by Gina Fattore
Jeremiah Crutchley, who loved to hunt and thought Johnson’s Life of Pope was the best of his Lives, died in 1805, at sixty.
Fanny’s hip, cool, suspiciously young-looking musician father made it to the advanced age of eighty-eight, and her erstwhile BFF Mrs. Thrale, all the way to eighty. Mad King George III also hit the four-score mark, but his passive-aggressive Queen checked out in her early seventies. So perhaps it’s not really so good for you, keeping all your aggression on the inside. Oh, shit, I really am doing it, aren’t I?
Obsessing about death.
Signing your will will do that to you.
Plus, signing tons of other papers deciding what to do with all your money and organs in the event of your untimely death.
Harold, my business manager, set all that up for me, and all I had to do was drive to Beverly Hills and sign. My little sister came with. She’s a lot more dependable than the little sister in Hannah and Her Sisters. I picked her up at the airport around three, and after we signed all the papers, I was planning to take her by my office and introduce her to everyone—Jill and Dave and whichever shoe girls and delightful twentysomething assistants happened to be around. I was also going to show her the sets and, possibly, god help me, try and introduce her to some of the actors. My little sister’s a pretty big fan of the show I’ve been working on, so I thought she might enjoy that. Plus, if I died, then she’d be able to tell everybody back home in the Rust Belt what a big success I was. How even though I never did manage to lose those last twenty pounds or tell good third-date stories, at least I had made some of my TV-writing dreams come true and had my own parking space and a chair with my name on it. But signing all those documents related to my own death kinda took it out of me. I didn’t think I could handle that plus the stress of driving over the hill during rush hour, so I sent Dave an email asking him to tell everybody that I was bailing. Then I took my little sister to my favorite sushi place and called it a night. She’s sleeping now in my guest room/office. At least I presume she’s sleeping, because it’s like 2 a.m.
I am not sleeping.
But then it’s probably not hugely important to get a good night’s sleep before you have brain surgery. I think it’s probably fine to stay up all night thinking about Fanny and how she died on January 6, 1840, with her devoted niece/editor by her side.
Actually, you know what’s kind of freaky and always makes me sad?
January 6 was the exact same day her favorite sister, Susanna, died.
That’s kind of weird, right? Fanny didn’t see her after the fall of 1796, when Molesworth Phillips, Susanna’s evil scofflaw of a husband, carted their whole family off to Ireland. Susanna didn’t want to go to Ireland—from the get-go, the whole thing sounded like a gigantic drag to her—but her husband had basically kidnapped her eldest son and put him in school there, so what choice did she have? Women didn’t have a lot of choices back then. They weren’t “empowered” like we are today, with our high heels and constant waxing. So Susanna went to Ireland with her half-mad, unfeeling reprobate of a husband, and while she was in Ireland, she kept getting sicker and sicker, and eventually she did try to come home to England—to see her family and to live, or perhaps to die, among people who actually loved her—but right after she crossed the Irish Sea and landed at a place called Parkgate, she died.
In lodgings.
Which always sounds worse to me than any other kind of dying.
I’m not sure why.
Maybe because it implies that the person who died didn’t belong anywhere.
That she was adrift and alone, which Fanny’s favorite sister wasn’t.
She wasn’t alone.
Her brother Charles was with her and her half-mad, unfeeling reprobate of a husband, and so was her daughter, Fanny, who was named after—well, it should be pretty obvious who she was named after. It was 1800 by the time Susanna died, the dawn of a new century, and for the next forty years of that century—for the rest of her life—Fanny always observed January 6 as a day of remembrance. You know, like Jewish people have Yom Kippur. Or maybe that’s not what Yom Kippur is for—I don’t know these things because I had the misfortune to be born Catholic and Italian American. Basically, whatever else she happened to be doing that day, on January 6, Fanny would always stop and take a moment to think about her favorite sister, the one who loved to play the piano and spoke French really well. I’m not exactly sure what she would think about. Forty years is a long time to outlive your favorite sister, so I’m sure it changed from year to year.
In the beginning, Topic A was probably how Susanna never should have married that asshole Molesworth Phillips.
In later years, Fanny probably thought more about the good stuff. You know, about the time they dressed their brother Charles up in a funny outfit and sent him off to the printer with the manuscript of Fanny’s first novel. When they did that, they weren’t thinking about how much that one simple act might change Fanny’s life. They sent it off, she later said, “for a frolic.” They weren’t thinking that Fanny would become the toast of London, live in fancy houses with Mrs. Thrale, hobnob with Dr. Johnson, and flirt unsuccessfully with Jeremiah Crutchley.
They weren’t thinking about how George Owen Cambridge would break Fanny’s heart.
And that Stephen Digby would break it again—in the same way.
Or about how god-awful it would be working for the Queen.
So god-awful that in December 1790, Fanny finally worked up the courage to submit her letter of resignation.
That’s right.
She quit her glamorous, high-paying job.
You know, just like Woody Allen does in Hannah and Her Sisters.
And then guess what happened?
Go ahead.
Guess.
It shouldn’t be too hard, because it’s exactly what happens at the end of every romantic comedy.
