The Doctor and the Diva (8 page)

“Doctor Ravell!”

He whirled around.

A patient, of course. He collided with them everywhere. As the woman reached toward him in greeting, her fat upper arms strained the seams of her green satin gown.

Knowing all this particular woman had endured, he felt pleased to see her mingling freely in public, so obviously happy. She insisted on introducing him to her sister, to her cousin, to four friends. They smiled politely. None of them quite understood why this woman looked as if she’d melt with thanks at the sight of Doctor Ravell. Only she (and presumably her husband) knew that Doctor Ravell had removed the greatest blight for her. Before treatment, the affliction would never have killed her, but it had certainly ruined her life. Women did not confess or exhibit such a thing even to their closest female friends—not if they could help it. Long before he met her, she had pushed a baby from her womb with such force, over so many hours, that her uterus had fallen and hung out of her body. When she presented herself to him, she could hardly walk. Gravity and tumescence had left her with an organ dangling between her legs like an elephant’s trunk. She could not leave her house, not with any dignity, not comfortably. He had designed a pessary for her, and finally restored her with surgery.

“I thank you every day,” she murmured into his shoulder. “You are always in my heart and my prayers.”

She grasped his sleeve, until he smiled and nodded deeply, and finally got away.

The grand rooms glowed with hot embers inside their hooded hearths, and the burning logs made the air smell like a forest. By firelight Ravell could see every halo and earlobe in the paintings.

“A good fire adds a certain medieval quality, doesn’t it?” remarked a gentleman standing near Ravell.

When Ravell strolled to a window that surveyed the high-walled courtyard, there was still no sign of Erika. At every level of the building, candles wavered like spirits.

Where was she? Erika had explained to him that she was not part of the main concert. Instead, she would emerge to sing one quick aria, serving as a curtain-raiser for Madame Nordica.

His heart clenched. He panicked for a moment, worried that at this instant, she might be performing in some tucked-away room. What if he had missed her singing completely? He leaned over the railing as far as he dared, but he detected not a single note.

In the Gothic Room he felt someone’s hand glide across the back of his trousers. It was a deliberate caress. He jerked back quickly and stepped away when he saw her: Mrs. George Appleton stood there, older and taller and more mischievous than he. She smirked at him. “Hello there,” Amanda said. She had lain in his bed that very morning, and he imagined that he still smelled his own damp sheets wound around her body. He glanced across the gallery, nervous that someone had seen her pat his woolen pants, but all backs seemed to be turned, all faces raised toward the framed pictures.

“Have you seen Sargent’s portrait of Mrs. Gardner?” Amanda asked. “The one that caused such a scandal?”

Her breath carried its familiar scent, reminding him of warm, dried apples. She led him across the room to inspect the regal figure of Mrs. Gardner posing in a black velvet gown. In the portrait Mrs. Gardner’s décolleté dress dived into a deep heart shape. A double strand of pearls encircled her tiny waist.

Although the artist had accentuated every curve of her figure, he had also painted Byzantine halos around Isabella Stewart Gardner’s head—as if she were a saint and a queen and a vixen.

“Captivating,” Ravell decided. “A masterpiece.”

“Sargent’s a genius,” she said, laughing softly, “to have spun gold out of such a homely little creature as Mrs. Gardner.”

Again Ravell glanced over his shoulder, hoping no one had overheard.

More visitors poured into the gallery. He saw Mrs. William Farquahr—Caroline—come through the doorway. She recognized him before there was time to avert his glance.

Many months had passed since he’d last seen her. Now she headed straight toward him, with her husband straggling behind her. Her gown was dark blue, the color of Mrs. Gardner’s courtyard delphiniums. Fortunately her husband halted for conversation with acquaintances.

“Doctor Ravell,” she said, smiling and extending her gloved hand.

He had no choice but to introduce her to Amanda. “This is Mrs. George Appleton. A patient of mine.”

Caroline Farquahr smiled and nodded. Her hair was as blonde as ever, coiled and pinned against her head. He had always been wary of Caroline, because he suspected that she used her good looks as a kind of whip, and she delighted in dominating others. Whenever she noticed his attention to her drifting, the muscles around her eyes tightened, and she edged closer. It hadn’t been easy, fending her off.

“Tell me,” she said, and leaned toward Amanda in a confidential manner, as if they’d known each other all their lives. “What do you really think of all this?” With long-gloved arms, she gestured at the walls of the palazzo. She beckoned Ravell and Amanda to follow her into a corner where the three of them could speak more privately.

“Some people have called this place a junk shop,” Caroline said. “I don’t necessarily agree with that. But I do wonder what the good people of Venice think of her. What gives a rich American lady the right to buy every marble column and stone balustrade she can find in Venice, and bring it here to build a monument to herself?”

“Some people think all this art ought to be returned to the countries she’s taken it from,” Amanda said.

He had made an error, Ravell felt, by introducing the two of them. The two women began to discuss the Sargent portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner from halfway across the room. Back in the 1880s when the painting was first unveiled, Amanda recalled, the image stirred so many malicious comments about Mrs. Gardner that her late husband had never wanted the portrait exhibited again in public during his lifetime. But now that Mr. Gardner had been dead for five years, Caroline pointed out, his wife displayed it with prominence alongside her masterworks by Giotto and others here in the Gothic Room.

“Mrs. Gardner claims it’s the greatest portrait Sargent has ever done,” Caroline said.

