Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 8

Fanny’s breath came slowly. But for an intermittent shiver, she sat perfectly still. At the request  of  the  other  students,  she  had  returned  to  Mr.  Julian’s  studio  to  pose  for  the morning head study. It was four weeks since Hervey’s death.

“So sad,” the Russian girl remarked as she studied Fanny’s face, running her fore?nger along the contour of her cheek. The other students gathered around. “Can you bear to sit?” they asked.

She could have said no. But these women had comforted her like sisters during her boy’s illness. Anyway, it hardly mattered where she was. Here, at least, they understood her stupefaction. If they wanted to draw despair, it did not trouble her to face them.
For two days she bore witness to her son. Sitting for the artists, she did not see them. She saw only the gentle, heroic Hervey. How could any of them begin to understand what she had witnessed: a four-year-old boy with more courage in his tiny, wasted body than she had ever seen in an adult.

It haunted her that his was not a proper burial place, but there wasn’t enough money to pay for a headstone, let alone a decent site. Fanny, Sam, and the two children had walked through the streets to the Saint-Germain cemetery behind the little white casket. There, amid headstones and statues of weeping angels, they clung to one another as her baby was lowered  into  a  small  unmarked  rectangle  of  French  earth.  As  they  were  leaving,  the cemetery superintendent approached, followed by a dolorous nun who translated for him. “Your lease will expire in ?ve years,” the nun explained. “If you can’t keep up the grave permanently, the remains will be moved into a  common  grave with  others.” The word “pauper” was not uttered, but Fanny assumed that was what the o?cial meant by “others.” He pointed approvingly at a child’s grave surrounded by a small iron fence. Lying ?at on the ground, the stone was etched with the outline of a cradle and one word: Regrete. The superintendent led them to a nearby grave where the ?gure of a sleeping woman, her arms crossed over her breast, topped a grave.  “Le gisant,” the man said. He turned to another marker.  “Un  obélisque.”  The  nun  translated  in  a  monotone. “The  reclining  statue.  An obelisk, perhaps. These are some of the possibilities you will want to consider for your son’s grave marker.” Looking at the superintendant’s pitiless expression, Fanny wanted to spit in the man’s face.

“He died peacefully,” Sam said repeatedly when they returned to the apartment.
“He did not!  What do you know?” she shouted at him.  She wanted to pummel him, though her husband had been only kind to her since his arrival. What use was there in recrimination? The man was su?ering badly. But the loss did not bring them closer; they grieved at opposite ends of the apartment.

In the days that followed, she su?ered searing headaches, collapsed from dizziness, lost her  memory.  She  found she  couldn’t  spell  when  she  tried to  write  notes  on  the  blackbordered stationery Belle brought home. After nights of wakefulness, when slumber ?nally came, she dreamed Hervey was uncomfortable, lying so long on his back in the co?n; he needed to be turned.

“You kept getting out of bed, trying to turn over your mattress all night,” Belle told her in the morning.

Sam feared she was going mad; he said as much.  “You don’t seem to know I’m even here,” he told her.

He was right. His voice was the buzz of a fly in the next room.

“You must go away someplace warm and rest,” a  doctor told her.  “Your nerves have experienced a terrible shock. Sammy is pale. Too thin. He could fall sick, as Hervey did.” The last sentence snapped her into awareness. She got up out of bed.

“I know of a quiet place not far away,” Margaret Wright told Fanny. “An inn at Grez, on the Loing River. It’s close to Barbizon but away from all the bustle, and cheap. It’s near the Fontainebleau Forest. I’m going there sometime this summer.”

The future, such as it was, assumed a shape. They would leave these heartbreaking rooms and take in the country air for a while. Miss Kate would not accompany them; she had turned up an old aunt in Paris who offered her a room.

In May, Sam delivered his family to the inn. Before he returned to America, Fanny argued for more time in Europe. “I want Sammy to be a gentleman. He has a chance at that if he attends school here.”

“One year,” Sam said. “That’s all I can manage or tolerate.”