Under the Wide and Starry Sky (8 page)

Downstairs, Thomas Stevenson already occupied the head seat at the table.

“Louis.” His father spoke his name matter-of-factly, as if he were identifying an object. When Louis and his mother were settled, his father lifted his knife and set to work on the lamb chop before him.

“Hello, Father,” Louis said pointedly, when it became clear that there would be no cordiality. “And how was
your
trip?”

When Thomas Stevenson spoke, he had the look of a weary academic finishing a long lecture. Thomas kept his head bent and tilted slightly to one side while he glared up from heavy eyelids. His eyebrows winged at an angle, forcing deep horizontal lines to etch his forehead. One always had the sense that he was using every shred of patience he possessed to make his point to a thickheaded audience.

“You've had your holiday. It's time you take on clients.” He pushed mashed potatoes around his plate. “Monday morning, get yourself over to the Parliament House and—”

Louis took a deep breath. “I've decided to try to make a go with the writing. I began a book of essays when I was in France, and I thought we might talk about—”

The head of the father tipped farther forward, as if he were confused. “Let me understand this. You abandoned engineering because you were bored. But you agreed to study the law if I paid for your legal studies. I did so, believing that your writing would be secondary to the law. Now you are saying you won't practice?”

“It was a compromise. It was never a true calling to me.”

“It was an agreement,” he thundered. “Have you forgotten that?”

“I told you when I was fourteen that I wanted to write, and you wouldn't hear of it. You looked at me and saw another lighthouse builder. And when engineering school didn't work out, you looked at me and saw a lawyer. I entered the bar for your sake. The truth is, I have no desire to walk the boards of the Parliament House for the rest of my days.” Louis tried to modulate his tone. “I have so many ideas to express. What I want is to become a good writer—a great writer, if it may be. A writer of influence. I don't feel that way about being an advocate.” Louis waited for the usual rejoinder: How do you intend to feed yourself?

“Your personal commitments are as fickle as your faith?”

Straight to the old wounds.
Louis measured his words. “We have been through this all before, Father. It isn't the ideals of Christianity with which I disagree, it's the intolerance of a religion that won't permit questions. How can you live with that? If you believe, then believe. But don't tell me I can't use the reason I was born with.
You
are the one who taught me about science, to explore and question.”

His father stood up slowly. “I have made all my life to suit you,” he said, his voice an agonized rumble. “I have worked for you and gone out of my way for you, and the end of it is that I find you in opposition to the Lord Jesus Christ. I would ten times sooner see you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and bringing ruin on other houses as you have brought already upon this.”

“So that is what I will do as a writer? Shake the faith of other young men?” Louis's eyes filled with tears. “Have you ever once done something for the joy of it? Or is it all just degradation and damnation with you?”

Thomas Stevenson looked stricken. It was an unfair remark, and Louis knew it. His father had nursed him through the nights when he was sickest. He had laughed and played with him as if he were a child himself. But this matter of religion had wedged them apart.
You are a good man,
Louis thought,
but you are cowed by some strange Calvinist devil.

Louis observed his father's hunched shoulders, his face red with distress. He had long worn a neat beard like a stirrup around his ruddy face, without a mustache. In the lamplight, the bitterness in his heart showed on his naked, downturned mouth.

“I thought to have had someone to help me when I was old,” he said.

His father left the dining room, the food on his plate gone cold. In the past, it was usually Louis who stormed off, running to his room or racing outside. Thomas Stevenson lumbered to his study and shut the door. Louis had heard it slam in the past after their exchanges. Now he sensed defeat in the dull click of the latch.

Maggie Stevenson eyed her son, her pretty features tortured. She had not spoken up for Louis; these days she rarely did. It did not surprise him. His parents had long enjoyed their own society, and even as the adored only child, he often felt left out. Her silence simply confirmed what he'd known for some time.
My mother is my father's wife. And the children of lovers are orphans.

“Excuse me,” Louis said. He stood up, fetched his jacket in the vestibule, and headed into the night.

