Twain's End (37 page)

Angry footsteps pounded up the stairs and into the hall, announcing Clara's return. She flounced into the room, then, putting on a pleasant expression, primly lowered herself into the chair opposite her father. “Did I miss anything?”

Mrs. Macy spelled the question for Miss Keller, who sniffed the air.

The King made an unhurried nod at the fox coat that Isabel had folded and laid on an ottoman next to him. “Not as much as these fellows miss their hides.”

Clara made a face at him, then lowered her head at Mr. Macy. She lifted her eyes to gaze at him through her lashes.

Miss Keller smiled in Clara's direction, her sweet fleshy face a study in fondness. “We were discussing whether women prefer to be coddled or challenged.”

Clara winced at Miss Keller's voice, then turned to her father. “What did you say, Papa? Let me guess: coddled. Because that is how he treated my mother,” she explained to the guests. “He treasured her. He showered her with gifts. She was the only woman he ever
loved—the love of his life.” She flicked Isabel a triumphant look. “As everyone knows.”

Isabel stirred her own tea.

The King puffed on his cigar. “Where's Gabrilowitsch?”

“I sent him off.” Clara smiled at her father.

The King stared at her. “He left?”

“I made him.”

“He really left? It's dark.”

“I watched him go,” she said sweetly.

Isabel could hear The King's furious breathing. She worried about the strain on his heart. He glanced at his guests. “Gabrilowitsch is a damn good pianist. You would like him. Isabel, go get him.”

Clara pushed back a fallen lock of hair. “Yes, Isabel. Try. Try to get him.”

January 8, 1909

Stormfield,
Redding, Connecticut

A
LANTERN SWINGING IN HER
hand, Isabel gained ground on the frail top-hatted figure striding down the road with his overcoat flapping. She regretted not taking the time to put on her galoshes before pursuing Mr. Gabrilowitsch. Snow was seeping into her pumps, and now her stockings would be wet while she entertained Miss Keller and the unhappy Macys, at least until she was released when they changed for dinner. However, it looked as if she might catch Mr. Gabrilowitsch. He hadn't gotten far—not even to the lighted carriage house. Like many men, he seemed incapable of the brisk pace that most women could achieve even while in the grips of a corset. Women were perpetually hobbled by long skirts, silly shoes, and steel-ribbed foundations, yet still they outran their men. Now that she thought about it, how appropriately “stays” were named—it was not just flesh that was to be kept in its place.

“Mr. Gabrilowitsch!” she called.

He looked over his shoulder.

“Mr. Gabrilowitsch, please!”

He walked on and then suddenly stopped. He put his black-gloved hand to his ear, knocking his hat askew.

She trotted to his side, then paused to gulp air that smelled of snow and cedar and cold earth. “Thank you for waiting.”

There was something touchingly awkward about Mr. Gabrilowitsch, who was in his early thirties and boyishly small. Perhaps it was his formal hat and voluminous black overcoat, in which he seemed to be playing dress-up. Or it could have been his eyes. Although large and winsome in a mournful way, with their hooded lids, they were out of scale with the rest of his delicate person. They were contracting in the lantern light, as if their owner might be in pain.

He spoke with an accent that hinted of onion-domed churches and shearling hats. “I do not wait for you. I am ill and slow.” He closed his eyes in misery.

“I'm so sorry. What is wrong?”

“You say Miss Clemens wishes to see me, but when I come, she tell me I must go.”

“I didn't think she would react like that.”

“So it was not her idea for me to come? It was you?”

“Not me.” Although she was telling the truth, it was Twain-style truth—true and yet not true.

“You said it was opportune time to see her. Opportune! What does that mean?”

“It means it was an advantageous—”

“I know what ‘opportune' means! I do not know why you say it when she does not want to see me.”

I said it because The King commanded me to, and I am desperate enough to win him back to do anything. Forgive me.
“She's been upset.”

“Upset! Upset! She is always upset. Now it is my turn. I am upset!” He clutched at his ear.

