Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“Just there, in front of the hearth.”

“You mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all.”

I was used to Stanley smoking whenever he sat for me: Thusly anticipating my new subject’s similar habit, I had my butler put out an ash urn beside the chair for Clemens to use. Wearing my smock, and with a fresh sheet of paper on which to draw my preliminary study of him, I tried to determine the position in which Mr. Clemens would be most comfortable and which pose would be advantageous to him.

“Just relax, as if you were talking to me, but sit generally still.”

“That’s something I generally aspire to, madame,” he said.

I began to draw him in pencil, and, as I did so, I noticed that he had started to hum to himself; looking out through my studio window to a great chestnut tree, he took on a tranquil expression.

“And what is that you’ve been humming?”

“Oh, an old Negro spiritual taught to me by slaves on my uncle John’s farm, back when I was a boy. He lived about four miles out from Florida, Missouri, he did. A finer man there never was.” Then: “Do you know, Mrs. Stanley, that whenever I am troubled I think of my days there and in Hannibal?”

“Are you troubled now?”

“Madame, I am like a cucumber soaking in a vat of vinegar, but I am still optimistic enough, I suppose.” Then: “It is a funny thing, Mrs. Stanley: The older I get — and I will be fifty-seven come November — the more aware of the minutiae of my past I become. As your wise husband told me the other day, there’s so much to remember that, as the years go by, there’s hardly any room left in the brain for something new. Each day I ask myself, ‘How are things remembered, Sam?’ Then I say that I remember things as if my brain were some kind of camera — a camera that has taken a million photographs. Why some of those pictures stick in the mind more clearly than others, after so many years, is a mystery to me. Take my mother, Jane Lampton. She passed on two Octobers ago, in 1890, at a mighty age, her eighty-eighth year. That she lived so long was miraculous in a way, for she was as frail and delicate in her youth as my own wife, Livy, is now; and yet if there is such a thing as the spirit keeping the body sound, despite its maladies, she did so, year after year.”

Then he fished out from his vest pocket a watch: Within its top encasement was an image of his mother.

“Here she is, Mrs. Stanley — my little reminder of the great lady that was my mother, Jane Lampton. It’s just a photograph, but each time I see her I am both warmed and grieved. How can it be that one simple thing can bring so much to mind? She’s about fifty in this picture, slender and petite, but she was so sturdy of heart that she always stood as a great example to me. If I have a kind bone in my body, it’s because of her. You see, she was one of those rare Presbyterian souls who actually cared about the condition of her fellow humans: She loved people and animals — took in every poor bewildered cat in our neighborhood when I was a boy — and was always a lively sort, despite her infirmities. Far from being an invalid who allowed herself to wither away, she relished every opportunity, whatever her misfortunes, to enjoy life. She danced and loved music, loved the circus and minstrel shows that came to town; she was kind to our slaves, and she taught me something about books.

“Once, we had a little slave, brought to Hannibal from Maryland, a gentle and cheerful boy named Sandy. He was always singing and whooping, whistling and yelling — so noisily that he drove me to distraction. One day when he had been singing for an entire hour without stopping, I lost my temper and went to my mother in a rage asking her to please shut him up; but instead of becoming angry with the boy, tears came to her eyes and she said, with much kindness: ‘Sam, when the poor thing sings, it’s because he doesn’t want to remember he’ll never see his family or mother ever again; if he’s quiet, then he will surely think of them and become very sad. So just remember this when you hear that friendless child’s voice again.’ After that, I kind of took comfort in hearing him, and his carrying on never bothered me again, for in my selfish boyishness, I had forgotten his sad situation; that he was so terribly alone in the world and trying to cheer himself up with songs and all kinds of wild whistling suddenly made sense to me. Thereafter I went out of my way to befriend him — later I put him in my book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . But that was the kind of thing in which my mother instructed me.

“All in all she was one of those proper churchgoing ladies for whom every occasion, whether it was a Fourth of July celebration or a revival meeting, a lecture or even a funeral, was an opportunity to turn out and show her sunny side. To the day of her death, she remained fair-minded and compassionate — that’s the word, ‘compassionate.’ What I am, what good qualities I have, I believe I owe largely to her. Her strength of spirit is what sustained her for so many years, and it is something I have tried to summon up for myself in times of darkness: For despite the downturns and tragedies of her life, she never allowed herself to get beaten down. It was faith, I suppose, that made the very great difference in her attitude. A faith in a God I have never seen any evidence of but whose imaginary presence in so many lives, like her own, has been a solace. Needless to say, Mrs. Stanley, I miss her.

“But memory is a funny thing. Lately certain things still come back to me about her as clearly as if they had happened this morning. Some come as clear as a photograph. One picture I most vividly remember is fifty years old: I was six, my mother forty. We were in a bedroom of our house in Hannibal, Missouri, where my older brother Benjamin — he was ten — lay dead, the poor boy having succumbed to a fever; my mother had brought me in to say good-bye, I guess. We knelt down by the bed, my mother holding my hand, when all at once she began to weep and moan in a way I had never seen before. I can remember feeling ashamed of myself for not crying along with her and ashamed that I was powerless to stop her tears. And as for my poor brother, well, being so little I wasn’t completely convinced that he was gone. And that’s perhaps why my mother, in her wisdom, had me lay my hand against his brow. It was cold and still and so sad a thing that I could not understand why it was so. He hardly seemed a person at all anymore: I can remember feeling a terrible guilt about it — you see, Mrs. Stanley, I had been the sickly child of the family. I had been born two months premature, and so frail, slight, small-boned, and prone to diseases that until I was about six or so, little hope had been held that I would survive childhood. But there I was beside her, with my hand held against my brother’s face, somehow thinking — for I was so young, just six, when everything in life seems a paradise — that it should have been me and not Benjamin in that bed. Somehow I believed that I had been spared and he had taken my place. It’s the kind of reverse thinking that comes to children, I suppose. But just the same, all the occasions when I had acted the brat out in the yard and wished him dead over some stupid thing landed on my conscience so badly that for the longest time I suffered terrifying nightmares from it. That kind of thing never leaves you. Even now, when I see a late morning sunbeam drifting in through a window, I can close my eyes and, ever so fleetingly, find myself in that room again, my brother lost to the world, my dear mother by my side.”

In that moment Mr. Clemens’s expression, as I recall it these years later, was nearly beatific. He seemed caught up in a distant moment, his face taking on an air of concentration, as if he were composing something inside his head. But then the spell left him; he shifted in his chair and drew from his jacket pocket a cigar—“My own brand, Mark Twain,” he said. Lighting it, he went on: