Twain's End (13 page)

She eased toward a velvet couch, coughing. Isabel put down the box, vibrating with its efforts, as Mrs. Clemens slowly lowered herself into her seat.

“Is there anything I can do for you, ma'am?”

“I can see why Youth chose you,” said Mrs. Clemens. “You stand up to him even as you worship him. He can't resist either in a woman, especially when done simultaneously. I did the same once.”

The music tinkled along in its dainty pirouette.

Isabel found her tongue. “Mrs. Clemens, with all due respect, you and I have never spoken. How can you say these things about me?”

Mrs. Clemens closed her eyes. “Youth got me this music box years ago. He told me that he got it in a San Francisco whorehouse. I didn't know whether to believe him. Our Samuel—if he seems to
be lying, he's telling the truth. Perhaps you've discovered that by now.” She laughed. “He has revised his story, saying he bought it for six-hundred-fifty dollars in Geneva. He told me another time that he bought it for Katy in New York, then took it back from her. Which do you think is the fiction?”

She opened her eyes. “Clara likes you, Miss Lyon, and so does Jean, and for that I am eternally grateful. They haven't many friends, I'm afraid. Mark Twain has extracted a terrible price from them. But you make them happy, and for that you will always have a place, if not actually in my home, then near it.”

Isabel's value to Mrs. Clemens was not as a secretary, it was now clear, but as a companion for her grown daughters. For them she had allowed her husband to hire Isabel. And now Mrs. Clemens understood that their companion had fallen in love with the master. How Mrs. Clemens must loathe her.

“I've upset you,” said Mrs. Clemens. “I'm sorry. That was not my intention. I shock myself with what comes out of my mouth these days. I seem to have lost my ability to temper my words. I've been stripped of my protective covering—the unadulterated truth just comes spilling out. It's not an attractive quality, I fear. No one wants to hear the actual truth. Not even me.” She reached for Isabel. Her hand was as delicate as a wren's foot when she grasped Isabel's fingers. “Please go with us to Italy. You'll make the girls so happy, and it's a beautiful place. I'm not so bad. I promise.”

“Your offer is generous, and I thank you, but I have my mother to consider.”

“Oh. I thought she was coming. Youth told me that he invited her.”

Isabel thought of her mother, already bragging to the butcher yesterday about their upcoming trip to Italy, as Isabel had paid for their chop.

The music jingled more slowly, winding down once again. “She'll adore it,” said Mrs. Clemens. “I think we shall all be happy in the warm Italian sunshine. I was happy there once, when Susy was alive. We were all happier when Susy was alive.”

The door swung open. Clara's glare of surprise was so like her father's. “Miss Lyon, I didn't know you were here. Mamma, you said you needed a nap!”

“Don't chase her off; I sent for her. I'm feeling quite peppy at the moment.”

“The doctor says five-minute visits.”

Mrs. Clemens leaned her head back against the chair. “A prisoner of my own rules.”

The music stopped. The vibration of the final note gently strummed the air.

“We were just finishing.” Mrs. Clemens coughed feebly. “Thank you for coming, dear. Let me know if you need trunks for the voyage. We have plenty. Clara, be a dear and crank up the box.”

• • •

That night, Isabel stopped typing to massage her sore fingers. She leaned forward to advance the page trapped against the roller of the typewriting machine, then, by the flickering yellow light of the oil lamp, examined the nine lines of type that she had achieved in a half hour's time. She sat back, too warm in her high-necked linen shirtwaist. The walls of the parlor in the rented cottage seemed to close in around the table at which she sat. Everything irritated her since leaving Mrs. Clemens's room earlier that day—the sound of her mother's chewing at dinner, the hesitant drip of the leaky kitchen tap, the feel of her own hair growing oily.

Her mother looked up from her mending. “Does Mr. Clemens really think that clackety instrument is an improvement over the work of a good old-fashioned scribe? My father's clerk could put out a beautifully penned letter in half the time it takes you to peck on those keys, and he didn't give one a headache while he was doing it. Surely Mr. Clemens could afford a good clerk.”

“Modern businessmen have lady stenographers to take their dictation and typewrite their words. Or they employ lady typewriters, if dictation isn't required. Mr. Rogers uses one.”

“What a terrible trend.”

“I rather like typewriting. I'll get better at it.” She had no choice but to improve. She would need the skill once she left Mr. Clemens.

“And you will have fingers as fat as that German butcher's once you do. The brute strength it takes to press those keys! You won't be able to fit a ring on your finger when you are done, mark my words. What will Mr. Bangs have to say?”

“Nothing, I fear.”

“That's not true. He likes you, I can tell.” In a singsong voice, Mrs. Lyon added, “Better keep your ring finger ready!”

Isabel sighed. What was wrong with her that she did not want to wear Mr. Bangs's ring? She did not want to bring his slippers, she did not want to bear his children, she certainly did not want to share his bed. But he was half Mr. Clemens's age and had lovely dark eyes. He was not married. He did not have a sick wife who was her employer, an intelligent, fierce wife who hid in an invalid's body.

A knock sounded upon the door.

Mrs. Lyon looked at her daughter. “Mr. Bangs would never come this late! He's a gentleman.”

Her blood throbbing, Isabel thought of one who was not a gentleman. In spite of his mansion, his friends at Standard Oil, his trips around the world, his endorsement by dukes and kings, he was not a gentleman, not at all. She opened the door.

Mr. Clemens glared at her. He clasped his hands behind his back, the way he held them when he dictated letters or when he was thinking about his writing. “She talked to you.”

Fury blazed up inside her. She stepped outside on the slab of stone that served as a porch, then closed the door against her mother's curious gaze. “Your wife? Yes, she did.”