Isabel drew a breath. “Are you unwell?”

“I have ache in my ear. It started last night at my concert.”

“Come back to the house, Mr. Gabrilowitsch, please. I will call a doctor.”

A cutter hung with lanterns crested the hill just ahead on the road. Isabel recognized a driver from the Redding train station; behind him were two men. When they saw Isabel, they half-stood and leaned out the sides of the sleigh. “Miss Lyon! Miss Lyon!”

Reporters. Who had alerted them? She took Mr. Gabrilowitsch's arm. “Please let me call a doctor for you. I can get you all fixed up.”

Surely her stress was tipping her into paranoia. The reporters were probably just there to mine The King for more homespun wisdom, although it was rather late in the day. Surely after all The King's embroidering about Clara and Mr. Gabrilowitsch, the story about Clara and Wark was dead.

“Say!” cried one of the reporters. “Is that Mr. Gabrilowitsch?”

Mr. Gabrilowitsch turned around. “Yes? That is me.”

Isabel tugged him in the direction of the house. “Which ear hurts—the left? I have some drops that I could heat for it. I have heard that blowing tobacco smoke into it helps, too.” Isabel heard the jingle of the reins and the shish of the runners as the cutter grew closer.

“Mr. Gabrilowitsch!” shouted one of the reporters. “Are you still courting Miss Clemens? What do you think of the rumors about her and her accompanist?”

Mr. Gabrilowitsch stopped, and holding his ear, rounded his Russian forest-animal eyes at Isabel.

“Mr. Gabrilowitsch!” the other reporter called. “Is Miss Clemens your gal, or is she Mr. Wark's?”

Mr. Gabrilowitsch squeezed his eyes into a pained squint. “I do not understand. Miss Clemens is not my ‘gal.' But I do not know why you say she can be gal for my friend Will Wark. Will Wark is married. I meet his wife.”

In all of New York, perhaps only Ossip Gabrilowitsch, living in a dense musical reverie when not actually playing the piano, had not heard about Clara's affair with Wark. No wonder that after The King had gone into town in December and driven Clara out of their Stuyvesant Square apartment like the pharaoh forcing Moses out of Egypt, he had invited Ossip to Stormfield for a visit. Who else would have been naïve enough not to realize he was being manipulated?

Isabel steeled herself as the sleigh hissed to a stop and the reporters jumped out, the light from their lanterns careening into the trees.
She put on the smile that showed her delight in representing The King to the press, the one that made her look pleasant while she was dodging the truth and hating herself for it. “Gentlemen, may I ask you for your help?”

“And what about you?” said the one with the gap in his teeth. His cheekbones were the size and color of crabapples. “What about you, Miss Lyon? Are wedding bells still ringing for you and the chief?”

Isabel laughed even as the insides of her chest scorched. “I'm not even going to dignify that with an answer. But gentlemen, please, Mr. Gabrilowitsch and I could really use a hand.”

• • •

Isabel returned to the living room, her stockings squishing in her shoes. She quietly took a chair across from Mrs. Macy, not wanting to disturb Clara, standing at the fireplace with a cup of tea, nor to disrupt the game of verbal one-upmanship being carried on by The King and Mr. Macy. Between them on the sofa sat Miss Keller, her hands on the lips of both men. Judging from the upward tilt of his patrician chin, Isabel guessed that Mr. Macy had not yet realized he was a beaten man.

Isabel was wincing under the new pain emanating like the war beat of tom-toms from the back of her skull when Miss Keller cried, “Miss Lyon—you're back!” She gave a single sniff. “You've gotten wet.”

The men, arguing about which was the best of Shakespeare's plays,
Hamlet
or
King Lear,
weren't listening; nor, in fact, were the other women. Isabel was free to try to determine the extent of her own damp scent and, in doing so, became aware of the scents of the others in the smoky room: The King's smell of cinders and ash; the astringent mix of Mr. Macy's perspiration and hair tonic; Mrs. Macy's bready blend of stale skin and cloth; Clara's expensive perfume of jasmine and clove; Miss Keller's powdery sweetness—scents that were there all along but had been overshadowed by the information delivered by the eyes and ears. What other sensory cues might Miss Keller
be receiving that the rest of the party was blunted to, even while she missed what they were seeing and hearing?

