The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  As the painting reached completion and Esther returned to her own small studio, she missed “the space, the echoes, the company, and above all, the sense of purpose, which she felt on her scaffolding. She complained to Wharton of her feminine want of motive in life. ‘I wish I earned my living,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what it is to work without an object.’” Wharton replied that some of the world’s greatest work had been done “with no motive of gain.” Esther did not disagree but simply bewailed the fate of her sex: “Men can do so many things that women can’t.”

  Esther’s discontent swelled to anguish with the death of her father, an episode in which Henry Adams tried to imagine how Clover might react to the death of Dr. Hooper, then in his seventies. Listless and unable to sleep, Esther busied herself with trifles. The Reverend Stephen Hazard called every day, partly to offer solace and partly because of his growing attraction to Esther. When he declared himself and asked her to marry him, she agreed, grateful for his kindness and eager to fill the void left by the death of her father. To her concerns about the gap between his faith and her skepticism, he offered sublime comfort: “Love is the great magnet of life, and Religion is Love.”

  But as Esther listened to Hazard’s sermons, she felt the same emptiness Clover had known in the Trinity Church of Phillips Brooks. And the more Hazard urged Esther to trust that his faith would conquer her doubt, the more agitated she grew. Sounding much like Madeleine Lee of Democracy, who wanted to know whether America was right or wrong, Esther asked George Strong, “Is science true?” Strong gave her a resounding negative. In that case, Esther inquired, why believe in it? He denied that he did. “Then why do you belong to it?” she pressed. “Because I want to help in making it truer,” Strong replied.

  Convinced that Esther was on the wrong track, Strong tried to dissuade her from using logic to acquire faith: “Faith is a state of mind, like love or jealousy. You can never reason yourself into it.” But since she believed in Hazard, Strong thought there was no reason that she could not believe in his church. “Faith means submission,” he said. “Submit!”

  Cornered at last, Esther cried, “I want to submit. Why can’t some of you make me?”

  Finally Strong understood the force of Esther’s will. Where he had once feared that Hazard would “turn her into a candlestick of the church,” he now worried that Esther would destroy Hazard by destroying his faith. But with the cool detachment of the scientist, Strong chose not to interfere. He would stand by, as unblinking as Henry Adams, and wait for the inevitable collision.

  Wrung out by her religious debates with Hazard, Esther allowed her aunt and uncle to take her away to Niagara Falls. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she watched the thundering cataract and listened to “the voice of the waters,” which told her “a different secret from any that Hazard would ever hear.” Face to face with the raw power of the falls, she realized that she could give to Nature what she could not give Hazard or his religion: submission.

  Hazard came to Niagara to plead his case once more. Esther, wanting none of it, confessed that she could not enter his church without a feeling of hostility: “I never saw you conduct a service without feeling as though you were a priest in a Pagan temple, centuries apart from me.”

  Hazard calmly answered that he had heard these objections before. Since Esther was particularly repelled by the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, he asked her to imagine an afterlife in which she would not meet her loved ones. Surely, he argued, “the natural instincts of your sex must save you from such a creed!”

  “Why must the church always appeal to my weakness and never to my strength!” Esther cried. “I ask for spiritual life and you send me back to my flesh and blood as though I were a tigress you were sending back to her cubs…. the atheists at least show me respect enough not to do that.”

  When Strong appeared, Hazard accused him of turning Esther against religion and fled in defeat. Esther, alone with Strong, struggled against tears. Strong consoled her with his judgment that she had waged a valiant fight. He offered to marry her. The novel ends with Esther’s reply: “But George, I don’t love you, I love him.”

  Taking their cue from Henry Adams, who set the conflict between Hazard and Esther in religious terms, many critics and biographers have seen Esther as the author’s investigation of the paradox of faith in an age made skeptical by science. But the novel reveals less of the author’s concern for the relation of man and God than his lifelong perplexity over the relation of man and woman. As a student at Harvard, Henry had read the tracts handed out by radical Boston women who wanted the right to vote. He found their arguments unconvincing, but as he reflected on the spirited, perceptive women in his own family—from his great-grandmother Abigail Adams to his rebellious sister Louisa—he realized that the inferior status of women was a result of history, not a fact of biology.

