The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  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.

  7

  On 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:

  “Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa . . .”

  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.

  8

  That 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.

  “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 introduc
ing 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.

  “Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa . . .”

  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 u
p 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.