The Doctor and the Diva (52 page)

At Tumatumari he and Peter sat on boulders to view the cataract, now a cascade of nearly pure stone. Sun warmed the rocks and heated their backsides. “With a thriving river,” Ravell said, “the waterfall here must be glorious.”

And then, to Ravell’s surprise, Peter’s forehead became furrowed and he said: “When I left Erika with you at the coconut plantation and went off to Venezuela, I knew you’d sleep with her. I fully expected it.”

Ravell turned his head and stared at Peter.

More loudly Peter said, “I wanted you to have intercourse with my wife.”

The shock of it marred Ravell’s vision; he saw splotches before his eyes. “Why?”

“Because I wanted a child—and I wanted to keep Erika. I understood that I’d never make her pregnant myself.”

Ravell heard the frustration in Peter’s clipped words.

“Well,” Peter said. He lifted his head and scanned the uppermost reaches of trees. “I suppose it’s all irrelevant at this point, whatever you or I wanted, isn’t it? She’s gone off to Italy and left us both.”

Hidden in the forest near Tumatumari, he and Peter found a cluster of Indian huts, all deserted. “The owners can’t be far away,” Peter concluded, noting fires blazing and pots boiling. Then they saw an old Indian who’d been left behind. He lolled in a hammock, flesh hanging from his bones as if he wore a suit that stretched.

Each hut had four posts, the roof thatched with palm leaves. When Peter noticed a few weapons tucked under the rafters, he pulled down a bow and one six-foot-long arrow, handed them to the old Indian in the hammock, and pointed to a large lizard fifty yards away. The old man took the bow. Without leaving the hammock, he shot the arrow and it pierced straight into the lizard’s head.

“You see the skill of these people,” Peter said.

Walking back to the rest house at Tumatumari, Ravell could not resist asking Peter, “If you wanted a child so much . . . and if you were willing to use another man’s sperm . . . why didn’t you make discreet arrangements with a specialist? Why did you have your wife sleep with another man?”

Peter’s words sounded emphatic. “I didn’t want to use a stranger’s seed, someone I knew
nothing
about.”

“Weren’t you worried that Erika and I—” Ravell hesitated. “That we’d fall in love? That she might stay with me?”

“I suppose, in a way, I counted on your honor—” Peter shrugged. As a last thought, he added: “I’m a businessman. I know when a very hard bargain must be made.”

That night at the rest house, Ravell lounged on a bed while Peter continued his long letter to Quentin. At every opportunity he found, Peter took out his pen and wrote to the boy. He read parts of the letter aloud:
If I’d asked the old Indian lying in his hammock to shoot a fish far downstream
,
I am certain the old man would not have missed. . . .
He wrote as though the boy were always at his side, accompanying him.

He is writing to my son,
Ravell thought.
A boy who stands at a window watching snow fall. A boy with a face I have never seen.

Upon their return to Trinidad, they both stayed overnight at the Queen’s Park Hotel before Ravell headed east from Port of Spain. It was turning out to be a very good year for Peter’s business, he told Ravell, and messages from his partner awaited him at the hotel, urging him to return to Boston as quickly as possible. Peter would not have time to come to the coconut plantation.

Before a tender arrived to take Peter away to his steamer, anchored a couple of miles offshore, Ravell suggested a stroll through the Botanical Gardens.

He showed Peter the rare bloom on the Trinidad bamboo, a flower that appeared only during times of devastating drought. Shopkeepers displayed it in their windows, and old men claimed they could not recall having seen the flower before.

Peter peered at the bloom. “I suppose there’s always something beautiful to be had, even during a drought,” he said. “Even when crops are failing, and people are suffering.”

Ravell asked, “Do you have a picture of him?”

Peter’s eyebrows twitched quizzically.

“Quentin, I mean.”

They sat down together on a bench and Peter pulled a billfold from his suit jacket pocket. “He’s got dark hair. Big eyes, rather like yours.”

In the photograph the boy posed with a violin, although Peter said that Quentin did not like to practice. The child wore a sailor suit. Ravell studied the image, looking for traces of Erika in the child, but the boy did not resemble her.

When they got up to resume their walk, Ravell held on to the photo and halted twice to stare at it. “Why did you want me to know of his existence?” he asked.

“I’m a man who believes in the truth,” Peter said. “I’ve always felt it fair for you to know.”

“But why now? Why were you so careful not to tell me until now?”

“Because the divorce has become final, and I’ve got legal custody. Nobody can take him from me at this point, not even Erika.”

Ravell handed back the photograph. “I’m sure he’s very attached to you.”

Peter replaced it in his billfold. “Oh, he is.”

His father was far away again. Quentin wriggled down and closed the hamper lid over his head and waited for the others to find him. He pressed his teeth against his knees and closed his lips to keep from laughing, because it was very funny when the others raced into the room and he could hear every sound they made as they peered around. “Look under the closet, look under the bed,” said Margaret, the eldest girl. Inside the hamper Quentin fell sideways and wondered if they would see the bulge his body made against the wicker sides. The lid lifted slightly as Quentin’s head pushed against it. “Open the drawers,” Margaret ordered. Drawers slid open and banged shut again before they ran out, thinking they had searched very thoroughly. Nobody thought to look inside the hamper filled with dirty clothes that smelled.

“He lives here with us now,” Margaret explained. “At least for the summer.”

“Are you an orphan?” her friends asked.

“No,” Quentin said.

“What happened to your father and mother?”

“My father is in Egypt buying cotton,” he said. “And my mother is a singer in Italy.”

They stared at him for a moment, as if they were unsure whether to believe him. Their faces looked grave, as if they did not envy him for whatever circumstances brought him here, without parents. He asked if they wanted to see a thirty-foot anaconda skin his father had brought back from the jungle for him, and they nodded.

“I will even let you touch it.” Quentin said, and drew the special bag his father had given him from under the bed. He brought the snakeskin along everywhere he could.

His father’s business partner, Mr. Talcott, had five children and a summer house on Cape Cod with a roof so steep it looked like a witch’s hat. Papa thought Quentin might be happier here, with a family, rather than at camp.

The house had a hundred dark corners and tiny doors in the wainscoting that opened into cupboards and low closets to crawl inside and hide. The Talcotts had cousins who also liked to visit here. Two of the oldest boys brought sticks like swords into the attic to attack a squirrel that lived up there, but the squirrel sneaked away through a hole under the eaves.

Whenever Quentin and the others returned from the beach, they carried towels so twisted and dirty and heavy with sand, they were told to drop them at the back porch. Nobody was allowed in the house with a damp towel.

At night he would lie in bed and feel sand silted between his toes. The rush and fizz of waves stayed in his ears, like sounds caught inside a conch shell. High up in his nose, the sharp scent of the beach stayed alive.

When Quentin had a cold, Mrs. Talcott poured him a glass of vinegar to purify his system. None of her own children could bear to drink vinegar for their colds, she said, because the taste was so terrible, but Quentin braved it. He gulped the full glass, got it all down in one long swallow, and though he grimaced and shuddered right afterward, Mrs. Talcott petted his shoulders and told him he was exceptionally strong.