Twain's End (11 page)

“Don't worry, dear. That's the only gray I saw.”

Isabel stared into the mirror.

Mrs. Lyon resumed back-combing her daughter's hair. Gracious, Isabel needn't take one silly gray so hard. How about having to deal with your husband's illegitimate child—alone? There wasn't a person in the world with whom she could talk about it. Isabel knew nothing of it—none of the children did. Mrs. Lyon had protected them from the knowledge and borne the shame of its existence by herself. Not that she expected their thanks for shielding them. It was just what a mother did.

“Now, tell me about Mr. Clemens.” She picked up the next section of hair framing her daughter's face. “Where did he take you in New York? Wherever you went, you simply ruined your hair. It's so
damp, it will hardly take a back-combing. You might as well have toured the Niagara Falls on the deck of the
Maid of the Mist.
” She presented the lank hank as evidence.

“What?” Isabel appeared to swim out of a daydream. “It rained.”

“I know it rained. It rained so hard here that I couldn't see across the street from our window. Why didn't you stay inside until it stopped?” Mrs. Lyon dropped the hank, then reached for a towel and began to blot Isabel's hair.

• • •

Isabel glanced away from the mirror. Her mother's dabbing had jiggled free a disquieting recollection from that morning. Isabel had arrived at the Clemenses' home earlier than usual, to catch the 8:50 train to the city with Mr. Clemens. The air was cool as she had crossed the side lawn, a cardinal warbling
birdie-birdie-birdie
and the dew glistening on the grass. She had just taken her gaze from the river—she had grown even fonder of the view since sharing it with Mr. Clemens—when she saw him on the terrace, tipped back in a wrought-iron chair. Katy stood over him, rubbing his hair with a towel.

For a moment, Isabel had not recognized her. A smile had transformed the maid's sour face into that of a fresh-faced pretty girl. She was singing some sort of hymn, to which Mr. Clemens listened with closed eyes, seemingly unabashed by his bare chest and his bare feet, with which he rocked his tipped chair. Isabel had hiked quickly back toward the front of the house, discomfited by the intimate scene.

Now Mrs. Lyon repeated, “What were you doing in New York that you couldn't stay indoors?”

Isabel's gaze trailed over to the pot with a hydrangea plant sitting next to the bed. A kitten was batting one of the heavy blue heads. The cat had come from a litter of one of Mr. Clemens's cats; Clara had given it to her. “We were busy.”

“Too busy to get out of the rain? What will Mr. Bangs say about this hair?”

Isabel refrained from saying that she did not care what Mr. Bangs would say about her hair. She did not care what Mr. Bangs would say about anything. As her mother vigorously reapplied the brush, systematically teasing one section until it stood up on end before moving to the next, Isabel slipped into her thoughts. Soon the rhythmic tugs to her scalp gave way in her mind to the sound of clopping horse hooves.

She saw herself with Mr. Clemens, two hours after the disquieting scene earlier that morning. His derby crowned his tempest of clean hair as he jostled along companionably next to her within the horse-drawn cab. They were making their way down Broadway, an automobile puttering ahead of them, its pneumatic tires pummeling the Belgian blocks of the street. Trolleys rumbled past with a scowling driver in front and riders clinging to the grab-rails in the back. Schools of men in straw boaters and women in white dresses and huge hats fluttering with ribbons flowed purposefully down the sidewalks, the tide of humanity in flapping summer-weight cloth dwarfed by the elegant entrances of stores adorned with gigantic lanterns, columns, and extravagant awnings.

The broad brim of her hat brushed her shoulders as she shifted toward the cab window to look up. Where Fifth Avenue and Broadway crossed at Twenty-Third Street, the just-completed Fuller Building, the tallest and strangest of the new “skyscrapers,” loomed on its triangular lot like a twenty-some story slice of wedding cake.

“Magnificent.” Mr. Clemens leaned over her to view it. He smelled like smoke, wool, and man. She tried to make nothing of the fact that his arm was resting against her breast.

“Want to stop and see it?” he asked.

She reminded herself that it wouldn't be right for Mrs. Clemens's secretary to appear alone in public with Mr. Clemens. “No, but thank you.”

