Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 3

“Papa” Gerhardt—for that was what everyone seemed to call the man, including his wife— took Fanny and her party into the family’s sitting room. There she met the matriarch, a shapely woman whose round ?at face resembled one of the painted plates depicting the Virgin that Fanny had seen in a shopwindow. Surrounding her was a gaggle of offspring.
“There are ten,” Belle said to her mother after counting.

“I think that’s excessive,” Fanny muttered under her breath.

The oldest boy, their translator, who hovered nearby, looked puzzled.  “Excessive?” he asked.

“Expensive.” Fanny smiled. “It’s expensive these days to have a big family.” All of the Gerhardts spoke some English, though it wasn’t necessary. Alliances formed
instantly. The middle girl took possession of Belle, who was her age. Sammy claimed a pretty daughter about his size, and Hervey was adopted by the older boys and girls, who promptly began stu?ng him with sweets. Fanny’s family had arrived at a moment when everyone in the household was engaged in preparing surprises for the wedding anniversary of the parents. Soon the Osbourne clan was elbow-deep in the planning, too.
Fanny and Miss Kate settled the rooms. In the evening, with the children and nanny out of  earshot,  Fanny  told the  Gerhardts  about  the  long  and arduous  journey.  “There  was terrible ?ooding around Indianapolis. The oats and corn were thriving when we arrived, but by the end of the week, when we were to depart, the crops were underwater. There was no train service out of that town, of course. I waited for a couple of extra days but couldn’t postpone any longer. I decided to try to get to the next station by wagon. Probably a half dozen times, the horses plunged over embankments into raging streams. It’s a miracle we weren’t all swept away and drowned. At one point, we went across a shaky bridge. Just minutes later we turned back to see it collapse.”

The Gerhardts registered the proper horror, but there were more details to the story than Fanny chose to share. She had talked to several drivers before she found one willing to push past the blockades and chance his old omnibus. Daring as he was, even he had to be ordered on. When they came to a bridge that had not been demolished by the roaring river below it, there were men waiting nearby to warn people away. The driver had not wanted to cross that bridge, yet she had insisted on it.

“As we continued our journey, word went with us from one driver to the next that I was bent on getting our train to New York and was not to be tri?ed with,” Fanny said.  “I’m actually a little frightened now to re?ect on how desperate the whole enterprise was. I risked not  only  my  life  but  my  children’s as well.” As she  heard herself  tell the  story, though, she was as awed by her daredevil journey as the Gerhardts were. The mother sat next to her on the divan in the parlor, catching her breath from time to time. The father wrung his hands, got up, and poured Fanny a beer.  “Brave girl,” he said when they all retired at the end of the evening. He and his wife embraced her.

The family was so familiar in its simple warmth, Fanny felt as if her Indiana childhood were playing out in front of her. The children practiced dances and piano and violin pieces and wrote little dramas for the upcoming party. Fanny’s boys played in the parlor while the smell of frying onions drifted in from the kitchen.

It half-grieved her to see the tenderness between the parents, for it showed how poor her own marriage was in comparison. Yet she wanted her children to know what real family happiness looked like. They should know what to want. Belle had been a honeymoon baby; she’d seen plenty of happy times growing up. But the boys had come along later, after sieges of hard feelings. Both  were conceived during  fragile reconciliations. In  his seven years, Sammy hadn’t seen nearly enough of his father.

The days in Antwerp ?lled up. Miss Kate, whom Belle called “the governor” for her brusque manners and the dark down across her upper lip, worked at tutoring Sammy while Fanny and her daughter went out for hours to view the most important pictures and often to try to sketch them. The Osbourne women were an oddity in Antwerp, which turned out to be a rather small town. When Tim Rearden sent a package in care of the American consul, it was delivered directly to their little hotel rather than to the consulate.  “I believe,” Papa Gerhardt told her,  “you and Belle and your governess are the only American women in town besides the consul’s wife.”

Belle was right. Virgil and Dora Williams were not as worldly as Fanny had given them credit for being. “Europeans are accustomed to women taking grand tours on their own,” Dora had insisted. “You will ?nd plenty of other female students like yourself. Women have been traveling without their husbands for years—to reinvigorate their lives.”
Fanny had laughed. “Ah, to be reinvigorated.”

“I don’t believe they take their children along, though,” Dora added. Fanny had looked at her friend in wonderment. “That’s out of the question. My children
are coming with me.”

During the second week in  Antwerp, when  she went to the cathedral with Belle and Sammy in tow, they positioned themselves in front of Rubens’s Descent from the Cross and sketched furiously. O? to the side, she noticed a  cluster of curious locals staring at the peculiar little American family.

Fanny interviewed a drawing teacher who told them to go to Paris where they would ?nd the Julian Academy, which admitted women, but she dismissed the idea. They would stay here for a while, pursuing their own course of study with a tutor. Many of the things she wanted for her children—for herself—could be had in this place. The Gerhardts had taken them to their bosoms. On the boulevards, the men in baggy pants and funny little jackets began to look ordinary. In her letters to friends back home, she changed her signature, abandoning the family spelling of Vandegrift for the Dutch spelling. Fanny van de Grift Osbourne. She liked the look of it. Much more authentic.

One evening she noticed Hervey was listless. Earlier in the day, the boy had been under Kate’s wing while Fanny was out.

“Who are you today?” she asked her son. Hervey was wearing a coat she’d sewn for him that was like those worn by the San Francisco ?re?ghters he so admired. The costume was one of two she had packed for him. The other was a soldier costume. Sometimes he dressed half as a soldier, half as a ?reman, wearing his ?re?ghter hat and carrying a sword so he could quickly switch roles if the spirit moved him.

The boy looked down to check what he was wearing. “All fireman,” he said. Fanny noticed his yellow ringlets were wet underneath his paper helmet. She put the
back of her hand to his forehead. “He’s got a fever,” she said to Kate.
“He didn’t have it this morning.” The nanny’s tone was defensive. “Draw some water, cool but not cold.”

Fanny  bathed  Hervey,  then  put  him  into  bed  with  her.  After  three  days,  when  he continued to be feverish, she called for the Gerhardts’ doctor.

The man poked and prodded.  “In truth,” he admitted,  “I’m a little ba?ed.” He wrote down a name—Johnston. “You need to take the boy to Paris to this man. He’s an American.

Very competent.”

Within two days, Fanny, Kate, and the children were on a train.