Under the Wide and Starry Sky (17 page)

“Fanny, are you awake?”

“Hmmm?” Fanny sat in a chair in Señorita Bonifacio's stucco-walled garden. She had nodded off to the drowsy hum of bees among the yellow roses covering the arch over the gate. “Funny,” she said, yawning, “I was half-dreaming just then.”

“You have a telegram.” Nellie Vandegrift's blue eyes beamed at her from underneath a curtain of blond hair across her forehead. The girl put the envelope in her sister's hand.

Fanny sat up straight and ripped the telegram out of the envelope.

“Louis is coming,” she said. She looked around the inn's garden as if seeing it for the first time. “What day is today?”

“Why, it's August twenty-seventh,” her sister replied. “Is that what you mean? It's a Monday.”

Fanny's fingers went to her mouth, her cheeks; she ran her palm over her head. “My hair!” she groaned. “It's positively grizzled.”

“You're just as beautiful as you always were. Don't get yourself worked up. Dr. Heintz is coming over here any time now.”

“No, no, I've got to put myself together.” She glanced down at the dressing gown and slippers she wore. “I look like an old nana in this nightgown, like Aunt Tidge.”

“You know what the man said: Rest. Come, climb into your bed and stay there. Once he leaves, you can get up again.”

“There's so much to do. Louis could be here in what … three days?” Fanny stood up to embrace her sister. “At last,” she said. “Something good.”

“No fever,” the doctor pronounced when he began to examine her. “What about the pain in your head?”

“Long gone,” Fanny said. She sat at the edge of her bed perfectly still, trying to ignore the stethoscope pressing her breast. The smell of chile peppers roasting over a flame in the kitchen came to her, and the raspy sound of a scrub jay scolding some other creature outside the window.

The man turned to Nellie. “Any sign of delirium?”

“Not since those first two days.”

Fanny closed her eyes, remembering the time she and Louis drifted in a canoe downstream from Grez. It was the day after they first made love. They had looked into each other's eyes and
known
: This is love, this is real.

“Convulsions?”

“No.”

The doctor widened Fanny's eyelids, his own eyes boring into her pupils. “Does the sunlight bother you, Mrs. Osbourne?”

“Not a bit. Makes me happy.”

“How is your sense of balance?”

“I'm all right now.”

“I must say, you appear to be on the mend. What it was, I'm not so sure.”

Fanny looked at the young doctor's already careworn face. “When you were here before, you said inflammation of the brain.”

“It probably was brain swelling caused by anxiety and general wretchedness,” he said. “It can happen to people who are going through a struggle, as you said you were. But it could just as well have been a bad case of influenza. Whatever you had, you need to eat now. No meat, eggs, or sweets. No coffee or tea.” The man stood up and put away his stethoscope.

“Tell him about the crying,” Nellie said, twisting one of her long braids nervously. When Fanny didn't speak, Nellie went on. “She breaks down a lot.”

The doctor looked wearily at Fanny, as if he had seen too many crying women in his time. She could see he wanted to go home to his wife and dinner. “I'm perfectly fine now,” she said, managing a smile. “I haven't cried for days.”

“Cold sponge baths,” the doctor advised, putting on his hat. “Nothing like a cold cloth to activate the skin and chase away the melancholy. Brightens the eyes and cheers the soul.”

Nellie saw him out the front door. When she came back to the room, Fanny took her sister's hand and squeezed it. “There's one thing that can cheer my soul right now, Nellie, and it's not a sponge bath.”

“Louis?”

“Oh, Nellie, you will love him. He is the kindest, most decent, wittiest … “

“It won't be long now.”

“Nellie,” Fanny asked cautiously, “what happened when I was out of my head?”

“You saw things that weren't there.”

“I have no memory of it at all.”

“You were talking to Pa.”

Tears pooled in Fanny's eyes. “I feel terrible I wasn't there at the end.”

“Pa never doubted you loved him. You know, not long before he died, he said you had every right to leave Sam. He was on your side.”

Fanny blotted her eyes with a handkerchief.

