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14. The Exile Returns

DESPITE THE TONE OF resignation in her note to Twain, Mrs. Ash-croft had not yet given up all hope of reconciliation. After she was fired, she returned to Stormfield each day, trying to wriggle her way back into her boss's good graces. She arrived at ten in the morning and fussed around until five, when she left for home. “Now & then she would sail into my room,” Clemens remembered, “artificially radiant & girlish with something killingly funny to tell me, & would stand by my bed & detail it with all sorts of captivating airs & graces & bogus laughter-& get no response.” She haunted Stormfield, hoping to reestablish the old magic.^[1] She pretended her relations with him were pleasant, but she could no longer bewitch the master with her charms and flattery. He had lost his taste for flirtation.

Though he still believed in her essential honesty and good character, she irked him mightily. When she began a speech about how her marriage was a sacrifice for him, Clemens interrupted brusquely, saying he had “enough of that offensive nonsense already from Ashcroft, & didn't want any more of it. I said the pair had done a silly thing, with a purpose in view—‘God knows what, I can't guess!’—& it couldn't be palmed off on me as having been done for my sake.”^[2] Her marriage to Ashcroft was a potent vexation.

The master of Stormfield was also irritated by Clean-Up Day. “[T]he insolences & impertinences of her contract of March I3th were rankling in me,” he revealed, “& the sight of her exasperated me.” One contract especially dropped acid on his heart: her casual rejection of the permanent one-tenth interest in the royalties of an edited collection of his letters.

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Ashcroft had told him she considered the royalties “petty,” which stung the author's vanity. He thought she was throwing away fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a year—more than she would ever earn in her lifetime. The casual way she treated his manuscripts also rankled—“dumped helter-skelter into drawers” was his exasperated description.^[3]

She must have been perplexed by Clemens's genuine indifference to her artful insinuations. Declaring her willingness to save him from a despairing old age, Mrs. Ashcroft was met with a coldness that contrasted sharply to the welcoming reception she had grown to expect as Miss Lyon. She who in early March had been his powerful queen, adored and pampered, was by late April a mere lackey, licking his boots and getting kicked for her trouble.^[4]

Meanwhile, Clara finally had her father back. Confident now that she would not be the one who was rebuffed, Clara again called on Henry Rogers, who agreed to oversee a complete “overhaul” of Twain's financial affairs. Once more Rogers put himself at the service of his famous literary friend. “In the last two or three years,” he wrote to Clemens, “I had my suspicions of things, which you in your good na-tured way have overlooked.” Praising Clara's dignified, articulate, and in his words “convincing” story, Rogers said he would be glad “to assume such burden in the matter as was necessary.”^[5] Unfortunately for Clemens, his friend would not live to fulfill his promise.

As the time of Jean's return approached, the Lioness knew her grace period had run out. She left just before Jean arrived and never set foot in Stormfield again. But before her departure, she was busily packing up her trunks and spending considerable time in the attic. Just as Ashcroft had anticipated, Clara wanted those trunks inspected and demanded a key, which she got. But Clemens, uncomfortable with such a humiliating shakedown and still unaware of the extent of the Ashcrofts' scheming, blocked Clara's search. “It was a mistake,” he later believed, because she had taken some now unstrung carnelian beads that had been worn by his wife.^[6] After Lyon left Stormfield for good, however, she returned the beads through a third party to an open attic trunk, and instructed her favorite maid, Teresa, to tell Clara where they could be found.^[7]

The whole incident is trivial and might be brushed aside except for the reactions of the family. Clara, in a confrontation with Lyon before she finished packing, demanded that she find the missing carnelian

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beads, described by Paine as “highly valued.” Twain, in his own commentary, called them “hallowed keepsakes.” But these so-called “hallowed keepsakes” had been gathering dust in the Clemens attic for years. No family member had shown any interest in Livy's unstrung beads until Clara surprised Lyon by her hawk-eyed inventory of attic memorabilia. Though Lyon returned the beads, Clemens called this incident the coup de grace to his faith in her honesty and good character. Yet his vehement reaction to this minor theft seems grossly out of proportion against Lyons real theft of three years of his daughter's life—a much more painful fact to come to grips with and one he faced only by degrees.^[8]

“Dear child,” he wrote to Jean four days after he fired Mrs. Ashcroft, “you will be as welcome as if it were your mother herself calling you home from exile!” On April 26, 1909, Jean was joyfully restored to her father, and the week of grace that Peterson had granted turned in to a permanent stay. She was “eloquently glad and grateful” in Clemens's words, “to cross her father's threshold again.” Having so yearned for that day, she must have devoured the moment. Both father and daughter were happy, but his feelings could not compare to hers. For as she crossed his threshold, she knew she loved her father while he could not yet anticipate how much he would grow to love her.^[9]

