Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 39

Louis grasped the brass handles on either side of the clinic’s large scale and mounted it. He was not naked, but for Davos, nearly. He wore no shoes or jacket, just trousers and a thin shirt.

“Let go of the handles now,” Dr. Reudi said as he peered at Louis’s o?cial weight. “Two pounds,” the doctor announced. The small group of patients gathered in the hall politely applauded.

Louis alighted with a sheepish grin. “Pathetic,” he whispered as he took his seat next to Fanny.

“Your weight?” she asked. “This gathering.”

By the end of the meeting, every patient had taken his turn at the weekly weighing. Then they returned to their places in the community, as pharmacist, furniture maker, postal clerk, chocolatier. This working community of tuberculars in Davos was but one innovation of Dr. Reudi, who prescribed fresh air, exercise, and a  positive outlook along with any medications  he  handed  out.  Dr.  Reudi  would  have  none  of  the  old  thinking  about tuberculosis  that  romanticized the  pale  beauty  of  the  a?icted,  lying  about  on  fainting couches.

When they arrived at Davos, the taciturn doctor had come over to the chalet where they were keeping house to have a look at Louis. He itemized the patient’s conditions: chronic pneumonia; in?ltration and bronchitic tendency; enlarged spleen. He did not say the feared word “tuberculosis.”

“You  will  need  to  stay  here  a  minimum  of  eighteen  months,”  he  said.  “I  make  no promises, but you have a chance to stabilize your lungs if you stick to the regimen.” Reudi prescribed a diet that called for warm cow’s milk, red meat, and plentiful wine. He limited Louis’s work sessions to three hours and outlawed cigarettes, though he permitted him three pipes  per  day.  After  giving  Louis  a  good  talking-to,  he  turned  a  cool  eye  on  Fanny, pronounced her fat, and put her on a diet of meat, lemons, health tonics, and a low dose of arsenic.

“One of those custard pastries with apricots,” Fanny said as they walked through the snow back to their chalet after the weighing session. “If I could have anything I wanted to

eat, that’s what I would choose.”

“I wouldn’t have food. I’d have six cigarettes straight in a row.” “I’m fat,” she said sighing, “but I want you to know I don’t approve of it.” “Plumpness is fashionable in Paris, Fan,” he comforted her. “How many pipes have you smoked today?”

“All three.”

“Mmmm. It’s going to be a long night.” “There’s wine.”

“Ah, there’s that,” she said, linking her arm with his as their chalet came into sight. Since their arrival in October, Louis had done his best to partake of what Davos o?ered.
When she saw him heading outside with his ice skates or bundling up for tobogganing, Fanny demurred. She’d always hated cold weather. There were plenty of inside activities, such as whist, and charity bazaars to knit for, but Fanny mostly stayed on the couch in the big open room on the second ?oor, slowly reading her way through a pile of novels and Lancet medical journals she’d found at the sanitarium library.

As the weeks wore on, she began to worry aloud that Davos was not a healthy place for her son. Sammy was pleased enough to spend his days with Louis, printing stories on his little press and waging  vast and long  military  campaigns against each  other with  lead soldiers. Thought tutors were interspersed between the entertainment, she decided Sammy would be far better educated at a  small private school in  Bournemouth, England. Louis embraced the boy heartily as he departed, shouting to him as the train began to move, “Be diligent, Sam, especially in play!”

Now it was down to three of them, counting Bogue.

With the boy away, the health resort full of sunburned optimists began to feel oppressively arti?cial even to Louis, though he tried not to show Fanny. She, on the other hand, could not conceal her growing misery.

“Did you ever see one of those snow globes?”

“The paperweights you shake? With the sparkly snow that swirls around inside? Yes, in Paris. They’re delightful.”

“I feel as if I’m living in one. I am the figure inside, wearing a frozen smile.” Louis patted her knee. “We won’t be here forever, little man.”

“What does that mean?’ Fanny asked crossly. “My health is much better.”

“I mean ‘little man.’”

Louis laughed. “You are tiny, and you have the heart of a courageous man. It’s a compliment.”

Fanny was losing her sense of humor—fearful, no doubt, that they would have to live out the remainder of his days in the Alps.

Symonds, the Renaissance scholar, was one of Dr. Reudi’s patients who had accepted his fate and built a permanent home in Davos. “You will notice a certain nervous strain from the high altitude among the people who reside here,” he warned one day as Louis sat in the man’s study, “particularly sensitive souls like yourself. You may find yourself a bit grumpy.” “So that’s what’s wrong with us.”

“You’ll get accustomed to the climate because you must,” Symonds pronounced. Louis could not conceive of calling Davos home. The landscape presented itself in black,
white, and blue, without a hint of natural smell. The snow had its own beauty but was nothing to the brown and green of a Highlands meadow fragrant with life. He would never concede defeat the way Symonds had, though he welcomed the man’s company and gladly listened to his lectures about Shakespeare and Italy and the Council of Trent. They helped fill the time.

As the days stretched into weeks, people went missing. It happened without fanfare. A knitting companion of Fanny’s would be unavailable. The man who regularly sat at the next  dining  table  stopped  appearing  for  dinner.  A  new  postman  replaced  the  old.  All around, fellow inmates were quietly dying—many of them young, athletic, cheerful, and the least likely candidates for the undertaker.

Louis was positively spruce by comparison and tried to help the others with a good turn. He spent one afternoon desperately searching for a birthday gift for a twelve-year-old girl who was not expected to see another birthday. Hearing that another resident had received roses at Christmas, he went to her quarters and talked the woman out of her ?owers, then delivered them to the sickly girl.

