The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  The same could not be said of the Anglo-Mexican Mining Company. To sell the Yedras, King and his American partners had accepted $400,000 in stock and the promise of $1 million in cash. But when a plunge in London stock prices left the new investors short of money, they asked to stretch out their payments. King granted the extension without consulting his Boston partners, once more taxing their patience. He considered making a trip to Mexico in the spring of 1884 (probably as a show of penance since his presence at the Yedras would not alter the realities of London), but he soon changed his mind. John Hay was coming to England, once more in need of tranquility for his jangled nerves.

  This time Hay’s symptoms could be traced to the raging national debate over The Bread-Winners. Recently published in book form, the novel was attributed to both Hay and Adams, and many readers concluded that the author of The Bread-Winners had also written Democracy. (“What an unspeakable idiot the Public is!” cried Clover Adams, who thought Democracy much superior.) No one relished the comparisons and wrong guesses more than Henry Adams, who, like Clover, was party to the secret. “I am glad to hear that you are publishing another novel,” Adams had written Hay while The Bread-Winners ran in the Century. “I was so frank in telling you my unfavorable opinion of ‘Democracy,’ that I will try to read the new one in hopes that I may be able to speak well of it.” With mock concern for Hay’s anonymity, Adams asked, “Is it not a little risky … to lay the scene at Cleveland after laying the scene of ‘Democracy’ at Washington? Two such straws must be fatal.”

  Hay had played merrily along, blaming The Bread-Winners on Adams. “To think that while Mrs. Hay and I, and Mrs. Don Cameron, sat guilelessly by your fireside and bragged about Cleveland, you were taking down our artless prattle for the use of future satire—it is too much, 75 percent too much.”

  Outside the Five of Hearts The Bread-Winners was no joke. Dozens of Century readers protested Hay’s treatment of unions and laborers, and numerous journals of opinion, including the Atlantic, excoriated the author for libeling the workingman while making no mention of abuses by monopolies and corporations. Hay stood the criticism for as long as he could, then climbed into the Century pulpit for a counterattack. “For several months I have listened in silence to a chorus of vituperation which seems to me unjust and unfounded,” his anonymous letter began. In the past he had dismissed his work for his father-in-law as a sinecure, but now he told the world that he had always earned his own living. Skirting the question of whether he had treated labor unions too harshly, Hay claimed that he had not dealt with unions at all: the Bread-Winners was “a little society,” run by a criminal who expropriated the language and methods of union organizers in order to swindle poor workmen. Defending his anonymity, Hay denied any cowardice or nefarious purpose. “I am engaged in a business in which my standing would be seriously compromised if it were known that I had written a novel,” he said. “I could never recover from the injury it would occasion me if known among my own colleagues.” Hay did not specify the injury he feared, and it is hard to imagine that The Bread-Winners would have ruffled the placid gentlemen of Euclid Avenue. Their problem, as he himself had observed, was apathy. With perfect ease Hay could urge W. D. Howells to “come to Cleveland and get in a buggy with me and see a novel in our neighborhood.” But he did not want curious strangers asking for the same tour.

  In a “noice clean floy” rented from a Cockney liveryman, Hay and King trotted through green woods, listened to the song of the cuckoo, and inspected ancient churches. Mark Twain had found the English countryside “too absolutely beautiful to be left out of doors,” and after one excursion with King, Hay shared Twain’s reverence. “It was like a fairy scene,” he wrote to Clara. Taken with the idea of spending summers in Britain, Hay looked into the purchase of a country estate. Between Amasa Stone’s bequests and the riches Hay had accumulated under Stone’s tutelage, he and Clara were now what Clover called “tri-millionaires”—worth some $3 million. But Scottish castles and English manors, Hay decided, were still beyond his means.

  Tenderly devoting himself to Hay’s care, King rowed him on the Thames, took him to dine with Bret Harte and Henry James, and indulged him in a visit with Constance Fenimore Woolson, who had moved onto James’s turf in 1883. Although James often called on her, Fenimore had begun to sense that his ardor did not match hers. “I am terribly alone in my literary work,” she confessed to Hay. “There seems to be no one for me to turn to.” She wanted to believe the rumors that Hay had written The Bread-Winners because she longed to have him as a colleague. As with Democracy, she thought she detected signs of a collaboration with King.

