by Nancy Horan
“Mrs. Osbourne.” The doctor’s face was momentarily confused. “You are looking healthier since I last saw you.”
Fanny summoned her dignity. “I am here to see Louis Stevenson. He is an old friend of mine.”
“Oh? Well, I’m glad to know he has someone in town. I took him in for a few days until he recovers. “ He looked at her curiously. “Are you aware that he is quite ill?”
“He had a hard journey from England. He’s here on a lecture tour.”
“I can’t be sure—there’s no real test—but I suspect the man has consumption.” He shook his head. “Compounded by pleurisy and malnutrition. Came mighty close to dying out on that ranch. The boat and train travel from England broke what was left of his health.” He shrugged. “Follow me. He’s upstairs.”
Louis lay with his hands at his sides, palms down, white sheet pulled up over his chest. His eyes were closed, and his face, in profile, looked remarkably peaceful. No matter how sick he was, his features showed his boyish sweetness; he had in him a soul as pure as Hervey’s. He was brilliant, just, and wholesome—the closest thing to a holy man Fanny had ever known. In rooms full of people, she had watched others expand with happiness just to be in his presence. He was the most alive person she’d ever met. And he was funny on top of it all. How useful a thing it would be to keep such a man in the world. How extraordinary a life would be hers if she stayed within that circle of light.
Fanny knelt by the bed and put his icy hand into hers. “Don’t die on me, Louis,” she murmured. “Yes, I will marry you. Just hang on.”
She saw the eyelids flutter. She didn’t know if he could hear her, but she kept talking. “I was afraid, Louis. Do you understand what it is for a woman …? I was protecting myself, and I thought, How will we live? But when you left that day on the beach, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. Sam has agreed to a divorce. Do you hear me? He’s asking for a ‘decent’ interval. Don’t you enjoy that, darling—decent? Oh, Louis, you are going to be a great writer, I know it in my heart, and a healthy one, and we are going to be happy together, in our own home. I can’t promise I can give you a child of your own, but I will try, I promise you I will try, if that’s what you want. If you can just hang on … Only a few more months until the divorce can be finalized, and then a little while after that … ”
Louis stirred, turned his head toward her. The radiant hazel eyes took her in. “You look beautiful today, Fanny,” he said. “Forgive me if I am not at my best.” He gestured weakly at his body. “I’m all to whistles. This is hardly the figure I had hoped to cut as a bridegroom.”
Fanny swallowed back tears. “I shall fatten you up before then.” She dipped a cloth in a bowl of water on the table near his bed and wet his dry lips.
“I don’t want to misrepresent myself to you, Fanny.” Louis’s breathy voice was as tattered as the rest of him. “I am a mere complication of cough and bones. When we met in Grez, I was the healthiest I had been in some time. The truth is, I’ve been an invalid off and on all my life. It will not be easy for you.”
Looking down at Louis, she remembered the months of caring for Hervey. It had been excruciating, and it had not been enough. How vividly she remembered the day they buried him at Saint-Germain. Watching the little casket go into the ground, she’d felt like the perpetrator of a terrible crime. The child should have been at home in Oakland, nestled safely in his own bed. Perhaps at some deep level she didn’t want to look at, she expected she could redeem herself for letting Hervey slip through her fingers: Maybe marrying an invalid would be a prayer, an act of contrition. She didn’t know. All she knew for certain was that she loved Louis.
“I shall carry you,” she told him. “And you can carry me.”
He nodded. “You’ll pardon me, Mrs. Stevenson,” he whispered, and in a few moments, he was sound asleep.
CHAPTER 35
1880
“A decent interval” was not only Sam Osbourne’s request; it was on the lips of every member of Fanny’s family. Her parents and sisters had vehemently opposed the divorce. Even Nellie had argued against it. The very mention of an impending divorce was being kept from Fanny’s sickly sister Elizabeth for fear the disgraceful news would knock her over the edge.