She fell in love.
If you are a truly extraordinary person, sometimes it takes a revolution for your love life to improve.
That’s what happened in Fanny’s case.
There was a revolution.
The French Revolution.
Perhaps you’ve heard of it? As revolutions go, it’s one of the bigger ones. The details aren’t important. For the purposes of this story, all you really need to know is that once they started chopping off heads in France, tons of French people ended up living in England, and some of these people—including some interesting French bachelors with deep-set, gray-blue eyes and hair that flowed over their collars—moved in right next door to Fanny’s favorite sister, Susanna.
Which I guess is just dumb luck or something.
After all, Fanny didn’t cause the French Revolution.
She didn’t man the barricades or try to hasten it along in any way.
It just happened.
And because it happened—because a bunch of strangers living in France decided that they had had enough of kings and took to the streets and started killing each other—Fanny fell in love.
In the spring of 1793.
When she was forty years old.
With a penniless French émigré named Alexandre d’Arblay. He was thirty-eight, a minor aristocrat, a friend of Lafayette, a general in an army that didn’t exist anymore, and here’s the thing…
He actually loved her back.
You didn’t see that coming, did you?
Neither did Fanny.
Nonetheless, it happened.
Now if I could just figure out how it happened—you know, what Fanny did differently this time to make the interesting French bachelor love her back when all the others had not. If I could just unravel that plot twist, I think I could finally give up on my ill-fated, six-part miniseries, stick it in a drawer somewhere, and then you know what I’d write?
A self-help book.
About how to fall in love at the advanced age of forty.
I think a lot of women would want to read that book.
They’d want to know
how it’s possible for someone to fail so miserably at love for two entire decades and still wind up getting the sort of picture-perfect, storybook happy ending that is normally reserved for pretty, extroverted heroines who look great in sleeveless outfits and devote their whole lives to personal grooming and “putting themselves out there.”
There wasn’t a makeover montage, if that’s what you’re thinking.
When they met, Fanny was the same nearsighted, badly dressed novelist she’d always been.
She was still herself in every essential way.
Still the same girl who had refused Thomas Barlow, gotten into strange quarrels with Jeremiah Crutchley, and sat next to George Owen Cambridge at parties for too long without telling him to fuck off and leave her alone. She was still the same girl who got jilted for Miss Gunning and her 10,000 pounds. Only way older, of course. And way less successful in the entertainment industry.
Yet Alexandre d’Arblay seems to have been taken with her right from the start.
They met on Tuesday, January 22, 1793—or possibly, Wednesday the 23rd—and six months later, on Sunday, July 28, 1793, they were married in the church at Mickelham and lived happily ever after.
At least until the British and the French decided to go to war with each other.
And then a bunch of very confusing and hard-to-explain Napoleonic wars happened.
And then in 1818, Alexandre d’Arblay died.
The interesting French bachelor died.
So there’s another person Fanny outlived.
Her husband.
Her soulmate.
Her one true love.
On the day he died, he looked up at her with what she described as “sweetness inexpressible” and said…
M. D’ARBLAY
Qui?
Which is French for “who.” But according to Fanny, what he actually meant was…
M. D’ARBLAY
Who will be there for you when you are dying? Who’s going to return the favor and give you something to drink?
Because I guess at the time she was giving him a beverage of some sort. And when she answered him, she said…
FANNY
You! My dearest Ami! You yourself! You shall recover, and take your revenge.
She claims she said it cheerfully, which seems kind of hard to believe given the whole deathbed context, but then maybe if you had to wait until you were forty to meet the man of your dreams, and suddenly there you were at your soulmate’s deathbed, and his main topic of conversation was you and how things might end up going for you after his death—well, then maybe you’ve done okay for yourself.
Maybe you’ve managed to get the whole love thing right.
After she said it, he smiled and shut his eyes, and then a few hours later he died. She had to go on for twenty-two more years without him—without the soulmate it had taken her forty years, two novels, tons of lurking fevers, and one really shitty job to find.
Although, perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
I seem to have skipped over all the happy parts of the story, the parts where love conquers all. I forget sometimes just how much normal people seem to enjoy those parts. At the very least I should have told you how the interesting French bachelor proposed, but it’s not a very good story by contemporary GirlWorld standards because there was no diamond ring involved. All he did was send her a letter. That’s it. Just a letter. It’s dated “31 March 1793,” and in this letter, the interesting French bachelor goes on for pages and pages about some crackpot scheme he has come up with to establish “un Corps d’artillerie à Cheval qu’on dit que le gouvernement anglais veut lever pour la deffense de ses Côtes.”
Did you catch that?
I think it’s something about French cavalry officers. Cheval I’m pretty sure is “horse,” and corps d’artillerie can’t be anything other than “artillery corps.” Anyway, the impoverished academics who make it their life’s work to study Fanny swear this letter is a declaration of love—they say it’s tantamount to a proposal of marriage—and Fanny seems to have agreed with them because at some point after she received this letter and before she died, she wrote on it “Precieuses!”
Like that.
With an exclamation point.
