44
“I haven’t seen Venice in years,” Erika said, “and I want to go back.” “It’s smelly,” Edmund said.
Mark tossed aside a magazine he’d been reading. “What’s smelly?”
“Venice. Last time I took a gondola along the Grand Canal,” Edmund complained, “the water was green, with muck floating past. I had to hold my nose shut.”
“Well, don’t come along with us, then,” Christopher said.
In the end, because Edmund couldn’t stand to be left out, he packed a valise. All three of them (Christopher, Mark, and Edmund) accompanied Erika to Venice.
They found an enormous room in a decaying palazzo so full of atmosphere that they could not bear to search for any other accommodation, even though it meant the four of them would have to stay together. They agreed to split the cost four ways. When a gondolier dropped them at the palazzo’s water gate, the entry was so low that Erika’s skirts dipped into the canal as they hopped out.
“I can smell it, too,” Erika said the first night, as they settled themselves under blankets in scattered corners. “That odor Edmund was talking about. But it isn’t unpleasant.” Moss-covered pilings held the buildings up. She sniffed again and there it was: the aroma of wet wood and ancient stone.
The Gothic windows framed views of the Grand Canal, and the tiled floors felt sunken under their feet. The furnishings were glorious—tapestries that cloaked the walls, and vermilion chairs with carved, gilded legs.
“An opera ought to be staged here,” Christopher said. “In this very room.”
“We’ve got to see that our prima donna is outfitted properly,” Mark said. “For future concerts and recitals.”
The three men took Erika to a dressmaker Mark had heard about. As one particular bolt of Italian fabric was unfurled, with bits of gold woven through its shimmering folds, they all lost their breath for a moment. It reminded them of a Byzantine mosaic. Mark walked in a circle around Erika, draping a length of the fabric against her. “Imagine Erika standing there in the footlights,” he said, “with the gilded bits reflecting.”
They danced around her, as though it made them half-drunk, the fun of costuming her.
While the men were out exploring and losing themselves in the labyrinth of Venice’s canals and streets, Erika got a chambermaid to fill a metal tub so she could bathe. She lolled for a long time in the warm water, a rolled towel cushioning her neck so she could gaze at the great room’s painted ceiling.
The men had not taken a key, knowing that she remained in the room. When they returned, they rattled the wrought-iron latch and banged impatiently. They could not fathom why she took so long to let them in.
Half-panicked, she dried herself with a fat towel and searched for her clothes. Over and over, like a chorus, they called her name, bending their mouths to the keyhole as they continued to thump on the thick door.
“Erika—ERIKA!”
“MADAME VON KESSLER, are you in there?”
When she finally opened the door, they fell into the room and Mark glanced around with wicked amusement. “What’s been going on in here?” He peeked under a bed, and playfully opened an armoire to check for a possible lover she’d taken care to hide from them.
“Where is he?” Mark asked. “Is he handsome? Would we like him?”
“I was having my bath.” Erika pointed at the tub.
“You were having a bath,” Mark said, “and what of it? You didn’t have to lock the door.” He lifted his nose and pretended to be miffed. “Listen,” he added jokingly, “if you happen to think that Christopher or Edmund or I have any interest whatsoever in seeing you—” He laughed.
At night a gondola carried them along the Grand Canal, and they glided past Venetian palaces that glowed from within. Through arched Gothic windows they saw how chandeliers gleamed above tables lined with candles and guests. Erika felt both close and distant from the lives they glimpsed.
The coolness of night rose up from the water and blew across their faces as the gondolier steered. On a passing boat a bass-baritone sang, “Se vuol ballare, signor Contino,” to the rousing delight of his friends. The other gondola wobbled with applause as he finished.
Not a bad voice, Erika thought.
“Sing something back,” Christopher begged her, leaning forward.
