Under the Wide and Starry Sky (13 page)

“I had lost one leg already, and my doctor wanted to take the other. When I heard Lister was having success with scrofulous tuberculosis, I went to his Edinburgh infirmary to get treatment. That's where I met Louis, you know.”

“No, I didn't know. He told me that Leslie Stephen introduced you.”

“Except for Leslie Stephen, who had seen a couple of my verses, I was friendless in Edinburgh. I'll tell you no lie. I was poor as they come and desolate with loneliness. My only companions were a couple of little boys laid up in that place alongside me. Then one day Louis appeared, unannounced. He told me he was Leslie's friend. He was the jolliest fellow, smart and full of mischief. It was as if Puck had just walked into my room.

“I wasn't supposed to leave the hospital, but before I knew it, he had me out of that bed. We had to get down a long stair with me like this.” Henley waved a hand at his stump. “But he did it. He had a carriage waiting, and it was spring outside.” His eyes watered. “I had been in hospital for eighteen months. He drove me around to look at the cherry trees blossoming and the blue sky. I shall never forget his kindness as long as I live. Look at me, then look at him, and you will understand the act of will it took to cart me out of that place. And not just once did he take me out. Oh, no. He came back and back.”

Henley produced a handkerchief and blew his nose furiously. “Don't ever take the man for granted,” he said to her. “Understand what you have, Fanny Osbourne. There's not another one comes near him.”

Later, after she had taught everyone to roll cigarettes, after they had merrily smoked and finished off three bottles of champagne, Fanny regaled them with stories of her ancestor Daniel Boone and tales of life in a Nevada mining camp. She'd told how she served barley coffee to the Paiutes who came to the window of her cabin every morning; how she'd battled bothersome varmints; how she'd befriended the minister called Smilin' Jesus. The whole group burst into fits of laughter as she talked, especially when she used words like “varmint.” She wondered briefly if they knew she was speaking tongue in cheek.

“I didn't know you were related to Daniel Boone
and
Captain Cook,” Louis whispered when he bent over her to say good night.

“Loosely,” she said. “Daniel is on Sam's side, and the captain on my mother's. But it makes a better story.”

“Fanny, Fanny,” he murmured indulgently.

She smiled up at him. “I was simply obliging the audience, darlin'.”

“I'll see you in the morning,” he said, kissing the top of her head. He began to leave, then turned back. “First impression?” he asked.

On the train to London, she had told him that her first impression of a person was practically infallible. Louis so wanted her to embrace his world. She had wanted to be embraced by it. How to tell him now that she felt out of place among his friends—that they were strange, overly mannered, and a little frightening?

She reached out her hand and rubbed the curtain fabric between her fingers. “Lovely,” she said.

The day after Fanny returned to Paris, she discovered an opened letter from Sam among other mail sitting on the entryway table. “When did this letter from your father come?” she asked.

“A week ago.” Belle and Sammy sat at a table near the window, playing with a traveling chess set Fanny had bought them in London. “He's coming over in the spring.”

“When in the spring?” Fanny's heart began to thrash about in her chest.

“Probably May. He said he would write soon with more details.”

Sammy's eyes lit up. “He said he bought a pony for me for when I get home.”

“A pony,” Fanny muttered.
How predictable
.

“You'll have to be gone when he comes,” she told Louis when he came to visit that afternoon. They were sitting in the parlor of the apartment, speaking in low tones so as not to be heard by Belle or Sammy. “It must be done exactly the right way, or I shall be left with nothing.”

“I understand.” Louis shifted in one of the battered chairs. “I had my own letter today. From my father.”

“Yes? Is he coming to see you?” While they were in London, she had encouraged Louis to make amends with Thomas Stevenson. When his eyesight improved, Louis had written to his father, explaining that there were new complications in his life now and inviting him to visit Paris.

“He'll be here in March.” Louis took her hand. “Have I mentioned how brave you were to take me in like that when my eyes went bad?”

She nodded solemnly.

They had not talked about Louis living with her. He had stayed the night before when they got in. But it was clear, after their enforced separation in London, and after a night of passion and tender declarations, that neither wanted to be apart again.

“My father can be a reasonable man, and I believe he'll help us if I ask. But I can't present you to him just yet. He would love you, Fanny, he will love you when he meets you. But this arrangement”—Louis swept his gaze around the tawdry parlor—”he wouldn't understand. It would work against us.”

Fanny winced at the remark. She straightened in her chair. “I don't play the fallen woman very well. I have known the real type, and I don't admire it.”

