Impossible to leave him. Impossible to fly away on the wings of her voice.
“No, Mama, no!” Quentin snatched back the shoe she’d taken from him.
“You’re putting that shoe on the wrong foot,” Erika said.
“No!” At two years of age, he slapped her hand.
I am bored by the petty spats, she decided. By the fastening and refastening of small shoes. I am not alive; I am only marking time until he grows old enough to recognize his left shoe from his right.
It was a tedious thing to spend one’s day trailing after a small child, though nobody she knew admitted it. Most ladies she knew simply sighed, and handed over their young to nursemaids.
She became one of them, gone from afternoon into evening, rehearsing for other appearances and recitals. She attended countless performances at the Opera House. Sometimes she took supper with Magdalena, glad for the intimacy of their old tête-à-têtes. Erika often returned to the house long after Quentin had been tucked into bed.
Up late, she slept late, too. Whenever Peter was away, she asked the servants to place Quentin on a small bed in the room adjacent to hers. Mornings were her time with him. The little boy slept as late as she did. He did not climb from his pallet until he heard her stirring. Then he came with his teddy bear and plunked its fur down on her mattress and stood there, his breaths noisy while he waited for her to open her eyes fully. “Mama? My wanna milk,” he’d say.
“All right,” she’d say, pulling him into bed with her. She hugged his small, plump shoulders, and gave his nape loud, smacking kisses. He giggled and ducked his head as if being tickled, and then waited for her to do it again. After they both grew breathless and sore from laughing, she rang for the nursemaid to bring his milk and porridge.
One evening as Erika was changing her clothes before going out to the theatre, Quentin stood in her bedroom in soft pajamas, his feet encased in sheepskin slippers. She had just slipped a coral dress over her head. The driver would be coming around with the motorcar in fifteen minutes, and she was running late.
Her dress—donned at the last possible moment—became a hideout to Quentin. As she turned to reach for a hairbrush, he lifted her skirt and ducked under it, giggling as he held on to both of her legs.
“Quentin!” she said, laughing. “Get out of there!” In all her life, no one had ever darted under her skirt before. At two, he was short enough to stand upright between her legs. As she tried to walk forward, she saw his head protrude against her smooth skirt. “What do you think you’re doing under there? Being born?” She laughed again.
During a week when the nursemaid left to tend to her ailing mother, Erika took care of Quentin herself. On their way to the Public Garden one afternoon, she was stunned as her two-year-old reached out to examine dog excrement on the sidewalk.
“No!” she cried, amazed that she should have to explain why he must never touch such a thing.
At supper he took a fistful of bananas and flung it with exuberance toward the ceiling, saying: “BYE-E-E-E!” Erika choked on her own dinner, laughing at the sight. That got him pitching faster.
Quentin followed her into the parlor. Guests were expected soon, and the maids had filled silver bowls with salty nibbles. Quentin grabbed fast, knowing he’d be stopped. He shoved handfuls of crackers into his mouth, crushing the crumbs against his lips.
The cook had set a coconut cake on the dining room table. Quentin climbed onto a chair and dived—his full body nearly landing on the white icing—until Erika caught his squirming torso, and lifted him horizontally into the air while he kicked.
All the scolding, fighting, and explaining overwhelmed her. But every night at eight o’clock sharp, Quentin went down blissfully. He was an easy child then, a very solid sleeper. Erika wound up his wooden music box, carved in the shape of a sheep, and darkened his room. In a chair she rocked him, tucked the rubber nipple of a feeding bottle into his mouth, and stroked his straight hair. Her lips touched his forehead and she whispered: “You know Mama loves you. . . . All our fights mean nothing. . . . You know Mama loves her boy. . . . Mama will always love Quentin.”
His lips opened as he broke suction on the bottle to respond, “Yes, Mama.” They nodded together.
