The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  A phrase from “Una voce poco fa” kept going round and round in Erika’s head:

  The taxi rolled closer toward Donna Anna’s house—toward the rented room with the red-tiled floor that overlooked the Arno, a place much too small to accommodate two people. If she and Ravell continued a life together in Florence, they would need to find more spacious quarters, and perhaps one day they might bring Ajeet from the Cocal to live with them.

  In the dark cab Erika leaned against Ravell. She pressed her nose into his neck, just below his ear. Instead of the flowers, she smelled him. When she entered a room and caught a whiff of the bedsheets he’d risen from, she noticed it. A sweet smell. At the coconut plantation, when she’d helped little Ajeet into his pajamas, she’d sniffed it again on the small boy’s skin, as familiar as baking bread. Quentin did not smell like Ravell, but this second son did. Until then, she had never known that a particular child could inherit his father’s smell.

  Ravell looked again out the taxicab window, fingering her rings through her glove.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him.

  “I was remembering that day in the cemetery, riding in the carriage with your brother,” he said. “The first time I heard you sing. The snow on your face, your white furs.”

  “And now we are here,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Now we are here.”

  When the taxi pulled up in front of the house, they tried to be as quiet as possible as they hurried up and down the staircase, carrying armloads of flowers. Even the driver assisted. Blossoms and petals dropped on the steps, the stairwell filling with so many fragrances that it smelled like a florist’s shop. At the very top landing, a door opened. Dressed in a white nightgown, Donna Anna appeared, steadying herself against the banister. Erika suspected that before they left the theatre, Ravell had telephoned the old woman to tell her the news.

  “I know what has happened,” the landlady called gaily down to Erika. “I can smell it.”

  Laughing, they rushed upstairs to the landlady’s apartment, their arms laden with several bouquets to give to her. Her parlor was dark as they entered, with light from streetlamps streaming across the floor, because the blind woman had no need to close her shutters.

  “Ah, lilies,” Donna Anna said, plunging her nose into a spray of white flowers. “Lilies to trumpet your night of glory.”

  The old lady took the armful of lilies and stepped onto the balcony. With a strength that surprised Erika and Ravell, Donna Anna made a great sweep with her arm and flung the lilies, letting them arc into the air. They landed on the dark waters of the Arno, where the white flowers scattered and floated like swans.

  A Further Historical Note

  Even in past centuries, certain bold doctors experimented with fertility treatments now regarded as modern. They undertook such work behind veils of secrecy and at the risk of moral disapproval. An illuminating moment in the scientific understanding of human reproduction occurred when sperm was first viewed through a microscope invented by a Dutchman, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, in the late seventeenth century. This opened a window through which early pioneers in gynecology began to see endless potential and possibilities.

  Artificial insemination, which can be achieved by relatively simple technology, has long been practiced. In 1785, the revered Scottish surgeon John Hunter recorded a case in which he successfully inseminated a female patient with her husband’s sperm, and the birth of a living infant resulted. In 1866, the brilliant American physician John Marion Sims—referred to as “the father of modern gynecology”—reported a similar accomplishment.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become clear to Dr. Sims that infertility—which had historically been blamed solely on a “barren” wife—might also arise from a husband’s reproductive difficulties. Based on his clinical investigations, Dr. Sims proclaimed the radical notion that a sexually potent man could be sterile. He performed fifty-five artificial inseminations for six couples. Sims and other innovative gynecologists of the nineteenth century invented variations of the “impregnating syringe,” as well as other tools and implements, so that sperm could be strategically stored, manipulated, and optimally positioned for the purpose of facilitating conception.

  In his many clinical attempts to assist conception, Dr. Sims used only a woman’s husband’s sperm—and that stirred moral controversy enough. But in 1884, the first successful insemination with donor sperm reportedly took place. A Quaker couple consulted Dr. William Pancoast, a professor at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, to help them conceive. When the husband’s semen was examined, he was found to be “azoospermic” (i.e., sterile). Dr. Pancoast allegedly turned to his circle of six medical students, and they agreed that one of them should serve as a sperm donor. Under the guise of performing some other treatment on the wife, the doctor then chloroformed the woman and artificially inseminated her with the sperm of the medical student deemed to be “the best looking.” A baby boy was born to the woman nine months later. The mother was never told what had happened, although the doctor supposedly informed her husband. Only in 1909, after Dr. Pancoast’s death, did one of the medical students who had been present reveal the story.

  By the 1890s, other medical experts performed treatments with donor sperm. Such procedures had to be undertaken on such a clandestine basis that one physician, Dr. Robert L. Dickinson, did not publish reports of what he had done until another forty years had passed.

  Apart from the fear of moral condemnation, early fertility specialists may have preferred to keep the exact nature of their procedures veiled for another reason: their statistical rate of success was undoubtedly low. Many doctors found the treatment of infertility the least rewarding aspect of their practice. Their clinical trials and experimental work were hampered by a couple of key issues. First, many male patients were sensitive to any questioning of their “virility”, and found the act of submitting to a semen analysis repellent, so physicians did not require them to do so. Second, the timing for ovulation was poorly understood during the nineteenth century. In the 1870s and 1880s, a woman was thought to be most fertile during the time of menstruation. (This notion was soon questioned as medical experts noticed that breast-feeding mothers, in the absence of their periods, sometimes became pregnant.) It was not until well into the twentieth century that medical investigators determined that ovulation occurred at mid-cycle.

  The possibility of freezing sperm has long inspired the medical imagination. In 1866, the Italian physician Dr. Paolo Mantegazza suggested that before soldiers went off to battle, they should leave behind frozen sperm, so that in the event of their deaths, their widows might bear them posthumous children. Effective methods for cryopreservation (freezing sperm) were not perfected, however, until the 1950s.

