Twain's End (26 page)

“Me?”

He paced on the other side of the table. “You're the only one I can trust. Even Livy was hell-bent on tidying me up. She cleansed me until I was fit for mass consumption, but sometimes she took the ‘me' right out of me—usually, if she could help it. Clara would be worse. I am as embarrassing to her as breaking wind in church. And Jean . . .” He sighed. “She's got her own battles.”

“She does.” Before Isabel could say more, he came over and stood behind her.

“So will you do it?”

She twisted around to look at him. “Edit your letters?”

He nodded.

“I'd be honored.”

He rested his hands on her shoulders. “Don't let Clara get her hands on them. Don't let her tamper with my autobiography or, God help us, write my biography when I'm gone. She'll have me singing in the choir every Sunday and helping Civil War widows across the street.”

“I'll do whatever you want.”

He patted her head.

• • •

Late that night, Isabel awakened with a rush. A disturbance in the air hovered over her as she struggled to orient. She was alone in her third-floor bedroom in the New Hampshire house. Mr. Clemens's room was below hers. They had spent the evening talking, sipping his “Carnegie” whiskey; she'd played the piano for him—Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata.” As the music rippled under her fingers, he'd lain back on the sofa, his pipe between his lips. He'd watched her, boring into her soul, as his chest rose and fell to the rhythm of her left hand stroking the bass. She pounded the strident notes of the treble, her heart crying out to him, until she broke off and, trembling, strode upstairs. If he came to her, she would let him in. It was time, now, for them to act. She waited, naked in bed, woozy with drink, listening to the insistent crickets. She shut the window against them and then, in the spinning blackness, fell asleep.

She awakened. The air near her cheek swooshed softly as if pushed with exquisite wings. Samuel? She opened her mouth to call for him—

What if it were Jean come to her for help? Or a staff member—she was in charge of the house. What would they think if she cried out in her bed for Mr. Clemens?

She felt it again: a quiet fluttering. A displacement of air so slight, so delicate, she seemed to imagine it. She held her breath to listen.

Silence.

Slowly, she reached out for her nightstand and carefully felt its smooth surface for her box of matches. Fingertips grazed cardboard; stealthily, she gathered the box to her and struck a match. A flame flared up. Movement in a dark corner caught her eye. Her gasp put out the flame.

“Hello?” she whispered.

No answer.

She struck a second match. Shaking, she held it out like a sword. “Hello!” she said louder.

In the weak glow, a soft brown creature fluttered toward the ceiling in the shadowy corner.

She hiccupped a laugh. A moth! It was just a moth, a
Cecropia
as large as her open hand, evidently trapped inside when she'd shut the window.

Her scalp tingled with relief. “Poor fellow. I'll let you out.”

Shaking out the match, she got out of bed. She was crossing the room in the dark when she heard the click of a latch.

The door gently closed.

December 1905

21 Fifth Avenue, New York

C
HRISTMAS PURCHASES WERE TO
be made, their selection critical enough that the elite shoppers of Simpson Crawford were able to ignore the monster in their midst. Clara Clemens was among the anointed, judiciously examining hats in the perfumed, humming beehive of the most exclusive department store in New York.

Isabel, being without funds, was free to contemplate the beast: a mammoth Santa Claus that swelled up toward the glass dome of the six-story atrium like a genie freshly let from its bottle. Its noggin alone was taller than two grown men stacked head to toe. The behemoth clutched an armful of baby dolls so defiantly to his chest that he appeared to be taking them hostage. It was by far the most enormous Santa that Isabel had ever seen, outstripping all the decorative Right Jolly Old Elves she'd admired as a girl when her mother had taken her shopping at tony stores like this.

“How do I look?” Clara modeled a flat-topped amber velvet picture hat with a glossy brown bow on its brim.

Isabel pulled her gaze from the yuletide ogre. She shifted her hold on Clara's coat, folded over her arm, and then juggled Clara's fur wrap, hat, and muff. “Wonderful.”

It was true. Clara shone. She had emerged that fall from a year in the sanitarium like a butterfly from a cocoon, her slightly pudgy
girlish softness hardened into a womanly beauty. She had a gravity to her, an attractive confidence that she hadn't had before her hospitalization. Yet as much as Isabel rejoiced in her recovery, the metamorphosed Clara unnerved her. This Butterfly Clara had all the Caterpillar Clara's endearing bad habits, like lowering her head as if to bowl over anyone in her way, or smiling too broadly when complimented, but in her newfound hardness, she was a foreign creature: Clara, yet not, as if goblins had replaced the real Clara with one of their own in the night.

Isabel shimmied back Clara's coat on her arm to pick up a moss-green hat awash with veils. She casually turned it over. Clara watched her, then looked in a mirror and rearranged a lock of auburn hair curling from under her hat. “If you're looking for a price tag, Simpson Crawford doesn't use them. The theory is that if you need to know the price, you can't afford it. I suppose you wouldn't know that unless you shopped here.” She raised her dark brows as if in pleasant surprise. “Maybe you do shop here. Now that you're not paying rent, you must have all the money in the world.”

Isabel caught her breath. Who was this goblin child? The truth was, Isabel could hardly bear her. She'd noticed Clara's new cruel edge immediately after returning to New York from the summer season in New Hampshire, the first they had seen each other in a year. Even as Isabel was pulling back from a one-sided embrace, Clara announced that Isabel needed to find lodgings elsewhere; her mother's old rule was being enforced.

The bottom had dropped out of Isabel's heart. Didn't Clara know that Isabel had arranged for Clara's medical treatment during her hospitalization, that she had written to Clara nearly every day because her father hadn't the time, that she had found a manager when Clara announced that she wanted to sing professionally? Isabel knew when she wasn't welcome. She promptly gave her notice, but Mr. Clemens convinced her to stay and ruled that she would keep her third-floor room in the house. Give Clara time to adjust, he had said. It would all work out.

