No one in Florence—apart from her maestro, Donna Anna, and Christopher—listened to her with real pleasure yet, but Erika sang as if she stood in their theatres, as if the people of Italy were already hearing her.
She sang until eleven-thirty at night. Surprisingly, no sleepy neighbor begged her to stop. When cool drafts of air entered through the pair of open balcony doors, she realized it was raining. She couldn’t smell the roses anymore, only the odor of rain wetting the dust on the pavement. She closed the lid over the keyboard. When she went to latch the doors, she leaned over the balcony rail and noticed two women and a man huddling below in the rainy street.
When the man saw her at the window several stories above, he removed his hat and waved it high in the air, calling out, “Eccolà! Here she is!” The women, who had been covering their heads with shawls to fend off the rain, looked up in sudden surprise, tilting their heads to gaze halfway to the sky. Rain wet their faces. One woman danced in a circle, her skirt whirling around, while all three cried out, “Brava! Brava!” as they thrust their arms upward toward Erika.
42
My dear brother,
The funds you promised to send have still not arrived. It has now been three months. Even after making allowances for the slowness of the Italian postal system, there can be no excuse for this.
Your loving sister, Erika
Gerald must be behind in his bookkeeping, she told herself, irritated that he had forgotten her.
“I’ll pay,” she said when Christopher hesitated outside a restaurant with brass lamps. “Consider it part of your salary.” Apart from their weekday luncheons, Erika worried that Christopher didn’t get enough to eat.
She did not want him to sense her concern about the delay in receiving her brother’s check. Although Christopher served as an accompanist for other singers, she suspected that they did not compensate him well because they were struggling themselves. Probably none of them had a brother like hers, who—at least until now—sent regular income from their mother’s estate.
For her birthday, Papa had sent a postal order—a generous sum—so she wasn’t low on funds yet. To celebrate, Erika invited Christopher and his friends to Doney’s busy caffè, where they all ordered zuccotto, a Florentine version of a trifle, and she licked the rich chocolate that stuck to her spoon.
From time to time Erika would leave a basket of citrus fruits and strawberries in Christopher’s room. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” she’d ask gently. He would say that he had coffee earlier, but nothing else. He’d reach at once for the fruit. With his thumbnail he would poke into an orange’s rind, his delicate hands turning the fruit and peeling back the skin, and he’d pop the segments into his mouth as eagerly and furtively as a squirrel.
Christopher’s family sent him nothing. He wore trousers that were frayed at the hems. One ghastly hot morning in May, while Christopher sat at the piano accompanying her, perspiration gathered on his forehead like moisture condensing on a windowpane. It flowed in tiny rivulets down his temples. Twice Erika begged him to take off his suit jacket, but he refused. Only when he could scarcely go on playing due to the heat did he remove it. Underneath, Erika saw what he had not wanted her to notice: the fabric of his shirt had grown thin after so many washings, and the back was torn.
The money from her brother had still not arrived ten days later. At that point Erika became alarmed. It occurred to her that Gerald and his wife, who had vigorously disapproved of her move to Italy, meant to exert leverage somehow.
My dear Gerald,
You know how I depend on the Bell Street rents to survive here. Do you intend for me to starve in a room in a foreign land? Is that what you and Thea believe I deserve? Do you imagine that if you withhold income that is rightfully mine, I will give up my music and all I have worked for, and return to Peter?
After mailing this letter, she paused at a storefront window and stared at a mannequin elegantly buttoned into a moleskin coat. Such a coat—long and dark—might become her; it had a slimming effect. It was a coat she might have bought if she’d stayed with Peter. The mannequin’s shining silk hose and pumps were lovely, too. Now she stood before the window in worn-down heels in need of repair. She did not have the money to leave them at a cobbler’s shop.
The worst thing was this: she owed Christopher his fee, but could not cover the payment.
Just hours after she sent one letter to her brother, she began another.
Dear Gerald,
Must I hire an attorney to sue my own brother? One-half of the rental income from our late mother’s Bell Street property is due to me. This is an inviolable fact. You have no right to decide otherwise.
She opened drawers, placing bracelets and diamond earrings and pearl necklaces across the surface of her bed, and thought about which jewels she might sell. I could give voice and piano lessons, she thought, for the young daughters of British and American expatriates.
From the array of jewelry on the bed, she chose a pair of diamond earrings and felt their weight, one glittering cluster in each hand. The next day she took the earrings to a pawnbroker and sold them for a fraction of their worth.
There were a number of ways she might survive. Even without a husband and a brother.
The following morning she decided to write to her father about engaging a lawyer on her behalf; she could no longer allow Gerald to serve as executor of their mother’s estate. The worry of it unleashed unhappiness about everything, especially Quentin.
Dearest Papa,
What has become of Quentin? You say that Peter has asked that I not write to my son because reminders of my absence are upsetting to a young child. Still, I cannot go on being punished like this, and left without any word of him.
