The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

On the bridge the Captain said, “We are now out of communication, I’m afraid.”

  “How do you mean?” Peter asked.

  “About an hour ago,” the Captain admitted, “the gale smashed our wireless apparatus to bits.”

  It was as though a giant had lifted the ship in his arms and kept shaking it, so that they would all rattle and break.

  Singing was a form of prayer, her voice teacher Magdalena always said.

  Erika sang “Agitata da due venti” four times, five. At the Conservatory it was the aria she most feared because of its rapid passaggi. Now she sang it as if it were the only aria ever composed, the only piece of music she could remember.

  Would it be the last song any of them would ever hear?

  At this moment Ravell was probably riding a horse along the beach at the Cocal, never imagining that she was here, pounding at a piano, arching her throat heavenward, hoping not to drop like a stone to the Atlantic floor.

  The linen napkin between her legs was still dry—the only dry thing on this ship, it seemed. Suppose, in the hold of her womb, a baby as small as a pearl was now rolling inside her? Another baby’s life over, just as it was beginning . . .

  If she abandoned this piano and headed upstairs to search for Peter, the storm might hurl her against a wall and shake the baby loose from her. But maybe there was no baby, only her in a room full of people, all wondering how much worse it might become.

  She sang:

  As the gale whistled through the boat, she felt the ghost of Vivaldi pass through her. In the music room one man fell completely over another, and the two of them somersaulted toward Prudence, who hugged a velvet pillow and let out a scream.

  On the bridge the windows blurred, awash. Peter could barely discern a figure in black on the deck below. It was a stout woman he saw—Mrs. Bickford in fact, a miserable spectacle of drenched hair and skirts. Mrs. Bickford was making her way haltingly toward the bridge, no doubt to issue a complaint.

  “All passengers must stay below,” the Captain bellowed to one of his men.

  As Peter descended into the violence of the weather, holding on as best he could, he decided that he must turn Mrs. Bickford around and lead her below. Afterward he must find Erika. He hoped his wife had stayed in the stateroom as he had advised.

  On the deck between him and the dark, soaked figure of Mrs. Bickford, Peter saw a bizarre sight: the ship’s pig had gotten loose—the sweet, crazed pig ran, its split feet useless for balance on the slippery, tilting deck. The pig was being saved for a feast on their last night at sea. It was entirely possible that this might be their last night, Peter thought ironically.

  The pig had slid from the arms of a Negro crewman who was trying to capture it without getting himself drowned. As the little beast twisted and turned, its curly pink tail jiggled. The animal skittered to a ledge and hung there.

  Given the choice, Peter thought wickedly, he would prefer that Mrs. Bickford be washed overboard rather than the sweet, helpless pig.

  “Come,” he shouted into the wind, grasping the widow by her upper arm. “None of us passengers are permitted to be enjoying the scenery just now.”

  “I cannot believe I am hearing such a gorgeous voice, in such a storm!” an old man cried out from a corner of the music room.

  Nobody dared to leave the room once they entered, not even when a table that had been screwed to the floor got loose and flew.

  The melody of “Agitata da due venti” was the only lifeline God had tossed them, it seemed. The priests and Prudence were still splayed across velvet benches and pillows, the Germans no longer wore their bibs, and the purser cradled his bashed mandolin. They all hung there listening to Vivaldi’s music, as if it contained the only passage that could lead them out of this.

  “We all might very well have drowned last night,” Peter said during lunch the next day. “The engineer tells me that we rolled to the absolute limit.”

  By dawn the weather had turned serene. Repairs were already under way. Hammers flailed and mallets pounded; new screws were being driven into the teakwood ladder that had been battered. A starboard rail had been ripped away by the rush of high waters, and crew members were tying ropes around the replacement beams.

  “We’re lucky to have survived,” Mrs. Bickford said. She helped herself to more chicken croquettes and an extra pickle.

  Erika turned to the purser. “Are you going to eat your beef?” “Actually, I’m not,” the purser said. “It’s a bit tough. Too much exercise for the jaws, if you ask me.”

  Erika eyed his plate. “Would you mind if I ate it?”

  “Certainly not,” the purser said.

  To everyone’s astonishment, she lifted her fork high and aimed the prongs straight into his filet, and took his portion for herself. She tore a large piece of bread with her teeth. Soon everyone at the table except Erika had finished, their silverware resting on their plates.

  “Would you like to have the rest of my hash?” the Captain offered, extending his plate toward Erika.

  She gave him a quick smile, and a nod. Erika’s fork and knife were soon at work on his potatoes, too.

  During the storm, her stomach had been strong, but when the sun was bright and the ocean as smooth as a lake, she felt so weak she could barely stand. Peter worried that despite all the quinine they had consumed, the fever might have caught her just as they left Port of Spain. He worried that, due to quarantine regulations, they would not be allowed ashore in New York. The authorities knew they were coming from a yellow fever port.

  She went from being ravenous to not being able to hold herself upright.

  Mrs. Bickford knocked one morning on the door of their stateroom. Peter had already gone upstairs to breakfast in the saloon. When the older woman entered, she found Erika hunched over a chamber pot with her mouth open to retch, but nothing came out.

