Under the Wide and Starry Sky (12 page)

“Mother,” Belle said when she came in the apartment door.

It was afternoon, and Fanny was scrubbing Sammy's school uniform shirt in a sudsy bowl. “What is it?”

“I had lunch with Frank, and he said Louis is sick.”

Fanny dropped the shirt and wiped her hands on her skirt.

“It's his eyes. Will Low told Frank that Louis is in bed and he can't see a thing.”

Fanny hurried into the bedroom to pull her boots on. “Go to my sewing box and get out a thimble. Fill it with boric acid crystals and wrap it in a clean napkin.”

She'd noticed Louis's eyes growing worse in the past day or two. Yesterday morning she had mixed a few grains of the white stuff in water and dripped it into his eyes, then sent him home to rest. When he hadn't shown up at two o'clock, as he usually did, she assumed he was writing away. Fanny threw on her coat. “Watch Hervey!” she called over her shoulder to Belle.

“I know who you mean,” Belle called back.

Snow had brought the cabs and trams to a crawl. When Fanny got to Will Low's studio, she saw the large white-haired head of an otherwise tiny doctor bending over Louis's bed. The man was disheveled, and his spattered shirt cuffs gave proof that he was at the end of a long workday. In profile, his nose was a bony ridge upon which stiff bristles of hair stood up like porcupine quills.

Louis was talking gaily in French to the old man. “What does he say?” Fanny asked Louis.

“There's my lady,” Louis said. “Hello, sweet one.” He stared blankly in her general direction.

“Louis, what does he say?”

“I got meself a roarin' eye infection. Fever, too.”

“What are we to do?”

“Drink a pint a' whiskey.”

“Please, Louis … “

“He says I need to have the bandages changed every fifteen minutes,” Louis said.

Will Low's jaw worked furiously as he watched.

“Tell me what the doctor just said, can you Will?”

“He says Lou could go blind if he does not care for his eyes. He shouldn't have any light.” Will covered his wispy mustache with a paint-splattered hand. He looked around his studio, dismayed. “I could put sheets over the windows … “

“Will, kindly ask the man precisely what we are to do and when. And ask him where I can get whatever medicine I need.'

“Of course,” he said. His face, boyish beneath a sealskin toque, registered his profound relief that she had arrived.

“I know how to do this, Will. Between the two of us, we should be able to get Louis into a cab and over to my flat.” Fanny patted Louis on the shoulder. “You're coming home with me,” she said.

“‘My young love said my mother won't mind,'” Louis sang.

Will Low blinked nervously. “I thought a little drink might take his mind off the burning.”

Fanny glared at Low. “He's pixilated. Get his trousers on him, will you?”

Fanny set him up in her bed and pulled a chair next to it. During the night, light from the streetlamp fell on his body. She had never seen him asleep, and she couldn't take her eyes off him. His face was as beautiful as Raphael's. She had seen a painting once of the artist as a young man and his face was oval, with pensive dark eyes, like Louis's.
Here is a man so full of life and goodness and gifts,
she thought.
And utterly reckless with his health.
He had ignored the burning in his eyes for a week, just kept on working.

Ten days ago he had come with pages to read, and she'd felt almost immediately that a new door was opening for them. He began with his canoe essay and read sections of it aloud over a period of a week. But yesterday he had arrived with a piece about falling in love.

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural …
She had pursed her lips to suppress the greedy pleasure she took in the words. The essay was written in generalities, but there was no doubt about it: It was an open love letter to her. Louis planned to send it off to
Cornhill
magazine.

She ran her hand over his forehead. He was twenty-six and she was thirty-seven. She had spent a good part of her life being regarded as the young one. “Such a young bride, such a young mother, so young to be traveling alone,” people had always said to her. How odd to find herself the older one. She didn't feel finished yet. She felt as young as he was. What did age matter, anyway? Not a scintilla. Except that it had allowed her to walk into love this time, eyes wide open—there was no falling about it.

In the morning, when she stood up, she nearly dropped over from want of sleep. Belle was lounging in the parlor. On seeing her mother emerge from the bedroom, the girl clasped her hands and said, “I'm not judging you, Mama.”

“There's nothing to judge,” Fanny responded testily. She put her hands to her waist and stretched backward. “Ten grains of boric acid mixed with water.” She pointed toward a cup on the windowsill. “You watched me do it last night, right?” She yawned. “Oh, do I need to move these legs! If he wakes up, tell him I will be back soon to make breakfast.”