One of Ashcroft's last acts as Twain's business manager had been to purchase a local farm for the boss. Clemens now gave this farm of about seventy acres to his daughter, who began immediately to turn it into a working unit. She repaired the house and barn and bought chickens and ducks from the surrounding farmers. As usual, she gloried in spending time outdoors, working on the farm and riding for pleasure. Jean also begged to take over the role of Twain's secretary, happily paying his bills and answering his letters. She soaked up the pleasures of being at home.^[10]

Never a helpless invalid, Jean was now working like a day laborer and loving it. Finally allowed to live in her father's house, she rose before seven, ate a quick breakfast, and rode to get the mail at the post office. By nine she was giving her father his newspaper, exchanging pleasantries, and glancing at a few of his letters. Then she changed clothes

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and spent the rest of the morning at her farm, where her tasks included mixing chicken feed, feeding her brood, watering her hepatica plants, and doing some light carpentry. She usually returned to Stormfield around noon, where she worked on her father's bank books and other accounts. Eating a quick twenty-minute lunch around one, she went back to her farm, where she often worked until four. She returned to Stormfield for tea around half-past four and then worked in her room, writing checks and business letters, addressing envelopes, and going over accounts for her father. “At 7:00 we had dinner,” she concluded a description of her day, “and after dinner I played billiards with my father until 9:00! Arrived in my room I was finally allowed to look at the newspaper, the first in four or five days and to read a little in a book, I went to sleep (I was already in bed) at io:oo.”^[11]

“Jean is a surprise & a wonder,” Sam wrote to Clara three months later. A surprise because he had not really troubled himself to understand her before she was exiled. And having had almost no communication with his daughter for three years that was not heavily manipulated or totally censored by his secretary, he was shocked to discover Jean's “wisdom, courage, definiteness, decision; also goodness.” Now Jean could talk to her father unmolested by conniving doctors, spying associates, and the lady-in-waiting—and the stereotype of the “epileptic personality” melted away. He discovered she had “a humane spirit, charity, kindliness, pity; industry, perseverance, intelligence, a clean mind, a clean soul, dignity, honesty, truthfulness, high ideals, loyalty, faithfulness to duty—she is everything Miss Lyon isn't.”^[12]

Her father found the great truth he had missed all along about his daughter—she was “like her mother.” Maybe his judgment sprang from an upsurge of guilt at their reunion, but he was also influenced by fresh observation and experience. “Jean's—like her mother's—was a fine character; there is no finer,” he concluded. And how could he not be swept off his feet by a child who played billiards? Now that Jean was home at last, her father was deeply involved in the process of getting reacquainted.^[13] Conditioned to think of Jean only in negative terms, he was genuinely surprised by the happiness he felt. His enlightenment was a wonder of courage and cussedness—his hallmarks.

Jean was not the only refugee who reappeared at Stormfield soon after Lyon was fired. Horace Hazen came to pay his respects, probably

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timing his first visit to coincide with the news of Lyons fall that traveled the local gossip circuit. Clemens jumped at the opportunity to ask his former butler why he had falsely claimed that Clara fired him. When Horace calmly responded that Ashcroft had “made him do it!,” Clemens was shocked and genuinely perplexed. “Ashcroft? How could Ashcroft make you do it, & he away down in Virginia?” Horace explained that Ashcroft had returned to Stormfield just after Clemens himself had departed and told him that he was going to be discharged. At Ashcroft's instruction Horace wrote a letter to his boss using the word “discharge,” which, the business manager assured him, would be worth a month's salary. Ashcroft had then carried the letter away, practically before the ink was dry. Clemens was dumbfounded. Convinced by the young butler's version of events, he began to revise radically his estimate of his business manager.^[14]

The only concrete action against the Ashcrofts was still pending: an independent audit to be supervised by Henry Rogers. After answering Rogers's summons to discuss the financial imbroglio, Ashcroft dashed off a letter to his boss. At first glance, his purposes seem innocent. The audit would soon prove, he wrote, that Clemens's affairs were conscientiously managed by both “Miss Lyon and me.” But Ashcroft could not contain his contempt for Clara. Her charges, he claimed, “emanated from a brain diseased with envy, malice and jealousy, and it is only when one forgets this fact that one views them seriously.” Nor could he contain his fury at the unjust treatment accorded his new wife. The business manager then painted a dramatic turnabout in Henry Rogers's attitude toward Lyon and Clara. “Mr. Rogers seems to be of the same opinion that many of your other friends are,” he lectured Clemens; “that the ghastly treatment accorded to Miss Lyon during the past few weeks by a member of your family is a mightily poor return for the way in which she has, since Mrs. Clemens' death, looked after you, your daughters and your affairs.”^[15]

Did Henry Rogers, after voicing his “suspicion of things” and calling Clara's story “convincing” in a letter to her father, actually tell the business manager that Clara's treatment of his wife was “ghastly” and unfair? It is doubtful that Rogers betrayed his famous friend in defense of Mrs.

