Under the Wide and Starry Sky (28 page)

John Singer Sargent was rifling through Fanny's wardrobe. The painter pulled out a gold-threaded white sari she had bought on a whim in London. “Do you mind?” he asked, holding it up to the light from the window.

When she appeared in the sari, Sargent seated her in a chair against a wall. “The shoes, Mrs. Stevenson. I wonder if you might …”

“Am I to understand that you want me barefoot?”

“Now, Fan, you know perfectly well you go around here in bare feet,” Louis chimed in from the other side of the bedroom, where he was brushing off his velvet jacket.

“And the shawl,” the artist said thoughtfully. He lifted the shimmering fabric off her shoulders, examined her without it, then draped it over her head so it partly concealed her face.

She had worked as a painter long enough to know what effect he was after for the portrait of Fanny with her famous husband: Sargent wanted to present her as truly exotic. If she hadn't been party to draping models herself, she might have refused to pose. It wasn't that she was afraid to cooperate with another artist's vision of “an artistic couple,” as he phrased it. But she suspected that, sweet as he was, she could not entirely trust him.

Earlier, Sargent had done a portrait of Louis, and the end result was strange indeed. Louis looked like a weird, bony, girlishly pretty aesthete. Fanny had tossed the finished painting into the garbage bin after Sargent left. The artist hadn't liked the first painting, either, and was back to try again. The young man was a good friend of Will Low, and these sittings were a favor to Sargent in the wake of a scandal that had erupted the previous year at the Paris salon. He had painted a portrait of a socialite in a revealing black dress, with one tiny strap falling suggestively off her white shoulder. The picture's overt sensuality caused a furor at the exhibition and sent the painter scurrying to London, where he was now living and trying to rescue his reputation as a portraitist by painting his friends and acquintances. It would not help Fanny's reputation among Louis's friends if she appeared uncooperative or haughty. Still, she couldn't dispel the creeping feeling she was about to be roasted and served up by John Singer Sargent.

Louis was more sanguine about the intrusion into their lives. He was feeling better, and the presence of the visitor summoned a burst of energy in him. To fend off boredom, he employed Adelaide Boodle to read aloud from
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
which Louis had just finished reading a couple of nights earlier, already reread, and was ravenous to read again.

“A novel?” Sargent asked glumly.

“Ah, he's brilliant!” Louis said. “You'll love the story.” Fanny could tell the artist detested the distraction. Soon Adelaide's high-pitched English accent was wrapping itself around Huck's American backwoods conversations, full of
hain'
ts and
reckon
s and
looky here
s.

Now Sargent was arranging her husband in the foreground. Louis managed to stand still for a while, though she knew he couldn't sustain it. In no time, he was pacing back and forth in his usual manner, one hand stroking his mustache as Adelaide read, the other hand fluttering in and out of his pocket, while the artist's brush darted like a hummingbird between his canvas and paints.

After the first sitting, Louis and Fanny looked at the canvas of their dual portrait. Only Louis had been sketched in so far, but the lines already captured his fitful bursts of motion.

“I believe he has done a good job on my hand,” Louis said. “It appears to be moving even now.”

“It expresses the whole man,” Fanny said.

Three days later, when Fanny viewed the nearly finished painting, her enthusiasm vanished. Sargent had captured Louis's youthful face, his intense brown eyes, his preoccupied brilliance. On canvas as in real life, Louis seethed with intellectual energy. The image of herself, however, deeply disturbed her. He had cast her as a sort of harem woman with painted rings on her toes and black lines around her eyes. It looked nothing like her. More disturbing was how insignificant she was in the painting compared to Louis. She was cut in half, pushed off the side of the canvas.

“I am a cipher under a shadow,” she remarked glumly to Sargent as she stared at the portrait on his easel.

“Yes, “ the painter admitted in a cheery tone. “Now that you say it, I suppose you are.”

“I like it, though it is damned queer,” Louis said after Sargent had departed. “I look like a madman—a caged maniac pacing about—”

“—while I sit at the edge looking colorful. An urn might have served just as well. Where on earth will it hang?”

“In one wealthy woman's parlor behind a potted fern,” he said. “No one will see it.”

As it turned out, Sargent decided to give it to them. “I can't stand it,” she told Louis when he hung it on the sitting room wall, “but at least it won't be exhibited in some gallery.”

“Oh, come now,” he said, “it's quite interesting. Let's live with it for a while.”

The painting annoyed Fanny whenever it caught her eye. No one else would notice, but never had it been so obvious that she was being set out on the periphery.

