The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  She screwed the glass bottle shut, and then uncapped it a second time. When she inhaled, it was as if she had drawn him into her body again. Her head went light. She closed the vial’s cap to stop the swoon.

  After finishing her supper, she took a hot bath and hung up her robe. She pulled a long, translucent nightgown over her head and reached for her jar of Glycerine and Rosewater, spreading cream onto her hands.

  When he was still a toddler, Quentin used to stand close to her, his tummy pushed against her leg while she sat at her vanity table. He had watched her rub the white cream into her skin until the iridescence vanished. “This makes Mama’s hands soft,” she had explained. When she held out her hands, her son had put his nose against her knuckles to sniff. She daubed a bit of Glycerine and Rosewater onto his arm and he rubbed and stared, fascinated, as it disappeared.

  Often at night when she unscrewed the jar, out came Quentin, like a genie appearing in the fragrant vapors.

  Now it was Christmas, and she was alone. Every person who had mattered deeply to her, she had deserted. Utterly and willfully, the court papers said. None of them had ever entered this building overlooking the river, or seen this room where she lived.

  And yet they were here with her, all of them. She was in Florence, in Tuscany, but if she uncapped a vial or unscrewed a jar of hand cream, two of them in particular floated into the room—Ravell and Quentin, a mirage of them in the scents.

  She lit a lamp and sat at a table and wrote to Ravell, picturing him as he unsealed the letter at a coconut plantation, far away.

  My dearest Ravell,

  . . . No matter what the law may prevent me from doing, I intend to see my son again. I will steal him if necessary, and before long I am going to bring him to meet you. . . .

  PART EIGHT

  53

  BOSTON

  1914

  She stood at the iron gates of her son’s school, uncertain as she pushed the grille open if the directors of the Chadsworth School would allow her near him.

  “Family visits normally occur on Sundays,” the secretary said. Three pearl buttons fastened her dress shut at midthroat.

  This was a Tuesday, as Erika well knew. In the long window behind the secretary’s desk, snow flurried like white moths melting against black branches, leaving no mark on the frozen ground.

  “The headmaster is not in his office,” the woman said. “Perhaps he’s in another building. Why don’t you have a seat in the parlor while I check to see if an exception can be made?”

  From the parlor window Erika watched boys in knickers playing football in a distant field. If she stood at the spiked iron fence, close to them, would one boy in the pack look up, recognize her, and stop hurling the ball? But the swarm of boys appeared too old—they were eleven, perhaps, and Quentin was not yet nine.

  She settled into a chair. While waiting, Erika removed a long glove and examined the sparkle of her amethyst ring. She reminded herself not to rush at him, or clutch him too desperately. On her lap rested a box of dried apricots glazed in bittersweet chocolate. After more than three years, Erika hoped they remained his favorite.

  And his face . . . at eight and a half years of age, how changed would his face be? In height he might reach her chest by now.

  The wait continued so long that Erika grew curious about the great building she stood inside, so she took a few steps into the long, vacant corridor. The place was reminiscent of a small castle, with its turrets and unseen wings. Doors at one end opened to a dark, beamed dining hall, and an aroma of boiled potatoes wafted through the hallway.

  From down a stairwell she suddenly heard a horrible shriek. Another scream sounded like a plea for someone to come. As she raced down the steps, her heart hurt in fear of what she would find. Why—it made no sense—but why did she think she might find her own son there?

  “Off with them!” Down a basement corridor a “THWACK!” resounded—the echo of a cane struck once, for practice, against a massive desktop. “Drop them. To the ankles!” As Erika headed toward an open door, she saw a stick slice the air. A boy’s yelps took bites from her heart.

  When she reached the basement room, the master had his back turned to her. The man thrashed fast and with such vigor that the victim hardly had a pause to cry out between blows. The boy was very small, his hair rust-colored, his face and bare calves freckled. His shirttail quivered, and his naked backside and legs were already striped red. To protect his buttocks, the boy’s hands flew to cover them. Then his hands flinched away in order not to be stung, too. Before the next impact came, his feet did a strange, twitchy dance to shy away from the blow. Knowing the master would be incensed if he missed, the boy sidestepped only a few inches left or right.

  “Don’t you think that’s enough?” Erika said loudly.

  The master wheeled around, his lower lip wet, agleam, a relish for the task brightening his eyes before his cane faltered. He was a burly man with a ginger moustache. At the sight of Erika, he reddened from his neck to the top of his hairless head.

  As the boy spun around, his small penis shook beneath his shirttail. Instinctively, he cupped his hands to hide his privates.

  The man put down the cane and dismissed the boy. While Erika continued to stand there, the child dressed hastily and picked up a satchel of books and exited from the basement through a side door.

  Without saying another word to the man, she followed the boy. Outdoors in the frigid air, the boy did not seem aware that she walked behind him. He sniveled, rubbing his knuckles against his nose.

  “Darling,” she called out, “I have something for you.” She folded her skirt carefully over her knees as she squatted down beside the child. Then she opened the box of chocolate-covered apricots she had brought for Quentin and handed a few to the boy.

