Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 25

The next morning, Fanny waited on a bench in the vestibule of her building for the mail. Sam was out with the children and, with luck, would return after it had been delivered.
Since her husband’s arrival, she’d watched for the postman downstairs, lest Sam happen upon a letter addressed to Louis at the ?at. The suspicious old concierge seemed perturbed by her presence. Wearing two coats, with a ring of keys at her waist, the woman watched every  day  for  the  postman  in  a  chair  outside  her  loge,  apparently,  she  did  not  want company. She lifted her small head like a tortoise, turning her kohl-circled eyes toward Fanny. “Il y a un probleme?”

“Un petit probleme—en Amérique,” Fanny replied. That seemed to satisfy the woman. An American woman’s family problems back home held no interest for her.
Fanny  felt  drained  from  the  previous  evening.  She  had  not  told  Sam  she  wanted  a divorce. He would ?ght it hard, and so would her family. Her parents and sisters seemed to think a divorce was more scandalous than the way Sam had been treating her all these years. It will leave you defenseless, and mark you and the children, her mother had written. How could she say to her mother: I love another man, a kind and good man who will shelter us?

When she pondered what had been said the night before, she was not surprised to know Sam carried a gulf of sorrow over Hervey’s death. That was the thing about Sam—he was capable of deep emotion. He was a mass of contradictions, a jumble of tender and heartless impulses. For so long, the two of them had been entwined at some elemental level. She had come  to  think  they  were  as  connected  as  Siamese  twins  joined  at  the  gut.  Back  in California, she’d known  it would require miles—thousands of them—to break free from him. A great distance was needed not only to discourage him from coming after her; it was necessary  to  keep  her  from  going  back  to  him.  Even  now  she  was  vulnerable  to  Sam Osbourne, even after two years and Louis Stevenson in her life. She no longer had any illusions that her connection to Sam was love. It was something stronger, like tangled veins and shared blood and unholy patterns that couldn’t be escaped.

Thank God he will be going back to California in two more days.

Fanny remembered the night she and the children and their nanny had sighted Antwerp from the  steamer’s deck.  She’d looked at  that  foreign  city  and thought, I am free  to be

somebody new. Free from being Sam Osbourne’s wife, the disgraced woman who kept taking her husband back. The shame she had borne for so long seemed to ?oat away into the Belgian air. Standing on the ship in port, she’d felt young in her skin again.
Loving  Louis  was  utterly  di?erent  from  loving  Sam.  She  felt  clean  with  Louis.  His goodness brought out the goodness in her. With Sam, the opposite was true.
Last night, as she stood up from the ?oor and headed for her room, Sam had taken hold of her wrist.  “Don’t you see? Losing Hervey changed everything,” he said.  “I want back what we had. Yes, I’ve made mistakes; I admit it, and I’m sorry. But you’ve had me on trial for the past ten years. You made it impossible for me to stay in the house with you.” He let go of her. “I know you better than anybody in this world. I know your heart. I wouldn’t ask you to come back if I didn’t love you.”

“Bonjour!” The postman’s voice echoing  in  the cold little vestibule roused her from her thoughts. She watched as the concierge divided the mail into piles for the various occupants of  the  building.  Fanny  took  her  pile  and  hurried  up  the  stairs.  There  were  no  letters addressed to Louis, only a literary journal, Scribner’s, and a telegram from San Francisco for Sam.  Fanny  sat  on  her  bed  and  perused  the  magazine’s  table  of  contents. “Bird Architecture,” “Camping Out at Rudder Grange,” “Topics of the Times,” “Bohemian Days”— Fanny’s eyes stopped there—by Margaret Wright. Margaret! She felt a little thrill of pride. Her friend, her dear neighbor, and here she was in the pages of a premier magazine. Best of all, she had written an article on Grez! Fanny ?ipped to page 121 and found the most delightful  illustration  entitled “Catching  the  Sunset,”  in  which  comical-looking  artists dabbed at their canvases. On the next page was a cartoonish depiction of a  “Scotchman” reading a thick book. It had to be Bob, for the funny fellow in the illustration was wearing his trademark striped stockings. Fanny took a deep breath and settled in.
She smiled to read the beginning, where Margaret portrayed herself as Philistina, a cityloving Parisian who goes out to see what all the excitement is about in the Fontainebleau Forest, speci?cally in Grez, a bohemian gathering place, where human nature showed neither at its worst nor at its best, but simply developed by a broad freedom of action and expression into some  of  its  most  extraordinarily  picturesque,  angular,  positive,  original,  beautiful,  and unbeautiful individualities ever seen upon the face of the earth.

That’s exactly it, Fanny re?ected. There was freedom enough in Grez to show who you

truly were. Fanny remembered Margaret always hanging back a little, madly jotting notes. It occurred to her now that her friend had been working the whole time she was there. And here was the result, as wry as the woman herself. Fanny read down past Philistina’s arrival by donkey cart in the village, then her description of the H?tel Chevillon, where artists gathered around the dining table and let fly with unreserved conversation.
Fanny tried to match each outlandish character in the story to her friends.

