“But you will sit for me again, won’t you?”
I could not help but press that point, and he was agreeable enough to say he would once he and the family were settled. Unfortunately it would be a long time before that day would come to pass.
SEVERAL DAYS HAD GONE BY when there arrived a letter posted from Guildford.
August 16, 1886
My dear friends,
If you have not heard from me in recent days it is because a crisis has arisen regarding the health of my daughter Susy. In the heat of a horrendous Hartford summer she has fallen ill from a fever. The brave girl has apparently been ill for some weeks and had the misfortune of depending too greatly on a spiritualist healer who advised her badly; she is now staying with some family friends, and I am glad to say that under a doctor’s care she is apparently coming along, though she at this point will not be well enough to come here for quite some time. All this has, of course, left my dear wife and daughter Clara in a state of concern, and yesterday I saw them off at the station, for they have booked passage back to America from Portsmouth to attend to her convalescence. Even now they are at sea; in the meantime I have been sitting on pins and needles, racked with anxiety. Last night what sleep I managed was filled with sad dreams. Though her doctor — Dr. Porter — has assured me by cable that her cure is a matter of rest.
Which is to say that once I hear better news nothing would more please me than for you to join me here for a day; it is a pleasant enough little town, without much to do but go walking. The surrounding countryside is idyllic, in a Surrey way.
Yours,
Samuel
Naturally Stanley wanted to head out to Guildford to reassure his old friend that all would turn out well, but he had come down with some very bad symptoms of his own — gastritis again — and could barely work up the will to leave his bed save to look in on the baby — in such moments, despite his awareness of the flagging resources of his body, he always managed to get up and drag himself, ever so slowly, to the nursery. Always a stoic about pain and somewhat indifferent to any fear of his own death, Stanley had been changed by Denzil’s presence in our lives. If anything pained him it was the thought that his wish to live for another twenty years, or at least as long as it would take for Denzil to grow into a man, was unlikely, given his own ever-declining health.
THEN CAME A DAY of sad news. Stanley had been sitting at the dining room table reading the morning newspapers when he came across an item on the front page of the London Times that much grieved him.
Gertrude, sitting across from him, noticed Stanley’s face draining of color. “What is it?” she asked. “Read it,” he told her. What met her eye was a headline: MARK TWAIN’S ELDEST DAUGHTER DIES OF SPINAL MENINGITIS.
A few nights before, on the evening of the eighteenth, Susy Clemens, after several weeks of suffering, passed away at her father’s Hartford home; in her company were several family friends, among them the Reverend Joseph Twichell, their housekeeper, Katy Leary, and her aunt and uncle Charles and Susan Crane. “The famous author’s firstborn daughter was called to peace at approximately 8:30 that night,” the article said. No sooner had Stanley deliberated on this tragic development—“Oh, why, dear God, should this happen to such a dear and decent man?” he thought — than he called out to his wife, Dolly, in her studio. Though he was having some difficulty walking, relying upon a cane, and although he had several appointments that he would have to cancel for the day, he had no doubt what they would have to do: “Come on,” he told her, showing Dolly the newspaper. “We’ve got to go to Guildford and find Clemens.” Her own distress was great — that this should happen to their friend in the midst of their own happiness seemed most unfair. “Yes, of course. We’ll go,” she told her husband.
THE DAY BEFORE, Clemens had been in the dining room of his rented cottage in Guildford, trying to distract himself from thoughts about Susy. The messages he and Livy had received before Livy’s departure for America had been mixed; the first few said that their daughter had fallen mysteriously ill, perhaps from her tendency to practice her singing for too many hours a day in the heat of an uncommonly warm Hartford summer. Indisposed with a fever that was “nothing serious,” she would have to recover before coming to England with her sister Jean and Katy Leary, their housekeeper, a journey that was to have begun on August 5. But later telegrams, while predicting an eventual recovery, were riddled with alarming phrases: “She is still weak and faint but in good spirits” and “In some pain, she is getting better” among them. Still, those telegrams raised such apprehension that Clemens spent nearly every evening at the town telegraph office, awaiting the latest word. On such nights, neither he nor Livy could sleep. The very possibility that her condition could take a turn for the worse precipitated his wife and daughter’s journey back to America. Even as they set sail from Portsmouth, and even as Clemens received yet another telegram saying that her recovery was all but certain, her spinal meningitis was diagnosed in Hartford. Yet for the life of him, as he would sit to work on his travel book, he couldn’t figure out why his thoughts — of meteorites flashing across the night skies beyond Hawaii and the luminous lunar eclipse they had seen on their way to Fiji, memories of a beautiful universe in motion — would turn into visions of Susy helpless in bed, a look of despair and loneliness upon her face. No, he couldn’t write much, hard as he tried to: A tightening of his legs, a flaring up of his rheumatism, a twisting of his gut accompanied the inescapable sensation that his daughter was, in fact, dying. All of them had experienced that sense without saying so, but Clemens, who refused to believe that it could possibly be true, still awaited the knock on his door, the arrival of the friendly telegraph man, with good news from Katy Leary or Joseph Twichelclass="underline" “Your daughter Susy has recovered and is now well” was the nine-word sentence he wanted to read; but that morning, August 19, when he had been thinking about whether he should take a walk to the local bakery to buy some bread, then make his way to the newsagent’s shop to collect the daily papers, then later drop a note to his friend Stanley, there indeed came, as he had hoped — and dreaded — a knock at his door.
Twain looked out: A ruddy-cheeked telegraph man with kind eyes, who had no doubt taken down the message after it had been conveyed across the Atlantic to London and then to Guildford, didn’t seem to know quite what to say. “Mr. Clemens, this is for you, sir.” And there it was, contained within the telegram, a simple phrase, sent by the Reverend Twichell, informing him of his daughter’s passing the night before.
“I am sad to report that Susy was peacefully released from her sufferings today.”
Clemens gave the telegraph man a shilling for his trouble. Heard the words “I’m sorry for you, sir.” He seemed to sit down, the actual contents of the telegram not quite registering upon him. He thought, for some reason, about molecules. How much does a molecule weigh? he asked himself. Why is it that when one is happy — say, at a time of love or when first beholding a newborn child — one experiences a nearly weightless density, as if one can nearly fly? And conversely, he wondered, what does a molecule weigh when one is feeling grief? And while he could not exactly determine what had just made him think of such things — the immediate fact of Susy’s passing having been occluded behind a wall of disorientation and denial — he fancied that the molecules around him were rapidly growing denser with alarming emotions, until each, as he would later put it, weighed “a ton of sadness, five tons of guilt, then twenty tons of gloom.” On that morning, as he sat with the telegram in hand, he found it a physical impossibility to even move, so great was his pain at being unbearably alone and beset by the sadness of this existence, which like the wind, could suddenly come upon him from any direction.