Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

  She slid her leg over him. Their lovemaking had a rhythm and a history, a flow of whispers and cues. It brought them together even in the worst of times. It was where they started after they had shouted cruelties at each other, when no words could fix a rift. There were no whispered intimacies at those times, just bodies moving in tandem and serving as proof that they could still connect.

  In the past when they had been away from each other, as they had been for two months, their reunions were frenzies of passion followed by gentle togetherness. Now, though, Fanny sensed a reticence in Louis. Was he still angry at her over the fight with Henley? Was he withholding his trust? Or was she only imagining a coolness in him?

  “They’re called holokus,” Belle said. “You wear a little chemise with a ruffled hem under it. That’s called a muumuu.”

  Fanny, Aunt Maggie, and Valentine were standing with Belle in the Chinatown shop of a tailor named Yee Lee. He was holding up tropical dresses for the women to try on. The loose lawn dresses were gathered above the bosom and flowed out in folds from the yoke.

  “‘Mother Hubbard’s is what we used to call them,” Fanny said. “Good Lord, they’re like altarboy-costumes.”

  “Certainly just as chaste,” Belle said when Valentine tried on a holoku. The French girl moaned at her reflection.

  “I must say,” Aunt Maggie remarked, turning left, then right in front of the mirror, “I am one queer-looking customer.”

  “Goodbye, corsets!” Fanny shouted gleefully.

  The women moved on through the narrow streets of Chinatown, past the stands displaying pickled foodstuffs that were unrecognizable to Fanny. She had already bought kegs of dried beef, sides of bacon, tinned fruit and vegetables, flour, lard—vast amounts of essentials for the ship’s pantry. Now she sought out pawnshops, where she gathered an assortment of old gold wedding bands for trading with natives.

  “I should have written,” Belle said. “Joe told me not to write.” She and Fanny stood together on the sea wall. Nearby, a party celebrating the Casco’s departure was in progress on the boat. Friends and crewmembers mingled with newspaper reporters.

  No man could ever keep me from writing to my mother, Fanny wanted to say, but she managed to hold her tongue. She could imagine the suffering that lay behind and ahead of her girl. Shame ran through her once again when she remembered the stupid, cruel things she had said long ago about Belle having a baby.

  “I have my own regrets,” Fanny said. “I wanted for you things I didn’t have. You always used to say that I lead with my temper. I have a pent-up volcano inside me that has to erupt sometimes.” She shook her head.”When the anger builds like that, it seems I’m not myself until I’ve made the world around me black with smoke and ashes. But oh, Belle, the remorse that follows. No one knows how I regret.”

  “Oh, I know, Mama. Your children know. So does Louis.”

  Of course they knew. What was she thinking? They had all seen her suffer for things that flew out of her mouth. They’d seen her near paralyzed while she went over and over some falling-out with a loved one. “You make people out to be perfect saints,” Louis had chided her. “And when they fall off the pedestal, then you turn on ‘em.” It was an ugly truth about her nature that she hadn’t wanted to hear.

  Belle was blood; Fanny loved her fiercely, however estranged they had become. And she would love Austin as utterly.

  “Will you go back to Bournemouth after the trip?” Belle had asked during lunch. “Perhaps,” Fanny lied. She never wanted to set foot in England again. Henley and the others had made sure of that. By now word of her supposed plagiarism was surely making the rounds in London’s literary salons. Henley hated her enough to spread such calumny. A return to Skerryvore was unthinkable, at least for now. They took my home right out from under me, she wanted to tell Belle. But she didn’t.

  There were many things that went unsaid. Such as the fact that Fanny had been in town for weeks before contacting Belle. When she arrived in San Francisco and visited her old doctor, she’d learned she had a throat tumor and had undergone an operation. Until she knew the tumor was benign, she believed she might be dying. When writing to Louis back in Saranac, Fanny pretended she was quite recovered from the hurt of Henley’s insult, so as not to worry her husband any further. In fact, the mere thought of it sent her into a torment. How can I even defend myself? To write about the matter to Fanny Sitwell or Sidney Colvin would be to exacerbate the situation. Surely they knew of the mess.

