by Mary Volmer
“The right way to do autobiography,” Mr. Clemens was saying, “is to start at no particular time in your life, wander at your free will all over your life, talk only about what interests you at the moment, drop it the moment it threatens to pale. I have been thinking about the subject for some time, and I cannot conceive why anyone would write an autobiography that marches with him to his grave!”
“For some time, Mr. Clemens?” Miss Rose scoffed. “A man of your young age?”
“Oh, I don’t mean to publish,” said Clemens. I sat down on the grass a few feet from William. “Not for a hundred years, at least, after my death. At least a century, so I may be honest as I can manage, and whatever meanness, ignorance, or bias I reveal will be forgiven as a product of the age.”
“And are you not honest?”
“I am a humorist, Miss Rose. Outside of that box, I am not allowed an opinion.”
“Such is the plight of woman, Mr. Clemens, though we do not have the privilege of choosing our box or prof iting from it.”
He did not reply. She did not, as I expected, press the issue, which meant he must be more important than I’d imagined.
“Come, Mr. Clemens,” she said instead. “What opinions can you possibly have that merit censure?”
“Well. Well,” he said again. “Democracy, for instance”—but paused.
I followed his smiling eyes down the garden path to f ind Mrs. French stepping briskly in bloomers and a man’s boots; a broad straw hat covered her shoulders. She carried a net and a collection basket, her face bright from her exertions.
“Samuel Clemens,” said Mrs. French, and Clemens stood up to meet her. “We expected you a week ago, at the gala.”
“Lorena,” he said, and grasping her free hand, peered with boyish enthusiasm into her basket. “What conquest today?”
“Mr. Clemens suffered an unavoidable delay,” said Miss Rose.
“And a prof itable one I’m sure, Sam,” said Mrs. French. “How is your sister?”
“Contentious, overbearing, f it only for a city of angels. She sends her regards, of course.”
“Mr. Clemens was just about to tell us his remedy for democracy,” said Miss Rose.
“Oh?”
Mr. Clemens offered his seat, but Mrs. French waved him down, put her net aside, and sprawled cross-legged on the grass beside me. Only Violet remained standing.
“And what about democracy?”
“Mr. Clemens thinks democracy a failure and universal suffrage the surest way to crush the nation,” said William leaning back.
“Sam!” said Mrs. French.
“Now I don’t mean restrict the vote. I don’t mean that. Here’s what I would do,” said Clemens. “Give men of education, merit, and property—give such men f ive, maybe ten votes to every one of your ignorant Joes. As of now, Joe can be made to vote for any cause by anyone who can persuade him through fear or prof it to make his mark on the line, even if that cause does damage to him and his family.”
“And women?” said Mrs. French. “Do you include women in the class of educated worthies?”
“Well, now, that’s another issue.”
“It is the same issue, Sam!” said Mrs. French.
He was wise enough to let the statement pass unchallenged. After a respectful pause, he said:
“There’s an election coming next spring. Is that what I hear?”
Mrs. French had not yet forgiven him for his last comment. Miss Rose answered. “The mayoral elections, in April.”
“Well, I bet—I bet you half the ignorant bastards in this town would make their mark for R. S. Werner if they saw the name on a ballot. Never mind that he . . .” Clemens stopped himself. “Well, that he is not in the best of health. He was mayor two times?”
“Three,” said Miss Rose, looking sharply at Mrs. French, as if a thought had passed between them.
“Three times, in bygone days, when the grass was always green and prosperity grew on trees. And that alone—his name and that alone—would be enough for our dear voting public. Enough of this.” He stood, angled his hat just so. “Lorena, don’t be mad. Come see what I have brought.”
Soon the six of us and a good number of servants, as well, gathered in the courtyard around a bizarre two-wheeled contraption of wood and welded iron f itted with a handle, a small saddle, and pedals. Mr. Clemens patted the saddle.
“A velocipede boneshaker,” he said with pride. “A bicycle. The newest fashionable conveyance.”
Mrs. French, who had been circling the contraption with rising interest, allowed Mr. Clemens to demonstrate its faculties. He made a trip around the fountain to great applause.
