Twain's End (14 page)

Jean tipped her lorgnette toward the matching chunk of marble across the way. “And that is the Baptistry. They say it's the oldest building in town.”

The squatty octangular structure looked like a giant's sugar bowl. Mr. Astor wouldn't stable his horses in it. But Mrs. Lyon kept her
comment to herself, recognizing that she was peevish after a night on that small Italian bed. She had expected to be disturbed by carts and wagons trundling past the windows—these people put their dwellings cheek to jowl with the streets—but she had not banked on the constant clanging of church bells and the relentless crowing of roosters. She felt certain she heard pigs rooting nearby. How she wished for a glass of baking soda and water to settle her digestion and a quiet session viewing
The Gardens of the World
on the beloved stereoscope that she'd left at home. She glanced at Isabel. The child was absolutely glowing. She went in for this foreign nonsense. Well, Mrs. Lyon wasn't going to spoil it for her. If her only unwed child, now that her dear son was gone, wanted to see Europe as a secretary to a humorist's family, then Mrs. Lyon was going to go along and make sure Isabel didn't get hurt. And perhaps find an Italian count to marry her.

They wound their way through streets lined with stone buildings the color of dust. Mrs. Lyon kept her thoughts in check as the buildings thinned out and the road became dirt, winding its way upward between stands of pointed cypresses, a few pines that looked oddly like bottlebrushes, and green-gray groves of olives. The houses, always stucco, always yellow, got scarcer as their horse plodded uphill. Soon they had left civilization completely and were up where they could look down on the orange tile roofs of Florence, up where donkeys and goats grazed in the long grass under the olive trees, up to where there was nothing but stone walls on both sides of the road, walls so high in places that only the tallest oaks appeared over them. The road had become a chute of rock so narrow that two wagons passing would scrape their sides on it. Mrs. Lyon felt like a rat in a colossal maze.

“Are we almost there?” Her voice had grown tremulous.

“Not quite. Hear the blackbirds?” Jean closed her eyes and sighed over the rattling of the cart. “There's no sadder sound in the world.”

Mrs. Lyon dabbed her perspiring upper lip with her handkerchief. Blackbirds! Who could listen to blackbirds at a time like this, when they were in the middle of nowhere among people who spoke
in gibberish and thought nothing of statues with their members dangling about, and she and Isabel did not even have lodgings! Mrs. Clemens had been very clear, Isabel said, about their not staying in the countess's palace. She had insisted that Mrs. Lyon and Isabel find lodgings elsewhere. Mrs. Clemens let this coarse Katy stay in the home, but not Isabel and her. It was rude, plain and simple, when they had a palace all to themselves. One might wonder if something had happened between Mr. Clemens and a servant now that Mrs. Clemens couldn't bear one in the house. Mrs. Lyon sniffed into her handkerchief. Maybe she should have done the same with her maid Poppy from the start, to have kept her from the hands of her goat of a husband. If she had, maybe there would not be a young woman who'd grown up in New York without a papa.

“We're here!” said Jean.

The wagon driver halted his horse at the blunt round-topped stone towers of the entrance. Mrs. Lyon thought wildly of tumescent male parts, then blinked away the thought as the driver hopped down, applied his shoulder to the iron gate, and pushed until it gave way with a rusty squawk. Pounding down a rutted road lined with a palisade of pointed cypresses, Mrs. Lyon patted her lips and throat, until, finally, they arrived before a dusty stone edifice. She stared, her handkerchief to her mouth. The place was bigger than Christ Episcopalian in Tarrytown.

It was large, but plain. There was no tower, no turret, no portico, no grand porch, just rows of windows with shutters as tall as a painter's ladder. A porter helped Mrs. Lyon, stiff in the hips, down onto the gravel courtyard. She had not quite unkinked herself when Jean took her by the elbow.

“You must see the garden.”

