Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Then: “But am I boring you, Miss Tennant, with this flight of words? If I do, I apologize, but as you stand behind your canvas making drawings of me—your eyes so kindly—I feel no hesitation in telling you such things.”

  “Mr. Stanley, what things I can learn of you most interest me: Please do go on.”

  “WELL, THEN, IT WAS a Saturday in 1847—a Saturday of dreary Welsh weather, the sky gray and air as damp and cold as the sea. With my few possessions stashed in a sack, I rode alongside the sexton’s son, who—and here, Miss Tennant, came another instance of hard learning, this time about man’s capacity for deception—had allayed my anxieties with stories of how pleasant my life with Aunt Mary would be, saying that hers was a beautiful house with a big garden that bloomed sweet in the spring. With the horse clopping slowly along, traveling the longest five miles of my life, he told me that Mary, like the mother of Jesus herself, loved little boys very much, and that she, having no sons of her own, had always wished for one and had all kinds of delicious cakes and sweets waiting for me to eat. In a lovely voice she’d sing me to sleep with Welsh lullabies at night, and he said no ghosts would enter her house to disturb me. But you see, Miss Tennant, when that carriage came to its destination, there was no pretty house awaiting me, and no Aunt Mary; no, before me, in all its stolid glory, stood an immense stone building, which looked something like a prison, with barred windows all around it. As we waited before its gated entrance, the sexton’s son told me that this was only a temporary stop to give our horse some rest, but he had gotten out and clanged a bell by its door. Two clangs of a bell I heard, then footsteps sounding on some paving stones from inside. Shortly a gloomy man stood at the entranceway and had a few words with the sexton’s son; with that he lifted me out of the carriage, and as I had started to cry, fearing the worst, because I did not trust the gloomy man’s face, he told me, ‘Now, wait inside, and Aunt Mary will come to fetch you soon enough.’

  “That was the last I saw him; and as there had never been any such person as Aunt Mary, I was taken inside, the gloomy keeper leading me into the inner courtyard of that place, which to my young eyes seemed like bedlam, for I could see, trembling and crying as I was, so many hopeless sorts—elderly paupers who seemed to have no purpose but to walk in circles around the courtyard, talking to themselves; and I saw an idiot speaking to a wall and a bent-over old woman crying in a corner; and when I looked up at the windows of the surrounding buildings, I could see the sad faces of little children, much like your urchins, peering down at me, and I wanted to run away. But this was not to be, Miss Tennant, for on that day I had been delivered into the care of the Victorian state. My new home went by the name of St. Asaph Union Workhouse. I was but seven years of age and very sad indeed.”

  “You poor, dear man,” Dorothy Tennant said.

  “Males and females, even married couples, were kept in separate wards. Among the transient population were prostitutes brought in for spiritual reawakening as well as dolts and madmen better suited for asylums but put there by a kindly local vicar. Of the children, there were about seventy: Forty were boys—the girls, kept in a separate ward, were rarely to be seen.

  “While the girls were taught by the matron in charge, my schoolmaster was one James Francis, a former collier of some education. He’d lost his left hand in a coal-factory accident as a younger man, and he was of such a bad temperament that at the slightest provocation he often used his good right hand to wield a birch rod. Though this Mr. Francis was a Welshman who could only speak broken English, he taught his lessons, however painstaking and confusing it might have been to his students, in the English language. His words were taken from books verbatim, exactly as they were written, Welsh being strictly forbidden in those classrooms. As I could only speak Welsh, many were the days I spent without knowing a word of what was being taught. But as there were boys willing to teach me some English, I learned to wean myself off the mother tongue—and in a hard way, for whenever I uttered any words of Welsh in the classroom or made an error in my pronunciation of an English word, Mr. Francis would give me a blow on the back of my head or strike a switch against the upheld palm of my hand—I still have two scars to remind me of that, Miss Tennant. But most humiliating was to have my breeches pulled down and be lashed.

