Twain's End (34 page)

Wark emptied another shell. “Next year,” he said, chewing, “when we return to Europe, we'll sell Clara's appearances on shares. It won't cost you anything, Mr. Clemens. We'll
make
you money.”

The King drew his attention from the window out which he'd been staring. “What? I don't care. Expenses are Isabel's department.”

“I wish you could join us in Europe, Nana.” Wark used the pet name he and Clara had given Isabel, as if she were their aging childhood nanny. “We kept seeing things that reminded us of you. Whenever we did, we said ‘Nana would like this tea' or ‘Nana would like this castle' or ‘Nana would like these cakes.' ” He glanced at Clara, who laughed. Isabel could well imagine how much of a joke what Nana liked had become between them.

As if sensing that Isabel was onto them, Clara quickly changed
the subject. “Next time, Papa, I'm going to insist that Mr. Johnston book me in bigger halls in Europe.”

The King kept his gaze out the window. “Conquer the little houses first. Being able to win over tough, small crowds—now, that's the mark of a real entertainer. It takes skill to bring a resistant group over to your camp.”

An offended silence radiated from Clara's side of the table. The King, oblivious, kept his watch outside. Finally, she burst out, “What's so important out there? It's dark.”

“Nothing. I thought I saw a comet.” He looked at Isabel. “You don't think Halley's Comet could come early?”

“No. It's on a set orbit.”

“Because you know that I'm going out with it.”

“We were talking about me,” said Clara. “For once.”

Will chewed his shellfish, glancing at Clara, then smiled at Isabel as if to enlist her support. “Have you been to England, Nana?”

She had been when she was Millicent Dana's governess, a time in her life that she didn't particularly want to remember. “Not lately.” She kept an eye on The King. He was upset about something.

“Well,” said Will, “it gets a bit thick over there sometimes, having the Brits looking down their noses at Americans. I'm from Canada, but I'd see it when Clara and I went out. They'd hear our accents and they'd act differently toward us. They'd look at us with these snobby little smiles, as if we were trained monkeys there to make them laugh.”

Isabel regarded him over her tiny trident fork. Although Wark's talent as a pianist had taken him far from his working-class roots in Ontario, he still had the laborer's chip on his shoulder. He clearly resented the privileged, even as he strove to be part of them. She wondered if, deep down, he resented Clara, with her European training and unlimited funds. She glanced at her King. No wonder he approved of Will. The King, too, was once a poor boy in pursuit of a rich man's daughter. How often patterns repeat themselves, or is it that we seek the comfort of familiarity?

“The Brits are the amusing ones,” Wark said. “Every time a limey calls a ‘sweater' a ‘jumper,' I want to laugh. Somehow I picture kangaroos in woolens.”

Clara's pout loosened. “Or when they call the hood of the automobile a ‘bonnet,' ” she said sulkily. “I see an Oldsmobile wearing a frilly hat.” When Wark laughed, she thawed into a smile.

Wark was enjoying himself now. “How about when I told that waiter I was ‘stuffed'? If you could have seen his face,” he said to Mr. Clemens. He shifted to Isabel when it seemed The King wasn't listening. “I told the fellow, ‘No thanks for dessert—I'm stuffed,' and the jackass coughed and turned away like he'd seen my sister's britches. How was I to know that the word had a dirty meaning over there?”

Clara threw her father a guilty glance. He took his gaze away from the window to look down on his plate, then seemed to see the oysters for the first time. Frowning, he jabbed at one.

“What's the matter with you, Papa? You haven't said two words.”

“Just thinking about someone.”

“Mamma?”

He looked at her blankly. “No.”

“Who, then?”

“My father, as a matter of fact. Your grandfather.”

Surprise registered in Clara's eyes. Isabel felt it, too. In her years with The King, he'd rarely spoken of his father, traumatized, she guessed, from witnessing his autopsy.

