Twain's End (6 page)

When she grew older, she dreamed of traveling to Greece and Italy with a husband who would be every bit as tall, handsome, and wise as her father. But he died when Isabel was nineteen, and with him, her comfortable life. The acres overlooking the Hudson were seized by the bank that held their note; the mortgage was called on Spring Side; the house in Tarrytown, Isabel's mother's ropes of pearls, her father's two-thousand-thirty-six-volume library—all were sold. When the lady from Bleecker Street paid a visit to Mrs. Lyon, prompting Isabel's mother to shoo her three mostly grown children from the room to protect them, there was nothing to offer her, threaten all she wanted.

Isabel's younger sister was soon situated in a hasty marriage, and her brother, Charlie, drifted to New York, but who was to care for Mrs. Lyon? At a time when Isabel's friends were busying themselves with debuts and subsequent impressive marriages, Isabel remained
with her mother in a rented mansion that they could not afford, taking in sewing or constructing pincushions for sale. It had been after an evening of stuffing wood shavings into pink heart-shaped velvet covers that she'd reread
Jane Eyre
and conceived of a steadier, possibly less depressing source of income: becoming a governess.

Her mother objected—no Van Kleek, no Lyon, had ever stooped to such a thing—but neither, Isabel reminded her, had they hawked pincushions among their wealthy friends. Only after Mrs. Lyon had been reminded of Jane Eyre's eventual marriage to her rich employer, Mr. Rochester, had the former Belle of Tarrytown come around.

• • •

Mr. Whitmore twitched his mustache at Isabel in a nervous smile, then tapped on the door with his walking stick. Isabel had never spent a moment alone with her employer, and now here they were, on Mark Twain's covered porch, with a host of cheeping crickets as their only chaperones.

Mr. Whitmore cleared his throat. “Mark's got quite a place here.”

“Yes.”

A horse whinnied in Mr. Clemens's stable. Out on the street, a carriage whirred by, its lit lantern jittering.

“I hope you are enjoying your employment in my home. The children aren't being too difficult, I presume?”

“Not at all. They are a credit to their parents.” Isabel was too absorbed in trying to make sense of the design of the Clemens house to fully grasp his discomfort. Tall, redbrick, and rambling, the mansion was a circus of gables and porches and chimneys, as though its owner had thought if one of a certain feature were good, a half-dozen might be better. Isabel was studying the patterned orange brickwork that belted the house like Indian beads when a fierce face appeared in the sidelight.

The door swung open. A maid, perhaps in her early thirties—
Irish, by the look of her ruddy skin and wiry black hair, and handsome in a gritty sort of way—allowed them in, her chin tilted up just enough to show her contempt.

Isabel had been at the house once before, delivering a book for Mrs. Whitmore to Mrs. Clemens, but had not gone inside. She was not prepared for the wallop to the eye delivered by stepping into the entrance hall. The walls seemed to fly at her in a jumble of angles—silver and brown triangles shimmered like fish scales from each crimson panel. Across the multilevel ceiling tumbled geometric stars vibrating with black and crimson dashes until they were sucked up into a dazzling three-story vortex of stairs. Mirrors and chandeliers glittered. Doors and interior windows opened to rooms throbbing with objets d'art. Penetrating this ambitious display was the prosaic smell of roast chicken, along with the smoke of cheap tobacco.

“Upstairs,” said the maid.

“Thank you, Katy.” Mr. Whitmore touched Isabel's back so briefly she might have imagined it. Away from his home, he seemed uncertain how to act around the family governess, this not-quite-servant, yet clearly not-gentry creature with a thicket of dark hair twisted up in a heavy knot.

Isabel trudged her way up the flowered carpet of the stairs, aware of Mr. Whitmore's gaze upon her back. They reached the third floor.

“Here we are,” he said. She stopped and waited for him to open the door. He looked into her eyes, longer than he'd ever done in his own home. Drawing in a breath, he turned the knob. She walked into a blue cloud of smoke.

