Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

What he did not tell Miss Tennant was the despair he felt when they were sitting together in a room and his mother, holding his hand and patting it nervously, began to go on and on about his newfound virtues: “Here I am with such a distinguished type of gentleman, my old boy John,” she had said. “What, then, can you give me, now? Have you any money for your dear mum?” Her prattle in that regard continued until he fished out from his pocket a pound note, which he gave her, and only then did she seem happy. “Now, then, this is more the way a darling son should be with his mum.” Before stuffing it down the front of her dress, she kissed the bill, adding, “And may it always be so, my boy.”

“Thereafter, Miss Tennant,” Stanley continued, “our relations only improved, I am proud to say, for I have visited Denbigh and her family on a number of occasions since then. But best, Miss Tennant, was the delicious spring — it was 1869—when I had the opportunity to take my mother and my half sister Emma on holiday in Paris. It was in those days, Miss Tennant, that whatever differences there had existed between us — mainly innocent misunderstandings — fell away forever.”

Curious, Miss Tennant then asked: “Does she call you John or Henry?”

“Henry, Miss Tennant.” Then, more sadly: “I have not seen her in some time. She has not been well. Perhaps one day you would like to meet her. I could bring her here one day so that you might paint her — what do you think?”

“For the time being, I am perfectly content with you as my subject, dear Stanley. Now, hold still for a moment.”

WHEN SHE WAS DONE for the day, Miss Tennant put down her brush and began to clean it with turpentine, appraising, as she did so, the fine portrait of Stanley that she was making. It was on that afternoon that she detected a speck of something on Stanley’s face, and as he got up she said, “You have something here,” and, standing before him, as she touched his cheek with her fingers, she suddenly engaged him in a kiss.

“Oh, Mr. Stanley, do trust me,” and she kissed him again. Why she, a lady of great beauty and many other male acquaintances to choose from, was doing so remained beyond his comprehension, but just as he began to feel that, however forward her sudden expression of affection was, he should reciprocate — just then, as he allowed his hand to fall upon her hip, to pull her closer, it was his bad luck that Gertrude happened into the room. “My God,” she cried. “How dare you!” she called out to Stanley. “Now, please leave this house.” She said other things that upset him, and as he went down the steps he heard mother and daughter shouting at one another, the veil of gentility between them lifted.

Out on the sidewalk, a bobby strolled by and saluted Stanley with a tip of his hat, then engaged him in a brief conversation (the usual questions about Africa), and while Stanley attempted to provide quick and satisfying answers, another part of him felt he would be better served to quickly leave the scene of his humiliation. Later that night he was somewhat distracted at a dinner he attended in the company of Mackinnon and Sir Alfred Lyall, and he drank more than his usual “ration”—that was how he categorized such things — of Champagne and brandy.

“You seem a bit low,” Mackinnon said to Stanley. “Is there something troubling you?”

“Not at all,” he answered. “Just work, nothing but work: I will be better in the morning.”

AS FOR DOROTHY, her evening was spent in silence with her mother, Miss Tennant not saying a word during their dinner together. By then Gertrude had offered some words she thought would soothe her daughter’s angered heart: “Now, now, dear daughter, I am only thinking of your own good. Why you seem taken with that charmless explorer is beyond my comprehension; can you fault me for that?”

“You are just jealous of my youth!” was her daughter’s answer.

The irony of it all was that her mother, when in her twenties, had been said to have been a former lover of Gustave Flaubert and, therefore, no stranger to the intricacies of romantic intrigues: Why, then, did she apply another standard to her daughter? In the days that followed her intrusion into the studio, Gertrude tried to convince her daughter that hers had been a natural, motherly response, but Dorothy, whose romantic life to that point had consisted of polite outings with wealthy and rather characterless young men who viewed her as beautiful but eccentric, was determined to never speak to her again. A week passed; several obligations regarding luncheons and dinners bound them together; but throughout Dorothy maintained her silence with her mother. Finally, one night in early August of 1885, when they were turning in to bed, her mother told her:

“My precious love, if it means so much for you to have this Mr. Stanley in your life, than so it will be. Do invite him here again, and I promise that I will be a warmer and more inviting person toward him in the future.”

With those words, Dorothy, feeling somewhat triumphant, said: “Thank you, Mother; I will.”

THEREAFTER, IN AUGUST, Stanley and Miss Tennant were seen in constant company; many were the trips they made to bookstores to browse among the titles; many were the restaurants they dined in. Looking over the restaurant menu at the Hotel Chatham, Miss Tennant ordered a dish called Poularde à la Stanley aux truffes and ate it slowly, with an amused smile on her face, her eyes rarely leaving his gaze. She struck Stanley as being wonderfully happy in that time and always elegant, if not sometimes flighty of nature. (“To see the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, we must appear in the exhibition room at exactly 5:45 p.m. tomorrow, when the sun is in its descent and when the light as the ancient Greeks saw it falls precisely on them, illuminating them before our eyes, as they were meant to be seen. Do not be late.”) Among her closest companions whom he met in those days was one Frederic Myers, her sister Eveleen’s husband, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research. Though he struck Stanley as “somewhat touched in the head,” the explorer accompanied Dorothy to his various lectures. All the while he was somewhat concerned with her dreams about “other worlds.” When she told him one day, “No matter how dreary life may seem to be, there is a more glorious and beautiful world awaiting,” he realized that she was still, despite her age, something of a child. And yet he was enchanted by her, and in her absence he thought tenderly of her.

She was of a generally good temperament in Stanley’s company, and it was a rare thing for her to show impatience with his timidity; rarer still were the occasions when she felt hurt by him. But during one of their lunches at her home, he had, in an attempt at an even greater sincerity, related to her the story of his former infatuation with Alice Pike: The image of the explorer racked by fever in his tent, or treading through the densest of terrains and thinking about her each day for three years, or riding in the portable boat he had named after her on various lakes and rivers — wherein daily he had not only been consumed by his longing for her but had also, to speak symbolically, entered Alice, in the form of a boat — stunned Dorothy. There he was, looking off into the distance, still speaking about her after a decade had passed and of “a hole in my heart that has yet to be filled,” all the while mumbling about the ways she had fooled him and spoiled his trust of women, perhaps forever.