Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 31

“Fanny, are you awake?”

“Hmmm?” Fanny sat in a  chair in Se?orita  Bonifacio’s stucco-walled garden. She had nodded o? to the drowsy hum of bees among the yellow roses covering the arch over the gate. “Funny,” she said, yawning, “I was half-dreaming just then.”

“You have a telegram.” Nellie Vandegrift’s blue eyes beamed at her from underneath a curtain of blond hair across her forehead. The girl put the envelope in her sister’s hand.
Fanny sat up straight and ripped the telegram out of the envelope.

August 18, 1879. Departing New York today. Due Monterey by Aug. 30th. RLS

“Louis is coming,” she said. She looked around the inn’s garden as if seeing it for the ?rst time. “What day is today?”

“Why,  it’s August twenty-seventh,” her sister replied.  “Is that  what  you mean?  It’s a Monday.”

Fanny’s ?ngers went to her mouth, her cheeks; she ran her palm over her head.  “My hair!” she groaned. “It’s positively grizzled.”

“You’re just as beautiful as you always were. Don’t get yourself worked up. Dr. Heintz is coming over here any time now.”

“No, no, I’ve got to put myself together.” She glanced down at the dressing gown and slippers she wore. “I look like an old nana in this nightgown, like Aunt Tidge.”
“You know what the man said: Rest. Come, climb into your bed and stay there. Once he leaves, you can get up again.”

“There’s so much to do. Louis could be here in what … three days?” Fanny stood up to embrace her sister. “At last,” she said. “Something good.”

“No fever,” the doctor pronounced when he began to examine her. “What about the pain in your head?”

“Long gone,” Fanny said. She sat at the edge of her bed perfectly still, trying to ignore the stethoscope pressing her breast. The smell of chile peppers roasting over a ?ame in the kitchen  came  to  her,  and the  raspy  sound of  a  scrub jay  scolding  some  other  creature outside the window.

The man turned to Nellie. “Any sign of delirium?”

“Not since those first two days.”

Fanny  closed  her  eyes,  remembering  the  time  she  and  Louis  drifted  in  a  canoe downstream from Grez. It was the day after they ?rst made love. They had looked into each other’s eyes and known: This is love, this is real.

“Convulsions?”

“No.”

The  doctor  widened Fanny’s  eyelids,  his  own  eyes  boring  into  her  pupils.  “Does  the sunlight bother you, Mrs. Osbourne?”

“Not a bit. Makes me happy.” “How is your sense of balance?” “I’m all right now.”

“I must say, you appear to be on the mend. What it was, I’m not so sure.” Fanny looked at the young doctor’s already careworn face. “When you were here before,
you said inflammation of the brain.”

“It probably was brain swelling caused by anxiety and general wretchedness,” he said. “It can happen to people who are going through a struggle, as you said you were. But it could just as well have been a bad case of in?uenza. Whatever you had, you need to eat now. No meat, eggs, or sweets. No coffee or tea.” The man stood up and put away his stethoscope.
“Tell him about the crying,” Nellie said, twisting one of her long braids nervously. When Fanny didn’t speak, Nellie went on. “She breaks down a lot.”

The doctor looked wearily at Fanny, as if he had seen too many crying women in his time. She could see he wanted to go home to his wife and dinner. “I’m perfectly ?ne now,” she said, managing a smile. “I haven’t cried for days.”

“Cold sponge baths,” the doctor advised, putting on his hat. “Nothing like a cold cloth to activate the skin and chase away the melancholy. Brightens the eyes and cheers the soul.”
Nellie saw him out the front door. When she came back to the room, Fanny took her sister’s hand and squeezed it. “There’s one thing that can cheer my soul right now, Nellie, and it’s not a sponge bath.”

“Louis?”

“Oh, Nellie, you will love him. He is the kindest, most decent, wittiest … “ “It won’t be long now.”

“Nellie,” Fanny asked cautiously, “what happened when I was out of my head?”

“You saw things that weren’t there.” “I have no memory of it at all.” “You were talking to Pa.”

Tears pooled in Fanny’s eyes. “I feel terrible I wasn’t there at the end.” “Pa never doubted you loved him. You know, not long before he died, he said you had
every right to leave Sam. He was on your side.”

