Under the Wide and Starry Sky

Part Two

CHAPTER 37

Margaret  Stevenson’s crystal glasses glinted up  and down  the  dining  table.  Candlelight threw a yellow glow on the faces of twenty Stevenson and Balfour relatives as they o?ered one toast after another to the newlyweds. Midway down the long table, Fanny sat with Louis on one side and one of Margaret’s brothers, Uncle George Balfour, on the other.
“I want Louis to come out hunting with me this year,” Uncle George said. He petted a graying beard that hung like a bib on his chest.

“It will depend on the weather, I’m afraid,” Fanny said. “If it’s damp, I won’t let him go. His health is too precarious. But if I’m here, I shall be happy to accompany you.”
“My goodness, Thomas,” the uncle said, chortling, “she’s a besom, all right.” “Is that anything like a bison?” Fanny asked archly.

The two men  fell into gales.  “No,  no,  my  dear,” said the man,  whose veined cheeks turned round and red as crabapples when  he laughed.  “I married a  besom myself, and wasnae day I regretted. “

“You mustn’t take o?ense, Fanny,” Thomas Stevenson said quickly.  “It’s a compliment. Means an impertinent sort of girl. A woman who could run the world if she chose to.”
A minute later, Fanny whispered to Louis, “I had a hard time understanding the toasts. It sounds like everyone is speaking through wool socks.”

“They’re being extra Scottish for your sake,” Louis said. He looked at her eyes. “It means they adore you.”

Fanny stared down at her place setting. “I’m starving,” she whispered. “Louis?” “Yes?”

“What am I to do with that?” She pointed to a ladle-like object above her plate. “Pudding spoon. Mother’s puddin’ spoons are as big as shovels. When dessert is served,
you hold it in your right hand, then push the cake into it with the fork in your left.”
“Oh.”

“Eat out of the spoon. You’re supposed to keep your elbows down during the operation. Can’t be done.”

At the beginning of the party, she and Louis had stood in the large drawing room of the Stevenson house on Heriot Row, greeting relatives. They had all come to celebrate as they would for any newlyweds. Judging by the close examination she received, they also had

come to have a good gander at the American bride. Clearly, word was out that Louis had married an older woman. A cousin’s eyes would scan her face, settle on the crow’s-feet, glance at the neck. Fanny regretted wearing a necklace that Louis’ mother had pressed upon her. No doubt someone in the room was making note that the daughter-in-law was already raiding the family jewels. Fanny regretted the dress she’d chosen for the evening as well, a shamrock-green satin gown that made her look like a Nevada dance hall girl among these subdued people.

When she stepped away from the drawing room to use the WC, she inadvertently went into a  small pantry and surprised two servants, who redirected her. As she turned and walked away she heard one say to the other, “He’s merrit wi a black woman!”
Louis received the same curious scrutiny for a di?erent reason. Many of the family’s circle were under the impression that he was still near death.

“You look quite well,” more than one guest remarked upon greeting Louis. “It must be the new teeth,” Louis responded when his cousin Bob said it. Fanny took quiet pride in the happy remarks upon Louis’s appearance. “You should have
seen him a month ago,” she said to Bob.

“He’s still frighteningly thin.” Bob sighed. “I think I could wrap my thumb and fore?nger around his thigh.”

“You don’t know how close he came … “ Fanny could not say the rest of the sentence. “But I’m convinced he’s on the mend.”

It was comforting to see Bob Stevenson, who cared so deeply for Louis. Any attraction Fanny had felt for Bob in the beginning had long ago settled into a sisterly feeling. His con?dent demeanor had changed. He was a touch faded from the glowing young lion who had dazzled her at Grez.

“Are you surviving this onslaught?” he asked.

“I’m busy putting the faces with the stories you and Louis have told me.” “Have you had a chance to talk with Katharine?” Bob asked. He and his sister, Katharine
de Mattos, had arrived at the party together. She was a slender, highstrung woman with the same sharp-chiseled features as Bob’s. Fanny knew she was divorced from a notorious philanderer and struggling to support her two children. On that information alone, she felt affinity for her.

“I have heard so much about you!” Katharine had gushed earlier in the evening when she

came  through  the  door.  She  kissed Fanny  on  both  cheeks  and chatted gaily  for  a  few moments. “I am going to steal you away once you are done with your greeting duties. Don’t be overwhelmed by all these relatives. If you can’t remember their names, I shall help you. Your Sammy is adorable, by the way. Oh my,” she said, looking around at the crowd in the room. “So much family excitement at once! And Bob tells me you are going to have your first grandchild soon.”

