Under the Wide and Starry Sky (24 page)

Exhausted, she hired a local woman named Valentine Roch to help nurse Louis. After one week of caring for him, the plain French countrywoman, wasp-waisted in her white apron, said directly, “I am not leaving you.” She melded into their lives as easily as a nice cousin might. Fanny taught her how to cook the food Louis could eat, and showed her how to lower him into bed on all fours when his back pained him. It was a godsend to have another strong person who could manage the job, and Louis liked her. He teased Valentine shamelessly and called her “Joe.” She was a simple young woman who intuitively understood the conditions that arose when a person boomeranged between life and death.

Louis was heroic, and for his companions to be anything less was unthinkable. “Might you pin some paper to a board and put it in front of me?” he requested of Fanny one day. “I've come up with a couple of verses I'd like to set down.” She provided him with the board and paper. He sat in the darkened room and defied doctor's orders by using his left hand to scribble out the poems.

“There is something else I want you to do for me.”

“What is it?”

“Go out on a walk and think up some story ideas for me, Fan, even if you just walk back and forth in front of the house. We need the money, and Prince Otto has stopped talking.”

“So I am to be your Scheherazade? I think you just want to be rid of me.”

He smiled. “There might be a touch of that in it.”

She found relief in the walks. She had been reading in the newspaper about some young Irish-American men who had returned to Ireland to participate in a bombing plot against the English. She tried to imagine what sort of people could allow themselves to be part of such a heinous scheme. Soon enough, a mysterious man in a sealskin coat was flitting about her head, followed by a wealthy girl using an alias, and a house exploding. At night she spun stories out of thin air the way she'd done as a child, and she glowed when Louis remarked, “My lady has quite the perfervid imagination, thinks I to meself.” She could barely contain her delight when he began concocting threads to connect the disparate tales.

“I'm fairly sure I can publish these,” he remarked at the end of her fourth night of tale spinning.

She jumped up and opened the best wine in the house. “To our first collaboration,” she toasted.

Out and about every day, Fanny learned from two encounters with English speakers that cholera was raging in Toulon, just three miles away. When she told Louis, they both let down their brave masks. Early in the morning, they could hear the sound of patients in the town below being wheeled to the pest house with the other contagious people. They knew then that cholera was closer than Toulon; it had obviously reached Hyères. In bed, Fanny huddled close to Louis's left side.

One night in late winter, he began to hemorrhage again. By now Fanny knew what to do. For some time she had carried a small vial of ergotin in pockets that she sewed into her dresses; she was never without it. The sight of Louis filling a bowl with nearly a pint of blood sucked the air right out of her lungs. She raced for water to mix with the ergotin granules in a minim glass, but her hands shook so wildly that Louis took the medicine away from her, he calmly poured himself the proper dosage, and drank it down.

He signaled to her to bring a pencil and paper. With his left hand, he scrawled out,
Don't be afraid. If this is death it is an easy one.

Fanny kept watch through the night. Outside, the trees rustled uneasily. She imagined the wind was blowing up the hillside from the old town, bringing with it thick clouds of germs—cholera, smallpox, typhus, who knew what—from the damp streets and pestilential piles of garbage below. She got up and went to the window. Even the olive trees had taken on a sinister aspect, as if their leaves were coated with a sickening dust.

Gypsies. Vagabonds. Nomads. Those were the words Fanny had used since their marriage to cast their wanderings in a romantic light. But the words didn't seem colorful or amusing or even accurate. The truth was, Louis's cruel illnesses whipped around their lives, pushed them toward places they didn't want to go, and pulled them out of places they loved. They had pursued the ideal climate from Silverado to Davos to Hyères, and she was utterly exhausted from it. Louis's sickness lived with them like an uninvited guest wherever they settled. Fanny couldn't be angry with him, but the tyranny of the illness made her feel murderous. She hated that it tethered Louis to a bed, decided he shouldn't have his own children, kept him from the simple joys other people took for granted. And then there was the fickleness, when it lifted for a while and let them
hope,
like fools, that they might live normally.

