The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  The screen door at the rear of the building remained open. A light illuminated the back stairs. He and Caroline both turned their heads when they heard the crisp clack of heels as an unseen person (a neighbor’s servant, perhaps?) passed through the alley.

  “Someone you know?” Caroline lifted her eyebrows in jest. “Another patient to whom you’ve given a private key?”

  It was a Monday evening, the night when Amanda Appleton usually found herself free to visit Ravell, due to her husband’s regularly scheduled card game with friends at the St. Botolph Club. Ordinarily it might be Amanda crossing through the yard at this hour, heading for the back entrance to Ravell’s private quarters. Amanda did indeed have a key. But tonight Amanda and her family were away in Bar Harbor, Maine.

  He made no reply. Caroline gave a rough tug to his right lapel and moved her nose closer to his. “Another patient?” she accused in a sharp whisper.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She rested one shoulder against the wall. “Women talk among themselves,” Caroline said. “That’s one thing a man like you never counts on. Amanda and I have become friends, you know.”

  He suspected that Caroline knew very well that Amanda Appleton was away with her family, that this was the night of the week they usually met.

  “Whoever would have guessed,” Caroline said, “that a lady of Amanda’s generation could be so . . . frisky?” Her shoulders twitched with mirth. From Caroline’s tone and airy manner, he realized that she was amused by the notion that he had become entangled with a woman so much older than himself.

  He placed a hand lightly on Caroline’s arm and guided her toward the formal exit to his practice. If she lingered here much longer, would she brush her lips against his face, or nip his neck? He could not predict what she might do.

  13

  Peter stretched out his arms as he stood and modeled the new boa constrictor he’d acquired during his travels. He’d coiled the snake around his neck and let it dangle the way a woman might show off her long pearls.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t he?” Peter said. “When I spotted him in a market in Tangier, I had to have him. I couldn’t resist.”

  The snake delighted Ravell. When he let Peter drape the thing around him, he felt the reptile’s sinuous weight fall against his shoulders. Before the mantel mirror Ravell posed with the boa’s patterned skin twined around him like a royal decoration. In the mirror Ravell saw his own irrepressible grin.

  “I want you to have him,” Peter said suddenly. “As a gift.”

  “God, no. I couldn’t—”

  “Please,” Peter said. “After all you’ve done.”

  “You be responsible for his upkeep, and I’ll visit him,” Ravell said.

  In his personal library Peter walked over to the wall where his collection of painted butterflies hung in fourteen individual frames. He selected the largest and most intricate one, a dazzling Morpho that Ravell had previously admired.

  “Then, I want you to accept this instead.” Peter lifted the frame from the wall and handed the miniature painting to Ravell.

  “But this must have taken you weeks to do!”

  “Take it,” Peter insisted.

  Someday, Peter said, he and Ravell ought to travel together to that island off the coast of South America, to that coconut plantation owned by Ravell’s friend. Ravell had described in ravishing terms the abundance of flora and fauna on the island. From there, Peter suggested that they might take a boat trip down the Orinoco River together, and explore the wilds of Venezuela.

  “Yes,” Ravell said, “if I can ever steal away from my medical practice.”

  “I’ll serve as your excuse,” Peter said. “Tell everyone that you’ve promised to make the trip with me.”

  Returning home from a middle-of-the-night delivery, Ravell pulled a plate of cold lamb the housekeeper had left for him from the icebox. He ate, wondering with terrible unease if anyone else knew what he did—that Peter could not possibly father a child. Suppose another specialist whom Erika and Peter had consulted in the past had lapsed—just as he himself had done—and out of curiosity had slipped a slide under a microscope and peered at the truth?

  Now that Erika was pregnant . . . how could such a thing be explained? Suppose another physician, driven by a sense of righteousness, were to confront him and make an oblique yet insinuating remark?

