The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  “I miss my father,” he whispered.

  After Erika and Ravell rode horses down the beach to Mayaro and back, she dismounted and headed into the house. A groomsman led their horses away while Ravell went off to tend to patients in the plantation’s infirmary.

  The house felt changed from the moment she entered it, though she could not have said why. Servants chattered in the kitchen, and she caught sounds of someone tipping a bucket and sluicing the floor, dragging a mop. Nothing unusual there. But as she turned and entered the hallway to her room, she saw that the door had been left open. It was never open. Three of her shoes had been flung in her path—heels upside down, a buttoned boot collapsed on its side. She could have tripped over them. One of her petticoats had been dropped there, too. It had landed like a parachute.

  In Erika’s room, Uma stood at the mirror, brushing her hair upward, holding it off her neck with one hand. She was wearing one of Erika’s corsets, her silk stockings, and other undergarments of hers.

  The lid of the trunk yawned open, every private thing removed. Dresses and shirtwaists had been tossed on the bed, or cast on the floor. Perfume had been dumped from bottles.

  “What have you done?” Erika heard herself blare. She gripped the crown of her head, and swayed as though onstage.

  The other servants’ feet pounded toward them, but Uma did not even turn her head. She went on stroking her hair with the silver brush.

  “She’s raving—like her parents!” Erika told Ravell that night.

  They stood on a promontory overlooking the sea.

  “It’s not a healthy situation for her—or for us,” he said, “to keep her on here. I’ll ask Hartley to make inquiries among his friends about another position for her.”

  “What about Ajeet and her baby? They’re your children. You can’t send them elsewhere.”

  Ravell looked at her. “Do you expect me to separate them from their mother?”

  Erika said nothing more. It would take time, of course, to secure a new situation for a servant. Such a change could not happen the next day, or the day after that.

  Uma did not return to the house for the rest of the week. Then the cook, who suffered from headaches, took to her bed. Munga stepped in to take charge of their meals, and he must have ordered Uma to help carry plates to and from the kitchen.

  On a Saturday evening Munga concocted a stew of lamb, plantains, and spiced yams—a favorite of Ravell’s. Erika remembered the sweetly flavored meat from long ago, how Munga splashed the lamb with a minty marinade. But that night after they put the first forkfuls to their mouths and tasted, Ravell pressed his napkin to his lips and spat into it. “Soap,” he said. “The food tastes of soap.” Erika, too, was sorry that she had swallowed.

  Ravell pushed his chair back and stomped into the kitchen to find Uma.

  “Are you trying to threaten us?” he cried.

  “I’m sending you away!” he shouted. “Do you hear me? We can’t have you here any longer, lurking and distressing people!”

  55

  Quentin went down to the lagoon to search for a dead toucan somebody told him they’d seen by some bushes. He thought he would wrap it in a pillowcase and arrange for it to be stuffed and preserved. He would take the toucan back to Boston, as a gift for his father.

  From beyond the thickets of mangroves where he stood, his ears caught the sounds of a little boy’s shrieks and protests and desperate hollering.

  Quentin lifted his head and walked toward the commotion. In the middle of the lagoon, Uma stood in the rowboat and Ajeet leaned over the side, straining and reaching his small arms in vain to catch hold of the baby, who had fallen into the water. Uma grabbed Ajeet and lifted him up. Her four-year-old son squirmed in her arms. He wriggled down the front of her, hammering at her thighs with his fists.

  She threw Ajeet into the deep water.

  Quentin froze. Only then did he realize that she had also deliberately tossed her own baby into the lagoon.

  Uma pushed off with the oars, turning her back on Ajeet as he struggled and flailed. In the rowboat she headed around an island, and was gone around the bend.

  Quentin ran closer to where Ajeet and the baby were. While the four-year-old thrashed and tried to keep his head above water, the baby floated facedown, not moving at all. The lagoon was deep and Quentin had not yet learned to swim in water over his head, but a dugout waited on the bank, so he climbed inside it and paddled sloppily toward them, as best he could.

  Ajeet saw him. The lagoon must have felt black and thick and bottomless to his struggling legs, but he was a strong little boy, and his arms flew like small windmills, his neck high out of the water as he fought his way in Quentin’s direction.

