Frail daughter of a millionaire coal magnate, apotheosis of gentility and respectability—everything, in short, that to Twain meant “making it”. . . .
I was surprised at the details that flooded back. Livy would become his censor, his respectability filter. I’d argued in my J school thesis that she symbolized Twain’s great sellout; that in settling for bourgeois security, he forever cashed in his bohemian credentials, sold short his creative freedom. Never again to be an independent satiric visionary—an artist—he fittingly became the superstar crony of plutocrats.
Well, hurling thunderbolts at Livy Langdon from grad school was one thing. Holding her letter now was quite another. I felt a feverish-ness beyond anything research was likely to evoke. Livy, only twenty-three if I had calculated correctly, was very much alive and being courted by Twain. I remembered that he was some ten years older, which would make him about . . . my age.
I pushed through the cars till I caught the porter. He knew of no passenger list, but suggested I stop by the saloon car, where some gentlemen still held forth. I retraced my steps and found the car near the end of the train. At a counter along one wall several forlorn men were drinking; another slumped facedown, his hat mashed on the counter. Card games were in progress at two tables, the players low-voiced, intent.
I stood in the doorway peering through clouds of smoke. In my mind was an unsmiling daguerreotype image of Twain as a young man. I tried hard to match it to the faces I saw. Impossible. I walked inside, my excitement slowly dissolving. None of these could possibly be Twain. I was about to leave when I saw the door to the toilet swing open at the far end. Out stepped a slender man with bushy auburn hair and a thick mustache that drooped beneath a Roman nose. His eyes met mine briefly; in that instant all doubt vanished. I was looking at Mark Twain.
I had an impulse to rush to him, hug him, tell him . . . what? That I’d grown up reading books he hadn’t yet written? That I’d been named for him?
I watched him sit alone at the most distant table. He was smaller than I expected; medium height, not short but small-framed, with narrow shoulders. He wore a dark, rumpled suit; his tie was unfastened. Beneath the tousled hair his skin looked pale in the lamplight. He produced a pipe and rummaged through his pockets for matches. I took a deep breath and stepped forward.
“Mr. Clemens?”
His eyes reflected blue-green as they met mine. His hands paused in their search. His mustache twitched. Something in his face changed, a quick masklike adjustment. Pensive and even melancholy in repose, the features were abruptly charged with sly alertness. “Yes?” He peered at me. “Are we acquainted?” The reedy voice held a pronounced drawl.
I held the letter out. “I think this is yours.”
“Sweet Jesus,” he breathed, snatching it and crushing it to his mouth. He breathed its scent, eyes squeezed shut. “Hang my head and carry me home to die!”
I stood awkwardly as he pulled out a handkerchief and honked into it.
“Forgive me,” he said. “As a general thing my feelings’re more cordially reserved. I’ve hunted high and low for this infernal letter. What a relief to have it!”
I told him where I’d found it.
“Must’ve dropped from my pocket. Sit down, sir! Allow me to stand a drink. This night’s built for pleasuring after all. Hell, I’ll stand us a dozen!”
He came back with four whiskeys, two apiece. Sorry, Andy, I thought, but this is a very rare occasion.
“You knew I was Clemens,” he said. “How’s that? Most sound me by a certain nom de plume. I can’t recollect—Washoe, the Pacific Slope, the Lyceum circuit? Have we met?”
“Not personally,” I said. “I’m Sam Fowler.”
“One Sam to another, I’m obliged.” We clinked glasses and drank. He gestured at the letter. “I’d be a ruined proposition if my darling thought I cared so little for her as to misplace that. Course, I’d gladly go through Hades in a celluloid suit to make up for it. Not that she’d demand it. She’s the dearest, gentlest, sweetest—oh, the best woman I can picture. Why such a noble and delicate creature as Livy consented to a conjugal matchup with the likes of—” He stopped suddenly, pulled the ribbon from the letter, and scanned its sheets.
“Why, there’re no full names here, just as I reckoned. How’d you know it was to me?”
“Isn’t it signed Livy Langdon?” I said.
He shook his head, eyes narrowing slightly over the hawk nose. “It addresses Youth and is signed Livy. Took months to convince her there’s no comfort to me in signing Olivia Louise Langdon, a practice that nigh put me into lunatic spasms. Presently I’m working to repair her spelling. When I’ve done that, I’ll relax with something easy—like bringing the Pyramids over brick by brick.”
