Twain's End (43 page)

R. FRIDERICI.

Westchester, N. Y., April 22, 1910

April 1910

Racine, Wisconsin

I
SABEL'S MOTHER SNAPPED ON
the light in the spare upstairs bedroom, disturbing the fringe of the lampshade. The rattling of katydids wafted through the open window, and the barking of neighborhood dogs. Somewhere out there in the dark, a baby cried. Mrs. Lyon never thought she'd live in Wisconsin. Wisconsin! In truth, she hadn't given the place much thought for most of her long life, until they'd moved there. While the climate might have been rather similar to Tarrytown's, it was worlds away in refinement and charm—although she did rather like the malted milk balls that were a specialty here.

She dabbed her nose with her handkerchief, then tucked it back up her sleeve. Though it was getting late, there was only one more of Isabel's boxes to unpack. Isabel really should thank her:
she
wasn't going to do it. She'd become such a funny little thing of late. So distant. Not her cheerful self at all. Vacantly tapping Beethoven's Fifth with her knuckle on the table when she thought no one was in the room—Mrs. Lyon couldn't understand it.

Mrs. Lyon picked up the box, immediately groaning from its effect on her hips. She had misjudged its weight. It was surprisingly heavy for its size: not that big, about the size of a department store hatbox. The side of the box was printed with
FRESH TURKEY
in red and green, with a sturdy red and green gobbler as illustration. She
thought wildly that there might actually be a live turkey inside, heavy as the box was—an idea that gave her a chill, until she laughed at her delightful imagination. Mrs. Lyon wondered if the contents hadn't been disturbed since Isabel had packed to leave their Redding house last summer.

That
had been a hurried move, being rushed along by a sheriff after Mr. Clemens had taken back Isabel's house, one of the most humiliating episodes in Mrs. Lyon's life. This was a different move altogether. Such a pretty house Mr. Ashcroft had bought Isabel here—not as nice as the house Charles had bought Mrs. Lyon, of course, but these were different times. Persons were flitting around in aeroplanes, for goodness' sake. Unsinkable luxury liners, big as a city block, were zipping people across the ocean. People were gaping at Frankenstein's monster on the silver screen instead of reading about it in Mary Shelley's book. Charles would not recognize the place. But Charles had not lived. She had.

You would think that Isabel would enjoy her little dollhouse more, fluff it up a bit, put up curtains in the breakfast nook, hang some ferns on the porch. She had planted some hydrangeas by the front door just after they'd moved in but had lost interest in gardening after that. There was no talk of putting in a nursery. Mrs. Lyon had resigned herself to what that meant.

Mrs. Lyon opened the box and removed a layer of balled-up newspaper. She uncrumpled one—
The New York Times
—then harrumphed. The
Times
! Traitors. After all the occasions when Isabel had treated the reporters so nicely on Mr. Clemens's behalf. The very fellows who had drunk Isabel's coffee over the years had fallen over themselves to print every foul lie Mr. Clemens and Clara said about her.

Mrs. Lyon took it personally. Hadn't she done those reporters a favor that night when Helen Keller had come to visit, walking through the cold and dark all the way from Isabel's house to call them on Mr. Clemens's telephone after Mr. Wark had come to her door near tears? She'd let the reporters know that Clara Clemens was
considering marriage, that her swain was right in Mrs. Lyon's very house, and after finally convincing them that she was
not
crying wolf this time, they'd come. Regardless if they didn't get the story about Clara and Mr. Wark that Mrs. Lyon thought she was giving them, they got an even better one when the old man told them his daughter was marrying Gabrilowitsch. And look at the thanks Mrs. Lyon got!

She sniffed, stroking her high collar. Heavens, that had been a topsy-turvy evening. Mrs. Lyon had thought that after Clara's affair with Mr. Wark was exposed, Mr. Clemens would flee straight into Isabel's arms to save his good name. Isabel
was
living under his roof, and no matter what she said, it really did not look right. And the two were so much in love—why didn't they just go ahead and marry? All they needed was a little push, and Mrs. Lyon, as a good mother, gave it.

Yet when Mrs. Lyon essentially
delivered
him to Isabel, she wouldn't marry him. She went for Ralph. Why, you could have knocked Mrs. Lyon over with a buttonhook! In one stroke, her dreams of enlightening the Tarrytown ladies with talk of her daughter and famous son-in-law had fallen away. In one stroke, her vision of having tea with the English king had gone
poof
! Oh, the potential—wasted! Well, bad luck has a way of turning into good; it was a blessing that they didn't marry. For it turned out that Mrs. Lyon had been right from the start: the old man was just not nice.

Clutching her throat, she pawed through the wadded clippings to see if any were the articles with his foul accusations. Why, she'd shred them up! Isabel was the kindest, most caring girl in the world. Hadn't she made a lovely home for Mr. Clemens? Didn't she find the best doctors for poor Jean, who hadn't lasted a year without Isabel to watch over her? The girl had drowned in her own bathtub on Christmas Eve morning, eight months after Mr. Clemens had brought her home. Isabel had warned them that she couldn't be alone. Katy had found her dead—why didn't anyone wonder about that?

Mrs. Lyon sighed, feeling tired now as she sat among rafts of wrinkled newsprint floating upon her coverlet. At least Ralph had defended
Isabel. For every accusation that the old liar and his daughter had come up with, Ralph had come back swinging with suits and countersuits.
He
wasn't afraid of the old bully. When he'd returned from England and found out that the rapscallion had forced her to sign away her
house,
he had the means to expose what a monster the brute was. Yet just when Ralph had the old villain against the wall, Isabel stopped him.

Mrs. Lyon could still see that day, clear as a bell—they were in the lobby of their hotel in New York, having lost the house. She'd begged Isabel to speak up. “Clear the air, child! Defend your name! Stand up for yourself!”