  Over tea, Fenimore pleased Hay by telling him that she found King “superlative,” but this time Hay refrained from matchmaking. Whether or not he guessed her attachment to James, he could see that King was in no mood for talk of marriage. He was, in fact, “cross as a bear,” Hay told Clara. Financially pressed, the geologist had traded his luxurious suite at the Bristol Hotel for modest lodgings in Bolton Street, two doors from James. In Washington the Adamses and Hays had recently purchased a piece of property on Lafayette Square and had commissioned H. H. Richardson to build a pair of houses. Hay hoped to send word from London that the fifth Heart would join their colony. Still waiting for the Anglo-Mexican investors to honor their promises, King was forced to decline.

  King stayed in England until September 1884, then left as suddenly as he had sailed from America two years before. “Yes I am really back in America!” he wrote Hay on his arrival in New York. But as he sat in the oak-paneled hush of the Union League Club and asked himself how he felt about being home, he said, “there is but one answer which comes up from the very depths of my being. Save for my family and you and yours I am hopelessly ‘out of it’ and ‘out of it’ forever. I would not have believed so great a change possible. Everything but food seems to be so inferior, so crude, so banale. This first sensation is one long black regret that I must stay here and make the best of it.” To King’s distress, his half brother, George Howland, had been pronounced “too delicate” for college, and his mother was “more nervous and broken” than ever. “Were it not for the hope and confidence that I shall see you from time to time I would take an October steamer back again.”

  At every turn, King was overwhelmed by feelings of alienation and disconnection. Leaving his card with old acquaintances produced an avalanche of invitations, but dinners and parties only served to remind him of how far he had drifted from his old life. His precious hoard of paintings and bric-a-brac, put into storage because of his small quarters at the Brevoort House, underscored the rootlessness of his existence. While he envied the other Hearts their plan to live side by side on Lafayette Square, he knew that he could not join them even if he had the money. “If I were married, how I should delight in buying the house you are now living in and remaking it a little to suit my needs,” he told Adams. “But I am human and could not bear the exasperating spectacle of your and Hay’s domestic happiness.” On a trip to Boston a few weeks later, King stayed away from the Adamses at Beverly Farms. After explaining that he had not had time for a visit, he made the curious observation that he had enjoyed Henry’s friends Sir John Clark and Sir Robert Cunliffe more for their distance than their intimacy. They had, he said, “what I never saw in America, the easy habit of moderate friendship. Here one either hates or adores one’s acquaintances. The sort of cordial mellow indifference of which the best English are capable was most charming and new to me.” King cherished the Hearts, but he had come to fear their closeness even more than he needed it.

  10

  In Mid-Ocean

  For all that Clarence King left out of his letters, he confided more in his fellow Hearts than they did in him. In 1884 at least, the “spectacle of domestic happiness” that he envied his friends was largely an illusion, preserved by careful silences. The death of Amasa Stone had left the normally imperturbable Clara Hay feeling vulnerable and apprehensive. Throughout their marriage,
John had kept up the graceful pretense that his relationship with Clara’s father was a one-sided affair, with all the benefits flowing in the direction of John and Clara Hay. Believing this fiction, Clara worried that John would not know how to manage their finances without her father’s guidance, when in fact he had handled the responsibility very ably for years.

  In the spring of 1884, while Hay and King gamboled in the English countryside, Clara chanced to read a letter to John concerning a purchase of high-interest bonds that entailed more than the usual amount of risk. When Clara served notice that she wanted no part of such speculations, Hay rushed to soothe her anxieties. “You are the dearest, sweetest, truest woman that ever lived,” he told her. “You make me love you more and more.” Assuring her that their holdings were safe, he promised that henceforth he would avoid such propositions and “turn all of our property that I can into the securest form I can find.”