Fanny made it down to the newsstand and was on her way to the bakery in the next block when her ankle buckled. It was the right foot, the foot that had ailed her since Grez. She gritted her teeth and hobbled back to her building, hoping against hope it was not a real sprain.

Four flights. Up to an awful apartment. Sam had made certain they couldn't get too comfortable in Paris. When she had returned from Grez, her Paris doctor had told her she was still fragile from Hervey's loss. “You will need a housekeeper,” he'd said. “You're much too weak to do that sort of work.” Ha! Housekeeper, indeed. She had dared not tell him they lived on the fourth floor and felt lucky to have it.

When Fanny returned, Louis was sitting up. “They're much worse today.” There was despair in his voice. “A man can write with bad lungs. But what does he do without eyes?”

Fanny took his hand. “Louis, I think you should go home.” She waited for a response, but none came. “We'll get Bob to take you to your parents' house,” she said finally.

“Bob isn't in Paris, Mama,” Belle said. “He's gone to Scotland for a week.”

“Two weeks,” Louis corrected her. “He left yesterday.”

Another silence.

“There is a good doctor in London I have gone to,” Louis said. “I have close friends there who have taken care of me before. Colvin, my editor friend. And Fanny Sitwell. She would help us, I'm sure of it. Henley is there, too. He owes me a little fussing.”

It was the curtains Fanny couldn't help staring at. Sitting on a chaise in front of the drawing room window, she pretended to look out on Brunswick Row, but her gaze went only as far as the lush brown velvet that framed the view. The curtains were pure simplicity; Fanny could have sewn them herself. But the fabric made her want to bury her face in it. The velvet would feel soft as a baby's thigh, she was certain; it was that fine. Subtly layered refinement—that was the atmosphere Fanny Sitwell had achieved with the pieces in her drawing room, from the leather chairs worn to a mellow shine to the pale blue damask wallpaper. That summed up the lady of the house, too.

“How is the pain today, Fanny?” Mrs. Sitwell asked. She moved over to the divan, where she adjusted the pillows under Fanny's foot cast.

“Gone,” Fanny said. “Thankfully gone. I would have had the operation a month ago if I'd known I would feel so relieved.”

“Dr. Hedgebrook is a miracle worker.”

“That he is,” Sidney Colvin concurred. He sat by the fireplace in a chair that was clearly designated as his, since no one else ever approached it. He was a pinched, sober fellow, an intellectual type who buried himself in journals and books when it was just the three of them, tossing a remark now and then into the conversation. It was when Louis showed up that the fellow blossomed. He was a real Cambridge professor of some sort. Everything about him was neatly trimmed, from the hairline below his bald pate to his close-cut beard to the tailoring of his coat.

“He may come across as a cold fish,” Louis had warned her, “but he is the soul of decency. They both are. Oh, they're proper types. You must never smoke in front of them, for example. But they have been extraordinarily kind to me.”

Fanny and Louis had shown up in London like a pair of injured birds; he nearly blind and she limping and queasy with worry. Louis's old friends had gone into action, arranging visits from the finest doctor in town. They brought in food to their hotel room during the fortnight Louis was laid up, with Fanny at his bedside. It was during one of the doctor's visits to the hotel that the venerable physician had spied Fanny's limp, examined her foot, and pronounced her an ideal candidate for surgery.

Now she was the patient. Returning from the hospital, Fanny had come to recuperate in the home of Mrs. Sitwell. The pair insisted she stay there and showered her with concern. They set her up on the sofa by the window, where she served as a splash of color in the subdued decor. They had thrown a tiger skin over the upholstery before settling her there, tied a yellow silk scarf around her head, swathed her in bright shawls, then sat down and gaped at her across the tea table as if she were Pocahantas.

“Mrs. Sitwell,” she said now, glancing at the piano “might I persuade you to play?”

“If you can bear my little errors,” the woman said. “I have been working on a Mozart Sonata.”

“If there are errors, I won't know it. I would love to hear it.”

“I second that,” Colvin piped up.

“Do you play, Fanny?” Mrs. Sitwell asked.

“I don't have a musical bone in my body.”

The woman laughed. “Louis doesn't have much of one, either. No sense of pitch whatsoever. But he does
adore
music, doesn't he? He puts his heart into that little flageolet of his.”

“Oh,” Fanny said. She realized she did not know he played anything.