How did this woman know that Belle and Joe Strong were expecting a child? Fanny and Louis had heard only a couple of weeks ago. Louis must have told Katharine, for of his cousins, he was closest to her and Bob.

Fanny smiled grimly. “Yes,” she said, “it’s true.”

Thankfully, Margaret Stevenson showed no concern about the matter of age. It seemed the woman had been waiting for a daughter-in-law to come along for some time. If Fanny was not the dewy-eyed virgin they had all expected Louis to choose someday, Maggie, as she was called by her friends, showed no sign of disappointment. The pale lady of the house was awash in the glow of her son’s marriage long after the dinner party ended. “You all need new clothes!” she declared, and soon enough, a seamstress and tailor were measuring Louis, Fanny, and Sammy.

“She dresses me up like a doll,” Fanny complained to Louis when they were alone in their bedroom after a session with his mother. “Do you think she’s embarrassed by my clothes?” The delicate Maggie had darted around in her embroidered dressing gown, fetching bonnets and sparkling hair ornaments to put on Fanny’s head and draping her in Kashmir shawls and jet necklaces, all the while pressing her to keep them. “When I complimented a vase in her room, she said,’It’s yours! I shall send it to you the moment you get your own place.’ I’m afraid to admire anything now.”

Louis embraced her. “I think the lady doth protest too much. And all along I thought you adored making furniture out of logs.”

Fanny grinned.  “Your mother knows where my heart lies. She doesn’t take me for a climber.”

Over needlework in the sitting room, Maggie’s genteel reserve fell away one morning. She took hold of Fanny’s hand and declared in a heartfelt rush, “I am so happy to have a partner  now.”  She  didn’t  say “a  partner  in  keeping  my  boy  alive,”  but  Fanny  knew

perfectly well what she meant.

“It’s not so easy taking care of a genius, is it?” Fanny asked her.  “It’s very much like angling for sly trout, I think. You have to know when to pay out the line and when to carefully pull it in.”

Maggie nodded knowingly.  “He’s a bright young man who is careless with his health. And he has pride, my boy. He does not take my advice gladly. But he listens to you, Fanny, I have seen it. I can’t tell you how relieved I am.”

On a Sunday morning, while Louis was out walking and his parents and Sammy were at church, Fanny moved through the house in her robe. She was dying to fry up a couple of eggs,  but  that  was  an  impossibility.  All  the  meals  in  this  house  were  delivered  by dumbwaiter,  sent  up  by  a  cook  who  worked  and  lived  with  another  servant  in  the basement. She would have to wait to eat breakfast when everyone returned.
In the dining room, she ran her ?ngers along the smooth walnut surface of an old clawfooted desk, one of the many antiques with which Thomas Stevenson had ?lled the house. She turned over china plates to look at the maker’s mark, held up crystal decanters to the light, felt the scalloped hollow of a silver tea caddy spoon and the bumpy surface of an antler-handled knife. The house was stu?ed with exquisite things. Her own childhood home had not been humble by Middle West standards. Jacob Vandegrift had fared well enough as a lumber merchant and raised his brood in a perfectly respectable brick house surrounded by perfectly respectable walnut furniture. But respectable in Indianapolis was a world apart from refined in Edinburgh. It was the difference between twine and silk floss.
When she returned to the bedroom, she poked through a closet that spanned one wall of Louis’s bedroom. Inside, she found an entire wardrobe of ?ne things he had never worn in her presence: morning coats, smoking jackets, dressing gowns, wool neck scarves soft as rabbit  fur,  cloaks,  an  array  of  embroidered caps.  The  closet  smelled faintly  of  leather; looking down, she spied six pairs of boots and shoes arrayed on the ?oor along the back wall. Fanny fetched a chair so she could reach a high shelf. Her hand brought down a set of underclothes made of ?ne silk cord that was netted. The drawers and shirt, so soft and airy, had never been  worn.  She threw  o? her nightgown  and pulled on  the garments.  Pure heaven, they felt. And the fit was perfect. These I will take for myself.

Now that Fanny was in the family, the war between father and son seemed to have sputtered out. Thomas Stevenson, it appeared, had been waiting for someone to listen to

him.

“I was not born to wealth,” he told Fanny that evening in his study while attending to his whisky, sip by sip. “My father was a lighthouse man, and he had taken my brothers into the business.  Well,  and so I  went.  My  father was experimenting  with  silvered re?ector lamps, to magnify the beam, you see. It was the great quest in those days …”
When Thomas Stevenson spoke of re?ector lamps, he might as well have been a preacher bent on  saving  souls. He was modest about his own  role in  getting  the lamps to blink intermittently by revolving, but Louis let Fanny know it was an enormous achievement. “He’s a true inventor,” Louis said, and she was moved by the pride in his voice.  “He’d be famous if he’d gone after a patent for any of it. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. It was a moral issue with him.”

