The Doctor and the Diva (61 page)

“What have you liked best about New York?” she asked.

“The dinosaur skeleton at the museum,” he said. Perched on a stool, he sucked through a straw and swung his legs in contentment.

“Would you like to go to a tropical island?” she asked. “One with monkeys and alligators and palm trees?”

He pulled his lips away from the straw and made his eyes big and nodded.

“We could take a ship,” she said, “and visit a coconut plantation. A place where you can watch coolies climb palm trees and cut down coconuts with their machetes.”

“Father told me about it. They’ve got quicksands there. Your horse could sink in and you’d disappear.”

She smiled. “That’s the place.”

“And they’ve got mysterious lights on the water,” Quentin went on. “But I think that’s caused by phosphorescent fish.”

“So you’d like to go?”

He nodded. Erika gave a soft laugh, and tousled his hair with her fingers, feeling his reserve and mistrust of her ebbing. She took a swallow of sarsaparilla and let the sweet tang wash over her teeth. “Your father and I have an old friend who manages the plantation. Doctor Ravell. I was thinking you might want to meet him.”

Quentin finished his frothy drink. He sucked bubbles from the very bottom of the glass. By now he had forgotten about the Chadsworth School and his lessons and his alcove and the playing fields. She could have persuaded him to go anywhere.

At the passport office, she made inquiries. Did a young child require a separate passport? Not if he was less than twelve years old and traveling with his mother, the clerk said.

In a photographer’s studio she posed with her arm around her son. At the passport agency, after handing over a large bill to expedite things, she asked for her passport to be reissued with the new photograph that included him.

Before leaving Boston, she’d taken a copy of Quentin’s birth certificate from her father’s drawer. In the event of an emergency, Peter had left it with Papa, along with a written statement appointing his former father-in-law to direct Quentin’s medical care.

Erika Myrick,
her passport read, still issued in her married name.
Quentin Myrick
, his birth certificate read. The clerk glanced at their faces and stamped various documents and handed over the new passport as if no case could be simpler than that of a mother leading her young boy onto a ship.

“Where are you off to, young man?” the clerk in suspenders asked.

“We’re off to a coconut plantation,” Quentin said.

Back at their hotel room, she sat across from him at a table, playing a game of checkers. Quentin picked up a black checker and leapfrogged twice across the board, snatching up two of her red pieces.

“Were you angry that I went away for so long?” Erika asked.

“I knew you were coming back.” He smiled rather smugly, and drew himself up straighter in the chair, pleased that he was winning. For such a young boy, he carried himself with an air of manly confidence that seemed faintly comical.

“How did you know I’d be back?”

“I just did.” His nostrils flared as he gave one quick laugh. His shoulders twitched.

She laughed, too, and went around the table, hugging him from behind, burying her face in the side of his neck. She kissed his cheek rather loudly.

“Why are mothers always doing that?” he asked.

“Doing what?”

“Giving their kids great big smackers.”

Before they embarked from New York, Erika posted a letter to the parents of young Oliver Madsen, whose address she’d found in a municipal directory, stating what she had witnessed in the basement room of the Chadsworth School. A second letter she mailed to her father:
“Quentin and I have set off on a small adventure,”
she wrote. “
He’s in my safekeeping, and no one should worry.”

 

 

 

“E
rika?”

She heard Ravell call her name before she saw him paddling toward them through the mirrorlike stillness of the lagoon. (
QUENTIN AND I WILL VISIT COCAL SOON
, she’d warned him in a cablegram from New York, but she’d given no exact date for their arrival.)

The dugout cleaved the water. Ravell happened to have a small boy with him as well, a child as light-skinned as a European, except that it was obvious from his dress that the boy was a coolie.

At the sight of her, Ravell stood up in the boat and teetered and laughed; she thought he might fall backward into the water. He swept his hair back from his forehead with his fingers, his shoulders moving fast from a shortness of breath. He wrestled the dugout onto land, his boots still half-submerged, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. As she and Quentin walked closer, Ravell stood with hands on hips, feet wide apart in his boots, gazing at them.

He looked at her, then at Quentin, and then at her again.

“By God,” he said. “You’ve actually done this mad thing. You’ve actually come and brought him here.”

“I always do what I say.”

Children were present, so he and she did not so much as shake hands. Instead, they could not stop smiling.

“Quentin,” she said, touching her son’s shoulder. “This is Doctor Ravell.”

“Hello, Quentin.” After a vigorous handshake, Ravell stepped back to stare at the boy. “Tall, aren’t you?” he said. “Much taller than I was at your age.”

A crush of new wrinkles had appeared around Ravell’s eyes, and to Erika’s surprise, she saw sharp tears in them. She could not tell what overwhelmed him more—the sight of her, or Quentin. At that moment she thought,
He knows that Quentin is his
.

