Erika was glad the landlady couldn’t see the look of distress that must have flitted across her own face. She confessed that she had expected her husband, Peter, to write at least one letter—if only to persuade her to return.
Not a single word had arrived from him. His silence, his rage of pride, surprised her. He had certainly not come to Florence, as she’d imagined he might.
“And your son?” Donna Anna asked.
Erika recalled singing Quentin to sleep, his hair like dark feathers against her hand. She explained how her son had just been learning to form letters of the alphabet with his pen when she left for Italy. “If he were older, I would have made him promise to write me letters,” she said. But Quentin was too young. Already her son must have half-forgotten her.
The blind woman listened, her head bowed as though she were studying Erika’s feet, and the unevenness in the tiled floors. Donna Anna rose from her seat and motioned for Erika to join her on the balcony. “Remember why you came here,” Donna Anna said as she pointed upward. Even if she couldn’t see the night sky, she knew what existed there.“You came here to reach the stars,” Donna Anna said. “To touch the moon.”
40
TRINIDAD
1911
Ravell dropped Peter’s letter onto the desk, having reread it several times. He got his rain slicker and walked down to the beach. A late morning shower had just finished. The water looked dark, and the sand felt gritty as it sank underfoot. As he stared into the waves, he thought about what the letter meant.
My dear Ravell,
My apologies for not having written for so long, but the news is bitter from my end. It saddens me to report this, but since you are like a brother to me, I don’t wish to hide the situation from you. Erika has left me and moved to Florence, Italy, with the hope of developing her operatic career. After three years have passed, the law will permit me to divorce her, and I intend to do so.
Pulling off his shoes, Ravell tossed them onto the damp sand. During the months after Erika and Peter had left the Cocal, Ravell had waited and hoped for any news, but since the day the steamship had taken Erika from Trinidad six years previously, there had been not a single word from her—only a few rare letters from Peter.
With his trousers rolled to his knees, Ravell stood at the shore and let the coolness and foam wash over his feet. This was the Atlantic—part of the same sweep of waters that reached through the Strait of Gibraltar and licked the boot of Italy, only to reverse and mingle with this vast ocean, traveling thousands of miles before it rolled up here, all brine and breakers. The tide tugged gently at his ankles, and he suddenly felt closer to Erika than he had been in years.
Perhaps I should go to Florence, he thought, and search for her.
Before Erika’s departure from Trinidad, she had intimated that she might send him a safe address—perhaps that of a friend—where he could write to her, but she had never done so. The cold wake of silence she’d left behind had hurt and bewildered him. He had not been in a position to write any sort of private message to her—as she well understood. From a hundred street corners in the city of Boston, she could easily have slipped a brief note or a farewell letter into a mailbox. Once when an envelope arrived addressed by her husband, Ravell put the letter to his nose, hoping for a whiff of the lilac sachets she kept in her drawers, but the paper smelled instead of pencil shavings and stale tobacco.
About a year after Erika left, he had gone into the forest one day and reclined on the ground where he had made love to her. Lying on his back, he heard wind pass through palm fronds. He remembered her soaked white shirtwaist and her walking skirt, limp with rain.
On the veranda at Eden, Ravell sat one night with Hartley and his wife, Stella, sharing Peter’s news. The drama of it impressed them. In the darkness, dressed in their white clothes, they held themselves as motionless as the wicker chairs they sat upon.
“Does she plan to support herself by singing?” Hartley asked. “Or is her poor husband paying for her upkeep?”
Ravell had no answer for this. Stella Hartley’s tone became lofty and knowing. “Erika always struck me as fiery. Desperate.”
“Desperate?” Ravell said.
“Restless. You could call it that,” Stella said. “She’ll make a perfect prima donna.”
“They had no children,” Hartley said. “That’s always hard on a woman.”
Stella gave a start, remembering. “Didn’t they—did they never have another baby?” she asked with a lilt of sympathy, but that note of hope died before she finished the question, because the answer seemed already obvious.
“No,” Ravell said. “I don’t believe they did.” He puffed on his cigar and released a wreath of smoke into the air, obscuring everything.
At the coconut plantation, Ravell sat at his desk and began a letter.
Dearest Erika,
It is now spring at the Cocal. Yesterday as I walked through a clearing in the forest, I pictured your husband racing after butterflies with a net, and it was impossible to forget—
He shredded the page. Such words—reminding her of her husband—were not a good way to begin. He dropped the torn bits of white paper into the wastebasket, and started again.
Dearest Erika,
The news has reached me that you have moved to Italy, and I am glad that you have succeeded at last in throwing off everything that must have held you back. Your art is the essential thing. . . .
He wanted to praise her bravery, to applaud her for freeing herself from the judgments of gentlemen in starched shirts, and from the stifling opinions of Yankee matrons laced so tight they could hardly breathe. He wanted to laugh with her and say, You’ve wrestled free! You’ve flung the weight of them from your shoulders like a great musty coat.
Then he pushed away from the desk, got up from his chair, and paced the room wondering where he would even send such a letter. He had no address for Erika. How could he ask Peter for his estranged wife’s exact whereabouts? The notion was ridiculous. Nor could he make inquiries to her father or brother about how to contact her—not after the disgrace of his last days in Boston—and he could think of no other way to reach her.
