Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 80

1893

Dr. Roth ushered Louis into his private o?ce and settled him in a chair, then went to sit behind his desk. The Sydney doctor was a trim fellow, kindly if not a touch awkward. He took o? his eyeglasses and rubbed the pad beneath  each  eye, as if buying  time before delivering bad news.

“Your  wife’s  physical  health  is  not  good.  The  gallstones  and  rheumatism,”  he  said, replacing the spectacles. “We have a sense of her physical ailments. Her mental situation is more di?cult to analyze. She tells me she has had brain fever and congestion in the past. And that your uncle George gave her chlorodyne for head pain. It’s hard to make sense of what exactly is at work in her brain. You say her moods are up and down.”
“I should explain a bit about my wife,” Louis said.  “Fanny may look like a timid little woman, but she has an intense personality. She’s a violent friend and a brimstone enemy— people  tend to  hate  her  or  worship  her.  She  is  capable  of—no,  she does  extraordinary things. She’s always been a wonderful, supportive wife to me. The fact that I am alive is due entirely to her.” Louis shook his head. “She has a habit of taking on too much, though, of  overreaching.  There  will  be  a  period  of  frenzied  activity  and  then  weeks  of  entire hibernation when she simply shuts the door on the rest of the world. The pattern is nothing new. But I would say that for a good year now, she has been an exaggerated version of the woman I just described. She improved immensely on the voyage over here, but I must tell you, before the breakdown, she seemed possessed. She would go out into the ?elds and crawl around in the dirt with a spade in her hand for ten, twelve hours at a time. Like a demented beast.”

The doctor’s forehead creased, and Louis realized how horrifying a phrase he had uttered to describe his own wife.

Roth ?ngered a gold pin on his lapel. “Doctors tend to use the latest terms when we have no  certainty  of  what  causes  the  symptoms.  I’m  reluctant  to  do  that,  since  your  wife’s condition could be any number of things. You say a doctor in Honolulu diagnosed her with Bright’s disease. Kidney failure is sometimes accompanied by delirium. That could explain her symptoms.” He shrugged.  “On the other hand, it may be the change of life; it’s not unheard of. Perhaps she has worked herself into a  state of delirious exhaustion. Or it’s

possible  she’s  reacting  to  some  medication.  She  seems  to  have  dosed  herself  with  any number of things.

“But there is a chance, I’m sorry to say, that it’s a more entrenched mental illness. We know little about how to treat mental breakdowns. What we know is that she can come back and live a normal life. Or not. It varies. All I can do is give her medicine to sedate her. Only  her  brain  can  cure  itself.  And every  brain  is  di?erent,  you see.  Rest  is  essential. Healthy food. Exercise. That’s the best we have right now.” He handed Louis a note for the pharmacist. “This will calm her. Give it to her right away.”

“So we wait and hope it is over?”

The doctor wagged his head somewhere between yes and no.

At the Oxford Hotel, where they were staying, Louis administered the new medicine to Fanny and then took his wife and stepdaughter to lunch. Belle and Louis ate oysters, while Fanny, following doctor’s orders, ate something that looked like gruel and drank Maltine for her stomach. She seemed calmer already. All three of them turned buoyant with relief at being out of the doctor’s office and in the normalcy of the restaurant.
“Do you remember the first time we came here?” Louis touched Fanny’s knee gently. “To the Oxford? Yes.”

“You forget I was with you, too,” Belle chastised him. “It was the ?rst time I ever saw Louis Stevenson in a blue fury.”

They had retold the story time and again, but it felt right to tell it here and now. Three years before, when they’d ?nished the Equator voyage and come to Sydney, he and Fanny had gone to the elegant Victoria Hotel to check in. He had dressed in a suit to enter the hotel,  albeit  one  that  had been  stu?ed into  the  corner  of  a  trunk  for  the  previous  six months, while they sailed the South Seas. Fanny looked no better, though he recalled they had put on shoes.

“Can you blame a man?” Louis said. “I asked for a suite of rooms on the ?rst ?oor. The receptionist, without a word, hands a key to a porter who takes us up to a tiny room on the fourth ?oor. It was terrible. As you recall, I rode the lift down and had words with the man at the desk.”

“That was just the moment when I stepped out of a taxi and entered the lobby of the Victoria,” Belle said. “There was Mama, rather stunned-looking, watching the scene unfold. And there you were, at the beginning of a performance I think of as ‘RLS Unbound.’ Had

words? You were apoplectic, Mr. Stevenson. But the author didn’t lose his tongue for long. Oh, no. It was poetic wrath that came out of your mouth. I have never in my life heard anyone lay another human being so low, and without one curse word.” She shook her head remembering. “I have a vivid image of your luggage, sitting in that lobby, and all these fine ladies in silk dresses disgruntled to have to step around it. You had a few traveling cases, but there were other pieces—those tree trunks that had lids. The insides of the trunks were stu?ed with  all manner of  souvenirs.  And you had not just tree trunks;  you had straw baskets, calabash gourds, tapas, fish nets, spears …”

“We  were  a  bit  unconventional,”  Louis  conceded. “Still,  that  pretentious  little  man behaved as if we smelled, which we most certainly did not.”

