The Doctor and the Diva (34 page)

During the storm, her stomach had been strong, but when the sun was bright and the ocean as smooth as a lake, she felt so weak she could barely stand. Peter worried that despite all the quinine they had consumed, the fever might have caught her just as they left Port of Spain. He worried that, due to quarantine regulations, they would not be allowed ashore in New York. The authorities knew they were coming from a yellow fever port.

She went from being ravenous to not being able to hold herself upright.

Mrs. Bickford knocked one morning on the door of their stateroom. Peter had already gone upstairs to breakfast in the saloon. When the older woman entered, she found Erika hunched over a chamber pot with her mouth open to retch, but nothing came out.

“I’ve just come to look in on you, dear.” The widow gathered Erika’s hair into a loose knot to keep it from falling into the bowl.

Later, Mrs. Bickford brought Erika little saltine crackers and biscuits and a large pickle to settle her stomach.

Mrs. Bickford shifted the shawl around her shoulders and flagged down Peter as he was leaving the dining room. He wanted to duck away when he noticed her coming, but there was no pole to hide behind, no alternate avenue to take. The memory of her in her drenched black skirts during the gale reminded him of the ship’s pig running loose on the deck—the poor creature had been knocked dead by the storm. The pig had always been skittish, terrified when anybody tried to hold it. The only person the pig trusted was the butcher, whom it shadowed and followed like a pet.

Since the storm, they’d enjoyed plenty of bacon and pork chops. The widow’s upper torso looked fatter, as though the unfortunate pig had become a visible part of her. As she stepped close to Peter, lowering her chin, two prongs formed between her brows, and he braced himself for a reprimand.

“Your wife,” she said, her tone low and knowing, “can only be suffering from one thing.”

“And what is that?”

“A pregnancy.”

Shortly after their return to New England, Erika walked across the white expanse of Boston Common on a silent, muffled winter morning. As she drew in breaths, particles of clear, cold air sharpened like crystals in her lungs. With glee—with the toe of her boot—she wrote in the newly fallen snow:

I AM EXPECTING A BABY

“I
’d never seen such a gale,” Peter said. “Even crossing the Atlantic—even when we came within sight of an iceberg—I was not so terrified.” In the months afterward, at social gatherings, Peter liked recounting what they’d witnessed during the great storm at sea. He told the story again that summer, as he relaxed on his business partner’s veranda on Cape Cod.

Erika overheard him through an open window as she lolled in an upstairs bath. His business partner’s children ran outside, little people alive with shrieks as they chased the evening’s first fireflies. The nights Erika had longed for had come, when she could rest her palms against her abdomen and feel the baby’s movements.

For their weekend on Cape Cod, she had brought along a special bar of jasmine soap. Something within her had changed and evolved, but as the scent blended into the bathwater, she remembered wet orchids dangling in a forest, and a house on stilts, after-dinner lime and rum swizzles. She remembered Ravell taking hold of her face and rolling her head between his hands until her senses swooned. When Peter made love to her, she let her mind fill with Ravell because that picture brought blue sparks, pleasure, madness. Then it was over. In just a few minutes, it was always over.

Below the window where Erika bathed, Peter and his business partner and his portly wife murmured in contentment on the porch. Their wicker chairs squeaked as they rocked.

In the bath, the water grew cooler. Erika watched the child inside her roll, as smooth and slow as a hill that shifted position, her midriff higher on the right side until the baby reversed and rolled left.

This little one’s movements seemed more tranquil than the last one’s. The infant floated serenely, having crossed oceans to come here. A water child.

Now that the child had grown larger, she liked to frame the moon of her belly with her arms and encircle the tremblings.

“Should we write to Ravell, and tell him?” she’d asked Peter.

“Why don’t we wait until the baby’s born?” Peter said. “Just so we can assure him that everything has turned out well.”

In late August, when Quentin was born, the doctor held him up in triumph, as if he’d just leaped, glistening and shining, from the sea of her womb.

Erika never tired of gazing at her baby. Hour upon hour, there was always something new to see. His hair was dark, like Ravell’s. The child had delicate features, petite crimped nostrils, very small lips through which he poked a tiny kitten tongue. Quentin laced his fingers together with exquisite poise.

One evening while Magdalena was visiting, Quentin awoke in Erika’s lap, ready to be nursed. While she and the older woman spoke, his newborn eyes stared, as blind and black as a hamster’s. His rooting mouth did the seeing for him. He tongued her sleeve. When his gums clamped—with blind success—onto her nipple, an electric current went through her.

After Quentin had nursed enough, his head fell back, his arms outstretched, milk oozing from the corners of his mouth, his eyes closed. He looked like a man intoxicated.

From week to week Quentin grew more awake and alert to the world. When he was two months old, while Erika and the nursemaid bathed him in the wide kitchen sink, he stared up, astonished at the noise of water running from the faucet. Stray droplets fell, and he licked them.

“Don’t you just wonder,” Erika said to the nursemaid, “what he’s going to
say
when he learns to speak?”

Wrapping the freshly bathed baby in a white towel, Erika packaged up the child and brought him to show Peter. A terry-cloth hood framed Quentin’s face like that of a miniature monk, his baby skin moist. At no moment did their son look more perfect than just after he’d been bathed.

Peter drew the child snugly against his chest. “A warm little loaf,” he said. “He smells like he just came from the oven.”

Even after their baby boy’s birth, she did not write to Ravell. She decided she did not want to shatter everything—Peter’s rapture over his delicate-limbed and dark-haired son, and, above all, the little boy’s position in the world. If she began a letter to Ravell, she was afraid there would be no end to all she wanted to tell him. With every phrase that poured from her, bricks would loosen from the walls of the Back Bay town house she shared with Peter. She imagined her son might be turned out into the streets, shunned because of what she had done.
He is only a small boy,
she reminded herself.
Peter must continue to love him. He must be protected.

When correspondence arrived from Ravell at Christmas and on other occasions, she left it to Peter to respond. She never asked if Peter had told Ravell about the child, although she presumed he had.

 

 

 

 

R
eturning from attending an opera one evening, Erika headed straight to the nursery. The room was dim, but her son, outfitted in white flannel, glowed as she lifted him from his crib. With the heat of him pressed against her satin dress, she sat down in a chair and nestled his head against her neck.

All evening, under the influence of glittering costumes and singing, the orchestra and the Opera House’s chandeliers, she had been remembering that other life she had once planned for herself. She had been imagining things that were blasphemy.

With the baby balanced against one arm, she took huge breaths and tried to calm herself. She pulled pins from her pompadour and let the strands fall down. She put her lips against Quentin’s scalp, sniffing him, hoping the salty baby scent would center her and stop the agitation of her heart.
This child is a gift. He is all I could ever want. And yet . . .
Tears seeped from under her closed eyelids and wet the baby’s ears. She bent her head until it was touching his, and drowned him in her hair.