SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 69 (of 78), Part 2
Wheresoever She Was, There Was Eden (Death of Livy, 1904)
CHAPTER 69, Part 2
Wheresoever She Was, There Was Eden (Death of Livy, 1904)
EDITOR’S NOTES, continued
Katy Leary, who was employed by the Clemens family for thirty years as ladies’ maid and seamstress, was with Susy when she died in 1896, with Livy when she died in 1904, was the first to discover Jean after she died in 1909, was with Twain when he died in 1910, and present at the birth of Twain’s only grandchild four months after Twain’s death. In Mary Lawton’s book A Lifetime with Mark Twain: The Memories of Katy Leary, for Thirty Years His Faithful and Devoted Servant, Katy recounts a scene in the Clemens home after she had returned there from an errand. Katy immediately inquired of Livy’s nurse:
“How is Mrs. Clemens?” She said: “She is not so well, she’s having a bad spell. I am going to give her some oxygen.” I hurried to her room on the ground floor, to get it ready, and when she saw me she whispered: “Oh! I’ve been awful sick all the afternoon, Katy.”
“Well,” I says, “you’ll be all right now.” And I held her up, held her in my arms, and I was fanning her and then—then she fell right over on my shoulder. She died right then in my arms. She drew a little short breath, you know, just once, and was gone! She died so peaceful and a smile was on her face. I looked at her—and I knew that was the end. I knew she’d gone. I couldn’t hear her breathe any more. I lay her back on the pillow and ran out to get the family. They had all been right around her only a few minutes before, and had left because the nurse thought it best for her to be alone.
Miss Clara was in the parlor and Mr. Clemens was in the dining-room, waiting. Oh! I don’t know how I told them. I guess I didn’t have to—they knew…. They came into the room and oh, God! It was pitiful. Mr. Clemens ran right up to the bed and took her in his arms like he always did and held her for the longest time, and then he laid her back and he said, “How beautiful she is—how young and sweet—and look, she’s smiling!”
It was a pitiful thing to see her there dead, and him looking at her. Oh, he cried all that time, and Clara and Jean, they put their arms around their father’s neck and they cried, the three of them, as though their hearts would break. And then Clara and Jean, they took their father by the hand, one on each side, and led him away…. I dressed Susy for her burial, and I dressed Mrs. Clemens for hers, and then, later on, I dressed Jean.
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In his 1905 sketch Extracts from Adam’s Diary, casting himself and his wife in the roles of the first human pair, Twain has Adam say of Eve: “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
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When Twain’s youngest daughter Jean was nine, he had been receiving invitations to meet various dignitaries. When the Emperor of Germany invited the Clemens family to dinner, this made quite an impression on Jean. She said to her father, “Why, papa, if it keeps going on like this, pretty soon there won’t be anybody left for you to get acquainted with but God!” Twain’s reaction to that observation was that it was not complimentary to think that he was not already acquainted in that quarter, but that Jean was young, and the young sometimes jump to conclusions without reflection.
Corroborating Jean’s observation, in the middle of 1904 (shortly before Livy’s death) Twain wrote the following in a letter to Twichell, speaking about the death of his friend Henry Stanley (he of the much-ballyhooed “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” interrogation):
I believe the last country house visit we paid in England was to Stanley’s. Lord, how my friends and acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days! I had known Stanley 37 years. Goodness, who is it I haven’t known! As a rule the necrologies find me personally interested—when they treat of old stagers. Generally when a man dies who is worth cabling, it happens that I have run across him somewhere, some time or other.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.