When they abandoned Hyères, they went to London, where Henley and Baxter claimed they'd located
the
specialist. George Balfour came down to be present at the consultation. As it turned out, the physician directed his remarks to Uncle George, rather than Louis or Fanny. Louis's lungs, he said, were clear of disease. “You can stop the ergotin now,” the doctor said before taking a quick exit. And Uncle George had agreed!

“I don't believe it for a minute,” Fanny fumed when they were alone. “You just lived through the worst hemorrhaging imaginable.” She promptly found another doctor who agreed with her. “Most definitely you should return to Davos for the winter,” he warned them.

“Mother says Uncle George believes you have exaggerated my condition,” Louis told her after reading his letters one afternoon. “And Henley is miffed because it was his doctor you went against.”

“I don't care what they say!” Fanny cried out. “No one could witness what you just went through in Hyeres and believe you have no lung disease.” She stormed around the bedroom, tossing clothing into piles. “Why do they all talk about climate and good air, and none of these people ever talks about
germs
? Maybe it's germs that cause tuberculosis; that's what some articles in the
Lancet
say … “

“You and the damned
Lancet,
” Louis moaned.

Fanny glared at Louis in the hotel bed. His hair, which he kept long to protect his neck from drafts, pressed damp against his skull. “Look at you. You shiver. You can't sleep. You cough constantly. The morphine they give you makes you nauseated … but ‘throw away the ergotin,' they say. Your lungs are just ducky. What am I to do when you start
bleeding
again?”

Louis looked at her sadly. “My poor little man. You're so brave.”

“Stop it! Stop the empty talk. I can't be a saint all the time, the way you are. Sometimes I'm just so … angry.” She threw up her hands. “What do we do now? Where do we go?”

“Let's go see Sammy,” Louis said, “as soon as I'm able. We're close. I think it would do us both some good.”

When Sam came to their hotel, she hardly recognized him. He was taller and thinner. Before her stood a handsome sixteen-year-old schoolboy wearing new gold-rimmed spectacles and speaking the King's English.

“Look what happens when a mother turns her head,” she said proudly. He had gone away a year earlier, an uncertain, preoccupied boy; now he was a gentleman wearing an overcoat.

During dinner, Sam talked of his tutor, who was putting him through rigorous instruction to test for Edinburgh University. If all went well, he would live with Louis' parents while studying for his degree. Fanny devoured every detail of her changing boy. The pale beginning of a mustache on his upper lip. The part down the middle of his light brown hair. The way he drank tea now—full of milk and with both hands on the cup. His sudden interest in Gladstone, Irish politics, Victor Hugo.

“Where will you go next?” Sam asked when he understood they wouldn't be returning to Hyeres.

His question hit Fanny like a blow to the sternum. It wasn't “Where will
we
go?” Her son had grown accustomed to being away from family. Or maybe he hadn't. Perhaps he desperately longed for a home, as she did. He'd been seven years old when she uprooted him from Oakland. In the intervening ten years, he had lived in a half-dozen places. When she recalled her own childhood, she saw the brick house surrounded by tiger lilies where she spent seventeen years. She traced in her mind the pattern of the wallpaper in her bedroom; she scattered feed for her mother's chickens beside a shed painted red. What place could Sam picture as home?

It dawned on her how little time she had left with him before he went off to university and then out into the world. It was possible he'd return to the States. His father had been trying to lure him to California to become the manager of a ranch he had bought there.

“What would you think of staying in Bournemouth?” she said to Louis that night.

“Has pine trees and health seekers,” Louis said. “Has a boy named Sam. Has bathing machines tended by plump ladies in beach costumes. Has a path called Invalid's Walk. What more do we require? I hate the idea of Davos as much as you do. The place is full of germs.”

They rented rooms in a boardinghouse. Louis wrote, while she used the kitchen to make meat pies and chocolate cakes for the boy's weekends with them. They had been in Bournemouth for five months when Thomas Stevenson and “Aunt Maggie,” as Sammy called Louis's mother, came for a visit.

At sixty-six, Thomas Stevenson was frail-looking and had grown a little muddled. “Small strokes, they think,” Margaret Stevenson told Fanny when they were alone.

