Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

  “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 gia
nts 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.

  “Well, foolish enough to marry a man who went off to find gold. I didn’t know he was going to do that when I married him. “

  “So you followed him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  “And then there were snakes and angry Indians and raw winds whistling through the boards of the shack, and I learned to live with it all. I could have stood anything, I think, except his philandering.”

  “Even there?”

  “There were prostitutes in the camp. Whether it was going on there or not, I’m not sure. But when he gave up on the claim in Austin, when we moved to Virginia City, there was no doubt about it.”

  Louis studied her. “You stayed with him. You had more children.”

  “Always after a reconciliation.” Fanny sighed. “He swore he had changed …” She shook her head. “On my forgiving days, I think it’s a sickness with Sam. There are times, though, when I wish he were dead.”

  She bit her upper lip, regretting those last words. No one should say such a hideous thing about anyone. Louis certainly wouldn’t. She remembered him walking around taking up a collection a few weeks ago for a couple of stranded minstrels. He was above such remarks.

  Something Bob had said about Louis popped into her mind: “He makes everyone around him a little better, a little brighter.”

  Watching Louis peel an apple, Fanny realized she was glad he had come back.

  CHAPTER 18

  In the morning, he was waiting for her when she appeared in the dining room.

  “Would you like to take a walk?”

  “I’m wary of walks in the woods with you Stevenson men,” she said. “Anyway, Sammy is still asleep.”

  “It’s going to be a warm day. I think it would be good for you.”

  Fanny finished her cup of coffee, stepped into the kitchen to confer with the cook, then went upstairs. She thought about the walk and felt an odd little palpitation. Stopping at the mirror in her bedroom, she pinched her cheeks for color, tied a red kerchief around her neck, then turned sideways to study her figure. She was surprised her that looks had not gone down, given the past year. She pulled her heavy boots out of the closet, the flat-soled ones she wore for walking. On the floor of the closet lay a small case. Impulsively, she opened it and removed the revolver Sam had given her back in Nevada. It was heavier than her pistol and did not fit in her pocket. She put the gun into a cloth bag, threw in a handful of bullets, pulled the drawstring, and slung the thing over her shoulder.

  “Where are you going?” Sammy appeared in the bedroom doorway in his nightshirt.

  “Louis and I are going for a walk.”

  “May I go?”

  “Ernestine said she would make you an omelet while we are gone.” Fanny hugged the boy. “If I know Louis, he will want to fish with you this afternoon.”

  Downstairs, Fanny collected the lunch the cook had prepared and put it in a knapsack for Louis to carry. “Sam will be all right here for a couple of hours. He just woke up.”

  “The chicken we had last night?” Louis asked, patting the bag.

  “And croissants.”

  “You’re brilliant.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  They walked from the inn toward the path into the forest. There were a couple of dogs waiting at the opening. She had noticed before that they didn’t go into the forest on their own, but they would follow people in. “Come on, then,” she said to a mutt, and two followed. Louis went ahead of Fanny, moving along confidently, like an explorer. He stopped now and then to hold back branches that hung over the trail. They walked for a half hour without saying much, the dogs trotting along behind them.

  It was a path neither of them had walked before. When Louis stopped, they were in a clearing near a stream. Fanny found a rock on which to lay out the picnic food. She used her small knife to cut up the chicken and put it on the bread. Louis had brought a goatskin of water. They ate quickly. It was nothing but bread, chicken, and water; still, they were content.

  Louis sat on the ground against a rock and tilted back his head. Suddenly, he shouted out, “I love this forest! I love France!”

  The echo of Fanny’s laughter reverberated in the clearing. She sat upright and surveyed the ground around them. Soon she was on her feet, collecting pinecones, four of which she placed in a row atop a flat rock near the base of a tree. Next she came back to where Louis was and sat down, reached into her bag, and pulled out the smooth-handled gun.

  His face registered the desired effect: The cigarette nearly fell from his lips. “I didn’t know I had come among revolvers,” he said.

  Fanny emptied the bag of bullets into her lap and loaded the gun. She stood up and took her position, about twenty yards from the rock. With her back straight and both eyes open, Fanny blasted four shots, hitting each of the cones.

  The air smelled of gunpowder. Her ears rang. When she turned around she saw that the dogs had run off and Louis was on his feet, his expression registering something between alarm and marvel. She offered him the handle of the gun.

  “Not my forte,” he said, holding up his hands, as if in surrender. He lit a cigarette for her. “Do all the girls in Indianapolis carry guns?”

  “Just the ones who like to shoot things.” She put the revolver back into her sack. “I like to shoot things.”

  “Was that some sort of warning?”

  “Take it as you wish,” she said in an imperious way, but she couldn’t sustain the pose. She put her head back and laughed. “I was trying to impress you.”

  “You did that. Where the devil is Indiana?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know where home is anymore. We leave in a week for Paris, but we can’t stay there forever.”

  “Don’t think about it,” he said.

  Outside, the days were growing cooler. The last flowers of summer were fading and the horse chestnut was dropping its spiky green balls. In the river, red berries fallen from bushes on the shore drifted in lines with the water’s ripples and collected along the banks.

  There were things she did need to think about. Getting Sammy a tutor in Paris was one, but the bigger worry was money. She dreaded the prospect of another threadbare winter in Paris, never knowing if Sam would send support or not. All the years they lived together, he made her ask for the week’s household money; he would never give her the allowance outright. First he would demand an accounting for the last amount he’d given her, then look in her purse to see if she had some money left. He said it was only fair. But it made her furious to remember the humil
iations. Sam had taken her dowry, along with money borrowed from her father, and thrown it down a mineshaft that he eventually walked away from. Where was the fairness in that?

  I mustn’t think out loud about Sam anymore. That couldn’t be what Louis wanted to hear. As the days at the inn wore on, she found herself withholding stories if they involved Sam. Was Louis keeping to himself such stories of his own?

  Now she woke every morning feeling calm, knowing she would see him first thing. They’d meet at the breakfast table, where he would concoct some adventure for the three of them. They paddled the river and fished, mostly tangling their lines in the thick sedge. Out in the woods, Louis reverted to eight—Sammy’s age. They chased around playing hide-and-seek among the trees. “What was that about living inside your skin?” Louis asked her, pulling her into the game.

  In the afternoons, Fanny and Louis sat beside the dining room stove. He told her about the lighthouses his father and grandfather had built. She told him about her own father’s lumber business. Louis talked about how he had known at fourteen that he would be a writer. She told him about the art school in San Francisco where the creative impulses she’d always had veered toward painting.

  She felt herself softening. Over the years she had made a near art of listening to men, no matter how boring; she perfected the interested gaze. But Louis was not boring, not ever; he was an extraordinary talker. And the pleasure was, he listened to her. Closely enough that after a time he seemed to be reading her mind, anticipating what she would say next. They came from entirely different worlds, yet they shared a surprising number of common experiences.

  One night while she was mending stockings next to the stove, Louis and Sammy sat on the floor nearby and sculpted wads of wax into small human figures.

  “This is a Confederate lieutenant who lost his boots in the last battle,” Louis said to the boy. He had retrieved a matchstick and stuck it in the wax man’s hand. “He may be barefoot, but he still has his trusty sword.” He held up the soldier for Sammy to see. “What do ye think of this fella, mannie?”