  Although there is no evidence of friction over the Hays’ decision to ask H. H. Richardson to design a house for them in Lafayette Square, the move from Euclid Avenue surely unleashed a tempest. It seems unlikely that Clara would have wanted to leave her mother, who had not recovered from the shock of Amasa Stone’s suicide, and even without that sorrow, Mrs. Stone would not have welcomed the Washington plan. It was she who had delayed Clara’s wedding, putting off for as long as she could the unhappy day when her daughter moved away. While Hay claimed that the move to the capital was essential to his collaboration with Nicolay on the Lincoln biography, the truth was that they had worked successfully by mail for several years. Perhaps John prevailed by persuading Clara that Whitelaw Reid was right: Cleveland was ruinous to his health.

  King’s impression to the contrary, Henry and Clover Adams also had more tribulations than domestic bliss in 1884. The exclusivity of their H Street salon had the perverse if predictable effect of attracting swarms of unwanted guests. “Hardly a day passes that someone doesn’t bring a letter of introduction,” Clover complained to her father early in the year. To spare herself the parvenus, she instructed the servants not to admit anyone who inquired whether she was receiving—the standard approach of a stranger seeking entry without an invitation. Even Henry, who enjoyed parties and guests, lamented that Washington society was becoming “a mob almost as uninteresting and quite as crowded as in any other city.” Faced with sheaves of invitations from newcomers longing to penetrate the innermost sanctum of social Washington, the Adamses adopted a policy of saying no to everyone. The strategy was awkward but efficacious, Henry explained to an English friend: “people begin by taking offence at it; then they cool down, and end by leaving us alone.”

  Apart from Clover’s new passion for photography, little had changed in the lives of the Adamses. They rode in the morning, Henry worked in the afternoon, and they passed most evenings with friends. “Nothing could be pleasanter or less heroic,” Henry told Sir John Clark. He never felt an urge to travel, he said, and Clover was even more immovable: “Nothing will induce her to contemplate any change except final cremation, which has a certain interest of new experience.”

  Still, they were both aware of the ennui creeping over their existence, especially since the departure of their vivacious young neighbor, Lizzie Cameron, who had gone to Europe in hopes of finding a cure for her husband’s alcoholism. “We miss you—miss you—miss you,” Clover wrote her. Confessing that she and Henry were “not as happy as we once were,” Clover said they now wondered “how any man or woman dares to take the plunge.” She closed with a heartfelt imperative: “Come home.” Henry told John Hay that he and Clover were “becoming green with mould. We are bored to death with ourselves, and see no one else. At long intervals we chirp feebly to each other; then sleep and dream sad dreams. Don’t quote this of us. We try to be cheerful at times when we meet a native.”

  Childlessness may have supplied the text for some of those dreams, but the Adamses also suffered from a less definable malaise: a gnawing sense that something, some larger sense of purpose, was missing. Part of their yearning appeared to be spiritual. Like most of their friends, they had long since divorced themselves from conventional religion. Dr. Hooper had not imbued his children with much Christian piety, and Clover was as irreverent about religion as everything else. Writing to a friend on a Sunday morning many years before, she noted that the church bells had “rung the white sheep into their respective folds and left the naughty black ones to outer sunshine and quiet. I’m so happy sitting on the floor with my back against the window and hot sun going through me bringing a prophecy of springs and summers and green things.” She had twice gone to Trinity Church to hear Phillips Brooks, the most charismatic preacher in Boston, but, she said, “neither heart nor brain got any food.”

  Henry’s rebellion against religion was one more aspect of his flight from the world of the Adamses. In his twenties, he had been thrilled by Charles Darwin’s challenge to the biblical account of creation. Late in life he liked to say that he had been a Darwinist for fun, and he joked that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant was all the evidence one needed to disprove Darwin’s theory that life evolved from lower to higher forms. But as a young man, he befriended geologists and paleontologists and wrote admiringly of their work. He was also intrigued by the fledgling science of anthropology, with its investigations of culture and mythology. By treating Christianity as a set of myths, the anthropologists implied that it was no “truer” than Buddhism, Islam, or any other creed.