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Ashcroft. Perhaps Mr. Ashcroft simply projected his own feelings of contempt for Mark Twain's daughters onto the man behind the desk at Standard Oil. “There is no reason on earth why the rest of your days should be spent in an atmosphere of artificiality, restraint and self-sacrifice,” Ashcroft scolded his boss. Clearly, he thought Twain's daughters were ir-relevancies, if not impediments, to the famous author's personal pleasure. “[A]nd while I don't suppose that the happiness that was your lot during the last six months of 1908 will recur in all its fulness and entirety,” he sneered, “still I trust that you will, regardless of your philosophical theories, exercise your prerogatives of fatherhood and manhood in a way that will be productive of the greatest benefit to yourself.”^[16]

If Ashcroft was attempting to prod some chivalric defense of his wife from her ex-boss, his undisguised arrogance produced the opposite result. “I am nearly 74 & a figure in the world,” Twain said, “yet he blandly puts himself on an equality with me, & insults me as freely & as frankly as if I were his fellow-bastard & born in the same sewer.” But Ashcroft's disdain for the boss who he believed was not man enough to control his daughters misses the point. It was not his daughters—or the Ashcrofts—Clemens needed to control; it was himself. A virtual puppet of Lyon, who pulled his strings for years, he finally dislodged the pair of manipulators through self-rule. It never occurred to the business manager that the old man had a spine.^[17]

Clemens discovered around the first of May that Rogers's second secretary, a Miss Watson, had been put in charge of the audit. This disturbed him, because he feared that a woman would be more susceptible to lies and flattery than a man and that she would become the Ashcrofts' friend and champion rather than their judge.^[18] (His own gullibility and the disastrous effects this had upon his family entirely escaped his gender calculations.) Clemens calmed himself, however, with the thought that Rogers would be the final arbiter.

While he was awaiting the results of the audit, an unexpected and accidental revelation destroyed whatever credibility Mrs. Ashcroft still had with her former boss. On May 9 or 10 Clemens and Paine were being driven to the train station by Harry Lounsbury when one of them mentioned the cost of rehabilitating Lyons cottage—$1,500.

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“Lounsbury said, ‘Fifteen hundred?’” Clemens remembered. “‘Why, it cost thirty-five hundred!’”

Clemens argued with Lounsbury, telling him that Lyon had given him the exact figures a day or two before Christmas. But the general contractor did not budge from his numbers. Right then and there he produced “his deadly memorandum book” from which he furnished “the figures, the names, & the dates.” Sam was stunned, but he had more surprises in store. “The dates showed that Miss Lyon had spent about $2,000 of my money on her house before I had offered to assist her with a loan,” he wrote incredulously. Though he claimed this honor for the theft of the carnelian beads, it was Lounsbury's little memorandum book that actually fixed Miss Lyons dishonesty in his mind.^[19]

Clemens spoke the lethal words: “This was plain simple, stark-naked theft.” Up until that moment, he had believed that the numbers furnished by his ex-secretary were entirely trustworthy. Once he discovered the duplicity surrounding her cottage renovation, his attitude shifted abruptly. This was an important turning point. Before Lounsbury brought out the memorandum book, Clemens had only been conducting an “inquiry” meant to satisfy Clara. After the incident, he was pursuing a “case” with legal ramifications. He immediately put the matter in the hands of his lawyer, John Stanchfield. On May 25 Paine and Clemens went to see Stanchfield, who, perhaps in part because of the unexpected death of Henry Rogers on May 19, wanted the audit transferred to an independent accounting firm.^[20] Clemens retrieved the checkbooks and vouchers from Miss Watson, whose coldness confirmed his earlier suspicions that her investigation was being influenced by the “injured-servant tears” of Mrs. Ashcroft. A professional accountant was now in charge of the inquiry.

