Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  Alice James might have been a new woman, but she was independent only in her spirited, sharp mind. Her neuroses did her in, early, her father hadn’t educated her like her older brothers, he wasn’t like Clover’s. Alice believed she was dying most of her life, and then of course she died. (See her diary, introduction by Jean Strouse.)

  James identified, ambivalently, with these females, and made them his characters, protagonists, tainted and maimed, idealistic and pure of heart, representing aspects of himself, and his conflicts. They struggled, he did. (See Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master.) Many didn’t marry, and he played with a few of their hearts, dallying, even disastrously, with some, Constance Fenimore Woolson, especially. In Florence, she and Henry James had lived together, secretly, in the same house, sharing it but not a bed. James couldn’t be a husband, like the men who falsely wooed his female characters. He left Venice, and some time later Woolson took her life. He visited her grave, later.

  The number of suicides seems disproportionate in their subculture, but I don’t know. These sad nineteenth-century characters lived before the drugs that make life bearable for present-day depressives, manic depressives, etc.

  I could have done myself in, I’m a Hooper, with some sad genes, along with intelligence, creativity—I mean, for depression and suicide. Suicide is a tragic inheritance. It may be genetic and, also, psychologically inherited. There’s research from the Emory University School of Medicine that shows it’s possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA. The scientists discovered that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic experiences to the next generation, which somehow transfer from the brain into the genome.

  Oh, man, bad genetic inheritance never came up at the Hooper-Stark dinner table. No way. Mother’s ancestors permeated, but their sicknesses were ignored in favor of their promise for us, the inheritors. Selective inheritance, totally.

  Mother looks to her dead relatives for juice, what she calls inspiration. Different from what Clarissa does, but still there’s thriving from the permanence of the dead.

  A college prof told me: came a time he couldn’t commit suicide, because he’d brought a child into the world. He felt an ethical responsibility not to burden his child with hopelessness.

  Freedom, limited the way it is, allows some choices: to have or not to have; to have and to hold, then not to hold; to gorge or purge. Ha.

  clover’s last tragedy: her own

  Her touchstone, best friend, closest, oldest friend, nominal mother—her father died in April 1885.

  Her sister and brother didn’t tell her, though, until it was too late for her to attend his funeral. Even if it was because her sibs were concerned about her mental health, this must have hurt Clover. Was it malice, an act of revenge against the sib the father might have loved most? Oh, man, that must have killed her.

  After his death, Clover’s depression turned acute and dangerous, and Henry and their friends were worried. Adams did what he thought best. He took Clover away from home, out of her element, to the Allegheny Mountains. She was exhausted: she’d been her father’s devoted caretaker in his last months. Adams believed a change of scene would restore her. He also wanted to take her to Yellowstone, but the trip had to be canceled, he wrote their heart-friend, John Hay, because “we broke down.” He and Clover returned home at the end of July 1885. They went to their Beverly Farms home, then to their D.C. house at 1607 H Street, where Clover became even more withdrawn, staying in her bedroom, not seeing anyone, and her friends worried even more.

  One morning, Henry left the house for a dentist appointment, and, after he was gone, Clover swallowed photographic chemicals, an excruciating way to die. He returned, and found her. She probably left a note for Henry, she wrote letters, right, but it was never found, if there was one. Adams destroyed all of Clover’s letters to him. A fastidious historian destroying primary material inspires astonishment and horror in me; it’s even crazier, for an eminent historian, that, in The Education of Henry Adams, he never mentions Clover or their marriage, their years together erased.

  If Adams had kept a photo album, he would be one of those guys who’d have torn out her picture. Worse, the ones she took, the negatives, etc., kept in their home, he destroyed.

  Scholars believed that Henry Adams never wrote or spoke Clover’s name again, the accepted view for a long time until letters turned up, which he had written to Clover’s friend Anne Palmer Fell.

  “During the last 18 months, I have not had the good luck to attend my own funeral, but with that exception I have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.” The letter is dated December 5, 1886; she’d died on December 6, 1885, a year before.