  “I’m not permitted to have any candy,” he said, lowering his head.

  “Take them,” she said. “Take two right now and eat them while I’m standing here.”

  He obeyed. He chewed and wiped the mucus from his face with the dark blue sleeve of his school jacket.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Oliver Madsen.”

  “Where do your parents live?”

  “In Chestnut Hill.”

  The February air felt fierce and wonderfully cold on their faces after the heat of what had happened. She slipped him another candy and let him go.

  When she returned to the main building, she went directly to the office. The secretary with the pearl buttons raised her head and said, “The Headmaster is back. He’ll see you now.”

  The man in the basement had worn a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but when she entered the Headmaster’s office she encountered the same man wearing a tweed suit jacket, his suspenders nicely covered up. He looked taken aback when she entered, and he tidied his ginger moustache with his fingers before he spoke.

  “Mrs. von Kessler?” He did not sit behind his desk. He stood. “According to our files, you no longer have custody of Quentin.”

  “I’m not asking for custody. I am his mother, and I wish to visit him.”

  “Is the boy’s father aware that you’ve come here?”

  “As you may know, Quentin’s father is an importer. He happens to be away in England at the present time. I’m asking for only a little time alone with my son in the school parlor, and a short stroll around the school grounds with him.”

  The Headmaster clasped his hands behind his back, his tone sharpening. “Do you have the court’s permission to see the boy?”

  Erika strode over to the window and reflected for a moment, and then she turned to the Headmaster, her wrists firmly crossed. “It would be most unfortunate for you, sir, if young Oliver Madsen’s parents over in Chestnut Hill were informed—in the greatest detail—about the scene I just witnessed downstairs.”

  He reddened again, from the edge of his collar to the curve of his balding crown.

  She plucked at the fingertips of her long gloves, and pulled the glo
ves tighter at the elbows, straightening them.

  “I’m sure it won’t take long to locate Quentin,” she said.

  When they brought her son into the parlor, Erika did exactly what she had vowed not to do—she leaped at him too quickly. At first sight he looked strange to her, not as sweetly plump in the neck or limbs as she remembered. But his eyes, hooded by his dark eyebrows, stared at her with a familiar seriousness, like Ravell’s. As she thrust her fingers into the thick wings of his dark hair and kissed his forehead, he stepped back and stood numb. Her heart dipped, and she opened the box of chocolate-glazed apricots and apologized for the few that were missing, though she did not explain what had happened to them.

  “It must be quite a surprise for you—seeing me,” Erika said brightly. She patted the brocade cushion of the settee so he would sit beside her.

  “Why are you here?” Quentin asked. He moved stiffly, the mistrust evident in him.

  “To visit.” She leaned toward him and straightened his tie. “Because I’ve missed you and wanted to see you.”

  “Did Father send you?”

  She noticed that he called Peter “Father” now, not “Papa,” as he used to. “Your father,” she said drily, “has no idea I’m here.”

  Quentin drew back his chin to show his unease. Erika closed the parlor door and slid closer to him. She glanced at his wrists and knuckles and searched for any bruises or discolorations a long stick might have made. “Quentin,” she said solemnly, “don’t be afraid to answer me truthfully. Have you ever been punished here at school?” She paused. “Physically, I mean? With cruelty?”

  Quentin looked baffled. He did not appear to understand what she was alluding to. After he had eaten several candies and licked the chocolate from his fingers, she suggested that they take a stroll around the grounds and tour the Chadsworth School. They passed the playing field, where Quentin’s gaze turned toward boys in heavy sweaters and knickers, all tumbling in a muddy heap around a football. He watched them with more interest than he showed in her.

  “I’ll be staying in Boston for a while,” Erika said. “Next time you visit Grandpapa, maybe I’ll see you there.”

  Quentin halted. He bent down in the cobblestone driveway and retied his shoe. “I don’t think Father would be happy about that. I think he’d be angry to know you came here.”

  “I am your mother,” she said firmly. “It’s natural for me to visit you.” She asked if she might see his room.

  “I don’t have a room,” he said, “just an alcove—which I like better.”

  “Your alcove, then?”

  Her son guided her into a dormitory where walnut wainscoting darkened the hallways. Quentin put one hand on the oiled banister and faltered. “I don’t know if you are allowed.”

  “Are boys up there now?”

  “No. They’re doing their lessons before supper.”

  At her prodding, he showed her upstairs. The youngest boys, who were only six or seven, slept on a dozen beds in a dormitory room that lacked ventilation, its dark green shades depressingly drawn in the late afternoon. She felt faint passing through it. A staircase almost as narrow as her hips led upward to a third story resplendent with light, even on this February day. A ring of windows opened to treetops—the branches stark now, but she imagined thickets of leaves would grow upon them in the spring.

  His alcove was there, and she understood why he liked it: the small space was his alone, with no roommate crowding him. Its tiny window pointed in a Gothic arch. The alcove had a bookcase recessed into one wall where he kept his collection of lead soldiers. Quentin had made his bed so carefully that an iron appeared to have passed over it. A half-finished letter lay upon the desk.

