Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  May 22, 1903

  Dear Samuel,

  I know that you have your own ongoing difficulties with Livy’s health, but I feel it my duty to inform you that last month my beloved husband suffered a stroke. It came to him at Furze Hill in the middle of the night, his cry for help awakening our household: Of course, we sent for a doctor, who arrived at four in the morning, but as with such things there was little that could be done save for the usual recommendation of a sustained period of rest. If I have not informed you sooner, or if Mother has not, it is because we had hoped for a sudden turn for the better, but for the last month Stanley has been unable to speak with coherence and unable to move—my great and brave explorer as helpless as an infant. The doctors say that time will perhaps restore his energies, but it is hard to look at him; one side of his face seems normal, the other dreadfully still or else pinched. I have spent many an hour administering massages to the afflicted areas, as per Dr. Kellgren’s methods, but there has been no result so far. Still, we have tried to make him as comfortable as possible; more frustrating is that he knows not who is attending to him and seems lost to the world. That is what is hardest to endure.

  For my part, however, I remain hopeful. Not long ago I consulted a London doctor who also happens to be a spiritualist, and he has assured me that Stanley will greatly improve in the coming months; surely once this recovery begins we will have much to celebrate. In the meantime, on behalf of Stanley, I send you and your family much affection.

  Yours always,

  Dolly

  June 1, 1903

  Dearest Lady Dolly,

  I am truly sorry to hear about Stanley’s illness; believe me, I can commiserate, for we are both tethered to the same burden of seeing a loved one suffer. As you know, Livy has been laid low these past few years—with gout, a weak heart, and a general malaise of the spirit that has its origins in Susy’s passing and our daughter Jean’s worsening epilepsy and fainting spells. Worries about Jean’s condition have been a great drain on Livy, and so as a rule we have tried to keep Jean’s continuing seizures a secret. Our decision to finally sell our old house in Hartford has not helped matters, because it is filled with Susy’s spirit. It is impossible for us to return there—we closed on the sale, at a considerable loss, just a few weeks ago—but I am also much vexed by the fact that some doctors seem to think my moods have somehow aggravated Livy’s condition of “nervous prostration.” And so for a good part of the past seven months I have only been allowed to see her for a few minutes a day—and sometimes not at all. Even when I do visit her, the nurse stands by with a stopwatch, restricting me to two minutes a day. On our wedding anniversary we were allowed five minutes, and just this past February, when Livy seemed to improve somewhat, this was increased to fifteen minutes—though by then our Riverdale house had been turned into something of a sick ward. Back in December, Jean had come down with pneumonia (which we kept a secret from Livy) and then, once she finally recovered, both Clara and Jean came down with measles and our house was quarantined; it was one of those ironies that on top of it all, even as Livy seemed to improve, yours truly fell into an agony of toothaches, bronchitis, and rheumatism, all of which left me in bed for five weeks. It was only a few weeks ago that I was up and about again.

  In the meantime, Livy has been well enough for our servants to occasionally bring her downstairs to our front lawn to take in the sun; and although she cannot get around without a wheelchair, it is our hope that a change of scenery to a warmer clime may help extend her life. We have been considering a move to sunny Italy, perhaps by the fall, if she is well enough to endure the crossing. But am I optimistic or hopeful? The truth is that my wife is slowly dying—that is clear to us all—and as a result, when I contemplate it I am drawn to the conclusion that sooner or later, in a sunny clime or not, I will become one of the loneliest men in the world.

  Forgive my maudlin ramblings—I turned sixty-seven last autumn, and if I cannot be frank at this time of my life, when will I ever be? I am feeling more than a little upset to hear about Stanley; I hope you do not mind that I did not share your letter with Livy, for I know she would be greatly saddened to hear about him, and that is why she has not written to you herself. I am simply trying to protect her from anything that would bring further aches to her heart. Stanley remains one of the lights we both look to, and whatever controversies have swirled about him in recent times, I think him a very great man and count myself lucky that he is a good friend. So when he comes around, as I am sure he will, please tell him that Samuel Clemens looks forward to the day when the two of us will sit out in some sunny place, sipping drinks and swapping stories.

