Twain's End (4 page)

The King blew out a lavish cloud, then put Miss Keller's hand back on his mouth. “Not even those old turnips could accuse you of being unoriginal in
The World I Live In,
Helen. Pegging a person's character through the feel of the hands—I thought it was brilliant. Of course, I might be especially partial to your mode of reckoning, seeing how you wrote that my own flippers were ‘whimsical' and ‘droll.' ”

“I believe the rest of my description read, ‘The drollery changes to sympathy and championship.' ” Miss Keller peered earnestly into space, though her voice remained flat. “I can feel that, Mark. I can feel your kindness and your lovingness. I am so very grateful for them.”

“You caught me out.” The King kissed her hand.

Miss Keller's winsome face glowed.

Mr. Macy put his cup on his saucer with a clink of bone china. “I fear Helen was talking about me when she referred to the friend whose hands gave away his aggression. She said his hands' ‘impatient jerk'
alerted her to a forthcoming argument.” Mr. Macy's tone was meant to be playful. “Do I argue that much, Helen?”

“Get over here, Macy,” said The King. “She's going to have to read that off your lips, not mine.”

Mr. Macy needed no further invitation to spring from his chair and onto the sofa, to the place where his wife had been. He put Miss Keller's other hand on his lips, repeated his accusation, and, with glasses glinting, watched for her reaction.

Miss Keller gleamed. “John, you know I can never reveal that person's identity. But if you recall, I also said in that passage that I could feel this friend start when a new idea shot through his head. It is a thrill to feel this person's probing intelligence.”

“A thrill? You also said that you could feel his soul wrap itself in darkness. That you could feel his grief.” Mr. Macy's laugh held no mirth. “He sounds like less of a thrill and more of a burden.”

Isabel glanced off as if she had intruded into a personal scene. Miss Keller couldn't see how she gave herself away. But how was she to know how much we must keep to ourselves?

The King pushed from the sofa. “Who wants to go look for Michelangelo's cradle with me?”

“Not everyone is done with their refreshments,” Isabel protested.

“They'll wait.” The King drew up Miss Keller and, with his hand at the small of her back, guided her toward the loggia. Mr. Macy started to follow and then stopped to collect his wife. Isabel fell in behind them, pretending not to see Horace's embarrassed glance as she passed him at the door. At least someone acknowledged that she was more to The King than just a secretary.

January 8, 1909

Stormfield,
Redding, Connecticut

I
SABEL FOLLOWED THE KING
and Miss Keller's party down the hall, savoring the soft cushion and autumnal palette of the Persian carpet under her strapped pumps. The authentic Bokhara, woven in her favorite dull greens and rusty reds, had been purchased after much haggling with a dealer on Broadway in New York. The King had no idea of its quality or the trouble to which she had gone to get it, nor would he ever care. He might have been feted around the world by royalty and men of mark, awarded an honorary degree from Oxford University in England, and made a boon companion of the rich and powerful in New York, but at heart he was a Mississippi steamboat pilot whose idea of luxurious decor was that found in a New Orleans brothel.

Isabel wished she had known him in his piloting days, before Time and his wife had tried to tame the animal out of him. How lucky Livy Clemens had been to possess such a magnificent beast, with his flowing auburn mane and powerful lusts, a man who could dance the Schottische until dawn on the deck of the ship that he captained and then steer the four hundred tons of cargo, wood, and pressurized iron through the sucking black depths of a snag and sail it home. Women couldn't resist him. Long before he was famous, if there was only one
woman in a crowd, he'd be the man to bed her. Isabel knew this because he bragged about it to her often, which both interested and repulsed her.

She remembered The King telling her such a story several years back. He'd been dictating his autobiography to his stenographer then, Miss Hobby. He was in bed, of course. After Mrs. Clemens died, he always wrote or dictated in bed—he did whatever he pleased in all things. He had on a velvet wrapper, vermilion, his favorite color. Isabel had given it to him for his seventieth birthday.

