The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  Ravell decided to send a message at once to Mr. Hartley, who could go directly to Port of Spain and make inquiries.

  Yet less than a day afterward, Peter appeared, as hearty and ebullient as ever. He drove up in a wagon, and when he saw them, he spread his arms and jumped from the height of it, landing on both feet. After his steamer had arrived at Port of Spain, he had gone to the Club and run into Mr. Hartley, who had invited Peter to stay at Eden for a few days and join him for a bit of hunting.

  “How did you explain our situation to Mr. and Mrs. Hartley?” Erika asked when they were alone and Peter was unpacking his things.

  “What situation?”

  “The fact that you’d left me here.”

  “I told them that Ravell had you on strict bed rest, fearing a miscarriage.”

  “You told them I was pregnant?”

  “It isn’t any business of theirs what we do. These are private matters. We’ll be leaving Trinidad soon.”

  She sank her hips down on the bed and sat there, dismal at the thought. Peter was bent over a trunk, rifling through clothes. “There it is.” He held up a pistol, relieved. “The authorities confiscated my other revolver when our boat arrived at Port of Spain. They realize everybody coming from Venezuela must be armed.”

  “Peter,” she said. “My period is coming back.”

  He hesitated, brushing a scuff mark from his shoe. “I see,” he said dully.

  She let him think that she was menstruating. She could not bear the lie of it, to sleep with two men at once. During these last days on the island, until the ship took her away, she wanted to open her body to only one man, and that was Ravell.

  At Ravell’s house, her husband looked quite tall. His hair grazed the tops of doorways, and his height seemed unfamiliar to her. When Peter’s feet touched hers in bed, there was the sensation of ice. She pulled her legs away from his.

  When he perspired into the bedsheets, the air became tainted by a smell she did not recognize. What bitter foods had he eaten in Venezuela? What sour water had he poured from a pitcher and drunk? When Peter unpacked the rum he’d brought back from Bolívar—the one luxury produced there—she took a little on her tongue and tasted, grimacing. She put down the glass and pushed it away.

  It isn’t Peter who has changed, she realized. It is me. For me, everything is different now.

  When Peter left to go swimming at dawn, Ravell came into her room. They stood naked together in the light. She wore nothing except a necklace, a wreath of tiny, tear-shaped garnets. He stood with his shoulders no higher than hers, his eyes level with her eyes.

  On the morning of the day they were to leave, she woke up and found the mattress empty beside her. Sunlight warmed the walls, and Peter was suddenly, inexplicably gone.

  They were supposed to load their luggage into a wagon and set out by buggy that afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Hartley had invited them to spend Christmas at Eden, and Ravell was included as well.

  She sat up in bed and realized what had awakened her. Gunshots rang out on the beach. She shoved her arms through the sleeves of her dressing gown and ran from the house, barefoot, the wind filling her robe like a cape. More shots. Peter was shouting in frustration, and shots came again. With each burst of bullets, her heart split apart. She tripped and fell hard, her whole weight coming down against her outthrust palms. Sand grated her knees and she got up, still running, until she saw Peter and Ravell, both of them alive. Peter was aiming his pistol and shooting at the beach itself. With each bullet, sand spit skyward and sprayed.

  He’d been unable to catch the specimens he’d wanted to pack in alcohol and take back to New England. Portuguese men-of-war had washed up in brilliant color across the beach, with their long turquoise and violet streamers, but they were not the quarry Peter was after. It was the strange four-eyed fish that captivated him, the ones with divided eyes. Those fish could see simultaneously above the ocean’s surface and below its depths. Every time Peter felt on the brink of capturing one, the four-eyed fish eluded him, and so he’d decided to stop them with something faster than his hands.

  “My goodness,” Erika said. “You have no idea—how much you just frightened me.” She pressed one hand against her stomach; the other hand flew to her forehead as she stood there, recovering.

