One was from the American South, one from Serbia. One was a family man; the other had never been married or shown any interest in women. But they were both towering geniuses whose faces and names carried a sort of burden. They were two of the first true American celebrities. Not many people knew what it was like to be famous, and I think that for all their differences, they always had that. That mutual respect for what the other had sacrificed in the name of his work.
Henry had been a fan of Twain’s writing for years, particularly of Huckleberry Finn:
I’d read it so many times that I could quote whole passages of it from memory. There’s one I remember, even now:
“The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.”
Twain extended his hand. “Sam Clemens,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr.—”
“Sturges,” said Henry. “Henry Sturges, and the pleasure is all mine, sir. I’m a great admirer of your work.”
“Well,” said Twain, “that makes one of us.”
He held my hand longer than I expected and looked at me with those eyes—eyes that, and I know this is an overused expression, but in this case it’s the right one—eyes that twinkled. I noticed him do the same thing when I introduced Duell. He looked at us like a schoolboy with a secret. I considered trying to read his thoughts, to see why his eyes twinkled the way they did, but then scolded myself. Lifting stock tips from J. P. Morgan was one thing. But this was Mark Twain. How dare I invade his privacy?
“And where did you and our friend Mr. Tesla meet?” asked Twain.
“At Delmonico’s.”
“Ah, of course. Helluva steak they have there, isn’t it.”
“Yes.”
“ ’E was makin’ a fuss over ’is soup,” said Duell, pointing to Tesla.
“I was,” said Tesla, smiling. “Very funny, very funny, very funny. Mr. Sturges told me to shut my mouth. I loved this. We are friends now.”
“And did you know Mr. Sturges and Mr. Duell are vampires?” asked Twain.
He said it so matter-of-factly, without the slightest hint of fear or accusation. This was the kind of confidence born of being one of the most famous men on earth.
“Know?” asked Tesla. “Of course I know this, you blustering old fool! Why do you insult my intelligence? Vampires, yes, yes, yes.”
It was clear that Tesla hadn’t known. That he hadn’t, in fact, had the slightest idea that his new friends were vampires. He suddenly seemed less interested in showing them his inventions and more interested in keeping an eye on them.
Twain winked at Henry. “Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Sturges. Some of my closest friends are dead.”
There’s that damnable word again. This time Henry kept his mouth shut. Scolding William Duell and scolding Mark Twain were two very different things.
“We ought not to discriminate against them on that account,” said Twain, “since sooner or later we all end up afflicted with the same condition.”
The foursome of Tesla, Twain, Sturges, and Duell passed much of 1901 together, congregating in Tesla’s lab and dining at Delmonico’s—where Twain amused himself by telling the waiters to “bring Mr. Sturges’s and Mr. Duell’s plates back to the kitchen, as they clearly can’t tolerate a mere mouthful of it.” There were no other attacks on the Union Headquarters or on any of its members. All the same, the Union kept its war footing, and Henry remained under Duell’s watch.
I’d grown to like [Duell]. He was ribald and loud, and he certainly wasn’t an intellectual. But he was intelligent in his own salty way, and more than that, he had good intentions, even if he often fell short of displaying them. You know the saying “possession is nine-tenths of the law”? In my experience, intentions are nine-tenths of a man’s character.
Tesla divided his time between his lab on Houston Street and a new facility he was building on Long Island called Wardenclyffe. The centerpiece of this new facility, built largely with J. P. Morgan’s money, was a huge metal tower that rose 187 feet from the center of the brick laboratory and was topped by a metal dome that vaguely resembled a flying saucer. Tesla planned to use the tower to beam energy wirelessly across the Atlantic and claimed that he had already proved the concept on a smaller scale. When not overseeing Wardenclyffe’s construction, Tesla carried on with various experiments at his Houston Street lab, often using one of his frequent guests as test subjects. He took an X-ray of Henry’s head and hands and studied the anatomical differences between the bone structures of humans and vampires. For the first time, Henry could see the physical changes that his body had undergone over those three days at Roanoke. His old bones thickening and new bones—claws—growing beneath the skin of his fingers. The retracted fangs that rested behind his face.
This was, I think, the beginning of a change in my thinking. The change from believing, like most vampires, that our condition had some kind of “magical” component, that it was a kind of “curse,” to wondering if maybe—maybe—it was rooted in the physical. That it was just another ailment, passed from person to person through the blood, no different than, say, the HIV virus, or hepatitis.
Tesla was also interested in the physiological differences between vampires and humans and was determined to make a scientific study of them. He quizzed Henry endlessly on a variety of intimate subjects, taking notes and mumbling to himself while pulling at strands of his black hair with his free hand.
“Do vampires… do they use the water closet?” asked Tesla.
“Well, we don’t eat or drink, so…”
“Yes, yes, yes, I see, and… can you make love to a woman?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, ah, ah, and when you finish making love, do you…?” Tesla mimed a miniature explosion—poof!—with his hands. Henry found it amusing that such an unabashed man was embarrassed by something so natural.