Fanny Sitwell had an appeal of the pre-Raphaelite sort, with sculpted cheekbones, straight brown hair parted down the middle and knotted at the back of her neck, and limpid blue eyes framed by brows fixed in pretty concern. Apparently, she had retired her bustle, for there was none to arrange when she sat down on the piano bench. Instead, she wore cream-colored tea gowns in her home. She was all patrician loveliness: her carriage, taste, flawless manners. In fact, she used the word “lovely” all the time, whether speaking of the sky or a friend or a rib roast.

Thank God for the piano
. There were three more days to be gotten through on the sofa in this overheated flat before Fanny and Louis could return to Paris. These people had been ever so kind, petting her and waiting on her every desire, but she was no good as an invalid. Never had been. And the whole situation was strange, staying in the home of a woman whom Louis seemed to have desired rather heatedly at one point. “I worshipped her,” he'd told Fanny in explaining their close friendship. “But it was merely a boy's crush; I was so young.” “So young,” as Fanny calculated it, was only three years ago. It hadn't been such a long a time since Louis was coming to this house, pouring out his soul to his nurturing angel, and resting his head in his Madonna's lap.

With his eyes healed, Louis was spending time with Henley, working on the magazine. In the late afternoons, the two men would show up, brimming with excitement and ideas for
London
. That was when Sidney Colvin would look up from his book with a spark in his eyes and plunge into some literary debate with them.

“Do you think the Purist Movement has lost its momentum in Britain?” Henley had said over tea yesterday, in a tone that the others apparently took as provocative. Colvin's color seemed to heighten, and he pursed the rim of his cup in his lips for a good long moment before he replied flatly, “No, not at all.” Fanny didn't dare ask what the movement was, for fear of appearing ignorant, but it dawned on her as the conversation proceeded that she was sitting among the vanguard of the Purists.

Now the music allowed them all a brief respite from polite conversation. What an odd relationship her two hosts had. They seemed to share pleasure in being “literary discoverers.” They acted like an old married couple, yet they were careful to a fault not to show overt affection. Fanny doubted that any real intimacy existed. Just the promise of intimacy, probably, if only the Reverend Sitwell would kick the bucket. To be perceived as having a lover, given Mrs. Sitwell's marital state, was out of the question. Much better to be viewed as the nourishing goddess in her salon, with her friend ever at her side. Colvin, for his part, appeared content as a favorite cat with the arrangement.

Fanny wondered if her feeling was simply raw envy. Louis had said she and Mrs. Sitwell would find they had much in common: both of them separated from wretched husbands; both grieving the recent death of a child. But Fanny suspected they shared very little. Mrs. Sitwell was from a different world entirely—a world of soirees peopled by the literary lights of London. Judging from the adoration of the men around her, she was the pinnacle of British womanhood: a person of delicate sensibilities whom they trusted to be discreet, a woman whose presence was calming. She appeared to have no artistic ambitions of her own. Instead, she was the Great Appreciator, stoking the egoism of each one. If she must work now, as Louis said she did—secretary to the College for Working Women—there was no sense that the wolf had ever been at her door, as it had been for Fanny.

She didn't long for Fanny Sitwell's life; she just wanted a little more comfort and security in her own. She had been making do for so long, scraping together what she could. An unpretentious life but genteel in its way, literary and artful—how nice that would be. She was tired of troubles. She had a pretty little falling-down house in Oakland and a sweet garden, but nothing like this place.
Imagine what I could do with a touch of money.
She let herself sink back into the cushions and picture what life as the wife of a successful writer might be. Louis would work in his study during the day. She could run the household and do her own writing. She would be his confidante, his editor, his counsel. She was nothing like Fanny Sitwell, but she knew well enough her own attractions. Louis loved her because she
wasn't
overtamed.

When Mrs. Sitwell stopped playing, Fanny applauded. Colvin had been sitting with his eyes closed, once in a while letting his toe fly up in time to the music. “Soul-stirring,” he murmured.

The doorbell rang, and a servant ushered in Louis and Henley. They paused at the door as Henley, wearing a high-crowned hat with a floppy brim, leaned his crutch against the wall, placed his hat on it, and used his cane to get to a chair. Louis, to Fanny's astonishment, was wearing new clothes. “You've been shopping,” she said.

“Am I no a bonny writer chap?” he asked in an exaggerated brogue. He stood back, pointed a dandyish toe, and modeled for everyone the double-breasted dark blue suit and stiff bowler.

“Lou, you look handsome in that hat,” Fanny Sitwell said. Her voice turned kittenish. “Do you remember the hat you were wearing when I first met you?”

“A straw hat, as I recall,” Louis said, looking uncharacteristically embarrassed.