Fanny blotted her eyes with a handkerchief.

“You’ve got a lot of Pa in you.” Nellie’s face grew pensive. “I think I’m more like Ma.” “You mean I got the temper,” Fanny said sardonically, eyeing her sister, “and you got the
sweetness?”

Nellie laughed.  “I  was thinkin’ of  how Pa  stood up  for what he believed in.  Do you remember when I would have to go to the grocer’s for Mama, and there were those two big boys—awful bullies—who threatened me? They said I had to pay a nickel to walk down their block. That’s all I had in my sweaty little palm! I was terri?ed to walk that block, but I was almost as scared to go home without the groceries. Pa wouldn’t abide a coward in the family.”

“He told me it was my job as the oldest to go out and ?ght them,” Fanny said, “to teach them not to fool with us.”

“Oh, you were a sight when you came home.” “I guess it was a draw. They were bloodied, too.”

“Pa wouldn’t stand for nobody being treated unfairly. He was two-?sted when it came to that. You were the one Pa counted on to settle a score if we were picked on. Why do you think us girls looked up to you, Fan? You were brave. You were the one who really took care of us.”

Fanny shook her head. “I’m tired of being strong.”

Nellie  chewed on  her  lower  lip  before  asking.  “Have  you told Sam  yet  that  Louis  is coming over here?”

“He knows.”

Bathed and dressed, Fanny went back to her chair outside. The courtyard garden was a tribute to the se?orita’s tender care, bursting as it was with a fat hedge of fuchsia shrubs, pink roses, and the Gold of Ophir rose over the gate that the lady said had been a gift from a suitor, Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, during his assignment in Monterey. The

house on Alvarado Street was like so many others in this sleepy coastal outpost. It was in the Mexican style, with a clay tile roof under which mostly Spanish was spoken.
Sam Osbourne had been so pleased with himself when he brought Fanny to Monterey. He knew she would love the adobe houses and the arches made from bleached whalebones that led to lush private gardens. He told Fanny the story of Se?orita Bonifacio’s love a?air with the young Sherman, little suspecting that the story of a failed romance would touch her so. Apparently, Sherman had given the beautiful girl the rose shrub as a token of his love and a promise of his return when he was transferred out of the town. Maybe the young o?cer and the belle of Monterey courted in this garden. Did the famous general crush her when he married  someone  else?  There  was  no  hint  of  it,  though  she  had  never  married.  The se?orita,  thirty  years  beyond  the  romance,  remained  slender,  arrow-straight,  and handsome. Flitting around the garden like a hummingbird, watering this, clipping that, she appeared to be among the happiest of God’s creatures.

Fanny had returned from Europe with heavy-hearted resignation. One more time, she told herself. One more try, for the sake of Sammy. She and Sam agreed to go away from the Oakland  house  to  try  to  mend.  They  stayed  at  the  inn  in  Monterey,  which  seemed  a wholesome place to heal a broken marriage. They had sat in the se?orita’s romantic garden and spoken about trying to make a future together. They had walked the beaches for hours and talked about who they once were, who they were now. “Nobody understands you like I do,” Sam had told her. “I knew the soft, shy girl. Still know her.” They stayed in their big Castilian bed, tangled up in each other.

In one of his grand gestures, Sam rented an entire wing of Se?orita Bonifacio’s house for Fanny, Belle, Sammy, and Nellie, who had come out for a visit and decided to stay. He even installed  new  horses  for  all  of  them  at  a  livery  stable  nearby.  Sam  seemed  calm  and con?dent now that he was on solid ground with a job as a court stenographer. He promised to come down on weekends from San Francisco to be with the family.
For a brief while in Monterey, the four of them played their parts in the Osbourne family with grace. They rode into the hills together, and Sam acted like a real father, adjusting Sammy’s stirrups and making a point to ride beside the boy while keeping up a kindly conversation. Belle put aside her bitterness toward her mother for  “snatching” her away from the arms of Frank O’Meara. They all behaved as if they were a normal, happy clan.
“I’ll come clean with you, Fanny,” Sam said one night during that time.  “There were

others you didn’t know about. I don’t know why …” He shook his head, as if as puzzled by it all as she was. “I am a changed man now. That I am.”