But obviously, this will all have to be changed in the stirring conclusion to my six-part miniseries. Think about it. Even if you had Colin Firth in the part and you had him write the letter while he was naked and dripping wet in the bathtub—still, a letter about fencible cavalry would be a big snooze. Admittedly, it does seem romantic the way the interesting French bachelor wrote the letter, got on his horse, and rode all the way to London so he could drop it in the penny post that very same day; but no network currently in existence is going to get on board with that as the stirring conclusion to a six-part miniseries about the fortunes and misfortunes of a little-known, long-dead eighteenth-century novelist who was incredibly nearsighted and had bad fashion sense.
Obviously, a mad dash would have to be made to someplace more exciting than a mailbox.
To a dock, maybe. Docks were basically what they had back then instead of airports. Or, fuck it, maybe there could just be a ball or something? That was always our fallback plan at the teenage melodrama—dress ’em up, slap a song on it, the kids will cry. I’m sure that would work. It wouldn’t be true as far as what actually happened, but who would know? Just me, I guess. And even I don’t know what actually happened, because the letter about the fencible cavalry scheme is all in French, and I don’t read French. Ironic, isn’t it? Here I have spent almost twenty years of my life studying up on Fanny—obsessing on her romantic difficulties, reading all her diaries, her books, her letters, getting to know her family members, her coworkers, getting myself all invested in her story—and when we finally get to the Happy Ending (Rule #2), the part that is all about Love, I can’t even begin to understand any of it because it’s all in French, and I don’t speak French.
Or maybe that’s not ironic.
Maybe that’s totally appropriate, since Love is also turning out to be a language I don’t speak. It just doesn’t make sense to my spinster brain the way it does to all the expensively shod residents of GirlWorld, which is either because I was born with a tiny little brain tumor pressing on my frontal lobe in the exact “love” location, or, I suppose, it’s also possible that I just never tried hard enough to learn it.
That’s basically what happened with French.
I did take it in high school.
I took it for three years.
And then I took it again in college.
So if I concentrate super hard, sometimes I can get the general gist of what’s going on with Fanny and her interesting French bachelor.
But only when something incredibly boring is happening.
Like they’ll be alone in the parlor, and the interesting French bachelor will be kissing her hand and saying I don’t know what, and Fanny will interrupt him with lines like…
FANNY
Comment se porte Me de Staël?
M. D’ARBLAY
Très bien.
FANNY
M. de Narbonne?
M. D’ARBLAY
Bien.
FANNY
Ma Soeur?
M. D’ARBLAY
Bien, bien.
FANNY
Et Norbury–
M. D’ARBLAY
Et tous! Tous se portent bien!
And that’s exactly the sort of conversation you can understand if you’ve had high school French. Basically, all she’s doing is asking him how her sister is—and a bunch of other people they know—and that’s like day one of high school French. It’s pretty elementary stuff. But the letter about the cavalry scheme is way more advanced than that. It’s not just in French—it’s in eighteenth-century French—and it seems to involve a lot of conditional tenses, and the impoverished academics who make it their life’s work to study Fanny don’t even begin to translate it for you.
That seems kind of c
ruel, doesn’t it?
You’d think they could help you out a little. But I guess they assume that if you’re actually attempting to read this stuff—well, then, surely you’ve been to graduate school and you can read French on your own, so they don’t want to insult your intelligence by translating it for you.
Or possibly they’re just being spiteful.
From what I hear, graduate school can be pretty rough. Worse than Hollywood, in fact. Competitive, star-driven, political. I was actually going to go at one point, so I could study up on Fanny in some sort of official capacity. Back when I was still in my twenties, going to grad school and getting a PhD in English seemed like a good idea to me—or at least it seemed like a better idea than crying in the stairwell at the alternative newspaper every Tuesday night for the rest of my life. So I took the GRE and sent away for applications, but then one Thursday night during a particularly good episode of ER, I got the Phone Call That Changed My Life. All in all, I’m pretty glad I answered that call. It was from this woman who used to be my boss at the New York Public Library when I was a struggling twenty-something assistant-girl, and she said, and I quote…
FAIRY-GODMOTHER-TYPE CHARACTER
I think you should move to LA and work for my son, and he should help you be a TV writer.
So I did.
I never went to graduate school. I never even finished filling out the applications—although you know who did go to graduate school?
Dave.
That’s why he’s so much older than the other assistants and why he’s read so many books written before 1900. For the record, it’s also why he wears those goddamn flip-flops all the time. I guess before he moved out here, he spent six long, hard, graduate school winters on the East Coast, and so the second he touched down in California, he made some kind of vow that he would never wear real shoes again unless he absolutely had to, which seems a little ridiculous to me, but then who am I to talk?
I’ve made a lot of ridiculous vows in my time.
Dave actually just sent me an email a little bit ago. Jill sent me one too—hours ago, wishing me good luck and all that—but Dave’s didn’t come till just now. He said everyone at the office was really sorry they weren’t going to see me—and meet my little sister—but that of course they all understood about me not wanting to drive all the way to Burbank. He also said he’d miss emailing with me, but that obviously I should get this whole brain-surgery thing crossed off my list of things to do so we could go out and get drunk again real soon.
