Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 46

“No! Noooo!”

Fanny  leaped up,  her heart in  her windpipe.  Louis was ?ailing  about in  the twisted bedcovers. She pulled back the sheet and looked all around his face and pillow but saw no blood. Fanny shook his shoulder. “Louis, wake up!”

His eyes, open now, darted around the room.

“You’re having a nightmare,” she said, running her palm across his forehead to soothe him.

“Damm it! Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” “You were yelling—”

“Get my board!”

Fanny padded over to the corner of the room where a rectangle of wood leaned against the wall.

“Hurry! Pen and paper. Now!”

She tiptoed out of the room and went to the extra bedroom. In the hallway, the clock showed 2:10 A.M. When she woke again around seven, she put her ear to the keyhole and listened for him but heard nothing. Carefully, she cracked open the door. Louis was sitting upright, his pen scratching furiously across paper.

In the kitchen, only Valentine’s rump was visible. She was cleaning the oven. “Quick,” Fanny said, panting  from her race downstairs.  “Make co?ee and toast on  a
tray.” When she hustled up stairs with the food, he gave no sign that he saw or heard her. He wore his wine-colored poncho over his shoulders; his head was bent in concentration, a dark forelock drooping over his brow. She set the tray on a chair next to the bed and left.
The previous week, Louis had had a hemorrhage. “He’s not to have any excitement,” the doctor had said after examining him. “No guests. No speaking. Give him the morphine to keep  him  sedated  for  a  few  days.”  Now  she  remembered  the  usual  addendum: “No movement of the arm.” She knew better than to interrupt Louis. Once he had said to her, “A story should read like a dream you don’t want to wake from.” Right now he was writing about a dream, and he was in a dreamlike trance as he did it.

For three days, the air in the house was charged, as if a ?erce thunderstorm were roaring

upstairs. Fanny, or sometimes Valentine, crept into the bedroom to leave food for him. Once, when Fanny brought in a new supply of ruled foolscap and ink, she noticed he was writing with his pen between his third and fourth ?ngers, the fore?nger obviously gone numb. The ?nished pages of his story lay on the ?oor, punctured through by the steel nib of his pen as he furiously raced to record his thoughts.

She stayed away except when he needed something, sleeping in another room rather than risking a break in his fierce concentration.

On the third day, when Fanny brought him lunch, he spoke. “Sam—” Louis started, then corrected himself. “Lloyd is home?”

“Yes,” she said brightly, “for the weekend. Do you want to see him?” “Not now. But tell him I will read tonight.”

When he came downstairs that evening, Louis looked feverish. He shook his red right hand all about, trying to relieve scrivener’s cramp. She fetched some paper for Sam and herself to write down their responses, as was their custom.

Louis arranged himself in his favorite chair. He loved reading his work aloud. It was a self-indulgence, poorly disguised. He used Fanny’s criticism and edits when he thought them right, though she could just as well have read his manuscripts. But he loved to feel his tongue shape the sounds of the words he’d written on paper. He loved to hear a voice out loud—Long John Silver’s, for example—after having heard it only in his head. Reading was his reward after any day’s work, and he savored the attention of his little troupe of true believers. It was with plot that Fanny’s attentiveness helped. She would pepper him with questions: How exactly did the chest get there? Or How would the others know?
Louis began.

“‘Henry Jekyll was a respected chemist in London town,’” he read,  “‘a tall, handsome man of ?fty whose large, ?rm, white hands spoke of his profession in shape and size. At the moment, he was engaged in measuring out some white salts into a graduate containing a bright red liquid.’”

As the story continued, Fanny and Lloyd learned that Dr. Henry Jekyll was a spiritually bankrupt man who was frustrated that he could not indulge certain urges because of his standing in the community. He began experimenting with powders and eventually came upon a chemical formula that, when drunk, allowed him to assume the disguise of another person entirely, an ugly, primitive-looking, uncivilized man with hairy hands, an evil man

named Edward Hyde.

It was as suspenseful as any story Louis had ever written, Fanny thought, but there was a strong  aroma  of  sexual  misconduct  about  Hyde’s  nocturnal  adventures.  Louis  described Jekyll’s struggle as a  “war in the members” and a  “spirit versus the ?esh” problem. The sexual innuendo bothered her,  but  she  knew  Louis would dismiss her  squeamishness as worthy of the worst prude.

There was something more deeply amiss in the story, though. Louis had made Dr. Jekyll a  thoroughly  bad  man  whose  only  purpose  in  transforming  himself  into  Hyde  was  to bene?t from the disguise it provided him. She wrote in her notes: Shouldn’t Jekyll be both good and bad, as all people are? The understanding hit her like a bolt, and she did not know whether to tell him the truth. Louis needed to be propped up just now, but to lie to him, to mask her true feelings would bring down his wrath later. He called her his “critic on the hearth.” He counted on her. She wrote her feelings as best she could.

Sitting  on  the  window  seat  in  the  drawing  room,  Louis  read while  Fanny  continued taking furious notes. Lloyd had started to but put down his pencil and stared ahead with a horrifed look as the plot thickened. Louis read straight through for nearly two hours. At the end, Lloyd was clapping wildly. “How on earth did you do that in three days?”
Louis gloated for only a moment before turning to his wife. It was obvious he could tell from her reticence that Fanny was disturbed.

“All right,” he said, extending his hand for her written notes. “I’m going to just say it, Louis.”