“Really?” He sat back. Isabel's breast tingled where he had made contact. “You looked pretty interested.”

Even in the shade of the cab's interior, she could feel the intensity
of his eyes. Although she would not look into them, she knew exactly their color: gray, with a tendency to soft green when he was happy. She yearned to see if they were soft green now. “No. But thank you.”

“Just as well.” He pulled a cigar from his coat, then fished a match from his pocket. “You could lose your virtue out there.”

Isabel acted as if she had not heard.

He struck his match against the sole of his shoe and watched her as he lit a cigar. “The wind whips around that devil's flatiron like a Missouri cyclone”—he puffed as he waved out the match—“wreaking the most awful havoc on the ladies' skirts. It has gotten so that a squadron of policemen has to patrol the sidewalks around it. Any casual ‘scientist' who makes too close a study of the effect of wind on skirts is told, ‘Twenty-three skidoo,' and gets familiarized with the street out front of that number.”

Isabel glanced through the netting hanging over the edge of her hat. “I don't believe you. You're making that up.”

“Now, Lioness, I thought I had trained you better than that. What do I say about stories that sound like whoppers?”

“ ‘The more it sounds like a whopper, the truer it is.' ”

“Good girl. You'll make a fine secretary yet.”

She laughed. She was thirty-nine, and he made her feel like a girl. “I am trying.”

“Try harder. Rogers thinks he's got the best secretary in the world. I want to make him jealous.”

“I'll do my best, but I am just your wife's social secretary.”

“The hell you are. I have purloined you from Livy, and now you've got to make me look good. Why do you think I hired you?”

“I thought I was Mrs. Clemens's employee.”

“Have you ever talked with her?”

“No.”

“Then how could she have hired you? I'm the one who wanted you. Those card games we had were the last I had a good time, the last I felt
in charge,
before”—he scowled—“before everything went
to hell.” He knit his warlike brows. “I'm counting on you to take me back to those happier days. I want you to sail me back there. You think you can do that for me, Lioness?”

“I'll try.” She meant it. She'd do anything for him.

He squeezed her hand. “That's my girl.”

They joggled south down Broadway, a private bubble of camaraderie surrounding them as their cab navigated the sea of machines, horses, and people. At last, past City Hall, past St. Paul's Chapel, past Trinity Church, they arrived at an elegant skyscraper several blocks short of the base of the island. In spite of its prominence above its neighbors, the Standard Oil Building, with its eleven white stone stories, was marked solely with a black 26 between the massive columns of its entrance. A trip across the marble tomb of a lobby and then skyward in a brass elevator cage took them to the stronghold of the person against whom Mr. Clemens had pitted her: Katherine Harrison, secretary to Henry H. Rogers, the ranking director of the Standard Oil Company.

Wearing an expression that she hoped struck the right note between serenity and seriousness, Isabel gaped inwardly as Miss Harrison led the way to Mr. Rogers's quarters. At over six feet in height, Miss Harrison towered over Mr. Clemens. The top of Isabel's voluminous hat didn't reach the bottom of her shoulder blades. Miss Harrison had outfitted her Amazonian figure in a man's shirt and coat over a tailored skirt and had pulled back her dark blond hair in a severe bun. She was said to be the best secretary in the world and was certainly the best paid. At ten thousand dollars a year, she made more than twenty schoolteachers combined.

When she turned around at Mr. Rogers's office door, her face held all the emotion of an anvil. “You two chat,” Mr. Clemens told her and Isabel. He entered the office. “Henry, you old pirate!”

Miss Harrison stepped over and sealed the door closed, then looked down upon Isabel without speaking. Chatting, it seemed, was a waste of her expensive time.

An electric fan—the latest in conveniences—droned in a corner.
Isabel's dress rippled in the hot air blown from its black metal paddles as she faced her competition. “I'm very glad to meet you, Miss Harrison. Someday I should very much like to be as respected in our field as you are.”

Miss Harrison glanced at the elaborate hat for which Isabel had paid a quarter of a month's wages. “Really.”

Isabel shored up her confidence, fast eroding like a sandcastle at high tide. She was not a child. “What advice can you give me on how to be a first-rate secretary?”

Miss Harrison paused. “Never get personal.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Thank you. I mean, what skill do you recommend that I work on?”