So Ravell crumpled that page and threw it away, too.
Now that she was a free woman, he wondered if she would write to him. Even after so many years, he was convinced that she had not forgotten him.
Months passed, but no letter came from Erika. Hartley and Stella brought their children to the plantation for a few days. The boys and girls had gone down to the lagoon hoping to catch tarpon in a net. On the front porch at the Cocal, Ravell sat with Hartley and his wife. They drank green swizzles. They rocked in chairs, they watched the surf.
“Don’t you think it’s time we found a proper wife for you?” Stella asked Ravell.
Once at a dinner party at the Eden estate, a married acquaintance of Stella’s had pressed up against Ravell in an unlit hallway, and the lady had hinted that he should meet her at a hotel room in the capital, but he’d declined. Her breath smelled of the lamb they’d just eaten; he knew he did not love her and never would.
“I’m beginning to side with my wife about this,” Hartley said, leaning back deeply in his rocking chair.
“Next month we are going to have another garden party,” Stella said. “Several attractive young ladies are bound to be present.”
They understood his loneliness. Ravell wondered if he had referred too frequently to Erika in their presence. He worried that the memory of Erika was ruining his life. When he wandered through the coolie village at the plantation, he saw laborers surrounded by their little ones, and he yearned in a simple, aching way for children he could call his own. If he could not bring himself to forget about Erika, he would remain alone, living on a plantation in a remote part of the world.
“All right,” he told Stella. They agreed that Ravell would spend several days at Eden, where Stella would oversee his search for a wife.
A couple of weeks before the Hartleys’ garden par
ty, Stella decided to arrange a series of dinner engagements for him, so that he could meet his prospects in a leisurely way, one or two ladies at a time.
On a Wednesday, two very young sisters appeared at the Hartleys’ table. Both were blonde, their twisted curls elaborately pinned and dangling from their temples. They were pretty enough, but as they ate their roast pork, they had little to say until Ravell inquired about their fashionable hairstyles. The sisters glanced at each other, unable to stop giggling and chattering after that. It sounded as though they mainly liked to spend their days arranging each other’s hair.
“Am I expected to marry them together, as an inseparable pair?” Ravell asked after they departed, and Hartley laughed. Ravell did not want to tell Stella how depressed the young sisters had made him feel, how very old and somber.
The following evening Stella invited a pale young widow who had lost her husband so recently that tears welled in her eyes, and she kept reaching for her glass of white wine and taking hard swallows. Ravell felt ashamed sitting across from her, as though he’d rushed in like a grave robber.
“I’m afraid this was all too soon for her,” Stella apologized afterward.
To cheer him up, Hartley went into another room and reappeared with a cue, which he handed to Ravell as he challenged him to a game of billiards.
On Saturday, Ravell’s final night at Eden, a mother and her very tall daughter descended from a motorcar. Both wore feather boas. When the daughter shook his hand, he felt as though ice had been rubbed against his palm.
The daughter, who was in her midtwenties, had a lovely face. He admired the balance of her features, but when he looked closer, he noticed that she had red eyes (an allergy to her feathers?) and a habit of dabbing her thumb under her runny nose.
“I understand you lived in Boston previously,” the mother said.
“I did,” Ravell said.
“Tell me.” The mother leaned toward him and spoke in a quiet tone, clearly hoping to be subtle. “Did you live in a pleasant neighborhood? What sort of house was it? Did you rent or did you own?”
As the evening wore on, the tall daughter kept inquiring about the price of things—the Hartleys’ fringed lampshade, Stella’s high-heeled, buttoned shoes. The conversation bored Ravell so much that he wanted to bolt across the Hartleys’ great lawn and lose himself in the wild forest.
After the tall one rode away with her mother in their motorcar, Stella took a breath and turned toward Ravell expectantly. “Well?” she said. “What do you think?”
His gaze flitted away at that moment. Surely Stella guessed that he couldn’t marry that one, either. After each carefully hosted encounter, he felt he was failing her.
“I’m impossible, I know,” he said.
After his return to the Cocal, Ravell went for his usual evening walk along the beach. He found himself talking to the waves, to the night sky, to Erika. Many months had passed since she had left Peter, yet still no word—not even a postcard—had come from her. Ravell felt sure that she must have taken another lover—a leading man, a tenor or a basso profundo, whose vocal cords were long and whose limbs were long, too, because (as Erika had once told him) all men who sang bass were invariably tall.
I have faded into her past like a face in a forgotten audience, Ravell thought.
He reached for fistfuls of sand and threw them at the white foam spreading along the shore. Instead of Erika’s voice—which he still recalled so keenly—he heard his own wails. Toward the moon he pitched more sand, but drafts of wind blew it backward, blinding him for a moment until he staggered sideways, rubbing his eyelids to wipe away the grit. He told himself he must no longer think about Erika. He decided he ought to attend Stella’s garden party in a few weeks. Until he’d let Stella introduce him to every available woman on the island, he should not resign himself to loneliness.
Walking back to the house, he turned his back on the sea.
