The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Pondering architect’s drawings and negotiating with contractors in the summer of 1890, John Hay often found his thoughts drifting to the Lodges’ cavernous wooden house on the crags of Nahant. Only Henry Adams and Lizzie Cameron knew it, but John Hay and Nannie Lodge had fallen in love. In 1887, when Cabot took his seat in Congress, Hay needed only a glimpse to see that Nannie at thirty-seven was easily the peer of Henry Adams’s beloved Lizzie Cameron. Her dark hair was swept into a loose knot at the back of her head, her skin was a pale, pure ivory, and her eyes, according to John Singer Sargent, were an “unforgettable blue”—verging on violet. Mesmerized by “the kindness and intelligence of her expression,” Sargent would always regret that he had not painted her. With her elegant silk gowns, perfect carriage, and aquiline nose, Nannie looked as queens ought to look but never did, said Theodore Roosevelt.

  Intellectually, none of the women of Lafayette Square was a match for Nannie Lodge. Growing up in the erudition of Cambridge, Anna Cabot Mills Davis read voraciously and could toss off classical quotes with as much aplomb as a university man. The daughter of a rear admiral, she could also hold her own when the talk turned to naval affairs. Cabot, her distant cousin and childhood sweetheart, routinely asked her to pass judgment on his speeches. Whatever she thought inferior he tossed into the fire and rewrote. Sensing—correctly—that the cure for Cabot’s arrogance lay beyond her powers, Nannie settled for undercutting his ferocity at strategic moments by addressing him as “Pinky”

  Taking a cue from Henry Adams and Lizzie Cameron, Hay was careful not to see Mrs. Lodge alone. In Washington, Professor Adams and Colonel Hay escorted Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Lodge to concerts and museums while their husbands toiled nobly on Capitol Hill. After their outings, the quartet frequently retired to Adams’s house, where, as far as anyone knows, they comported themselves with perfect respectability.

  John Hay in his prime.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  But the story that unfolds in Lizzie’s letters to Henry in the South Seas is not a tale of innocence. At the end of August, as Adams and La Farge steamed into Oahu, the Hay family descended from their New Hampshire mountain and boarded a train for Nahant. “John and Nanny got a little walk together but on the whole behaved extremely well,” Lizzie reported. In October, the Camerons journeyed to Cleveland to visit Lizzie’s family and found the Hays in residence on Euclid Avenue. They had come to Ohio to enroll poor old Del in a new boarding school. Clara, handsome and uncharacteristically chatty, seemed not to have recognized that Hay’s heart was elsewhere, but Lizzie was troubled to find that everyone else in Cleveland appeared to know about it. “I hate to hear it here in Mrs. Hay’s home,” she told Henry. Hay, just back from duck hunting and looking “brown and well,” was eagerly anticipating a trip to New York for a banquet in honor of Henry Morton Stanley, the great explorer of Africa. Nannie and Cabot would also be in New York. “It is rather a coincidence that Mr. Hay must start on the same day,” Lizzie remarked. Hay and the Lodges planned to stay on for the horse show, which opened the following week. Cabot was an avid equestrian, but Hay had never displayed an interest in horses.

  There had been a similar rendezvous in New York the year before, when Hay gave a dinner at the Knickerbocker Club for three American artists who had won medals at the Paris Exposition. Nannie had gone to New York at the same time, “leaving Cabot to run Congress,” as Adams put it.

  Returning to Lafayette Square after the horse show, Hay dismantled a crate from Italy and gingerly lifted out a painting in a circular gilt frame. “My big Botticelli has come and is hanging on the stairs,” he informed Adams. “It is a beautiful thing—a picture of the first importance. I lie awake nights fearing it will warp and get up in the morning to see if the convexity has become critical during the night.” Roosevelts and Camerons were summoned to view the Madonna and Child, which glowed against the rich paneling of the foyer. Hay arranged to sit by Lizzie at dinner, and they spent the evening talking of Adams. “He says that there is a big hole in his life where you dropped out of it,” Lizzie wrote. “I understand that.”