“A wide-awake hat, it was. You were coming up the lane to your cousin's house with a knapsack on your back and reading a book, oblivious to the world.”

Louis smoothed the jacket. “Well, I can't be going around London to see editors in ma auld tatters,” he said. “And I'm celebrating a bit.” He pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and waved it. “This is a contract with none other than Leslie Stephen at
Cornhill
. He's going to publish my essay “‘On Falling in Love.'”

Fanny's eyes welled with tears.
I miss you
, she mouthed to him across the room. He shot her a tender smile, and put his hand to his chest.

“Fabulous,” Colvin was saying. “An editor of Stephen's standing can make a career for a young writer.”

“Now, come,” Mrs. Sitwell said, “sit down and tell us everything.”

They pulled chairs around the sofa where Fanny lay, and Louis recounted the details of his meeting and the taciturn Stephen's remark that he was a fine stylist.

“That must have cost him quite a bit, to let loose with a compliment,” Colvin remarked. “Quite a stellar day for you, my friend.”

“And Henley here is going to publish “‘The Suicide Club,'” Louis said. “It's possible we could see a few pounds from it all.”

Henley's big face puckered with delight. “It's not out of the question. If all goes well, I intend to have the best of the new crop of writers. Louis, of course. And Henry James, and some of the others. I shall give Leslie Stephen a run for his money!”

“I don't know if James will last,” Louis said. “His
Roderick Hudson
was a fair start—”

“Fair start? I thought the characters were brilliantly drawn,” Fanny protested.

Mrs. Sitwell turned to her, her face barely masking her astonishment that Fanny had uttered a literary opinion. Colvin and Henley ignored the remark.

While everyone chatted, Fanny settled into the pillows at her back. She was so happy to see Louis excited and well. She saw relief on his friends' faces, too. Clearly, Louis's charm loosened them from their stiffness. He was their Great Exhilarator. And Lord above, they needed one.

“Lou,” Mrs. Sitwell said warmly, squeezing Louis's hand, “
your
time is coming. I always knew it would.”

Fanny put her hand into her skirt pocket, found a cigarette, pulled matches from her waist pouch, and in the spread of thirty seconds, was savoring a mouthful of smoke. Louis stopped midsentence and stared at her, his face gone slack. Fanny Sitwell appeared to bite her inner cheek, then said, “I didn't know you smoke, Fanny.”

“I seem to have quite forgotten myself.”

“Why, it's all right. You can smoke here.” She fetched a chine sauceer and placed it in the tea table for ashes.

“This will be the only one.” Fanny laughed. “I'm out of tobacco.”

“You make your own?”

Fanny drew on her cigarette. “I do.”

“Sidney,” Fanny Sitwell said, “might I prevail upon you to go out and get some papers and tobacco?”

“Of course.”

“I should like to learn how to roll a cigarette,” Mrs. Sitwell said. “And if you can put your hands on some champagne, I do think this crowd would appreciate it.” If she was only being polite, Mrs. Sitwell, nevertheless, was managing, to rescue the moment, judging from the look of relief on Louis' face.

With Colvin gone, the hostess drew her chair closer to Louis's and they fell into conversation about “art for art's sake.” Fanny bristled when she saw how easily they talked. She felt a petulant urge to burst out in her mother tongue, “It's too blamed hot in here,” but she held herself in check. William Henley was left to hoist his great trunk up out of the little gilded chair on which he was perched and to push it nearer to Fanny.
You're quite agile for a one-legged man,
she thought, and in the next instant,
Thank God I didn't say that out loud.

“I understand you might be willing to give us a spot of help with the magazine,” he said to her. “Louis says you've done some writing?”

“Oh yes, I have written for any number of publications. I'm an editor, too. Of course, I could find other writers for you. Margaret Wright comes to mind. She's an American journalist who writes a column called ‘Paris Letters' for some newspapers. She lives in my building. There are several of us writers at that address, actually. Our building is something of a haven for artists.”

Henley seemed to lose track of the thread of conversation. He grabbed hold of either side of his chair to lift his body with his mighty arms, once again trying to get comfortable on it. He wore a barely suppressed grimace much of the time, she realized. And she was struck by how big he was. No wonder Louis called him Burly. The man filled the eye.

“Are you in pain?” she asked him.

He looked at her sadly, not responding to her question. Instead, he said, “I know you lost your son. I didn't say anything to you in Grez because I knew you were trying to get back on your feet. But you have my sympathy, Fanny.”

Fanny stared soberly at him. “How I wish I might have found a doctor as astute as yours.”