He called to the bass-baritone across the water, prompting him: “Sing—‘Là ci darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì—’ ”
The bass-baritone launched into Mozart’s famous love duet from Don Giovanni, and Erika, to her own surprise, heard herself singing in response. Suddenly the bass-baritone’s gondola turned and headed in their direction, drawn toward the lady who sang in the dark. Several other boats followed his.
“My God,” Mark hissed in excitement. “It’s an armada coming after us!” He flapped his arms at the man who steered them. “Slip away—fast!”
To elude their pursuers, their gondolier maneuvered the boat into a smaller waterway. Erika, thrilled by the nearness of those who gave chase, let her head drop back and she heard herself laugh at the sky. As their gondolier wrestled the boat around another corner, steering them from sight, she opened her mouth and again announced their whereabouts to all of Venice as she sang another aria from Mozart, “Un moto di gioia.”
Along the smaller canal, shutters swung open and heads poked out. Listeners clapped and whistled. Someone tossed a flower that landed at her feet. When Erika and her friends turned to look behind, the flotilla of pursuers had found them—so many followers that they feared their gondola might soon be surrounded, tipped over in the heat of the chase.
As soon as she finished, Mark cupped his hand over her lips to shush her—just until they’d escaped through the silent canals.
Then she sang again. She could have sung all night, her head leaning back, her mouth opening wide. The stars and moon could have fallen on her tongue; she could have swallowed them.
PART FIVE
45
BOSTON
1912
Quentin did not go for a walk with the other boys. All Sunday afternoon he sat in the window seat at the boarding school and waited for his father to come. Earlier that week he had sent his father a letter begging him to drive down from Boston in the Haynes Touring Car. Dear Pappa, Quentin had written. Please bring your atomobile and kum to see me on Sunday. I want the other boys to see it. Quentin knew the stir the sight would cause as his father motored through the school gates, riding upon the Haynes’s quilted seats and shiny wheels. Papa would step from the Haynes in goggles, cap, and duster, and when he pulled Quentin close—just for a moment—Quentin’s face would press against the cold crevasses of his father’s coat with its smell of crisp, decaying leaves. The other boys, who’d been waiting in the parlor, would rush out, too, and surround the car.
His father was so long in arriving that Quentin laid his head against the window seat cushion and closed his eyes until the matron came by and told him to straighten up. Lifting his head, he saw mothers drive up, their slender ankles stepping down from carriages or purring motorcars. Boys in short trousers and dark jackets flew toward doorways, and they were caught up and tossed into a blur of furs, hugs, perfume, skirts. From the bow-front window he watched them, thinking of his own mother until his throat went sore.
The roads beyond the wrought-iron gates of the school had been hard and frozen, and quite dry in the morning, but by late afternoon, the snow whirled as if the air thickened with white, battling flies. “Come away from the window,” the matron who had been monitoring the parlor said to Quentin. “Perhaps your papa will come to see you another Sunday.” She closed the draperies and led Quentin away.
The stairs to the alcove where he slept were so steep, his shoes felt weighted as he climbed. That evening he wrote:
My dear Pappa,
Why didn’t you kum to visit me today? I waited for you all afternoon . . .
Between sentences he put his head down on the desk and rubbed his eyes until his knuckles grew wet,
smeared with blue ink. His cursive grew larger, the letters crossing the page in big loops, becoming more reckless.
WHEN IS MAMMA KUMING BAK?
I WISH YOU WOULD TELL ME.
For more than a year, this was the question he’d continued to ask. Sometimes during his vacations in Boston, he thought he heard her in various parts of the house. He expected that he might awake one morning to find her lifting the shades in his bedroom. His father said only, “Your mother has hopes of becoming a better-known singer. She has gone off to Italy to study opera.” This did not explain why she did not send him any letters while he was away at Mowgli Camp last summer, or why—after he wrote and told her about the mole he and another boy trapped—she did not reply.
Because he had been sent to the school not long after she left, it was possible that she did not know his address. On a fresh sheet of white paper he scratched a message with his pen: My dear Mamma, I wish you would rite to me. My address is the Chadsworth Skool. . . .