  During their last hour at the Cocal, Erika sat under a grove of palms and listened to the fronds crackle as she watched the surf. She made Ravell bring her a chilled coconut. He’d drilled a little hole into it and put a straw inside. “This is the thing I want to drink,” she said, laughing, “just before I die.” She dug her toes deep under the sand until her feet touched the place where it grew damp and cool, and she sipped the clear juice from the coconut and felt the sweetness flow and spread inside her. I will never see this place again, she thought, and sipped slowly, trying to make it last.

  When they climbed into the buggy to leave, Munga and the other coolies gathered around to say farewell. Bowing low to Peter and Erika, Munga placed their hands upon his head.

  The presence of the Hartley children no longer tormented Erika. The thunder of their small feet on the spiral staircase as they chased one another was part of the surroundings—like hibiscus, or hummingbirds. Even the Hartley baby did not matter. Instead, she thought about Ravell.

  While Peter and Erika were guests at Eden, Ravell decided to stay at the Queens Park Hotel, which had recently reopened. He told Mr. and Mrs. Hartley that he had business to take care of in town.

  The day before Christmas, Peter and Mr. Hartley took their guns and left the house very early to hunt deer. While Erika still lay under the bedcovers, she heard a horn in the distance, which triggered thrilling barks from the new hounds in Mr. Hartley’s kennel. In the bed she hugged a fat pillow and smiled to herself, knowing that day she would be able to escape to town to see Ravell.

  “I have shopping to do,” she told Mrs. Hartley.

  Since they’d come to Eden, Peter had asked Erika, rather gently, if her period had finished yet. She told him half-truths. For days, she told Peter, she had feared that her period might be on the verge of beginning, but so far it hadn’t. She hinted that another baby might be struggling to take root; if they made love, they might risk jarring a baby’s tenuous hold.

  At this, Peter gave a delicate smile. She felt a pinprick of shame, toying with his hopes. Peter backed away from her. He regarded her from a slight distance, almost reverently.

  On Christmas Eve, to her own surprise, she felt shivers of joy as she helped Mr. and Mrs. Hartley sneak into the darkness of the children’s rooms, placing gifts under their beds while they were sleeping. The eldest boy only pretended to have his eyes closed when they crept in. As soon as the grown-ups finished, he woke all the others and the upper floor exploded into happy pranks and havoc.

  In the parlor, after a midnight dinner, Peter held forth, telling all the guests about the unusual sights he’d witnessed during his Orinoco trip. He described how women in Venezuela fenced off areas of the river so they could launder things in safety, and not be attacked by alligators or electric eels or other biting fish.

  “Things are a bit more civilized here,” Mr. Hartley declared. He sipped the last of his eggnog, and set the goblet down. “In Trinidad and Jamaica, we’ve got laws against shooting birds, for example—whereas in Venezuela you’ve got terrible slaughter going on.”

  “For the feathers,” his wife added. “For ladies’ hats.”

  Ravell excused himself and went upstairs. From the distant reaches of the second story, the flush of a toilet could be heard.

  Erika lingered for a time in the parlor, then slipped away. In the hallway upstairs she caught Ravell by both wrists and pulled him into the darkness of a linen closet.

  “Has your period come?” Ravell whispered. “You said you saw signs of it?”

  “Not yet,” she told him in delight. “Any hour it might come, but not yet.” The linen closet smelled of mothballs and cedar and woolen blankets and starched sheets on the s
helves. She pulled pillows down so they could cushion themselves against the floor, and she unleashed her breasts from her corset. They had to be hasty, just a fast lift of her skirts, the licks of heat continuing until she swallowed her moans, her pompadour loosening, the pins coming unhinged.

  No one saw. No one heard. No one who mattered, at least. Ravell emerged from the closet first, and started down the stairs. Erika waited a moment before following, but as she gathered up her skirts and slipped from the closet, a servant was heading down the hallway with folded bedding in her arms. It was the green-eyed servant girl, Uma. She paused and stared strangely at Erika, and pointed, finally, at Erika’s hair. It had fallen to one side. Erika hurried to her room, where she stood before a mirror, straightening herself. With her elbows raised, she smoothed her pompadour, and wondered how long it would take for the flush of high color in her face to subside.