  “How tidy you keep things,” she praised him.

  While Quentin went to the lavatory, she spied around a bit. My darling Mother, the letter on his desk began—and her pulse leaped with the shock of seeing that. When he was younger, he had always referred to her as “Mama.” She sat on Quentin’s bed and pulled the letter’s loose pages into her lap. He’d composed it like a diary.

  February 15

  My darling Mother,

  I miss you so awfully I cannot think strait. Yesterday three boys in the class had dredful headaches and I got one myself and my eyes drooped and my forehed hit my book, so Mr. Taylor gave me leave. I stayed in bed all afternoon and the kittchen ladies brought me soup with carrots floating in it.

  February 16

  My hedache is not so bad as yesterday but it is bad enuf. As you know, I have got the stamp craze and so I stayed in bed all day and did my stamp catalog. It was dull with nobody to talk to except Percy the cat that one of the boys snuck in. . . .

  February 17

  My freind Nigel is teaching me to box . . .

  Erika skimmed the parts about ball games, lessons, the skunk caught under the dormitory wing. Her eyes slowed over lines that seemed to address her directly.

  . . . Sometimes at night I wake up and forget that I am not in the Boston house with you. I listen and think you are close by and that you may come into the room. . . .

  I have been wearing my hat and boots and learning my verses just as you would want me to do. I have finished the psalm you gave me and have gone on to Psalm 148. . . .

  Psalm 148? Erika eyes stumbled over the passage, perplexed for a second, for she had never been religious herself. Other odd references and strange names littered the letter—“Margaret” and “the sailing races” and “playing hide-and-seek in the big house at Buzzard’s Bay.” Then Erika recalled her brother’s report that Quentin had passed the summer with the Talcott family, and that Mrs. Talcott doted on him like one of her own children.

  My darling Mother, Quentin had written. Erika felt her breath halt in shock, knowing that Mrs. Talcott must have encouraged him to call her that.

  When Quentin returned from the lavatory, drying his hands against the sides of his pants, the pages dropped from her hands. Her son froze at the alcove’s entrance, as if he understood his own infidelity.

  Erika went to him. She knelt, holding him by the shoulders. “You probably thought I was never coming back, didn’t you?”

  Quentin looked uncomfortable, chin down, staring at his shoes. He slid one shoulder loose from her grasp and walked over to the window. “The boys are lining up for supper,” he said, pointing. “I’d better go back now.”

  Her father’s walrus moustache had whitened during the three and a half years since she’d gone away, and she worried at the stiffness she saw in him. As the motorcar dropped them in front of his Back Bay town house, her father failed to see the curb. He stumbled, falling into a bank of snow.

  “Are you all right, Papa?” Erika scurried to help him to his feet.

  “Nothing serious.” He rubbed his hip and backside. “The worst part is always the embarrassment.”

  He had aged at a rate that surprised her. Magdalena told her that Papa would be hastening down a street with his black medical bag, and he would halt suddenly, as though lost. More than once he had stepped inside Magdalena’s house to telephone his office so that his nurse could remind him of his destination. Her brother claimed that Papa had missed appointments. For the first time, their father had begun to lose patients.

  Yet the old man still exuded warmth. When her father’s chauffeur drove them to the Chadsworth School to pick up Quentin for the Washington’s Birthday holiday, Quentin sprinted down the school steps, happy to be pulled into his grandfather’s arms. On the veranda, the Headmaster stopped greeting parents and ducked back into the building when he saw Erika.

  They rode directly to her brother’s house, where they’d been invited to dine with Gerald and his family. Quentin shot up the stairs, eager to disappear with his cousins.

  After dinner Gerald took Erika aside into his study to review financial matters with her. As he closed the door, they heard the rumble of children’s feet overhead.

  “Erika.” Her brother set a green leather folder on his desk
and swung around in his chair to face her. “May I inquire about your plans?”

  “My plans?”

  “Do you intend to return to Italy? Or has that phase of your life been ‘played out,’ so to speak?”

  “ ‘Played out’?” she said.

  “You seem more interested in your son these days. I was simply wondering.”

  “I don’t plan to live in Boston again, if that’s what you mean. I’m here only for a visit.”

  “I see.”

  “You and your wife disapprove of me entirely, don’t you?” she asked. “If there’s anything you’d like to say—why don’t you go ahead and say it?”

  “I don’t think it would have the least effect.” Gerald turned back to his desk, and finished writing the check he’d promised her from their mother’s estate.

  Almost from the moment Erika returned to Boston, she longed to escape. In the Back Bay, she could hardly walk two blocks without seeing stunned looks of recognition from people she’d known all her life. People regarded her differently now, since she’d gone away.

  On the main floor of a department store, she met two ladies she’d first encountered as girls at primary school. Amid the tables of dry goods, they whirled around, incredulous at the sight of her.

  “Erika!”

  “Are you famous now, in Italy?”

  “Hardly.” Erika gave them a small smile.