Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 45

1885

later, when they looked back on their time in Bournemouth, Louis would scratch his head and wonder at the fruit of his e?orts. “I was sick to death half the time, yet I never produced so many words in my life.” Fanny would remember him sitting in bed, churning out Kidnapped,  trying  to write fast  enough  to capture  the  dialogue  of  his wild Scottish characters. “Hoot!  Hoot!”  he  would  shout  from  the  bedroom,  transmuting  the  story’s wretched old uncle’s disgust into a whoop of joy.

Later, she would understand that he was, in bursts, doing the writing that would solidify his reputation. Afterward she would recognize something else that they hadn’t felt then: the subtle shiftings beneath their feet that shook their certainties about who they were. While she thought they were happily expanding into house and garden, Louis felt his life slowly shrinking.

Throughout those three years, there were the usual ?uctuations in Louis’s health, the strangle of bills, the pressure of deadlines, squabbles that rose out of nowhere. Not that they didn’t savor the day-to-day pleasures. They knew how to squeeze every drop of joy from linnets trilling outside, or visits by friends, or the heroics of Bogue. When the dog caught rabbits that ate Fanny’s lettuces, Louis would pour him a cup of beer. And when Bogue got into a set-to with another dog, a frequent occurrence, Fanny could see that the master,  cursed  by  physical  frailty,  beamed  with  pride  at  the  outsize  con?dence  of  his terrier.

During a bout of wellness in their second year at Skerryvore, Louis announced one day after opening the mail, “Cousins coming!”

“Bob and Katharine?”

“Yes. Henley’s tagging along as well. And don’t arch that eyebrow at me,” he said when he glanced at Fanny. “He knows his fate if he so much as sneezes.”

When the party arrived full of gay spirits late one afternoon, it seemed the din and stir of London  rushed in  the front door with  them.  Katharine always looked chic,  despite her economic situation. Today she wore pointed shoes with ?owers embroidered on the toes. Bob brought champagne and cheeses one could buy only in the city. They sat down, popped corks,  and  bathed  Louis  and  Fanny  in  talk.  Valentine  lit  candles  around  Skerryvore’s

drawing room, and it took on the feeling of a city salon.

Henley recited from memory a positive review that their London production of Deacon Brodie had garnered, then went into a lengthy analysis of why it had failed with audiences. After a while, Katharine turned the talk toward another subject. “Did you hear?” she said. “Thomas Hardy has built a country house in Dorcester and moved there with his dreadful little wife.”

“Dorchester is, what, thirty-?ve kilometers from here?” Henley asked. “You ought to go over and meet him. George Meredith could set it up. He knows him. I loved The Mayor of Casterbridge.”

“I didn’t,” Bob said. “Makes me feel gloomy.”

“Is that all it takes?” Louis jumped in. “I’ll tell you what makes me gloomy these days. The state of the British Empire. We’re headed for another war in Burma …”
Over dinner they celebrated the publication of Louis’s Child’s Garden of Verses in March and his new collection of short stories in April—The Dynamiter, based on the tales Fanny had invented for him at Hyères.

“Were you pleased with the reviews?” Katharine asked. “Well enough,” Louis said.

Fanny felt a ?ush of anger.  “I would have been more pleased had just one newspaper mentioned my name in a review.”

“Your name is on the cover of the book next to mine, Fan,” Louis said. “That’s where it matters.”

“Katharine, you’re writing more stories, I’m told,” Fanny said, changing the subject. She had helped Bob’s sister in the past with a story. Katharine was a clever, cultivated woman but a weak writer, Fanny thought.

“Yes, William is nurturing my poor efforts along.” “I’m scheming for Katharine to become famous.” Henley chortled.

“It does seem to be one of the ways a woman can earn money these days,” Fanny mused. “I’ve just begun a new story,” Katharine said, sitting up on the edge of her chair, wideeyed and nervous as a squirrel.  “It’s about a puzzling little chance encounter. A young
man on a train meets a young woman, an attractive woman who has something mysterious about her, something captivating but very di?erent from the girls he knows. She speaks as if she is from a foreign culture, and he quickly falls in love with her. It will turn out that

the reason she seems so unusual is because—”
“She’s a water nymph, a nixie!” Fanny interjected.

Katharine frowned.  “No. No, I don’t think so. I think he falls in love with her for her charming way of saying things, and then … he learns that she has escaped from an lunatic asylum.”

Now Fanny frowned.

