Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 4

In the seat opposite Fanny, Belle cuddled Hervey under her arm, while across the aisle, Miss Kate read a book to Sammy. Fanny felt the tension in her body ebb some as she leaned back in her seat. Hervey was sleeping, his curls falling over his forehead. She smiled as she noticed for the hundredth time how di?erent her children were; a stranger wouldn’t know they were related. Hervey was a tintype of his father, blond and blue-eyed, with a gentle nature that was all his own. Belle’s beauty was earthier: She had Fanny’s complexion, the same wavy brown hair that went where it wanted, the same dark brown irises shot through with  streaks  of  gold  like  cat’s-eye  marbles.  Belle’s  looks  were  an  exaggeration  of  her mother’s, though; her eyes were bigger and bolder, her figure more voluptuous.
The girl peered out the window, lost in what thoughts, Fanny didn’t know. She was so close to womanhood. Fanny believed their emotional landscapes were similar: Both were tenderhearted, headstrong, tough and vulnerable all at once. Belle was saucier, far more impertinent than Fanny had ever been to her own mother. But studying her in the fading afternoon light, Fanny found herself thinking, I was that girl. I was that girl.
She was Belle’s age when she met Sam Osbourne, and she was standing on stilts in her mother’s garden. Fanny was the oldest of the Vandegrift children, the ringleader of the pack, lively as a bird and still playing at a child’s games when the handsome young man showed up at the house. Sam was twenty, far more mature and sophisticated than the boys in  the  neighborhood.  He  was  bright,  with  a  law  degree  from  the  university  and  an impressive job as the private secretary to the governor of Indiana. He was charming, and he shared her sympathies against slavery.

Did any of that matter to her back then? What do a man’s prospects mean to a girl of sixteen? No, it was his handsome face, his pale hair, the slender cut of his jacket, the little Vandyke beard he stroked. It was the sunny way he could tease her out of a snit, the way he looked at her so hungrily. It was the romantic notion that he counted Daniel Boone as one of his ancestors. It was his shiny boots, for God’s sake.

She had married him when she was seventeen, and within nine months they had Belle. They were all children  together, really. Maybe that accounted for why Belle sometimes seemed less like a child than a sibling; often enough these days, she was taken for Fanny’s sister.

Those ?rst three years of marriage in Indiana, Fanny had sewn tiny dresses for Belle and made a cozy nest of the house her father had built for her as a wedding gift with materials from his lumber company. In the evenings, Sam made love to her in every corner of that house. He was full of ideas and excitement, though she noticed that he fell from time to time  into  slumps  of  dark  rumination.  To  Fanny,  the  melancholy  only  made  him  more attractive. In those days, she’d believed such brooding revealed a deep soul. When Sam went too deep, though, she had to pull him up out of the mental holes he dug.
“Was he a soldier in Lincoln’s war?” Mr. Gerhardt had asked one evening. “Yes.” She understood why he asked it. Sam had gone o? with the Indiana Regiment to
?ght  in  1861 and had come  back  a  di?erent  man.  Probably  just  as  all  the  soldiers  in Belgium and China and Greece, in every war since the beginning of time, returned home: changed. The small faults in Sam’s personality became enlarged. He was bent on getting rich quick. He drank more. He was still loving and sweet to her, but he was restless in a new way. With  the gallant intent of getting  her sister’s consumptive husband to better weather, Sam left her and the baby and headed out to California. George, their brother-inlaw, died on the journey. Sam hadn’t turned back. He’d buried George and kept going, on to the gold fields.

Fanny reached across the space between  seats and felt Hervey’s head, nestled in  the crook of Belle’s arm. His cheek was warm, but so was her own  hand. She couldn’t tell anything by feel just now.

“Don’t look so worried all the time, Mama,” Belle said. “It puts creases in your forehead. Go to sleep, why don’t you?”

Fanny closed her eyes and returned to musing. How trusting I was in those days. When Sam sent for her, she didn’t hesitate. She sold their house and sent him the money
so he could buy a claim in a Nevada silver mine. His letters were full of stories about gold and silver miners turned to millionaires in the space of a month. Once he sent her a chunk of ordinary-looking rock that had a seam of silver in it. Excitement ricocheted around inside her when she held it in her hands. She and Belle would have to take the same route Sam had, by train to New York and then a ship down to Panama, where they would cross the isthmus by land, then sail up the Paci?c coast to San Francisco. It would take twenty-nine days.  People  worried aloud to  her  parents  about  malaria  and bandits,  about  a  comely twenty-one-year-old girl traveling alone with a child. Jacob Vandegrift gave his daughter a

derringer pistol to put in her pocket. “Carrying all that cash,” he told her, “you’ll feel safer with  a  gun  on  you.” Her  father  didn’t  know  she’d already  sent  most  of  her  money  to California. She was short on funds from the moment she set out.