“How could you tell?” Fanny asked wryly, and they began to laugh. Perhaps it was simply the giggle coming from Fanny’s mouth, or perhaps it was the gush
of warmth that had been absent from her voice for so long, but her simple remark caused the three of them to fall into hysterics. They savored the laughter, prolonged it, cried from it.

“All right. Maybe the luggage smelled,” Louis said.

“The best part was when the Sydney newspaper trumpeted that the famous R.L.S. was in Sydney and staying at the Oxford Hotel. And the Victoria had to send over your mail every day!”

He smiled. “That was satisfying.”

“Hold me close,” Fanny said to him that night.

Her whole being seemed sweet and gentled. He pulled her into his arms, where they huddled together under the sheet like children in the dark. “Are you afraid?” he asked her.
She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “I’m terri?ed that the thoughts will come back and it will start again.”

He stroked her forehead gently. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

She didn’t answer. After a minute or two, she said, “Don’t leave me alone, Louis. I don’t want to be this way.”

Outside their room, they heard luggage cart wheels creak down the hall. “Do you love me?”

“Yes, Fanny, yes.”

“Forgive me.”

“For what?” he asked.

“For the cruelties. I don’t know why I strike out—I hate myself afterward. Hate myself. I think, somehow, the meanness comes of fear.”

In the morning, he watched her face while she slept. She looked ?fteen years younger. He felt a surge of tenderness course through him, and he realized how long it had been since he’d felt such protectiveness toward her. Fanny was such a strong force, no one had seen the cracks. Her terrible unhappiness had left deep lines on either side of her mouth. At the moment, he couldn’t see them anymore; it was as if the night had smoothed away all the worry.

The streets of Sydney were lively when they went out. Belle was the ?rst to notice how a few people stopped in their tracks. “Louis,” she said. “You’re being recognized!”
He was already aware of eyes and ?ngers directed at him. He’d actually heard a passing woman  ask loudly of her husband,  “Is that his Moroccan  wife?” Soon  enough  someone approached him for an autograph. The man pro?ered a fresh copy of Jekyll and Hyde.  “I just popped into the bookstore and bought it. Read it already, of course.”
Louis hated such attention, but now it amused him, because it had been such a long time since it had happened. The whites in Apia were used to him. They talked to him about his work, but there was no adulation, thankfully. Among the native Samoans, few of them seemed aware that he was famous for being an author elsewhere in the world.
He took Fanny and Belle shopping for new dresses and had a suit of clothes made up for himself,  including  a  new  white  shirt  and  a  white  tie.  When  they  happened  upon  a photographer’s studio, Louis impulsively had a picture taken of the three of them sitting together on a divan. Fanny slept in the afternoon, while he and Belle went to a dressmaker and had a new gown made up for Fanny using Belle’s measurements. They presented the black velvet dress to her a few days later, and Louis warmed to see her ?ngers linger on the duchesse lace trim.

“One more surprise.” He went to the bureau, where he’d hidden more presents. With his arms behind his back, he returned to Fanny and Belle, making a deep bow. He brought his hands around to the front and gave to each of them a small wrapped box. “For my pair of fairies, plump and dark,” he said.

“You go first, Mama,” Belle said.

Fanny peeled back the wrapping paper and opened the shiny wooden box. Nestled in a pillow  of  satin  she found an  opal ring,  with R.L.S. engraved inside its gold band.  “Oh, Louis,” she said, “you know how I love blue opal.”

“Your turn,” he said to Belle, who pulled an identical ring from her box, also engraved with his initials. She slipped it on her finger. “Louis,” she said, “thank you! It’s lovely.”
“I bought one for meself as well.” He slipped o? the opal ring on his ?nger to show them its inscription.

Fanny squinted at the lettering inside the band. “F and B,” she read aloud, as a troubled look flitted across her face.

dined in a ?ne restaurant so they could wear their new clothes. In the candlelight, with the white lace glowing against her neck and wrists, Fanny was as radiantly lovely as she had ever been. He felt her old a?ectionate warmth  as she squeezed his arm while telling a story. The simple niceties that once were ordinary came rushing back. It was as if his wife had been returned to him after a strange and terrible journey.
At the end of their three weeks in Sydney, they boarded the S.S. Mariposa. They would be home in Apia by the last day in March, when the cyclone season would be nearly over and the rainy days tapering o?. Fanny said comically how happy she was that her pig-chasing would no longer be conducted in mud.

Later, he would think, Of course it couldn’t last. Roth had warned him. Still, it took him by surprise when he found Fanny sitting on a deck chair, chattering to herself. “Mother just came by to talk,” she said when he sat down next to her, “and Pa was with her, too.”
By the time they arrived at Vailima, the swirling madness had retaken her.