  In 1876, when Professor Henry Adams was invited to deliver the prestigious Lowell Institute lecture in Boston, he used the occasion to attack the widely held notion that Christianity had rescued women from slavery. He began his talk, “The Primitive Rights of Women,” by granting that the institution of marriage probably had evolved from notions of ownership. But he did not believe that primitive wives were property in any conventional sense. Among American Indians, wives retained their status as free members of their clans no matter how their marital status changed. The Egyptians were equally enlightened, inspired by the example of Osiris and Isis, the god and goddess who reigned as peers. In ancient Greece, wives were freewomen, with rights their husbands were legally bound to respect.

  Christianity had turned the tables, Adams argued. The church had risen to power on the ruins of the Roman Empire, “and of all the corruptions of the Empire none had been more scandalous than the corruption of the women!” In the new Christian order, a woman’s submission—the act Esther Dudley found impossible—came to be prized more highly than her rights. Out of this demand for surrender arose the new feminine ideal: “the meek and patient, the silent and tender sufferer, the pale reflection of the Mater Dolorosa, submissive to every torture that her husband could invent.” The professor did not think the inequity called for legislative redress of the sort sought by women’s-rights advocates (who were, he believed, “a vile gang”). He preferred to trust in male common sense: Out of love for his wife and regard for his property, a man would instinctively seek equality with his mate.

  This conservatism plus Henry’s unsparing frankness about Clover’s flaws have made it easy to accuse Adams of misogyny, and detractors have not lacked other evidence for their case. In an 1883 letter to John Hay, Adams said he struck out of his writing whatever Clover criticized “on the theory that she is the average reader, and that her decisions are, in fact if not in reason, absolute.” The patronizing tone is unmistakable. But however intellectually superior Henry thought himself, he would not have sought Clover’s opinion, much less acted upon it, unless he had respected it.

  In another widely quoted letter, Henry told an English friend that the young women of America were “haunted by the idea that they ought to read, to draw, or to labor in some way, not for any such frivolous object as making themselves agreeable to society, nor for simple amusement, but to ‘improve their minds.’ They are utterly unconscious of the pathetic impossibility of improving those poor little hard thin, wiry, one-stringed instruments which they call their minds, and which haven’t range enough to master one big emotion, much less to express it in words or figures.” But that indictment is followed by an equally damning (though rarely cited) judgment of the male of the species: “Our men in the same devoted temper talk ‘culture’ till the word makes me foam at the mouth. They cram themselves with second-hand facts and theories till they bust, and then they lecture at Harvard College and think they are the aristocracy of intellect and are doing true heroic work by exploding themselves all over a younger generation, and forcing up a new set of simple-minded, honest, harmless intellectual prigs as like to themselves
as two dried peas in a bladder.”

  Without denying Henry’s condescension, it is possible to see his attitudes as part of his larger bafflement over the eternal battle of the sexes. In Esther, he clearly despised his male characters’ treatment of women. He berated them for exploiting the young Catherine Brooke’s eagerness to submit, and the idea that Hazard’s will should dominate Esther’s struck him as indefensible. He also saw the hollowness of Wharton’s claim that his aesthetics were superior to Esther’s. But when Henry tried to imagine how the sexual scales might be balanced, he saw no happy solutions. The contest between Hazard and Esther, which pitted one strong will against another, had had no winner. They ended with the dismal realization that not even love could bridge the gulf between them. In his own life, Henry had chosen a partner who was as much his equal as the times permitted. He never would have been satisfied with the benign docility of a Clara Hay. But in spite of the Adamses’ closeness and compatibility, there remained a gap they longed to close. In writing Esther, Adams discovered that he, like Clover, like Esther Dudley, was alone in mid-ocean.

