Man in White - The Grand Adventure of His Final Years by Michael Shelden

Author:Michael Shelden [Shelden, Michael]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A serious card game on the terrace of Twain’s new home in Redding, Connecticut, with “angelfish” Dorothy Harvey (center) and the daughters of biographer Albert Bigelow Paine.

FOURTEEN

Connecticut Yankee

We float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory.

Mark Twain1

…

AFTER MONTHS OF HARD WORK, Isabel Lyon was finally ready to show off the house she had helped to create in the Connecticut woods. She sent word to Twain in New York that he could come up on Thursday, June 18. Many of the furnishings at No. 21—including the huge orchestrelle—had already been shipped to Redding. A few kittens and a tough old alley cat adopted earlier by Twain were given a new home at the villa and were allowed free run of the property, with tiny bells around their necks to warn the local bird population of their arrival.

Twain was so eager to see the house that he barely slept the night before. He was out of bed in the morning at an hour that rarely saw him stirring—six o’clock. His train wasn’t scheduled to depart until late in the afternoon, but he was shaved and dressed and ready to go before breakfast. Paine was with him and managed to keep him entertained until it was time to leave. “I am conscious of a steadily augmenting great curiosity to see what the house looks like,” he said. The area around Redding, he had been told, was “as beautiful as Tuxedo,” but he doubted the claim was true.2

Wearing his white suit and a Panama hat, he took a cab to Grand Central with his biographer at his side and boarded the four o’clock train on the New Haven Railroad for the sixty-mile trip to Redding. It was a sunny afternoon, and on the way he sat by the window enjoying the view of the countryside while he chatted with Paine’s daughter Louise, who was returning home from her boarding school on Long Island. As the train neared its destination, he assumed a benevolent, princely air toward the porters and other railway workers helping to transport him to his palace. Passing a large handful of silver coins to Paine, he gave instructions that sounded faintly Elizabethan: “Give them something—give everybody liberally that does any service.”3

At the little station three miles from his house, a crowd of local people waited patiently to welcome him to the neighborhood. They were mostly simple farmers and tradespeople, and had no experience of staging a big reception for a famous man. Lacking proper signs or banners, they did the best with what they had, decorating their horses and wagons with ribbons and roses. Some carried copies of Twain’s books, hoping for an autograph, while others held their children’s hands and tried to explain why an important man was coming to live among them.

It wasn’t easy to explain. Everybody had taken note of the new

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