Twain's End (22 page)

“I don't want to go in.” She planted her feet.

He drew her upright. A wave of yearning—for life, for love, for what had been—buckled her knees. He caught her as she was falling.

“Kiss me!” she whispered.

“Ugo!” he shouted. “Ugo! Help me!”

“Sam!” Her lungs seemed to be closing. “Sam!”

“Ugo, hurry.”

The butler hastened out the door. “Signora Olivia!”

“Help me with her!”

Ugo gathered her up into his arms. She felt as insignificant as a bag of sticks.

Inside, she looked up at her husband when she was propped against her pillows.

“Are you all right?”

She couldn't answer.

“You gave me a scare!”

She looked up at him, tears flooding her throat, robbing her of air.

“You rest up.”

She listened as he walked away. Down the hall, his voice rose up
again, and then a plinking on the piano. She recognized the song, his favorite, reserved for celebrations. He had played it for her on the first morning in their first house. The day before, the whole wedding party had taken a private train from her hometown in Elmira up to Buffalo, then, in sleighs, had merrily set out for a housewarming in their brand-new house. Sam had rented it at Papa's urging, sight unseen.

When they had arrived at the elegant three-story house, Sam had been fit to be tied. They would never be able to keep up the rent! Her father was trying to make him look bad! He'd been about to have a tantrum in front of the entire wedding party when Livy said, “Don't you see? Papa bought this for us. It's ours—we own this house now, free and clear.”

After the guests had gone, Sam and she had explored the house. He had touched the sky-blue velvet chairs and the scarlet sofa, the wallpaper and the crystal lamps. She had followed after him, smiling, with the pleasure of watching a small boy receive a train set.

“Livy, it's perfect.”

“Papa remembered: a piano. He knows I couldn't live without one. I don't even know—do you play, too?”

Sam had sprung over to the instrument and dropped down on the stool. He sang as he struck the keys: “ ‘Go chain the lion down . . .' ”

“So you do play.”

He raised his hands from the keyboard. When he looked at her, the fire in his eyes took her breath away. “You don't know the half of my talents.”

She'd never felt so wicked or so alive. “Show me.”

With a whoop, he had jumped up, scooped her in his arms, and carried her upstairs.

Now another jolt rocked her chest. She clutched her breast against the crushing pain. Her lungs, her airways, were as unyielding as stone. She opened her mouth to scream, but there wasn't enough air.

She clawed at her sheets as the piano rang out downstairs. Her husband's husky voice joined it.

“Go chain the lion down,

Go chain the lion down,

Go chain the lion down,

Before the heav'n doors close.”

He came to her, young now. So young, so beautiful, with that red hair. She had always loved his wild red hair. And his eyes—oh, when he looked at her like that, with those quicksilver eyes. There was never a more beautiful beast.

He touched his lips to hers. Her mouth melted against his warmth, melting, melting, dissolving, receding, as the darkness grew ever bright.

The New York Times,
August 18, 1904

“MARK TWAIN” LEASES HOUSE.

Gets Lower Fifth Avenue Residence for a Term of Years

Samuel L. Clemens, “Mark Twain,” has taken a lease of the four-story brick and stone dwelling 21 Fifth Avenue, at the southeast corner of Ninth Street. Mr. Clemens evidently intends to make his residence in this city for some time, as he has secured the house for a term of years. He will occupy it early in the Fall.

The New York Times,
November 26, 1905

MARK TWAIN: A HUMORIST'S CONFESSION

On the Eve of His 70th Birth Anniversary He Admits He Never Did a Day's Work in His Life.

Mark Twain will be 70 years old on Thanksgiving Day, and he has never done a day's work in his life. He told me so himself, sitting in one of the cheerful, spacious rooms of the old-fashioned stately New York house which he will probably call his city home as long as he lives. I probably started upon hearing this unlooked-for statement from the lips of the good, gray humorist, for he repeated emphatically:

“No, Sir, not a day's work in all my life. What I have done I have done, because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.

“The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.”

January 1905

21 Fifth Avenue, New York

W
INTER DAYLIGHT, WHITENED BY
the falling snow, streamed through windows as tall and arched as those in a church, illuminating the books in Mr. Clemens's library as if they were holy. The Greenwich Village mansion did have the feel of a house of worship, Isabel thought, with its vaulted ceilings, Gothic windows, and sheer size—no accident, as it had been designed by James Renwick, Jr., the architect behind Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral there in town. Any sort of ecclesiastical hush was broken, however, by the constant clicking of billiard balls and the blasts of creative cursing that radiated up from the basement. Since October, when Mr. Clemens had rented the house—four months after Mrs. Clemens's passing—only his recent bout of bronchitis had subdued the tapping and swearing, replacing it with a hacking that echoed through the vaulted halls. Isabel heard her employer coughing now, vaguely worrying her, as she beheld the library bookshelves shining in the sun.

From floor to ceiling on three walls, the spines of the books had been arranged in a perfectly gradated rainbow. Shades of vermilion blended into rust; mellow sienna melded into tobacco brown; chocolate became inky black. Someone had put countless hours into this project—Jean? She had little time, what with giving out Humane Society citations to the cabbies just down the street in Washington
Square and rescuing cats from alleys. Isabel hadn't noticed the work going on, having been busy tending to Mr. Clemens, ill in bed and sullen for the past two weeks, and with moving her mother into a boardinghouse just around the corner. Isabel's own room was above Mr. Clemens's. The rule that all female servants other than domestics had to reside off-premise had ceased with Mrs. Clemens.

