A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates
Malvinia listened; and, with many a nod of her lovely head, appeared to concur, whilst her eyes roved the festive interior, seeking to observe who might be observing her, and her illustrious escort. She was not disappointed: for it was a rare diner, in this sybaritic enclave, who did not recognize Miss Malvinia Morloch—and even those wealthy foreign visitors, dining with robust appetites, and queer continental manners, knew at sight the great man of letters Mark Twain.
She listened; she sympathized; she encouraged her suitor to tell her more; and, at the conclusion of a long and particularly impassioned speech on the “exquisite and fastidious and altogether beautiful miracle” of the Paige machine, she roused herself to some thoughtful commentary, to indicate the depth of her attention. Nay, she acquitted herself admirably, fetching out of some dim reservoir of memory—one of her theatrical speeches, perhaps?—these stirring words: “To my amateur’s ear, Mr. Twain, it sounds very much as if this machine is indeed extraordinary, and will do you proud. Not merely to supply wealth, which you, as our greatest American author, scorn by instinct; and still less to supply fame, which you already possess in vertiginous abundance: but to hasten the progress of our great century, and promote all that is rare, and good, and wondrous, in Democracy itself! Why, it may be, Mr. Twain, that, owing to your prescience, future generations of mankind will be irreparably altered—enhanced—revolutionized. I am but a woman, and consequently hesitate to make such judgments, but it sounds very much to me as if this machine is no tinkerer’s dream, but a device that will revolutionize the continent. And you are to be applauded, my dear sir, for not only having recognized this fact, but for doing all you can to bring it to fruition.” A speech of such boldness, and such contagious enthusiasm, that the aging gentleman’s susceptibility to Miss Morloch’s female charms can be well understood.
“Your thinking, Miss Morloch,” Mr. Twain said, after some seconds of rapt silence, during which time he stared quite fully into his companion’s face, “has the timbre and resonance of a man’s thinking!—which is quite, quite remarkable. But,” he added, his mustache quivering in a smile that was almost boyish, despite his creased face, and the fatigue that registered in his bloodshot eyes, “but, I am happy to observe, you possess nothing else, about your person, that might be mistaken as a man’s.”
IN SUCH WISE the “mental telegraphy” between these two celebrities drew them together, and allowed them the admittedly considerable pleasures of self-deception, unavailable to those of us who hoe far humbler rows. From time to time, Malvinia’s heart was pierced by sudden recollections of that wronged and lost man of the cloth, Mr. Malcolm Kennicott: yet, being a most wondrously resilient heart, how readily it mended itself! The frequent and animated discussions about the Paige machine, which Mr. Twain conducted generally, in the company of divers others, could not fail to have had the effect of causing Malvinia to recall, and to brood upon, and perhaps even to shed a tear over, her rejected family, and Mr. Zinn most of all: whom, she supposed, she did love, and would one day be a more dutiful daughter to, if only Bloodsmoor were not so very distant, and its custodians so tiresome. (In her quieter moments, forced by the exigencies of the body to endure yet more prolonged, and hotter, baths, Malvinia bethought herself sadly that Mr. Zinn as he had been in the nursery, so many years ago, would remain, perhaps, her most priz’d admirer: she had recited for him, and memorized for him, and preened herself for him, and ah!—how he had applauded! Now, her various audiences might very well applaud, with gratifying enthusiasm, but, as Vandenhoffen had sourly observed, they were perhaps not altogether meritorious arbiters of taste: and quite, quite impossible to love, as she had loved her father.)