“Have I talked about the all-male dance I attended while I was a prospector in Nevada?” He had been addressing Miss Hobby but kept his gaze on Isabel, who'd been standing by with a sheaf of letters for him to sign.

Miss Hobby, a young woman whose moist olive skin and blunt features put Isabel in mind of a salamander, had looked up with colorless eyes from her typewriter. “No.”

“Good. Take this down.”

While Isabel waited, The King told of a night in a ramshackle barn in which 160 female-starved miners decided to hold a dance in spite of the dearth of women.

“It was a pitiful sight,” he said, watching Isabel, “grown men shuffling through the sawdust in each other's arms, serious as schoolboys at a funeral. Half of them wore kerchiefs to play the part of girls. The other half wore their own greasy hats. Hot smelly wax rained down from the wagon-wheel ‘chandeliers' slung overhead, peppering the whole sorry, untrimmed bunch.”

The King ignored Isabel's gesture for him to sign the letters. Instead he pulled a cigar from his robe pocket. “So there we were, half-singed and fully drunk, tottering along to the fiddle music, our six-shooters thumping on our legs. We had resigned ourselves to waiting for a fight to break out for the evening's entertainment, when into the barn flounced a girl. Wearing a red dress. That stopped just short of her knees.”

He reached for his matchbox, struck a match, then after lighting his cigar, waved it out. “Her name was Etta. Etta Booth. She was fifteen years old, and her dull stump of a mama was called Maude.”

Isabel affected boredom.

“The fiddle screeched to a halt,” said The King. “Those candles hadn't time to drip another cruel drop before one hundred and sixty tin cups of punch appeared before that girl. One hundred and sixty hairy arms were proffered up to dance. One hundred and sixty dungarees peaked with hope. And who do you suppose, among all those cups, arms, and dungarees, sweet-talked the girl into going out back to see the moon rise over the slag pile?”

Isabel shoved the letters in his hand. “I can't guess.”

He laid them on his wrapper front and took a tug at his cigar. “Miss Hobby?”

Miss Hobby raised her salamander's face, her fingers splayed on the typewriter keys.

He blew out smoke. “Scratch that story. I've got to tell it in a different way.” He nodded at Isabel. “It seems that my editor here does not approve.”

Isabel dared not look up at him. He'd called her his editor. No one was good enough to be his editor. The only other woman he had allowed to edit his work was his wife.

He hesitated as if shy when Isabel met his eyes, then let a corner of his mouth inch up. They had confronted each other, no grinning allowed, while Miss Hobby ripped the paper out of the typewriter and rolled in a new piece.

• • •

Now The King had stopped in the hallway and was placing Miss Keller's fingers below the ledge of his mustache for her to read his lips. “We have come, my dear, to the beating heart of the universe: my billiards room.”

Toying with her coral necklace, Isabel entered behind Mr. and Mrs. Macy. The space, thickly paneled in mahogany, papered with
scarlet brocade, and bursting at the seams with potted palms, tufted leather chairs, books, pictures, and a tassel-hung billiards table, was not to her taste, but she had known her King when she'd furnished it. “How about a game of billiards, Helen?” he asked.

She laughed as she read his mouth. “I have no sight. I can't.”

“The kind of billiards that gets played around here, you could. Plenty of people who come to this table have less skill than you have sight, though they claim to be to the cue stick what Edison is to light.”

“Speaking of Edison,” said Mr. Macy, edging closer, “you heard what he said about you—something to the effect that an average American loves his family; if he has any love left over, he generally selects Mark Twain.”

“Now we know why they call him a genius.” The King spoke as languidly as a maharaja riding an elephant through Delhi. “But as smart as he is, it would have been my friend Tesla, not Edison, mentioned in one breath with electricity if Tesla hadn't given up. He got discouraged when he lost all his papers in a fire, and he let Edison grab the glory. The moral of the story is,” he said, glancing at Isabel as Miss Keller felt his lips, “don't ever give up.”