  By going away, Adams created a labyrinth of complications in the romance of Colonel Hay and Mrs. Lodge. At the end of January 1891, Hay took Lizzie aside at a party to confide that Clara was about to leave for Cleveland. He had planned a series of lunches, concerts, and plays with Nannie, and he wanted Lizzie and someone else to go with them. “But we cannot decide upon the fourth man,” Lizzie told Henry, “and Mr. Hay and Nanny seem to think it very stupid of me not to like anyone well enough to spend long hours with him alone. Oh, how I miss you!” For a breakfast at the country club, they exasperated Lizzie by turning to Ward Thoron, a young man she considered a fuddy-duddy “Have I come to that?” Lizzie asked. “You must come home! When are you coming? I cannot endure it forever.” Before leaving town, Clara Hay had introduced another obstacle by accepting an invitation for John on one of the evenings he had planned to spend with Nannie. “I cannot get out of it without a disagreeable squirm,” he told Lizzie. “I can only curse the day I was born and give up trying to be happy.” Ultimately, the lovers and their accessory were forced to the most dire extreme—inviting Cabot himself. “Cabot has to be the fourth man in all these parties, and it is a little fatiguing for me,” Lizzie reported. Though Lizzie did not appreciate the farce, the high-pitched cackle of Henry Adams must have been audible from one end of Tahiti to the other.

  Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge (known as Nannie), one of the most popular women in Washington and a particular favorite of John Hay.REPRODUCED FROM THE LETTERS AND FRIENDSHIPS OF SIR CECIL SPRING-RICE, EDITED BY STEPHEN GWYNN

  Two political imbroglios made Cabot even more contentious than usual in the winter of 1890-91. The first was a consequence of a high tariff, which had begun to have a paradoxical, and wholly unintended, effect on national life. As Cecil Spring Rice noted, America’s steep duties on imports had accelerated “the pauper emigration from Europe, as a number of industries have been seriously hurt there and the workmen are flocking over. The feeling against immigration is very strong indeed here.” Cabot, declaring that the country was being overrun by “undesirables”—namely Slavs and Italians—announced that he did not intend to stand by and watch “the quality of American citizenship decline.” Nor would he tolerate “a system which is continually dragging down the wages of American labor by the introduction or the importation of the cheapest, lowest, and most ignorant labor of other countries.” To staunch the flow he introduced a bill requiring newcomers to be literate in their native language. The measure met a well-deserved death on the desk of President Cleveland, who vetoed it, but the notion of racial purity endured as one of Cabot’s most infuriating obsessions.

  Lodge was also smarting from the defeat of a nobler effort, a bill to provide federal supervision of polling places in order to assure that Southern Negroes cast their ballots unmolested. As a member of the party which had freed the slaves and a proud heir of Boston’s antislavery movement, Cabot was genuinely appalled by the harassment of Negro voters—and astonished to find that almost no one in Congress shared his views. White Southerners felt they had nothing to gain by broadening the Negro franchise. Northern Democrats feared the bias of election officials appointed by a Republican administration. And Northern Republicans darkly forecast economic upheaval. As Don Cameron bluntly put it on the floor of the Senate, “Northern capital has been flowing into the South in great quantities, manufacturing establishments have been created and are now in full operation, and a community of commercial interest is fast obliterating sectional lines…. The Election Law would disturb this desirable condition.” Pinky in high dudgeon struck Nannie as “pretty amusing,” but Lizzie came home from an evening of his righteous company feeling tense and drained.

  Whatever Clara Hay’s suspicions, they did not show in her appearance. “Mrs. Hay is looking too stunning this winter,” Lizzie told Henry “She is really superb.” In seventeen years of marriage Clara had barely changed. At forty-one, she was still qu
iet, docile, pious, and dull. Hay had grown as bored with her tranquility as he was with the rest of his existence. She still refused to go out on Sundays, even for a sedate meal with such intimates as the Roosevelts. Her robust figure, which Hay had once seen as the bloom of beauty and health, had turned irrevocably to fat. Giving up potatoes and bread did not seem to help. During a stay in New York Hay could not help remarking on how much she enjoyed “a whack at the vittles of the Hotel Brunswick.” In short, Clara was the opposite of the slim, witty, sparkling Mrs. Lodge.