I know what my own brother and his wife must think of me. . . .
A crinkled envelope arrived soon after that, addressed in Gerald’s small, tight penmanship. He had mailed it several months previously. The letter looked as if it had fallen from a postman’s sack and blown into a gutter, or behind a bush. Perhaps it had remained there until someone noticed it, and placed it, for a second try, into a mailbox. The envelope remained sealed. It was dry now, though clearly it had been soaked—the paper rippled, the blue ink of the address blurry. The letter looked as if it had been dragged under the sole of a stranger’s shoe.
Inside she found the check her brother owed to her.When she opened it, she was aghast at herself.
All those withering, accusatory notes to him and Thea . . . Erika put the check for safekeeping in a drawer. She ran upstairs to Donna Anna’s apartment, where the blind woman sat calmly in a chair.
“Send a cable to your brother,” the landlady advised. “Maybe it will reach them before your letters do.”
Erika hurried off to arrange for the cablegram.
DOCTOR AND MRS. GERALD VON KESSLER
176 COMMONWEALTH AVENUE
BOSTON
YOUR LOST LETTER AND CHECK OF APRIL 30
FINALLY ARRIVED.
WILL YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?
ERIKA
43
Erika arrived at Christopher’s building on a Thursday afternoon carrying a basket of salami, prosciutto, provolone, and pears. The foyer and stairs were as dark as a church’s interior, and she groped for the banister, half-blinded by the sudden dimness. A box of newborn kittens had been abandoned on the bottom step, and one furry creature brushed her ankle, then slinked away. The old newspaper they nested upon smelled of cat urine.
A desolate quiet often ran through the building at this hour, when Christopher tended to be gone. But today she heard the sounds of a gramophone at the top of the stairs, the voice of a countertenor coming from Christopher’s quarters, under the roof.
She ascended, and rapped her knuckles noisily against his door, hoping to be heard above the flourish of the orchestra. No stirrings from within. She tried again. Still no response. Had he left in a hurry, she wondered, and forgotten to shut off the gramophone? That would
be typical of him. Erika scoured her memory to reconstruct what she knew of Christopher’s schedule. Hadn’t he mentioned something about going to audition for a man who was arranging a party at a palazzo on the Via Maggio? Or perhaps he had gone to Mark’s place, a rented room near the Duomo.
Fishing in her bag, Erika searched for the key Christopher had given her. She would step inside, just for a moment, and deposit the basket on the table. Just as she took hold of the doorknob, the recording reached its rousing finish; the gramophone music died and the air became quiet. Her chain of keys jingled as she inserted one in the lock. A drowsy mumble came from within; she worried that the sounds of her entering might have awakened him. Apparently Christopher had fallen asleep while listening to music, as he was apt to do on a hot afternoon.
The dangling keys swung from the door’s lock; she caught and squeezed them silent in her hand. Not glancing over at the bed at first, she tiptoed inside and set the basket down. Then Erika turned. She hardly moved or breathed as she surveyed the room. Her eye followed the odd trail of clothes strewn across the floor—Christopher’s shirt and trousers, and also Mark’s high-collared jacket, a distinctive dark maroon. A shoe of Christopher’s, lopsided and worn at the heel, lay upside down on top of one of Mark’s buffed boots. The mates—one of Christopher’s and one of Mark’s—had been kicked halfway under a chair, and those were touching, too.
In the bed, in the unpleasant heat of the afternoon, the two men lay together, asleep. Their backs were turned toward her, the sheet half-shrugged from Christopher’s shoulder, exposing a golden shoulder with a sprinkling of freckles, like sand, upon it. Suddenly, without opening his eyes, Mark rolled over. Reaching out an arm, he grasped the sheet and flung it off. Both men lay there nude. The bed linens exuded smells of salt and perspiration, semen and sweating feet.
The room enclosed her in its odors. With his eyes still closed, Mark scratched his groin.
Her footsteps were fleet, her respiration softer than a gasp, as she turned and fled.
Later, she had no recollection of how she had gotten down four flights; she might have been dropped, like a parachutist, down the empty well.
Outdoors she went, straight into sunlight, and crossed the river. She found herself wandering into one of those nameless, innumerable churches that waited with open doors all over Florence, as silent as caves harboring frescoes and statuary.
Just a handful of shrouded old women were present, their heads bowed, rosaries twined around arthritic fingers. Erika sat in a pew, trying to gather the quiet of the sanctuary inside herself.
Two men in love—yes, her heart was hitting hard from the shock of that. Never before had she thrown a door open to the sight of a man she’d not expected to see naked. And there had been two of them lying there relaxed and languorous, at their most private. She could still hear the sound of Mark’s fingernails as he scratched himself. If they had opened their eyes at that instant and seen her, what could she have said? She might have given a small strangled cry. Should she have apologized to them? Or they to her?
Two men, friends of hers, in love. How very peculiar that was—contrary to nature’s laws, for no child could ever be born to them.
