Twain's End (10 page)

“So disgusting,” Win had said, tugging at her gloves. “Everyone will think Olive is a shameless fortune hunter.”

Isabel had agreed that it was a most unsuitable affair.

Jean nudged her with her elbow. “Look, there she is—his wife. Isn't she a darling? Everyone looks at the boy bird with his bright blue, but I think the girl's quiet colors are nicer. Not everyone needs to be such a show-off.”

Isabel shot her a sidelong glance. Jean's father was the biggest “show-off” Isabel had ever met. People adored him for it, including her. She knew exactly from whom he'd drawn his scheming adventurer Tom Sawyer: his own irrepressible self.

She gave back the glasses to Jean. “How is your mother?”

“You'll have to ask Clara. I haven't seen Mother in weeks.”

“You haven't?” Although Isabel still had not met her employer, receiving her orders via Clara or with a sneer from Katy, she had assumed that Jean made regular visits to her mother's bedside.

Jean lowered the opera glasses. “I guess you don't know. I've been banned from Mother.”

Isabel grasped for a response. “Why?”

“I make her sad.”

“Jean! You would never make anyone sad.”

“I scare her.”

Isabel sighed. “Jean. You couldn't scare a”—she looked across the lawn—“bluebird.”

“I do,” said Jean. “I scare Mother, and one more scare might kill her. We all have to do everything we can to preserve her. We can't survive without her—none of us.”

Isabel thought of the photograph, and of the wisp of a woman being whittled away by her husband in it. “I'm sure she'll get well.”

Jean's prominent chin crumpled. “The only person I scare more is Father.”

“That can't be,” Isabel murmured, even as she pictured Mr. Clemens leaving the room whenever Jean entered. She had thought
it was just a coincidence—he was a busy man and, in spite of the languid mode in which he moved, a restless one. He never stayed in one place long. He could not even remain seated at dinner. From behind the servants' screen in the dining room, Isabel had watched him prowl around the Belgian-lace-clothed table, smoking one of his pungent cigars, as his friends, perhaps William Dean Howells, or Henry Huttleston Rogers of Standard Oil, ate their meal. Of course, Mrs. Clemens never joined them.

Jean's cheeks had gone red. “It's not just that he doesn't find any interest or entertainment in me, which he doesn't. There's something wrong with me.”

“Oh, Jean—” Isabel broke off when she saw that the girl was serious.

“I have fits. They started when I was fifteen. We thought it was an isolated incident, but then I kept having them. No one is to marry me—an epileptic can't have children—but the awful fact is, even if I were well, Papa would never let me marry.”

“Jean.”

“It's true. He won't let any of us. He hates the thought of us with men. No wonder Susy turned to someone he thought he would not object to. But that turned out to be the biggest mistake of all.”

This was the first anyone had spoken of Susy. “I'm so very sorry.”

“I shouldn't be telling you this.”

“You don't have to if you don't want to.”

A mourning dove burst whistling from the grassy verge. “Poor Susy. She was his favorite—he made it quite plain to us. He seems not to have the insight to see how that might hurt Clara and me.” Jean watched the bird. “It turned out that getting the lion's share of his attention was unlucky for Susy, though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.” Jean's gaze went toward the house. She seemed to shrink into the high collar of her shirtwaist.

Isabel turned to see Mr. Clemens ambling from the terrace with its empty stone urns, a cigar between his slender fingers. “Well, look
who's out here,” he called. “I thought I was going to have to smoke this thing alone.”

Jean galloped off, as ungainly as one of her abused horses. The wind groaned in the trees as Isabel waited for him. He stopped next to her. “What's wrong with her?”

He gazed out over the river and drew on his cigar. Under the bluff, a train approached on the tracks by the water, its rumble growing.

Isabel felt disloyal to Jean for remaining with him. Yet she did not want to go. She tried to strike a cheerful note. “Did you know that bluebirds mate for life?”