  Clara Hay with her children Del, standing, and, from left, Helen, Clarence, and Alice.JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

  To John it seemed that no matter where Clara was, most of her time was spent packing to go somewhere else. On Lafayette Square she pined for Cleveland, in Cleveland she craved the refinements of Europe, and in English ballrooms she longed for the rusticity of Lake Sunapee. For years the Hays had gone round and round, a pair of prosperous gypsies trailing children, servants, and an Everest of luggage. In 1887 they watched Queen Victoria parade through Piccadilly for her Golden Jubilee and called on the Andrew Carnegies at their castle in Scotland. Hay stocked up on Old Master drawings in London and joked to Adams that he had spent “the last cent I got for ‘Democracy’ in minerals for Mrs. Hay.” The summer of 1888 was passed in the Colorado Rockies, where Hay had once carved the Five of Hearts emblem into a boulder. The children learned to ride, they climbed Pike’s Peak, and Hay struggled against another outbreak of baffling medical symptoms.

  After a winter on Lafayette Square, the Hays dove once more into London society, where they met a woman who delighted Hay by announcing that Democracy and The Bread-Winners were the only American novels worth reading. “I tried to make her believe I wrote them, but it was n.g.,” Hay reported to his literary accomplice in Lafayette Square. With his poise and self-possession, Hay impressed a London Star reporter as “the embodiment of that perfection of manner which the American gentleman can show even better than the cultivated man of any other nationality.”

  The Hays visited the Camerons, who were summering in a rented castle near Birmingham, and they renewed their friendship with Cecil Spring Rice. Now attached to the Foreign Office in London, Springy took every opportunity to tell his American friends about the burdens borne by those who managed affairs of state for Her Majesty. One June day had been devoted to a case of jam newly arrived by diplomatic pouch from Russia. The jam jars had burst in transit, Springy told his friends, “and all our despatches together with various silks which the royal family were smuggling in according to their wont arrived dyed a sanguinary red—The messenger thought he was conveying the mangled remains of a nihilist.”

  Springy was amusing, society was amusing, the Star was amusing, but Hay was not amused. Writing to Adams from London, he asked, as if he himself wondered, “What are we doing? Nothing in particular;—we dine somewhere every night; we go to a few big jams where we know nobody, and moralize on the passing show.” He reserved his most astringent moralizing for earls and baronets who chattered about social reform while gorging on champagne and truffles. There was, he told Adams, “a touch of comic-pathetic in an aristocrat who thinks he is a radical, sitting gaily on the bough and sawing away at it, between himself and the trunk.”

  Hay’s favorite Londoner was Henry James. Forty-five in the summer of Victoria’s jubilee, James had just returned from Florence and his first encounter with the perils of intimacy. For several months he had rented an apartment in the Villa Brichieri, a crumbling mansion leased by his friend and fellow novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. Before going to Italy, he had written a friend about Fenimore’s “immense power of devotion” to him, but he did not seem to realize she was in love.

  Both James and Fenimore worried what the gossips would make of their living under the same roof. James’s letters emphasized the separateness of their lives and often gave the impression that Fenimore was more of a duty than a pleasure—someone to be “worked in,” as he put it. But in a letter to their old friend John Hay, James made no secret of his contact with Fenimore: “I see her every day or two—indeed often dine with her.” Fenimore was more concealing. When she wrote Hay, she was full of praise for his Lincoln biography, which was serialized by the Century, but said almost nothing about James.

  Soon after James settled into the Villa Brichieri, he reviewed Fenimore’s new collection of stories, Rodman the Keeper, for Harper’s Weekly. After a few courtly compliments on her “remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling,” he noticed that she was particularly fond of “cases of heroic sacrifice—sacrifice sometimes unsuspected and always unappreciated” and of “irretrievable personal failures, of people who have had to give up even the memory of happiness, who love and suffer in silence, and minister in secret to the happiness of those who look over their heads.” He also detected a fascination with “secret histories” and “the ‘inner life’ of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried. She believes in personal renunciation, in its frequency as well as its beauty.” James the critic was as perceptive as ever, but in his letters and notebooks he gave no sign of recognizing Fenimore’s self-renunciation as the theme of their relationship.

