Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  Later, when Louis went to meet his mother in Sydney, he invited Belle to a meeting with him alone. There had been so much bad blood between them, he wasn’t certain if she would be open to his suggestion. But he forged ahead and invited her family to come and live at Vailima.

  “I never managed to have children of my own. You and Lloyd are my only family. I want you with us. And your mother needs you.”

  A flood of emotions and memories erupted then, and she explained how she had come to understand why her mother had left her father. “I don’t know about Joe, whether he can get better,” she’d said at the time. “But I cannot come to Samoa without him. He’s Austin’s father.” Louis promptly agreed to her request.

  Belle still talked about that meeting in Sydney. “‘A child at Vailima!’ That’s what you shouted,” she liked to tell Louis. “I’d never seen you so tickled. After that, I don’t think you cared a fig whether I came along with Austin or not.”

  She had matured enormously since the days of her vitriolic letters demanding money. She’d apologized for them. “I was behaving like a spoiled brat,” she admitted that day in Sydney. They had been friends ever since. They all missed Austin. Belle was glad to have some purpose now that he was gone. She showed up every day, chatty as a magpie but a great help nonetheless. In the wake of her failed marriage, Louis had tried to make her feel she had a safe place with them at Vailima.

  They worked for an hour before Belle got up to go. “Louis, I really appreciate your kindness to me.”

  Louis embraced her. “A grit joy it is working wi ye, Belle,” he said, glancing toward the clock. “Lunchtime, isn’t it?”

  In turning toward the clock, he glimpsed a figure standing on the verandah. Fanny’s face, crazily vexed, stared in at them through the window.

  “Fanny!” Louis called out. “Come in. We were just—”

  She disappeared from view and in half a second was inside Louis’s study.

  “Youuuu!” Fanny screamed. “Both of you!” He saw a blur of blue dress, of Fanny’s arms swinging, waving, and then coming down upon the desk. Her hands went for a stack of manuscript pages, and in a heartbeat she was hurling them around the room. The papers were still flying when she pitched his inkpot, splattering black streaks across the wall.

  Transfixed, Louis watched glass shards fly in a shower onto the floor. “What the hell, Fanny?” he cried out. He reached out to stop her, but she flew past him, pushing Belle out of the way as she charged through the door.

  CHAPTER 78

  Fanny darted toward her horse’s stall. Before she opened its gate, her eyes fell on a bush knife hanging from a nail on a post. The heavy tool leaped into her hands, and she ran with it to the cacao field beyond the barn. She gripped the handle with both fists and began swinging at the cacao saplings. Green stalks snapped. Leafy heads fell to the ground. She swung and cut and swung until her arms could not lift the scythe.

  Into the sunless bush she ran, tripping and grabbing at vines as she went. Raw wails pushed up from her belly. She brushed past a tree where flying foxes hung upside down from its branches. Wings opened—whoosh—blackening the green forest air.

  On the wet ground, she wrapped her arms around her middle and pressed her fingers into the flesh of her back. She rocked and rocked. Beside her, a giant moth with glowing red eyes watched. She heard the sky crack and Lafaele’s voice. The devils are fighting up in the sky.

  Heavy drops of water splatted on her face, rained down on her shoulders and breast. Her dress was a cold wet skin. She stood up, shivering, and began to walk.

  Ferns tangled their fronds around her ankles. Red mud sucked her feet down. Above, nodding trees groaned in the tearing wind. A snow-white owl screeched her name from a stump. Then two skulls, human, lay on the ground with bones scattered all around.

  Hervey’s tiny voice came next. Faint, sweet music. “Now, Mama.”

  When she woke in her own bed, it was to Belle’s voice. “Who found her?”

  “Lafaele,” Louis murmured. “He went out into the forest and played his clarionette. She went to him.”

  “Did you give her something?”

  “Yes. Her feet are cut pretty badly. Lafaele bandaged her with those leaves he uses.”

