Twain's End (28 page)

Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe Papa actually realized how much this night meant to her. So far he had obeyed her, by not bringing Miss Lyon, and by not sitting in front or wearing
his freakish white suit. Why had he taken to wearing that, just when everyone was turning to seasonal black?
Mein Gott
, the man was desperate.

Clara attacked the long crescendo to the finish, with all its pleas to the Virgin Mary.

Santa Maria!

“It's September,” Clara had told him last week when she'd met him on their staircase and he was in that damn white suit. “You can't wear that.”

Santa Maria!

“I'm calling it my ‘dontcareadam suit.' I'll be polite. I'll ask before I come to dinner, ‘Madame, do you mind if I wear my dontcareadam?' ”

Maria!

“You look like a Southerner.”

He laid his hand upon the banister. “You think I look like a Southerner, Clärchen? That might be because I am a Southerner.”

“You are not. You live in New York.”

Maria!

“Oh, but I am one, Clärchen. My family had the slaves to prove it.”

“Yes, but Grandmother let them go.”

Pray for us!

“My mother told you that?”

“Yes.”

“She shouldn't have.”

For we are sinners.

“Why?”

He had started down the stairs. “Because it was a lie.”

Clara's crescendo grew until her whole body shook. If only people knew about him. Yet there he slept, looking as guileless as a baby, the most beloved man in the world. God, she hated him.

The music broke off.

When the piano resumed, the tempo was calmer. Clara shut her
eyes and let the music comfort her. This was her moment. Hers. Not her father's. Hers.

She caressed the final notes like a mother soothing a child.
Amen. Amen.

The piano music floated to its finish, and with it, her most tender voice, reduced to a single grain of sweetness.

And then it was done.

She stood there, her every fiber ringing from the music that had passed through her.

Her people jumped to their feet.

• • •

The bouquets of roses rustled in Clara's arms as she took her third bow, the applause reverberating in her ears. Her manager, Louden Charlton, hustled out next to her, the coat of his checked suit flapping. “And who would like to hear a word from Mark Twain?”

The applause intensified as if that were what her audience had been waiting for. Papa waved them off.

She smiled over the rose blooms. She would murder Mr. Charlton in the morning.

“These people have come all this way to see you,” he said. “What do you have to say about your daughter's performance?”

Her glare would have killed a lesser man. But Papa got slowly to his feet, then shambled to the stage. “Now that took some bravery. Let me tell you about my first time before an audience. I wrote the book on stage fright—well, that and a few other tomes.”

The crowd—Clara's crowd—caressed him with fond chuckles.

Some twenty minutes later, laughter was shaking the very dumbbells on their rack. When people calmed down, Papa rubbed his shirtfront. “I got up here to thank you for helping my daughter, by your kindness, live through her American debut. And I want to thank you for your appreciation of her fine singing”—he lifted his chin in mock pride—“which, by the way, is hereditary.”

Clara pushed past her manager, past the shrouded parallel bars, past the rapt pair of women clutching copies of
Huckleberry Finn
near the door. Laughter chased her as she spilled onto the lawn surrounding the cedar-shingled building. The cool night air, the crickets hunkered in the cold grass, even the horses stamping at waiting carriages, seemed to vibrate with love for her father.

No one came for her.

At last she heard the closing of a screen door. “Clara?”

She turned around as Will Wark strode across the grass.

“Clara, what are you doing out here? They're looking for you.”

He stopped before her. In the porch light, she could see that his boy's face was crumpled with concern. She could feel the warmth of his solid body.

“He's ruined it for me,” she said.

“Who?”

“My father.”

When he stepped closer, he seemed so troubled, so innocent and sweet, that her anger dropped away. He looked like a boy who had lost his pet turtle.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “I don't care.” And finding that she really didn't, not at this moment, she laughed.

“Well, I do. I care. Are you all right?”

“I am now.”

“You were great in there. You're something special.” He pushed a lock from her cheek. How did he play the piano with such thick fingers? “Clara Clemens, how'd you get to be so wonderful?”

She kept her face upturned to his. “You are terribly kind.”

“I'm not kind, I'm honest. You're wonderful. And beautiful. A fellow doesn't stand a chance against falling in love with you. You must have a hundred beaus.”

“Not so many.” She felt the solidness of his body in the space between them. She searched his eyes, the evening air cool against her hot face. The laughter coming from the gymnasium melted away as
his gaze reached down inside her, grasped her heart, and tugged it back to him. She gasped from the actual physical pain of it.

“What are we doing?” he whispered.

She could feel her light flooding out of her and into him, and his sweet light pouring back. So this was love, this was the ecstasy that she'd missed all those years she'd been locked away with her mother, those years of nearly total isolation that had started as a child. It wasn't getting away from her now.

She seized his face as if to devour it.

January 1907

The Princess Hotel, Bermuda

M
R. CLEMENS'S LINEN-CLAD KNEE
jiggled against Isabel's thigh as their cart, drawn by a sleepy mouse-colored donkey named Blanche, crunched down the white pulverized limestone road. The muted pounding of the sea below the cliffs could be more felt than heard on this windblown stretch of Warwickshire Parish, where white houses cloaked with scarlet hibiscus bushes studded the rolling green hills. The bend in the road revealed the sea stretching out before them, startlingly turquoise and clear.

Isabel closed her eyes and felt the salt breeze wafting through her veil. There were no dinners at Sherry's to attend, no young actresses to entertain, no curious well-wishers to turn away from the house. Clara, as her father put it, was warbling across Europe. Jean was off getting treatment for her sickness. At last Isabel and Mr. Clemens had gotten away to Bermuda, six months after agreeing to it. But they had not come alone.

