The Doctor and the Diva (7 page)

In just a few weeks Peter would be back. Usually when his homecoming neared, she felt a small dread, knowing that soon she must sink back into the limits of wifely routine. Dinner at seven, bed by the early hour of ten. No more running off by herself to attend evening concerts. No lingering by the gramophone, listening to Nellie Melba past midnight. When Peter was home, she felt she ought to awake with him at six, and take breakfast with him before a carriage bore him off to the office.

Peter had noticed (how could he fail to notice?) that her voice was gathering acclaim. More offers for recitals and concerts had come, including engagements with the Handel and Haydn Society. A man from London had urged Erika to let him manage her career.

“Promise that you won’t leave me?” he once murmured as they lay in bed. “Not even when they try to lure you away to Covent Garden or La Scala?” He meant it as a little joke, but to her, the vision of having a larger career felt real.

Peter did not want a wife who lived apart from him in Europe. Whenever she had broached the possibility, he had become dismissive. He was tall, with princely good looks that made ladies pause in the street to stare at him. A man of bullish enthusiasm, he had a knack for bending others to his way of thinking. He often won her over with his body.

Within minutes of his homecoming after a trip abroad, he would bound up the staircase with her, locking the door against overly attentive servants, drawing the shades. She’d hardly missed him at all, she thought, until he’d appeared in the foyer and she’d seen him again—the glint of many colors in his hair, strands of russet, bronze, and gold. As he removed his jacket, she saw the taut muscles in his slim hips; she knew their shape even before she placed her hands against them. In the bedroom she quickly kissed his face, and found his cheek perspiring. Her lips came away with the taste of salt. She could never pack trunks and get away to Italy with Peter present in the house. The pull of him was as hard as an undertow; she could drown in it.

Like a pair of athletes, they were often collapsing, spent, with pumping hearts and glistening skin against the bed. But if it were not for the physical, without that, what did they have in common? She with her scales and cadenzas, he with his ledgers that recorded clever bargains he’d made for shipments of cotton from the Minet-el-Bassal?

What did they have, really, to talk about? He barely cared about music. If not for lust, would they even be friends?

While he was absent for long stretches, she almost forgot that he was part of her life. During the weeks he’d been away, as her throat vibrated with song and her fingers trembled over the ivory keys, she, too, had gone to another place.

And she loathed the thought that when he returned, he’d resume his zealous quest to conceive a child. Why did he need a child so much? It used to depress her, too—their lack of children—but no longer. She had sung her way past it.

That night Erika was too elated and too full of plans to sleep. She enjoyed having the bed to herself. When the bed was all hers, she could lie diagonally across it, arms flung overhead, toes resting against the bamboo footboard.

If she meant to make a new life in Italy, she knew she ought to book her passage and leave before he returned. She would be twenty-nine on her next birthday. She could no longer allow Peter to silence her.

“In the great design of fate,” Madame Nordica had said tonight, “there are no accidents. It is fascinating to look back at obstacles and realize how they were overcome. I have an absolute belief in destiny.”

Tonight’s instructions from Madame Nordica would alter her own life, she felt certain. The diva’s words had been like a finger pointing to the moon. Erika now understood—unequivocally—where she must head.

O
n the day she was scheduled to sing at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s grand new palace, Erika telephoned her voice teacher and begged: “Can you listen to me sing this dreadful note?” Erika held the receiver as far from her mouth as possible, and let the phrase escape through open lips.

“Nothing in that aria is beyond you,” Magdalena assured her. “Before you leave this afternoon, try to take a deep, hot bath. After that, I want you to place a butterscotch candy on your tongue and keep it there—just to relax the muscles—while you sing the same note you just sang to me.”

During its years of construction, the palazzo Isabella Stewart Gardner had been building over on the Fenway had been closed off like a secret. Not even Mrs. Gardner’s closest friends had been permitted to view what lay behind its fortresslike walls until she had every statue, every orchid, every painting, every Venetian balustrade, perfectly positioned. On New Year’s Day in 1903—just a few months previously—Mrs. Gardner had finally opened the doors to the most eminent of her acquaintances. They had driven up in their carriages at nine o’clock in the evening, and the next day newspapers burst with accounts of what her guests had found there.

Since then, several concerts had been given at Fenway Court. On the afternoon when Erika first entered Mrs. Gardner’s palace, the musicians and soloists were invited to wander freely through the grand rooms, as if the private art collection belonged to them.

Erika’s trepidation about the performance vanished as soon as she stepped inside, for she had never known a place that soothed her so. The great courtyard with its arched Venetian windows opened before her, welcoming her with its fountain, its vast shaft of light, its potted mimosas and stone urns and softening ferns. A glass ceiling protected everything. Tonight she would sing one aria in the courtyard, while standing on the Roman mosaic tiles near a tiny sarcophagus. Other soloists would be stationed on the upper balconies so that their voices would erupt from various levels of the building, like surprises.

