Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  Monsieur de Keyser, his chest puffed like a pigeon’s in his morning coat, examined the items the American woman had spread out on top of his desk. In the pregnant silence, Fanny sat opposite him on a chair so high that her feet barely touched the ground. Behind the director, from floor to soaring ceiling, important-looking oil paintings proclaimed the school’s stature. Her eyes took in green landscapes, portraits of powdered aristocrats, still-life oranges on shadowed cloth. Was the looming wall of art intended to make prospective students feel small? That was precisely the effect it was having on her.

  “Why, why were you not born a boy?” the director cried out suddenly, throwing his arms heavenward. “You could learn more here in one year than in five at your San Francisco school.” The man was saying “it’s a pity” and “on your own … six months of hard work on anatomy, then a year in Paris and another in Rome” when it came fully clear to Fanny that none of her work or Belle’s would ever hang in this room. There wasn’t a prayer that she could talk her way into this school.

  Her cheeks went hot. She stood up abruptly to take her leave, gathering her things before he could see the tremble in her hands.

  In front of a café across the street, a woman in an apron was sweeping. Fanny pictured what awaited her back at the hotel—Belle’s eager face, Kate Miller and the children asking, “What are we going to do next?” Fanny went into the café to collect her wits. At a table in a corner she lit a cigarette and ordered coffee, all the while looking up at the tin ceiling to keep tears from spilling. What a fine mess.

  The scene she’d glimpsed this morning at the St. Antoine came into her head: women in pastel dresses breakfasting beside pretty pyramids of buns and fruits in the marble-floored palm court. She closed her eyes and heard her husband’s voice bellowing in her brain. What fool notion made you haul the kids over to Europe on such poor information? How on earth had she imagined she could make it all work?

  She reached into her bag and took out a piece of stationery to write a letter.

  My dear Mr. Rearden,

  We enjoyed a comfortable voyage over on a ship that was only half full. On the second day at sea, who should appear on board but our nanny, Miss Kate! I had told her that I could not afford to take her to Europe, and we all said our goodbyes in New York. But the girl is a loyal soul. She quietly bought her own steerage ticket, and when she showed up on deck, she cried and said she would not cost me much, only meals. And so we are a party of five … Belle had her first proposal on the boat. A wealthy cotton man from Kentucky asked me for her hand. Of course, I told him no. She is far too young. I had similar interest from a New York doctor who declared his devotion every time he saw me. Quite a bother.

  The art and pastry of Antwerp are divine, and you will be pleased to hear that the charming old wooden shoe has not disappeared from the streets. Alas, the art academy is just as old-fashioned and not nearly as charming. Can you believe they do not accept women students? The director was distressed to have to refuse us. He offered to personally oversee our private instruction. I am thinking on it.

  We are having the time of our lives …

  Fanny sealed the letter, addressed it to Timothy Rearden, Director, Mercantile Library, and imagined her friend opening it. She pictured him going over to the Bohemian Club after a long day and having a drink with her husband. Rearden had remained friendly with both her and Sam during all their marriage troubles, though Fanny’s relationship with him was much closer. For a while she and Rearden were a tiny bit romantic, holding hands and sharing a kiss during one of her covert visits to his rooms. But they had both backed away from that kind of intimacy. She was still married to Sam Osbourne, in name, anyway. Even now she and Tim Rearden flirted some in letters. He was a confidant, a scold, an adviser, a brainy playmate of some stature among their fashionable friends back in San Francisco. Best of all, he encouraged her writing, which was her first love, far more than painting. And he was a great gossip. He could be counted on to mention to Sam the details of her letter. Better that Rearden, rather than she, break the news about her failure at the painting school. Sam would be in full-blown fury when he found out.

  The next item of business was clear: Get out of that blessed hotel. What they would do, after that, she hadn’t a notion. Of one thing she was certain: She would not go back to the humiliating role of betrayed wife.

  Walking to the hotel, she noticed a fine old three-story brick building with a facade that zigzagged in steps up to a peak. At the entrance hung a sign that read BOARDERS in Dutch, English, and French. Above it, etched in stone, was HÔTEL DU BIEN ETRE. She consulted her French dictionary. The Hotel of Well-being.

