Mark Twain in Milan

by Rob Hunter

conclusion

Lady Ada #4 got the timetable exactly right. We barreled down the spiraled ironwork stairs one flight and hustled our way to the nearest subway accessway: Uncle Larry’s pop-hole. This took us to a network of underground passageways, and back to the 2nd Avenue tunnel. We waited.

Ka-bunka, ka-bunka, ka-bunka, the bus named Università flopped to a stop on squared-off wheels. A woman got off, descending what remained of a circular stairway to the upper deck. She could have been entering a ballroom. Her floor length gown was white silk trimmed with magenta velvet touches; her hair was coiled into a lacquered confection that framed a delicate oval face. She carried a white sable muff, one of those 19th Century hand warmers that doubled as a lady’s carryall.

“Well, that was exhilarating,” she said. “The last thing I remember is dodging overripe tomatoes at the University of Turin. And here I am.” It was Lady Ada, another Lady Ada.

“Lady Lovelace #5, I presume?” said Lindy.

“I never dreamed that algorithm would work,” said Lady Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. “On material human beings — characters as they navigate the mechanics of a fugal landscape. This is too, too fabulous. I was stretching my intellectual muscle, showing off a bit in front of those self-important preeners.”

“Giancarlo?” I asked.

“Sì.”

“Would the faculty of the Università di Torino have been the sort of folk to throw overripe fruit at a guest lecturer?”

His eyes grew large to the point where they bulged. “No, Andreas, excitable but not violent. Atti di violenza are for football and the opera. Oh, sì. This proves my hypothesis: I am not me. I mean, I am not your Giancarlo; if there is a Giancarlo Pieranunzi in your timeline he probably did not escape from the Fascisti and come to New York. And he would be 115 years old, which the General Theory of Relativity forbids.”

He smiled at Ada Lovelace and groomed his moustache; she smiled back coquettishly.

“Relativity? Tosh. Interesting, but a plaything. Wilmo Darndlefang of Gothenburg, a clerk at the Swedish Patent Office, wrote of it in 1839. A curious fancy, hardly the mete of serious mathematics.” Lady Lovelace smiled fetchingly at me. “And mathematics is an art, not a science. Science is all steam and rivets.” At this there was a hiss and a belch from the omnibus as it expelled a shower of glowing cinders. “And bitumen is so noisy,” concluded Lady Lovelace.

“For you.” Giancarlo handed Lady Ada his treasured cameo.

“Ohh,” she held it at arm’s length. The long lost carver had done her justice. “Do I really look like this?” We all nodded. She shrugged her very creamy, very white shoulders. “I wish I had known before I married William.”

“It is never too late,” Giancarlo made calf’s eyes at her then kissed her hand. Even though she was heart stoppingly beautiful Lady Ada had to be almost two hundred years old. Albeit her husband was stranded in their home continuum, she was far along in years for this timeline. She certainly didn’t look her age.

“What about 1929?” said Lindy and I simultaneously. “And if the omnibus is from 1841, where are the horses?”

Giancarlo displayed a cavalier grin. “Another train has pulled into the station. This time an omnibus. Like the trains on the tracks, the espresso and the train we could hear but not see? In the empty tunnel?”

“Yes. Yes,” from all four of us.

“Lady Lovelace,” he bowed in Lady Ada’s direction and was rewarded with a fetching curtsey, “is from a different continuum altogether. Different from yours and different from mine. And since I am here, she at least may leave but it is unlikely that I shall ever go home again. This pleases me. I like it here. Even the lovely Lady Lovelace,” another bow and another returned curtsey — very European, these Europeans — “must obey the constraints promulgated by Relativity.”

“If we wish it so. Men! Is that not correct, my dear?” Lady Lovelace asked of Lindy. “By the way,” said Lady Ada, “I simply adore your little dress and your shoes. Would you allow me a small intuition?”

“Of course, your ladyship.”

“You are around when these arrivals happen — these conditionals?”

“Gee, I...” Lindy gave us a questioning look. We nodded. “Yes, I guess so.”

“Then you are the operand. The missing factor of my most elegant equation. You are the gatekeeper.”

“You mean I have a supernatural thingy?”

“No, only cute shoes. It is right that a woman have cute shoes. Because I am a woman, even dear Charles and Luigi tended to patronize me — I am but a woman. Likewise the Earth is hollow and spontaneous human combustion occurs regularly. Just look around you.”

We looked around.

“A gatekeeper,” said Lindy with an ear-to-ear grin that would have melted even Don Paolo Carbone’s heart.

“Don’t let it go to your head, my dear,” said Ada Lovelace. “China flats do not a summer make and if I might essay an observation — and this is not a characterization of you, dear girl — in my equation the gatekeeper is more of a doorstop than a doorperson: a brick, a lump, a catalyst. If you appreciate conditionals as I do, my dear, you will know that if you are not really the missing operand, you are a flag, a pointer to where it resides. Op. Cit.: a gatekeeper. You are not a part of the phenomenon. But without you nothing happens.”

“What about the scissors? They were hot,” said Sam as he wistfully eyed Lady Ada’s silk ball gown.

“An effect, not a cause, dear boy. Do you like it? I had it made in Paris. You have excellent taste for a man.”

“200 years old. And horny,” I volunteered.

“As you say,” said Ada Lovelace, “Men are a testosterone time machine.”

Sam Clemens took a bow. He averted his eyes and shuffled his feet.

Lindy gave my hand a squeeze.

“You don’t remember trying to cut off my head? With a sword?”

“Nonsense, I don’t even own a sword.”

I explained the goings-on with Carmine the Don, the Moose and the 2nd Ave. tunnel.

