Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Clemens walked into the library and returned to the drawing room. Above the broad, carved mantel in front of them was a window looking out onto the yard from above the fireplace. Clemens patted it. “This was my idea. Few things are cozier than sitting inside on a winter day with one’s family, watching the snow fall just above the crackling fire.” He touched little carvings and vases set along the mantel and atop the bookcases on either side.

“John and Alice have placed everything just as we had it,” he said in that strange voice. “Every vase and carpet that Livy and I had purchased on our early travels. Every beloved-by-the-children carving and knick-knack.” He touched one of the carved pieces on the mantel. “You see, every Saturday, Susy and Jean and Clara would demand stories about various ornaments and paintings that stood on these top shelves and on this mantelpiece. At one end of the procession, you see, was a framed oil painting of a cat’s head; at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life size, called Emmeline , an impressionist watercolor. Between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-a-brac things . . . oh, and also an oil painting by Elihu Vedder, the Young Medusa . So my little girls required me to construct a romance—always impromptu—not a moment’s preparation permitted—and into that romance I had to get all that bric-a-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the cat and finish with Emmeline . I was never allowed the refreshment of a change, end for end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-a-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the procession. These bric-a-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath. In their lives there was no peace. They knew no existence but a monotonous career of violence and bloodshed. In the course of time the bric-a-brac and the pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such violent adventures in their romantic careers.”

“Good practice for a writer,” chuckled Howells.

“The stories often included a circus,” said Clemens. He hadn’t seemed to have heard Howells. He didn’t seem to remember that the other men were in the room with him.

“The girls truly loved stories about a circus and so I usually wove a circus into . . .”

Clemens seemed stunned. He took a few staggering steps and collapsed more than sat in a flowery chair.

“Sam?” said Howells.

“I’m all right,” said Clemens, shielding his eyes with his hand as if hiding tears. “It’s just that . . . it is only, you see, that everything is in its proper place.”

The others stood without knowing what to say.

“I promised Livy that even though I had to see old Hartford friends about investing in some of my endeavors, I would not get close enough to the Farmington Avenue house even to see its high chimney. But as soon as I entered the front door here I was seized with a furious desire to have my entire family in this house again . . . and right away . . . and never go outside the grounds of here and Nook Farm anymore forever. Certainly never again to Europe.”

Clemens lowered his hand and looked around him as if in a dream.

“Everything in its place. Everything that Livy and I so treasured and shopped for and debated purchasing and celebrated in what now feels like our youth. When the girls were babies or toddlers or wee ones.”

He turned and looked directly into the eyes of Howells, then James, and finally Holmes.

“How ugly, tasteless, repulsive are all the domestic interiors I have ever seen in Europe, gentlemen. Compare that baroque awfulness with the perfect taste of this ground floor, with its delicious dream of harmonious color and its all-pervading spirit of peace and serenity and deep, deep contentment. This is simply nothing more than the loveliest home that ever was.”

“It is beautiful, Sam,” said Howells.

It was as if Clemens hadn’t heard him speak. “Somehow, through some dark, malevolent enchantment, I had wholly forgotten our home’s olden aspect,” he said softly, speaking to himself. “This . . . this . . .” Clemens simultaneously slapped his palms on the arms of his chair and brought his polished shoes down hard on the floor, although he meant to signify neither in its isolation. “This place, to me, gentlemen, is bewitchingly bright and splendid and homelike and natural and it seems at this moment as if I have just burst awake out of a long and hellish dream. It is, gentlemen, as if I have never been away and that I will turn my head . . .”

He did so toward the stairway.

“ . . . and see my dearest Livy drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after her.” He looked at them each in turn again. “But I feel in my heart that it is not to be. That it is never to be.”

No one spoke after this.

Clemens passed his hands over his eyes again and stood abruptly. “Enough of this nonsense,” he said, voice harsh. “Let us get up to the billiards room on the third floor where I kept my typewriter . . . that instrument of the Devil around which Mr. Holmes’s murder investigation pivots so ingeniously.”

James and Howells were trailing behind Clemens and Holmes and on the second-story landing, Howells touched James’s sleeve to bring him to a stop.

“That was Sam and Livy’s bedroom,” whispered Howells, pointing to a door at the far end of the hall as Clemens and Holmes climbed out of sight to the third floor. “In Italy they’d bought this amazingly large bed with such an intricately carved headboard that Sam and Livy always put their pillows at the footboard end so, Sam would say, that staggeringly expensive headboard would be the last thing they’d see at night and the first thing they’d see in the morning. John and Alice Day provided their own bed, so Sam and Livy’s carved wonder is still in storage.”

James nodded, but Howells’s soft grip on his forearm continued.

Using his free hand to point to another door far down the hallway, Howells whispered, “That was always my room when I visited. Many’s the time that I would awake to some stealthy sound at one, two, even three o’clock in the morning only to peer out and see Sam in his nightshirt carrying a billiards cue . . . walking the halls in search of a playmate as it were.”

“Did you accommodate him?” whispered James.

“Almost always,” said Howells with a soft chuckle. “Almost always.”

Clemens’s voice suddenly roared down the stairway—“Are you two coming up, or are you busy ransacking through drawers down there in search of treasure? I need someone to play billiards with. The World’s Foremost Consulting Detective doesn’t know how to play the game and refuses to be taught!”

Henry James made mental notes of the American writer’s billiards room. The inward-sloping walls—this room was at the top of the tallest tower rising from the home—had been painted a light red that bordered on pink. The room was dominated by the five-foot-by-ten-foot billiards table, and James noticed that it was one of the more recently designed pocket-billiards tables with the six holes and external pockets of gold cloth and tassels at each corner and halfway down each long side. The billiards pockets gave a sense of Christmas-stocking celebration to the room, and the sloping ceilings made it feel like what it was—a playroom in a high attic.

The floor was completely carpeted over with a Persian rug that boasted patches of more (and brighter) red amongst its intricate designs. A brick fireplace on the far wall was offset from the center of the table and room and James could imagine how cozy this small, high room could be in the winter or on a chilly and stormy summer night. Next to the fireplace was a rough-hewn and open-faced storage cabinet rising about five feet high. There were still a few stacks of papers and books in it.