“William here believes he can get the story into print for me when I ?nish it.” Katharine ?ashed a fond look at Henley, who attended to her like a devoted pup. It occurred to Fanny that Henley might be a little in love with Katharine.

After everyone else had gone to bed that night, Fanny poured glasses of wine for Louis and herself as they lingered in the kitchen, talking quietly.

“Do you remember the story Katharine sent me, asking to see if I could get it published in America?” Fanny whispered. “I had to rewrite the whole thing. Even she knew how bad it was, I think.”

Louis shrugged. “She seems intent on making her way by writing, it appears.” “Why did she divorce her husband?”

“Terrible  ass.  Unfaithful,  a  liar.  She  must  have  known  it  before  she  married  him; everyone else did. Thankfully, she got out of the marriage, but she hasn’t much money.”
“Your uncle Alan was mad, you told me once. Maybe that’s where she got the lunatic concept for her new story.”

“He had a breakdown when the children were small—never managed to fully come back from it. I was too young to notice.” Louis gnawed on  a  ?ngernail.  “Since Uncle Alan’s death, my father has tried to look out for them, in his fashion. He, Alan, and Uncle David were partners in the family ?rm. Now David has retired, and his sons are the only o?spring who have continued on in the business. The money end of it has been awkward. They reached an arrangement where my father will get a fairly signi?cant share of the pro?ts while  he  is  alive.  When  he  dies,  my  cousins—David’s  sons—will  have  the  business exclusively. So my father has been giving money to Bob and Katharine, though not enough to live on, to be sure. It hasn’t been the easiest situation for any of them.”
“How does Katharine live?”

“She gets by somehow.” Louis shook his head. “People seem to think anybody can publish what they write. It’s a craft, for God’s sake.”

After Louis went upstairs, Fanny stood alone in the kitchen, anger rising inside her. His parting remark was clearly intended for her as well as Katharine. She wanted to shout at him, But I’m a better writer than she is, I know I am. It burned her up to see Henley fawning over Katharine, making her part of their tight little coterie. No one would admit it, but Fanny was outside the circle. What was she to them? A nurse. A housewife.
Fanny pushed the cork into the wine bottle and put it in the cabinet. Maybe, in reality, that’s all she was. Some days it felt that way; there was so much hard labor in taking care of Louis and the household. She had been trying to write a story of her own for months, but every time she got a head of steam going, some duty waylaid her. She had gladly signed on to this life when she’d married him, but if Louis were well, she suspected there still would be little encouragement from him for her writing ambitions.

In her free moments at Skerryvore, she had scratched her creative itch by decorating the house  and  making  a  garden,  thinking  that  having  a  house  of  her  own  would  spell contentment at last. And it did, to a degree. But that kind of work ultimately didn’t satisfy her deeper creative impulses, and it didn’t fetch any glory in Louis’s circle. Lately she had begun to wonder if the work she did fetched much respect from Louis.
When her mind went in this direction, she felt as if she might explode with frustration. One minute she was longing desperately for time to realize her own gifts, and the next minute she was chiding herself for egoism. Damn vanity. I am my own worst enemy.
Surely it was their situation that was causing this awful frustration. Any woman who had ever taken care of a  sickly husband over a  long period of time no doubt felt the same emotions. Louis’s own frustration at being a patient was understandable enough. Yet his frequent surliness at being nursed hurt her and fed the nugget of rage in her chest. Why, he didn’t even seem to notice she was su?ering. There were times when she wanted to scream, “Do you have any idea what I give up every day for you?”

As it turned out, a new friend was to enter their lives who made Fanny feel a part of a far ?ner connection than she ever could have had with Louis’s old cronies. Henry James, who had accompanied his ailing sister for a ten-week stay in Bournemouth, appeared at their front door one summer day. Valentine mistook him for a tradesman—inexplicably, given the fact that he was well dressed—and sent him around back. The incident mortified Fanny, but James enjoyed a good laugh and came by the house nearly every evening after that.

He and Louis had become acquainted when James published an essay on the art of ?ction in  a  literary  magazine.  James  insisted  a  novel  should  convey  a  sense  of  reality  so convincingly vivid that one couldn’t help but say “Yes!” when reading it. He mentioned two books he had just read, a novel about a cosseted French girl’s upbringing and eventual broken heart when she failed to marry; and Treasure Island, full of buried doubloons and hairbreadth escapes. The psychological portrayal in the French novel caused James to say “No!” repeatedly, while he called Louis’s adventure story a delightful success, though he added that he could not gauge whether it competed with real life: “I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for buried treasure.”

