The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Page A

intervened. He had sparked her labor with a substance called ergot. As she writhed on a bed with her legs open to fate, she had felt the doctor’s nearness, and everything had disappeared except for him. To him she had screamed warnings: My legs are tearing away from my body. . . . Love, that’s what she had felt for her doctor when it was over. A love as extravagant as her terror had been. The doctor rejoiced because her baby was the biggest he’d ever delivered alive.
    Before her departure for Boston, Phoebe happened to meet her New Hampshire physician on the street. It was the first time the doctor had seen her slender. “He dropped a package he was carrying!” she whispered intently. “I was so shy, I couldn’t say anything. I know he expected something. He seemed disappointed. . . .”
    Since her arrival in Boston, Phoebe had begun writing a letter to her obstetrician, and she wanted Erika to tell her—frankly, please—if sending the letter would be an act of madness. The doctor was a good man, engaged to marry for the first time in November. She had no wish to ruin anybody’s life—she wasn’t asking for much, just another meeting, and perhaps a kiss. . . . “I just want to draw him close and smell him,” she said.
    Heartache made her voice weak. Cousin Phoebe kept a clipping from a New Hampshire newspaper hidden in a large satchel. It featured a photograph of her obstetrician at an awards ceremony. In the middle of the night she’d sit and stare at the doctor’s photograph. While her four children and her husband slept, she’d weep.
    “Tell me,” Cousin Phoebe said, “if you think I ought to send the letter.”
    “Suppose this man declines your proposal?” Erika pointed out. “You’ll feel the pain of rejection. Suppose his response is positive? What would that reveal about his character?”
    “I know what you’re saying,” Phoebe said. “I just need an outsider’s voice to say it to me.”
    As they headed out of the Public Garden, Erika steered the baby’s carriage.
    “You wouldn’t believe how often this happens with expectant mothers and their obstetricians,” Cousin Phoebe said. “The lady across the street felt the same way toward her doctor. And my oldest sister, the same thing.”

    The waiting room was crowded. A young asthmatic, huge with child, wheezed in her chair, and her jaw hung open as she struggled for air. Erika surveyed the mix of ladies, ranging from expectant girls of twenty to aging widows dressed in black silk. In amusement she wondered how many of these patients harbored an unspoken fondness for Ravell.
    An opera ought to be written, she thought. A whole harem of sopranos and mezzos might sway on a stage, some writhing in the throes of childbirth, some penning letters of passion to their favorite medical man. The Doctor of Women, such an opera might be named.
    She smiled with sealed lips, as though she were privy to an understanding few women in this waiting room had. Someday she might ask Ravell about his experiences.
    Twice Ravell rushed past an open door. He wore a rose-colored cravat. When he finally noticed her in the waiting room, he snapped to a halt, his hands catching the sides of the doorway. “Erika! I didn’t realize you were coming today.”
    The doctor liked to check the baby’s heartbeat every two weeks. He led her down the hallway. “Have you felt the baby move yet?”
    When she nodded, flickers of interest brightened his eyes.

    One morning as Peter got up for work, the dawn light showed his nude silhouette as he crossed in front of the gauzy draperies. He had a long torso and a backside so muscular that she wanted to cup his buttocks in her hands.
    Suppose she had actually gone to Florence or Milan? She had not wanted to consider how her body might have fared without his. Magdalena said that once a woman has experienced physical intimacy, she finds it almost impossible to live without.
    From the bed Erika watched Peter button himself into a