Menu card from a Five of Hearts dinner party. The Hays preserved the card, but nothing is known of the occasion.JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Knowing nothing of the Adamses’ reservations, James wrote Clover—his “Voltaire in petticoats”—that he was exhilarated by the prospect of seeing her and Henry “in the Washington to which you so fondly cling.” Though he did not plan to come until after Christmas, he added, “I cannot longer delay to let you know of my arrival—conscious as I am that it is fraught with happy consequences for you.”
Back on Lafayette Square, Adams learned that his friend and former student, Henry Cabot Lodge, had just lost a close race for a seat in the Massachusetts senate. Sending his consolations, Adams said he had “never known a young man go into politics who was not the worse for it. They all try to be honest, and then are tripped up by the dishonest; or they try to be dishonest (i.e. practical politicians) and degrade their own natures.” The Adams family’s political experiences and his own years in Washington had convinced him that “no man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there. Public service should be a corvée; a disagreeable necessity. The satisfaction should consist in getting out of it.” It was an interesting letter in view of Henry’s summer at Beverly Farms. The distance Henry claimed between himself and politics strongly resembled the distance he tried to achieve from fatherhood: what he privately concluded he could not have, he publicly announced he did not want.
Disagreeable or not, politics enthralled the Adamses in the waning months of 1881. Beyond the blazing red and yellow maples of Lafayette Park, they could see the White House, where garlands of black crepe decked every window, column, and cornice. When the trial of President Garfield’s assassin began on November 14, Henry and Clover were as eager to attend as the rest of Washington.
Charles Julius Guiteau was a sad case—forty years old, a failure at journalism, law, and public speaking. His discontent with Garfield had begun when James G. Blaine, the secretary of state, refused to consider Guiteau for the job of American consul in Paris, a post for which he possessed not a single qualification. Guiteau protested in a letter to Garfield, who did not respond. Brooding on a bench in Lafayette Park, Guiteau concluded that the president must be murdered and that God had chosen him for the task. The trial would center on the question of Guiteau’s sanity. If found insane, as his attorneys hoped, he would be locked away in an asylum. If the prosecution proved that Guiteau was sane, he would be held accountable and go to the gallows.
At the courthouse the assassin signed autographs, cursed, and lost his temper so often that the judge threatened to have him gagged. Four days into the proceedings, while traveling between the courthouse and the jail, Guiteau was slightly wounded in an attempt on his life. Clover, worried about the “sporadic gunpowder lying around,” said she and Henry had given up their thoughts of attending the trial. But when they received an invitation from Dr. Charles Folsom, a physician of their acquaintance who served on the National Board of Health, they could not resist.
On December 7 a marshal ushered Clover to a seat near an open window, and Henry sat among the expert witnesses. “It was intensely interesting,” Clover reported to her father. “The assassin was in front of me, so I could only get his profile—a large strong nose, a high straight forehead, and a good height from top of ear to top of head. He bullied and badgered everyone; banged his fist on the table; broke off in reading a paper, saying, ‘Arthur’s message has the true ring. I think he’ll give us the best administration we ever had.’” Several “nice, intelligent men” from Guiteau’s home state of Illinois testified that “no suspicion of insanity had heretofore rested on the family,” which in Clover’s view smashed the defense argument of hereditary insanity.
When the court was adjourned for the day, the Adamses watched as guards led Guiteau past the jeering crowds on the sidewalk to the van that would return him to jail. Dr. Folsom, on his way to the jail to examine Guiteau, invited the Adamses to accompany him. Henry immediately agreed. After some hesitation, Clover decided to join them. “As we entered the jail, we came into a large hall,” she told her father. “In one corner I noticed a group of four or five men, one sitting in a rocking chair, whose face seemed to me of the Guiteau type, though I had not got a front view in Court. As we entered he got up and came forward very courteously, saying, ‘How do you do, Doctor?’ and shook his hand. Dr. Folsom introduced Henry and me, and supposing it must be the jailer I met his offered hand. I felt rather overwhelmed as it broke upon me who the man was.”
