Twain's End (42 page)

July 1909

The Lobster Pot,
Redding, Connecticut

W
HITE SHEETS FLAPPED ON
the clothesline strung across the yard as Isabel swiped her forehead with the sleeve of her cotton blouse, then plucked another tomato from the vine. She peered into the basket on her arm, sniffing in the fruit's tang of wormy dirt. It was her first crop at the Lobster Pot, her first full summer, and in spite of her inexperience, a decent haul. Inside the gray-shingled house, her mother was heating up water for canning—a new skill for both of them.

The crunch of stones and the whining of engines announced the approach of automobiles on her lane. She looked up as an automobile emblazoned with EDISON STUDIOS rumbled past, its dust billowing into the open touring car rolling behind it, in which sat the famous inventor himself. His notoriously grumpy expression and hayseed haircut were visible in the backseat. He and his crew must be making a motion picture of The King. How Mark Twain would like that. Now he might be captured on film, pontificating about her dishonesty, her whorishness, her penchant for stimulants and whiskey. She could only imagine the captions. She picked another tomato, a lovely specimen until she turned it over and found a gaping hole in the sugary coral flesh.

The summer had been brutal. Clara had graduated from a slanderous
letter-writing campaign to mutual friends, to frequent conferences with the press in which she accused Isabel of thievery and drug addiction. Ralph had fought back, blithely exposing Clara's attachment to her married accompanist and the true nature of Jean's disease, which in turn goaded The King into publicly threatening to file suit against Isabel for theft. It had become a full-scale war of the ugliest kind. Isabel's head throbbed with the thought of it; she didn't sleep; and now Ralph was in England, rallying support for their cause. The next volley lobbed at her by the Clemenses she would have to handle alone.

She had taken her filled basket into the kitchen, where her mother was looking doubtfully upon the mason jars boiling in a pot on the stove, when someone knocked on the front door. Wiping her hands on her apron, Isabel went to answer it. Mr. Lark, The King's attorney, stood on the white-painted porch.

He thrust a document at her when she opened the door, then glanced away. In all these months since the burglary, she hadn't gotten used to the inability of men to look her in the eye.

“Hello, Mr. Lark.”

“Don't bother to read it. I'll tell you the gist of it. Mr. Clemens has filed a complaint against you for stealing four thousand dollars from him, which he will press to the full extent of the law.”

“His timing is quite clever, considering he knows my husband is out of the country and cannot help me.”

Mrs. Lyon came to the door. “What is it, Isabel?”

“A big problem for your daughter.” Mr. Lark turned to Isabel. “Mrs. Ashcroft, my client is a lenient man. He has offered to drop the charges under one condition.”

“What?” bleated Mrs. Lyon.

“Mother, please.”

Mr. Lark cleared his throat. “Mr. Clemens wishes for the return of this house.”

The fruit of nearly seven years of work, of complete devotion, gone in an instant. “It's my house. I have the deed.”

“It won't be much longer, unless you particularly enjoy a thorough
dragging through the mud.” He shrugged. “I understand he's got rather a lot on you.”

“He can't do this!”

“Oh, but he can.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lark.” She shut the door.

She stalked up the stairs two at a time, then burst into the spare room, where she dropped to her knees and started pulling trunks from under the bed.

“Isabel! What are you doing?”

“Leaving. I won't be near that malevolent force another moment.”

Mrs. Lyon's voice rose with her hysteria. “You're not just going to give him your house, are you?”

“No. I'm going to see our lawyer. I want to sell the place—I want to get away from that man—but I'm not giving it to anyone.”

“Which lawyer? Not Mr. Hill in Tarrytown! Everyone there will know our troubles!”

“Everyone everywhere does know our troubles, Mother. I'm not going to take it anymore. I thought innocence was enough.”

“Innocence is never enough!”

“Evidently not.”

Isabel dragged a case onto the bed, then recognized it: she had taken this one to Bermuda. Tears boiled in her throat as she grabbed for a different one, one she didn't associate with her relationship with The King, one she hadn't used since Italy.

