Under the Wide and Starry Sky (26 page)

Henry merely grinned.

If that happened, it was a fair enough trade, for Henry James was the most splendid company, and every one of his visits had a tonic effect on Louis. The adorable, balding bachelor with the wickedly funny tongue brightened the house every time he entered it. The hours they spent with him were a reprieve in that time of struggle. For struggle there was.

Money troubles loomed large and were uncomfortably interwoven with her family. Louis had taken on the expenses of Sammy's education, though. Fanny knew Sam Osbourne told people he supported his son over in Europe. The truth pained her: He had sent five dollars once to Sammy, and then, about two months ago, four dollars so the boy could have his photograph taken and sent back to his father. That was all.

Recently, he had sent to Louis an old unpaid bill for Fanny's flat in Paris. The bill reminded her vividly of her ex-husband's mean streak.

Louis had been magnanimous in paying for Sammy's private schooling, as well as the taxes on the Oakland house, which Sam conceded to her in the divorce. It was not these expenses that set Louis's teeth on edge; he took them on gladly and never spoke of them. It was the rare letters from Belle and Joe Strong to Louis, bragging of their important new lives now that Joe was set up in Honolulu as a painter, and then in the next paragraph asking for—demanding—money.

“What infuriates me,” Louis seethed in a rare moment of complaining, “is that they insult me as they beg!” Standing in the foyer after retrieving the mail, he held the latest letter in his hand. “I am the cause of the Osbourne family breakup. And therefore, I must pay my dues. Belle is collecting on the damages.”

“I don't know what's happened to Belle; I don't recognize her anymore,” Fanny said. “Can't she see? Every coin we send her has first been minted in your brain. There she is, living in Hawaii, socializing with the royal set, while Joe drinks himself to death.” The more Fanny talked about it, the angrier she got. “She writes more often to Dora Williams than she does to me. She cares not one bit for how I am or how you are. But mark my words: One of these days we will find ourselves strapped with supporting them.”

The whole matter was thrown into a new light when a letter arrived from Belle describing news she had received from Paulie, Sam's new wife. Fanny read it aloud to Louis during lunch:

“‘I write with a heart broken. Paulie sent a letter saying Papa has gone missing. It has been a month now without a word from him, and his friends believe, as I do, that he is undoubtedly dead. He left one morning for work, asking that Paulie have a late supper for him, and he never returned.'”

Louis looked up from his soup. “Didn't he go missing once before?”

“Yes.” Memories rushed at her. She could feel the desert dust in her nostrils. “We were living in Virginia City. He joined a party of men headed to Montana to work a new mine. It was his last fling at getting rich quick, he said. But months passed and no word came. He didn't come back and didn't come back. One day I looked outside the little cabin where we lived and saw wagons stuffed full of dressers and pans and children. All these people were clanging out of town, headed for San Francisco. I was barely getting by with my little sewing business. A friend of ours offered to help me get to the city, so I threw our few things into a couple of trunks, I spread word around town where I would be if Sam came back, and I got on a stagecoach with Belle.”

Sitting across from Louis, she could picture vividly the dirty, rundown neighborhood she'd moved to in San Francisco. “We lived in a cheap boardinghouse. I went around to shops, looking for work. I took with me the pretty little smocked dresses I'd made for Belle as proof of my skill. Somehow I passed myself off as a French seamstress and got a job.”

Louis looked stunned. “But you hardly speak a word of the language!”

Fanny shook her head at the memory. “I didn't talk. Mostly gestured, as I recall. We were near destitute, but I got Belle enrolled in a real school.” A pang of sorrow passed through her when she remembered the lonely little apartment. “After a few weeks in San Francisco, word came to me that the men had all been massacred by Indians.” She swallowed hard, remembering the agony of those days. “I was twenty-six years old and suddenly a widow. I worked all day in a dress shop, sewing, and at night I took in fancy work for extra pay. My fingers stung from pinpricks. Some days I felt as if I were clinging to the side of a cliff, and the only thing keeping me from falling off were my wretched, worn-out fingertips.”

