by Nancy Horan
CHAPTER 24
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 thi
nk 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.
CHAPTER 25
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 conci
erge 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.