5. A Pact with the Devil
ON SEPTEMBER 25 Jean paid a visit to the Thayer family in Dublin. “It seems curious,” she wrote the next day, “that after the Thayers had asked if I had ever been in a sanitarium, yesterday, Dr. Sarah Stowell should have spoken most emphatically in favor of it, this morning.”[1] Curious indeed, for Jean had never mentioned the subject to either party. It would seem as if someone had talked to the Thayers and Dr. Stowell, Jean's gynecologist, behind the scenes. Yet Jean's sister had never set foot in Dublin. Her father had left on September 15. Paine would certainly not have been privy to intimacies with Jean's gynecologist. And Dr. Peterson was in Europe (though Jean reports that he had always emphasized the need for a strict regime). There was no one in Dublin but the Lioness to plant the idea of a sanitarium-virtually simultaneously—with Jean's gynecologist and her family friends. No one but Jean, that is—who expressed her surprise at the coincidence.
It seems more than coincidence that on September 27—while Lyon was still in the midst of her “episode”—Jean should report, again with innocent surprise, that the secretary “had already spoken of it to Father and that he agreed to it absolutely, provided it was considered at all desirable.”[2] The Thayers, Dr. Stowell, and Sam himself had been lobbied about a sanitarium for Jean without her knowledge. Lyon had procured her father's approval before Jean had even opened her mouth.
But skillful ventriloquists do not move their lips. “I have talked a good deal with Lioness about it,” Jean wrote of a conversation she had with Lyon on September 26, “and she agrees wholly with me.” Quickly it had become “[m]y sanitarium idea.” Though she did not suppose that
Lyon played on Jean's fervent desire to find a cure. She also countered Jean's doubts by painting the sanitarium experience in colors that would appeal to her. Told that Anna, their young maid could accompany her, Jean noted, “That would make it ever so much less lonely.” Although she had no actual knowledge of the medical regimen, Lyon also soothingly assured her she would be able to correspond with friends and could be out-of-doors, to go driving and walking. “I would not be a regular invalid,” Jean echoed, “merely a person needing a fixed and unchanged mode of life.”[4]
On September 28 Lyon wrote a long letter to Dr. Peterson. Given his belief that epileptics should be segregated and his work in the funding of public sanitariums as well as the founding of private ones, Peterson was predisposed to agree to the advisability of treating Jean in a sanitarium, even without guidance from the laity.[5] Sam had been effectively lobbied and was, as Jean had noted, awaiting Peterson's advice. Lyon was in command—the Janus-headed mediator among daughter, physician, and father.
At this time a new note enters Lyons comments in her diaries. “She subconsciously feels my weakness,” Lyon wrote on September 28, a day when Jean suffered two grand mal seizures, “and all her venomous points are to the fore; for it is absolutely essentially [sic] that a person who is mentally strong should be with her and should fearlessly direct her.” Fiercely critical of Jean's demeanor, she also implied for the first time that she was no longer capable of supervising Sam's daughter. While this may be an unselfconscious reflection of her genuine anxieties, it also dovetailed with her plan to convince Sam that Jean belonged in a sanitarium. Jean's illness did make her cranky and occasionally angry. But more often her responses to life were good-natured, thoughtful, and empathetic. “Lioness is feeling badly, today, too,” she
Jean had decided on her own not to make a planned climb of Monad-nock with Gerry Brush the next day, but to go for a walk instead. While chatting with Lyon quite early that Saturday morning, Jean had a series of petit mal, actually a routine occurrence. But Lyon became agitated, dressed hurriedly, and when Gerry arrived “she came right down stairs,” Jean recalled, “and told him that when Father was away she was in supreme control over everything here and that she forbade him to go out walking with me before luncheon. I was rabid, of course, but I don't believe Gerry minded much.” They spent the morning in her study and walked in the afternoon, mindful of the secretary's dictum. According to Jean's lights, they had a “perfectly delightful day, even with Miss Lyons meddling.”[7]
Lyons version was different in tone and detail. “I have had to ask Mr. Clemens to come back on Monday,” she wrote on that Saturday. “Today a climax with Jean—In the King's name I had to forbid Gerry Brush going with her for a long walk—then I collapsed—Jean would not listen to reason. She was far too ill to go.”[8] Lyon depicted Jean as uncooperative, childish, irrational, and too ill to leave the house. By contrast, Jean portrayed herself as discerning and energetic and described the enjoyable walk she had with Gerry in the afternoon, demonstrating that she was apparently able to “listen to reason”—even from someone as antagonistic as Miss Lyon.