  “Even though there were many things that pained me greatly about that institution, there was much there by which I profited. We were taught to read and write. Latin and Greek. Geography and history and mathematics. And at the same time, our religious instruction was thorough. It was the practice of the chaplain to post upon the classroom walls and in other public places sheets bearing passages from the Scriptures, such as which might help our moral education. Bible lessons were given twice a day, and among the many books in the library at St. Asaph’s were included the writings of the eminent theologians of the day. Services were held twice on Sundays, and each dinner began and ended with a communal prayer, to be recited aloud in unison. So strong were the precepts of faith advocated in that place that the sense of a watchful God, aware of one’s every movement and embodied by the stern presences of our guardians, pervaded our thoughts constantly. Of course one had to be humble and pious and never sin, and to this I aspired.”

  Then, clearing his throat, he said:

  “But one day, a very sad thing happened: I am not so certain that I should tell you, but it seems that I will. While sitting in the communal dining hall one evening, I noticed, among the new inmates, a woman whose face seemed familiar to me. She was tall, like you, with a full head of red hair and a somewhat pretty but hardened face. She had a little girl with her, and as she sat down by one of the tables, it came to me that this woman, remote and aloof from the others, was my mother, fallen on hard times. But as I was uncertain of this, I did not approach her until the schoolmaster himself, Mr. Francis, came over to me and said, ‘John, do you not recognize your own mother?’ I went to her, not knowing what to say. Still I managed a few words—‘Mother? I am your son.’

  “In a better world, this lady would have brightened at the sight of me, but in the midst of her own low misfortunes—she had been sent there over some debt—she merely looked at me and said: ‘What is that to me?’ And then she commenced to finish her meal in silence, her daughter, my half sister Emma, by her side. Though I was deeply wounded by her indifference to me, as I would see her passing in the courtyard or in the dining hall, I maintained the dim hope that she would warm to me, but in the weeks she remained there, as a temporary inmate, her coldness was strongly and hurtfully reinforced in my mind at every turn.”

  “And did you, Mr. Stanley, see her again?”

  “Yes, Miss Tennant, but it was not until some years later.”

  Then, shifting in his chair and fishing out a match from his vest pocket to light a cigar, Stanley said, “Miss Tennant, you must forgive me, but it is time for me to go—I am due to meet with Mr. Mackinnon over some important matters.”

  “I understand,” she told him. “But please, Mr. Stanley, do come back, and soon.”

  He was brooding as he left her that day, angry at himself for having let slip the business of his mother’s coldness; on the other hand, he remembered the pure kindness in Miss Tennant’s eyes, the discerning intelligence and sympathy with which she seemed to regard his sad story. As she led him out, he, feeling duped, did not say much, and while they parted congenially—“Do write me a note and let me know when you can come here again,” she reminded him—he remained solemn. As there had been no meeting with Mackinnon—he’d contrived it as a means to escape, the feeling of being locked in by the truth of his emotions having overwhelmed him—he returned to his flat to attend to some correspondence with King Léopold. And yet as he wrote to Léopold, somewhat disinterestedly, about the equatorial territories east of the Congo, which the king was anxious to annex for himself, Africa could not have been further from his mind. Sheepishly, unable to dwell on the matters at hand, he jotted down a note, which he sent off with Hoffman.

/>   Dear Miss Tennant,

  I must thank you for the delightful time we spent in your studio. In truth I do not feel myself to be a proper subject for your artistic contemplation, but I still feel greatly honored. I see I have a few hours free the day after the morrow—on Thursday—and if it would please you, I could come by in the afternoon, at about four, and perhaps afterward we might have supper together, if such an idea is congenial to your schedule.

