Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 42

Gypsies. Vagabonds. Nomads. Those were the words Fanny had used since their marriage to cast their wanderings in a romantic light. But the words didn’t seem colorful or amusing or even accurate. The truth was, Louis’s cruel illnesses whipped around their lives, pushed them toward places they didn’t want to go, and pulled them out of places they loved. They had pursued the  ideal  climate  from  Silverado  to  Davos  to  Hyères,  and she  was  utterly exhausted from it. Louis’s sickness lived with them like an uninvited guest wherever they settled. Fanny couldn’t be angry with him, but the tyranny of the illness made her feel murderous. She hated that it tethered Louis to a bed, decided he shouldn’t have his own children, kept him from the simple joys other people took for granted. And then there was the ?ckleness, when it lifted for a while and let them hope, like fools, that they might live normally.

When they abandoned Hyères, they went to London, where Henley and Baxter claimed they’d located the specialist. George Balfour came down to be present at the consultation. As it turned out, the physician directed his remarks to Uncle George, rather than Louis or Fanny. Louis’s lungs, he said, were clear of disease.  “You can stop the ergotin now,” the doctor said before taking a quick exit. And Uncle George had agreed!

“I don’t believe it for a minute,” Fanny fumed when they were alone.  “You just lived through  the  worst  hemorrhaging  imaginable.” She  promptly  found another  doctor  who agreed with her.  “Most de?nitely you should return to Davos for the winter,” he warned them.

“Mother says Uncle George believes you have exaggerated my condition,” Louis told her after reading his letters one afternoon. “And Henley is mi?ed because it was his doctor you went against.”

“I don’t care what they say!” Fanny cried out. “No one could witness what you just went through in Hyeres and believe you have no lung disease.” She stormed around the bedroom, tossing clothing into piles. “Why do they all talk about climate and good air, and none of these people ever talks about germs? Maybe it’s germs that cause tuberculosis; that’s what some articles in the Lancet say … “

“You and the damned Lancet,” Louis moaned.

Fanny glared at Louis in the hotel bed. His hair, which he kept long to protect his neck

from drafts, pressed damp against his skull. “Look at you. You shiver. You can’t sleep. You cough constantly. The morphine they give you makes you nauseated … but ‘throw away the ergotin,’ they say. Your lungs are just ducky. What am I to do when you start bleeding again?”

Louis looked at her sadly. “My poor little man. You’re so brave.”

“Stop it! Stop the empty talk. I can’t be a saint all the time, the way you are. Sometimes I’m just so … angry.” She threw up her hands. “What do we do now? Where do we go?”
“Let’s go see Sammy,” Louis said, “as soon as I’m able. We’re close. I think it would do us both some good.”

When  Sam came to their hotel,  she hardly  recognized him.  He was taller and thinner. Before  her  stood  a  handsome  sixteen-year-old  schoolboy  wearing  new  gold-rimmed spectacles and speaking the King’s English.

“Look what happens when a mother turns her head,” she said proudly. He had gone away a year earlier, an uncertain, preoccupied boy; now he was a gentleman wearing an overcoat.

During dinner, Sam talked of his tutor, who was putting him through rigorous instruction to test for Edinburgh University. If all went well, he would live with Louis’ parents while studying  for  his  degree.  Fanny  devoured  every  detail  of  her  changing  boy.  The  pale beginning of a mustache on his upper lip. The part down the middle of his light brown hair. The way he drank tea now—full of milk and with both hands on the cup. His sudden interest in Gladstone, Irish politics, Victor Hugo.

“Where will you go next?” Sam asked when he understood they wouldn’t be returning to Hyeres.

His question hit Fanny like a blow to the sternum. It wasn’t “Where will we go?” Her son had  grown  accustomed  to  being  away  from  family.  Or  maybe  he  hadn’t.  Perhaps  he desperately longed for a home, as she did. He’d been seven years old when she uprooted him from Oakland. In the intervening ten years, he had lived in a half-dozen places. When she recalled her own childhood, she saw the brick house surrounded by tiger lilies where she spent seventeen  years. She traced in  her mind the pattern  of the wallpaper in  her bedroom; she scattered feed for her mother’s chickens beside a  shed painted red. What place could Sam picture as home?

It dawned on her how little time she had left with him before he went o? to university and then out into the world. It was possible he’d return to the States. His father had been trying to lure him to California to become the manager of a ranch he had bought there.
“What would you think of staying in Bournemouth?” she said to Louis that night. “Has pine trees and health seekers,” Louis said.  “Has a boy named Sam. Has bathing
machines tended by plump  ladies in  beach  costumes. Has a  path  called Invalid’s Walk. What more do we require? I hate the idea of Davos as much as you do. The place is full of germs.”

They rented rooms in a boardinghouse. Louis wrote, while she used the kitchen to make meat  pies  and  chocolate  cakes  for  the  boy’s  weekends  with  them.  They  had  been  in Bournemouth  for  ?ve  months  when  Thomas  Stevenson  and  “Aunt  Maggie,”  as  Sammy called Louis’s mother, came for a visit.

At sixty-six, Thomas Stevenson was frail-looking and had grown a little muddled. “Small strokes, they think,” Margaret Stevenson told Fanny when they were alone.
One evening Mr. Stevenson stood up from his chair in the parlor and made his proposal. “It would do Mrs. Stevenson and me a great favor if you found a way to be nearer to us
in our”—he paused to ?nd the word—“our dotage, I suppose you’d say.” He patted Louis’s head, as if he were a small boy. “Isn’t that the proper expression for the decrepit state in which you find me?

“If you stay in Bournemouth,” Thomas went on, “I shall buy a house for you.” He peered at them through narrowed eyes. When no immediate response came, he added, “And I will provide ?ve hundred pounds to furnish it.” He turned his head to look squarely at Fanny. “Well, now, what do you say?”