  And please do keep us apprised of Stanley’s health, as I will keep you informed about Livy.

  With all best wishes and love,

  S. L. Clemens

  THE MONTHS PASSED, and slowly Stanley began to come around, an improvement that Dolly attributed to the stream of spiritualist healers whom she had brought to his bedside—their hands passing over the ailing magnetic fields of his body, their voices summoning the spirits of the great healers of the past to breathe new life into him—or perhaps he had been heartened by the continuous attentions of Dolly herself, who rarely left his bedside and often spoke to him sweetly or read aloud from his favorite books. Denzil, too, entirely bewildered by his father’s condition but obedient to his mother’s wishes, sat with him for at least an hour a day. Then, after many weeks of the deepest unconsciousness, some movement came back to him: He could open his left eye, had some feeling in that hand, and slowly began to emerge from the dark and claustrophobic room. With the movement of his eyes, there slowly returned the faculty of his speech, although his words were slurred and labored.

  His first full phrase consisted of a question: “Where am I?”

  “Oh, Stanley, my love, you are at home, safe and sound!”

  “Safe and sound?”

  “Yes, my love!”

  “But is this Cairo?”

  “No, you are home, at Furze Hill.”

  And he looked at Dolly with confusion, having trouble recognizing her.

  “And you are?”

  “I am your wife, Dorothy.”

  “So I am married? How did that come to be?”

  “Oh, Stanley, do you not remember? We have been wedded now for thirteen years!” And she pulled the boy close to his side. “This lovely cherub is your son, Denzil. And look there, through the windows: You will see the spreading meadows and woods—they are yours, as is everything you see around you.”

  “Ah, yes, I suppose that is so.” Then: “What’s happened to me?”

  “You’ve fallen ill.”

  “From malaria?”

  “No, my love; you have suffered from a different kind of affliction.”

  “And you say that my name is Stanley?”

  “Yes! Henry Morton Stanley.”

  “Why does it seem odd to me?”

  “Because you have been ill.”

  And when he turned away sadly, Dolly, in her most hopeful and cheerful manner, said: “The main thing is that you are getting well! And if you do not remember everything clearly now, it will all come back to you, day by day; that I promise you.”

  BY LATE JUNE, HAVING RECOVERED his memory and most of his faculties, he was well enough to be carried downstairs from his sickbed in an invalid’s chair to take in the sun on his lawn at Furze Hill. Once out through the entry hall’s door into the open air, he nearly wept from joy. It was a glorious day, teeming with life: a flight of sparrows flocking across the woods; the tapping of woodpeckers and the churning of a brook sounding from a forest hollow in the distance; a monarch butterfly dallying over a rose. In the fields, some of his men, a hearty crew, were digging out a well. Cows, sheep, and horses lolled in a meadow; dogs were barking; his farmhands were going about their business in attending to the estate. And around him—everywhere, he supposed, in the very radiance of life itself—was God’s unseen presence, of which the miracle of t
he world’s existence in those moments was proof enough.

  Although he was no mystic, his stroke had left him predisposed to wild imaginings, for whereas before he had once looked at the horizon and saw it, geographically speaking, coming to an end, in whatever direction he now looked Stanley fantasized that he could follow the terrain beyond its apparent boundaries, as if, radiant with divinity and the promise of youth, he could roam the world from his chair. Though he could not move without assistance, for he did not yet have the strength to wheel himself about, he spent many a day reveling in mental adventures, the likes of which he had not experienced since he was a boy and dreamed of following the road out from St. Asaph’s to the rest of England. Just looking out at the horizon brought back the wanderlust that had driven him throughout his life—how else could he have journeyed so far and wide? He felt blessed to have seen so much of the world, and whether it had been good or bad, he reckoned that he had experienced more than most men ever would. If he felt sad at all, it was out of a longing for the days when the future was a mystery to be pursued and explored.

  How he wished he could get out of that chair.

  He read quite a bit then—Dickens, Blake, Gibbon—his son often by his side, playing with some puppies on the lawn. With the sun suddenly emerging from behind a cloud and filling the world with light, his son would come with some drawings in hand to show him: “This is Mother”—as a hen. “This is you, Daddy”—as a lion. Day after day went by in this fashion, and he always lamented the coming of night: Even if the mansion was a most comfortable and homey place by then, the world’s darkness distressed him, as the night could only bring him sorrow.

  His farmhands often came to pay their respects to him and to see how the old man was doing. One of his builders came by to tell Stanley that he was naming his new house Bula Matari, and one of his housekeepers, having given birth to a little boy, tried to cheer her employer by christening her son Henry. The local vicar, Lamb, and his wife came to visit weekly. And certain friends from London ventured out—Henry Wellcome, H. G. Wells, Edward Marston, and dear old Edwin Arnold.

  Often he would simply sit looking out into the woods in a daydream of his past. Once, while drifting into sleep, he conjured a riverboat on the lawn, and, looking up beyond its various decks, he saw Samuel Clemens as a young man in the pilothouse. Samuel was considerate enough to wave and gesture for him to come up and take the wheel, the Mississippi waiting. Then he had a dream of being on the Congo River, along one of its tranquil stretches, its serpentine course drifting past verdant tracts of jungle, friendly Africans clustering on its banks, clacking sticks to get his attention, and holding up baskets of food they wished to barter for lengths of merikani cloth and coils of wire and beads—ah, yes, it was not all bloody hell. Somehow he grew sad to think that some of the Africans might end up slaves: He saw them being herded off by the Arabs, transported in chains through the jungle, their robes dropping off of them; then, just as suddenly, the Congo would turn into the Mississippi, and he would see these same natives on riverboats as the vessels, their great horns blowing, would come into the port of New Orleans or Natchez or Memphis—the two rivers, the Congo and the Mississippi, merging as one in his mind. Along the way the native Africans were turned into the niggers of the South, the sorrowful and beautiful souls he had once known—“At least, in my small way, I have perhaps spared some of their predecessors from a similar fate.” And then, just then, he might hear a voice and open his eyes to see that it was all an illusion, a great sadness coming over him as he realized that he was confined to a chair.

  The view from Mount Craig, the African highlands, a stampede of zebras and antelopes in the distance, and much more came to him during such enforced idylls.

  DAILY, WITH THE HELP of his nurse and a servant, he attempted to stand up, his legs and coordination having gone out from under him. Giving such exercises his all, by September he could, with considerable effort, walk short distances—down a hallway, across a room, from one end of the veranda to the other—but only with a cane and the assistance of Dolly, the only one to ever hold him closely, to help him along. Sometimes, in order to keep up the strength of his one good hand—his right—he would spend hours kneading a small rubber ball (his left hand was never strong again). And while he consoled himself with the fact that he was making some progress, many a dark thought entered his mind, and so it was that against his doctor’s orders he’d bribe one of his servants to bring him a glass of whiskey or some other strong spirits.

  The Carriage Ride

  THAT WINTER, back at Richmond Terrace, Stanley, in wishing to settle matters for the future, made up a final will (his fifteenth), leaving most of his estate to Lady Stanley and Denzil. Many of his geographical books, maps, and travel notebooks he left to the RGS; informally, he prevailed upon Dolly, who did not care for such talk, to send, upon his demise, certain items to friends—especially Samuel Clemens, for whom Stanley had set aside a very old edition of the Twelve Caesars, which Clemens had once admired while visiting him, and a vest-pocket watch and gold chain, the inner case inscribed BULA MATARI so that his old friend would perhaps remember the man known as Stanley. Much else of what he possessed he left to Lady Stanley to keep or dispose of as she pleased, though he expressed the hope that she would “take care of and cherish” his collection of Mark Twain books, in particular his copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  Although he was not at all prone to speaking about the future, on some days, when he could slowly amble about the mansion and settle into his study, he spent many an hour searching through old papers, as if to see whether there were overlooked portions of narrative that might be easily be put together for a new book. On one such afternoon he came across the forgotten fragments of his autobiography that described his journey to Cuba from years before; with his memories of that distressing and disappointing time reawakened—and with his own uncertainty about just how much of the tale was true—he was tempted to throw the sheaves into the fire, and yet, because they contained some happy bits of portraiture about the young Samuel Clemens, he could not bring himself to destroy them. Thinking that his illness was affecting his judgment, he decided to put them aside for the time being, stashing them in his cabinet for future contemplation; these, however, he never returned to, and the pages were to remain undiscovered until years later, when Lady Stanley found them.

