Under the Wide and Starry Sky (14 page)

The next morning, Fanny waited on a bench in the vestibule of her building for the mail. Sam was out with the children and, with luck, would return after it had been delivered.

Since her husband's arrival, she'd watched for the postman downstairs, lest Sam happen upon a letter addressed to Louis at the flat. The suspicious old concierge seemed perturbed by her presence. Wearing two coats, with a ring of keys at her waist, the woman watched every day for the postman in a chair outside her loge, apparently, she did not want company. She lifted her small head like a tortoise, turning her kohl-circled eyes toward Fanny. “
Il y a un probleme
?”

“
Un petit probleme—en Amérique
,” Fanny replied. That seemed to satisfy the woman. An American woman's family problems back home held no interest for her.

Fanny felt drained from the previous evening. She had not told Sam she wanted a divorce. He would fight it hard, and so would her family. Her parents and sisters seemed to think a divorce was more scandalous than the way Sam had been treating her all these years.
It will leave you defenseless, and mark you and the children
, her mother had written. How could she say to her mother: I love another man, a kind and good man who will shelter us?

When she pondered what had been said the night before, she was not surprised to know Sam carried a gulf of sorrow over Hervey's death. That was the thing about Sam—he was capable of deep emotion. He was a mass of contradictions, a jumble of tender and heartless impulses. For so long, the two of them had been entwined at some elemental level. She had come to think they were as connected as Siamese twins joined at the gut. Back in California, she'd known it would require miles—thousands of them—to break free from him. A great distance was needed not only to discourage him from coming after her; it was necessary to keep her from going back to him. Even now she was vulnerable to Sam Osbourne, even after two years and Louis Stevenson in her life. She no longer had any illusions that her connection to Sam was love. It was something stronger, like tangled veins and shared blood and unholy patterns that couldn't be escaped.

Thank God he will be going back to California in two more days.

Fanny remembered the night she and the children and their nanny had sighted Antwerp from the steamer's deck. She'd looked at that foreign city and thought,
I am free to be somebody new.
Free from being Sam Osbourne's wife, the disgraced woman who kept taking her husband back. The shame she had borne for so long seemed to float away into the Belgian air. Standing on the ship in port, she'd felt young in her skin again.

Loving Louis was utterly different from loving Sam. She felt clean with Louis. His goodness brought out the goodness in her. With Sam, the opposite was true.

Last night, as she stood up from the floor and headed for her room, Sam had taken hold of her wrist. “Don't you see? Losing Hervey changed everything,” he said. “I want back what we had. Yes, I've made mistakes; I admit it, and I'm sorry. But you've had me on trial for the past ten years. You made it impossible for me to stay in the house with you.” He let go of her. “I know you better than anybody in this world. I know your heart. I wouldn't ask you to come back if I didn't love you.”

“
Bonjour
!” The postman's voice echoing in the cold little vestibule roused her from her thoughts. She watched as the concierge divided the mail into piles for the various occupants of the building. Fanny took her pile and hurried up the stairs. There were no letters addressed to Louis, only a literary journal,
Scribner's
, and a telegram from San Francisco for Sam. Fanny sat on her bed and perused the magazine's table of contents. “Bird Architecture,” “Camping Out at Rudder Grange,” “Topics of the Times,” “Bohemian Days”—Fanny's eyes stopped there—by Margaret Wright. Margaret! She felt a little thrill of pride. Her friend, her dear neighbor, and here she was in the pages of a premier magazine. Best of all, she had written an article on Grez! Fanny flipped to page 121 and found the most delightful illustration entitled “Catching the Sunset,” in which comical-looking artists dabbed at their canvases. On the next page was a cartoonish depiction of a “Scotchman” reading a thick book. It had to be Bob, for the funny fellow in the illustration was wearing his trademark striped stockings. Fanny took a deep breath and settled in.

She smiled to read the beginning, where Margaret portrayed herself as Philistina, a city-loving Parisian who goes out to see what all the excitement is about in the Fontainebleau Forest, specifically in Grez, a bohemian gathering place,
where human nature showed neither at its worst nor at its best, but simply developed by a broad freedom of action and expression into some of its most extraordinarily picturesque, angular, positive, original, beautiful, and unbeautiful individualities ever seen upon the face of the earth.

That's exactly it,
Fanny reflected. There was freedom enough in Grez to show who you truly were. Fanny remembered Margaret always hanging back a little, madly jotting notes. It occurred to her now that her friend had been working the whole time she was there. And here was the result, as wry as the woman herself. Fanny read down past Philistina's arrival by donkey cart in the village, then her description of the Hôtel Chevillon, where artists gathered around the dining table and let fly with unreserved conversation.