Fairy in size, like a hummingbird in movement and in purpose of life, her Majesty seems, to the not too clear-sighted observer, in spite of her thirty-eight years, scarcely more than a girl. Her Majesty is not a sumptuous queen, as her raiment proves …

Fanny  ?inched  as  it  dawned  on  her  that she  was  being  portrayed as  “the  Queen of Bohemia” and the most ridiculous person at the inn.

… though her Moorish blood, streaming for centuries through conquered Spain and invaded Netherlands, to reach by strange channels far-o? California, and leave its swarthy stain upon her complexion and its ?ery gleam in her eyes, gives the impression she has a barbaric taste for splendor, for leopard and tiger hues, and glories of ?amingo and birdof-paradise in all her appertainings.

Her Majesty is smoking a cigarette between the soup and the roast. Her Majesty is generally smoking a cigarette when she is not sleeping, and when dining usually has her little feet upon the rungs of her neighbour’s chair, while she tells strange stories of wild life among the Nevada mines, where feverish brandy and champagne were cheaper than cool water and sweet milk  … There is subtle suggestion of castanets and guitars in the queen’s voice, even somewhat monotonous as it is—a faint shadow of the cachuca and the cracovina in the free motions of her arms above her head.

Fanny felt dizzy but kept reading. The words—vicious, damning—wouldn’t stop.

In the highly civilized old world she may seem a lost princess, a stray daughter of the Incas, come only to shabby queenhood in Bohemia by right of her uncivilized blood and her royal birth. Before New World eyes, looking from nearer into barbarism, there is none of the glamour which sees romance and poetry in simply dusky skins, wild, free motions and turbulent lives, so that real, unromantic barrenness and poverty of nature is as visible to them in a deposed daughter of the Incas or Mexican dancer as in the pale factory girl who toils and spins and knows nothing else.

Stunned, Fanny sat up on the bed and took a deep breath. She read the piece to its end. Apparently,  in  Margaret’s “New  World  eyes,”  Fanny  was  the  most  unbeautiful  of individualities in the whole lot, for no one else fared as badly as she.
Poverty of nature. Uncivilized blood. Barbaric. Fanny leaped up from the bed and went to the bathroom, where she took Sam’s razor from the cabinet. She slit out the contents page ?rst, then the pages of Margaret Wright’s article, and crumpled them. When she saw how mutilated the  magazine  looked,  she  decided to  put  all  of  it  in  the  trash,  hoping  Louis wouldn’t miss it.

She tried to remember the last time she had seen the brisk little American. She could think only of the many times Margaret had popped her head out into the hall, snooping. Had she seen Fanny and Will Low carry Louis into the apartment that night, drunk and singing and nearly blind? Probably. Her door was cracked often enough. Surely she had seen  Louis  coming  and  going  since  then.  Surely  she  knew  he  lived  there.  Fanny  had considered her a friend; she had made no great efforts to conceal the situation.
Even  as she crushed the hateful pages, she shivered at the possibility that Louis had already seen the article. It was his habit to read his journals the moment they arrived, cover to cover. Without his own copy, he would read it at a friend’s. Louis considered it a plum to be published by Scribner’s, something he hadn’t yet managed. But Margaret had managed. At the moment, all Fanny wanted to do was ask her why. Why? But she was gone—moved back to England a few weeks ago without so much as a goodbye, a rebu? that Fanny had attributed at the time to a hurried departure.

She felt as if she might be sick. She opened up the balls of paper and forced herself to read the pages again. Some would consider the essay a  witty parody, but the woman’s remarks were as raw as the racial cartoons Fanny had seen in the newspaper when she was growing up. How could one’s skin color prompt such vitriol? There was ferocious contempt running through the piece; Fanny suspected it was because she had been living openly with Louis, right next door to Margaret, who surely found the arrangement more evidence of Fanny’s “barbaric nature.” Fanny had always prided herself on judging a person’s character correctly from a ?rst meeting. She’d believed Margaret was a friend who understood her circumstances. How had she been so wrong about the woman?

She put the wadded papers and magazine in  a  bag, then  raced downstairs, bumping against walls in her frenzy, and out into the street, where she dumped the bag into a pile of trash. When she returned up the four ?ights of steps, she returned to her bed, this time climbing under the blankets and pulling them over her head. She was shaking, and her teeth were clattering. Fanny knew that it would be no secret to any of the Grez crowd whom the piece was about. They were probably buzzing in cafés right now. Had they all viewed her as Margaret did, a pretentious fool? Weren’t any of them her true friends?
In her head, she heard Sam Osbourne’s voice: What are you doing here among these people? Fanny climbed out of the bed, washed her face, and went out of the apartment building
before  Sam  and  the  children  returned  and  saw  her  distress.  She  walked  through

Montmartre, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, trying to dispel the panic she felt. Wandering through a park, she noticed a mother sitting on a bench, gently rocking a pram. A wave of shame washed over her.

Looking  at  her  situation  from  the  outside,  Fanny  didn’t  like  the  picture  she  saw. Regardless of Sam’s repeated betrayals, there was no excuse for her laxity; she should have been more discreet in front of Belle and Sammy. The portrait Margaret Wright had painted of her as a merry seductress, living loosely so soon after her child’s death, was hideously unfair. Still, she saw how unseemly her life might appear to people who didn’t know her.
I have been living in a dream world, she thought. This can’t go on.