The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  “If you desert us,” he warned, “I shall have to divorce you. And I’ll take custody of our son.”

  Was he really speaking as loudly as she thought, or had her own distress turned up the volume? This could not go on much longer, because she sensed that her plans were pushing him toward being something he had never been—a man who verged on doing her harm. As Peter stalked across the carpet, his arms brushed the long draperies and she expected him to rip the hanging fabric from its rod.

  “There’s nothing more to discuss, then,” she said, and ran upstairs to lock herself in the bathroom. She went to the tub and turned on the taps, welcoming the roar of water as she prepared the hottest bath she could stand.

  As steam rose, misting the mirror, condensing on the wainscoting, Erika thought about all the years she and Peter had fallen asleep together, spines touching, and yet her husband hardly understood her. She thought of Ravell, the night they’d spent at the Esmeralda estate where they’d sat on the tall steps of the hexagonal house. As she sat on the stairs and sang, Ravell had listened more closely than anyone ever had. He’d heard what propelled her, what was now taking her away. He would not have fought her like Peter. Ravell would have nodded, knowing how long this had been in the making, and together they might have made a plan.

  It was after that conversation that she stopped loving Peter. It had drained away gradually, of course—everything she’d once felt for him. Now silence stretched between them every evening as they sat opposite each other in the dining room. As she stared down into her plate, the air filled with sounds of him chewing a piece of beef, or sucking on a pear. Their lack of conversation made her want to writhe under her clothes.

  Inside her, the discomfort was building like an illness. When she left the house, she dreaded returning in the evening and mounting the stairs to her own front door. If Peter was near, she chatted with the servants or escaped to the nursery, where she squatted beside Quentin, petting his dark silky hair while he opened his small fists to show her two cat’s-eye marbles he’d found on the grass at the Public Garden. If she passed Peter on the stairs, she turned sideways, so that her body would not graze his.

  One evening Peter came into the music room and sat down on the davenport as if he had every right to be there. “You were in a frenzy to have a baby,” he said, “and now you’re in a frenzy to run off to Italy. You find motherhood tiresome.”

  Peter leaned his head back. His eyes searched the ceiling, his Adam’s apple sharpening in his neck. “You gave birth to a little boy and now you don’t even love him,” he said.

  She wailed then, “I do love him, I do.” On the carpet she walked in half-circles, and hit the sides of her skirt with her fists. “Why can’t we all move to Italy?” she cried out.

  Peter reminded her—as though she were unaware of this—that for the past eighteen years, he had been cultivating a network of business interests among mill owners in New England, textile machinery manufacturers in Bradford, England, and cotton traders in Alexandria. “I don’t see how Italy fits into that picture,” he said coldly.

  He pushed himself from the sofa and stood up. “Why can’t you sing here? Boston is a musical city.”

  She made a face.

  His tone softened as he pleaded. “I’ve given you this house,” he said. “A beautiful life. Your son will—”

  “But it’s not what I most want,” she said.

  For a moment he looked helpless, devastated by her words. Then his mouth tightened. “Am I supposed to let my business collapse because of your—your illusions that you’ll arrive in Florence and be worshipped? There must be a thousand foreign singers who land in Italy every year—”

  She glared at him. “You hope I’ll fail.”

  “Yes,” he said. “For Quentin’s sake, I hope you’ll fail.”

  On a Thursday she arranged for her passage to Naples, but within an hour, shudders of self-blame passed through her, so she went back to the agent and asked for a refund of her ticket. It would be a deplorable act to leave Quentin. She could not do it.

  That evening when Peter arrived home from the office, a layer of light rain rested on his sandy-colored hair. Before he had even removed his overcoat, she confessed what she had done.

  “I hate my lack of resolve,” she added, and showed him the torn receipt. Later she wondered why she had admitted such a thing to him. Had she hoped to make him drive her from the house?

  His eyes became huge, daring her. “If you want it so much, why don’t you just go ahead and desert us?”