Fanny tried to match each outlandish character in the story to her friends.

Fanny flinched as it dawned on her that
she
was being portrayed as “the Queen of Bohemia” and the most ridiculous person at the inn.

Fanny felt dizzy but kept reading. The words—vicious, damning—wouldn't stop.

Stunned, Fanny sat up on the bed and took a deep breath. She read the piece to its end. Apparently, in Margaret's “New World eyes,” Fanny was the most unbeautiful of individualities in the whole lot, for no one else fared as badly as she.

Poverty of nature. Uncivilized blood
.
Barbaric.
Fanny leaped up from the bed and went to the bathroom, where she took Sam's razor from the cabinet. She slit out the contents page first, then the pages of Margaret Wright's article, and crumpled them. When she saw how mutilated the magazine looked, she decided to put all of it in the trash, hoping Louis wouldn't miss it.

She tried to remember the last time she had seen the brisk little American. She could think only of the many times Margaret had popped her head out into the hall, snooping. Had she seen Fanny and Will Low carry Louis into the apartment that night, drunk and singing and nearly blind? Probably. Her door was cracked often enough. Surely she had seen Louis coming and going since then. Surely she knew he lived there. Fanny had considered her a friend; she had made no great efforts to conceal the situation.

Even as she crushed the hateful pages, she shivered at the possibility that Louis had already seen the article. It was his habit to read his journals the moment they arrived, cover to cover. Without his own copy, he would read it at a friend's. Louis considered it a plum to be published by
Scribner's,
something he hadn't yet managed. But Margaret had managed. At the moment, all Fanny wanted to do was ask her why. Why? But she was gone—moved back to England a few weeks ago without so much as a goodbye, a rebuff that Fanny had attributed at the time to a hurried departure.

She felt as if she might be sick. She opened up the balls of paper and forced herself to read the pages again. Some would consider the essay a witty parody, but the woman's remarks were as raw as the racial cartoons Fanny had seen in the newspaper when she was growing up. How could one's skin color prompt such vitriol? There was ferocious contempt running through the piece; Fanny suspected it was because she had been living openly with Louis, right next door to Margaret, who surely found the arrangement more evidence of Fanny's “barbaric nature.” Fanny had always prided herself on judging a person's character correctly from a first meeting. She'd believed Margaret was a friend who understood her circumstances. How had she been so wrong about the woman?

She put the wadded papers and magazine in a bag, then raced downstairs, bumping against walls in her frenzy, and out into the street, where she dumped the bag into a pile of trash. When she returned up the four flights of steps, she returned to her bed, this time climbing under the blankets and pulling them over her head. She was shaking, and her teeth were clattering. Fanny knew that it would be no secret to any of the Grez crowd whom the piece was about. They were probably buzzing in cafés right now. Had they all viewed her as Margaret did, a pretentious fool? Weren't any of them her true friends?

In her head, she heard Sam Osbourne's voice:
What are you doing here among these people?

Fanny climbed out of the bed, washed her face, and went out of the apartment building before Sam and the children returned and saw her distress. She walked through Montmartre, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, trying to dispel the panic she felt. Wandering through a park, she noticed a mother sitting on a bench, gently rocking a pram. A wave of shame washed over her.

Looking at her situation from the outside, Fanny didn't like the picture she saw. Regardless of Sam's repeated betrayals, there was no excuse for her laxity; she should have been more discreet in front of Belle and Sammy. The portrait Margaret Wright had painted of her as a merry seductress, living loosely so soon after her child's death, was hideously unfair. Still, she saw how unseemly her life might appear to people who didn't know her.

I have been living in a dream world,
she thought.
This can't go on.

When Louis planned it, a long walk seemed the best salve for his troubled heart. A twelve-day 120-mile trek through the Cévennes would be daunting, but the sting he felt would not be soothed by meadows and summer. He needed to exercise himself against terrain that pushed back. The stretch of mountains in southern France matched the state of his soul—desolate and rocky, a cold expanse of steep hills and mournful valleys.

“I'm going for a walk,” he told his friends who questioned the wisdom of a trip into the wilderness alone. “A book is in it.” They knew it was peace he was after. He had been a sad case since Fanny left to return to the United States.

Louis could not make sense of her departure. He'd heard what Fanny
said,
but it did not satisfy. “I love you,” she had assured him. “But there are the feelings and needs of other people to consider.” While she was packing her trunks to leave Paris, she was already framing their love affair as a memory. “I shall never forget the time we've had together,” she said.

