Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 35

1880

“A decent  interval”  was  not  only  Sam  Osbourne’s  request;  it  was  on  the  lips  of  every member of Fanny’s family. Her parents and sisters had vehemently opposed the divorce. Even Nellie had argued against it. The very mention of an impending divorce was being kept from Fanny’s sickly sister Elizabeth for fear the disgraceful news would knock her over the edge.

“I don’t mind waiting so much,” Louis told Fanny. “Your family has come further along than my own.”

It was true. His father had used a desperate ploy to get Louis to return to Scotland, and his senses. Through Baxter, Thomas Stevenson had sent word that his son was murdering his parents with anguish and disgrace. The father pretended to be near death to draw Louis home.

Suspecting he was being misled, Louis refused. Slowly recovering his strength under Dr. Heintz’s care, he continued to work furiously on what he thought would pay fastest, fables and short tales, knowing that Fanny and Sammy would be under his protective wing soon enough.  When  that would happen  remained uncertain,  for the actual divorce date was dangled and withdrawn  by  Sam.  In  October,  Fanny  traveled north  to  Oakland,  taking Nellie with her as a  “chaperone.” In December, when the decree was o?cial, the decent interval between divorce and remarriage officially began.

A couple of days before Christmas, Louis moved to San Francisco to a boardinghouse, where he worked and waited. Twice a week during that long winter, Fanny took a ferry over to meet him for dinner. They sat at a modest little restaurant and gentled each other out of their anxieties. “June,” she told him when he asked what would make a respectable wedding date. “That will be six months.”

“If I can finish the work I began in Monterey, we will be all right by then,” Louis said. “What do you eat during the day?” she asked him over dinner one evening in March.
Louis looked terrible, his cheeks hollow and shadowed.

He hesitated.

“Tell me,” she said. “You look as if you are starving.” He hemmed and hawed. “Enough,” he told her.

“Not enough,” Dora  Williams informed Fanny when she saw her friend a  week later. “Virgil and I saw him last week at the Pine Street co?ee house. He was having his usual breakfast there, he said. A cup of co?ee, one little roll, and a pat of butter—a bargain at ten cents. He told us he’s mastered the art of having the bread and butter expire at the same moment. We laughed, but then he laid out the rest of the day. He goes back in the evening for another roll and co?ee—that’s his supper. He’s eating only one meal, really, midday, that he gets for fifty cents.”

“Louis only tells me about the stories he’s working on,” Fanny said, shaking her head. “He’s trying to save what little money he has for when he has to support me. But that has already begun. He gave me fifteen dollars recently to keep the house going.”
“Isn’t Sam supporting you until you remarry?”

“Didn’t you hear? Sam lost his job a few days ago.”

The constant anxiety, the enforced diet, and the frantic work pace took its toll: Louis fell ill with malaria. Fanny moved him to an Oakland hotel room to be nearer her cottage. It was there  that  Louis’s  lungs  began  to  hemorrhage.  When  she  discovered  him  in  his  room coughing up blood, Fanny raised a handkerchief to her mouth, vowed to herself she would not faint, and immediately fetched a doctor.

Stroking his goatee, white and sti? as a brush, Dr. Bamford stood over Louis’s bony, painwracked body and said,  “The patient is not to move. He must lie on his back so that his lungs can heal.” Before he left, Bamford handed Fanny a bottle of ergotin and showed her how  to  measure  an  exact  dosage.  “This  will  make  the  blood  vessels  contract  during  a hemorrhage. He will need to have this medicine by him at all times.”
“So,” Louis said sadly of the latest horrific twist. “He arrives—’Bluidy Jack.”‘ Fanny sat by his bed and held his hand. She knew he was devastated, for the bleeding
confirmed his fear that he would probably die of tuberculosis, and soon.
“For the sake of appearances,” another phrase her family liked to use, was now ignored. One idea loomed large: She must get Louis to a safer climate. If they stayed in the San Francisco bay fog, it would probably kill him. She promptly moved him from the hotel into her cottage, consigned him to the sofa where she could nurse him, and set the wedding date for May. Sammy was away at boarding school by then in Sonoma, and Nellie was living with her. What her family, friends, and neighbors thought of the whole arrangement didn’t

trouble her mind now. If she could nurse Louis to the point where he could travel, she could get him to a better weather.

By day she dosed him with Dover’s powder and made soups to spoon-feed to him. By night she sat next to the sofa, watching helplessly as the ruthless cough hammered deeper in his chest. She and Nellie paused in fear to listen when Louis, past coughing, made a sucking noise in his windpipe. She held her own breath at those moments, uncertain if the last punch had been deadly. There would be a little gasp of air as Louis—limp as a dishrag, drenched with cold sweat, unable to speak—opened his eyes to peer at hers intently. I am not dead yet, the eyes said.

What astounded her was how close to the gates of death he could be at one moment and how alive he could be the next. After a nightlong assault of coughing, he might awaken unable to speak; or, he might sit up, ask for oatmeal, and announce he’d come up with a new story idea.

It’s going to be a wild, rickrack journey with this man.

Within a few days of the hemorrhaging, he was standing on a kitchen chair, reciting Robert Burns. Nellie had spotted a mouse and jumped up on a stool, prompting Louis to rise from the sofa in the parlor and mount another chair.

“‘To a Mouse,’” he announced dramatically, putting hand to breast, “‘On Turning Her Up in  Her  Nest  with  the  Plough.’  By Rrrrobbie  Burrrns,”  he  said,  stretching  the  R’s  like  a Scottish drum roll.