  Dear God, let it be.

  Fanny reached to turn the doorbell ringer, but her fingers missed it by an inch. She was accustomed to such frustrations as a petite woman. While other people might view each other eye to eye, she found herself confronted by vest buttons, tie pins, and bosoms if she didn’t tilt her head back.

  She opened the door unannounced and found herself in a front hallway, where she nearly bumped into a white apron stretched across the belly of a bald man who introduced himself as the owner.

  “I am wondering if you have rooms for a family of four,” she said. “Five, actually. We have a governess who can sleep in a room with my daughter. You see …” In a spurt, Fanny poured out her predicament—unhappy marriage, surprise nanny on board, rejection by the art school—after which she appended the fact that she couldn’t pay the hotel’s asking prices. The bald man’s expression shifted from confusion to alarm to sympathy. Soon enough he was patting her back and showing her to a suite of rooms two doors down from his own family’s quarters.

  Elated, she stopped at a shop on the way back to the hotel and spent too much on a box of chocolates. She would surprise them with it after dinner. The children deserved a special treat. Didn’t they all? It had been a long and wearing journey.

  At the St. Antoine, she found Sammy and Hervey cutting capers on

  one side of the room, trying to make themselves dizzy. On the other side, Miss Kate sat on a chair, drilling Belle. “Pencil of the barber,” the governess droned.

  “Crayon du coiffeur,” Belle replied lazily.

  “The academy doesn’t take women,” Fanny announced, dropping her satchel on the bed.

  “They don’t?” Belle sat up. “What are we going to do?”

  “We will go on living. We will have breakfast tomorrow morning, one way or another. We will go to the American embassy and get help finding a teacher. What is your suggestion? And why are you still in your robe? We have to check out.”

  Kate Miller leaned forward in her chair. The young woman’s eyes darted from mother to daughter to mother. Sam and Hervey, who were on the floor, looked up cautiously.

  “Don’t blame me, Mama,” Belle said, pulling the dressing gown close around her neck.

  Fanny saw the concern on their faces and knew she was taking the wrong tack. “I’m sorry, Belle. It has been a frustrating morning, but a little bit funny. You should have seen the man who ran the school. He was so puffed up.” Fanny thrust out her chest in imitation of Monsieur de Keyser and pranced around the room like a prig. When she came to the part where he bemoaned that she and her daughter were not boys, she tugged at her hair and waved her arms dramatically. The children giggled, even Belle.

  “And what did you say to the director?”

  “Why, I told him I didn’t care one whit for his stuffy old painting school.”

  “Oh, well … “ Belle sighed. “It was too good to be true, anyway.”

  “We’ll have none of that talk. This is your chance, Belle. This is our time.”

  The girl looked at her warily.

  “Virgil Williams says you have a real artistic gift,” Fanny said.

  “Virgil says this, Virgil says that. It turns out Virgil isn’t right about everything, is he?”

  “Go get yourself dressed!” Fanny ordered. “We will simply hire our own teacher.”
She lifted Hervey off the rug and settled him on her hip. “Did I mention I’ve found a different hotel? Pack your things lickety-split, my pigeons,” she said gaily. “We have a new home.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Papa” Gerhardt—for that was what everyone seemed to call the man, including his wife—took Fanny and her party into the family’s sitting room. There she met the matriarch, a shapely woman whose round flat face resembled one of the painted plates depicting the Virgin that Fanny had seen in a shopwindow. Surrounding her was a gaggle of offspring.

  “There are ten,” Belle said to her mother after counting.

  “I think that’s excessive,” Fanny muttered under her breath.

  The oldest boy, their translator, who hovered nearby, looked puzzled. “Excessive?” he asked.

  “Expensive.” Fanny smiled. “It’s expensive these days to have a big family.”