Out on the street, Louis felt a chemical mix of rage and freedom in his chest. It was the same dangerous brew that had propelled him at seventeen into raw adventures. He remembered the first time he stormed out after his father shamed him. He'd been so full of outrage, he frightened himself. He had not known then where he would go—it was ten o'clock—but he wasn't going back in, that much he knew. That night Louis discovered confidence, or perhaps recklessness, within himself. He had walked for hours through the old section of Edinburgh, repeating his father's words in his head until the night world around him erased the dispute. In the neighborhood he knew so well by day, new faces appeared after nightfall. He went back often after that, sneaking past his parents' bedroom door, creeping home at three or four
A.M.,
until he felt the Old Town was his and he could stride through its dark landscape like a tiger surveying its territory.

Louis stormed along Princes Street now, kicking a light pole in his fury.
Sick of it! Sick of you!
The old man's insults crowded his brain. It was on Princes Street a few years back that his cousin Bob had come close to being pummeled by Thomas Stevenson. Louis's father had discovered an incendiary piece of paper while pawing through his son's room when he was away at school. It was the constitution of Louis and Bob's Liberty, Justice, and Reverence Society. Bob had drafted the LJR's irreverent, tongue-in-cheek manifesto that rejected everything their parents had taught them, but Thomas had made the leap that it was Bob who'd caused Louis to reject his faith.

“You have tampered with a man's soul, the worst sin!” Thomas had shouted at his nephew upon encountering him on Princes Street. “How could you do that after all I have done for you?” Stunned by the transformation of his amiable uncle Tom, Bob had held up his hands to fend off any blows that might be coming at him.

“I understand what you are contending with,” Bob later told Louis when relating the events, and it had given Louis comfort to know that someone else could see the vein of repressed violence that throbbed in his father. Not once had he seen it physically expressed, but it was there, deep and ready to burst.

“Velvet.” Louis heard the familiar name from a voice just behind him and turned to see who had spoken it.

“Mary! How are you?”

A young woman with a wide gap between her front teeth smiled and extended a gloved hand. “I'm weel,” she said. “Juist oot gettin dinner makkins.”

“You look wonderful, Mary.”

“Thank ye.” She averted her eyes for a moment. “Ah'm gaun tae America. In juist twa weeks. Gaun tae to live with relatives in Michigan. Hae ye been there?”

“No, never.”

She shifted from foot to foot. “It was lovely getting tae ken ye, Velvet.”

“I'm glad I know you, too, Mary. And glad for you that you're leaving this place. I wish you a wonderful life.”

“You hae a fine yin, tae,” she said. She squeezed his hand, then walked on ahead of him, her great hips swaying beneath her skirts.

It was on one of his earliest angry walks, when he was drunk on beer, that he'd met Mary. She was a country girl whose soft hands, blue eyes, and honest Scots tongue seduced him instantly. They had stepped around graves in the Calton cemetery, looking for an unoccupied patch of grass. Louis could see vividly, even now, the moon-washed shapes of entwined couples lying on the ground between graves, like toppled stone statues.

Mary was the first girl he had ever lain with. After a few trysts at the graveyard, she'd stopped meeting him, and he'd moved on to spend his allowance at the brothels in Leith. One in particular, run by a woman named Flora who managed the business for an absent owner, became his favorite. The place was full of a changing cast of businessmen, petty thieves, sailors. Flora took one look at Louis and named him “Velvet Coat.” He realized in time that everyone got a new name in that house. It made sense; nobody wanted to use his real name. Flora sat Louis down at a table in the kitchen, where she got an earful of his playful, bright talk. “This seat at this table is yours. Any time. Any day,” she told him. He took to bringing a notebook and penning bad verses while the prostitutes—young and old—fussed over him between their assignations. In time, when he came through the door, the women would gush, “Velvet Coat!” Or simply, “Velvet!” He took comfort with a number of them.

In the past, Louis's feet would have walked him directly to Flora's on a night such as this. But he was a different man inside his skin now. It struck him that in the rages of his youth, he might have gotten himself into real trouble. Ironically, it was probably the moral compass Thomas Stevenson installed in his son that had kept him out of jail.