“What'd she say about me?”

She shook her head.

His expression sharpened to the point of cruelty. “If I'm going to know you and you're going to know me, you have to tell me.”

“I'm your wife's secretary. You don't have to know me.”

“You know you're more than that.”

The urge flared up to strike him. She didn't want to be more than that. To be more was shameful and degrading. She would be hated for disrupting the beloved family of the most loved man in America.

A growing rumble marked the approach of a train to the nearby station.

He brought his hand from behind his back. He thrust a framed picture at her. She took it and held it up to the light of the window. It was his photograph. “For when I can't be with you.”

She looked at him, incredulous. This was her reward for risking everything? She should smash it on the doorstep.

The train whistle moaned in the night.

“She said that you used to have slaves.”

He pulled back.

“That masters had access to their female servants.”

He drew in a breath, then burst into one of his rare laughs.

“It's not funny,” she said when he did not cease.

He leaned forward and kissed her on top of her head. “Good night, Lioness.”

He melted into the night as the train thundered into town, its brakes screeching, metal upon metal.

November 1903

Florence, Italy

M
RS. LYON REPOSITIONED HER
hatpin, repeatedly stabbing her chignon until she found traction. How was she to keep her hat on her head when she was being tossed like a lettuce salad with Isabel, Jean Clemens, and that rude maid Katy down the filthy streets of Florence? In the States, they would have called this “cab” in which their teeth were being loosened a wagonette. It amounted to no more than a covered cart. The passengers were given the same rough ride as their precious luggage, trunks containing pieces of heirloom Van Kleek china. All around them, people were on foot. Where were the decent carriages in this city?

They rattled past an applecart attended by a pretty woman wearing a shawl on her head and an apron wrapped around her slim waist. Her Charles would have stared. Men liked that kind of thing, shawls and aprons and such. Why? Did it remind them of their nannies? For a man of Charles's stature to fall for an apron and the poor Italian girl wearing it—their own maid!—when his own children were babies: it was a terrible pill to swallow. And then for Charles to set her up on Bleecker Street, unbeknownst to Mrs. Lyon, after Mrs. Lyon had dismissed her! What a shock it had been when the little fortune hunter had come begging after he'd died, demanding money for his alleged bastard child. The only thing that had crushed Mrs. Lyon more was
when her own beloved son had passed away—of a heart attack, her poor angel!—when he was a youth of twenty-seven and in the pink of health. Why did such bad things happen to good people?

Mrs. Lyon shuddered, although for a day in late November, it was not as cold as the Tarrytown of her youth. In fact, it was pleasantly warm—unseasonably warm, Jean Clemens had said when she met them at the hotel, having arrived in Italy with the rest of the Clemens family several weeks before them. Mrs. Lyon reminded herself that she would do well to keep an open mind about this place, to try to enjoy it. Isabel had presented the move as an opportunity to experience European culture firsthand, with the cream of royal society, no less, and it was true that Mr. Clemens had procured an estate from an Italian countess. The most famous man in the world could do that. Let Mrs. Lyon's friends in Tarrytown say that
they
had lodged in aristocratic accommodations in Europe, no matter how well their husbands had invested.

But as the shoddy vehicle shuddered across the bridge by their hotel (dirty, small, no hot water, hard cookies for breakfast), only to come upon naked Italian urchins diving off the bank into the muddy brown Arno, Mrs. Lyon was having her doubts. Why, here they were, approaching one of the most important palaces in town—at least according to Jean, and one did wonder about anything she said—and there was yet another statue of a man with his parts on full view. Had they never heard of loincloths in this town? Even the Catholics back home knew to artfully drape them over their Jesuses. And now Jean was putting her lorgnette to her eyes to look, although
that
needed no further magnification. It was the size of a prize crookneck squash.

“I don't know how you can stand looking at it,” Mrs. Lyon cried.

The maid Katy, who'd been glaring at the sky as if it might levitate her from the wagon, threw her a disrespectful look. Mrs. Lyon would have given her notice then and there if she were hers.

“Looking at the dog?” said Jean. “The one at Hercules's feet could be the twin of my little Rosie. I found her in London. She snapped
so much that Mamma didn't want me to keep her, but I knew she was sweet. You can't judge a creature's temperament when it's in distress.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Lyon lowered her gaze from the crookneck squash and squinted at the recumbent stone animal. It was a wolf, wasn't it? “Have we much farther to go?”

“Mother,” said Isabel, “all around us are the treasures of the Medicis. Can't you just enjoy them?”

Jean trained her glasses up where Mrs. Lyon was sure that she shouldn't. No wonder Mr. Clemens insisted upon a constant chaperone for her, although she was a grown girl of twenty-three. Isabel claimed that the two Clemens daughters were too sheltered for their own good, but Isabel was not a mother and did not understand.

“Our villa was built by a Medici,” said Jean. “Cosimo the First used it as a summer retreat.”

“Retreat!” Mrs. Lyon bleated. “That sounds far.”

“It's not bad. Only up into the hills. We look down over the city—you can even see the Duomo. There are lots of birds up there. You'll love it.”

Birds!
thought Mrs. Lyon grimly. She wondered once more what was wrong with Mr. Clemens's youngest daughter. Isabel had hinted that something wasn't right about the girl, but Mrs. Lyon couldn't get it out of her. Isabel was so loyal to that family that it was unhealthy. As much as Isabel wanted to think that she was one of them, she wasn't. Mrs. Lyon feared that it was all going to come to tears.

“There's the Duomo,” Jean announced.

Mrs. Lyon gazed at the building rising from the stones of the street. Gaudy, if you asked her. The builders had crosshatched the white facade with so much orange and green marble that it was as plaid as a Scotchman's kilt.