“You've got a lot of Pa in you.” Nellie's face grew pensive. “I think I'm more like Ma.”

“You mean I got the temper,” Fanny said sardonically, eyeing her sister, “and you got the sweetness?”

Nellie laughed. “I was thinkin' of how Pa stood up for what he believed in. Do you remember when I would have to go to the grocer's for Mama, and there were those two big boys—awful bullies—who threatened me? They said I had to pay a nickel to walk down their block. That's all I had in my sweaty little palm! I was terrified to walk that block, but I was almost as scared to go home without the groceries. Pa wouldn't abide a coward in the family.”

“He told me it was my job as the oldest to go out and fight them,” Fanny said, “to teach them not to fool with us.”

“Oh, you were a sight when you came home.”

“I guess it was a draw. They were bloodied, too.”

“Pa wouldn't stand for nobody being treated unfairly. He was two-fisted when it came to that. You were the one Pa counted on to settle a score if we were picked on. Why do you think us girls looked up to you, Fan? You were brave. You were the one who really took care of us.”

Fanny shook her head. “I'm tired of being strong.”

Nellie chewed on her lower lip before asking. “Have you told Sam yet that Louis is coming over here?”

“He knows.”

Bathed and dressed, Fanny went back to her chair outside. The courtyard garden was a tribute to the señorita's tender care, bursting as it was with a fat hedge of fuchsia shrubs, pink roses, and the Gold of Ophir rose over the gate that the lady said had been a gift from a suitor, Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, during his assignment in Monterey. The house on Alvarado Street was like so many others in this sleepy coastal outpost. It was in the Mexican style, with a clay tile roof under which mostly Spanish was spoken.

Sam Osbourne had been so pleased with himself when he brought Fanny to Monterey. He knew she would love the adobe houses and the arches made from bleached whalebones that led to lush private gardens. He told Fanny the story of Señorita Bonifacio's love affair with the young Sherman, little suspecting that the story of a failed romance would touch her so. Apparently, Sherman had given the beautiful girl the rose shrub as a token of his love and a promise of his return when he was transferred out of the town. Maybe the young officer and the belle of Monterey courted in this garden. Did the famous general crush her when he married someone else? There was no hint of it, though she had never married. The señorita, thirty years beyond the romance, remained slender, arrow-straight, and handsome. Flitting around the garden like a hummingbird, watering this, clipping that, she appeared to be among the happiest of God's creatures.

Fanny had returned from Europe with heavy-hearted resignation. One more time, she told herself. One more try, for the sake of Sammy. She and Sam agreed to go away from the Oakland house to try to mend. They stayed at the inn in Monterey, which seemed a wholesome place to heal a broken marriage. They had sat in the señorita's romantic garden and spoken about trying to make a future together. They had walked the beaches for hours and talked about who they once were, who they were now. “Nobody understands you like I do,” Sam had told her. “I knew the soft, shy girl. Still know her.” They stayed in their big Castilian bed, tangled up in each other.

In one of his grand gestures, Sam rented an entire wing of Señorita Bonifacio's house for Fanny, Belle, Sammy, and Nellie, who had come out for a visit and decided to stay. He even installed new horses for all of them at a livery stable nearby. Sam seemed calm and confident now that he was on solid ground with a job as a court stenographer. He promised to come down on weekends from San Francisco to be with the family.

For a brief while in Monterey, the four of them played their parts in the Osbourne family with grace. They rode into the hills together, and Sam acted like a real father, adjusting Sammy's stirrups and making a point to ride beside the boy while keeping up a kindly conversation. Belle put aside her bitterness toward her mother for “snatching” her away from the arms of Frank O'Meara. They all behaved as if they were a normal, happy clan.

“I'll come clean with you, Fanny,” Sam said one night during that time. “There were others you didn't know about. I don't know why …” He shook his head, as if as puzzled by it all as she was. “I am a changed man now. That I am.”

Fanny drew in a deep breath. “I have made my own hurtful choices,” she blurted out. “I had a relationship with Louis Stevenson.”

