Twain's End (23 page)

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A deck of cards in her hand, Isabel confronted Mr. Clemens's bedroom door that evening, trying not to take its firmly closed state or his absence from dinner as a personal message. She hated playing cards, and the daily silent rounds that she'd endured with Mr. Clemens since his wife had died had not improved her love for them. But if a deck were to be her Trojan horse, if it could bring her and Mr. Clemens to a truce, so be it. She knocked on the door.

“What?” It was Katy's voice.

Isabel sagged. “I'll come back,” she called.

There was a brief silence.

“No,” called Mr. Clemens from inside the room, “come in.”

She let herself in. Mr. Clemens sat on his bed, naked to the waist. Katy stood next to him, holding a small green jar. Isabel's gaze went directly to the exposed flesh of his chest. “I didn't mean to interrupt.”

He lay back against the piles of white pillows. No sultan in a harem looked more comfortable. “What did you want, Miss Lyon?”

She thought of the time she had come upon Katy drying his hair back in Riverdale. She held up the deck. “Hearts,” she said awkwardly.

He patted the other side of the bed. “Come here. Sit.”

Regretting her need to be with him, she obeyed. Katy uncapped the green jar. The release of camphor and menthol overwhelmed the room.

“Deal,” Mr. Clemens said after Isabel reluctantly sat.

She shuffled the cards, pretending not to be disconcerted by the sight of Katy rubbing the ointment on his chest. She could not keep her gaze from the glistening salt-and-pepper hair springing under Katy's fingers.

“Are you just going to shuffle all day?” said Mr. Clemens.

Isabel dealt the cards upon the bedspread as Katy finished massaging in the Mentholatum and then laid a thick one-foot square of white flannel on his chest. Isabel picked up her cards and arranged them in her hand as he shrugged into his shirt while Katy held it. When Isabel glanced up, Katy was looking down upon her master with naked tenderness.

Mr. Clemens scooped up his cards as Katy buttoned his shirt. “What's wrong, Lioness?”

She shook her head. How had she not realized that she was not the only employee in love with her master? She should have seen it in Riverdale when she'd caught them alone, or any time they were in the same room, now that she thought of it. How blind we are to things we can't imagine.

“Thank you, Katy.” He shifted to adjust the plaster under his shirt as he positioned his cards. Katy went over and stoked the fire, necessary on this cold night even though the house had a modern furnace. Reluctantly, the maid left the room.

They played several hands. The blood rose in Isabel's face as she pictured herself carrying on a flirtation with him at the Pitti Palace, at her
villino,
back in Riverdale, everywhere. What made her think she had any more chance with him than Katy ever did? She hoped that he got some enjoyment out of them. Pull up a chair, enjoy the hen fight between servants!

Mr. Clemens stopped the game to unbutton his shirt, wipe his chest with the flannel, and pitch it across the room. “Thing stank.”

Isabel wanted to leave.

“You aren't trying to talk my leg off for once,” he said, buttoning up.

“Sorry.”

They resumed playing. He took another trick. “Are you letting me win?”

“No.”

“You sick?”

“No.”

They threw down more rounds; Mr. Clemens scooped them up, winning each hand. “You've got terrible cards. Just look at them! Products of the devil and his ancestors. You must be as cool as a saint on ice not to boil at the sight of them.”

She didn't feel like laughing.

A rattling came at the windows. Both looked up. “Sleet,” he said. She could feel him watching her. “Pour me some of Carnegie's whiskey, why don't you?”

She put down her cards and retrieved the bottle on the nightstand. The whiskey splashed into a crystal tumbler.

“Queen Victoria's distiller made that stuff,” he said as she poured. “Her son Edward only lets it out to a chosen few. Carnegie got a supply, and now there are only three people in the United States currently sipping that stuff—Carnegie, the president, and me. Hell, make it four. Pour yourself a glass.”

She grimaced.

“Go on.” He waggled his fingers for her to pour. “Don't make an old man drink alone.” He raised his glass when she was done pouring. “To the New Year.”

The liquid burned its way down her throat. Across the room, the sleet hissed against the windows.

He watched her drink. “Do you like it?”

“No!” But she kept drinking.

Several hands later, he said, “I shouldn't have said that to you earlier.”

There were many things he should not have said to her in their years together.

“About Livy,” he said.

She finished her glass and put it down. The top of her head seemed to be floating toward the vaulted ceiling.

He slapped down a card. “It's not your fault that I killed her.”

She tightened her jaw to stabilize herself. “You didn't kill Mrs. Clemens.” It was vanity, really, that he thought he controlled his wife's very breath—vanity or madness.

“I should have been more careful with her. How did I not see she was in such a bad state?”

She could not bear his anguish, as wrongheaded as it was. “She had been feeling better that day. Clara had told me. Everyone was so encouraged.”

“She really was better?” His eyes begged her to confirm it.

His vulnerability deflated her anger. “Yes, Clara said. She was up walking more than she'd been in months.”

“I shouldn't have let her walk so much! She hadn't walked more than twenty steps at a time in the last five years. Since she was a girl, she couldn't walk over a hundred feet. Why'd she think she could start now?” His tears shone in the firelight. “I loved her, you know. People said that I married her for her money, but that wasn't true. Oh, I loved her money, don't get me wrong, and I loved how she made me respectable, or at least tried to, but that's not why I had to have her.” He took a drink, then set down his glass. “She was just a
little
girl, you see, frail as a child. It was as if I could hold her in one hand. I was so honored that she trusted me not to crush her.” He sighed. “But I did. I crushed her every day.”

A crash came from the street outside, the screaming of horses, shouts. Isabel went to the window.

