Under the Wide and Starry Sky (9 page)

At a table on the Chevillon's long lawn, Fanny was working on a new story. Beyond her, the river mirrored perfectly the ten sunlit arches of the graceful old bridge. From where she sat, the reflected curves created the illusion of a row of ellipses. She loved those arches for the way they framed the landscape beyond, and for the cool shade they provided when she canoed through them on a hot day a couple of weeks earlier. Just now the sun was hitting the inside of them, turning the old gray stone a rosy terra cotta. She had seen the bridge painted from every angle, and she'd painted it herself, yet its moods continued to mesmerize her. Today she would put it into a story rather than on canvas. She'd begun a tale about a woman staying at an old hotel that was frequented a hundred years earlier by a group of artists. Somehow Fanny wanted the woman to encounter the ghost of one of the long-ago painters. The woman wouldn't know he was a ghost, and she would fall in love with the reclusive artist who came into the parlor to talk with her only late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.

Fanny closed her eyes and tipped her face up to feel the late-September sun on her skin. Maybe she should put the bridge in a travel story about Grez. She'd have a much better chance of selling that.

“How happy you look out here.”

It was Louis Stevenson's voice, and it startled her; she'd not heard the sound of shoes brushing through the grass. When she opened her eyes, his midsection came into view, in particular his hands. The fingers were so long and thin, hanging there like string beans next to his trouser pockets. Fanny nearly welcomed Louis with a smile, then remembered her hurtful conversation with Bob and that she was angry with both Stevensons.

“Bob has gone back to London,” she said curtly.

“Yes, I know.”

“Will Low is gone, too. They all left a week ago.”

“I came to see you,” Louis said.

Fanny put down her pencil. She wished he would go away. When she looked up, there was that persistent, earnest face awaiting her reply.

“Is it your turn now, Louis?”

“What do you mean?”

“You and Bob seem to be under the impression that I am a movable feast, to be shifted around at your convenience. Isn't that right?”

“Fanny. No. Did Bob …?”

“Bob did your bidding, Louis.”

“What did he say?”

“Enough to get his message across.”

“I didn't want to interfere if he had begun something with you.”

Fanny sighed. “Well, isn't that loyal of you. Nothing had begun, but I'm sure Bob thought he was letting me down. Frankly, I've had many men in love with me and except for an unfaithful husband, I have never had occasion to feel rejected. Quite the contrary. So I found it amusing to be let go of, so to speak,
and
handed over to someone else in the bargain.”

Louis rubbed his forehead. “This is all my fault. I told Bob I was in love with you.”

“How is that possible? You don't know me.”

“I want to know everything you are willing to tell me, Fanny. Everything you love and hate, your whole life. Just talk to me, please. And I will talk to you. I want you to know me as something more than”—he sighed—”a blundering fool.”

Fanny waved her hand dismissively. “You're a good man, I can tell that. But you're mistaken if you think you can simply walk in and claim me. I don't belong to Sam Osbourne and certainly not to Bob Stevenson.”

“I am here to see you because I have never felt so joyful in the presence of a woman.”

Fanny regarded the warm eyes, devoted as a spaniel's. Aside from the fact that he was slender, Louis appeared perfectly fit, not the sickly specimen Bob spoke of.

“I'm sorry if I've troubled you.” His fists went into the pockets. “Forgive me.”

Fanny rose from her chair. Louis grasped her hand and held it. They stood still a moment, their eyes downcast.

“I don't know what you want from me, Louis. You're a young man, and I am a married woman. I can only be your friend.”

“That would make me incredibly happy,” he said.

Back in her room, Fanny was surprised to find her daughter packing. “What are you doing? We have another two weeks here, Belle.”

“That's what I want to talk about. The landlady said the flat would be empty by October first. I thought I would go and get the place set up before you and Sammy come in.”

“Nonsense. You can't be alone in Paris.”

“I'm so bored here, Mother. Everyone has left.”

“Louis Stevenson just came back.”

Belle shrugged.