“It isn't what I want, but I am asking you to trust me. Look at what you are asking of me—to disappear while your husband visits. Can you possibly think I am not offended by that prospect?” Louis's frustration smouldered in his words. He struggled to calm himself. “Look, I won't have to depend on my father much longer, Fanny. I'm going to support you and your children. I'm going to marry you someday. For now, if my father gives me a decent allowance, I can cover your rent and have enough to tide us over until you can get a divorce.”

At that moment, Sammy came into the room. The boy looked at both of them and turned to leave.

“Come along, my friend,” Louis said, making his voice gay. “I am going to take you and your mother to dinner.”

“I have heard they serve good food that's not too dear,” Louis said of the café he'd chosen. When they entered, Fanny noticed the maître d' was curt, as if he disapproved of something—Louis's coat, no doubt, which was showing wear. The waiter was equally haughty. Almost in reaction, she suspected, Louis ordered a bottle of Clos Vougeot. It was an extravagant choice; they would be living on soup for a week as a consequence.

“It's superb,” he promised Fanny, who knew little about wine.

Now the bottle was on the table. Louis sniffed the poured wine, leaned back in his chair, and crossed his arms. “It is corked.” His voice was matter-of-fact.

The waiter stiffened. He smelled the wine and insisted it was not.

“Indeed, it is.” Louis said, his tone growing more indignant.

The waiter turned on his heel, and marched off.

“How infuriating,” Louis fumed, “to be treated like a gullible … “

“… hayseed,” Fanny said.

“It makes my blood boil.”

When the waiter returned, he placed a bottle in front of Louis and walked away. Louis tasted the wine, and his face turned crimson. “It's the same goddamned bilious stuff he served before. He simply put it in a different bottle.”

Louis stood up from his seat. He called out, “Monsieur!” and “
Monsieur!
” again when the waiter did not respond. In a hot fit, Louis leaped from his seat, grabbed the bottle by its neck and smashed it against the wall next to the table. Fanny and Sammy ducked as glass chunks flew. All around them, diners ran from their chairs. Louis was shaking, staring at the bottle neck in his fist and the red streaks dripping down the yellow wall.

Fanny pulled Sammy up and put on her gloves. “I need to leave now.” She took her boy's hand, swallowed hard, and walked past the staring diners and maître d', out the door of the café.

“It was outrageous—” Louis began when he caught up with them outside.

Fanny shook her head emphatically. There would be no discussion on the way back to her flat. Louis hailed a cab, and they rode in silence. At the apartment, she sent Sammy scurrying up the steps. “I will be there in a minute,” she told him.

“What in God's name happened in there?” She stood facing Louis, her hands curled into fists on her hips.

“I won't stand by and let someone be taken advantage of,” Louis said, “including myself.”

“But that
rage
—it wasn't moral indignation. It was an unholy tantrum. Completely out of proportion, and in front of my son.”

Louis's shoulders sagged.

“You are feeling pressure. Well, so am I. That is life, my dear. You say you want to marry me, and then you behave like that?” She shook her head. “You are a good man, when you behave like a man, but I do not need another child. Decide which you are.”

Sam Osbourne filled the doorway of the parlor, wearing a banker's suit and a felt Stetson. One arm held a suitcase and the other his ecstatic daughter, whose own arms were wrapped around her father's neck.

“Might just choke your pa.” He laughed. He took Belle's hands and stood back to look at her. “My, goodness,” he said, shaking his head. “My baby girl's all grown.”

Sam peered into the dim parlor, where Fanny stood with her son, who huddled beside her, his thumb looped through the back of her belt. “Come in, Sam,” she said.

The man took off his wide-brimmed hat. “Fanny,” he said with the slightest bow.

“Say hello to your father.” She moved the boy around to the front of her and put her hands on his shoulders.

Sam mussed the child's hair. “Something for you,” he said. He knelt down in front of them and rifled through his satchel until he produced a small braid of horsehair. “That's from the mane of your filly, son. She's waitin' for you to give her a name.”

Sammy took the braid and rubbed it between his fingers. “Is she this color all over?” he asked.

“Chestnut, with a little white blaze between her eyes,” Sam said. “She's the prettiest little filly I ever met, and calm as they come. Gonna be big someday. Could be sixteen hands by the time she's grown.”

The boy wet his lips. “When do I get her?”

“As soon as you get home.”

Sam Osbourne was still handsome, the pale-lashed blue eyes framed by crow's-feet now, the rosy cheeks gone a little leathery. The mining years showed more on him than the years inside an office. But Sam hadn't grown fleshy. He retained the muscled frame, the square jaw, and the straight nose that had made him seem so much finer than the other Indiana boys she'd known all those years ago. As for his legendary charm, she had only to look at her children to know it still worked. They hung on his every word; they hung on him.