  Acknowledgments

  The Doctor and the Diva is a work of fiction, filled with countless dramatizations of incidents, characters, and scenes that are purely imaginary. Yet the inspiration for the story was sparked by my son’s paternal ancestor—a great-great-grandmother who lived a century ago. The novel would not exist had she not led an extraordinary and unconventional life. In the early twentieth century, Alice Wesselhoeft Haserick deserted her prominent husband in Boston and sailed to Italy, where she settled in Florence to further her operatic career. Among others, she left behind a small son who wrote heartrending letters to her from boarding school.

  In equal measure, I am beholden to Arthur A. Haserick, the remarkable man she loved and later abandoned. British born, he was a highly gifted entrepreneur and international businessman whose far-ranging curiosity and intrepid wanderings took him into remote places on four continents. As I read his exquisitely detailed letters about surviving violent storms at sea, or taking a moonlight buggy ride along a hard beach in Trinidad, or sharing dinners at his friend “Ravell’s” coconut plantation, the novel began to take shape in my imagination. (In fairness to Arthur Haserick’s memory, I would like to point out that there is no evidence tha
t his sons were fathered by anyone but him.)

  Long after their deaths, Alice and Arthur lived on quite vividly in the minds of their descendants. Alice and Arthur’s two granddaughters, Polly Brockhoff and my former mother-in-law Barbara Dodge, always felt intrigued by their grandmother Alice, and were haunted by the fact that she had deserted their father when he was a small boy. When I started writing a novel inspired by their grandmother, Polly and Barbara generously shared mementoes and photographs with me, as well as stories, anecdotes, and an abundance of family letters. To those two marvelous women, my abiding love and thanks.

  An elderly cousin from England, born in 1898, once came to visit the United States, bringing with her rumors she had overheard as a child about her American aunt, including whisperings about Alice’s love life. Whether those rumors were true or not, I am grateful for the recollections the cousin shared.

  Alice Wesselhoeft Haserick was born into a family of illustrious Boston physicians. To re-create the milieu in which she lived, as well as to capture the work life of the character “Doctor Ravell,” I relied on many sources, notably The Empty Cradle by Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner; Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950 by Judith Walzer Leavitt; and A History of Women’s Bodies by Edward Shorter. To set the stage for my heroine’s performance at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I found that Mrs. Jack, Louise Hall Tharp’s remarkable biography of Mrs. Gardner, was essential. To understand how an ambitious American mezzo-soprano might move to Italy, find a maestro, make her prova, and enter the world of professional singers abroad, I depended greatly on Ira Glackens’s exceptional biography Yankee Diva: Lillian Nordica and the Golden Days of Opera. (Lillian Nordica’s “Hints to Singers”—included as an appendix in Glackens’s biography—provided the basis for the advice she offered my heroine early in the novel.) Geraldine Farrar’s autobiography, Such Sweet Compulsion, also enlightened me about my heroine’s training and experiences as a singer—as did biographies and memoirs of other vocalists, especially those of Enrico Caruso, Nellie Melba, Kiri te Kanawa, Luciano Pavarotti, and Renée Fleming.

  The immense beauty of certain recordings gave rise to whole scenes and chapters in this novel; I only wish I could thank the composers who created certain arias, and the vocalists who sang them. For example, as I listened to Frederica von Stade’s meltingly beautiful rendition of Paisiello’s “Il mio ben quando verrà,” I envisioned the scene when Doctor Ravell sees the diva “Erika” for the first time—the snow, the ice skaters, and the woman in white furs stepping from the black motorcar. When I heard Cecelia Bartoli’s astonishing “Agitata da due venti,” the storm-at-sea chapter broke loose in my mind. (I realize that Vivaldi’s music had fallen into obscurity during that era, but I couldn’t resist having my heroine sing that aria.)

  As I wrote the novel, a number of people sustained me with their precious friendship, and by reading and reacting to early drafts: Elizabeth Fishel, Janet Peoples, Linda Williams, Mollie Katzen, Mary Ellen Geer, and Christine McDonnell. My deep thanks go as well to my fellow workshop members at three writers’ conferences—Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Napa Valley; and to faculty at those conferences who critiqued excerpts of the manuscript with keen insight and encouragement—particularly Tim O’Brien, Jill McCorkle, Erin McGraw, Samantha Chang, and Mar-got Livesey.

  Above all, the novel owes its entry into the world to two particular women—my phenomenal agent, Lisa Bankoff, and my legendary editor, Pamela Dorman. Lisa Bankoff’s clarity of thought, finesse, charm, and literary discernment make every interaction with her a joy, and that pleasure is enhanced by her stellar assistant, Elizabeth Perrella. My editor, Pamela Dorman, has brought her passionate involvement to the novel, and I have marveled at her artistic instincts and her gift for catching every wayward word or phrase. As an editor, she has stayed attuned to every nuance in the evolving psychology of the characters. I will be forever grateful for all she has done, and how she has helped to strengthen the novel. Her assistant editor, Julie Miesionczek, has been a truly nurturing and outstanding partner in the process; no detail eludes her. From Little, Brown in the UK, Rebecca Saunders has also offered a wise and wonderful editorial voice, and has left her distinct mark on The Doctor and the Diva.

  My appreciation goes as well to my parents. I will simply say that the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me was to have been born and raised as one of their eight children. I thank my son, Colin, for the adventure of mothering him, and for connecting me with the ancestors who inspired this novel. To my husband, Barry—man of unflagging humor, huge warmth, advice, love, and vitality—let me say: I am happy to finally place this book in your hands. At long last you can open the novel, and read this story.