The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  “Until I saw your grief over the first baby,” Peter said, “I never suspected that you were in love with my wife. I never realized that Erika was infatuated with you.”

  “She wasn’t in love with me. Not when the little girl was born.”

  “So why did she sleep with you? Because she was desperate for a child?”

  Ravell sat up and swung his legs over the side of the folding bed. He went over to the fire the black boy had built for them and threw dirt to extinguish it.

  “Don’t make me answer,” he said to Peter finally. “Don’t make me explain.”

  Neither of them could sleep after that. The crew had shared their liquor with Thomas, and the boy was soon vomiting against a tree. Ravell and Peter helped the boy into his hammock that hung at the foot of their beds. Thomas fell into a heavy, drunken slumber but Ravell and Peter lay there, unable to rest, listening to the crew catcall and howl by the riverbanks.

  “I’m afraid I shall have to assert myself,” Peter announced finally, as he prepared to head toward the smell of the whiskey.

  Ravell felt it unwise to say anything. “Don’t go down there,” he called warningly to Peter. They were a long way from any settlement, a world away from other white men.

  But nothing stopped Peter. As Ravell watched his old friend move down the slope toward the drunken men, he wondered at Peter’s sense of invincibility.

  After Peter made his complaint and turned away from the crew, the unruliness only worsened. Near the riverbanks, a large object was hurled through darkness into the water. A great splash could be heard, and angry shouts. From his camp bed Ravell watched Peter slowly returning uphill. Behind him, men raised their fists as they dodged and shadow-boxed. In their drunkenness Ravell feared that they would lunge after Peter, and then him.

  He realized they might die here together tonight. Had Peter brought him here as a kind of vengeful wish? A handful of inebriated men might leave them for vultures and animals, until nothing remained except the whiteness of their bones. Their bodies might vanish into the forest, disappear into the darkness of the soil, and feed the shrieks of hungry birds. No acquaintance of theirs would realize what had happened. Perhaps nobody would ever know the fear he felt, waiting there.

  48

  At dawn, like a mercy, the sun came up and the expedition continued.

  Farther upriver a smaller stern-wheeler awaited them, allowing them to pass through shallower depths with ease. The engine resembled a toy. A broad-ribbed Negro fed wood into the miniature furnace. Each time they transferred into a new boat, signatures were exchanged for a receipt to be sent back to Mr. Manthorne.

  By afternoon they reached Tumatumari, where a rest house sat on a hill overlooking the river. The front door had a pointed arch. Inside, Ravell and Peter shed their moldy clothes that smelled of fish, mud, sweat, and the river. After they took turns lowering themselves into a bath, they got up from the hot waters refreshed, and put on clean bush clothes.

  Outside they went to inspect the giant bleached boulders that blocked the river. The grand cataract had dried up, reduced to nothing more than the force of a few bathtub faucets. In Tumatumari everyone told them that the Kaieteur Falls had waned, and now barely dripped.

  Peter said, “I’m afraid our journey must end here.”

  “Perhaps we could hire Indian carriers to help us reach the Kaieteur Falls,” Ravell said. Only forty miles remained.

  “We haven’t got proper supplies for an overland journey,” Peter pointed out.

  Ravell’s heart shrank in disappointment. What had been the purpose of having fought their way so far upriver, if they would never see the marvel they’d struggled to reach?

  At Tumatumari he and Peter sat on boulders to view the cataract, now a cascade of nearly pure stone. Sun warmed the rocks and heated their backsides. “With a thriving river,” Ravell said, “the waterfall here must be glorious.”

  And then, to Ravell’s surprise, Peter’s forehead became furrowed and he said: “When I left Erika with you at the coconut plantation and went off to Venezuela, I knew you’d sleep with her. I fully expected it.”

  Ravell turned his head and stared at Peter.

  More loudly Peter said, “I wanted you to have intercourse with my wife.”

  The shock of it marred Ravell’s vision; he saw splotches before his eyes. “Why?”

  “Because I wanted a child—and I wanted to keep Erika. I understood that I’d never make her pregnant myself.”

  Ravell heard the frustration in Peter’s clipped words.

  “Well,” Peter said. He lifted his head and scanned the uppermost reaches of trees. “I suppose it’s all irrelevant at this point, whatever you or I wanted, isn’t it? She’s gone off to Italy and left us both.”

  Hidden in the forest near Tumatumari, he and Peter found a cluster of Indian huts, all deserted. “The owners can’t be far away,” Peter concluded, noting fires blazing and pots boiling. Then they saw an old Indian who’d been left behind. He lolled in a hammock, flesh hanging from his bones as if he wore a suit that stretched.

  Each hut had four posts, the roof thatched with palm leaves. When Peter noticed a few weapons tucked under the rafters, he pulled down a bow and one six-foot-long arrow, handed them to the old Indian in the hammock, and pointed to a large lizard fifty yards away. The old man took the bow. Without leaving the hammock, he shot the arrow and it pierced straight into the lizard’s head.

  “You see the skill of these people,” Peter said.