  Near midnight, Peter burst through the doorway of her bedroom. She’d been sitting up in bed, reading. He came toward her with such a wild look that she wondered if he might strike her, although he had never done so before. She tensed, ready to pull the servants’ bell and wake the whole attic full of them.

  “You love nobody except yourself!” he shouted, and suddenly his eyes watered.

  Even three stories above, no one could have failed to hear the thunder of his voice. She pictured the servants shaken into consciousness, sitting upright in their beds.

  From the room directly overhead, they heard another sound: Quentin had awakened, and was sending up a thin wail. The echoes of a little boy’s sobs shamed them into silence.

  Peter opened the door and bounded up the staircase to Quentin’s room.

  She shut off the lamp and pushed her face into a pillow and wept in the dark. I should board a ship and stop threatening, Erika thought. My indecision is tormenting us all.

  She waited until September when Peter was gone on business, so that he could not stop her. Then she stepped into Quentin’s room one evening, and ran her hands over the bedcovers to feel his small legs before she kissed him good night. She put her face close to his and said, “Tomorrow I am going away.”

  “Where?” he asked.

  “On a long journey far across the ocean. To Italy. I’m going to sing opera there.”

  He looked so alarmed that his head lifted off the pillow. “When are you coming back?”

  “Not for a long time,” she said. “But you must write me letters and tell me all about school and your friends, and I’ll write to you. I’ll even send you little presents.”

  “Is Papa going with you?”

  “No, he’ll stay here.” Except when he’s traveling, she thought. Except for the long months when he’ll be off buying Egyptian cotton or textile machinery in Manchester. But it would be best not to make the child anxious by mentioning that.

  “I want to be the best singer I can be,” she said. “Italy has many theatres and audiences love music there, so that’s where I must go so that more people will hear me.”

  “You want to be famous. That’s what Papa says you wish for.”

  “Shall I sing you another lullaby?”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “In the morning.”

  Quentin sat up and tightened his arms around her neck. He pressed the sharp bones of his face against hers. Did he mean to hug or hurt her?

  “Sing for me, Mama,” he begged. When she finished one soft little song, he asked for another—a funny one, and then another. He tried to keep her singing to him as long as he could. When she slid toward the door and opened it, he beckoned her to sit near him again.

  “Mama? Will you be here when I wake up?”

  “Yes, in the morning. But not after you get home from school. My ship will sail at noon.”

  “Mama? When are you coming back?” he asked a second time.

  To this house? she thought silently. Never back to this house. Not to live with Papa. He swears he’ll divorce me for leaving. But she did not speak those words to her son.

  How long . . . ? How long would it be before she stroked the little notch in his chin again? She didn’t know. She didn’t have a date she could promise him.

  Quentin moved his hot breath closer to her ear. “Please don’t go away.”

  She could have lost all courage at that moment. Her eyes grew wet
, but she couldn’t let Quentin see that, so she caught her tears with her thumb and rubbed them onto the sheet. “Maybe you’ll—” she said. “Maybe you’ll come to Italy and hear me sing.”

  The previous week she’d taken Quentin to the beach for one last outing together. Hand in hand, they’d run along the edge where waves met land. Whenever she looked back at their footprints in the sand, water was filling the cups of their heels, mother’s and son’s, and washing them all away.

  She pressed her nose against the top of his head and sniffed deeply, trying to hold the scent of him inside her. As he lay back down, she kissed him again, folding the blanket around his small shoulders as though it were already winter. “Remember Mama loves you,” she whispered. “Even while she’s far away, Mama always loves you.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. They nodded together, yes and yes and yes, until Quentin’s eyes closed.

  PART FOUR

  34

  I TA LY

  1910-1911

  On a sheer moonlit night, a steward rapped on her stateroom door and woke her, alerting her as they passed one of the Azores. To view it, Erika hurried up to the deck in her dressing gown and slippers. Under a generous moon, she saw the island of Pico in silhouette, its solitary peak seven thousand feet high. She imagined Ravell beside her. Like him, she was leaving one land for another, and he seemed alive in the salty tang of sea air, in the pressing onward of the ship, in the slapping weight of waves.

