Under the Wide and Starry Sky (6 page)

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 appears 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.

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.

“You can't go back, is what I am saying to you.” Fanny's voice softened. “You sashay out of your childhood, and the world makes sure you can't have it again. Think about what you're doing.”

“It's too late for that, Mama,” Belle murmured. She walked into the adjoining room and shut the door.

Fanny brushed her hair absently. Too much had happened. How could a shred of childhood be left in Belle after she'd witnessed her brother's long death? Even before that nightmare, Belle's naïveté had peeled away in the acid atmosphere of the Oakland household.

When the girl stomped back in, she was wearing her mother's melon-colored dress. It was clear she had borrowed a corset, too, for her elevated breasts threatened to unleash themselves from the neckline.

“All right, Belle,” Fanny said wearily.

“Then I can wear it?”

“Come here, sit down.” The mother stood up and allowed her daughter to sit on the stool in front of the mirror.

“Do you see how your eyes appear rather prominent when your hair is pulled back tight?”

“It crinkles up if I don't pull it back after I wash it.”

“First of all, never say ‘warsh'. That is the worst sort of twang.”

Belle looked puzzled. “Isn't that how you say it?”

“Not anymore.” Fanny yanked strands loose from the band that held her daughter's hair up in a knot. Belle flinched but kept quiet. With small nail scissors, the mother cut pieces of hair around the girl's hairline. “Short curls around your face will soften your features.”

Fanny ran the brush through her daughter's hair, pulled back the black mass, and shook it. Small snippets of wavy hair fell around the girl's brow and cheeks. Belle beamed at her reflection.

“When I was little,” Fanny said, “my grandmother was ashamed of me because my skin was dark, at least compared to hers. Every morning she sewed a sunbonnet into my braided hair and made me wear long nankeen gloves up to my shoulders. Imagine going out every day like that! Everyone knew
why
I had to wear the gloves, and no one else had a hat sewn on her head. I was a shy child at that point, and I felt terribly embarrassed. When I came in from playing and my face had turned the color of a pecan anyway, she scrubbed my skin raw. It wasn't enough that everyone wanted blond looks; my grandmother believed people with dark skin were naturally wicked.”

Another memory flooded Fanny's mind; she was surprised that it still wounded her. “What are you?” a neighborhood girl had once asked her.

She'd known even at the age of seven that the girl was inquiring for one of her parents, since Fanny had overheard the child's father use the phrase “some kind of half-breed” when she was visiting once.

“Who wants to know?” Fanny asked in response.

“My pa.”

“Dutch and Swedish,” Fanny had replied.

The girl had seemed unsatisfied, as if she'd heard that answer before. “But what are you
really
?”

“My mother never stopped telling me I was beautiful,” Fanny told Belle. “I didn't believe her for a long time. Now I prefer my dark skin to that unnatural ‘flesh' color in my paint box.” She replaced the scissors in a small leather case. “You got my coloring, honey, just as I got it from my own mother. Don't bother with mauve, no matter what the French tell you is fashionable. It doesn't set off your skin. Always wear a spark of color, and find some touch that is all your own. Maybe it's a particular way you wear your hat. Something.” Fanny reached over her daughter's shoulder and yanked up the bodice of the melon dress. “A collarbone is far more alluring than exposed breasts. A man wants to imagine. Did you see that local girl who came around yesterday and was talking to the writers? She was all dressed up, poor thing. And do you know what the men did when she left? They laughed. One of them said, ‘She's wearing her hunting clothes.'”

Belle stood back from the mirror to study her new hairstyle from different angles. “Mama, do you think that Irish painter Frank O'Meara likes me?”

“Did you even hear what I just said, Belle?”

“Yes, I did.”

Fanny sighed. “I don't know what Frank O'Meara likes. Except maybe that thorny shilalagh he carries around.”

“Oh, his singing voice … “

“It won't put bread on the table, darlin'.”

“He's rich, too.”

“Well, that helps.”

“Helps? Aren't you the one who always says it's as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man? I thought you would approve.”

Bob Stevenson had told Fanny that O'Meara had wealthy Irish Catholic parents. She tried to weigh the parts of that equation. He might be rich as Croesus, but the parents would never permit the boy to marry a Protestant girl. There was no harm in allowing Belle her point for now, though. “He does have a nice voice,” Fanny said.

Belle turned and gave her mother a conspiratorial look. “Louis Stevenson was sparkin' on you last night.”

Fanny waved away the remark. “I don't care a particle about that.”

A grin spread over Belle's face. “Frank says he's from a wealthy family and is in line to inherit a lot of money, but he won't live that long because of his dissipation. Frank thinks Bob and Louis are both mad.”

“Do you know what I think? I think this inn is full of gossips. Go down to dinner. I'll be there in a few minutes.”

At the closet, Fanny reached for one of her black dresses but pulled out the white instead.
It has been three months.
She had allowed herself a blue shawl or white blouse since she'd arrived, but not without the black skirt or gray jacket. Fanny sighed bitterly. Why did any of those rules matter? No mourning clothes could begin to express the weight of that loss. Her baby was gone. No mourning clothes could lighten that weight. There would never be another day in her life when her mind and heart were not bound up in black weeds. She put on the white dress.

Fanny heard loud conversation coming from the dining room when she descended the stairs. As she entered the room, Louis Stevenson stood up and called out, “Guid een'! “

“Good evening,” she returned.