As they bounced along in the cart, the sun smiling upon her hat and shoulders, Isabel pushed down the nerves that had been churning her stomach since Mr. Clemens had announced last week, after several cancellations, that he was ready to sail. Would she please rebook a passage for them, he'd asked as her heart rose—and get one
for Reverend Joe Twichell. Her heart had plummeted. They were going to Bermuda with Reverend Joe? How could Mr. Clemens have allowed him to horn into their plans? Couldn't Mr. Clemens have said no?

She had endured Clara's abuse, indeed, she had turned her into a friend. She'd sought and secured Jean's place at the best facility for epilectics in the world, hopeful for a cure. Upon his insistence that she be at his side, she'd played his hostess to perfection, performed her secretarial duties to exhaustion, and would have done the same with her wifely duties, too, had he let her. Oh, they had cuddled and fondled, had kissed and tantalizingly stroked, but they had not yet consummated their love, although not by Isabel's choice. She was sure that she made it clear she was willing. Her commitment to him could not be greater had they been married. That he gently sent her out after heating her up made her feel like the worst kind of tramp. Yet he encouraged her affection and put his hands on her whenever he could—when just out of sight of others, and there were always others in the house, Jean, Clara, Katy, his multitude of fans. Isabel did not know how it felt to be with him without knowing that someone could walk in on them at any moment. And now, having finally shed the clinging Reverend, here they were, just the two of them, with Blanche the donkey and the sighing turquoise ocean as their only witnesses.

Mr. Clemens spoke up, the first since Blanche had clopped from the shade of the Princess Hotel portico perhaps a half hour earlier. He had been quiet, too. “I was thinking how much this place reminds me of home.”

She sifted through his tone to gauge his mood. They had not discussed where they were going when they set out. He had appeared at her room and told her to get her hat, they were going for a ride. Just you and me. She had tried not to read too much into it, even as her heart raced.

“It reminds you of New York?”

He shook his head. “Missouri,” he said, pronouncing it as he always did:
Miz-ur-ruh.
Of all the places he had lived in the world—
San Francisco, Nevada, Connecticut, all over Europe, New York—he still called Hannibal home.

“Hannibal,” she said, clarifying. “Because of the water?”

“Not Hannibal. I meant Florida, Missouri, the town where I was born. No water there. It was prairie land, nothing but long grass and loneliness, stretching all the way to the horizon. The sky crushed you with its vastness. A sky like this one.”

She gazed up, holding her hat, as he continued.

“I can still remember Jennie raising me up to look at it. I was just a little shaver, three years old, maybe, or four—couldn't be older than that because we moved before I was five. I remember a hawk overhead, one lone brown wheeling hawk, the blue of the sky showing through his fringe of end-feathers. Jennie wanted me to see him, so she held me up, but it made me mad.”

“So you've always had a temper,” Isabel said with affection.

He smiled. “It didn't sneak up on me as an adult? No. I was angry because that hawk wouldn't come down for me to touch him. If I couldn't touch him, why, I didn't care about him. When I told Jennie that, she said, ‘You're going to grow up mad if you think that just because you want something, you're going to get it.' ”

“Who is Jennie?”

He glanced at her, then shifted the reins to one hand to feel his pocket for a cigar. “You didn't ask me why Bermuda reminds me of home.”

“Because of the sky?”

He shook his head. “You notice that half the faces here are dark? Well, that gives me comfort. I have always felt most at peace when in the company of Negroes.” He gave up on his cigar hunt. “Back in Florida, I used to go out to the slave cabins to play with the boys my age. I didn't even know we were different. When I found out, it hurt me to think how they must have felt when they found out they were slaves. What must that have done to their minds?”

“Was Jennie a slave?”

“Ah, Jennie.” He sighed, then chirruped on Blanche, who raised
her head but not her speed. After a while he said, “I was seven when my mother whipped her. My mother, the same person who would scold me for doing anything as violent as waking up a cat. To see her threaten anyone with a horse whip, especially my Jennie, tore the rug right from under me. And to hear her shout! I'd never heard such terrible words. They singed my soul like a branding iron:
You black whore.
”

He was silent a moment, as if gathering courage.

“Mother snapped the whip,” he said quietly, “but Jennie grabbed it. So Mother sent for Father, and Pa came roaring home. My brothers, my sister Pamela, and I watched as he dragged Jennie outside, bound her hands with leather reins, and whipped her with a cowhide. I wanted to kill him. I wanted him dead. And I knew I would do whatever it took to accomplish that goal.”

The donkey's hooves crunched on limestone. Isabel found that she was holding her breath.

“When it was over, and Father had stormed away, and Mother was weeping in the house, I crept out back to be next to Jennie. She was lying in the dust, all in a heap. I whispered that I was sorry, real sorry, but that did no good. She did not move. So I lay down next to her and, shyly, crept my hand upon her arm. And as I lay there begging God to help her get up so we could run away together, I saw that the skin of her forearm was paler than the freckles on my hand. How could Mother call Jennie black if she was whiter than me in places?”

He stopped the cart. From the distance came the moan of the turquoise sea, collapsing on the beach. “I've never told anyone that. Not even Livy. Her family was as abolitionist as mine was slaveholding. It would have made her hate my mother. But it wasn't Mother's fault that Jennie got whipped. She didn't cause everything that happened to Jennie.” Gripping the reins, he turned and glared at Isabel in defiance. “I did.”