The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  She happened upon Uma, who sat on the stoop of a hut, balancing a toddler by his underarms to prevent him from tumbling. The tiny boy wore no diaper, only a loose shirt, and was clearly just learning to walk. He went forward a few feet and fell in the dust, picked himself back up, and wobbled a few steps before stumbling again.

  “Is that your baby?” Erika asked. The servant girl nodded. It had not occurred to Erika before that Uma was a married woman with a child.

  “That’s a beautiful sari,” Erika said. The girl’s sari was the color of saffron, bordered with a brilliant turquoise design. Uma beckoned Erika into the hut and opened a trunk to show her others—an astonishing assortment of saris, fabrics the colors of jewels, lengths of garnet, emerald, and amethyst.

  Inside the dim hut with mud floors, Uma showed Erika her other treasures. She drew long, fringed earrings from pouches, and she pushed silver bangles halfway to her elbows. The interior of the hut smelled of incense, cumin, sandalwood.

  In Italy Erika had come to adore costumes. How strange it was to stand next to a thin-boned girl who inhabited a hut with dirt floors . . . and to long, suddenly, to drape herself in the scented garments of a Hindu coolie woman.

  “Would you show me how to wrap myself in a sari?” she asked Uma.

  Erika forgot that she had come to call Quentin to lunch. While Uma’s baby played at their feet, rolling the husk of a coconut back and forth like a ball, Erika let herself become transformed. She selected the most dazzling sari that had been folded into the trunk—the fabric the color of lapis lazuli, with gold threads woven through it—a sari intended, no doubt, for festival days.

  Silently, expertly, Uma spun the long banner around Erika, winding it around her hips. Uma formed perfect pleats in front with her nimble fingers, tucking the folds here and there, passing a length of cloth between Erika’s legs. Erika felt shivers of coolness as the coolie girl’s fingers nipped and grazed her form.

  Finally Uma held up a mirror to show the banner of deep blue across Erika’s chest. A long glimmering tail fell from Erika’s shoulder to her knee.

  The door of the hut opened and light flooded in. Quentin and four-year-old Ajeet halted at the threshold. Ajeet came inside and rubbed his head against Uma’s hip, begging for something to eat. Ma, he called her. “Ma.”

  “I didn’t realize that Ajeet was also your son,” Erika said.

  She asked if she might borrow the sari, and wore it to dine with Ravell that evening. He was stunned when she appeared.

  “Well, look at you,” he said.

  Across the table, he could not wrest his gaze from her. They lifted their glasses of green swizzle and laughed at her new persona.

  “To the diva in her sari,” he said, toasting her.

  At one point during the meal, Uma stationed herself in a corner of the room. She held a serving platter, and studied Ravell with an intensity that seemed strange. When he addressed her, Uma lowered her eyelids, but when he continued to converse with Erika, the servant girl looked at him with a yearning that hinted of pain.

  After dinner, he closed the doors to the parlor, so that he and Erika could be alone.

  “I was surprised to see how many saris she had to choose from,” Erika said. “Such a feast of luscious colors. And the jewelry—all those little pouches she kept opening, with bracelets and anklets and nose rings.”

  “The workers are like that,” Ravell said. “Their women are regarded as princesses. Husbands funnel their wages into their wives’ adornments.”

  Erika smoothed the long scarf of the sari draped over her shoulder. On the divan she lounged with bare feet. The doors were shut, but she softened her words nevertheless, so as not to be overheard.

  “I see that Uma has a baby. Did you deliver her younger child?”

  He nodded. “It was fortunate that I was there.” Uma’s younger son had presented feet first, so Ravell had been forced to reach up and turn the child’s body completely around.

  Erika remembered herself in the aftermath of giving birth, the mystical figure Ravell had become for her.

  “You know, I think Uma is in love with you.”

  Ravell turned his head away in embarrassment. “That sometimes happens with servant girls. They form a fixation on their master.”

