Free The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Page A

Magdalena was European, and Europeans had a reverence for skin.
    After Magdalena got dressed, they went downstairs to the solarium, a room shaped like a glassed-in gazebo—their favorite place to talk. The room was as humid as a tropical forest with its orchids, moist potted soil, and Kentia palms that brushed the ceiling. The solarium windows wept steam.
    “Have you seen my amaryllis?” Magdalena touched the petals like long tongues. Even in winter when the solarium was cold, they sat here—Magdalena in a wool cape, Erika in black fur. They would cover their laps with crocheted blankets, while hot bricks toasted their feet. Through a hexagon of windows, they watched snow slant and melt against the brick sidewalk.
    When Magdalena heard how Papa had responded to Erika’s news, the older woman shook her head. Earrings shivered like raindrops on her lobes. “This is the great difference between your father and me,” she declared. “He’s a conventional man, not a person who understands that to be a true artist, one must burn all one’s ships.”
    As a child Erika used to dream of her father and Magdalena together. If only Magdalena’s husband—that long, thin businessman who walked with legs like two stiff canes—if only he would become ill with tuberculosis, as her mother had; if only that husband of hers would die!
    As a child, Erika had longed for Magdalena to throw open the doors in the dark, shadowy corridors of the house where she and Papa and her brother, Gerald, lived; she imagined that Magdalena would replace the black walnut woodwork and lighten the walls with fresh paint. Just as in Magdalena’s town house, light would be reflected from mirrors, and there would be long windows everywhere. . . . Or perhaps Papa and she and her brother would come to live at Magdalena’s home on Beacon Street, among the jungle of orchids and Kentia palms, in a house that resonated like the inside of a piano.
    Now she detected something in Magdalena’s impatient remarks about Papa that made her think that the older woman had once considered the same possibility. Perhaps after Magdalena had finally been widowed, several years previously?
    “Tell me something,” Erika said, “now that I am going away.” Her fingers caressed the sofa’s velvet curve. “Were you ever the least bit in love with my father?”
    Magdalena inhaled so deeply, Erika could hear the underlying wheeze, the old struggle deep in her lungs.
    “We had a romance.”
    Startled, Erika felt her ears rise, as if they were lengthening, opening. “When?”
    “Long ago. The year after you first became my student.”
    How had she missed this? Erika wondered. Memories rushed back, clues that now made sense. As a girl of nine or ten, she had settled herself squarely in her father’s lap, thinking it odd that she smelled the scent of Magdalena’s lily-of-the-valley sachets on Papa’s cheeks, on his shirt cuffs.
    As a girl, Erika had arrived at the Beacon Street house one afternoon for her lesson just as Papa was descending Magdalena’s brick steps with his black medical bag. Was her teacher ailing? Papa made no excuse about why he’d come to call at her voice teacher’s home. Instead, he’d fished out his engraved pocket watch and opened its etched filigree cover and peeked at the time with the edge of his eyes. He’d cupped Erika’s small chin in his huge hand for a moment, given a reluctant sigh, and departed.
    “Did you ever consider marrying my father?”
    “Never,” Magdalena said. “Your father and I could never have lived well together. But we’ve shared many things. Like you, for instance. There was a period when he was a wonderful secret in my life, and he said that I was a gift for him.”
    Erika considered the timing of when this had all occurred. When no chambermaid or adult had been around to stop her, she used to wander into her mother’s old bedroom and peer into bureaus and jewelry boxes. Curious, she had pulled open a drawer and