“Forgive me,” said Henry. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“You understand,” said Tesla, turning red, and mimed his little explosion again.
“Do we disappear?” asked Henry.
“No! Do you—” Tesla repeated the gesture, this time with an accompanying moan that sounded to Henry less like unbridled pleasure and more like the gravelly bleating of a large sheep.
“Yes,” said Henry, laughing at Tesla. “Yes, we do.”
“Ah, yes, yes, yes. But then, why—”
“Why can’t we have children?” said Henry.
It was a question all vampires pondered sooner or later. Henry himself had spent countless hours wondering if there was some deeper meaning behind the barrenness.
It had never occurred to me that there might be some medical reason behind it. I’d always assumed it was just another part of the “curse” of being a vampire. That somehow, some cosmic trade-off had been worked out at the dawn of time. “Okay, you get to live forever, but you don’t get to create life. All you can do is borrow it from others.” I’d been so close. That’s the thing that really got me. I’d been so close to being a father, before a vampire, of all things, had taken that chance away. You understand why I thought—why I had to think—there was something bigger going on.
Tesla’s experiments were interesting and often exciting, but it was Twain’s company that Henry took the most pleasure from. He soaked up every minute of it, cherishing the chance to converse with one of his favorite writers and the great wit of his day.
Imagine having a chance to talk to Shakespeare or Voltaire. Actually, in point of fact, I did meet Volta
ire in Paris at the very end of his life, but it was only for a few moments, and nothing substantive came out of it. I was fascinated by [Twain]. I was hundreds of years older than he was.12 Yet to me, he seemed like an elder. Like he had all the answers. We talked about everything. His books, the philosophical and religious implications of vampirism, life and death, especially the death of his oldest daughter,13 which he was still carrying on his old shoulders. We talked about Roanoke and Paris and the American Revolution—he had a million questions about that, especially about Ben [Franklin], some of which I could answer, some of which I couldn’t. He wanted to know all about the Civil War and my friendship with Abe. He was especially interested in all that. He’d always considered Abe something of an idiot savant, I guess. Good at stringing words together, but not much else. It was hard for him to picture that caricature—that gangly man in ill-fitting trousers and an old top hat—fighting off vampires with an ax.
The Civil War had divided Mark Twain’s household, as it had so many others. And it had divided Twain, too.
“I was still a young man during all that business,” said Twain. “Tell you the truth, Henry, I didn’t know whether I wanted to fight or not. Or for that matter, which side I wanted to fight for. We owned a slave, I’m not ashamed to admit. I’d grown up thinking it was the way of things. Nothing in the local papers or preached from the pulpit told me otherwise. I had friends, good men, all of them, who were tripping over each other to take up arms against the Yanks. Yet my own brother Orion had been a staunch Lincoln man. Knew him. Campaigned for him. I knew both sides would be in need of a good steamboat pilot, and by that time I daresay I was a pretty good one. But which way to point the bow, you understand? North or south?”
In the end, Mark Twain ended up fighting for both sides. In 1861, he joined a local Missouri militia loyal to the Confederacy, but the small force disbanded after only two weeks, when they got word that a Union detachment had been ordered to hunt them down.14 At roughly the same time, Abraham Lincoln appointed Twain’s brother Orion secretary to the Territory of Nevada. Having failed in his brief career as a rebel, Mark Twain decided to point his bow not north or south, but west—joining his brother in Nevada and working as his assistant during the war.
“I came to respect Lincoln mightily,” said Twain. “Read all about the man. He lost his mama when he was nine. I lost my daddy when I was eleven. He worked the Mississippi, as did I. We both wandered here and there, doing this and that, trying to make something out of nothing. And the man could turn a phrase, by God. He had a wit. Most people don’t remember that. He was a helluva witty fellow.”
“He had a wit,” said Henry. “But I wouldn’t describe him as ‘witty.’ To be perfectly honest, he had a rather gloomy disposition.”
“Oh, Henry, Henry—the wittiest pens are usually wielded by the gloomiest hands,” said Twain. “Surely you know that. A man can be whip smart and witty and caught up in the gale of life, chatting up roomfuls of people and making them laugh till their teeth damn near fall out, and at the same time, he can be the world’s loneliest, most miserable creature.”
Twain paused. His wise eyes suddenly fogged over, somewhere else.
“I had a brother named Henry, you know,” he said after a while.
“Had?”
“He was the youngest of the seven of us. I was the second youngest. He and I… we were about as close as brothers could get. Folks sometimes thought we were twins, on account of his being big for his age and me small. Died when he was twenty, working on the river. Boiler went.”
“A boiler explosion… Well, he never knew what hit him, I suppose.”
“I’d like to think so,” said Twain. “I’d like to think that it was just like that.” Twain snapped his fingers. “I like to think that one minute, he was asleep in his bunk, young, his lungs full’a air, dreamin’ of a pretty girl. That he woke up drinking out of a golden chalice. But that’s not the way it happened.”
Twain hesitated. He’d told the story a hundred times. He’d even written about it. But each time brought those old feelings back—the pain as fresh as it had been all those years ago.
