Free The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell

the right arch, family under the left. These days his consulting room was typically filled with elderly widows dressed in black, their white silk hair slipping from under their bonnets. Patients sometimes noticed Erika on the sidewalk as she came to visit her father. They caught her hand and rolled it in their own, as they had been apt to do ever since she was a child. (Poor, motherless daughter of Doctor William von Kessler!)
    “Your papa,” one effused, “can describe every symptom I’ve been experiencing without my even telling him.”
    In winter, wreaths of apples and evergreens—anonymously given—hung from their front door. At Christmas, Papa’s doorbell would ring and a fruitcake would appear on the steps of fresh, unshoveled snow. A carriage would pull away quickly, leaving no sign of who’d left it—except for footprints in the snow from a lady’s heeled galoshes.

    “Erika,” Papa said. “Forgive me for my opinion, but this plan may be the greatest mistake of your life.”
    Her father blurred before her. Tears melted like hard bits of ice in her eyes. “Don’t tell me that someday, with luck, I’ll have children,” she said desperately, “because you know that won’t happen.”
    “But how will you live,” Papa asked, “without a husband to support you?”
    “I can manage on the income from the Bell Street property that Mama left to us. I can live simply. Gerald can mail me a check for my share of her estate, just as he does now.”
    Papa lit his meerschaum and puffed calmly on the carved ivory pipe. “Why not take a summer in Milan?” he suggested. “Immerse yourself in all the opera you’d like. Go every night to La Scala. Why not?” he said. “After all you’ve been through, I’m sure Peter would understand. Perhaps he’d go with you.”
    “I am not yearning for a long holiday—I am embracing a career!”
    She got up and opened one of the long drapes and looked down at the stunted saplings planted along the mall that divided Commonwealth Avenue. She let the drape fall and turned to her father again.
    She pressed her fingers against her windpipe. “Your daughter,” she whispered at him fiercely, “has been given this voice for a reason.”

    “So,” Magdalena said, “how did things go with your father yesterday?”
    Dripping, Magdalena stood up in the bathtub. Her maid took a hand mitt foaming with special soap and rubbed the older woman’s thighs and buttocks with a hard, massaging motion. Magdalena believed such rub-downs lessened peau d’orange —the lumps and dimples that marred a female’s lower body.
    “It was unpleasant,” Erika said.
    Apart from professors at the New England Conservatory, Magdalena was the first and only voice coach Erika had ever had. Magdalena was also the first woman Erika had ever seen naked. The summer she was nine, when she first arrived at Magdalena’s town house for her morning vocal lesson, the older woman would often be running late. During her career as a diva, she had gotten into the habit of falling into bed very late, and being slow to rise. “Come upstairs, don’t be bashful,” Magdalena used to call down the stairwell to Erika. “Come up and keep me company while I’m getting dressed.”
    Today, just as she had done long ago, Magdalena sat at the vanity table and combed wet tendrils upward with her fingers and locked them against her head with tortoiseshell pins.
    The dressing gown slipped from her shoulders as Magdalena stood, and she discarded it across the bed. Magdalena strode around the bedroom with the same athletic self-assurance that she had exhibited as a much younger woman, oblivious to whatever assessments her maid or Erika might make as they observed her unclothed sixty-year-old body. “I like to delay as long as possible before I lock myself into a corset,” Magdalena said. “Not that I approve of wearing no corset at all—but for a certain period every day, I think a woman’s skin should breathe .”