  All of the Gerhardts spoke some English, though it wasn’t necessary. Alliances formed instantly. The middle girl took possession of Belle, who was her age. Sammy claimed a pretty daughter about his size, and Hervey was adopted by the older boys and girls, who promptly began stuffing him with sweets. Fanny’s family had arrived at a moment when everyone in the household was engaged in preparing surprises for the wedding anniversary of the parents. Soon the Osbourne clan was elbow-deep in the planning, too.

  Fanny and Miss Kate settled the rooms. In the evening, with the children and nanny out of earshot, Fanny told the Gerhardts about the long and arduous journey. “There was terrible flooding around Indianapolis. The oats and corn were thriving when we arrived, but by the end of the week, when we were to depart, the crops were underwater. There was no train service out of that town, of course. I waited for a couple of extra days but couldn’t postpone any longer. I decided to try to get to the next station by wagon. Probably a half dozen times, the horses plunged over embankments into raging streams. It’s a miracle we weren’t all swept away and drowned. At one point, we went across a shaky bridge. Just minutes later we turned back to see it collapse.”

  The Gerhardts registered the proper horror, but there were more details to the story than Fanny chose to share. She had talked to several drivers before she found one willing to push past the blockades and chance his old omnibus. Daring as he was, even he had to be ordered on. When they came to a bridge that had not been demolished by the roaring river below it, there were men waiting nearby to warn people away. The driver had not wanted to cross that bridge, yet she had insisted on it.

  “As we continued our journey, word went with us from one driver to the next that I was bent on getting our train to New York and was not to be trifled with,” Fanny said. “I’m actually a little frightened now to reflect on how desperate the whole enterprise was. I risked not only my life but my children’s as well.” As she heard herself tell the story, though, she was as awed by her daredevil journey as the Gerhardts were. The mother sat next to her on the divan in the parlor, catching her breath from time to time. The father wrung his hands, got up, and poured Fanny a beer. “Brave girl,” he said when they all retired at the end of the evening. He and his wife embraced her.

  The family was so familiar in its simple warmth, Fanny felt as if her Indiana childhood were playing out in front of her. The children practiced dances and piano and violin pieces and wrote little dramas for the upcoming party. Fanny’s boys played in the parlor while the smell of frying onions drifted in from the kitchen.

  It half-grieved her to see the tenderness between the parents, for it showed how poor her own marriage was in comparison. Yet she wanted her children to know what real family happiness looked like. They should know what to want. Belle had been a honeymoon baby; she’d seen plenty of happy times growing up. But the boys had come along later, after sieges of hard feelings. Both were conceived during fragile reconciliations. In his seven years, Sammy hadn’t seen nearly enough of his father.

  The days in Antwerp filled up. Miss Kate, whom Belle called “the governor” for her brusque manners and the dark down across her upper lip, worked at tutoring Sammy while Fanny and her daughter went out for hours to view the most important pictures and often to try to sketch them. The Osbourne women were an oddity in Antwerp, which turned out to be a rather small town. When Tim Rearden sent a package in care of the American consul, it was delivered directly to their little hotel rather than to the consulate. “I believe,” Papa Gerhardt told her, “you and Belle and your governess are the only American women in town besides the consul’s wife.”

  Belle was right. Virgil and Dora Williams were not as worldly as Fanny had given them credit for being. “Europeans are accustomed to women taking grand tours on their own,” Dora had insisted. “You will find plenty of other female students like yourself. Women have been traveling without their husbands for years—to reinvigorate their lives.”

  Fanny had laughed. “Ah, to be reinvigorated.”

  “I don’t believe they take their children along, though,” Dora added.

  Fanny had looked at her friend in wonderment. “That’s out of the question. My children are coming with me.”

  During the second week in Antwerp, when she went to the cathedral with Belle and Sammy in tow, they positioned themselves in front of Rubens’s Descent from the Cross and sketched furiously. Off to the side, she noticed a cluster of curious locals staring at the peculiar little American family.

  Fanny interviewed a drawing teacher who told them to go to Paris where they would find the Julian Academy, which admitted women, but she dismissed the idea. They would stay here for a while, pursuing their own course of study with a tutor. Many of the things she wanted for her children—for herself—could be had in this place. The Gerhardts had taken them to their bosoms. On the boulevards, the men in baggy pants and funny little jackets began to look ordinary. In her letters to friends back home, she changed her signature, abandoning the family spelling of Vandegrift for the Dutch spelling. Fanny van de Grift Osbourne. She liked the look of it. Much more authentic.