He drew in a long breath. “Just another example of how low a form of life mankind is. When it comes to decency, even birds beat us.”

“Humans mate for life,” Isabel said. It came out as a warning.

Her tone drew his glance. “Do they?” He tugged on his cigar. “Show me a couple that has been faithful in spirit, if not in action, for their entire marriage, and I'll show you the day that river down there changes directions. Humans just can't do it.”

An onrush of blood stung Isabel's face. She could feel the train roaring under her feet as it neared.

He blew out smoke. “Livy and myself excluded, of course.”

“Of course.”

They stood looking at the water as the train shrieked below them. Isabel wondered what the loss of a child—two children, if you counted the baby son who'd died several decades earlier—had done to the Clemenses' marriage, and what toll Mrs. Clemens's infirmity might have taken on it as well.

He raised his voice. “You can't beat this view of the Hudson.”

“It's magnificent.” With a dig of steel stays, she turned away to wait out the passing train, her bones trembling with its vibrations.

At last the train lumbered away, leaving a ringing quiet. Birdsong swelled into the void.

“Damn trains,” said Mr. Clemens. “They're as inelegant as an elephant at a tea party. A steamboat's the thing. How I yearn for the
days when I piloted them. What a life! I mean to set it down in my autobiography—as unflinchingly truthfully as a lying human can do.”

“You're writing an autobiography?”

“If you call the cowardly stabs I've made at it ‘writing.' It's a daunting proposition, Miss Lyon, telling the whole truth about yourself. Ever try it?”

“No. I'm not sure I'd want to.”

He was quiet a moment. “I keep trying, but my pen gets in the way.”

“People would want to hear everything about you.”

“Would they? I think they might want to hear about Mark Twain; about Samuel Clemens, maybe not as much. They wouldn't care for some of the things I've done. I don't know if even my beloved twin Twain could take the heat if I told the unvarnished truth about myself.”

She remembered Jean's accusations, then shook them off. “Then varnish it.”

He smiled. “I like you, Miss Lyon. Wish I knew you back in my steamboat days.”

She could not look at him, glowing as she was.

“Those were the days,” he said with a sigh. “There is no man who rules so absolutely, so independently of the opinion of others, so aware of and greedy for his awful responsibilities, as a riverboat pilot. I thought I was king.”

“You would make a good king,” she said stoutly.

“Would I?”

She could not resist the pull of his gaze. She turned around to look at him. “I think so. You move like one.”

“I do? If only you knew what I came up from, you wouldn't say that. We were poor enough when my father was alive, but after he died, we were so frantic that I had to leave school and go to work at the age of twelve. But I'd like to be king.” He tossed his graying auburn mane and held out his cigar like a scepter. “How's that?”

She bowed to him. “Your Highness.”

“What am I king of?”

She thought of his fondness for cards. “Hearts.”

He nodded. “Right.” He put out his other hand. “You may kiss the royal mitt.”

She gazed at his wedding band shining from within a sparse thicket of hair. When she looked up, he lifted his hand.

She returned his bold look, then leaned forward and kissed his knuckle. The salty taste of his skin stayed on her lips after she pulled back; she smelled the tarry smoke of his cigar.

The laughter in his eyes settled into seriousness. They took a breath and, as one, turned toward the river. Below, a ship, trailing smoke from its single black stack, navigated the broad and sparkling seam in the earth.

The drawl left his voice. “Way up here, I feel like Christ looking out over the world, with Satan at His side, offering Him power over all the dominions.”

“Does that make me Satan?”

He laughed, the first time she'd heard him do so. “By God, Miss Lyon, you are a lioness.”

Breathing hurt her chest. She ached all over from happiness.

“What would you wish for, if you could have that power?” she asked.