“Hmmm... a genuine bohemian trysting place,” said Lady Ada. “The underworld can be so stimulating — and you have assured me that you have seen me here before, have you not?”

“I have. Three times at least, although it is hard to keep count when one is being shot at and run over by a train...”

“Understandable, albeit not helpful,” she replied. “Confusing. This is a clue, I believe.”

“Ahh... a clue,” said Sam Clemens, trying to look wise.

“A clue. We are in a mystery, a detective story. And like all good mysteries it must have a peak, a climax and, sadly, a dénouement.”

“But what about Lindy... the gatekeeper...”

“And your marvelous calculating machine, the difference engine,” said Giancarlo Pieranunzi. He blushed as Lady Ada leaned forward to ruffle his hair.

“Lindy is, alas, the love interest. This is a story after all, nicht wahr? A power greater than ourselves has found us to be diverting playthings; our realities are mere hallucination. The machine is naught but a quantity of cogs and wheels held together with rivets, my darlings. Without a soul it is nothing but ingenious levers and switches. I have the key to its soul.”

“Hallucination...” I gave myself a pinch. “Ouch. I seem to be real enough,” I said.

“I should hope so,” said Ada #5. “Dear Giancarlo, pinch me.”

“Uh...”

“Go ahead.”

He went ahead. He reached tentatively for an exposed earlobe. “No, something more personal. If we are Destiny’s playthings, let us be more adventuresome. If I can feel your pinch, then we are both in for a surprise.” She hiked up her petticoats and exposed what the High Victorians would have called “a comely thigh.”

Lindy quickly put herself between me and the exposed Lady Ada. “Where you are from? I mean to say it sounds, well, messy. Steam omnibuses, no refrigeration and all. Your potato salads must be crawling with bacteria. Your ensemble is, of course, devastating,” she added. “Coordinated.”

“Coordinated... I can swim quite well, my dear, and can ride a velocipede, if that is what you are getting at,” said Lady Augusta Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. “Ah-hah, you are asking me if my socks match the drapes. I am afraid not.”

Lindy got that out-to-lunch glassy stare I recognized from her séance and I knew she was plotting the makeover of an entire parallel universe.

The steam omnibus gave a puff, then another. The reek of coal gas was intense; my eyes watered. “Woo, the fumes,” said Lindy, waving her hand in front of her nose. The omnibus gave a tentative chug then rumbled into full steam idle. Cinders rose from a ruptured vent somewhere in its innards.

A cat, scruffy with long hair, singed and with irregular bald patches, descended the steps from the bus’s truncated upper deck. There was a squirming bundle in its teeth. “Oh, hello, Puss.” The lady and the cat seemed to be on speaking terms. It walked over and dropped a rat at Lady Ada’s feet.

“Thank you Widdershins.” She held the rat up by its tail, examining. It raised its head and looked at her with black, beady eyes. “No, Puss. If you won’t eat it, neither will I. But thank you for your concern; I have missed my lunch. Well, time to go.” The rat scuttled off. The cat sat and groomed itself. “Giancarlo, would you care to accompany me?”

“Ahem.” Sam Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain reached down to pet the cat. He was toking on one of the sidewalk peddler’s absconded joints. “I hate to be an old stick-in-the-mud, but things must be piling up back in Milan. I have a book to write.”

“That aroma. Surely it is not bitumen fumes from the omnibus’s boiler,” said Lady Ada. Mark Twain passed her the joint.

“Ahh, the Arab weed,” said Lady Ada, inhaling deeply.

“Andy?” Lindy gave my hand a hopeful squeeze. She wanted to go along and neaten up the nineteenth century.

“Uh, I think we might make them feel intruded upon. And they won’t have indoors plumbing.” The two sweethearts would crave solitude at their nineteenth-century picnic, even with all the bacteria and botulinum toxins.

“I didn’t think about that. You don’t even have TV?”

“I am aware that smoking is detrimental to the lungs but, no. My mother’s brother died in a sanitarium, however.” Lady Ada passed the joint back to Sam Clemens. She looked hopeful but was puzzled by the reference.

“Not tuberculosis, television.” Sam explained television to Lady Ada.

“No. No TV. But ‘talking wallpaper,’ you say? This brings to mind the wallpaper in your gangster’s inner sanctum: shepherds and shepherdesses disporting themselves in a bosky dell? Such naughty business, particularly for wallpaper. I am absolutely entranced. And by-the-bye...” She pulled a dog-eared notebook from her carryall. “And if my calculations are correct I should soon be leaving you lovely people. I can only hope poor Luigi and dear Charles are adjusting to things where they are. But then, they wouldn’t have a choice, would they?” She giggled becomingly.

Giancarlo sighed and shuffled his feet. Lady Ada offered him her hand. “Shall we continue this discussion en tête-à-tête? My, won’t dear Charles and Luigi be jealous.”

“I have always wanted to be a shepherd,” said Giancarlo Pieranunzi.

* * *

And they disappeared.

Not so all the Mark Twains. The Twain Boys seemed lost out of their milieus and followed us everywhere. None of the duplicates seemed as bright as the original. Sam went for a walk with Marcus Tertius and the rest of his siblings and led them on board the Staten Island Ferry. When the ferry made berth at St. George on the Staten Island end, they were gone. Sam Clemens — my Mark Twain — hung about for a few weeks then finally got the hint that Lindy and I would like to begin our honeymoon without him.

And about there all of us went to live happily in our assorted forevers — Manhattan, Bay Ridge, wallpaper shepherds on a Tuscan meadow — a regular Hollywood ending. Lady Ada and Giancarlo we never saw again. But just for old times’ sake I sometimes drop in at Parrucchiere Gianni for a haircut and shave from their grandson.