The green baize expanse of the billiards table dominated the cramped red-papered space. The nearby folding card table and the two men sitting at it seemed an afterthought. Etchings of drinking vessels and smoking pipes winked from the frosted glass of the far windows. A rack of cues idled on one wall. Only a small desk littered with papers, a wall of pigeonholes jammed with manuscripts, and a
set of bookshelves hinted that more was knocked around this room than celluloid balls. In this flamboyant, spacious mansion, all the endeavors of the man of the house seemed crammed into this one small space, as if he'd been forced to take refuge beneath the rafters.
Refuge from what?
Isabel wondered.

Touching her back again, Mr. Whitmore introduced her to the first gentleman, although she already knew him from the Sunday post-church promenade, he strolling with his wife, and she following the younger Whitmore children, prompting them to walk straight and be silent, which they did because they worshipped her. Like others of his class, the gentleman had eyed her and said nothing; she doubted he knew her name. But she had known his: Reverend Twitchel, but called Joe by the others.

He smiled mildly. “You don't mind if we smoke, do you?”

Isabel hated smoke. “Not at all.”

Mr. Clemens—Mr. Whitmore introduced him by his pen name, Mark Twain—squinted at her as if sizing her up. Or maybe he was just squinting from the smoke snaking up from the cigar wedged between his fingers. At fifty-three, he was handsome in an almost violent way, his gray eyes too piercing, his cheekbones too raw, his arched nose somehow sexual. Although he was only sitting there and smoking, his energy seized the cramped room. His avalanche of silver-shot auburn hair, even his mustache—a coarse, impenetrable, orange and black buffer between the world and the man—was aggressive. Its twin haystacks lifted from his face when he frowned, as if creatures were readying to crawl out from under them. Isabel wanted to touch it, much as one was tempted to touch a cactus.

His speech was as slow as a lion licking its claws. “We don't usually have ladies up here. You're going to see things ladies don't like to see. Smell things ladies don't like to smell.”

“With you, Mark,” said Mr. Whitmore, offering her a chair, “she's more likely to hear things ladies don't like to hear.”

“Damned if you aren't right. Unless she's not a lady.” Mr. Clemens
rolled the tip of his cigar against an ashtray. “Then she won't mind as much.”

Mr. Whitmore flashed Isabel a sympathetic look. “You'd better be careful, Mark. Her father owned the land that they're building the Bear Mountain Bridge on. Miss Lyon, you'll be my partner, all right?”

Isabel nodded.

Reverend Joe sat back in his chair, bumping into the billiards table. “Is that fiasco done yet? They've been working on that bridge for decades.”

“So you're a rich girl,” said Mark Twain.

Was. Was a rich girl.

He tapped away more ash. “My wife, Livy, is a rich girl. She bought this place. Do you like it?”

Reverend Joe coughed.

“Excuse his rough manners, Isabel,” said Mr. Whitmore. “He's from the West. His wife has tried to tame him, but she's not done yet.”

Mr. Clemens continued to smoke and stare as Isabel settled in her chair. She wouldn't let this comedian, this former “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” unnerve her. She might be just a governess, but she was no one's joke, especially not a nouveau-riche Westerner's. She removed her gloves as the first hand was dealt. Mr. Whitmore played his card.

“What's the news on your typesetting machine, Mark?” Reverend Joe put down his ten of spades. “Don't worry, Miss Lyon, our man Twain is going to be richer than his wife once his new investment takes off. He'll leave Carnegie in the shade.”

“I say Mark should stick with his writing,” said Mr. Whitmore. “There's something about that machine that makes me uneasy. Too many moving parts that could fail. It doesn't look good that Mr. Paige has had to ask for so many infusions of cash to prop up his creation.”

Mr. Clemens reordered the cards in his hand. “When Paige and I are counting our money from it, don't say I didn't invite you in on
the action, Whitmore. It takes an old typesetter like me to know that automatic typesetting is the wave of the future. I intend to ride it all the way in like a Sandwich Island surf-bather on his board—only not naked, like they were. At least, not most of the time.”

Mr. Whitmore glanced to see if Isabel was scandalized. She wasn't, except by Mr. Clemens's cocksureness. He gazed around the table, his eyes cooling with triumph within their ginger fringe while he laid down his card: an ace of spades.

Isabel had no spades to follow suit, but she did have trump. Playing it would take away the lead from Mr. Clemens. She placed it carefully on top of his card.