  Yours,

  Henry Stanley

  THOUGH HE HARDLY KNEW HER, in early July he accompanied her to several functions; within a few days they appeared together as “friends” at luncheons and diplomatic gatherings, among them one at the American consulate for an Independence Day celebration. Wherever she went she dressed in the highest fashion and most elegantly; at times he couldn’t help but imagine what she must look like as she prepared for her outings, but he hadn’t a clue and would probably faint at the sight of her in the mornings, so striking must she be, stepping from her bath, her arms crossed over her pendulous breasts, even if her maid had seen her grow from an infant to a woman. (He imagined the scene: She puts on a pair of bloomers and then a heavily boned corset with its long stays of pink coutil, which her maid tightens, almost to the point that she sometimes gasps, so that her fine figure, with its slim waist and fulsome hips, takes on the shape of an hourglass. Then the stockings are clipped to the corset; and over that she puts on a petticoat, and then a somewhat longer silk skirt over that. Then she puts on a flowered blouse with a high collar; then a fine jacket over it; then her maid gets on her knees to help with her soft leather boots, whose laces she hooks over a series of crisscrossed eyelets; standing before a mirror, she dusts her throat with white powder and finds a hat suitable to the occasion—sometimes a bonnet, sometimes a Parisian concoction of satin and lace and braid, its brim turned upward and smothered in silk flowers—and voilà: She is ready to stun any man.) He had at this juncture only seen her a few times, but upon occasion, despite his natural disposition against thinking he was part of a couple, he posed with Dorothy for the brigades of photographers, with their apparatus and flashing chemicals.

  A week into July he saw her again. Those few days later, he brought along a bouquet of flowers and a box of Belgian chocolates with which to ingratiate himself with her mother, Gertrude. Announced by their butler, he found Gertrude sitting in their parlor, reading by the window light a biography of Voltaire, and though Stanley did his best to present an air of gladness to see her, she was put off by his presence: “I am very thankful for these gifts,” she said. “But you shouldn’t bring such things to me, for we are merely acquaintances, are we not?”

  “I am hopeful that it will not always be so.”

  She did not respond to that comment, just pointed to a table, saying: “Now, put those things over there.” Then he waited for a simple thank-you, but that was not her way with him. “Now, go: I suppose my daughter’s waiting for you.” Taking his leave, and thinking himself foolish for having gone to the trouble to befriend Dorothy’s mother, he made his way, somewhat gloomily, toward Miss Tennant’s studio, where he found the lady standing behind her easel.

  Stanley sat, nervously at first, and passed the first half hour in silence, striking a still pose, his face tilted as if to watch a bird’s nest hiding in the recesses of an oak tree just outside her studio window. But after a while, though he was somewhat tempted to speak again of his mother, he, with so many other things that he might relate, and without knowing that it would lead to his mother’s door, began with a discussion of his relationship to the disease of malaria, as if, mindful of the distant possibility that they might one day grow closer, he wanted Dorothy to know just what she was getting into.

  “THE OTHER DAY, MISS TENNANT,” he began, “when I first came in, you happened to comment on how ‘well’ I looked; and, yes, I would say that on the whole, I am feeling somewhat more fit and better than I have in recent times; just a few months ago, I made a visit to the Swiss Alps to restore my vigor, as, you see, with each of my expeditions a little of my vitality is drawn from me. This is a result not only of the rigors of such expeditions and the want of food and the strange infections that can come over one from a simple cut in the wilds but also from malaria, Miss Tennant, which in Africa is called the mukunguru, or seasoning fever. Even as I sit here, I figure by my own estimation that I have had it at least a hundred times: I never know when it will come upon me. I can be well in the morning and by night laid up in my bed with the fevers and then the chills. The shaking is terrible, and so are the many bad dreams that come to one. In such states, Miss Tennant, one never knows what is real, for many an apparition and demon come visiting the sufferer. In Africa, I heard of an officer attached to one of Cameron’s expeditions blowing his brains out because of the fever, and it has sometimes driven men to deeds of violence toward others or to lewd and lascivious and sometimes blasphemous behavior. Of such madness I have been largely spared, though I have had my share of incredible waking dreams, as it were.”

  “And of what kind?” Miss Tennant asked, her interest piqued.