“Isabel,” said Clara, “I understand that you have bought a great deal of gorse seed, with a plan to turn Papa's land into an English moor. Remember, Will, when we were riding the train to Yorkshire, all the yellow hills—”

“I never gave my father a chance. Wonder what I'd have made of him if he lived longer. As it was, I hated his guts.” Finding everyone's stunned gaze upon him, The King put an oyster in his mouth, then spat it into his napkin. “These oysters look and taste like a fetus.”

Clara whispered a strangled “Papa!”

Wark wiped his mouth on his napkin. “If that's what your dad thinks, he should be able to say it at his own table.”

“Why must you be so crude?” Clara jumped up from the table and fled the room. Wark nodded at The King and went after her.

The King leaned back against his chair. “I seem to have that effect on people.”

Isabel waited. From her years with The King, she knew it was best to be silent.

“My girls were fully grown before I realized how much they hated me. I thought I was their hero, but it turned out they couldn't stand to be around me. Could a person be more blind?”

“That's not true. They love you. They're terribly proud of you.”

He nudged his plate away. “Susy was so ashamed of me that she didn't even want me to give the commencement speech at her college. She feared that I would tell ‘The Golden Arm.' I swore to her that I wouldn't—who would tell that fool yarn at a commencement? But she knew. She knew! And sure enough, no sooner than I was given a chance, there I was, demanding of all those Bryn Mawr girls, ‘Who's got my golden arm? Who's got my golden arm? Who's got my golden arm? YOU DO!' ”

Isabel flinched.

He shook his head. “I don't know why I say the things I say. Livy's doctors knew I could freeze her blood with a single word and rightly kept me away from her. I so scalded Susy with my talk that she refused to come with us on that last tour. She stayed home, which exposed her to disease. If she had been with me in Europe, she wouldn't have gotten meningitis and died. And then there's what I did to Jennie.”

She waited for him to explain about Jennie as he fumbled in his pocket for a cigar. He stopped. “You tell me if this is lucky or not: since my forties, I haven't been able to utter a single word without it enriching my pocketbook, and the gold rush is still gaining steam.
You've seen the reporters scrambling over the nuggets I drool. I can't observe the weather without them sifting it for ore. Yet it's this same cursed mine that spills the words that do my killing. Words! I kill the people I love with words.” He shoved a cigar between his lips, lit it, then waved out his match. “I'm the King Midas of talk. Christ, I'm tired of it.”

“It seems to me,” she said quietly, “that you hurt yourself more than anyone.”

He blew out smoke, then got up. “I can't eat anymore.”

Isabel rose to go with him.

He waved her down. “I don't want to infest you with me right now.”

As soon as he was gone, Isabel jumped up and went to the window. Above the silhouette of treetops, the full moon lit a sky hazy with stationary stars. All was quiet in the firmament. She sank back with relief.

• • •

After dinner, Isabel jotted in her daily reminder for a few minutes, then put on her cape to go see her mother, recently installed in the cottage on the grounds that The King called the Lobster Pot. Although the cottage was supposed to be Isabel's, she stayed nights in The King's house, in the bedroom adjoining his. He wanted her to be close, although she had not lain in his arms since before her trip to Nova Scotia last summer. His proximity, without being able to have him, was a torture to her.

As she fastened her cape, she heard singing coming from Clara's room upstairs. Isabel heard a tenor join her. Will was in her room?

When she'd gotten to the top of the stairs, she heard The King's whisper. “Isabel.”

He came out of his room, dressed only in silk underdrawers. He was trim for a man his age, upright as a youth. “Guess what?”

“They sound heavenly.” She pretended that he wasn't undressed.

“What they sound like is happy.” He kept his gaze toward his daughter's suite. “Guess who just asked me if he could marry Clara?”

Isabel swallowed. “Wark?”

“I know it's surprising, as much of a handful as she can be, but yes, he did.”

She needed to tell him about Will's marriage now, before this got past the point where she might hope for Mr. Clemens's forgiveness for not telling him.

He gathered her in. “Lioness, you make me happy, and you know I'm not an easy man to cheer. You have put up with a lot—with my terrible pride, my worse temper—and you're still around.” He pressed her to him. “Why am I so lucky?”

She listened to his thumping heart, her mind snatching for words.

