A calm dreamlike concentration with eyes wandering on far be-yond … when he was working on Eve’s Diary or Some purely fictional fancy … liked the Mysterious Stranger [crossed out: (a child of his fancy)] But Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven held an amused concentration. Then he would … leave his chair to … knock out the ashes of his pipe with Sharp quick taps & against the fireplace or the … porch rail. But when he was letting his lovely dream life flow along he would knock out the pipe ashes in slow deliberate dreamlike fashion sitting down stairs you could gauge his mood by those pipe knocks.
At this stage of his life and career, Twain was less interested in being critically challenged than he was in being comforted and reassured, and Isabel had become the crucial person in keeping his demons at bay. Twain needed to believe that he was still productive, and Isabel was there to reassure him that he was. At summer’s end, Isabel totaled up the number of manuscripts Twain had written:
This morning Mr. Clemens called me upstairs & read the last—the end of the beautiful story—“The Horse’s Tale.” It is so lovely & so touching.
Mr. Clemens’s output this Summer has been a remarkable one.
The Microbe Story—
The wonderful Poem to Death.
Adding to the “Mysterious Stranger” some fine imaginative chapters.
The beautiful Eve’s Diary.
Revising the Gospel. The Deity Article.
The Freedom of Speech article
& now this exquisite story [“A Horse’s Tale]
For a troubled man in frequent poor health on the eve of his seventieth birthday, this was a record of which he could justifiably be proud.
On November 1, 1905, Jean, Isabel, and the household staff bid farewell to pastoral Dublin and returned to New York City. Twain would join them a few days later. As the group arrived in a horse-drawn carriage at 21 Fifth Avenue at 9:30 in the evening, they saw the light in Clara’s room dim. A minute later they saw silhouetted against the light a “black figure” in the front doorway; Isabel realized that the prodigal daughter had finally returned. She and Clara had not seen each other for over a year.
TWO
THE GATHERING STORM
FALL 1905-FALL 1908
I am the only person in the world who sees the King in his sorrow; & when he sings loudest, then I know his loneliness & sorrows are weighing most heavily upon him. … If you could know the King just a little, you’d find in him all the exquisite colors of the world. You’d find in him an ice storm & a thunderstorm, & the deeps of night, & the granite crags, & the great song of the wind, & the sweetest flower.
—ISABEL VAN KLEEK LYON
Insert card issued by the Mogul Egyptian Cigarettes Company, summer 1909–fall 1910. It reads, “To woman: a parodox who please when she puzzles and puzzles when she pleases.”
1
Twain had last lived in Manhattan with his family in 1900. During the intervening five years, the city had been transformed. New York City now boasted the world’s busiest harbor, the biggest ships and longest bridges, the worst slums, and overwhelming prosperity. There were elevated trains that crossed rivers and twenty miles of newly completed New York subway; the fare was just a nickel. Traffic was thick with people, pushcarts, horses, cars, and trolleys all jostling for a place in the crowded streets. The largest conglomeration of millionaires in history, who had accumulated gigantic tax-free fortunes, lived in massive homes on tree-lined boulevards. An enormous wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy was passing through Ellis Island, changing the city’s ethnic makeup and culture and creating tremendous social and political stresses. New York was the largest Jewish city in the world, the largest Irish city, one of the largest German cities, and home to more than seven hundred thousand Russians. This was Mark Twain’s city and he was its most celebrated citizen, popularly recognized as the “Belle of New York,” a moniker his friend Jamie Dodge had given him.
The fall of 1905 found all the surviving Clemenses and Isabel living under one roof at 21 Fifth Avenue. The year before, extensive remodeling had been done on the house to prepare it for the family’s residency, and over the summer, while Twain, Jean, and Isabel had been in Dublin, Clara, with Katy Leary’s assistance, had completed an extensive redecoration. Clara spared no expense in her efforts to create a beautiful environment, and the house stood ready to receive its occupants, gleaming walls freshly plastered and painted and rooms stocked with new furniture and linens. Surely this might prove to be a propitious time when father and daughters, comfortable in their new home, could rebuild their lives together. Yet families, unlike buildings, are not so easily repaired. Even the house, despite its solid and well-maintained appearance, seemed to reflect the stresses of its new residents. As part of the lease agreement, over the summer a heating system had been installed. But the new radiators, with their banging and rattling, made such a constant racket at night that everyone’s slumber was ruined.
In the midst of their luxurious New York City surroundings, Clara, Jean, and Isabel, three short-tempered, sleep-deprived women, were constantly ill with psychological and physical ailments. Despite having made a full recovery from her appendix surgery, Clara was consumed by a multitude of ailments that kept her bedridden. In September, she had a minor sinus operation that left her “weak & tired & discouraged.” She also suffered from sore throats, forcing her to cancel concerts in November and December. Her voice problems continued despite frequent visits to throat specialists. Twain halfheartedly supported his daughter’s singing ambitions, viewing her efforts primarily as a good way to keep her busy, although his ambivalence likely contributed to Clara’s pattern of sudden illnesses and abrupt cancellations. Friends of the family, like the poet Witter Bynner, described her voice as “queer.” (After listening to a performance Clara gave circa 1930, Russell McLauchlin, a professional music critic for The Detroit News, was more blunt. Clara “was not a good singer,” McLauchlin opined. “Her vocal gifts were several kilometers short of great.”) Even the dutifully politic Isabel euphemistically referred to Clara’s voice as being “strongly individual.”