She thought of Mr. Kennicott, and forgot him; she thought of Mr. Zinn, and forgot him. At odd times, oft in the midst of a histrionic speech, in the blaze of the footlights, she thought of her sisters: and wondered what the roles were, that they now played; and whether they were quite so cynical about them, as Malvinia was becoming—alas, almost day by day—about hers. (Constance Philippa, Malvinia realized, would now be thirty-seven years old: a sobering age. Had that strong-willed young woman changed greatly? Malvinia wondered; did she repent of her wedding-night escape from the Baron, or had she entered an utterly new life? It was difficult for Malvinia, vain as she was, and obsessed with the inevitable incursions of aging, in her own much-vaunted beauty, even to attempt to imagine her older sister as thirty-seven years old: she preferred to cozen herself with memories of the brash, blunt, handsome Constance Philippa as a young girl of eleven, or fourteen, or seventeen, so very awkward in her Sunday finery, and vexed by the weight of her hair, that Malvinia could not help but burst into a spasm of giggling, and risk incurring her rage. At the very most, Malvinia was willing to summon forth, in her mind’s eye, Constance Philippa as a bride: in that beautiful silk gown, the lace cap and veil so beguiling upon her high-held head, her dark eyes glittering with an unarticulated emotion, not unlike that glimpsed in the eyes of certain noble steeds—saddle-broken by a skillful trainer, yet mercurial, and shrewd, and always on the alert, for weakness in any other handler. “Ah, my dear Constance Philippa!—my courageous, and altogether fantastical, older sister!” Malvinia laughed softly to herself. “That you did right, to escape your gnome of a husband, I cannot doubt: that you have succeeded as well as I, in conquering the world beyond Bloodsmoor, I cannot believe: but I hope that, wherever you are, in whatever unguessed-at circumstances, you are happy—indeed, happier than I.” This uttered with a sigh of atypical weariness, in which not a little genuine sentiment for her sister might have been discerned. And, in a mood of reverie, her laudanum-drowsed mind drifting upon the others, Malvinia saw again the warm brown eyes, flushed cheeks, and loving smile of Octavia; and the small, pinched, pale, homely, and rather mysterious countenance of Samantha; and the melancholy, brooding visage of Deirdre—whom, by some happenstance, she unthinkingly recalled as her sister, rather than her adoptive sister. Had her relations with Mr. Twain touched more sincerely upon personal matters—had, indeed, her relations with any gentlemen done so—Malvinia would have dearly liked to speak of Deirdre, and of Samantha, who now struck her, in retrospect, as having been, in potential at least, exceedingly interesting; she would have enjoyed telling a spirited anecdote about Constance Philippa, and the sinister little Baron, and the dressmaker’s dummy; and there was Octavia too—so very dear a sister, one forgave her her piety, and all the tedium it engendered! But Malvinia Morloch shimmered, like a beautiful mirage, quite alone: it was part of the glamour, impressed upon her by Orlando Vandenhoffen, and by the manager of the Fanshawe troupe, that she stand by herself, of mysterious origin, unique in her beauty, one of a kind. “And I very much doubt that they should be interested in my family life,” Malvinia said with a bemused sigh, “my zealous gentleman-admirers.”)
With her moods swinging violently from the brooding and near-elegiac, when she was alone, to the vivacious and festive, when she was in the company of others, Malvinia had cause to wonder if Mr. Twain’s strictures on the shallowness of man, and his mechanistic psychology, might not be woefully precise. When, his tongue loosened by Angostura bitters, and hot toddies to forestall the “January void,” Mr. Twain railed on and on about the meanness, the selfishness, and, most damning of all, the pointlessness, of human existence, Malvinia quite spontaneously played the ingénue (as she suspected the unhappy gentleman required), and pretended to be scandalized; when he drifted from his adulation of the Machine, to an alarmingly bitter attack upon the Machine, and the entire “universe of Machine-Men,” she pretended to disagree, and to wish to point out, prettily, that he was surely an exception to his own philosophy. (“Am I?” Mr. Twain asked, staring and blinking, his expression gone quite blank, and, as it were, greatly moving in its childlike appeal, “Am I? Am I? Am I?”—turning the poignant moment into a joke, and really a very witty joke, in its improvised mimicry of a machine: whereupon the others of the company uproariously laughed, and Malvinia herself could n
“Life has absolutely no dignity or meaning,” Mr. Twain catechized, his soft-twanging Southern drawl amusingly at odds with the bleakness of his words. “Absolutely no dignity or meaning, my friends, except that suggested by the agreeable bubblings, seethings, and airy emissions, engendered by an excellent meal. . . . Gentlemen, and ladies, and all the rest of us, I propose a toast to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Typesetter, which is to say, the mind of man, of which we try so very hard, to be so very proud. Will you join me?”
Malvinia laughed shrilly, as if in delight, and protested: “My dear Mr. Twain, you do not mean half of what you utter! You wish only to shock.”
Whereupon the slow twanging voice rejoined: “My dear Miss Morloch, I do not utter half of what I mean.”
