Dr. Roth ushered Louis into his private office and settled him in a chair, then went to sit behind his desk. The Sydney doctor was a trim fellow, kindly if a touch awkward. He took off his eyeglasses and rubbed the pad beneath each eye, as if buying time before delivering bad news.
“Your wife’s physical health is not good. The gallstones and rheumatism,” he said, replacing the spectacles. “We have a sense of her physical ailments. Her mental situation is more difficult to analyze. She tells me she has had brain fever and congestion in the past. And that your uncle George gave her chlorodyne for head pain. It’s hard to make sense of what exactly is at work in her brain. You say her moods are up and down.”
“I should explain a bit about my wife,” Louis said. “Fanny may look like a timid little woman, but she has an intense personality. She’s a violent friend and a brimstone enemy—people tend to hate her or worship her. She is capable of—no, she does extraordinary things. She’s always been a wonderful, supportive wife to me. The fact that I am alive is due entirely to her.” Louis shook his head. “She has a habit of taking on too much, though, of overreaching. There will be a period of frenzied activity and then weeks of entire hibernation when she simply shuts the door on the rest of the world. The pattern is nothing new. But I would say that for a good year now, she has been an exaggerated version of the woman I just described. She improved immensely on the voyage over here, but I must tell you, before the breakdown, she seemed possessed. She would go out into the fields and crawl around in the dirt with a spade in her hand for ten, twelve hours at a time. Like a demented beast.”
The doctor’s forehead creased, and Louis realized how horrifying a phrase he had just uttered to describe his own wife.
Roth fingered a gold pin on his lapel. “Doctors tend to use the latest terms when we have no certainty of what causes the symptoms. I’m reluctant to do that, since your wife’s condition could be any number of things. You say a doctor in Honolulu diagnosed her with Bright’s disease. Kidney failure is sometimes accompanied by delirium. That could explain her symptoms.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, it may be the change of life; it’s not unheard of. Perhaps she has worked herself into a state of delirious exhaustion. Or it’s possible she’s reacting to some medication. She seems to have dosed herself with any number of things.
“But there is a chance, I’m sorry to say, that it’s a more entrenched mental illness. We know little about how to treat mental breakdowns. What we know is that she can come back and live a normal life. Or not. It varies. All I can do is give her medicine to sedate her. Only her brain can cure itself. And every brain is different, you see. Rest is essential. Healthy food. Exercise. That’s the best we have right now.” He handed Louis a note for the pharmacist. “This will calm her. Give it to her right away.”
“So we wait and hope it’s over?”
The doctor wagged his head somewhere between yes and no.
At the Oxford Hotel, where they were staying, Louis administered the new medicine to Fanny and then took his wife and stepdaughter to lunch. Belle and Louis ate oysters, while Fanny, following doctor’s orders, ate something that looked like gruel and drank Maltine for her stomach. She seemed calmer already. All three of them turned buoyant with relief at being out of the doctor’s office and in the normalcy of the restaurant.
“Do you remember the first time we came here?” Louis touched Fanny’s knee gently.
“To the Oxford? Yes.”
“You forget I was with you, too,” Belle chastised him. “It was the first time I ever saw Louis Stevenson in a blue fury.”
They had retold the story time and again, but it felt right to tell it here and now. Three years before, when they’d finished the Equator voyage and come to Sydney, he and Fanny had gone to the elegant Victoria Hotel to check in. He had dressed in a suit to enter the hotel, albeit one that had been stuffed into the corner of a trunk for the previous six months, while they sailed the South Seas. Fanny looked no better, though he recalled they had put on shoes.
“Can you blame a man?” Louis said. “I asked for a suite of rooms on the first floor. The receptionist, without a word, hands a key to a porter who takes us up to a tiny room on the fourth floor. It was terrible. As you recall, I rode the lift down and had words with the man at the desk.”
“That was just the moment when I stepped out of a taxi and entered the lobby of the Victoria,” Belle said. “There was Mama, rather stunned-looking, watching the scene unfold. And there you were, at the beginning of a performance I think of as ‘RLS Unbound.’ Had words? You were apoplectic, Mr. Stevenson. But the author didn’t lose his tongue for long. Oh, no. It was poetic wrath that came out of your mouth. I have never in my life heard anyone lay another human being so low, and without one curse word.” She shook her head, remembering. “I have a vivid image of your luggage, sitting in that lobby, and all these fine ladies in silk dresses disgruntled to have to step around it. You had a few traveling cases, but there were other pieces—those tree trunks that had lids. The insides of the trunks were stuffed with all manner of souvenirs. And you had not just tree trunks; you had straw baskets, calabash gourds, tapas, fish nets, spears …”
“We were a bit unconventional,” Louis conceded. “Still, that pretentious little man behaved as if we smelled, which we most certainly did not.”