“Yes, yes.”

“I don’t think you should specify the vice.”

Louis waved a hand dismissively. “Thank you, Mrs. Grundy.”

“You’ve missed the point,” she persisted. “Dr. Jekyll should not be such a bad fellow; he should be someone who is a mix of qualities. You’ve said it yourself time and again, that good and evil both reside in every man and woman. That’s why this story should be an allegory,  not  another  bogey  tale.  You’ve  written  it  as  only  one  man’s  horror  story. Furthermore, the potion doesn’t ring true.”

Louis looked ba?ed by her challenge.  “The potion was in the dream. A dream doesn’t lie,” he said indignantly. “And of course it’s an allegory, but it must be subtle.”
“It is too subtle, Louis. You need to make Jekyll’s weaknesses less de?ned, so that anyone

can see himself in the story and feel uneasy. If you strengthen the allegory and make the vice more abstract, it can be a masterpiece.”

He snatched up his papers from the hassock in front of him. “What do you know?” he shouted at her. “You don’t own my mind!”

Fanny’s face ?ushed hot as she watched him stand up and let his ?st ?y into the wall, then storm out of the room and up the stairs.

Valentine peeked around the doorway, wide-eyed.

“We mustn’t speak to him at all now,” Fanny told her. “Not a word.”

tiptoed into the bedroom around eleven to see if she might make amends and share the bed for the night. Louis was awake and appeared to be thinking. She could not read his expression in pro?le, though, and he did not speak. When he became aware she was in the room,  he  pointed  a  long  bony  ?nger  at  the  ?replace.  She  misunderstood  at  ?rst  and prepared to add coals to the ?re. But when she saw the scraps of burnt-edged paper with a few letters remaining in Louis’s hand, the horror of the situation fell upon her.
“Why? Why did you burn it?” Her eyes filled with tears. “To punish me?” He looked away.

She went back  downstairs and sat by  the ?re in  the dining  room.  The ?ames threw ?ickering light on the muskets and pistols on the walls. Well, it was done; he’d burned it. Be honest, Fanny, she mused. You wanted to burn it yourself.

Everyone looked at Louis and thought of the boyish fellow who wrote Treasure Island. The story he had read to her tonight touched on something she had refused to explore before. How perfectly named his evil character was—Hyde. What dark longings did Louis hide? Jekyll’s compulsions in the story sounded sexual. The reader couldn’t help but think of whoremongering, though Louis hadn’t included any significant women characters.
The story left her deeply uneasy. It made her wonder if she really knew her husband. Over the years, she’d noticed that Louis had many friends who were homosexuals. She thought of Symonds in Davos, who was Louis’s closest friend during their stay. If ever there were a man living a double life, it was he. He was married and a father of four daughters, but he kept male lovers on the side, and everyone knew it.  “He publishes his own dirty little books,” a  woman  in  Davos had told her,  “then  he gives them out to his  ‘special’ friends.”

Fanny felt perplexed. Lord knows, Louis doesn’t condemn the disposition. Neither did she. But it occurred to her that men fell in love with Louis the way women did. Gosse, Colvin, Henley. Even Henry James seemed smitten.

It  was  not  something  she  wanted  to  think  about.  But  she  had  made  the  mistake  of averting her eyes from Sam Osbourne’s dalliances, so she forced herself to contemplate the possibilities. When she ?rst met Louis, she found some of his mannerisms woman-like—the way he moved his hands when he talked; his sensitive mouth; the private humor he seemed to share with his men friends that could spin out into high hilarity and leave her puzzled; more than anything, the way he showed his emotions so openly. He would fall upon the ground in tears and then be up the next moment, giggling out of control. She’d dismissed all that as part of his high-strung personality, especially since, from the beginning, he’d shown himself to be a hungry man in bed. When he was well, his appetite for her was voracious. And when he was ill? Of his earthly pleasures, lust seemed to be the thing he let go of last.
Early on in their relationship, Louis had confessed to visiting prostitutes when he was a young man. Wouldn’t he have pursued men back then if that was his inclination?
No,  she  was  certain  her  marriage  was  not  a  false  front.  Still,  she  wondered: What unnameable impulses does Louis harbor?

She  knew  what  he  would say  about her Hyde. That inside the kind, loving  girl from Indiana resided the Greek Furies themselves, who came out, ever so occasionally, seeking blood and vengeance. He referred to her as the Angry One. She couldn’t deny it.
Louis, she realized, was one of the few people who had not disappointed her. Once she had thought him the closest to Jesus Christ of anyone she’d ever met; she knew now that he wasn’t so perfect. He was vain, vulnerable to ?attery. Henley teased him that he couldn’t pass a mirror without looking at his reflection.

Louis was incapable of conscious cruelty, but he did have a temper. Few people knew how  enraged  he  could  become.  She  would  never  forget  the  scene  in  Paris  when  he overheard a Frenchman insulting the British. Fanny could still see the blur of Louis’s velvet jacket as he leaped up and demanded the man retract his remarks. When the fellow stood to call his bluff, Louis slapped him across the face.

That is the man I married. Louis hated for anyone to be treated unfairly, including himself. Sometimes he overreacted. As for dark longings, if he had a desire for some other kind of life, it was hidden even from himself.

The longer she tried to understand it, the more she saw the subject as an enigma. She put out the ?re in the dining room, collected a quilt, and, listening to the coo of doves in the chimney, fell asleep in a chair.