  One evening she noticed Hervey was listless. Earlier in the day, the boy had been under Kate’s wing while Fanny was out.

  “Who are you today?” she asked her son. Hervey was wearing a coat she’d sewn for him that was like those worn by the San Francisco firefighters he so admired. The costume was one of two she had packed for him. The other was a soldier costume. Sometimes he dressed half as a soldier, half as a fireman, wearing his firefighter hat and carrying a sword so he could quickly switch roles if the spirit moved him.

  The boy looked down to check what he was wearing. “All fireman,” he said.

  Fanny noticed his yellow ringlets were wet underneath his paper helmet. She put the back of her hand to his forehead. “He’s got a fever,” she said to Kate.

  “He didn’t have it this morning.” The nanny’s tone was defensive.

  “Draw some water, cool but not cold.”

  Fanny bathed Hervey, then put him into bed with her. After three days, when he continued to be feverish, she called for the Gerhardts’ doctor.

  The man poked and prodded. “In truth,” he admitted, “I’m a little baffled.” He wrote down a name—Johnston. “You need to take the boy to Paris to this man. He’s an American. Very competent.”

  Within two days, Fanny, Kate, and the children were on a train.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the seat opposite Fanny, Belle cuddled Hervey under her arm, while across the aisle, Miss Kate read a book to Sammy. Fanny felt the tension in her body ebb some as she leaned back in her seat. Hervey was sleeping, his curls falling over his forehead. She smiled as she noticed for the hundredth time how different her children were; a stranger wouldn’t know they were related. Hervey was a tintype of his father, blond and blue-eyed, with a gentle nature that was all his own. Belle’s beauty was earthier: She had Fanny’s complexion, the same wavy brown hair that went where it wanted, the same dark brown irises shot through with streaks of gold like cat’s-eye marbles. Belle’s looks were an exagg
eration of her mother’s, though; her eyes were bigger and bolder, her figure more voluptuous.

  The girl peered out the window, lost in what thoughts, Fanny didn’t know. She was so close to womanhood. Fanny believed their emotional landscapes were similar: Both were tenderhearted, headstrong, tough and vulnerable all at once. Belle was saucier, far more impertinent than Fanny had ever been to her own mother. But studying her in the fading afternoon light, Fanny found herself thinking, I was that girl. I was that girl.

  She was Belle’s age when she met Sam Osbourne, and she was standing on stilts in her mother’s garden. Fanny was the oldest of the Vandegrift children, the ringleader of the pack, lively as a bird and still playing at a child’s games when the handsome young man showed up at the house. Sam was twenty, far more mature and sophisticated than the boys in the neighborhood. He was bright, with a law degree from the university and an impressive job as the private secretary to the governor of Indiana. He was charming, and he shared her sympathies against slavery.

  Did any of that matter to her back then? What do a man’s prospects mean to a girl of sixteen? No, it was his handsome face, his pale hair, the slender cut of his jacket, the little Vandyke beard he stroked. It was the sunny way he could tease her out of a snit, the way he looked at her so hungrily. It was the romantic notion that he counted Daniel Boone as one of his ancestors. It was his shiny boots, for God’s sake.

  She had married him when she was seventeen, and within nine months they had Belle. They were all children together, really. Maybe that accounted for why Belle sometimes seemed less like a child than a sibling; often enough these days, she was taken for Fanny’s sister.

  Those first three years of marriage in Indiana, Fanny had sewn tiny dresses for Belle and made a cozy nest of the house her father had built for her as a wedding gift with materials from his lumber company. In the evenings, Sam made love to her in every corner of that house. He was full of ideas and excitement, though she noticed that he fell from time to time into slumps of dark rumination. To Fanny, the melancholy only made him more attractive. In those days, she’d believed such brooding revealed a deep soul. When Sam went too deep, though, she had to pull him up out of the mental holes he dug.