“I don’t mind waiting so much,” Louis told Fanny. “Your family has come further along than my own.”
It was true. His father had used a desperate ploy to get Louis to return to Scotland, and his senses. Through Baxter, Thomas Stevenson had sent word that his son was murdering his parents with anguish and disgrace. The father pretended to be near death to draw Louis home.
Suspecting he was being misled, Louis refused. Slowly recovering his strength under Dr. Heintz’s care, he continued to work furiously on what he thought would pay fastest, fables and short tales, knowing that Fanny and Sammy would be under his protective wing soon enough. When that would happen remained uncertain, for the actual divorce date was dangled and withdrawn by Sam. In October, Fanny traveled north to Oakland, taking Nellie with her as a “chaperone.” In December, when the decree was official, the decent interval between divorce and remarriage officially began.
A couple of days before Christmas, Louis moved to San Francisco to a boardinghouse, where he worked and waited. Twice a week during that long winter, Fanny took a ferry over to meet him for dinner. They sat at a modest little restaurant and gentled each other out of their anxieties. “June,” she told him when he asked what would make a respectable wedding date. “That will be six months.”
“If I can finish the work I began in Monterey, we will be all right by then,” Louis said.
“What do you eat during the day?” she asked him over dinner one evening in March. Louis looked terrible, his cheeks hollow and shadowed.
He hesitated.
“Tell me,” she said. “You look as if you are starving.”
He hemmed and hawed. “Enough,” he told her.
“Not enough,” Dora Williams informed Fanny when she saw her friend a week later. “Virgil and I saw him last week at the Pine Street coffee house. He was having his usual breakfast there, he said. A cup of coffee, one little roll, and a pat of butter—a bargain at ten cents. He told us he’s mastered the art of having the bread and butter expire at the same moment. We laughed, but then he laid out the rest of the day. He goes back in the evening for another roll and coffee—that’s his supper. He’s eating only one meal, really, midday, that he gets for fifty cents.”
“Louis only tells me about the stories he’s working on,” Fanny said, shaking her head. “He’s trying to save what little money he has for when he has to support me. But that has already begun. He gave me fifteen dollars recently to keep the house going.”
“Isn’t Sam supporting you until you remarry?”
“Didn’t you hear? Sam lost his job a few days ago.”
The constant anxiety, the enforced diet, and the frantic work pace took its toll: Louis fell ill with malaria. Fanny moved him to an Oakland hotel room to be nearer her cottage. It was there that Louis’s lungs began to hemorrhage. When she discovered him in his room coughing up blood, Fanny raised a handkerchief to her mouth, vowed to herself she would not faint, and immediately fetched a doctor.
Stroking his goatee, white and stiff as a brush, Dr. Bamford stood over Louis’s bony, pain-wracked body and said, “The patient is not to move. He must lie on his back so that his lungs can heal.” Before he left, Bamford handed Fanny a bottle of ergotin and showed her how to measure an exact dosage. “This will make the blood vessels contract during a hemorrhage. He will need to have this medicine by him at all times.”
“So,” Louis said sadly of the latest horrific twist. “He arrives—’Bluidy Jack.”‘
Fanny sat by his bed and held his hand. She knew he was devastated, for the bleeding confirmed his fear that he would probably die of tuberculosis, and soon.
“For the sake of appearances,” another phrase her family liked to use, was now ignored. One idea loomed large:
She must get Louis to a safer climate. If they stayed in the San Francisco bay fog, it would probably kill him. She promptly moved him from the hotel into her cottage, consigned him to the sofa where she could nurse him, and set the wedding date for May. Sammy was away at boarding school by then in Sonoma, and Nellie was living with her. What her family, friends, and neighbors thought of the whole arrangement didn’t trouble her mind now. If she could nurse Louis to the point where he could travel, she could get him to a better weather.