As I laughed he gauged my reaction with a deadpan expression, the performer checking his material.
“Why Youth?” I said.
“There is no word for failure in the bright lexicon of youth,’” he recited dryly. “One of the sayings Livy keeps in her infernal little inspiration book. It’s part of her scheme to haul me out, scrape my keel, and refloat me.” He winked foxily as he produced a box of matches. His pipe emitted thick clouds and a swampy odor. He eyed me keenly. “Now, you didn’t answer me about the letter, did you?”
“I can’t really explain it, Mr. Clemens,” I said. “Call it a hunch. To tell the truth, I know a lot about you. You’re quite famous, you know.”
“Call me Mark,” he said, looking pleased. “What exactly do you know?”
The whiskey eroded my caution. “Well, for one thing, I know how you first saw Livy—her brother showed you her picture.”
His eyebrows lifted. “And where was that?”
“On your cruise around the world.”
“Bay of Smyrna, summer of ’sixty-seven.” His drawl sounded almost dreamy. “Even in that ivory miniature she was the loveliest of visions.” He shrugged and sucked on his pipe. “But you could be pals with young Charley Langdon or any other close to the family.”
“I know your engagement date.”
“Oh?” He frowned slightly. “You do?”
“February fourth.” I’d proposed to Stephanie on the same date. “It’s inscribed in Livy’s gold engagement band—and probably inside that one on your finger, too. Want another drink?”
“How’d—?” he began, staring hard. “Yes, I guess I do!” After they came he said, “What part of the country you from, Fowler?”
“San Francisco.”
“Freddy Marriott!” he exclaimed. “That’s who you pumped! And yet I don’t see how Freddy would’ve known of the rings. . . .”
“Your first daughter will be Susy,” I said, laughing, enjoying the power of it; in a way my whole life had been a preparation for this. “I’ll give my second girl that name.”
“That’s very curious,” he mused. “Later you’ll write a wonderful book about a boy on a raft and—” “Hold on,” he interrupted. “You’re not the first to tell me—I mean, about the girl Susy.”
I was speechless for a long moment. My sense of power evaporated, replaced by sharp and poignant sorrow: Susy, his favorite, would die in her early twenties, a terrible loss to Twain and his family. I had no right to be doing this.
“Who else told you?” I said.
“Spiritualist woman, a Lyceum stager with Redpath, same as I was. Went by Madame Antonia, something like that.”
I remembered the card in the drugstore. “Clara Antonia?”
“That’s the one.” He looked at me quizzically. “She also told me I’d run into a spiritual counterpart from another dimension. Said it with tolerable gravity. Even seemed a mite troubled to be informing me. It gave me pause at the time, though I didn’t exactly hang fire over it.”
My pulse quickened. I was following a path, I must be. “What would you say,” I asked him, “if I told you my full name was Samuel Clemens Fowler, and that I’d come here from another century?”
He sipped his whiskey. “My historical double?”
“I don’t think—well, in a way, maybe.”
He regarded me impassively. “What century’d you have in mind?”
“Oh, say the next one—the 1980s, let’s imagine.”
“They still know about me up then?”
“You’d be surprised.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “And folks say I suffer from overblown imagination. Would you care to know what I’m wondering?”
“Whether I’m crazy?”
“No,” he said, hooded eyes alert. “It’s manifest you’re a lunatic. I’m wondering if somehow you managed to steal that letter off me.”
“I didn’t, I swear. Anyway, why would I return it?”
He nodded slowly, seeming to agree.
From whiskey we moved to champagne cocktails. Then sherry cobblers. Then brandy smashes. Twain showed the skeptical bartender how to make what he called “Californy Concoctions.” They carried names like Santa Cruz Punch, Eye-Opener, and Earthquake. He bought rounds for the car, celebrating, he said, the prodigality of his love. We raised our glasses to Livy.
Later he let himself be coaxed up beside the bar, where he slouched with thumbs hooked in his vest and told stories in a flat drawl. His style was that of a frontier Jack Benny, I thought; he maintained an unshakable deadpan, pausing often for effect, feigning puzzlement when interrupted by guffaws—a frequent occurrence.
