The Doctor and the Diva (60 page)

“I don’t have a room,” he said, “just an alcove—which I like better.”

“Your alcove, then?”

Her son guided her into a dormitory where walnut wainscoting darkened the hallways. Quentin put one hand on the oiled banister and faltered. “I don’t know if you are allowed.”

“Are boys up there now?”

“No. They’re doing their lessons before supper.”

At her prodding, he showed her upstairs. The youngest boys, who were only six or seven, slept on a dozen beds in a dormitory room that lacked ventilation, its dark green shades depressingly drawn in the late afternoon. She felt faint passing through it. A staircase almost as narrow as her hips led upward to a third story resplendent with light, even on this February day. A ring of windows opened to treetops—the branches stark now, but she imagined thickets of leaves would grow upon them in the spring.

His alcove was there, and she understood why he liked it: the small space was his alone, with no roommate crowding him. Its tiny window pointed in a Gothic arch. The alcove had a bookcase recessed into one wall where he kept his collection of lead soldiers. Quentin had made his bed so carefully that an iron appeared to have passed over it. A half-finished letter lay upon the desk.

“How tidy you keep things,” she praised him.

While Quentin went to the lavatory, she spied around a bit.
My darling Mother,
the letter on his desk began—and her pulse leaped with the shock of seeing that. When he was younger, he had always referred to her as “
Mama
.” She sat on Quentin’s bed and pulled the letter’s loose pages into her lap. He’d composed it like a diary.

Erika skimmed the parts about ball games, lessons, the skunk caught under the dormitory wing. Her eyes slowed over lines that seemed to address her directly.

Psalm 148? Erika eyes stumbled over the passage, perplexed for a second, for she had never been religious herself. Other odd references and strange names littered the letter—“Margaret” and “the sailing races” and “playing hide-and-seek in the big house at Buzzard’s Bay.” Then Erika recalled her brother’s report that Quentin had passed the summer with the Talcott family, and that Mrs. Talcott doted on him like one of her own children.

My darling Mother,
Quentin had written. Erika felt her breath halt in shock, knowing that Mrs. Talcott must have encouraged him to call her that.

When Quentin returned from the lavatory, drying his hands against the sides of his pants, the pages dropped from her hands. Her son froze at the alcove’s entrance, as if he understood his own infidelity.

Erika went to him. She knelt, holding him by the shoulders. “You probably thought I was never coming back, didn’t you?”

Quentin looked uncomfortable, chin down, staring at his shoes. He slid one shoulder loose from her grasp and walked over to the window. “The boys are lining up for supper,” he said, pointing. “I’d better go back now.”

Her father’s walrus moustache had whitened during the three and a half years since she’d gone away, and she worried at the stiffness she saw in him. As the motorcar dropped them in front of his Back Bay town house, her father failed to see the curb. He stumbled, falling into a bank of snow.

“Are you all right, Papa?” Erika scurried to help him to his feet.

“Nothing serious.” He rubbed his hip and backside. “The worst part is always the embarrassment.”

He had aged at a rate that surprised her. Magdalena told her that Papa would be hastening down a street with his black medical bag, and he would halt suddenly, as though lost. More than once he had stepped inside Magdalena’s house to telephone his office so that his nurse could remind him of his destination. Her brother claimed that Papa had missed appointments. For the first time, their father had begun to lose patients.

Yet the old man still exuded warmth. When her father’s chauffeur drove them to the Chadsworth School to pick up Quentin for the Washington’s Birthday holiday, Quentin sprinted down the school steps, happy to be pulled into his grandfather’s arms. On the veranda, the Headmaster stopped greeting parents and ducked back into the building when he saw Erika.

They rode directly to her brother’s house, where they’d been invited to dine with Gerald and his family. Quentin shot up the stairs, eager to disappear with his cousins.

After dinner Gerald took Erika aside into his study to review financial matters with her. As he closed the door, they heard the rumble of children’s feet overhead.

“Erika.” Her brother set a green leather folder on his desk and swung around in his chair to face her. “May I inquire about your plans?”

“My plans?”

“Do you intend to return to Italy? Or has that phase of your life been ‘played out,’ so to speak?”

“ ‘Played out’?” she said.

“You seem more interested in your son these days. I was simply wondering.”

“I don’t plan to live in Boston again, if that’s what you mean. I’m here only for a visit.”

“I see.”

“You and your wife disapprove of me entirely, don’t you?” she asked. “If there’s anything you’d like to say—why don’t you go ahead and say it?”

“I don’t think it would have the least effect.” Gerald turned back to his desk, and finished writing the check he’d promised her from their mother’s estate.

Almost from the moment Erika returned to Boston, she longed to escape. In the Back Bay, she could hardly walk two blocks without seeing stunned looks of recognition from people she’d known all her life. People regarded her differently now, since she’d gone away.

On the main floor of a department store, she met two ladies she’d first encountered as girls at primary school. Amid the tables of dry goods, they whirled around, incredulous at the sight of her.

“Erika!”

“Are you famous now, in Italy?”

“Hardly.” Erika gave them a small smile.

“It must be lonesome, living by yourself in a foreign country,” one prompted her.

“Not really.” Erika would have made an excuse and fled quickly if she’d been able, but the sale was being rung up, and she had to wait until a basket riding an overhead trolley clacked and returned with the receipt and her change.

She hoped that her two acquaintances had not noticed the odd purchases she had just made. She did not want them to guess the next part of her story. In Boston it was still winter, but she had asked the clerk to search the storeroom for a boy’s white sailor suit, and lightweight things more suited to summer.

The two ladies scrutinized her for regrets and shreds of remorse.

“Is it official, then—the divorce?” One lady spoke the question in a hush. They must have seen the legal notice the court had required Peter to run in the
Boston Transcript
for three consecutive weeks, in order to finalize his proceedings against her.

“Yes,” Erika said. They waited to hear more, but she lifted her eyes to the basket being lowered from the ceiling. “Lovely to see you,” she said, smiling. Taking her package and her change, she headed for the street.

Behind her, she knew, their huge hats must have drawn close. As soon as she left, they must have exploded into discussion about her.

“I’d like to take Quentin to New York with me for a few days,” she told her father, “just so he and I can become reacquainted.”

Papa understood that in New York, she would feel freer to stroll down the streets with her son without the burden of explaining herself to old acquaintances.

“Go to New York,” her father said, and gave a limp wave. “I will notify the school.”

Papa did not seem to notice that she had bought a new valise for the child, or that she’d filled it with new clothes for him—summer-weight fabrics in cotton and seersucker. The sailor suit was probably too large, but such things were not easy to find in Boston stores in February.

“I’m sure Quentin will cherish every moment you’re willing to give him.” Her father stood by a window as he said this. Light shone on his aging face, and there was a trace of sadness in him.

Quentin, too, liked the idea of an excursion to New York. What boy wanted to miss the chance to slip away from a few days of school? In New York she would take him to Central Park and the Museum of Natural History, where he’d see a dinosaur assembled with all its bones.

On the morning Quentin was due back at school, they waited for Papa’s chauffeur to take them to the train. Erika overheard her father downstairs in his office, almost shouting into the telephone.

“Scarlet fever,” he was saying. “That’s right. This is Doctor von Kessler, Quentin’s grandfather. He’s come down with scarlet fever and he won’t be returning to school for a while. . . . Yes, we’ll keep you informed.”

In New York City she and Quentin sat at a soda fountain while he drank an egg cream and she sipped a sarsaparilla. She’d just bought him a new pair of lead soldiers.