“Ah, this one is going to take a bit of work,” Louis said to his cousin. He pulled out a chair between his and Bob's. “Tonight, Fanny Osbourne, with your permission, I suggest we undertake a wee lesson. In fact, we shall all undertake a lesson in the Scots tongue,” he said to the rest of the table.

“Hopeless,” said the German artist. “You can't teach an American or a Frenchman to pronounce Scots.”

“Nonsense,” said Will Low. “Give us a try.”

Louis's eyes went bright. “All right! Let's start with the simplest phrase. ‘Guid een'.' It starts here.” He pointed to his neck. “Guid,” he growled, fingering the tendons beneath his jaw. “One gags from the nether folds of the throat.”

“One could strain oneself,” Fanny replied.

“Ah, now, give it a try.”

“Ged eeenin',” she said, her lips stretching.

“She's on to it!” Bob said.

“Got eenen',” someone ventured.

“Try it,” Fanny said to Margaret Wright, who had arrived the day before, but her friend demurred, uncharacteristically shy in the midst of these madcap jokers.

Sitting beside Margaret at the end of the table was Joseph Howard, a famously homely Louisianan whom the others had found strange from the start. Fanny suspected the Europeans had never heard a true Southern accent, for when he spoke, they tended to gawk in wonder at the large squareheaded man. He was not the least bit strange to Fanny. He might have been one of her eccentric uncles, proud of his backwater roots. While the others painted the bridge, he sat before his easel, creating a blazing scene from the Battle of New Orleans. In the afternoons, when everyone climbed into canoes, Howard would squeeze into a washtub he had persuaded Madame Chevillon to part with and merrily paddle in their midst.

“Gooood evenin'',” the contrarian called out now in his Southern drawl.

Fanny began to smile along with everyone else. She felt as if she had fallen into some hollow that might have been in the remote hills of either Scotland or perhaps Tennessee. She couldn't remember the last time she had felt so silly. As the pot-au-feu was passed, Bob served her from the tureen while Louis refilled her wineglass. Oh, it felt fine.

Was it the accents that gave the mad Stevensons their charm? They clearly loved speaking in broad Scots, switching from their Edinburgh English into a tongue that was nearly incomprehensible to her ear. And they reveled in playing off of each other, finishing each other's sentences. The two of them did not look to be kin. Louis had dark blond hair and wide-set brown eyes that went hazel in the light, full lips, a narrow chest, and a wispy patch of hair beneath his mouth. His face was a theater of emotions, his features shifting in a twinkling from gay to tragic as his supple mind ranged across subjects that moved him. He seemed to have no protective veil; his feelings lay open as a child's.

Bob was three years older than his cousin and the more sophisticated of the two. He had dark, handsome features and a tall, athletic body; he was, quite simply, one of the finest-looking men Fanny had ever seen. He was adept at everything—art, music, philosophy. Everyone regarded him as the best talker in any room. How different his tone was now, compared to his clipped formality when she first met him.

She found it touching when she remembered how Bob, dead set against her at first, had gently helped to revive her. Oh, the others had been attentive and kind. But it was Bob's company she wanted most. Lately, she'd allowed herself to imagine what was unthinkable before. What would it be like to live in London or Paris with a man like Bob Stevenson—a refined, educated, charming European? Over here, divorce was not the moral failure it was in America. What would it be like to never go back, to raise young Sam over here, to send him to fine schools?

She would want a modern man who wouldn't expect an old family dowry. What she had to offer was herself—no innocent, to be sure, but wise and still pretty at thirty-six. Her sisters, and even Sam told her she was at the height of her beauty. It wasn't too late for her to find another husband, and it wasn't a selfish impulse to be on the lookout for one. The best thing she could do for her children's future would be to remarry, and well.

Fanny's reverie fell away as the hilarity in the room grew louder.

“Dae ye speak Scots?” Louis was shouting. He was leaning forward in his chair, his lank hair falling over one eye.

Her tablemates brayed the phrase back to him.

“Juist a wee,” he replied.

“Joost a way!” they sang back.

“Awa', an' bile yer heids!” he said.

The diners stared at one another, confused.

“What did he say?” Belle asked.

“Go boil your heads,” Henley said matter-of-factly.

More laughter followed, but within the noise, Fanny heard little choking sounds coming from her left. She turned to see Louis holding his chest and gasping for breath.

She had seen real choking once when her father had saved a man by lifting him up and squeezing him; a chunk of meat had popped like a cork from the man's mouth and shot across the room. She stood up, prepared to pound or squeeze Louis, just as he slid from his chair onto the floor. Tears were running from his eyes.

“What is it?” Fanny shouted to Bob above the din.

“
Madderam
, madam,” he said. “Bend back his hand.”

She didn't know the word, but bending his hand wouldn't help. She dropped to her knees, wrapped her arms around his chest, and squeezed. When she glanced at Louis's scarlet face, she realized he was laughing hysterically, like a man possessed.

“Bend back his hand!” Bob shouted again.

Fanny felt disoriented. She looked, confused, from one cousin to the other.

“Never mind,” Bob said. “I'll do it.” He took Louis's hand and bent the slender fingers back so hard, Fanny thought they would snap off. When Louis's laughter coughed and sputtered to a stop, he climbed back on his chair and began chatting as if nothing had happened.