In any case, potential patrons rarely heard it. Clara’s desire to perform could have been related to wanting to succeed in public as her father had, yet her fear of not measuring up to the standard of excellence expected of Mark Twain’s daughter muted her time and again, to her utter frustration. Moreover, she had to fight to avoid the charge that it was only because of her father’s fame that she was given engagements.
Isabel shared Clara’s health woes. She suffered from depression, and the decorous mask she wore around the family slowly began to slip. She complained in a journal entry she later inked through, “Some breath of life is gone.” In December, she confessed (an admission she later tried to obliterate): “My brain is so brittle these days. I feel it could snap so Easily.” While she felt seriously unwell, she tried to hide any visible signs of illness from the family because she feared negative repercussions. When Teresa Cherubini, the Italian maid, fell ill with a stomach ulcer in February and was hospitalized, Isabel and Twain visited her. In his usual fashion, Twain exaggerated the severity of Teresa’s affliction, in effect writing her off, saying to Isabel that Teresa should be shipped back to Italy posthaste. He claimed that he could not be held responsible for allowing Teresa to remain “against the doctor’s advice and warning. If I allowed her to stay I should feel that I was treacherous to her people, who are trusting me and believe me worthy of their trust.” Despite Twain’s prediction of her imminent demise, Teresa recovered after an extended convalescence and returned to work. To Isabel, Twain’s message was clear. If she wanted to avoid being stuck on an express train back to Farmington, Connecticut, she had better appear to be the very picture of robust health.
Jean was by far the worst off of the three women. In the years after her mother’s death, Jean’s seizures dramatically increased in their frequency and severity. Isabel carefully charted the occurrences of the seizures throughout 1905 an
d 1906, in effect creating a medical history, and her record shows an alarming acceleration beginning in spring of 1905 and continuing into the fall of 1906.
By this time Jean had been suffering from epilepsy for approximately a decade. At the disease’s onset, she had only petit mal seizures. This kind of seizure, most often observed in young people, involves a brief lapse of consciousness lasting seconds or a few minutes. After the “absence” seizure concludes, normal activity can resume. Jean described the effect of the petit mals as leaving her tired and “not any too clearheaded.” About half of the children who suffer from this kind of seizure outgrow the malady. The other half will develop much more serious grand mal seizures, and that is what happened with Jean.
A characteristic of her illness was that, as she grew older, she often experienced a cluster of seizures, sometimes as many as three a day. On a single day in August 1905, her multiple seizures prompted Isabel to observe: “one at 11.30–1.20–& 5.30 very droopy all day.” Over the next few months Jean’s health continued to worsen, and in November there occurred an episode that would affect the course of her life for years to come. Three days after Thanksgiving, Jean experienced cluster seizures at three o’clock in the afternoon and eight o’clock in the evening. Sometime that evening she physically attacked Katy Leary. While the attack was unprecedented for Jean, prevailing medical opinion at the time held that there existed a direct connection between epilepsy and violence. In fact, epilepsy was commonly accepted as a source of criminality. Obviously, that theory has since been debunked, and there is no evidence that a patient can make an intentionally motivated act of aggression during a seizure.
Recent research, however, has identified the existence of a postictal psychotic state (a state of altered consciousness) in which physical acts of aggression against other people and “behavior disturbances” do occur in epileptic patients. Psychosis usually develops in patients ten to fifteen years after the onset of epilepsy. Today postictal psychosis is widely regarded by experts as “the most common of the episodic epilepsy-related psychoses.” According to Dr. John Milton, a professor of neurology at the Claremont University Consortium, during “the postictal period, the patient becomes psychotic, and in this case, the aggression against another person is not intentionally motivated violence. The other person just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. … These acts are not intentionally planned by the patient, but are the response of the psychotic patient to a stimulus.”
During the month of November 1905, Jean had a total of six seizures, with three of them occurring on the same day, six days before her attack on Katy. Immediately following a seizure, a patient suffering from postictal psychosis will experience a period of lethargy and confusion. This confusion resolves into an “interval of apparent normality” lasting hours or days before the onset of psychosis. Patients then enter a psychotic state, typically lasting at least fifteen hours and not more than two months, during which they experience one or all of the four main forms of the disorder: “confusion, visual and auditory hallucinations, and paranoid ideation.” Jean’s medical history is consistent with a diagnosis of postictal psychosis.
In Isabel’s papers, there are two mentions of the post-Thanksgiving attack. On November 26, 1905, she noted the times of Jean’s seizures and underlined Katy’s name. Directly underneath, Isabel quoted the last stanza of William Blake’s poem “The Fly.”
Jean. 3–pm 8 pm Katy
Then am I
A happy fly.
If I live
Or if I die.
