Twain's End (29 page)

She wanted to touch him but was afraid. “How could it be your fault? You were just a little boy.”

“I wrote
Huck Finn
and
Pudd'nhead Wilson
and ‘A True Story, Repeated
Word for Word' and my Congo piece and what-all to make up for it. I'll take the heat for showing man's ugliness and absurdity, for his capacity for casual, bloodcurdling cruelty to all living creatures. I'll sin against half my countrymen, as one hot critic has charged, by turning against the South. But nothing, nothing, eases the guilt of what I did to Jennie.”

She searched his anguished face. Whatever it was that he imagined that a seven-year-old boy could have done, Isabel saw that there was no convincing him otherwise.

She took off his hat and, smoothing his hair, looked into his eyes. “I'm so sorry, Samuel.” She stroked his cheek. “I'm so very sorry.”

He slid his arms around her. “I loved her. I loved her more than anything. I thought I was going to marry her.”

They held each other, the surf groaning in their tropical Eden. What had become of his Jennie?

Before she could gather the courage to ask, she heard the crunch of hooves on the coral road.

He sat up, putting back on his straw boater. A cart with a lone Negro jostled by. Mr. Clemens tipped his hat.

“We'd better get back,” he told Isabel.

They spoke little on the way back to town, and only then anodyne remarks like how the sand in the southern coves was pink, and how whitewash on the pyramidal roofs of the houses was blinding in the sun, yet each impersonal comment kept a foot in the door cracked open by his admission.

In time they came to the docks of Hamilton. She was gazing up at the white balconies of the wooden buildings along Front Street, bracing herself for their return to the hotel, when Mr. Clemens guided Blanche up Reid Street.

She looked at him questioningly.

“We've got to get you in some better clothes.”

She smoothed the skirt of her white linen ensemble, suddenly aware that her blouse was thinning at the elbows from a decade of ironing. It was the best of her two warm-weather dresses.

He stopped before the most expensive clothing store in town. “Do you think an emporium that only deals with the carriage trade will accept customers who came in on a donkey?”

“It didn't work well for Jesus.”

He shook his head in admiration. “Lioness, you are a tiger.”

Soon he was sitting in a flowered chintz chair with his hat on his knee as Isabel swished before him in a yellow silk dress. “Like it?”

He tapped two fingers on the arm of the chair:
tap-tap-tap-TAP.
Then he sat back and crossed his legs, a sheik admiring his harem. “Back home in Mizurrah, Jennie would have called you the ‘Queen o' de Magazines.' ”

She knew how privileged she was that he could speak Jennie's name to her.

He sat forward. “From now on, I want to see you in rich, soft, clinging silks. I want to see you in splendid colors. I want people to recognize when your comet goes by, flashing with beauty, and to clap their hands in appreciation.”

Her chest filled with elation. “I hardly think this dress will do that.”

“Then put on another.” He sat back. “I'll wait.”

• • •

Isabel was wearing the yellow dress when they entered the Princess Hotel an hour later. The lobby smelled sweetly of lilies. Vases of them covered every marble-topped table within the elegant, cool hall, and yet their strong scent only partially penetrated Isabel's consciousness. Her awareness was centered on the hand Mr. Clemens had placed upon the small of her back as he guided her toward the brass doors of the elevator.

They gazed at each other, mindless of the white-jacketed boy polishing the mirrors that hung from every wall. A red spot glowed high up on each of Mr. Clemens's cheeks; his eyes shone like quicksilver. He pushed on the button again, breathing hard. His excitement made Isabel's heart beat even faster. This was it.
He was going to let her in. They were going to pledge their bodies to their union.

The brass doors parted. Out walked Reverend Joe Twichell in a boater and white flannels, still tall and handsome in his old age, a grin lighting a face that seemed all the more kindly with his downward-slanting mustache and eyes. “There you are. I've been looking for you. I've hired a carriage to take us out to Devil's Hole.”

“We've been out,” growled Mr. Clemens.