She popped the latches and flipped open the bag. In her violence, the cloth divider of the lid flopped loose, ripped open by the weight of a book behind it. Yellow pages fluttered out, along with crumbling remains of flowers too desiccated for anyone but her to identify, and the book. Isabel picked up the volume—Baedeker's
Florence
—then put it down. She recognized the smudged handwriting on the papers: hers. But they weren't her words. They were words that she'd forgotten.

She sat down and, accompanied by the shuffling sound of her
mother opening the wardrobe and transferring clothes in the next bedroom, began to read.

December 23, 1903

She liked flowers. Hydrangeas were her favorite. The boy hadn't known their name until he had brought them to her that first time. He had thought of them as snowballs, and strictly as fodder to chuck at his friends until bigger boys took over the game and the pack of them was finally chased off at broom-point by the owners of the bushes. He wasn't sure what had made him pick them for her that first time, and in Mrs. Quarles's yard, too, when he knew that Mrs. Quarles's black sausage of a terrier would bite him as soon as look at him.

But pick them, he did. Each snap of a stem sent a satisfying shiver through the parent plant as the boy plucked, spurring him to rip shoot after shoot from the resistant bush. He had accumulated a respectable bouquet, no, a church-altar-worthy bouquet, when the back door opened.

The dog shot out like an oily-haired cannonball. The boy pelted across the yard and flung himself over the fence, a mere tooth's breadth from a puncturing. He streaked toward town, posies in hand, his skin tingling from the piercing it nearly got. Cutting through the hot thick air that smelled like turtles—everything in that river town smelled like turtles—he flashed by a sow and piglets demolishing a watermelon shell, past two clerks slumped in rockers before a storefront, past the fragrant drunkard sleeping in the shade of some crates stacked and ready for the next steamboat. He ditched inside the general store, where he darted past Mrs. Holiday waiting for her coffee to be ground, dodged Old Man Breed fishing a pickle from the brine of the pickle crock, and skirted the lopsided wicker baby buggy containing the Robards' ninth
child. He bounded up the sagging stairs, the stolen snowballs flopping against his freckled twig of an arm, to the rooms above, where his family uncomfortably lived.

Jennie was at the spinning wheel in the main room. She sang as she spun, her voice as sweet to him as fresh milk. “ ‘Go chain the lion down.' ”

He waited, panting, as the wheel kept whining—the most beautiful sound in the world, the boy thought, like angels humming—until she had put a slender brown hand to it. The wheel stopped.

He held out the flowers.

“For your mama?” she said.

He swiped the back of his arm over his forehead, making his red bush of hair spring up. “No. You.”

She sat back, the knobs of her knees making a tent of her yellow and brown calico skirt as she regarded the boy. He squirmed under her steady stare even as he drank it in.

She smiled. “Well, that is about the nicest thing anyone ever did for me.”

His insides warmed with happiness.

“Those are my favorite flowers.” She was missing an upper eyetooth, which only enhanced her beauty. He thought all women should have such a gap. “Did you know that?”

He shook his head.

“Hydrangeas. Your mama taught me that word: hydrangeas.” She wiped her face on her sleeve, then got up. Though the air in the room was stifling, she moved with the light step of a doe. She had raised him up from a baby, all six and a half of his years—she'd been with his parents since they were married—and still she looked like a girl. The boy could watch her move all day, or listen to her talk or just breathe. In his household, with his mother's fury as ready to boil over as beans bubbling under a rattling lid—even more so since his brother Ben had died the month before—and with his father's
cold stare, Jennie's presence was like cool water chuckling through a spring house. He thought he might marry her someday.

“I'll get you more.”

“No. What my going to do with these?” She reached into a cupboard and brought out a tin cup. “We'll tell your mama they're for her.”

She saw his face.

“Sammy.”

He crossed his greenstick arms. “What?”

“Thank you.”

