Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

As his old friend Stanley had begun to fade in the early months of 1904, so did Livy. Various attacks of breathlessness and torpor and depression came over her, and oxygen and morphine had to be often administered. Worse was that he could rarely see her: Livy’s doctor limited his visits to two minutes a day — once again! — as if he, the love of her life, were somehow harmful to her. For those months she had remained in bed, attended by a nurse, Margaret Sherry, and by Katy Leary, their housekeeper, who had joined them from America.

Occasionally Clara went into her mother’s room to pass an hour by her side, as her presence seemed to calm her; but neither Samuel nor Jean, with her own continuing frail health and tendency toward fainting, was allowed to freely visit her. Clemens was so grieved by their separation that he would sometimes go into her room to quickly embrace her and cover her neck with kisses: Then suddenly, fearing that he would harm her, he would just as quickly leave.

To assuage his misery — and the long wait — he worked on his autobiography, dictating aloud to his secretary.

AT LAST, BY MAY, the weather became glorious; the gardens went into bloom, wisteria fell over the walls, and butterflies came lilting over the blossoms. And the palazzo itself, while never entirely warm, had, with its fireplaces burning, at least lost its constant chilliness. With the appearance of the sun and Florence gloriously vivid to the west — the duomo , the campanile, the Medici Chapels, and the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio glowing in the distant plain, and with many villas and houses vanishing in and out of the light, as if time had dissolved them — the dreariness of that setting was transformed by a peculiar Tuscan magic. (Clara had the best of the views, because from her room, she could look out at the scenery through ten-foot-high windows.) Clemens, newly invigorated and inspired by the change of weather, began to search anew for a villa near Fiesole.

Livy seemed to become better by early May, but during one of Samuel’s brief visits with her, she looked at him with haunted eyes and said: “I don’t want to die, but I will, won’t I?”

Sometimes Clemens would take long strolls along the pathways of the villa, enjoying the gardens and the beautiful decay of its moldering, ivy-covered walls. His passage meandered under arbors heavy with grapevine; or he would head out to the stable to watch his daughters ride around the estate on the gray mares that their mother had given them. But at around four, he always waited for his servant to bring the papers in from Florence, among them the London Times (always a few days old), La Stampa , and Corriere della Sera , which he would go over with an Italian dictionary in hand. But on that day — May 11, 1904—he had no need to, for even with his quite limited Italian there was no mistaking the headline: IL ESPLORATORE HENRY MORTON STANLEY È MORTO A LONDRA, IERI MATTINA.

Greatly saddened by the news, Clemens called forth his memory of first seeing Stanley, so many years before, standing by the railing of the boiler deck of the steamship — the scene coming back to him with an immediacy that confounded him. It was as if, as they had sometimes discussed, the past, as cumbersome as it was in memory, seemed only separated from the present by the thinnest of lines, and more so as one got older — a tautological folly. Like free-winging angels, exempt from the linear constrictions of time, memory did as it pleased. As he thought about his friend a few tears came to his eyes; these he brushed away. For by that time in his life so many old friends had passed on — just a week earlier he had read of the death of Antonin Dvo ák, whom he had gotten to know in Vienna; there were others, but Stanley went back so far in his life that he immediately set out to write Lady Stanley a letter of condolence, despite the fact that he would have preferred to not dwell on the subject at all.

Villa di Quarto, Firenze

May 11, ’04

Dear Lady Stanley,

I have lost a dear and honored friend — how fast they fall about me now, in my age! The world has lost a tried and true hero. And you — what have you lost? It is beyond estimate — we who know you, and what he was to you, know that much. How far he stretches across my life! I knew him when his work was all before him, fifteen years before the great day when he wrote his name faraway up on the blue of the sky for the world to see and applaud and remember. I have known him as friend and intimate ever since. I grieve with you and with your family, dear Lady Stanley. It would be “we,” instead of “I,” if Mrs. Clemens knew, but in all these twenty months that she has lain a prisoner in her bed, we have hidden from her anything that could sadden her. Many a friend is gone whom she asks about and thinks is still living.

In deepest sympathy I beg the privilege of signing myself,

Your friend,

S

Wherever she was there was Eden.

— SAMUEL CLEMENS, “EXTRACTS FROM ADAM’S DIARY,” 1904

Not a month later, a shout was heard coming from Livy’s sickroom: “Come quickly, Mr. Clemens!”

And with that Clemens rushed to her side. Not a few moments before, she had said to Katy Leary, “I’ve been awful sick.” And while Miss Leary, holding Livy in her arms, told her, “You’ll be all right,” she gasped, then slumped forward, her chin resting on her housekeeper’s shoulder. Samuel knelt before her; as her eyes were still open, he hoped she would recognize him. But she said not a word, neither did she move; in that instant, as it occurred to him that she had been released into her final peace, his heart began to beat rapidly; then his right eye and cheek began to twitch and his stomach went into knots, and while he could hear what was going on around him — his daughters, now beside him, wailing out in grief — he felt himself at a far remove from that room and only came around when Clara and Jean huddled near him, weeping. Then indeed, when he realized she was gone, he staggered from the room, opened a liquor cabinet, his hands shaking, and bolted down two full glasses of whiskey. Her visage, with her lips so tightly pursed, neither smiling nor contorted into a frown, haunted him in its lifelessness. Everything seemed lifeless then; though he knew that a mantel clock was surely ticking, its hands seemed frozen in place, and through the windows he could see that the gardens were absolutely still — in those moments, he wondered if he had been the one to die; but this was not the case, and he began to weep and weep. What else could he do but go back into that room and sit helplessly before her throughout the night and into the next day? The doctor had come in at five with all manner of arcane devices and closed the doors as he made preparations to embalm her. At least, in those hours, he consoled himself by thinking that in the repose of sleep and release from her sufferings, the gauntness of her features had faded and she became, in his eyes, beautiful again — an angel.

“Just remember, if you can, wherever you have gone, that I adored you, and not only for the way you helped me raise our children but also because you never abandoned me; not once did you falter, and I will never forget that. And when you are in the other world, with Susy, I hope that you will always remember the day we met, in New York City in 1867, when an organ grinder was playing ‘In the Sweet By and By’ on the sidewalk across from the St. Nicholas Hotel, and the way you, in your beauty and quiet ways, looked at me, as if I would certainly be your man.”