Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

SUFFERING A SEVERE DEPRESSION, Clara did not leave her mother’s bedroom for days; Jean was visited by a sudden epileptic seizure. Clemens occupied his time writing letters, among them this one to Lady Stanley in London.

Villa Reale di Quarto

June 10, ’04

Dear Lady Stanley,

As you no doubt already know, Livy is gone, and I am numb, as you must have been over Stanley. Even now we are preparing for her transport to America — to Elmira, where she will rest beside Susy and others of our family. What can I say but that hers was the best heart that ever beat beside my own? I blame myself for her premature passing. She should have had a much easier life than the one I gave her. But she put up with me, my irascible personality and all, and her reward for so many kindly efforts was nothing less than heartbreak. At least her death was instantaneous: I do not think that even after twenty-two months of suffering (by my count) she expected it to come so suddenly, but it did.

As to your deeply held beliefs in spiritualism, though I am numbed, I still see Mrs. Clemens in my every waking thought. I dream about her — perhaps she is a ghost, but I doubt it: I don’t sleep much in any case. But she comes to me all the same, not so much as a spirit who might be contacted — what I know you believe in, with your spiritualistic societies — but as a calming note during my nights. And so I thank you for the abundance of your thoughts in that regard.

Yours,

Samuel

TOWARD THE END OF JUNE, when the Clemenses finally departed for America on the steamship Prinz Oskar , they arranged to transport the two gray mares that Livy had bought for her daughters. Their Italian butler and maid had also come along with their party. On that journey his daughters’ faces remained hidden behind mourning veils so thickly meshed that one could not see their eyes. Clemens spent much of the transatlantic journey stretched out on a lounge chair on the deck, bundled up against the high winds, ever aware that his wife, in a lavender dress and velvet slippers, lay in her coffin in the ship’s hold. Looking out over the horizon and the endlessness of the churning waters, he was so stunned by the depth of his sadness that he hardly ever spoke.

When you and I are dead and forgotten, the name of Stanley will live!

— DOROTHY STANLEY TO A RIOTOUS MOB DURING STANLEY’S FIRST CAMPAIGN FOR PARLIAMENT, 1895

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED Stanley’s passing, his widow lost her taste for visiting Furze Hill but continued to do so in good weather for Denzil, who had grown fond of the outdoor life. Not far removed in temperament from Stanley, he was a lonely-seeming child, despite the tutors and the smothering attentions of his mother and grandmother. Delicate in his manners, and already better educated than most children of his age, he seemed to come to life only when he was out in the countryside and free to consort with the farmhands and their children and roam the property’s gardens and woods. Even if his father had once survived the most rugged terrains in the world, Denzil, their precious treasure, was guarded closely, as if he were a young prince. He was never allowed to climb trees or swim in the pond Dolly had named Stanleypool, and he could not venture out without a servant trailing behind him at a discreet distance. But he was already an enthusiastic, if not entirely accomplished, horseman, having been taught to ride at the age of seven; his equestrian pursuits were always conducted under the vigilant eye of a footman who led him along by the reins.

Still, he was turning into the kind of fine and well-bred adolescent that Stanley would have wanted him to be — not too foppish or spoiled or overly aware of his high social standing. Never told by Stanley that without his and Dolly’s intercession he would likely have ended up as a ward of some parish orphanage in Wales, he moved through his childhood as humbly and happily as possible for a boy who’d witnessed his own father’s gradual death. Among his interests were the language of French and collecting cartes de visite : he wrote to many a family friend requesting such items and amassed a great variety of stamps and butterflies as well. While lacking any genetic link to the drawing talents of his adoptive mother and father — she’d always admired Stanley’s hand-drawn maps and illustrations of the various arcane objects he wished to record in his travels — Denzil seemed to possess some natural ability of his own. It helped that his mother had taken considerable joy in teaching him the rudiments of drawing with pencil and watercolors and that he had had much exposure to the artistic habits she resumed after the upheavals of her husband’s final illnesses.

Even in her widow’s life, she rarely refrained from spending at least an hour or two every day in the room known as the birdcage, working on some unfinished portraits or scenes; and while she did not take long strolls around the city, as she once used to, Dolly, commissioned by friends to make new illustrations for books and articles about the life of poor children in London, still visited her favorite squares by coach, looking for more urchins to sketch. Dressing in black for a year, she had not allowed her sadness to keep her from renewing that practice, nor did she abstain from wearing jewelry, for, while wanting to seem in mourning, she never wanted to appear drab or commonplace. And while her mother, Gertrude, continued to disapprove, as she always had, of bringing such children into the mansion—“It is below your station,” she would say — when those often unruly children came into her studio, Dolly remained open-minded enough to allow Denzil into the room while she drew her subjects. She even allowed him to make his own sketches and talk with the children, though they did not have much in common. They were the children of beggars or washerwomen or garbage pickers, while he, as she was wont to remind him, was the son of one of the greatest men who’d ever lived in England.

Only ten years of age, this slight and long-nosed boy seemed to understand this. The hours he had spent with his father, listening to him describe the “dark” regions he’d traveled, listening to his lectures about the making of maps or where a particular spear or arrowhead had come from — all these he had not forgotten. And there were his father’s books in the library — rows and rows of them, in many languages, and while he had not yet developed the taste or patience for actually reading them, he sometimes picked one of them off a shelf and would sit, its pages opened before him, astounded by the sheer magnitude of words and thinking that his father was still alive because of them.

Dolly remembered how well composed Denzil had been through all the eulogies at Westminster; he sat without moving for most of the service, only turning once when the shadow of some bird traveled across the stained-glass windows and seemed to cross the floor toward the altar. Afterward, during the recessional, he slowly marched out of the church with his family, clouds of incense preceding him, his hand in his mother’s. Then their progress toward Waterloo station: On public buildings the Union Jack fluttered at half-mast, and the streets were lined with people, many of them working-class folk who counted Stanley as one of their own. Most were standing on the curbs solemnly; some applauded, and some dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs. Through all this Denzil had been well behaved, even stoic; but even so, he asked his mother, “Where will Father go?”