The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  After Peter rushed off, twice a week Doctor Ravell completed the procedure on his wife. She was forced to lie for a half hour with her legs raised, knees and calves propped by pillows and bolsters, to allow her husband’s seed to flow into her.

  “It’s hopeless,” she said to Ravell every time.

  “I’m afraid that she plans to end her life.” The wife of Doctor Gerald von Kessler sat in Ravell’s office. The worried little woman wore the same crushed violets in her hat that she’d worn that day at the cemetery. “Something dreadful is going to happen to my sister-in-law, I’m certain.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Erika asked me, ‘If I did something that hurt the family terribly, would you and Gerald ever find it in your hearts to forgive me?’ She’s asked about wills; she says she wants all of her financial papers in order. She’s given away beautiful dresses from her closet, saying that she won’t be needing them. She’s worried about her maid losing her job. Erika asked me, ‘If something happens to me, would you promise to help find another position for Annie?’ ”

  “Thank you for telling me,” Ravell said.

  He left the room, shaken, and stood behind a door down the hallway to collect himself. He’d once known a patient who had harmed herself under similar circumstances. That had happened during his days as a medical student, while he’d served as an assistant to another obstetrician. Ravell had never forgotten how cheerful the lady had seemed the day before she’d died by her own hand. When he’d passed her on a staircase, she’d smiled and called him by name. As she was leaving the building, she’d thrust her arm upward and waved to him with a flourish, and he heard her calling exuberant good-byes to everyone—the nurse, the head doctor, other patients and acquaintances seated in the waiting room.

  The odd cheerfulness. That is what stayed with him most. Later another physician explained to him that a suicidal patient might appear suddenly uplifted just after she’d made her decision, thinking that she’d soon be free from whatever was causing her agony and sorrow. In a last note to her husband, the poor woman had written: Since I have failed to give you the children you so dearly wanted, it seems only fair to leave you free to remarry more happily, and fruitfully. . . . If Erika lost her life over this, Ravell knew the news would blind him with regret. He’d never wash the darkness of it from his mind.

  At Erika’s next appointment, Ravell stepped away after examining her. “So you’re having your period,” he said. That morning, Erika admitted, she had hidden her bloodstained bloomers from her husband.

  “You can tell Peter yourself,” Erika told Ravell. Bitterness sharpened her features. “I’m tired of seeing the disappointment in his face.”

  She was his last appointment of the day. Ravell asked her to come into his office after she’d finished getting dressed. It always took an excruciatingly long while for a patient to rearrange her undergarments and rows of buttons, he’d found, before she was ready to exit with grace.

  In the intervening minutes he slipped into the washroom, lathered his hands, and dried them. The small bathroom felt as private as a prayer cell. He tugged hard at the hot and cold water taps to shut off large drops that fell into the porcelain sink. As he combed his dark moustache with his fingers, he wondered what he would to say to her.

  In the mirror he stared at himself—a slender man, shorter than most others he passed in the street. People said that if he weren’t wearing a fine suit, he might be mistaken for an Arab sheik or a Tartar. His eyes dominated his face—dark eyes like his father’s, thoughtful, deep-set. “It’s those eyes,” a lady had once said, “that make people want to tell you things.”

  Each woman, each patient, was her own mystery. He tried to listen until he saw distress ease or tears dry on a woman’s face. Much depended on their trust in him. Some told him how they shuddered under the weight of their husbands’ bodies, shunning and avoiding conjugal duties whenever they could.

  When a rare husband or two had pleaded for his advice, Ravell had shown them diagrams and spoken with candor about the importance of a woman’s enjoyment. At times he’d needed to be stern with wives, asking: How do you expect to ever have a child if your husband finds that you keep locking the door to your room?

  He heard a hallway door open. When he returned to his office, Erika was already there, walking around. From his desk, she picked up the glass cube with the big blue Morpho butterfly trapped inside, and she held it up to the light before setting it back down. Then she lifted the magnifying glass. Centering it above her upturned palm, she peered at the lines.

  “Are you trying to read your palm?” he asked.

  Erika gave a rough shake of her head and put the magnifying glass down, as if she did not believe in palmistry. The walls of his office could not contain her restlessness. She gave a noisy sigh.

  When Ravell sat down behind his desk, she took the chair opposite him. “May I ask you something personal?” he said. “A woman’s attitude is important. . . . Do you want to become a mother, or is this Peter’s—?”

  Closing her eyes for a moment, she then opened them and spoke with sharp resolve. “I used to want a child more than anything,” she said, “but I’ve learned not to want a thing I can’t have.”

  She looked sweet and solemn as she said this. Ravell watched her closely. If he did not interrupt and allowed a patient to continue talking, he’d found that she might reveal things she hid from a close friend or sister-in-law. Erika, however, said nothing else.

  He leaned toward her, his forearms resting on his desk. “Erika, other people are worried about your state of mind.”

  She stared at him, then glanced at the closed door. Obviously there was something she was wary of admitting. “You must have a great many patients waiting,” she said.

  He assured her that this was his last appointment of the day—that he had plenty of time just now to counsel her—but she got up and began fastening her long purple cape.