During Easter vacation, behind a fourth-story window of his father’s Back Bay house, Quentin pressed his forehead against the glass pane and peered out. Below, cherry blossoms whitened the street. He pretended he could see his mother on the sidewalk, scurrying. Her lavender skirts swished past tall brick row houses, darkening and lightening as she moved under trees.
At the window he blinked twice; his mother’s lavender skirts were gone. Cherry blossoms still fluttered white in the sunlight; the sidewalks emptied, nothing there but dull red bricks. Quentin retreated from the window, a terrible and familiar tightness beginning in his chest. No matter how long he watched the street, no matter how acutely he remembered or imagined her, his mother did not return.
He walked from his bedroom into the hallway and leaned over the banister. He peered down four flights, staring into the spiraling loop of stairs where the abyss was frightening. What would happen, he had asked his father once, if somebody fell into the stairwell? Papa said that surely a neck would be broken; if you were lucky, just an arm or leg.
A wine-colored carpet covered the stairs, laced by a pattern of scrolls and flowers. The landing used to be a favorite spot of his for playing. Here on the landing, he used to make his little lead soldiers climb the steps and form barricades. From this position, sounds in the high, narrow house rose up to him—the tinkle of silverware being polished and replaced into drawers in the dining room. The high notes of his mother’s arias used to mount and glide up here until the walls shivered. He used to pause sometimes, listening to her. She sang in a foreign language—Italian—that he did not understand. But when she sang, something made him stop. The skin behind his ears tingled.
Since she’d gone away, he no longer liked to play on the stairs so much because the house seemed too empty and silent there. So Quentin went down to his father’s study. Though his father had been abroad for weeks now, the study still smelled of leather and cigar smoke. On Papa’s desk, a real butterfly lay preserved and embedded inside a magnifying glass.
When Quentin had been much younger—before he’d started school—he’d heard his parents argue many times. The terrible sounds had made him bolt upright in bed. He’d sobbed noisily until they heard him, and that made them stop because Mama had rushed into his room. She wore a hat and long cape and gloves, as if she were going out. Her dress made stiff, crinkly sounds as her weight fell lightly against the bed. She removed her gloves and stroked his face with her fingers, and he kept very still and pretended to be asleep. For a long time she remained with him in the darkness, as if his room were a place to hide. Finally she rustled toward the door and he saw her face by the hall light, her cheeks wet, her eyes squeezed tight.
The housekeeper, Mrs. McMannis, put her hands on her hips and let out a gusty breath when she found Quentin writing a note in the study. “I don’t know why you scribble so many letters,” she said. “A big strapping boy like you ought to be outside enjoying yourself on a bright afternoon.”
He knew a boy from school who lived nearby at the Lenox Hotel. They had planned to play ball together in the Boston Common, but that morning the other boy had felt poorly and could not go out. So Quentin kept on with the note:
Dear Uncle Gerald,
I wish you would give me the photograph you have got on your piano. I mean the one of my mother wearing her opera kostume.
When Quentin had told his cousin Susan that he wanted that framed picture, she told him that Uncle Gerald wouldn’t want to let him have the photograph because Papa would probably burn it.
“Why would he burn it?”
His twelve-year-old cousin had made her eyes large with surprise. “Your father is going to divorce her, don’t you even know?”
I promise nothing bad will happen to the pikture, he wrote to his uncle. Becuz I am going to keep it in a secret place in my room.
When he finished the letter to his mother’s brother, Quentin hunted through his father’s desk drawer for a stamp. At school they put stamps on your letters for you. He found ink bottles, rulers, a compass, and elastic bands in his father’s top drawer, but no stamps, so he opened the next one. A sheaf of pages was stored there, tied with a ribbon, with his handwriting across the papers. These were letters he’d composed at school. My dear Mamma, one began. Another said, Dear Mamma, Did you get my letter I wrote about the skunk? A third said, Do you love Italy?
Every letter he’d written to her was here. No one had mailed them.