  Later that evening, Ravell shut the curtains that hung like white veils at his bedroom windows. Erika’s backside fell against the bed as they went down together. As Ravell unwrapped her body from the sari, they smelled spices wound up inside the cloth—ginger, cardamom, and hints of coconut.

  “Which of the coolies is her husband?” Erika asked him another night, as they lay in bed.

  “She doesn’t have a husband.”

  “Who fathered her children?”

  “That’s a source of speculation. I never ask about such matters.” Ravell got up to use the outhouse.

  The older boy, Ajeet, was light-skinned, the younger one much darker. Erika wondered if Mrs. Hartley had viewed Uma as too much of a temptation to keep at the Eden estate. Perhaps Mr. Hartley had become overly fond of the girl, and that was why Uma had been exiled to the Cocal.

  “How long has Uma been here?” she asked when Ravell returned to bed.

  “Five years,” he said. He turned on his side, away from her.

  She bent an elbow and propped her head against her hand. With one finger she traced the outline of his shoulder, bared above the sheet.

  “Have you slept with her?”

  A pause. “Why do you ask?”

  She did not repeat the question, and he said nothing more at first. Her head slid against the pillow and she watched shapes shift against the ceiling and walls. Wind bent the tall stalks in the garden. The next time she saw Quentin and Ajeet playing together, she would look at them differently. It had not occurred to her before that they might be half-brothers.

  Ravell turned, and they lay on their backs in parallel. “You’re angry,” he said, and sighed.

  If it had been daylight, he would have seen how flushed she’d become, her neck and face reddening in the darkness. The servant girl’s beauty used to intrigue her, but now it felt ominous. When Ravell reached for Erika’s hand, she withdrew it.

  She had expected that other women might pass through his days and nights, like waves that washed away. It had not occurred to her that Ravell would have fathered two children—a choice on his part, clearly, because as a doctor, he knew how to prevent such things.

  “Were you in love with her?” Erika asked.

  “Not in love,” he said. “But I felt . . . well, compassion for her. Her parents were dead, she had no family . . . and she was happiest around children. It was obvious that she wanted a baby. . . . And to be honest, I longed for children myself.”

  Ravell sighed. “You never wrote,” he said. “In all those years, you never so much as mailed a postcard to me. . . . How was I supposed to guess that you’d ever come back to this island?”

  It was unfair of her, she knew. Why had she imagined that this man understood how often she thought of him, even while she had avoided him for years?

  Yet knowing she had a rival only sharpened the edge of their lovemaking. Now something dangerous lurked, and that figure of loveliness must be kept from the bed. But how had it come to this? Erika also wondered, as she straddled Ravell and rode him hard; or as she paused to touch his navel with the tip of her tongue. She was warring against a servant, a young woman who had no voice at all.

  They had been at the plantation about ten days when Ravell took Quentin on horseback with him to collect the mail. Fifteen miles along the hard beach they traveled, all the way to Sangre Grande.

  Ravell was writing a book about the history of obstetrics, and he was pleased to receive two yellowing volumes from a London bookseller for his research.

  A letter had also arrived from Christopher.

  Dearest Erika,

  . . . Signor Nardini, the impresario for whom you auditioned in Perugia, has made inquiries regarding your whe
reabouts. Nardini is gathering a cast for a summer production of Il barbiere di Siviglia, and he wishes to consider you as a possible Rosina. . . .

  Inside her chest she felt a burst of vindication, her body summoning up its familiar and wild readiness for flight.

  Then she read further.

  If you can catch a ship fast, auditions are to be held on the first of March. . . .

  But the first of March had come and passed, and Christopher must have known that his correspondence would never arrive in time. So why had he told her about an opportunity that had already expired? Erika wanted to wad up the letter. A cry of anguish came out of her.

  Ravell tried to console her. “If one impresario still remembered your voice months after you sang for him, others will,” he said.

