Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  For the first time in his life, Louis found his writing pace slowing to a crawl. “Do you remember how I couldn’t seem to write in this place when we first came here? Now all my little fishes talk like whales.”

  “How is that?”

  “I find myself using big words to give some force to a thought. It’s these peaks all around us. Never have I used such lofty polysyllables.”

  She did not respond or look up. The carved clock on the mantel ticked off a minute before she said dully, “Just write.”

  She resisted being joked into a happier humor.

  “A good novel might cure your boredom,” he suggested when he realized Fanny had stopped reading books or writing stories. Only the Lancet held her attention.

  “This article says that some vinegars erode your intestine,” she said, looking up from the journal.

  “Does that mean I can’t have vinegar now?” he protested. Sure enough, she moved the vinegar cruet away from him when they went to dinner that evening. Another day, she was excited by the idea that salt hardened one’s arteries and caused early death. Yet another time, she became highly exercised by an article on germ theory.

  “Many diseases are spread by germs, it says. Well, we both know that; I have known it for years. It makes perfect sense. Your body’s weak right now, so you’re more likely to catch something.”

  “What next? Will you be making every visitor take a bath before he comes through the door?”

  “You treat me like your jailer!” Fanny shouted, throwing down the magazine.

  “Why must you always expect the worst possible outcome for everything?”

  Fanny stood up and put her face close to his. “Why must you go around chirping like a canary, pretending everything is perfect? It is so wearisome.”

  “You are wearisome! Stop trying to manage every minute of my bloody life!” Louis stormed into the bedroom, slammed the door, and crawled under the covers. There he seethed, glad she was miserable on her diet, glad she was getting a taste of her own medicine. As the hour passed, though, he felt immeasurably sad that they had come to this point.

  How I hate fighting with her!

  Excitable. Both of them were. What was to be done about it? There probably would always be some snapping friction in the house, high altitude or no. At least they spoke openly, argued frankly. It was a damn sight better than the silent treachery that a lot of married couples practiced.

  In Davos, in such close quarters, his illness brought out the best and worst in both of them. Fanny was her nurturing, wry self one day, and the next, a screeching hellicat. Or worse, so willing to find the dark cloud that she actually made him feel sicker. Fanny let out sighs that seemed to rise up out of a Slough of Despond. Her kidneys ached, her head went dizzy, she could never get warm. As she sat and stared at the beams overhead, her mind seemed to get stuck on things. “Will you look into getting a cross for Hervey’s grave?” she’d asked Louis, and he promised he would. She was terrified the officials at Saint-Germain cemetery would move the boy’s bones into a common grave, even though the contract had not yet run its five-year course. “I’ve put Baxter on it,” he assured her, and he had, but it wasn’t enough to say that. “Have you heard from Baxter?” she asked again and again.

  Louis realized he was far better equipped to survive solitude than Fanny. He could retreat for hours while buccaneers or truant sons played about the hills and furrows in his brain, even if they never made it onto the page. Louis had been escaping the stupefying lassitude of sickness in just this way for as long as he could remember. And when words were doing what he wanted them to do on the page, he could soar above everything, even the sickbed.

  Not Fanny. Her whole life was about being busy, about things she touched in the course of a day. She had been this way all her life, continually experimenting, exploring, creating with her hands, whether it was a recipe for stew or a photograph or a mix of pigments for a better blue on canvas. Confined by cold weather, in a community of sick people, she had grown frustrated and then depressed.

  Louis left his bed to go speak with her. He poked the fire, then went to her at the stove across the room. “What have I let you in for, Fan?” he said, putting his hand on her back. “I always expected I would be a rather dignified invalid. I’ve always believed it is a person’s sacred duty to be happy. But this … “ He shuddered. “I know you hate this place. Well, so do I; I don’t want to die here. But what good does it do to complain about it?”

  “You are not going to die in this place,” she growled. She slammed down a wooden spoon and went outside.

