Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

But then there came over Stanley’s expression a certain sadness: Though he rarely wept when such feelings of loss came to him, his face grew tense and solemn, and a slight mistiness entered his eyes.

“I was so taken with him, Miss Tennant, that in the months after finishing my memoir of that first expedition— How I Found Livingstone —I put my mind to writing a children’s novel with which I’d hoped to please Kalulu: It was an African tale set in the wilder climes of Zanzibar, a story that I could not wait for him to read. I called it My Kalulu, Prince, King, and Slave: A Story of Central Africa. I held him in such high esteem that when David Livingstone died in 1873 and his body had been brought back to England for his funeral at Westminster, I insisted that Kalulu, of whom Livingstone was fond, be among the pallbearers, a most distinguished group of explorers. Walking directly behind me, as he always had in Africa, Kalulu, in a smart dark suit, comported himself with great dignity and serious bearing. I was very proud of him that day, Miss Tennant, as I would be until he met his end.

“You see, Miss Tennant, when I set out once again for Africa in 1874, I had no choice but to bring Kalulu along with me. As I would be away for an indeterminate amount of time, I did not want to board him in some school. He welled up with tears at the mention of being separated from me, his ‘white father.’ Having no notion of the dangers and difficulties awaiting us, I decided that the only practical solution was that he come along in his faithful role as my rifle bearer. And so we set out. By then the child, who had been a little boy, had grown into a man, springing up, as I would always say, like a palm tree. Taller than I and knowing the run of such expeditions, he was one of my most trusted and beloved companions — and rugged and persevering as well. Kalulu survived many of the calamities we encountered, from near starvation to attacks by the natives. However, there came a day in 1877 when my expedition began a descent from a plateau along a route of steep gorges and rapids some one hundred and fifty-five miles long — these deafening and impossible cascades I had named Livingstone Falls. Those cataracts were so treacherous that we soon saw our first casualties, among them one of my officers. I almost suffered from the same fate, for I was also thrown into the rapids and would have drowned had I not been rescued by one of my assistants, a strong swimmer, a brave Zanzibari named Uledi. But my dear Kalulu was not so fortunate. As he rode in those same rushing waters, his steersman had allowed the canoe to crash into some rocks, and poor Kalulu was among the six men carried off into the currents. The last I saw of him, from a distance, he was being swallowed up by a whirlpool at the bottom of a falls, which I then named after him — the Kalulu Falls. What he must have been thinking I cannot say, but it is my hope that he went down with good thoughts of me.”

Dolly took his hand in her own and lowered her head slightly, as if attempting to look into his heart.

Gertrude

DESPITE HER PROMISES, Gertrude continued to regard Stanley’s presence in her and her daughter’s lives without enthusiasm. Grudging in the respect she accorded his accomplishments, she found his general demeanor and manner so telling of his lowly roots as to feel embarrassed whenever they ventured out in public. His manner of eating particularly offended her, for he ate quickly, chewed loudly, and so relished his meals that he always finished, as no true patrician would, every last morsel of food. The tics of his digestive system she also found trying.

While there was never any telltale sign of personal unseemliness about him — in fact he took considerable pride and care in his grooming — Gertrude thought him filthy inside: More practically, she could not imagine why any woman, let alone her own daughter, who could have her choice of eligible men, would want to bind herself to the burdens that Stanley, in his unsteady health, would no doubt bring to a union. In that regard, he did his cause no good by openly admitting that, from time to time, he would unexpectedly come down with bouts of his recurring malaria, which would lay him up in bed for weeks at a time; furthermore, obviously aged by such maladies, Stanley reminded Gertrude, almost seventy, of her own mortality, and in thinking of her daughter’s future happiness, she wondered how many years he, with his worn-down system, would have left to him.

EVEN IF DOROTHY SEEMED VERY much taken by him, for reasons beyond her mother’s understanding, by late August, after only two months of putting up with her own unhappiness about their budding courtship, Gertrude Tennant decided that it would not be a bad time for her and her daughter to go on vacation by way of a Continental tour. It was on a late August day, when Stanley had come by the house for lunch, that Gertrude announced that she and Dorothy would be going away until November. Since the tour had been suggested by Dorothy herself earlier in April, before she had met Stanley, her mother’s abrupt decision did not come as a surprise; and while it had slipped into the back of her mind by then, Dorothy, in fact, did not mind the prospect of revisiting her favorite museums; nor, by way of collecting her emotions, did she object to the perspective that such a separation might give her — for in midlife, she was somewhat perplexed by her growing attachment to a man whom many others apparently found stern and unlikable.

That day Dorothy spoke of her excitement over the prospect of painting from nature, as they would also visit the country estates of friends in Scotland and Wales; besides, though she would greatly miss him, they would never really be apart. As she later told Stanley, “I will write you every day of my thoughts of you, as I know you will write me.”

Later that evening, as he lay in bed in his New Bond Street flat, trying to read himself to sleep, he decided, as he occasionally did, to make an attempt at the highest of the arts, the writing of poetry. It was about one in the morning when he, feeling both relieved and disconcerted at the sudden announcement of her departure, wrote out these rudimentary lines:

Oh, the weary lion am I

Parched from want of water

Searching far and wide

For the respite of dusk and the

Slumber of the wilds…

Gifts

THAT CHRISTMAS HE VISITED the shops of Oxford Street in search of a gift for her: He considered sable-lined plumed hats, majestic jewelry boxes, and intricately inlaid mother-of-pearl Swiss clocks with automatic movements (cherubs — how he adored cherubs, poised to ring little golden bells). He looked at elaborate purses woven with gold thread, ornate ivory chess sets, pearl necklaces, silver perfume decanters, gold earrings, an antique leather globe — the possibilities confounded him. But finally he settled on a diamond bracelet (which cost him five hundred pounds) and, apropos of their dinner with Gladstone, a copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi , which he had come across in the J. & E. Bumpus bookshop on Oxford Street. (Her mother called the first gift splendid, the second “somewhat stingy.”) Miss Tennant gave Stanley a fine first edition of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers , which, in his love for that author, delighted him. (Years later, that same edition would sit among other books in his widow’s home.)

Spending Christmas Day by her side at Richmond Terrace, he, sitting in front of the parlor fireplace, thought it a possibility that he would one day have the kind of Christmas he had never known: with a wife and family beside him.

More than a month later, on January 28, 1886, his birthday, Dorothy presented him with a silver adornment for his watch chain, a coin-like token that bore her monogram and said in Swahili: BULA MATARI, TALA, or “Breaker of rocks, remember me.” (While he celebrated his birthday on the aforementioned date, his favorite anniversary of the year was always November 10, the day he found Livingstone.) And she had given him other gifts, for no particular reason — books, mainly. They always came with an inscription such as: REMEMBER THAT LOVE CONQUERS ALL or NEVER FORGET THE ONE WHO CARES MOST FOR YOU. These he cherished and kept in a section of a bookcase that he set aside for her missives.