All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Henry Adams, whose quirky modesty prevented him from trumpeting his own accomplishments as a historian, saw no reason to wait for posterity to rule on Hay and Nicolay’s achievement. He recommended that Harvard award Hay and Nicolay honorary doctorates for “a work the equal of which I know not in any literature.” (Harvard president Charles Eliot politely disagreed. “They were actors in many of the scenes they described,” he wrote Adams, “and, therefore, could not be historians.”)

  The praise that meant the most by far came from Robert Lincoln. By dark coincidence, while Lincoln was looking over the biography’s final pages, a chapter written by Hay entitled “Lincoln’s Fame,” his only son, sixteen-year-old Abraham “Jack” Lincoln II, lay gravely ill. Wracked with worry, Robert was moved to muse on his relationship with his own father, recognizing just how much it had been strengthened, posthumously, by the memories and mediation of John Hay and John George Nicolay. “I have . . . the last sheets of the book,” he wrote Hay in January 1890. “Without being the proper critic, I can express my delight with the last part & with the whole of the work & I shall never cease to be glad that my father had two such devoted & exceptionally competent friends as you & Nicolay to make this testimonial.”

  When Jack Lincoln died three months later, Hay wrote to Robert, “You can never outlive it, but we hope that time may bring you peace, and that memory, which is now nothing but pain, may even become a blessing.” Perhaps he had said something quite similar to his friend twenty-five years earlier, after they had rushed from the White House and stood by each other’s side at a different deathbed. The moral, anyway, was the same: One ought never attempt to blot out memory; Robert must find a way to savor the lives of his father and son, especially now that there would never be another Abraham Lincoln.

  BY THE SPRING OF 1890, Hay had nothing especially pressing to do. The Lincoln odyssey was now complete—“the last kick of my expiring Pegasus,” he declared. He had declined an offer to edit the Tribune while Reid served in Paris. He had no role in any administration or campaign, and his business affairs—which included a stout stock portfolio and sizable commercial real estate holdings—were ably managed by a man in Cleveland. His three eldest children were in school, and the latecomer, Clarence, was well cared for by a live-in nurse.

  Yet it was too soon to be bored. Adams was right next door, and Hay was surrounded and celebrated by a circle of Republican stallions: Roosevelt, Lodge, Blaine, not to mention Don Cameron. President and Mrs. Harrison welcomed him and Clara at the White House. And with the Lincoln book finished, he had more time to write other things. He turned again to poetry, pulling together an edition of some of his early work—post–“Banty Tim” and “Jim Bludso”—which, as he explained to Henry James, “I have had specially printed for my good friends and lovers.” He also composed a new sonnet, “Love’s Dawn,” whose weary narrator discovers love after a long search:

  In wandering through waste places of the world,

  I met my love and knew not she was mine. . . .

  And then one blessed day, I saw arise

  Love’s morning, glorious, in her tranquil eyes.

  He sent the sonnet to the Century, though he admitted, “I am rather too old a bird to be singing in this strain.”

  At fifty-two, however, he was evidently not too old to be beguiled by other women. His fixation on Lizzie Cameron, while still inchoate, was ongoing, and she was not the only woman who turned his head. Sometime in 1889, and certainly by the spring of 1890, he became enamored of Nannie Lodge, the congressman’s wife. Soon he and Nannie were finding ways to be together, frequently in the company of Adams and Lizzie. How far their romance progressed can only be conjectured, but for a short while they were drawn to each other, concealing their attraction from their spouses and the rest of capital society. Given the timing and the circumstances, it is hard to believe that “Love’s Dawn” was written with Clara in mind.

  Anna Cabot Mills was the daughter of the commandant of the Naval Observatory and a cousin of Cabot Lodge, whom she married in 1871, when both were twenty-one. While Lizzie Cameron was seductive and effervescent, Nannie Lodge’s beauty was enchanting in its grace and serenity. While men tended to fawn over Lizzie, women were jealous of her, suspicious of the undercurrent of guile implicit in a marriage to a much older man. Nannie, on the other hand, was adored equally by both sexes. Theodore Roosevelt’s sister, Corrine, declared that Nannie had a “fascination possessed by no other.” Nannie’s friend Margaret Chanler proclaimed: “Forget any praises I may have bestowed on others. She was the most charming woman I have ever known. . . . [S]he took delight in all that was delightful, yet never lost her bearings in fogs of enthusiasm.”

  Nannie was slim and fair; she loved poetry and played the piano well. Friends commended her wit and strength, her sweetness and gentleness. Yet it was her eyes that bewitched all those fortunate to meet their sympathetic gaze. (Were these the “tranquil eyes” of “Love’s Dawn”?) Margaret Chanler described them as “the color of the sky when stars begin to twinkle.” John Singer Sargent, lamenting that he had never painted Nannie’s portrait, remarked, “I had such an unqualified regard for her that the odds were in favor of my succeeding in getting something of that kindness and intelligence of her expression and the unforgettable blue of her eyes.”

  Hay and Nannie were together often, although they found few occasions to be together alone—surrounded, as they were, by their spouses, children (Nannie had three), and social set. Still, nothing would have prevented them from engaging in pleasant, even subtly flirtatious conversation, an idiom in which Hay excelled. They were in each other’s company at Adams’s breakfasts, frequent dinners, and a string quartet performance at the Hay house. Hay’s renewed interest in romantic verse may have been purely coincidental, but at about the same time that he submitted “Love’s Dawn” to the Century, he wrote Henry James, “I was drinking tea this afternoon with one of the most charming women in America, Mrs. Cabot Lodge.”

  While Hay was being charmed by Nannie, Adams was doting on Lizzie. By the spring of 1890, Adams had made plans to sail to the South Pacific, departing in August, to be gone for as long as a year. In the months leading up to his absence, Adams looked for every possible chance to be with Lizzie, visiting her at Beverly Farms and at Blue Mountain, in western Maryland. In Washington, they were back and forth to each other’s houses and on several occasions were able to get away on walks and carriage rides. “[D]o you remember those June nights?” Lizzie wrote after he had gone. “Have you seen anything so beautiful since?”

  Hay and Nannie remembered those nights, for on a number of them they, Adams, and Lizzie were a foursome. And on one particular evening the foursome divided into two separate couples. The evidence of this more intimate interlude is a poem written by Hay sometime between June and August, after a moonlit visit to the Capitol. “Two on the Terrace” describes a pair of lovers gazing, suggestively, westward down the Mall toward the Washington Monument:

  See the white obelisk soaring

  To pierce the blue profound.

  Beneath the still heavens beaming,

  The lighted town lies gleaming . . .

  The narrator sees “the wide pure heaven” reflected in the eyes of his companion and exclaims:

  Ah love! a thousand aeons

  Shall range their trooping years;

  The morning stars their paeans

  Shall sing to countless ears.

  These married states may sever,

  Strong Time this dome may shiver,

  But love shall last forever

  And lovers’ hopes and fears.

  So let us send our greeting,

  A wish for trust and bliss,

  To future lovers meeting

  On far-off nights like this.

  Who, in these walls’ undoing

  Perforce of Time’s rough wooing—

  Amid the crumbling ruin

  Shall meet, clasp hands, and kiss.

  Hay showed
the poem to Lizzie, and presumably to Nannie, shortly after completing it, but Adams did not read “Two on the Terrace” until it appeared in Scribner’s a year later. By then, he was on the other side of the world. “Great Kung-fu-tse!” he wrote Lizzie. “[W]hat two? which two? for were we not four? or do I dream it? and the kiss! I can say that the pair to which I belonged, knew nothing of any kiss. If kissing there was, the other two were the sole parties of it! Is the kiss to be regarded as poetic, or is it attributed on trust to me, or was it—oh no! it would be naughty to even think it. I never could have believed that John should so compromise a trusting and lovely female. What must she think? and Mrs. Hay?”

  Perhaps Adams was right, and there had been no kiss. His letter at least seems to substantiate that his relationship with Lizzie was platonic, or anyway not consummated sexually. Likewise, it is safe to surmise that Hay never got much farther than a kiss with Nannie, if in fact he got that far. Nevertheless, his admiration was real, persistent, and to a certain yet unknowable degree requited.

  As for Clara’s reaction, there is nothing to tell. Hay had written numerous romantic poems over the years, assuring his wife that they were merely exercises of imagination. Doubtless the sexual imagery of a white obelisk piercing “the blue profound” was lost on her. Nor would she have given second thought to her husband’s phrasing, “These married states may sever,” assuming he meant states of the Union and not unions of matrimony. Hay, however, was no naïf; his choice of words may have been wistful, but it was hardly accidental.