  So much for a quick reconciliation.

  Through the window, he could see her leaning against the balcony rail. What is she thinking about out there? Going over all her troubles? Maybe it wasn’t entirely him. Maybe she was regretting the distance between her and her daughter. When news came that Belle had her baby, it was Louis who wrote the standard congratulatory letter and who later kept up correspondence with Belle and Joe. She nursed her grudges, Fanny did. And then all of a sudden they would disappear. Just the other day, Fanny had apologized to him for exploding at his friends while they were in London. It had taken her months to get over that anger.

  No doubt she was there in the cold, wishing for the peacefulness of the Monterey beach or the warm hills of Napa, where she could watch snails and bees going about their business. He remembered a remark she’d made at Silverado when they’d both stopped what they were doing to watch a spider weaving an intricate web. “That,” she’d said thoughtfully, “is a spider explaining himself.”

  Louis watched her standing on the balcony without a coat, her back to him. A gust of wind whooshed a fine spray of snow off the roof and over her. She seemed not to notice. The blinding sun lit up the snowflakes in her hair like glitter.

  CHAPTER 40

  “Louis, are you all right?”

  Louis was splayed on the bed, his legs half on and half off the mattress, his arms spread like wings. “I’m preparing myself,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For the Brownies.”

  “Don’t the Brownies come if you’re just lying in your usual way?”

  “This position always brought them when I was a child.”

  “I’ll sleep in the other bedroom.”

  “Do you mind, Pig? I had a real crawler last night. Perhaps I can get it back again tonight if I go to sleep thinking about it. I was an injured soldier in a hospital in Spain, and the doctor sent me off to recuperate in a terrifying old house …”

  She didn’t mind. The bed was Louis’s nest, his writing desk, his sitting room for receiving visitors during the day, and at night a playground for the Brownies, or “the Little People,” as he called them. When he was under the weather, he took his meals there. Sometimes the sheets were stained with gravy from his dinner. On nights like this, she welcomed a retreat into another room. Here in Scotland, where they were sharing a cottage with his parents in Braemar, she would stay in the extra bed in Sammy’s room.

  By now she knew that dreams were as important to Louis as a bottle of ink. Sometimes a particular dream stretched out over three or four nights, unfolding as neatly as a finished story. When that happened, he credited the Brownies entirely. More often they left behind puzzle pieces from which he put together a story. Any moral element had to be created during waking hours. “The Brownies don’t have a rudiment of conscience,” he told her drily.

  Fanny’s dreams were nothing like his. Sometimes they were so humdrum that she was bored even as she had them. “How did you dream last night, love?” he would ask in the morning, and she’d have to report, “I laced my shoes and brushed my hair.”

  The morning after the Spanish dream, he said, “I got the rest of it. I woke up and wrote down what I could remember. It’s a whole story.”

  “You’re making me positively jealous.”

  “You have to train yourself to be ready for the Little People. Set yourself to sleep with a partic
ular place in mind.”

  Fanny attempted the method for a string of nights, hoping to bring up a ghost tale. She remembered the gnarly black branches of an oak that used to tap on her bedroom window in Indiana and set loose waves of goose bumps. In the morning, no story suggested itself. Her own Brownies were stingy, having left behind a paltry image of herself as a girl of seventeen, looking all over the house for something she had lost.

  “It doesn’t work for me,” she told him. They were sitting on the porch of their cottage.

  “Don’t let it get you down, Pig. You seem to have your own strange route to the spirit world.”

  “Make fun all you want.”

  “I’m not making fun,” Louis said gently, rubbing the top of her hand. “I’ve seen your instincts run true a hundred times.”

  “Well, you do make fun of me.”

  “When?”

  “Every time you call me Pig.”

  “But that’s an affectionate term, love.”

  “And I’m much thinner now that we are out of the blessed Alps.”

  “You are. Stop all this, now. Let’s go for a walk.”

