Where once they had worried that their field was becoming crowded, now they sensed that the ground was fertile. Two rather sentimental and less than thorough biographies of Lincoln—one of them by William Stoddard, the third secretary in the White House, whom Hay had considered so ineffectual—appeared in early 1885 and were well received. More encouraging was a series of articles that had begun in the Century the previous fall under the rubric “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” These recollections by key generals and officers on both sides of the conflict were instantly popular. “[T]he market is ready,” Hay wrote Nicolay. “I am getting anxious to print a volume or two.”
Throughout the spring and summer of 1885, Richard Watson Gilder pursued Hay and Nicolay for the rights to publish the biography, first as a serial in the Century and then in book form. In mid-July, Nicolay met Gilder in New Hampshire and presented him with 114 chapters. Gilder read the manuscript straight through. Later that month, he wrote to Hay, congratulating the co-authors for their “comprehension and treatment” of the subject and beseeching them to allow the Century to be their publisher: “If the Century can accomplish this I will consider it one of its proudest achievements. . . . As great as Lincoln’s . . . hold upon the present and the future, the work of yours and Nicolay will strengthen this hold, will lift him still higher above the group of great men about him, and will widen and deepen the lesson of his pure life and extend its influence upon the character of men and the whole course of history.” When Gilder offered $50,000, an extraordinary sum, for the serial and book rights, Hay and Nicolay accepted.
The first excerpt was scheduled for November 1886. They would have to write the remaining chapters—roughly half the biography—at a pace that would keep them ahead of the serial.
With publication now imminent, Hay was more aware than ever that he was writing to render the fullest possible honor to Lincoln. Accordingly, he sent a chapter to Nicolay, asking his opinion: “I want you to say with entire frankness whether you think it is up to the mark, of course I mean up to our mark. I don’t compare it with Gibbon or Thucydides. As to style, arrangement, effect, am I, in your opinion, holding my own?”
In fact he was thinking of Gibbon and Thucydides, for he knew that the chapter he sent Nicolay was one of the most forceful in the entire biography. It was the one in which he damned George McClellan for his craven conduct during the Second Battle of Bull Run in September 1862. With great care and long-simmering animus, Hay detailed how McClellan’s spiteful recalcitrance had left General John Pope’s Army of Virginia to face the full fury of Robert E. Lee. He attacked McClellan’s assertion that Lincoln had regarded Washington as all but lost after the battle and that McClellan was the only person who could save it. By the end of the chapter, Hay had succeeded in reducing McClellan’s self-aggrandizing account of these events to contemptible fiction.
Yet while he had waited more than twenty years to prosecute his case against McClellan, once the moment arrived, he recognized that vengeance was best served cold. “I think I have left the impression of [McClellan’s] mutinous infidelity,” he told Nicolay, “and I have done it in a perfectly courteous manner. . . . It is of the utmost moment that we should seem fair to him, while we are destroying him.”
Nicolay had crossed the line of courtesy at least once in his own chapters, suggesting that Robert E. Lee ought to have faced a firing squad. Hay reminded his colleague that, even while settling old scores, they ought to give the impression that they were above the fray: “We must not show ourselves to the public in the attitude of two old dotards fighting over again the politics of their youth. . . . [W]e ought to write the history of those times like two everlasting angels—who know everything, judge everything, tell the truth about everything and don’t care a twang of their harps about one side or the other.”
Still, he added, there was one prejudice they need never repress: “We are Lincoln men all the way through.”
HAY CAME TO WASHINGTON several times that winter and spring, scheduling meetings with Nicolay and sessions with his architect. He was frustrated by the slow progress and soaring expense of the house, but Richardson assured him that it would be finished by the end of the year.
Hay and Nicolay were too busy to make it back to Colorado that summer. Instead, Hay and Clarence King made a trip to New Hampshire in September to look at property. They were particularly taken with the country surrounding Lake Winnipesaukee and Lake Sunapee. Hay wrote to Adams, proposing that the Five of Hearts “seize a hill or two” for a summer retreat.