Louis looked dolefully at Modestine, the mouse-colored little pack donkey he had bought in Le Monastier for sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy. In that small town of lace makers and wine-shop proprietors, the donkey was attested to as a fine specimen. Louis had fallen hard for her sweet eyes and austere elegance, but it wasn't more than an hour into his journey that he discovered the nature of the beast: The donkey took small steps and few commands. In one day, the animal had grown deaf to Louis's ongoing, one-sided, out-loud conversation with Fanny, for she ignored her new master's pleas to “Go!” as just more blather from the skinny human with the stick. She curled her lips back, baring her brown teeth as she enjoyed a healthy hee-haw at his predicament.

The local peasants along the way were no more cooperative. They were unfriendly, sometimes ignoring his requests for directions. Even the children seemed contemptuous. Having gotten lost repeatedly while following stony mountain paths that seemed to circle back from whence he came, Louis felt fury in his gut. He and the donkey were stuck together in this most inhospitable corner of the world in a farce worthy of Moliere. Modestine refused to move despite his exhortations. Louis realized he was a laughingstock when a passing peasant cut a switch, whacked the donkey's rump, and yelled, “Proot!”

“You have to show her who is the boss,” the man said when he had gotten his laughter under control.

“Argggh,” Louis groused. He didn't like hitting anything, certainly not a shuddering, winded creature, least of all a female creature. When he'd set out from Le Monastier a day earlier, he had taken her mincing steps as the gait of all donkeys and resigned himself to follow her pace through the wooded slopes and river-crossed valleys. But now, with the man applying his switch and Modestine leaping forward and running without pause, Louis suspected he had been fooled by the Sarah Bernhardt of hoofed mammals. Once the peasant left the path and bid adieu, however, Modestine slowed. Louis found himself in an isolated dale with a steep hill to climb, and no amount of prooting could get the stubborn donkey to move faster. He was desperate to set up camp at a lake ahead before night fell. He switched the animal harder and was immediately sickened by his own brutality. Compounding his misery, the bag he had made for sleeping, strapped as it was over Modestine's back, kept slipping off and scattering the provisions stuffed inside it.

One egg whisk, two loaves of black bread and a loaf of white, a bottle of brandy, a leg of mutton. Spirit lamp, jackknife, lantern, leather flask, pilot coat. Tins of chocolate and sausage. These were the necessaries he had packed in his clever sleeping sack and flung over the back of the wretched Modestine. The supplies yet again were strewn all over the dry and rocky ground where the ass grazed on tufts of grass.

Louis sat down, smoked a cigarette, and took a few swigs of brandy. “Ah, Fanny,” he said out loud. He pictured her sleeping right now, her eyelashes quivering as they did when she dreamed. Louis closed his own eyes and saw Sam Osbourne lying next to her. He leaped up, shook out his limbs to throw off the image, and furiously retied the bag on the donkey. This time he loaded some of the supplies on his own shoulders and set out once more.

The walking was easier but Louis grew discouraged when darkness came on and he'd found no lake. He cursed the indifferent stars as they began to appear. In time, he happened upon an old stone inn at Bouchet St. Nicolas where he gladly took the one bed available in a room shared with a young married couple. He was so embarrassed by his proximity to the pair he averted his gaze, but not before glimpsing one pretty white arm hanging over the side of the bed. Louis didn't know if she slept nude or in a gown, but he didn't need the young woman's nearness to stir thoughts of Fanny.

Why did you leave?

It mystified him. They were so close to making their dream happen. Yes, there were obstacles. Sam Osbourne was cutting off money to Fanny until she returned. Sammy was eager to go back. And Louis wasn't even close to being financially independent. Still, none of it seemed insurmountable to him. Only a few weeks earlier, he had been filled with hope. He'd just published
Inland Voyage
and gotten positive reviews—reviews that startled him with their enthusiasm. True, no real money had materialized. But his meeting with his father had gone well, and he now had a modest monthly income to count on. Fanny was already his bride; a marriage certificate would be a mere formality. She knew he was pledged to supporting her children as his own once he had his sea legs in publishing. Why, then, was she saying a union was out of the question? Why now, after resisting Sam for so long, had she given in and returned to California?

He tried to put himself into Fanny's shoes. Any woman in her position would be fearful. There was much to lose on a nameless chap like himself. Maybe she felt their differences were too great, that her very soul was at risk. He remembered something she'd said once: “I'm not remotely close to being Scottish or French, Louis. I'm made from different clay.”