The final auditor's report confirmed that “IVL” (for Isabel V. Lyon) was added at a later period to many check stubs with the original notation: “Work on the Redding House.” Lyon had indeed merged the costs of Clemens's house construction with her own remodeling jobs. Afterwards she fiddled with the checkbook stubs in a crude attempt to cover up her theft, apparently hoping to convey the impression that she was keeping track of her own expenses. The ink being less darkened by age, however, meant that her revisionist impulse could not be disguised.^[21]

Once the “deadly” memorandum book appeared, Paine urged Clemens to hunt for more evidence of her graft and thievery. After their visit

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to Standard Oil to reclaim the checkbooks, Paine took the boss to an Armenian rug dealer, remembering that Lyon had borrowed $45 from him to buy a rug that cost $90. They discovered that she had paid the balance with her boss's checkbook. Paine also trotted the boss to Strohmeyer's, where they found that she had purchased $115 worth of furniture for her newly refurbished cottage, probably paid for by means of Clemens's handy checkbook. Lyon loved objets d'art and had an eye for style, color, and design, which Clemens lauded. On a salary of $50 per month, which she stretched to support her aging mother, it is likely that while she shopped for his house in Redding, she was also decorating her own. It would have been effortless to combine the decorating expenses for both houses; she already had practice merging her construction costs with his.^[22]

But she also had another source of revenue available to her that could not be traced. The Clemens household version of petty cash, referred to as “house money” within the family, was used “only for trifling expenses which could not be paid by check,” Clemens explained. This untrace-able source of cash—$5,500 for a two-year period—was a ready temptation. Lyon turned down several offers of a raise, perhaps based upon a less formal “arrangement.” “House money” may have functioned in her mind as something akin to a personal expense account, which she no doubt justified as a well-deserved salary augmentation. “She was not an easy creature to understand,” Twain admitted. Why would she turn down a raise, he wondered, and yet steal money from him? Why, if she were hard up for cash, would she refuse his checks to buy gowns?^[23] The answer, of course, is that the secretary had stopped making a distinction between her money and his. In her own mind she had no need for a salary, much less a raise. She had no need for special checks to buy gowns, much less permission to use his cash. In her mind, she had ceased to be his employee; she had become his virtual “wife.”

Another lightning bolt struck Stormfield at the end of May 1909. On a trip from the train station to the Ashcrofts' cottage, Harry Lounsbury's son, also named Harry, was discussing the local gossip about Clemens with Ralph. “He!” Ashcroft snorted. “I can sell his house, over his head, for a thousand dollars, whenever I want to!” Harry told his father, who

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told Paine, who, “greatly worried,” approached Clemens with the dramatic news.^[24]

The old man was sanguine, believing it was all brag, but Paine and Clara were not so certain. They decided to visit the local notary, Nick-erson, who had routinely affixed his seal on documents brought to him by Twain's emissaries. He recalled certifying Clemens's signature on a general power of attorney in November or December; he thought both Ashcroft and Lyon were assignees. Clemens was convinced that Nicker-son was wrong, but Paine insisted that they search the New York banks. With Clemens lounging at his hotel, Paine went on his hunt and, in the Liberty National Bank, found the pirated treasure: a comprehensive power of attorney. Clemens was astonished. “By it I transferred all my belongings, down to my last shirt, to the Ashcrofts, to do as they pleased with,” he quipped sarcastically. Having gone through a painful bankruptcy that had left deep scars, he was not a man to be casual about his last shirt. “These people had not asked me for a power of attorney,” he stated categorically and unequivocally, “and I had not conferred one upon them. The subject had never been mentioned.”^[25]

Those who believe in the innocence of Ashcroft and Lyon doubt Twain's memory or suspect he was getting dotty in his seventy-third year. “Self-incriminating” is what one biographer calls his indictment of the pair; he concludes that Twain was “a gullible and foolish man” who created the Ashcrofts' corruption “in his own mind.”^[26] Even Twain would agree that he was gullible and foolish. But the evidence of his activities in 1908—and of the 429 pages of detailed, forcefully argued criticisms of his newly discovered foes that he composed the following year—suggests that he was far from intellectually feeble. There is every reason to believe he was in full possession of his mental faculties in November 1908 when he signed—and supposedly forgot-a comprehensive power of attorney that gave his business manager and secretary virtually complete control of his estate while he was alive.