The King leaned away from Miss Keller. “Where's Ossip?”

Clara turned from the fireplace.

“I have him settled upstairs with a hot water bottle,” said Isabel. “I'm afraid he has a terrible earache.” She pictured the reporters, helping Mr. Gabrilowitsch into the house at her direction, then accepting a cup of coffee in the kitchen and the promise of an interview with Mark Twain in the morning as payment. When the morning came, she would have to concoct a reason why the famous humorist could not meet them.

“That's a pity,” said The King. “I wanted Ossip to play for us tonight. How the man can take a block of wood, wire, and ivory and squeeze heavenly music out of it is beyond me. Go get him, Miss Lyon. My angel Helen is homesick for her native music.”

Miss Keller laughed as Mr. Macy spelled The King's quip into her hand. The King smiled around the plug of his cigar, proud to have amused her.

Isabel tried to keep her voice pleasant. “I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that my pumping of the Orchestrelle is the only piano that will be playing tonight.”

Clara sipped her tea. “You're so good at that. Such a good little pumper.”

The King calmly pulled on his cigar.

Still clinging to Helen's hand, Mr. Macy edged forward on the sofa. “Miss Clemens, would you sing for us?”

“Yes, make her sing, Macy,” said The King. “You won't regret it. She's quite the contralto.”

“Bravo—I see you know now which voice I sing in, Papa. You introduced me as a mezzo-soprano the last time I played for your friends.”

The King blew out smoke. “I'm a musical buffoon, Clärchen, dear, you know that. I don't know a tenor from a turnip. But you ought to sing for these nice people. I'm sure they'd love it.”

“No,” she said flatly. Then she added an unrepentant “Sorry.”

Mr. Macy shifted back onto the sofa and glanced at his wife, but her cold stare gave him no quarter. He cleared his throat. “Returning to Shakespeare, what do you make, sir, of the new theory that the Bard of Avon was not really the actor William Shakespeare?”

Isabel grasped at a chance for unthreatening conversation. “Who might it have been?”

Mr. Macy turned to her. “Hm? Frances Bacon.”

“Why Bacon?” growled The King.

Mr. Macy adjusted his chin as he assumed the role of scholar. “As you know, as Queen Elizabeth's chancellor, Bacon was a lawyer as well as a scholar and a scientist. He took interest in the theater, yes, but he was the queen's key man, so it was beneath him to write plays. He had to find a front man, and there, nice and handy, was the unknown actor Will Shakespeare. But perhaps Will Shakespeare was a poor choice if Bacon truly didn't want the credit. The plays are so full of history and law and the study of human nature, who could believe that their creator was a run-of-the-mill actor?”

The King rounded the ash off his cigar. “You might give Mr. Shakespeare more credit, Macy. We simple people have been known to make silk handbags from sows' ears from time to time. I'm the son of a failure with nothing to my name but sheer ambition and blind grit, yet damn it, I wrote
Huck Finn
and a few others. I'm proud of those damn books.”

“Did you write them, Sam?” Clara dropped into a chair. “I thought Mark Twain did.”

Eyeing his daughter, The King drew on his cigar. The tip of his cigar crackled and reddened, eaten by fire. Mr. Macy glanced at Miss Keller, who was sniffing the air like a rabbit. He shifted with discomfort until his gaze caught upon something across the room. His shoulders relaxed. “Hello.”

Ossip Gabrilowitsch stood in the doorway, an ice bag to his ear.

The King waved Isabel back down onto her seat, then languidly
tapped his cigar on his ashtray. “Ossip, get in here. What's wrong? You look like you just got spit out by a cyclone.” Clara turned away, even as Miss Keller's party smiled at him expectantly.