The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  How could he ever manage a wife, with so many patients? Their needs sometimes exhausted him. By day’s end, he could not have gone upstairs to his rooms and listened to a wife’s problems. At suppertime he occasionally took a book and carried his plate into his study just to escape the chatter of his housekeeper.

  Still, he wondered if he kept himself from being fully alive by never marrying. At the park a boy held up a baseball glove to catch a ball and missed; the ball landed at Ravell’s feet and he reached down and threw it back. Would he never watch his own child being born? Would he remain an observer, in service to others’ lives?

  He understood Peter’s longings more than he dared to say.

  4

  “It’s still a tad early, Doctor,” the parlor maid confided in a rough, splintery whisper as she opened the door. “The musicians are upstairs, rehearsing with Madame von Kessler.” In the entry hall Ravell took a seat on the velvet cushion of a carved bench. The maid put a finger to her lips as they both heard violins strike up overhead.

  The stringed instruments soared in unison, in an exuberance of wings. Erika von Kessler’s voice swooped in and caught the air currents of the violins, leading them heavenward. Phrases of the aria she sang—Handel’s “Va col canto”—echoed down the wide black walnut staircase.

  The thin parlor maid folded Ravell’s coat over her arm, her wiry gray hair pinned tightly against her head. Then, with a whimsy Ravell would never have expected from a woman her age, she smiled and rose up on her toes like a ballerina and danced into a dim corridor, out of sight.

  It was a stately house—narrow and vertical like the other brick residences on Beacon Street. The entry hall was unusually spacious, with dark wallpaper that had the sheen of gilded leather, imported from somewhere exotic—Morocco, perhaps. While Ravell waited alone, he reached out and touched the wall’s leathery paper with its embossed filigree.

  Just as the aria ended, Peter appeared from a side staircase that ran five stories from top to bottom of the house. “Forgive me,” he said, breathless, pulling on his French cuffs before he clasped Ravell’s hand. “When I heard the bell, I put my head out the window and saw you standing on the front steps—but I found myself standing three stories above you with not a stitch of clothing on my body!” He and Ravell both laughed.

  After all the guests had arrived, they took their cue and headed upstairs to the music room, where Erika stood near the piano singing “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro, her shoulders half-exposed in a dress that shimmered like pale turquoise water. She placed one hand on the piano, welcoming everyone with her other arm outstretched.

  The fashionable white woodwork made the music room feel larger and more airy than anywhere else in the high, narrow house. As she moved through more Handel and Mozart, to “Caro mio ben,” her eyes glittered and skimmed across the audience. I always search for a face I can sing to, Erika had told Ravell. Tonight he hoped that face would be his own. When she broke into a flirtatious “Havanaise” and “Près des remparts de Séville” from Carmen, she tilted her shoulders and swished her skirts at her husband, and then she glanced at Ravell, as if to say, After the rest of the guests leave, it will be just us here—Peter, you, and me. The giddiness in her expression was impossible to miss.

  The enthusiasm of the audience was so great that they demanded encore after encore, until she finally refused to sing anymore. Rings of light shone on her half-bared shoulders. Her face was luminous, moist with exertion. How different she seemed here, Ravell thought, than when she sat in his consulting room. He imagined that if they extinguished every light in the house, her face would remain visible in the dark, incandescent. He wondered if she, like so many artists, suffered from periods of manic euphoria—followed by debilitating gloom.

  They raised champagne flutes and toasted Peter’s birthday; they ate mint ice cream and hazelnut torte. As the party wound to a close, her brother, Doctor Gerald von Kessler, lingered in the entry hall with Ravell. It appeared they would be the last guests to go.

  Erika had already declared herself exhausted and she’d bid her brother good night and gone upstairs. For the sake of appearances, she’d also made a show of saying farewell to Ravell, although their business for the evening was hardly finished.

  “May I drop you somewhere?” Doctor von Kessler asked Ravell, opening the front door for them to exit together.