But Adams and Clover were having a hard enough time holding on to each other, much less their friends. When Clover’s father, Dr. Robert Hooper, died in April, she had fallen into a depression that Adams was helpless to alleviate. The “Voltaire in petticoats” who once had dubbed Chester Arthur “our chuckle-headed sovereign” and said of Henry James, “[H]e chaws more than he bites off,” lost both her humor and vigor and shrank from society.
Those who search for clues to Clover’s collapse inevitably parse the pages of Esther, a novel Adams published a year earlier under the pseudonym Frances Snow Compton. The book sold few copies, and Adams had no difficulty keeping his secret from an indifferent public. Hay and King did not read it until two years later.
Esther Dudley is a free-thinking artist who is given the chance to paint one of the frescoes in a new church (similar to Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston), where she tangles aesthetically with the church’s principal artist (inspired by Adams’s friend John La Farge, whose work decorates Trinity Church) and theologically with the church’s minister (of the same cloth as Phillips Brooks, another Adams friend). Stirring the mix is Esther’s cousin, the picaresque paleontologist George Strong, who bears an uncanny likeness to Clarence King.
The story of Esther, denser than Democracy, is a scaffold from which Adams paints his own philosophical frescoes on religion and science, faith and atheism, intellect and instinct, masculinity and femininity. Esther nurses her ailing father until his death—this written two years before Clover did the same for her father. In her grief, Esther becomes a “wandering soul, lost in infinite space. . . . She said to herself that youth was gone. What was she to do with middle-life?”
There are many more similarities between Clover and Esther. Wharton, the artist, describes Esther’s “bad figure” and “imperfect” features. “She is too slight, too thin; she looks fragile, willowy. . . . She gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid-ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is doing there. She sails gayly along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough water coming.” Esther does her best to stand up to the “impalpable tyranny” of the men who press upon her their notions of God and art and truth. Yet she nonetheless finds herself desiring masculine approval. Strong, the King stand-in, quips, “Once in harness she will be kind and gentle, a little tender-mouthed perhaps, and apt to shy at first, but thorough-bred.”
It was almost as if Adams had dug through one of his old letters describing Clover. “She is certainly not handsome,” he had written to an English friend in 1872, “nor would she be quite called plain. . . . She is very open to instruction. We shall improve her. She dresses badly. She decidedly has humor and will appreciate our wit.”
If Esther is not Clover precisely, then perhaps a kinder observation is that Clover informs Esther. In this sense it can also be said that neither one was necessarily intended as a deprecation of the other, for in the end Esther passes the test, rejecting the domineering beliefs—and proposals—of her suitors and declaring, “Is it not enough to know myself?”
Clover, too, had triumphed, Adams believed, at least until her depression hit. Like Madeleine Lee in Democracy, she overcame “a woman’s natural tendency toward asceticism, self-extinction, self-abnegation.” He was truly proud of his wife’s eccentricity and independence. “How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere?” he asked.
As for his suggestion that Clover or Esther was in need of “harness” or improvement, in Esther Adams acknowledged that men fumbled at playing Pygmalion and needed the guidance of women just as badly: “The business of educating their husbands will take all the rest of their lives.” In her droller days, Clover also appreciated that the shortcomings of marriage were not solely the woman’s fault. “Lot’s wife . . . would have had a sweeter old age and been a pillar of strength to her reprehensible husband,” she joked in 1883, as she turned forty, “but I suppose she looked back because with such a mate she had nothing to look forward to.”