  A pregnancy might arise from more than one scenario, of course. An unfaithful wife . . . A secret agreement reached between a couple and their doctor to infuse the wife with an anonymous man’s sperm . . . If accused, Ravell decided that he must remain aloof, noble, and silent—as if his patients’ confidentiality were sacred to him. He would stare at his accuser until the other man turned away.

  Suppose someone told Peter, sent him an anonymous letter? The chance of that was very remote. No doctor would wish to be suspected of violating Peter’s privacy.

  Ravell put his empty plate in the sink, ran a little water over it, and retreated to the parlor. He poured himself a glass of brandy and sipped, hoping to relax, or he’d never be able to sleep. He kicked off his boots and sank into a fringed chair, his ankles crossed, his stocking feet resting on an ottoman.

  Nothing terrible would come of it, he told himself . . . only the sweetness of a small child. . . . He took a long swig and let the brandy run deep and warm his ribs, almost certain that he would be able to swallow the secret.

  As dusk shadowed the bedroom, the two men hovered over the bamboo bed where Erika lay. Her white blouse had been raised like a curtain to expose her belly, and Peter and the doctor leaned toward her navel, their heads nearly touching. Doctor Ravell gave an eager nod, unhooked the stethoscope from his ears, and passed the instrument to Peter, who frowned at first, detecting nothing. Then he jumped back with a yelp and tore the tubes away from his ears.

  “He just told me his name is Oliver,” Peter joked. “What a ghastly name.”

  “Let me have a listen,” Erika said, reaching out.

  Strangers and passersby on city streets would not have guessed just yet that she was with child. She herself could not completely believe that a living creature actually existed inside her, and that made her particularly curious to hear a heartbeat.

  She heard nothing at first, and wondered if a hoax was under way. She felt like a skeptic at a séance. What signal, precisely, was she expected to perceive—a faraway moan, a rap behind a wall?

  “Try here,” Doctor Ravell said, adjusting the stethoscope for her, moving it lower on her abdomen.

  The sounds pumped through the bones of her own ears—the first message sent by a ghost from the future, an unseen person who floated and thrived in a netherworld.

  “By God!” She laughed, her fingers fanned over her mouth to stifle her own surprise.

  The thumps might have been her own heartbeats, only wildly quicker. The marvel of it raced through her.

  The three of them listened, passing the stethoscope back and forth, over and over again. Even Doctor Ravell, who must have checked such heartbeats many times every day, appeared affected by hearing the rapid, underwater whooshes—the whip crack of the child’s heart. As he put the stethoscope back into his black medical bag, his eyes glimmered wetly.

  “He’s a sentimental man,” Erika said, after the doctor had gone.

  Peter nodded. “He’s in the right profession.”

  “It’s a postponement of your plans, that’s all,” Magdalena said upon first hearing the news. The older woman folded her arms and paced, as she was apt to do when disappointments surfaced. “In a year or two, you’ll hire a nursemaid and take the child to Italy with you.”

  Take this child from Peter? Erika thought. He’d pursue me from Milan to every small hillside village in Umbria or Tuscany, hunt me down like a kidnapper.

  Her vocal training continued to be focused and productive. In the mornings she headed to Magdalena’s house for a formal lesson, and then she returned home to practice. As long as she fed
herself bits of apples and cheese and oranges to keep her energy level, she could pitch away far into the afternoon. She’d end in exhaustion. A deadline loomed before her: only five more months remained, and soon it would be four, then just three. . . . What would happen to her life, her voice, her aspirations of Italy, after the little creature came? Surely it would be eons before such perfect stretches of solitude were hers again.

  Books about Italy, unpacked from their trunks, lay in piles around the house. These days she could not bear to look at them. If she had not gotten pregnant, where would she be at this moment? Trying to secure a fine vocal coach in Florence? Auditioning? She pictured herself having found splendid rooms overlooking the Arno, where two long shuttered windows could be flung open.

