And that had been the end of that nightmare. Where now were his wife Livy, Clara, Jean, and Susy, his daughters? What dreams were they dreaming? Did he figure in them? If so, as what? Where was Orion, his brother? Inept bumbling ne’er-do-well optimistic Orion. Sam had loved him. And where was his brother Henry, poor Henry, burned so badly when the paddlewheeler Pennsylvania blew up, lingering for six excruciatingly painful days in the makeshift hospital in Memphis. Sam had been with him, had suffered with him, and then had seen him carried off to the room where the undoubtedly dying were taken.
Resurrection had restored Orion’s charred skin, but it would never heal his interior wounds. Just as it had failed to heal Sam’s.
And where was the poor old whiskey-sodden tramp who had died when the Hannibal jail caught fire? Sam had been ten then, had been awakened out of sleep by the fire bells. He had run down to the jail and seen the man, clinging to the bars, screaming, blackly silhouetted against the bright red flames. The town marshal could not be found, and he had the only keys to the cell door. A group/had tried to batter the oaken doors down and had failed.
Some hours before the marshal had picked up the bum, Sam had given the bum some matches to light his pipe. It was one of these that must have set fire to the straw bed in the cell. Sam knew that he was responsible for the tramp’s terrible death. If he had not felt sorry for him and gone home to get the matches for him, the man would not have died. An act of charity, a moment of sympathy, had caused him to be burned to death.
And where was Nina, his grandaughter? She was born after he’d died, but he had learned about her from a man who’d read her death notice in the Los Angeles Times of January 18, 1966.
RITES PENDING FOR NINA CLEMENS, LAST DESCENDANT OF MARK TWAIN
The fellow had a very good memory, but his interest in Mark Twain had helped him to record the heading in his mind.
“She was fifty-five years old and was found dead late Sunday in a motel room at 20-something-or-other North Highland Avenue. Her room was strewn with bottles of pills and liquor. There wasn’t any note and an autopsy was ordered to find out the exact cause of her death. I never saw the report.
“She’d died across the street from her luxurious three-bedroom penthouse in the Highland Towers. Her friends said she often checked in there for the weekend when she was tired of being alone. The paper said she’d been alone most of her life. She’d used the name of Clemens after she divorced an artist by the name of Rutgers. She had been married to him briefly in, ah, 1935, I think. The paper said she was the daughter of Clara Grabrilowitsch, your only daughter. It meant that she was your only surviving daughter. Clara married a Jacques Samoussoud after her first husband died. In 1935,1 think. She was a devout Christian Scientist, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know!” Sam said.
His informant, knowing that Sam loathed Christian Science, that he had once written a defamatory book about Mary Baker Eddy, had grinned.
“Do you suppose she was getting back at you?”
“Spare me your psychological analyses,” Sam had said. “Clara worshiped me. All my children did.”
“Anyway, Clara died in 1962, not long after she’d authorized publication of your unpublished Letters to the Earth.”
“That was printed?” Sam said. “What was the reaction?”
“It sold well. But it was pretty mild stuff, you know. No one was outraged or thought it was blasphemous. Oh, yes, your 1601, uncensored, was also printed. When I was young, it could be obtained only through private presses. But by the late 1960’s, it was sold to the general public.”
Sam had shaken his head. “You mean children could buy it?”
“No, but a lot of them read it.”
“How things must ’ye changed!”
“Anything, well, almost anything, went. Let’s see. The article said that your granddaughter was an amateur artist, singer and actress. She was also a shutterbug—a person who liked to take photographs—she took dozens of pictures every week of friends, bartenders, and waiters. Even strangers on the street.
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