  They passed Gibraltar, where the people could not drink water from the rock they lived upon, so rainwater had to be collected in huge tanks. African shores appeared, and then Sardinia.

  When at last they came to the Bay of Naples, the fourteen hundred Italians in steerage waved their arms at the sky and sang in celebration of the voyage’s end. The great tossing crowd pressed against the rails with babies and bundles. When a school of porpoises glided past, the Italians pointed and cheered. The grand sight of a smoky Vesuvius unleashed the last hint of restraint in them and made them wild, their loose garments flapping, their hair flying as they danced.

  A ghostly fog threaded through Erika’s hair as she watched the shores of Italy coming closer. She thought of Lillian Nordica and Geraldine Farrar, American divas who had sailed to Europe to seek fuller careers. Both of them had arrived here so young that their mothers had accompanied them as business managers and chaperones. It was their mothers who had shaped ambitious futures for them, their mothers who were determined that their daughters would appear at Europe’s finest opera houses.

  She was much older than those two Yankee divas had been. Whatever strength a mother had given them, she must provide for herself.

  A strange hunched man met her at the Stazione Centrale in Florence. All day and all night, he must have haunted train platforms, on the lookout for a bewildered foreign face like hers. He saw her hesitate just after a cascade of luggage tumbled and landed around her.

  “You want hotel? I find,” he said in English, and made a grab for her valises.

  A hard shake of her head did not sweep him away, this creature whose long yellow teeth reminded her of a mummy with its lips dried up and gone. The hunched man wore a dark, shabby suit. She did not trust him to find a clean mattress for her.

  Erika beckoned a porter, who hauled her things toward a cluster of taxi horse cabs that waited in the street.

  “You want nice, expensive? You want cheap? I find,” the shabby man said, for he had followed her out to the horse cabs.

  A mixture of weariness and anxiety filled her chest; the night appeared so black already. If only she had not boarded such a late train from Naples—if only she had arrived tomorrow instead. The little man to her right seemed to hear her thinking these things. He pointed to himself and batted the air with his sleeves, like an insect.

  To escape him, she climbed into the cab and uttered a few words to the driver—the name of a random pension listed in the guidebook—“Bianchi, Piazza dell’Indipendenza.” When she had visited Florence previously, she and Peter had enjoyed the luxury of the Hotel Savoy, but she had to curb expenses now and could no longer stay at large, comfortable places.

  When the horse cab drew up to the pension, a woman wearing a sprigged skirt came to a third-story landing, and she looked surprised by the sight of an American lady in fine clothes.

  No, the pension owner shook her head. No more beds left. By this late hour, every bed in the city must have held a dozing body, Erika fretted; every hotel clerk had probably shut off the front-desk light and bolted the door, all booked up for the evening.

  The next pension was full, too, when the horse cab paused outside. Did every tourist who came into Florence from the Central Railway Station carry the same British guidebook? The hordes must have arrived in the city earlier in the day, and claimed every room on the list.

  At least Quentin wasn’t enduring this with her. She would have felt dreadful, pulling him along by the hand, or wandering with the sleepy weight of him against her shoulder, unable to find a bed for him. If he were here now, he’d have grown too heavy to carry. If she let him slide from her arms, he’d have sunk to his knees, his breath sweet and sticky with candy.

  When the coachman turned down a narrow, nameless street, Erika noticed a red carpet and potted palms through a glass doorway—a small hotel lobby.

  “Only one room left,” the clerk said. “I can give it to you for—” The man named a sum that sounded like a great quantity of lire, and while she stood and mentally calculated how many dollars that would translate into (she had always been slow at figures), he threw down his pen and halved the price.

