Twain's End by Lynn Cullen Page A

back-combing. You might as well have toured the Niagara Falls on the deck of the Maid of the Mist. ” She presented the lank hank as evidence.
    â€œWhat?” Isabel appeared to swim out of a daydream. “It rained.”
    â€œI know it rained. It rained so hard here that I couldn’t see across the street from our window. Why didn’t you stay inside until it stopped?” Mrs. Lyon dropped the hank, then reached for a towel and began to blot Isabel’s hair.
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    Isabel glanced away from the mirror. Her mother’s dabbing had jiggled free a disquieting recollection from that morning. Isabel had arrived at the Clemenses’ home earlier than usual, to catch the 8:50 train to the city with Mr. Clemens. The air was cool as she had crossed the side lawn, a cardinal warbling birdie-birdie-birdie and the dew glistening on the grass. She had just taken her gaze from the river—she had grown even fonder of the view since sharing it with Mr. Clemens—when she saw him on the terrace, tipped back in a wrought-iron chair. Katy stood over him, rubbing his hair with a towel.
    For a moment, Isabel had not recognized her. A smile had transformed the maid’s sour face into that of a fresh-faced pretty girl. She was singing some sort of hymn, to which Mr. Clemens listened with closed eyes, seemingly unabashed by his bare chest and his bare feet, with which he rocked his tipped chair. Isabel had hiked quickly back toward the front of the house, discomfited by the intimate scene.
    Now Mrs. Lyon repeated, “What were you doing in New York that you couldn’t stay indoors?”
    Isabel’s gaze trailed over to the pot with a hydrangea plant sitting next to the bed. A kitten was batting one of the heavy blue heads. The cat had come from a litter of one of Mr. Clemens’s cats; Clara had given it to her. “We were busy.”
    â€œToo busy to get out of the rain? What will Mr. Bangs say about this hair?”
    Isabel refrained from saying that she did not care what Mr. Bangs would say about her hair. She did not care what Mr. Bangs would say about anything. As her mother vigorously reapplied the brush, systematically teasing one section until it stood up on end before moving to the next, Isabel slipped into her thoughts. Soon the rhythmic tugs to her scalp gave way in her mind to the sound of clopping horse hooves.
    She saw herself with Mr. Clemens, two hours after the disquieting scene earlier that morning. His derby crowned his tempest of clean hair as he jostled along companionably next to her within the horse-drawn cab. They were making their way down Broadway, an automobile puttering ahead of them, its pneumatic tires pummeling the Belgian blocks of the street. Trolleys rumbled past with a scowling driver in front and riders clinging to the grab-rails in the back. Schools of men in straw boaters and women in white dresses and huge hats fluttering with ribbons flowed purposefully down the sidewalks, the tide of humanity in flapping summer-weight cloth dwarfed by the elegant entrances of stores adorned with gigantic lanterns, columns, and extravagant awnings.
    The broad brim of her hat brushed her shoulders as she shifted toward the cab window to look up. Where Fifth Avenue and Broadway crossed at Twenty-Third Street, the just-completed Fuller Building, the tallest and strangest of the new “skyscrapers,” loomed on its triangular lot like a twenty-some story slice of wedding cake.
    â€œMagnificent.” Mr. Clemens leaned over her to view it. He smelled like smoke, wool, and man. She tried to make nothing of the fact that his arm was resting against her breast.
    â€œWant to stop and see it?” he asked.
    She reminded herself that it wouldn’t be right for Mrs. Clemens’s secretary to appear alone in public with Mr. Clemens. “No, but thank you.”
    â€œReally?” He sat back. Isabel’s breast tingled where he had made