From somebody else his material might have bombed—a preacher who spilled faro cards hidden in his gown during a sermon; a huckster who charged admission to see an eclipse from a topless tent—but Twain made it work. His cappers were tall tales—“stretchers,” he called them—about a corporation of mean men who docked an explosives worker for time lost in the air while being blown up; or a champion liar who claimed that his horse outran the edge of a thunderstorm for eighteen miles while his dog swam behind the wagon all the way.
Well into morning, when most of the others had gone, Twain and I sat bleary-eyed. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Sam, want in on a proposition that could make us richer than Solomon?”
“Sure.” I remembered that he loved get-rich-quick schemes, and that several would prove ruinous.
“I mentioned Freddy Marriott earlier. He puts out that infernal Advertiser in Frisco. You read it?”
I shook my head, glad I hadn’t told him I was a reporter. “What about him?”
“Later this summer Freddy’ll announce news so grand it’ll make the Pacific Railroad blush. He worked with Henson in England, you know, and never gave up the notion of aerial transport. Using every dime from his paper, Freddy’s been hiring engineers on the sly.” Twain gave me his foxy look. “At last he’s developed a flying steam carriage!”
If it was meant to shock, it failed. I stifled a yawn and said, “You believe that?”
“I’m satisfied Freddy believes. He’s happy as a lord, laughing at all the doubting sapheads. A working model goes on display next month. Then he’ll offer stock in his new company.”
“A company to build and sell flying machines?”
“Nope, Freddy figures imitators’ll swarm in like insects, soon as the word gets out. He couldn’t do much to stop them. He’s primed for something bigger.”
“Bigger than airplanes?”
“Aerial carriages,” he corrected, looking around to make sure we were alone. “Freddy’s going after a monopoly on transcontinental passenger service.”
“What!” I almost laughed out loud. “He intends to fly people coast to coast?”
“These are revolutionary times, Sam,” said Twain firmly. “What sounds lunatic one year is thundering reality the next. Those who don’t take risks swallow the dust of those who do. Think of the hidebound wretches who didn’t invest in steamboats and trains, canals, the telegraph—a host of modern inventions. There’ll soon be steam trolleys and Lord knows what else. Anyway, Freddy’s letting his friends know about it now, so we can get in before things go sky high.” He paused to make sure I caught the pun. “I’d be of a mind to plunge, if I had cash at the ready. Picture the returns!”
I didn’t get much of a picture. “Why are you telling me about it?”
He looked hurt. “As a favor, my man! For the service you did. You struck me as a likely gent for a brave new game.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t have the cash either.”
“A damnable shame. Well, when you get back to Frisco”—he gave me a penetrating look—“that is, if it happens to be in this century, maybe you’ll see fit to hunt up Freddy and look into it. Are you headed back soon?”
I explained that I was meeting the Stockings in New York.
“Ah, baseball. The game’s everywhere now, puffed up like a dime-show marvel. I’ve stood reg’lar watches on Elmira’s bleaching boards, observing our two local clubs trying to humble each other. Played myself as a boy in Missouri—called it town ball then. One afternoon Tom Blankenship struck a ball through Widow Holliday’s kitchen window. Overturned a painkiller bottle from the sill. The widow’s old yellow cat, Last Judgment, took a stiff wallop of the stuff and streaked out to settle accounts with every dog in the township.”
I laughed, again aware of his scrutiny.
“You look done in,” Twain said. “Let’s get some sleep.”
It seemed only seconds after I’d fallen on my bunk that the shout came: “Jersey City! All off!”
We crossed the Hudson—here it was called the North River—on one of the small side-wheelers packed along the Jersey docks. I climbed to the observation deck, hoping to see the Manhattan skyline, but fog formed a dense curtain. The ferry’s pealing bell was answered by invisible craft on all sides. I stared into the mist and wondered what lay ahead for me. As the Desbrosses Street dock loomed, I felt my elbow touched.
“Been here before?” Twain’s reedy drawl.
“No,” I said, which was almost true. I’d attended a conference once, gotten a few first impressions.
“This island held the noblest fascination for me when I arrived sixteen years ago, a printer boy with ten dollars sewn in my coat. Stayed the whole summer of ’fifty-three. Saw the World’s Fair at the Crystal Palace. A spectacle! Did you know six thousand attended every day? Double my hometown’s population.” He knocked his pipe against the railing. “Fell in love with Manhattan like she was a woman. Now it’s different. Traffic’s an abomination. Prices are higher’n perdition—lodging alone’s triple what I paid then. By the way, where’re you staying?”