In her cryptic fashion, Isabel’s quoting “The Fly” deftly defines the temporality of her and Jean’s peculiar existences; they were both caught in a place on the margins of life as they dreamed of living it. Both women were frustrated in their attempts to create futures for themselves and both were subjected to circumstances they were powerless to control: Isabel was ensnared in a trap created by circumstance and dependent upon an elderly man’s whims, and Jean was mired in a downwardly spiraling illness.
It makes sense to consider Jean’s epilepsy as a barometer of the Clemens family’s discord. Unlike Clara, Jean did not retreat to a sanitarium after Olivia’s death. Instead, she remained at home and was the primary witness to a growing intimacy between her father and Isabel. Of all the Clemens children, Jean had been the daughter closest to and most dependent upon her mother. When Olivia was alive, she was the parent who bore direct responsibility for managing her daughter’s treatment, and she was Jean’s greatest comfort. After her death, Jean’s care was relegated to Isabel. The loss of her mother created a wound that would never heal, and the sight of her father happily accepting Isabel’s overtures must have caused her extraordinary anxiety. The continuing trauma left by Olivia’s death, combined with the change in Jean’s physical surroundings from country to city, must also have been enormously stressful for her. While she was safe from public scrutiny in Dublin (a location she infinitely preferred to New York City), at 21 Fifth Avenue, with its endless parade of visitors attempting to gain access to her father, she had nowhere to hide and nowhere to heal from the loss of her mother.
Living in such an incendiary household was proving to be too much for Twain’s fragile youngest daughter, Isabel realized: “Not only has her malady increased—but her whole physical condition is at a low ebb. And the child calls … for great waves of love from those of us who care. … In these last few days a sadness has settled over her, a gentleness that is pitiful—& you long for the masterful young creature whose powerful moods … spread consternation. But always back of these moods there [is] an individuality—a frankness of a very high order.” Jean was desperately calling for help, but the people around her were absorbed by their own needs and no one understood her illness well enough to effectively answer. Tragically, Dr. Edward Quintard, the family’s personal physician, regarded Jean as a physical threat and dangerous to those around her; he warned Isabel “never to let Jean get between her and the door, and never to close the door.” Assuming that Isabel at least in part heeded Dr. Quintard’s advice, one can only imagine what signals she might have sent Jean through changes in her behavior toward her.
The friction between Clara and Isabel that had been simmering over the course of the summer now reached a slow boil with the two of them living in the same space. When Isabel arrived at 21 Fifth Avenue in the fall of 1905, five days before Twain, Clara immediately told her that she could no longer live with the family. Most likely the two argued, with Clara insisting upon the living-out arrangement that her mother had enforced and Isabel countering that Twain always wanted her instantly available. In a victory for Clara, Isabel began looking for accommodations the next day. Isabel chose not to write about their exchange and the next six days in her daily reminder were left uncharacteristically blank. Isabel’s search for housing was immediately terminated upon Twain’s arrival. This contesting between father and daughter over where Isabel would live was a difficult situation for Isabel, of course.
Clara and Isabel next clashed over who would assume responsibility for managing the household. All had proceeded peacefully under Isabel’s direction while Clara was away. Now that Clara had returned, she made it clear to everyone that there was a different mistress of the house. Twain vainly attempted to mediate the situation. He had assured Clara prior to his return that 21 Fifth Avenue was under her “full and sole authority,” and that no one other than she would be allowed to “scold or correct a servant.” Isabel fumed about Clara’s victory in that skirmish and wrote in her journal about the servants’ unhappiness under Clara’s direction. On one occasion, according to Isabel, Clara impulsively decided that the cook should be fired and demanded that Isabel dismiss her. A reluctant Isabel did her bidding, indignantly noting that “Mary the good little cook” had a mother to support. Upon finding Isabel weeping over what she had been forced to do, a furious Clara declared: “After this I’ll do my own dirty work.” An appalled Katy Leary warned Isabel, “In time she’ll do the
same to you & worse. She hates you and don’t you forget it.”
Isabel was made sorely aware of her inferior status, especially on those rare occasions when she was included in highly fashionable public events. She was thrilled to be invited to the September society wedding of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s daughter Margaret, although she was disappointed by the seating arrangements: Twain “sat in pew 16—in the middlest aisle.” She and Jean “were only ‘Common or Garden’ folk. & sat on the side.”
A few months later, on December 4, 1905, Isabel was overjoyed to learn that she had been invited to Twain’s seventieth birthday fête at Delmonico’s Restaurant just two days later, on December 6. Delmonico’s was New York’s finest dining establishment and the first New York restaurant to have a separate wine menu. Its stylish décor was the height of Gilded Age excess, and the columns flanking its entrance reportedly had been imported from the ruins of Pompeii. Rather than being directly invited by Twain to accompany him, social decorum once again reared its tiresome head so that Twain passed along a message from Colonel George Harvey, the party’s organizer, informing Isabel that the Colonel “would be glad if I would go.” She cautiously celebrated her good fortune: “I’m afraid to breathe lest I find that the permission be nothing more than a … thistle-down of a thought to float away into … clear air.”
Mark Twain's Other Woman Page 10