Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE ONE DAY, after he had settled back into his New Bond Street flat, was a letter from Dorothy Tennant. It had been written one morning when she had awakened from yet another of her dreams about him.

June 7, 1890

Dearest Stanley—

I know that you may have thought of never hearing from me again, but I should let you know that although I behaved foolishly in regard to you, for the many months of your absence — four years now — I have often reflected tenderly on the matter of our mutual affections; these thoughts came to me when I realized my own despair over the possibility that you might have come to harm in Africa. I prayed for your safe return nightly — I consulted often with Lord Mackinnon as to word of your well-being… In short, dear Henry, I realized how dearly I held you and regretted my grievous and selfish actions. Though you must surely think me bold to write you now, after so long a time, it is because I have been struggling to change… to turn away from the selfishness that blinded me to your worth as a man. If I have been neglectful in this regard, then understand that I am more than what I was then and would be honored and deeply glad to see you again, not because you have done great things but because I fear I might never see you again.

Your sincere friend,

Dorothy Tennant

STANLEY DID NOT ANSWER THIS LETTER and did his best to avoid her. Each time he went to a reception or banquet in his honor, his face would heat up at the prospect of meeting Miss Tennant. But in the small circles of London, it was inevitable that they would meet again. It happened one evening at a reception held by Mackinnon in Stanley’s honor at the Langham hotel. With Mackinnon by his side, Stanley — dressed in the same white corded Egyptian officer’s uniform that Dorothy would immortalize in her painting of him — stood about, gloomily sipping Champagne. Then he saw her, in the bloom of her beauty — even more beautiful than he recalled — standing in the corner of the room demurely with her mother, the old bat nodding at him when she caught his eye. Why was it, he wondered, that Dorothy then beamed a smile at him, despite all the public humiliation she had put him through? (Everyone in London knew about her rejection of his proposal.) And why did the very air around him seem to take on such a heavy weight, as if its molecules had grown dense? Why did his pulse race — either anger or nascent love teeming through him? He could not say. Hoisting her own Champagne glass up to him, Dorothy nodded, and he turned away, his face flush. Mackinnon, who had taken the liberty of inviting the Tennants to his fete on the chance that Stanley might reconcile with her (for she had seemed genuinely affectionate in speaking of Stanley in his absence), turned to his explorer friend, asking: “But Stanley, what harm would there be in your speaking to her?”

“I would sooner be back in the swamps and up to my neck with leeches,” he snapped.

As he occupied himself in petty conversation with his admirers, she noticed him turning to look toward her despite his efforts not to do so — an effort he would never admit to undertaking. Inevitably, she worked her way across the room, her progress slow, for in her way she was famous, too, and she often stopped to speak with her own admirers. Finally, when she found herself standing a few paces from him, she was startled to see how the great man had been aged by his travels. It was not so much that his hair had turned completely white but that his whole being, which had seemed, in his moments of good health, tireless, now seemed subdued, even frail. She was suddenly aware that he had seemed to have shrunk somewhat, not in matters of height — she was some three inches taller than he was — but by way of a diminished vitality. His air of immortality had faded. All at once, though he refused to look her squarely in the eye, she found this softer, more world-weary Stanley somehow more appealing than the previous Stanley, and without even considering how it would look to others, Dorothy took hold of his hands and held them close to her heart: “Oh, Mr. Stanley, if you only knew how long I’ve waited to see you again.” Then: “But will you not speak to me?”

“Miss Tennant,” he said somewhat coldly, “I appreciate your sentiments, but please, do me a service: Go off into your fine life and leave me alone.”

“I don’t believe you mean it,” she said — and the truth was that he trembled when speaking it. “You will hear from me — again and again until we can be as we once were.”

And that was how they left it.

MORE NOTES FROM MISS TENNANT continued to arrive at his flat: He chose to ignore them. Still he received more letters — first of farewell (“When shall we say our proper good-byes?”), then others of devotion (“Having been so foolish a girl, unacquainted with love, I rejected you; but now I feel as if by doing so I have exiled myself to a lightless land of complete unhappiness”; “I am yours whether you will or will not be my husband”; “I am ready to be yours”; “I will obey as well as love”).

These were letters so humble that Stanley, in a maudlin and solitary mood himself for some weeks — finally chose to respond to her:

That you have put me, a man of importance and high self-esteem, in such a bad way; that you, whom I have told so much to, especially about the misery I had known in terms of family relations… that you, who had seemed so maternally kind to me, had in a callous mood refused my sincerest emotions, denying such emotions and whatever feelings you had, if you had them at all — all these, taken together, have made any future arrangements between us impossible: For your refusal has entered me like an arrow deep into my heart. There is nothing I can further say on this subject: You must leave me alone.

Then came this missive from her:

Of course I understand. And if I am never to see you again, never to hear the timbre of your powerful voice, and if I must expect to go on regretting such things as I have done for the rest of my life, then so it must be. But if you can believe that there can be a different outcome to a story that began brightly, then darkened because of my own faults and inexperience, then I know that we can make a life of happiness: For I know that deep down you want the same wonderful things as I do. So humbly, I ask you to marry me, Mr. Stanley. Should you refuse, then this will be the last you will hear from me. But oh, Bula Matari, say yes, and a new and glorious life will begin.

RECEIVING THIS LETTER ONE JUNE MORNING at his New Bond Street flat, he sat down, without moving, for several hours. He half crumpled the thing in his hands. He got up to shave. Looking into a mirror, he thought that he had lost the innocence and openness of his expression, each line equal to a year of passing loneliness and struggle in his life. Well into his twenties he had been boyish in appearance, but slowly his visage began to change, not just because of the ordinary passing of time but also from having witnessed so much death. It had been a companion since his boyhood days in Wales; it had followed him to New Orleans, then to Cuba, and then, during the Civil War, at the Battle of Shiloh, as a Confederate. Thereafter he watched death multiply before him in Africa time and time again. From native attacks. Fevers. Dysentery. And he had witnessed all of it from the vantage point of his solitude — would it ever pass, that loneliness?

Once, in an African forest, he had come upon a clearing where the trees were shimmering blue, their leaves vibrating rapidly. He stepped closer. Thousands of butterflies of many colorations had been resting there, wings flickering like candle flames — but all he could identify with was the lowly beetle that had scurried by his mud-encrusted boots.