If I’ve led you to believe Mrs. French a mirthless prisoner of her own intellectual pursuits, it is only because this was my f irst impression. She possessed a tinker’s fascination with gadgets like this one (she owned two of William’s flip books) and a love of vigorous exercises (she considered taxonomy and botanical painting light amusements). When she was not in the library, she could be found with a collection basket by the river searching out insects and plants, or in the conservatory behind an easel, where her efforts to “capture the transcendent life of the putty root orchid” always left her disappointed. I thought she might count as heathen, for she talked of nature—that is, Nature with a capital N—but never about God in the Bible terms I was used to. Plus, she seemed overly fond of making up proverbs for my benef it. “Only a fool insists on revealing what she knows the moment she learns it, Madelyn. She might as well expel a meal as soon as she consumes it. Let it nourish you f irst. Digest, Madelyn!”
She certainly didn’t dress like a Christian lady. Often she wore bloomers, but was as likely to ramble in men’s trousers; even on formal occasions, she wore a man’s tapered jacket over worsted brown or black skirts and white silk ascots. She never wore a corset. (She and Miss Rose had long debates over the facility and purpose of this female fashion, in particular.) So focused was she on each present task, that until about a week before, I’d never wondered about her past or even imagined she might possess one, like other people.
I don’t know how the subject came up, but Mrs. Nettle told me that Mrs. French had been disappointed in love, then refused to say more about it—a sign of ignorance, I knew by now, rather than courtesy, as Nettle pretended. So the next day, while I was meant to be f iguring sums, I worked up a roundabout way of asking her about it.
“Mrs. French, I been wondering.” Mrs. French bent over her notes, lips moving over phrases with care, did not immediately respond. Violet looked up at me from her primer. “You said we’re better off wanting things we can get by will and effort, right?”
Mrs. French f inished her thought, then cleaning her oculars, considered my question with a respectful attention I was not yet accustomed to. In four short weeks, such attention had forged in me the inconvenient habit of considering my own thoughts with more care as well. Previously I imagined one thought as good as any other, simply because it had arisen out of the same mysterious well inside me.
“Why can’t you get love that way?” I persisted. “That’s what you”—I searched for the word—“implied, right? That you can’t.” And looking briefly at Violet, I came to it. “Have you ever been in love, Mrs. French?”
I watched her (Violet and I both watched her) with fascination and not a little horror, for I was sure that, before she recovered herself, emotion flashed across her eyes. “My dears,” she said, “you are young and ridiculous. The f irst is forgivable; the second . . .” she waved away the possibility of forgiveness with a swipe of her hand and didn’t answer the question.
For some reason—maybe it was William standing there or the curious energy with which she examined the wooden struts of the boneshaker—my question and her evasion came back to me. “Sam, may I?” asked Mrs. French, but she had already shed her net and basket.
“Really, Lorena, you will surely break yourself,” said Miss Rose.
“It is sometimes easier to start on a hill,” said Mr. Clemens.
“Lorena,” said Miss Rose, holding her hat against the rising breeze. “Madelyn, go with her.”
Off we went, one of us on either side of the handlebar, pushing the hefty machine with such energy that when we stopped and turned, I found the manor a disconcerting distance below. High above, geese tracked shadows over the roof, the gardens, the fountain, but Mrs. French didn’t notice, much less speculate about their species. She ran her hands over the bicycle frame, her face beneath her gray hair so eager and young, I felt obliged to provide the voice of reason.
“Mrs. French. Mrs. French are you sure you want to . . . ?”
She flung one leg over the iron bar, and was now straddling the contraption with both hands f irmly on the handle and one foot on the pedals. Mr. Clemens had begun to walk and wave his arms. “Not so far!”
“Madelyn.” Mrs. French took a tremendous breath. “Let go.”
I did as I was told. The wheels began to turn, the machine to wobble, then steady as it picked up more and more speed, hurtling Mrs. French, whose legs, too slow for pedals, flared out on either side, then clamped over the frame. I was running now, down the hill after her, as Mr. Clemens ran up.
