Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 52

Thomas Stevenson, on ?rst look, appeared to be napping. When Louis found him in his bedroom, he was sitting upright in a chair, wearing his broadcloth suit, and holding a pipe in his hand.

“Father,” Louis said, leaning over so Thomas could see him. He patted the old man’s knee, and the pipe, which had been propped loosely in his fist, fell to the floor.
Thomas’s glazed eyes blinked toward his son’s face, then closed again. “He doesn’t even know who I am.”

Standing behind Louis, Maggie Stevenson quaked with sobs. “Nor does he know me.” She turned to Fanny and drew her into the family circle, placing an arm around her waist. “He would have wanted it this way. He always said that any man who respected himself would not die in bed. He wants to spend his last day fully dressed, having smoked his pipe.”
“But is he comfortable?” Fanny asked.

“No, he can’t be,” Maggie said. “But this is what he always said he wanted.” “Did he actually smoke a pipe today?” Fanny asked.

“Yes.”

“Well,  then.”  Fanny  knelt  before  her  father-in-law.  “Master  Tommy,”  she  whispered. “Would you like to lie on the bed for a bit?”

The old man looked blankly at her. He had slid down and to the side of the wing chair, where his fragile body was folded like a rag doll. His eyelids fluttered.
When they managed to get him lying ?at, still wearing the suit, Fanny took Louis aside in a corner of the bedroom. “You must tell him it is all right if he leaves us now. Tell him how good a father he has been. Tell him his work is finished and he has done a fine job.”
Left alone in the room with his father, Louis saw Fanny’s wisdom. Thomas Stevenson had waited to leave them until his boy got home. Now he needed to be released. Louis knelt beside the bed and put his mouth near his father’s ear.

In a few hours, the old man was gone.

Rain fell in slanted sheets on the day of the funeral. Despite having a cold, Louis greeted guests to the house but took his leave after a  half hour when  he felt too exhausted to continue. Uncle George Balfour followed him upstairs to his bedroom.

“I cannot in good conscience allow you to attend the burial, Lou,” he said.  “You are a very sick man. If this cold goes into your lungs, it could kill you. And I don’t intend to let that happen on my watch. It’s all up to you. You have a ?broidal lung disease that can’t be cured.  It can be managed, and if you take care of yourself properly, you can avoid the hemorrhages.” Louis’s uncle produced a respirator mask shaped like a pig’s snout from the medical bag he carried with him wherever he went. “Strap this on your mouth and nostrils. There’s pinewood oil in there. The vapors will do you good.”

Now  Louis  stood in  his  robe  at  the  window  of  his  bedroom.  Outside,  a  sea  of  black umbrellas and carriages ?lled Heriot Row. Fanny and his mother ?led out in black veils, followed by his cousin Bob, who would stand in for him during the service at the cemetery. Louis watched Bob gently help Maggie into the carriage and then Fanny. How changed Bob looked. He wore his world-weary demeanor not nearly so handsomely as he had when he was twenty-?ve. He was a professor of ?ne arts in Liverpool and looked like every middleaged don Louis had ever known—wise and disappointed. How quickly the wild boy had dissolved.

Alone in the house, Louis cast about, seeking he knew not what. Some sense of sorrow on this funeral day? He didn’t feel it. He was glad that his father was no longer su?ering, that the old man’s spirit was happily released. Thank God he and his father had made their peace or he would be feeling very different.

Louis wandered into his parents’ bedroom. It had always served as their sanctuary; he hadn’t been in the room much since he was a small boy running in and out. He climbed onto the bed on his father’s side and felt the indentation in the mattress where he had lain every night for so many years. Louis examined the white marble ?replace mantel in front of him, where his mother had placed mementos from his childhood: a silver baby rattle and a photograph of Louis when he was three. He was a round-faced child with blond ringlets, attired as boys were at that age, in a white dress with a tartan silk sash around his middle. His father probably had gone to bed and awakened every morning to that picture for the past thirty years. It was how he would have preferred to think of his son, for those earliest years were the most comfortable times for his father as a father. He had read lovingly to Louis when he was small, taken him on outings, showered him with attention. It was when Louis  started  to  form  his  own  opinions  that  his  father  had  found  him  impossible  to understand. Poor man. What a hopeless cause Thomas Stevenson had faced, trying to shape

his odd and puzzling offspring.

Louis took up a pen and paper to write out an obituary. He began listing a few of his father’s feats: harbor engineer; legend in the world of lighthouse builders. Perfected the revolving holophotal sea light. Together with his brothers, Alan and David, carried on the tradition of their father, building lighthouses that guided sailors to safety and saved untold lives. A humble man who took no patents on his inventions; regarded his work as a duty to the nation.

