Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan Read Free Book Online Page B

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 five 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 official meant by “others.” He pointed approvingly at a child’s grave surrounded by a small iron fence. Lying flat 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 figure 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.
    â€œHe died peacefully,” Sam said repeatedly when they returned to the apartment.
    â€œHe 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 suffering badly. But the loss did not bring them closer; they grieved at opposite ends of the apartment.
    In the days that followed, she suffered searing headaches, collapsed from dizziness, lost her memory. She found she couldn’t spell when she tried to write notes on the black-bordered stationery Belle brought home. After nights of wakefulness, when slumber finally came, she dreamed Hervey was uncomfortable, lying so long on his back in the coffin; he needed to be turned.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œOne year,” Sam said. “That’s all I can manage or tolerate.”

CHAPTER 9
    It was still cool when they arrived in Grez-sur-Loing. Nestled in the midst of vast farm fields, the village was a smattering of stone houses, a picturesque bridge, and a ruined twelfth-century tower with ferns growing in its cracked walls. In those first few weeks at the Hôtel Chevillon, they bundled in coats and wool scarves and arrayed themselves along the bank of the river—she and Belle with paintbrushes and Sammy with a fishing pole.