Louis reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “You never told me all the details.”

“I didn't want to sully our relationship with more talk about Sam. I figured you'd heard about enough.”

“And, of course, he came back.”

“Yup.” Fanny laughed. “Walked into the boardinghouse one day with open arms. Told me that he and a friend had lagged behind the party of prospectors the day they were ambushed. Miraculously, they escaped with their lives.”

“I remember that part,” Louis said. He fell silent for a minute. “Do you believe he's dead this time?”

“He might be,” she said thoughtfully. “It's possible he committed suicide. He was given to melancholy.” She ran her hand over her mouth and breathed deep. “It will crush the children. Especially Belle.”

“Are you going to tell Sammy?”

“Not yet. I'm going to write to a couple of friends to see what they know.”

When she heard from Dora Williams a month later, Fanny realized she might never learn what happened to Sam Osbourne. A pile of clothes had been found on the beach; they were thought to be his. But a rumor of a sighting in South Africa was afloat as well. It was just as likely Sam had decided to cut and run once again. Fanny wondered if he was with some new young woman, far away from California.

When she finally revealed to Sammy that his father was missing and thought to be dead, the boy turned his head slightly to the side and looked at her through squinting eyes, as if he disbelieved her. He went out of the house for several hours. When he came back, his face was swollen from crying. He allowed Fanny to put her arms around him. He stepped back, then, and composed himself. “I want to change my name to my middle one,” he said. “From now on, call me Lloyd.”

“No! Noooo!”

Fanny leaped up, her heart in her windpipe. Louis was flailing about in the twisted bedcovers. She pulled back the sheet and looked all around his face and pillow but saw no blood. Fanny shook his shoulder. “Louis, wake up!”

His eyes, open now, darted around the room.

“You're having a nightmare,” she said, running her palm across his forehead to soothe him.

“Damm it! Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.”

“You were yelling—”

“Get my board!”

Fanny padded over to the corner of the room where a rectangle of wood leaned against the wall.

“Hurry! Pen and paper. Now!”

She tiptoed out of the room and went to the extra bedroom. In the hallway, the clock showed 2:10
A.M.
When she woke again around seven, she put her ear to the keyhole and listened for him but heard nothing. Carefully, she cracked open the door. Louis was sitting upright, his pen scratching furiously across paper.

In the kitchen, only Valentine's rump was visible. She was cleaning the oven.

“Quick,” Fanny said, panting from her race downstairs. “Make coffee and toast on a tray.” When she hustled up stairs with the food, he gave no sign that he saw or heard her. He wore his wine-colored poncho over his shoulders; his head was bent in concentration, a dark forelock drooping over his brow. She set the tray on a chair next to the bed and left.

The previous week, Louis had had a hemorrhage. “He's not to have any excitement,” the doctor had said after examining him. “No guests. No speaking. Give him the morphine to keep him sedated for a few days.” Now she remembered the usual addendum: “No movement of the arm.” She knew better than to interrupt Louis. Once he had said to her, “A story should read like a dream you don't want to wake from.” Right now he was writing about a dream, and he was in a dreamlike trance as he did it.

For three days, the air in the house was charged, as if a fierce thunderstorm were roaring upstairs. Fanny, or sometimes Valentine, crept into the bedroom to leave food for him. Once, when Fanny brought in a new supply of ruled foolscap and ink, she noticed he was writing with his pen between his third and fourth fingers, the forefinger obviously gone numb. The finished pages of his story lay on the floor, punctured through by the steel nib of his pen as he furiously raced to record his thoughts.

She stayed away except when he needed something, sleeping in another room rather than risking a break in his fierce concentration.

On the third day, when Fanny brought him lunch, he spoke. “Sam—” Louis started, then corrected himself. “Lloyd is home?”

“Yes,” she said brightly, “for the weekend. Do you want to see him?”

“Not now. But tell him I will read tonight.”