  FOR DOLLY’S PART, in attempting to maintain some semblance of normalcy among her friends—Stanley’s illness being something she would not rather mention—she remained the ever-buoyant grande dame of social occasions, often attending fetes around the city and having acquaintances over to the mansion for lunch. Both she and Stanley were acting a role: Even when Stanley knew his demise was just a matter of time, he would speak of future trips—to Switzerland, to Paris, and to Florence, as Samuel Clemens had in recent times moved to a villa outside that city. Stanley spoke of traveling there “as soon as I am better, if Livy is well enough.” And Dolly never failed, when seeing him, to remark, “You look well; better than yesterday.” Or to convey some glad tidings: “My astrologer says that once we have gotten through this rough patch with your health, better days await you.” Bent upon cheerfulness, and trusting that she was allied to a great number of benevolent spirits, she never lost her hopefulness. “You will get better, my love: Think of yourself six months before, barely able to move, and think of yourself now. Yes, you will get better.”

  He wanted to believe this was so: As a stroke had so suddenly befallen him, he still held out the hope that one night, as he slept, the malady would be suddenly lifted by God “in the twinkling of an eye.” Yet he would hear no talk about religion or an afterlife, dismissing them as subjects of pure conjecture.

  “I’ll find out, soon enough, won’t I?” he told her one evening.

  THAT DECEMBER, as Stanley had grown fond of Christmas, and for the sake of their child, Dolly decided to hold a dinner as of old. The first visitors arrived around seven; by eight the parlor
was crowded, with Lady Stanley and her mother greeting everyone, and as dinner approached and their company retired, one by one, into the dining room, Stanley rested in his bed. Rising up the winding staircase and down the hall into Stanley’s room were the murmur of voices, clinking glasses, and toasts—“To England!”—and laughter and piano music as well as the clamor of servants coming and going from the kitchen and pantry into the dining hall. Stanley was moaning and feeling sad when Dolly, tapping at his door, told him, “Come and meet our guests, my darling.”

  In her crimson velvet dress and pearl earrings, Lady Stanley helped him along; an observer who did not know them would have thought that Dolly was escorting her elderly father. White-haired and eyes bloodshot, Stanley had lost a great deal of weight: His skin had thinned so that it had a nearly transparent quality, and his evening suit hung loosely on him. He seemed more like a bird-boned child than an intrepid explorer—in fact, making his way slowly down the hallway, he was bemused by the thought that such a small passage was as exhausting as any he had ever made in Africa. To rely upon anyone, including his dear wife, embarrassed him, but whenever he tried to make his way alone, he tottered as if he would fall. Eventually they made their way into the dining room, their guests standing up and applauding him: From guest to guest he went, whispering a few words of thanks to each, then taking a seat between Gertrude and Dolly. He sat in silence, barely picking at the various plates put before him and preferring to sip at the brandy while taking in the conversations around him. As it was Christmas, Stanley, however great his indisposition, rose to say a few words—his last before any gathering in that mansion.

  “To count the blessings of my life: First there is my family, who has bestowed upon me the healing love of angels. From them, despite my waning powers, I have regained the celestial spark of trust and affection; it is especially so with my boy, Denzil, who in reminding this old man of the purity and joys of youth, with all its innocence, has made me feel like quite a wealthy man. And all of you, in your friendship with me and my wife, have made me happy as well: It is to you—to us, to the season—that I raise this toast. May God bless you in all your days. And, yes, Merry Christmas.”