How to capture the real man in a newspaper obituary? It couldn’t be done. How could he say that his father was a morbid man, preoccupied with sin and death, almost paralyzed when he contemplated the terrors of hell? That he lost too much time to slinking about in childish snits? That he bore a thousand prejudices and yet provided moral guidance to his friends and acquaintances who regarded him as something of a holy man. That, despite being a ?erce Christian and Conservative, he insisted any woman who wanted a divorce should be free to have it, and that no man who asked the same should be granted it. That he  loved  sun?owers  and  antique  furniture  the  way  some  people  loved  the  works  of Michelangelo, and that he made the drollest remarks at family gatherings. That he kept only a few books near him, mostly Latin texts, and a copy of The Parent’s Assistant, a book of little moral tales he had read to Louis as a  child. That, religious as he was, he had succumbed to the sin of pride when he installed the grandest bathroom on Heriot Row.
Someday I will write a real account of you, Louis thought, something beyond these facts of your life embalmed for a half column of newsprint. I will write you a book.
Louis wrote down the phrase My dear, wild, noble father.

He was struck immediately by the words. A week earlier he had been longing to end his own life in a wild and noble way. Somewhere in the unfolding events of the last two days, a sea change had come over him. He wanted to live. Desperately. Louis strapped on the hated pig snout and breathed deeply.

A few days after the funeral, the reading of the will took place in Thomas’s study. The document called for Louis to get three thousand pounds, his minimum entitlement from his mother’s marriage settlement. His mother would get 2,000 pounds and then live on the rent from the twenty-six-thousand-pound estate. When she died, Louis would inherit. And in the event of Louis’s death, Thomas Stevenson speci?ed that Fanny would inherit it all, then

Lloyd.

Louis noticed Fanny nodding solemnly, clearly honored by his father’s recognition. How like his father, Louis thought, to protect her.

“One other thing,” the lawyer added, browsing the legal document over his gold-rimmed glasses.  “Your father’s will asks that you take care of the children of his brother Alan, if they need help.”

It made sense. Uncle Alan  had been  a  key member of the family business before his breakdown and eventual death. A proper, equitable distribution of funds from the three brothers’  family  business  might  never  materialize,  and  Louis’s  understanding  of  the company’s earnings and value were murky.

Bob and Katharine would need help, if not soon then sometime; of that, Louis was fairly certain. Luckily, he was making money from his writing, for his three thousand pounds wouldn’t last long. He knew there were people who would think he’d become a rich man on the death of his father. They would be wrong. He would arrange an annual stipend of some sort for Bob and Katharine—not too little, certainly not too much, as he didn’t have it.

“Why don’t you come back with us to Skerryvore for a while?” Louis said. He was helping his mother respond to a pile of notes. “I don’t like leaving you here alone.”
When Margaret Stevenson looked up, her pained eyes softened. “I would like that,” she said. “Very much.”

“I must tell you, we may not be in England all that long. Uncle George says Colorado is not a bad idea for the winter. What would you think of that?”

“Oh.” Maggie Stevenson sighed gratefully. “I think I should enjoy seeing America.” Her cheeks, pink from a blanket of tiny blood vessels spread upon them, ?ushed red. “I have some money coming out of your father’s business. I believe there is enough of it to cover a winter in Colorado for all of us.”

After the funeral, Lloyd returned to Bournemouth for the summer.  “I don’t want to go back to school in the fall,” he announced to Fanny and Louis, “and not just because you’re talking of going to Colorado. I want to be a professional writer.” He shifted from foot to foot, glanced at Louis, then looked down. “Maybe apprentice with you?”
“But you’ve only finished two years of university,” Fanny said.

Louis looked at Lloyd. He was six feet tall, sober and studious in his thick glasses. In a

deep voice accented by his years in English schools, Lloyd put forth his case. “I have been writing since I was eleven, when you gave me the printing press. I’ve gotten much better, and it is what I want to do more than anything else I can think of. Why should I stay at Edinburgh when I could learn more from you about writing than any old professor can teach me, and we would be traveling, and I could …”

Louis thought he heard real passion. Passion was the easy part; the proof would be on the page. The boy had written some clever little stories over the years. Well, and how could he say no?

Louis  elevated  his  eyebrows  in  Fanny’s  direction.  She  returned  a  nod.  “It  will  be  a peripatetic sort of education, “ he said. “But sometimes those are the best.”
Beaming, Lloyd shook Louis’s hand and then shook it again.

In a twinkling, Louis realized afterward, their household circle had expanded by two fulltime members and their lives changed dramatically. Fanny found renters willing to take Skerryvore for half a year, booked passage for ?ve, including Valentine, on a steamer to New York, gave away jars of preserves to neighbors, and put Adelaide Boodle in charge of feeding the wild cats in the chine. They departed Skerryvore with sleeves sticking out of trunks and tempers frayed but dressed respectably, at least.

In London, their old friends trooped to Arm?eld’s Hotel to see them, from Henley and Henry James to Katharine and even Cummy. It was a sweet farewell but for Henley, who couldn’t resist ?ring a parting shot. “It’s a pity you must go,” he told Louis. “You won’t be understood in America.”

A day later, when they arrived at the docks to board the ship, they found Colvin there to see them o?, with a bag of books for Louis and a bouquet of pink carnations for Fanny. In their cabin, they found a case of champagne sent by Henry James.

Drink for seasickness and general merriment, his note read. Bon voyage, dear ones. I await the stories.