I pulled a slip of paper from my wallet. “Earle’s Hotel, Canal Street.”
“Why, that’s right near the St. Nicholas. How’d it be if we took in a few sights together? I’m a mite weary of folks I generally see.”
“You’re on,” I said, delighted.
“Buy a money belt,” he said. “The cash you’re carrying in that fancy billfold won’t be with you six blocks in a Seventh Avenue car or downtown Red Bird bus.”
“Muggers?”
“Them too, but I meant pickpockets.”
We walked down the ferry ramp. The dock was noisy with workers on freight platforms, baggage wagons rumbling over planks, horsecars gliding on rails. Twain hailed one of the lined-up hacks.
We slanted onto Canal Street and clattered beneath a flimsy-looking iron trackway running along Greenwich. It stood fifteen feet above the street. “What’s that?” I asked, reminded of erector-set constructions Grandpa and I had made.
“The new Ninth Avenue Elevated,” Twain said. “Runs from Battery Place clear up to Thirtieth and Ninth. Experimental, cars pulled by cable.” He explained that steam trains weren’t permitted below Forty-second: noise and smoke terrorized horses; cinders posed a fire hazard.
I craned my neck as we crossed Broadway. Paved sidewalks were overhung with broad awnings. The streetlamps were globes topped by brass balls. Pedestrians swarmed among bicycles—I’d learned they were fairly new and known as velocipedes—and round-topped public minicoaches and swifter carnages and carts and horsecars. There were no traffic signals. One cursing cop tried to keep it all moving. Traffic wasn’t bad this early, Twain remarked. To me it looked awful.
I peered around the driver, trying to see everything. A maze of telegraph wires stretched overhead. Buildings were encrusted with ironwork, and the tallest stood only five or six stories. In the distance a steeple soared above its surroundings. It was Trinity Church, Manhattan’s tallest structure at well over two hundred feet. But it would soon be surpassed, Twain said. The walls of the new St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue would stretch some three hundred and thirty feet heavenward.
A horrendous clanging sounded. Pedestrians and vehicles gave way to form a corridor in which an ambulance emerged, its grim-faced driver wielding a whip on a single straining horse. The cab’s shades were raised; I glimpsed an attendant struggling with his patient, a bald man thrashing spasmodically. I stared in morbid fascination. Violence and death were close to the surface back here; it lent existence a certain tenuous vitality.
The lobby of Earle’s Hotel held worn horsehair furniture, tarnished spittoons, and an oppressive portrait of the Duke of Wellington, whose painted eyes followed us. Twain rumbled disapprovingly and suggested I stay with him at the St. Nicholas. I said it was presently out of my price range. He reflected on that, nodded, and said he’d return later.
My room was drab but reasonably clean. I examined my wound. It was still stiff and tender, but had virtually healed. The gash was unchanged. Weary and a bit hung over, I tried the bed and was soon making up for lost sleep.
Manhattan’s built-up portions extended to 130th Street, near the Harlem River, and held over a million people. Twain seemed determined for me to see most of them. He started by escorting me along Broadway, tipping his hat to people staring at him, beaming and responding when they called, “Hi, Mark!”
He showed me the famous gray-stoned Astor House at the corner of Barclay. Built thirty years earlier, it had been considered too far uptown, Twain said. Now it was too far down, its glory stolen by the Metropolitan and St. Nicholas, whose homey comforts Twain preferred, and which in turn were being supplanted by mammoth new establishments farther uptown. At Madison Square we strolled into one—the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It covered a square block and held six floors. Twain showed me its steam-powered elevator (he called it a “perpendicular railway”); so many used it for fun that the management had installed in it a gas chandelier, plush carpeting, and a divan. Every room contained the latest comforts: central heating, private baths, speaking tubes for room service.
We hired a hack and toured the white-fronted palaces of consumerism along the fashionable “Ladies’ Mile.” There, lavishly outfitted women left liveried coachmen to wait while they shopped in Lord & Taylor’s emporium at Twentieth or Arnold Constable’s at Nineteenth, both having recently opened their pale marble facades to the public.
I told Twain I wanted to visit a state-of-the-art department store. He chose A. T. Stewart’s cast-iron palace at Ninth, just east off Broadway. Its exterior white metal, ornately sculpted, was designed to look like marble. Blue awnings shaded the window displays. Inside, the scale was grandiose. Eight floors spanned two and a half acres. Two thousand employees dispensed stock to meet life’s physical requisites, from baby clothes to funereal “black goods.” A central rotunda framed an enormous domed skylight. A double staircase linked all floors. An organ played solemnly—appropriate, I thought, for a marketplace shrine.