While the driver unloaded their belongings, Mrs. Lyon let herself be frog-marched to the back of the house. At least the view there was more satisfactory. Three covered stone arches graced the door, their shade extended on either side by the arbor that ran the length of the house. Beyond the gravel walkway, an enormous garden stretched
out before them. The countess must have put her money here, for it was a lovely garden, with a tall boxwood maze and a fountain around which rosebushes were still blooming in November.

Isabel caught up with her and Jean, with Katy trailing, unwelcome, behind. “What do you think, Mother?”

The excitement in Isabel's voice made Mrs. Lyon uneasy. “I'll reserve my judgment until we find lodgings.”

Jean rubbed the ears of the dog that had come bounding out. “Papa said that there's a
villino
on the grounds that is nice. A clockmaker in Florence rents it.”

“Is he a noble, too?” asked Mrs. Lyon. She was looking at the garden, wondering if she might take cuttings home to show off to the ladies of the Tarrytown Garden Club, when Mr. Clemens himself stepped out smartly from under the arches, the pebbles ringing under his feet. His face lit up when he saw Isabel:
Too bright!
thought Mrs. Lyon, nearly gasping.
Too bright! He gives himself away.

He pulled in his smile but kept his eyes on Isabel. To Mrs. Lyon's dismay, Isabel was gazing back at him as if no one else could see her.

Mrs. Lyon glanced guiltily at Jean. “Isn't this place lovely?” But the odd girl had raised her glasses to look at a bird and was paying no attention.

Mr. Clemens growled, “What took you so long?” He wasn't talking to his daughter. Nor was he talking to Mrs. Lyon. Nor Katy, who was marching away with a furious crunch of gravel. No, he wasn't talking to them at all.

December 1903

Florence, Italy

I
SABEL LINKED HER ARM
through Clara's as they strolled across the piazza, pigeons bobbing like comical windup toys before their buttoned shoes. She breathed in deeply, filling her nose with the smell of wet marble and bronze splashing from a fountain as they passed. Above them loomed the fearsome Palazzo Vecchio, wearing its crenellations like a stony crown. A crowd had gathered in its shadow before a Christmastime puppet show. Walking past the spectators vying for a view, Isabel thought that their earthy odor of dirty wool and flesh mingled almost pleasantly with the street smell of rot and horse dung on stone paving block. She smiled at her irrational exuberance. The world stank, and she loved it! Why not revel in the commonplace? Why not embrace the smelly, the comical, and the homely? How good it was to be alive! The babble of Italian, the endless barking of dogs, the clop of hooves ringing on rock—they were a symphony to her ears, especially when blended with the throaty drawl of Mr. Clemens, lecturing Jean, just ahead.

Clara leaned in to Isabel. “What do you think of Florence so far?”

They walked from shadow into winter sunshine. Isabel withheld her answer as Clara let go of her arm to raise her parasol. Its shade
did not quite reach Isabel, but she didn't mind. It would obstruct her view of Mr. Clemens.

“I love it here.” Isabel realized she should curb her enthusiasm. Mrs. Clemens had not yet regained her strength; the move overseas had not yet produced the miracle cure that the family had hoped for. She saw no one save Clara and Katy and, on occasion, Mr. Clemens, but then only for a minute or two. But surely Mrs. Clemens might still improve.

• • •

From the deep shade of her considerable hat brim, Clara studied her mother's employee. Miss Lyon had been unreasonably enthusiastic since arriving at the villa several weeks earlier. She got rather too big a thrill from living in Italy. Certainly, Americans went giddy over the place, but Clara wouldn't have guessed that Miss Lyon, with her polish and her privileged upbringing, would be among them. She usually kept herself pulled together with the extra care of a rich person without money.

Clara, on the other hand, was genuinely unimpressed with things Italian. Of the many European cities Clara had lived in, Florence rated only a lukewarm nod. It was a town built ages ago by men showing off for one another, each one trying to top the others with palaces or statues or gardens. A pissing contest, Papa would call it, like little boys seeing who could pee the farthest.
Vienna
was the city that held Clara's heart, Vienna with its music, its sophistication, and its attentive, gentlemanly men. It was in Vienna that the great pianist Theodor Leschetizky had said his male students suffered from “Delirium Clemens” whenever Clara came to his studio. Dear, dear man. Dear, dear students. As soon as Mamma was well, Clara was taking the first train back.