  Ravell glanced at Peter. Peter stared at him. They had made no firm plan, no excuse for him to remain after the other guests had departed.

  “My place isn’t far,” Ravell told von Kessler. “Just over on Commonwealth Avenue. I’m in the mood for a little brisk exercise.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” Doctor von Kessler offered, clearly intent on further conversation. His wife had gone to New Hampshire to visit her sister, who’d recently given birth to a sixth child, so he was alone.

  Ravell could think of no graceful way to refuse his company. Under a streetlight near the curb, von Kessler’s handsome brougham waited. The driver had dozed off. Doctor von Kessler nudged the man awake, and instructed the driver to meet them over at Ravell’s address.

  As they walked, von Kessler adjusted his muffler. “So how is the treatment progressing? Are my sister and her husband—?”

  Ravell avoided answering. At Clarendon Street, as a cart clattered past in the darkness, he put out an arm to caution his companion before crossing.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Doctor von Kessler said, “but it’s dreadfully hard on Erika, prolonging things.”

  Ravell sensed the doubts and barely disguised judgments of the other physician. If you don’t feel capable of handling the case—just say so, von Kessler might as well have been saying, and we’ll move on to another man in the profession who may be.

  “What’s the prognosis? Is my sister able to conceive, in your estimation?”

  “Your sister is as fertile as any woman in my practice.”

  “Then why—?” von Kessler said, frowning.

  “Confidentiality is at stake here,” Ravell said. “If you persist in conveying such impatience to your sister, it won’t help matters.”

  Under a lamppost on Marlborough Street, von Kessler stopped mid-stride. A tall, large man, he loomed over Ravell in the darkness. “Are there techniques you haven’t tried? Is there any cause for optimism?”

  With all the bravado he could muster, Ravell caught himself uttering words he knew he should not have said. “Of course. Absolutely.” At this, the other man’s shoulders softened and relaxed, and Ravell felt he had just made an awkward promise.

  By the time they reached Ravell’s house on Commonwealth Avenue, von Kessler’s rig was waiting at the curb. Once again they had to rouse the driver, a man who clearly had a gift for dozing anywhere. The other physician raised his hat to Ravell as they drove off.

  The telephone was ringing inside his office as Ravell unlocked the door. He hastened to catch it before the caller hung up.

  “Are you coming back to the house?” Peter said. “We are waiting for you. Knock softly,” he added, “so as not to wake the servants.”

  It was Peter himself who opened the stout front door as soon as Ravell’s knuckles grazed the wood. Peter tightened the belt of his silk dressing gown, which he wore over pajamas. “I thought we’d never be rid of my brother-in-law,” he muttered.

  As they stole up the grand public staircase (the steps creaked less there than on the second, narrower staircase along the side of the house, Peter confided), Ravell wondered if he ought to be carrying his shoes in his hand. Peter led him into the family’s private quarters, careful to lock the bedroom door behind them.

  Erika lay on a peach velvet chaise longue in her own silk robe and matching gown, reading a ladies’ magazine. “I see you’ve come to help us out,” she remarked, sounding amused.

  He’d never seen her hair fully unleashed from its pompadour before; it rippled and streamed across the back of the chaise, the strands reaching her elbows. Contrary to
what she’d told her brother, she didn’t appear fatigued after her performance. With her body outlined under silk, she looked ready to leap, quite impetuously, from her long chair.

  A chambermaid had already turned down the fine linens of their great bamboo bed. The pillows lay smooth, the sheets folded back in parallel triangles, his and hers. The bed had been a wedding gift, built in Japan, they told Ravell.

  “This isn’t the sort of house call I usually make,” Ravell said lightly. He thought of the great Doctor Sims. Back in the 1840s and 1850s, Doctor Sims had not hesitated to bring his newfangled instruments into a married couple’s home and stand at the ready, behind a wall, to assist conception—an arrangement that shocked any number of people.

  “I suppose we ought to begin,” Peter said, his hands hidden in the pockets of his long robe.

