Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 17

At a table on the Chevillon’s long lawn, Fanny was working on a new story. Beyond her, the river mirrored perfectly the ten sunlit arches of the graceful old bridge. From where she sat, the re?ected curves created the illusion of a row of ellipses. She loved those arches for the way they framed the landscape beyond, and for the cool shade they provided when she canoed through them on a hot day a couple of weeks earlier. Just now the sun was hitting the inside of them, turning the old gray stone a rosy terra cotta. She had seen the bridge painted  from  every  angle,  and  she’d  painted  it  herself,  yet  its  moods  continued  to mesmerize her. Today she would put it into a story rather than on canvas. She’d begun a tale about a woman staying at an old hotel that was frequented a hundred years earlier by a group of artists. Somehow Fanny wanted the woman to encounter the ghost of one of the long-ago painters. The woman wouldn’t know he was a ghost, and she would fall in love with the reclusive artist who came into the parlor to talk with her only late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.

Fanny closed her eyes and tipped her face up to feel the late-September sun on her skin. Maybe she should put the bridge in a travel story about Grez. She’d have a much better chance of selling that.

“How happy you look out here.”

It was Louis Stevenson’s voice, and it startled her; she’d not heard the sound of shoes brushing through the grass. When she opened her eyes, his midsection came into view, in particular his hands. The ?ngers were so long and thin, hanging there like string beans next to his trouser pockets. Fanny nearly welcomed Louis with a smile, then remembered her hurtful conversation with Bob and that she was angry with both Stevensons.
“Bob has gone back to London,” she said curtly.

“Yes, I know.”

“Will Low is gone, too. They all left a week ago.” “I came to see you,” Louis said.

Fanny put down her pencil. She wished he would go away. When she looked up, there was that persistent, earnest face awaiting her reply.

“Is it your turn now, Louis?”

“What do you mean?”

“You and Bob seem to be under the impression that I am a movable feast, to be shifted around at your convenience. Isn’t that right?”

“Fanny. No. Did Bob …?”

“Bob did your bidding, Louis.” “What did he say?”

“Enough to get his message across.”

“I didn’t want to interfere if he had begun something with you.”

Fanny sighed. “Well, isn’t that loyal of you. Nothing had begun, but I’m sure Bob thought he was letting me down. Frankly, I’ve had many men in love with me and except for an unfaithful husband, I have never had occasion to feel rejected. Quite the contrary. So I found it amusing  to be let go of, so to speak, and handed over to someone else in  the bargain.”

Louis rubbed his forehead. “This is all my fault. I told Bob I was in love with you.” “How is that possible? You don’t know me.”

“I want to know everything you are willing to tell me, Fanny. Everything you love and hate, your whole life. Just talk to me, please. And I will talk to you. I want you to know me as something more than”—he sighed—”a blundering fool.”

Fanny  waved her  hand dismissively.  “You’re  a  good man,  I  can  tell that.  But  you’re mistaken  if  you  think  you  can  simply  walk  in  and  claim  me.  I  don’t  belong  to  Sam Osbourne and certainly not to Bob Stevenson.”

“I am here to see you because I have never felt so joyful in the presence of a woman.” Fanny regarded the warm eyes, devoted as a spaniel’s. Aside from the fact that he was
slender, Louis appeared perfectly fit, not the sickly specimen Bob spoke of.
“I’m sorry if I’ve troubled you.” His fists went into the pockets. “Forgive me.” Fanny  rose  from  her  chair.  Louis  grasped  her  hand  and  held  it.  They  stood  still  a
moment, their eyes downcast.

“I don’t know what you want from me, Louis. You’re a young man, and I am a married woman. I can only be your friend.”

“That would make me incredibly happy,” he said.

Back in her room, Fanny was surprised to ?nd her daughter packing. “What are you doing? We have another two weeks here, Belle.”

“That’s what I want to talk about. The landlady said the ?at would be empty by October first. I thought I would go and get the place set up before you and Sammy come in.”
“Nonsense. You can’t be alone in Paris.”

“I’m so bored here, Mother. Everyone has left.” “Louis Stevenson just came back.”

Belle shrugged.

“I thought you found him entertaining. You said when he was here before that you would rather listen to him than read a book.”

“He’s nice-looking for an ugly man,” she said.  “But I’m ready to go back, Mama. The school session has already begun. It seems my whole life, I have started my classes late. Everyone will know each other.”

“Where is Frank O’Meara going to be October first?” “Mother!”