Within a couple of weeks, Sam's visits to the rooms in Monterey began to taper off. Fanny suspected her admission cooled Sam's ardor. And then, a month ago, he admitted he had another woman in San Francisco.

Fanny wrapped her fingers around the warm cup of coffee the cook had set out for her. She wondered what Louis would think of her now. She had put on a few pounds; she was thirty-nine years old. They'd been apart a year, but Paris seemed a lifetime ago. She was haunted by the idea that she had betrayed him—betrayed his faith in
them.
No one would condemn her for trying to reconcile with her husband. But she felt as tawdry now, having let down Louis, as she had felt after reading the vicious parody of herself in
Scribner's
magazine. Margaret Wright's article had cut her to the quick.

It was then she decided to return to the States. She'd reasoned that she owed one more try to the marriage. If it could not be repaired, she planned to pursue a respectable divorce. None of it had gone according to plan. She was simply outplayed by her husband. Lost was the piece of higher ground she had clung to for so long. Her confession to Sam about the affair had divested her of that real estate.

“Sam has me right where he wants me,” she said to Nellie, “in a rented place where he won't have to see me very often. He can charm his children and lure them away while waffling about a divorce. So much for high hopes.”

Her dreams for Belle had been dashed as well. The girl had fallen in love with a rakish San Francsco youth named Joe Strong. He was a good enough painter and sweet, but he drank too much and was perpetually broke. Fanny saw something in Joe that was in Sam Osbourne's character as well. He was weak as water and a professional repenter, the kind of man who would be offering apologies for the rest of his life for the mistakes he kept repeating.

Belle sniffed her mother's disapproval. “
Papa
likes Joe,” she said one day to Fanny, setting her jaw. Living in Monterey, Belle lately found many reasons to adore her father and to dislike her mother. One day, when Fanny persuaded her daughter to go to the beach with her, she had made a picture of the girl sitting on the sand. When Belle saw the sketch, she fell into a bubbling furor. “What kind of mother makes her child look ugly in every drawing?” she demanded contemptuously.

Belle was soon going off to the beach, not with her mother but with Joe. When Fanny objected, Belle exploded. “I'm eighteen years old! You can't control me anymore! It is hypocrisy to tell me I can't see a young man who is just beginning to make his way. You chose Louis Stevenson, who is penniless. And you have
lived
with him already.”

Fanny gritted her teeth but remained silent, so Belle chose a new angle. “Frank O'Meara desperately wanted to marry me. I loved him, and you dragged me away. You have tried to break up everything good in my life. Worst of all is how you have tried to turn me against Papa.”

“I wanted for you what I didn't have,” Fanny argued. “A chance to enjoy something of your own before you start taking care of other people. Maybe a chance to actually shape your own destiny. You are an artist, Belle. You don't have to find yourself by
marrying
an artist.”

Belle looked at her incredulously. “You know nothing about Joe Strong. You are an old woman, Mother, full of bitterness and talk of doom. And this is one time you will not have your way.”

When Joe got wind of Fanny's disapproval, he hustled Belle off to San Francisco and married her. Fanny took to her bed, while Sam welcomed the happy couple with open arms and set them up in a fine hotel for a honeymoon stay.

How had the one thing Fanny wanted in all the world, a happy little family of her own, slipped through her fingers? Sam lost long ago, Hervey dead, Belle estranged despite all the love and work, despite everything Fanny ever did to make a home. She had been too free with Belle. She had let the girl drift away from her.

Thank God she still had Sammy.

Fanny was in the garden when the boy returned from a visit to the stable. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.

The boy's eyes widened. “Yes.”

“Louis Stevenson is going to pay us a visit sometime soon,” she told him. She watched as the news registered: His pale, long face lit up. He leaped in the air and shouted, “Luly is coming!”

“Shhh. Now, don't tell. You are the only one who knows.”

In the early-September sunlight, Fanny stood on the wooden sidewalk in front of the house on Alvarado Street and watched for Louis. She knew his route. He would take a train from Oakland to Salinas City, then transfer to the narrow-gauge train that dumped its passengers rather unceremoniously a few miles outside of Monterey. There he would get a wagon to bring him into town. Exactly when this would happen was anybody's guess.

