Twain's End (21 page)

Clara came out. “Mamma!”

“I heard your singing. Lovely. Schubert, yes?”

“I know how much you like Schubert. I asked the maestro to include a number in my program.” She slid out her lower lip, a nearly-thirty-year-old child. “I was going to surprise you with it.”

“It's not your fault, dear. Sound travels. You can hear everything in this terrible old house.”

The flesh twitched under Mr. Clemens's eyes. “Livy, you must go to bed.”

“Not yet, Youth, not yet. But it won't be long now.”

He gritted his jaw. “Go,” he ordered Isabel.

Isabel walked away, sick with dirtiness. His wife was protecting what was hers. Isabel could not blame her.

Yet Isabel could not release him. Nor could she save herself.

June 1904

Villa di Quarto,
Florence, Italy

O
LIVIA CLEMENS SAT IN
her chair, listening to crickets. It was her least favorite part of the day, when the light dissolved into darkness. The gloaming. Eventide. Twilight. Dusk. For this hour to have so many names, it must have troubled the ancients. As a girl in Elmira, before her health had become delicate, she'd liked this time best, especially in summer, when there were fireflies to capture and a white moon to watch rise, after which she would drag herself indoors, sticky and tired from playing, to sit in the warm soapy water of a tin hat tub. Now the folding of day into night held none of these delights. Twilight felt purely ominous: the ending of a chance; the dwindling of time that would never repeat itself; a loss. The earth itself seemed to hold its breath during these fading minutes, as if afraid of what was to come. The lingering made the surrender so poignant, until the light finally . . . went.

She was on the villa terrace during this gloaming in June—the fifth of the month, nearing the longest day of the year. She'd had Ugo, with his brute's face and lamb's heart, move her chair outside from the bedroom. Youth and the girls were downstairs playing cards, just like in the old days in Hartford. She could hear him tease them—he was in one of his rare jolly moods. For the moment, the girls were
not tiptoeing around him and his temper; Jean was not out sacrificing herself for her animals; Clara, thank God, was not singing.

Poor Clara. Her singing was bound to let her down someday. Olivia had not been able to go to the three recitals in town, but she could imagine them: Clara yodeling as if to save her life before a crowd there to see Mark Twain's daughter or, better yet, Mark Twain himself. At the end of Clara's performance, Youth would give them what they wanted and stand up to applause that was heartier than it had been for the anxious young contralto onstage. Clara hadn't a chance. No one did, really, against Mark Twain. Not even poor Youth himself.

Olivia's sigh blended with the rasping of the crickets. It was wrong, what she was doing to Clara, not responsible of her as a mother at all. She should not make her daughter spend so much time with her when Clara should be out discovering her own life. When she was Clara's age, she had borne three children and lost one of them; another baby would come two years later, conceived in England, during those halcyon times when Youth's talent was being discovered and she was his beloved wife. She—quiet, serious Olivia Langdon, an invalid who'd spent six years of her youth confined to her four-poster—was married to a man so vibrant and virile that he electrified any room he entered, be it a parlor, a ship's dining room, or a concert hall. Such an exciting life! He had been a terror in bed; oh my, Olivia had lived for that. She had ignored her doctor's warnings that she could not withstand childbirth, that the marital bed would kill her, that her body was too delicate to take the violence of a man's sex. Well, the doctor was right about all of those things, but not in the ways he had meant.

She fingered the padded silk of the armrests. Clara. Poor, greedy, headstrong, tempestuous Clara. Just like her father, but without her father's mitigating wit and intelligence. She was all appetite and no wisdom, with plenty of vanity thrown in—like her father, she had an excess of that. The pair of them needed praise like the rest of us needed oxygen. How could Olivia let Clara, made so vulnerable by
her narcissism, loose in the world without a mother to guide her? Olivia had to get well—she
willed
herself to do so. She had made the mistake of acquiescing to Youth's insistence of keeping the girls at home when they were small and not allowing them to go to school, or much of anywhere else without their parents. She'd not been thinking. How were the girls to deal with the world when they'd had no exposure to it? Why was Youth so against letting them out? No wonder Susy had run wild during the semester she went to college. It was like sitting a girl raised by wolves to dinner at the Waldorf with the expectation that she'd fit in beautifully.

And then there was the problem of Jean. Olivia closed her eyes. Cruel, cruel time of day—it always brought out her regrets.

A terrible braying cut through her repose. Her lids jolted open. That unfortunate beast, wounded now with a gash to his head, was more dangerous than ever. His condition could be remedied by simply turning him out to a field, but the countess kept him tied up, too busy with her lover to care. Olivia peered toward the stables. A light shone in the window of the carriage house. She saw the countess and her lover draw together, their silhouettes framed within the rectangle of yellow light. The big Roman steward cupped the countess's elbow, then drew her to him by the waist. He grasped her hair at the nape of the neck and pulled back her head to kiss her.

Olivia shifted in her chair and let out a long breath. Sam used to kiss her like that. She'd been frightened of him at first. Just looking at him had terrified her. He'd shown up at her parents' house wearing a sealskin coat and hat—fur side out, like a beast—with boots to match. He looked like a trapper or prospector or criminal or worse. Mamma refused to let him in. Only her brother, Charles, overhearing him at the door and coming to identify him, had saved him from being run off.

“This is the chap I was telling you about,” Charles had said, introducing him in the parlor to the family. “From my voyage. Sam Clemens the newspaperman—you know, Mark Twain? Funniest man I ever met.”

With his storm of wavy red hair, his chiseled face, and those frightening gray eyes, Sam Clemens seemed anything but funny. Before Olivia knew it, he had grabbed her hand and was shaking it. He hung on too long. When she got her hand back to herself, she had cradled it, now a precious thing, for the rest of the night. No man outside of the family had ever touched her. She was twenty-two.

