The Doctor and the Diva (36 page)

The cook had set a coconut cake on the dining room table. Quentin climbed onto a chair and dived—his full body nearly landing on the white icing—until Erika caught his squirming torso, and lifted him horizontally into the air while he kicked.

All the scolding, fighting, and explaining overwhelmed her. But every night at eight o’clock sharp, Quentin went down blissfully. He was an easy child then, a very solid sleeper. Erika wound up his wooden music box, carved in the shape of a sheep, and darkened his room. In a chair she rocked him, tucked the rubber nipple of a feeding bottle into his mouth, and stroked his straight hair. Her lips touched his forehead and she whispered: “You know Mama loves you. . . . All our fights mean nothing. . . . You know Mama loves her boy. . . . Mama will always love Quentin.”

His lips opened as he broke suction on the bottle to respond, “Yes, Mama.” They nodded together.

Quentin always wanted to be with her. He slipped away from the nursemaid and followed Erika wherever he could. She had to teach him that he should not accompany her into the bathroom, because adults needed privacy. While she used the toilet, she told him he must wait outside the closed door. Across the floor he lay down on his stomach, peeking under the door crack to see his mother’s shoes.

“Hiiiii—” he called. His tiny fingers slid under the door, waving to her. Nearly his whole little hand fit through. Playfully she lifted the sole of her shoe, pretending to step on his fingers. The hand disappeared as he giggled, and then the fingers came into view, wiggling at her.

“Hi, Mama,” he repeated hopefully, leaning his cheek against the floor, pressing his little mouth close to the crack.

“Hello, my little monkey,” she said, slowly opening the door.

At a dinner party, seated with guests around the fireplace, Peter charmed everyone with stories of his latest trip to Morocco. Whenever Peter finished his business with cotton traders in Alexandria, he liked to visit remote and fabled places. Outside Tangier, he’d traveled by mule with a guide named Hadj. They had wandered along cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, gazing far down at the green sea.

“We came upon a signal station,” Peter recalled, “where an Englishman—a kind of hermit—lived behind a white gate with a garden. On the gate a sign read LLOYD’S AGENCY. The hermit was delighted to see us. His job is to peer through a telescope and watch for vessels on the horizon.” The man wired messages to tell people in London exactly which ship had just passed Morocco.

“Just days after I met him,” Peter told the guests, “I found myself on a boat passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. I peered through my glasses at the cliffs and I saw a tiny white blur. I gave a wave, because I knew my friend must be up there, watching me.”

The guests were amused by everything Peter had seen and done. While listening, Erika toyed with the fringe of the Spanish shawl he’d brought back for her. She wondered why he—a man—was allowed to go away and leave his child for weeks that grew into months at a time, whereas she was bound to the house, tethered to the Back Bay. Why must she be the one to stay, while he was free?

If she remained in a backwater like Boston, she would never have a real career.

She had a plan, she told her husband finally. The plan was this: she would take Quentin and a servant with her, and they would go to Florence to live. Whenever Peter crossed the Atlantic, he would come to stay at the apartment she’d rented for all of them.

“You must be raving,” Peter said. He sat on the side of the bed and stared at her. A pair of socks dropped from his hand. “How many years did it take for us to have a child? And now you want to live apart? You want to take my son from me?”

“You come and go as you like, don’t you?”

“Am I supposed to provide for my family another way? The bulk of my business is conducted here in Boston.”

Peter snatched up the fallen socks and pulled them over his feet. He stood and pulled his suit jacket from the back of a chair, shoving his arms through the sleeves.

“I cannot believe you would even consider such a thing,” he said. “Quentin isn’t a lapdog you can tuck under your arm. He’ll be attending school soon. The best schools for Quentin are right here in New England.”

“The greatest kind of education would be to grow up abroad—”

“The family is here. His grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins . . . You intend to cut him off from everyone? I won’t allow it,” Peter said. “You won’t ruin Quentin’s life, and you won’t ruin mine.”

After breakfast, he left for his office. From an upstairs window, she watched him go.

Peter was in England, visiting the mills in Manchester, when Quentin contracted diphtheria. He was four years old by then. At first her son complained of a sore throat and hoarseness. When his swallowing grew painful and his neck swelled to unbearable fullness, she realized what it must be, even before the doctor told her.

Knowing the dangers, Erika sat up at night with him. Beside her sick child, she fell asleep, sliding sideways in a chair. She understood that children could suffocate from the bacillus; it could inflame and weaken a child’s heart. It was March, still winter then, and she told the servants to bring her clean rags that had stiffened with ice while on the clothesline. She wrapped the half-frozen cloths around his feverish neck to lessen the swelling.

“Does that feel better?” she murmured, bending close. Her breath blew wisps of dark hair from his forehead.

Quentin did not open his eyes, but he heard her, and nodded. His throat had narrowed; he could not speak.

“Drink this,” she said softly, and held up a glass filled with hot water, lemon extract, and honey. “This will soothe your throat. It’s sweet.”

As her son’s head lay in helpless surrender against the pillow, his eyelids closed and moist, his features had never looked so delicate and perfect to her, like a child’s face captured by an Old Master’s brush. His chin reminded her of Ravell’s, the shape of his lips.

One morning when she woke, the light of dawn filled his room, and Quentin was struggling to breathe.

“Call the doctor,” she told the maid. “Call my father, call my brother! Tell them to come at once.”

Quentin may die,
she thought,
before Peter returns
.

When she heard a motorcar drive up, she ran to the window, lifted the shade, and saw three men get out. She pushed the window open and called to them. Her father and brother looked up and waved. Downstairs, a maid waited to let them in.

She thought of Quentin prancing in high spirits through the Public Garden, raising his legs in goose steps. Why did a child appear in one’s life, if he were only fated to die, and melt away like winter?

Her heart sore with worry, she waited for the men to file into the room. Her little boy’s breath had developed a peculiar, unpleasant odor. While the specialist bent and fitted a tube down her son’s tiny throat, she held Quentin’s hand. The physician, who had come twice before, administered a larger dose of antitoxin serum this time.

“My wife wants you to know that she’s praying for him,” her brother, Gerald, paused to tell her softly. Just before he left, he squeezed her hand, which was unlike him. But by that afternoon, Quentin’s breathing eased. By evening, he sat up and asked in a loud, cracked voice if he could have some ice cream. She leaped from her chair and rang for a servant.

Later she wrote to Peter,
Quentin has rallied. He is going to live.
She wept as she wrote it.

As Quentin slowly recovered, Erika spent long hours with him. When a maid came to relieve her, Erika went to her own bed but could not nap. Peter had acquired a new toucan. In the adjacent room the bird was making dreadful screeches, its wings batting and clamoring against the bars of its cage. When Erika lifted the cage door, the toucan hopped out, flew straight into the mantel mirror, and banged its head.

One day she opened both windows in Peter’s study and set the unhappy bird on a ledge. It was spring then. The temperature was mild.
I will tell Peter that someone accidentally left a window open,
she decided. Erika let the toucan fly straight out above the rooftops of the Back Bay, and she felt herself going with the creature, its wings lifting to catch updrafts of air until the exotic bird became smaller and smaller, and blended into the sky.