  “You cannot leave this island without seeing our famous horse races,” Mr. Hartley told Peter and Erika. “The celebrations go on for three days.”

  All the people of Trinidad filled the roads and headed for Port of Spain for the event, which always occurred just after Christmas. En route to the festivities, Erika could not keep herself from staring at the travelers they passed. From across the island, dilapidated, rickety carts all moved in the same direction, carrying entire coolie families: the men in white, the women and children sheathed in silks that stunned the eye—a saturation of amethyst, topaz, emerald, and marigold.

  On Port of Spain’s Savannah, where the races took place, a mounted escort delivered the Governor to the grandstand. Behind bamboo stands, coolies peddled curries and potato-filled pastries.

  Peter and Mr. Hartley and other friends cheered the riders. Their ears grew pink as they shouted for the horses they’d bet on. Erika studied the crowd of spectators. The races did not interest her so much as the staggering array of colors that fanned across the perimeters of the Savannah. As women in saris brushed past, Erika stared at the rosettes of gold pierced through their left nostrils, and she counted the earrings—at least five—that outlined each woman’s ear. They were outfitted like princesses, and as they walked, one heard the sound of money. Coolie husbands often invested all their savings in their wives’ adornments, in the gold and silver bracelets that clinked from wrist to elbow. The wives’ anklets, too, jingled as they stepped.

  Suppose one of these women deserted her husband? Erika thought. He would lose everything.

  Ravell wandered off to say hello to an acquaintance. When he made his way back through the crowd, he insinuated himself behind Erika and squeezed her lightly at the waist. Nothing seemed quite so delicious as that moment, his hands upon her, then gone.

  He was standing next to her when the one horrible event of the afternoon came. A nimble jockey, as slight as a child on the back of his horse, rushed into the lead, upsetting all predictions, surprising and thrilling nearly everybody. The hordes opened their mouths. Silk handkerchiefs flashed in the air as he won. Hearing the roar, Erika’s eyes smarted with tears: it reminded her of those times when she’d sung so well that the audience had been lifted to their feet.

  Afterward Erika kept thinking of those cheers, the last sounds the jockey must have heard. At least that rising of voices reached his ears. For just after he won, the jockey’s horse ran into a post and the man fell to the ground, dead.

  31

  As a lighter carried them to the steamship anchored offshore, she and Peter waved to Ravell until their arms ached, and he became a fading figure on the wharf.

  “We’ll visit Ravell again next year,” Peter said. Erika noticed that her husband, like her, seemed a little bleak and mournful.

  On the steamship Trent, Erika and Peter had been given the best stateroom, the one vacated by Trinidad’s Governor, who had recently returned from England. But she did not want to go to their quarters yet. At the Captain’s invitation, Peter hurried off to the bridge to survey the panorama of the Caribbean while she remained at the stern. With a sense of stabbing loss, she stared back in the direction from which they had come.

  The island of coconut palms sank away and Ravell disappeared over the edge of the earth, like a setting sun.

  The previous night at the Eden estate, she and Ravell had stepped out into the garden and stood behind a tall hedge, knowing these would be their last moments alone together. In the darkness they made promises to write to each other, and she told him she would send a friend’s address (Magdalena’s, perhaps?) where he might send her private letters. He held her so tightly and for so long that she had grown nervous and worried that the others who remained in the house might question their absence. As she began to pull away, his shoulders trembled, and she felt shudders of sadness moving through him. His cheeks were wet when she kissed his face. She squeezed his hands hard before she broke away from him—afraid that she’d cry, too—and hurried back to the house. It was a long time before he followed her. When he finally returned to the parlor, he wore an overcoat, waved a brusque good-bye to everyone, and departed quickly.