  Quentin wanted to help the baby first, because he was so tiny, so helpless, his shirt drifting like a shroud over his head. The baby’s bare bottom appeared yellow under the water, his small legs motionless, floating behind him.

  Quentin would have tried to go straight to the baby, but the baby drifted at a distance, and the dugout reached Ajeet first.

  When the canoe neared Ajeet, Quentin extended the paddle like a long stick. “Grab hold!” he shouted to Ajeet.

  The four-year-old caught the oar, and Quentin tried to reel him in. But when the younger boy reached the boat, Quentin leaned too far over the side, pulling Ajeet by both wrists. The dugout flipped over, and they both descended into watery darkness.

  Munga was the first to notice the empty canoe. As far as he could see, there was no one to save, but the capsized dugout made him worry.

  He led Ravell and Erika down the path, all three of them running. When Ravell ran around the lagoon’s perimeter, he noticed what appeared to be a piece of laundry floating near the bank. Coming closer, he saw a little body rotate, softly turning, with one tiny arm flung east, the other west.

  Ravell jumped into the water and scooped up the baby, brought him to land. Water streamed from the toddler’s shirt and Ravell’s clothes. He took the baby’s body firmly and flipped him over. Ravell knelt and lowered his face close to the child’s. He pinched the baby’s nostrils shut as he turned his head left, inhaled, and pressed his mouth against the child’s, blowing air.

  When his efforts came to nothing, Ravell set the baby’s body on the ground. As the tiny, lifeless boy lay on his back, Ravell placed the child’s hands neatly, one on top of the other, across his little chest. Crouching beside him, Ravell kissed the child’s forehead and bowed his own head in grief.

  A spear of sadness went through Erika. The sight of that blue-faced toddler made her think of the stillborn daughter who had passed through her own body, and she sensed that Ravell must have been reminded of that loss, too.

  But then another emotion flashed through her, and that was fear. Erika knew that Quentin had gone down to the lagoon after breakfast, and now it was long past lunch. Her neck grew stiff as she surveyed the lagoon, not wanting to scan for the sight she dreaded, but forcing herself to hunt with her eyes.

  She stood on the bank and called her son’s name. She screamed for him to answer, and Munga called out a phrase loudly in Hindi, hoping for Ajeet to scamper from behind a tree on the opposite shore.

  Ravell stood up, put his fists on his hips, and looked out over the water. “The other children might have been in the canoe with the baby. We’ve got to keep searching,” he announced. The words rushed out of him.

  He swam out to the capsized dugout, righted the canoe, and brought it back. The paddle had already drifted to shore. As Erika and Munga climbed into the boat, their heels knocked the bottom with the sound of wood on wood. If they hoped to find anyone alive in this vast lagoon—anything besides an anaconda coiled around a tree trunk, or a rare manatee—they had to glide quickly. It was a matter of time.

  Her hand was a visor, the sun a blade in Erika’s eyes, as she squinted through the mangroves. She must not think about the lifeless infant. The baby could not be saved. Her breaths hurt as if she were sprinting, but the dugout moved
slowly—far too slowly, as they all knew.

  A huge trunk lay like a fallen bridge across the water. As the canoe neared it, Munga took the paddle from Ravell and pushed against the great log for leverage, and they got past.

  Erika turned completely around to look backward, wondering if they had overlooked any human shapes in the dark depths behind them.

  Noises. The screams of birds. Erika rose unsteadily to her feet, the better to survey the islands and bends. The water seeped endlessly between trees, overtaking the land. Erika called to her son, and to Uma’s four-year-old boy:

  “QUENTIN! AJEET!”

  Ravell lifted the oars from the water and they all listened in vain for a small voice to respond. They heard nothing, only the soft splashes as Ravell resumed rowing. In long, searching syllables, Erika wailed to the children again:

  “QUENNNNTIN! AAAAAJEEEET!”

  Only her sorrowful voice echoed back. The men let her emit the mournful syllables. She cried out the boys’ names until her voice broke like a snapped string. The dugout swayed, and the men warned her to sit. As she collapsed back down, her hip bones fell hard on the plank seat.

