Twain's End (17 page)

The door was thrust open. They jerked away from each other.

Katy hove into the room, her broad face bunched with hostility. She looked from one to the other. “Mrs. Clemens wants you.”

Mr. Clemens patted his pockets for a cigar. “She does?”

“Not you, sir.” Katy thrust her gaze at Isabel. “Her.”

“Me?”

“You'd better go,” said Mr. Clemens.

Isabel followed Katy's rigid form down the hall. What had Katy seen? Isabel vowed never to put herself in such a position again.

Several yards from Mrs. Clemens's bedroom door, Katy turned and blocked the way. “You think you're smart, but you're playing a fool's game.”

“I'm not playing any game, Katy.” Isabel sounded guilty, even to herself.

“Other people have been his favorites. It never lasts.”

“I really don't know what you're talking about.”

“You think you're better than me, with your pretty face and fancy accent. You just watch yourself. I know what you're up to. So does everybody else.”

Isabel squeezed by her, catching her yeasty scent.

“Two minutes,” Katy said as Isabel reached the door.

She stepped into the bedroom. Sunlight flooded in from the floor-length windows. Isabel raised an arm to shade her eyes.

“Youth tells me that you have begun working on his story.”

Isabel squinted in the light. Across the room, beneath a brass headboard wrought into a heart the size of an extravagant box of chocolates, Mrs. Clemens lay propped against a pile of pillows. The whimsical design of the headboard, full of flourishes around the heart, seemed a cruel joke for a sickbed. Its occupant was far more ill than Isabel had been told. Her disease had progressed in the nearly seven months since Isabel had spoken with her. Now the bones of Mrs. Clemens's skull strained against her skin in such a way that every contour could be clearly traced, from the rounded bulge of her brow
to the delicate hinge of her mandible. The flesh on her hands had melted away to the point that it was barely discernible; hers were a graceful skeleton's hands. Yet the wasting away of her physical body somehow made her look younger, even girlish, as if her suffering were erasing the years. Isabel could not help but stare, trying to comprehend how this could be.

Mrs. Clemens stared back calmly, grunting slightly with each breath.

Isabel found her words. “We've begun his autobiography—I mean he has. He's dictating it to me.”
Don't be flustered. You have done nothing wrong.

“I have heard,” Mrs. Clemens said with a wheeze. “He thinks he's hit on the way to tell the truth about himself.”

Isabel covered her alarm at Mrs. Clemens's worsened shortness of breath. “Yes, he's very excited. I'm honored to be able to help him. I don't think anyone has ever written a completely truthful autobiography.”

“The truth.” Mrs. Clemens's laughter turned into a cough. “Have you ever met a person with such a burning need to tell the truth—”

“It's very honorable.”

“—yet who is so incapable of telling it?”

Isabel swallowed. “He has lived a long and rich life. I think he just wants to share it.”

“Does he? By describing the carpets in this place?”

Mrs. Clemens took gasping sips from a glass of water at her bedside. Outside, the countess's donkey brayed as if its heart were breaking, its cries faint through the closed windows.

“He told me what he talked about yesterday. Rugs. That seems like thin material for an autobiography.” She watched Isabel. “I see you agree.”

“Actually, he was quite amusing.”

“Don't tell him that if you want to keep his eye. He loses respect for anyone whom he amuses. As successful as he has been with his humor, that is just about everyone.”

Isabel glanced at the oxygen tank that had been set up by the bed. Near it sat Mrs. Clemens's music box, silent.

“Do not misunderstand me. I'm glad that he is working on his autobiography, Miss Lyon. His publisher wants it, and Youth thinks that he'll make money on it, and nothing makes Youth happier than the prospect of making money.”

Isabel grasped for safe ground. “Everyone will want to read it.”

Grunting softly with each breath, Mrs. Clemens waited until Isabel stopped smiling. “If you care about him, let him talk about the rugs in this place, Miss Lyon. Let him talk about the wall color. Let him talk about the shutters. Just don't encourage him to tell the truth about himself.” She paused, panting slightly. “No one wants to hear about the deepest part of another person's heart. It's too unbearable.”