  Other clues to the affair are provided in Lizzie’s letters to Adams. In July, Hay, Clara, and the children went to Lake Sunapee, boarding in the town of Newbury while construction began on their new house. At the end of August, Hay and Clara met Lizzie and Nannie in Boston, followed by visits to Beverly Farms and Nahant. “John and Nannie got a little walk together,” Lizzie informed Adams, “but on the whole behaved extremely well.” Later in the fall, Lizzie wrote again to Adams: “Nanny and Cabot go to New York on the 10th. It is rather a coincidence that Mr. Hay must start on the same day.” And in Washington the following January, Hay got Lizzie aside after a musicale and told her that Clara was going to Cleveland and that, while his wife was away, he hoped he might lunch with her and Nannie at the Washington Country Club and possibly also squire them to Mount Vernon, the theater, and “a few other quiet entertainments.”

  “So Friday we go to the play,” Lizzie told the wayfaring Adams, “and Tuesday next to the [Country Club] and Mt. Vernon depends on the weather. But we cannot decide on the fourth man and Mr. Hay and Nannie seem to think it very stupid of us not to like anyone well enough to want to spend long hours with him.”

  Several short letters from Hay to Lizzie are similarly suggestive. None is fully dated. “I have asked Mrs. Lodge if she would like to go with you—if you come for her,” he wrote Lizzie, arranging a rendezvous. “Would you like to do this & let me try to find somebody”—presumably a “fourth”—“or will you give it up?” On another occasion, he proffered: “Here are two tickets, for you and the mysterious but welcome fourth person. I will meet you at the Theatre.”

  Lizzie was aware also that Hay had written intimate letters to Nannie. After Hay’s death, when Clara began collecting her husband’s letters for publication, Lizzie recalled that Nannie “destroyed all hers in a panic of terror . . . in order that she could truly say she possessed no letters at all.”

  Yet regardless of its degree or depth, Hay and Nannie’s romance broke off at the end of April 1891, when he sailed to Europe alone. By chance, Lizzie Cameron sailed two weeks later, without her husband. Before leaving Washington, she wrote Adams, somewhat speculatively and, as it turned out, inaccurately, “[Hay’s] love for Nanny does not wane. I am awfully sorry for him.”

  Little did she anticipate that Hay’s ardor was about to be transferred to her. The tryst with Nannie had lasted hardly more than a year. He would be in love with Lizzie Cameron for the rest of his life. As he had written seven years earlier in The Bread-Winners, describing Arthur Farnham’s maneuverings among the ladies of Buffland: “He then gave himself up to that duplex act to which all unavowed lovers are prone—the simultaneous secret worship of one woman and open devotion to another.” John Hay’s open devotion would always be to Clara. Henceforth the object of his secret worship would be Lizzie Cameron and none besides.

  ON THE BOAT OVER, Hay caught a cold that worsened after he got to London. The doctor prescribed a cocaine spray that made his throat go numb. He wrote mournfully to Clara: “I do not believe it pays, at my time of life, to travel alone and I shall never do it again.”

  Yet he was hardly by himself. He made the rounds of the galleries and auction houses and looked up old friends, including Robert Lincoln, George Smalley, and Henry James. Lizzie arrived on the fourteenth, accompanied by her daughter, Martha; her stepdaughter Rachel; and Hattie Blaine, daughter of the secretary of state. As she came ashore, Lizzie mailed a letter to Adams: “I shall see John Hay at once. . . . It is so nice to be able to talk of you to some one, and it does me a lot of good. I’ll talk of you and he of Nannie!” Hay immediately invited them to dinner at the Bristol Hotel, along with James, Bret Harte, and several others.

  On the advice of his doctor, he cut short his time in London and went to Paris, staying with Whitelaw Reid. Again his letters to Clara are forlorn and tender. “I am already looking forward to getting home—& home is not Washington nor Cleveland nor any other town—it is you, my own darling, my dear sweet, good wife.” And four days later: “I want to get back to you. I want to hold you in my arms. I want to love you & kiss you. You are the only person in the world I care for or who cares for me.”

