perimeter, and stone benches stood in shady corners where the dark earth remained moist. Erika loosened her veils while a breeze toyed with the ends, blowing the chiffon tails.

Donna Anna lifted her nose and sniffed. “Jasmine,” the old lady said, before Erika even noticed the hedge ornamented with white petals.

“I wonder what it would be like to live in a villa like that,” Erika said. From their aerial perspective, she could see a glass-roofed courtyard where a fountain gushed and oleanders bloomed. She described it all to Donna Anna.

“That sort of house is usually filled with tapestried chairs and tapestried fire screens,” the old lady said. “And the doors are locked by great iron bars at night.”

As they motored farther, Donna Anna tilted her face to the sky, absorbing the sunlight and rush of wind across her skin.
Look at her,
Erika thought,
alive to every pleasure, while my ambition cripples me.

“You were not wrong to come to Italy,” the old lady said. “Not with talent like yours. It would be against God’s wishes not to try to bring that voice before the world.”

“Sometimes I feel that God is against me,” Erika responded. Why had she been blessed with a gift, if upon every attempt to release sounds from her throat, the world silenced her?

The chauffeur stopped the car at an overlook. They got out and sat on a stone bench to view the panorama of Florence with its Duomo and tiled rooftops.

Erika said, “I’ve cast away everything. I have nothing now.”

Donna Anna said, “You have money saved, don’t you? Christopher is right—you should take yourself on a journey, get away.”

A letter finally came—the very letter she’d most longed to receive. When she saw Ravell’s handwriting on the envelope, she mounted the stairs with haste, and sat by the window and held it in her hands for a long while before opening it. It was a reply to the one she’d sent, just before her
prova
. Mail moved slowly across the seas, his words seven weeks old by the time she read them: