Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“Yes,” said Livy.

“Then she is singing there as well.”

She stood up.

“Please do believe me: My line goes back to the sibyls. I promise that what I have told you is truthful.” Then: “It has been a pleasure to meet you and your daughter: Please do come back. And the fee is two guineas. Thank you.”

Frederic lingered with his notebook to scribble down the more or less indecipherable scribbles that had eluded interpretation, many of the letters not even looking like letters at all. For my part I tried to forward the idea that it had been a successful outing, but Samuel was incensed. Walking along with him on the street, I was startled to hear him carry on in a manner that made me feel bad.

“Not a thing she said could not have been derived from the newspaper accounts of her passing. The only thing she came up with of interest was the ‘my book’ business, but then it would not be a wild impossibility for someone, even a half-baked medium, to suppose that Susy — the daughter of a writer — might have wanted to venture into such territories. All in all, Mrs. Stanley, while I appreciate your efforts on our behalf, please be careful — and not in regard to me, as I have taken every harsh thing in life — but with my wife, who is too delicate for this world. Please do be careful.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“No: just stating my point of view.”

From Samuel Clemens’s Notes

MRS. STANLEY, DESPITE MY DEEPEST allegiance to Livy, strikes me as some kind of lady, eccentric as she seems to be. Even if she gets on my nerves sometimes and goes through life like a kid, with the attitude that there is a Santa Claus (God and afterlife; happy endings), and even though she often annoys me with such optimism, I enjoy her company. Mainly I like looking at her — never directly, but in a passing way. She is beautiful in the sense that her most attractive qualities come not from her surface but from within. When she is eighty, I am fairly certain that she will be just as engaging and enticing in an eternally female way as when she was young. Livy has the same qualities but not so much control over her physical aspect, which is to say that she has been set back a bit, having suffered so much from various chronic maladies. (When I see Livy coiled up on a couch feeling so sad, I want to throw myself on her and protect her from the cruel realities of life forever; I wish I could fend off all sadness, all illness, and death from this angel. I would cut off my right hand to protect her.)

But Dolly… when I’m around her, despite her frivolous ways, she always reminds me that there is a difference between prettiness and timeless beauty. While the young have the advantage of possessing smooth and untroubled features, which passes as a kind of loveliness, the real truth of beauty has to do with a timeless expression of physical and psychic soundness. I have to say that Mrs. Stanley seems to possess it. She not only looks young — somewhere around forty — she also never seems to age (the advantages of an untroubled life, though I can imagine that Stanley can be a handful). She seems younger and more ebullient each time I see her: For all her aristocratic affectations — her “How dooo you dooo?” and other mannerisms of speech — she seems self-assured. Stanley, on the other hand, at a relatively young age, seems old. How that union happened, aside from the allure of fame, I do not know. Seems an instance of pure luck — what a soul she is, ever so cheerful. When I’m around her, I feel a tinge of envy toward Stanley, for no matter what she says sometimes, she somehow brings me a feeling of comfort.

DURING THE WANING MONTHS of 1897, Clemens went to pose for Dolly again. While hoping to exhibit her portrait of him at the National Gallery, she had come to view her painting as a means to express her warm feelings for the man. His sitting for her that autumn was a highlight of her days.

“MR. CLEMENS—”

“Samuel to you—”

“While I know that you have had your share of hard times, is there — and forgive my curiosity — any one memory you have of yourself from a time of happiness that enters into your mind when you are feeling troubled?”

“I don’t get what you’re asking me.”

“Whenever I am feeling melancholy I like to recall the walks I would take as a little girl with my father in Scotland. I would prance after him, for he had a quick pace, over the meadows, and run into his arms as he, smiling sweetly, awaited me. Sometimes I dwell upon my youth, when I posed for various London and Parisian artists. I would feel overwhelmed by the way they looked at me, as though I were beautiful.”

“You are.”

“Well, if you think so, then I am flattered, but if you could have seen me thirty years ago — I am but a shadow of that now.”

“You never age, Mrs. Stanley. You are as fresh as when I first saw you; if anything, you look younger to me.”

“Thank you, Samuel. But as to my question… can you answer it?”

He gave it some thought, then said the following:

“There is something I think about fairly often. It goes back to my piloting days: I used to bound down the stairway from the pilothouse to the boiler deck and from there to the lower deck. Sometimes when we came to the landing of some river town and we only had an hour in that place to take on cargo, I would want to make my way to whatever bookstalls might be around. So I’d sometimes just leap off the riverboat railings onto the dock with nary a concern for tearing the tendons in my heels and spring off in my mad searches. I’d make my way into the town, nearly galloping like a pony. And I would do this again and again, without the slightest infirmity — no pains in my hands, hips, or knees then. I was light as an angel. You see, Dolly, in my youth I was made out of rubber, it seemed, and able to bounce around without the slightest benefit of conscious exercise.”

And before Mrs. Stanley could say another word, he added, “I mean jumping down and landing hard on the planking in boots! I have sometimes seen myself doing this in a kind of silhouette — again and again — it would kill me now, of course. Takes me back to more fanciful times, when passage through this world was a dream: Even when I knew I was not made of rubber, I was barely conscious of it; it was just what it was, the vitality of youth, pure and simple. I don’t know if my memory of that easy leaping and landing down hard somehow soothes my aching limbs now, but I hold that memory in esteem just the same. Keeps me going sometimes. Wish I had the same elasticity now, but the years have taken that away from me, along with the hawk-pretty looks I once had.”

“I disagree; you are still a handsome man.”

“Excuse me while I guffaw, Dolly. One thing I do know is that you are a nice lady — and Stanley is a lucky bloke.”

He then made some mention of having first met Stanley on a steamboat around 1859, which much intrigued her.

IN THE GRIEF OF THOSE YEARS, his was a restlessness that led him and his family to extended stays in various locales — in Switzerland, in an idyllic spot called Weggis; in Budapest, in Prague, and then in Vienna, where they took up residence at the Hotels Metropole and then Krantz. Clemens chose that city of great music so that his daughter Clara might study piano (and it was there that she met a brilliant fellow student, one Ossip Gabrilowitsch, with whom she later fell in love). As for Livy, she had, in those few scant years, aged in even greater increments than Stanley had in Africa — she was thin, frail, and grandmotherly, already ancient-seeming beyond her time, a gaunt and haunted relic of her own youth, a hundred years of anguish having transformed the once delicate and youthful countenance that Clemens, while traveling to the Middle East as a young man, first spied in a cameo carried by her brother.