“Never getting personal.”

Mr. Clemens and Mr. Rogers strolled out of the inner office. Erect as a rifle stock, Henry H. Rogers stood about a hand taller than his secretary. With his white hair parted down the middle to form two opposing bulwarks, and a mustache bristling like a timber breastwork, he seemed of a different, bellicose race. He looked like he might be one of the richest men in America, and he was.

He nodded slightly. “Good afternoon, Miss Lyon.”

Isabel nodded back, surprised that he knew her name. They'd never spoken. On the occasions when he'd come to dinner with Mr. Clemens, she'd remained properly out of sight.

He clapped Mr. Clemens on the shoulder as he spoke to Isabel. “Nice that Mrs. Clemens let you slip away to keep this old buccaneer out of trouble.”

“Miss Lyon is not Mrs. Clemens's property anymore.” Mr. Clemens raided his own suit coat for a cigar. “I've commandeered her. That's what we pirates do.”

Mr. Rogers let go of him, still smiling. “What does Livy say about that?”

“She doesn't mind. I'll get her a new one.” Cigar between his fingers, Mr. Clemens put his arm around Isabel's shoulders. “This model suits me fine. I'm not trading you her for Miss Harrison, so
don't even ask. She's just the right size for throwing, should a bomber give me a scare—pint-sized, just the way I like them.”

Mr. Rogers's mustache lowered. “You've lost me, Mark. To what are you referring?”

Mr. Clemens snapped his fingers as if to remember. “Who was that tycoon who threw his clerk at the villain who threatened him with a bomb?”

“Russell Sage,” Miss Harrison said coolly.

“That's right. Russell Sage. Didn't do much for the clerk, but it sure saved Sage's hide.”

Isabel felt the weight of Mr. Clemens's arm on her shoulder as he bantered with Mr. Rogers. A fog of shame had begun to infiltrate her mind, preventing her from following their speech.

“What do you say about a ride in Rogers's motorcar?” Mr. Clemens asked her.

She nodded numbly.

“Have you ever been in one?”

She shook her head. The corners of her mouth were leaden.

He looked at her a moment longer, then removed his arm to sign some papers that Miss Harrison produced. Soon they were ushered into one of Mr. Rogers's motorcars, where Isabel spent the first automobile ride of her life turned away from Mr. Clemens. Miserable in the open backseat behind Mr. Rogers's goggled chauffeur in a duster, she was jostled north up Broadway. Gunmetal clouds roiled overhead, darkening the crowds and skyscrapers. The temperature was dropping. A storm was soon to come.

“These things give a body a shaking,” Mr. Clemens shouted over the roar of the engine, “right where they need to be shaken. A man could get a massage just going to the haberdasher.”

She said nothing.

A wind whipped up Broadway as they passed the gushing fountain in City Hall Park, tipping Isabel's hat forward at a precarious angle. A second gust lifted it from behind, ripping it from its pins and tumbling it toward the driver.

Mr. Clemens snatched it in midair. He turned around and held it out to her. “You need to pin it better.”

“You're getting too familiar,” she said suddenly.

They confronted each other, the car bumping along.

His tone was bitter when he spoke. “You society girls. Always trying to civilize me.”

“I'm not a society girl.”

“You were.”

“Not for a decade. Not for two decades. Why do you insist on humiliating me with that?”

A red spot the size of a thumbprint appeared on each of his cheeks. “You don't know humiliation. Humiliation is living above the store that your father lost. Humiliation is having your mother make a deal with the devil so you can eat supper that night. Humiliation is growing up to be goddamn bankrupt, just like your goddamn bankrupt father.”

“I'm sorry.” She turned away, not caring that the wind was tearing at her hair. Trolleys passed in both directions, clanging on their tracks under the boiling black sky.

“Damn it,” he demanded, “talk to me.”

The motorcar sputtered by the crowd of men clustered around a pushcart selling oysters, its awning flapping madly. Boys on the sidewalk hawked newspapers to the men rushing past with their collars turned up to their hat brims.

“There are rules, Mr. Clemens.”

“I know,” he said viciously. He scraped off his hat, then ran his hand through his hair. He gave her a fierce look. “Livy's getting better.”