The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Page A

her, as well as the strain of her father summoning her to his house twice to argue with her. (“I won’t live forever, Erika. . . . If you leave your husband, if your aspirations come to nothing—do you realize how alone you will be in this world?”)
    She had to banish Papa from her concerns as she ran from the dentist to the shoemaker, and to the milliner to order more hatboxes. She filled half a trunk with heavy linen feminine napkins, as if Florence were not a civilized city, as if Florence were not a place where a modern woman could be assured of finding what she would require for her personal hygiene. Guidebooks were crushed into her overstuffed baggage. In the middle of the night, she rose from the bed to scratch a note to herself that she must order yet another trunk. What relief such extra space would bring—not having to cram more clothes into the impossibly small walls of her luggage. She felt an easing inside her chest at the prospect. Her own respiration had grown tight from planning what bordered on the impossible: to reduce her worldly possessions from what fit inside a five-story house into what might fit inside a pile of latched boxes.
    At yesterday’s appointment, she should have asked Doctor Ravell about replacing a douche bag. . . . Suppose she visited a pharmacist in Florence but could not manage, with her limited Italian, to ask for such a thing? The servants understood that she had been studying conversational Italian with an old woman from the North End, but everyone presumed that Erika did this to fine-tune her pronunciation of librettos.
    In the deep of night, she awoke again and her eyes roved in the darkness. Famished, she descended the servants’ staircase to the deserted cellar kitchen, an area of the house she seldom visited. Every servant was asleep under the eaves five stories above. No point in ringing any bells or rousting any of them from their dreams. Within two or three hours, the kitchen would become the noisy hub of deliveries from the iceman, the milkman, the grocery boy. Until the late morning, she would lie in bed three stories above this ground-level kitchen, trying to recoup the sleep that eluded her now, while dimly, at the edges of her pillow, she’d hear the ragman yelling as he peddled rags and bottles from his cart, and the laundress laughing to someone in the alley as the woman strung bed linens between posts.
    The instant Erika flicked on the pantry’s electric light and saw the fruit bowl, she felt herself swoon. She lunged for a banana with mounting panic, ripping the skin from it and shoving its smooth flesh against the roof of her mouth. Greedily she bit down. After a few quick swallows, her stomach settled, and the terrible hollow feeling was gone. She relaxed then, convinced that she was not sick, and reassured that she would indeed embark on Friday morning and make the voyage as planned.
    Upstairs in the master bathroom, just steps from her grand bamboo bed, she’d set a box of heavy linen napkins near the toilet. Twice in the past few weeks she’d felt aches and congestion in her lower abdomen—sure signs that her period verged on descending. Yet it had not come. The stress of planning for travel and for an unknown life, Erika reasoned, had upset her normal rhythms. The box she’d brought out she now tucked into a cabinet and packed away. How long had it been since she’d last menstruated? Before or after the concert at Fenway Court? She could not recall. . . . She could only remember how before she sang that night, she’d carefully strapped a linen napkin between her legs, just to be certain. Suppose she’d sat on a stone bench in Mrs. Gardner’s courtyard and stood up to feel mortifying scarlet drops across the back of her white diaphanous dress?
    It seemed a blessing how that part of her body had shut down temporarily. Her mind must have begged her body to postpone the inconvenience of menstruating while she bustled frantically from the drugstore to