Clearly upset, Clover called Guiteau a “beast” three times in her letter and repeated that her mistake had resulted from not seeing Guiteau clearly in court. She implored Dr. Hooper to tell the story carefully: “I don’t wish to have it repeated that I shook hands with the accursed beast, without the context being given. Someone would write on that they ‘were sorry to hear that I had asked Guiteau to tea.’”
The Adamses’ view of the White House in 1881, after the assassination of President Garfield.R. B. HAYES PRESIDENTIAL CENTER
Like most Americans, Clover wanted Guiteau pronounced sane so that he would be punished for his crime (which happened, despite his bizarre behavior during the trial). But she also may have resisted the idea of hereditary insanity for deeper reasons since it posed disturbing questions about her family history of suicide and melancholy.
The autumn of 1881 also marked the beginning of Henry and Clover’s friendship with Elizabeth Sherman Cameron. Tall, beautiful, and barely twenty-four, Lizzie was unhappily married to Senator J. Donald Cameron of Pennsylvania, a machine politician of the stripe Adams had in mind when he advised Lodge to swear off politics. Don’s father, Simon Cameron, had been removed from his post as President Lincoln’s secretary of war for corruption in awarding military contracts. Simon later won election to the U.S. Senate and in 1876 persuaded his friend President Grant to appoint Don as secretary of war to fill an unexpected vacancy. That fall, during the heated dispute over the results of the Hayes-Tilden election, Don put federal troops at the disposal of Republican Party functionaries in two of the four states where electoral votes were being challenged. When the victorious Hayes declined to reward Don’s initiative with a cabinet appointment, Simon Cameron came up with a consolation prize—his own Senate seat. Simon resigned, the Pennsylvania legislature elected Don to serve out his term, and Don took his father’s place in the Senate amid sneers about the power of “the Cameron Transfer Company.”
“Beauty and the Beast,” a gossip columnist called Lizzie and Don. She was five-feet-eight, a slim brunette with compelling gray eyes. He stood six-two, had sandy-red hair, and under his large Roman nose wore a drooping mustache that made him look permanently out of sorts. She was twenty when they married in 1878. He was forty-four, a widower with five children, one of whom was a contemporary of Lizzie’s.
A member of the formidable Sherman clan of Ohio, Lizzie was the niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman and his brother John, who served in both houses of Congress and two Cabinet posts. Lizzie had wanted to marry another man, but the Shermans, suspecting him of a fondness for alcohol, ended the relationship. Bowing to the pressure of family members eager for a match with a powerful senator, she finally agreed to marry Don Cameron. On her wedding day she begged that the ceremony be called off, but the Shermans held firm: Lizzie had given her word. Lizzie and Don passed their wedding night aboard a luxury railroad car; years later she confided to a friend that his clumsy insistence had left her feeling like the victim of a rape. A second cruel surprise soon made itself felt: the senator downed a fifth of bourbon a day.
It would have been unthinkable for Lizzie to confide her unhappiness to her new friends on Lafayette Square, but the Adamses could not have failed to notice her eagerness for their companionship. An intelligent listener, full of questions and appreciative laughter, she quickly won their affection. In the earliest weeks of their friendship, Senator Cameron was a
way, politicking in Pennsylvania, but as soon as he returned the Adamses asked him to tea. Apart from the senator’s enthusiasm for one of their terriers, Clover saw “nothing to please one” and feared that Lizzie had “drawn a blank in Don … for all his money and fine house.” Henry felt likewise but decided to tolerate the senator for Lizzie’s sake. “I adore her and respect the way she has kept out of scandal and mud, and done her duty by the lump of clay she promised to love and respect,” he told Hay.
Waiting out the fall of 1881 much as they had waited out the spring, Hay and King were now as eager to leave New York as they had been to exit Washington. Garfield’s assassination had forced Hay to spend weeks away from the quiet pleasures of Euclid Avenue, and his departure had been further delayed by news from Whitelaw Reid. Mrs. Reid, newly pregnant, had been advised to postpone her voyage home from Europe.
