The Doctor and the Diva (10 page)

“So,” Magdalena said, “how did things go with your father yesterday?”

Dripping, Magdalena stood up in the bathtub. Her maid took a hand mitt foaming with special soap and rubbed the older woman’s thighs and buttocks with a hard, massaging motion. Magdalena believed such rub-downs lessened
peau d’orange
—the lumps and dimples that marred a female’s lower body.

“It was unpleasant,” Erika said.

Apart from professors at the New England Conservatory, Magdalena was the first and only voice coach Erika had ever had. Magdalena was also the first woman Erika had ever seen naked. The summer she was nine, when she first arrived at Magdalena’s town house for her morning vocal lesson, the older woman would often be running late. During her career as a diva, she had gotten into the habit of falling into bed very late, and being slow to rise. “Come upstairs, don’t be bashful,” Magdalena used to call down the stairwell to Erika. “Come up and keep me company while I’m getting dressed.”

Today, just as she had done long ago, Magdalena sat at the vanity table and combed wet tendrils upward with her fingers and locked them against her head with tortoiseshell pins.

The dressing gown slipped from her shoulders as Magdalena stood, and she discarded it across the bed. Magdalena strode around the bedroom with the same athletic self-assurance that she had exhibited as a much younger woman, oblivious to whatever assessments her maid or Erika might make as they observed her unclothed sixty-year-old body. “I like to delay as long as possible before I lock myself into a corset,” Magdalena said. “Not that I approve of wearing no corset at all—but for a certain period every day, I think a woman’s skin should
breathe
.” Magdalena was European, and Europeans had a reverence for skin.

After Magdalena got dressed, they went downstairs to the solarium, a room shaped like a glassed-in gazebo—their favorite place to talk. The room was as humid as a tropical forest with its orchids, moist potted soil, and Kentia palms that brushed the ceiling. The solarium windows wept steam.

“Have you seen my amaryllis?” Magdalena touched the petals like long tongues. Even in winter when the solarium was cold, they sat here—Magdalena in a wool cape, Erika in black fur. They would cover their laps with crocheted blankets, while hot bricks toasted their feet. Through a hexagon of windows, they watched snow slant and melt against the brick sidewalk.

When Magdalena heard how Papa had responded to Erika’s news, the older woman shook her head. Earrings shivered like raindrops on her lobes. “This is the great difference between your father and me,” she declared. “He’s a conventional man, not a person who understands that to be a true artist, one must burn all one’s ships.”

As a child Erika used to dream of her father and Magdalena together. If only Magdalena’s husband—that long, thin businessman who walked with legs like two stiff canes—if only he would become ill with tuberculosis, as her mother had; if only that husband of hers would die!

As a child, Erika had longed for Magdalena to throw open the doors in the dark, shadowy corridors of the house where she and Papa and her brother, Gerald, lived; she imagined that Magdalena would replace the black walnut woodwork and lighten the walls with fresh paint. Just as in Magdalena’s town house, light would be reflected from mirrors, and there would be long windows everywhere. . . . Or perhaps Papa and she and her brother would come to live at Magdalena’s home on Beacon Street, among the jungle of orchids and Kentia palms, in a house that resonated like the inside of a piano.

Now she detected something in Magdalena’s impatient remarks about Papa that made her think that the older woman had once considered the same possibility. Perhaps after Magdalena had finally been widowed, several years previously?

“Tell me something,” Erika said, “now that I am going away.” Her fingers caressed the sofa’s velvet curve. “Were you ever the least bit in love with my father?”

Magdalena inhaled so deeply, Erika could hear the underlying wheeze, the old struggle deep in her lungs.

“We had a romance.”

Startled, Erika felt her ears rise, as if they were lengthening, opening. “When?”

“Long ago. The year after you first became my student.”

How had she missed this? Erika wondered. Memories rushed back, clues that now made sense. As a girl of nine or ten, she had settled herself squarely in her father’s lap, thinking it odd that she smelled the scent of Magdalena’s lily-of-the-valley sachets on Papa’s cheeks, on his shirt cuffs.

As a girl, Erika had arrived at the Beacon Street house one afternoon for her lesson just as Papa was descending Magdalena’s brick steps with his black medical bag. Was her teacher ailing? Papa made no excuse about why he’d come to call at her voice teacher’s home. Instead, he’d fished out his engraved pocket watch and opened its etched filigree cover and peeked at the time with the edge of his eyes. He’d cupped Erika’s small chin in his huge hand for a moment, given a reluctant sigh, and departed.

“Did you ever consider marrying my father?”

“Never,” Magdalena said. “Your father and I could never have lived well together. But we’ve shared many things. Like you, for instance. There was a period when he was a wonderful secret in my life, and he said that I was a gift for him.”