When he came downstairs that evening, Louis looked feverish. He shook his red right hand all about, trying to relieve scrivener's cramp. She fetched some paper for Sam and herself to write down their responses, as was their custom.

Louis arranged himself in his favorite chair. He loved reading his work aloud. It was a self-indulgence, poorly disguised. He used Fanny's criticism and edits when he thought them right, though she could just as well have read his manuscripts. But he loved to feel his tongue shape the sounds of the words he'd written on paper. He loved to hear a voice out loud—Long John Silver's, for example—after having heard it only in his head. Reading was his reward after any day's work, and he savored the attention of his little troupe of true believers. It was with plot that Fanny's attentiveness helped. She would pepper him with questions:
How exactly did the chest get there?
Or
How would the others know?

Louis began.

“‘Henry Jekyll was a respected chemist in London town,'” he read, “‘a tall, handsome man of fifty whose large, firm, white hands spoke of his profession in shape and size. At the moment, he was engaged in measuring out some white salts into a graduate containing a bright red liquid.'”

As the story continued, Fanny and Lloyd learned that Dr. Henry Jekyll was a spiritually bankrupt man who was frustrated that he could not indulge certain urges because of his standing in the community. He began experimenting with powders and eventually came upon a chemical formula that, when drunk, allowed him to assume the disguise of another person entirely, an ugly, primitive-looking, uncivilized man with hairy hands, an evil man named Edward Hyde.

It was as suspenseful as any story Louis had ever written, Fanny thought, but there was a strong aroma of sexual misconduct about Hyde's nocturnal adventures. Louis described Jekyll's struggle as a “war in the members” and a “spirit versus the flesh” problem. The sexual innuendo bothered her, but she knew Louis would dismiss her squeamishness as worthy of the worst prude.

There was something more deeply amiss in the story, though. Louis had made Dr. Jekyll a thoroughly bad man whose only purpose in transforming himself into Hyde was to benefit from the disguise it provided him. She wrote in her notes:
Shouldn't Jekyll be both good and bad, as all people are?
The understanding hit her like a bolt, and she did not know whether to tell him the truth. Louis needed to be propped up just now, but to lie to him, to mask her true feelings would bring down his wrath later. He called her his “critic on the hearth.” He counted on her. She wrote her feelings as best she could.

Sitting on the window seat in the drawing room, Louis read while Fanny continued taking furious notes. Lloyd had started to but put down his pencil and stared ahead with a horrifed look as the plot thickened. Louis read straight through for nearly two hours. At the end, Lloyd was clapping wildly. “How on earth did you do that in three days?”

Louis gloated for only a moment before turning to his wife. It was obvious he could tell from her reticence that Fanny was disturbed.

“All right,” he said, extending his hand for her written notes.

“I'm going to just say it, Louis.”

“Yes, yes.”

“I don't think you should specify the vice.”

Louis waved a hand dismissively. “Thank you, Mrs. Grundy.”

“You've missed the point,” she persisted. “Dr. Jekyll should not be such a bad fellow; he should be someone who is a mix of qualities. You've said it yourself time and again, that good and evil both reside in every man and woman. That's why this story should be an allegory, not another bogey tale. You've written it as only one man's horror story. Furthermore, the potion doesn't ring true.”

Louis looked baffled by her challenge. “The potion was in the
dream.
A dream doesn't lie,” he said indignantly. “And of course it's an allegory, but it must be subtle.”

“It is too subtle, Louis. You need to make Jekyll's weaknesses less defined, so that anyone can see himself in the story and feel uneasy. If you strengthen the allegory and make the vice more abstract, it can be a masterpiece.”

He snatched up his papers from the hassock in front of him. “What do you know?” he shouted at her. “You don't own my mind!”

Fanny's face flushed hot as she watched him stand up and let his fist fly into the wall, then storm out of the room and up the stairs.

Valentine peeked around the doorway, wide-eyed.

“We mustn't speak to him at all now,” Fanny told her. “Not a word.”