King, still fatigued by his Western travels and discouraged by mining setbacks, sometimes talked vaguely of marriage and sometimes dreamed of an escape to Europe. Approaching forty, he was still a favorite at the Century Club, but an evening there inevitably wound to a lonely end. When his contemporaries went home to their wives, King skulked downtown alone to his hotel room at the Brevoort House.
Believing that the time had come for King to marry, Hay took him for tea with a cousin who lived in New York. King’s behavior was “angelic,” and the cousin “had long loved him in secret,” Hay reported to Clover. When nothing came of the meeting, Hay supposed that the problem was distraction; King always seemed to have more to do than “a juggler with four knives in the air.”
King seemed to want a wife like Clara Hay, whose “rooted repose” and “tranquility” made even Nirvana “seem fidgety,” he said. “Only once in a million times does Providence pour out the full cup for man to drink,” he told Hay. “For you it has.”
Worried about King’s loneliness and eager to preserve the alliance of the Five of Hearts, Hay went to a New York printer and ordered stationery embossed with a small red replica of the five of hearts found in a deck of playing cards. “I had a few sheets of paper made for the official correspondence of the Club and send a sample by mail to you today for your approval,” he wrote to Clover in November 1881. About to meet King for lunch, Hay promised that the New York and Cleveland branches of the Five of Hearts would “remember the Residency-Branch with affection tempered with due respect.” King looked at the stationery and predicted that when the Adamses’ “sedate servant-man” saw the envelope, he would suspect that Henry’s great literary labor was a book on poker.
A few weeks later, in a howling snowstorm, Hay boarded the train for Ohio. A bad cold had forced King to cancel their farewell lunch at the Union League Club, but Hay had gone to see him at the Brevoort. “I stayed till the last minute,” he told Clover, “and then drove away with a heavy heart.”
8
“My Facts Are Facts, Too”
For the Adamses, 1882 opened with a visit from Henry James. He had come home mainly to see his parents in Massachusetts, but he also meant to explore New York City, where he had been born, and Washington, which he had never seen. The Adamses booked him a sunny suite of rooms near Lafayette Square, and he was soon a fixture of the “very pretty little life” he found at 1607 H Street. He marveled at Clover’s “perennial afternoon tea” and observed that in their native air, the Adamses “bloom, expand, emit a genial fragrance.” During their last trip abroad, they had tired him with their long list of grievances against the Old World, but James needed only a few days in Washington to understand why they preferred it to London. As he put it to Sir John Clark, a Scottish friend of the Adamses, “they are, vulgarly speaking ‘someone’ here, and … are nothing in your complicated Kingdom.”
At first James found Washington a refreshing change from New York, where life moved at a frenetic pace and money was the measure of everyone and everything. “I believe that Washington is the place in the world where money—or the absence of it, matters least,” he told Sir John. Essentially “social and conversational,” the capital was “the only place in America where there is no business, where an air of leisure hangs over the enormous streets.” Before long, however, James felt “woefully and wickedly bored” and “horribly homesick for the ancient world.” The layout of Washington was “bristling and geometrical,” the Capitol “rather wanting in tone.” In the “hideous” interior of Congress, he winced at paintings and sculptures of statesmen that created an effect “too serious for a joke and too comic fora Valhalla.”
“That young emigrant has much to learn here,” Clover fumed. “He may in time get into the ‘swim’ here, but I doubt it.” She guessed that the novelist preferred “a quiet corner with a pen where he can create men and women who say neat things and have refined tastes” to the “real, live, vulgar” America.
The truth was that James showed a larger appetite for “real, live, vulgar” Americans than the Adamses did. They groaned when he accepted invitations from people they shunned, though he noticed that they pumped him dry when he returned. After one dinner, he said, “they mobbed me for revelations; and after I had dined with Blaine, to meet the president, they fairly hung on my lips.” Unhappily for Henry and Clover, the bland Chester Arthur failed to excite the novelist’s descriptive powers. In his “well-made coat and well-cut whiskers,” he merely struck James as an agreeable man with a “desire to please.”