One evening Mr. Stevenson stood up from his chair in the parlor and made his proposal.

“It would do Mrs. Stevenson and me a great favor if you found a way to be nearer to us in our”—he paused to find the word—“our dotage, I suppose you'd say.” He patted Louis's head, as if he were a small boy. “Isn't that the proper expression for the decrepit state in which you find me?

“If you stay in Bournemouth,” Thomas went on, “I shall buy a house for you.” He peered at them through narrowed eyes. When no immediate response came, he added, “And I will provide five hundred pounds to furnish it.” He turned his head to look squarely at Fanny. “Well, now, what do you say?”

1884

Fanny enclosed the portrait she'd just had made. It screamed respectability, and she knew Dora would notice that, but Fanny also knew her well enough to be certain she would show the picture to all their friends. Six years ago, when Louis was living in San Francisco waiting out Fanny's divorce, he had gone to over to meet Virgil and Dora Williams at their art school. When Virgil came to the door, he had taken Louis to be a tramp and nearly turned him away. They became good friends the moment the mistake was corrected, and it meant nothing to Louis then or now, but the sting of that encounter still burned for Fanny.

In the full-length photograph, Fanny wore a pearl choker above a white lace dress with a snug white belt around her recently recovered waist. In a previous portrait with Louis's family taken soon after their arrival in Scotland, she had looked unpleasantly thick around the middle. It had distressed her enough that she'd brushed black paint on the picture to reduce the appearance of her midriff. Happily, this photograph would require no doctoring. She knew it was vanity, but this image was how she wanted to be thought of by her old friends in San Francisco: composed, slender and beautiful at forty-five, and very much
arrived.

Fanny leaped out of bed every morning now that they were in the new house. Maybe it had been a bribe from Thomas Stevenson to get them to stay near Scotland, but surely Thomas had also seen how desperate she was becoming without a house of her own. And Skerryvore was her own. It was a place she could make better, and she set about doing that the moment they moved in. First came a new bed for them and one for Sam; then she went to work on the red dining room. She bought a Sheraton-style dining set, some decorative blue china pieces, two Piranesi prints, and spent fifty-five pounds on napery and silver utensils. When Louis came down one day from his study and saw the latest pile of stuff that had arrived from London, he drew on his cigarette and remarked, “Perhaps we can pawn it for food.”

It was in the blue drawing room that Fanny released a pent-up urge to decorate rather grandly. She bought wicker lounge chairs, enough seating for a proper salon, and yards and yards of yellow silk the color of pale mustard. She imagined a beautiful window seat where Louis could work, where Sam could read a book or guests could sit, drinking their aperitifs. The idea of hiring someone to do the kind of carpentry she could do herself seemed out of the question. Instead, she acquired several identical oak boxes, lined them along the study wall below the window bay, and topped the surface with cushions covered in the yellow fabric.

The results suited her. The house did not look as if it belonged to Margaret Stevenson. There was nothing precious about it.

When Louis saw the effect, he gasped. “It's so delicious I could eat it,” he said, and then, “Isn't this too fine for the likes of us?” He looked hard at his wife, who was wearing one of her good dresses. “Too fine for the likes of me, I should say. You're a chameleon, Fanny. I swear, you take on your setting.” He turned in a circle to regard the room. “I, on the other hand, feel a qualm coming on.”

It was only a moment later that he threw off his reservations. He retrieved from a box a plaster sculpture that his friend Auguste Rodin had sent to him. It depicted a naked man and woman kissing and made Fanny squeamish to have it set out. Louis laughed off her sudden prudishness, set the piece between a pair of smiling Buddhas, poured himself a whisky, and stood back to admire his cleverness.

Skerryvore. They had taken the name from the most challenging, the tallest and noblest of all the Stevenson lighthouses. Against daunting odds, Alan Stevenson, father to Bob and Katharine, had managed to build the Skerryvore light station on a treacherous strip of submerged reef off the west coast of Scotland. The lighthouse had surely saved many lives. It was a symbol of indomitable spirit to Louis and Fanny. Outside, on the porch, they placed a model of Skerryvore.