  When their canoe rounded the next bend, the lagoon widened and spread like a lake before them. They saw an empty rowboat surrounded by blooms of color, banners of saffron, celadon, magenta, royal purples, and blues.

  “Saris—!” Erika said in disbelief.

  Uma had flung her saris from the boat—every one of them, it would appear. Erika suspected that Ravell had bought the poor girl many of these saris as gifts. Some dangled from trees. Most drifted in the water, the fabrics crisscrossed in places, stripes of red over gold.

  They wanted to gasp—it was almost beautiful, until they noticed Uma floating facedown, her garments swelling to the surface like a balloon. Uma’s hair was undone, trailing as dark as the depths of the lagoon.

  The laborers carried two more old rowboats that had been stored in a shed down to the lagoon. They searched all afternoon, but located no more bodies.

  The two children had hidden. It was growing dark and they were lost in the forest. Earlier, just after Quentin had fallen into the water, he’d risen to the surface and clung to the side of the capsized dugout. “Hold on to my shirt!” he’d yelled to Ajeet. “Hold on!”

  While Quentin kicked and pushed the canoe toward the muddy bank, Ajeet had clutched his shirt so tightly that Quentin’s vision dimmed and he felt his face reddening, because the younger boy was nearly choking him.

  When the boat finally rubbed against the shallow bottom of the lagoon, Quentin struggled to his feet, carrying the terrible weight of Ajeet piggyback. They wobbled, lunging in the muck. With every step, Quentin’s soaked shoes sucked mud. The moment they reached land, he let the younger boy slide from his shoulders, relieved to drop Ajeet on the ground. The younger boy sat in the dirt, sobbing. He’s crying, but he’s alive, Quentin thought.

  At first he believed that they were safe. Then he heard a woman’s strange, raging sounds not far away, and great splashing as things were being hurled into water. Finally, from an unseen place in the lagoon, a great swash echoed, as if a huge fish, or a manatee maybe, had fallen into the depths.

  It was Uma he heard, and he knew they must hide from her. Ajeet sprang up, muddy-kneed, and raced through the trees with him. For a long time they knew she could be close. Twigs crackled and broke behind them—it sounded like footsteps. From behind every creeper-laden tree, it was possible that Uma, swaddled in her sari, would appear.

  By late afternoon they were completely lost. At the edge of the forest, they wandered into a clearing. A worker saw them and dragged them homeward, pulling them by the wrists. Both boys were crying. The man spoke Hindi, and Quentin felt helpless, trying to explain why Ajeet must not go back to his mother’s house in the village.

  Only when they saw Erika hurrying and stumbling in their direction did the boys cease resisting. They reached out their arms, and ran toward her.

  The boys were given supper and baths, and Erika and Ravell helped them into their pajamas. That night Ajeet would sleep in the attic room, in the big bed with Quentin.

  In the tub Quentin recounted every detail of his bravery. How he’d fallen into the lagoon . . . how he’d grabbed on to the overturned canoe, how he’d ordered Ajeet to hang on to his shirt . . .

  Erika took Quentin to her room while Ravell spent time alone with Ajeet. She rubbed Quentin’s damp hair with a thick towel; she brought a dish of peppermints for him to eat.

  When she told him what had happened to Uma, Quentin asked worriedly: “Who will raise Ajeet? Who will look after him now?”

  “Doctor Ravell is Ajeet’s father,” Erika told Quentin quietly. “Doctor Ravell will take very good care of him.”

  56

  “A doctor takes an oath to do everything in his power not to do harm,” Ravell said. “Now a woman has ended her life because of me.”

  Seated on the bed, he took hold of his head, with shreds of his dark hair caught between his fingers. Against his white shirt, his black vest looked as if it were binding him.

  Erika’s mouth filled with liquid. More than her eyes, it was her mouth that was running with grief. She swallowed, and wiped her nose with the end of the bedsheet.

  “I should have sent Uma away on the day you arrived,” Ravell said.

  “She wouldn’t have survived being banished.”

  “At least I might have protected the children from her.” He got up from the bed and pushed aside the long drapes, letting moonlight burn through. “I’ve fathered four children,” he said suddenly.

