Twain's End (9 page)

“The pink or the green?” Clara lifted each arm in turn, displaying a pink brocade featuring voluminous mutton sleeves on one and
a heavy green satin with a high neckline of sheer netting on the other. Isabel herself owned three dresses: a secretarial shirtwaist costume, a navy day dress, and an evening gown that had been lovely when she debuted in it twenty-one years earlier but now made her look like a Civil War widow. Her salary of fifty dollars a month paid room and board for her mother and her, but it did not cover bolts of satin. It didn't even allow her to feel secure. She and her mother were still assembling pincushions for sale upon an evening, stockpiling them against adversity.

“How formal is the party?” she asked. “What is the occasion?”

“See? Katy wouldn't have known to ask that. I'm so glad that you work here now, although Katy would not agree. What did you do to set her so against you?”

Isabel thought of Katy's refusal to serve her coffee, to bring her the mail, or do any other little service for her. She was especially chilly if Isabel was speaking with Mr. Clemens. “I was born, evidently.”

“I shouldn't laugh. It's no joking matter. As hot-tempered as Katy is, I wouldn't want her against me.”

“Believe me, I don't relish it.”

Clara didn't really hear, her attention returned to her clothes. “It's just a dinner at my friend Marie's house, but there will be several musical gentlemen there, and I want to look”—she plucked a piece of lint from the pink dress, then shrugged—“desirable.”

“I like you in the green.”

“I look good in green,” Clara agreed. She pressed the gown against herself as if to model it.

Isabel smiled at Clara's unapologetic vanity. It seemed a forgivable flaw in someone who devoted all her time to her ill mother.

“Don't tell Papa about the gentlemen,” Clara said abruptly.

“I won't.”

Clara saw her frown. “You don't know how Papa is about men. He cannot bear for them to be near me.” She went to the door and carefully closed it. “When I was sixteen and we were staying in Marienbad, he locked me in my room for three weeks after a young German
army officer paid me a call at our lodgings. I had met him in a café with Papa. I'd never even spoken to the man.” Clara glanced over her shoulder before continuing. “Papa banished him as if he were a criminal, and locked me in my room. He only let Katy in to bring me trays of food. For three weeks, he made me a prisoner. I didn't get out until Mother came home. And you know what she did?”

Isabel shook her head.

“She laughed.”

Isabel pushed away her disbelief. “They were trying to protect you.”

“No, they weren't, especially not him. You don't know—sometimes he is frightening. It comes out of nowhere.”

Clara hitched the dresses over arm and reached for an envelope on the desk. “How many does he get? Fifty invitations a day? Everyone loves good old clever Mark Twain.” She put down the envelope. “I see him talking to you, Isabel. He likes you. He's the one who suggested that we hire you. Katy says he's in love with you.”

“Katy!” Isabel scoffed.

“I know. She can be absurd. We keep her around because she's as loyal as she is coarse. You're my friend, aren't you?”

“Of course I am.”

“Don't let him turn you against me. He will. I swear to you, he will. He's not happy unless everyone loves him and only him. He won't even let anyone love his own daughter. That's why I so rarely have friends. He steals them.”

Isabel straightened the blotter on her desk. He'd hired her?

“I shouldn't have told you this.”

“No, I understand.”

Clara took Isabel's hand. “Thank you.” She pressed Isabel's fingers. “Friend.”

When Clara left, Isabel picked up her pen. Before she could go back to settling accounts, her sights strayed to an old family photo on the wall. Grouped with Clara and little Jean on the porch of their Hartford home, Mrs. Clemens seemed to be willing herself from
view by smiling at her lap and clamping her frail arms to her sides, reducing her figure to a sliver. She appeared hardly bigger than her robust toddler, Jean. Yet her handsome tousle-haired husband, paired with a disgruntled-looking Susy, nearly throbbed with virility and well-being as he sucked on a thick cigar. It was as if he were tapping Mrs. Clemens of her very lifeblood, growing stronger as she grew weak.

