The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  “After the way we acted in Montepulciano,” Signora Lorello began, “we find it very difficult to say certain things to you.” Her upper and lower teeth met in a neat, even line, and she smiled so hard her eyes slitted.

  “We are candid people,” her husband said. “We must be truthful with you.”

  Erika waited, her neck rigid.

  “We are concerned,” Signora Lorello said, “that you simply do not have the stamina to endure a long performance.”

  Christopher uncrossed his legs. “How can you say such a thing?” he demanded. “You, who heard her vocalize for a whole night straight at Montepulciano?” He moved so suddenly that Signora Lorello’s poodle, which had been resting like a fluffy slipper against his foot, was roused and began to bark.

  Signora Lorello gathered the poodle into her lap. Her eyes cut toward Christopher, then away from him.

  “You have a lustrous voice,” Signora Lorello assured Erika. “With luck, if we choose your repertoire correctly—you’ll give a nice little recital.”

  Did they care for her talent at all anymore, Erika wondered, or had they simply trapped themselves into offering her something? Certainly they did not want to appear unreliable in Pietro Palladino’s eyes.

  “We’re just as enthusiastic about your future as we were at Montepulciano,” Signora Lorello insisted.

  “Are you?” Erika said coldly. It was a bad tone to have used. “What did you think of the Rossini—my version of ‘Una voce poco fa’?”

  “It was lovely,” the impresario admitted.

  “Certain passaggio problems,” his wife added.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Christopher said bitterly.

  The impresario’s wife cast him a look that begged for a waiter to clear him from their presence like a soiled plate.

  “Listen,” she snapped finally at Erika, “do you want to be a singer or not?”

  Erika told them she would consider the proposed recital, and let them know her decision on Monday.

  By Monday morning Erika had convinced herself that she must be humble and not arrogant; she must do the recital for them, of course. After Christopher had headed off to a caffè to enjoy an espresso and a newspaper, she finished her toilette, and prepared to call Pietro Palladino. Accept their offer, she would tell him.

  Erika had just fastened the last hook of her white dress when she heard a brusque whack on the door. Signora Lorello strode into the hotel suite, and the tails of her sash flew around her like whips. It was the first instance Erika had ever seen her alone.

  “Signora von Kessler—” The impresario’s wife’s tone was harsh. “My husband and I have thought about it all weekend, and we do not wish to engage you for any performance. We’re uncomfortable working with a person like you.”

  Erika heard a plea escape from her throat. “Please don’t say this. Please! Just listen to me.” She gestured for the impresario’s wife to be seated in a gilded chair carved with cherubim. The woman sat, while Erika took a similar chair nearby.

  “I was ill on the day of my audition at your opera house,” Erika said. “Besides, my voice is not suited to Puccini. Believe me, if you hire me to sing the music of a different composer—”

  “Your ambitions are far grander than your voice,” the signora said.

  “I tell you, I can do better on another day.” Erika knew she had fallen to begging now.

  “We don’t wish to work with a singer who brings her silly young boy-friend along to defend her.”

  Erika decided to ignore this.

  The plump woman slid her hips to the edge of the chair, preparing to leave. When she spoke, her syllables were hard. “You can say what you like, but your voice is not smooth across the three registers. Your top notes are faked, metallic! No amount of study or rehearsals can resolve that.”

  Behind this Erika heard the ugly concurrence of a whole committee. She had humiliated the Lorellos before their associates; she saw that in the tiny muscles that tightened bitterly around Signora Lorello’s eyes.

  Signora Lorello got up. “I will tell Pietro Palladino.” She announced this as if it were the last dreaded task that remained.

  Erika gave a soft wail—a plaintive sound she had not made since she was a child.

  The impresario’s wife hastened to the door, pulled it open, and fled.

  After she left, Erika dropped onto the divan. Inside her came a hardening. For months, for years now, she had figured: if my prova fails, if all my sacrifice and training come to nothing, I will throw myself from a high tower, or the roof of the Duomo.