  “Ah, Mama,” Belle said, rubbing her mother’s still arm. “Mama, Mama …”

  CHAPTER 79

  Louis sat in a chair by her bed. It was after midnight, and the others had gone to try to sleep. Outside, a gale was blowing, and the rain made a hellish tattoo on the sheet-iron roof. Thank God they had found her in the endless density of the bush.

  They’d been taking turns watching Fanny. Her face was waxen pale, her breathing slow. So weak, he would think, and then she would rise up suddenly, thrashing at anyone in her way, and in a burst of strength try to run away.

  She stirred again. Louis straightened, ready to grab hold of her. As if in imitation, she sat up. “You’re the cause!” she shouted when she saw him. She tried to bite his arm, and when he drew back, she scrambled off the other side of her bed and raced to the door.

  “Belle!” Louis called out. “Lloyd!”

  In the hall, Belle had her arms around her mother. Louis and Lloyd pulled Fanny back into the bedroom, where she fought with the strength of a man.

  “We will have to tie her down,” Belle said. “Otherwise she will hurt herself. Or one of us.” Louis saw a streak of blood come up where Fanny’s fingernail had scratched her daughter’s cheek.

  Belle went to get sheets while Lloyd held his mother. She tore them in thick strips and wound them around Fanny’s ankles, which Louis held fast, knotting the ends onto the metal bedstead. Belle crossed the sheets over her torso and had Lloyd tie the ends with a rope beneath the mattress. Then they crisscrossed sheets to cover her shoulders.

  Lafaele was standing in a corner, riveted. He didn’t speak.

  In the morning, while Lloyd and Lafaele kept watch, Louis and Belle walked around the lawn, speaking softly lest the natives overhear.

  “There is a doctor in Sydney,” Belle said. “His family befriended me when I was there.”

  “Yes?”

  “He has worked with people who are … like Mama. His name is Roth. They say he’s good.”

  “Do you know how to reach him?”

  “I’m in touch with his wife.”

  “Then you shouldn’t hesitate.”

  “How will we manage a two-week cruise with her in this condition?”

  “Morphine. Whatever is required.”

  “What do the others know?” she asked.

  “Lafaele found her, and he’s awful at keeping secrets. So they all know now.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to see the medicine man from Apia show up for an exorcism,” she said with bitter humor. “That would be like Lafaele. He and Mama are devoted to each other. He will want to help.”

  Belle looked up at Louis and saw the tears streaming from his eyes. She patted his back tenderly. “It will be all right.”

  “It’s so sad, now that one understands.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. “It’s been going on for months, over a year, when I think back. She blows up at the slightest thing. You know your mother. She’s high-strung. But lately, I’ve been thinking, Something ain’t right.” He dabbed his eyes. “It breaks my heart to see her tied down.”

  “It had to be done.”

  “How did you know what to do?”

  “I saw it done once. In Paris.”

  “At a hospital?”

  “At home.”

  “Ah, of course, Hervey was delirious—”

  Belle turned her eyes to his. “No.”

  Louis felt a chill run across his scalp.

  “A doctor came. She was seeing things, and would wander through the apartment at night. It was for her own safety.”

  “I knew she was depressed after Hervey’s death,” he said slowly, trying to remember what she’d said about that time. “Any mother would be. But I
didn’t realize she had … broken down so.”

  “Well, she did. Sometimes I wonder if a little piece of her never got quite right again.” Belle rubbed her eyes. “Thank God Austin is back in California—”

  “—and my mother in Scotland. Neither of them could bear it, I think.”

  That night, Louis kept watch beside Fanny’s bed, where she slept fitfully. When she woke, she looked like a demented stranger. Her face made tragic contortions as she whimpered. At least she was unbound. Dr. Funk had come up from Apia and given her sleeping pills. The good German doctor, called away during his cocktail hour and mildly inebriated, had put out his cigar and come inside. When he saw the state she was in, his whole attitude sobered. “I know Dr. Roth,” he said simply. “Take her to him as soon as you are able. I will prepare a sack of medicines to carry with you, enough to last the voyage to Sydney.”