His voice rumbled in his chest. “Isabel, I can't give you what you need. I can't be a real man to you. It makes me ashamed.”

She pulled back to look up at him. “Sam.”

He put his finger to her lips. “I can't be a man in the way a woman like you needs. You saw how I was. I'm not likely to have improved.”

Her heart ached for the boy whom she saw in his anxious eyes, and then for the tortured man. She could tell him about Wark another time. He needed her now. And she needed him.

Gently, as would one with a beloved child, she cradled his face. “Let me be the judge.”

• • •

Through the panes of the window, a shaving of moon glowed high in the milky heavens. Isabel rolled onto her side and laid her hand on her King's chest as he stared up at the ceiling. “Thank you, Sam. That was just what I dreamed of.”

He took away her hand. “Well, your dreams are what I call nightmares.”

“Stop,” she scolded. “It was wonderful for me.”

He sighed tiredly. “Lioness, you can't lie to a liar.”

“We were too excited. Next time—” She rolled onto her back, her hair, undone from its knot, tangling under her. She rested her arm across her forehead. “Maybe you didn't like me.”

“Damn it, Isabel, I liked you too much.”

She rolled back and kissed his chest.

He stroked her hair. “What am I going to do with you?”

“What you just did. Over and over until we get it right.”

She kissed him, then got up and went naked to the open window, as if the moonlight might soothe her swollen flesh, still needing release.

A whip-poor-will's eerie call broke the calm of the night. Isabel thought of the legend that a whip-poor-will sang when a soul was departing—its song could capture the soul as it fled. She pictured souls, filmy, tattered, and urgent, sailing through the dark, pursued by the insistent cries of the bird. By the time its calling ceased, she had accepted her physical relationship with Sam for what it would be.

She returned to the bed and got under the covers. When she found his hand, he squeezed hers back before drifting into sleep.

• • •

A thump jilted her awake. She listened. There it was again: downstairs. In the kitchen. Was it the cats? They must be after a mouse.

She had closed her eyes, reminding herself to tell the butler, Claude, to look for holes in which the mice were entering, when she heard the door to the terrace open.

Probably it was Clara out for a midnight stroll with Will. Poor doomed pair, let them have their moment. She rolled over, then slid her foot until she touched the leg of her sleeping King.

A splintering crash sent her upright.

She looked down on her King. Still asleep. She got out of bed and peered out the window.

Her eyes could not make sense of it: out on the terrace, by the light of a lantern set on the stone wall, two men struggled to lift the partially smashed kitchen sideboard to waist-level, then unceremoniously dropped it on a step, where it broke open like an egg. A man delved into the gaping orifice, then held up something to the moonlight: Mrs. Clemens's silver teapot.

Isabel heard herself scream.

Sam sat up.

“Burglars!” She grabbed her dress.

“What?”

“Outside!” She struggled to put on her dress. “They broke in. Claude!” she screamed. “Claude, get your gun!”

Samuel was scooting to the edge of the bed when the door opened. A candle lit Katy's face, turning her ghostly. Claude and the other maids appeared behind her in the flickering light, their mouths straining open like those of baby birds.

“Burglars!” Isabel cried. “Help!” She clutched at her gaping dress and hobbled to the window then back. “They're running away!”

The sheets pulled around him, Mr. Clemens strode toward his robe on the chair. “Damn it!” He snatched up the robe and, with a flash of nakedness, wrapped it around himself. “Are you all just going to stand there? Claude—you gone soft? Call the sheriff!”

In Katy's light, the herd of servants bucked and turned in the hall, just as Will Wark thrust his head from Clara's door. He ducked back. Isabel glanced at her King. He had seen Will. Everyone had.

“Out! Out! All of you, get out!” cried The King. “Claude, what the hell are you waiting for?”

The maid Teresa burst into tears.

“What's the matter with her?” he exclaimed.

“She's scared,” said Isabel.

“That's not it,” Katy snapped. “She can't take the shock of it.”

The King was breathing hard. “We're all shocked. Get the hell after them!”

“That's not what I mean,” said Katy. She glanced at Isabel. “It's just that—it's shameful.”