Quentin always wanted to be with her. He slipped away from the nursemaid and followed Erika wherever he could. She had to teach him that he should not accompany her into the bathroom, because adults needed privacy. While she used the toilet, she told him he must wait outside the closed door. Across the floor he lay down on his stomach, peeking under the door crack to see his mother’s shoes.
“Hiiiii—” he called. His tiny fingers slid under the door, waving to her. Nearly his whole little hand fit through. Playfully she lifted the sole of her shoe, pretending to step on his fingers. The hand disappeared as he giggled, and then the fingers came into view, wiggling at her.
“Hi, Mama,” he repeated hopefully, leaning his cheek against the floor, pressing his little mouth close to the crack.
“Hello, my little monkey,” she said, slowly opening the door.
At a dinner party, seated with guests around the fireplace, Peter charmed everyone with stories of his latest trip to Morocco. Whenever Peter finished his business with cotton traders in Alexandria, he liked to visit remote and fabled places. Outside Tangier, he’d traveled by mule with a guide named Hadj. They had wandered along cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, gazing far down at the green sea.
“We came upon a signal station,” Peter recalled, “where an Englishman—a kind of hermit—lived behind a white gate with a garden. On the gate a sign read LLOYD’S AGENCY. The hermit was delighted to see us. His job is to peer through a telescope and watch for vessels on the horizon.” The man wired messages to tell people in London exactly which ship had just passed Morocco.
“Just days after I met him,” Peter told the guests, “I found myself on a boat passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. I peered through my glasses at the cliffs and I saw a tiny white blur. I gave a wave, because I knew my friend must be up there, watching me.”
The guests were amused by everything Peter had seen and done. While listening, Erika toyed with the fringe of the Spanish shawl he’d brought back for her. She wondered why he—a man—was allowed to go away and leave his child for weeks that grew into months at a time, whereas she was bound to the house, tethered to the Back Bay. Why must she be the one to stay, while he was free?
If she remained in a backwater like Boston, she would never have a real career.
She had a plan, she told her husband finally. The plan was this: she would take Quentin and a servant with her, and they would go to Florence to live. Whenever Peter crossed the Atlantic, he would come to stay at the apartment she’d rented for all of them.
“You must be raving,” Peter said. He sat on the side of the bed and stared at her. A pair of socks dropped from his hand. “How many years did it take for us to have a child? And now you want to live apart? You want to take my son from me?”
“You come and go as you like, don’t you?”
“Am I supposed to provide for my family another way? The bulk of my business is conducted here in Boston.”
Peter snatched up the fallen socks and pulled them over his feet. He stood and pulled his suit jacket from the back of a chair, shoving his arms through the sleeves.
“I cannot believe you would even consider such a thing,” he said. “Quentin isn’t a lapdog you can tuck under your arm. He’ll be attending school soon. The best schools for Quentin are right here in New England.”
“The greatest kind of education would be to grow up abroad—”
“The family is here. His grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins . . . You intend to cut him off from everyone? I won’t allow it,” Peter said. “You won’t ruin Quentin’s life, and you won’t ruin mine.”
After breakfast, he left for his office. From an upstairs window, she watched him go.
Peter was in England, visiting the mills in Manchester,
when Quentin contracted diphtheria. He was four years old by then. At first her son complained of a sore throat and hoarseness. When his swallowing grew painful and his neck swelled to unbearable fullness, she realized what it must be, even before the doctor told her.
Knowing the dangers, Erika sat up at night with him. Beside her sick child, she fell asleep, sliding sideways in a chair. She understood that children could suffocate from the bacillus; it could inflame and weaken a child’s heart. It was March, still winter then, and she told the servants to bring her clean rags that had stiffened with ice while on the clothesline. She wrapped the half-frozen cloths around his feverish neck to lessen the swelling.
“Does that feel better?” she murmured, bending close. Her breath blew wisps of dark hair from his forehead.
Quentin did not open his eyes, but he heard her, and nodded. His throat had narrowed; he could not speak.