  To delay her, Ravell stepped between her and the doorway. “Don’t do anything drastic—will you promise me that?” he said.

  She was as tall as he was; her blue-gray eyes looked straight into his, her proud neck growing longer. “My life is my own,” she said. “I can do what I like with it.”

  Had she already rehearsed a ghastly act in her mind? In the darkness of the moment he offered blind assurances. “This will all turn out happily, Erika. I’m certain of it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. When she reached for the doorknob, he moved aside. Just before she turned away, he saw the sharp light of tears in her eyes. Drawing her wool cape tighter, she headed into the corridor, and when the front door opened, cold air blew into Ravell’s face, lifting the hair off his collar. Long after she had gone out into the winter day, his mind held on to her. Long after the strand of bells jingled and the door banged shut, he saw her dark purple cape make a sweeping turn just above her heels.

  Would she keep her next appointment? He worried that something awful would happen before then.

  By the time his nurse filed some papers and left for the day, the sky had gone dark outside. Ravell extinguished the lights in his office, went down the corridor, and shut himself into a closet-like room. At medical school—at Harvard—he was hardly the most brilliant, but he had asked bolder questions than most. Since then, he had braved more and taken more risks; he had often gotten results where others had missed.

  Now he was about to do something unforgivable. Ravell removed a glass dish from a drawer, set it on the counter, and removed the lid. Less than two hours before, Peter Myrick had departed from this room, leaving a sample of his semen; the specimen was still fresh. Ravell had used only a portion of it; on a hunch, he had saved the rest. Now he adjusted knobs on the microscope.

  With nervous hands he took a pipette, and let a drop of fluid splash onto the slide. As he slipped the specimen under the lens, he felt moisture break over his face. He thought of Leeuwenhoek, a man from Holland who had first seen sper
m through a microscope in the year 1677. A daring act of discovery then. Before gazing into the eyepiece, Ravell bent his head and held his breath, as Leeuwenhoek must have done.

  At first nothing darted past his eye, only a blizzard of grayish-whiteness. He pulled away, changed the magnification, adjusted the focus, and peered again. The results made him feel snow-blind. He saw nothing there, no sperm at all.

  3

  “Your neck smells marvelous,” Ravell said, laughing. His nose nudged the soft place under her earlobe.

  Mrs. George Appleton was over forty—a decade older than he. On his bedside table she liked to keep a ring of candles burning while they made love. Wax ran from the tapers. His bedsheets felt moist after their exertions, the air humid with scents from her body and his.

  Her hair was half-gray, but her speaking voice was low and deep, with theatre in it. Her laugh had the resonance of an actress’s. Her own husband had not touched her in four years.

  “I need to leave now,” she said. She was a tall woman. When she got up from the bed, in search of the clothing she’d cast across a chair, he saw the large-shouldered, great-breasted silhouette of her, the long lean stilts of her legs, the absence of any tapering at her waist. Her backside fell flat like a cliff, like a man’s. (“Where’s my derriere?” she liked to jest, grabbing herself there.)

  Ravell knew he was not the first man she had sought out, apart from her husband. He loved her hunger. Since he lived on the floors above his practice, he was careful to draw the shades before she came, and he shut every window. She was noisy while being caressed, and in her cries he heard more animals than he could name. When he told her this, she squatted on all fours and dived at his body, snuffling and rooting. That made him laugh. He had to shush her sometimes, because even three stories up, she might be heard from the street.

  Prior to Amanda Appleton, he’d never had an affair with a patient. The idea had appalled him. But from the day she first flung herself across his bed, he’d felt relieved and grateful for all she’d taught him. He’d never had a wife, and when it came to advising married couples, he’d felt secretly embarrassed by the limits of his own experience. He used to worry that he did not know all he felt he should.

  She sat at the bed’s edge and squeezed Ravell’s knee. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look troubled.”

  He frowned at the ring of candlelight that wavered on the ceiling. “I’ve been thinking about a patient. An infertility case.” Ravell did not describe to her how he had stolen a bit of Peter Myrick’s semen and how, with nervous hands, he had slipped the sample under a microscope. He only said, “It turns out that the husband is azoospermic.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That means he has absolutely no hope of fathering a child. He has no sperm in his semen, none whatsoever.” Ravell sat up and punched a pillow lightly between his fists. “I don’t know how to tell them.”

  “I have no desire to adopt,” Peter Myrick said. “It’s not the same, although I admire people who do it.”

  Ravell and Peter had arranged to lunch at the Algonquin Club. They agreed to meet there as late in the day as possible, after most of the tables had been cleared, to ensure more privacy. They sat in a far corner and kept their voices down. Even their waiter sensed that he ought to stand at a distance, a crisp white towel hung over his bent arm.

  Ravell wished he could be frank, but how could he simply blurt out what he’d learned? Peter had never given permission for his manhood to be inspected and counted under a microscope. As a physician, Ravell knew he had committed an invasion of an appalling kind: what husband would trust him in the future if it became known that he had violated a patient’s privacy?

  “Perhaps it’s time we resorted to the dreaded semen analysis,” Ravell said briskly.

  “What good would it do?” Peter said. “Would it mean that we’d do anything differently?”

