Then he fished out from his vest pocket a watch: Within its top encasement was an image of his mother.
“Here she is, Mrs. Stanley — my little reminder of the great lady that was my mother, Jane Lampton. It’s just a photograph, but each time I see her I am both warmed and grieved. How can it be that one simple thing can bring so much to mind? She’s about fifty in this picture, slender and petite, but she was so sturdy of heart that she always stood as a great example to me. If I have a kind bone in my body, it’s because of her. You see, she was one of those rare Presbyterian souls who actually cared about the condition of her fellow humans: She loved people and animals — took in every poor bewildered cat in our neighborhood when I was a boy — and was always a lively sort, despite her infirmities. Far from being an invalid who allowed herself to wither away, she relished every opportunity, whatever her misfortunes, to enjoy life. She danced and loved music, loved the circus and minstrel shows that came to town; she was kind to our slaves, and she taught me something about books.
“Once, we had a little slave, brought to Hannibal from Maryland, a gentle and cheerful boy named Sandy. He was always singing and whooping, whistling and yelling — so noisily that he drove me to distraction. One day when he had been singing for an entire hour without stopping, I lost my temper and went to my mother in a rage asking her to please shut him up; but instead of becoming angry with the boy, tears came to her eyes and she said, with much kindness: ‘Sam, when the poor thing sings, it’s because he doesn’t want to remember he’ll never see his family or mother ever again; if he’s quiet, then he will surely think of them and become very sad. So just remember this when you hear that friendless child’s voice again.’ After that, I kind of took comfort in hearing him, and his carrying on never bothered me again, for in my selfish boyishness, I had forgotten his sad situation; that he was so terribly alone in the world and trying to cheer himself up with songs and all kinds of wild whistling suddenly made sense to me. Thereafter I went out of my way to befriend him — later I put him in my book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But that was the kind of thing in which my mother instructed me.
“All in all she was one of those proper churchgoing ladies for whom every occasion, whether it was a Fourth of July celebration or a revival meeting, a lecture or even a funeral, was an opportunity to turn out and show her sunny side. To the day of her death, she remained fair-minded and compassionate — that’s the word, ‘compassionate.’ What I am, what good qualities I have, I believe I owe largely to her. Her strength of spirit is what sustained her for so many years, and it is something I have tried to summon up for myself in times of darkness: For despite the downturns and tragedies of her life, she never allowed herself to get beaten down. It was faith, I suppose, that made the very great difference in her attitude. A faith in a God I have never seen any evidence of but whose imaginary presence in so many lives, like her own, has been a solace. Needless to say, Mrs. Stanley, I miss her.
“But memory is a funny thing. Lately certain things still come back to me about her as clearly as if they had happened this morning. Some come as clear as a photograph. One picture I most vividly remember is fifty years old: I was six, my mother forty. We were in a bedroom of our house in Hannibal, Missouri, where my older brother Benjamin — he was ten — lay dead, the poor boy having succumbed to a fever; my mother had brought me in to say good-bye, I guess. We knelt down by the bed, my mother holding my hand, when all at once she began to weep and moan in a way I had never seen before. I can remember feeling ashamed of myself for not crying along with her and ashamed that I was powerless to stop her tears. And as for my poor brother, well, being so little I wasn’t completely convinced that he was gone. And that’s perhaps why my mother, in her wisdom, had me lay my hand against his brow. It was cold and still and so sad a thing that I could not understand why it was so. He hardly seemed a person at all anymore: I can remember feeling a terrible guilt about it — you see, Mrs. Stanley, I had been the sickly child of the family. I had been born two months premature, and so frail, slight, small-boned, and prone to diseases that until I was about six or so, little hope had been held that I would survive childhood. But there I was beside her, with my hand held against my brother’s face, somehow thinking — for I was so young, just six, when everything in life seems a paradise — that it should have been me and not Benjamin in that bed. Somehow I believed that I had been spared and he had taken my place. It’s the kind of reverse thinking that comes to children, I suppose. But just the same, all the occasions when I had acted the brat out in the yard and wished him dead over some stupid thing landed on my conscience so badly that for the longest time I suffered terrifying nightmares from it. That kind of thing never leaves you. Even now, when I see a late morning sunbeam drifting in through a window, I can close my eyes and, ever so fleetingly, find myself in that room again, my brother lost to the world, my dear mother by my side.”
In that moment Mr. Clemens’s expression, as I recall it these years later, was nearly beatific. He seemed caught up in a distant moment, his face taking on an air of concentration, as if he were composing something inside his head. But then the spell left him; he shifted in his chair and drew from his jacket pocket a cigar—“My own brand, Mark Twain,” he said. Lighting it, he went on:
“Even when I know that I was not at fault, there’s a part of me that still thinks it is so. And it’s not a feeling that I’ve since become immune to: Folks say that we should count our blessings — and I have had many, Mrs. Stanley. I’ve been blessed to have been raised in Hannibal. Blessed to have a good wife and three precious daughters. I’ve had my share of fame and fortune, along with all the nonsense that goes with it, and I have seen a lot of this world along the way. But for all that, as many blessings as I can count, I am always aware of how weakly tethered they are to this life. As I said, I’m lucky to have three precious daughters, but my first child, Langdon, born premature, like myself, in 1870, was a different story.
“As newlyweds, Livy and I had moved from Buffalo, New York, to Hartford, Connecticut, and were living in our first house in that pretty town — a wonderful cottage set down in the midst of a quite literary neighborhood called Nook Farm. Livy was then in mourning over her father’s death the year before, but my spirits were high, as I was just managing to make something of a living as a writer by then, but my main livelihood depended on the lecture tour, as I was in some demand, having become the next best thing after Bret Harte. But a cloud followed me around just the same.
“For the first year of his life Langdon was so sick that he cried and cried to the point where I thought I would go mad. Livy was sick constantly, too, with colds and the flu, and she came down with typhoid fever, which almost killed her — of course she recovered — but for the longest time I was both a writer and a nurse in a gloriously comfortable sick house. A beautiful sick house that had to be paid for. And so when Livy finally recovered from her various maladies, that second year of our marriage mainly found me out on the road traveling by rail from town to town in the northeast, lecturing. I hated that life — the late trains, the bad weather, the cold and graceless hotel rooms. I worked so much that I missed my second Christmas with Livy because of it. All in the name of making money, and not much, at that. But in the midst of that drudgery, something wonderful happened: Our little Susy, a healthy baby and fat as butter at birth, came to us in March of 1872, a very great blessing and joy indeed, but a joy that — and forgive my entangled way of speaking, Mrs. Stanley — was short-lived. A few months later, on a raw and chilly morning, I took little Langdon out with me in an open barouche for a ride through the countryside. Wrapping him up in furs, I believed that I had attended to him with the best of care, and as our coachman drove us, I fell into a reverie of thoughts about some story or other, which I went to jotting down in my notebook, and while I was thusly occupied, for such thoughts envelop all my attentions, I had failed to notice that the fur wrappings had fallen away and exposed his little legs to the cold air. By and by the coachman noticed this, and I covered him up again, but by then it was too late, as he had caught a chill. And shortly this turned into a cold and the cold turned into diphtheria and he died at nine one June morning in his mother’s arms. He was only nineteen months of age.”