  “I’ll take it,” she said, relieved. The bed sagged and a faucet dripped behind the wall and kept her awake, but she felt lucky to have found it.

  The guidebook advised her to apply to a gentleman on the Via dei Pecori about furnished apartments for rent. He escorted Erika into a building whose corridors the sun never touched. A single gas jet burned all day and all night to illuminate the stairwell and the wearisome climb four flights up. The furnished apartments were situated under the roof, and the upholstery in each held the odor of burned stew or other stale smells of previous tenants.

  Erika stood for a long while in one, attempting to envision a life here. She pulled open the shutters and found herself peering across a narrow alleyway and into the window of the opposite house, where a dog that sounded like a German shepherd gave terrible barks. She wondered if it would bark all night, a couple of yards from her pillow. “It won’t do, I’m afraid,” Erika told the agent, and she went away depressed.

  The desk clerk at her hotel was a chubby, neatly dressed man. His dark hair grew thick around his ears and had broken off into thin bristles at the top of his head, where a round spot of scalp had worn through. He wrote in the ledger in such a precise manner that Erika asked if he owned the hotel.

  “How I wish,” he said, and laughed. Erika imagined him to be the father of young children.

  He was patient with her efforts to converse in Italian. “Per favore—” she said. “How one might find a furnished room in Florence?”

  “To rent by the month?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Something pleasant but reasonable? I’ve come here to study—” She was surprised how she turned, almost pleadingly, to a stranger in this way, but there was no one else.

  He was appalled at the price the agent had quoted for the apartment she’d seen earlier that day. “Such a man is a thief,” the clerk declared. Little wrinkles worked into his forehead as they talked.

  The next morning while she sat eating breakfast and studying her Italian language book, he approached her table in the courtyard.

  “I know of a place,” he announced. “Views of the Arno. Right near the Ponte Vecchio. Very beautiful.”

  “Is it expensive?”

  “No,” he insisted, both of his forefingers pointing toward his heart in sincerity. “Only forty lire a month, plus five lire a month for servants. Sunny. Perfect.”

&
nbsp; “What is the address? May I see it?”

  He looked uneasy. The elderly proprietress was very particular in choosing her tenants, he had heard, and she might not care for foreigners, so perhaps he should go and vouch for Erika’s character himself. He found his hat and went directly out, leaving a waiter in charge of the front desk.

  While he was gone, she waited on a courtyard chair and studied Italian verbs. In a short time he returned, looking dejected.

  “No luck?”

  A servant had answered his knock, and had carried the message to the elderly landlady that a gentleman wished to rent the room for a lady, but the owner had refused to see him.

  “Did you say that I am an American?”

  “Only that you are a dignified lady, and a schoolmistress.”

  A schoolteacher. He must have fabricated that to furnish her with respectability, but perhaps the old proprietress had felt suspicious that a man had come to rent the place, rather than the lady in question.

  “What is the address?”

  Erika decided to wait until afternoon before paying a call herself at the house on Lungarno Acciaiuoli. She would have to pretend to be an entirely different lodger from the one proposed that morning.

  When a horse cab drove her past the place, she could hardly believe how splendid it was. The façade was ochre-colored, the dimensions high and narrow. The upper-story rooms had wrought-iron balconies where one could stand and survey the river with its arched bridges reflected on the water. Less than a block away, jewelers’ shops clung, like squatters’ huts, to the sides of Florence’s ancient bridge, the Ponte Vecchio.

  The driver dropped her off. She worried that just in the past hour, the place had slipped away and been rented to someone else. Thank goodness she had worn her most impressive suit, the dove gray with the blue velvet collar, and her blue toque with the ostrich feather. The day was warm, and as she strolled toward the building, she fretted that she had become hot and unkempt in the heat. Perhaps the elderly landlady suspected that the hotel clerk wished to lodge his mistress in her house. Perhaps that was why she had turned him away. Or it could be that the old lady simply disliked men, or felt afraid of them.