She knew too much to be seduced by him again. Before she'd left Oakland, she had asked a neighbor friend to watch the cottage. The woman reported by letter that within two weeks Sam had installed a woman in the family house, no doubt still sleeping in Fanny's bed. It was important to keep bad memories alive, lest she feel guilty about her love affair with Louis. She recalled the time she'd found a beautiful pair of women's shoes in Sam's satchel. She'd been excited—it was just before Christmas—and then enraged when she unwrapped the tissue around them. They were probably four sizes bigger than Fanny's small foot. She had gone into the kitchen and poured hot boiled jelly into the shoes, then thrown the sticky things back in his bag. Not once did he mention it.

When she mulled it over later, she was annoyed by how easily Sam slipped back into their lives, as if the separation had resulted from some fluke of scheduling. Sam had been clear in his letters that he wanted a reconciliation. In her responses, she had made clear that she had no intention of reuniting with him. But she could not wish away the facts of her own life. She needed his monthly checks, and he was growing mightily impatient sending them. How could she negotiate if she didn't welcome him? And the children deserved to see their father. The first night, though, she set down the rules. “You will sleep in Sam's bedroom. Belle will sleep with me,” she said.

The beginning of Sam Osbourne's visit was feeling like a family vacation. He spent his mornings with his son, strolling through different neighborhoods, visiting parks, and trying new pastries. When Belle and Fanny returned from the atelier, he took them all out to explore Paris. Fanny was thrown off by the strange pattern of their days together: tense conversations punctuated by bouts of gay sightseeing. Several afternoons spent at the newly opened Paris exposition only enhanced the unreal quality of their hours together. They wandered through halls displaying paintings and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone and other modern inventions.

They moved on to an ethnological exhibit that made Fanny wince. The
village nègre
was an actual human zoo, a series of tableaux that showed hundreds of Africans dressed in animal skins, supposedly portraying their normal daily lives. “They make them out to be primitive freaks,” Fanny said to her boy as she pulled him away from an iron fence through which the white Europeans and black Africans gawked at each other.

“In America, they put Indians in shows like that,” Sam Sr. chimed in. “What you just saw, son? That wasn't real. It's somebody's mixed-up idea of who they think those folks are.”

There is the Sam Osbourne I once knew.
It was one of the few remarks he had uttered since his arrival with which she could concur. Long ago she had admired Sam's solid decency. He had become unreliable over the years, but his progressive attitudes and geniality still won him admirers. He'd been one of the founders of the Bohemian Club, where he socialized now with some of the biggest names in San Francisco. People tended to like him until they had a business deal with him. Or married him.

For a man who claimed to have limited funds, he showered his family with little gifts and treated them to good food during outings. Waiters in restaurants took them for tourists, which annoyed Fanny. After two years in Paris, she spoke limited French, but she could read it. It was always Louis who ordered for them with his flawless pronunciation. But Sam, in his big hat, was immediate evidence that they were Americans and wouldn't know the difference between a crepe and a croquette. Sam complained that French beer was inferior and French manners were prissy. One night as they walked back to the flat, Fanny encountered a fellow artist from Monsieur Julian's school and greeted her in the way all her friends greeted one another in Paris, with a kiss on both cheeks. Sam snickered in disgust. “You don't even talk like you used to, Fanny. What are you doing here among these people?”

It was the first shot across the bow.

“What does it look like? I am living in a miserable little apartment, barely scraping by on the money you send us, so that Belle can study art.”

“Oh, come now. So
you
can live the ‘creative life.' You are having a fine time here with all your arty friends.”

Fanny fingered the chain at her waist. “Nobody knows you here, Sam. They don't know about your sordid little peccadilloes. They don't pity me. Believe it or not, people here like me for who I am. That must be hard for your narrow mind to comprehend.”

“You hauled away the whole goddamn family,” he growled. “If you don't bring the children back, I will sue for custody.”

Fanny batted away the remark with the back of her hand. “I thought you liked the arrangement. We're out of your hair. You're free as a bird to have any whore you want. And I don't have to know about it.”

She used the word pointedly. She knew Sam hated it, and that fact enraged her more. It wasn't just sexual adventures he pursued. He fell in love with the women he kept, the women who siphoned off the family's grocery money and sucked away Sam's attention and protection, who dressed him in the latest styles and sent him home to Oakland smelling of violet perfume. They weren't whores to him. He had even defended the virtues of one to his wife. “She wants to be your friend,” he had said at the time.

“Let's not do this to each other.” Sam's voice was weary now. “Can't we have a moment of peace?”