  For her memorial, Adams commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to make a sculpture. Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) was considered the greatest American sculptor, whose work includes the Sherman Monument in Manhattan and the Shaw Memorial in Boston, honoring Clover’s cousin, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, and the men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment.

  Henry chose Saint-Gaudens, only the best for Clover. The bronze sculpture’s full title is The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. The memorial and grounds, in Rock Creek Cemetery, were designed by Stanford White, also the best, which Clover would have expected, no, demanded—the celebrated couple were known for their exquisite taste. And independent thinking. When she and Henry were asked what they thought of George Eliot’s marriage to a younger man, Clover famously said: “We declare a woman of genius is above criticism.”

  Saint-Gaudens’s statue, usually called “Grief,” allegorized Clover Adams as a serene, hooded figure, in black cast bronze, her head draped in stone folds curving around her face and torso. The figure appears to be hiding or withdrawn, as Clover once had hidden in the few photos that survive. White’s granite block stands behind the seated sculpture. Clover/she appears to be resting against it, the body’s pose might also suggest resignation, to God, I suppose. She is leaning (nb: anaclisis), and maybe she is being cradled, by the mother who died when the girl was five.

  Tragedy’s tragic muse.

  Adams kept up his long-running romantic friendship with Elizabeth (Lizzie) Cameron, the wife of Senator Don Cameron, an alcoholic. If their intimacy had affected Clover’s state of mind, no one knows. Clover was friends with Lizzie, also. It wasn’t a usual ménage à trois; if it was, it was sublimated. Henry wrote Lizzie more than affectionate letters. No secret to Clover, and Clover also wrote them to Lizzie. Whether Clover believed that Henry was in love with Lizzie Cameron, again, no record, just supposition.

  An ethnographer isn’t equipped to truck in unsupported supposition, unless it’s based in culture, society, that is, somehow routinized behavior, an expected wheel turning a social system to keep it going, stable. Maybe a romantic friendship did that then, kept society singing. I don’t and didn’t feel equipped to say it was merely a social pattern, in their case. Maybe Clover didn’t see it, that theirs was romantic love, or Henry’s was. Or maybe what she saw was within the bounds of decorum.

  I didn’t “see” Maggie and that fucking creep, had no clue, and it happened before my eyes, seeing can’t be trusted, because eyes are the windows to the mind, right, and the mind sees what it wants to see, and I did (which affects how we see photos and how we make images). Adams didn’t fuck Lizzie. Later, she had a child with her husband, and Henry adored the baby.

  now is, isn’t

  I’m in D.C., and get down into this stuff, and stall. I didn’t know what I was looking for, really, but told myself, It’s the time to visit Clover Adams’s memorial, everyone else in my family has already, even Little Sister, or maybe especially Little Sister.

  Little Sister relates to what she calls her sentries, or guardians. For a long time she’s been aligned with Mother and Clarissa on their psychic trail.

  Do it, man, I exhorted myself, it’s now or never, but what an idiotic way to think, right.

&n
bsp; Only a representation, Clover’s statue, and it didn’t look like her, though no one knows now what she looked like. It mesmerized me, I was mesmerized, and I can’t say what happened as I stood there. Adams’s effort to immortalize her spirit through Saint-Gaudens’s statue and Stanford White’s setting, this monument, maybe it was his grief touching me—I communicated with it, his remorse, and such weird sensations flitted in me, affected me. Haunted would be the conventional term.

  I stayed way longer at Clover’s memorial than planned. During that time, I still planned—or got lost. My reluctance to leave, both mental and physical, surprised me. My mind said, do this, my body, do that, and I couldn’t move: in stall mode.

  This might be sacred ground, I speculated, I might have been touched by the sacred, which is what church-going is meant to evoke, but never did for me. And suddenly, crazy as this sounds, I became intent upon a mission. I mean, as if there were a mission to accomplish, maybe a mission impossible—kidding—but a kind of return of the repressed I had to come to terms with, my past, my family’s. I felt freakily alive, energized, even full or fulfilled. It was magnificent being there, on the top of my very own mountain, with a mission. This feeling-experience was novel, not even what I had felt with Maggie. But Maggie must have been with me. She was always with me, because she was not with me. I thought a thought that couldn’t be thought: maybe it’s not Maggie, it’s Clover, she’s with me. I wanted it not to be Maggie, right, and took it as logical, at least reasonable, because since the divorce, I hungered for a connection to life, and Clover could be the way, a way, to love. Simple.