Isabel took one last appreciative gaze at the colors fanning out on the walls around her, then stepped forward, grasped two books by the spine, and dropped them to the Persian rug. She slid out two more, let them fall,
thud, thud,
then repeated, until a landslide of books was slithering around her buttoned pumps.

She was just about to release two more when a gilt word caught her eye:
Pitti.
She dropped the other book as she opened
The Treasures of the Pitti Palace
. She turned the pages of the collection of colored photos until she found what she was looking for: Raffaello's painting of his mistress. How the man must have loved this woman. And for them to have had such a night of passion together that it killed him!

“What are you doing?”

Isabel shut the book. In the doorway, Katy shook with such fury that the ruffles of her pinafore trembled. The recent return to New York, Mrs. Clemens's death, or just the effects of time had taken their toll on her. Her face had a squashed look, as if her skin had softened and gravity were having a field day with it. Only her fierceness had remained evergreen.

“What are you doing?” she demanded again.

Isabel realized now who had created this beautiful, useless library arrangement. “I'm sorry, Katy, but books have to be arranged by subject, not color. Who can find anything this way?”

“Miss Jean liked it.”

“I like it, too, but it just isn't practical. But I completely agree, the books do look prettier this way.”

“Don't you look down your nose at me!”

Isabel sighed, then tried again. “This must have taken hours of your time. I apologize for ruining it.”

“I hear your disrespect.”

Wearily, Isabel removed more books. “I wish we could get along, Katy, since neither of us is going anywhere.”

“Aren't we? I wouldn't be so sure of that.”

Isabel would not respond to her bait.

Katy spoke over the books thumping on the rug. “Just wait till Miss Clara gets back.”

“Miss Clara understands that I am here to serve her family. I only do what her father wants.” She doubted the words as they came out. Clara did not know or care what her father wanted. If she knew what he wanted, she would want the opposite. She so vehemently blamed him for her mother's death that it had broken her own health. She had not spoken to him or Isabel since the funeral, after which she immediately put herself into a sanitarium on Fifty-Ninth Street, where she would not receive his or Isabel's letters.

“He'd want the books arranged in a manner that would make sense to him,” Isabel continued truthfully. “Please try not to take it as a personal affront.”

Katy's voice rose. “What makes you the expert on what he wants? You don't know him, not like I do.”

“You're right—you've known him much longer than I have.”

“There's more to it than that.”

“I suppose that his wife's maid would know him very well.”

Katy's ruddy face went crimson; her eyes glimmered with loathing. “He and I understand each other. We come from the same place.”

“Ireland?” Isabel pulled down more books as if Katy's stare weren't boring into her.

At last Katy said, “You'd better watch yourself. Miss Clara hates you, and don't you forget it.”

They turned when they heard coughing in the hallway.

Mr. Clemens trudged in, dressed in his robe and slippers, an unlit cigar between his fingers. “Who hates who?”

“Nobody, sir.” Katy swiped at her fallen pompadour.

He leaned against a leather wingback to fish in his pocket for a
match. “What is it about a hen fight that so satisfies a man? Let me draw up a chair to watch. Just make sure no one flies off the handle and kills a body like our neighbor Dan Sickles.”

Isabel felt a stab of offense. She was not a hen, nor did she like the idea of him thinking she had invited Katy's hostility. But she submerged her hurt feelings beneath relief that Mr. Clemens was moving around and joking. He'd spent both Christmas and New Year's in his room, glum and uncommunicative, not cheering up even when the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie dropped by with a case of rare whiskey. Usually, the homage of the rich and powerful was a tonic to her employer, but he had only sipped from his tumbler, morose, as the bewhiskered Carnegie, with a boyish grin that undermined his pretense to modesty, remarked casually about the English king's drop-in visit to his “little castle” in Scotland. When Mr. Clemens did not try to top Carnegie's story, missing his chance to tell of having walked a mile with the king while taking the waters in Homburg, Isabel had been worried indeed.

She blinked the memory away and mustered her good humor. “Old General Sickles?” She pictured the one-legged former Civil War officer being helped down the steps of his Fifth Avenue mansion across the street, then being ladled into his open carriage.

“Old General Sickles shot his wife's lover, I'm sorry to report. The lover was a bigwig, too—Philip Keyes, a U.S. attorney and the son of the man who wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.' When young Dan fired that gun, he shot himself into a world of trouble.” He lit his cigar, sucking on it to get it going. “But he claimed that seeing the pair together made him temporarily insane, and damned if the court didn't let him go. Temporary insanity was a new defense at the time, and it worked like magic. Don't know why we don't all use it whenever we run off the rails.” He broke off, coughing.

“Please don't smoke, sir,” Katy said. “You haven't been well.”

He waved her off along with his cigar fumes. “Oh, a little tobacco heart never killed anyone. I'm as hardy as a stump. It was Livy who was fragile.” He took a long draw on his cigar. “The doctor only gave
me two minutes with her a day for all those years because I could kill her with my words. I laughed at him. Who kills people with words? Me, evidently.” He looked at Isabel. “Why didn't you stop me?”

She was as wounded as he meant her to be. He had bottled up his anguish for these past six months, and now he was releasing it in front of Katy.

Katy gently took his arm. “You didn't kill her, sir. No one did. It was her time.” As one does with a small, hurt boy, she carefully turned him around and, with her stubby hand on his back, walked him to his bedroom, leaving Isabel standing among the fallen books.