  He also told Clara that he had seen “the Cameron clan,” who had crossed to France soon after he did. What he did not bother to mention was that, despite his nagging cold, he was escorting Lizzie Cameron around Paris. “John Hay and I have had a real Parisian spree,” Lizzie confessed to Adams on May 26. “I hope that you are jealous. Please don’t tell him I told you, but we dined in a cabinet particulier, and went in a lover loge to a ballet. I actually felt wicked and improper. He did, too, for he felt obliged to follow up the precedent and to tell me how much he loved me.”

  By now Lizzie was accustomed to men falling under her spell, and in her letter to Adams she made light of Hay’s advances, using one man to play the other—something she did very well. Adams had served as her buffer against the boorishness of her husband, and now Hay was the bait to draw Adams to Paris. Neither she nor Adams was sure what would happen when he arrived, but Adams’s heart was hopeful. Writing to Lizzie from Tahiti, he divulged: “Actually I wish I were at sea. My only source of energy is that I am actually starting on a ten-thousand-mile journey to see—you!” In the same letter to Adams in which she recounted her “Parisian spree” with Hay, Lizzie sang a siren song: “I feel sure now that you will come to Europe. . . . Of course you understand that if you come here you come home. I’ll use force, if necessary, but home you must come.”

  After his fling with Lizzie, Hay returned to London and promptly collapsed with what he at first reckoned was a heart attack—and it may well have been, although the doctor dismissed the incident as a bad case of indigestion. Lizzie arrived in London several days later and found Hay looking pitiful. “He told me yesterday that he felt that this was the last year of his life,” she wrote Adams.

  He was not too frail, however, to take Lizzie to see a collection of old masters at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London or to L’Enfant Prodigue, performed in pantomime by the sad, white-faced Pierrot. Lizzie cried all through the final act, and afterward wrote to Adams about Hay: “When I think of how freely I am seeing him, and that it might be you—! It will be you soon. We are having a desperate affair, so hurry up. Something must break it up before we return to Washington. It was that night in Paris that did the mischief.” Her tone was teasing; she was playing the coquette, as ever. But she was telling the truth—in such a
way that Adams dared not believe her.

  She and Hay saw each other throughout the month of June—at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, in Burlington Gardens, at lunches, teas, and dinners. In his own correspondence to Adams, Hay was not as forthcoming in his descriptions of l’affaire as Lizzie had been, remarking simply, “I sought her genial presence and we took sweet counsel together concerning you and encouraged each other a good deal.” To his wife he mentioned his frequent sightings of Lizzie, making sure in his gossipy commentary to surround her with “the Cameron party,” “all the Camerons,” and “her usual little court.”

  Several days after returning from Paris, he wrote Clara: “When I think of the seventeen years you have been with me, the happiness and content of the heart you have given me, I am filled with a wondering and grateful sense of my great good fortune. In the whole world there was no other woman who could have made me so happy and I found just the one. If I could only dare to hope you have been happier with me, or as happy as you would have been with anyone else, there would be nothing wanting to my content. But I am so conscious of what I lack, I often feel that it was selfish in me to take you for my own, and appropriate to myself your rich, beautiful nature. But that is done, and no repentance will undo it.”

  And so he did not repent. Before his ship departed England, he sent a letter to Lizzie: “London is floating way in the Eastern distance like a city of dream. Before I get to New York I will convince myself that all our innocent sprees were too nice to be true, and I will try to seize them again in visions of the night.”

  When he landed a week later, he found Clara and the two eldest children on the dock to greet him.

  CHAPTER 12

  Tame Cats

  After a short stay in Cleveland and a quick trip to Warsaw to visit his mother, Hay arrived at Lake Sunapee with Clara and the children at the beginning of August. The house at the Fells was not quite finished but far enough along for them to move in. Hay called the place a “pine shanty,” but it was considerably more substantial than that. Its bowed gambrel roof was typical of genteel summerhouses of the day. Sunny upstairs bedrooms and a sixty-foot-long piazza afforded panoramic views of the lake and the magnificent mountains beyond. In addition to a servant wing, icehouse, and stable, Hay also installed a dock; the best way to and from Newbury was by hired steam launch. The Fells would never again be a working farm, although sheep continued to graze in the boulder-strewn pastures.