41
I TA LY
1911
Dear Erika,
I am frankly alarmed, her brother Gerald wrote, that you have lived in Florence only eight months, and yet your expenditures have far outpaced your share of the quarterly income from the Bell Street rental property. Before you decided to move to Italy, I warned that if you planned to live on the proceeds of our mother’s estate, you would be forced to endure a very simple—even meager—existence.
Erika threw her brother’s note into a cupboard drawer and slammed it. “Excessive,” he had called her expenses. Sunlight streamed through the French doors and reflected so brightly against the red-tiled floor that the color burned painfully in her head. She pulled a hard wooden chair up to the simple table she had bought, took paper and a pen, and wrote back.
Dear Gerald,
If you and your wife saw the Spartan furnishings surrounding me in the single room that I rent, the two of you would be shocked. Thus far I have purchased a narrow bed, a wooden cupboard, a rather crudely constructed table, and a couple of chairs. My only extravagance has been a rather pretty sofa. . . .
She glanced at the sofa, with its carved frame and plush wine-colored upholstery, the fabric soft against her cheek when she napped on it. From the moment she saw the sofa in a dark shop, she’d felt that it belonged in this room, the same red as the tiled floor. She wrote,
I have bought a good piano, but that is a necessity for my career. There are set-up costs when one moves to a foreign country and arrives with nothing. I am living in a room with no carpet, no paintings on the walls—no sort of decoration, not even a proper coverlet to hide the sheets on my bed.
If you and Thea are worried that you may end up supporting me one day, let me assure you that I don’t intend to depend on anyone financially.
To conserve money, she tried to go less often to the Teatro Verdi and other local theatres. Instead, on Saturday evenings she swaddled herself in a white mohair shawl, its lacy crocheted folds slung over her shoulders, and she sat alone on her balcony. A line of electric streetlamps illuminated the Arno’s black channel and the ochre-colored buildings on the opposite bank.
“Allow the vocal cords a rest after a hard week’s practice,” Maestro Valenti had advised, so on Saturday and Sunday nights, Erika did not sing at all.
On Saturday nights in particular, the panorama of lights and the rattle of carriage wheels in the boulevard below reminded her of her own isolation. She imagined that all over Florence, people were rushing to one another’s houses to eat bowls of ribollita or veal saltimbocca. She watched couples step into motorcars bound for theatres, gentlemen in tall hats and ladies with long pearls that swung from their necks to their hips.
Where was Christopher on Saturday nights? With his American friends, no doubt. She never knocked on his door on weekends because she did not wish to appear too needy. Instead, she waited for the hastily jotted notes that occasionally came from him. “A stroll in the Boboli today at three?” he would write. Or: “Save next Sunday afternoon. We’ll go to Fiesole by tram.”
Her loneliness was her own fault, she knew. Other lodgers at Donna Anna’s had been friendly, but Erika had gently shut the door on their overtures. She had introduced Christopher as her “brother” as well as her accompanist, to ward off any disapproval about a man occasionally visiting her room. One had to keep a distance from neighbors, especially in a house where so many lives emptied into one stairwell.
On a street corner the roses waited, dark red and long-stemmed. On a Friday evening, she paused and brushed her nose against their velvet petals, inhaling a sweetness that traveled along the arc of her spine and reached her toes. It was the sort of extravagance her brother, Gerald, had warned her against. The vendor came right over, ready to lift them, dripping, from their pail and wrap them in thin paper. She shook her head and backed away.
I cannot afford such things, she reminded herself, and resumed her walk home. Soon she would climb three stories and open a door to a room where nothing waited to welcome her. Christopher was off with his
friends; even Donna Anna had gone to the countryside to visit relatives. In this ancient city where artists had been living and dying for centuries, she had no one to converse with. A completely unknown singer, perhaps she would always remain so.
The roses, she thought, will keep me company. She wanted them beside her on this night. So she went back and bought an armload, carrying their weight and rich hue up to her room.
She placed them in a vase until the air thickened with their dark fragrance. Before leaving Boston, she had bought herself a crimson dress and matching shoes that she intended to wear one day for a recital. Now she put them on. She pinned up her hair and placed clustered diamonds on her earlobes. In the mirror she studied herself, trying to see the woman Ravell might find if he stood here now. Her earrings captured and reflected pinpricks of color—yellows, greens, and blues.
Alone in her room, she opened the long windows, and sitting at the piano, she sang her favorite arias—those that suited her voice best. She sang for only herself. She sang for the day when others—besides her blind landlady—would hear her. Although no man had touched her in months, her body burned, never more alive. Music streamed from her throat and fingers.
Sounds floated through the open windows and she went with them, over the Arno, across terra-cotta rooftops and the Duomo, across every beautiful thing that men long dead had created here in Florence. Someday she, too, would be dead, but for now that did not matter; for now she was as alive as every light that glimmered and reflected against windowpanes in Tuscany. As she sang, she was not sorry that she had brought herself here to add her voice to all the rest—her singing passed across frescoes and statues, across towers and all the architectural dreams that rose in giant silhouettes against the horizon.
The Doctor and the Diva Page 26