As Erika walked through the Raphael Room, the Dutch Room, the Titian Room, she felt as if she were inside a private home rather than a museum. Mrs. Gardner now resided on the palazzo’s uppermost floor. Erika could hardly believe that one individual—a widow in her sixties—had fought so relentlessly to gather things she loved from around the world and bring them all here. Mrs. Gardner, everyone said, had fussed over the placement of each object, setting a vase or a small painting next to a window to make it gleam.

Although Erika had never met her, she had glimpsed Mrs. Gardner twice in a brougham on Beacon Street, riding past.

Standing at an arched Venetian window that overlooked the courtyard, Erika was startled by the sounds of birds, a glance of wings flitting against the stucco walls. Mrs. Gardner must have ordered them released from cages to add a dash of whimsy.

Erika could not decide what captivated her more—the art or the architecture that housed the collection. In nearly every room, she wandered from the paintings to the balcony windows, drawn to look upon the courtyard gardens from above.

I could already be in Italy,
Erika thought as she leaned her forearms against the balustrade and drank in the light, the archways, and the delphiniums.

Three stories below, the musicians were tuning up. For the few remaining moments before the rehearsal began, she lingered at an open window. Tonight Madame Nordica would perform here. Erika and the other soloists would emerge, one by one, in a kind of preshow tribute to the renowned diva. Two hundred guests would arrive and wander through the public rooms, surveying the art prior to the concert. No one could be present in the palace, with its arched windows open to the courtyard, without hearing Erika’s aria. For the few brief minutes when she was singing, her voice would be everywhere, as pervasive as air and light. Everyone would hear her—even the great Nordica, whether she cared to listen or not.

Afterward, at precisely nine o’clock in the evening, the two hundred guests would file into the Music Room at Fenway Court for a formal concert. The Cecilia Society would sing, and as a sumptuous finale, Madame Nordica would spread her arms draped in wide sleeves of velvet, and the famous soprano would dazzle them all.

The strings sounded fiercer now, a signal for Erika to clutch her skirts and hasten down two flights. She took her place next to the sarcophagus. It was a strangely small container—no body larger than a very young child’s could have lain inside it. As she closed her eyes, quieting her heart, preparing to sing, she recalled what everyone in the Back Bay knew: Mrs. Gardner and her late husband had only had one child, a son who had died of pneumonia before his second birthday. Erika opened her eyes and glanced at the child’s sarcophagus again—no lid on its stone. The coffin lay open, and empty. A baby might have risen from it and gone through the skylight to heaven, leaving Mrs. Gardner with no one to mother—and all this to create.

If I had children,
Erika thought,
perhaps I would not be here, nor would I be on my way to Italy very soon.
She was certain that Mrs. Gardner had placed this infant’s sarcophagus in her courtyard for a reason.

Let there be music here,
Mrs. Gardner must have said.

The conductor signaled to Erika, and she nodded. As the violins began their stately preamble, the sounds swelled inside her until her arms lifted away from her body. Her mouth opened to let Handel’s spirit out. She sang:

After the last note trailed skyward, after the last vibration of sound had passed over her tongue, she lifted her face to the palazzo’s uppermost level. Four stories overhead in the penthouse, a small, frail figure appeared at an open window, listening. Isabella Stewart Gardner extended her arm toward Erika, and gave her a wave like a blessing.

T
hat same day—just hours after Erika had finished rehearsing—Ravell arrived alone at Fenway Court. Night had fallen by then, and the whole Venetian palace glowed, illuminated by torches and candles and red Japanese lanterns that festooned the courtyard. Two hundred guests wandered along the arcades, most viewing the palazzo for the first time.

As Ravell entered that evening, his eyes took a moment to become accustomed to the luminescence of hundreds of candles. The courtyard’s graceful mimosas cast their own silhouettes against the stucco walls. Along the arched windows in the upper stories, figures passed like shadows. Overhead, Ravell saw guests pause to lean their elbows against balustrades and stare down into the courtyard.

Ravell knew that Erika was somewhere in the palace. Most likely the vocalists and musicians were being sequestered until the time came for them to perform. Yet as Ravell climbed a staircase, his hopes rose; he half-expected to encounter Erika on the landing. Or she might be hidden in the next gallery. . . . He felt it possible that he might come upon her suddenly—she might look away from a masterpiece by Raphael and notice him, and her upper lip would twitch in surprise.

As he stood gazing at a painting in the Veronese Room, his hands joined behind his back, a woman cried out his name with a squeal.