By day she dosed him with Dover’s powder and made soups to spoon-feed to him. By night she sat next to the sofa, watching helplessly as the ruthless cough hammered deeper in his chest. She and Nellie paused in fear to listen when Louis, past coughing, made a sucking noise in his windpipe. She held her own breath at those moments, uncertain if the last punch had been deadly. There would be a little gasp of air as Louis—limp as a dishrag, drenched with cold sweat, unable to speak—opened his eyes to peer at hers intently. I am not dead yet, the eyes said.
What astounded her was how close to the gates of death he could be at one moment and how alive he could be the next. After a nightlong assault of coughing, he might awaken unable to speak; or, he might sit up, ask for oatmeal, and announce he’d come up with a new story idea.
It’s going to be a wild, rickrack journey with this man.
Within a few days of the hemorrhaging, he was standing on a kitchen chair, reciting Robert Burns. Nellie had spotted a mouse and jumped up on a stool, prompting Louis to rise from the sofa in the parlor and mount another chair.
“‘To a Mouse,’” he announced dramatically, putting hand to breast, “‘On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough.’ By Rrrrobbie Burrrns,” he said, stretching the R’s like a Scottish drum roll.
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy b-r-r-reastie!
“What are you doing?” Fanny called from the other room. She rushed into the kitchen, put her hands on her hips. “Get down this minute!”
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering b-r-r-rattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
“I’ll murder you with a paddle,” Fanny cried. “You’re supposed to be flat on the sofa.”
Nellie’s laughter only encouraged him, and he held forth through two more Burns poems.
“Get down,” Fanny said, but by then even she had begun to giggle. He went on to impersonate a clergyman asking questions from the Shorter Catechism of a frightened child, also played by Louis, and all of it in his best broad Scots. When he climbed down, their eyes were wet from laughing.
The morning after his performance, he was on his back on the sofa, with his feet buried under the family dog, Chuchu. Fanny, and sometimes Nellie, worked as his amanuensis, taking down a new book idea or writing out his letters. In his hours of wellness, Louis’s joy in life was so acute it amazed Fanny. He loved the chaotic household of two women, an occasional child home from school, a dog, four cats, and two horses, and delighted in making Nellie and Fanny the subjects of his jokes.
It was not the same giddiness he used to show, though. She remembered his displays of uncontrollable laughter and the hand-bending it took to stop it. The last time it happened, when she’d bitten him hard and opened a cut, Louis had looked at her with such injured shock that she’d been flooded with shame. She had seen such a look once before, on the face of her son Sammy. Long ago when he was a baby, Sammy developed a habit of kicking furiously whenever she tried to diaper him. He was just under a year old and playing with her, really, but she’d been tired at the time and slapped his leg—pretty gently, yet hard enough to surprise him. The child had stopped moving and gazed in disbelief at his mother. It was as if the world changed in that moment for him, and for her. Had she knocked the wildness out of the little fellow with one slap? Made him cautious? For that was what Sammy was now. Or was he going to be a careful type from the moment he came out of her womb? He never kicked again; she never slapped him again. As it turned out, Louis never lost himself to hilarity after Fanny’s angry bite.
Louis was a far more sober man now than he was three years ago, and his joy less frenetic. Having seen his suffering up close in the last few weeks, she understood better why he would have wanted to abandon himself to untamed gaiety. She could see why he hated the ugly realism of Zola. No wonder he wanted to write adventure stories.
When he was feeling stronger, Fanny walked him slowly through her cottage’s garden. It was not only for the sunshine that she led him along the twisting stone paths on the Oakland hillside, where each turn revealed a distant view or an arrangement of plants that pleased the eye. She wanted him to see what she had made with her own hands, for it was a record of herself. She had laid every stone of the path, planted every fragrant delight, built the arbors and log benches, dug the beds for six great patches in which pumpkins and onions and tomatoes had grown large on the hillside. She could remember herself when she first laid out the garden—young and industrious, so pleased to be grafting roses and pickling her own cantaloupe. She took Louis to the photography studio she’d built in an old shack, where cobwebs covered the glass plate negatives now—pictures of trees and flowers that she’d left behind when she went to Europe with the children. She took him to the shooting range she had set up so he could see that she had been someone before she knew him. A woman of parts.
