Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  “You are the very spectacle of self-sufficiency,” Louis said.

  When Fanny raised her eyes to his, he caught his breath. She focused her gaze on him as if sighting a pistol. “Are you mocking me?” she asked.

  “No, no, not at all! I’m admiring you. Have you always rolled your own cigarettes?”

  “Ever since I started smoking. A miner in Nevada taught me.”

  “In Nevada?”

  “I lived for a while in a silver mining camp.”

  “My goodness! How … bracing.”

  She drew on her cigarette. “That’s a delicate expression, Mr. Stevenson.” Her eyes remained unwaveringly on his.

  “I meant you seem so ladylike, and to be such an adventuress—”

  “Oh, it’s not that unusual to find women in mining camps. But I wasn’t in the same line of business some of the others pursued, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  Louis shook his head. “I am wondering why you take whatever I say and misconstrue it, madam. You have known me five minutes, not nearly long enough to despise me. It usually takes at least ten.”

  She laughed then and small, perfect white teeth flashed across her face. “I’m only teasing you, Louis.” Lou-us, she pronounced his name, soft and slow, as if stroking it. “I liked you the minute you jumped in.”

  Bob returned with a plate of food for him and a bottle of whisky. “To Louis the Canoeist,” he said, tapping his glass to his cousin’s. “Give us the plums, Lou.”

  There had been an abundance of plums to pick from along the banks of the Scheldt and the canals of Belgium and then, at the end, the upper Oise. Louis had traveled for twenty days in the Arethusa with his shy, athletic friend Walter Simpson, who manned another sailing canoe, the Cigarette. Their voyage had provoked furious notetaking on Louis’s part—from observations on the free life of the barge captain to his own near-kidnapping by the mad young oarsmen of the Belgian Royal Nautical Sportsmen’s Club, whose enthusiasm for boating was almost frightening. For the sake of a warm clubhouse dinner and a bed for the night, he and Simpson pretended to know the great English rowers whose names the Belgians reverently recited. As they were escorted to their sleeping quarters by one of the club members, Louis and Simpson, under pressure, agreed to give a morning demonstration of the proper English stroke. At dawn, they fled rather than be found out as rank amateurs.

  There was so much Louis had saved up to tell Bob, but how could he say it now, in front of this new woman? He wanted to say, If you want to find out who you really are, then go travel. To move is the thing. He wanted to say, Something important has begun. Every chance encounter, every change of landscape in the journey, offered itself up to his pen. He could see a way now to go out and have adventures, to pour all that he witnessed through his soul and onto paper, a way he could make a living doing what he loved, in spite of his father’s plans for him. At the end of the journey, after he had maneuvered the Arethusa to a dock in Pontoise, it was raining. He hated wet weather. Yet he had put his face up to the drizzle and thanked it for falling on him.

  Louis looked at Bob and Fanny’s expectant faces. “French rain is different from the stuff that falls in Auld Reekie.”

  Bob laughed, but Fanny said, “It takes leaving, doesn’t it, to see things through fresh eyes.”

  “It does,” Louis said. He saw she had two or three wavy silver strands, like sprung coils, at each temple. “I felt free, truly free. Just to be out in the open air …”

  “Do you know that Whitman poem ‘Song of the Open Road’?” Fanny asked. “‘I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air … ‘“

  “… I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like,’” Louis responded, picking up the verse, “… and whoever beholds me shall like me.’”

  He saw the faintest smile flicker across her somber mouth as she took his measure.

  “So, you’re a travel essayist now, are you?” Bob injected into the quiet moment that followed. He sucked hard on his pipe and released a cloud above their heads. The sardonic grin he had developed at Cambridge was in full display. “Your father will be thrilled to hear that.” He turned to Fanny. “Our friend here just completed his legal studies.”

  “I am not suited to be an advocate,” Louis said, suddenly cross.

  “You’re not much of a vagabond, either,” Bob observed. “Look at you with a knapsack. No self-respecting gypsy carries a freshly pressed shirt.”