James also called on Oscar Wilde, who was touring America and doing his best to live up to Gilbert and Sullivan’s parody of his outlandishness. When James mentioned his homesickness for London, Wilde replied, “Really? You care for places? The world is my home.” James reported to the Adamses that Wilde was a “fatuous fool” and a “tenth-rate cad,” judgments Clover repeated with glee. Clover had resolved not to entertain Wilde during his Washington sojourn, insisting that she “must keep out thieves and noodles,” but she managed to catch a titillating glimpse of him one day on Pennsylvania Avenue. She was out walking, she told her father, and there was Wilde, tall and slender, “cafe au lait in the face, long hair, dressed in stockings and tights, a brown plush tunic, a big yellow sunflower pinned above his heart, a queer cap on his head: turning to look after him,—as you taught me was very vulgar,—I saw a large blue card on his back, Oscar on a wild toot.’”
In the spring, when James boarded a liner for England, his parting thoughts were of Clover. He had chosen her to receive his last American letter, he explained, because he considered her the incarnation of her native land. In view of his love for England, Clover considered the gesture “a most equivocal compliment” and was left to wonder, “Am I then vulgar, dreary, and impossible to live with?”
And that, in the mind of Clover Adams, was the end of Henry James. When the death of his father in December 1882 brought him back to the United States, he revisited Washington and once more made his way up H Street to the Adamses’ little round dinner table. But Clover no longer cared to repeat his gossip or even to disapprove of his disapproval of America.
The loss was Clover’s. In her impatience with James’s Continental tastes and ruminative style, she deprived herself of his vast sympathy for natures much like her own. The heroines of his novels are intelligent, spirited women striving for self-expression, yearning for some acknowledgment of their value as individuals.
As for what the self was, and what expressed it, James was undecided. In The Portrait of a Lady, the worldly Madame Merle maintained that the self had no discernible boundaries. “It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again,” she explained to young Isabel Archer, a visitor from America. “I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s clothes, the book one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.”
Miss Archer was appalled. “Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; on the contrary, it’s a
limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one,” she insisted. “Certainly, the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should!”
James’s failure to resolve the debate between Madame Merle and Isabel Archer mattered less than his identification of self-expression as a fundamental human impulse, one that compelled women as much as men. He would have been most touched by Clover’s instruction to her father in a letter written at the end of 1881. “Save this,” she said, achingly aware that her accounts of politics and society were superior to the versions that appeared in the newspapers. “My facts are facts, too, which all the special correspondents’ are not.”
Barred from the world of work, Clover, like most of her female contemporaries, sought self-expression in private realms. She wrote letters, served as gatekeeper of an exclusive drawing room, and collected art with a gusto not apparent in any other part of her life. In 1882, when an English friend presented the Adamses with a small painting by Richard Bonington, Clover was ecstatic. “That makes our fourth, and in Europe Bonington is ‘heads even’ with Turner in reputation,” she boasted. “We shall at this rate leave fine pickings for our heirs.” She could not resist adding that a neighbor had paid her taste the ultimate compliment: “My dear, I dislike auctions very much, but I mean to go to yours after you die.”
Her prize acquisition, made a few weeks after the Bonington was shipped from England, began with a mysterious unsigned note directing her to a house where she would find an armoire, a secretary, and two portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds for sale at “reasonable” prices. Curious but wary, Clover asked Henry and a friend to go with her. When they reached the house, a dilapidated stucco affair on F Street, the servants showed the merchandise but proved unable to answer questions about it. Mystified and slightly irritated, Clover decided to leave. But while she had been interrogating the help, Henry had turned up a clue: a book inscribed with the signature of Theodore Dwight, librarian of the State Department. Henry had met Dwight in the course of researching his history.
The Five of Hearts Page 10