  But now she thought: Who would commit suicide for the sake of such a flighty, silly woman?

  For an hour she remained on the gray divan and waited for the thing that would surely happen next. A messenger from the agent’s office would knock on the door to inform her that the great man had abandoned her, too.

  Instead, the telephone rang. Pietro Palladino’s voice came on the line, sounding soothing and assured and paternal. The decency and fairness in his response surprised her. “Well,” he said, “I love your voice and I want to find a good home for your talent at a fine opera house.”

  Over the weekend, the agent confided, he had learned that Erika had not been the first singer to whom Signora Lorello had made extravagant promises that were later forgotten. “Her infatuations,” the agent observed, “extinguish themselves as rapidly as they ignite.

  “I’ve already sent my courier to deliver a letter to another impresario,” he added. “We’ll march onward, and arrange other auditions for you.”

  But Erika worried that Signora Lorello had spoken the truth. Perhaps her own aspirations reached far beyond where her voice could carry her.

  52

  Everyone in her neighborhood—the fruit vendor at the corner stand, her blind landlady, the new charwoman on the stairs—all of them were curious about what had happened in Milan. Would she now sing from grand stages? Each time Erika shared the disappointing news, she felt even more depressed.

  Thus far, her famous agent had found her nothing. He was trying, that she knew, but it was not easy to sell an obscure mezzo-soprano. Opera house managers preferred vocalists whose names were securely familiar. Pietro Palladino had tried a little bargaining with impresarios, telling them that he would let them have a certain well-known baritone they coveted if they would agree to hear his new mezzo-soprano. Auditions were scheduled; Erika traveled to small cities to sing before coveys of men who smelled of cigars and old creased bills passed from wallet to wallet.

  In the end, only one hired her—as an understudy for the leading role in La Cenerentola. An understudy must be present always—at every rehearsal, every performance, ready to glide onto the stage at any moment. Erika tried not to lurk, and tried to remain unobtrusive, but the prima donna glared at her during rehearsal one day and pointed a finger and shouted, “She’ll bring me bad luck. Get her out of here! I don’t want to lay eyes on her again.” The singer was famous, and she shuddered with such distress that everyone rushed to calm her.

  After only three days, Erika was dismissed and sent back to Florence. Sometimes in the streets, or at a caffè on the Via Tornabuoni, she encountered one of Maestro Valenti’s other students, who would inevitably inquire if her illustrious Milan agent had yet found her a booking. If she noticed one of these students from afar, she ducked her head over her cappuccino or turned inside a shop to hide.

  “You need a vacation from all of this,” Christopher remarked as they were strolling over a bridge that crossed the Arno. “It’s a pity you can’t simply get away.” He sucked the last juicy threads from a peach stone, and with a grunt of satisfaction, he took the clean pit from his mouth and tossed it from the bridge.

  To cheer her, Mark and Edmund invited her along to Miss Maude’s English Tea Room. “This is the only place in Florence where scones can be had,” Mark said, opening a menu. “And the equivalent of Devon cream.”

  “I never cared much for Devon cream,” Erika said.


  “Not the sort of thing one comes to Florence to sample.” Mark caught sight of his reflection mirrored in the window, and his gaze lingered there as he studied his own smart looks. Legs crossed, he stroked his trousered thigh almost lovingly, and bobbed his foot.

  Erika described to them how, for months, she had been approaching each new audition with senseless hope, preparing for it for days. Past disappointments hardly mattered, she tried to persuade herself—only reaching for the next opportunity.

  The men had already wearied of her angst, she knew, and now that weeks and months had gone by, they barely listened. A slim-hipped waiter brushed past their table and Mark and Edmund stared after him.

  “Another bugger,” Mark said. “Like us.”

  “Nice-looking,” Edmund nodded.

  “Take him.” Mark winked at Edmund. “He’s all yours.”