  The three of them looked at one another. Ravell brought his heels together and stood straighter. He reached into his black bag and gave Peter a special condom, telling him that he should use it with care so that not a drop of his precious seed would be lost. Ravell explained that he would reappear afterward to aim the syringe directly into the opening of the womb. The quick injection might prevent the sperm from tiring on their journey, and from going astray. The syringe might carry the seed more effectively—even faster into a wife’s depths—than nature could.

  Erika and Peter knew such things by now, of course. “Have you any other advice for us?” Peter joked.

  “Enjoy yourselves,” Ravell said. “And let me know when you’ve finished.” He took his black leather medical bag and found his own way through the adjoining room, which happened to be a bathroom. From there he wandered into what appeared to be Peter’s private study and latched the door.

  To distract himself, Ravell picked up a stereoscope. He inserted photographs Peter kept of bazaars in Cairo, and of serpentine streets and arches that might be located, Ravell guessed, in Morocco. Held up to the light, viewed through the stereoscope, the scenes shifted in the brain and became three-dimensional, so that he felt himself step inside dusty North African towns where he had never been.

  When he heard the quickening of her breaths in the other room, he put down the slides and the stereoscope and shut his eyes. The door was closed, but he heard them nonetheless. He could not focus on anything else. Not a sound came from Peter, only from her. Her gasps heated up in a mounting crescendo. Something thudded. (A foot or leg against the bamboo bed?)

  Ravell walked the circuit of Peter’s study, trying to mask the echoes of lovemaking with his own footsteps. He leaned closer to inspect a dozen framed images on the walls—a series of butterflies Peter had painted (Morphos, Caligos, extraordinary specimens)—all exquisite miniatures, absolutely true to nature, the colors applied with a hair-thin brush. Normally such paintings would have ensnared Ravell’s complete attention.

  But not tonight.

  Peter’s instincts had been good. He had predicted that after a performance, his wife’s every pore would open in a kind of radiance. Privately Ravell had to agree: if there was ever a time to impregnate her, tonight was surely it. Was this the same woman who had complained to him—to the point of weeping—about her husband’s obsessive tracking of her periods, his habit of picking up undergarments she’d dropped to the floor and turning them inside out, checking for blood?

  How relaxed she had seemed tonight when he, her doctor, had entered the bedroom. He’d worried that she might resent his presence, but clearly she wasn’t minding the intrusion at all. In the adjacent room, the bamboo wedding bed squeaked like an object vibrating on a factory chassis. Ravell envisioned it shuttling back and forth at a rate faster than the human eye could measure. His chest hurt from the effort of trying not to make a sound, as though something sacred were occurring behind that closed door.

  She began to use her voice, issuing more than pants of pleasure. He heard hints of the music they’d all reveled in earlier, her back probably curved, her mouth open as notes leaped from her.

  He couldn’t recall ever having been in such a position before. In hotels, yes. But not as a physician. No other couple had ever suggested that he embroil himself like this.

  Why had he come? He didn’t really believe he could help Peter impregnate her, did he?

  So why had he come—to torment himself? He rubbed his palm across his face as roughly as if he were washing it. It was unbearable to think, just now, of ruining their hopes. And the elation in Erika that he’d seen tonight—he wanted to keep sparks of that alive. Yet the fact was that Peter’s sterility could not be changed. Ravell shut his eyes at the thought. I will deal with the consequences of that later, he decided.

  In the corner of the study Peter kept a huge birdcage. Either Peter or one of the servants had draped a cover over the bars to help the creature sleep. Ravell lifted the cloth to peek. A gorgeous parrot balanced on a swing, its feathers saturated with scarlet, yellows, and cobalt blue. Ravell removed the cover completely to have a better look.

  The parrot’s clawed feet shifted on the bar. The cage trembled as the bird awoke.

  “Kiss me!” it squawked. “Kiss me!”

  Ravell threw the cover back over the bars and the bird went silent.

