Under the Wide and Starry Sky (21 page)

“True. And you're alike.”

“How is that?”

Louis did not detect that she was smarting. “You tend to look at the dark side sometimes. You have healthy tempers. And you both rather savor your indignations.”

“Oh,” she said, “don't hold back now. Is there anything else?”

Louis's face fell. “I'm sorry, Fan. I was only teasing. Let's be gentle with each other.”

There was no pretense that they were equals. When he had first read one of her stories he said, “You have a colorful way of saying things.” Her spirits had sailed high on that remark until the next time she showed him a story and he said, “This is perfectly awful.” She knew she was not a bad writer, but she suspected Louis found her stories, with their supernatural twists, a bit beneath his literary standards. “Maudlin!” he had written next to one of her paragraphs.

After a time, she no longer asked for his help. He neither encouraged her to write nor discouraged her, though he admitted that two writers in one family was quite a lot. Still, Fanny cherished their time at that shared desk. The writing hours were boring for Sammy until Louis unpacked the printing press that had followed the boy since their time at Silverado. Now the whole family devoted mornings to words on paper, with Louis contributing stories to Sammy's little magazine.

When Mrs. Stevenson poked her head in the door and found them all engaged, she let out a frustrated sigh. “Who will be my playmate today?” she moaned. “Come away with me, Fanny. Just for a couple of mornings.” Fanny regretted the interruption but cheerfully followed her new mother-in-law.

As it turned out, Louis's mother had a gift for Fanny. It was a piano scarf to be

embroidered. The two women sat down and began to sew. Mrs. Stevenson was only a decade older than Fanny, yet her ways made her seem older. She sat stiff as a clothespin in her lace-trimmed tea gown. It was in her sweet family stories that her warmth shone through.

“I often used to take Lou to my parents' home in Colinton for a few days at a time. My father was a serious-minded parson who stayed mostly in the house after my mother's death. The grandchildren were all terrified of him, but Lou would skip up the old staircase with me to see him in his study. He would brave going in with a little snippet of psalm to recite so he could look around at the Indian pictures in there, of warriors on horseback and such. My father was utterly charmed by him.” Margaret Stevenson laughed to herself. “The other spot at Colinton that held Lou's interest was the old cemetery nearby. We always had to go look at the headstones. He liked to scare himself.”

Mrs. Stevenson's stories were at odds with Louis's own memories of his mother. She'd been absent in many ways, he once told Fanny. Thomas Stevenson had cosseted her because of her bad lungs, which kept her in bed until noon in those days. Cummy took her place, Louis had told Fanny sadly, and he blamed his father for keeping his mother at a distance from him.

In the afternoons that followed, Fanny's fingers flew through the project. “You make such tiny stitches so quickly,” Mrs. Stevenson commented, only partly in praise. Seven days after it was presented to her, Fanny held up a completely embroidered piano scarf.

Louis's mother goggled in amazement at it. “It's perfect,” she said with distinct disappointment. “That cloth was supposed to take two months, Fanny.”

A couple of weeks into the visit, Maggie suggested they all go to a resort in Strathpeffer, in the Highlands. There they met up with a few Balfour cousins and uncles, who dined with them and took the long walks everyone in the family seemed to thrive upon.

It was on one such walk that Uncle George Balfour, the doctor of the family and Fanny's amusing seatmate at the first dinner party, took her arm.

“He's too thin,” he said soberly, staring at his nephew a few yards ahead of them. “If you can get him to go, you should take him to Davos, in Switzerland. Have you heard of it?”

“Yes,” Fanny said. Davos was on the tip of the tongue of every doctor Louis had seen in London and Paris a year ago.

“The thinking now is that cold alpine air is the best medicine for pulmonary phthisis. Dr. Reudi doesn't coddle anyone at his sanitarium. Louis will be out exercising, and he'll have to stop smoking. The place could return him to some semblance of health. No better climate exists for tuberculosis.”

“I don't think his parents understand how sick he was in Oakland.” She stopped and turned to the old man. “I will speak honestly with you. He has been near death several times in the past year.”

George Balfour looked toward his sister, who walked arm in arm with Louis. “Go immediately,” he said. “His mother has been without her son. Naturally, she wants him near, but I will make them understand. I know Thomas will want to help with the cost of it all.”

It was decided they would go to Davos. As Fanny and Louis made their rounds saying goodbye, Walter Simpson—Louis's old friend and canoeing companion—and his sister presented the newlyweds with a cat and a dog. “To keep you company,” the sister said. “It's a rare breed.” Fanny took one look at the caged cat and knew she would leave it behind with someone, to be picked up at some point in the future. Or not. But the dog, a Skye terrier with wavy black hair over his eyes and ears that rose up from his head like small wings, snared her heart.

