Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“You are being harsh with yourself, Stanley; even if you had given him In Darkest Africa it would not have made any difference in the long run. How many copies of the Africa book did you sell with the Scribner’s company in America?”

“Sixty thousand in the first two weeks alone.”

“And how many do you think you would have sold through Clemens’s door-to-door salesmen, with their clientele of farmers and backwoods people?”

“Not half as many, but we will never know. In the meantime my friend came to financial ruin, and he is suffering for it still.”

“Stanley, you are tormenting yourself over something that cannot be changed. Besides, he has remained your friend, despite your fears.”

“Oh, Dolly, if you only knew the number of times he wrote to me about the matter. He even sent me telegrams about my book as I was writing it in Zanzibar. Look here,” he said, and he pulled from his correspondence cabinet a slew of telegrams and showed me a handful of them.

“It would have been an easy enough thing to do at that time; he even sent his partner, Charles Webster, over to see me, but after he had gone to the trouble and expense, I still turned him down. Why, Dolly, I cannot say, but I have sometimes sensed his disappointment over the matter. Even if it is something that he has not since mentioned, I know that he must have felt let down by me: Had I a way to make it up to him I would, but he has no company now with which to publish anything, and, in any case, I have lost my desire to write.”

“Then you must forget the whole matter.”

“I wish I could.”

CLEMENS AND HIS FAMILY ARRIVED at half past seven. The first to come in was Livy, in black and wearing a veil of mourning. She was followed by her elegant daughters, each also dressed solemnly. Then Mr. Clemens himself entered, with his top hat in hand and dressed finely in a dark frock coat and silk necktie. Mother and I greeted him. “Better late than never, goes the adage,” he said. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it?”

Most evident at first sight, after a scant six months or so, was how much Clemens seemed to have aged, for he seemed to have many more lines of grief about his eyes, and his brow was more furrowed than before: Like Stanley’s, his hair had turned white. As for Livy, that sweet, dear woman was thinner than ever and tentative in her movements, though for the sake of her children, she put on a good face, encouraging her daughters to enjoy themselves.

Shortly I escorted Mr. and Mrs. Clemens into the parlor, where our other guests had gathered for drinks, among them Gladstone, who had also just arrived. There Clemens found Stanley engaged in conversation with Bram Stoker, whom Clemens apparently admired and knew somewhat. Mr. Stoker, a short stick of a man with an unforgettable, darkly featured face, had in those days just finished writing a gothic fantasy — some tale about vampires, ghosts, and other spirit creatures entitled Dracula. (Stanley had read the thing and dismissed it as a captivating bit of arcane fluff that played upon people’s superstitions and fascination with death and their belief in ghosts; he had seen enough truly horrid things in this world to think that reality was cruel enough without help from the spirits.) However, I noticed that Mr. Clemens, who had also apparently read the book, was quite complimentary of it, telling Stoker that “the simple vampire’s sleep, out of sight from people and the sunlight,” held rather an appeal for him.

“A wonderful fantasy, my dear Stoker, of people coming back from the dead — a physical impossibility, but one that has its appeal in a Christian, Lazarus-back-from-the-grave kind of way. Still, even if the idea is nothing new, I like your book, Mr. Stoker; it fits my mood these days.”

“That resurrection business,” Stanley said, “goes back long before the days of Christ — to Egypt, of course, but even the ancient Greeks had a number of folktales relating to the risen dead.” Then: “Come, Samuel, meet our other companions.”

As with all things, certain evenings that start in one direction end up going in another. While we had hoped to avoid any discussion about Susy or the supernatural, and although we had conceived the evening as a belated Christmas for the Clemenses, the specter of Susy’s passing came suddenly into our house. As merriment was the first order of business, we played some charades, which Clemens’s daughters and some of the other young guests enjoyed; but even as we were in the midst of these parlor games, there arrived Lady Winslow and her daughter Lily, whose resemblance to Susy was so great that Mrs. Clemens fell back into her chair in a swoon.

“It is her way these days,” Mr. Clemens told me. “She is in an emotional state lately, I’m afraid to say.”

But if our original promise to avoid the subject of Susy’s passing was forgotten, I owe this to Mother: When Livy, fainting, had been attended to by her daughters, Mother, beside her on a couch, poured out her sympathies — and this, I am afraid to say, opened a floodgate of tears on Livy’s part, for she wept unabashedly in Mother’s arms. Then, to settle Livy, Mother took her off for a “private talk” in her own study about the spiritual realms.

I was a little peeved — and Stanley was furious. He seemed to feel that Mother had opened a “can of worms,” while my reasons were different. Mother only had a wishful belief in such things, whereas my own conviction was based on a careful study of hard scientific facts as pursued by the Society for Psychical Research. Mother had little more than a passing interest in those facts, but she based her general belief in such things on some rather reassuring visits with spirit mediums and on what she claimed were several visitations from Father’s ghost when she was first widowed. But I take issue with the idea that Father is a “ghost,” in that it implies that he is “dead”—no, I say he is very much alive!

At dinner, Livy smiled occasionally at my brother-in-law, even though she spent much of the time staring down into her plate, rarely eating a morsel or saying a word. Finally she piped up, asking Frederic, “What is it, Mr. Myers, that you do?”

Up to that moment, my husband and Clemens, at the other end of the table, had been holding forth about diverse subjects.

My brother-in-law responded, “Mrs. Clemens, I am a classicist by profession, trained at Trinity College, Cambridge, and among my other credentials, I am one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, whose inception dates back to 1882. Our fundamental doctrine, in regard to the division between this life and the next, has always been one of telepathy — that is, communication between the so-called dead and the living through a process called supersensory communion, wherein the thoughts of the departed are conveyed through the ‘ethers,’ which I define as the silence that exists between our waking thoughts. It is our belief, Mrs. Clemens, that in death the consciousness we call the self and refer to as the ‘I’ never disappears but is transferred into a realm contiguous with the present; from that realm come communications, and these mainly enter our minds not through ghostly apparitions but through the phenomena of hallucination and dreams.”

Clemens, I noticed, was somewhat put off by this business, fumbling about his pockets for a match with which to light his cigar, even when there was a lit candle before him. I heard him muttering to himself: “Now, where is that thing?” and “Where are you?” as if to distract himself from the importance of what he refused, in his godless way, to believe. Livy, on the other hand, seemed raptly engaged: I cannot say if it was Frederic’s eloquence that held her so, but she, rising above her timidity, said, “Please do go on.”