  When Peter appeared, blinking hard against the light, he handed Ravell a small balloon filled with whitish liquid. “Did the parrot wake up?” he asked, incredulous. Ravell quickly turned away and reached into his medical bag, wiping his smile away with his hand.

  Erika lay on the bed, fully draped in her silks. Her skin was moist, her cheeks and forehead flushed. The smell of sex filled the room, though she’d tried to disguise it by spraying herself with an atomizer that rested, half-full, on the night table. Her thighs were damp with the spray she’d flashed across them, preparing herself for the doctor. The fragrance was fruity with cherries.

  Peter held a bright light for the doctor as Ravell prepared his instruments. He took the condom and siphoned its contents between Erika’s open legs. Meticulously he completed his work.

  In his dressing robe and slippers, Peter escorted the doctor through the dark house. At the front door, Peter rose up on the balls of his feet, looking pleased. “Maybe tonight will be the turning point,” he said.

  Ravell had taken care to save the condom that Peter had given him. In the small hours of the night, back in his office, he cut off the end of the rubber he’d tied so precisely, and extracted an unused portion of residue from the condom’s interior. He smeared a few drops across a slide, and peered at this second sample. He squinted, watching for anything to float into view, but saw nothing that swam or wiggled or flitted past. The second sample, too, was as lifeless as water siphoned from the Dead Sea.

  5

  “I no longer wish to become a mother,” Erika said. In his medical office she sat dressed in a smart blue-gray suit with velvet lapels, nipped and tailored to display her slim waist. On her head she wore a matching blue toque, pinned at a fashionable angle against her hair.

  She’s in despair again, Ravell thought. She cannot really mean this.

  He listened. Her husband had gone away on business, she said, and when he returned, he would find his life forever changed. “I know I’m about to cause him great sadness,” she added.

  He kept his eyes on her for so long that she finally glanced away from him—out of embarrassment, perhaps. She tilted her chin upward as if to scan the spines of the medical texts on his shelves. Clearly she had made some sort of decision: he sensed an underlying cheerfulness in her, and that worried him. Yet he still could not be certain that she was a person on the brink of extinguishing her own life. Less than a week previously, Ravell had entered her bedroom and smelled her as she lay in her nest of silks. He’d heard her every inhalation of pleasure. She was a woman of emotions and appetites so strong that she forgot—at least for the duration of lovemaking—why her husband had ever irritated her.

  “What are you planning to do that might cause Peter such sadness?”

  She would no
t answer. There was finality in every sharp turn of her head. If she walked out of his practice today, he knew she would not return. (“I warned you,” her sister-in-law might rail at him later. “And you did nothing.”) The prospect that he would disappoint Peter and Erika and all the von Kesslers—that these efforts might provoke a tragedy—sank through him.

  Why had he lied to her brother in such a foolhardy way? Insinuating that he could cure what could not be changed? In the end they would believe the failure was his.

  He had it in his power to save her life, if that was really what was at stake here. He could satisfy them all. It would be easy enough.

  But I cannot do it, he thought. I would never do such a thing.

  “So—” he said. “You are refusing to seek my help in trying to conceive? Is that what you mean?”

  “I’ve come to say good-bye to you,” Erika said.

  He felt alarm pulse in his wrists. I am at my best in times of trouble, he thought. At moments of greatest emergency. Others depended on his ability to rush into a dark room where a dire scene was unfolding and react as if by instinct. It was a gift he had: he could decide a thing quickly, in a flash of light from an opening door. In this way he had pulled forth babies from wombs that might soon have become graves; he had revived half-conscious mothers and staved off more deaths than he could remember.

  A doctor is supposed to save lives, he thought, by any possible means. Erika has been tortured by this situation long enough, he decided. His leg muscles flexed; he prepared to rise from his chair. Above all, he must keep her from walking through the door and disappearing.

  “Erika,” he said, and leaned across the desk. “Are you depressed?”