  She had lain in a San Francisco hospital bed, feeling desperately alone and devastated by the cruelty of the London liars. It was all she could do to keep from reaching for the bottles of arsenic and morphia that stood on her bedside table and ending the agony with a couple of swallows.

  Louis had a sense of loyalty to old friends that bordered on the ridiculous. These monsters were the very people he had named as heirs in his will! Would he change it now that he’d been betrayed? Not likely. When she began to heal, her rage had grown. She wrote an angry letter to Baxter about her will, cursing Henley and Katharine as slanderers and murderers, knowing full well that he was a friend to them, as Louis had been. While they eat their bread from my hand—and oh, they will do that—I shall smile, wish it were poison that might wither their bodies as they have my heart.

  She had exploded righteously and, when she cooled off, sent a calmer second letter to Baxter. But she was done with the London crowd. Whom would she miss among those people? Only Fanny Sitwell and Sidney Colvin. And Henry James, God bless him. A note had arrived this very morning that made her love him all the more. I wish I could make you homesick and somehow persuade you to return, he’d written to them.

  Fanny thought about what lay ahead. She hated and feared the sea. She would never say so to Louis; of course. She had secured the schooner knowing full well she would be sick and terrified every day of the voyage. They were betting much of their money on the chance that a six-month cruise might save his life. Now there was nothing to do but wait and let the hand reveal itself.

  At five A.M. on June 26, a tug pulled the Casco out through the Golden Gate to open sea. “See you in Honolulu!” Belle shouted from the dock.

  Fanny waved and waved at the figures of her daughter and grandson until they disappeared in the foggy morning. Then she turned her back to the shore and faced the wide ocean.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 59

  “Aw-haw-haw!” Louis shouted above the roar of the waves. The Casco, sleek as a giant marlin, was slicing through the Pacific waters at a furious speed, the world ahead of it a vast blue-gray where sky melded into sea. In the next moment, though, the yacht was heeling so near the ocean’s skin that Louis feared he might topple over the bulwark. In front of him, the blue expanse had disappeared behind the starboard side of the boat. Salt water sprayed his face.

  “She’s runnin’ with a bone in her teeth!” he called out joyously to Lloyd, who was clinging to his spectacles with one hand and a shroud with the other. “Do you know how many miles this wild vessel has covered in the past twenty-four hours? Two hundred fifty-six!”

  “Woo-hoo!” the boy called back. “That’s better than a steamer!” When the boat righted itself, they clambered below.

  “I’m mortal hungry,” Louis said to Fanny. “Any dainties down here?”

  She padded away to the galley. Louis pulled off his wet shirt and laughed. Above the pallid skin protected by his trousers, he saw his arms and chest were already turning brown from a week in the sun. By God, dare he say it out loud? I feel wonderful.

  The first couple of days at sea, he had kept to his cabin, as had everyone in the family, including Valentine. Even Captain Otis, who acted the part of the salty sea dog, had been unable to come to meals for the first two days. Only Maggie Stevenson possessed unassailable sea legs. She ate like a sailor and strode the planks as if she’d been born on a boat. Her single concession to nausea was to pass up at breakfast red herring and mutton chops on the first day. She had b
een on deck ever since, happily knitting Lloyd a pair of socks as the schooner raced southwest.

  Fanny suffered the worst. For three days, she was too seasick to partake of anything but sips of water and a rare ship biscuit. On the fourth day of the voyage, she shakily crept from her bunk, barefoot and dressed in one of her new holokus. What Otis and the crew thought of her, Louis could only guess. She had worn her hair cut just above shoulder length for some time, and though he was used to it, she was the only woman he knew who wore it in that fashion. When he saw her sitting on the deck with that mop of curls shaking furiously in the wind as she smoked and stared fixedly at the horizon to steady her stomach, even Louis could see that his wife made quite an unconventional picture. He suspected her manner disconcerted Otis, who steered clear of her.