Reverend Joe looked between them, his smile dimming as he noticed their tension. “The carriage is waiting.”

“Well, I need a nap.”

“Miss Lyon, too?”

Mr. Clemens glared at him from beneath belligerent brows. “I don't know what she wants.”

But he did know what she wanted. She wanted him, with every scrap of her being. She would throw propriety out the window, along with her reputation, because he meant that much to her.

Reverend Twichell covered his awkwardness with a laugh. “We've come all the way to heaven, and you're considering a nap? Don't tell me that this is the same Mark who walked with me the hundred miles between Hartford and Boston.”

“You seem to forget,” Mr. Clemens growled, “that we only made twenty-eight miles of it. And that about killed us.”

“Who noticed? The papers surely didn't care. Mark Twain was taking a walk. You could spill your tea and the papers would be full of it. The world can't get enough of their beloved Mark Twain.” He gave his friend a pointed look. “They are watching your every step.”

A footman in the livery of the hotel approached them. “Your carriage is waiting, sir.”

It crushed Isabel that Mr. Clemens seemed almost relieved as they strolled out to the portico, where a drooping horse patiently awaited.

• • •

Less than an hour later, she found herself peering into a clear emerald pool flashing with colorful fish, Reverend Joe at her elbow. Every carriage on the island seemed to be parked on the bright white road behind her. Beyond the jam of carriages, in the shade of a large cedar tree by an inn, a flock of ladies in picture hats and gentlemen in boaters crowded around Mr. Clemens.
Let him entertain them,
thought Isabel, turning away. She would not protect him. He could have insisted on claiming her as his woman, and he didn't.

“See anything?” asked Reverend Twichell.

At the bottom of the clear depths of the pool, perhaps twenty feet down, skulked a gray fish the size of an ice wagon. Wafting side fins comically small for its bulk, it sat with its lower lip thrust up, all too human in its petulance.

“It's a grouper,” he said when she didn't answer.

She felt as peevish as the gray monster looked.

The aw-shucks slant of his eyes enforced Reverend Joe's disarming smile. “I think what you're doing for Mark is a great thing.”

She kept her gaze upon the fish. “And what is that?”

“Taking care of him. God knows our Mark can't take care of himself.”

She did not want to have this conversation. “There seem to be little blue fish nipping the gills of that big fish.”

He peered down into the pool. “They're cleaning him.” He drew in a breath. “Miss Lyon, as Mark's best friend, I must speak up: I'm afraid that you're making him lazy.”

“Lazy!”

“Livy tried to reform him, and for her, he worked at being a gentleman. But lately, I see him falling back into his wild ways. He's drinking more, he's swearing more, he's as confrontational and rude in his writing and in his manners as when I first met him. He's become a complete boor.”

Isabel watched the fish. At a speech in New York several weeks back, Mr. Clemens had stopped mid-lecture to berate a woman in the audience whose only offense was that she was knitting. He scolded
her until, glowing with shame, she had stuffed her needles and wool into her bag. Isabel had radiated with her own shame for him, then chalked it up to his exhaustion, as she attributed most of his uncivil acts. It was tiring being the most famous man in the world.

“I knew him before his marriage,” said Reverend Joe. “In fact, I married Mark and Livy. The Mark Twain of the 1870s was not fit for polite company. Livy had her work cut out for her.”

“His name is Samuel.”

He smiled gently. “You're right. Samuel. Don't get me wrong, Mark—Samuel—even when wild, is a genius. But left to his own devices, he's his own worst enemy. He's rude and bad-tempered, the most mercurial man I've ever met. His friends know to take the good with the bad, but his public doesn't.”

“Mr. Clemens is over seventy. He has earned the freedom to behave however he likes.”

Reverend Joe half gasped, half laughed. “Are you joking? He'll be hated. People will turn against him in droves. And more than anyone I've ever met, Mark—Sam—whatever you want to call him—needs to be loved. Miss Lyon, you have to save him from himself.”