Miss Keller laughed. “I won't!”

Behind them, Mrs. Macy toyed with the fringe of a lampshade as if at a loss for what to do with her hands when she wasn't spelling into her student's palm. Isabel remembered her to be much more talkative the last time they had met. She and Helen had bantered at the dinner table as if they were twins conjoined at the hands, finishing each other's sentences and arguing between themselves. Mr. Macy hadn't been there.

“I play billiards,” said Mr. Macy.

Mrs. Macy pulled back her chin and looked at her husband. “You do?”

Even though Mr. Macy pushed up his glasses, the one brow remained stubbornly arched over them. “Not very well, but yes.”

“Good,” said The King. “We'll lay bets. How's tonight, after supper?”

“Be prepared for a long night of it,” Isabel told Mr. Macy. “The King demands his pound of flesh.”

“I am up for the challenge. Evenings at the Harvard Club have prepared me.”

“You play billiards there?” said Mrs. Macy.

Mr. Macy made one of his exhalations of amusement. “Of course I do.”

Mrs. Macy stared at him. “I thought you were working.”

“You're on, Macy.” The King gestured to the row of photographs of pretty adolescent girls and pictures of fish wreathing the room. “Like my Angelfish? I call this room ‘The Aquarium' in their honor. It's our meeting place when they come. Helen, would you like to be one? All you've got to be to join is young at heart.”

And to be female,
Isabel thought. Boys were never invited. And to be a dewy-skinned beauty. And to flirt with the old man as if he were fourteen.

“Or, if you'd rather,” The King added, “you could scuttle down to the Lobster Pot—Miss Lyon's house—and knit with her and her old mother. Your choice.”

Isabel stared at him as Miss Keller exclaimed, “Me?”

“You do love to swim, Helen,” said Mr. Macy. “You'd make an excellent fish. She goes out with our dog when we go to the Cape. I'm trying to teach her how to do more than just a fair dog-paddle.”

Our
dog?
Isabel glanced between husband and wife. Was everything shared between student, teacher, and the teacher's husband in that household?

“Helen doesn't have to swim,” said The King. “She just has to wear at all times the Angelfish pin that I give her and to write letters to me.” He pointed to a handwritten list tacked on the wall, then produced a match from another pocket.

Mr. Macy thrust his heavy chin forward and examined them. “ ‘Angelfish Club Rules.' It's all here.”

“Miss Lyon can give you one of the little pins I award my minnows.
I had Tiffany make them in New York. Run and get one for Helen, will you, Miss Lyon?”

“That would be lovely,” said Miss Keller, “but I don't want to trouble you, Miss Lyon.”

When Isabel paused, The King shooed her with his cigar. “Helen's waiting. Hurry up.”

Isabel stalked up the stairs and switched on the light in The King's bedroom, so angry that she was short of breath. She was not imagining it. After all they had been through, he was treating her shabbily, punishing her in front of their guests. She had been working hard to repair their relationship since the night of the burglary, looking the other way when he was unkind to her, putting up with his little girls, throwing him frequent parties to fill his bottomless need for love. She could not make it clearer that she was sorry for what she'd done. When would he ever forgive her?

She gritted back tears. She didn't have to take it. She could just leave him and never come back. He had no idea how much he needed her. He had no clue how to manage his career, cajole his creditors, schedule appearances, arrange travel, write letters, plan his day, hire household help. It was she who had to buy presents for his daughters, Clara and Jean, to set the amount of their allowance and dole it out monthly, to prop up Clara's singing career. It was she who'd had the heartbreaking job of arranging for Jean's care in the sanitarium after she'd seen what a danger Jean had become to herself when she was left unattended. It was she who communicated with the doctor and who wrote often to Jean to keep her spirits up. For all his ordering her around and showing off to guests, The King was helpless as a baby. She kicked his slippers under the bed. He couldn't even button his own shirt collar.