Under the Wide and Starry Sky (25 page)

Louis sighed heavily. Fanny hated those sighs when she heard them. The poor girl must be melting with humiliation in there.

“The English language is old, Boodle. But a good writer owns every word he puts on paper because he makes it new and fresh, you see. It must be precise, though. Precision is everything. Why? Because words have power—to inspire or embarrass, or even to kill.”

There was a weighty pause, and Fanny waited for some gentler encouragement.

“Adelaide. You must promise me you will never,
ever
write anything this dreadful again.”

“Stop that, you brute!” Fanny shouted from the drawing room. She bolted from the seat and went to fetch the girl. “Are you all right, dear?”

“Yes,” Adelaide squeaked. She departed in tears.

“Look what you've done,” Fanny growled. “You were perfectly savage to her. And people think you are the Prince of Kindness. Ha!”

Louis waved off the rebuke. “Adelaide has backbone. She will return with something better tomorrow.”

Fanny shook her head. “They will be having quite a mimic session over in the Boodle parlor tonight.”

“Are you up to a lesson with Adelaide?”

Louis was sitting, stuporous, at the desk in his study. “Is she here?”

Fanny nodded in the direction of the drawing room.

“Send her in, then.”

He eyed the pile of correspondence he had intended to attack. It would have to wait. He had nearly as little enthusiasm for writing letters as he had for teaching writing to Adelaide Boodle. The wind had been out of his sails for a week, ever since the Forces—his doctor, Fanny, his lungs—pronounced the London teaching position mere fantasy to pursue.

“I came across something I want to read to you,” Louis said to Adelaide Boodle, who sat in a wing chair opposite him. He pulled from a bookcase behind him a volume of essays by Shelley. “‘A man, to be greatly good,' he read, “‘must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.'” Louis closed the book. “Now, I believe that is fine advice for a writer. Except, I would add, he ought to try to live inside the skin of other species, too. I suspect a pig has a point of view about a few things.”

“I think that way—about the cats,” Adelaide said.

“Oh, I don't doubt it. You are a naturally good girl, Boodle. It will be easy to put yourself in the boots of the hero. As a boy, I always imagined myself as the good fellow on a white horse who was coming to the rescue of the others. But if you want to be a writer, you are going to have to put yourself in the shoes of people who are not so good. Everybody has faults. Some people have a lot of them. Yet no one sees himself as a monster. You need to try
being
him—or
her
—to know how she feels and thinks.”

Louis went to one corner of his study, where wooden crates his mother had recently sent from Edinburgh were stacked up to his height. They contained books, except for one marked “Skelt” on the outside. He removed a couple of boxes off the top to get to that one, then used his folding knife to pry it open. He laughed softly when he looked at the contents. On top of some smaller boxes inside was the collapsed framework for the toy theater he had played with as a child. “Have you seen one of these?”

“No.” The girl moved over to the corner where Louis sat cross-legged on the floor, assembling the simple wooden stick framework that supported painted background scenery, props, and the little hand-colored figures of a particular drama.

“I got my first drama set when I was six years old,” he said. “Now, what you see here are pieces of a number of different sets I owned as a child. “ He lifted out a painted scene. “This is a backdrop for a melodrama called ‘Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica.' Some of the characters in that little play have survived, but not all.”

He began sorting through a box that held small hand-colored figures from different dramas. “Here's Robin Hood. Here's Aladdin. Here's a maiden who works at an inn. You can see it's a mishmash. I think that is all right for us. I loved the little plays they provided, but I often departed from those outlines, and that's just what I want you to do. Start with a backdrop. There are a couple of others in the box.”

The girl pulled out a castle scene, a prison vault, and an island/ocean scene with a warship among the waves.

“Good,” he said. “Now look through these characters and see if you can fit together a likely setting for, say, four of them. See these little props? There's an ax, a bag of gold coins. A paper that's a will, from the looks of it.” He rummaged about. “Here's a treasure chest. The way the plays always worked was that there was some contest to get at a treasure. Might be a pretty girl two fellows are after. Choose your—”

“I know what to do,” Adelaide said.

“Have them talk to each other. Out loud. Even yell.”

The girl got down on her belly in front of the wood structure. She slid the castle scene into the slot for the backdrop, then started poking through the colorful paper characters.

Louis departed the room so the child wouldn't be embarrassed to try out a few lines. Winded from the box lifting, he lay down on his daybed in the drawing room to rest. Memories of his boyhood Saturdays flooded his head.