“Brake,” yelled Clemens as the contraption whooshed past him. Now we were running together down the hill.
“Brake!” yelled Clemens.
“Whoa!” yelled Mrs. French, pulling back with all her might on the handlebar to no effect. “Whoa!” as she hurtled toward the fountain. Onlookers scattered. Violet screamed. Mrs. French swerved left, gave a short, clipped yelp, and plunged into the topiary. A plume of birds flew up as one body, then scattered. For a moment no one else moved, until Miss Rose, hiking her skirts, began to run as best she could.
“Lorena!” she cried. Soon Mr. Clemens and I were kneeling with her, breathless at Mrs. French’s side. “Lorena!” said Miss Rose, her hands hovering above Mrs. French’s supine body, as if afraid, after such a spill, a touch would break her.
“Back up now,” I heard Hardrow say and the pearl necklace of faces staring down upon us dispersed.
“Lorena,” said Miss Rose. “Are you terribly hurt? Dear Lorena. Say something!”
Mrs. French, eyes wide, struggling for breath, raised herself to her elbows, as the crowd moved another collective step back. “I think,” said Mrs. French as if she had been lying there considering it, “I think next time, a smaller hill.”
Of course, there would be no next time for the splintered remains of the velocipede boneshaker, but apart from a sprained ankle, a few scratches, and one admirable bruise on her knee, Mrs. French survived undamaged, suffering far more from the attention paid her. She had not performed for the sake of the audience, as Rose might have, but to satisfy her own impulsive curiosity. Nevertheless, by the time I was sent to dress for dinner, her calamity had become, in Miss Rose’s dramatic retelling, an event of great allegorical weight: a death-defying plunge of Woman strapped on the back of modern invention and surviving, bruised but victorious.
21
In a nasty show of magnanimity, Violet declared that of course we would dress for dinner in her room. Goodbye now, William, come along, Madelyn, poor dear.
So there I sat at Violet’s dressing table as the chambermaid, Susan, considered my tangled rope of hair. She had f inished with Violet, who was now posing before her vanity in an ankle length lilac gown with a hint of a bustle and a gently plunging neckline. The dress she so generously lent me was green tulle, calf length, with puffed shoulders: a girl’s dress.
“Oh!” Violet cried. “It is dreadful to be both vain and ugly.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Be grateful you are not vain, Madelyn.”
“I’m not going,” I whispered to Susan. It wasn’t only William’s presence making me anxious. I could hear carriage wheels on gravel and imagined a house full of strangers with eyes sharp as needles. You could comb and curl and braid my hair all you wanted, there was no way to prepare my face to meet them.
“Of course you’re going,” Susan whispered back. “Miss Rose says. And when Miss Rose says—Oh, what is that, miss?”
For I had, in nervousness, begun to toy with the charm around my neck.
“It is very pretty,” said Susan.
Violet, tugging herself from her reflection, peered over my shoulder. “Where did you get that?”
“William,” I said, and this time the lie, so quick from my mouth, tasted much like the truth. “Mr. Stark gave it to me.”
“Well, I think it’s very pretty,” said Susan. Violet’s nose flared. Her silence as much as her expression should have been fair warning to me.
But voices and music, not to mention savory smells, had begun to waft from the gallery floor. I let Violet go on ahead. One thing was sure, I wasn’t about to stay in her pocket all night, playing the ugly dressed-up doll to her benevolent angel. Instead I lingered at the balcony overlooking the gallery, an anxious lump thickening my throat. Violet, light as a dancer, began to distribute charming comments among the dinner guests, young men mostly, whose voices at f irst tempered, now tested the wide and vaulted space. The houseboy, Tom, smartly dressed and looking f ine, walked among them with a silver tray of drinks.
A door, then another, closed behind me. Miss Rose, then Mrs. French, who was limping but trying not to, emerged from their separate rooms. Mrs. French dressed in her usual public costume: worsted black skirt, white blouse and cravat, with a black f itted vest. Miss Rose wore blue velvet with a bustle of textured black lace; three giant ostrich feathers quivered atop her head. Such a mismatched pair would never have been hitched to a dray.