Mrs. Lyon could picture Ralph stalking to the telephone, then placing a call to the
Times.
Isabel had snatched the handset from him.

“Let Mr. Clemens keep his name,” she'd said. “It means everything to him. I want him to have it.”

“Why?” Ralph cried. “After all he's done to you!”

Oh, there'd been a row, out in public, too. But Isabel had held firm. She never defended herself, not even once.

Now the doorbell rang, giving Mrs. Lyon such a start that it rattled the clippings around her. She got up, gingerly straightened her sore hips, then tottered to the bedroom window just as the porch light came on and Isabel went out onto the front steps. Through the window screen, she could see Isabel receiving the reporters: two of them, one of them fat, the other one black-haired with a cowlick, like her son Charlie had. She found herself aching so sharply for Charlie, for young Isabel, for days she could never get back, that she could hardly breathe.

“He's died?” Mrs. Lyon heard Isabel say.

“Yep.” This was the unruly-haired one who reminded her of Charlie. “This afternoon. Got it on the wire.”

Suddenly, Isabel was brushing past them onto the walkway to look up at the sky.

“The maid says you killed him.” The reporter flipped a page in
his notepad. “A Katy Leary. She says he never got over your lying and stealing from him. Just mentioning your name would bring on a heart attack. She was there with him when he died.”

Still shading her eyes, Isabel glanced at him as if at a fly, then lifted her face again to the dark. She hiccupped with laughter.

Mrs. Lyon saw the reporters look at each other. “Mrs. Ashcroft?”

The fat one tried again. “Is it true? Did he die of a broken heart? Or did Katy Leary have it wrong as to how you broke it? What I notice is that his health went downhill after you married Mr. Ashcroft. Weren't you and Mark Twain about to get married?”

Isabel jerked her gaze back down to them. “I have nothing to say.”

“But what about you and him?”

Save for the buzzy tap of beetles against the screen, it was silent. When she finally spoke, Isabel's voice was thick. “Mark Twain was in love with his wife. Mark Twain was a family man who suffered from the loss of his children. I was his secretary. There was nothing between me and Mark Twain.”

Mrs. Lyon listened, but Isabel would say no more. After the reporters left, she stayed out on the walkway. Mrs. Lyon was about to go down and bring her in when Isabel cried, “Sam, you didn't kill Jennie. Hear me? I forgive you. We all forgive you. We always have.” Her sigh was that of a hurt animal, its injury deep and everlasting. “Oh, but you are lovable and naughty and good.”

Mrs. Lyon's voice broke as she called through the screen. “Isabel!”

Her face still lifted to the heavens, Isabel raised her arms and whistled. “There goes America's Sweetheart.” And then softer, almost inaudibly, “There goes my sweetheart.”

Mrs. Lyon closed her eyes, then jumped when she heard the screen door bang. She dabbed her nose. What good did it do to dwell on the past? It couldn't bring them back: Charles or Charlie; her parents; nieces and nephews; friends she had loved. All you could do was to keep on going, no matter that your heart had broken.

She poked her handkerchief back up her sleeve thinking,
strangely, if she might trace Charles and Poppy's daughter. Had she little children? Were they smart, like Isabel? Would they like to learn to sew?

Taking a breath, she pressed her face to the window and looked up. Through the mesh, she saw it sailing over trees and rooftops, over the tip of the tallest steeple, over the glow of the restless city: a comet, searing its way through the velvet red-black night.

E
VEN IN A CULTURE
that encourages the rise of the self-made man, Samuel Clemens took his own creation to audacious heights. By the time Clemens was done fashioning himself into the humorist Mark Twain, his finished product bore little resemblance to the serious, often lonely and angry actual man. How did the son of a failed Virginian lawyer and his unloving wife go from a hardscrabble, traumatic childhood to an extravagant lifestyle in which he hobnobbed with kings and millionaires, the most widely known and beloved man in the world? Plenty of biographers have taken up the challenge of defining the man, but Clemens makes for a particularly slippery target in spite of his frequent talk about wanting to write the truth about himself. The truth is, Sam Clemens's fabled storytelling ability extended to the facts about his life.

It's telling that Clemens's “autobiography” is about Mark Twain, a made-up character. The autobiography of Samuel Clemens would be a different work altogether, and one that he never wrote. Yet the autobiography of the fictional Mark Twain got close enough to some of Clemens's true opinions that he insisted that it not be published for one hundred years after his death, thus putting a broad cushion between himself and his adoring public. One wonders what he felt that he needed to hide. As Thomas Edison said during Twain's lifetime,
“An average American loves his family; if he has any love left over, he generally selects Mark Twain.” Did Clemens fear that his adulation would be taken away if the man behind the curtain were discovered?

As much as the battle between Sam vs. Mark intrigued me as I considered writing about Mark Twain, the sand in the oyster that irritated me into layering a story around it was his treatment of his secretary of six-and-a-half years, Isabel Lyon. It bothered me that one month after Lyon married Clemens's business associate Ralph Ashcroft, Twain fired her. Over the course of the next few months, Clemens took away the house he'd deeded her, commenced a lawsuit against her, slammed her to reporters, and wrote damning letters to friends, including the infamous one to William Dean Howells in which he called her “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction, and always getting disappointed, poor child.” These letters became part of a 429-page manuscript exclusively devoted to destroying the reputations of Isabel and her husband. This stunningly ferocious vitriol was leveled against a woman who Clemens himself admitted knew him better than anyone. She intended to keep up her duties for Clemens after her marriage, for which she'd gotten his blessing, never imagining he would turn on her with a vengefulness that was breathtaking in its viciousness. To steal from Shakespeare, I thought the gentleman did protest too much.