We looked in on the vast sewing room, an entire floor, where rows of women—more than nine hundred—hand-stitched every bit of clothing sold in the store. Noticing that they didn’t work from patterns, I questioned the floor manager, a silk-hatted martinet who gave me a fishy look and informed me that not only did no such absurdity exist, but that Stewart’s was far too exclusive to consider it.
“Forget about airplanes,” I told Twain. “Just market paper sewing patterns all over the country.”
“Do I look prize fool enough to try ‘n’ get any two females to make the same thing?” He snorted. “It’d never work.”
With some surprise I saw women among the clerks at Stewart’s. Until then I’d seen only men employed in stores. Hiring women, Twain said, began during the war, when manpower was short. Girls also worked among Stewart’s two hundred cash children. They were very young and looked poor and tired. No wonder. They worked fourteen hours a day.
“Aren’t there any child-labor laws?” I asked Twain.
“Not to speak of,” he said. “That a fault?”
“Of course,” I said.
“But if there were, how’d I’ve learned my printing trade? My father died when I was ten. I left school and went to work—and then my true education commenced. How would you have it different?”
I didn’t know. Without social legislation, few choices existed.
We lunched in a basement saloon off Printing House Square. Thick pork loin sandwiches, wedges of cheese, fried oysters—tasty and absolutely free, but so salty that a number of nickel beers were required to wash it all down; no fools, the pub owners.
Afterward we strolled through City Hall Park, where the Tribune and Times buildings stood side by side. Excavation was under way at the southern end for an enormous new post office. We sat on a bench and enjoyed the scene. Birds sang in the trees. Squirrels chattered. Children laughed and screamed. Strolling couples bought balloons, checked their weight on scales, peered through telescopes, and blew into a strange-looking contraption that measured lung strength.
“Hokey pokey, penny a lump!” cried a vendor.
“What’s he selling?” I said. “Coal?”
Twain looked at me sidelong. “Ice cream, you saphead.”
I bought two cups of sherbet. “Hey,” I said to the vendor, a stick-thin boy, “You know ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!’?”
“Oh, ain’t you the trump,” he said, giving me a withering look. “That’s precious old, mister.” At least the sherbet was good.
The foot of Broadway resounded with a welter of languages. Peddlers abounded. Knife grinders rang bells and pushed their carts. Barefoot children stood beside steaming pots shouting “Here’s sweet hot corn!” Others shouted, “Roasted peanuts!” and “Strawberries, fine, ripe, and red!” Still others hawked apples, flowers, pencils; one even had french fries—“Saratoga potatoes”—and I bought some eagerly, the first I’d encountered. Everywhere we were besieged with cries of “Blackin’, sir? Shine, sir?”
“Every street arab buys a brush and foot box,” Twain grumbled, “and sets up boot-blacking.”
Over the sidewalks hung meat and poultry crawling with flies. We skirted cut-rate furniture and dry goods piled on the walks. Rank odors came from tables of smoked meats and fish, decaying fruit and vegetables. Twain said most of it had likely been picked off the ground at the Fulton and Washington markets. Pointing to ragpickers trudging behind small dog-drawn carts, he informed me that they had to pay license fees, yet some made as much as seven dollars a week and bought farms out West. I didn’t believe it.
“‘Ere you, mister!” An urchin girl poked matches at me. I bought a penny parcel—and threw them down when I saw lice crawling on my fingers. In the Alger novels of this time, I remembered, ragged kids got ahead through luck and pluck—saving a rich child from drowning or returning a fat wallet—but these sniveling, rot-toothed waifs looked too malnourished to save anyone, especially themselves. And a wallet dropped here would vanish in microseconds.
“Something’s got to be done about these kids,” I said to Twain as we moved on.
He snorted. “There’s a mortal confusion now of workhouses, jails, charity asylums, hospitals—all for the unfortunate.”
“Shouldn’t the government take responsibility for people’s welfare?”
“You’ll never make that old cat fight,” he retorted. “The people are responsible for their own welfare.”
“But those kids are living on pennies!”