His anger at his father had begun to look like the kind of sorrow the Greeks wrote about—something that couldn't be fixed. Why had he chosen to tell the truth about his waning belief, especially since he'd lied to his father about so many other things? Louis once used the word “atheist” to describe himself when, in fact, “agnostic” was more accurate. But “atheist” was more hurtful; it was the juice of a lemon in his father's wounds.

If he were free of his financial indebtedness, he might be able to strike a new relationship with the great lighthouse engineer, man to man. But here he was, twenty-six, not yet a writer of any worth, and still relying on his father for money. It was nothing to be proud of.

The thought of Fanny Osbourne came to him again. He kept hearing her voice, a running brook under ice. She was like no woman he had ever known—a real American girl, unimpressed by class and all the things he hated. She was a brooding listener, and when she spoke, she flickered new light on his understanding of a thing. And good Lord, she looked like a Mayan goddess. He wanted to stroke the dark, smooth loveliness of her shoulder, gone brown and shiny from the sun; he wanted to know the soul behind those eyes. Some men would run away from a woman who had lived life. He wanted to dive into that deep pool.

Louis's mind ran to another woman he had loved not so long ago, Fanny Sitwell—Claire. That was the private name he had given the patrician dark-haired woman who had taken him under her wing a couple of years before. She was staying at the time in a cottage in Suffolk, grieving over the loss of one of her two sons, and trying to separate from her idiotic vicar-of-something husband, though divorce was out of the question.

Louis had gone to Suffolk during a holiday to escape the pressures of home and law school. Fanny Sitwell was eleven years older than he and a nuanced woman, yet she'd been instantly kind and accepting of him, never calling attention to the gulf of years that separated them. “You're a born writer,” she told him with an enthusiasm for his work he'd never known. “I want you to meet my friend Sidney Colvin. He can help you. He has publishing connections.”

For hours she had listened as Louis poured out his misery, detailing the battlefield engagements at his father's house. Always, Claire had taken his side. He would lay his head in her lap while she listened with the tenderest sympathy. It was what he had needed three years ago. He was a little embarrassed now to think of the noisy letters he'd written to her in fits of passion and depression from 17 Heriot Row.

“Things sometimes get exaggerated at twenty-three that will seem less significant later on,” she said to him a few months later when he saw her in London. Claire was thirty-four at the time and, in her gracious way, adept at letting down an admirer who was behaving like an immature fool. She was a true friend, but he had mistaken her solicitude for romantic love. He might still be pining for her if Sidney Colvin had not come to him and asked rather directly that he step aside. Sidney himself was smitten by Fanny Sitwell and let Louis know he was prepared to wait as long as it took for her wretched husband to die.

What was this attraction to older women? Louis couldn't explain it, nor did he think it really mattered. He was ready and willing to love. Claire had not wanted to be the object of his passion. Why would Fanny Osbourne want him? He had made a barking fool of himself by declaring his feelings for her.

He remembered something that had happened on the canoe trip with Simpson. Somewhere along the Scheldt, they had come upon a couple lying on the hillside, wrapped in each other's arms. Louis's eyes had grown accustomed to reeds on the shoreline and cows hanging their heads over the bank. He was unprepared for the sight of the lovers. Paddling along, he'd been playing with some rather satisfying words in his head that he meant to make a note of:
It was a fine, green, fat landscape …
when he realized he was looking at a man's naked white flank resting atop a pink dress with a pink-cheeked woman in it. The two were gazing at each other, talking, when they realized they had been found in their secret spot by two
voyageurs. Voyeurs
, really, for Louis could not take his eyes off them. He was captivated by the dreamlike scene. His heart and groin in unison set off a racket of thumping longing.

Louis had arrived at Grez just after that. Had Fanny Osbourne noticed the galloping desire that seemed to have made an idiot of him? There was no shame in longing. But what had he shown to Fanny Osbourne except the longing? He wanted to return to her, to let her see he was capable of higher feelings, that he had serious bones in his body.

He wanted to be worthy of her love.