In her original diary entry, Lyon linked the construction of Jean as an out-of-control menace with her own portrayal as a victim. Clearly the two conditions were paired in her mind. Yet if she did indeed “collapse” in the morning, crushed by the burden of Jean's care, it was a short-lived prostration. “They all came up to my room after tea… and had such a gay time,” she confided, naming Gerry, Jean, and Paine as participants. “Gerry recited nonsense verse,” she recalled with pleasure, repeating a few lines to underline the hilarity of the gathering in her room. People can, of course, bounce back quickly from adversity. But such a dramatic turnaround contained contradictions that seem to have troubled Lyon,
“The King has come back” was how the Lioness heralded Sam's return to Dublin at her urgent request, and he brought “joy and restfulness” in his wake. “I almost cry with happiness and with relief,” she sighed.[10] Jean, however, was having second thoughts about the sanitarium idea. Discovering that Gerry Brush might settle in New York City for the winter, she decided that she would “actually be glad to live in New York”—meaning at home. Lyon's heart must have fluttered as she listened to Jean's waffling. “But, as Lioness was saying,” Jean recounted innocently, “it would be better to be entirely away from Gerry and unable to see him because of the distance, than to be living within a few blocks of him and be constantly so ill that I could almost never be with him.”[11] Lyon mounted her arguments with ingenuity and bold elan. Her work was less arduous after Dr. Peterson weighed in, not only approving the plan but specifying that Jean go to his own private sanitarium in Ka-tonah, New York, a little southeast of Peekskill in Westchester County. “The news is just as I hoped it would be and yet,” Jean reflected, “now that it has come, I can't help having crawly feelings inside. To go away from the family is a thing I haven't done since 1895.” Her hope was that she would be able to see her family, “at least occasionally.” But wherever she landed for the winter, Jean had one overarching goal: to return to Dublin the following summer. Anxious about leaving, she sought her father's reassurance, confessing her fear that he would suddenly decide not to come back. “I have good friends here and nowhere else,” she said simply. Her father's eyes, she wrote, filled with tears. Her plan was to “get into a pretty good physical state while I am in the sanitarium” so that through the sale of her woodcarving, plus gifts and her regular allowance, she could buy a small plot of ground in Dublin. She intended to build a house when she was able, and live in New Hampshire every summer.[12]
Her last full day in Dublin Jean yearned to have a conversation with Gerry Brush, and she “felt a painful gnawing on my inside.” “Is there any possibility of my seeing him inside of six and a half months?” she asked rhetorically. “If he doesn't care enough about me to think of coming to say good-bye, then he is very unlikely to want to take over an hour's train-ride to come and call on me.” Not expecting to see him until she returned to Dublin, she was unable to stop her tears. The clouds that encircled Monadnock that final morning looked to her as though the mountain, too, was weeping at her departure. But when they lifted, Jean was not reassured. “Oh! I do so hate to go!!!” was her regretful farewell.[13]
Arriving in New York on October 17, Jean found that Clara was considerably upset by the unexpected news that her sister was to go to Ka-tonah. She had taken to her bed for three days, almost as if she were in mourning. The Lioness, however, was in high gear and hustled Jean off to buy dresses, silk blouses, and a Parisienne hat—all to be packed in her newly purchased trunk. She also arranged for a consultation with Dr. Frederick Hunt, who would be in charge of her case at the Katonah sanitarium.[14] During that first consultation, the doctor revealed Lyons plans for Jean. “Dr. Hunt said he had gotten the idea from what Lioness wrote that I wished Anna to sleep with me!” Jean noted without suspicion. “Considering how I loathe having anyone in the room with me that really seemed laughable,” she continued. “Dr. Hunt doesn't care at all about having anyone sleep with me; so that unpleasant suggestion is settled.” Although he was perfectly indifferent to her sleeping arrangements, he had instructed in his earlier letter “that someone ought to sleep in the same room with me—,” Jean reported.[15] Hunt, it seems, had passed on Lyon's instructions as if they were the “doctor's orders.” This was interpreted by Jean as an innocent misunderstanding but in reality the secretary had assumed command, giving orders in the name of the King.
