The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Read Free Book Online Page B

the bed was all hers, she could lie diagonally across it, arms flung overhead, toes resting against the bamboo footboard.
    If she meant to make a new life in Italy, she knew she ought to book her passage and leave before he returned. She would be twenty-nine on her next birthday. She could no longer allow Peter to silence her.
    “In the great design of fate,” Madame Nordica had said tonight, “there are no accidents. It is fascinating to look back at obstacles and realize how they were overcome. I have an absolute belief in destiny.”
    Tonight’s instructions from Madame Nordica would alter her own life, she felt certain. The diva’s words had been like a finger pointing to the moon. Erika now understood—unequivocally—where she must head.

7

    O n the day she was scheduled to sing at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s grand new palace, Erika telephoned her voice teacher and begged: “Can you listen to me sing this dreadful note?” Erika held the receiver as far from her mouth as possible, and let the phrase escape through open lips.
    “Nothing in that aria is beyond you,” Magdalena assured her. “Before you leave this afternoon, try to take a deep, hot bath. After that, I want you to place a butterscotch candy on your tongue and keep it there—just to relax the muscles—while you sing the same note you just sang to me.”
    During its years of construction, the palazzo Isabella Stewart Gardner had been building over on the Fenway had been closed off like a secret. Not even Mrs. Gardner’s closest friends had been permitted to view what lay behind its fortresslike walls until she had every statue, every orchid, every painting, every Venetian balustrade, perfectly positioned. On New Year’s Day in 1903—just a few months previously—Mrs. Gardner had finally opened the doors to the most eminent of her acquaintances. They had driven up in their carriages at nine o’clock in the evening, and the next day newspapers burst with accounts of what her guests had found there.
    Since then, several concerts had been given at Fenway Court. On the afternoon when Erika first entered Mrs. Gardner’s palace, the musicians and soloists were invited to wander freely through the grand rooms, as if the private art collection belonged to them.
    Erika’s trepidation about the performance vanished as soon as she stepped inside, for she had never known a place that soothed her so. The great courtyard with its arched Venetian windows opened before her, welcoming her with its fountain, its vast shaft of light, its potted mimosas and stone urns and softening ferns. A glass ceiling protected everything. Tonight she would sing one aria in the courtyard, while standing on the Roman mosaic tiles near a tiny sarcophagus. Other soloists would be stationed on the upper balconies so that their voices would erupt from various levels of the building, like surprises.
    As Erika walked through the Raphael Room, the Dutch Room, the Titian Room, she felt as if she were inside a private home rather than a museum. Mrs. Gardner now resided on the palazzo’s uppermost floor. Erika could hardly believe that one individual—a widow in her sixties—had fought so relentlessly to gather things she loved from around the world and bring them all here. Mrs. Gardner, everyone said, had fussed over the placement of each object, setting a vase or a small painting next to a window to make it gleam.
    Although Erika had never met her, she had glimpsed Mrs. Gardner twice in a brougham on Beacon Street, riding past.
    Standing at an arched Venetian window that overlooked the courtyard, Erika was startled by the sounds of birds, a glance of wings flitting against the stucco walls. Mrs. Gardner must have ordered them released from cages to add a dash of whimsy.
    Erika could not decide what captivated her more—the art or the architecture that housed the collection. In nearly every room, she wandered from the paintings to the balcony windows, drawn to look upon the