  Walking back to the rest house at Tumatumari, Ravell could not resist asking Peter, “If you wanted a child so much . . . and if you were willing to use another man’s sperm . . . why didn’t you make discreet arrangements with a specialist? Why did you have your wife sleep with another man?”

  Peter’s words sounded emphatic. “I didn’t want to use a stranger’s seed, someone I knew nothing about.”

  “Weren’t you worried that Erika and I—” Ravell hesitated. “That we’d fall in love? That she might stay with me?”

  “I suppose, in a way, I counted on your honor—” Peter shrugged. As a last thought, he added: “I’m a businessman. I know when a very hard bargain must be made.”

  That night at the rest house, Ravell lounged on a bed while Peter continued his long letter to Quentin. At every opportunity he found, Peter took out his pen and wrote to the boy. He read parts of the letter aloud: If I’d asked the old Indian lying in his hammock to shoot a fish far downstream , I am certain the old man would not have missed. . . . He wrote as though the boy were always at his side, accompanying him.

  He is writing to my son, Ravell thought. A boy who stands at a window watching snow fall. A boy with a face I have never seen.

  Upon their return to Trinidad, they both stayed overnight at the Queen’s Park Hotel before Ravell headed east from Port of Spain. It was turning out to be a very good year for Peter’s business, he told Ravell, and messages from his partner awaited him at the hotel, urging him to return to Boston as quickly as possible. Peter would not have time to come to the coconut plantation.

  Before a tender arrived to take Peter away to his steamer, anchored a couple of miles offshore, Ravell suggested a stroll through the Botanical Gardens.

  He showed Peter the rare bloom on the Trinidad bamboo, a flower that appeared only during times of devastating drought. Shopkeepers displayed it in their windows, and old men claimed they could not recall having seen the flower before.

  Peter peered at the bloom. “I suppose there’s always something beautiful to be had, even during a drought,” he said. “Even when crops are failing, and people are suffering.”

  Ravell asked, “Do you have a picture of him?”

  Peter’s eyebrows twitched quizzically.

  “Quentin, I mean.”

  They sat down together on a bench and Peter pulled a billfold from his suit jacket pocket. “He’s got dark hair. Big eyes, rather like yours.”

  In the photograph the boy posed with a violi
n, although Peter said that Quentin did not like to practice. The child wore a sailor suit. Ravell studied the image, looking for traces of Erika in the child, but the boy did not resemble her.

  When they got up to resume their walk, Ravell held on to the photo and halted twice to stare at it. “Why did you want me to know of his existence?” he asked.

  “I’m a man who believes in the truth,” Peter said. “I’ve always felt it fair for you to know.”

  “But why now? Why were you so careful not to tell me until now?”

  “Because the divorce has become final, and I’ve got legal custody. Nobody can take him from me at this point, not even Erika.”

  Ravell handed back the photograph. “I’m sure he’s very attached to you.”

  Peter replaced it in his billfold. “Oh, he is.”

  PART SIX

  49

  CAPE COD, MASSACHUSETTS

  1913

  My dear Pappa,

  Please I don’t want to go back to Mowgli Camp this summer. I’d rather be with you. . . .

  His father was far away again. Quentin wriggled down and closed the hamper lid over his head and waited for the others to find him. He pressed his teeth against his knees and closed his lips to keep from laughing, because it was very funny when the others raced into the room and he could hear every sound they made as they peered around. “Look under the closet, look under the bed,” said Margaret, the eldest girl. Inside the hamper Quentin fell sideways and wondered if they would see the bulge his body made against the wicker sides. The lid lifted slightly as Quentin’s head pushed against it. “Open the drawers,” Margaret ordered. Drawers slid open and banged shut again before they ran out, thinking they had searched very thoroughly. Nobody thought to look inside the hamper filled with dirty clothes that smelled.

  “He lives here with us now,” Margaret explained. “At least for the summer.”

  “Are you an orphan?” her friends asked.

  “No,” Quentin said.

  “What happened to your father and mother?”

  “My father is in Egypt buying cotton,” he said. “And my mother is a singer in Italy.”

  They stared at him for a moment, as if they were unsure whether to believe him. Their faces looked grave, as if they did not envy him for whatever circumstances brought him here, without parents. He asked if they wanted to see a thirty-foot anaconda skin his father had brought back from the jungle for him, and they nodded.

  “I will even let you touch it.” Quentin said, and drew the special bag his father had given him from under the bed. He brought the snakeskin along everywhere he could.

  His father’s business partner, Mr. Talcott, had five children and a summer house on Cape Cod with a roof so steep it looked like a witch’s hat. Papa thought Quentin might be happier here, with a family, rather than at camp.

  The house had a hundred dark corners and tiny doors in the wainscoting that opened into cupboards and low closets to crawl inside and hide. The Talcotts had cousins who also liked to visit here. Two of the oldest boys brought sticks like swords into the attic to attack a squirrel that lived up there, but the squirrel sneaked away through a hole under the eaves.

  Whenever Quentin and the others returned from the beach, they carried towels so twisted and dirty and heavy with sand, they were told to drop them at the back porch. Nobody was allowed in the house with a damp towel.