Mr. Clemens's face hardened. The very air in the room seemed to contract. Around the table, eyebrows danced and smirks flickered, but not a word was said until the hand was played out and Isabel picked up all of the remaining tricks.

The men broke out in a roar—except Mr. Clemens.

He touched his cigar to the ashtray as he studied her. “Now, who'd you say you were?”

Mr. Whitmore took up the cards to shuffle them. “Come on, Mark. She's just the governess. Take it easy on her.”

“She was only doing what anyone else would do with trump,” said Reverend Joe. “You yourself say to never nibble when it comes to cards.”

“I say to never nibble when it comes to everything,” growled Mr. Clemens. “But that only applies to me.”

Isabel glanced away, but his gaze drew her back to him.

“How'd you get to be a governess,” he said slowly, “if you're so rich?”

“Mark,” protested Mr. Whitmore.

“Bad luck,” Isabel said.

From behind the arrogant tilt of his nose, behind the hillocks of his mustache, behind the belligerent tendrils of his smoke, he studied her.

“Luck. Huh.” He drew on his cigar, then slowly let it out. “It is lucky to begin life poor; it is lucky to begin life rich. Both are wholesome. But to begin it prospectively rich! Now that is foul luck.”

He flicked ash from his cigar. “My father had land in Tennessee, hundreds of acres. He expected money to come pouring in from it at any moment, to lift my family out of poverty and restore us to our rightful place among kings. When the riches had not yet come by the time I was grown, I thought I might goose my true destiny by prospecting in Nevada. Along with a couple other aspiring tycoons, I took myself into the hills, where we found a creek just spoiling for despoilment. We followed it up to a fork, and then, consulting Fate, took the branch to our left. There we dug and we dug until we had made the most enthusiastic,
emptiest
hole in the territory. Desperate now for cash, I saw that I might write a little piece for the local paper. I liked writing it, and people liked me writing it. I traded in my pan for the pen and never looked back, something I never would have done if I had found the mother lode.”

“Is this another of your tall tales?” asked Mr. Whitmore.

“It's our good fortune that you failed,” said Reverend Joe. “
Tom Sawyer
is part of the American canon now, as is
Huckleberry Finn
and your Mississippi book.”

“And
The Prince and the Pauper,
” said Mr. Whitmore, “and
Roughing It.
And
Innocents Abroad.
What other pieces of your genius did I forget?”

“
A Tramp Abroad
and
The Gilded Age,
but who's counting?” Mr. Clemens took a pull on his cigar. Smoke tumbled out with his words. “Funny thing is, if we had turned right where that creek forked, instead of left, we would have stumbled across a vein that was one of the richest in Nevada. The mine is still putting out today. I would have been richer than Carnegie, Gould, all those robbers. So am I lucky or not?” He stubbed out his cigar. “None but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in.”

“Amen,” said Reverend Joe.

Mr. Whitmore kept his anxious watch on Isabel. “Amen.”

Mr. Clemens leaned back, folded his arms, and then pinned his gaze on Isabel. “Play.”

• • •

Mrs. Whitmore was a small woman, like Isabel, and pleasant-looking in her middle age in spite of the turned-down grooves at the corners of her mouth which put one shamefully in mind of a ventriloquist's dummy. The unfortunate grooves were deepening as she watched Isabel slip black rubbers over her shoes that rainy November night. “Another card game?”

“Apparently so.” Isabel flattened any trace of delight in her voice. Only a fool would be honored that Mr. Clemens refused to play his Friday-night cards without “the little governess,” as he called her, after that evening a number of weeks back. Even the term lessened her—the professor's accomplished daughter had become a diminutive nanny. There was nothing to celebrate, although she'd come to relish Friday nights more than the Fourth of July.

Mrs. Whitmore fingered the filigree edge of the brooch at her throat. “How does Mrs. Clemens like having her house invaded every Friday night?”

“I don't know.” Isabel snapped on the other boot. “I haven't spoken with Mrs. Clemens.”

Mrs. Whitmore cocked her head. “In all these weeks?”

“No.” Isabel straightened. “I've met their daughter Susy briefly—”

“Now, she's an odd duck! So peculiar, did you notice? As high-strung as a Thoroughbred.”

“—and I have heard Clara's voice when she was speaking downstairs—”