A couple of months later, in an essay for the same literary magazine, Louis delivered a playful  thwack  to  James. If  he  has  never  been  on  a  quest  for  buried  treasure,  it  can  be demonstrated that he has never been a child, he wrote. There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit in the mountains; but has fought and suffered shipwreck and prison.

Soon enough they were in correspondence, each perfectly gleeful to ?nd another writer who pondered as deeply as he the art of ?ction writing. Fanny thought nobody else came close to those two minds in exploring the subject. Now that the actual person of Henry James was in Bournemouth, he had his own chair by the ?re at Skerryvore, and the two men spent hours talking about their work. Fanny reveled in his calls, often sitting in on their conversations.

At first she’d been intimidated by James’s regal bearing, the balding intellectual head, the serious eyes, and an expression on his full lips that she took to be condescending. But he quickly showed himself to be a kind man and still an American, despite his many years in Europe. Perhaps it was for Fanny’s amusement that he slid into slang quite easily, saying “Well, hang me” when he couldn’t think of a word, or calling faces  “mugs,” or claiming he’d been  “bamboozled.” Soon he and Fanny were sharing their perceptions about being outsiders, though Henry was not regarded as such among the European social and literary sets. They discovered commonalities—they’d both been living in Paris in 1876, and Henry knew Montmartre as well as she.

Fanny took pleasure in pampering Henry James. He loved American foods; corn on the cob dripping with butter was his favorite. The fact that it came straight out of her garden struck him as a miracle. Veal loaf with mashed potatoes brought the man close to tears. “A

working fellow needs proper belly timber,” Fanny assured him when he accepted second servings.

He often arrived with a gift for her—a jar of chestnut puree or a box of pretty stationery —and once he came with a beautiful Venetian mirror to decorate the dining room wall. She loved how he interrupted a high conceptual thread of talk to gossip about a society woman at  whose  country  house  he  had recently  dined.  Henry  was di?erent  from Louis’s other friends in many ways. For one thing, he understood a woman’s mind so much better, as was evident in everything he wrote. But there was another di?erence: He’d not had a friendship with Louis before his marriage to Fanny.

“He doesn’t long for the ‘old’ you,” she told Louis one evening after James had left. “It’s such a relief.”

“I think you’re sweet on him,” Louis teased.  “Ever since you wrote him a note and he called it clever.”

Well, maybe she had swooned. How extraordinary it was for a girl who had attended the Third Ward public school in a bumptious upstart town like Indianapolis to be discussing ideas—in front of her own hearth—with the worldly author known for making hay out of American expatriates in Europe. Henry James’s sensibilities were broad enough to allow that a woman like her might o?er up wisdom of a di?erent shade than what he heard in the company of barons and princesses. Fanny felt enlarged by his attentiveness. Was he listening  so  carefully  because  he  would  eventually  turn  her  into  one  of  his  “American abroad” characters? She had read all of his books, and she had lived long enough with a novelist to know how friends’ speech and mannerisms found their way into Louis’s books.
Once, after she’d regaled Henry with a story about her days in Nevada mine country, he’d said, “I haven’t heard the word shucks for a good while.”

“Are you taking notes for an upcoming novel?” Fanny rejoined. “The Hoosiers, perhaps?” Henry merely grinned.

If that happened, it was a fair enough trade, for Henry James was the most splendid company, and every one of his visits had a tonic e?ect on Louis. The adorable, balding bachelor with the wickedly funny tongue brightened the house every time he entered it. The hours they spent with him were a reprieve in that time of struggle. For struggle there was.

Money troubles loomed large and were uncomfortably interwoven with her family. Louis had taken on the expenses of Sammy’s education, though. Fanny knew Sam Osbourne told people he supported his son over in Europe. The truth pained her: He had sent ?ve dollars once to Sammy, and then, about two months ago, four dollars so the boy could have his photograph taken and sent back to his father. That was all.

Recently,  he  had sent  to  Louis  an  old unpaid bill  for  Fanny’s  ?at  in  Paris.  The  bill reminded her vividly of her ex-husband’s mean streak.

Louis had been magnanimous in paying for Sammy’s private schooling, as well as the taxes on the Oakland house, which Sam conceded to her in the divorce. It was not these expenses that set Louis’s teeth on edge; he took them on gladly and never spoke of them. It was the rare letters from Belle and Joe Strong to Louis, bragging of their important new lives now that Joe was set up in Honolulu as a painter, and then in the next paragraph asking for—demanding—money.