  11

  Seeking Shelter

  Hiding behind the feminine pseudonym of Frances Snow Compton, Henry Adams sent his gloomy Esther into the world in March 1884. In a mood to experiment, he persuaded Henry Holt, the publisher of Democracy, to issue the book with no advertising or publicity. The object of this furtive exercise (which Adams underwrote) was to see how the novel would fare on its own: what would the public make of a book unheralded by the ruffles and flourishes of the press agent?

  The public paid virtually no attention. Esther attracted a perfunctory notice in Publishers Weekly, the journal of the book trade, and a passing mention in the Nation, which merely remarked that the Literary World had not received a copy for review. Nor had anyone else. In June, the frustrated Holt asked Adams for permission to “whoop up” the novel. Adams refused on the grounds that their experiment had just begun. With a touch of grandiosity, he had promised that if he died before he was ready to admit his connection with Esther, Holt could make the most of the Adams name. As he reminded the publisher, that was “a sure card.”

  Six months later, Adams conceded defeat. “So far as I know, no man, woman or child has ever read or heard of Esther,” he wrote to Holt. Clearly hoping for a triumph on the order of Democracy, Adams proposed that they run their experiment again, on the other side of the Atlantic. “I want to test English criticism and see whether it amounts to more than our own,” he said. Holt obliged, and after three reviews—two of them negative—the novel sank in silence. Not even Clarence King and the Hays were let in on the secret.

  Happily, life offered other diversions. Early in 1883, a sizable piece of property on the northwest corner of Sixteenth and H Streets had changed hands. It was rumored that the new owner planned a seven-story apartment building for the site, which was immediately east of the house occupied by Henry and Clover Adams. Upset by the prospect of “darkness and smoky chimneys” and the inevitable loss of neighborhood trees, the Adamses invited John and Clara Hay to join them in buying out the proprietor with the idea of building houses of their own. “I need not say how eager I am to spend your money to have you next door,” Henry told John. “I would sacrifice your last dollar for such an object.”

  Henry’s proposition caught Hay in a receptive frame of mind. A few months earlier, he had scouted the lakes of New Hampshire in search of a spot for a Five of Hearts summer colony, and he had entertained similar fantasies during his Colorado camping trip with George Nicolay. He had also imagined himself on Lafayette Square. “Do you think I could buy St. John’s Church?” he once asked the Adamses. “I would not want to be out of an invalid’s walk from your door.” The price Henry projected for the corner of Sixteenth and H, over $70,000, seemed exorbitant to Hay, and he questioned the wisdom of undertaking so vast a project in his current state of “maladeimaginairity,” but Henry’s proposition was irresistible. He asked only that Henry make him a silent bidder, perhaps fearing that the steep price would reflect badly on his financial sagacity.

  The Hays and the Adamses made their purchase in December for just under $75,000. For $25,000, the Adamses acquired about a third of the land, fronting on H Street. The Hays took the rest, on the corner of H and Sixteenth. Henry and Clover’s windows would look south across Lafayette Square to the White House while the Hays’ house, facing east, would stand opposite the pillared portico of St. John’s on Sixteenth Street. Henry suggested that Hay could recoup part of his $50,000 by selling the northernmost chunk of his lot, along Sixteenth. Still dreaming of a Five of Hearts enclave, Hay offered the slice to King. When the geologist declined on account of his finances and his envy of his friends’ married bliss, Hay decided not to look for another buyer.

  To Hay’s chagrin, and despite Adams’s vow that no one would ever learn the extent of their profligacy, the price was soon the talk of Washington. Their $75,000 worked out to six dollars per square foot—twelve times the going rate in the local land market. Hay shrewdly guessed that the seller had leaked the news in an effort to drive up the value of his other real-estate holdings. Writing to Lizzie Cameron, Henry declared himself ruined by his extravagance, and Clover predicted that their spendthrift habits would force them to build cramped and squalid quarters. “We shall pad the tops of our heads so that the ceilings may not hurt them,” she joked to Anne Palmer.