  “He has us pegged as wealthy eccentrics,” Fanny said when they discussed the captain’s cool attitude.

  “Well, any customer who can spend two thousand pounds on a six-month cruise must seem rich indeed to him,” Louis said.

  “Little does he know it’s most of your inheritance.”

  This morning Fanny had started the day badly with Otis by striking up a conversation with his helmsman while he was seated at the wheel, which was located in the cockpit where they all gathered. She had peppered the Russian with a dozen questions when Otis instructed her not to talk to the man while he was steering. Louis could tell the captain preferred Fanny out of sight, in her berth. He probably preferred all of them in their berths. Even Maggie had incited Otis’s ire when she walked along a narrow part of the deck too close to the rail.

  “What would you do if my mother-in-law fell overboard?” Fanny asked provocatively after the captain chastised the sprightly woman.

  Otis stared ahead impassively. “Note it in the log,” he said.

  The voyage, so far, had been easy and was beginning to take on a rhythm. Louis was the first passenger out of his berth at dawn. He helped raise the American flag that the vessel had come equipped with, then hoisted the Union Jack that he’d provided. As the sun rose and the smell of coffee floated through the open companionway door, Louis breathed deep the salty air and blessed the sun, blessed the four pilot birds that had followed them since they left San Francisco, blessed the flying fish that glided above the blue-green waters with their fins outspread. If there were a finer way to begin a day, he couldn’t conceive it. After a while, he forced himself to go below, where he would lie in his bed and write furiously. He felt a supreme urgency to get down on paper the things he was seeing, the comments of the sailors, the laconic remarks of Otis, whom he knew he would transmute into a fictional character someday.

  Without a cabin boy, a position Otis had failed to fill before departure, Valentine took on the morning job of folding up the bunks so the area could become a sitting room. Lloyd’s job was official photographer, documenting the cruise with pictures that might be used in the South Seas book. Fanny was chief consultant regarding food and injuries. She remained queasy, but her seasickness did not keep the cook from coming to her regularly for instructions, or the injured mate, who tumbled during a storm and had to have his head sewn up.

  The doctoring kept her mind focused during some of the terrifying weather of the cruise. A squall would descend upon the Casco in the midst of calm weather and throw the inhabitants around like rag dolls. After three days of squalls, with the lee rail dipping below the foaming sea and the wood of the boat groaning as if to break under the punching waves, even Louis quailed. He crawled to the berths, where the women had taken refuge, and called out, “I never should have subjected you all to this!”

  Fanny stuck her greenish face out of the bed curtain. “The timber remembers it used to be an oak trunk,” she said bravely. “It wouldn’t dare split.”

  When the weather calmed, she went back into the galley to teach the cook how to season his bland meat dishes. One afternoon while she was going through a storage cabinet in the pantry, she called to Louis: “What is a sail doing in here?” Louis reached back into the corner cabinet where some pans were stacked. He tugged at the canvas, which felt heavy. When he got it out on the floor, he saw it was wrapped around two iron weights. Also tucked inside was a small flag—American. “It’s nothing,” Louis said, “just overflow.” But he knew perfectly well what it was. Otis had packed away the necessities for a burial at sea. In that moment he understood how the captain viewed Louis’s frail self: food for the fish.

  That evening, when the dour Otis bit into the chicken on his plate, he looked up in wonder. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A Mexican sauce I used to make in Monterey. It’s called salsa,” Fanny said. “A little hot, but tasty, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes watering. “Yes.”

  After dinner, everyone assembled for the big event of the day—the viewing of the sunset—then adjourned to the cockpit “drawing room,” where they gathered around the table, studying the chart.

  “I haven’t been to Polynesia,” Captain Otis said when they pinpointed the island of Nuka Hiva, their first destination, “but the directory says there are two distinct sharp peaks.”

  “Oh,” Maggie said. “I thought you had already traveled to the Marquesas.”

  “I know a number of men who have,” he said.