Despite Jacob Vandegrift’s sober countenance and his occasional outbursts of temper, a sentimental  heart  beat  beneath  his  barrel-hard  chest.  That  day  at  the  train  station  in Indianapolis,  he  looked bereft  when  he  handed over  the  free  tickets he’d secured as a stockholder of the railroad.

“What  will  we  do  without  you,  Frances  Mathilda?’  he  said.  “You  are  the glue.”  Her mother had shown characteristic calm.  “You’re a sensible girl, Fan. You will be just ?ne. The world has a way of taking care of you.”

Even then Fanny had looked younger than her age. At the beginning of the journey, when she walked down the train aisle comforting three-year-old Belle, someone said to her, “Where is the child’s mother?”

Fanny shook her head as she remembered it. That whole trip had been full of mishaps. She’d run out of money at one point, and a sympathetic passenger passed a hat to help her. Somehow she and Belle survived the journey. When the ship from Panama spat them out onto San Francisco soil, penniless, Sam had been waiting, and a  few days later, they’d charged o? to Nevada in a stagecoach, dreaming of glory. During that ?rst year in Nevada, they’d lived in a miner’s shack in Austin, where they watched their savings disappear down barren shaft and then another before Sam gave up chasing silver. Discouraged, they moved on to Virginia City, where he took a job as a clerk of the court. Fanny sewed for the wives of luckier miners, and for a while, it looked as if they might get themselves upright. Then Sam began keeping company with the local prostitutes who populated the bars. It was a habit he repented of, only to take it up in grander fashion in San Francisco.
Why  didn’t  I  leave  him  sooner?  After  all  the  discoveries  of  his  betrayals  during  their eighteen years of marriage—the love notes stu?ed in pockets, the gifts that weren’t for her —every time he swore he would change, she eventually reconciled with him. The last time was di?erent, though. Fanny had been sitting with Belle in the Oakland cottage’s parlor with the door open. It was a warm day, full of April smells. The young woman had come up the  walk  to  the  porch—how  she  balanced  a  hat  on  that  preposterous  chignon  was  a mystery—and  announced  she  was  there  for  “a  friendly  visit.”  Fanny  knew  from  the clownlike rouge on  the strumpet’s face what she was dealing with.  “Don’t come a  step

closer,” she warned. When the woman put her foot on the threshold, Fanny shouted “Get out!” and the brazen creature turned tail, revealing a bustle the size of a wheelbarrow on her ruffled behind. Fanny glanced around to find Belle, who had witnessed the whole thing, shaking.

Fanny walked out into the yard that day and paced frantically. She looked with new eyes at the ivy-covered house and her beloved garden, just breaking into bloom. The papery orange poppies that had delighted her the day before seemed pure mockery. For so long she’d tried to make a happy household for her children, despite the rancor when Sam was home. She’d been putting a pretty face on this life of lies, telling the neighbors that her husband had to keep an apartment in San Francisco for the sake of his city job, that he regretted spending  only  weekends  with  his  family.  When  she  was  among  their  artistic friends in San Francisco, Fanny held her head high, pretending her husband’s philandering no longer hurt. Sometimes she ?irted de?antly with Sam’s friends; other times she a?ected a worldly hardness. In fact, every betrayal she discovered was a humiliating wound.
Staring at the cottage that day, she knew she had to leave, for in staying, she felt as tawdry as the whore at the front door. The strain of Sam’s unfaithfulness brought low the whole tenor of life inside the walls of the cottage, even when he was gone. Fanny carried his dishonor like a sign on her back. How long would it be before the children, too, bore the shame that was rightfully their father’s?

From their earliest years, Fanny had read to the children, put clay and paintbrushes into their small hands, taken  them to music and dancing  classes with  high  hopes that they would acquire a sense of beauty. She wanted Belle to have the advantage of the best art training. She wanted Sammy and Hervey to become educated gentlemen. She wanted a creative life for herself. But in the oppressive atmosphere of the house, where was the air for dreams to breathe?

It  was  with  these  thoughts  ?lling  her  mind  that  Fanny  had  packed  their  trunks, announced to the children they were going to Europe, and made a dash.
Their time in Antwerp had been too short, only a few weeks. When she announced they were moving to Paris, Sammy protested, “But we just got here.” He looked out the window of their flat and asked fretfully, “Will there be dogs?”

Gazing at her little brood as they rattled in the train coach toward France, she felt a streak of optimism. Hervey will be back to himself in a few days. We probably should have gone

to Paris from the outset. She shook her daughter’s knee. “Are you awake?” The girl opened her eyes, nodded.  “You know,” Fanny said,  “I have the best feeling, Belle. I just know something good is about to happen.”