Yet Clover did have much to look forward to. Beside the new house, in which she had shown great interest until the illness and death of her father, she had mastered photography, taking thoughtful portraits of her parents, her husband, the family dogs, H. H. Richardson, John La Farge, and the historians Francis Parkman and George Bancroft. She also seemed content in her marriage, although it was true that her husband could be prickly and undemonstrative. “As it is now thirteen years since my last letter to you, possibly you have forgotten my name,” he had written while she was in Boston caring for her father. “If so, please try and recall it. For a time we were somewhat intimate.” Adams was, in this instance, being facetious; until the spring of 1885 they had been virtually inseparable, and after Clover lost her grip, Adams’s devotion, by all evidences, was steadfast. “Henry is more patient and loving than words can express,” she vouched. “God might envy him—he bears and hopes and despairs hour after hour.”
Her decline would be blamed variously on infertility, menopause, and an inherited tendency toward melancholy. Still, no one will ever know which factors carried Clover to the brink and beyond. On November 29, Adams wrote to Robert Cunliffe, “My wife . . . has been, as it were, a good deal off her feed this summer, and shows no fancy for mending as I could wish.”
On December 4, Clover was able to pull herself together to bring a bouquet of roses to Lizzie Cameron, who was pregnant and abed with morning sickness. Two days later, a Sunday morning, while Adams had stepped out of the house, she took her life by drinking potassium cyanide, one of her photographic chemicals. In a letter she left for her sister, she despaired: “If I had one single point of character or goodness I would stand on that and grow back to life.” Unlike Esther, she no longer believed in herself, or in anything at all.
The funeral on the ninth was for family only. Hay happened to be in New York with King that day and was frustrated to be so far away from their friend at such a sad time. “I can neither talk to you nor keep silent,” he wrote Adams. “The darkness in which you walk has its shadow for me also. You and your wife were more to me than any other two. I came to Washington because you were there. And now the goodly fellowship is broken up forever. I cannot force on a man like you the commonplaces of condolence. In the presence of a sorrow like yours, it is little for your friends to say they love you and sympathize with you—but it is all anybody can say. Everything else is mere words. Is it any consolation to remember her as she was? that bright intrepid spirit, that keen fine intellect, that lofty scorn of all that was mean, that social charm which made your house such a one as Washington never knew before, and made hundreds of people love her as much as they admired her. No, that makes it all so much harder to bear.”
Adams was devastated but held his chin up. “Nothing you can do,” he wrote Hay, “will affect the fact that I am alone in the world at a time in life when too young to die and too old to take up existence afresh; but after the first feeling of desperation is over, there will be much that you can do to make my struggle easier. I am going to keep straight on, just as we planned it together, and unless I break in health, I shall recover strength and courage before long. If you want to help me, hurry on your house, and get into it. With you to fall back on, I shall have one more support.”
IN HIS GRIEF, ADAMS also drew closer to the Camerons, especially Lizzie. He and Clover had seen quite a bit of their Washington neighbors in recent years. Adams found he could put up with Cameron because he enjoyed the company of his young wife. In 1883 he had written to Hay: “Don is behaving himself again. . . . We were asked to a charming dinner there the other evening, and I am now tame cat round the house. Don and I stroll round with our arms round each other’s necks. I should prefer to accompany Mrs. Don in that attitude, but he insists on my loving him for his own sake.”
Yet three months later, when the Camerons were preparing a trip to England, Adams declined to write letters of introduction, as he had done for Hay and King. “I . . . cannot saddle my friends with Don,” he confided to Hay. “I adore her [Lizzie] and respect the way she has kept herself out of scandal and mud, and done her duty by the lump of clay she promised to love and respect. . . . [I]f you can tell our friends to show her kindness, pray do so.”
After the Camerons departed, Adams wrote Lizzie, “The dogs wept all the morning. . . . The town is deserted without you.”
Clover may possibly have grown jealous of her husband’s attentions to their lively neighbor, fourteen years younger than she and nineteen years younger than Adams. Then, too, she might have felt a twinge of envy in November, when Lizzie returned from California and revealed she was to have a baby. Still, the roses that Clover delivered two days before her suicide were surely a token of sympathy and kindness. Whatever further understanding was reached by the two women, one morbidly depressed, the other nauseous and unhappily married, will never be known. The flowers were still on Lizzie’s bedside table when she learned about Clover.
