Twain's End by Cullen Lynn

Author:Cullen, Lynn [Cullen, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18.

March 1905

21 Fifth Avenue, New York

MRS. LYON COULD UNDERSTAND why Isabel had insisted upon dragging her to the moving picture show the other week. The studio, so common with its rough wooden benches and pressed tin ceiling, had smelled distressingly of foreign food and unwashed hair, but the action in Rescued by Rover made up for it. Mrs. Lyon had gaped at the jerking images, as keen on them, she supposed, as an immigrant beholding the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan when descending the gangplank to Ellis Island. The picture show was an interesting improvement over her beloved stereoscope after all, and she admitted as much to Isabel. Mrs. Lyon could admit when she was wrong. It took a big person to do so.

What Mrs. Lyon could not understand, however, was the thrill Mr. Clemens got in riding this underground death trap. Her ears ached from the racket of their subway car banging along its tracks like a coffee tin full of pennies. The passengers were all jumbled together like mulligan stew, Italian street repairmen in filthy overalls next to Russian shirtwaist-factory girls next to Negro men in celluloid collars next to bowlered clerks reading the Sun.

When she had entered the domed cast-iron kiosk to the Astor Place station, Mrs. Lyon had asked Mr. Clemens if they would be riding in a first-class car. Yes, he had said in that maddeningly slow way of his as they went down the steps to the tracks. They were all first-class. She was questioning how that could possibly be as she gazed dumbfounded at the tiled walls decorated with plaques of beavers—beavers, of all things, so crude to someone accustomed to the classical nude statues of Florence—when a train rumbled up, shrieking like Grendel being hewn by Beowulf. Higgledy-piggledy, the rich, the poor, and the middling had piled into what amounted to covered coal cars fitted out with benches. Mrs. Lyon entered with all the dignity one could muster when an Italian organ-grinder with a monkey on his shoulder was nudging one’s back with his instrument.

Once seated behind Isabel and Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Lyon tried to catch the eye of the woman dressed in furs in the seat across from her, traveling with her maid, to commiserate about this sorry state of affairs. But the woman had been too busy smiling at Mr. Clemens to see.

Now they screeched along their subterranean circle of Hell. Mrs. Lyon adjusted her neckpiece, a single mink clasping its own tail between its needle teeth, an adornment she had owned since her debut. Its glass eyes were a little dull, a situation she had not improved with some shoe black, and it had a thumbprint-sized patch on its left haunch where the skin was rather too visible, but it and she looked respectable enough, especially when she held her chin high. You could always tell a person of quality by how she held herself. Her straight back was one of the perilously few things that elevated her above the

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