  “Did they speak of cannibals?” Valentine asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, “but these were old sailors. They sailed there some time ago.”

  Louis didn’t say it out loud, but the directory of which the captain spoke—

  A Directory for the Navigation of the South Seas—also made reference to the morals of Marquesan women. Back in Saranac, when they were poring over the thick book one frigid evening, Lloyd had read aloud a paragraph to Louis and Maggie that caused them all to sit up straight: “The one great feature which distinguishes these natives in the eyes of Europeans is their unbounded licentiousness. The women … appear to have not the slightest idea of chastity or delicacy.”

  Sitting in his buffalo coat by the fire, Louis had raised his brows and said slyly, “Nuka Hiva was Melville’s first stop on his voyage.”

  “‘Their whole conduct, gesture, and motive appear directed to one end,’” Lloyd had continued reading from the directory that night back in Saranac, despite the deep sighs coming from Maggie Stevenson. “‘Their character has been often portrayed, and must be familiar to all readers of the Pacific voyages. It is a point, too, which ought to weigh much with the commander who would bring his ship here.’”

  Maggie had changed the subject back then as she did now, by taking out a deck of cards. She teamed with the captain in a game of whist and roundly defeated the others.

  Sensing that the ice was finally thawing between the taciturn captain and his passengers, Louis ventured an observation that he’d been wanting to explore. “I realize this is not your boat. But don’t you think the Casco is overrigged and oversparred? I wonder if a racing boat, glorious as it is, is suited for this kind of cruise.”

  Louis immediately regretted the question, as the captain didn’t answer but merely withdrew to his own quarters. Just when I was making headway with the man! Louis chastised himself.

  Maggie Stevenson, oblivious to any turmoil, started another hand of whist. When Otis emerged from his cabin, he was carrying a bottle of brandy. “Oh, good,” Maggie cried. “I will deal you in.” Otis poured small glasses of brandy all around.

  “How nice,” Maggie cooed. “May I propose a toast?” She raised her glass to the captain, the Russian at the wheel and another sailor standing by, Valentine, and her family members one by one. “To the Cascos!”

  There were smiles all around.

  “Now, tell me,” Maggie said to the captain when she’d quaffed her brandy, “have you ever read Treasure Island?”

  Louis flinched. How like his mother to embarrass him. She asked almost everyone

  she met this question. Louis waited for the usual “I liked it” that people offered, especially th
ose who hadn’t read it.

  Otis drew on his pipe, smiled slightly, then lifted his glass and clinked it to Maggie’s. “Yo ho ho,” the captain said.

  CHAPTER 60

  “Land!”

  Fanny heard Louis’s shout as if in a dream. She lifted her head off the pillow, shook it, then slid down from her bed. Maggie was already standing there in her robe. The lantern in her hand lit the soles of Valentine’s feet, which were coming down at them from her berth overhead. The women hurried along the hallway and up the ladder to the deck, where they found Louis and the captain staring through binoculars into the near darkness. Louis handed the glasses to Fanny. A long low shadow spread itself wide across the distance. “Morning comes on fast here,” the captain said. But this morning was spreading lazily, to reveal a thick patch of clouds sitting atop the water.

  Otis ordered the crew to cruise along the northern shore of Nuka Hiva island with Anaho Bay as their goal. The cook came up with coffee and passed around cups as they watched the dawn give way to day. “There are the two peaks!” someone shouted. Within the hour, the captain had sailed into the bay and dropped anchor.

  Bright light illuminated the bank of fog lying on the water between the Casco and Nuka Hiva. The block of white covered their view of the beach, but above and behind the cloud layer, they saw brilliant green peaks rise up to points in the blue sky. Through the white mass, a black form appeared. Lloyd was the first to spot it. “Canoe!” he shouted. Paddles projected from either side. As the form grew larger in the distance, they saw a figure stand up and sit down. Two men came into focus, dressed in proper linen pants and coats. Fanny, Maggie, and Valentine hurried below to dress. When they came back up, the men in the canoe were bobbing alongside the schooner.