  He took her hand and led her from the stone cottage, through the garden gate, and away from the other picturesque stone houses, past an open country field to where a birk wood began.

  They sat on a carpet of soft grass in an unshaded spot. Above, an Indiana-blue sky spread itself out between the tall downy birches. “You are my own luscious spaewife,” he said. “You know I adore you.” She laughed and let her head fall back on the warm earth. He lay down next to her and rested her head on his shoulder. Lying still, she felt sunned all through.

  “You can leave Davos. Your lungs are in splendid shape,” Dr. Reudi had told Louis. “But there are no guarantees. If you won’t remain at a high altitude, then go somewhere in the South of France, fifteen miles as the crow flies from the sea, and if possible, near a fir wood.”

  They had danced for joy around the chalet when Louis came home with the news. In Davos, Louis’s face had filled out; his cheeks had turned ruddy with health. The idea that he might not have tuberculosis made them buoyant. They left the Alps in a hurry, before the outlook changed, and headed for Scotland to summer with his parents and Sammy in the Highlands before they went on to find a place in France.

  Louis had been writing like a madman since they’d arrived in Braemar. He finished two shockers—”Thrawn Janet” and “Body Snatchers”—and “The Merry Men,” about wrecked treasure ships. It was the pile of completed work on his desk, rather than her own dreams, that inspired Fanny to finally finish a tale of her own, “The Shadow on the Bed,” which she hoped would be included in his next collection.

  Everyone in the family felt the creative whirl inside the cottage. Having lost his best companions to the writing table, Sammy sometimes set up his paints to pass a rainy afternoon. “Come color with me,” he pleaded one day when Louis emerged from the room where he’d been working. Louis spread out a piece of paper on a table and began painting an island with some watercolors. Below the drawing, he wrote “Treasure Island.”

  “Imagine that there is an island where a chest full of gold is buried,” he said to Sammy. “There is a boy named Jim who, quite by chance, comes into possession of a map of the island. The map has been drawn by a crusty old sailor of questionable morals, a man named, ah … Billy … Billy Bones. And through some series of events, the boy goes off on a schooner to look for the treasure. He is traveling with a collection of sailors, some of them decent fellows, and some scoundrels bent on killing the other men when they find the gold …”

  “Luly, is John Silver one of them?”

  “Aye, he is.”

  Louis turned out several chapters in a matter of days. When Fanny tiptoed into his room, he cried out, “There’ll be widders in the morning!”

  “Widders?”

  “Widows, madam.”

  At dinner, he complained, “The trouble with a boy’s story is to write it without any cursing in it. And pirates do nothing but curse. I need tepid oaths, I suppose.”

  “Fiddlesticks?” Maggie offered.

  “Carpet bowls!” Thomas thundered.

  Soon they could hear Louis shouting in his study. “Son of a Dutchman!” he would yell. “Dash my buttons!” Passing by his door, Fanny heard him cackle, “Shiver my timbers!”

  “The Sea Cook,” he announced one evening when everyone gathered in the sitting room after dinner to hear the first chapter. “Or ‘Treasure Island,’ as you wish. By Captain George North.”

  “A pseudonym?” Mrs. Stevenson asked.

  “I can’t risk my literary reputation on a piece like this.”

  When Louis read it to the family, he pitched his voice high for the mother’s words—”Dear, dearie me! What a disgrace upon the house!”—and made the voice of the buccaneer Billy Bones as gravelly as a river bottom. Fanny noticed Louis seemed to be playing not only to Sammy but also to Thomas Stevenson who tittered like a schoolboy at every exciting plot turn. What made them all gasp was the arrival of Long John Silver, the pirate character who had been brewing in Louis’s imagination for some time.

  “‘His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird,’” Louis read. “‘He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham—plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling.’”

  “It’s your friend Henley!” Thomas shouted.

  “Aye, it is,” Louis admitted. “But in body only.”