  Instead, she found herself climbing Beacon Hill. In her fourth month, before any stranger might have noticed a suspicious curve to her middle, she headed upward toward Louisburg Square, passing the stately brick homes, following the narrow streets she knew so well. She had always been a hearty walker, but now as she headed uphill, the muscles of her belly tightened, resisting every step. Each stride was cut to a third of its normal length, and such a faltering pace depressed her. The baby she carried could hardly have been larger than her own thumb. . . . So why must she mince along, as helpless as an invalid? It made her want to sob.

  For twenty-eight years, her body had been her own domain, but no longer.

  The sky darkened as she descended into Charles Street. The stores had closed; she passed storefronts with blackened interiors. Before a locked photographer’s shop she paused to inspect a portrait displayed in the window. An electric light illuminated the face of a blond boy dressed in a sailor suit. He must have been about two years old, and the sight of him made tears seep into her eyes. Whose face would she see in two years—the features of a little boy or a little girl? Reflected in the glass storefront window, she noticed her brow clenched in distress. Who was this person who stole her oxygen and reduced her crisp steps to an old lady’s creeping gait? How humbling, to bow before the needs of a being she had never seen.

  Together Erika and her cousin Phoebe strolled through the Public Garden, wheeling a carriage that held Phoebe’s fourth daughter, who had entered the world at the staggering birth weight of eleven pounds.

  “Twenty-eight years I’ve been alive,” Erika said musingly, “and my body has never made a baby before. It’s never grown all the parts for a little boy, if I have a son. I watch all the changes and wonder: how does it know?”

  “Yes.” Phoebe gave a soft laugh. “How does the body know?”

  They wheeled Baby Judith to an area shaded by rose trellises. Under an arbor they sat down on a wooden bench. In the distance children rode swan boats propelled by paddle wheels, their cries as faint as fingerprints on glass. In the carriage’s nest of pastel blankets, Baby Judith kicked her bent legs and twitched her tiny hands.

  “Since the birth,” Phoebe blurted suddenly, “something dreadful has happened.” Her husband had insisted that she leave their New Hampshire home and come down to stay with Boston relatives “for a rest.”

  Everything had been fine, Phoebe confessed—until the labor. “I am going to tell you things I haven’t told anybody else.”

  With her daughter three weeks overdue, Phoebe said, nature had done nothing. Nature might have let the baby fatten inside her forever—if her doctor had not intervened. He had sparked her labor with a substance called ergot. As she writhed on a bed with her legs open to fate, she had felt the doctor’s nearness, and everything had disappeared except for him. To him she had screamed warnings: My legs are tearing away from my body. . . . Love, that’s what she had felt for her doctor when it was over. A love as extravagant as her terror had been. The doctor rejoiced because her baby was the biggest he’d ever delivered alive.

  Before her departure for Boston, Phoebe happened to meet her New Hampshire physician on the street. It was the first time the doctor had seen her slender. “He dropped a package he was carrying!” she whispered intently. “I was so shy, I couldn’t say anything. I know he expected something. He seemed disappointed. . . .”

  Since her arrival in Boston, Phoebe had begun writing a letter to her obstetrician, and she wanted Erika to tell her—frankly, please—if sending the letter would be an act of madness. The doctor was a good man, engaged to marry for the first time in November. She had no wish to ruin anybody’s life—she wasn’t asking for much, just another meeting, and perhaps a kiss. . . . “I just want to draw him close and smell him,” she said.

  Heartache made her voice weak. Cousin Phoebe kept a clipping from a New Hampshire newspaper hidden in a large satchel. It featured a photograph of her obstetrician at an awards ceremony. In the middle of the night she’d sit and stare at the doctor’s photograph. While her four children and her husband slept, she’d weep.

  “Tell me,” Cousin Phoebe said, “if you think I ought to send the letter.”

  “Suppose this man declines your proposal?” Erika pointed out. “You’ll feel the pain of rejection. Suppose his response is positive? What would that reveal about his character?”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Phoebe said. “I just need an outsider’s voice to say it to me.”

  As they headed out of the Public Garden, Erika steered the baby’s carriage.