“He told me he once wanted to be a writer,” she said to Louis before they retired in their room.

“From what I gather, he tried any number of things that failed to stick. Here’s the story my mother gave me. My father was studying engineering at the university when one day his father found one of his made-up stories stu?ed in his coat pocket. My grandfather was irate. He told him he had wasted seven pages of perfectly good paper with his nonsense and that he had better get a  profession  while his father was still alive to support him because  he  would  be  penniless  otherwise.”  Louis  laughed  at  Fanny’s  sober  expression. “Another one of those ‘sins of the father’ stories, eh?”

“It makes me sad,” she said.

Since she was a little girl, Fanny had been able to pinpoint the one person in a room who needed to be won over. It was a challenge she made for herself when she encountered a shy or taciturn or di?cult person, and rarely did she fail. Now she trained her eyes and ears on Louis’s father as he gradually shared the story of his life. She observed the small details of Thomas Stevenson’s person. He sat across from her in his study with his elbows on the chair arms, ?ngertips forming a steeple. A gas lamp illuminated his features from below, and when the steeple went to his lips, when he paused to consider his words before speaking, she  thought  he  looked  like  a  monk  from  the  Middle  Ages,  contemplating  Scripture  by candlelight. He might have made a ?ne cleric if he had not been a “Lighthouse Stevenson.” Fanny witnessed the moral rectitude that had driven his son away; Louis’s forgiving nature

must have come from his mother. She also saw the similarities between father and son. Louis was just as ?erce as Thomas in his own moral convictions. And like his son, Thomas was a rascal. Behind his bene?cent smile lived a terrible tease. He called Fanny a variety of names: Cassandra was one. He chided her for the occasional presentiment that something was about to go wrong.  “And what chaos is Miss Cassandra predictin’ for us today?” he would say.

After dinner, if she did not immediately go to his study for a cordial, he would shout, “Where is the Vandegrifter?” He’d be waiting for her with two ?sts on his desk and some artifact or book that signaled the subject of their conversation that evening.  “Aha! She’s wearin’ her cordial face,” he’d say when she arrived. He knew she liked a drink as much as he.

Fanny met his roguishness with measured impudence. “Master Tommy,” she said at one such session, “our home is absolutely lovely, but I am taken aback by one fact: Your bath facilities  are  terribly  out  of  date.  Shouldn’t  the  premier  engineer  of  Edinburgh  have  a proper bathtub? Shouldn’t he have a loo on every ?oor? Why, in America, even people of ordinary means are adding them to their homes.”

Thomas appeared startled by her remark. The reference to his status as an engineer, the mention of Americans—one of the two kept him up late that night. The next morning he showed Fanny the bathroom he had drawn to be built out in a large room adjoining his bedroom. It was extravagant and featured an enormous tub with a wood rim where he could set  his  whisky  glass  if  he  chose,  and a  wood cover  for  the  whole  that  could be lowered to keep the water warm as it ?lled. A toilet compartment would be built into the corner; cupboards would run up to the ceiling. Margaret would have a fine dressing table.
“It will be here when you next come,” Thomas promised Fanny.  “And there will be a choice of three loos to meet your fancy.”

“You’ve disarmed the man,” Louis told her one afternoon as he sat down to write. “In one visit, you’ve accomplished what I couldn’t in a lifetime.”

She took her place across from him at the table they shared as a desk, where Louis was working  on  his Amateur Emigrant and she was writing a short story.  “Well, I am not his son.”

“True. And you’re alike.”

“How is that?”

Louis did not detect that she was smarting. “You tend to look at the dark side sometimes. You have healthy tempers. And you both rather savor your indignations.”
“Oh,” she said, “don’t hold back now. Is there anything else?”

Louis’s face fell. “I’m sorry, Fan. I was only teasing. Let’s be gentle with each other.” There was no pretense that they were equals. When he had ?rst read one of her stories
he said,  “You have a colorful way of saying things.” Her spirits had sailed high on that remark until the next time she showed him a story and he said, “This is perfectly awful.” She knew she was not a bad writer, but she suspected Louis found her stories, with their supernatural twists, a bit beneath his literary standards. “Maudlin!” he had written next to one of her paragraphs.