Isabel had pushed aside the checkbook and was writing her private thoughts in her daily reminder when the closed door was cautiously opened. Thinking that it was Clara with more dresses, Isabel stashed her journal in her desk and rose. “Wait—I'll help you.”

Mr. Clemens inched his head around the jamb. “You will?” he said in a falsetto voice.

She dropped back into her chair.

When Mr. Clemens stepped inside the room, Isabel was astonished to see that he was still in his nightshirt, over which he'd wrapped a blanket gown. His bare legs were slender and muscular for a man of sixty-seven—unusually youthful, like the rest of him—and as sleekly furred as a mink. He had black felt slippers on his feet.

He shut the door behind him. “I have a secret mission for you.”

She folded her arms tightly, suppressing a smile. “You do?” She could not help but enjoy the absurd fact that one of the most famous persons in the entire world had just shut himself in with her, wearing only nightclothes and slippers. This would have to go in her journal.

“I want to get Mrs. Clemens a necklace. To cheer her up. I need you to go into town to Tiffany's to pick one out.”

“Thank you for asking me, but I'm afraid that I don't know her taste.”

“Her taste?” Mr. Clemens scratched the back of his neck. “Why, Livy's taste is your taste. She was brought up rich, like you.”

Isabel could not understand why he so often mentioned her former wealth in their conversations, when her plain clothes, humble salary, and rented cottage near the tracks marked her as someone long out of the swim with the wealthy.

“Wouldn't you rather have the pleasure of choosing for her?”

He pulled the belt of his robe tighter. “My pleasure is in the giving. I've always had my secretaries buy for me. My nephew Charley bought her a fine enough diamond, and he was the worst secretary I ever had. The crooked little swindler destroyed me financially, but I'm not holding that against him, may he burn in hell.”

Technically, Isabel was Mrs. Clemens's secretary, but of course, he knew that.

“I've been seeing ropes of red beads on the girls around town.”

“You must mean coral. Coral is stylish now.”

“I knew you'd know. Get her a whopping big strand at Tiffany's, would you? I like to see a woman in red.” He swept his gaze over her. “You'd look good in it, too. How come there aren't any fellows around here, trying to take you from your work?” He stepped to the desk and, leaning so close to Isabel that she could smell his flesh, peered over the envelopes. “You hiding one behind there?”

“Not hardly.” She laughed uncomfortably. “Unless one has risen from these scraps of paper like Adam springing from the dust.”

He gazed down on her, considering. “It wouldn't be the first time. One has loosed itself from my pages, and now the beast is in control. You've heard of him—Mark Twain? ‘Known by Everyone, Liked by All'? I hate the rascal.”

She looked to confirm that he was joking, but he had caught sight of something outside the window. He paused, propped over the desk and Isabel. “I never noticed those were out there.”

Before Isabel could ask him what he meant, the door flew open.

Mr. Clemens drew back slowly as Clara stopped, the dresses swishing in her arms.

Isabel stared at Clara in declaration of her innocence.

Shutters banged closed behind Clara's eyes. She turned to her father. “What are you doing?”

“Planning a surprise for your mother.”

“I'll say,” she said bitterly. “I thought you were never doing this again.”

“Clara.”

She spat out her words. “You are indecent in that nightgown, Papa. Go upstairs right now!”

“I'm comfortable. Miss Lyon doesn't mind, do you?”

Isabel straightened a stack of envelopes.

“Upstairs, Papa! Now! You are embarrassing Miss Lyon.”

He raised his brows at Isabel. “Am I, Miss Lyon?”

“You are embarrassing me,” said Clara.

“Well,” said Mr. Clemens, “heaven forbid I should ever do that.”

He strolled out, slippers scuffing against the floor.

Clara waited until he was out of reach. Her voice was tight. “I told you he was trying to win you.”