Adams was touched by the letter of condolence he received from Don Cameron, but instead of responding directly to its author, he wrote to Lizzie. He invited her to show his letter to her husband, but plainly she was the one he wanted to reach. “All I can now ask is that you will take care of yourself and get well,” he implored. “All Clover’s friends have now infinite value for me. I have got to live henceforward on what I can save from the wreck of my life, and it is lucky for me that she has no friends but the best and truest.”
Two weeks later, he sent Lizzie a piece of Clover’s jewelry. “Will you keep it,” he asked, “and sometimes wear it, to remind you of her?” Grieving and alone, he also hoped the present would connect Lizzie more closely to him. Beyond what he had said in his most recent letter, he chose to think of Lizzie as not just Clover’s friend, but now very much his own.
ADAMS MOVED INTO THE new house three weeks after burying his wife. The Hays’ house, twice as large, was not yet ready, though Richardson tried to persuade them to take occupancy immediately, “even if it does necessitate some little picnicking and even discomfort in the beginning.” Had Clover not died, Hay would have preferred to wait until spring. But out of concern for his stricken friend, he arrived in Washington on January 26, 1886, followed by the rest of the family a week later. Clara could not have been thrilled to be uprooted from Cleveland in the dead of winter, and evidently there was no talk of giving up Euclid Avenue any time soon. That was one thing she would not permit. They bought separate furnishings for the new house, and in the coming years they would fill it with an extraordinary collection of art, antiques, rugs, and bric-à-brac.
The two houses were more siblings than twins, each tailored to the personality of its respective owner. Both had three stories and were faced in red brick, with Ohio sandstone at street level. Adams’s entranceway, which fronted on Lafayette Square and the White House, was set back from the street beneath a stern archway of carved stone; the first floor had a study and a library, but no parlor—an arrangement that allowed Adams to gaze directly on the affairs of the capital while guarding his privacy.
Hay’s house was more of a public monument, commanding the corner of H and 16th with a castlelike turret. Its high-arched entrance was on scale with a train tunnel. The exterior was modestly adorned, like Adams’s; not so the interior. The front hall and stairway were even more finely crafted and more splendid than the woodwork of the Cleveland house; the ceiling was c
offered in gold leaf. The dining room was exquisite, its crown jewel a fireplace of emerald green marble called Royal Irish of Galway. “It looks like under the sea,” Lizzie Cameron wrote gaily to Clara, “and we’ll all have to dress like mermaids with funny tails.”
The parlor had two kinds of stonework: an African marble called Aurora Pompadour and a Mexican onyx. “I have forgotten the name of the hall fireplace,” Hay would write many years later to his daughter Helen, as she prepared to build her own house. “[It] is a pink tinge, you remember. In the library the fireplace is yellow, and the hearth is a reddish porphyry. The name they called it, I think, was ‘Boisé d’Orient.’ ” Upstairs were five capacious bedrooms. The servants lived on the third floor; the kitchen, laundry, and furnace were in the basement. Washington could boast a number of houses that were grander, but, at 12,000 square feet, Hay’s was the biggest on Lafayette Square, unless one counted the White House.
From his richly appointed parlor and library, he could look across H Street, across the park with its rocking-horse statue of Andrew Jackson, across Pennsylvania Avenue, to the house into which he had moved twenty-five years earlier. From his bedroom he could see the light in the window of the room he had shared with Nicolay.
The nearness made a difference. One of the reasons for moving to Washington this time, besides his friendship with Adams, was to complete his work with Nicolay. They had many chapters yet to write, but they knew what they had done so far was good and reputable, and that the end was within sight. This was the land of their Lincoln, and they were bringing his story home.
All the Great Prizes Page 29