She and Louis stood quietly near a patch of orange lilies. “Do you know what my mother called me as a child? Tiger Lily.”
He smiled. “How appropriate.”
“Ma always grew them in her garden.”
“Are you saying goodbye to yours?”
“Yes,” she said. “But there will be another garden to make, and a better one. “
On a sunny spring day, Fanny and Louis, dressed in his ulster against any possible chill, took the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco to be married. It wasn’t anything like a wedding, mostly paperwork and a few words spoken by an old Presbyterian minister in his parlor. When she filled out the marriage certificate, she had to pause to think of the date: May 29, 1880. Below it, she admitted to being forty but wrote widowed rather than divorced. Whose business was it other than her own?
The minister read from Corinthians about love being patient and keeping no record of wrongs. They exchanged slender silver rings while her friend Dora Williams stood by as a witness. Afterward, the three of them went out for dinner. Louis raised his glass of wine and said, “I don’t think many wives will be loved as much as mine.” That was the extent of the festivities. Even their simple meal might have been out of the question a few weeks earlier, before Louis’s father finally came around.
Apparently, Thomas Stevenson got wind through Baxter that his only child was broke and lying sick in America. Shamed and remorseful, the old man promised Louis 250 pounds a year as an allowance. Before the conciliatory letter from Louis’s father, Fanny’s throat would constrict when she thought of money. Sam’s monthly support payments for Sammy had ended when he lost his court stenographer job. Thomas Stevenson’s promised allowance eased her anxiety.
The moment the first check arrived, she took Louis to an Oakland dentist to have his rotten teeth pulled and replaced. When the swelling disappeared, they went together to a photographer to have wedding portraits done. Louis looked thin but groomed, while Fanny wore her best hat cocked at a flattering angle, and a string of beads around her neck with a wooden cross attached, an effect she hoped would garner the Stevensons’ approval.
When Fanny saw the portraits, she was pleased. Soon she would send the pictures along with a warm letter to Louis’s parents, preparing them for the fact that, when his health permitted, they would be meeting their new daughter-in-law.
CHAPTER 36
“Napa County.” Dora Williams’s finger glided over a California map. “In the valley, just below Mount Saint Helena, there’s a little town called Calistoga. T
hey’ve got hot springs up there that will cure anything you throw in them. Go to the Springs Hotel.”
“Honeymoon” was too fine a word to put on the trip to Napa. They planned to stay for a couple of months in the mountain air on the advice of the Oakland doctor. After getting a look at himself in the mirror the morning they departed, Louis understood the gravity of the advice, for he resembled more a candidate for the grave than a groom heading off on his wedding trip. Yet his heart felt light, and his mind raced with the possibilities ahead.
They took a train north as a party of three, including Sammy, plus the dog, Chuchu. Outside, rolling hills—May-green and naked of trees—undulated past.
“Let’s look at land up in Sonoma and Napa, maybe buy a ranch,” Louis said when they passed a farm. “We could live out in the hills, hunt and fish for our food. You could sketch.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
He turned away from the panoramic view, leaned back in his seat, and rested his eyes on her. “Just now, in the sunlight—my God, you look splendid in blue.” He squeezed her hand. “You are a beauty who has married a skinny wolf. Don’t you find my toothy new smile rather fine, though?”
“I do.”
“Listen, Fanny,” he said, suddenly serious. “I am done with travel books. Lately, all I care to write is action, with drama and incidents. Big characters with moral dilemmas.”
“I think you already do that in your stories.”
“I’m talking about something with more carpentry.”
“A novel?”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Louis looked back outside and caught sight of a stone quarry where men stood like ants on giant boulders. There was true labor, the kind that broke backs. How dare he complain about travel writing?