The day had always begun with the stated intent of “having a look at the ships.” He went out to a corner near his house with his father or mother and others—Bob came, too, when he was living with them—and stood in the chill, whipping Edinburgh wind to admire from a distance the visiting ships in the Firth of Forth. The joy of those long-ago Saturday mornings was what came next: strolling to the window of a stationer's shop on Leith Walk that sold Skelt's Juvenile Drama toy theater sets. In front of that window, penniless, Louis suffered bouts of anguished longing. The scenes in the window changed regularly. There might be a forest with a halted carriage. Beside it would be a battle raging between a rowdy band of robbers and bearded fellows in dress coats, brandishing pistols. He studied the names displayed near the characters: “The Miller,” “The Huntsman,” “Long Tom Coffin.” A person could buy a paper figure, unpainted, for a penny. There were colored ones available for twopence, having been painted by the wife and grown daughter of the shop's owner. But that would have stolen the pleasure –when he was able to buy some figures—of dipping his own brush, choosing his own colors, then cutting out the little people and pasting them to cardboard. And then the acting out of the play began.
What a bargain those childish dramas were for my parents!
The theater sets bought hours of solitude for the adults who lived at 17 Heriot Row, and incalcuble happiness for the boy who was housebound there.

“She's having a grand time.” Fanny's voice. She laid a blanket over his chest.

Louis focused his eyes upon his wife. “Who am I as a writer but what Mr. Skelt made of me? He taught me how to tell stories.”

“Stand back!” came a holler from the other room.

“Shall I send her home?”

“No, God no. Leave her alone. Let the child play.”

1885

Years later, when they looked back on their time in Bournemouth, Louis would scratch his head and wonder at the fruit of his efforts. “I was sick to death half the time, yet I never produced so many
words
in my life.” Fanny would remember him sitting in bed, churning out
Kidnapped,
trying to write fast enough to capture the dialogue of his wild Scottish characters. “Hoot! Hoot!” he would shout from the bedroom, transmuting the story's wretched old uncle's disgust into a whoop of joy.

Later, she would understand that he was, in bursts, doing the writing that would solidify his reputation. Afterward she would recognize something else that they hadn't felt then: the subtle shiftings beneath their feet that shook their certainties about who they were. While she thought they were happily expanding into house and garden, Louis felt his life slowly shrinking.

Throughout those three years, there were the usual fluctuations in Louis's health, the strangle of bills, the pressure of deadlines, squabbles that rose out of nowhere. Not that they didn't savor the day-to-day pleasures. They knew how to squeeze every drop of joy from linnets trilling outside, or visits by friends, or the heroics of Bogue. When the dog caught rabbits that ate Fanny's lettuces, Louis would pour him a cup of beer. And when Bogue got into a set-to with another dog, a frequent occurrence, Fanny could see that the master, cursed by physical frailty, beamed with pride at the outsize confidence of his terrier.

During a bout of wellness in their second year at Skerryvore, Louis announced one day after opening the mail, “Cousins coming!”

“Bob and Katharine?”

“Yes. Henley's tagging along as well. And don't arch that eyebrow at me,” he said when he glanced at Fanny. “He knows his fate if he so much as sneezes.”

When the party arrived full of gay spirits late one afternoon, it seemed the din and stir of London rushed in the front door with them. Katharine always looked chic, despite her economic situation. Today she wore pointed shoes with flowers embroidered on the toes. Bob brought champagne and cheeses one could buy only in the city. They sat down, popped corks, and bathed Louis and Fanny in talk. Valentine lit candles around Skerryvore's drawing room, and it took on the feeling of a city salon.

Henley recited from memory a positive review that their London production of
Deacon Brodie
had garnered, then went into a lengthy analysis of why it had failed with audiences. After a while, Katharine turned the talk toward another subject. “Did you hear?” she said. “Thomas Hardy has built a country house in Dorcester and moved there with his dreadful little wife.”

“Dorchester is, what, thirty-five kilometers from here?” Henley asked. “You ought to go over and meet him. George Meredith could set it up. He knows him. I loved
The Mayor of Casterbridge.
”

“I didn't,” Bob said. “Makes me feel gloomy.”

“Is that all it takes?” Louis jumped in. “I'll tell you what makes me gloomy these days. The state of the British Empire. We're headed for another war in Burma …”

Over dinner they celebrated the publication of Louis's
Child's Garden of Verses
in March and his new collection of short stories in April—
The Dynamiter,
based on the tales Fanny had invented for him at Hyères.