“I don't understand,” she said, understanding completely.

“Mark needed Livy. She edited everything he wrote.” He paused as the knowledge bounced between them that Isabel currently served in that role. “She kept him from indulging in his appetites—as you know, he's pretty wild in his extremes.” Again he paused, underscoring the understanding that if anyone knew of Samuel Clemens's mania, it was Isabel. “His girls are terrified of him, even his dear Susy was, but Livy wasn't. You wouldn't think that such a little mite of a woman, so sickly, could stand up to him, but she did, and he adored her for it. Livy was his great guiding star.”

“Livy is dead,” she said with a vehemence that shocked even her. She backpedaled quickly. “I will not go against his wishes. It's my great pleasure to make him as comfortable as possible so that he may write. Look at all he has produced this past year and a half—an output unmatched since he was young. Do you think he could have done
this unprotected? No. He must not be harassed, must not have unnecessary matters brought to him that he might fret over. He must be saved from all anxiety.” She thought of their earlier conversation. “He's had enough of it in his life.”

He looked at her long and hard. “Marriage to a man like Sam must seem appealing, Miss Lyon. He is worshipped around the world. You'd be worshipped, too. Livy was.”

“That's not why I'm here, Reverend Twichell. I don't want attention. It's insulting that you might think so.”

“Mark will eat you alive.”

“Please don't call him Mark. If you only knew how it tired him.”

“No, Miss Lyon, in this case, I do mean Mark. Mark is the one who's going to hurt you. Mark will do anything to further himself—Mark would step on his own mother if he thought it would benefit him. Mark will never let Sam marry you. Mark's got a certain image to uphold, an image he painstakingly crafted over the years, the image of a devil-may-care rascal who was tamed only by the love of his life, his brilliant wife, Livy, and his adoring daughters. Marrying you would ruin that story, Miss Lyon, the story everyone loves, and Mark won't let you.”

“I can't believe that you are speaking so hatefully about your friend.”

Reverend Joe looked over to where Mr. Clemens was entertaining the crowd. “Come to think of it, Mark isn't really my friend. He's no one's friend. There has never been a more self-serving creature. The man I'm trying to protect is Sam.”

Isabel took her gaze from the small blue fish nipping at the sedate gray monster. “And I am as well. He won't tell you this—he won't tell anyone this—but he gets vertigo when he's feeling stressed. He almost fell last week when he got up to light the gas. I only know because I came in and found him sitting in a chair, looking gray. The pressure is killing him. Who's going to take care of him if I don't?”

“His daughters.”

“Ha! Clara won't and Jean can't; Jean has life-threatening struggles of her own. He has no one, unless you want to count his maid Katy.”

He took off his hat, wiped his high forehead with his handkerchief, then put his hat back on. “The fact is, Miss Lyon, you can't keep living under his roof with him. People are talking.”

“I don't care.”

“Don't you see? He does. Who do you think asked me to come on this trip? He's got his image to uphold. Only he's too scared to tell you.”

“Scared?”

“Scared that you'll leave him. You've made him completely dependent upon you.”

“I've made him? I only give him what he wants.”

“And that's the problem, isn't it?”

Over from beneath the big cedar, Mr. Clemens caught Isabel's gaze. He beckoned to her from the center of his crowd. She shook her head, close to tears.

“We'd better go,” said Reverend Twichell.

With a last glance at the grouper and his sycophant down in their turquoise hole, Isabel held up her chin and put on a smile.

Mr. Clemens was addressing the group. “So in closing, friends, remember that life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss SLOWLY. Love truly, laugh uncontrollably. And never, ever regret ANYTHING that makes you smile.” The laughter of the crowd mixed with the balmy breeze.

When Isabel neared Mr. Clemens, he spread out his arm to her. “Here she is. My secretary. I have brought her here with me because she knows everything, and I find that I don't know anything. Every man needs a smart little secretary to keep him straight. Miss Lyon, take a bow.”