Ravell excused himself, saying that he needed to meet a friend elsewhere in the building. The sight of those two women together, Amanda and Caroline—one outfitted in violet, the other in dark blue—felt odd. Whenever he happened to encounter Caroline, awkwardness weighted down his shoes as he sought a way to elude her.

Finally he escaped. Walking through a passageway, he wondered why Mrs. Gardner excited such envy and controversy. Nowhere, he thought, did another house of art like this exist. A century from now, visitors would wander through this palazzo and sense her presence in the sculpture garden, in the fountain waters, in every gilded picture frame. Long after her demanding personality and her homeliness had been forgotten, Mrs. Gardner’s spirit would linger, and she would be remembered for what she had created here.

A sudden commotion began in the courtyard. Musicians were entering with stringed instruments. On the second floor Ravell rushed to an open window and bent over the balustrade to view things better from above.

A great torch had been lit near a small, empty sarcophagus. Out of the darkness Erika appeared and stood next to it. Her gown was white, like that of a Roman goddess. She looked almost terrifyingly small—until she began to sing.

Then the sounds that came from her soared and penetrated behind every potted tree and carved archway.

When her far-too-brief aria ended, Erika fled into the darkness. The audience, stunned, did not react for a moment, not quite believing that after only one Handel aria, she was already gone.

“Such a voice!” exclaimed an elderly woman who shared the balcony window with Ravell. Her hand, ridged with age, flew to her windpipe and she held it there. Applause resounded from every level, every arcade. Candles wavered and blurred; Ravell blinked away the moisture in his eyes. Guests clapped until their hands stung and male voices bellowed for the singer to reappear, but Erika did not show herself again.

(“I didn’t want to delay the performance,” she told Ravell later. “There were so many more singers yet to come. Not to mention Madame Nordica.”)

The elderly lady next to Ravell put a knotty hand on his arm, and motioned upward with her forefinger. “You see Madame Nordica up there, listening.” In Mrs. Gardner’s penthouse far above, a statuesque woman stood half-hidden by a velvet drapery. “Madame Nordica must be staying with Mrs. Gardner,” the old lady remarked.

Three other soloists sang after Erika. The other vocalists stationed themselves on various balconies, calling to one another like figures in a play. To Ravell’s ears, they all sounded shrill or flat compared to her.

When the time came for the formal concert of the evening, the slow-moving crowd made its way into the Music Room. Ravell followed almost reluctantly, because Erika had told him she would sing only once that evening. Mrs. Gardner’s Music Room surprised him in its simplicity—its white purity, its straw-bottomed chairs and light wood floor. At the rear, Ravell saw to his discomfort that Amanda and Caroline had found seats together, along with their respective husbands. The pair of women had remained together, still chatting fast. Their husbands, who had obviously just been introduced, had fallen into conversation, too. Ravell nodded to the two ladies, though not to their husbands, whom he had never met. A glance told him that one husband (Amanda’s) was bald, and the other (Caroline’s) sported a thick blond moustache. Though Ravell had always entertained a curiosity about those men, and while he might have wished for the opportunity to observe them better if he could have remained invisible, he hardly dared to look at them. He hunted for a seat near the stage, to distance himself from them all.

Most people were already seated as he wriggled toward an unclaimed chair. Two grandmotherly types reached for his wrist as he sidestepped down the aisle. “Doctor Ravell!” they exclaimed, and petted his hands. The gray-haired ladies offered him fond looks and knowing winks, and he smiled back, although he could not recall whether it was their grand-children he’d delivered or their infections he’d cured.

Then the conductor announced that the star of the evening (the celebrated Madame Nordica) had requested that Erika von Kessler sing another aria before the main program began.

In the darkness of the stage Erika appeared again, the sleeves of her white gown diaphanous. The acoustics of the Music Room were so pure, the resonance so intimate, that the audience might have been enclosed inside one perfect, wooden instrument. He could see the stage light reflected in her eyes.

Ravell recognized the aria from
Don Giovanni
. He could not understand the exact lyrics, but he knew he was hearing the war cry of a woman betrayed, the anguish of a woman who loved and pitied an amoral man.

Erika was so close that he saw the perspiration across the bridge of her nose. He saw the color of her blue-gray eyes, and wondered if she would turn to look at him. She did not do so. He knew he was staring at a woman who might be carrying his child, though she had no inkling that this could be so. For the only time in his life, he had deliberately tried to impregnate a woman. Three times during Peter’s absence, Erika had visited the office, and Ravell had persuaded her to cooperate. (“But I’ve promised your husband—”) Three times since Peter’s departure, Ravell had placed his own seed inside her.

Even a raped woman knew what had happened to her. Erika had no suspicion.

In the mad, gorgeous music that possessed her, he heard strains of his own goodness and evil. How often did a man gaze at a woman, having done what he had done, without her possibly knowing?

He wondered what compelled him to take such a risk. The dread of disappointing the von Kesslers? The need to impress them? That was part of it. Soon—through no fault of his own—they might cast him aside and move on to another specialist. He told himself that her suffering would deepen the longer it went on. But another truth was this: he did not want to give her up. He wanted to keep her from leaving him.

Onstage she sang of the doom she foresaw: the world was closing in on her lover, a man entangled in unspeakable crimes. Outraged fathers and husbands hunted him, ruined daughters and wronged women wanted revenge. The welling up of injustice shuddered through Erika.

Suppose, under the white veils of her dress, his child now grew? No one must know—not even twenty years from now. He blinked in sudden terror for himself. If anyone learned the truth, no patient could ever entrust herself to him again. Such a thing could never be forgiven.