  Pacing the bedroom, sorting through memories of their years together, Louis began to see the scattered fingerprints of an unwell woman. What had Baxter said to him just before he departed for America to pursue Fanny? Henley fears you are going to face a life of alarms and intrigues and perhaps untruths. Louis winced at the thought that his former friend had clearer vision than he. When he reflected on individual incidents, though, he saw how easily mistaken they were for the normal expressions of Fanny’s personality. She was by nature a fiery, complicated woman. He had been drawn to her because she was earthy and untamed, compared to the overrefined girls his parents admired. She showed the very qualities he’d been trained to politely suppress in himself. I wanted what she had. It occurred to him that those traits, over time, had bloomed into insanity. His eyes had not seen her madness coming, but he wondered now if his unconscious mind had recognized it long ago.

  He thought of Jekyll and Hyde. The characters had erupted from the deepest place inside him. The story had flowed out as if it were telling itself. There were truths in that story not even he had understood entirely. Truths about what happens when a person’s repressed desires fester until they turn monstrous. He shivered to remember the words he’d used to describe the connectedness of Hyde to Jekyll. Closer than an eye, closer than a wife.

  CHAPTER 80

  1893

  Dr. Roth ushered Louis into his private office and settled him in a chair, then went to sit behind his desk. The Sydney doctor was a trim fellow, kindly if not a touch awkward. He took off his eyeglasses and rubbed the pad beneath each eye, as if buying time before delivering bad news.

  “Your wife’s physical health is not good. The gallstones and rheumatism,” he said, replacing the spectacles. “We have a sense of her physical ailments. Her mental situation is more difficult to analyze. She tells me she has had brain fever and congestion in the past. And that your uncle George gave her chlorodyne for head pain. It’s hard to make sense of what exactly is at work in her brain. You say her moods are up and down.”

  “I should explain a bit about my wife,” Louis said. “Fanny may look like a timid little woman, but she has an intense personality. She’s a violent friend and a brimstone enemy—people tend to hate her or worship her. She is capable of—no, she does extraordinary things. She’s always been a wonderful, supportive wife to me. The fact that I am alive is due entirely to her.” Louis shook his head. “She has a habit of taking on too much, though, of overreaching. There will be a period of frenzied activity and then weeks of entire hibernation when she simply shuts the door on the rest of the world. The pattern is nothing new. But I would say that for a good year now, she has been an exaggerated version of the woman I just described. She improved immensely on the voyage over here, but I must tell you, before the breakdown, she seemed possessed. She would go out into the fields and crawl around in the dirt with a spade in her hand for ten, twelve hours at a time. Like a demented beast.”

  The doctor’s forehead creased, and Louis realized how horrifying a phrase he had uttered to describe his own wife.

  Roth fingered a gold pin on his lapel. “Doctors tend to use the latest terms when we have no certainty of what causes the symptoms. I’m reluctant to do that, since your wife’s condition could be any number of things. You say a doctor in Honolulu diagnosed her with Bright’s disease. Kidney failure is sometimes accompanied by delirium. That could explain her symptoms.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, it may be the change of life; it’s not unheard of. Perhaps she has worked herself into a state of delirious exhaustion. Or it’s possible she’s reacting to some medication. She seems to have dosed herself with any number of things.

  “But there is a chance, I’m sorry to say, that it’s a more entrenched mental illness. We know little about how to treat mental breakdowns. What we know is that she can come back and live a normal life. Or not. It varies. All I can do is give her medicine to sedate her. Only her brain can cure itself. And every brain is different, you see. Rest is essential. Healthy food. Exercise. That’s the best we have right now.” He handed Louis a note for the pharmacist. “This will calm her. Give it to her right away.”

  “So we wait and hope it is over?”

  The doctor wagged his head somewhere between yes and no.

  At the Oxford Hotel, where they were staying, Louis administered the new medicine to Fanny and then took his wife and stepdaughter to lunch. Belle and Louis ate oysters, while Fanny, following doctor’s orders, ate something that looked like gruel and drank Maltine for her stomach. She seemed calmer already. All three of them turned buoyant with relief at being out of the doctor’s office and in the normalcy of the restaurant.

