Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 55

The ink was frozen, as it had been every morning since December. Louis grabbed the bottle from his desk and went to the woodstove in the sitting room to warm the black chunk inside. He found his mother bundled up in her buffalo coat and mittens.
“How are your ears this morning, dear?” Maggie Stevenson asked her son. “Did you go through the window again?”

Maggie Stevenson grinned sheepishly, her face a little white wafer above an enormous fur ruff at her neck. “I’m none the worse for it.”

Since their arrival in Saranac, his mother had been climbing in and out of her bedroom window and walking around the outside of the house to get to the sitting room, rather than cut  through  Louis  and  Fanny’s  bedroom,  where  Louis  worked.  It  was  but  one  of  the inconveniences she endured cheerily.

Fanny had a  wood ?re going, but the room was frigid. The ?ve of them would stay together there so as to keep warm. Louis would work in the morning, as would Lloyd, who pounded away with gloved ?ngers at his typewriter. The two men would ice-skate on the pond nearby in the afternoon, or Louis would walk through the snowy hills by himself, carefully avoiding the other tubercular inhabitants, who bore a startling resemblance to those at Davos. Pink-cheeked in the twenty-below weather, they ?ew by him on horsedrawn sleighs, calling out giddy pleasantries.

As soon  as the  ink  melted,  he  would pen  a  letter  of  introduction  for  his new  friend McClure, who was headed to London on a foray into the English publishing world, seeking talented writers for his publications. Louis had suggested that Henley act as his agent in London.  He  would  write  notes  to  Henley,  Colvin,  and  Baxter,  alerting  them  that  an American newpaper syndicator would be soon knocking on their doors.
“The neighbors o?ered to take me into town on the buckboard tomorrow,” Maggie said. “I’ll get groceries and go to the post office.”

“I can make that trip,” Louis said. “You don’t have to.” “No, you work. I rather enjoy the cold air.”

Louis hardly recognized the delicate matron of 17 Heriot Row. He wondered if a part of his mother had been buried all those years while living with the powerful and protective Thomas Stevenson, for she seemed to have blossomed since his father’s death.

The words came quickly in the morning, and despite the sounds of boots on wood, the clang of pans, and the repeated fussing at the ?replace as Fanny and Valentine heated up soapstones  to  put  under  their  feet,  Louis  lost  himself  in  his  novel  about  the  Scottish uprising. He couldn’t seem to get away from that pivotal moment in history when the Scots rose up against the English and were defeated. Louis wanted the book to have sweep, to possess an emotional depth that would satisfy Henry James, and to have a female character who  would  earn  Fanny’s  approval.  He  wanted  a  tragedy:  brother  against  brother.  He wanted no less than the fall of a great house caused by the father’s sin of duplicity.

“Did you ?nish your chapter?” Fanny asked later that afternoon. Standing at the stove, dressed in a petticoat with thick wool stockings pulled up to her knees, a heavy pair of boots, and a  coat, she was frying a  slab of ham in  a  skillet. Through the window just beyond her, snow fell softly, erasing the rabbit and deer prints that threaded over the white drifts.

“I did.”

“Are we to have a reading tonight, then?” Maggie asked, looking up above her reading spectacles at her son. She was seated by the hearth, her feet propped on a fat log to avoid the freezing drafts of air that shot across the floor.

“I’d prefer to hear a little of Melville,” Louis said. “He has just come among cannibals in the Marquesas Islands.”

Lloyd lifted his head. He was studying a world map spread out on a table in front of him. “I cast my vote for Typee,” he said.

After dinner, they gathered around the battered map. Lloyd’s ?nger traced the route of Melville’s journey in the South Pacific.

“If we could get a boat in San Francisco, we might sail to the Marquesas,” Lloyd said. “Here is the island of Nuka Hiva where Melville first encountered cannibals.”
“Are they still eating people there?” Maggie asked cautiously. “Cannibales!” Valentine gasped.

“Former  cannibals,”  Louis  said. “The  directory  says  the  missionaries  have  reformed
them.”


“Oh, think of the warmth,” Fanny said. “Palm trees …” Lloyd added.

“… the air full of the smell of coconut.” Maggie sighed. “McClure would pay me in installments for those South Seas letters.” They turned in unison toward him.

“We could afford to do this?” Lloyd asked.

“If I accept his o?er? Quite.” Louis grinned. “What is wealth good for, anyway? Just two things, as I see it—a yacht and a string quartet.”

“Can you bear another sea journey?” Louis asked her when they were alone in bed. “You’ve hardly recovered from the Ludgate Hill.”

Fanny was quiet. “We would be out how long?” she said after a while. “A month before we saw land again?”

“It depends on where we sail to. If we leave from San Francisco, my guess is that it would be three or four weeks before we reach the Marquesas.”

Her ?ngers played over her lips. “I could do it,” she said, “I could do it. I want to go see my mother. I could continue on to San Francisco … look into hiring a boat.”
It would not be easy on her, he knew. But cold air and altitude were not easy on her, either.  He  was  healthiest  in  places  that  laid  her  ?at  from  dizziness  or  nausea  or melancholy. Only in Hyeres had they found a place that worked its spell on both of them.
Louis glanced at her face. He could tell she was mentally packing her trunk.