“Today Jean went out to Katonah,” Lyon wrote on October 25, 1906. “It was heart stretching to have her go and to see her go.”[16] Given her efforts toward Jean's removal, her “heart stretching” likely included a portion of jubilation and relief. Sam unquestionably felt genuine sorrow but shared some of his secretary's sense of release. “There's been a cloud-lift today,” Twain had written his friend Mary Rogers on the day
Jean had not been separated from her family for ten years. “It was desperately hard to leave Father and Clara in order to come out to a totally strange place,” she acknowledged. “I tried my hardest not to cry before them, but as the time of departure began to approach I found it growing more and more difficult to restrain myself, especially when Clara began to cry, too, then it was really hopeless. Poor little Father seemed to feel badly, too, and the whole business was perfectly horrible to me.”[19]
Jean's departure from 21 Fifth Avenue signaled several new opportunities in the Clemens household. To begin with, plans for the Redding house were now on again. The cause of the sudden turnabout is hard to prove but easy to guess. Jean was in exile, and her wishes no longer needed to be taken into account. Plans for the house were also probably scaled back—temporarily—to match Sam's cost ceiling. He had been up to see Jean in Katonah and saw the Redding project, surprisingly, as a way to meet his youngest daughter's needs. “I must have a country home for her,” he wrote, in spite of her own wishes to summer in Dublin.[20]
Sam also had ideas of his own, independent of his aide-de-camp. After Jean left home, he immediately began preparations for a journey to Egypt. Lyon was “stunned” by the news that he planned to make the trip without her; Clemens insisted that she was still needed in the States.[21] Her dismay was short-lived, however, for on October 31 he gave up his Egyptian plan, ostensibly because of a severe cold and bronchial infection.[22] He may also have been influenced by something more frivolous. Since 1891, when he left Hartford, he had been without a billiard table. That changed when he was given a new state-of-the-art table by Emilie Rogers, intended for Christmas 1906, but purchased and installed in the
Though billiards once again became his favorite pastime, Sam did not give up travel altogether. He spent a week in Bermuda with Lyon and Joseph Twichell in early January 1907 and vacationed there again for five days with Lyon in March.[24] With Jean in Katonah and Clara off in her own world of music and men, the Lioness was now the only woman in Twain's life who was a constant presence—except for Katy, whose role had been significantly undercut by Lyon.
Miss Lyon now believed that she alone understood how to manage Twain's affairs. “I know that the King must be kept calm, where I know how to do it,” she insisted. “He mustn't be harassed, he mustn't have unnecessary matters brought to him to fret over, he must be saved in all ways that he can be saved from anxiety.”[25] Soon after Jean's “heart-stretching” departure, the secretary concocted a plan to save her employer from all anxiety and worry about his youngest daughter. Her plan, she told him, would be beneficial to both father and daughter. She would read Jean's letters and summarize their contents for him. His daughter's letters, she unctuously advised him, contained “complaints which were unreasonable & mere fictions of Jean's imagination.” He believed her. She reminded him that Jean would ask for things “which it would be impossible to grant.” His headstrong daughter, she cautioned sympathetically, would suggest “projects which it would not be possible to entertain.” Why not let her read Jean's letters and save him the pain and sorrow of denying his daughter's requests?[26]
Twain agreed. Her false solicitude sounded reasonable at the time, and he was tortured by his inability to relieve his daughter of her difficult affliction. But if his motives were not entirely heartless, they were appallingly selfish. Shunning Jean's actual letters himself, he would listen to Lyons version and then write a “few empty lines to Jean”—his later characterization of what happened. Relinquishing even more control,
Each time a letter arrived, Twain reenacted this ritual of betrayal, not only of his daughter but of himself, abdicating his role as parent and protector to save himself anxiety and distress. Though he could and did claim ignorance of his secretary's machinations, he was her conscious co-conspirator in agreeing not to read Jean's letters, placing his comfort, convenience, and undisturbed lifestyle above his daughter's happiness.[28] Lyon's vow to release her employer from any unnecessary anxiety and vexation of spirit reflected a high-minded rationale for an underhanded ploy. Her scheme cut Jean off almost completely from her own father and strengthened the secretary's dominion by closing an important channel of communication. Whether conscious or intuitive, she had embarked on a campaign to isolate him from intimates.
And at this juncture, Twain made what may be a very revealing decision. It is a well-known fact that in the winter of 1906 he began wearing white suits year round. “The King is filled with the idea of defying conventionalities, and wearing his suitable white clothes all winter,” Lyon wrote before Twain left Dublin, “so he has bidden me order 5 new suits from his tailor; the suits to be ready against the time we arrive in N.Y.” He wore his white serge in Washington, D.C., at a joint Congressional hearing on December 6, 1906, where he lobbied for an extension of the copyright law, and he loved the dramatic effect so much that he never stopped. He called the conceit “my don'tcareadam suit.”[29]
“His white suits, which focused on him such attention—love, really—” one of his biographers observes, “were the fetish of what had become an obsession with guilt, with forbidden and therefore unclean thoughts.”[30] According to this biographer, Twain's posthumous writings, everything he never intended to publish in his lifetime, were one manifestation of this guilt. Twain began wearing white suits soon after Jean had been packed off to the sanitarium and he had arranged not to read her letters. There is no way of proving an unconscious motivation, but can it be a total coincidence that his decision to clothe himself permanently in white came on top of his pitiable compact? He did have something to feel guilty about that winter, and the white suits may indeed have been more than an appealing sartorial invention.