The Doctor and the Diva (38 page)

She glared at him. “You hope I’ll fail.”

“Yes,” he said. “For Quentin’s sake, I hope you’ll fail.”

On a Thursday she arranged for her passage to Naples, but within an hour, shudders of self-blame passed through her, so she went back to the agent and asked for a refund of her ticket. It would be a deplorable act to leave Quentin. She could not do it.

That evening when Peter arrived home from the office, a layer of light rain rested on his sandy-colored hair. Before he had even removed his overcoat, she confessed what she had done.

“I hate my lack of resolve,” she added, and showed him the torn receipt. Later she wondered why she had admitted such a thing to him. Had she hoped to make him drive her from the house?

His eyes became huge, daring her. “If you want it so much, why don’t you just go ahead and desert us?”

Near midnight, Peter burst through the doorway of her bedroom. She’d been sitting up in bed, reading. He came toward her with such a wild look that she wondered if he might strike her, although he had never done so before. She tensed, ready to pull the servants’ bell and wake the whole attic full of them.

“You love nobody except yourself!” he shouted, and suddenly his eyes watered.

Even three stories above, no one could have failed to hear the thunder of his voice. She pictured the servants shaken into consciousness, sitting upright in their beds.

From the room directly overhead, they heard another sound: Quentin had awakened, and was sending up a thin wail. The echoes of a little boy’s sobs shamed them into silence.

Peter opened the door and bounded up the staircase to Quentin’s room.

She shut off the lamp and pushed her face into a pillow and wept in the dark.
I should board a ship and stop threatening,
Erika thought.
My indecision is tormenting us all.

She waited until September when Peter was gone on business, so that he could not stop her. Then she stepped into Quentin’s room one evening, and ran her hands over the bedcovers to feel his small legs before she kissed him good night. She put her face close to his and said, “Tomorrow I am going away.”

“Where?” he asked.

“On a long journey far across the ocean. To Italy. I’m going to sing opera there.”

He looked so alarmed that his head lifted off the pillow. “When are you coming back?”

“Not for a long time,” she said. “But you must write me letters and tell me all about school and your friends, and I’ll write to you. I’ll even send you little presents.”

“Is Papa going with you?”

“No, he’ll stay here.”
Except when he’s traveling,
she thought.
Except for the long months when he’ll be off buying Egyptian cotton or textile machinery in Manchester.
But it would be best not to make the child anxious by mentioning that.

“I want to be the best singer I can be,” she said. “Italy has many theatres and audiences love music there, so that’s where I must go so that more people will hear me.”

“You want to be famous. That’s what Papa says you wish for.”

“Shall I sing you another lullaby?”

“When are you leaving?”

“In the morning.”

Quentin sat up and tightened his arms around her neck. He pressed the sharp bones of his face against hers. Did he mean to hug or hurt her?

“Sing for me, Mama,” he begged. When she finished one soft little song, he asked for another—a funny one, and then another. He tried to keep her singing to him as long as he could. When she slid toward the door and opened it, he beckoned her to sit near him again.

“Mama? Will you be here when I wake up?”

“Yes, in the morning. But not after you get home from school. My ship will sail at noon.”

“Mama? When are you coming back?” he asked a second time.

To this house?
she thought silently.
Never back to this house. Not to live with Papa. He swears he’ll divorce me for leaving.
But she did not speak those words to her son.

How long . . . ? How long would it be before she stroked the little notch in his chin again? She didn’t know. She didn’t have a date she could promise him.

Quentin moved his hot breath closer to her ear. “Please don’t go away.”

She could have lost all courage at that moment. Her eyes grew wet, but she couldn’t let Quentin see that, so she caught her tears with her thumb and rubbed them onto the sheet. “Maybe you’ll—” she said. “Maybe you’ll come to Italy and hear me sing.”

The previous week she’d taken Quentin to the beach for one last outing together. Hand in hand, they’d run along the edge where waves met land. Whenever she looked back at their footprints in the sand, water was filling the cups of their heels, mother’s and son’s, and washing them all away.

She pressed her nose against the top of his head and sniffed deeply, trying to hold the scent of him inside her. As he lay back down, she kissed him again, folding the blanket around his small shoulders as though it were already winter. “Remember Mama loves you,” she whispered. “Even while she’s far away, Mama always loves you.”

“Yes,” he nodded. They nodded together, yes and yes and yes, until Quentin’s eyes closed.

 

 

 

 

O
n a sheer moonlit night, a steward rapped on her stateroom door and woke her, alerting her as they passed one of the Azores. To view it, Erika hurried up to the deck in her dressing gown and slippers. Under a generous moon, she saw the island of Pico in silhouette, its solitary peak seven thousand feet high. She imagined Ravell beside her. Like him, she was leaving one land for another, and he seemed alive in the salty tang of sea air, in the pressing onward of the ship, in the slapping weight of waves.

They passed Gibraltar, where the people could not drink water from the rock they lived upon, so rainwater had to be collected in huge tanks. African shores appeared, and then Sardinia.

When at last they came to the Bay of Naples, the fourteen hundred Italians in steerage waved their arms at the sky and sang in celebration of the voyage’s end. The great tossing crowd pressed against the rails with babies and bundles. When a school of porpoises glided past, the Italians pointed and cheered. The grand sight of a smoky Vesuvius unleashed the last hint of restraint in them and made them wild, their loose garments flapping, their hair flying as they danced.

A ghostly fog threaded through Erika’s hair as she watched the shores of Italy coming closer. She thought of Lillian Nordica and Geraldine Farrar, American divas who had sailed to Europe to seek fuller careers. Both of them had arrived here so young that their mothers had accompanied them as business managers and chaperones. It was their mothers who had shaped ambitious futures for them, their mothers who were determined that their daughters would appear at Europe’s finest opera houses.

She was much older than those two Yankee divas had been. Whatever strength a mother had given them, she must provide for herself.

A strange hunched man met her at the Stazione Centrale in Florence. All day and all night, he must have haunted train platforms, on the lookout for a bewildered foreign face like hers. He saw her hesitate just after a cascade of luggage tumbled and landed around her.

“You want hotel? I find,” he said in English, and made a grab for her valises.

A hard shake of her head did not sweep him away, this creature whose long yellow teeth reminded her of a mummy with its lips dried up and gone. The hunched man wore a dark, shabby suit. She did not trust him to find a clean mattress for her.

Erika beckoned a porter, who hauled her things toward a cluster of taxi horse cabs that waited in the street.

“You want nice, expensive? You want cheap? I find,” the shabby man said, for he had followed her out to the horse cabs.

A mixture of weariness and anxiety filled her chest; the night appeared so black already. If only she had not boarded such a late train from Naples—if only she had arrived tomorrow instead. The little man to her right seemed to hear her thinking these things. He pointed to himself and batted the air with his sleeves, like an insect.

To escape him, she climbed into the cab and uttered a few words to the driver—the name of a random pension listed in the guidebook—“
Bianchi, Piazza dell’Indipendenza
.” When she had visited Florence previously, she and Peter had enjoyed the luxury of the Hotel Savoy, but she had to curb expenses now and could no longer stay at large, comfortable places.

When the horse cab drew up to the pension, a woman wearing a sprigged skirt came to a third-story landing, and she looked surprised by the sight of an American lady in fine clothes.

No, the pension owner shook her head. No more beds left. By this late hour, every bed in the city must have held a dozing body, Erika fretted; every hotel clerk had probably shut off the front-desk light and bolted the door, all booked up for the evening.