  “I am running out of chances,” she cried to Christopher upon returning from yet another failed audition. She worried that before long, Pietro Palladino would give up on her and quietly cease his efforts on her behalf.

  Her anguish grew so extravagant that Christopher bent under it, as if her gloom were a whip hitting him. One day he ran out of her room saying, “What is the point of talking? Nothing I say ever cheers you.”

  Erika leaned her head over her third-story balcony and called to him in the street. He pretended not to know his own name. In his unpolished shoes he rushed along the Lungarno Acciaiuoli and disappeared into a tunnel of tourists buying fruit. She picked up an embroidered cushion and crushed her face into it.

  “Why didn’t you answer?” she asked later, painfully.

  Softly he replied, “Because I didn’t hear you.” But she knew otherwise.

  A postman pulled the bell one morning. When Erika peered down from the balcony, he called out that she must sign for a registered letter. Her feet tripped down three flights, and her heart flew with the silly, impossible hope that an opera house manager had reconsidered and written to Pietro Palladino. Perhaps she was running toward the news that would save her.

  She wondered, too, if the slow mail that crossed oceans might have finally brought Ravell’s response to the letter she had sent.

  As she scratched her signature on the postman’s pink receipt, she saw that the large envelope had been sent from the States, from the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston. She passed the new charwoman in the foyer, a rough, unpleasant woman who twisted her washrag and gave long, suspicious stares whenever Christopher or Mark or Edmund ascended for a visit to Erika’s room.

  The legal document notified her that three years had passed since she had “willfully and utterly” deserted her husband. Peter’s petition to divorce her had been finalized; custody of their one minor child had been granted to him.

  It was hardly a surprise, but it saddened her. It marked a kind of death. Finally, irrevocably, her marriage was over; her son was gone.

  She recalled what her brother, Gerald, had recently written to her:

  Quentin, it seems, is spending his summer on Cape Cod while his father is away traveling in England. The wife of Peter’s business partner—mother to a large brood—has decided to take on Quentin as a kind of foster child.

  Why did her brother feel the compulsion to tell her this?

  If she threw her capes, dresses, slippers, and opera scores into a pile of trunks and went back to Boston, the court would not allow her near Quentin again—not without permission, not with any ease. She could approach her former door and hammer with the brass knocker, but if the servants peeked out and saw her on the step, they’d probably let the window drape fall. No doubt they’d been warned against opening the door to her.

  The court did not know about her and Ravell, how their bodies had made that little boy, how Quentin belonged to them as much as to Peter.

  She read the documents thoroughly, and then placed them at the bottom of a drawer. No judge knew how strangely exquisite Quentin had looked to her when he’d been ill with diphtheria, during those nights when she held him and whispered prayers into his sleeping face. Very softly she’d parted her lips and blown cool air across his feverish forehead, scattering his fine dark hair (Ravell’s hair!). Let him live, she’d prayed.

  On the afternoon that Erika received the divorce papers, she walked for miles through Florence, covering much of the city.

  She went to the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, and stood before the Hospital of the Innocents. Over centuries, until just thirty or forty years earlier, mothers had come here, shawls over their heads to obscure their faces, carrying infants in their arms. Some had hesitated, and turned back. Some had rushed boldly—desperately—forward before they could change their minds.

  Erika glanced up above the nine arches where terra-cotta medallions pictured babies in swaddling clothes, their plump, outstretched arms imploring their mothers not to desert them.

  She saw the window that framed the special wheel—the ruota—where mothers placed their infants, and with a spin, passed them anonymously to a stranger’s care on the wall’s other side.

  And she thought: Where are they now, those ghostly mothers who came here in centuries past? At this hour she was the only woman who stood staring at the ruota, but she felt the spirits of those other mothers around her. Many of them, like her, must have returned here, sorrowful and regretting what they’d done.