Erika considered the timing of when this had all occurred. When no chambermaid or adult had been around to stop her, she used to wander into her mother’s old bedroom and peer into bureaus and jewelry boxes. Curious, she had pulled open a drawer and slid a long satin glove over her hand. Her own short fingers only half-filled the empty tubes; with her other hand she pinched the limp finger ends, hoping to discover a square folded note or something left by her mother inside, but there was nothing.

Around that time Papa used to whistle arias that Magdalena taught her. One day she had gone into Mama’s former bedroom and noticed that her mother’s clothes had finally been taken away. The dark violet Chinese dressing gown Mama had always worn no longer hung from the armoire door.

A
t the hospital a nurse led Doctor Ravell with terrible haste down a corridor toward a young woman who was lying on the floor in a crescent, knees bent toward her chest. The staff hovered around her, draping her arms over their shoulders as they helped the young woman hobble—doubled over and emitting coarse moans—to the nearest bed.

Her pallor was extreme. When Doctor Ravell touched her flat belly, she flinched. Yet she had no fever. Strands of her hair felt as dry as hay when his palm brushed against her forehead. He lifted her upper lip with his thumb and saw a telltale blue line across her gums.

“She has swallowed lead,” he told the nurse. “She’s going to abort very soon.”

Later that evening, when her struggles had ended and the young woman rested in quiet isolation, he stopped by her bedside. No doubt she was poor—it was always the poor who presented themselves at hospitals, desperate for free care and a place to give birth apart from the dank, tenement rooms they usually shared with many others. Affluent patients had servants; the rich could afford to pay physicians to attend them while they gave birth at home. But for poor women, the hospital was the only sanctuary where they could be assured of starched sheets, and nurses who could sponge them clean and bring soup to their lips. How many a destitute mother, especially one who already had several children, could find anyone to bathe and spoon-feed
her
?

He knelt beside her, and kept his tone grave and muted. “You’ve taken a great risk,” he said. “I’ve seen women dead—I’ve examined the corpses of women who’ve done to themselves what you did.” He paused. “If this ever happens to you again, come to me first.”

The young woman’s head barely moved on the pillow, and her voice was faint. “You’d have tried to convince me to have the baby.”

Ravell kept silent for a moment. A series of crisply tucked beds adjacent to hers happened to be vacant, surrounding them with a measure of privacy.

“You’d have refused to help,” she said.

He leaned closer to her, his forearm braced against his knee. “There are other, safer means.”

“Like what?”

He had to be careful. He did not mention apiol, a substance extracted from parsley seeds. He did not speak the name of a pharmacist he knew on Water Street—a friend who over-innocently explained to a woman that if she took three tablets of apiol, the medicine would help to regulate her periods. If she
happened
to be pregnant, however, and if she
happened
to swallow twelve tablets at once, she’d lose the baby within a week.

“If you ever need help,” Ravell repeated, “come to me as quickly as you can.”

“I shudder,” a well-coiffed matron was saying, “when I think what my daughter might endure on her honeymoon.”

At Ravell’s private practice, the matron sat on the opposite side of his massive oak desk, and she had been talking for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes.

“And what is it exactly, Mrs. Philbrook, that you wish me to do?”

“I thought you might have a talk with my future son-in-law, to warn the groom about
excesses
.”

The egret feathers on the matron’s hat shook with emphasis. According to her, according to the tales she’d heard, the enthusiasms of a young groom not only exhausted a young woman; such honeymoon exertions were apt to result in fever, miscarriage, sterility, illness, and, on rare occasions, the death of a bride.

“I thought you might impose certain limitations,” she declared, “and set forth rules.”

“If you hope to regulate the frequency of their intimate relations,” Ravell said, “I am afraid that is a matter for a young couple to decide between themselves.”

The egret feathers drooped. Ravell stood up, a signal that the appointment had drawn to a close. A puddle had collected on the floor below the tip of Mrs. Philbrook’s umbrella, and Ravell thought of Erika outside in the rain, hurrying toward his office at this very moment.

“Think of all the ladies you know who have survived their honeymoons,” he said.

All afternoon he’d only half-listened to patients, aware of the fury of rain pelting his office windows, the rain that had surely become part of Erika’s day as well. He pictured her shielding herself with her umbrella, lifting her ankle to step over a puddle before it soaked her feet and discolored her shoes. All afternoon he’d attuned his ears to the jangle of bells hanging from the office’s front door, a signal that one patient had departed or another had arrived. Every shimmering sound of the bells marked the passing of the hours that brought him closer to her, his last appointment of the day.

He knew, as one who counts the chimes from a church tower, exactly when it must be she who pushed open the front door. He peered down a corridor just as her skirt and the back of her rain-soaked hood were disappearing into the waiting room. This was the final occasion he would see her before Peter returned a week from Thursday. Enough time had elapsed by now for Erika to know the sobering results; what news might she bring him? For a moment he stood in the vacant corridor, half-terrified to face her now that the hour had finally come. Yet he savored the chill air she’d carried into the corridor, the tang of excitement.