“Well … “

“He won’t be in Paris yet,” said Belle.  “He went back to Dublin. And Mrs. Wright has already moved her family into the ?at next to us. She said I could stay with them if I came back early.”

Fanny knew then that she would let Belle return on her own to the city. Margaret Wright was the kind of woman who didn’t miss a thing; she could be trusted to act as a substitute mother in a pinch. “I suppose you can get the coach tomorrow to Bourron.”
Belle threw her arms around her mother. Over her daughter’s shoulder, Fanny’s eyes fell on the open satchel, where one of her best shawls was poking up in a corner.
“No,” Fanny said.

“Oh, all right.” Belle pulled out the shawl and returned it to her mother’s closet. “I’m desperate for a nap. Will you go look for your brother? I haven’t talked to him all
day. He might be hungry.”

When the door shut, Fanny fell into bed, exhausted. Belle wasn’t near ?nished. She had to be watched for nuances, listened to in the spaces between sentences. This happened with girls,  they  developed  secret  lives  and  behaved  mysteriously  and  worried  you to  death. Fanny didn’t know if she had the strength at the moment to oppose it. Sammy was an altogether di?erent matter. He was no trouble, never had been. That was the thing about good children. If you got busy, you could forget to watch. Hervey had been sweet and easy,

too.

The next afternoon, while Sammy ?shed from the bank of the Loing, Fanny met Louis in the dining room at four, as they had agreed the night before. Ernestine was bustling in and out preparing for dinner. In the kitchen, Fanny could see chickens beginning to roast on a spit  in  the  ?replace  above  a  pile  of  crackling  twigs.  Madame  Chevillon’s  ancient grandmother  sat  silently  beside  the  ?re,  occasionally  taking  a  bellows  from  a  hook  to squeeze at the embers.

“Ask Ernestine to give us jobs,” Fanny said, pulling two chairs up beside the woodstove. Louis spoke in French to the young woman, who seemed surprised by the o?er from the American lady. “Tell her my hands like to be busy.” The young woman returned in a few minutes carrying a basket of apples and a small tray with two glasses of vermouth.
“You skin those so expertly,” Louis said when Fanny set to work on the apples. She glanced at him. “Tell me something about yourself that people don’t know.” Louis seemed taken aback by the question but answered it quickly. “I was a pious child,”
he said.

“Weren’t we all expected to be pious?”

“No, you don’t understand. I was morbidly pious. When I was ?ve or six, I couldn’t sleep for the sorrow I felt from the su?ering of Jesus. Oh, and I was terri?ed, too. I feared I would die during the night and slip into hell for some o?ense. So I’d ?ght o? sleep by counting up my sins and praying for forgiveness. When I think of it now, I pity that sad little chap.”

Fanny whistled. “So do I.”

“I never should have told you that.” Louis put his face in his hands. “You must think I am thoroughly damaged.”

“I think you are one of the cheerfulest men I’ve ever met, actually.” Louis sat up and smiled broadly. “A philosophical choice,” he said. “Tell me about your
own family.”

“Let’s see,” Fanny said thoughtfully, sipping the vermouth. “I was raised by parents who believed a child was born with a nature that was either good or bad, and nothing they did was going to alter it very much. Oh, they inoculated me with a proper sprinkling in the Whyte River. Henry Ward Beecher did the honors, in fact. Our house was right next door to

his church.” She tossed a long curling peel into a bowl set on the ?oor between them. “My mother was sweet  as pie,  and she  convinced my  father that  all six of  us children  had sterling characters. So, we were free as birds—there wasn’t a  shred of discipline in the house.”

“I never would have attended school if I were in your family.”

“My schooling was”—she weighed her words, she did not want him to think her stupid —”spotty.”

“Mine as well,” he said. “One year my parents hired a French tutor, and all we did was play cards. It’s not a bad way to learn French.”

Fanny laughed. “I never learned French, but I started to read in English when I was four. My father would sit me on a stool and have me read aloud for the neighbors.”
She remembered just then one of those occasions. The local newspaper editor, a friend of the family, had questioned her after she read a passage from a book called Familiar Science. “If the world is round, why don’t we fall o??” he’d asked her. “Gravitational attraction,” she’d piped up, much to the glee of her father.

“The adults were appalled,” she recalled to Louis. “They thought it highly unnatural.” “You were precocious.”

“Only in some areas. I went through high school, but all I cared about was reading. That and being outside in nature.” Fanny looked at his face, seeking a trace of judgment. “It may sound like I come from bumpkins, but I don’t. My ancestors arrived in Pennsylvania before William Penn. Truth be told, I spent a lot of time running free with my cousin Tom, who was as rough-and-tumble as they come. We would ford streams up to our necks, climb trees, swing by ropes. I was a wild thing—always had to jump off the highest rock into the river.” “A tomboy.”