  “You wouldn’t believe how often this happens with expectant mothers and their obstetricians,” Cousin Phoebe said. “The lady across the street felt the same way toward her doctor. And my oldest sister, the same thing.”

  The waiting room was crowded. A young asthmatic, huge with child, wheezed in her chair, and her jaw hung open as she struggled for air. Erika surveyed the mix of ladies, ranging from expectant girls of twenty to aging widows dressed in black silk. In amusement she wondered how many of these patients harbored an unspoken fondness for Ravell.

  An opera ought to be written, she thought. A whole harem of sopranos and mezzos might sway on a stage, some writhing in the throes of childbirth, some penning letters of passion to their favorite medical man. The Doctor of Women, such an opera might be named.

  She smiled with sealed lips, as though she were privy to an understanding few women in this waiting room had. Someday she might ask Ravell about his experiences.

  Twice Ravell rushed past an open door. He wore a rose-colored cravat. When he finally noticed her in the waiting room, he snapped to a halt, his hands catching the sides of the doorway. “Erika! I didn’t realize you were coming today.”

  The doctor liked to check the baby’s heartbeat every two weeks. He led her down the hallway. “Have you felt the baby move yet?”

  When she nodded, flickers of interest brightened his eyes.

  One morning as Peter got up for work, the dawn light showed his nude silhouette as he crossed in front of the gauzy draperies. He had a long torso and a backside so muscular that she wanted to cup his buttocks in her hands.

  Suppose she had actually gone to Florence or Milan? She had not wanted to consider how her body might have fared without his. Magdalena said that once a woman has experienced physical intimacy, she finds it almost impossible to live without.

  From the bed Erika watched Peter button himself into a pair of pin-striped trousers. Shirtless, he bent over a bureau and jotted a note, a reminder to himself. His naked back formed a lean bridge of muscle. Erika smiled because he was hers, her lover. Others might admire his moustache or the tan calfskin shoes he’d purchased in London, but she had rights nobody else had: she could rise from the bed, walk over and bite his shoulder like an apple, rub her nose against his flesh and take a sniff if she felt like it.

  In the middle of the night she could not understand why her eyes had come open in the dark. She lay there, then felt it: someone gliding through soft waters within her.

  During those sleepless spaces in the night, she was no longer alone. With her palms placed against her midriff, the unknown creature’s stirrings soothed her. She had never had a companion like that,
so close and silent in the night.

  Her fingers parted in order to catch every rippling under the bones of her hands. All she knew of her child were these vigorous wanderings, not the face, nor the sex, nor the voice. Only the movements hinted at what this secret person must be like.

  One evening in Magdalena’s parlor, as Erika gave a private recital for a small circle of friends, the silky billows of her magenta dress began to move. She wanted to pause—mid-aria—and hiss down the front of her dress, “Behave yourself! Not now!”

  When viewed against the long sweep of a woman’s whole life, these were rare months, and she told herself to notice everything. So one morning, trying to savor the otherworldliness of it all, she reclined on the chaise near her bedroom window. She’d just finished bathing.

  Light circled her belly as she pulled open her dressing gown and peered over the horizon of her midriff. She had to wait a long time before anything moved. Quivers came near her navel—what caused those? A punch? A foot? She studied her belly like the pure curve of the earth. The motions could only be observed the way one stands in a field and knows, in retrospect, that one has just seen a white dart of lightning.

  Then something rolled like a ball under a rug. She gasped. A head. A human head, inside her. Shock slapped her heart. Then it was gone, submerged. During the rest of the pregnancy she never saw that head again.

  Regarding the baby’s gender: she savored the mystery and was glad not to know. For much of her life, she had longed for a daughter as a confidante, but ever since the pregnancy began, perhaps as a means of preparing herself, she had imagined it to be a boy. She envisioned sniffing his damp, salty scalp after a bath, her boy swaddled up and clean as she carried him from room to room. Her visions of him grew so real that she wondered at the loss she would surely feel if Doctor Ravell handed her a girl after the delivery: “But where is my son? That son, my son?”