  “I’ve just come to look in on you, dear.” The widow gathered Erika’s hair into a loose knot to keep it from falling into the bowl.

  Later, Mrs. Bickford brought Erika little saltine crackers and biscuits and a large pickle to settle her stomach.

  Mrs. Bickford shifted the shawl around her shoulders and flagged down Peter as he was leaving the dining room. He wanted to duck away when he noticed her coming, but there was no pole to hide behind, no alternate avenue to take. The memory of her in her drenched black skirts during the gale reminded him of the ship’s pig running loose on the deck—the poor creature had been knocked dead by the storm. The pig had always been skittish, terrified when anybody tried to hold it. The only person the pig trusted was the butcher, whom it shadowed and followed like a pet.

  Since the storm, they’d enjoyed plenty of bacon and pork chops. The widow’s upper torso looked fatter, as though the unfortunate pig had become a visible part of her. As she stepped close to Peter, lowering her chin, two prongs formed between her brows, and he braced himself for a reprimand.

  “Your wife,” she said, her tone low and knowing, “can only be suffering from one thing.”

  “And what is that?”

  “A pregnancy.”

  Shortly after their return to New England, Erika walked across the white expanse of Boston Common on a silent, muffled winter morning. As she drew in breaths, particles of clear, cold air sharpened like crystals in her lungs. With glee—with the toe of her boot—she wrote in the newly fallen snow:

  I AM EXPECTING A BABY

  32

  “I’d never seen such a gale,” Peter said. “Even crossing the Atlantic—even when we came within sight of an iceberg—I was not so terrified.” In the months afterward, at social gatherings, Peter liked recounting what they’d witnessed during the great storm at sea. He told the story again that summer, as he relaxed on his business partner’s veranda on Cape Cod.

  Erika overheard him through an open window as she lolled in an upstairs bath. His business partner’s children ran outside, little people alive with shrieks as they chased the evening’s first fireflies. The night
s Erika had longed for had come, when she could rest her palms against her abdomen and feel the baby’s movements.

  For their weekend on Cape Cod, she had brought along a special bar of jasmine soap. Something within her had changed and evolved, but as the scent blended into the bathwater, she remembered wet orchids dangling in a forest, and a house on stilts, after-dinner lime and rum swizzles. She remembered Ravell taking hold of her face and rolling her head between his hands until her senses swooned. When Peter made love to her, she let her mind fill with Ravell because that picture brought blue sparks, pleasure, madness. Then it was over. In just a few minutes, it was always over.

  Below the window where Erika bathed, Peter and his business partner and his portly wife murmured in contentment on the porch. Their wicker chairs squeaked as they rocked.

  In the bath, the water grew cooler. Erika watched the child inside her roll, as smooth and slow as a hill that shifted position, her midriff higher on the right side until the baby reversed and rolled left.

  This little one’s movements seemed more tranquil than the last one’s. The infant floated serenely, having crossed oceans to come here. A water child.

  Now that the child had grown larger, she liked to frame the moon of her belly with her arms and encircle the tremblings.

  “Should we write to Ravell, and tell him?” she’d asked Peter.

  “Why don’t we wait until the baby’s born?” Peter said. “Just so we can assure him that everything has turned out well.”

  In late August, when Quentin was born, the doctor held him up in triumph, as if he’d just leaped, glistening and shining, from the sea of her womb.

  Erika never tired of gazing at her baby. Hour upon hour, there was always something new to see. His hair was dark, like Ravell’s. The child had delicate features, petite crimped nostrils, very small lips through which he poked a tiny kitten tongue. Quentin laced his fingers together with exquisite poise.

  One evening while Magdalena was visiting, Quentin awoke in Erika’s lap, ready to be nursed. While she and the older woman spoke, his newborn eyes stared, as blind and black as a hamster’s. His rooting mouth did the seeing for him. He tongued her sleeve. When his gums clamped—with blind success—onto her nipple, an electric current went through her.

  After Quentin had nursed enough, his head fell back, his arms outstretched, milk oozing from the corners of his mouth, his eyes closed. He looked like a man intoxicated.

  From week to week Quentin grew more awake and alert to the world. When he was two months old, while Erika and the nursemaid bathed him in the wide kitchen sink, he stared up, astonished at the noise of water running from the faucet. Stray droplets fell, and he licked them.

  “Don’t you just wonder,” Erika said to the nursemaid, “what he’s going to say when he learns to speak?”

  Wrapping the freshly bathed baby in a white towel, Erika packaged up the child and brought him to show Peter. A terry-cloth hood framed Quentin’s face like that of a miniature monk, his baby skin moist. At no moment did their son look more perfect than just after he’d been bathed.

  Peter drew the child snugly against his chest. “A warm little loaf,” he said. “He smells like he just came from the oven.”

  Even after their baby boy’s birth, she did not write to Ravell. She decided she did not want to shatter everything—Peter’s rapture over his delicate-limbed and dark-haired son, and, above all, the little boy’s position in the world. If she began a letter to Ravell, she was afraid there would be no end to all she wanted to tell him. With every phrase that poured from her, bricks would loosen from the walls of the Back Bay town house she shared with Peter. She imagined her son might be turned out into the streets, shunned because of what she had done. He is only a small boy, she reminded herself. Peter must continue to love him. He must be protected.