“Drink this,” she said softly, and held up a glass filled with hot water, lemon extract, and honey. “This will soothe your throat. It’s sweet.”
As her son’s head lay in helpless surrender against the pillow, his eyelids closed and moist, his features had never looked so delicate and perfect to her, like a child’s face captured by an Old Master’s brush. His chin reminded her of Ravell’s, the shape of his lips.
One morning when she woke, the light of dawn filled his room, and Quentin was struggling to breathe.
“Call the doctor,” she told the maid. “Call my father, call my brother! Tell them to come at once.”
Quentin may die, she thought, before Peter returns.
When she heard a motorcar drive up, she ran to the window, lifted the shade, and saw three men get out. She pushed the window open and called to them. Her father and brother looked up and waved. Downstairs, a maid waited to let them in.
She thought of Quentin prancing in high spirits through the Public Garden, raising his legs in goose steps. Why did a child appear in one’s life, if he were only fated to die, and melt away like winter?
Her heart sore with worry, she waited for the men to file into the room. Her little boy’s breath had developed a peculiar, unpleasant odor. While the specialist bent and fitted a tube down her son’s tiny throat, she held Quentin’s hand. The physician, who had come twice before, administered a larger dose of antitoxin serum this time.
“My wife wants you to know that she’s praying for him,” her brother, Gerald, paused to tell her softly. Just before he left, he squeezed her hand, which was unlike him. But by that afternoon, Quentin’s breathing eased. By evening, he sat up and asked in a loud, cracked voice if he could have some ice cream. She leaped from her chair and rang for a servant.
Later she wrote to Peter, Quentin has rallied. He is going to live. She wept as she wrote it.
As Quentin slowly recovered, Erika spent long hours with him. When a maid came to relieve her, Erika went to her own bed but could not nap. Peter had acquired a new toucan. In the adjacent room the bird was making dreadful screeches, its wings batting and clamoring against the bars of its cage. When Erika lifted the cage door, the toucan hopped out, flew straight into the mantel mirror, and banged its head.
One day she opened both windows in Peter’s study and set the unhappy bird on a ledge. It was spring then. The temperature was mild. I will tell Peter that someone accidentally left a window open, she decided. Erika let the toucan fly straight out above the rooftops of the Back Bay, and she felt herself going with the creature, its wings lifting to catch updrafts of air until the exotic bird became smaller and smaller, and blended into the sky.
When Quentin was cured of his diphtheria at last, Erika took him to the Boston Public Library with a friend of his. The boys got their books and raced ahead of her down the great marble staircase. At the place where the stairs turned, the boys patted the great marble lion’s backside, just as thousands of hands had done before theirs, polishing the lion’s bottom.
At the Public Garden, as Quentin and his friend skipped and ran far ahead of her, Erika felt her old restless yearning to move to Italy returning. Why must I trail after my son for the next eighteen years? she wondered. In the summer he would turn five; Quentin already needed her less. Soon school would take more hours of his day. In the end, a son grew tall and shrugged off his parents and went away.
Whereas music was hers, it would never part from her.
If only I had been born without this voice, she thought. It would have been simpler for everyone.
“Let me be frank,” Magdalena said. “If you are serious about achieving an international reputation, you shouldn’t wait. For a woman, the voice reaches its full glory in her thirties or early forties, but then—” Resting an arm across the back of the divan, Magdalena gazed through a window, perhaps recalling theatrical stages where she had sung in St. Petersburg or Milan, triumphant evenings that would not come again.
“The problem is this,” Erika said. “I can’t afford to wait all the years for my son to grow up, and Peter refuses to let me take Quentin along.”
“Can you survive by yourself? Financially, I mean?”
“I’ve got a small income from my mother’s estate—enough for one person. I haven’t the means to hire a servant or support a child.”