At the beginning of 1908 Twain gave a moving speech at the Lotos Club banquet in his honor, came home, and played billiards with Paine until quarter to four in the morning. In the spring he spoke at the Cartoonists' dinner, the Booksellers' banquet, the British Schools and University Club, and a dedication for the City College of New York. In late June he gave a spontaneous eulogy at a memorial for his friend Thomas

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Bailey Aldrich that swayed his audience with ripples and then waves of laughter. During the fall of 1908 he could talk for long stretches on geology and time, the future of democracy, King Leopold's depredations in Africa, the history of Tacitus as compared with the biblical accounts of Rome, the unseen forces of creation, and the unity of nature. This display of mental agility and range came at the very time he was supposedly going senile.^[27]

What is intriguing about Ashcroft's power of attorney, beyond its dubious origin, is that it included Lyon. One wonders why he included her and if she was in on the ruse beforehand. Twain pondered the question himself. “Ashcroft had conceived the ideal of robbing me on a comprehensive & exhaustive scale,” he concluded, “& he did not feel safe to carry out this plan without first closing Miss Lyon's mouth.”^[28] In making her a confederate on the General Power of Attorney, Twain believed that her future husband effectively beguiled her or frightened her into fraud on a grand scale.

Ironically Twain's interpretation is very similar to the one Lyon offered some thirty years later, when she told the detective posing as a literary go-between that Ashcroft “proved to be a forger and all-around crook for whose actions she was equally blamed.” But her protestations of innocence should always be viewed skeptically. Ever willing to revise history to suit her needs, she told the detective a string of lies.^[29] The veracity of her charge that Ashcroft alone was to blame for unnamed fraud and theft—probably encompassing the power of attorney—is problematic at best. She was already “borrowing” money to renovate and furnish her Redding cottage. And as signer of the checks, she had long ago lost the distinction between Clemens's money and her own. It might have taken little to persuade her that with this power of attorney she would be able to protect her boss from everyone else: errant daughters, avaricious relatives, and benighted friends. She was treating him like a precocious child and she the doting, though occasionally stern, mother. She could easily have rationalized this additional power as one more self-sacrificing act to save him from himself.

The fact is, however, that the power of attorney was never used to rob Twain. There was no rush, he noted wisely: he was seventy-three, and

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“they could go on living upon me comfortably until I should some day get sick unto death, then they could sell my securities & my Mark Twain stock & decamp.” Or, even more chilling, they could remain and “furnish death-bed approvals of their acts,” he wrote, “worded in the first person, & with my signature forged to them.” Or after he was dead, if his transfer signature had remained on all his stocks and bonds, they might have legally transferred ownership to themselves, and pocketed what he estimated at over a million dollars. “However,” he mused in his classic deadpan, “I didn't die.”^[30]

Whether the pair intended to use the power of attorney for good or ill can never be established, but its fraudulent origins cast a pall on their motives. Moreover, by taking the unusual legal precautions he did to certify the document's legitimacy, Ashcroft was behaving as if he had some guilty knowledge. Curiously, he incriminated himself in a bizarre memo he sent to Clemens's lawyers, itemizing all the unpaid labor he had rendered his boss, with a mocking dollar value attached to each claim. The man Friday suggested, for example, that he was owed $880 for “accompanying Mr. Clemens to England,” and $500 “for his services in checking over Miss Lyons account.” With daring nonchalance, he included an unpaid fee of $10 for drafting the power of attorney.^[31]

Smarting from the calculated insult, Clemens reacted furiously to Ashcroft's mock charges. First, he sent his lawyer a counter list of charges for services that he had rendered Ashcroft. For example, he requested $500 compensation for introducing Ashcroft to the Lord Mayors of London and Liverpool, many London journalists, and members of Parliament. “But for me,” he noted, “he could not have gotten access to these prominent and useful men.” Still angry, he penned a point-by-point rebuttal to Ashcroft's cheeky inventory and vigorously denounced Ashcroft's insulting mock-fee of $10 for the power of attorney. He once again repudiated the legitimacy of this legal instrument and “all acts perpetrated by the Ashcrofts under its false authority.” Ashcroft apparently used the power of attorney once to sell some Knickerbocker Bank stock five points under its market value without Clemens's knowledge. Clemens suggests that the $800 brokerage fee was split between the broker and Ashcroft. Even if this is true, he suffered relatively minor damage. In any event, on June i he formally revoked the legal power that he never knowingly gave away, thus ending a significant danger to his family.^[32]

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Clemens was now thoroughly disillusioned. By the end of May, he had moved from an almost unshakable faith in Lyons integrity, honesty, and trustworthiness to the extreme opposite opinion. “The muscle in her chest that does duty for a heart,” he wrote, “is nothing but a potato.” Clemens suddenly wanted her out of his sight, out of his life—and he definitely did not want her to remain his neighbor. “[S]he cares for no one but herself,” he recognized with a shudder. This was the same judgment he made of his business manager. “What I always admired about Ashcroft,” he wrote ironically, “was his diligence & single-mind-edness in looking out for Number One.”^[33]