“What infuriates me,” Louis seethed in a rare moment of complaining, “is that they insult me as they beg!” Standing in the foyer after retrieving the mail, he held the latest letter in his hand. “I am the cause of the Osbourne family breakup. And therefore, I must pay my dues. Belle is collecting on the damages.”

“I don’t know what’s happened to Belle; I don’t recognize her anymore,” Fanny said. “Can’t she see? Every coin we send her has ?rst been minted in your brain. There she is, living in Hawaii, socializing with the royal set, while Joe drinks himself to death.” The more Fanny talked about it, the angrier she got. “She writes more often to Dora Williams than she does to me. She cares not one bit for how I am or how you are. But mark my words: One of these days we will find ourselves strapped with supporting them.”
The  whole  matter  was  thrown  into  a  new  light  when  a  letter  arrived  from  Belle describing news she had received from Paulie, Sam’s new wife. Fanny read it aloud to Louis during lunch:

“‘I write with a heart broken. Paulie sent a letter saying Papa has gone missing. It has been a month now without a word from him, and his friends believe, as I do, that he is undoubtedly dead. He left one morning for work, asking that Paulie have a late supper for him, and he never returned.’”

Louis looked up from his soup. “Didn’t he go missing once before?”

“Yes.” Memories rushed at her. She could feel the desert dust in her nostrils. “We were

living in Virginia City. He joined a party of men headed to Montana to work a new mine. It was his last ?ing at getting rich quick, he said. But months passed and no word came. He didn’t come back and didn’t come back. One day I looked outside the little cabin where we lived and saw wagons stu?ed full of dressers and pans and children. All these people were clanging out of town, headed for San  Francisco. I was barely getting by with my little sewing business. A friend of ours o?ered to help me get to the city, so I threw our few things into a couple of trunks, I spread word around town where I would be if Sam came back, and I got on a stagecoach with Belle.”

Sitting across from Louis, she could picture vividly the dirty, rundown neighborhood she’d moved to in San Francisco. “We lived in a cheap boardinghouse. I went around to shops, looking for work. I took with me the pretty little smocked dresses I’d made for Belle as proof of my skill. Somehow I passed myself off as a French seamstress and got a job.”
Louis looked stunned. “But you hardly speak a word of the language!” Fanny shook her head at the memory. “I didn’t talk. Mostly gestured, as I recall. We were
near destitute, but I got Belle enrolled in a real school.” A pang of sorrow passed through her when she remembered the lonely little apartment. “After a few weeks in San Francisco, word came to me that the men had all been massacred by Indians.” She swallowed hard, remembering the agony of those days. “I was twenty-six years old and suddenly a widow. I worked all day in a dress shop, sewing, and at night I took in fancy work for extra pay. My ?ngers stung from pinpricks. Some days I felt as if I were clinging to the side of a cli?, and the only thing keeping me from falling off were my wretched, worn-out fingertips.”
Louis reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “You never told me all the details.” “I didn’t want to sully our relationship with more talk about Sam. I ?gured you’d heard
about enough.”

“And, of course, he came back.”

“Yup.” Fanny laughed.  “Walked into the boardinghouse one day with open arms. Told me that he and a friend had lagged behind the party of prospectors the day they were ambushed. Miraculously, they escaped with their lives.”

“I remember that part,” Louis said. He fell silent for a minute. “Do you believe he’s dead this time?”

“He might be,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s possible he committed suicide. He was given to melancholy.”  She  ran  her  hand  over  her  mouth  and  breathed  deep.  “It  will  crush  the

children. Especially Belle.”
“Are you going to tell Sammy?”

“Not yet. I’m going to write to a couple of friends to see what they know.” When she heard from Dora Williams a month later, Fanny realized she might never learn
what happened to Sam Osbourne. A pile of clothes had been found on the beach; they were thought to be his. But a rumor of a sighting in South Africa was a?oat as well. It was just as likely Sam had decided to cut and run once again. Fanny wondered if he was with some new young woman, far away from California.

When she ?nally revealed to Sammy that his father was missing and thought to be dead, the boy turned his head slightly to the side and looked at her through squinting eyes, as if he disbelieved her. He went out of the house for several hours. When he came back, his face was swollen from crying. He allowed Fanny to put her arms around him. He stepped back, then, and composed himself. “I want to change my name to my middle one,” he said. “From now on, call me Lloyd.”