Magdalena sighed. “You’d never manage on your own. Not with a five-year-old child in tow.” The older woman sank against the plush burgundy cushions on her divan. She passed a box of marzipan to Erika, and then chose a piece for herself.
“What makes me desperate is knowing that this voice I’ve been given cannot possibly last.” Erika patted her throat.
“A great voice is like any other living thing,” Magdalena said. “It weakens and ages and develops breaks and loses its upper register—sooner for some of us than for others.”
Time, time. It was the press of time that pushed her and made frantic feelings circulate through her. If she waited ten years, any splendor in her voice might be gone.
An hour after she put Quentin to bed one evening, Erika tiptoed into his room again, just to stare at him. Nothing looked holier than a child asleep.
A coonskin cap hung from the bedpost. She took away the rabbit’s foot that her little son cupped in his hand, and set the trinket on the windowsill. She saw nothing of herself in his features, really. The twitch of his nose, the way his lips drew into a pucker as he made his mouth smaller—even his gestures were Ravell’s. At times she thought: Peter must see it. How could he fail to see Ravell in the black waves that fell, slightly uplifted, from the child’s temples?
At moments Peter studied their son with such sadness in his gaze that she thought: He knows. He knows, but does not want to know.
She glanced around at the objects in the nursery. A thirteen-foot-long stuffed crocodile curved along the baseboards and encircled half the room. Peter had purchased the crocodile from an old Egyptian peddler on the steps of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo during a business trip. It was the first thing visiting children chose to sit upon, and it had soon become a tattered, mangy thing.
At the age of five, Quentin was very much Peter’s boy. No one in his life had proven quite as exciting as Peter, who returned from transatlantic crossings and opened trunks and pulled out treasures that made the boy hop back in awe. Peter read to Quentin, took him fishing, showed him how to capture frogs and hold them between his thumb and forefinger. At a soda fountain, after eating ice cream, Quentin would slide from his mother’s lap and climb onto Peter’s.
“He’s trying to get warm,” Peter observed, amused. “And I’ve got the larger body mass.”
Just before she left her son’s room, Erika drew the covers higher over Quentin, draping the sheet like a collar under his chin.
In her own bedroom she sat at the vanity table and leaned closer to the mirror, uneasy at what she saw. She took a pair of tweezers and plucked several silver hairs from her head, and then rubbed rouge onto her pale cheeks. These days when she performed in costumes and jewels, her face looked paler, aged. Yet the voice w
as resplendent, everyone assured her of this—the singing trumped all petty loss of beauty.
As she watched other things fade, the voice was growing better. The voice still soared.
Erika brought Peter into the music room, relying on its fine cream-colored upholstery and good light and airiness to keep him calm, but in no time at all, the volume of Peter’s response magnified. She felt the beating of her own blood rise behind her ears.
“It’s entirely possible,” she said, “for a child to have a happy life without a mother living in the house.”
“Is it?” Peter looked at her, incredulous.
“I grew up without a mother, didn’t I? After Mama’s death when I was seven years old, my father gave me all the love I needed.”
He glowered at her. “Quentin isn’t seven. He’s five.”
Peter paced the room slowly, with emotion heightening the color in his face and neck. “It isn’t as if your mother had a choice about dying, is it?” He paused to wipe a drop of spittle from his chin. “How do you expect a boy to live with the notion that his mother has decided to abandon him?”
Erika replied almost in a whisper: “I’m not abandoning him.”
“What do you call it, then?” Peter asked. “Moving permanently to another continent, with no intention of coming back?”
She told Peter that she meant to return, but he did not believe her. To go away just for a year, or two or three, to see how she fared—that was her plan, with a couple of long visits in between. If she flourished by her efforts, she might shuttle back and forth. In the meantime she would send her son gifts, and letters twice a week. He might come to stay with her in the summers. Anything was possible. Nobody she knew had lived the life she was prepared to embark upon, the route unmapped, the road unlit. It was all a great risk.
The Doctor and the Diva Page 21