The Doctor and the Diva (15 page)

Her husband had departed to bring in the New Year with rounds of whiskey and whist with his male friends at the Club. No doubt it would be three or four in the morning before her husband staggered home. The previous year as New Year’s Day dawned, a maid had found two inebriated men, stiff and nearly lifeless, on the carpet at the Club. One of them had been Mr. George Appleton, Amanda’s husband. The maid had nudged them awake with her carpet sweeper, saying, “You gentlemen should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Amanda’s children were grown and lived elsewhere, and the servants were out reveling, so she and Ravell savored the rare quiet of a town house deserted by everyone except them. Ravell almost never came to her home. As an alibi, he’d brought his black medical bag. If anyone startled them by knocking on the locked door, they would explain that Amanda had summoned Doctor Ravell to treat her for a violent onset of abdominal cramps.

With their heads cradled against pillows, they listened to the crunch of footsteps pass on the brick sidewalks below. A recent storm had changed the landscape of the Back Bay, leaving rooftops lathered in snow, and ropes of ivy hanging like whitened nets across red brick façades. Outside, passersby linked arms and celebrated Boston’s First Night by singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

Ravell got up from the bed, pulled on his trousers and shirt, and crouched at the windowsill like a boy, peeking through the draperies to admire the scene illuminated by streetlamps. Amanda joined him, swaddled in a warm robe, and she knelt and rested her chin on the window ledge. They huddled like two children awed by the wintry sights. On the strip of parkland that divided Commonwealth Avenue, someone had sculpted an enormous dragon from snow, and dyed its long body with splashes of green food coloring. Icicles ran in spikes along the crest of the dragon’s spine.

“A marvel,” she whispered, “isn’t it? I watched them yesterday as they built it.” By the streetlight, her hair shone like frost that grew at the corners of the window. He had never before slept with a woman whose hair was as white as hers, yet she always flew at him with vigor, her legs long and sturdy as two lean trees.

A pounding came from below. At Amanda’s front entrance, someone hit the door hard with the wrought-iron knocker. The noise was so insistent that Ravell sprang to his feet. He scrambled for socks, vest, suspenders, detachable collar and cuffs, throwing them onto his body, tying his shoes.

It had begun, he realized at once. It had to be. No servant of Amanda’s, no husband of hers, would bang like that. Not that incessantly. (“If Erika von Kessler should happen to go into labor,” Ravell had instructed Doctor Markham, “alert me at once. My housekeeper will know where I am.”) When Ravell had slipped away to Amanda’s house, his housekeeper had still been out, so he had left a note on the servant’s pillow, telling her where to find him.

His heels hardly touched the stairs as he headed downward, toward the banging.

On Amanda’s doorstep, his housekeeper stood with her gray hair slipping from a woolen hat, and her snub nose looked red, shocked with cold. “Doctor Markham has telephoned several times,” his housekeeper reported. “I didn’t see your note on my pillow until I got ready for bed.”

They rode together in the brougham. After the horses paused before his house to let the housekeeper off, Ravell continued. His breaths were broken, his nerves unsteady, his knees and shoulders jostled by the motion of the carriage. Suppose he had already missed the birth? He winced at the foolishness of having lolled in Amanda’s bed on such an important night. Suppose the baby mirrored his own features so exactly that as he entered Peter and Erika’s house, everyone turned to him, mouths open, their faces aghast? Suppose there could be no hiding his treachery?

Through the carriage window he watched as they passed icicles that glinted from trees. To be born on First Night, amid clear, cold air that enlivened the mind and circulation. It seemed an auspicious sign.

How many minutes left before midnight? Ravell reached into his vest to check the hour, only to discover his pocket watch gone.

Worry flared in his chest. In his haste he had not checked around Amanda’s bedroom as carefully as he should have. Earlier in the evening, he had unhooked the pocket watch from its chain, intending to place it on the table next to her bed—just to keep track of the hour. The watch had been securely in his palm at the instant when Amanda had hopped onto him, straddling him from behind, pushing him onto the mattress. He did not remember what had happened to it after that.

Suppose her husband discovered it? Suppose his bare foot grazed it, wedged under a tunnel of twisting sheets? Mr. George Appleton would toss back the bedclothes and scoop up the round, silver timepiece and hold the weight of it in his fist. He would flick on the electric light. George Appleton would turn the watch over, examine the Roman numerals that marked the hours, and he would see Ravell’s initials engraved in silver filigree across the back.

“Turn around,” Ravell yelled to the driver.

The light was still on under his housekeeper’s door when he rapped his knuckles against it, panting. “
You must go back and ask for my pocket watch,”
he said.

The housekeeper understood everything. She stuffed her feet back into her boots, and found her muff and hat and woolen coat. If anyone other than Mrs. Appleton answered the door, his housekeeper was to explain that the doctor had treated Mrs. Appleton earlier that evening, and he needed his pocket watch at once in order to time a patient’s contractions. The housekeeper looked sleepy. Inside Ravell, a voice also barked instructions for Amanda:
Scour the room, search the carpet. Rip the sheets off the bed and shake them. Don’t give him cause for suspicion, even if he lands in your bed drunk!

The housekeeper rode beside him in the carriage as they reversed course and headed back several blocks to Amanda’s home. The driver parked around the corner, and Ravell waited in the brougham while the housekeeper approached the front door alone. He cursed every minute his oversight had cost him.