God knows there have been enough missteps on my part to frighten her away.
The bottle-smashing scene in the café hadn't helped his cause. He cringed at the memory of another moment. Early on during their time together in Paris, they were in a carriage when one of his fits of laughter overtook him.

“Pull back my fingers,” he had said to her between gasps.

“I won't,” she replied. “Now stop this nonsense.”

Louis's voice kept rising as he laughed. “Dammit, Fanny, bend my hand! I mean it! If you don't, I shall bend yours back until I break every bone.” He grabbed her hand and did indeed bent back her fingers until they clearly hurt.

“Stop it!” she shouted. She pulled his hand to her mouth and bit it hard, breaking the flesh and causing him to cry out. The shock of seeing blood rise up out of his punctured skin had brought him to his senses.

What a stupid, immature fool I was!
And yet she had not left him then. He'd asked her forgiveness, and she had given it.

In the weeks leading up to her departure, their life together in Paris had been heaven and hell. She'd confided to Louis that she was going to return soon to the U.S. so she could begin divorce proceedings. He was stunned but comforted himself with the thought,
At last. The wheels are moving.
As the days wore on, though, her intentions became less clear. She seemed to be struggling mightily within herself. “You're a
dowie
lass,” he said, “ain't ye?” She admitted she was depressed. And then one day, as they sat in a café on Boulevard de Clichy, he saw a calmness come over her for no apparent reason. After that day, she turned her gaze to California with a stony resolve.

Belle, who had no idea that her mother was intent on moving them back, was stricken with anger and hurt, but Fanny seemed to ignore the girl's pleadings. By the time Louis put her and the children on the train, headed for a steamer, Fanny was offering no him words of encouragement. Walking down the platform away from the train that day, he could not bring himself to look back at Sammy leaning out the window, waving to him with a small paper American flag that someone had given him.

Louis turned his back to the couple's bed and slept fitfully. In the morning, the innkeeper's husband, a simple, gentle man who once worked as a muleteer, fashioned a goad for Louis. “The problem, is she can't feel your switches on her hide,” he said. The goad had a tiny metal point, only an eighth-inch high, whose prick was all the motivation Modestine needed to move. “The goad is not the only thing,” the man said. He argued that Louis should discard the bulk of his sleeping sack and distribute the remaining weight evenly on her back. “Do you see how hard it wears on her?” the man asked with surprising compassion, given the metal point he had just honed. Indeed, Louis could see raw spots on the mule's hindquarters. Out went the mutton, the empty bottle, the white bread for himself. He kept the loaves of black bread to feed the donkey. After that adjustment, Modestine went on at a steady trot, with the help of the occasional prick. She was freer without the heavy load, and he felt a new sense of freedom, too, out in the cold air with miles ahead—free to walk, free to love, free to hope.

In the nights that followed, the sack he had concocted allowed him to sleep, in spite of roaring winds. He congratulated himself again on its cleverness: a six-foot-square bag made of green cart cloth on the outside and blue sheep's fur inside that kept him warm and dry. The landscape began to work its spell on him. In the mornings, he woke with wonder at each new setting.

Near the end of his trip, he camped among a stand of pines. It was late by the time he fed the donkey and spread out his setup. The pines formed walls that encircled him, and the sky was a ceiling of jittering stars. He laughed to himself over his absurd meal: a bite of Bologna sausage alternated with a bite of chocolate, washed down with sips from his single precious bottle of Beaujolais. He listened to the sound of water tripping over stones in a burn nearby, listened to the last calls of birds as darkness blacked out his sylvan room.

A year ago he had written an essay arguing that the best way to walk was alone. Who wanted to have one's solitude disturbed by someone else's talk? Lying in his bag, he thought it was a different man who had written those words.

Louis dug through his pack in the darkness, feeling for his journal and a taper he carried. He rolled over and struck a match. The brightness was sudden, almost alarming. He lit the candle and began to write.

I wish a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.

That night, as on every night of his journey, he fell asleep with Fanny as his pillow-thought. How happy they had been in Paris! Talking, laughing, walking together for hours through the streets until the night cast them into their bed, where they were happiest.

At sunrise, he reread what he had written so far during the journey and realized it was filled with private coded messages to her:
I love you. I want you. Don't forget. Don't forget.

He tied up his pack and looked around at the green floor of the glade, and the walls of spired pines. It was one of the loveliest chambers in which he had ever passed a night, and it had been entirely free. He felt a sense of gratitude and debt to someone for the privilege of the accommodations. Louis reached into his knapsack and pulled out a handful of coins, then arranged them in a pile at the center of the room. Hopefully, they would fall into the unexpecting hands of someone in want of them.