  To amuse Quentin, Ravell took the boy to hunt butterflies the next day, while Erika took opera scores to the beach. She held up a parasol and faced the Atlantic and practiced her scales. Every morning, she promised herself, she would go to a spot of shade where palm fronds blew. She would sing until her powers came fully back. She would perform for the Portuguese men-of-war with their purple and blue streamers, and for fish that floated and listened under the waves.

  Every day the housemaids swept the bungalow. They waxed the floors and changed the bedding and bleached the mud from Quentin’s sailor suit. It was Uma who laundered Erika’s undergarments and soaked her hairbrush in ammonia, Uma who tended Erika’s personal things. The servant girl entered Erika’s room only during her absence. When Erika returned, her perfume atomizers and tortoiseshell hair combs had been neatly shifted to the left or right on a table; her silk stockings had been folded over the ladder-back of a chair. The white coverlet on the bed looked as smooth as freshly fallen snow.

  One morning when she returned to the room early, before Uma had left with her broom, the servant girl glanced up. Uma’s eyes formed two slits of resentment, and then she was gone.

  Later that day Erika told Ravell about the spite she’d seen in Uma’s eyes. He lowered his head, sighed, and ran his fingers roughly through his hair. “I’ll have to say something to her,” he said. “Do my best to apologize.”

  Through a window Erika saw Ravell in the yard behind the kitchen, where he’d gone to speak with Uma. His face looked pained. Whatever he was saying, whatever words of reassurance he meant to offer her, Uma would not listen to any of it. She stood with her back to him, bending to fill pitchers from canisters of rainwater. When he patted Uma’s shoulder, she flinched, and left the filled pitchers on a bench, her long braid swinging along her spine as she made her way back to the village.

  Ravell took Erika to Esmeralda, the other estate he managed for Mr. Hartley, where the house stood on stilts, high off the ground. They sat together one evening on the high steps that led inside, and listened to the animals and parrots hidden in the forest that encircled the house.

  Ravell liked to come to the smaller estate to work on his book. Here, he found fewer interruptions from workers, servants, and the overseer. Last time he visited, he’d finished a chapter on the history of contraception. Across a long table inside she’d seen his piles of notes.

  He told her how the kings of ancient Egypt had ordered girls in their harem to have their ovaries removed, in order to prolong the time of pleasure that might be had from them.

  A thousand years ago, an Islamic physician had written down twenty recipes for birth control. “Sneezing was one method,” Ravell said.

  “Sneezing?”

  “After coitus, he said a woman ought to sneeze to expel semen. He also advised a woman to jump backward seven or eight times right after sex, so the sperm would fall out.”

  Erika laughed at that. “What would happen if she leaped forward?”

  “That was the worst possible move—that would cause her to conceive.”

  They fell into silence, letting the forest speak for them, listening to the crack of wings and the shiver of leaves as monkeys leaped from one branch to another.

  Erika said quietly, “Quentin is your child, you know.”

  Ravell nodded. His dark eyes held on to hers, absorbing her words with tenderness. “I’ve been aware of that. Peter told me that while we were in Guiana.”

  She stared. “Peter told you? How would he have known?”

  “Apparently a fertility specialist told him that he was incapable of impregnating you—but that was something I’d always known.”

  “Well,” she said, gazing into the blindness of the nighttime forest, “he did make me pregnant once.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  The air thickened with the humid perfumes of the forest. She listed to one side, sensing something awful coming, a terrible duplicity. She struggled to breathe, and when she wiped her brow, water ran from her fingers. “What are you telling me?”

  “I was the father of the baby daughter you lost.”

  She got up and went into the house. The house was built in a hexagon, and sticks propped open the windows on all sides. She staggered around in a circle and felt herself growing dizzy, as if she were riding a carousel.

  “I was your patient then.” She stopped walking and braced her legs a stride apart. “You never asked, you never told me?”

  “It was the only time I ever did such a thing to a patient.”

  “Why did you do it?” She peered into his face.

  “I wanted you to have a child.” His tone grew desperate. “It was the only way.”