“A submerged reputation.” He looked down on her, eyes shining. “The man who gets that market, his fortune is made, his livelihood is safe. People will never go back on him. An author may have a reputation that is confined to the surface, and lose it. He becomes pitied, then despised, then forgotten, then entirely forgotten: the frequent steps in a surface reputation. A surface reputation, however great, is always mortal, and always killable if you go at it right—with pins and needles, and quiet slow poison, not with the club and tomahawk.”

His gaze grew intent. “But the submerged reputation, down in the safe water, down mark twain deep, is different. Once a favorite there, always a favorite. Once beloved, always beloved. Once respected, always respected, honored, and believed in. What the reviewer
says never finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers, nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. Down there they never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up at the surface, and fade and crumble and blow away, but down below, he is as indestructible as gold.”

The birds calling, the groan of the trees, the train steaming into the distance, fell away. They smiled at each other, not just with their eyes but with their whole selves—there was no need to hold back.

“What would you have, Lioness? With your power over the dominions.”

She caught her breath. She had never been asked. She had never asked herself.

The fierceness was gone from his face. He beheld her deeply, his gray eyes gentle with sadness. “You have to ask, Lioness. In this life, you don't get what you want unless you ask.”

He raised his gaze and then stiffened.

Isabel turned around to see a frail hand extending from an upper-story bow window of the mansion. It waved a lace handkerchief until the wind snatched the bit of cloth away. The handkerchief, white as the sunlight dappling the Hudson, pitched and sailed languorously toward the terrace. The hand withdrew.

“Livy. She's calling me.” Mr. Clemens threw down his cigar and stalked to the house, sending the pair of bluebirds up and away.

Isabel crushed the smoldering nub under her boot, then, after checking the window, picked it up and touched the damp end where his mouth had been.

June 1903

Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York

O
H DEAR, IT WAS
humid, and it was only June! Mrs. Lyon patted her face with her handkerchief as she surveyed Isabel's hair, assessing the work to be done. How was she to fix the mess her daughter had made of it in time for her gentleman caller and still make them a lovely tea? The Wild Men from Borneo had tidier coiffures. Shaking her head, she tucked her hankie into her belt and then plunged into battle with the teasing brush.

“How many years has Mr. Bangs taught at Columbia?” She furiously back-combed. “You did tell him that your father taught there for eighteen years?”

Isabel scraped the chair armrests with her fingernails, as if warring against the urge to spring from her seat. Mrs. Lyon renewed her grip on Isabel's hair to keep her from moving. Not only was John Kendricks Bangs a Columbia man, but charming, sweet, and pleasantly even-featured in a bald, Humpty Dumpty–ish but nice way. He was a famous humorist (although not as famous as Mr. Clemens), and still Isabel said that she found him as boring as unsalted bread. Did Isabel consider that he was still in mourning? His wife had died only two months earlier—of course he was not at his best. Isabel should not be so judgmental.

“Be still!” Mrs. Lyon seized another hank of her daughter's hair
as if apprehending a criminal. “I see a gray.” She isolated the offender with the point of the teasing brush, grasped it by the root, and yanked. She produced her culprit. “There.”

Isabel glanced at it, then rolled her gaze away with a sigh.

Mrs. Lyon cleaned the excess strands from the brush and then stuffed them into the ceramic hair receptor on the vanity. From a quick stirring of the pot with her little finger, she gauged that she had just about enough hair to roll together a new rat—a fresh rat was the secret to the fluffiest pompadour, didn't you know. She could see why her daughter would be disturbed by the gray. It was 1903, which—goodness!—made Isabel almost forty. Almost forty and unmarried. To be graying before achieving wedlock must be a terrible shock. Mrs. Lyon had not been gray at this age, although she was already married with two children. Her hair had been thick as a fox's pelt, and had glowed with hints of russet. She had not had grays until Charles died twenty years ago, although then they had come in droves. In truth, it was a miracle that at Isabel's age, she hadn't had a shock of hair as white as thistledown. It had not been easy being married to a man as handsome and as vain and as unfaithful as Charles had been. How often had she needed to look away and pretend he was not having relations with another woman?