Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 16

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 ?rst 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 con?dence, 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 ?ne 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 ?rst 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 di?erent 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 ?xed. 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  ?nancial  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 ?ickered 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 Su?olk, 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 Su?olk 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  battle?eld 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 signi?cant 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 ?ne, green, fat landscape  … when he realized he was looking at a man’s naked white ?ank 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 o? them. He was captivated by the dreamlike scene. His heart and groin in unison set o? 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.