  Henry Adams in his study at Beverly Farms, photographed by his wife, Clover, in 1883. The manuscript in the photograph may be part of Adams’s history of the United States in the early nineteenth century, or the photograph may be a coy flaunting of his second secret novel, Esther, which explored Clover’s spiritual crisis.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Some clerics, like Phillips Brooks, tried to ease the tension between science and religion by emphasizing that truth was the aim of both. While that may have reassured the communicants of Trinity Church, tougher minds saw that it dodged the fundamental conflict between the faith required by religion and the skepticism intrinsic to science.

  In the summer of 1883, taking a break from his history, Henry decided to write a novel about the tug of war between faith and doubt. He called the book Esther, after his protagonist, who was in turn named for the central character in “Old Esther Dudley,” a Nathaniel Hawthorne story set in Massachusetts after the American Revolution. No longer of sound mind, the aged Mistress Dudley did not understand that the British, whose cause she supported, had left for good. In vain she watched for the royal governor and the return of the old order. As a symbol of the rift between fact and wish, Old Esther Dudley made a convenient peg on which to hang a tale of the split between science and religion.

  As with Democracy, Henry wrote in secret. And once again, he entrusted his dilemma to a female protagonist whose keen intelligence and emotional intensity were inspired by Clover Adams. Like Clover before her marriage, Esther Dudley lived at home with her father, a man who strongly resembled Dr. Hooper. William Dudley had been a widower for years, had inherited enough money to lead a life of leisure, and was not a pious man. At twenty-five, Esther was “absolute mistress” of her father’s house. Observing that she was “not used to harness,” a perspicacious uncle worried that she would rebel, “and a woman who rebels is lost.”

  Esther possessed all of the physical and intellectual shortcomings Henry had pointed out in Clover before their marriage. She was too slight, dressed badly, and owned a face composed of “imperfect” features. “Except her ears, her voice, and her eyes which have a sort of brown depth like a trout brook, she has no very good points.” Her undisciplined mind, “as irregular as her face,” suggested “a lightly-sparred yacht in mid-ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is doing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming.” She painted, much as Clover pursued photography. Henry declined to give his opinion of
Clover’s art, but Esther would never be more than “a second-rate amateur.”

  During their life in Boston in the 1870s, Henry and Clover had often visited the construction site of Trinity Church. Phillips Brooks and Henry Adams were second cousins, and the Adamses eagerly followed the minister’s collaboration with their friends H. H. Richardson, who designed the church, and John La Farge, who decorated the interior. Henry built his novel around the construction of the fictional St. John’s Cathedral in New York. Phillips Brooks became the Reverend Stephen Hazard, his name perhaps chosen to suggest Henry’s ambivalence about his subject. Hazard would indeed prove a danger to Esther, and in a sense he would also be martyred, like St. Stephen. The temperamental John La Farge was cast as Wharton, a vain, opinionated, domineering artist.

  Esther came to know Wharton and Hazard through her cousin George Strong, a geologist as footloose as Clarence King and as rigorously intellectual as Henry Adams. Wharton had belittled Esther’s painting, but because she had more skill than some of his artisans, he invited her to take part in the decoration of St. John’s. High up in the north transept of the church, she was to paint a figure of the blind St. Cecilia, patroness of music. For a model, she would use their new friend Catherine Brooke, a beautiful ingenue reminiscent of Lizzie Cameron. Not yet twenty-one, fresh from Colorado, Catherine delighted George Strong and his male friends. “Her innocent eagerness to submit was charming, and the tyrants gloated over the fresh and radiant victim who was eager to be their slave.” By feigning gentleness, they lured her on.

  Esther wanted to capture Catherine’s radiance, but Wharton insisted that she pour her own soul into the painting. When Catherine accused Wharton of forcing Esther to paint like a man, Wharton snapped, “An artist must be man, woman and demi-god…. Put heaven in Miss Brooke’s eyes!” he commanded. “I want to make St. Cecilia glow with your soul, not with Miss Brooke’s.” The celestial fire in the saint’s eyes, Henry Adams wanted readers to know, was blindness.