Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan Page B

those wide-eyed nights. Margaret and Thomas Stevenson were observant Presbyterians but happy enough to be lumped together on Sunday with all the other Church of Scotland burghers on their street, unlike Cummy, who belonged to the more evangelical Free Church. Could his parents possibly know their fair-haired darling had knelt next to his nurse and prayed for their souls’ redemption because they played whist? Could they have imagined the menu of horrors Louis had been provided on a nightly basis while they slept? The images were as vivid now as they were then, the blistered skin of the unrepentant roasting on a million spits. Did his parents guess that the night terrors that plagued him—his vision of the devil riding furiously past their house on horseback—had roots in the nurse’s tales of damnation? Cummy’s heaven was a pale thing compared to her vivid images of a roaring, devouring hell.
    All of Cummy’s stories had been administered to him as she sat on the counterpane of his bed and dosed him with castor oil, cough syrup, the dreaded antimony wine that tasted of metal and sometimes made him vomit, and the strong black coffee she brewed to calm him in the night. All the good of the woman was mixed together with the dark and bitter.
    Yet Cummy was as dear to him as his mother was. She had never allowed a novel or play into his room, but she had read to him with drama and gusto the things she loved: long passages of Scripture and the Shorter Catechism; a poem called “The Cameronian’s Dream” whose singsong first lines he could recite even now: “In a dream of the night I was wafted away / To the muirland of mist, where the martyrs lay … “
    Sometimes she had broken her own rules by reading aloud to him from
Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper.
It was a family periodical full of articles about art and science and, best of all, delicious made-up stories. Cummy bypassed her scruples by choosing to view the tales as true. She had seen firsthand the magic such stories exerted on him.
    â€œI’m not going to practice law,” Louis said, blotting his mouth with a napkin.
    Cummy waited a while before she responded. “Have you told your father?”
    â€œI will tonight.”
    She patted his hand, then drew in a big breath. “Well, now,” she said, exhaling the words thoughtfully.
    â€œAnd I have met a woman.”
    â€œOh!” Cummy struggled to conceal her surprise. “You don’t say.”
    â€œShe’s an American and she has children. Divorced.” Louis watched her
    eyebrows quiver slightly at the announcement. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention it.”
    â€œOf course, Master Lou, I won’t say a word.” She glanced at her watch as if she had an appointment, then hurried to the foyer to get her coat. When she came back to hug him, her eyes were wide and blinking. “I shall be saying a prayer for you about suppertime.”
    When she was gone, Louis went upstairs to change clothes. In his bedroom he noticed what a lot of junk there was, things from his early years that embarrassed him to look at now. His mother had made the room a museum of his childhood. He had never bothered to pitch anything himself; and he commenced doing so. Picking up the little cardboard figures from a play theater he’d loved as a boy, he considered throwing them into the wastebin, then rejected the idea. His eyes fell on a stack of papers next. He knew the pile intimately but spent the next couple of hours reading through the pages anyway, walking down that avenue of history one more time.
    It was no accident that he’d become a writer, he thought when he glanced up from the pages. In his bookcase, he spotted
The Arabian Entertainments,
a book he had borrowed repeatedly from his grandfather’s library before he finally owned it. Next to it stood a row of romances that had been his friends:
Robinson