Sam Clemens had then vanished from her life for weeks, only to pop up in New York City, where she and Charles had gone to see the great writer Dickens. Mr. Clemens intercepted them at their hotel, flashing the better tickets he'd gotten, then sat with them in the center of Steinway Hall. How aware she had been of his energy throbbing next to her, even when Mr. Dickens strode out onto the stage, looking neither left nor right but bearing down upon the podium with his luxurious goatee and the side wings of his hair brushed stiffly forward, as if he were being blown in by a gale.

“Someone should advise him about his hair,” Olivia had whispered to her brother. “He looks like a Scotch terrier.” She could feel Mr. Clemens turn and stare so long at her that she was sure she had offended him. Perhaps Mr. Dickens was his idol. She hazarded a glance.

“You, dear lady, are brilliant.”

Two weeks later, she received a note in the mail containing a clipping from a San Francisco newspaper, in which Mark Twain had described Mr. Dickens's hair as giving him the appearance of a Scotch terrier. Mark Twain also announced in the article that “there was a beautiful young lady with me—a highly respectable young white woman.” He did not mention to his readers that later that evening he had told the beautiful young lady that he planned to be bigger than Dickens. Richer, too. And she had not laughed.

Now Olivia smiled, half conscious of the lovers in the carriage house across the garden. How Sam Clemens had wooed her! She'd believed that he would indeed outstrip Dickens if he applied himself as vigorously as he did to winning her. She turned him down repeatedly, the animal in her wary.

But how often do we listen to the animal in us? In spite of his rough Western ways and alarming restlessness, in spite of her father worrying that young Mr. Clemens was just after her fortune, he being penniless and she a coal heiress, she couldn't resist him, broken down by his winsome letters full of flattery and appeals to cure him of his drinking, cussing, and tobacco chewing. He begged her to “sivilize” him, and she jumped at the role, calling him “Youth” although he was ten years her senior. He told her in his letters that the only kind of women he ever got, he didn't want; he wanted a respectable woman, like her. If he could just marry a woman as beautiful, smart, and cultured as she, why, he'd become the kind of man he knew he should be. Couldn't she help him, please?

Olivia would hold his letters to her breast, trembling. She yearned for him to take her in his arms and ravish her. Oh, and when he finally did, after a thrilling two years of courtship and breakups and tearful reunions—

Olivia closed her eyes again, remembering the first months of her marriage. He had tried to be tender, calling her his little girl, his sweet, delicate, fragile little girl, stroking her, petting her, until his kisses became so passionate she thought he would eat her. He made her scream out in ecstasy, her body tearing with pleasure.

She smiled now and opened her eyes. The lovers across the way were gone. Loneliness swooped in, devouring her like the night swallows the day. What had happened to her and Youth? She still loved him, and he still loved her in his self-centered way. At least she thought he did. Maybe you couldn't call what he had felt for her “love.” It was need, it was desire, it was dominance, but love? In their thirty years of marriage, had he ever known her? Had he ever asked what she had on her mind or how she felt about the girls, what made her the happiest, what she was fearful of, what she wanted for dinner?

It wasn't all his fault. Instead of facing him, she had retreated to her room, a trick she'd learned as an adolescent. When she tired of
his trampling over her and the girls, of his restlessness, his blustering, his preening, his ambition, his relentlessness, she had run away. She had confined herself to her bed, pretending she was sick until, after years of constant feigning, she had become truly ill.

Well, if she had willed herself into this wasted state, she could will herself out of it. There was still time. She was only fifty-eight. She needed to work on her walking, to get up her strength, to go into town, to see Clara perform, to see the art. This was Italy! Romantic, life-affirming Italy! And it was June—she glanced across the way—the time for lovers. Sam and she could be lovers again. Her heart hurt with a pang of desire.

She heard whistling. Youth? She sat up, then felt her face as if unsure she was still there.

“Livy, what are you doing outside?” His voice was bright. His good mood encouraged her.

She clutched at the velvet armrests. “Sam, I want another chance.”

“Chance? Chance at what? Winning the church raffle?”

She coughed. Traitor body. “Sam, I'm serious.”

“You're always serious. The most serious little girl I ever met. I don't hold it against you.”

She could feel her energy flag. “Sam, please. Listen.”

He noticed her face. “All right.” He got closer to peer at her in the lamplight cast through the open door. “You ought to get back in bed. My little girl needs her rest.”

“No, Sam. I want to be up. I want to live. I want—I want to go to the Pitti Palace.”

“The Pitti Palace?” He laughed. “What has gotten into you?”

“Sam, I've been thinking. I've been throwing away the years, hiding from our problems, when I should have been facing them straight on.”

The crickets pulsed into the silence. She could feel his frown.

“We've had big problems, Sam. Your moods, my moods, Susy—”

“You need to go to bed,” he said sharply.

“I want to talk, Sam. All these years, I haven't talked. I want to get well.”

She could hear his swallow. “I came to say good night, Livy. They're trying a new kind of communication tonight, out in the hills. The army is flashing lights in Morse code to communicate over distances. They're stationed between Fiesole and town. Miss Lyon's seen them—she said they look like fireflies up in the trees.”

Her heart jolted. “Miss Lyon.”

“She knows just where to stand to see them best. That funny little priest showed her. You get better, and you can join us.”

“Miss Lyon.” Olivia's energy drained from her.

“She's waiting down in the entrance hall. It starts as soon as it's dark.” Olivia could sense his impatience. “Let me take you inside.” He took her elbow.