“He—”

Mrs. Clemens raised a wren's claw to stop her. “Not even Youth would still be loved by his readers if he bared his soul, Miss Lyon. In his heart, he knows this. That's why he flirts with spilling it. He loathes himself, Miss Lyon, and everyone's adulation only makes him loath himself more.”

It took Isabel a moment to wrench out the word. “Why?”

Mrs. Clemens wheezed for a moment. “Why does he hate himself?”

“No, why do you tell me this?”

“Because I love him, Miss Lyon. I always have. No matter what he's done to me.”

“He loves you, that is clear.”

“I know. He does. Or at least he loves the idea of me. But having Sam Clemens's love is hard on a person. You're going to need every scrap of your strength for it.”

“Mrs. Clemens—”

“I don't have time to pretend, Miss Lyon.” She paused to swallow, then regained her breath. “My heart is not strong. I can spare no energy on pretense. But that doesn't mean I want things thrown in my face. Spare me that, please.”

The door opened behind Isabel. Katy thrust in her face. “Time, ma'am.”

“We were through.” Mrs. Clemens melted back onto her pillows. “Katy, help me with my air.”

Katy strode over and began to unfurl the rubber tubing from the iron tank of oxygen.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Clemens.

Isabel turned around.

“And take this.” Mrs. Clemens gestured at the music box. Katy's hands stilled upon the tubing. “Go on. Take it. See if you can get Youth to tell you the truth about it. I'm done with it.”

Isabel scooped up the silent box next to Katy and reeled from the room. She stashed the hateful thing behind an urn in the entrance hall, then had the presence of mind to find Jean, to whom Mr. Clemens had assigned the job of turning Isabel's pages of handwriting into typescript. Once she had pressed the day's dictation into Jean's hands, she collected the music box and turned homeward. Tomorrow she would make the five-mile walk into town and book a passage home for her mother and herself. She would leave now, while her reputation and conscience were intact. Oh, she loved him, she loved every part of him, but that didn't mean she could have him. She could never have him. He was his wife's, his daughters', his readers' around the world. Who would be a friend to the mistress of Mark Twain? No one, not even her mother.

She entered the overgrown boxwood maze surrounding the fountain—ironically, the fastest way home. Clutching the music box, her feet crunching on the gravel of the path between towering hedges that smelled of cat piss, her mind wandered to the countess and her steward, and the violent lovemaking that she had witnessed in this garden. She batted at the jutting branches, their stiff leaves as small as mouse ears, as she realized, perversely, that she hoped she would come across the lovers. She hoped to see their bodies twisting together, lusted to hear the wet smack of their flesh, their animal
cries. The skin of her throat throbbed from the memory of Mr. Clemens's touch as, in her mind, their limbs, their groans, became hers and his.

She glanced over her shoulder. Someone was at Mrs. Clemens's window.

Correcting herself with a sharp sniff, she quickened her pace on the spongy gravel. She looked again. Whoever it might have been was gone.

Fear washed over her. He was married,
married,
and she'd let him come too close.

She heard a rustling in the hedges. She changed her tack, taking an offshoot that bore to the east, away from the stables and the countess and her steward—out of her way home. She could bear to see no one now.

The rattling came again. Closer. The hair tingled on her arms as the animal in her sensed danger. She quickened her pace and listened, hyper-aware, over the noise of her steps on the gravel. A blackbird tootled, out of sight. From the direction of the olive grove beyond her house, goat bells tinkled, soothing and sweet.

The shrubbery rent with a crack. Something crashed through the greenery. A glimpse through the hedges revealed the donkey, pounding toward her, no longer a docile barnyard creature but something murderous, with eyes white, ears flattened, teeth bared.

She raced down the overgrown tunnels, her corset digging her ribs. She hit a dead end, retraced, ran faster. Branches snapped behind her. The thudding, the furious breathing, closened. A glance showed her pursuer gaining ground. She heaved the music box. It bounced from its haunch and smashed on the path with a ringing chime. Still the animal kept on.