Below, the streetlight cast a sleety glow upon an overturned carriage. One of the pair of horses had fallen on the ice. While two men struggled to extract a woman from the side of the vehicle, the downed animal stabbed at the glistening street for purchase. The mare became tangled in her lines, dragging the other down upon her. She rolled back with a shriek.

Mr. Clemens came up behind Isabel as a bystander ran to help the screaming horse. Isabel turned away, face in hands.

He cradled her head against his chest. “It'll be all right.”

She heard his beating heart. Slowly, she looked up, sleet hissing against the window. He kissed her, then pressed her to him again. His voice rumbled against her ear. “Lioness, what are we going to do?”

A shot rang out. She could feel herself shaking.

He gathered her closer. “Poor horse. Nothing to be done when they're broken like that.”

March 1905

21 Fifth Avenue, New York

M
RS. LYON COULD UNDERSTAND
why Isabel had insisted upon dragging her to the moving picture show the other week. The studio, so common with its rough wooden benches and pressed tin ceiling, had smelled distressingly of foreign food and unwashed hair, but the action in
Rescued by Rover
made up for it. Mrs. Lyon had gaped at the jerking images, as keen on them, she supposed, as an immigrant beholding the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan when descending the gangplank to Ellis Island. The picture show was an interesting improvement over her beloved stereoscope after all, and she admitted as much to Isabel. Mrs. Lyon could admit when she was wrong. It took a big person to do so.

What Mrs. Lyon could not understand, however, was the thrill Mr. Clemens got in riding this underground death trap. Her ears ached from the racket of their subway car banging along its tracks like a coffee tin full of pennies. The passengers were all jumbled together like mulligan stew, Italian street repairmen in filthy overalls next to Russian shirtwaist-factory girls next to Negro men in celluloid collars next to bowlered clerks reading the
Sun.

When she had entered the domed cast-iron kiosk to the Astor Place station, Mrs. Lyon had asked Mr. Clemens if they would be riding in a first-class car. Yes, he had said in that maddeningly slow way
of his as they went down the steps to the tracks. They were all first-class. She was questioning how that could possibly be as she gazed dumbfounded at the tiled walls decorated with plaques of beavers—beavers, of all things, so crude to someone accustomed to the classical nude statues of Florence—when a train rumbled up, shrieking like Grendel being hewn by Beowulf. Higgledy-piggledy, the rich, the poor, and the middling had piled into what amounted to covered coal cars fitted out with benches. Mrs. Lyon entered with all the dignity one could muster when an Italian organ-grinder with a monkey on his shoulder was nudging one's back with his instrument.

Once seated behind Isabel and Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Lyon tried to catch the eye of the woman dressed in furs in the seat across from her, traveling with her maid, to commiserate about this sorry state of affairs. But the woman had been too busy smiling at Mr. Clemens to see.

Now they screeched along their subterranean circle of Hell. Mrs. Lyon adjusted her neckpiece, a single mink clasping its own tail between its needle teeth, an adornment she had owned since her debut. Its glass eyes were a little dull, a situation she had not improved with some shoe black, and it had a thumbprint-sized patch on its left haunch where the skin was rather too visible, but it and she looked respectable enough, especially when she held her chin high. You could always tell a person of quality by how she held herself. Her straight back was one of the perilously few things that elevated her above the coatless young clerk across the aisle, still wearing his arm garters and slumped like a sack of navy beans upon his bench. Once Isabel married Mr. Clemens, there would be no question of Mrs. Lyon's respectability. Mrs. Lyon could slump like a cooked noodle out in public if she cared to, and there would be no mistaking her rank. Her daughter's elderly humorist was a very famous man.

Isabel
would
marry him someday. It was done, you know. Why, Isabel's former suitor, Mr. Bangs, had married his secretary just the previous year. Mrs. Lyon had seen Mr. Bangs and his secretary-wife with her own eyes this past November, riding through the Washington Square arch in a shiny new carriage. Mrs. Lyon had kept her head
down as they passed, ill with her daughter's bad fortune. It should have been Isabel sitting in that brougham! But now it seemed that Isabel was the luckier for not having married him, leaving her free to wed a much bigger fish. If Mrs. Lyon could read the signs right, wedding bells should be ringing any day now. Funny how often bad luck was good luck in disguise.

And to think that just a few months ago, Mrs. Lyon never would have given a thought to them as a couple. Whatever closeness they had enjoyed before Mrs. Clemens passed away—purely professional, mind you—had been dashed by Mrs. Clemens's death. Mr. Clemens had taken her demise hard, although not as hard as his daughter Clara, who immediately took to swathing herself head to toe in black veils
if
Isabel could get her to rise from her bed, which believe you me was not often. As soon as they were back in the States and her mother was buried, the girl locked herself in a sanitarium near Central Park. She was languishing there to this day. She would not even entertain a letter from her papa!

Now the train screamed to a stop. Mrs. Lyon held her handbag tightly during the exchange of people getting off or on. It was just the sort of place where riffraff preyed on their superiors, looting them when they were helpless. She stared at the well-dressed woman with the maid, trying to catch her eye to let her know that she had a compatriot in the fight against rabble, but the woman seemed more interested in the buttons on her glove. Gripping her bag until the tin can was back in motion, Mrs. Lyon finally gave up on the woman and let her mind wander to more pleasant places.

It was two months ago, in January, that Mrs. Lyon had noticed the encouraging change in Isabel and Mr. Clemens. Oh, they had been playing cards all evening for a number of months after Mrs. Clemens's passing, sometimes with that poor, wild Jean. He did things like give Isabel his letters to mail and had her send his telegraphs and place telephone calls and so on. Then, what seemed like overnight, just after the evening when that horse had to be put down right in front of Mr. Clemens's house, Isabel and he became inseparable. He gave her
his stories to read. He taught her to play on his Orchestrelle organ. He had her trotting with him all over town and filling in at home as his hostess.