It was not the first time. People befriended them because of Louis. She understood; he was so lovable. But she had grown weary of letters written only to him, after all the effort she had invested in his friends. She received the occasional letter from Colvin or Symonds and sometimes a chafing one from Henley criticizing her for some perceived misdeed—masked, of course, as friendly joking. To Louis's old crowd, she would always be an interloper.

The exceptions were Sidney Colvin and Fanny Sitwell. When they came to visit in the summer, Fanny poured out her soul to the woman she had least expected to become a confidante. And yet Fanny Sitwell was just that.

While Colvin sat with Louis in the garden to sit, the two women headed to town for a walk. Around Fanny's neck hung a pair of field glasses for bird viewing. They walked down the chine through a stand of pines where the smell of resin filled the air.

“Louis's spirits seem good,” Fanny Sitwell remarked as they gingerly descended a rustic stairway.

“You always put the best face on things, my friend. His health is just plain bad.”

“I'm so sorry for both of you. You must be exhausted.”

Fanny shrugged. “I have always taken care of other people. I suppose I am used to being tired. That's not what frustrates me most.”

Fanny Sitwell's eyebrows rose quizzically.

“I have become invisible,” Fanny said.

“Oh,” her friend responded.

“Don't misunderstand me,” Fanny said. “I haven't any interest in blaming men. I happen to like them, especially educated men. That's why it has come as a surprise to find such offensive attitudes among my husband's friends. Louis cannot see it. He thinks I imagine it.”

If Fanny Sitwell was surprised by the outburst, she didn't show it. She said, “We were raised to be companions and mothers.”

“If I seek to make a mark of my own, am I not a woman, then?”

“You know how I feel about all this,” Fanny Sitwell said. “You simply have to move forward despite all the notions about how we are
supposed
to be.”

“Heaven knows you have made a life for yourself …”

“I didn't have a job when I first met Louis, you know. It would have been unacceptable for a vicar's wife to be out in the workplace. But when my first son died … After the fog, a clarity arrives, as you know. I knew I would separate from my husband, and I had to find work to survive. The secretarial job at the women's college came some months later, through friends. It freed me.”

They sat down on a bench. She took Fanny Sitwell's hand in her own. “You are a boon to me. What would I do without you? Some days I feel like such an oddity in this place. “

Fanny watched the bowl of mashed potatoes go around the table. It was a wilting July evening in Bournemouth, and a new flock of guests was at her dinner table. Before Henley and his wife, Anna, arrived along with Bob Stevenson and Katharine de Mattos, Fanny had stood in the steaming kitchen beside Valentine, overseeing the miserable meal preparation. The girl was prone to mistakes when she was out of sorts. She spewed incomprehensible French phrases into a boiling pot while Fanny sliced tomatoes and wondered aloud what had possessed her to choose lamb and potatoes for a hellishly hot evening.

“I sent it everywhere,” Henley was saying as he scooped a fat spoonful of potatoes onto his plate. “The magazine market at the moment appears to be glutted.”

“William is being polite,” Katharine said with self-deprecating good humor. She was cool-looking in a fashionable linen dress, except for the beads of sweat across her upper lip. “Let's be honest among friends. Mr. Henley has had little success with my story because it is my story.”

“When I read your manuscript, I kept thinking that it was too realistic,” Fanny said. “Do you remember my idea of the sprite? Why don't you try it that way, instead of portraying the mysterious woman on the train as an escapee from a mental ward?”

Katharine's knife paused midcut. “No, I don't think so. It's not the sort of story I write.”

“Then let me try my hand at it,” Fanny said. “We can collaborate on it.”

Katharine glanced at Henley, then down at her lap. “I'm not like the rest of you,” she muttered. “I don't believe I would be very good at collaborating.”

“Are you going to work on it some more?”

“I hadn't planned to.”

“Well, then, why don't I give it a go?” Fanny said. “The spirit-world angle would change the whole gist of it.”

Katharine bit her lip, considering. “All right. I suppose if you want to try … “ Her eyes went to Henley's again.

Fanny knew what they all were thinking: that she wasn't any more fit to get the story published than Louis's cousin. What a pleasure it would be if she could prove them wrong.

“I don't know why you want to bother with that, “ Louis said when they were in bed. “I don't think it's a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“It's not your story now.” Louis yawned.

“But she consented,” Fanny said.

“With her lips, yes.”

“It will be a different story when I'm done. Much better. Anyway, I suggested the nixie idea to her before she wrote her version. Haven't we all thrown ideas around, shared them? As I recall, ‘The Suicide Club' was Bob's idea.”