  “Oh, I have seen myself as a child, sitting in my own tent, staring at myself; I have seen my dead grandfather Moses and the very great Livingstone, who died of malaria himself, coming seemingly from the afterlife to offer me some words of comfort. But as you can see for yourself, I am here before you in one, admittedly weary, piece; this I owe to the wonders of modern medicine. Livingstone himself invented a remedy that, in his own case, at least put off the worst effects of the disease for many years—his remedy being called a Zambezi rouser—a concoction of calomel, quinine, jalap, and treacle; but lately, thanks to the efforts of a very fine young American chemist, Henry Wellcome, who has come up with a very useful antimalarial pill.

  “Still, if I have survived this disease for so long, I think it is because of my early exposure to malaria as a young man in Arkansas. In other words, Providence intended that I have malaria to later protect me.”

  “By ‘Providence’ you mean God?”

  “I don’t know about that, Miss Tennant: To me, it’s a matter of luck, largely, but after a time, when so many incidents of survival mount up, one sees a pattern and wonders if one is protected. When I was a young soldier with the Confederate forces at the Battle of Shiloh, I saw many of my fellow men shot dead or blown to pieces within a moment or two of my having stood by their side: I could have easily been killed on at least one occasion. Not long afterward, when I was captured during that battle and sent off as a Yankee prisoner of war to a disease-ridden camp outside of Chicago, I survived when so many others, more hardy of body than I, did not. I should tell you, Miss Tennant, that surviving such early experiences—and numerous others—made me feel somewhat fearless when it came to matters of physical courage. Through it all, I learned to maintain a coolness of mind under duress. That, Miss Tennant, is one of my greatest talents, and it has served me well over the years, though”—and here he looked at her woefully—“it has apparently left strangers, who do not know me, with the impression that I am a distant sort.”

  “No, Mr. Stanley,” she said. “I would not consider you distant at all; rather, I find that you have much warmth, in your way. From the things you have told me, with your workhouse upbringing and the very difficult path you had to take in this life, it is a wonder to me that you are so remarkably open.”

  “Dare I say, Miss Tennant, that there is something in your gentle nature that calms me?”

  She sketched the contours of his symmetrical Welsh face: He was rather handsome, though if she were to judge his age, on the basis of his careworn wrinkles and the frown lines that crossed his forehead she would judge him to be a man in his late fifties, though a very fit one. She drew his very sad eyes; they must be beautiful when not rheumy, she thought, and she wondered about what he was thinking as he withdrew into himself during those periods of silence.

  “You once mentioned your mother to me, Mr. Stanley; and you said that she did not
treat you very well at the workhouse. May I ask if you have since made your peace with her, as I imagine you must have?”

  “As I have intimated to you, Miss Tennant,” he began, “Mother was a very hard case. She never cared too much for me, which I blamed on some very great faults of my own. Of the very few conversations I ever had with her as a boy, I can remember her once telling me that she was not really my mother at all but had found me as a swaddling infant in a refuse bin in London. Why she would invent such a thing I cannot say, but I took it as the truth for a very long time. Harsher still was that she had not spoken to me at the workhouse during her stay there—the small substance of which I earlier related to you—and though it was hard for my young mind to comprehend, I attributed her indifference to her shame about her fallen and lowly state; still, I felt as if I could very much love her, and the truth is that a mother is of very great importance to a child, no matter how callous she may be. And so it was, Miss Tennant, that I continued to love her very much, despite the fact that she never answered any of the letters I wrote to her during my years in America.”

  “IT TOOK ME A MONTH to arrive in Liverpool. Forty miles south of Liverpool lay Denbigh, Wales, and as I was determined to get there, I walked most of the way, some carriage drivers taking me for small distances along the route. I came to the district of Denbigh looking like a disheveled and unkempt young beggar. In Glascoed, inquiring after my mother, I was told of the whereabouts of her inn and cottage: And so it was that under the watchful eyes of many suspicious-minded villagers I knocked on her door one afternoon.