  She gripped the back of a wooden chair and sat down hard. “My God,” she whispered. She put her fists against her temples and widened her eyes, staring at nothing.

  “Do you hate me for it?” Ravell sat down on the bed and waited.

  “I don’t know what to say. . . . Violated—I feel violated,” she said loudly. “For a woman to believe she’s carrying one man’s child—and then to find out. . . . It’s the worst kind of lie, to dupe a woman like that!”

  “I did it because he was incapable—” His words diminished to whispers as he pleaded with her. “I did it because I loved you. I couldn’t bear to have you gone from my life.”

  Erika swiveled her head from left to right, collecting herself. “It’s just a shock,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now I have to view the story of my life differently.”

  For a while she was silent, thinking. “I suppose, looking back—” She gave him a nod. “I guess I’m glad you did it.”

  “Mama?”

  Back at the Cocal on another night, she reared up from the pillows. She fled from Ravell’s bed, shoving her arms through the sleeves of her dressing gown.

  Quentin stood in the hallway, a small figure in pajamas too short for him, ending halfway up his calves. Normally he was a heavy sleeper. During their voyage to Trinidad, he’d dozed off in a chair while the ship’s band was playing. She was startled to see that he’d found his way down from his attic room.

  “Where did you go?” he asked, his tone sharpened by fear. “You weren’t in your bed.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I got up to get something to drink.”

  She was afraid that he recognized the falsehood. Had the noises she’d made with Ravell and the greed of her enjoyment awakened her son? She sometimes worried about this.

  “I heard a bird,” he said in a plaintive way. “It was in the house, very close by.”

  He cooed—giving high little pants that got faster and changed from quarter notes to eighth notes and erupted into long, delirious squeals. It was a pitch-perfect imitation of how she sounded as her head tossed from left to right against Ravell’s pillows. It amazed her, the accuracy of her child’s ear.

  “Maybe it was the red howler monkeys in the trees behind the lagoon,” she said quickly.

  “It wasn’t,” he insisted. “It was a bird in the house.”

  “Then it was me,” she said. “I cried out—I had a terrible dream.”

  Quentin put his fists against his ears. “Please don’t do that. Please!”
r />   “All right.” She steered him by the shoulders to the wicker settee on the front porch, where they sat down. She kept an arm around him, and pulled him against her side.

  “Listen to the breakers,” she said. “That’s always soothing.” From the porch they heard the tumult of the sea that never rested, even while they slept, and she hoped the explosions of the surf would wash the fright from him.

  “When are we going back to Boston?”

  The question caught her off guard. The Cocal had seemed a paradise for him—Ravell had taken Quentin for treks through the forest, and her son had come back elated over the wildlife they’d sighted. (Hadn’t he been thrilled by the iguana he’d seen? And by the hoofed, piglike peccary? And the agouti that skittered away like rabbits?) Before breakfast, he’d bounded toward the beach and ridden Ravell’s shoulders into the surf. (What boy would not love to begin the day with a good, salty soaking of his hair?) In the village, the workers’ doors hung open, with more than enough playmates for him.

  “Don’t you like it here?”

  “I’m homesick,” he said.

  “What do you miss?”

  “Everything.” His face fell into his palms as he wept.

  She heard a noise behind them. Ravell stood in the doorway in a striped dressing robe.

  “I miss the Talcotts and their big house on the Cape.”

  Her heart dropped and beat dully. Mrs. Talcott, she thought, with a hard knot of bitterness. She pictured the matronly Mrs. Talcott as she’d always been: with a book open on her lap, lifting her fat wrists to reach into a box of chocolates. Erika recalled the letter in the form of a diary that Quentin had been keeping for Mrs. Talcott. My darling Mother, it began.

  Ravell pulled up a wicker chair and placed one hand on Quentin’s knee.

  “What else do you miss?” Ravell asked.

  Quentin rested his head against the back rim of the settee and closed his eyes, wetness caught between his lashes, settling there, crystallized.