Up ahead, Belle linked arms with her brother. Fanny slowed so they didn't overhear bitter words. Nearly an adult, Belle knew of her father's infidelities; she understood the complexity of the situation. But Sammy had never understood why they were living abroad. He was so innocent, that in fact, Fanny feared to think what the boy might reveal if he got on the subject of their new friend Louis. If Sam learned she had shared a room with another man, if she lost her claim to higher moral ground, she stood to lose everything, including custody of the children. She hadn't been thinking about that possibility when she'd welcomed Louis into her bed.

“It was good times, all right,” Sam was saying. They all sat in the parlor. “Do you remember going down the mine shaft, Belle?”

“I think I do. But maybe it's just that I heard the story all these years.”

“Tell me.” Sammy lay on the floor with his head propped on one hand.

“Well. It was the first mine in Nevada we had. I went down every day and—”

“We sent Belle down there in a bucket once, “ Fanny said. “I can't believe I allowed it, when I think of it now—maybe because I was so young. I stuck a lump of clay on the bill of her cap and set the candle into it. Then I watched my little girl go down that shaft until she was just a tiny flickering light in a black tunnel.”

“It was how we all did it.” Sam laughed. “I caught her on the other end, and she was perfectly fine. She brought me down some lunch, as I recall.”

“You didn't show one bit of fear, Belle,” Fanny said. “You had a wonderful time.”

“I remember the stagecoach ride to get to the camp,” Belle said. “And I remember music. A fiddler and a squeeze-box.”

“The squeeze-box was Charlie Craycroft's,” Sam said. “He was a real loner. Rumor was he'd been involved in a shooting in California and the law was looking for him; he kept to himself. Had a shack near ours, and he was sweet on your mother, like a lot of the fellas were. That's because your mama was the prettiest girl in camp.”

Sam was trying to worm his way into her affections with old memories. It was his preferred method of softening her up.

Fanny again saw the eagerness in Sammy's young face. “Charlie used to make cookies for Belle,” she said finally. “He shaped the dough into little animals. But he was too shy to give them to us. He'd leave them outside the door.”

“Oh, but he could play that squeeze-box,” Sam went on. “Late at night, usually. It was just about the lonesomest music a man ever heard.”

They sat in the parlor long after Belle and Sammy had retired.

“I want to find a way,” Sam said. “I miss you, Fan. I want my family together.”

She sighed wearily. “Do you know the name I call you in my mind? The Man with No Shame. I am the one who carried the humiliation all those years. Isn't it funny how that works, Sam? There you were, sleeping with your latest whore five days a week in San Francisco. And there I was, ashamed, as if it were my fault. I'm still trying to make sense of that.”

Sam looked out the window, where streetlamps made bright blurs in the foggy air. “You cut me off, Fanny. You know it.”

“Any woman would.” Fanny shook her head. “You were never left out in the cold for long.”

“You did your own flirting. With my friends, no less.”

“Nonsense.”

“Don't lie to yourself, Fanny. What about Rearden?”

Fanny waved away the remark.

“You wrote to him so he would pass on to me what you said, didn't you? To make me jealous that there are men falling all over you here.” Sam's voice was rising. He got up and paced. “What were you thinking, Fanny, to take the kids like that? Off you went half-cocked, just like you always do. How could you drag three children halfway around the globe and not know that fancy art school didn't even
take
women? What kind of planning was that?”

“The only bad planning was being born into this world a woman,” Fanny lashed back. “That and marrying a whoremonger.”

“He never would've gotten tuberculosis in California,” Sam shouted. “And if he had? He wouldn't have died of it.” He stood still, fixing her with a cold stare. “Rearden told me you knew for months Hervey was deathly sick. Long before you told me. Rearden said you begged him not to tell me because you didn't want me over here.” Tears ran down his cheeks. “Wasn't he my boy, too? Didn't he love me, too?”

Fanny felt the anger in her chest shift, in that second, to aching remorse.

“Did he ask for me at all in those months?”

She looked down at her lap.

“What did he say?”

“He called out for you,” she admitted.
Over and over again
. “I didn't know those first couple of months he was so sick. He'd sit up and eat and seem to be getting better.” She heard the pleading in her own voice. “He was far too sick to travel back home by the time I understood. I was keeping the truth from myself, not just you. I would sit by his bed and think,
There, he took that milk. See how the color is coming back to his face
.”

Sam fell to his knees beside Fanny. She put her hand on his heaving shoulder. “I missed you during that terrible time, Sam. I realize I had no right to have Hervey so far away.” Her throat felt like it was closing. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “I should have wired you sooner.”

Fanny slid to her knees from the chair. She put her head on his chest as they leaned to each other, weeping.