And so his quest began to supply her with many hydrangeas. Neighbors soon found their bushes picked clean. Children had to turn to the spiky balls from sweet gum trees or the spongy pellets from sycamores for ammunition for their wars. He had even further unburdened Mrs. Quarles's bushes, allowing her shorthaired bullet of a beast several shots at cleaning its teeth on his ragged britches. Within a few days, mounds of drooping hydrangeas lay on the battered floor of the main room above the store, filling the air with a green tang as they wilted.

One afternoon his mother turned from the open window out which she'd been staring, her forefinger and thumb pressing her lips as if to seal in a scream. She looked down on the hydrangeas and scowled as if seeing them for the first time. Suddenly, she was in motion, her apron strings swinging, the locket around her neck thumping, the cords of her throat straining and white. She snatched up the limp snowballs and, one by one, hurled them out the window, little cream-colored fluttering petticoats that smashed on the street below.

September came and with it school. For a time, the boy forgot about hydrangeas. He liked school. He liked learning. He was good at it. It made him feel special. Smart.

One day, just past his seventh birthday in November, a day no one remembered but him and Jennie, who marked the occasion by putting maple syrup on his toast the way he liked it, he was walking home, reading his McGuffey's, when a soft tan blur caught his eye. There, in Mrs. Quarles's yard, shuddering in the wind that held the snaky breath of the Mississippi in it, was a single hydrangea head, faded to an airy wisp. How had he missed it?

With an eye on the door for the greasy black terror, he made his way to the shrub, his book clamped against his chest. Closing his hand around the speckled green stem, he yanked the survivor free.

The door banged open. The boy tumbled across the yard and over the fence, laughing, not only at beating the dog and its crooked yellow teeth but at picturing the surprise on Jennie's face.

He took the stairs to his family's lodgings at a happy hop. When he spilled into the room, Jennie was not there. She wasn't at her wheel, or tending the stove, or on her stool, mending cuffs or collars or socks.

His mother wasn't there, nor were his sister and his brothers. A steamboat had just docked, the tootling of its calliope audible clear across town as the passengers, God's privileged ones, trod down the gangplank to shore. Maybe the others were there. He knew that he would have been, had not his mission driven him home. He hated to miss a boat.

He noticed that the door to his parents' bedroom was closed. Sometimes when his mother had headaches, she shut herself in there. No children were allowed in if she was sleeping.

He listened. A muffled thumping came from behind the peeling door. Mother?

He crept forward, the pat of his bare soles swallowed by the
stillness of the room. The shriveled hydrangea head trembling in one hand, he turned the glass knob.

They were against the wall, next to the picture of Jesus. His father sprang off her with a smack of wet flesh.

“Get out!” His father wiped his face on his arm.

The boy shrank into himself. He could not move.

“Sammy! What the hell are you doing?” His father stepped toward him.

Jennie touched his father's back.

The boy turned and trampled blindly down the stairs, mistaking the fear in his father's face for his own red-black rage.

The New York Times,
April 22, 1910

MARK TWAIN IS DEAD AT 74

End Comes Peacefully at His New England Home After a Long Illness.

DANBURY, Conn., April 21.—Samuel Langhorne Clemens, “Mark Twain,” died at 22 minutes after 6 tonight. Beside him on the bed lay a beloved book—it was Carlyle's “French Revolution”—and near the book his glasses, pushed away with a weary sigh a few hours before. Too weak to speak clearly, “Give me my glasses,” he had written on a piece of paper.

The people of Redding, Bethel, and Danbury listened when they were told that the doctors said Mark Twain was dying of angina pectoris. But they say among themselves that he died of a broken heart. And this is the verdict not of popular sentiment alone. Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer to be and literary executor, who has been constantly with him, said that for the past year at least Mr. Clemens had been weary of life.

The New York Times,
April 23, 1910

MARK TWAIN AND HALLEY'S COMET.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I wish to draw your attention to a peculiar coincidence.

• Mark Twain born, Nov. 30, 1835.

• Last perihelion of Halley's comet, Nov. 10, 1835.

• Mark Twain died, April 21, 1910.

• Perihelion of Halley's comet, April 20, 1910.

It so appears that the lifetime of the great humorist was nearly identical (the difference being exactly fifteen days) with the last long “year” of the great comet.