The Doctor and the Diva (9 page)

He had never heard her sing an aria so dramatic before. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recover from his flash of fright.

She left the stage wrung out, her hair falling from its pins.

At the evening’s close, Madame Nordica sang “Let the Bright Seraphim” for an encore, the same chestnut she’d been feeding her worshippers for many years. The diva’s hard, polished voice left Ravell cold. He hurried from the concert room as soon as he could and found Erika at a side door, where a circle of enthusiasts surrounded her. She smiled and reached over strangers’ heads and tucked her hot hand inside his, just a fleeting squeeze of recognition before she pulled it away.

She smiled at everyone and no one. She looked dazed, as though she couldn’t decipher the words being spoken to her, her eyes unfocused by candles and torches and the glory of the evening, her head still ringing with Mozart, perhaps. And why shouldn’t she be elated? Madame Nordica had requested that she sing.

“Are you coming to the office next Thursday?” Ravell called out. “I’ll see you then.”

She called back to him over the heads of others: “Oh—there’s something I must tell you—I’ll tell you on Thursday.” More bodies crushed together in the passageway, and other musicians and singers pressed her to join them for a private celebration. Before she disappeared through a doorway, Erika sent a fleeting wave in Ravell’s direction. He wondered if she already sensed—as women sometimes did—that she had a child inside her, but that seemed unlikely. It was really too soon for her to know.

As he turned from Erika, he noticed another figure standing nearby in the hallway. It was Caroline Farquahr. After rushed excuses to her companions, she must have followed him in hopes of a private exchange.

With the ice of resentment in her eyes, she looked at him, and Ravell wondered what she had just witnessed. The quaver in his voice as he’d called out nervously to congratulate Erika on her singing? The worshipful hunch in his shoulders? The heat in his face? Caroline had clearly caught hints of something.

Ravell tipped his hat to her, raised one arm in greeting, and without stopping he followed a herd of dark overcoats into the night.

O
n a May morning Erika sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on her stockings, her head ripe with plans. She caught herself singing fragments of another Handel aria, over and over again.

She was due to depart for Italy in just nine more days, and she decided she must go that very afternoon to her father’s house and inform him of what was to come. She had booked her passage on the White Star Line’s
Canopic,
intending to flee before Peter’s return. Until now she had not found the courage to tell her father or her brother or any family member that she meant to leave her marriage and find her future on another continent. Only her voice teacher, Magdalena, knew that years might pass before any of them saw Erika again.

Even the servants had no inkling that anything extraordinary was afoot. For weeks Erika had been walking to Magdalena’s house every day, smuggling a few items at a time—a satchel filled with undergarments, a parasol that would shade her from the Tuscan sun, a costume bag containing a long cape she might need for winter in Florence. From a dressmaker she had ordered an Eton suit with a white satin collar, as well as a Princess gown in burgundy chiffon velvet. She had arranged for these things to be delivered to Magdalena’s Beacon Street address, where Erika had packed them into brand-new trunks she kept hidden there.

She wanted Papa to know that she did not mean to abandon him. Although he still practiced medicine and looked remarkably robust for a man of his age, his blond walrus moustache and sideburns had gone white and his heart was weak. Other men with similar circulatory ailments sometimes left the house in the morning and fell onto the pavement, dead of apoplexy before they rounded the front gate. If she sailed for another world, Papa might not be there to greet her ship upon her next visit.

As Erika turned the key and let herself inside her childhood home, she saw that things remained unchanged. Papa had not yet returned from his rounds at the hospital, though the maid informed her that he would appear soon. She looked around, trying to memorize a place she did not expect to see again for years. The immense furniture felt rooted in the rooms. As always, her late mother’s Spanish fan dangled from a knob on the foyer mirror. On the floor of Papa’s study, a pair of men’s Chinese slippers rested in the corner—the same style of slippers he’d worn for a quarter century.

Shortly after Erika’s seventh birthday, her mother had died. Her own memories of Mama were distressingly few. Her mother used to lie on a wine-colored chaise longue writing letters. Erika could no longer see her mother’s face, yet Mama’s hands were imprinted in her memory: long, tapered fingers that smelled of gardenia soap. While Mama braided Erika’s hair, Erika had sat erect, savoring the lovely chilly feeling as the strands were drawn upward, and she felt Mama’s cool breaths upon her nape.

For several years Papa had wished to keep things exactly as they had been prior to his wife’s death.

“Where are her magazines?” he had demanded of the chambermaid one evening. As a child, Erika had watched from a doorway as he stumbled around like a man who returns to find his house burglarized. “Where are her powders that used to be on the bathroom shelf? Where are the perfume bottles from her vanity?”

The chambermaid, thinking she was doing the widower a gentle favor, had concluded that it was time to stop dusting a dead woman’s cosmetics.

“I’ve taken it all in boxes to the attic, sir,” the maid had said.

From the doorway Erika had noticed how Papa drove splayed fingers across his scalp, leaving his hair in unruly spikes. In a pained voice he told the chambermaid, “I want everything replaced. Exactly as it was.”

Her father was a doctor who treated members of the Back Bay’s most prominent families. His practice was located on the ground floor of his house, distinctive for its twin archways. Patients entered under the right arch, family under the left. These days his consulting room was typically filled with elderly widows dressed in black, their white silk hair slipping from under their bonnets. Patients sometimes noticed Erika on the sidewalk as she came to visit her father. They caught her hand and rolled it in their own, as they had been apt to do ever since she was a child. (Poor, motherless daughter of Doctor William von Kessler!)

“Your papa,” one effused, “can describe every symptom I’ve been experiencing without my even telling him.”

In winter, wreaths of apples and evergreens—anonymously given—hung from their front door. At Christmas, Papa’s doorbell would ring and a fruitcake would appear on the steps of fresh, unshoveled snow. A carriage would pull away quickly, leaving no sign of who’d left it—except for footprints in the snow from a lady’s heeled galoshes.

“Erika,” Papa said. “Forgive me for my opinion, but this plan may be the greatest mistake of your life.”

Her father blurred before her. Tears melted like hard bits of ice in her eyes. “Don’t tell me that someday, with luck, I’ll have children,” she said desperately, “because you know that won’t happen.”

“But how will you live,” Papa asked, “without a husband to support you?”

“I can manage on the income from the Bell Street property that Mama left to us. I can live simply. Gerald can mail me a check for my share of her estate, just as he does now.”

Papa lit his meerschaum and puffed calmly on the carved ivory pipe. “Why not take a summer in Milan?” he suggested. “Immerse yourself in all the opera you’d like. Go every night to La Scala. Why not?” he said. “After all you’ve been through, I’m sure Peter would understand. Perhaps he’d go with you.”

“I am not yearning for a long holiday—I am embracing a career!”

She got up and opened one of the long drapes and looked down at the stunted saplings planted along the mall that divided Commonwealth Avenue. She let the drape fall and turned to her father again.

She pressed her fingers against her windpipe. “Your daughter,” she whispered at him fiercely, “has been given this voice for a reason.”