“Well,” Ravell said, composing himself. “We were just setting out to find a manatee or an anaconda, if we get lucky.” He turned to Quentin. “Would you and your mother like to hop in a boat and come along?”

They traded the dugout for a dinghy to better fit the four of them. Ravell put the oars in the water and rowed to a dark quarter of the lagoon where the mangroves grew thick. Insects speckled and marred the surface, like pulled threads in a silk stocking.

Ravell pointed out the mangroves’ deep roots growing underwater, with shells clinging to them. “Oysters grow on trees here,” he told Quentin. “We’ll eat those for dinner.”

Afterward, Erika thought how fortuitous it was that the coolie boy should have been there with them, because the small boy’s presence relaxed everyone. His name was Ajeet, and though he was half Quentin’s age—only about four—the children eyed each other with awkwardness that lasted only a minute. The two of them soon hung their heads over the sides of the rowboat, peering into the water in the hope of sighting the great body of a manatee that might be passing under the surface. It didn’t matter that the shadows darting below the surface turned out to be ordinary tarpon, nothing more. The boys raised their heads and pointed in excitement at peculiar movements in trees that might be an anaconda dangling from a limb. They ignored the adults and spoke to each other in the secret language of boys.

In a densely forested part of the lagoon, water penetrated far into the woods. The depths were dark brown and shadows touched their faces. Quentin jerked in his seat and pointed upward when he caught sight of two monkeys springing through trees.

“My feet are a bit damp,” Erika said.

“Take off your shoes.” Ravell rested the oars on their metal locks and drew a dry towel from a wooden box. Facing her, he beckoned her to extend her right leg. He captured her foot, rubbing gently with the towel’s soft folds.

As he massaged her one foot and then the other, chills shot up her legs and opened a channel of warmth inside her. Gooseflesh spread to her upper arms. She gave a shiver, bent her knees, and slipped both feet back inside her soft leather shoes.

“You’re cold,” he said. He reached inside the wooden box and took out a navy blanket and unfolded it, careful to avoid making the boat waver. He laid the blanket over her lap and helped tuck it under her hips. He knew, with alarming precision, exactly where to place his hands.

When he raised the oars and resumed rowing, there was no ambiguity in the look he gave her. “How long has it been?” he asked. “Nine years?”

The saplings planted at the Cocal nine years previously had become immense trees now, thousands upon thousands of them, all heavy with coconuts. Ravell suggested a tour, so they drove past in a wagon. “I call this area the Madame von Kessler Plantation,” he remarked, “because these began to grow the year you were here.”

He stopped and split a coconut open with a machete, and gave Quentin a taste of its sweet milk.

When they dropped the boy Ajeet at the village where the workers lived, Quentin hopped from the wagon and ran off to join the children playing there.

At dinnertime, both boys returned. The cook fed Quentin and Ajeet in the kitchen, while Erika and Ravell were served in the dining room. One surprise was this: it was not Munga who waited on them, but the lovely, green-eyed coolie girl who had worked at the Eden estate long ago. Erika still recalled the girl’s name—Uma. The servant girl carried in a platter of fresh oysters served over that rarity in these parts—a bed of crushed ice.

The girl appeared to be in her late twenties, a woman now, but she still carried herself with the same mute, remote air. As she reached to arrange dishes on the table, her forearms stretched long and smooth, her skin tan and polished, as if with a hint of curry. The fragrance of coconut oil emanated from her. Barefoot, she moved around the table. Even after she left the room, they heard the faint jangle of silver bands around the servant girl’s ankles.

After the door to the kitchen had swung shut, Erika leaned forward and said, “I remember her. Wasn’t her father the one who—?”

“The one who tried to poison Hartley’s father’s soup?” Ravell nodded.

Their voices shrank to whispers, their eyes huge as they stifled awkward laughs over the horror of it. Ravell refilled her glass with green swizzle.

“She works at the Cocal now? Not for the Hartley family?”

“Mrs. Hartley grew uncomfortable with Uma’s presence.” Ravell kept his tone low, and glanced at the kitchen door, lest it open again. He tapped two fingers against his temples and looked at Erika meaningfully.

Uma’s mother had gone mad, Erika remembered. Something about a fire and an asylum . . .

“One can’t just turn someone like Uma out, you know,” Ravell explained in a hush. “One feels an obligation, and as long as she does her work—”

Ravell interrupted himself as the kitchen door breezed open, and Uma came in bearing finger bowls of rainwater. One end of her lavender sari trailed over her shoulder like a long scarf. Her face was expressionless and serene, but there was something haunting about the girl. Erika could not recall having heard Uma utter more than two syllables, or ever having seen her smile.