A sophisticated clerk floated up on strapped pumps, assessed Isabel's plain clothes, then turned to Clara. “Amber suits you,” she said in the rounded voice of an aristocrat. “Do you like a toque? This one is very French.” She held out a hat in amber and apricot.

Clara took on a frostily superior tone. “They were wearing toques in Paris when I was there a few years ago. Surely they're not wearing them
still.
”

Isabel contained her eye roll. The clerk had probably just gotten off the boat from Ellis Island. Aristocrats did not work in department stores any more than they worked as secretaries. And as much as Isabel worshipped Mr. Clemens, she knew his backwater pedigree. Neither woman was the royalty they pretended to be.

Her gaze drifted back to the troubling Santa. Now that she thought about it, the titan's wild white hair and mustache were much like Mr. Clemens's, which made her like it better. She smiled to herself, picturing Mr. Clemens bending over the game table in his billiards room last night, his glorious shipwreck of hair shining in the ruby glow of the Tiffany lamp suspended overhead. He had invited her down to the lower-floor room via the famous notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony rapped on the radiator, now their code for her to come to him. She could still see him straightening when she entered.

“Listen.” He had leaned on his cue stick and cocked his ear toward the basement window, through which the sidewalk could be seen on the other side of their iron fence.

She'd gone over, rubbing her arms against both her anxiety of having just been accused by Clara of moving the furniture in the parlor, and the cold air sliding through the window. She peered outside. The light of a streetlamp revealed the clean gaiters and pressed pant cuffs of a man standing just beyond the fence. He was singing “Danny Boy” in a voice so rich, so full of longing, that it made her heart hurt.

Mr. Clemens strolled over. “ ‘The pipes, the pipes are ca-all-ling.' ” He stopped next to her. “He's been yowling like that for some time.”

Isabel sighed. “He sounds like all the misery in the world.” She curled her hands, icy from the cold, under her chin. “It's beautiful.”

“The man is probably dead drunk, but that doesn't lessen your heartache.” He took her hands, then rubbed them. “What's wrong, Lioness? You've been dragging along with your tail between your legs.”

Your daughter.
She shook her head.

“As soon as I finish my autobiography, I am taking us someplace warm. Like Bermuda. You ever been to Bermuda, or did your old boss take you there, too?”

“I haven't been.”

“Then you and me, we're going. Just us.”

As conscious as Mr. Clemens was of his image, he'd never risk ruining it by traveling alone with an unmarried woman. Mark Twain the beloved family man would never stoop to such scandal. She searched his eyes. Was this his strange way of proposing marriage?

He broke their gaze to peer out the window. Suddenly, he swept up his arms, making her flinch, then whistled as he stretched his hands high. He dropped his arms only to whoosh them up and whistle again.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm giving the fellow the Chinese applause.”

“The what?”

“In San Francisco, the Chinese show their appreciation by imitating a sky rocket. Clapping pales in comparison once you've gotten a good Chinese send-off.”

He went closer to the window, then whistled and waved, whistled and waved, until the singer bent down, peered between the iron railings, and, spotting Mr. Clemens, bowed.

Katy burst into the room. “What was that sound?”

“My Chinese applause? Katy the Librarian, you have eagle ears.”

She looked between Isabel and him, breathing hard. “I thought you were in trouble,” she said petulantly.

After Katy left, nothing more had been said about Bermuda. Isabel had stored it in her heart, waiting for clarification.

• • •

Now Clara said, “Miss Lyon, wait while the clerk boxes them up, will you? Be a dear and give her my account, please.”

Isabel found the noble salesclerk and Clara watching her. “Yes, of course.”

“I can have the boxes held until you're done shopping,” said the clerk, “or perhaps you'd like them sent to your home.”

“No, Miss Lyon will wait for them. She loves to help.”

Isabel met Clara's cool green gaze. “Go on, do more shopping, I'll catch up. Which department will you be in?”

“Dresses.” Clara laughed for the clerk's benefit. “Isn't it obvious?” She swished her dress, a rose-colored silk that made Isabel's black wool look dowdy. “All I have are rags.”

Twenty minutes later—according to the clock across from the Christmas leviathan—balancing two hatboxes and the rest of Clara's wraps, Isabel rode the clacking wooden steps of the escalator up to meet Clara. She stood by as Clara tried on gown after gown, keeping the clerk, an older Frenchwoman with a red pincushion on her wrist, busy with buttoning, fastening hooks and eyes, and strategically draping material. How many decades had gone by since Isabel had shopped like this with her mother? She remembered a certain blue velvet gown that showed off her girlish waist. The clerks had gathered to exclaim how beautiful she looked.

“Here, Miss Lyon.” Clara plucked a dress from the final selection the clerk had brought out on hangers. She laid it across Isabel's arms. “This is for when I go to church on Christmas Eve. And this is for New Year's Day breakfast. And this is for New Year's Day lunch.”

The clerk looked doubtfully at the heap upon Isabel. “Let me have them sent to you, madam.”

“No, no. Miss Lyon will carry them. She's indispensable, don't you know?”

Isabel felt sick.

The dresses, once boxed, proved too much for any mortal to carry in combination with the other packages, but Clara
was able to make her point by insisting that Isabel at least bring home the hats. Isabel was able to make
her
point by carrying them. Soon they were out on Sixth Avenue, where the roar of the elevated train, the murmur of the teeming crowd, and the shouts of men hawking fir trees and mistletoe intensified Isabel's headache.

She was gritting her teeth against the clanging of a Salvation Army worker at her kettle and the shouts of children running to Christmas display windows when Clara, marching ahead, suddenly stopped. Isabel ran into a nurse pushing a baby carriage.