“How’s the government at fault? Look, Sam, here they got a chance to make their mark. Sure, some’ll end up as ragged bummers, some as flash girls. But they all had a chance. That’s it. Why you think so many come pouring in here from all over creation?”
I shut up. What struck me as basically harsh struck him as basically fair—at least as fair as anything else.
Bumping back up Broadway in a coach, we halted behind a crew paving over the cobblestones with asphalt. My eye was caught by a theater marquee across the street. Niblo’s Garden proclaimed the presence of LYDIA THOMPSON’S BRITISH BLONDES! I asked Twain about it.
“They put clipper-built girls up on the stage, prancing with barely clothes enough on to be tantalizing.” He confessed that he’d seen the first of the leg shows, The Black Crook, at Niblo’s three years before. “Since then, imported blondes have become all the rage. But it’s still the scenery and tights that’re everything—except for one new blonde who’s supposed to be a genuine dazzler.”
“Elise Holt?”
“That’s the one. How’d you know?”
I explained where I’d seen her. He drew me out with questions, and I found myself telling him about Morrissey, McDermott, Le Caron, the money, the shooting—everything.
“Whew,” he said. “Morrissey’s not to trifle with, and them others don’t brace me up either. You carrying that gun?”
I patted my coat pocket.
“I had no thought of being teamed with such a desperate character,” he said, stoking his pipe. “Feels like Virginia City all over.”
We started moving. Near Fifth Street, Twain suddenly pointed at the facade of a small building beside the Metropolitan Hotel.
“Jesus, that’s her,” I said excitedly. “Think we can get tickets?” “Pretty late for a Friday,” he said. “I’ll see to it tomorrow. Strikes me that a dedicated journalist should make every effort to stay abreast of things. So to speak.” He shot me a look from under his eyebrows.
“Bear in mind that by no stretch would this ever be a fit topic for Livy’s ears.”
“Of course not,” I said.
Next morning I got a note from Twain saying that business had occupied him, but he’d meet me that night at the theater. Feeling at loose ends, I wrote a letter to my daughters telling them that even if I missed their birthdays—Hope would turn five early in July, Susy three a few weeks later—I loved them and would come home as soon as I could. I included their zip code in the address just in case, put a three-cent stamp on the envelope, walked it to the post office—no mailboxes yet—and dropped it through a slot, feeling silly and yet closer to them.
By the time I strolled up Broadway in my black evening suit, my spirits had rebounded. I’d slicked my hair, scrubbed my teeth with Burnett’s Oriental Tooth Wash, and put on gleaming new high-laced shoes. Around me throngs of people stepped briskly in the deepening dusk, speaking in animated voices. Lamps from theaters and concert saloons splashed the sidewalks with brilliant colors. Bursts of music and applause floated from lobbies. The lamplighters were out with their ladders, making the streetlights glowing yellow balls. Stagecoaches’ lights of red, green, and blue formed tracers as they bumped over the cobblestones. Excitement bubbled in me. I was on my way to the theater. With Mark Twain, no less.
He stood in the lobby of the Waverly, natty in tails, silk stovepipe, and polished gaiters, surrounded by admirers. When I pushed close he muttered, “Let’s clear out.”
Our seats occupied a small gilt-framed box flanking the stage. The Waverly’s interior was intimate—cramped, to be less poetic—all its surfaces festooned with draperies and gilt molding. In the orchestra seats were a few fat burghers whose overdressed wives looked self-conscious in the mostly male audience. The fifty-cent sections were boisterous. The house held about three hundred, and standing room was vanishing fast.
The curtain rose. A hand-lettered sign said that we were about to see “A Pretty Piece of Business,” which turned out to be a comedy skit. Following it were two sisters who danced in remarkable unison, like music-box figures. The audience grew restless.
Finally the feature. By the most forgiving standards it was awful. Performed to Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, set with flowery painted backdrops depicting ancient Greece, a sequence of frothy numbers built to the goddesses’ contest for the golden apple. Buxom women in platinum wigs wore garish clinging gowns, one Viola Crocker, as Venus, parading herself especially sinuously. Her heavy curves were much appreciated by the house. To me she looked almost alarmingly overweight.
I’d had about enough when Elise Holt finally sauntered on as Paris. Although ostensibly a male—she played the wisecracking, cigar-smoking soubrette—Holt alone wore flesh-colored tights. Her well-curved legs and hourglass torso showed to maximum effect. The blond curls peeped from under leafy garlands; the oval face was powdered and rouged. The audience paid rapt attention. So did I.