  The charwoman eyed Erika with wrath not long after Christopher paid a call to her room. Erika had gone out for lunch and come back. As she tiptoed up the cascade of freshly washed steps toward her room, lifting her skirts and smiling an apology for the spots her shoes might leave, the servant stopped her.

  Holding a string mop aloft, letting it drip rivulets into a bucket, the charwoman said, “People tell Donna Anna the kind of woman you are, but she doesn’t listen. She is old and blind and she will stand for the worst, just to have a singer around to listen to.

  “Your singing,” the servant said, “has gotten worse.”

  “Dreadful woman,” Donna Anna said. “I will give her notice.”

  A driver brought Donna Anna’s motorcar around and chauffeured them into the hills behind Florence. Erika and the landlady sat at the rear, swathed in tulle and veiled in chiffon to keep the dust away.

  They parked at a curve overlooking a villa nestled in a dip of land. Soft hillsides ringed the house, and as they sat in the open-air automobile, Erika described the view of it to Donna Anna—the villa’s red-tiled roof and the walled gardens. Box hedges defined the estate’s perimeter, and stone benches stood in shady corners where the dark earth remained moist. Erika loosened her veils while a breeze toyed with the ends, blowing the chiffon tails.

  Donna Anna lifted her nose and sniffed. “Jasmine,” the old lady said, before Erika even noticed the hedge ornamented with white petals.

  “I wonder what it would be like to live in a villa like that,” Erika said. From their aerial perspective, she could see a glass-roofed courtyard where a fountain gushed and oleanders bloomed. She described it all to Donna Anna.

  “That sort of house is usually filled with tapestried chairs and tapestried fire screens,” the old lady said. “And the doors are locked by great iron bars at night.”

  As they motored farther, Donna Anna tilted her face to the sky, absorbing the sunlight and rush of wind across her skin. Look at her, Erika thought, alive to every pleasure, while my ambition cripples me.

  “You were not wrong to come to Italy,” the old lady said. “Not with talent like yours. It would be against God’s wishes not to try to bring that voice before the world.”

  “Sometimes I feel that God is against me,” Erika responded. Why had she been blessed with a gift, if upon every attempt to release sounds from her throat, the world silenced her?

  The chauffeur stopped the car at an overlook. They got out and sat on a stone bench to view the panorama of Florence with its Duomo and tiled rooftops.

  Erika said, “I’ve cast away everything. I have nothin
g now.”

  Donna Anna said, “You have money saved, don’t you? Christopher is right—you should take yourself on a journey, get away.”

  A letter finally came—the very letter she’d most longed to receive. When she saw Ravell’s handwriting on the envelope, she mounted the stairs with haste, and sat by the window and held it in her hands for a long while before opening it. It was a reply to the one she’d sent, just before her prova. Mail moved slowly across the seas, his words seven weeks old by the time she read them:

  My dearest Erika,

  You have never been gone from my thoughts since you left Trinidad eight years ago, and it gave me deep joy to receive your letter.

  By now you must know whether your operatic debut has turned out to be a victory or a disappointment (the former, I suspect). One thing is certain: you moved to Florence for the sake of your passion, and few have lived as fearlessly and vividly as you. . . .

  Perhaps you know that Peter and I traveled to British Guiana earlier this year. Due to a severe drought, we never reached the Kaieteur Falls, as was our plan. The journey was memorable nevertheless. Peter told me about your son and showed me his photograph. Quentin is a handsome boy, and I was deeply moved and happy to know about him. It would mean everything to me to meet him.

  I long for the day when we’ll see each other again, and I wish you every good fortune on the opera stages of Italy.

  With greatest love,

  Ravell

  After rereading the letter several times, she took a vial of musk from a drawer. It was almost Christmas, and she’d bought the little bottle as a holiday present for Christopher. Now she uncapped it. Musk was the scent Ravell used to slap on his jaw after shaving. With the vial drawn close to her nose, it seemed to her that his jawbone was within the reach of her own fingers.