  Pleas of hardship notwithstanding, the Adamses immediately hired the country’s most celebrated architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and the Hays quickly followed their lead. Although Clover disparaged Richardson’s massive Romanesque style as “Neo-Agnostic” and objected to his penchant for such ornamental falsehoods as fireplaces that did not work, Henry considered one of Richardson’s recent Washington houses the “handsomest and most ultimate” home in America.

  Enchanted with the idea of inserting the architect’s stone hulks among the trim, clean Federal-style houses of Lafayette Square, Henry was unfazed by the prospect of coping with Richardson’s eccentricities, which seemed to have swelled with his size. Richardson, weighed 345 pounds, and drew attention to his girth by wearing brilliant yellow waistcoats. When he traveled on business, he liked to stay with clients and blithely expected their households to dance to his rhythms. He slept until noon then demanded breakfast in his room. His abnormal bulk was the consequence of a kidney ailment and demanded a spartan diet to which he paid almost no heed. Servants, he seemed to think, were meant to be bullied and nagged, and since he found walking a strain, he insisted upon being driven everywhere. Adams professed not to care and dared to imagine that by giving “vigorous instructions,” he and Hay would succeed where Richardson’s clients always failed—with the budget. Swept along by Henry’s enthusiasm, Clover overcame both her reservations about Richardson’s work and her long-standing aversion to building a house. At a loss to explain herself, she told Lizzie Cameron, “I like to change my mind all of a sudden.”

  Henry Hobson Richardson, the greatest architect of his day, by Clover Adams. Richardson’s houses for the Hays and Adamses, completed in 1886, stood side by side on Lafayette Square until the 1920s. The Hay-Adams Hotel now occupies the site.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  The honeymoon between architect and clients lasted until the end of February. Looking at sketches of both houses, the Adamses thought the Hays’ decidedly superior to theirs, and when Henry ventured to say so, back came a splenetic reply in a dark, heavy scrawl: “Did I trust too much to your knowing how to regard an unfinished drawing?” asked Richardson. “Your liking Hay’s house better than your own is accounted for easily I think by the fact that in designing the former I was left entirely untramelled by restrictions wise or otherwise. (How’s that old boy—couldn’t help it—too good to pass.)” The architect promised to make Adams’s house “at least as attractive as Hay’s” and to incorporate all of Henry’s “pet notions” as well.

  Hay could afford to be tractable, and since he was far away in C
leveland, he cheerfully handed himself over to Richardson. The architect’s ideas were bound to be better than his own, Hay told Adams, and besides, he joshed, there was a noble principle at stake: “As a means of moral discipline, it is not best for us to have our own way in everything; hence, architects.”

  The spat over the sketches cost Adams dearly. Henceforth Richardson would regard Hay as the enlightened patron of genius and Adams as the prickly, meddlesome fussbudget. The Hays could do no wrong, the Adamses no right—an egregiously unfair twist in view of Henry and Clover’s artistic sophistication. When the Adamses passed along a sample of the ironwork they wanted for the grilles to be installed on the ground floor, the architect scoffed that “a designer of cast iron fences for a Western foundry could not do worse.”

  In some matters, Richardson’s charm could be as expansive as his girth. Felled by a case of the mumps in the summer of 1884, he focused on Clover’s passion for riding and spent hours writing her an erudite disquisition on the architecture of stables. After consulting the definitive English work on the subject, he was convinced he had hit on the perfect design for the Adamses’ horse barn—spacious, properly lighted, and pleasing to the eye. “Really it is good,” he told Clover. “Not a bad thing to look at from your back windows.”

  When the exteriors were finally decided upon, the two façades had little in common apart from their red brick and their height of four stories. The Adams house, with the Hay house on one side and Henry and Clover’s rented house on the other, had a decidedly modern look. Its roof showed only one simple upward slope while the Hays’ was a jumble of turrets, gables, and chimneys. The Adamses’ windows were grouped symmetrically, the Hays’ set off-center. The Hays’ front door, on Sixteenth Street, lay deep in the recesses of a porte cochere, while the Adamses’ main entrance was set back a few feet from the sidewalk, behind a pair of low stone arches.