The Doctor and the Diva (6 page)

With his shoulders, Ravell blocked the nurse’s view. No one could see inside his mind, but he worried that they might hear how loudly he inhaled and exhaled, the harsh beat of his pulse inside his ears.

“Don’t mix mine with another man’s,”
Peter had said. Peter who had read so many articles and obstetrical books.

Ravell had done no mixing. He used only his own.

“C
ome early,” her voice teacher had encouraged her. “We can have sherry and a few good laughs before the famous lady arrives.”

So Erika went early. Attired in her blue-gray suit with its velvet lapels, she walked several blocks through the Back Bay. The suit was new—she’d worn it only twice before, once to Doctor Ravell’s office—and its style and trim fit pleased her and invigorated her step. On her head she wore the matching blue-gray toque adorned with a flat satin bow. The bluster of the wind forced her to keep one hand pressed to her hat to prevent it from being snatched, pins and all, right off her pompadour.

When she reached her voice teacher’s town house on Marlborough Street, the glass in the bay window assumed the purple cast of dusk, as though the panes had been glazed. The front door swung open. Sixty years old and handsome still, Magdalena Hasselbach beckoned Erika into the solarium, where a grand silver tea set and a walnut cream cake had been placed. Anticipation lit her teacher’s movements. Magdalena touched her queenly white coiffure, fluffing and smoothing it in excitement. Inside Magdalena’s broad chest, laughter welled up. She laughed easily, and beneath her breathlessness, Erika heard familiar wheezes. Asthma had ended Magdalena’s singing career.

“So,
mein Schatz,
my treasure,” Magdalena said, “are you ready to meet America’s most famous diva?”

“The
most
famous?”

“On an international scale, she’s the most well-known singer New England has ever produced.”

The voice teacher had met the legendary Lillian Nordica long ago in St. Petersburg, where they had performed together for the czar. “We’ll have to think of an excuse for you to sing for her,” Magdalena said.

“You promised her that she wouldn’t be coming here to audition anybody.”

“In any case,” Magdalena said, regretting her ruses, “it’s essential for you to meet her. And if I still had a voice—a voice like yours—I would not be bashful.”

“I’m not going to risk annoying her,” Erika said.

“If the opportunity presents itself, you might try ‘Caro mio ben’ or one of your lovely Handel arias.”

“Not unless she asks me,” Erika said.

“Don’t fool yourself into thinking that she’ll hear you perform at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s palace. Believe me, she won’t be listening to the singers that precede her. She’ll be hiding somewhere, preparing for her own grand act.”

Magdalena strode over to the dark purple velvet drapes to scan the street for signs of Lillian Nordica. When a brougham approached and a stately lady with a great ostrich feather in her hat stepped down from the carriage, Erika and her teacher hurried downstairs.

“Surely the life of a great soprano has its difficulties,” Magdalena said. “Don’t you sometimes feel that people romanticize—? Don’t they overlook the hardships of a singer’s life?”

“Indeed.” Madame Nordica gave a nod. “Few have any inkling of what a lonesome life it can be. One finds oneself in a sterile hotel room . . . or one ends up spending the night in a Pullman car traveling between Kansas City and Minneapolis.”

“Or enjoying Paris?” Magdalena said.

“Or fighting seasickness on a boat between Dublin and Liverpool,” Madame Nordica finished, dismissing any nuance of glamour. “The important thing is that one must be a trouper. People say that prima donnas are temperamental creatures. Let me assure you, I’m so busy making certain that my gowns will be fresh for the next performance . . . or keeping scarves wrapped around my head to prevent colds . . . I don’t have the slightest energy left over for histrionics except onstage.”

While seated in concert halls, Erika had never realized what a physically massive person Lillian Nordica was. Onstage she appeared the size of an ordinary woman, but in the intimacy of this solarium, seated on a Turkish sofa surrounded by potted palms, Madame Nordica appeared taller than Erika’s own father. The diva had wrists as thick as a man’s ankles.

“What sort of advice would you give to a young woman who wishes . . . to further her operatic career?” Magdalena said, and moved her eyes meaningfully toward Erika.

For the first time that evening, Madame Nordica shifted her knees and regarded Erika, who was seated next to her on the sofa. A thousand times before, no doubt, the diva had been asked to guide aspiring singers. Counsel flowed from her like lines rehearsed.

“Go to Italy,” was the first directive she had to offer. “The first step, as I would advise anyone, is
to get yourself to Italy
. Select a reputable teacher, start studying repertory there.”

Erika sat up straighter and slid closer to the sofa’s edge. Only to her voice teacher had Erika already confided the plan that had been taking wing in her own breast. For months now, she had been intending to leave Boston, to leave Peter and move permanently to Europe for the sake of bettering her voice and expanding herself professionally.

“You wouldn’t consider a move to Paris?” Erika asked.

“The French language ruins the voice,” Madame Nordica declared, the ostrich feather on her hat shaking for emphasis. “Italian is far easier for singing. Besides, the cost of living is lower in Italy than in France or Germany. Also, in Italy you have more than eighty small towns where opera is performed. In Italy, even poor farmers attend opera. To them”—she extended her velvet sleeves horizontally, with theatrical flourish—“opera is a necessity.”

