Under the Wide and Starry Sky (20 page)

Surely it must be strange, Louis reflected, to go from having Sam Osbourne in his life after a long absence to having Louis Stevenson as his stepfather. How strange to sleep in a makeshift bunk above his mother and this man every night. Truth was, it had been strange for Louis. The boy's presence in the same sleeping room had put an end to his passionate interludes with Fanny.

“What do you suppose he thinks about this new setup?” Louis asked, gesturing around the humble shack where light peeped through the boards.

“I used to know what he thought on every subject,” Fanny said. She took a candle she'd brought and plugged it into a hole in the table's top. “But not anymore.”

“Perhaps the boy hardly thinks about us at all. Lord knows, I was that way. When I was a stripling like him, I regarded my parents as ancillaries at best.”

“Were you happy?”

“Supremely. I remember we used to go over east to a fishing village at the end of summer for a long holiday. My cousins would be there. The boys tended to run in a pack, and it seemed that town was created just for us. The stretch of beach was full of hiding places, and there were ruins of an ancient fortress at one spot. We were free, you see, to be hanging about the fishing boats, angling off the dock, or clambering over garden walls to knock on windows.

“There's one thing we did that I remember vividly. When the evenings began to get dark earlier, in September, and we knew our idyll would end soon, we would go out from our little cottages and meet on the beach. We all wore a tin bull's-eye lantern on our belt. Our innovation was to go out with a topcoat over the lantern so it was hidden, not a ray of light showing. Why we didn't immolate ourselves, I'll never know—you could smell the tin blistering. We'd sally out into the pitch black and, once in a while, flash our lamps. When we bumped into each other, we'd whisper conspiratorially, ‘Have you got your lantern?' And then we'd go as a group and climb into some boat, bring out our lights, and, as I recall, curse up a storm and tell frightening stories. But the talk was not the thrill of it. To walk in the dark and know you had that secret lantern at your belt … “ Louis put his hand on his chest. “Ah, there was the magic of it for a boy.”

“You know, Sammy's not been in one place long enough to make any good friends,” Fanny mused. “I don't think he's gotten his fair share of happy-go-lucky times.”

Louis began by taking the boy to explore the two mine shafts. With the sun hitting the upper crevice—a great crack between the red boulders—they could look down fairly far into the bowels of Mount Saint Helena. When they put their ears to the crevice, they heard water drops plip-plopping in the dark interior. Not far from the cabins was a blacksmith's forge to contemplate, plus a great iron chute down the hillside. Next to some railway tracks lay an overturned cart that once carried ore out of the tunnel to a stamping mill below, where tons of rocks were hammered into dust in the search for silver. Louis and the boy spent hours imagining adventurers who had come here to get rich. They pictured men playing poker and drinking whiskey around dozens of campfires flickering on the side of the mountain. They imagined miners returning home on the stagecoach, either penniless or with pockets stuffed with sacks of gold.

Late at night by the fire, after Fanny had gone to sleep, Louis told Sammy the tales he had heard in Calistoga, of the Mendocino City dentist who removed teeth with pliers in the morning and robbed stagecoaches in the afternoon; and of Black Bart, a stage bandit who looked like a minister and behaved like a perfect gentleman as he robbed ladies of their jewelry. Louis told every ghost story and every bogeyman legend in his repertoire, sang every sea shanty he knew, and when those were exhausted, he issued Sammy a lantern and went out with him to see what moved about in the darkness.

He recalled aloud a book he'd read in San Francisco about Christmas in the West Indies; in particular, the words “Dead Man's Chest” stuck in his mind. He couldn't remember the meaning of the phrase, but he quickly thought of the verse, which he sang out into the black night. “Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest—yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”

The boy laughed. “Tell me a pirate story.”

Louis drank down his cup of wine. “Well, let me think on it, Sammy. You would have to begin with the main pirate. Let's say you name him”—he cast his eyes around for some inspiration—”Silver. John Silver.”

“Does he have a saber?”

“Oh, yes, or maybe a cutlass,” Louis said. He thought of Henley, whom he'd always felt would make a fine pirate in a theatrical, given his wild red beard and barrel chest and general huffing bravado. “Silver is a crafty, shifting sort of fellow. People remember him because he has a peg leg. The other pirates often hear the tapping of the leg on the planks of the ship before they see him.”