Fanny drew in a deep breath. “I have made my own hurtful choices,” she blurted out. “I had a relationship with Louis Stevenson.”

Within  a  couple of weeks, Sam’s visits to the rooms in  Monterey began  to taper o?. Fanny suspected her admission cooled Sam’s ardor. And then, a month ago, he admitted he had another woman in San Francisco.

Fanny wrapped her ?ngers around the warm cup of co?ee the cook had set out for her. She wondered what Louis would think of her now. She had put on a few pounds; she was thirtynine years old. They’d been apart a year, but Paris seemed a lifetime ago. She was haunted by the idea that she had betrayed him—betrayed his faith in them. No one would condemn her for trying to reconcile with her husband. But she felt as tawdry now, having let down Louis, as she had felt after reading the vicious parody of herself in Scribner’s  magazine. Margaret Wright’s article had cut her to the quick.

It was then she decided to return to the States. She’d reasoned that she owed one more try to the marriage. If it could not be repaired, she planned to pursue a respectable divorce. None of it had gone according to plan. She was simply outplayed by her husband. Lost was the piece of higher ground she had clung to for so long. Her confession to Sam about the affair had divested her of that real estate.

“Sam has me right where he wants me,” she said to Nellie, “in a rented place where he won’t have to see me very often. He can charm his children and lure them away while waffling about a divorce. So much for high hopes.”

Her dreams for Belle had been dashed as well. The girl had fallen in love with a rakish San Francsco youth named Joe Strong. He was a good enough painter and sweet, but he drank too much and was perpetually broke. Fanny saw something in Joe that was in Sam Osbourne’s character as well. He was weak as water and a professional repenter, the kind of man who would be o?ering apologies for the rest of his life for the mistakes he kept repeating.

Belle  sni?ed  her  mother’s  disapproval.  “Papa likes  Joe,”  she  said  one  day  to  Fanny, setting her jaw. Living in Monterey, Belle lately found many reasons to adore her father and to dislike her mother. One day, when Fanny persuaded her daughter to go to the beach

with her, she had made a picture of the girl sitting on the sand. When Belle saw the sketch, she fell into a bubbling furor.  “What kind of mother makes her child look ugly in every drawing?” she demanded contemptuously.

Belle was soon going o? to the beach, not with her mother but with Joe. When Fanny objected,  Belle  exploded.  “I’m  eighteen  years  old!  You can’t  control  me  anymore!  It  is hypocrisy to tell me I can’t see a young man who is just beginning to make his way. You chose Louis Stevenson, who is penniless. And you have lived with him already.”
Fanny gritted her teeth but remained silent, so Belle chose a new angle. “Frank O’Meara desperately wanted to marry me. I loved him, and you dragged me away. You have tried to break up everything good in my life. Worst of all is how you have tried to turn me against Papa.”

“I wanted for you what I didn’t have,” Fanny argued. “A chance to enjoy something of your own before you start taking care of other people. Maybe a chance to actually shape your own destiny. You are an artist, Belle. You don’t have to ?nd yourself by marrying an artist.”

Belle looked at her incredulously. “You know nothing about Joe Strong. You are an old woman, Mother, full of bitterness and talk of doom. And this is one time you will not have your way.”

When Joe got wind of Fanny’s disapproval, he hustled Belle o? to San Francisco and married her. Fanny took to her bed, while Sam welcomed the happy couple with open arms and set them up in a fine hotel for a honeymoon stay.

How had the one thing Fanny wanted in all the world, a happy little family of her own, slipped through her ?ngers? Sam lost long ago, Hervey dead, Belle estranged despite all the love and work, despite everything Fanny ever did to make a home. She had been too free with Belle. She had let the girl drift away from her.

Thank God she still had Sammy.

Fanny was in the garden when the boy returned from a visit to the stable. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.

The boy’s eyes widened. “Yes.”

“Louis Stevenson is going to pay us a visit sometime soon,” she told him. She watched as the news registered: His pale, long face lit up. He leaped in the air and shouted, “Luly is coming!”

“Shhh. Now, don’t tell. You are the only one who knows.”