“I thought you found him entertaining. You said when he was here before that you would rather listen to him than read a book.”

“He's nice-looking for an ugly man,” she said. “But I'm ready to go back, Mama. The school session has already begun. It seems my whole life, I have started my classes late. Everyone will know each other.”

“Where is Frank O'Meara going to be October first?”

“Mother!”

“Well … “

“He won't be in Paris yet,” said Belle. “He went back to Dublin. And Mrs. Wright has already moved her family into the flat next to us. She said I could stay with them if I came back early.”

Fanny knew then that she would let Belle return on her own to the city. Margaret Wright was the kind of woman who didn't miss a thing; she could be trusted to act as a substitute mother in a pinch. “I suppose you can get the coach tomorrow to Bourron.”

Belle threw her arms around her mother. Over her daughter's shoulder, Fanny's eyes fell on the open satchel, where one of her best shawls was poking up in a corner.

“No,” Fanny said.

“Oh, all right.” Belle pulled out the shawl and returned it to her mother's closet.

“I'm desperate for a nap. Will you go look for your brother? I haven't talked to him all day. He might be hungry.”

When the door shut, Fanny fell into bed, exhausted. Belle wasn't near finished. She had to be watched for nuances, listened to in the spaces between sentences. This happened with girls, they developed secret lives and behaved mysteriously and worried you to death. Fanny didn't know if she had the strength at the moment to oppose it. Sammy was an altogether different matter. He was no trouble, never had been. That was the thing about good children. If you got busy, you could forget to watch. Hervey had been sweet and easy, too.

The next afternoon, while Sammy fished from the bank of the Loing, Fanny met Louis in the dining room at four, as they had agreed the night before. Ernestine was bustling in and out preparing for dinner. In the kitchen, Fanny could see chickens beginning to roast on a spit in the fireplace above a pile of crackling twigs. Madame Chevillon's ancient grandmother sat silently beside the fire, occasionally taking a bellows from a hook to squeeze at the embers.

“Ask Ernestine to give us jobs,” Fanny said, pulling two chairs up beside the woodstove. Louis spoke in French to the young woman, who seemed surprised by the offer from the American lady. “Tell her my hands like to be busy.” The young woman returned in a few minutes carrying a basket of apples and a small tray with two glasses of vermouth.

“You skin those so expertly,” Louis said when Fanny set to work on the apples.

She glanced at him. “Tell me something about yourself that people don't know.”

Louis seemed taken aback by the question but answered it quickly. “I was a pious child,” he said.

“Weren't we all expected to be pious?”

“No, you don't understand. I was
morbidly
pious. When I was five or six, I couldn't sleep for the sorrow I felt from the suffering of Jesus. Oh, and I was terrified, too. I feared I would die during the night and slip into hell for some offense. So I'd fight off sleep by counting up my sins and praying for forgiveness. When I think of it now, I pity that sad little chap.”

Fanny whistled. “So do I.”

“I never should have told you that.” Louis put his face in his hands. “You must think I am thoroughly damaged.”

“I think you are one of the cheerfulest men I've ever met, actually.”

Louis sat up and smiled broadly. “A philosophical choice,” he said. “Tell me about your own family.”

“Let's see,” Fanny said thoughtfully, sipping the vermouth. “I was raised by parents who believed a child was born with a nature that was either good or bad, and nothing they did was going to alter it very much. Oh, they inoculated me with a proper sprinkling in the Whyte River. Henry Ward Beecher did the honors, in fact. Our house was right next door to his church.” She tossed a long curling peel into a bowl set on the floor between them. “My mother was sweet as pie, and she convinced my father that all six of us children had sterling characters. So, we were free as birds—there wasn't a shred of discipline in the house.”

“I never would have attended school if I were in your family.”

“My schooling was”—she weighed her words, she did not want him to think her stupid—”spotty.”

“Mine as well,” he said. “One year my parents hired a French tutor, and all we did was play cards. It's not a bad way to learn French.”