Yes, she secretly concurred, who had, so many years previous, heard from the lips of the Transcendentalist spirit, John Quincy Zinn himself, words that were so completely the reverse!—words of faith, and hope, and charity toward all mankind—and unswerving, tho’ unconventional, belief in the undefinable Spirit of the Universe. How far, how tragically far, poor Malvinia has come, you may note, from Bloodsmoor, and its happy vales and hillocks: how far, too, our sovereign nation has come, from the poetical faith, the dream-certain bliss, the sacred certainty, of Mr. Emerson, to the blasphemous half-mad rantings, of the “humorist” Mr. Twain! Where the great Emerson declaimed with unswerving faith that God is All, and All is God, the besotted Twain declaimed, like a lowlife preacher stood rudely upon his head, that God is just a machine-notion, a machine-thought, put forth by the “coffee-mill” mind of man! Were it not too demeaning to do so, I would set forth the tenets of the Episcopal faith, as they confront, and, one by one, conquer, the heretical ravings of Mr. Mark Twain; were it not an exercise in superfluity, I would measure the great, the profound, the God-ordained wisdom of the Bible, against the nonsensical mutterings of an adulterous bully and drunkard, who, perhaps, scarce knew what his lips babbled, only that his constant circle of admirers was amused, and the beauteous actress Malvinia Morloch laughed with the others, and seemed close to being won. (Unbeknownst to Mr. Twain, Miss Morloch was in fact close to being won, in the bitter winter of ’93–’94; but only as a consequence of the defection of a wealthier gentleman-suitor, a vociferous supporter of President Cleveland, who had found an Egyptian hootchy-kootchy dancer more to his liking, than the temperamental Miss Morloch, who was, after all, hardly in the first flush of youth any longer. A revelation not known to Mr. Twain, certainly, and known to Malvinia herself but indirectly.)
“Do not look so aggrieved, my dear Miss Morloch,” Mr. Twain said, seizing her fair hand, and raising it to his lips, “tho’ we are but machines, and tho’ we are guided by naught but coarse self-interest, I hardly deny that there frequently occur mutual self-interests, indeed, mutual pleasures, of a kind best satisfied in tandem.”
THE ROMANCE CAME most abruptly, and hideously, to an end, upon the night of January 13: said night having begun when, after a performance of She Loved Him Dearly, Mr. Twain arrived at Malvinia’s dressing room to escort her to a private party, where much drinking transpired, and a heated discussion, between partisans and antagonists, as to the feasibility of Mr. Carnegie’s scheme for absorbing Great Britain, Ireland, and Canada, into an entity to be called the “American Commonwealth.” Mr. Twain brayed with laughter at the nonsensical idea; for who would want impoverished Ireland, and moose-ridden Canada, and dumpy Queen Victoria? It was quite loathsome enough, after all, to have won back the Alamo.
A quarrel later arose, I cannot say how, or why, over the comparative merits of Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science mind-cure, and Professor Lupa’s School of Cognition and Memory: the latter favored by Mr. Twain, the former by Sir Charles Nook, who was, Malvinia gathered, a $10,000 investor in the Paige typesetter, and a somewhat precarious friend of Mr. Twain’s—tho’, to be sure, all of his friends were “precarious,” if not fully in flight.
“Come, Miss Morloch,” Mr. Twain commanded, “come away with me: this is a vulgar lot, and you and I are degraded to remain in their midst.”
So a cab was hailed, and Malvinia and her suitor were taken uptown to the Nicklaus, and, Mr. Twain gripping her arm with a viselike attentiveness, and allowing her to know that, should she not allow him to escort her to her suite, and well into the interior of her suite, within the hour, she should not expect to hear from him again, the somewhat o’erwrought Malvinia heard herself acquiesce: for, after all, she thought, staring mesmerized as the gas lamps along Park Avenue appeared to trot backward to her, and past her, in a jolting unending stream, after all, the noisy old fool has perhaps paid his dues by now.
Once in the perfum’d privacy of Malvinia’s bedchamber, however, the couple was thrown into a nervous constraint: and Mr. Twain was so stumblingly inept, in merely disrobing, that Malvinia’s heart lifted with the momentary hope that he might collapse harmlessly upon the bed, and do not mischief—and, upon the morn, be convinced that he had.
But the determined man of letters righted himself, and, after some difficult moments, during which time his flushed face grew yet more reddened, he managed to extricate himself from his starched shirt, which was stiff and unyielding as armor; and from that vulgar species of masculine undergarment popularly known as long woollens, Mr. Twain’s being of a coarse gray wool, surprisingly soiled for one of his reputation and alleged wealth. He then turned to his hoped-for mistress, who stood in a pose of virginal detachment, prideful, and yet shy as a girl, not unlike the young Juliet in one of Miss Morloch’s first successes on the stage: he turned to her, with a show of lusty spirits, sighing, and cackling with nervous laughter, and rubbing his hands together: and seized her by the shoulders, that he might plant a moist, and strangely boyish, kiss upon her part-yielding lips. Glancing then uneasily about the luxuriously appointed room, with its several ornamental mirrors, and its numerous vases of flowers, that, in the shadowy light of so late, and so illicit, an hour, gave an eerie appearance of being witnesses to this degrading spectacle, Mr. Twain ordered that the candles be snuffed out at once, and “darkness be the order of the day.”
