Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  That night, as the train chugged through the dark hills of Iowa, the men in the car swigged from bottles and listened to the lonely tunes of a cornet player. The booze and the music loosened them, and they shared where they were headed. In short time, everyone in the car had a new train name. Louis’s bunkmate was “Pennsylvania”; the young fellow going west to cure his asthma was called “Dubuque” for his hometown; Louis was dubbed “Shakespeare.”

  The heat inside the train was blistering, so he wore only trousers and a shirt left unbuttoned and open. Every morning he went out onto the platform at the back of the train car with a tin dish of water to and the cloth and bar of soap he had bought at the same time as his bedding. It was a risky operation to bathe on the back platform of a moving train, with one arm looped through the wood railing for stability. Louis quickly apprehended who was bathing and who was not: There appeared to be a direct relationship between how much flesh one exposed and how much one smelled. Louis found the stench of the men in his car profound, but when he came into proximity with the women and children, he felt near to fainting. The least offensive were the Chinese, who were more thorough in their daily toilets and actually washed their feet, an idea that had not occurred to any of the men on his car, including him.

  And yet it was the Chinese who were reviled in one vicious “joke” after another by the white emigrants. It was common for men to make gagging sounds in proximity to a Chinese passenger. Not long before it had been the Irish who were hated, yet here was a race even more despised in the land of opportunity. Never mind that the Chinese had invented gunpowder and printing and a thousand ideas that the Western world was glad to imitate. It puzzled Louis, and he jotted down: Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs.

  Perched up top of a train car, where he could escape the closeness of the passenger section, Louis felt the terrible itching ease some. He looked out at the flat, near-naked Nebraska plains and pondered his notions about the United States. Like a lot of young Europeans, he had for some while viewed America as a promised land. Any place declaring from the outset that it was dedicated to the proposition of all men being created equal had a foot up. Places like Edinburgh seemed staid and passé compared to, say, Chicago, where a man could capitalize upon his native talents in grand fashion, regardless of who his father was. In the scheme of things, it was hard not to feel some jealousy that America was on the ascent, and Europe was wallowing in decline, thanks to its own bad behavior.

  Judging from the people he’d encountered so far, the American personality was gruff and suspicious until it became suddenly, inexplicably kind. Just this morning, he had experienced the dichotomy. Louis had positioned himself at the back of his car to catch fresh air through the door. Because the latch was broken, he held open the door with his foot. When a newsboy passed, he kicked Louis’s leg hard, causing him to cringe in pain. But when the boy figured out just how sick Louis was, his cruelty vanished.

  “Have a pear,” he said when he passed later, and handed Louis the fruit. “You can borrow one of these, if you want,” he added, giving him a newspaper. “Just keep it nice so’s I can sell it.”

  Dubuque, who had observed the encounter, moved a wad of tobacco out of the way of his tongue. “Most folks here got leather hides, Shakespeare. But inside? You’re gonna find a sack o’ feathers.”

  It was true. Americans as a people were decent types at heart. But their generosity did not extend to the Chinese. Nor to the Indians, who came in for particular ridicule. At a station near Omaha, a small family approached the idling train to sell trinkets to the passengers. The tiny woman was wearing a dirty print dress and a man’s bowler hat. The man looked strange and displaced, standing there in red suspenders and a dandy’s striped waistcoat with a watch fob dangling from the buttonhole. The children were merely dirty, wearing rags of indecipherable origin. How could American citizens witness such humiliation and not rise up in outrage? Louis was seething with that question when Pennsylvania joined a group of other male passengers outside the train car and began dancing behind the Indian family while whooping wildly, much to the delight of the men inside.

  Louis might have downed the whole bottle of laudanum at that moment were he not out of the stuff. How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook: Indians at Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.

  “What just came over you?” he fumed when Pennsylvania made his jolly return. “Did you leave your decency in your pocket when you got off the train?” Shamed, the boy turned his head away from his seat partner.

  Louis stared out the window after that, watching the plains turn into the stark black hills of Nebraska. When the train slowly pulled into a station in Wyoming, he saw an eastbound train reloading its passengers. Weary-looking people hurried to return to their cars on the other side of the platform, but not before shouting into the windows of Louis’s westbound train, “Go back! Turn around and go back!”

  CHAPTER 31

  “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.

  August 18, 1879. Departing New York today. Due Monterey by Aug. 30th. RLS

  “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 ge
neral 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 li
fe 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.