Louis took such pleasure in going out in the evening, when he was able, to light the lantern that fit inside the miniature lighthouse. He would come back inside then, and they would rest snug by the fire, savoring the new chapter they felt opening.

Word spread quickly in Bournemouth circles that an Author was living among them. Women bearing cakes came up the stone walk to pay calls, their faces expectant. Fanny managed to thank them as graciously as possible while letting them know they would not be invited in, for the Author, whom they'd really come to see, was in delicate health and not to be disturbed. Ever.

Only one person managed to get into the house, and that was early on, perhaps the third or fourth day after their arrival. They were unpacking boxes when the doorbell sounded. Fanny peeked out the window through the side of the temporary curtain she'd hung and spied a girl of about ten on the porch, standing beside a timid-looking woman whose face was streaked with tears.

“There's a woman crying on our porch,” Fanny remarked, wiping her hands on the old painting jacket she wore over her dress.

“We have to answer, then,” Louis said. He was sitting on a wooden box, swathed in a blanket over his jacket, and pawing through another box.

Fanny stepped over piles of packing straw to get to the door. When she flung it open, the woman let go a startled sob.

“We thought you weren't home,” the girl said. “We rang and rang.”

“I'm sorry,” Fanny apologized. “We didn't hear it. We were banging boxes around.”

“We're your neighbors,” the girl announced. “My name is Adelaide Boodle.” She made a businesslike curtsey. “And this is my mother.”

“Are you quite all right?” Fanny asked the shaken woman. She touched her arm gently. “Come in and sit down.”

The girl sprang into the parlor and settled herself on a packing case before her mother could restrain her.

“I told my daughter you would not want to be disturbed, but she's an aspiring writer and admires your husband's work. I'm afraid I succumbed to her enthusiasm. I am so embarrassed to be bothering you.”

“Come in!” Louis boomed. He led the mortified Mrs. Boodle to the only chair in the room. “Valentine!” he called out. “Valentine, dear! We need tea for our new neighbors.”

Much later, when Adelaide was a regular fixture at Skerryvore, Louis let slip the name he and Fanny had given to the threshold where Mrs. Boodle had dissolved: “The Pool of Tears.” In turn, Adelaide confessed that her family (far less inhibited in their own quarters) used nicknames for their new neighbors: “R.L.S.” and “His Sine Qua Non.” The girl revealed to Fanny how thrilling it was that first time to finally clap eyes on the Author.

“My mother is shy, but I am not,” Adelaide explained to Fanny on her second, solo visit to the house. “I want to be a writer, and a writer must be able to go out and meet the world as it is. I am hoping Mr. Stevenson would like to take on a pupil.”

Fanny suppressed a smile. Adelaide was a dark-eyed child with soft brown ringlets and an aquiline nose that suggested character. She was bright and chatty, confident and curious, a lover of books with a tender spot for any animal, much like Fanny had been at ten. Even if Louis wanted a pupil—which he didn't—he was too weak to take on such a project. Worse, he could be ruthless with his criticisms, as Fanny knew only too well.

“Have you written stories?” Fanny asked her.

“Yes, a lot of them.”

“I'm afraid Mr. Stevenson is not able to give time to tutoring. He must conserve his energy for his work. I'm a writer, too. I believe I could serve in his place. If you would like to come over next week and read to me while I do my mending, I will give you an honest assessment of your writing.”

So began one of their fondest attachments to Bournemouth friends, of whom there were only a handful. Louis's health didn't allow more; he was as sick as he had ever been, and for far longer periods. Many of his days were spent in bed, occasionally with one arm strapped to his chest so as not to set off a hemorrhage.

Sometimes Louis was so fragile after an episode that he dared not talk, so they had to communicate with hand signals. With his left hand, he wrote out on a scrap of paper the guidelines for the signals. A crooked finger asked for explanation. A pantomime should be followed by a statement of what Fanny or Valentine understood him to want. The third guideline hurt Fanny just to read it:
The case of the dumb patient is one of great inconvenience and suppressed wrath. When he has made you a sign you have failed to follow and he shrugs his shoulders, drop it forever.