“It was me who drug him down there in the first place,” he said. “I’d been working on the Pennsylvania15 a year or so as a cub pilot, and I was itching to move on. Me and the pilot, Bill Brown, we didn’t get on so well, to put it mildly, and I wanted out. But before I left, I got Henry a job on the boat as a mud clerk.16 Henry was a likeable fellow and got on well with the crew, with one exception.”
“Bill Brown.”
“He’d be damned if any brother of mine was going to get ahead on his boat. One day, he laid into Henry for something or other and gave him a good slap across the mouth. Now Henry, being the agreeable type, stood there and took it.”
“But you?”
“I knocked the spit out of the wretch’s mouth. Knocked him to the floor and then kept on knocking him till I had to be pulled off. The captain didn’t like Brown much, either, but all the same, he couldn’t well tolerate cub pilots beating pilots on his boat, and that was the end of me and the Pennsylvania. I took another boat upriver. A few days later, Henry was gone.
“Sunday, June eighteen, one-eight-five-seven anno Domini. Dead of night. Steaming upstream, just outside of Memphis. Four hundred and fifty souls aboard, most of ’em asleep, including Henry. But the engineer, he was awake. He and the two ladies he was keeping company with, trying to stoke a different sort of fire. I say ‘ladies,’ of course, the same way I would use ‘gentleman’ to describe the engineer. Anyway, the pressure built up in those five big cast-iron boilers, until one of ’em—only God knows which one—couldn’t hold on anymore. The first one blew and took the other four with it, and there went the whole front of the boat in a shower of burning splinters. Henry woke up in the air. Flying through the dark like a comet, his skin on fire, his lungs full of boiling steam, cooking him from the inside and out. By the time he landed in the Mississippi, he was a dead man. Not straightaway, mind you—he somehow managed to swim back in the dark to what was left of the Pennsylvania. Somehow, he found the strength to pull a few passengers out of the water, the fire beginning to spread, before he dragged himself ashore and collapsed.”
“A hero’s death.”
“Might’ve been. But he didn’t die just then,” said Twain. “If he had, I s’pose it would’ve been easier. No, he lay on that muddy shore, that burned and boiled mud clerk, wearing only a soaking nightshirt as the sun came up and beat down on him. It was hours before the Kate Frisbee came and scooped him up. Fifteen hours in all before he was in Memphis getting his wounds dressed. He held on another two weeks—waking just enough to look around, but never speaking. As far as I know the last words he ever spoke were before he went to bed on the Pennsylvania. I hurried to Memphis as soon as I got word, of course. Sat next to him day and night, praying for a miracle, in part because I wanted Henry to live, even if he would spend the rest of his life covered in burns, taking only shallow breaths. But I also wanted him to live—and it shames me to tell you this—because I knew that I would never forgive myself if he didn’t. Imagine that. Wanting someone you love to suffer, just to spare yourself a little guilt.
“There were others,” Twain continued. “Other victims of the tragedy, in beds lining both walls of the ward. Moaning, crying out in pain day and night. It was a noise I won’t forget should I live to see the end of time. It was hell, listening to them. An insufferable hell, though nothing compared to their suffering, I know. The doctor, a man by the name of Peyton—the best physician in Memphis—he looked after Henry and the others. He did his damnedest, God bless him. He’d been giving him morphine for the pain. An eighth of a grain to help him sleep through the night. Well, one night, Henry was squirming more than usual. Grunting, obviously in terrible pain. Dr. Peyton had already given him his morphine for the night. I’d been there when he gave it to him. But he was still in pain, you understand. Terrible pain, and all I could do was watch. Later that night,
one of Peyton’s medical students came by to check on Henry. Saw how much pain he was in. The student asked me if he’d been given morphine.”
“And you said he hadn’t.”
“I’d gone from praying for a miracle to praying for the end, see. Whether it was the morphine or not, I don’t know. But Henry died the next morning, and that’s that.”
“And you never forgave yourself.”
“You can call it dumb luck, or you can believe it was written in the stars. But you can’t argue with facts. And the fact is, I brought him to that boat, and I left him there. I got to grow old; he didn’t. Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t use at least a pinch of my life blaming myself, would it?”
“Perhaps,” said Henry, “the ‘miracle’ had already occurred.”
“How so?”
“Well… if your brother had never come aboard, you never would’ve had the fight with Bill Brown and had to leave. And if you hadn’t left, chances are you would’ve been killed when those boilers went. And if that had happened, well—not only would I have been denied the pleasure of your company, but countless others would have been denied the pleasure of your words. If your brother hadn’t been on that boat, the world would have been the poorer for it.”
“That’s a nice thought, Henry. I thank you for it. But an old man deserves his sorrows, and I won’t be denied mine.”
An old man. The words stirred something in Henry. Visions of an enduring friendship with an endlessly fascinating man. The thought of a hundred more Huckleberry Finns, each one more entertaining and enlightening than the last. Yes, the Union strictly forbade the making of vampires. But Twain was worth the risk, just as Abe had been. When Henry broached the subject, however, Twain laughed him off.