“Madelyn,” said Mrs. French. “You look”—she gave me a quick up and down—“tidy.”
“Thanks,” I said, miserably. “You too.”
If Miss Rose noticed me at all, I couldn’t tell. She stood with the flat of one hand to her chest, the other over her stomach, breathing.
“Miss Rose, are you . . .” To Mrs. French, I said, “Is she . . .”
Mrs. French, raising a f inger to her lips, joined me at the balcony rail as Miss Rose, released from some kind of trance, squared her shoulders and descended the spiral staircase. “She must make her entrance,” said Mrs. French. “Watch.”
One by one, heads turned, voices hushed; even the gathering storm outside seemed to hold its breath as Miss Rose’s shadow, appearing before the woman, extended a hand to receive the applause they gave her. “Charles Lock, you darling boy!” she said linking arms with a blond, balding young man. Her ostrich feather towered over him, and though tinged with intimacy, her voice could be heard above everyone. “Sigmund tells me you have been to Rome to see our Harriet. She has promised me a Persephone. Have you met . . . ?” She introduced him elsewhere, then traveling guest to guest, engulfed each in the limelight of her exclusive attention before moving on to bestow her presence elsewhere, the feathers of her hat visible from anywhere in the room.
“Well.” Mrs. French straightening her cravat, placed a hand on my shoulder. “Once more unto the breach?”
A misty rain fogged the gallery windows and erased the world outside the manor. Miss Rose laughed. Others joined. But where was William?
“Senator, Mrs. Biggs,” said Mrs. French to a very tall man beside a very round woman who greeted us in the gallery, “I’d like you to meet my promising new student, Madelyn.”
Senator Biggs barely acknowledged, much less questioned, Mrs. French’s description; his wife looked on me with pity. “What?” I bristled. Mrs. French’s blunt nails dug into my arm, then let go. Someone very good was playing the piano. Not Violet. There was Violet, hovering behind Miss Rose near the conservatory. Then bodies parted and I spotted William, near the parlor, his back to my Daphne statue, shaking his head in response to
something a thin, bending reed of a woman in a gray gown had said. Another man joined them, as did a Negro—Reverend something, very well dressed, which was nearly as much a shock to me as the pink letters AK branded across his left cheek.
“Mrs. French,” I said. “Mrs. French, that lady with William, who is she?”
“Well, Richard! Look!” The senator’s wife tugged her husband’s ear. “It’s Madame Molineaux. You didn’t tell me she would be here.”
“It’s all of it heretical nonsense,” said the senator. “Of course you agree, Mrs. French. Communicating with spirits in tips and taps? Imagine that woman prof iting from the grief of others.”
“I wonder,” said Mrs. French, “what your grandfather would have thought, Senator, if someone had told him his grandson would one day send messages, by tips and taps, through wires across continents and oceans? Absurd, he would say. Heretical?”
Mrs. Biggs beamed. “See now, Richard, if Lorena French . . .”
The dinner bell rang. Senator Biggs caught the eye and then the arm of Mr. Clemens as he passed. “About that book I’ve got in mind, sir. It’s only the writing that’s left to do.”
“His father won’t even send a telegram,” the senator’s wife conf ided to Mrs. French. “Says if everyone starts sending such correspondences, well, it will be the death of language. Really!”
“Mrs. French,” I said, beset with anxiety. Hungry as I was, I had been dreading dinner. I still remembered Mama’s performance at the Stockwells’, and wished to God for a puppeteer of my own, strings to guide my hands and manners. “I don’t feel good. I think—”
“You do not feel well. Of course you don’t. You’ll be f ine. I will be sitting there,” she pointed to a spot across the table, next to the balding Charles. “Watch me.”
But a silver tureen blocked a clear view of Mrs. French’s plate, and she was soon too engrossed in conversation with Charles to remember her responsibility. The cutlery, the crystal, the white glazed china plates might as well have been Violet’s mocking smile, which I could see clearly. She sat four chairs down, across the table—next to William, of course. The thin lady in gray, Madame Molineaux, sat on his other side, so that I couldn’t watch him without catching the eye of one or both of the other two.