  “When we were younger, perhaps sixteen,” Louis explained to Fanny, “we would go adventuring for a couple of days without anything but a toothbrush. Not even a comb. Considered it bad form to be encumbered.”

  “We couldn’t stand ourselves after a while,” Bob added, “so we’d have to go buy shirts and underwear and visit a barber rather often, just to get the hair combed. It got expensive.”

  “Our fathers were underwriting our adventures in those days,” Louis said.

  “Let’s be honest, they still are.” Bob swilled back a whisky.

  “So you were close as little boys,” Fanny said.

  “Like brothers,” Bob said.

  “But I want to know about you, Fanny Osbourne. How did you decide to come to Grez?”

  She flicked her wrist, and the vivacious face went slack. “There’s plenty of time for that. How long are you staying?”

  “I have to go back to Edinburgh in a few days.”

  “We can talk tomorrow,” she said. “I must put my boy to bed. He’s looking weary down there.” Louis watched her collect the limp child from his seat and depart the room.

  “She’s quite something, isn’t she?” Bob said when she was gone. “The locals call her la belle Americaine.”

  “Indeed. What is she doing in Grez?”

  “Ordered here by a doctor.”

  “Lungs?”

  “No, it’s not that. She came over to the continent to study painting, along with her daughter and sons. While they were in Paris, the youngest boy died of consumption—the kind Henley had.”

  “Ah,” Louis said. “What a pity.”

  “She broke down, and they sent her here to rest.”

  “Where is the husband?”

  “Back in California.”

  “And …?”

  “Rather raw, from what I can gather. Fanny doesn’t say much about him. I get the feeling it went cold a long time ago.”

  “Did you tell her we all dreaded her presence here?”

  “I did just recently. She found it quite funny.”

  So they are confidants, Louis thought, probably lovers. And once again, here am I, floating around in Bob’s wake.

  He poured himself a glass of whisky, drank it down, and then threw back a second. “A guid dram, laddie,” Louis growled playfully. But his heart stung. He waited for the burning to pass before pulling himself up to go talk to the others.

  CHAPTER 12

  Morning at the hotel was nothing like the night before. Louis remembered this fact from last summer, when he found the previous night’s comedians and revelers creeping around the dining table at ten, drinking coffee, surveying the tartines and croissants, assiduously avoiding intercourse with any early bird hanging about in the room.

  Since he’d been canoeing, Louis had become a dawn riser, and it took every bit of discipline he could command not to launch into cheery banter with his mates. It wasn’t a terrible sacrifice. He took his volume of Don Quixote and wandered into the woods, where he could read in the presence of pines.

  By eleven, when he returned, he saw that the guests of the inn had divided into tribes. The painters were strung along the banks of the Loing, eyeing the old stone bridge that spanned the river. Close to the small pier where the inn’s wide canoes were tied up among the bulrushes, Bob, Fanny, Belle, and others sat beneath white umbrellas, a few feet apart, dabbing at their canvases. If he strolled too close, he could find himself a motive of some painter’s work. “Motive” was the word the painter types used to describe that day’s subject.
A motive could be a boat or a bridge or the river, or him, if he weren’t careful. Louis walked up the long, narrow lawn toward the ragtag little group of writers and poets gathered on the inn’s terrace.

  What a merry mess the whole lot of them were, dressed in wooden sabots, blue fisherman shirts, waistcoats, scarves, berets, fezes, tam-o’-shanters, and wide-awake hats. They smoked cheroots, cigarettes, meerschaums. Men, mostly, they were—a mélange of English speakers from Britain and America, mixed with some French and Scandinavians, plus a Spanish fellow, a German and an Italian. Two colorful women, mistresses, lounged with the writers while their lovers painted. A woman journalist from America scribbled in her notebook. Many of the artists were fashionably cynical, yet he could see the truth: They were giddy as little children to be here, playing with one another.