  Seabirds followed in the steamer’s wake, fluttering behind the boat like tiny pennants, caught up in invisible drafts of air. She did not want to turn around and face north, so she stood there, wind-whipped and numb. For several moments she bowed her head and sobbed hard in silence. Fortunately no one passed by, so no one noticed. Only when a hard gust sucked her parasol inside out did she grab the handle and fight to set it aright, and then she went below.

  Near the Bahamas they awoke to a day that was deceptively clear. They were coming to the end of the tropics, yet seaweed still lay thick on the surface, and flying fish still erupted in spurts. Everyone had shed their whites and dug through their trunks for heavier clothes. By tomorrow they would stand at the rails shivering.

  Peter and Erika sat at the Captain’s table, along with Mrs. Bickford, a widow traveling with her daughter Prudence. The two ladies had been visiting Mrs. Bickford’s brother, the American consul in Barbados. During lunch Mrs. Bickford said that she felt quite appalled by the card playing and gambling on board—even the four Colombian priests had been at it. After lunch she intended to head directly down to her stateroom and write a letter of complaint to the Company.

  As she spoke, such a heavy roll moved under the steamer that it overturned Mrs. Bickford’s bowl of curry soup, spreading a stain of violent yellow across the tablecloth. That was the first sign of the weather to come.

  At a nearby table, Germans sat with their napkins tied around their necks like bibs. When one man leaned back gently, the front legs of his chair lifted slightly. As the sea pitched again, the German fell right over, his black shoes pointed toward the ceiling.

  By three o’clock the skies had darkened. Standing on the ship’s bridge, Peter saw a wave reach up and break a chain that held a set of deck chairs. Half the deck chairs washed into the sea; the other loose chairs were sent hurtling with a force that could kill a man.

  The crew hands rushed to tighten doors and batten down whatever they could. The storm shifted the cargo—coal, bananas, thousands of bags of cocoa, a herd of Hereford cows—and made the ship list badly to port. Peter could feel the imbalance in his hip and shoulders, as if one of his legs were shorter than the other. The steamer butted hard against the sea. His heart took a wild leap as he watched a wave crash higher than the ship’s funnel, because it looked so terrible, and so glorious.

  Erika braced herself as she moved down the corridor, her arms horizontal, her palms pressing the walls as she lurched from side to side. A man threw open the door to his stateroom and pointed to water sloshing across his floor. His mouth was agape.

  The purser, carrying a mandolin, staggered and stumbled toward the music room, where he hoped to calm the passengers by playing a few tunes. The sea heaved him hard against a door, and he fell backward. Erika winced at what she saw next: the purser’s mandolin, smooth as a red-gold gourd, hit a wall, and its neck snapped. When the purser turned the wooden instrument over,
the front had been bashed to splinters.

  When he glanced up, she saw the anguish welling up in his eyes, and she knew what she must do.

  In the music room the Colombian priests lay stomach-down on the velvet window seats, their heads hanging over the sides of the long benches.

  She went to the piano, planted her feet firmly against the floor, and accompanied herself as she sang in Italian. Her fingers hit the notes quickly, her throat on fire, with her voice leaping across two octaves, outrunning the waves.

  More passengers appeared, drawn to the furious music. Caught in stairwells, afraid to remain in their staterooms, they made their way toward the sound of Vivaldi. Mrs. Bickford’s daughter Prudence entered and dived against a bank of velvet pillows. Others held fast to whatever they could.

  In her stateroom, after finishing her letter of complaint to the Company about the gambling on board, Mrs. Bickford found it impossible to nap. Fear roused her from her bed. Her daughter had gone to the music room, and Mrs. Bickford decided that she did not want to die alone. She put on her best emerald necklace and tucked two pickles, for which she had a great fondness, into her pocket. Just before she closed the door to her stateroom, she heard an explosion of glass and water behind her; she turned to see that a tremendous wave had punched through both port-holes, and the sea poured in as if through a fire hose.

  Mrs. Bickford headed for the stairwell, feeling she ought to report this. She gripped every rail, making her way upward. Overhead, she heard havoc in the saloon—the smashing of what must have been stacks of white dinner plates.