  “Do you remember the first time we came here?” Louis touched Fanny’s knee gently.

  “To the Oxford? Yes.”

  “You forget I was with you, too,” Belle chastised him. “It was the first time I ever saw Louis Stevenson in a blue fury.”

  They had retold the story time and again, but it felt right to tell it here and now. Three years before, when they’d finished the Equator voyage and come to Sydney, he and Fanny had gone to the elegant Victoria Hotel to check in. He had dressed in a suit to enter the hotel, albeit one that had been stuffed into the corner of a trunk for the previous six months, while they sailed the South Seas. Fanny looked no better, though he recalled they had put on shoes.

  “Can you blame a man?” Louis said. “I asked for a suite of rooms on the first floor. The receptionist, without a word, hands a key to a porter who takes us up to a tiny room on the fourth floor. It was terrible. As you recall, I rode the lift down and had words with the man at the desk.”

  “That was just the moment when I stepped out of a taxi and entered the lobby of the Victoria,” Belle said. “There was Mama, rather stunned-looking, watching the scene unfold. And there you were, at the beginning of a performance I think of as ‘RLS Unbound.’ Had words? You were apoplectic, Mr. Stevenson. But the author didn’t lose his tongue for long. Oh, no. It was poetic wrath that came out of your mouth. I have never in my life heard anyone lay another human being so low, and without one curse word.” She shook her head remembering. “I have a vivid image of your luggage, sitting in that lobby, and all these fine ladies in silk dresses disgruntled to have to step around it. You had a few traveling cases, but there were other pieces—those tree trunks that had lids. The insides of the trunks were stuffed with all manner of souvenirs. And you had not just tree trunks; you had straw baskets, calabash gourds, tapas, fish nets, spears …”

  “We were a bit unconventional,” Louis conceded. “Still, that pretentious little man behaved as if we smelled, which we most certainly did not.”

  “How could you tell?” Fanny asked wryly, and they began to laugh.

  Perhaps it was simply the giggle coming from Fanny’s mouth, or perhaps it was the gush of warmth that had been absent from her voice for so long, but her simple remark caused the three of them to fall into hysterics. They savored the laughter, prolonged it, cried from it.

  “All right. Maybe the luggage smelled,” Louis said.

  “The best part was when th
e Sydney newspaper trumpeted that the famous R.L.S. was in Sydney and staying at the Oxford Hotel. And the Victoria had to send over your mail every day!”

  He smiled. “That was satisfying.”

  “Hold me close,” Fanny said to him that night.

  Her whole being seemed sweet and gentled. He pulled her into his arms, where they huddled together under the sheet like children in the dark. “Are you afraid?” he asked her.

  She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “I’m terrified that the thoughts will come back and it will start again.”

  He stroked her forehead gently. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  She didn’t answer. After a minute or two, she said, “Don’t leave me alone, Louis. I don’t want to be this way.”

  Outside their room, they heard luggage cart wheels creak down the hall.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, Fanny, yes.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For the cruelties. I don’t know why I strike out—I hate myself afterward. Hate myself. I think, somehow, the meanness comes of fear.”

  In the morning, he watched her face while she slept. She looked fifteen years younger. He felt a surge of tenderness course through him, and he realized how long it had been since he’d felt such protectiveness toward her. Fanny was such a strong force, no one had seen the cracks. Her terrible unhappiness had left deep lines on either side of her mouth. At the moment, he couldn’t see them anymore; it was as if the night had smoothed away all the worry.

  The streets of Sydney were lively when they went out. Belle was the first to notice how a few people stopped in their tracks. “Louis,” she said. “You’re being recognized!”

  He was already aware of eyes and fingers directed at him. He’d actually heard a passing woman ask loudly of her husband, “Is that his Moroccan wife?” Soon enough someone approached him for an autograph. The man proffered a fresh copy of Jekyll and Hyde. “I just popped into the bookstore and bought it. Read it already, of course.”