Fanny tiptoed into the bedroom around eleven to see if she might make amends and share the bed for the night. Louis was awake and appeared to be thinking. She could not read his expression in profile, though, and he did not speak. When he became aware she was in the room, he pointed a long bony finger at the fireplace. She misunderstood at first and prepared to add coals to the fire. But when she saw the scraps of burnt-edged paper with a few letters remaining in Louis's hand, the horror of the situation fell upon her.

“Why? Why did you burn it?” Her eyes filled with tears. “To punish me?”

He looked away.

She went back downstairs and sat by the fire in the dining room. The flames threw flickering light on the muskets and pistols on the walls. Well, it was done; he'd burned it.
Be honest, Fanny,
she mused.
You wanted to burn it yourself.

Everyone looked at Louis and thought of the boyish fellow who wrote
Treasure Island.
The story he had read to her tonight touched on something she had refused to explore before. How perfectly named his evil character was—Hyde. What dark longings did Louis hide? Jekyll's compulsions in the story sounded sexual. The reader couldn't help but think of whoremongering, though Louis hadn't included any significant women characters.

The story left her deeply uneasy. It made her wonder if she really knew her husband. Over the years, she'd noticed that Louis had many friends who were homosexuals. She thought of Symonds in Davos, who was Louis's closest friend during their stay. If ever there were a man living a double life, it was he. He was married and a father of four daughters, but he kept male lovers on the side, and everyone knew it. “He publishes his own dirty little books,” a woman in Davos had told her, “then he gives them out to his ‘special' friends.”

Fanny felt perplexed.
Lord knows, Louis doesn't condemn the disposition.
Neither did she. But it occurred to her that men fell in love with Louis the way women did. Gosse, Colvin, Henley. Even Henry James seemed smitten.

It was not something she wanted to think about. But she had made the mistake of averting her eyes from Sam Osbourne's dalliances, so she forced herself to contemplate the possibilities. When she first met Louis, she found some of his mannerisms woman-like—the way he moved his hands when he talked; his sensitive mouth; the private humor he seemed to share with his men friends that could spin out into high hilarity and leave her puzzled; more than anything, the way he showed his emotions so openly. He would fall upon the ground in tears and then be up the next moment, giggling out of control. She'd dismissed all that as part of his high-strung personality, especially since, from the beginning, he'd shown himself to be a hungry man in bed. When he was well, his appetite for her was voracious. And when he was ill? Of his earthly pleasures, lust seemed to be the thing he let go of last.

Early on in their relationship, Louis had confessed to visiting prostitutes when he was a young man. Wouldn't he have pursued men back then if that was his inclination?

No, she was certain her marriage was not a false front. Still, she wondered:
What unnameable impulses
does
Louis harbor?

She knew what he would say about
her
Hyde. That inside the kind, loving girl from Indiana resided the Greek Furies themselves, who came out, ever so occasionally, seeking blood and vengeance. He referred to her as the Angry One. She couldn't deny it.

Louis, she realized, was one of the few people who had not disappointed her. Once she had thought him the closest to Jesus Christ of anyone she'd ever met; she knew now that he wasn't so perfect. He was vain, vulnerable to flattery. Henley teased him that he couldn't pass a mirror without looking at his reflection.

Louis was incapable of conscious cruelty, but he did have a temper. Few people knew how enraged he could become. She would never forget the scene in Paris when he overheard a Frenchman insulting the British. Fanny could still see the blur of Louis's velvet jacket as he leaped up and demanded the man retract his remarks. When the fellow stood to call his bluff, Louis slapped him across the face.

That is the man I married.
Louis hated for anyone to be treated unfairly, including himself. Sometimes he overreacted. As for dark longings, if he had a desire for some other kind of life, it was hidden even from himself.

The longer she tried to understand it, the more she saw the subject as an enigma. She put out the fire in the dining room, collected a quilt, and, listening to the coo of doves in the chimney, fell asleep in a chair.