Louis had always hated being fussed over when he was ill. Her attentions—a shawl over the shoulders, a fluffed pillow—had to be done stealthily so he wouldn't notice them.

In the close atmosphere of Skerryvore, sealed off from drafts and visitors, Adelaide Boodle blew in most days like beach air. In between the informal writing lessons, she made herself useful by watering plants and helping Fanny feed her pigeons and the stray cats that lived in the chine below. She knew everyone in the neighborhood, and if a rented room was needed for one of Louis's friends who came down from London, Adelaide knew where to find one. Her reward was free access to the Skerryvore library. With Sammy gone during the week, Fanny took pleasure in having a child in the house; she savored afternoons spent with the girl in the drawing room, the sun slanting across the Persian rug as Fanny read
Little Women
to her, just as she had read it to Belle at the age of ten. Later, she introduced Adelaide to stories she loved by other American writers—Charles Warren Stoddard and Bret Harte, whose Gold Rush prospectors amused the girl. The fact that Fanny had known both writers in her San Francisco days raised her profile considerably.

A couple of months into their lives at Skerryvore, Sidney Colvin and Bob Stevenson visited. Colvin had a new job title, “Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings,” and occupied an apartment in the British Museum as a perquisite of the job. “Why don't you offer a course for aspiring young writers at the museum?” Colvin proposed to Louis. It nearly broke Fanny's heart to witness her husband's excitement at the prospect of getting out of the house. “I want it!” he said. “I could do it. Absolutely.”

Fanny and Bob locked eyes in that moment.

“I didn't realize he was so terribly frail,” Bob whispered to her later. “Do you think he is up to …?”

“No,” Fanny said sadly. “The doctor would never allow it. But it can't hurt him to entertain the idea. Maybe he'll improve if he feels some hope.”

When Bob and Colvin were gone, Louis said to Fanny, “I will need to practice on someone. Sammy might tolerate it on his days at home, but …” His eyes brightened. “Get me Boodle!”

“It terrifies me a little to send you into the lion's den,” Fanny warned the girl when she told her of the proposal. “Mr. Stevenson is not the easiest critic. I know from personal experience. You see, he considers writing a sacred calling—”

“I can accept criticism,” the girl insisted.

“—and he hates bad writing. When you are learning, there is bound to be bad writing.”

“I am stronger than I look,” Adelaide said. “I want to take lessons with him.”

“All right, dear. I will be in the next room. If he gets surly, you just come to me.”

Fanny listened in on the first few lessons. She could hear Louis in the

adjoining room, instructing Adelaide to write short paragraphs in the various styles of a few classical writers. After three weeks of such exercises, Louis announced that the girl had managed the assignments satisfactorily.

“It comes naturally,” Adelaide explained. “We like to mimic people in our house.”

“You're ready to write something in your own style,” he told her. “Describe a place. No more than a page. We shall discuss it tomorrow.”

“My mother's garden,” the girl whispered to Fanny on her way out the door. “I know it front to back.”

The next day, while the lesson proceeded in the dining room, Fanny lay down on the window seat in the drawing room. The cat jumped up and spread himself over her belly while Fanny fought off the urge to sleep. She remembered a few lessons in writing she'd had with Louis when they were at Silverado and, later, in Scotland. They were so contentious that Fanny and Louis agreed to abandon the idea.

“This is absolutely
appalling.
” Fanny sat upright when she heard Louis's raised voice. “Let us begin with the adjective
green,
” he said. He uttered the word as if it were bile in his mouth. She knew, if he were able, he would be pacing back and forth in high dudgeon.

“You say ‘green lawn' in this paragraph,” he went on. “Everyone knows a lawn is green. Never use green to describe a lawn. In fact, never use the word! Get rid of all these adjectives. Better to use active verbs. Don't say, ‘Climbing red roses are everywhere,' as you do here. Make them
do
something. Say ‘the roses clamber up the trunk of the elm, and redden an arbor that creaks under their weight.' Do you get my meaning?”