“He's a big dog in a small body. It's the short legs,” Simpson said. “Great heart, the Skye has, absolutely fearless. They're bred for hunting but a great family dog. He'll be easy to have around the house, though you can't ignore him. He'll let you know that.”

“Walter, we will call him,” Fanny said, and took him straightaway into her arms. Soon after their departure, Walter became Woggs and then, inexplicably, Bogue.

“He's the perfect dog,” Fanny cooed.

Louis smiled. “He even
looks
like you, Fan.”

1881

On the way to Davos, they stopped in London at the Grosvenor Hotel for a week, where they took a suite with an extra bedroom for Sammy and a sitting room in which Louis could receive guests. When Bob, Henley, Baxter, Colvin, and an old literary friend, Edmund Gosse, showed up, Fanny detected the cautious attitude of the men as they gingerly embraced her husband. “We thought the devil had you, Lou,” Gosse said. “But by God, you old stick, you're looking famous.”

“Both the Louises are looking famous,” Colvin said, pecking Fanny on the cheek.

It had been two years since she had seen her husband's old crowd. Henley had put on more paunch. So had Bob. They were all changed by age, marriage, children, jobs, and some of the friendships had grown more complex. Baxter, a lawyer, handled legal and financial matters for Louis. Henley was his publisher at
London,
as well as his literary agent—albeit unpaid, but he had high hopes that their play collaborations would prove lucrative. Colvin, who was paying off a significant loan from Louis in small amounts, acted as an editor and a sort of well-connected sponsor. Together just now, though, they might have been carefree schoolboys.

They had come to see Louis, their beloved Puck, but Fanny enjoyed the talk and stayed through the first evening's conversation. There was a genial glow in the room, such tenderness toward Louis, and Fanny, for what she had been through with his illness in the States.

Louis, for his part, was elated. He had been among mostly women and children for the past few months, and Fanny saw how it lifted his spirits to be with his old cronies, especially before the “confinement” in Davos.

“You'll be surprised by the place,” Gosse said. “Symonds is in Davos and plans to stay indefinitely. He has an actual life there. You'll like his company.”

“Ah, he's a pompous ass,” Henley opined.

“The man's earned the right. He's considered a great Renaissance scholar,” Gosse explained to Fanny.

“Symonds is his name?” Fanny asked. “Does he have a family in Davos?”

“A wife and four daughters.” Henley sniggered, waving a dismissive hand. “Professor Symonds is an expert on Greek love.”

“He just did a translation of Michelangelo's sonnets,” Louis explained as the others talked on. “As they were written—man to man.”

“I understood Mr. Henley's remark,” she replied.

“He's an impeccable scholar. He's all the talk now in certain circles.” Louis said.

“Are we a little jealous of Symonds's fame, perhaps?” Gosse asked Henley.

“No more than you.”

“I suppose I should be jealous.” Gosse sighed. “I seem to keep hanging by my eyelids to the outer cliff of fame.”

Fanny stifled a snicker.
What high opinions these fellows have of themselves
. She excused herself, put Sam to bed, then retired to her own room with a book. When she came back in the parlor near eleven, she found the men in their cups.

“Do bring your wives next time,” Fanny said, gently encouraging them out the door.

Next day was a luncheon at the Savile Club, from which Louis returned drunk. When he had slept off the effects, a new round began. Henley, who had not bothered to nap since lunch, arrived smelling of whiskey, an odor he was now complicating with wine.

“I want you to hear the poem our friend here recited for us today at the club,” Louis said. “He wrote it whilst in hospital with his leg—the year I met him. Do you mind repeating it, old man?”

Aiming his delivery to a corner of the parlor ceiling, Henley let loose a rant against death. He spoke the last lines with a defiant anguish: “‘I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.'”

“Thank you,” Fanny interjected into the silence that followed.

Louis paced the carpet, a crooked finger over his lips, while Henley looked at his lap.

“You have traveled a hard road, William,” Fanny said.

Henley muttered sadly into his beard, which lay flat upon his chest, “I was a panther once.”

“The man hasn't a shred of manners,” she steamed when Henley was gone. “It goes straight to my vitals that he ignores your health. It's one o'clock.”

“Yes, yes,” Louis said absently. He was up then, and out of bed, knocking into furniture as he went for paper and pen. “I must light the lamp for a bit. Sorry, Fan.”

“Can't it wait?”

“I need to write it: the maimed manhood of Henley.” His voice was feverish. “
That
is the key to a great character.”