  Erika realized he was including their stillborn daughter in the count.

  “Four children,” he said. “And I haven’t been a true father to any of them.”

  Ravell tiptoed to the attic to check again on the boys. When he returned, he beckoned Erika upstairs to look at them. Side by side, the boys were asleep. Quentin had fitted his arm under Ajeet’s neck, and their foreheads were nearly touching, as if they were accustomed to lying there as brothers.

  But later, a cry of distress tore into everyone’s sleep. Ravell ran up the attic stairs, and Erika rushed after him, clutching the sides of her nightgown.

  Quentin stood on the mattress, doing a short mad dance in his pajamas. “Help me!” he cried out in terror. “Somebody help me!”

  Erika caught Quentin by the arms and tried to calm him, but she was unable at first to rouse her son from his nightmare. In his blind dance, he batted the air with his arms and turned in a circle. Slowly she eased him down onto the mattress and rubbed his back with long, soothing strokes. Ajeet was also whimpering in the dark, and Ravell knelt to quiet the younger boy.

  Later, in their own bed, Ravell said to Erika: “I can’t stop thinking of Peter, and what he must be going through. Tomorrow I’ll write to him. We must give Quentin back to Peter.”

  Ravell liked to give others what they wanted; he tried to say yes as often as he could. In Trinidad, cremation had been declared unlawful, but here at the Cocal, miles from anywhere, Ravell decided to let the villagers do what they considered holy.

  Surely this was what Uma would have wanted. A Hindu priest had explained to him how Uma’s soul and the baby’s soul had flown away, suggesting that the most sacred thing to do would be to destroy their bodies. The blessed thing, the Hindus felt, was to make bodies disappear.

  So one morning Ravell dressed in white like all the rest, and went to join them at the place where they’d stacked the wood. The villagers stood ready to pour sugar and ghee—a type of liquefied butter—under the bodies to help them burn.

  On the day they cremated Uma and her baby, Erika walked for miles along the beach. Though Ravell attended the ceremony, she stayed away. If she appeared, the villagers might close their eyes in prayer, but in their hearts, she knew they blamed her.

  Her nostrils caught the smell of what was happening. No matter how far she walked, the wind brought the odor her way. She wondered if they had dri
ed out Uma’s saris and thrown them on the pyre, too. By noon, the sky and air held fingerprints of hazy smoke that drifted over the sun. In the air she detected ash and burning colors—vermilion, marigold.

  After that, she no longer wanted to remain at the coconut plantation. Ravell longed to leave, too—at least for several months. Neither of them could bear to follow the footpath adjacent to the lagoon, or see the ghosts that floated there.

  Ever since Christopher’s letter had come, informing her that at least one fine impresario still remembered her singing, her hopes had been rising; if she went back to Italy, her career might actually take wing. She told Ravell that the number of English-speaking expatriates in Florence was huge. If he came along with her to Florence, he could easily practice medicine there.

  “If I had been a better man—” Ravell kept saying in a remorseful tone.

  If I had been a better woman—Erika thought.

  In Ravell’s sins, she saw her own—he, like she, had longed and reached for ruinous things. Ravell was similar to herself; that was why she had yearned to see him; that was why she found herself in his bed again after so many years. She did not want to return to Italy without him.

  She told him, “If I ever earn enough money from my singing, we could bring Ajeet to Florence. We could hire a servant to mind him.”

  “Perhaps that will happen,” Ravell said.

  For the first time, she imagined that she could have love, and give herself fully to her music, too. Until now, she had not been able to envision how that might be possible.

  One morning when the sky was still softly colored with dawn, Erika and Ravell and the two boys sat on the beach wearing their pajamas and dressing robes. A week had passed since the awful day at the lagoon. Quentin lolled in the sand with his head against his mother’s lap. Ajeet sat crouched between Ravell’s legs, the man’s knees braced on either side of the boy, sheltering him. Since the drownings, Ravell had talked of taking Ajeet traveling with him when the boy grew older, and of sending the child to his old boarding school in England. Ravell planned to raise Ajeet as his legal son.