  When correspondence arrived from Ravell at Christmas and on other occasions, she left it to Peter to respond. She never asked if Peter had told Ravell about the child, although she presumed he had.

  PART THREE

  33

  BOSTON

  1905-1910

  Returning from attending an opera one evening, Erika headed straight to the nursery. The room was dim, but her son, outfitted in white flannel, glowed as she lifted him from his crib. With the heat of him pressed against her satin dress, she sat down in a chair and nestled his head against her neck.

  All evening, under the influence of glittering costumes and singing, the orchestra and the Opera House’s chandeliers, she had been remembering that other life she had once planned for herself. She had been imagining things that were blasphemy.

  With the baby balanced against one arm, she took huge breaths and tried to calm herself. She pulled pins from her pompadour and let the strands fall down. She put her lips against Quentin’s scalp, sniffing him, hoping the salty baby scent would center her and stop the agitation of her heart. This child is a gift. He is all I could ever want. And yet . . . Tears seeped from under her closed eyelids and wet the baby’s ears. She bent her head until it was touching his, and drowned him in her hair.

  On a winter’s night in Boston, hot air rose from the heating register, the iron grill set into the floor. The windowpanes became opaque with steam. In the darkness of their bedroom, she and Peter danced, their bare feet moving across the creaking floor. He had just returned from a trip, and, as usual, they reached in greed for each other’s bodies. By day, she pretended that the baby was really Peter’s son. By night, when she and Peter could not see each other’s faces, she pretended that she was back at the Cocal.

  It was not the low curve of her husband’s spine that her fingers stroked, but the fine fringe of hair that grew at the hollow of Ravell’s back.

  When she and Peter fell against the bed, their bodies damp and recovering, she imagined that if she opened a window, she’d hear the rough whisper of palm fronds in the wind; she’d see phosphorescent streaks across the water—not brick sidewalks crusted with ice.

  The trouble with having taken a lover was this: he never left your bed once he’d been in it. But she could never have remained at the Cocal with Ravell. How long could she have stood on a bluff and sung to the waves and the fish?

  In the morning the baby sat upright in his crib and turned and stared at her with Ravell’s dark eyes. She wondered how her life had evolved into this: for the sake of her son, she must say nothing. Quentin’s happiness and his future depended on her silence, the weight of a solemn lie.

  When she was alone at the piano, she leaned back her head and closed her eyes and heard it in her singing: the desperation that lay beneath everything.

  Peter accompanied her to a concert hall one evening. Dressed in his tall silk hat and starched collar, he was as high-spirited as ever, waving to their acquaintances. And she thought: On our honeymoon, he took me to see pyramids; thanks to him, I’ve walked through rain forests. He has given me everything. Now we even have a child, and yet . . .

  In the bedroom they continued to approach each other with the eagerness of two tennis enthusiasts, their bodies limber and ready for the match. But almost from the moment their bodies separated, Peter looked past her. He pulled a sheet of paper from the bedside table, and jotted notes about appointments, or about matters of complaint regarding shipments of machinery that had not yet been delivered.

  She lived in a world that did not matter to him. At the concert hall, he sat beside her with visible indifference. When the orchestra began an overture, his face looked numb, his expression dull. He slept with eyes wide open and waited for the performance to be over. He simply did not hear the music at all.

  During the first year after the baby’s arrival, she rarely sang in public. The gorgeous gift in her windpipe felt smothered; like a painful lump in the throat, it swelled and grew. It hurt to feel the voice there, silenced and useless.

  Then one afternoon while her son napped and she lay on her chaise, her vision blurred, and she could not tell the lace of her curtains
from the snow-flakes that fell behind them. Squeezing her eyelids tightly, she held her breath against the deadness she felt. She threw off the light knitted blanket that covered her legs, jumped up from the chaise, and paced the room. How could she allow her small, sweet son to end everything? Had she given Quentin life only to find that he had taken what was most real to her?

  She resumed her voice lessons with ferocious intensity. She gave a major recital. When Erika entered the stage to begin the performance, people stifled coughs and stopped rattling pages. As she sang, she noticed how the audience held its breath. These had always been her most passionate moments. Performing brought the deepest transport, a form of touching. Only during lovemaking had she felt anything close to the chill of pleasure sweeping through her as the audience listened.

  “Your voice is richer than before,” Magdalena said afterward. “At your age, it has ripened to its fullest power.”

  Peter brought her a newspaper, pointing to a review of her recital. The critic praised her technique and wrote that her voice was “like burning sugar in its sweetness and dark colorations.”

  Buoyed by those words, she sprang up the steps to the nursery. Quentin had learned to walk by then. She knelt beside him and pulled her son’s tiny rib cage against her own. She hugged him in apology, as though the child could hear her thoughts.

  Her own motherhood had been so long in coming that she was ashamed of her ungrateful feelings. Possibilities occurred to her that no mother was supposed to consider. She covered her son’s cheek in guilty kisses. How fresh a toddling boy’s skin was. How soft and new.