For a week the old friends came back to visit. Fanny kept Louis in bed much of the day, then stepped in and out of the evening scene in the parlor. Often she felt the air in the room was charged with something. Competitiveness? The men appeared to be jockeying for closer position to Louis. After the first night, she stayed in Sammy's room or her own until around ten or eleven, when she took a seat among them, hoping her yawns might signal that there were others in the suite eager for sleep. She listened silently to their repartee, which grew less clever with the ticking of the clock. What a collection of friends Louis had gathered! Colvin affected a look of bemusement most of the time. He kept his neat little head cocked and his nostrils half flared, as if he had picked up the scent of an overripe cheese. When he spoke, his words amounted to stiff nothings. Gosse's manner was smooth as silk, but he was hopelessly conceited. Henley, by contrast, revealed signs of a heart, mightily injured as it was. He bore the mark of suffering not only in his body but in his conversation. He had come from a big, poor family and his childhood had been a sorrowful struggle. Despite it, he was a self-made man who turned his miserable luck into heroic poetry. And yet in the midst of all his high talk, he diminished himself when he gossiped, or when he chewed his food like a sheep, with his mouth half open and his chin rotating in a circle while he spewed cracker crumbs into his red whiskers, where they rode out the remainder of the evening. Baxter, the lawyer, whom Fanny found to be one of those brown-haired young men who was indistinguishable from the next, remained insistently drunk. Only Bob Stevenson still pleased her, though she wanted to strangle him for staying on. The room was so filled with smoke that she could barely stand it, and she was a smoker herself.

Their planned week at the hotel turned into two as the men's visits melded

into one long bout of false humility and intellectual one-upsmanship. There were no pretenses now. When she made a rare comment, they talked over her. No one but Louis noticed when she retired to bed.

Unable to sleep, she sat up and was shocked when tears spurted from her eyes.
Why are you crying, you fool?
And then she knew. It felt like an arrow every time Louis's friends came and made her feel like an unwanted outsider. It
hurt
. When Henley got on to the subject of American culture, his frequent use of “barbaric” seemed aimed directly at her.

She wiped her eyes and comforted herself by formulating caustic remarks she wanted to deliver to each of them. “How fortunate for you, Mr. Henley, that you have never had to bother your head with the annoyance of notoriety … How perfectly suited you are to be a sponsor of talent, Mr. Colvin. Borrowed limelight is better than none.”

She picked up a pen and began a letter to Louis's mother.
I cannot bear London,
she wrote.
It is unhealthy for both my body and my mind.

One night Henley's shouts, booming like cannon reports through the thin walls, were especially infuriating. If they were keeping her awake, then Sam was wide awake in his bed on the other side of the sitting room. Sam adored Henley because he thought of him as a jolly musketeer; just now the boy was getting a full dose of the blackguard side of his hero.

She gave up trying to block out the voices and listened. They were gossiping about a journalist who had recently died whose name she didn't recognize. All of them were roasting the man on a spit. “I suppose I have some time left,” Louis said. “God seems to want only the bad writers up there.”

She would have smiled at another time, when her head wasn't throbbing. She got back under the covers. At two o'clock, when Henley's laugh roared once more, a rush of holy rage shot her out of bed and into the parlor.

“For God's sake, go home—all of you! Am I going to deliver a dead man to Davos?” she shouted. “You have kept him up until the morning hours every single night we have been here. And to what end? So you can assassinate someone's character! Have you no self-respect? Are you not
men
?”

Baxter sat up in his chair, bristling like a cornered cat. Henley set his jaw. Colvin leaped to his feet. In the space of a minute, the sodden party stumbled out of the hotel room, leaving behind half-finished cigarettes and whiskys. When they were gone, Fanny leaned, quaking, against the door. Outside, she could hear the men in the hall, waiting for the lift. “What did I tell you?” Henley's gravelly voice demanded.

It dawned on Fanny what she looked like. Her hair was undone, wild as Medusa's; her heavy breasts, hanging loose under a violet-printed nightgown, quivered with every thud of her heart.

In the bedroom, Louis held his tongue, though he was clearly crestfallen.

“Don't look at me like that,” she said, still shaking. “I'm not a diplomat! I can afford to say what I think.”

There was no leaving the Grosvenor Hotel, however, until the staggering bill was settled. Fanny was stunned to see that they had burned through fifty pounds. That was nearly one fourth of the annual sum Louis' father had promised them. How was it possible? She could only picture Henley finishing off bottles of Talisker when she considered the bill. But he hadn't done it alone. In the hotel restaurant, she and Louis had ordered freely, with no eye to the budget. Now they would have to eat humble pie by asking his father for more money. Louis leaned on Colvin, too, to come up with some cash. Fanny felt better about that; it was owed to him, after all.

When Colvin showed up with a check, he enjoyed witnessing their embarrassment. “What innocents you are,” he teased them, “taking the dearest suite in the hotel.”