Free The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Page B

slid a long satin glove over her hand. Her own short fingers only half-filled the empty tubes; with her other hand she pinched the limp finger ends, hoping to discover a square folded note or something left by her mother inside, but there was nothing.
    Around that time Papa used to whistle arias that Magdalena taught her. One day she had gone into Mama’s former bedroom and noticed that her mother’s clothes had finally been taken away. The dark violet Chinese dressing gown Mama had always worn no longer hung from the armoire door.

10

    A t the hospital a nurse led Doctor Ravell with terrible haste down a corridor toward a young woman who was lying on the floor in a crescent, knees bent toward her chest. The staff hovered around her, draping her arms over their shoulders as they helped the young woman hobble—doubled over and emitting coarse moans—to the nearest bed.
    Her pallor was extreme. When Doctor Ravell touched her flat belly, she flinched. Yet she had no fever. Strands of her hair felt as dry as hay when his palm brushed against her forehead. He lifted her upper lip with his thumb and saw a telltale blue line across her gums.
    “She has swallowed lead,” he told the nurse. “She’s going to abort very soon.”
    Later that evening, when her struggles had ended and the young woman rested in quiet isolation, he stopped by her bedside. No doubt she was poor—it was always the poor who presented themselves at hospitals, desperate for free care and a place to give birth apart from the dank, tenement rooms they usually shared with many others. Affluent patients had servants; the rich could afford to pay physicians to attend them while they gave birth at home. But for poor women, the hospital was the only sanctuary where they could be assured of starched sheets, and nurses who could sponge them clean and bring soup to their lips. How many a destitute mother, especially one who already had several children, could find anyone to bathe and spoon-feed her ?
    He knelt beside her, and kept his tone grave and muted. “You’ve taken a great risk,” he said. “I’ve seen women dead—I’ve examined the corpses of women who’ve done to themselves what you did.” He paused. “If this ever happens to you again, come to me first.”
    The young woman’s head barely moved on the pillow, and her voice was faint. “You’d have tried to convince me to have the baby.”
    Ravell kept silent for a moment. A series of crisply tucked beds adjacent to hers happened to be vacant, surrounding them with a measure of privacy.
    “You’d have refused to help,” she said.
    He leaned closer to her, his forearm braced against his knee. “There are other, safer means.”
    “Like what?”
    He had to be careful. He did not mention apiol, a substance extracted from parsley seeds. He did not speak the name of a pharmacist he knew on Water Street—a friend who over-innocently explained to a woman that if she took three tablets of apiol, the medicine would help to regulate her periods. If she happened to be pregnant, however, and if she happened to swallow twelve tablets at once, she’d lose the baby within a week.
    “If you ever need help,” Ravell repeated, “come to me as quickly as you can.”

    “I shudder,” a well-coiffed matron was saying, “when I think what my daughter might endure on her honeymoon.”
    At Ravell’s private practice, the matron sat on the opposite side of his massive oak desk, and she had been talking for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes.
    “And what is it exactly, Mrs. Philbrook, that you wish me to do?”
    “I thought you might have a talk with my future son-in-law, to warn the groom about excesses .”
    The egret feathers on the matron’s hat shook with emphasis. According to her, according to the tales she’d heard, the enthusiasms of a young groom not only exhausted a young woman; such honeymoon exertions were apt to result in fever, miscarriage, sterility, illness, and, on rare