  Having brought the Stevenson household to its feet, he made an outline of the rest of the story, sent it off to a boy’s magazine called Young Folks, and promptly sold it for serialization. It didn’t pay much, but he was exuberant in the following weeks as he worked toward the middle of the story.

  One evening after dinner, Louis walked through the cottage sitting room where the family was gathered, waving a few pages of the manuscript. “If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they’ve gone rotten since my day!” he shouted.

  Everyone laughed but Louis’s father.

  “It’s a fine story, Lou,” Thomas Stevenson chimed in. He waited a beat. “But this Amateur Emigrant book … “ He had been reading the Emigrant manuscript all afternoon by a front window of the cottage. His elbows rested on the arms of his chair; his fingers formed the steeple he made when he was deep in thought. “I don’t want it published. It’s not up to your standards, and it makes you look so … threadbare. It shames all of us.”

  Louis crossed his arms, his own characteristic response to his father’s criticisms. After a moment, he excused himself.

  “You just now got a taste of the bad Thomas Stevenson,” Louis said to her when Fanny came to the bedroom.

  “It wasn’t nearly so bitter as the arguments you told me about.”

  “This morning he actually pulled me aside to say I should insert a religious passage in the pirate story. He followed up that bit of advice with the news that he hopes to buy the Emigrant back from the publisher. He’s embarrassed that his son traveled in steerage. He thinks it reflects badly on him.”

  “Louis, Louis. Just ignore the first part. As for the Emigrant, I don’t think he sees it as censorship. And you can always publish it later. It’s a temporary compromise. They are supporting us, after all.”

  “That’s just the problem, isn’t it? As long as I depend upon his money, I am beholden to him. And his literary taste.”

  By morning, though, Louis had shifted. The Emigrant would be pulled.

  In the days that followed, the price of his frantic writing pace revealed itself. His nerves were at a high pitch, and he had a whoreson influenza bout followed by a visit from Bluidy Jack.

  Chastened, they returned to the Alps for the winter.

  CHAPTER 41

  1882–1884

  The following summer in Scotland weakened once again the health Davos had restored. As fall progressed and the question o
f winter quarters loomed, they decided to take their chances away from the Alps.

  Fifteen miles as the crow flies; near a firwood, if possible. Louis had happy memories of earlier visits to the South of France. “The Côte d’Azur,” he proposed. “Either Nice or Marseilles.” Louis set out ahead to find a place to live, while Sammy went back to school in Bournemouth. When Fanny arrived in Marseilles in October, they found each other in much better health and joyful to be reunited. The separation had shaken them awake.

  They made love tenderly and wide-eyed. She let go of the buzzing that usually filled her brain, the questions. Is he thinner? Was that a different sort of cough? Has he eaten his breakfast today? She pretended they were normal people on a holiday. Their reunion invigorated both of them.

  “What a morning,” Louis would say as they walked the rocky, dry hills above their rented chateau just outside Marseilles. “I want to take this day, fold it up, and put it in my pocket so I can have it again and again. What is really necessary in life? A blue bay to gaze on. Sun.”

  “We’re rich,” she said.

  Fanny sent for their furniture from Davos, but it wasn’t long before word came that typhoid fever was sweeping through Marseilles. In the wee hours she heard the thundering of wooden wheels on cobblestone. “What is going on at night that keeps people out in the city’s streets?” she asked a neighbor who spoke English.

  The elderly woman, whose chin bristled with white hairs, looked around as if she had a secret. “They’re carrying bodies to the cemetery in the night so no one can see how many are dead.”

  One morning when Fanny went out to get milk, she found the bloated body of a man at the bottom of their stairs. “Somebody has dumped a dead person in the street outside our house,” she told Louis excitedly. She suspected he didn’t believe her. He thought sometimes she exaggerated so as to get her way. “How do you know he was actually dead?” he asked. “He might have simply fainted in the heat.”

  “We’re leaving,” she said firmly. The furniture had not yet arrived. It was easy for them to get out of town.