“I guess Florence is interesting enough,” she told Isabel, “if you like dead people.”

Two paces ahead of them, Papa stopped. He leaned on his walking stick as Jean marched off, her small box Brownie camera clutched
before her like a shield. Clara saw Jean's quarry: a skeletal white horse tied to one of the crumbling stone buildings on the edge of the plaza.

“Only Jean kodaks ugly horses in one the most beautiful cities of the world,” Papa said when Clara and Isabel caught up with him. “I'm proud of her.”

“I wonder where the owner is,” said Clara. “She'll be giving him a card from the Humane Society, placing him under citizen's arrest.”

“Heaven forbid, Clärchen. Then I'll have to cool him down in my schoolboy Italian. And you know how well that works.”

Clara laughed. “You wouldn't believe how many horses Papa bought for Jean the last time we lived in Florence,” she told Isabel, “just to make peace. And not one of them was fit to ride.”

“At least we'd have a place to put them here.” Papa threw down his cigar. He had not yet acknowledged Isabel's presence, Clara noticed. “There's plenty of space under your mother's bedroom.”

Clara felt herself expand with pride. Her father didn't often give her his full attention. He was usually too busy telling stories to visitors, or entertaining reporters, or looking at things to see how he could fit them in his work. “I cannot believe that wretched countess makes us stable our horses under Mamma's bedroom while she keeps the stable building and the connected apartment for herself and that big Roman steward of hers. The countess was supposed to have left the grounds when we moved in. You'd think she'd be ashamed, living with that steward under our very noses.”

Walking stick tucked under his arm, Papa ground out the smoking stub on the paving stone. “If they weren't disturbing your mother's peace, I wouldn't so much mind the horses down in the cellar, polkaing with the flies. All that clomping around takes me back to a gentlemen-only miners' ball I attended in Nevada.”

“You should put these things in your autobiography, Mr. Clemens,” said Miss Lyon—too brightly, Clara thought.

He moved his gaze to her. “I suppose you're right.”

Clara took her father's arm possessively. She was surprised that he had not taken the bone she'd thrown him and gone on a tirade
about the countess. If there was anything that enraged her father the quickest, it was loose women. “I can't believe you aren't throwing a fit about the horses under the house, Papa. Poor Mamma can't escape them, bedbound as she is. Why aren't you raising Cain for her? I've seen you throw a bigger tantrum over snapping a pencil lead.”

“You don't give your father credit,” Miss Lyon said. “The creator of the
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
must be the most tenderhearted of men. How is your wife? I haven't seen her.”

“She's got the bedbug habit. But she's holding her own.”

Clara peered at her mother's secretary. The woman was glowing like Joan herself, in the throes of a beatific vision. Clara looked up at her father. He was lit up, too.

“
Joan of Arc
is my favorite book,” he told Miss Lyon. “How did you know that?”

Miss Lyon shook her head.

“He's only said so enough times in the newspapers,” Clara muttered.

“Never has there been a human animal who was so noble and so brave.” Papa's eyes had gone quicksilver, like they did when he was excited. “Joan was completely free of self-interest and personal ambition. She didn't
want
to have to lead France to fight the English, but she did because God asked her. I've been in love with the Maid of Orleans since I was twelve and found a page from a book about her blowing down the street.”

Clara withdrew her arm from his. “Didn't
Joan of Arc
sell the worst of all your books, Papa?”

He didn't seem to hear her. “If one more person comes up and tells me how much they admire
Tom Sawyer,
” he told Miss Lyon, “I might possibly brain them. He's just a prankster who's out for himself. There's not an important idea in that book, yet that's the one that I'm known for. What does that say about people?”