In jest he said: “For it is necessary that some rituals be performed, my dear; but not that they be observed.”
“Yes, Mr. Twain,” Malvinia said in a gay, benumbed voice, as she hurried unthinkingly to do his bidding, “yes, you are quite correct.”
Whereupon the oblivion of pitch-dark night ensued!—with what tragic consequences, I can scarce bring myself to record.
There followed immediately, upon the opened bed, with its silken canopy and massive fourposters, some minutes of dalliance, clumsy, and hopeful, and wicked, yet, I am led to believe, hardly unnatural, in a couple of adulterous intent—kisses of an adolescent fervor, and dampness; and awkward, tho’ forceful, caresses; and an attempt at a manly embrace; and divers amorous whisperings, and murmurings, and cajolings (there being the continued posture, agreeable to both principals, that Malvinia was of a recalcitrant and maidenly disposition); and many declarations, made in a drawl now heightened with urgency, as to the astounding beauty, voluptuousness, and general desirability, of Miss Morloch. (That Mr. Twain had entered into sacred Christian matrimony, many years previous, and that his invalided wife, Livy, wrote to him faithfully from Europe, during his long courtship of Malvinia, was not, of course, a fact the blackguard husband cared to mention; yet it was a fact Malvinia knew well enough, from other sources. So this “love embrace” was to be not simply unblessed by any churchly vows, but in positive defiance of Holy Wedlock!—an action beset with enormous risks, for Our Heavenly Father does not like to be insulted. Shameful, too, was the fact that Malvinia cared not a whit for the existence of a loyal and betrayed wife, whether invalided or no: for who among her numerous “bachelor” suitors was not married?)
Some minutes of animalistic loveplay, and the gradual “surrender” of the female, and the gallant attempt upon the part of the male, to initiate the unitary act: and then
The Beast! Announced by an abrupt chuckle in Malvinia’s throat, low and ribald and insinuating: and a sudden tugging of Mr. Twain’s wet mustache!
And then, the fit having come upon her, unstoppable, hideous, Malvinia gnashed her teeth, and ground them furiously together; and gave herself up to coarse, guttural, jocose—indeed, bestial—imprecations, which issued forth from her lovely lips, which, in the candlelight of scarcely ten minutes ago, had looked so pristinely innocent! These profanities and obscenities and primitive “names” for bodily parts are not only so evil in themselves, as to bear no consideration whatsoever, in this chronicle, but they are, I am proud to say, so foreign to my experience, in even the verbal sense, that I could not begin to guess how they might be spelled; and will make no attempt herein.
Mr. Twain’s amatory boldness, more the consequence of alcoholic ingestion, than of a natural inclination, was, as you may imagine, quench’d at once by this development: yet Malvinia Morloch took no mercy upon her lover’s consternation, and may, in fact, have had no clear awareness of it, so exuberantly did The Beast force himself into her slender, writhing body—fitting her arms, and limbs, and torso, and the nether regions of her being, like a powerful hand thrusting itself into a snug and slightly resistant lady’s glove!
The unlucky gentleman cried out, in surprise that halfway wished to be amused, as if his mistress’s wild paroxysms were but a joke: but no amusement was forthcoming, as slim female fingers grown brazen with the dark groped, and slapped, and twisted, and poked; and a knee wedged itself upward, with painful results; and the burning soles of frantic feet “walked” all over Mr. Twain’s body, both front and rear! The obscene chuckling increased in volume, issuing, evidently, from deep within the damsel’s throat; unspeakable—nay, ineffable—odors were released, from the primeval orifices of the body; there was a brute wrestling, and scrambling, and grunting, of a kind to summon forth, in the stunned author’s imagination, an image he would have supposed long forgotten: he saw again, in his paralysis of terror, the antics of a pet monkey on board the cholera-struck sailing ship America, in January of 1867: this comely little creature, cinnamon-brown of hue, and wondrously appealing as to its tiny, wizened, childlike face, had been grotesquely costumed in black velvet trousers and braided jacket, and black string tie; and, to the depraved amusement of the passengers and crew, who sought to distract themselves from the horror of the cholera epidemic, had been fed brandy-soaked bananas, so that the poor crazed creature jabbered, and twirled about, and foamed at the mouth, and rolled about the deck in convulsions. A piteous spectacle, which Mr. Twain had successfully buried, for nearly three decades, but which now sprang forth, unbidden, and in great confusion, as he struggled, as if for his very life, with the beauteous Malvinia Morloch. . . .