  “It might help you to stop blaming your wife.”

  “I’m not finding fault with anybody.”

  “Do you ever worry,” Ravell said, “that your wife may be feeling terribly despondent after all this? There are women who lose their will to live—”

  “Not Erika,” Peter said. “She has great zest for life. She’s indomitable.”

  Was Peter blinded by his own optimism, by his own gusto? Ravell wondered. Did the man know his own wife at all? Ravell gulped from a glass of ice water, then fingered the tines of his fork. Their white plates shone, clean and ready. The rack of lamb they’d ordered seemed a long time in arriving.

  “At this stage,” Peter said, “I know some might suggest mixing my seed with another man’s. But I won’t have it. If I were interested in adopting another man’s child, we’d have done that years ago. Besides,” he reasoned, “why fool ourselves? If I’ve fathered a child, I want to know it’s mine. I never want to wonder if it’s somebody else’s.”

  Their lunch arrived. The waiter replaced the cold white plates before them with hot plates laden with lamb that sizzled and steamed and ran with rich juices. Peter spooned dollops of mint jelly onto each bite with the delight of a boy who relished huge helpings of sweets. “Erika is giving a private recital at our home for my birthday,” Peter said. “And she has promised to sing my favorite arias. We’d like to invite you.”

  Ravell longed to hear her sing again. Peter’s enthusiasm welled up as he described the fine musicians he’d hired to accompany her, the turquoise damask dress he’d bought for Erika to wear at the event. “The dress is from Paris,” he said. “From Worth. I owe it to her, after all she’s endured. Besides, what could give me more pleasure on my birthday than to see my wife looking luscious?” He winked.

  After the party, Peter would leave for Egypt, where he had dealings with cotton merchants. From Cairo he would head to England to purchase the latest textile machinery. He would be gone for two months. Erika would not be joining him because she had singing engagements at the Handel and Haydn Society, as well as at the new palazzo Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner had recently opened on the Fenway.

  Since he would be gone for many weeks, Peter suggested that he might leave semen samples on ice, ready to be thawed and used on his wife in his absence. “Before I leave”—Peter leaned across the tablecloth and spoke in confidence—“perhaps you might be willing to come to the house? Perhaps on the night of my birthday recital, after the guests are gone? I think my wife and I might be more relaxed there. Things might go better at home, in our own bed, than they have gone at your office. Erika could drift to sleep afterward, and not stir until morning.”

  The invitation to enter their home intrigued Ravell. The rooms that people inhabited, he’d found, always mirrored unseen aspects of their souls. He was curious to see the paintings they’d chosen, to hear his own steps creak along the staircase they descended every day. He pictured himself opening the lid of Erika’s piano and brushing his knuckles across the ivories. He nodded as Peter talked. Ravell agreed to everything, the way one humors a child. What harm could come from pretending—at least for now—that the ghost of Peter’s future son or daughter might actually become real? Why crush a man’s hopes just before his birthday?

  And so Ravell let Peter go on speaking and imagining.

  “All I am asking is for a lucky thing to happen once,” Peter said. “For one child, boy or girl—I adore small children, their spark. To me, they’re like puppies. They’re eager to know all they can about the world. Children are always staring,” Peter went on. “Have you noticed that? They may stumble, but they pick themselves up and charge ahead.”

  Like you, Ravell thought.

  “If I had a child, I’d never stop teaching it things. . . . Last time I sailed to Europe, a tiny Italian girl saw me on the deck. She must have been about two. She left her mother and came right over to me. I held her in my lap and she opened her little fists and pointed upward. You know what she was after? She wanted me to grab a bird out of the sky and give it to her.”

  “I have no do
ubt that you would make a profoundly good father,” Ravell said.

  They left the Algonquin Club in separate carriages. Ravell headed toward the hospital, Peter toward his offices on Congress Street. Ravell told the driver to let him off early, a few blocks from his destination, so that he could stroll for a few minutes through a park.

  On the icy path Ravell’s shoes slid against the glaze. A stout nursemaid in uniform wheeled a sleeping baby in a pram, mincing her steps to keep from slipping. Near the pond, two mothers kept watch over young boys who poked and pushed toy boats through the cold water with long sticks. Children ran in circles, their aimless zigzags serving to heat their bodies on this chilly March day. Seeing families on benches, he wondered why he had held himself apart from all of this.

  Old dowagers sometimes patted his arm and asked, “Why isn’t a handsome young fellow like you married, Doctor Ravell?”

  “How can I marry?” he would say, smiling, in response. “It wouldn’t be fair to a wife. I’d be up half the night, delivering other ladies’ babies.”

  The truth was that he was fond of all women. He could never believe he had fallen in love for the last time; that was his failing. He looked forward to appointments with a patient so rotund that she barely squeezed through a doorway—because she blurted jokes that made him drop his stethoscope and laugh. Among his favorites were elderly ladies who no longer bothered to gaze at themselves in mirrors; they looked outward, gasping and rejoicing over lapdogs, children, blooming peonies. He missed young mothers whose deaths haunted him—patients whose wrists had gone limp in his hand as he’d searched in vain for a pulse.