  Louis suspected each of them, in his or her own way, was an exile—from bourgeois values, family crests, unhappy love affairs, childhoods too long spent in church pews. He wondered if they had started as social outcasts who found the artist’s life an acceptable way to be in the world; or if their passions for painting or sculpting or writing had shaped them into outsiders. He had never been quite sure how the chicken-versus-egg question played out in his own life.

  It seemed he had spent half his childhood in bed with a hacking cough. It was the stories read to him, and those that he eventually read himself, that had saved him from the worst of the loneliness. God, how pale and thin I was—a glasshouse seedling. Just different. His illnesses had cut him off from the society of other children. But the stories had made him different, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was. Those sick days when he had listened to the joyful sounds of football on the street below, he’d longed to be an ordinary kid. But at eleven or twelve, when he went out into the neighborhood dressed in pants too short and hair too long, his appearance set off taunts among other children—oh, he could hear them now, Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!—Louis knew he might as well be tattooed all over. The question of how he got that way was moot. It was around then that he began using his tongue as his sword, as small, fragile boys tend to do.

  He waded among the wooden tables where the writers leaned on their elbows, immersed in conversation. “There he is,” William Henley declared, pulling up a chair next to him. “Sit down, my good man, and tell us if Zola is taking us all to the dogs.”

  Louis drew on his cigarette and grinned at the Londoner, whose disheveled, bearded head was as large and friendly as an otterhound’s. “He don’t find much to like in humanity,” he said in a wry tone.

  “All that ugly realism not to your taste?” Henley asked, shifting his stump to get a better purchase on his seat.

  “Give me a rousing romance. Entertain me.”

  “Who’ve we got with us this mornin’?” Henley turned his friend’s book face-up to see the title. “Cervantes … ha! I should have known.”

  “I wanted to look at his style again. To try it on.”

  “Comment?” A French writer, who was recovering from the previous night’s excesses, raised his head from the tabletop where it had been resting next to a potted red geranium. “No man is a writer if he imitates!” he exclaimed, pulling himself upright.

  “I have taught myself the writing craft in just that way,” Louis said, “by aping the greats.”

  “To write is to give the soul,” the man objected. “Truth comes from this place.” He jabbed his chest with a forefinger. “No French writer says, ‘I ape this man. I ape that man …’”

  “Perhaps he does not admit it.” Louis grinned. “Come now, what does it matter? Let us hear what your souls are saying today.”

  Laughter, followed by silence. Then the sound of paper unfolding, as one after another of the writers took a turn reading aloud his verses and paragraphs to the others on the terrace.

  Henley leaned over and spoke softly in his ear. “Have you been wandering in the forest pitying yourself?”

  “No.” Louis smiled. “Well, maybe. Actually, I am thinking about starting a story.”

  “You are going to abandon your essays?”

  “It’s the law I want to abandon.” Louis sighed. “I’m simply in the mood to try something different, and fiction … “

  “Magazines buy essays,” Henley said.

  “An adventure story.…”

  “I don’t begrudge you your adventures, lad. Why don’t you write a little story about setting out in a canoe?”

  “Better still,” Louis said, his voice growing dark with conspiracy, “set out with me in one of the canoes after lunch.”

  Henley glanced dolefully at his abbreviated limb.

  “Forget the game leg,” Louis said, “you’ve got a mighty pair of arms on you, man.” He turned to the others in the group. “Gentlemen and ladies, I propose we writer types take on the painter types in a friendly boating contest this afternoon. What say you?”

  “Yes! Yes!” the cry went up.

  Later in the day, when the canoe wars had been waged and the paddlers had retired to their rooms to nap before dinner, Louis paced his bedroom. Something had come over him when Fanny Osbourne had emerged from the inn wearing her bathing costume. More than the magnificent form she made in her black cotton suit, it was the red espadrilles with laces tied around her ankles that nearly undid him. When he saw her, he’d wrapped his towel around his waist and tried to think about the Napoleonic code. Now the red shoes batted around in his brain like flies. He was a fool for footwear and he knew it. But could a pair of scarlet shoes render him so hopelessly smitten? Or was it the way Fanny’s somber focus on her paddle broke under his teasing? How she screamed helplessly when he tipped her over, then emerged from the water slick as a seal and, grabbing on to the bow of his boat, upended him with the power of a man. The scene as it replayed in his mind was almost perfect, except for the part where Bob lifted her wet and lovely body into his own canoe.