“Were you pleased with the reviews?” Katharine asked.

“
Well enough,” Louis said.

Fanny felt a flush of anger. “I would have been more pleased had just one newspaper mentioned my name in a review.”

“Your name is on the cover of the book next to mine, Fan,” Louis said. “That's where it matters.”

“Katharine, you're writing more stories, I'm told,” Fanny said, changing the subject. She had helped Bob's sister in the past with a story. Katharine was a clever, cultivated woman but a weak writer, Fanny thought.

“Yes, William is nurturing my poor efforts along.”

“I'm scheming for Katharine to become famous.” Henley chortled.

“It does seem to be one of the ways a woman can earn money these days,” Fanny mused.

“I've just begun a new story,” Katharine said, sitting up on the edge of her chair, wide-

eyed and nervous as a squirrel. “It's about a puzzling little chance encounter. A young man on a train meets a young woman, an attractive woman who has something mysterious about her, something captivating but very different from the girls he knows. She speaks as if she is from a foreign culture, and he quickly falls in love with her. It will turn out that the reason she seems so unusual is because—”

“She's a water nymph, a nixie!” Fanny interjected.

Katharine frowned. “No. No, I don't think so. I think he falls in love with her for her charming way of saying things, and then … he learns that she has escaped from an lunatic asylum.”

Now Fanny frowned.

“William here believes he can get the story into print for me when I finish it.” Katharine flashed a fond look at Henley, who attended to her like a devoted pup. It occurred to Fanny that Henley might be a little in love with Katharine.

After everyone else had gone to bed that night, Fanny poured glasses of wine for Louis and herself as they lingered in the kitchen, talking quietly.

“Do you remember the story Katharine sent me, asking to see if I could get it published in America?” Fanny whispered. “I had to rewrite the whole thing. Even
she
knew how bad it was, I think.”

Louis shrugged. “She seems intent on making her way by writing, it appears.”

“Why did she divorce her husband?”

“Terrible ass. Unfaithful, a liar. She must have known it before she married him; everyone else did. Thankfully, she got out of the marriage, but she hasn't much money.”

“Your uncle Alan was mad, you told me once. Maybe that's where she got the lunatic concept for her new story.”

“He had a breakdown when the children were small—never managed to fully come back from it. I was too young to notice.” Louis gnawed on a fingernail. “Since Uncle Alan's death, my father has tried to look out for them, in his fashion. He, Alan, and Uncle David were partners in the family firm. Now David has retired, and his sons are the only offspring who have continued on in the business. The money end of it has been awkward. They reached an arrangement where my father will get a fairly significant share of the profits while he is alive. When he dies, my cousins—David's sons—will have the business exclusively. So my father has been giving money to Bob and Katharine, though not enough to live on, to be sure. It hasn't been the easiest situation for any of them.”

“How does Katharine live?”

“She gets by somehow.” Louis shook his head. “People seem to think
anybody
can publish what they write. It's a
craft,
for God's sake.”

After Louis went upstairs, Fanny stood alone in the kitchen, anger rising inside her. His parting remark was clearly intended for her as well as Katharine. She wanted to shout at him,
But I'm a better writer than she is, I know I am.
It burned her up to see Henley fawning over Katharine, making her part of their tight little coterie. No one would admit it, but Fanny was outside the circle. What was she to them? A nurse. A housewife.

Fanny pushed the cork into the wine bottle and put it in the cabinet. Maybe, in reality, that's all she was. Some days it felt that way; there was so much hard labor in taking care of Louis and the household. She had been trying to write a story of her own for months, but every time she got a head of steam going, some duty waylaid her. She had gladly signed on to this life when she'd married him, but if Louis were well, she suspected there still would be little encouragement from him for her writing ambitions.

In her free moments at Skerryvore, she had scratched her creative itch by decorating the house and making a garden, thinking that having a house of her own would spell contentment at last. And it did, to a degree. But that kind of work ultimately didn't satisfy her deeper creative impulses, and it didn't fetch any glory in Louis's circle. Lately she had begun to wonder if the work she did fetched much respect from Louis.

When her mind went in this direction, she felt as if she might explode with frustration. One minute she was longing desperately for time to realize her own gifts, and the next minute she was chiding herself for egoism.
Damn vanity. I am my own worst enemy.

