I think about Nina Gabrilowitsch from time to time. I never met Nina, but I might have. That is, I conceivably could have, and I would have liked to. Nina was a lot older than I, but I can’t help thinking that she would have liked me. I bet I could have made her laugh, and I think she might have enjoyed having someone around that could make her laugh. Maybe some laughs would have helped. Nina died in a motel room in Los Angeles on January 17, 1966. Several bottles of pills and alcohol were found in the room. She was fifty-five years old. Fifty-five is too young to die, but I think perhaps it had been a long and trying fifty-five years.
A bartender at the bar in LA where she spent her last evening said that she had told him “When I die, I want artificial flowers, jitterbug music and a bottle of vodka at my grave.” I don’t know if her wishes were honored.
I was twenty-one in January of 1966, still in the army, and I didn’t know that Nina Gabrilowitsch existed. I didn’t know anything about her until years later, long after her death, but I think about her, and I have this sort of not very well developed fantasy about her. It requires some shuffling around of the chronology.
We’ll go back to the summer of 1963. I’m eighteen and I’m doing nothing much. I’ve left college, I’ve spent the better part of the last year in New York City living in a seedy old residential hotel with my friend Mike, working as a file clerk in an office near Times Square. I’m going nowhere; I’ve been adrift. I’ve moved back to New Jersey and I’m thinking maybe I’ll just join the army. I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet, but the more I think about it, the more I think maybe I will.
I happen to come across an article in a newspaper, or maybe in a magazine, about Clara Clemens Samossoud, who died the previous year. Clara was the only child of Samuel L. Clemens to survive him. She was the only child to marry, and she herself had only one child: a daughter from her marriage to the concert pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. The daughter’s name is Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch; she’s Samuel L. Clemens’ only surviving heir. The only living descendant of Mark Twain.
I’ve been reading Mark Twain since my mother gave me a copy of Tom Sawyer when I was a little kid. I’ve read everything I can find. I’ve read Huckleberry Finn, I’ve read Puddinhead Wilson, I’ve read A Connecticut Yankee, I’ve read The Prince and the Pauper, I’ve read Tom Sawyer Abroad, I’ve read Life on the Mississippi, I’ve read Roughing It, I’ve read The Innocents Abroad. I love Mark Twain. He’s been dead for over fifty years, but — and of course, why wouldn’t he?— he has a granddaughter.
Nina Gabrilowitsch. She’s way older than I am. She was born in 1910, so she’s fifty-three, but I don’t care. It’s not that kind of thing. I have to meet her. I know she was born after Mark Twain died, so she never knew him; she’ll have no first hand memories of him. But still, I have to meet her. I want to look at her. I want to know what she might have to say. I want to know if his sense of humor survives in her. I want to hear her voice. I’m not going to join the army after all. I’m going to find Nina Gabrilowitsch. And I do.
This is a fantasy, so the difficulty of finding out where Nina is, and tracking her down, which, if this were a story, and needed to ring true, might be an obstacle, doesn’t have to trouble us. I find her.
I find her in a bar. In Los Angeles. I’m sitting at the bar, having a vodka and tonic, and she’s sitting at the bar as well, down at the far end. I know it’s her. I call the bartender over and I tell him I want to buy a drink for the lady at the end of the bar. He says sure thing, pal. He makes her a drink—she’s drinking vodka and tonic as well— and he flourishes a cocktail napkin down in front of her, sets the drink on it, says something to her and looks my way. She turns and looks my way as well, and all she sees is this eighteen year old kid, so she’s not sure who the bartender’s talking about, but I raise my glass to her and she realizes I’m the one who bought her the drink. She picks up the drink and smiles at me, not particularly warmly, and nods her head.
So I get up and walk down there, and I say “Miss Gabrilowitsch?” She’s just lit a cigarette and she blows out the match and drops it in the ashtray and then she turns slowly to me and says “Clemens, honey. I go by Clemens.” And Mark Twain’s granddaughter has called me honey.
“Well, um, Miss Clemens, my name is Chuck. I…”
But she finishes my sentence. She’s heard it a thousand times before: “You’re a big fan of Mark Twain. You’ve read everything by him, you wish you could have met him, and when you discovered that he had a granddaughter, you just had to meet her.”
She’s got it exactly right. She looks weary. Her voice is husky, it’s the voice of a lifetime of cigarettes and cocktails. I start to say something but she goes on:
“Honey, I have to tell you. I never met him either. He died four months before I was born. I can’t tell you any stories about sitting on Mark Twain’s lap listening to him tell a tall tale. Those stories all belong to my mother and my aunts. Not me. I didn’t know him, I’m not like him. I don’t tell tall tales, I don’t write. I hate to disappoint you, but I’m used to it. I disappoint everybody.”
She stubs her cigarette out and signals to the bartender for another drink. “And another for our young pilgrim, here,” she says. She looks me over. “Where are you from, honey?” she says. “New Jersey,” I say. “New Jersey. A long way to come for nothing,” she says.
The bartender sets our drinks down. Nina picks hers up and as she raises it to her mouth I say “So who’s this Mark Twain?” She sets the glass back down, turns to me with a smile, this time with a little warmth, and says “Cute. That was cute, honey.” I know that calling people “honey” is her habit. She doesn’t mean anything in particular by it, but still, I like it. Mark Twain’s granddaughter calls me honey. I’ll tell my own grandchildren about that.
We don’t go any further with the “Who’s Mark Twain?” thing, but it broke the ice. It made her smile. I relax a little and she lets her guard down. I’ve had a couple of drinks and I’m not intimidated by her anymore, so we begin to talk comfortably, and we both enjoy it. And I make her laugh. I knew I would.
This is a fantasy, and I don’t know quite what to expect of it. Maybe that evening she spent with me in that bar in LA and the laughter we shared lightened her load a bit. Maybe it brought back to her a knowledge that her Grandfather certainly had and that is that if you’re cursed with an ability to see this world all too clearly, you’re going to need a sense of humor. Maybe the papers didn’t have to report her death of drugs and alcohol in 1966. Maybe she lived on. Maybe she wrote a book about her life. Maybe she dedicated it to me. Why not? It’s my fantasy.