The housekeeper reappeared with the silver watch almost at once, as though Amanda had stood by the door, expecting him to return for it. Ravell replaced the watch gratefully in his pocket. “Ring Doctor Markham,” he told the housekeeper as the carriage paused to drop her off. “Tell them I’m on my way.”

Peter appeared weary as he answered the door, his feet in sheepskin slippers, his striped dressing gown belted and neatly drawn shut. “So you’ve come at last.” He gave a crooked smile. “She’s still in the early stages of labor. Doctor Markham told me to take a nap, but I’m afraid I haven’t had much success.”

The house was quiet. Hours earlier, the servants had gone out, and most had not yet returned from their First Night festivities. On an upstairs landing Peter and Ravell parted ways, with Peter retreating to a bedroom down the hall.

Before Ravell entered the darkened chamber where Erika lay, he stopped in the adjacent bathroom and changed into a clean shirt he’d carried in his bag. That very morning he’d pared his fingernails, and now he scrubbed them with a brush, using a tincture of green soap. Then he lowered his hands into a bowl of alcohol to disinfect them.

Doctor Markham, a thin and boyish man of twenty-six, opened the bathroom door and entered to confer with Ravell. The younger man spoke in hard, terrified whispers—at least they were intended to be whispers, but harsh tones broke through. The door was ajar and Ravell was certain that Erika, who lay just steps away, heard every frantic muttering.

“I had the heartbeat half an hour ago,” Doctor Markham said, “and now I think I’m going deaf. I can’t hear a thing. Neither can the nurse.”

Ravell swept past him. His necktie flew over one shoulder as he rushed into the dim room where Erika lay on her side. The nurse and Doctor Markham switched on every electric light they could find. Erika turned onto her back and faced the ceiling, her expression stoic.

“I thought I felt a movement a little while ago,” she said.

“Where?” Ravell asked. “Where did you feel it?”

She pointed to an area near her hip bone. Ravell pressed the stethoscope against the mound of her womb. He jerked his elbows too high as he shifted the instrument from side to side, searching. For months he’d caught the heartbeats easily, every time. Only two days previously, he’d checked on the unborn child here in this very room, on this bed—and he’d heard the sounds immediately then—the quick and steady lashes of an underwater whip. But now no heartbeat came. Nothing.

Ravell raised his gaze to the ceiling, and then closed his eyes. He bit his lower lip so hard that he thought it might bleed.

He shook his head firmly.
I am NOT going to perform a Cesarean,
he thought.
Not if there’s no sign of cardiac life.

He tore the stethoscope from his neck and slapped the instrument down onto a table. His mouth filled with water and his face twisted with tears, but he quickly forced himself to straighten up. He drew his heels together, knowing that he must inspire calm and certainty. “I think we should proceed with the labor,” he declared. “Let her go on and deliver in the natural manner.”

The nurse pressed her knuckles against her mouth to smother a sob. Markham turned his back, his shoulders vibrating, for he must have been crying, too. Only Erika remained tearless. She sat up, noble and composed, and looked openly at Ravell. From the sadness and regret in her face, Ravell saw that she understood what must have happened, what they all feared. “Tell my husband to come here,” she said.

Markham went to find Peter.

When Peter pulled up a chair alongside the bed, she squeezed her husband’s hand and assured him gently, “I’ll give you another child someday, I promise.”

Peter flung back his head and howled like an animal then, and Ravell shuddered as if the sound came from under his own sternum.

“Let’s give them a moment alone together,” Ravell told Markham and the nurse. They all fled into the hallway, but Ravell hurried alone down another flight into Peter’s library. He turned the door key, granting himself privacy.

Ravell glanced through the window at the islands of snow on rooftops. Ice shone on the street. Only nine years previously, he had worked at Boston Lying-in when the first Cesarean was performed there. A Cesarean was still a rare and dangerous operation. And in Erika’s case, what purpose would it serve? A long time had passed since anyone had heard a heartbeat; the child must be dead. And he’d done enough damage, hadn’t he? Without invading her further and risking infection, without marring the pure globe of her womb with a desperate, possibly murderous incision—on top of everything else he had wrought? Surely she would survive the usual delivery. The infant was small enough. He was not a churchgoing man, but as he stared out the window, he saw everything, as clear as the icy air on this first night of the year. This was the Lord speaking, the Lord’s comment on what he had done. The judgment was absolute and irrefutable. No one—certainly not the woman upstairs who would now struggle for many hours to expel the dead child—must ever know his own part in what had happened here.

Erika was still sitting upright in the bed when he returned. The electric lights burned sharply in the room. “When this is over, I want to see the baby,” she told him. “Don’t try to hide the child from me.”

He was surprised by how firm she sounded, and by the command she retained over herself. Other patients he had attended under similar circumstances had required quick sedation or they could not have gone on laboring. But Erika did not weep. It must have been due to her years of training as a singer; she knew how to muster fire and steel before she stepped onto a stage.

“Give me something,” Erika told Ravell. Amid the commotion, her contractions seemed to have ceased. She added, “Whatever you need to make this faster and more painless, I want you to do.”

He reached for his medical bag, relieved to resume a definable task. To nudge her labor into motion, he gave her a dose of ergot, but not too much, lest it set her contractions galloping. When Erika’s labor pains resumed, the nurse handed him a tumbler. Ravell dropped a cotton ball soaked with a dram of chloroform into it and he made Erika hold the glass over her mouth and nose. Soon her hands faltered and she sank back against the pillows, and before he or the nurse could catch it, the tumbler had rolled off the bed and skipped along the carpet.