Alvarado was the main thoroughfare in a town with only three real streets, and these were paved with a top coating of beach sand. At street corners in either direction, Fanny could see the old Mexican cannon barrels that had been plugged upright, like cigars in spittoons, to serve as hitching posts. The air smelled of horse droppings and fried beans wafting from Adulfo Sanchez's saloon. The seaweedy odor of the ocean was there, too, and when the horse traffic quieted, the sound of the crashing breakers could be heard. Alvarado Street was alive with traffic at this hour, with vendors, shoppers, children walking home from school, and the occasional
vaquero
seated on a fancy-tooled saddle, riding by too fast.

Fanny didn't know everyone in town, small as it was, but she was beginning to recognize faces—the local restaurateur, the newspaper editor, the neighborhood women who nodded when they passed, the handful of stupified men who stumbled out of Sanchez's bar in the late afternoon. She knew personally some of the bright lights in town, including Adulfo Sanchez himself, who was officially engaged to her sister Nellie. Adulfo was a sweet man from an old Mexican family with deep roots in Monterey. Nellie had met him at one of the town's weekly public balls.

Another local character was Jules Tavernier, a rather well-known landscape painter. Early on in Fanny's stay in Monterey, Sam introduced her to Tavernier, whom he knew from the Bohemian Club, and took her to his studio on Alvarado Street, where she found some local “artists” lazing on Persian rugs, drinking whiskey, and talking about French Impressionism. One of these reclining idlers was Joe Strong, the young man who was already sniffing around Belle. Joe had jumped up and spoken respectfully to Fanny, but in that moment she felt the essential wrongness of him. Even then she could see he was the kind of young man who would burn himself up early and become an albatross for some girl when his bohemian ways lost their charm. Fanny reflected now that she should have shipped Belle straight back to Indiana at the first signs of their affair.

“Fish! Fish!” A Chinese youth with a bamboo pole over his shoulder passed in front of Fanny, and she hailed him. She had purchased from the boy before and was fairly certain that “fish” was the only English word in his vocabulary. Examining the catch inside his net, she pointed to a shad, and he held up six fingers. Fanny reached into the small purse at her waist and paid him six cents.

She went inside the house, where the thick walls kept the room cool. For two days now she had bathed, dressed, and perfumed herself as if expecting company. Each day they waited for Louis to arrive. Sammy behaved like someone with Saint Vitus's dance, so jumpy was he with the secret. As the dinner hour approached, Fanny cut onions into a frying pan, then went outside to watch one more time. The fog from the sea was already rolling in. Carpenters carrying tools walked along Alvarado, and some of the drinkers from Sanchez's bar exited noisily through the doorway. One of the men coming toward her had a familiar gait. He was a wraith of a fellow, with dark hair and … Fanny squinted. It was Louis.

She let out a cry, and then he was standing there before her: Louis Stevenson, looking as if he had lost one half of himself. His features, always so lively, were strangely still, as if his eyes and mouth were too weary to dance. He was wearing the blue serge suit he had bought in London to call upon publishers. The jacket was a wrinkled mess that hung off his bony shoulders as if from a wooden hanger; a belt cinched at his waist kept the gathered pants aloft. Her face went slack as fear raced through her chest.

Louis did not touch her. “It's good to see you, Fanny,” he murmured. The sweetness of his Scottish accent was the only thing about him that seemed intact.

“Where is your baggage?” she asked.

“I'm happy you're up, Fanny. I expected you'd be in bed.”

“I'm better, Louis.” She looked up into his face again, prepared now not to gasp.

“I was afraid you'd be …”

He put out his hand to hold hers, and when she grasped it, she saw his wrists were covered with red welts. She pulled her hand away. “What is it?”

“Ah, the emigrant's curse,” he said. “The itch. I need to get some medicine.”

“Is it all over you?”

He sighed. “Unfortunately.”