He was hungry for the company of his old friends, but only Colvin visited brie?y. When an unexpected guest did show up at their house in January, it was Fanny Sitwell. She had brought her eighteen-year-old son, Bertie, for treatment. He had just ?nished a school term

when he was stricken with a galloping consumption. It moved Louis to see his wife rise up from  her  depression  to  shower  kind  attentions  on  his  ?rst  love.  No  one  could  better understand her sorrow. He tried to ?nd hopeful words, but even Fanny Sitwell could see the boy’s condition was plummeting. By April, when signs of a thaw began, Bertie Sitwell was dead and buried at  Davos  in  a  cemetery  for  boys  and girls.  Fanny  Sitwell  went  home stricken, silent, and childless.

For the ?rst time in his life, Louis found his writing pace slowing to a  crawl.  “Do you remember how I couldn’t seem to write in this place when we ?rst came here? Now all my little fishes talk like whales.”

“How is that?”

“I ?nd myself using big words to give some force to a thought. It’s these peaks all around us. Never have I used such lofty polysyllables.”

She did not respond or look up. The carved clock on the mantel ticked off a minute before she said dully, “Just write.”

She resisted being joked into a happier humor.

“A good novel might cure your boredom,” he suggested when  he realized Fanny had stopped reading books or writing stories. Only the Lancet held her attention.
“This article says that some vinegars erode your intestine,” she said, looking up from the journal.

“Does that mean I can’t have vinegar now?” he protested. Sure enough, she moved the vinegar cruet away from him when they went to dinner that evening. Another day, she was excited by the idea that salt hardened one’s arteries and caused early death. Yet another time, she became highly exercised by an article on germ theory.

“Many diseases are spread by germs, it says. Well, we both know that; I have known it for years. It makes perfect sense. Your body’s weak right now, so you’re more likely to catch something.”

“What next? Will you be making every visitor take a bath before he comes through the door?”

“You treat me like your jailer!” Fanny shouted, throwing down the magazine. “Why must you always expect the worst possible outcome for everything?” Fanny stood up and put her face close to his. “Why must you go around chirping like a

canary, pretending everything is perfect? It is so wearisome.”

“You  are  wearisome!  Stop  trying  to  manage  every  minute  of  my  bloody  life!”  Louis stormed into the  bedroom,  slammed the  door,  and crawled under  the  covers.  There  he seethed,  glad she  was  miserable  on  her  diet,  glad she  was  getting  a  taste  of  her  own medicine. As the hour passed, though, he felt immeasurably sad that they had come to this point.

How I hate fighting with her!

Excitable.  Both  of  them were.  What was to be done about it?  There probably  would always be some snapping friction in the house, high altitude or no. At least they spoke openly, argued frankly. It was a damn sight better than the silent treachery that a lot of married couples practiced.

In Davos, in such close quarters, his illness brought out the best and worst in both of them. Fanny was her nurturing, wry self one day, and the next, a screeching hellicat. Or worse, so willing to ?nd the dark cloud that she actually made him feel sicker. Fanny let out sighs that seemed to rise up out of a Slough of Despond. Her kidneys ached, her head went dizzy, she could never get warm. As she sat and stared at the beams overhead, her mind seemed to get stuck on things. “Will you look into getting a cross for Hervey’s grave?” she’d  asked  Louis,  and  he  promised  he  would.  She  was  terri?ed  the  o?cials  at  SaintGermain  cemetery would move the boy’s bones into a  common  grave, even  though the contract had not yet run its ?ve-year course. “I’ve put Baxter on it,” he assured her, and he had, but it wasn’t enough to say that. “Have you heard from Baxter?” she asked again and again.

Louis realized he was far better equipped to survive solitude than Fanny. He could retreat for hours while buccaneers or truant sons played about the hills and furrows in his brain, even if they never made it onto the page. Louis had been escaping the stupefying lassitude of sickness in just this way for as long as he could remember. And when words were doing what he wanted them to do on the page, he could soar above everything, even the sickbed.
Not Fanny. Her whole life was about being busy, about things she touched in the course of a day. She had been this way all her life, continually experimenting, exploring, creating with her hands, whether it was a recipe for stew or a photograph or a mix of pigments for a better blue on canvas. Con?ned by cold weather, in a community of sick people, she had grown frustrated and then depressed.

Louis left his bed to go speak with her. He poked the ?re, then went to her at the stove across the room. “What have I let you in for, Fan?” he said, putting his hand on her back. “I always expected I would be a rather dignified invalid. I’ve always believed it is a person’s sacred duty to be happy. But this … “ He shuddered. “I know you hate this place. Well, so do I; I don’t want to die here. But what good does it do to complain about it?”
“You are not going to die in this place,” she growled. She slammed down a wooden spoon and went outside.

So much for a quick reconciliation.

Through  the  window,  he  could  see  her  leaning  against  the  balcony  rail. What  is  she thinking about out there? Going over all her troubles? Maybe it wasn’t entirely him. Maybe she was regretting the distance between her and her daughter. When news came that Belle had her baby, it was Louis who wrote the standard congratulatory letter and who later kept up correspondence with Belle and Joe. She nursed her grudges, Fanny did. And then all of a sudden  they  would  disappear.  Just  the  other  day,  Fanny  had  apologized  to  him  for exploding at his friends while they were in London. It had taken her months to get over that anger.

No doubt she was there in the cold, wishing for the peacefulness of the Monterey beach or  the  warm  hills  of  Napa,  where  she  could  watch  snails  and  bees  going  about  their business. He remembered a remark she’d made at Silverado when they’d both stopped what they  were  doing  to  watch  a  spider  weaving  an  intricate  web. “That,”  she’d  said thoughtfully, “is a spider explaining himself.”

Louis watched her standing on the balcony without a coat, her back to him. A gust of wind whooshed a ?ne spray of snow o? the roof and over her. She seemed not to notice. The blinding sun lit up the snowflakes in her hair like glitter.