  When James went back to London, Hay found him “in good looks and good spirits and full of new schemes of work.” But the Tuscan interlude with Fenimore clearly left him unsettled. Shortly after his return, James wrote “The Lesson of the Master,” in which a distinguished writer lectures a novice on the sacrifices demanded by the gods of art. It was the Master’s conviction that wife and family blocked the path to greatness. The price of immortality was celibacy.

  As much as Hay disliked the vagabond life, he had neither the will to refuse his wife’s requests nor the ambition to shape their lives along some other line. Throughout their marriage, his career had traced the path of least resistance. As custodian of the fortune left by Clara’s father, he felt no urge to strive for the riches of a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt. What he called “the greasy details of money-making” demanded his attention for only a few weeks a year. Enviably free to do as he chose, he let himself be carried along by the designs of others. He had moved to Cleveland at Amasa Stone’s bidding, he went to Washington as assistant secretary of state purely from a sense of duty, and he stood in for Whitelaw Reid as editor of the Tribune only because he could not summon the force to decline. Without the spur of a collaborator, it is difficult to imagine how Hay would have persevered for the two decades it took to complete the forty-seven hundred pages of Abraham Lincoln: A History.

  In 1885, five years before the book appeared in print, the Century magazine agreed to pay the unprecedented sum of $50,000 for the right to serialize it. The first installment appeared in November 1886, a month after the Century allowed a giddy Clarence King to insist that Hay and Nicolay had outdone Boswell and Carlyle. “A Boswell may crawl along at the heel of mediocrity and amuse whole generations with his twaddle and tattle,” King proclaimed. “Carlyle could scream his hero-worship in forced, fantastic phrase, and still leave you an utter stranger to his demi-god.” But John Hay, master realist, possessed both “poetic vision enough to truthfully discern … the whole hidden framework of society” and the ability to “keep his feet always on the solid bottom while wading deepest into the foaming river of life.”

  At Harper’s, W. D. Howells refrained from reviewing the biography during its three-and-a-half-year run in the rival Century, but when the ten-volume edition finally appeared in the summer of 1890, Howells admired it at length. He lauded the evenhanded treatment of Lincoln’s political rivals and the authors’ decision to base accounts of certain events entirely on Confederate sources. For Howells, the glory of Hay and Nicolay was that they had captured the glory of Lincoln, who had grown inexorably, Howells said, “to a national proportion, until at his death he stood so completely for his country that without him it may be said that his country would have had no adequate
expression.”

  After fourteen years of writing and four of publishing, Hay was pleased to have the praise of his old friend, particularly since he had warned him that the material had grown “musty and dry.” Tired of Lincoln and of writing, Hay cared little about the book’s reception elsewhere. “It is out, and out of my thoughts,” he wrote to Adams in the Pacific.

  Adams never sent Hay a word about the book, but behind the scenes he dropped hints that it deserved serious recognition as well as popular acclaim. When Harvard tried to award Adams an honorary degree for his History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, he urged the university to bestow the laurels on Hay and Nicolay instead. “Nothing that I have ever done, or ever shall do, will hold its own beside portions of the Lincoln,” he insisted to Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot. As far as Adams knew, “no great man of any time in any country has ever had from his contemporaries a biography that will compare with this whether in scope, taste or literary execution.”

  “Those gentlemen did not write history,” Eliot countered. “They were actors in many of the scenes they described, and therefore, could not be historians. They have prepared invaluable materials for the subsequent historian, and done an admirable piece of literary work; but I submit that they have not written history.”

  Adams must have known that Abraham Lincoln, for all its mass, lacked the grandeur of his own history. Hay and Nicolay had done less to interpret events than reconstruct them, and the style Adams claimed to see was lucid but mundane. Although Hay and Nicolay were both agile writers, they had deliberately muted their natural voices because they did not want readers to sense where one of them left off and the other began. As Hay saw it, the task was to “put facts together without a word of ornament or fancy.” The result was seamless—and bloodless.