She looked larger onstage than she had at the Troy ball grounds. But beside the others she was petite. She danced with jaunty grace. Her throaty voice sounded more suggestive than musical. Unlike the fleshy women, Holt exuded sensuality without seeming to try. It occurred to me that she was very like a 1920s flapper—liberated, mannish, sexual—almost sixty years before her time.
“Witching little thing,” Twain remarked. “Vital as a St. Rupert’s drop.”
“Fantastic body,” I said.
He glanced at me. “And dressed with meagerness to make a parasol blush.”
As an encore, the cast performed a wild full-stage cancan. “A wilderness of girls,” Twain called it.
He was hard to read on sex. The glitzy peroxide and tights seemed to have amused more than titillated him. I remembered his writings as being sexually repressed, standard for the age. But it might have been a facade. Or imposed by Livy.
Twain lit a cigar outside. “You fancy the little blonde?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
At a flower stall he purchased red roses and sent them backstage with a note. “Let’s see if this stirs anything.”
We stood by the stage door. After most of the performers had departed, Holt appeared, bundled in furs, flanked by a man and a woman.
“Miss Holt,” drawled Twain, tipping his hat. “If you’d be kind enough to join us, we’d be honored by your company at Delmonico’s.”
She looked at him, brows knit. The other woman whispered. Holt smiled vaguely; either she didn’t know of Twain or didn’t care. “The flowers were lovely,” she said, starting past. “Thanks ever so much.”
Damn, I thought, and stepped in front of her. “I enjoyed your performance here and in Troy.”
Startled, the blue-violet eyes scanned my face and rested briefly on my cheek. “Why, you’re the one who provoked that row at the match!” She laughed, low-pitched and throaty. “I enjoyed your performance, sir.”
“I’m Sam Fowler,” I said, grinning. “Come have a drink with us?”
“That’s kind, but I’m afraid not.” She gestured at the man. “My fiance.”
The guy gave me a tight smile. Fiance? Where the hell was he during the Troy game? Or did she only go to ball games with high-rolling Congressmen?
Holt must have guessed my thoughts. A warning flashed in her eyes: Be quiet. I nodded slightly, smiling. “‘Night, gentlemen,” she said crisply.
“That’s that,” I muttered, watching her move away.
We walked several blocks in silence.
“You fancy female companionship?” asked Twain.
I thought about it. “More than ever.”
We took a hack out Fifth Avenue toward Murray Hill, where Commodore Vanderbilt was planning to erect a magnificent railway depot to serve all Manhattan. In Twain’s view it would be too far uptown.
“Where does ‘uptown’ start, anyway?”
“About Twenty-fifth or so.”
“That’s not so far, then.”
“Too blamed far to walk from the St. Nicholas.”
We descended in front of a tall brownstone on Thirty-fourth.
“House of ill repute?” I said.
“A palatial bagnio,” Twain replied. “Parlor houses are prospering between Union Square and Central Park, but I guarantee you won’t fault this one.”
“You sound pretty knowledgeable.”
“One of fame’s advantages,” he said mildly. “Entering doors that are otherwise shut.”
A peephole clicked open. Twain was recognized. We stepped into a garnet-and-gold hallway. Recessed niches held a life-sized marble Diana and a bronze Cupid. A dandy with oiled sideburns ushered us into a large, overheated drawing room. I looked wonderingly at a profusion of crystal chandeliers, exotic plants, plush divans, and art objects. There were carvings and vases and busts—nearby on pedestals rested Cleopatra, Minerva, and, oddly, Milton—and on the walls oils by Hogarth, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Van Dyck. The dandy informed me archly that the carpets had been specially woven on Smyrna looms to match the Damascus hangings. Bursts of birdsong came from a gilded aviary. Incense hung heavily in the air. Water bubbled in a marble basin after flowing through an aquarium.
“My God,” I breathed, loosening my tie, sweating in the hothouse atmosphere where everything seemed overripe. I wanted to peel off my clothes—maybe that was the idea.
“Pleases the eyes, don’t it?” Twain said, looking about languidly as he settled on one of the divans. “I’d have no kick about this as a steady thing.”
I was about to say it would drive me crazy when a cultivated voice said, “Gentlemen.” We looked up. A stout woman enveloped in yards of lace and satin, ablaze with diamonds, regarded us regally. We rose and bent in turn over her jeweled fingers. All convivialities of her home, she assured me, were at my disposal.