When the stillness of the church failed to calm her, she left and went to the Accademia to gaze at a painting she loved more than any other—Botticelli’s Primavera. People talked of moving the painting to the Uffizi, where it might be displayed alongside the artist’s other masterpieces. She entered the building and headed straight toward Primavera, its vast canvas spanning a whole wall, its backdrop a dark forest, as mysterious as night.
Against that dark screen, eight figures danced and lifted their limbs as if lit by music, their long hair and whisper-thin gowns floating with wind. One blond figure with a beautiful, triangular face reminded her of Christopher—the features not quite those of a woman or a man.
The three Graces joined hands and danced in a circle, transparent costumes showing their long legs. The painting made her remember the smells of sweat and sex in Christopher’s room; she’d entered before the scent had evaporated. The air had been drenched with it, an atmosphere she had not stood inside in a very long time.
“I wanted to tell you about Mark and me, but I didn’t know how,” Christopher said the next day. “And Edmund, too—he’s one of us.”
She said nothing.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Christopher suggested, “along the river.”
They crossed a bridge built from a sketch by Michelangelo. Erika leaned her elbows against the arched stone rail. At this dusky hour, reflections of the ochre buildings that lined the Arno lay on the surface, as if their façades had fallen into the water. Their lovely, liquid images wavered and dimmed with the day.
“I hope things won’t change between us,” Christopher said. “Now that you know.”
“Why,” she said, “should anything change?”
In only a day, the shock had lessened, and she suspected that it would soon fade and not matter to her what the two men did. It wasn’t as if Christopher might have become her lover. She had always known, as women often do, that he would be a neutral presence in her life. Toward him she felt the same absence of tension that existed between her and female friends, no matter how attractive their faces.
How did one sense this? How did one understand, before any words of explanation came?
She envied what he and Mark had, that raw bliss. The sweep of a man’s breath against her spine, a man’s hand resting against her hip as they both faded to sleep: when would she know such rapture again?
“If I tell you something I’ve told no one else,” Erika asked softly, “will you keep my secret?”
The blind landlady nodded. In Donna Anna’s apartment, gilded frames held ancient paintings the old woman could not see. Here at last, so far from Boston—where gossip could not travel from tongue to tongue and harm her son—Erika found herself free to confide.
“Quentin is not related to my husband by blood,” she said. “The man who fathered my son—that man lives on an island near South America. I’ve never told him that my son is his.”
She swallowed, her words fading to whispers, her cheekbones warm with tears. “I’m a terrible person,” she said . “I left my child. I’ve done the worst things a woman can do.”
Donna Anna listened for a long while without speaking. In the darkness of evening, she shifted skeptically in her chair. Her small shoes retracted under her skirt. From the recesses of her bodice the old lady drew out a clean, folded handkerchief and handed it to Erika.
“Believe me,” Donna Anna said finally, “there are women who have done worse.”
“What could be worse?”
“There are women in jails in Florence who have murdered their own children.” Donna Anna waved a knotted hand dismissively, impatient with this opera of tears.
“Tell me,” the old lady said. “Do you still love him—the other man?”
“Yes,” Erika whispered. “I think about him constantly.” She described the coconut plantation—its bats, quicksands, and lights that glowed like messages across the water. But she explained that the Cocal was not a place where she could stay forever; she couldn’t live there, not even for Ravell.
“Maybe you’ll take a trip to see him,” Donna Anna said. “Or persuade him to visit here.”
In bed that night Erika flexed her toes, smiling in the dark. The sheets almost smelled of Ravell, his heat. In her excitement she slipped from the bed and sat at the wooden table, caught by the urge to write to him.
My dearest Ravell,
I have given up my life in Boston and come at last to Florence to sing. The hardest thing for me has been leaving Quentin. He is a sweet child, small for his age, with a thatch of dark hair rather like yours. . . .
Ravell could probably guess what she was telling him—if he hadn’t surmised the truth already. But for her son’s sake, she realized that she ought to be cautious and vague in writing about him. She had already c
aused enough distress in her little boy’s life. (“Always be careful what you put in a letter,” Papa had once warned her.)
She lay down her pen. It was really too much to confess—the complications too extraordinary and dangerous to introduce into all their lives just now. Who knew how Ravell might react to the news that he had a child? What if he wrote to Peter, and begged to see Quentin? Suppose Ravell felt disappointed in her? Disapproving? What if he wrote to her saying: It grieves me to think of our child growing up on another continent, apart from his real father and mother. . . . Erika, how could you have left him?
In a letter, there was little she could possibly say that would make the situation forgivable, or even comprehensible. If she saw Ravell again, if she discussed it with him over many days, surely she could make him understand why she’d come to Italy.
No, she wouldn’t tell Ravell just yet. She couldn’t unleash havoc now, not while she was working toward what mattered so much—her prova, and winning over an impresario.
So she folded up the letter and tore it into halves, quarters, eighths.
The Doctor and the Diva Page 27