  Louis could not bear it any longer. He poked his head out into the hall and found it empty. He stepped over to Bob’s door, knocked, then entered when he heard his cousin’s steady snore. “Bob … Bob.” Louis shook his shoulders.

  “What is it?” The voice—a frog’s—croaked his annoyance.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “Here,” Louis said, and handed him a glass of water. “Wake up.”

  Bob sat up in bed, yawned. His hair was wet and flattened on one side. “Did somebody die?”

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “Who?”

  “Fanny Osbourne.”

  Bob yawned. “Hell, no.” He scratched at his head. “She’s fetching, all right, and … “

  “Because I am,” Louis said.

  “You’re daft, Lou.”

  “I knew you would find humor in it.”

  “Well, her name is Fanny—”

  “Of course you would have to say that.”

  “She is married, and she is a good twelve years older than you.”

  “Ten and a half. And she’s separated from her husband.”

  “So was Fanny Sitwell, but that didn’t get you into her pantalets.”

  “I know, I know.” Louis’s voice was low and urgent. “But this is different. I swear it, Bob, she’s the one.”

  “Christ’s sake, Lou. You’ve known her for how long, a day and a half? Must you always fall so hard? Can’t you just play?”

  “You two are together a lot, and I assumed you had something started.”

  “Naw.” Bob laughed. “I must own she has a mischievous wit, but the daughter”—he let go a soft, admiring whistle—”the daughter is a minx.”

  “So you don’t mind if I …”

  Bob shrugged. “Have a try at it.”

  Louis leaned over and grabbed his cousin’s arm. “Will you talk to Fanny, then? Not yet, of course. But when the time is right, will you make my case?”

  “I’ll try,” Bob said, “but the woman appe
ars to have a mind of her own.”

  Louis lit a cigarette and waited for his comeuppance.

  “Don’t you already have a perfectly fine mother?” Bob asked.

  Louis dropped his cigarette into the water glass, sprang onto his cousin, and put him in a headlock. Ever the superior specimen, Bob flopped him around like a fish.

  CHAPTER 13

  Belle Osbourne, wrapped in a robe, collapsed on the old stuffed chair in their bedroom. “There is nothing for me to wear tonight,” she said to her mother. “Nothing.”

  “Wear the blue check dress, why don’t you?”

  “It makes me look as if I’m ten.”

  Fanny was seated at the dressing table. “You’re moving too fast, Belle.” She turned around in her seat. “These young men here …”

  “I want to wear something pretty for once.”

  Fanny’s palm made a dipping arc. “A lady keeps her voice low and sweet.”

  Belle hissed with frustration.

  “When I met your father,” Fanny mused, “I was your age, and …”

  “And you were standing on stilts.” Belle sighed.

  “The point is …”

  “… you were just a child. I know all that, a hundred times over, Mother.”

  “In those days, they started things too early. It was too, too early.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Isobel!” Fanny directed a look at the girl that instantly set aright their positions. Belle had always been a pleasant child, eager to help. Lately, she had grown willful, and in a heartbeat, the air between them could thicken with tension.

  The animosity wasn’t constant. Today, for example, they had all gone canoeing on the river. A contest evolved, and Fanny’s boat was overturned. When Bob Stevenson gallantly pulled her out of the water, Belle laughed and called to her, “How pretty you look all wet, Mama!” Soon enough, Belle was dunked, too, but Fanny could not return a tender compliment to her daughter. The mother, as well as anyone else with eyes, saw the blooming girl’s anatomy prominently outlined beneath her black blouse. It had left Fanny feeling oddly sad.