  At night he would lie in bed and feel sand silted between his toes. The rush and fizz of waves stayed in his ears, like sounds caught inside a conch shell. High up in his nose, the sharp scent of the beach stayed alive.

  When Quentin had a cold, Mrs. Talcott poured him a glass of vinegar to purify his system. None of her own children could bear to drink vinegar for their colds, she said, because the taste was so terrible, but Quentin braved it. He gulped the full glass, got it all down in one long swallow, and though he grimaced and shuddered right afterward, Mrs. Talcott petted his shoulders and told him he was exceptionally strong.

  On Sundays she asked her children to learn a psalm and repeat it to her, but they studied the verses half-heartedly and slipped away to the beach or the rowboat before finishing. He was the only one who stayed beside her on the porch until he got a whole psalm learned. When he was done reciting, she got up from the divan where she liked to sit with a book and an open box of chocolates. She let him choose a piece of candy, and then she pulled him against her waist and rubbed his head. People made jokes about her eating so many chocolates, and they called her fat, but he liked the feel of her. She had soft parts, like a bed with feather pillows you fell upon. He sniffed a sweet powder through her clothes.

  She said it would not do for him to call her “Mrs. Talcott” anymore; he should call her “Mother,” like the rest of them.

  One evening he sat on the porch swing with Mrs. Talcott. It was so dark they couldn’t see the lawn, but he smelled the grass; if he ran across it barefoot, the newly mowed blades would smear his soles green.

  “Did something bad happen to my mother?” Quentin blurted suddenly.

  “Something bad?” Mrs. Talcott said with hesitation, and used her heels to brake the swing. They stopped rocking.

  At school a boy once said that he’d heard Quentin’s mother was dead. The rumor had startled him, and now he felt an odd urge to confront Mrs. Talcott with the same strange words.

  “Heavens, no!” Mrs. Talcott sucked in her breath and exhaled quickly when she heard this. “Your mother is living in Italy, last I heard.”

  He knew this all very well. But it still troubled him to think of his unmailed letters to her, hidden in his father’s desk. Quentin told Mrs. Talcott how he’d found them.

  “Unless Mama died . . . why didn’t Papa send them to her?” Quentin asked. “After I’d gone to the trouble of writing them?”

  “I can’t speak for your father,” Mrs. Talcott said. “But I would imagine that your mother’s absence has caused him a good deal of grief. Maybe—maybe he thinks it’s better for you to carry on, and not be frustrated by things that can’t be changed.”

  Several nights later, after a game of freeze tag, Quentin flopped on the lawn, panting. He noticed how his heart hopped like a small animal caught inside his chest, until he had rested enough. After the others had scattered and gone into the house for card games and checkers, Quentin remained there, the ground cold against his back. Dew dampened the lawn, and stars glittered like the heads of pins.

  He heard Mrs. Talcott on the porch, behind the bushes, talking to another lady. No doubt they were passing the box of chocolates back and forth, although it was dark so he couldn’t see the ladies, and they did not see him.

  Mrs. Talcott was saying, “Everyone asks me: ‘You already have five children, so why would you take in another?’ The simple answer is that it tugs at my heart to see that little boy so alone. His father is always crossing the ocean, whether for business or pleasure or adventure. . . .

  “Quentin hurt his knee the other day,” she went on. “I brought him into the bathroom to wash and bandage it, and when I saw that blood flowing from his knee, I thought: Where is his mother? What can that woman be thinking? Where is she?”

  PART SEVEN

  50

  I TA LY

  1913

  Onstage at Montepulciano, Erika stood incandescent, the sounds of Bizet’s Carmen passing through her. Arms horizontal, she stood there with her tongue releasing beauty.

  During rehearsals, members of the orchestra applauded and cheered her. They had been hired to play at her prova, and they owed her nothing apart from a decent rendering of their services, but thanks to them, anticipation had begun to spread through the ancient hill town. The new singer, they were telling everyone, has a beautiful voice, una bella voce. You must come to her debut.

  The night Erika had first headed from the railway station toward the fortressed city where she was to make her prova, things had not seemed quite so promising. The train that delivered them was horrendously late, and
she and Christopher discovered that the station was far from Montepulciano. Darkness and slanting rain had taken hold as they found themselves being jostled uphill inside a covered carriage. A steep embankment rose up on one side of the road, and the silhouettes of olive trees fell away on the other.

  Lightning split the sky, close enough to touch. Erika watched the storm and worried. They would never reach the mountaintop city before restaurants locked their doors for the evening, and they were both famished. The ascent became steeper and the carriage moved in a cumbersome, treacherous way, on great waterwheels. She prayed for the horses not to lose their footing.

  Beside her Christopher napped, as he often did when a situation felt overwhelming. The road’s angle became so sharp that his head fell back and his mouth opened, his thin nose tipped toward the carriage roof.

  When they reached the inn at Montepulciano, only one room remained. The manager showed them to an odd corner chamber, hardly larger than its single, narrow cot.

  “It won’t do for my sister and me both to stay here,” Christopher declared, and Erika turned her face away to hide the mirth that rippled her lips. How could anyone really believe them to be brother and sister? They did not resemble each other in the least.