“What's the ship named?”

Louis made a grand gesture with his arm. “The
Hispaniola
!”

“Are there girls in this story?”

“I have no idea.”

“No Aunt Pollys. No girls.”

“Very well.”

Across from him, Sammy nodded with enthusiasm. He sat twirling his hair around his forefinger, mouth agape, wide eyes glinting in the light of the campfire. “Tell me more,” he whispered.

Margaret Stevenson's crystal glasses glinted up and down the dining table. Candlelight threw a yellow glow on the faces of twenty Stevenson and Balfour relatives as they offered one toast after another to the newlyweds. Midway down the long table, Fanny sat with Louis on one side and one of Margaret's brothers, Uncle George Balfour, on the other.

“I want Louis to come out hunting with me this year,” Uncle George said. He petted a graying beard that hung like a bib on his chest.

“It will depend on the weather, I'm afraid,” Fanny said. “If it's damp, I won't let him go. His health is too precarious. But if
I'm
here, I shall be happy to accompany you.”

“My goodness, Thomas,” the uncle said, chortling, “she's a besom, all right.”

“Is that anything like a bison?” Fanny asked archly.

The two men fell into gales. “No, no, my dear,” said the man, whose veined cheeks turned round and red as crabapples when he laughed. “I married a besom myself, and wasnae day I regretted. “

“You mustn't take offense, Fanny,” Thomas Stevenson said quickly. “It's a compliment. Means an impertinent sort of girl. A woman who could run the world if she chose to.”

A minute later, Fanny whispered to Louis, “I had a hard time understanding the toasts. It sounds like everyone is speaking through wool socks.”

“They're being extra Scottish for your sake,” Louis said. He looked at her eyes. “It means they adore you.”

Fanny stared down at her place setting. “I'm starving,” she whispered. “Louis?”

“Yes?”

“What am I to do with that?” She pointed to a ladle-like object above her plate.

“Pudding spoon. Mother's puddin' spoons are as big as shovels. When dessert is served, you hold it in your right hand, then push the cake into it with the fork in your left.”

“Oh.”

“Eat out of the spoon. You're supposed to keep your elbows down during the operation. Can't be done.”

At the beginning of the party, she and Louis had stood in the large drawing room of the Stevenson house on Heriot Row, greeting relatives. They had all come to celebrate as they would for any newlyweds. Judging by the close examination she received, they also had come to have a good gander at the American bride. Clearly, word was out that Louis had married an older woman. A cousin's eyes would scan her face, settle on the crow's-feet, glance at the neck. Fanny regretted wearing a necklace that Louis' mother had pressed upon her. No doubt someone in the room was making note that the daughter-in-law was already raiding the family jewels. Fanny regretted the dress she'd chosen for the evening as well, a shamrock-green satin gown that made her look like a Nevada dance hall girl among these subdued people.

When she stepped away from the drawing room to use the WC, she inadvertently went into a small pantry and surprised two servants, who redirected her. As she turned and walked away she heard one say to the other, “He's merrit wi a black woman!”

Louis received the same curious scrutiny for a different reason. Many of the family's circle were under the impression that he was still near death.

“You look quite
well
,” more than one guest remarked upon greeting Louis.

“It must be the new teeth,” Louis responded when his cousin Bob said it.

Fanny took quiet pride in the happy remarks upon Louis's appearance. “You should have seen him a month ago,” she said to Bob.

“He's still frighteningly thin.” Bob sighed. “I think I could wrap my thumb and forefinger around his thigh.”

“You don't know how close he came … “ Fanny could not say the rest of the sentence. “But I'm convinced he's on the mend.”

It was comforting to see Bob Stevenson, who cared so deeply for Louis. Any attraction Fanny had felt for Bob in the beginning had long ago settled into a sisterly feeling. His confident demeanor had changed. He was a touch faded from the glowing young lion who had dazzled her at Grez.

“Are you surviving this onslaught?” he asked.

“I'm busy putting the faces with the stories you and Louis have told me.”

“Have you had a chance to talk with Katharine?” Bob asked. He and his sister, Katharine de Mattos, had arrived at the party together. She was a slender, highstrung woman with the same sharp-chiseled features as Bob's. Fanny knew she was divorced from a notorious philanderer and struggling to support her two children. On that information alone, she felt affinity for her.