  Lots of religions encourage ancestor worship: you keep faith with ancestors, and believe their spirits want to comfort and help you, and that they want you to come to them. They will stay with you, be IN you.

  In Vietnam, people leave food at the graves of their ancestors.

  It wasn’t crazy, it was cultural. Aunt Clarissa’s speeches about Clover, well, finally I heard them, paid attention. Let them in. Teachers say students don’t use it until they need it, and now Clarissa’s encomiums and tributes to our long-dead relative sounded like revelation.

  I COULDN’T TEAR MYSELF AWAY. I couldn’t stop looking, the way I couldn’t stop anything. I couldn’t explain it or explain it away.

  I didn’t tell a living soul.

  Can belief be rational? Is having faith in something a belief? Faith in a person, or a feeling.

  Science was started by quacks and geniuses.

  relative absorption

  My visit to Rock Creek turned out to be the second exception I took to my basic rule, Be a doubter, a skeptic, especially of the irrational, or emotions (threw that rule away with Maggie). But I couldn’t distrust what I felt. I/it was shifting, unconsciously. I’ve come to realize that.

  Entrancement—at that moment it was logical mind-balm—I was entranced and also it was natural, I told myself: Clover was a blood relative. Right. See, “natural” is misleading, but I used it. There was nothing wrong if I found nurture in the faith of Mother and Clarissa, their psychic connection, because at last it connected me also. This empathy came to help me, to guide me.

  Clover and I had both been hung out to dry by our spouses.

  My family didn’t own any of her original prints—there aren’t many, and what there is lives in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  I went there, later.

  After filling out forms, I was allowed to ask for and handle precious materials. I wrote on the call cards what photographs and letters I wanted to see—everything. The librarian delivered these to me where I sat, a wooden desk.

  Clover’s hands touched these, there was a direct contact now, her DNA had to be on these, and even though my hands were gloved, it’s what I felt about the prints. She’d labored to make them, with her hands, they were close to her. Relics. Being related to Clover Adams helped me, I thought, maybe she could help me, I believed that. Rational, irrational, it didn’t matter. The most important things were: Love, for instance. And, hope. And here were both.

  I kept returning to her honeymoon, and her picture of Henry in their stateroom. That deluxe, romantic honeymoon, and Clover, like Cleopatra, and Henry, no Marc Antony, I can’t see that. No, they’re floating down the Nile on a boat called Isis. They’re in their stateroom. Or they’re on deck. And suddenly Clover’s world is dark.

  I’m wondering, speculating, about her breakdown.

  Maybe not coincidentally: Clover’s last letter to her father before the Nile trip was dated November 17, and the next, when she landed, December 5, 1872. This also means, during more than two weeks, she didn’t hear from him, her steady heartbeat, life support.

  There is an oblique mention, in a letter to him, of her suffering on the Nile, and to a friend, but no cause is specified. Her father had to have been aware of her depressions. They might have started after her mother’s death.

  Depression: there is much speculation about Clover’s breakdown; I suppose it’s historian decorum that says, No documents, we can’t claim it, not even speculate.

  I will: SEX. I’m just a low-down ethnographer.

  My speculations: Henry and Clover didn’t have children. But Henry appeared to love children, at least he doted on his nieces. Henry had probably wanted children, with Clover, and she couldn’t have them. Or, he didn’t have the sperm count. Anyway, no children.

  In an 1883 letter to Henry’s romantic friend Lizzie Cameron, Clover implored: “go to the Louvre … find a portrait of a lady in black, young child standing by her, by Van Dyck and tell her how she haunts me.” It must have been Portrait of a Lady with Her Daughter (1635–40).

  Maybe she’d wanted a daughter.

  She also longed for a mother, her mother.