Fanny laughed. “I never learned French, but I started to read in English when I was four. My father would sit me on a stool and have me read aloud for the neighbors.”

She remembered just then one of those occasions. The local newspaper editor, a friend of the family, had questioned her after she read a passage from a book called
Familiar Science.
“If the world is round, why don't we fall off?” he'd asked her. “Gravitational attraction,” she'd piped up, much to the glee of her father.

“The adults were appalled,” she recalled to Louis. “They thought it highly unnatural.”

“You were precocious.”

“Only in some areas. I went through high school, but all I cared about was reading. That and being outside in nature.” Fanny looked at his face, seeking a trace of judgment. “It may sound like I come from bumpkins, but I don't. My ancestors arrived in Pennsylvania before William Penn. Truth be told, I spent a lot of time running free with my cousin Tom, who was as rough-and-tumble as they come. We would ford streams up to our necks, climb trees, swing by ropes. I was a wild thing—always had to jump off the highest rock into the river.”

“A tomboy.”

She nodded. “I was a shy girl child and dark-skinned, which was not the standard of beauty in Indianapolis, let me tell you. I knew early on I was different, and I had got the idea that I wasn't pretty. So I gave up on the whole business of trying to be pleasing in a girlish way. It seemed to me that boys had a lot more fun. It was a relief. I didn't look at myself from the outside. I just lived inside my skin, looking out.”

“You had the kind of boyhood I craved,” Louis said.

Fanny took a deep breath. Thinking of it now, she could almost smell the odor of sticky pinesap from the forest near her house. She pictured the same woods in winter, when hoar frost feathered the pine needles. She wanted to tell Louis how she'd felt the world in those days, how the conversations of birds made sense to her, the clouds spelled out messages, the bright ripples of lake water moved through her the way sound did. Would he think her a silly fool?

“There were summer nights …” Fanny remembered aloud, pressing fingertips to her lips. “Do you have lightning bugs in Scotland?”

“No. But I've seen ‘em in the south of England.”

“Then I don't have to explain the magic of—”

“Do.”

“Well, I was the neighborhood storyteller. I probably got my taste for ghost stories from my granny. She was an unpleasant, domineering woman, and unfortunately, I had to share a bed with her. At night she told hair-raising tales about bodies rising from graves and the horrors of hell. I learned to tell stories from a gifted terrifier, you might say. Children would start gathering in our backyard while we were still eating supper. I must have been about eleven. Once I finished helping with dishes, I'd go outside, and there would be a pack of sweaty youngsters, waiting. I'd hold off until it was dark, when you could see the lightning bugs. The little ones sat close together because they knew things were going to get scary. That's about all I knew, too, because you see, I never made up the stories ahead of time. I just trusted they would come to me, and they did. There were the usual appearances by giants and talking animals in the stories, but what was going to happen was as mysterious to me as to anybody else. Right in the middle of things, a little one would slide down the wooden cellar door and scare the wits out of the fella sitting below. Or an older boy might reach out and grab somebody's wrist, and there'd be pandemonium.” Fanny laughed. “My, it was fun. The feeling of it, you know? Because I was waiting like everybody else for the story to reveal itself. And then to get going, and to feel like I was up on a draft of air like a bird, just sailing along with the flow of it. Not to mention the feeling of having the whole crowd in my palm … it was a giddy feeling for a girl of eleven.” She breathed in deeply. “I reckon I've been trying to get that feeling back ever since.”

“The feeling that you just touched something divine?”

“Oh, I'm talking about fairy tales and ghost stories, after all. But yes, I knew there was a wonderfully mysterious sensation to be felt when you create something. I knew even then it was an artist's life I wanted. “ Fanny stared into the fire. “There were probably four summers like that. And then my life turned upside down. Suddenly, I wasn't ugly anymore. Boys were coming around to pay calls.” She shrugged. “I got distracted—got married and had a child.” She put up her hands. “What more is there to say?”

“You were fearless.”

“Foolish, too.”

“Fearless enough to live in a mining camp in Nevada,” Louis said.