As a young girl, Madame Nordica had trained at the New England Conservatory, where Erika herself had studied. Among Bostonians, the story of Lillian Nordica’s ascent as an opera star had spread far. At twenty, Madame Nordica had journeyed to Milan, chaperoned by her widowed mother. In Italy, in a minor city, Lillian Nordica had sung in her first performance. On opening night, all her arias were encored. Eight curtain calls followed Act I. At the death scene, middle-aged men in the audience wept. The very next morning a hundred people swarmed in the street below her hotel room balcony, and they had cried,
“Nordica! Grandissimo talento!”

The three women paused to taste the walnut cream cake Magdalena had sliced. Madame Nordica drew the empty fork from her mouth and tilted her head dreamily as she chewed. In a generous gesture, she reached over and patted Erika’s knee.

It dawned on Erika that Madame Nordica probably mistook her for a woman much younger than she actually was.
Does she think I’m a sprite of eighteen?
Erika wondered
. A girl who can simply pack her bags and sail off to Italy without remorse or consequence to others’ lives? Without summoning up a terrible courage?

Detractors said that Madame Nordica, now sliding toward fifty, risked losing her upper register. At her most recent engagements in Boston, however, the ovations had lasted fifteen minutes. The public had thrown carpets of blossoms at Lillian Nordica’s feet. Yet at this moment in Magdalena’s solarium (and who would have dreamed such a meeting could happen?), the three of them sat so close that as the soprano swallowed her tea, Erika could see the wrinkled skin move on the great diva’s neck.

The three women had been conversing for an hour when Madame Nordica brushed crumbs from her lips with a napkin and stared with sudden interest at Erika. “Doesn’t she have a lovely-shaped face?” the opera singer remarked to Magdalena. “If she decides not to sing, she can always become a hat model or something.”

The comment left Erika feeling both flattered and diminished. As Magdalena refilled their cups, her eyebrows arched with inquiry: “Cream? Sugar? Lemon?” Her lips closed together in a humorless line, and Erika realized that her teacher did not especially care for Madame Nordica. Magdalena squeezed sour lemon into her tea until the cream separated and curdled.

“The thing I don’t understand,” Erika said, “is how an American goes from being a student to being a bona fide diva in Italy. She just auditions everywhere, is that it?”

Madame Nordica rested a heavy-boned hand on Erika’s arm, as if to impart something essential. “In Italy your teacher will arrange your debut. Your teacher will know an agent who selects artists and creates companies. An impresario from Acqui or a lesser city may come to a teacher seeking singers for
Norma
or
Ernani
.

“But let’s suppose,” she went on, “that the student dreams of doing
Traviata
or
Sonnambula
. The impresario may agree to alter the repertory, but only if she reimburses him to the tune of two or three hundred lire—”

Magdalena’s spine flinched and became erect with indignation when she heard this. “And you advise the young woman to pay such a sum?”

“Yes,” Madame Nordica replied. “It’s only fair to the impresario. Think of the risk he takes. He supplies the theatre, and he hires the orchestra and the rest of the cast. He lets this unknown foreign student assume the limelight in a role of her choice. Why should he agree to let this foreigner succeed or create a fiasco?

“Think of the expenditure as an outlay for training,” the diva advised. “Opera is an expensive profession. And if you’re successful,” she added, with another pat to Erika’s knee, “you’ll have a chance of getting a genuine offer.”

And if the debut were a failure? Erika wondered. That was a scenario Lillian Nordica did not consider, any more than she recognized that the “young lady” to whom she offered counsel was nearly twenty-nine, already encumbered with a husband and a five-story town house filled with servants.

Upon departing, Madame Nordica stood in the foyer wearing her lapis lazuli necklace and a fur coat that made her look like a hunter’s grizzly. She placed a crisp white card in Erika’s hand with the address of her personal agent printed in raised letters upon it. “Should you ever need the name of an eminent teacher in Italy,” the diva said, “do write my agent. He will gladly name you several.”

When the door fell shut behind the famous singer, Erika felt a draft of cold night air pass over her head. “She did not so much as ask to hear you sing,” Magdalena said.

Hurrying home on foot, Erika touched the sharp edges of the card in her pocket. Under a lamppost on Dartmouth Street, she held it up to the light to see the agent’s name
.
The letters had been embossed like Braille onto the card; she could read the name with a finger.

She had forgotten her house key, so she had to ring the bell. For weeks now, her husband had been away doing business in England and Egypt. One of the servants let her in.

“We’ve kept your supper warm for you, ma’am,” the cook said.

At the long mahogany table where Erika found herself alone on many nights, the servant set the meal before her—slices of pork with sautéed apples, creamed onions, mashed potatoes.

“Will you be needing anything else, ma’am?” the cook asked.

Erika shook her head. “It’s late now. Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll leave the dishes in the butler’s pantry when I’m finished.”

The cook nodded, wiped her hands on her apron, and left. Erika cut her meat into small pieces and paused to sip the burgundy that was the same color as the room’s flocked wallpaper.

“It must be hard on you,” friends sometimes observed, “that Peter travels so much.”

The fact that she was often alone meant that she had to fill the hours and her heart with something apart from him. Especially during his absences, her voice had bloomed. Music invaded her with wildness, overtaking everything. It consumed more hours of her life than a husband or a child could ever have done.

The servants were accustomed to holding her dinner late while Peter was gone. Sometimes Erika did not eat before ten o’clock at night because she had been sitting at the piano, not wanting to stop until she had sung through an entire opera. The notes under her fingers led her onward. She conversed with the music, with imaginary characters who sang in reply.