  Seeing that painting, Clover remembered her mother, how she had once stood by her skirts, how she had adored her, and the painting of a woman and child weighed heavy, never left her, that “ideal” image, which could never be hers.

  OK, all circumstantial evidence, but from it, here goes: on their honeymoon, their attempts at sex, a disaster. I picture fear on Clover’s face, seeing a penis for the first time, and then it became erect. Henry tried to enter her, and couldn’t; or, his erection failed, or she fainted, or intercourse was painful, too much for her. No blood, she rode horseback. She loved riding.

  Their attempts at lovemaking/sex might compare with Virginia and Leonard’s thwarted attempts.

  Whatever happened in that stateroom, or in a hotel before they sailed, and in a beautiful setting, sex was not beautiful. Not for her, not for him, not with her, or not ever. Clover’s depression had been coming on since their honeymoon began, then finally a break from reality, and a blackout in letters to her father and from him. Not a word. So, the boat ride along the Nile was nothing like Cleopatra’s, nothing like Shakespeare’s vision of these lovers clinging to each other with pyramidal lust.

  me: Clover and Henry’s union was a white marriage.

  analyst: Maybe.

  me: Mariage blanc. I like French better, blanc. I could find out.

  analyst: Why is it important to you?

  I kept seeing Maggie and me, after our no-frills ceremony, basically an event that said this was a wedding that wasn’t, and no dedicated honeymoon, just a fuck-fest, we didn’t pay attention to the niceties. Nothing issued from us, either, except misery.

  Maybe there are a few non-wedding wedding pictures extant, if she had any and didn’t destroy them. Anyway, I’d been dead set against them, told her how no one ever looks at them later, they go into a drawer, become kept images, blah blah blah. I interrogate myself: Could Maggie have been the person I was in love with? I must have made her up, this soul partner, what a concept. Maggie wasn’t Maggie. She wasn’t real then, she didn’t exist, she’s not real now.

  It occurred to me: I’d never considered Clover to have ever been an actual person. Her life and fate, sure, the family god, I knew about her, but looking at the statue, I felt this unbidden sa
dness and a flow of negative energy. Totally weird. Something shot into me, like I was mainlining electricity, maybe Henry’s pain, I thought, first, I’d been using his name in vain. Ha. The longer I stood there, the pain softened or lightened, hard to describe that, but it was more like a melancholy tune playing inside me than a drum machine drilling into me. It wasn’t Henry, so it must be her, her sadness, and she had let me feel it. Or, I just did. I’m not saying the dead have volition. But then do any of us? I felt as if the sadness, which felt wistful, might also be mine, and maybe had joined with hers, but it was mine, because I was feeling it. You feel me?

  I kept on.

  remote control, remote chances

  Is remote control inherently alienating?

  One afternoon, after hogging a tennis court in Central Park by taking on all comers, I checked my voicemail and heard this:

  “My name’s Valerie I was a patient there and last time I was discharged was maybe uhm uhm two years ago, and very important that Dr. Wilson the head psychiatrist gets in touch with me, I was supposed to get surgery, I was discharged to get surgery, on my knee, uhm, Dr. Diane, uhm, New York NYU for drug blood diseases, they discharged me, but I couldn’t get it because I had nowhere to live after I had the surgery. I know Maureen. If possible could you get the head psychiatrist, I think it’s Dr. Mars, I need the medical records of that if possible. It is very important …

  ’cause I’m seeing a judge that I can’t do any more rehab, and they’re denying me, I had enough rehab, and I need my surgery, and I’m in a wheelchair. I can’t walk no more. Get back to me, please, please help me out. This is very important. Bye-bye.”

  I thought about calling her back. I could tell her, Look, you have the wrong number. I wasn’t the right number. Or, I could mess with her mind, be a sadist or a Svengali; but her mind was a mess. Or, I might be the right number, in a way. I could talk to her, maybe save her from her terrible addiction, be a hero. I tried that on. I try on many coats and hats, seeing what fits. I can picture Valerie, how she looks, young, scrawny, beaten up, scared. I deliberated: Am I her keeper, or my own keeper? Is this a New Man or Old Man question?