She nodded.  “I was a shy girl child and dark-skinned, which was not the standard of beauty in Indianapolis, let me tell you. I knew early on I was di?erent, and I had got the idea that I wasn’t pretty. So I gave up on the whole business of trying to be pleasing in a girlish way. It seemed to me that boys had a lot more fun. It was a relief. I didn’t look at myself from the outside. I just lived inside my skin, looking out.”

“You had the kind of boyhood I craved,” Louis said.

Fanny took a deep breath. Thinking of it now, she could almost smell the odor of sticky pinesap from the forest near her house. She pictured the same woods in winter, when hoar

frost feathered the pine needles. She wanted to tell Louis how she’d felt the world in those days, how the conversations of birds made sense to her, the clouds spelled out messages, the bright ripples of lake water moved through her the way sound did. Would he think her a silly fool?

“There were summer nights …” Fanny remembered aloud, pressing ?ngertips to her lips. “Do you have lightning bugs in Scotland?”

“No. But I’ve seen ‘em in the south of England.” “Then I don’t have to explain the magic of—” “Do.”

“Well, I was the neighborhood storyteller. I probably got my taste for ghost stories from my granny. She was an unpleasant, domineering woman, and unfortunately, I had to share a bed with her. At night she told hair-raising tales about bodies rising from graves and the horrors of hell. I learned to tell stories from a  gifted terri?er, you might say. Children would start gathering in our backyard while we were still eating supper. I must have been about eleven. Once I ?nished helping with dishes, I’d go outside, and there would be a pack of  sweaty  youngsters,  waiting.  I’d  hold  o?  until  it  was  dark,  when  you  could  see  the lightning bugs. The little ones sat close together because they knew things were going to get scary. That’s about all I knew, too, because you see, I never made up the stories ahead of  time.  I  just  trusted  they  would  come  to  me,  and  they  did.  There  were  the  usual appearances by giants and talking animals in the stories, but what was going to happen was as mysterious to me as to anybody else. Right in the middle of things, a little one would slide down the wooden cellar door and scare the wits out of the fella sitting below. Or an older boy might reach out and grab somebody’s wrist, and there’d be pandemonium.” Fanny laughed. “My, it was fun. The feeling of it, you know? Because I was waiting like everybody else for the story to reveal itself. And then to get going, and to feel like I was up on a draft of air like a bird, just sailing along with the ?ow of it. Not to mention the feeling of having the whole crowd in my palm … it was a giddy feeling for a girl of eleven.” She breathed in deeply. “I reckon I’ve been trying to get that feeling back ever since.”
“The feeling that you just touched something divine?”

“Oh, I’m talking about fairy tales and ghost stories, after all. But yes, I knew there was a wonderfully mysterious sensation to be felt when you create something. I knew even then it was  an  artist’s  life  I  wanted.  “  Fanny  stared  into  the  ?re.  “There  were  probably  four

summers like that. And then my life turned upside down. Suddenly, I wasn’t ugly anymore. Boys were coming around to pay calls.” She shrugged. “I got distracted—got married and had a child.” She put up her hands. “What more is there to say?”

“You were fearless.”

“Foolish, too.”

“Fearless enough to live in a mining camp in Nevada,” Louis said.

“Well, foolish enough to marry a man who went o? to ?nd gold. I didn’t know he was going to do that when I married him. “

“So you followed him.”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“And then there were snakes and angry Indians and raw winds whistling through the boards of the shack, and I learned to live with it all. I could have stood anything, I think, except his philandering.”

“Even there?”

“There were prostitutes in the camp. Whether it was going on there or not, I’m not sure. But when he gave up on the claim in Austin, when we moved to Virginia City, there was no doubt about it.”

Louis studied her. “You stayed with him. You had more children.”

“Always after a reconciliation.” Fanny sighed. “He swore he had changed …” She shook her head. “On my forgiving days, I think it’s a sickness with Sam. There are times, though, when I wish he were dead.”

She bit her upper lip, regretting those last words. No one should say such a hideous thing about anyone. Louis certainly wouldn’t. She remembered him walking around taking up a collection a few weeks ago for a couple of stranded minstrels. He was above such remarks.
Something Bob had said about Louis popped into her mind: “He makes everyone around him a little better, a little brighter.”

Watching Louis peel an apple, Fanny realized she was glad he had come back.