“Paranoid much?”
“Your showing up like this is enough to make anyone paranoid!”
“I swear I will not take you to a psych ward. I don’t even know where the psych ward is! Swear,” she says, drawing an X on her chest with her index finger.
It’s strange that I’m actually considering going—but maybe I’m just embracing the absurd. Why the hell not, at this point?
“If I agree, will you promise not to hit me again and refrain from calling me ‘a pussy’?” I say, making air quotes with my middle and index fingers.
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Where are you going to take me?”
“You’ll see,” she says, smiling now, as if all that has transpired so far is part of some elaborate plan, like she’s been in complete control from the very beginning.
I fear I might be caught in her web, that Portia Kane is a hungry spider toying with my emotions.
But then somehow it’s settled.
CHAPTER 13
As Portia loads my duffel bag into the back of her rented car, I get an up-close look at her suitcases for the first time and see that they’re designer, just like the clothes that she wears—except the retro jean jacket—and I begin to understand that this woman has the funds and the means to take me anywhere, which is not exactly a pleasant feeling. I get into the passenger side and rest my cane between my legs.
She starts the car. “Put on your seat belt.”
“You’re joking, right, Mom?” I say, staring at my ruined truck, which is still embedded in the tree.
She sighs. “The car will make an annoying beeping noise, and I could get pulled over by a cop if you don’t buckle up.”
When the car starts to beep, she points to a little flashing yellow light on the dash that depicts a man properly strapped into a car seat, which is indeed annoying, so I return her sigh and buckle up. “I’m old enough to remember when no one wore seat belts.”
“Okay, Grandpa,” she says, and then smiles.
“Getting cocky, are you?” I say as we navigate the dirt roads through the long piles of snow pushed to the sides by plows. “Where are we headed?”
“You’ll see,” she says, smiling again.
And then she drives in silence for a long time on the highway, headed south, following the dashes, becoming part of the blur of vehicles doing sixty to eighty miles an hour, like so many drops of blood flowing through a countrywide system of arteries.
Are we any different than the molecules that make up our bodies, I think, or are we just the molecules that make up something larger that we can’t even fathom?
“What are you thinking about, Mr. Vernon?” she asks.
“Can I smoke in here?”
“No.”
“You’re a prison warden!”
And then we drive on for hours.
At one point she asks if I want to listen to music and what kind. I tell her, “Classical, please,” and she searches until she finds a station that’s playing Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor, op. 23.
“Is this good?” she says.
“It’s divine.” I remember listening to this very composition many times with Albert Camus curled up on my lap. He’d beat out the dramatic and wonderful piano notes with his little tail.
I lose myself in the music, and as the road dashes dance with the notes, I wonder if I could be dead. Could I have already killed myself, and might this be some sort of existential purgatory?
Massachusetts zooms by uneventfully, and then we are in Hartford, Connecticut, turning off the highway and entering what appears to be a financially challenged neighborhood.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Portia smiles coyly.
But I see a sign for the Mark Twain house, and suddenly I know exactly where we are headed.
From taking my class, she must remember that I am a huge fan of Mr. Clemens’s work. While I’ve never visited his home in Hartford, it’s going to take a lot more than this to help me answer the first question, and so I’m afraid Ms. Kane has underestimated her sizable task.
“You do know that Mark Twain was an extremely ornery man,” I say, “especially at the end of his life. If you read No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger, you’ll see that ultimately Twain was not very optimistic. Vonnegut loved Twain, and he tried to kill himself. Are you sure this is a good idea?”
Portia ignores my comments as she pulls into the parking lot and shifts into park. “In your classroom you used to have a poster of Mark Twain and his quote: ‘Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.’ Do you remember?”
I do remember, but instead of acknowledging that, I say, “Well, then, maybe you should keep away from me.”
“Come on,” she says and gets out of the car.
I follow and cane my way to the Twain house, which is brick, quite large, beautiful, and mysterious-looking.
Inside, Ms. Kane buys us tour tickets and we join a small group led by an almost oppressively eager young man who—to be fair—really does know a lot about Mark Twain, although he has an unfortunate love for posing unanswerable questions like, “If you were Mark Twain, living here back in 1885, what would you hope to have seen when you looked out this window?”
Our peppy guide leads us through various rooms as he discusses the “happiest time” in Mark Twain’s life, showing us his telephone even, one of the first in the world, the angels carved into his headboard, and his attic billiards room, where he shot pool and smoked cigars (always in moderation, Twain said, “one at a time”) and looked out from his lofty perch.