Surely it was their situation that was causing this awful frustration. Any woman who had ever taken care of a sickly husband over a long period of time no doubt felt the same emotions. Louis's own frustration at being a patient was understandable enough. Yet his frequent surliness at being nursed hurt her and fed the nugget of rage in her chest. Why, he didn't even seem to notice she was suffering. There were times when she wanted to scream, “Do you have any idea what I give up every day for you?”

As it turned out, a new friend was to enter their lives who made Fanny feel a part of a far finer connection than she ever could have had with Louis's old cronies. Henry James, who had accompanied his ailing sister for a ten-week stay in Bournemouth, appeared at their front door one summer day. Valentine mistook him for a tradesman—inexplicably, given the fact that he was well dressed—and sent him around back. The incident mortified Fanny, but James enjoyed a good laugh and came by the house nearly every evening after that.

He and Louis had become acquainted when James published an essay on the art of fiction in a literary magazine. James insisted a novel should convey a sense of reality so convincingly vivid that one couldn't help but say “Yes!” when reading it. He mentioned two books he had just read, a novel about a cosseted French girl's upbringing and eventual broken heart when she failed to marry; and
Treasure Island,
full of buried doubloons and hairbreadth escapes. The psychological portrayal in the French novel caused James to say “No!” repeatedly, while he called Louis's adventure story a delightful success, though he added that he could not gauge whether it competed with real life: “I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for buried treasure.”

A couple of months later, in an essay for the same literary magazine, Louis delivered a playful thwack to James.
If he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child,
he wrote.
There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit in the mountains; but has fought and suffered shipwreck and prison.

Soon enough they were in correspondence, each perfectly gleeful to find another writer who pondered as deeply as he the art of fiction writing. Fanny thought nobody else came close to those two minds in exploring the subject. Now that the actual person of Henry James was in Bournemouth, he had his own chair by the fire at Skerryvore, and the two men spent hours talking about their work. Fanny reveled in his calls, often sitting in on their conversations.

At first she'd been intimidated by James's regal bearing, the balding intellectual head, the serious eyes, and an expression on his full lips that she took to be condescending. But he quickly showed himself to be a kind man and still an American, despite his many years in Europe. Perhaps it was for Fanny's amusement that he slid into slang quite easily, saying “Well, hang me” when he couldn't think of a word, or calling faces “mugs,” or claiming he'd been “bamboozled.” Soon he and Fanny were sharing their perceptions about being outsiders, though Henry was not regarded as such among the European social and literary sets. They discovered commonalities—they'd both been living in Paris in 1876, and Henry knew Montmartre as well as she.

Fanny took pleasure in pampering Henry James. He loved American foods; corn on the cob dripping with butter was his favorite. The fact that it came straight out of her garden struck him as a miracle. Veal loaf with mashed potatoes brought the man close to tears. “A working fellow needs proper belly timber,” Fanny assured him when he accepted second servings.

He often arrived with a gift for her—a jar of chestnut puree or a box of pretty stationery—and once he came with a beautiful Venetian mirror to decorate the dining room wall. She loved how he interrupted a high conceptual thread of talk to gossip about a society woman at whose country house he had recently dined. Henry was different from Louis's other friends in many ways. For one thing, he understood a woman's mind so much better, as was evident in everything he wrote. But there was another difference: He'd not had a friendship with Louis before his marriage to Fanny.

“He doesn't long for the ‘old' you,” she told Louis one evening after James had left. “It's such a relief.”

“I think you're sweet on him,” Louis teased. “Ever since you wrote him a note and he called it clever.”

Well, maybe she had swooned. How extraordinary it was for a girl who had attended the Third Ward public school in a bumptious upstart town like Indianapolis to be discussing ideas—in front of her own hearth—with the worldly author known for making hay out of American expatriates in Europe. Henry James's sensibilities were broad enough to allow that a woman like her might offer up wisdom of a different shade than what he heard in the company of barons and princesses. Fanny felt enlarged by his attentiveness. Was he listening so carefully because he would eventually turn her into one of his “American abroad” characters? She had read all of his books, and she had lived long enough with a novelist to know how friends' speech and mannerisms found their way into Louis's books.

Once, after she'd regaled Henry with a story about her days in Nevada mine country, he'd said, “I haven't heard the word
shucks
for a good while.”

“Are you taking notes for an upcoming novel?” Fanny rejoined. “
The Hoosiers
, perhaps?”