“There is no winning. I'm just a secretary.”

Mr. Clemens's stage whisper floated down from the top of the stairs. “Psst. Miss Lyon.”

“You sure you want to deny it?” Clara asked Isabel.

“Miss Lyon,” Mr. Clemens called. “Is my whelp gone yet?”

Against all her better instincts, against every effort to master herself, Isabel chuckled.

Clara sniffed as if struck. “You laughed.”

“I'm sorry. He's just so . . . unexpected.”

“Oh, Miss Ly-on!” he sang.

Isabel pressed her lips together, but the more she fought off the laughter brewing in her chest, the closer she came to erupting.

Tears thickened Clara's voice. “He won't even leave me you.” She stormed from the room.

Isabel protested to the empty air, then remembering, looked out the window to see what he had commented upon. Through the railings of the covered porch she saw a bare hydrangea bush, its remaining withered flowers bobbing silently in the wind.

April 1903

Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York

T
HE FOLLOWING MONTH, THE
wind, sweet with the greenness of April, lifted Isabel's hat as Jean Clemens handed her the inlaid-pearl opera glasses. “Look. Up near the house, on that shrub.”

Isabel twitched her skirt from where it had caught on the grass, then took the glasses from the youngest Clemens daughter. She and Jean were near the edge of the lawn, where the property commanded the Hudson. Mr. Clemens had encouraged Isabel to indulge his daughter in her outdoor romps, and Isabel didn't mind. She welcomed a break from the paperwork that was descending upon her desk with the persistence of Sisyphus's rock, and she genuinely liked Jean, though there was something about her that made Isabel sad. Outwardly, Jean seemed to have everything—a world-famous father, money, intelligence, and, with her strong chin and Greek-goddess nose, healthy good looks. At nearly twenty-three, she was still a tomboy, not only in her appearance—she refused to wear a corset under her plain white shirtwaist and brown corduroy skirt, or to fashion her hair in anything but a single dark braid—but in her ungraceful movement as well. She spoke in the same way she moved: bluntly, plainly, no mincing allowed. Yet as sturdy as she looked, there was something vulnerable about her, something broken, like the stray dogs and cats
she was continually nursing back to health, like the dray horses in the city for which she bought freedom whenever she could.

“It's a bluebird,” said Jean.

Isabel squinted through the opera glasses.

“Calling for its mate. Hear it?”

Isabel squirmed under the nagging pain of her attire as she listened to the bird's plaintive murmur. The steel-ribbed busks of her corset painfully forced her small breasts up and her narrow hips back, as was the fashion. Her belt added fresh agony, driving the steel stays into her flesh. Why had she cinched her belt so tightly? In addition, she had left off her jacket to display her figure, and now she was cold. What folly to think that Mr. Clemens would notice her small waistline. Why should he? Why would she want him to? This was what happened when you were neither fish nor fowl, too low in status to attract high men, too high in status to attract low men—you ridiculously yearned for your married, much older employer.

“They mate for life, you know,” said Jean. “Well, unless another bird forces them apart.”

Isabel glanced at her guiltily.

“Or one dies.” Jean sighed. “The survivor won't abandon its mate. I saw that happen to a pair of Canada geese in the city. A trolley had killed the female and the male wouldn't leave. He frantically circled the body, dodging wagons and carriages until a cabbie ran over him.”

Isabel chased away the unpleasant image, concentrating instead on the bluebird, his head and wings a vivid azure against the orange of his throat. Maybe it would not be wise to tell Jean that last week on a trip to the city for Mr. Clemens, she had seen a stuffed bluebird just like this on a woman's hat, complete with mate, nest, and eggs. The woman was her friend Win Cattelle, whom Isabel had run into at a stationer's on Fifth Avenue. Isabel remembered the bluebirds on the hat distinctly, for she had stared at them steadily while Win told of their friend Olive's strange infatuation with a man many years her senior.