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy b-r-r-reastie!

“What are you doing?” Fanny called from the other room. She rushed into the kitchen, put her hands on her hips. “Get down this minute!”

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering b-r-r-rattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

“I’ll murder you with a paddle,” Fanny cried. “You’re supposed to be flat on the sofa.” Nellie’s laughter only encouraged him, and he held forth through two more Burns poems.

“Get down,”  Fanny  said,  but  by  then  even  she  had  begun  to  giggle.  He  went  on  to impersonate  a  clergyman  asking  questions  from  the  Shorter  Catechism  of  a  frightened child, also played by Louis, and all of it in his best broad Scots. When he climbed down, their eyes were wet from laughing.

The morning after his performance, he was on his back on the sofa, with his feet buried under the family dog, Chuchu. Fanny, and sometimes Nellie, worked as his amanuensis, taking down a new book idea or writing out his letters. In his hours of wellness, Louis’s joy in life was so acute it amazed Fanny. He loved the chaotic household of two women, an occasional  child home  from  school,  a  dog,  four  cats,  and two  horses,  and delighted in making Nellie and Fanny the subjects of his jokes.

It was not the same giddiness he used to show, though. She remembered his displays of uncontrollable laughter and the hand-bending it took to stop it. The last time it happened, when she’d bitten him hard and opened a cut, Louis had looked at her with such injured shock that she’d been ?ooded with shame. She had seen such a look once before, on the face of her son Sammy. Long ago when he was a baby, Sammy developed a habit of kicking furiously whenever she tried to diaper him. He was just under a year old and playing with her, really, but she’d been tired at the time and slapped his leg—pretty gently, yet hard enough to surprise him. The child had stopped moving and gazed in disbelief at his mother. It was as if the world changed in that moment for him, and for her. Had she knocked the wildness out of the little fellow with one slap? Made him cautious? For that was what Sammy was now. Or was he going to be a careful type from the moment he came out of her womb? He never kicked again; she never slapped him again. As it turned out, Louis never lost himself to hilarity after Fanny’s angry bite.

Louis was a  far more sober man  now than  he was three years ago, and his joy less frenetic. Having seen his su?ering up close in the last few weeks, she understood better why he would have wanted to abandon himself to untamed gaiety. She could see why he hated the ugly realism of Zola. No wonder he wanted to write adventure stories.
When he was feeling stronger, Fanny walked him slowly through her cottage’s garden. It was not  only  for the  sunshine  that  she  led him along  the  twisting  stone  paths on  the Oakland hillside, where each turn revealed a distant view or an arrangement of plants that pleased the eye. She wanted him to see what she had made with her own hands, for it was a record of herself. She had laid every stone of the path, planted every fragrant delight,

built the arbors and log benches, dug the beds for six great patches in which pumpkins and onions and tomatoes had grown large on the hillside. She could remember herself when she ?rst  laid  out  the  garden—young  and  industrious,  so  pleased  to  be  grafting  roses  and pickling her own cantaloupe. She took Louis to the photography studio she’d built in an old shack, where cobwebs covered the glass plate negatives now—pictures of trees and ?owers that she’d left behind when she went to Europe with the children. She took him to the shooting range she had set up so he could see that she had been someone before she knew him. A woman of parts.

She and Louis stood quietly near a patch of orange lilies. “Do you know what my mother called me as a child? Tiger Lily.”

He smiled. “How appropriate.” “Ma always grew them in her garden.” “Are you saying goodbye to yours?”

“Yes,” she said. “But there will be another garden to make, and a better one. “ On a sunny spring day, Fanny and Louis, dressed in his ulster against any possible chill,
took the ferry  from Oakland to San  Francisco to be married.  It wasn’t anything  like a wedding, mostly paperwork and a few words spoken by an old Presbyterian minister in his parlor. When she ?lled out the marriage certi?cate, she had to pause to think of the date: May  29,  1880.  Below  it,  she  admitted  to  being  forty  but  wrote widowed  rather  than divorced. Whose business was it other than her own?

The minister read from Corinthians about love being patient and keeping no record of wrongs. They exchanged slender silver rings while her friend Dora Williams stood by as a witness. Afterward, the three of them went out for dinner. Louis raised his glass of wine and said, “I don’t think many wives will be loved as much as mine.” That was the extent of the festivities. Even their simple meal might have been out of the question a few weeks earlier, before Louis’s father finally came around.

Apparently, Thomas Stevenson got wind through Baxter that his only child was broke and lying sick in America. Shamed and remorseful, the old man promised Louis 250 pounds a year as an allowance. Before the conciliatory letter from Louis’s father, Fanny’s throat would constrict when she thought of money. Sam’s monthly support payments for Sammy had  ended  when  he  lost  his  court  stenographer  job.  Thomas  Stevenson’s  promised allowance eased her anxiety.

The moment the ?rst check arrived, she took Louis to an Oakland dentist to have his rotten teeth pulled and replaced. When the swelling disappeared, they went together to a photographer to have wedding portraits done. Louis looked thin but groomed, while Fanny wore her best hat cocked at a ?attering angle, and a string of beads around her neck with a wooden cross attached, an effect she hoped would garner the Stevensons’ approval.
When Fanny saw the portraits, she was pleased. Soon she would send the pictures along with a warm letter to Louis’s parents, preparing them for the fact that, when his health permitted, they would be meeting their new daughter-in-law.