“Since it’s manifest you prefer the finest company,” she said, beaming at Twain, “allow me to say that our young ladies are finely bred. You will enjoy their discourses.”
“I’m sure I will.” I eyed a Rubenesque young thing floating around a corner in a filmy gown.
“Precisely,” she said, and disappeared through the leaves of an enormous dieffenbachia, her departure not unlike, Twain remarked, a lit-up paddle wheeler forging through an overgrown channel.
“How much will these Rabelaisian delights cost us?” I asked.
“Cost you” he corrected. “I’m sworn to reform myself. Oh, the night could run sixty, seventy dollars, but for that you’d get all you could concoct—and more.”
“I’ll limit my concoctions.” I had at most fifty dollars left from my gambling winnings.
Twain bought drinks, smoked a cigar, and departed. I wasn’t alone very long. A red-haired woman appeared, plump and rouge-cheeked. Her name was Opal, she said, and asked if I would care for champagne.
“Well, I think I would.”
She smiled and suggested showing me the salon. “Do you enjoy Chopin?”
At a grand piano, playing a nocturne with effortless facility, sat a young woman with chestnut hair and pale eyes. She was wonderfully slender—doubtless viewed as a freak, I reflected—and her skin was flawless. She looked up at me. She smiled. I smiled back. Opal vanished discreetly. A waiter appeared with champagne and two glasses. The young woman finished playing.
“Thank you, kind sir.” She sipped from the fluted glass and studied me over the rim. “I am Charlotte.”
“I’m . . . impressed.”
She took my arm and guided me to a loveseat. She sat close, her hip brushing mine. Her eyes regarded me intently. Her voice was cultivated, devoid of the flat eastern accents I’d grown used to. She was careful to ask little about me. We talked of San Francisco and its weather, topics about which she seemed knowledgeable. She asked if I would like to chat in a cozier quarter of the mansion.
Her room was almost as lush as the parlor. A silk canopy overhung a huge bed swimming in folds of blue satin. In an alcove stood a sofa carved with arabesques. She led me to it.
“Do you enjoy Moliere?” She laughed delightedly at my expression. “I am reading Le Misanthrope. Do you know it?”
I tried to remember it from college. “Well . . .”
She lifted a volume from her table and read a passage aloud in fluent, musical French. “Alceste’s friend, Philinthe,” she translated, “tells him, ‘My mind is no more shocked at seeing a man a rogue . . . than seeing vultures eager for prey, mischievous apes, or fury-lashed wolves.’”
She spoke slowly. Her pale eyes stared into mine. In them I saw tiny reflections of a flickering gas jet on the wall behind me.
“Sam,” she said huskily, stroking my hand, “a gentleman needs to be a rogue on occasion.”
That did it. I pulled at her dress as she tore at my shirt, and things became like a movie passion montage—you know, naked bodies churning and tumbling and dissolving from one position to another. Charlotte knew her business and gave every appearance of liking it. Once when I thought I was hurting her—she was anything but a heavyweight—she hissed and clawed at me when I slackened.
I couldn’t get enough of her smooth flesh against mine. I pressed her hard, ran my hands over her, stroked and kneaded, took the warmth of her into me. Toward dawn, after the last climactic shudder, after the last glass of brandy, she held my head to her breasts and rocked me like an infant.
“Dear Sam,” she whispered, “you needed this terribly.”
A high sighing sound escaped me; she pressed me tighter.
“I haven’t felt like this since I was first married.”
She laughed gently and said, “I help many marriages.”
“I’ll bet. What about you? A beautiful woman who reads Moliere and plays Chopin. Why aren’t you out shopping the Ladies’ Mile, spending a rich husband’s money?”
She smiled faintly. “I was ruined for that life.”
“Ruined?”
“Seduced by a gentleman.”
“So?”
“You don’t understand? We were to marry. I let him have his way. Then he no longer wanted me.” She shrugged. “It occurs commonly.”
“And you’re ruined?”
“Why do you say it so? You know perfectly well no respectable man would have me.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.” She shrugged. “It all took place five years ago. I don’t look backward or carry regrets. I’ve saved my earnings. Someday I’ll have a mansion of my own.”
“Ruined, for God’s sake,” I muttered. “What a time to live!”
She kissed me. “Is there another?