After a time, she no longer asked for his help. He neither encouraged her to write nor discouraged her, though he admitted that two writers in one family was quite a lot. Still, Fanny cherished their time at that shared desk. The writing hours were boring for Sammy until  Louis  unpacked  the  printing  press  that  had  followed  the  boy  since  their  time  at Silverado.  Now  the  whole  family  devoted  mornings  to  words  on  paper,  with  Louis contributing stories to Sammy’s little magazine.

When Mrs. Stevenson poked her head in the door and found them all engaged, she let out a frustrated sigh. “Who will be my playmate today?” she moaned. “Come away with me, Fanny.  Just  for  a  couple  of  mornings.” Fanny  regretted the  interruption  but  cheerfully followed her new mother-in-law.

As it turned out, Louis’s mother had a gift for Fanny. It was a piano scarf to be embroidered. The two women sat down and began to sew. Mrs. Stevenson was only a
decade older than Fanny, yet her ways made her seem older. She sat sti? as a clothespin in her  lace-trimmed tea  gown.  It  was  in  her  sweet  family  stories  that  her  warmth  shone through.

“I often used to take Lou to my parents’ home in Colinton for a few days at a time. My father was a  serious-minded parson  who stayed mostly  in  the house after my  mother’s death. The grandchildren were all terri?ed of him, but Lou would skip up the old staircase with me to see him in his study. He would brave going in with a little snippet of psalm to recite so he could look around at the Indian pictures in there, of warriors on horseback and such. My father was utterly charmed by him.” Margaret Stevenson laughed to herself. “The

other spot at Colinton that held Lou’s interest was the old cemetery nearby. We always had to go look at the headstones. He liked to scare himself.”

Mrs. Stevenson’s stories were at odds with Louis’s own memories of his mother. She’d been  absent  in  many  ways,  he  once  told  Fanny.  Thomas  Stevenson  had  cosseted  her because of her bad lungs, which kept her in bed until noon in those days. Cummy took her place, Louis had told Fanny sadly, and he blamed his father for keeping his mother at a distance from him.

In the afternoons that followed, Fanny’s ?ngers ?ew through the project.  “You make such tiny stitches so quickly,” Mrs. Stevenson commented, only partly in praise. Seven days after it was presented to her, Fanny held up a completely embroidered piano scarf.
Louis’s  mother  goggled  in  amazement  at  it. “It’s  perfect,”  she  said  with  distinct disappointment. “That cloth was supposed to take two months, Fanny.”

couple of weeks into the visit, Maggie suggested they all go to a resort in Strathpe?er, in the Highlands. There they met up with a few Balfour cousins and uncles, who dined with them and took the long walks everyone in the family seemed to thrive upon.
It was on one such walk that Uncle George Balfour, the doctor of the family and Fanny’s amusing seatmate at the first dinner party, took her arm.

“He’s too thin,” he said soberly, staring at his nephew a few yards ahead of them. “If you can get him to go, you should take him to Davos, in Switzerland. Have you heard of it?”
“Yes,” Fanny said. Davos was on the tip of the tongue of every doctor Louis had seen in London and Paris a year ago.

“The thinking now is that cold alpine air is the best medicine for pulmonary phthisis. Dr. Reudi doesn’t coddle anyone at his sanitarium. Louis will be out exercising, and he’ll have to stop smoking. The place could return him to some semblance of health. No better climate exists for tuberculosis.”

“I don’t think his parents understand how sick he was in Oakland.” She stopped and turned to the old man.  “I will speak honestly with you. He has been near death several times in the past year.”

George  Balfour  looked  toward  his  sister,  who  walked  arm  in  arm  with  Louis. “Go immediately,” he said.  “His mother has been without her son. Naturally, she wants him near, but I will make them understand. I know Thomas will want to help with the cost of it

all.”

It was decided they would go to Davos. As Fanny and Louis made their rounds saying goodbye,  Walter  Simpson—Louis’s  old  friend  and  canoeing  companion—and  his  sister presented the newlyweds with a cat and a dog. “To keep you company,” the sister said. “It’s a rare breed.” Fanny took one look at the caged cat and knew she would leave it behind with someone, to be picked up at some point in the future. Or not. But the dog, a Skye terrier with wavy black hair over his eyes and ears that rose up from his head like small wings, snared her heart.

“He’s a big dog in a small body. It’s the short legs,” Simpson said. “Great heart, the Skye has, absolutely fearless. They’re bred for hunting but a great family dog. He’ll be easy to have around the house, though you can’t ignore him. He’ll let you know that.”
“Walter, we will call him,” Fanny said, and took him straightaway into her arms. Soon after their departure, Walter became Woggs and then, inexplicably, Bogue.
“He’s the perfect dog,” Fanny cooed.

Louis smiled. “He even looks like you, Fan.”