“We can go to the pharmacist right now, Louis.”

“I need to sit down for a wee bit, is that all right?”

“Yes, yes, come in.”

When they went inside, they found young Sam standing near the table. His head tilted slightly to one side when he looked at the man with his mother.

“Sammy,” Louis said.

The moment the boy heard Louis's voice, he stepped partly behind Fanny. Stunned, mother and son ogled the apparition that had collapsed on a chair.

“I have all the makings for a fish dinner—just what you like,” Fanny said, forcing cheer into her tremulous voice. She bustled about finishing supper, while Louis's dazed eyes followed her. No clever quip came from his mouth, only a rattling cough.

“What are you going to do?” Nellie whispered when Fanny went into the hallway.

“Send him over to the boardinghouse. Will you go to Adulfo's and ask him to bring Louis's bag? He left it there, he said. I suspect he's too weak to carry it.”

“Weak?” Nellie said, grasping her sister's hand. “Honey, that man's half dead. Who knows what that rash is. What are you going to
do
?”

Fanny knew what Nellie was asking.
This is the man you want to make a life with, the man who is going to support you? Are you insane?
Through all the turmoil of the last months, during the battles with Sam, during all the letters from home condemning her for even considering divorce, Fanny had clung to Louis's memory. She had prayed for this moment, but now that it was here, everything felt wrong. Looking into the front room from the hallway, she saw an emaciated creature she didn't recognize, a tall man weighing perhaps 115 pounds, a thoroughly sick man.

“I don't know,” she said soberly. “I thought I knew, but now … “

By noon the next day, Louis had recovered some strength. He came by the house to collect Fanny. “Do your parents know you are in America?” she asked when they went out onto the street.

“They do now. I had a brutal letter from my father in New York. He told me to stop this ‘sinful enterprise.' He's cut me off, and do you know? I'm relieved.”

“Do you have any money left?”

“Not to speak of. Colvin owes me. He wrote that he would send some as soon as he is able.”

Just then Jules Tavernier emerged from his studio onto the sidewalk. “Mrs. Osbourne,” he called out.

“Mr. Tavernier,” she said, composing herself, “this is Robert Louis Stevenson, a friend of mine, and a great Scottish writer, I might add. He is in this country on a lecture tour.”

“Well,” the man said, appraising Louis none too subtly, “will you be speaking here?”

“Oh, no,” Fanny interjected. “He's just down from San Francisco for a little respite.”

When they had walked another half block, Louis asked, “Where can we go to talk freely?”

“To the beach,” she said. “It's a small place, this town. People do not speak kindly of each other behind backs.”

“I don't give a tinker's damn.”

“I still have to care,” Fanny said.

They walked down Alvarado Street to the soft sandhills that ran between the town and the ocean. She tried to cheer him as they walked, but he would have no part of small talk. The sound of the booming waves echoed like cannon reports in her ears.

“It was not an easy trip,” Louis said when they reached the beach.

“I can see that.”

“I was afraid you were in grave danger when I got the telegram. People die of brain fever.”

“Nellie sent it. She shouldn't have frightened you. We don't know what it was, but it passed.”

Louis stopped walking and turned to her. “Where are you in the divorce proceedings?”

Fanny caught her breath. “I haven't begun.”

Louis looked at her incredulously. “Don't tell me that, Fanny. You asked me to come.”

She looked at her feet, half buried in the sand. “It's not that I haven't talked to Sam about it.”

“And?”

“And he's resisting it, despite everything. The truth is, I have been under siege from my family, too. Everyone is opposed to it. They're like your father, Louis. They think it's a sin.”

“What do you want, Fanny? Not what do
they
want, for Christ's sake—what do
you
want?”

Fanny set her chin, looked into his eyes. “I want peace in my mind.”

He kicked the sand. Whether from anger or the rash, Louis's neck was flaming red. “Are you going to marry me or not?”

Fanny put a hand over her mouth and stared out at the ocean. Her mind raced as minutes elapsed. When she did not answer, Louis walked away, up the beach, and she turned back toward town.