“I have heard so much about you!” Katharine had gushed earlier in the evening when she came through the door. She kissed Fanny on both cheeks and chatted gaily for a few moments. “I am going to steal you away once you are done with your greeting duties. Don't be overwhelmed by all these relatives. If you can't remember their names, I shall help you. Your Sammy is adorable, by the way. Oh my,” she said, looking around at the crowd in the room. “So much family excitement at once! And Bob tells me you are going to have your first grandchild soon.”

How did this woman know that Belle and Joe Strong were expecting a child? Fanny and Louis had heard only a couple of weeks ago. Louis must have told Katharine, for of his cousins, he was closest to her and Bob.

Fanny smiled grimly. “Yes,” she said, “it's true.”

Thankfully, Margaret Stevenson showed no concern about the matter of age. It seemed the woman had been waiting for a daughter-in-law to come along for some time. If Fanny was not the dewy-eyed virgin they had all expected Louis to choose someday, Maggie, as she was called by her friends, showed no sign of disappointment. The pale lady of the house was awash in the glow of her son's marriage long after the dinner party ended. “You all need new clothes!” she declared, and soon enough, a seamstress and tailor were measuring Louis, Fanny, and Sammy.

“She dresses me up like a doll,” Fanny complained to Louis when they were alone in their bedroom after a session with his mother. “Do you think she's embarrassed by my clothes?” The delicate Maggie had darted around in her embroidered dressing gown, fetching bonnets and sparkling hair ornaments to put on Fanny's head and draping her in Kashmir shawls and jet necklaces, all the while pressing her to keep them. “When I complimented a vase in her room, she said,'It's yours! I shall send it to you the moment you get your own place.' I'm afraid to admire anything now.”

Louis embraced her. “I think the lady doth protest too much. And all along I thought you adored making furniture out of logs.”

Fanny grinned. “Your mother knows where my heart lies. She doesn't take me for a climber.”

Over needlework in the sitting room, Maggie's genteel reserve fell away one morning. She took hold of Fanny's hand and declared in a heartfelt rush, “I am so happy to have a partner now.” She didn't say “a partner in keeping my boy alive,” but Fanny knew perfectly well what she meant.

“It's not so easy taking care of a genius, is it?” Fanny asked her. “It's very much like angling for sly trout, I think. You have to know when to pay out the line and when to carefully pull it in.”

Maggie nodded knowingly. “He's a bright young man who is careless with his health. And he has pride, my boy. He does not take my advice gladly. But he listens to you, Fanny, I have seen it. I can't tell you how relieved I am.”

On a Sunday morning, while Louis was out walking and his parents and Sammy were at church, Fanny moved through the house in her robe. She was dying to fry up a couple of eggs, but that was an impossibility. All the meals in this house were delivered by dumbwaiter, sent up by a cook who worked and lived with another servant in the basement. She would have to wait to eat breakfast when everyone returned.

In the dining room, she ran her fingers along the smooth walnut surface of an old claw-footed desk, one of the many antiques with which Thomas Stevenson had filled the house. She turned over china plates to look at the maker's mark, held up crystal decanters to the light, felt the scalloped hollow of a silver tea caddy spoon and the bumpy surface of an antler-handled knife. The house was stuffed with exquisite things. Her own childhood home had not been humble by Middle West standards. Jacob Vandegrift had fared well enough as a lumber merchant and raised his brood in a perfectly respectable brick house surrounded by perfectly respectable walnut furniture. But respectable in Indianapolis was a world apart from refined in Edinburgh. It was the difference between twine and silk floss.

When she returned to the bedroom, she poked through a closet that spanned one wall of Louis's bedroom. Inside, she found an entire wardrobe of fine things he had never worn in her presence: morning coats, smoking jackets, dressing gowns, wool neck scarves soft as rabbit fur, cloaks, an array of embroidered caps. The closet smelled faintly of leather; looking down, she spied six pairs of boots and shoes arrayed on the floor along the back wall. Fanny fetched a chair so she could reach a high shelf. Her hand brought down a set of underclothes made of fine silk cord that was netted. The drawers and shirt, so soft and airy, had never been worn. She threw off her nightgown and pulled on the garments. Pure heaven, they felt. And the fit was perfect.
These I will take for myself
.