Louis was silent. When his breath came regularly, Fanny rose from bed and tiptoed to the desk where Katharine's manuscript lay. It was so clear what was wrong with the thing. No one wanted to read such a dreary, depressing story. Fanny thought she would keep the young man on the train as a character who is going out into the country. She would load him down with gear and high hopes for a quiet day of fishing in a stream. At first he would be annoyed by the waiflike creature he meets on the train; but she would not be insane. She would be a water sprite trying to find her way back to the river out of which she'd been fished. As the two leave the train, headed for the river, the young man could become smitten by her free spirit. But the woman he is growing to love—after a lovely playful interlude—will disappear into the water, as if in a dream.

Henley would hate that sort of mystical little tie-up, but Fanny loved the twist. It wouldn't take that much work to make the piece into a story someone would buy. She would call it “The Nixie.”

“Bogue went out fighting. There is a note of rightness in that,” Louis said.

Lloyd was digging a hole in the garden for the dog's body, while Fanny, weeping, painted a rock with his name.

“Why now?” Lloyd asked Louis. “How many times did he bark at that spaniel

when it walked by the house?”

“One time too many.” Louis sat in a chair on the lawn, watching mother and son prepare the grave.

There had been nothing sweet about the public Bogue. Privately, he was a cuddle. In the morning Bogue burrowed his way beneath the sheet and counterpane until he found Louis's feet, then draped his hairy body over them and snored, starting every once in a while—chasing a rabbit in his dreams, Louis supposed. Often, before Louis began writing, Bogue had already put in a good day's work, announcing through the hedge with fierce barks that the crowing rooster next door should not strut too confidently, that the moment of judgment might appear as suddenly as a new opening in the shrubs. Before breakfast scraps arrived in his bowl, Bogue had already chased some hound down the road, striking a blow for all small dogs in a big dog's world. Occasionally, he left the intruders with wounds.

“Why did he have to do that? Chase every dog he ever saw?” Lloyd's voice cracked with

anger at the needlessness of Bogue's death.

“Simply his nature,” Louis said. “He probably was the last of his litter to get at his

mother's teat, or some such injustice. Made him feisty.”

“He would just throw his body into the fray,” Lloyd said. “It was never an even

fight.”

“Maybe he knew that
life
is not an even fight,” Louis mused. “Given the odds, it's the stand one takes that matters.”

The troubles in Ireland weighed heavily on Louis's mind of late. In reading about a particular Irish family caught up in the violence, he began to see his own fate tied in to theirs. Two years earlier, in 1885, an Irish Catholic farmer in Kerry named Curtin had been murdered when he resisted a robbery by Irish nationalists who wanted his firearms and ammunition for their cause. Curtin's children, including two of the older girls, fought off and killed one of the intruders. When the Curtins gave police the names of their father's murderers, the family was boycotted. No food or supplies could reach them, ostracism being the price for their betrayal. Anyone who violated the boycott to assist the family would risk murder.

As they sat by the fire after dinner, Louis lit a cigarette and explained the strategy that had been shaping itself in his head all day. “Just imagine, for one moment,” he said, “how significant it would be if a well-known person—a famous writer—went to the Curtins' farm and brought the world's attention to that beleaguered family.”

Fanny looked askance at him as if he had lost his mind. “What are you saying?”

“I am saying that I am willing to go to that place, that farm, after telling the press

what I am doing. Don't you see? It could bring an end to this absurd boycott.”

“Or you could end up like that farmer. Dead,” Fanny said. “When did this cause become so close to your heart? Yesterday? Don't you hear what you are saying? You want to commit suicide.”

“Well, and why not?” Louis got up and kicked a basket full of kindling wood. “I'd rather use up what time I have left as a spendthrift than die daily in the sickroom. In the end, what matters is the stand one takes against the inevitable.”

“Oh, Louis, for God's sake.”

A few days later, when he spoke again of going to Ireland, they were eating breakfast.

Fanny eyed him calmly. “You haven't touched your eggs or sausage. When you are well, I will go with you. But for today,” she went on in her low, singsong way, “we must simply get you outside. The sun is shining.” She rose from the table before he could protest.

Fanny was humoring him now, but he knew if he got himself to Ireland, there would be no use trying to discourage her. She would go, for better or worse, and stand with him.

Louis allowed Valentine to dress him in layers of knitted and boiled wools. It was May, and catkins on the big beech tree had begun to open. They had been in Bournemouth for three years, but he felt as if he'd been a householder there for forty. He was a weevil in a biscuit. His body was growing more useless by the day. If he could get himself to Ireland, he could hurl his ruined carcass into the fight in one wild, final, noble act. How much better that would be than to slowly disintegrate further.

It was with these thoughts that he turned the brass knob of the front

door to find a red-cheeked delivery boy coming up the walk with a telegram from Edinburgh. Louis opened it quickly and found it was from his mother.

Come as soon as possible. Your father is dying.