“How could you tell?” Fanny asked wryly, and they began to laugh.
Perhaps it was simply the giggle coming from Fanny’s mouth, or perhaps it was the gush of warmth that had been absent from her voice for so long, but her simple remark caused the three of them to fall into hysterics. They savored the laughter, prolonged it, cried from it.
“All right. Maybe the luggage smelled,” Louis said.
“The best part was when the Sydney newspaper trumpeted that the famous R.L.S. was in Sydney and staying at the Oxford Hotel. And the Victoria had to send over your mail every day!”
He smiled. “That was satisfying.”
“HOLD ME CLOSE,” Fanny said to him that night.
Her whole being seemed sweet and gentled. He pulled her into his arms, where they huddled together under the sheet like children in the dark. “Are you afraid?” he asked her.
She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “I’m terrified that the thoughts will come back and it will start again.”
He stroked her forehead gently. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
She didn’t answer. After a minute or two, she said, “Don’t leave me alone, Louis. I don’t want to be this way.”
Outside their room, they heard luggage cart wheels creak down the hall.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes, Fanny, yes.”
“Forgive me.”
“For what?” he asked.
“For the cruelties. I don’t know why I strike out—I hate myself afterward. Hate myself. I think, somehow, the meanness comes of fear.”
In the morning, he watched her face while she slept. She looked fifteen years younger. He felt a surge of tenderness course through him, and he realized how long it had been since he’d felt such protectiveness toward her. Fanny was such a strong force, no one had seen the cracks. Her terrible unhappiness had left deep lines on either side of her mouth. At the moment, he couldn’t see them anymore; it was as if the night had smoothed away all the worry.
The streets of Sydney were lively when they went out. Belle was the first to notice how a few people stopped in their tracks. “Louis,” she said. “You’re being recognized!”
He was already aware of eyes and fingers directed at him. He’d actually heard a passing woman ask loudly of her husband, “Is that his Moroccan wife?” Soon enough someone approached him for an autograph. The man proffered a fresh copy of Jekyll and Hyde. “I just popped into the bookstore and bought it. Read it already, of course.”
Louis hated such attention, but now it amused him, because it had been such a long time since it had happened. The whites in Apia were used to him. They talked to him about his work, but there was no adulation, thankfully. Among the native Samoans, few of them seemed aware that he was famous for being an author elsewhere in the world.
He took Fanny and Belle shopping for new dresses and had a suit of clothes made up for himself, including a new white shirt and a white tie. When they happened upon a photographer’s studio, Louis impulsively had a picture taken of the three of them sitting together on a divan. Fanny slept in the afternoon, while he and Belle went to a dressmaker and had a new gown made up for Fanny using Belle’s measurements. They presented the black velvet dress to her a few days later, and Louis warmed to see her fingers linger on the duchesse lace trim.
“One more surprise.” He went to the bureau, where he’d hidden more presents. With his arms behind his back, he returned to Fanny and Belle, making a deep bow. He brought his hands around to the front and gave to each of them a small wrapped box. “For my pair of fairies, plump and dark,” he said.
“You go first, Mama,” Belle said.
Fanny peeled back the wrapping paper and opened the shiny wooden box. Nestled in a pillow of satin she found an opal ring, with R.L.S. engraved inside its gold band. “Oh, Louis,” she said, “you know how I love blue opal.”
“Your turn,” he said to Belle, who pulled an identical ring from her box, also engraved with his initials. She slipped it on her finger. “Louis,” she said, “thank you! It’s lovely.”
“I bought one for meself as well.” He slipped off the opal ring on his finger to show them its inscription.
Fanny squinted at the lettering inside the band. “F and B,” she read aloud, as a troubled look flitted across her face.
THEY DINED IN a fine restaurant so they could wear their new clothes. In the candlelight, with the white lace glowing against her neck and wrists, Fanny was as radiantly lovely as she had ever been. He felt her old affectionate warmth as she squeezed his arm while telling a story. The simple niceties that once were ordinary came rushing back. It was as if his wife had been returned to him after a strange and terrible journey.
At the end of their three weeks in Sydney, they boarded the S.S. Mariposa. They would be home in Apia by the last day in March, when the cyclone season would be nearly over and the rainy days tapering off. Fanny remarked how happy she was that her pig-chasing would no longer be conducted in mud.
Later, he would think, Of course it couldn’t last. Roth had warned him. Still, it took him by surprise when he found Fanny sitting on a deck chair, chattering to herself. “Mother just came by to talk,” she said when he sat down next to her, “and Pa was with her, too.”
By the time they arrived at Vailima, the swirling madness had retaken her.