46
EGYPT
1912
In Cairo, after Peter had finished his business, he hired a guide to take him into the bazaar on Mousky Street. His dragoman Abdou spoke smooth English, but their passage through the bazaar was hardly easy. Twenty thousand people flowed through it. One had to squeeze past other bodies. First came silver merchants, followed by vendors selling amber, then candles, then ostrich feathers, then ivory, then slippers, then scents. Roses and spicy incense tinctured the air.
A caravan of camels moved down the thoroughfare and blocked the road, setting off skirmishes and bursts of complaints. Peter found himself backed up into an open-air shop. It was there that he noticed a young woman who was perhaps seventeen standing in the shade.
The thing that struck Peter first—apart from her delicately shaped face—was the fact that she was not veiled. He’d become used to seeing Egyptian women with nothing more than their eyes showing. The young woman did not appear to be Egyptian, though he could not be certain of her origin.
Peter pretended interest in the atomizers and glass vials arranged on the tables. A fat Arab with steely curls and coarse features rose from a cushion and came to assist. This proprietor, a man in his forties, beckoned the young woman and she came forward like an obedient daughter. She pushed up the sleeve of her loose cloak, dabbed a fragrant oil on the inside of her smooth forearm, and held it up for Peter to sniff.
“Do you like it?” Abdou translated. “Would you like to try the musk?”
The girl upended another vial, moistened her finger, and rubbed the oil against the crook of her opposite arm. Hands behind his back, Peter bent over politely, careful not to touch her, only to sniff. The girl had a silvery scar, the size of a minnow, on the underside of her wrist. He could have stationed himself there all day, if only the young woman had a thousand arms.
Peter handed his guide a number of piastres and let him do the bargaining. “Ask where the young lady comes from,” Peter told Abdou.
After an exchange in Arabic, he learned that the girl was from Tangier, though no explanation was given about how she got here. Like most Moorish women, her eyes and hair were black, yet her skin was as white as a European’s.
That night at his hotel, he could not stop thinking of the Moorish girl, how she’d held her slim arm only inches from his lips. He remembered the silver minnow scar on her wrist.
A strange whim took hold of him. What if he returned to Mousky Street, offered her Arab master a healthy sum, and asked if he might borrow the girl for a day?
The next morning a different guide accompanied him to Mousky Street. The Arab in charge of the girl seemed perfectly willing to pocket a considerable amount of money. What was he—her husband? Uncle? Godfather? Paramour? Peter did not want to think about it.
The dragoman led them to a side street where a coachman and a fine carriage waited. Then the guide departed.
First they stopped at a dress shop for English ladies, where a seamstress agreed to take charge of the Moorish girl. She was escorted to an upper-story room and bathed until the sweat and stale perfumes of Mousky Street evaporated with the steam. The seamstress saw to it that the young woman’s hair was done. Finally the girl was fitted for slippers and a white eyelet dress, and fixed up with a parasol.
Within an hour the girl no longer looked Middle Eastern, but instead like a thoroughbred European. She could have been mistaken for a native of Britain. The dark hair had been drawn off her neck and lifted, fixed by a curved pompadour comb.
Through the streets of Cairo their carriage rolled at brisk speed. Her high-necked gown was white—the color that his wife had usually worn. Like his wife, the young girl had ringlets. Like Erika’s, her throat was long.
As she sat across from him, her pompadour jiggled slightly from the motion of the carriage. What he wouldn’t give to see inside her silent head, to know what sort of life she came from, how she got to be here. Peter had once seen a snake charmer in Tangier, and wished he could ask about her knowledge of such things. A serpent had bitten the man’s tongue; Peter had seen for himself how the blood flowed. Then the snake charmer had stuffed his mouth with hay. Peter had inspected the man’s mouth, tongue, hands, and the straw itself, but saw no gimmick. The performer had pushed more hay into his mouth, and then exhaled fire-works of smoke and flame.
The Doctor and the Diva Page 28