She stumbled out of the maze and into the tangled woods, where the grade turned sharply upward. She scrambled uphill through the waist-high undergrowth, tripping on roots, on rocks, ripping her dress on brambles. Over her shoulder she caught a glimpse of the
beast weaving uphill through the trees. Through more brush, she stopped dead: a tumbledown stone wall blocked the way.

Erected centuries ago to protect the olive grove on the other side, the crumbling rocks served as a home for lizards and snakes and now as a barrier for escape. She ran along it, faint from the heat, from the relentless clench of her corset, gasping for breath—choking like Mrs. Clemens. Justice! Justice!

Ahead, a wooden stile jutted into the leaves piled at the base of the wall. She dashed for it, moaning with relief, then scrambled upon its rough plank, grabbed the fence posts, and swung over a leg. Her skirt caught. She yanked at it as the beast stormed up and bit at her, long yellow teeth clacking. She tugged until the cloth ripped, sending her tumbling to the other side. She was sprawled on the ground, spent, dizzy, when her gaze trailed down the wall. Twenty yards away, the stones gave way to a gap through which the animal could easily pass.

She skittered on hands and knees to the closest olive tree, a twisted gray specimen as ancient as the wall, then cowered behind the clump of long grass at the base of the trunk, waiting to be found.

Shouts rose in the woods. “Signorina?”

She forced wind into her lungs. She squeezed out a reedy “Here!”

Over the buzzing in her ears, she heard the men's cries. There was a sturdy thrashing through the undergrowth, shouts, and then a single heartbroken animal scream.

Isabel's sights swam up through the lowering blue fog as the steward bent over her.
Handsome,
decided her inner self, ascending calmly into the branches of the olive tree above her reclining body.
His teeth are so white.
Her ears registered his thickly accented “Okay?” and, puzzlingly, the sound of distant weeping and the ring of a broken chime.

The deep blue twilight became a crushing black.

February 1904

Villa di Quarto,
Florence, Italy

C
LARA PULLED THE BEDCLOTHES
over her mother's shoulders, flattening the perky lace of her nightgown. The covers always slid down when Mamma slept propped up like this, and then Mamma would wake and say her hands were cold. Clara would have to rub some warmth into them, which was ridiculous when this faded Italian bordello boudoir was so hot that you could boil a pot of pasta in it.

Tucking the ironed sheets around her mother's wasted neck, Clara peered into her sleeping face. She
was
looking healthier, and astonishingly younger. Clara was not just imagining it. While Mamma's cheeks were not yet pink, her skin was taut and unwrinkled, perfect as marble. She looked like a child.

Coincidentally, her convalescence had begun on the day Miss Lyon was attacked by that absurd donkey. That same day, Mamma rose up in her bed, stood, and staggered to the window. Katy had seen it. Just two weeks later, Mamma was getting herself to the window and standing there for whole minutes at a time. Soon she would be strolling into the dining room, then outside to the garden, then into town to marvel at the art like everyone else. Anyone could be her companion then, it wouldn't be limited to Clara—Papa, Jean, Miss Lyon, any of them could do it. Especially Miss Lyon, who was
certainly getting paid enough. Fifty dollars a month! And then Clara, good, faithful,
deserving
Clara, could catch the train to delicious Vienna, back to the conservatory, to where men got to their feet when she entered a room. They jumped up for
her,
Clara Clemens, the star contralto, and not for Papa.

She could see herself in Herr Leschetizky's studio, waiting patiently as two handsome students fought to accompany her on the piano. She would choose between them, brightening one's day by promising that he could play for her, then telling the other—the blond, she had a weakness for blonds, with their gleaming gold whiskers—that he could take her to dine, causing the poor yellow-haired dear, looking so downcast, to beam like the sun in this hothouse. The two of them would step out in the evening, down the beautiful Ringstrasse glittering with cafés and men with top hats and canes and women in delectable furs. Other gentlemen would nod at her, but
her
blond young man would tighten his hold, his arm sinking into the fur of her wrap as he murmured to her in his rich Austrian accent.