Now that Fanny was in the family, the war between father and son seemed to have sputtered out. Thomas Stevenson, it appeared, had been waiting for someone to listen to him.

“I was not born to wealth,” he told Fanny that evening in his study while attending to his whisky, sip by sip. “My father was a lighthouse man, and he had taken my brothers into the business. Well, and so I went. My father was experimenting with silvered reflector lamps, to magnify the beam, you see. It was the great quest in those days …”

When Thomas Stevenson spoke of reflector lamps, he might as well have been a preacher bent on saving souls. He was modest about his own role in getting the lamps to blink intermittently by revolving, but Louis let Fanny know it was an enormous achievement. “He's a true
inventor,
” Louis said, and she was moved by the pride in his voice. “He'd be famous if he'd gone after a patent for any of it. But he didn't. He wouldn't. It was a moral issue with him.”

“He told me he once wanted to be a writer,” she said to Louis before they retired in their room.

“From what I gather, he tried any number of things that failed to stick. Here's the story my mother gave me. My father was studying engineering at the university when one day his father found one of his made-up stories stuffed in his coat pocket. My grandfather was irate. He told him he had wasted seven pages of perfectly good paper with his nonsense and that he had better get a profession while his father was still alive to support him because he would be penniless otherwise.” Louis laughed at Fanny's sober expression. “Another one of those ‘sins of the father' stories, eh?”

“It makes me sad,” she said.

Since she was a little girl, Fanny had been able to pinpoint the one person in a room who needed to be won over. It was a challenge she made for herself when she encountered a shy or taciturn or difficult person, and rarely did she fail. Now she trained her eyes and ears on Louis's father as he gradually shared the story of his life. She observed the small details of Thomas Stevenson's person. He sat across from her in his study with his elbows on the chair arms, fingertips forming a steeple. A gas lamp illuminated his features from below, and when the steeple went to his lips, when he paused to consider his words before speaking, she thought he looked like a monk from the Middle Ages, contemplating Scripture by candlelight. He might have made a fine cleric if he had not been a “Lighthouse Stevenson.” Fanny witnessed the moral rectitude that had driven his son away; Louis's forgiving nature must have come from his mother. She also saw the similarities between father and son. Louis was just as fierce as Thomas in his own moral convictions. And like his son, Thomas was a rascal. Behind his beneficent smile lived a terrible tease. He called Fanny a variety of names: Cassandra was one. He chided her for the occasional presentiment that something was about to go wrong. “And what chaos is Miss Cassandra predictin' for us today?” he would say.

After dinner, if she did not immediately go to his study for a cordial, he would shout, “Where is the Vandegrifter?” He'd be waiting for her with two fists on his desk and some artifact or book that signaled the subject of their conversation that evening. “Aha! She's wearin' her cordial face,” he'd say when she arrived. He knew she liked a drink as much as he.

Fanny met his roguishness with measured impudence. “Master Tommy,” she said at one such session, “our home is absolutely lovely, but I am taken aback by one fact: Your bath facilities are terribly out of date. Shouldn't the premier engineer of Edinburgh have a proper bathtub? Shouldn't he have a loo on every floor? Why, in America, even people of ordinary means are adding them to their homes.”

Thomas appeared startled by her remark. The reference to his status as an engineer, the mention of Americans—one of the two kept him up late that night. The next morning he showed Fanny the bathroom he had drawn to be built out in a large room adjoining his bedroom. It was extravagant and featured an enormous tub with a wood rim where he could set his whisky glass if he chose, and a wood cover for the whole that could be lowered to keep the water warm as it filled. A toilet compartment would be built into the corner; cupboards would run up to the ceiling. Margaret would have a fine dressing table.

“It will be here when you next come,” Thomas promised Fanny. “And there will be a choice of three loos to meet your fancy.”

“You've disarmed the man,” Louis told her one afternoon as he sat down to write. “In one visit, you've accomplished what I couldn't in a lifetime.”

She took her place across from him at the table they shared as a desk, where Louis was working on his
Amateur Emigrant
and she was writing a short story. “Well, I am not his son.”