Half in earnest, Hay wrote Lizzie Cameron during the summer to suggest that she buy one of the adjacent properties and “retire from the world you adore and seek real solitude.” Lizzie, meanwhile, remained in Paris, awaiting the arrival of Henry Adams, who, when last heard from, was in Australia. “John Hay writes to me now & then,” she informed Adams. “He pretends that he likes me since our London season together, but I know better. Nanny is the first.” Yet by now even Lizzie had to recognize that this appraisal was out of date.
Hay was slow to recover from whatever had sapped his health in Europe. He complained that he was constantly dizzy and that his heart was “miserably weak.” But, as he had hoped, the air at the Fells and the simpler rhythm of daily life had a restorative effect. And it was the only time during the year that he could spend unhurried hours with the children.
Helen was now sixteen and had taken on “a young lady look that startles and depresses me,” Hay told Whitelaw Reid. In the fall she would enroll in boarding school at Dobbs Ferry, an hour north of New York, and, like all fathers, he hated to see a daughter he doted on leave the nest. Helen and her younger sister, Alice, would remember their father as an unconditional pushover, sweet-tempered and adoring. “He was so tender-hearted that my mother always had to deal with our youthful injuries, illnesses & discipline,” Alice would reminisce. “He couldn’t bear to see us hurt or made unhappy even for our own good. He spoiled us shamefully.” Helen described him as “the jolliest kind of pal,” who sang “old war time songs & plantation melodies” and made up stories about a pixie “who was as real to us as a member of the family.”
As the two girls matured into young women, their father was ever more indulgent. “The greatest treat we had was to go ‘on a spree,’ ” Helen recalled. “When I was away at school he used to come out & always arranged a programme ahead which began with ‘we will have a nice sandwich for lunch at the Station, we then will go & call on an old lady who wishes to see you & we will finish the day with a delightful & improving lecture on Astronomy’—which of course meant that we lunched at Delmonico’s on whatever I wanted to order, be it ever so indigestible, & shopped & ‘played’ all the afternoon & finished up with a musical comedy.” In the same munificent vein, Hay told Alice, “ ‘If you see a thing you really want, get it, no matter what it costs; because if you don’t, it will haunt you all the rest of your life, & come between you & the later desires of your heart & make them appear less & less desirable by comparison.’ ”
With his son Del he was not so liberal. To a father quick of wit and slight of build, the boy seemed “fat and dull.” Hay complained to Adams that he had bought Del “a carload of fishing tackle, which he will never learn how to use.” When Del’s uncle Samuel Mather suggested that Hay acquire their own launch for Lake Sunapee, Hay thought it a bad idea: “I have no knowledge or capacity that way, and Del is too lazy.” What he did not recognize was just how rapidly Del was growing into his sturdy bones—a physique he inherited more from his mother. By fourteen, he was taller than his father, and his baby fat was already maturing into brawn. His great desire was to play football, the rage among schoolboys and college men but not exactly his father’s game. The most strenuous exercise Hay had undertaken in recent years was to shiver in a duck blind on a raw Lake Erie morning.
HENRY ADAMS HAD NOT seen Lizzie in a year, and now he could not travel fast enough. While he was in the South Pacific, she had written him that she would be in Paris in October, waiting for him. “To think that you are coming, are on your way!” she beckoned. “That I shall see you, shall take you home. I can scarce realize it tho’ I walk on air in consequence.”
From Sydney he replied: “I am grateful as though I were a ten-year-old boy whom you had smiled at, and put in rapture of joy at being noticed.” He was not the least alarmed by her disclosure that she and Hay had been having an “affair.” “The more you please others, the more you delight me. . . . Fascinate John Hay by all means,” he wrote with merry magnanimity. He arrived in Paris on October 10 and sent a note the next day inquiring “at what hour one may convenablement pay one’s respects.”
Lizzie was delighted that a man would come more than ten thousand miles to pledge his affection. Yet once he was at her door on the rue Bassano, off the Champs-Elysées, the currency of romance depreciated to the small change of anticlimax. It was the pursuit that had appealed to her; she had no intention of being captured, nor of capturing Adams. What either of them imagined might unfold in Paris, or after Paris, seems never to have been fully articulated. Once they stood face to face, the gulf between them was immeasurable, their nearness a dream dissolved. She was as blithe as Adams was stunned.
During the two weeks they were both in Paris, she avoided seeing him alone, using her daughter and stepdaughter as convenient foils. “Mrs. Cameron is no good,” Adams finally wrote to a friend. “She has too much to do, and lets everybody make use of her, which pleases no one because of course each person objects to the other persons having rights that deserve respect. As long as she lives it will always be so.” Quoting Elizabeth Browning, he told Lizzie he felt as if he’d been hit over the head with “an apocalyptic Never.”
Just the same, Adams followed her to London, where she tarried briefly on the way to America. On the day of her departure, as her cab rolled away from Half Moon Street, she told him she was sorry that their “Paris experiment” had not worked out. From the ship she wrote, “Thank you a thousand times for everything.”
In reply, he composed a series of lugubrious letters that would follow her to Washington. “[N]o matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask,” he confessed, “I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have. Sooner or later the end of such a situation is estrangement, with more or less disappointment and bitterness. I am not old enough to be a tame cat; you are too old to accept me in any other character.”
Nevertheless, he was willing to be taken back on any terms, if only he knew what they were: “I would give you gladly as many opal and diamond necklaces as Mr. Cameron would let you wear if I could only for once look clear down to the bottom of your mind and understand the whole of it.” Until then, he reconciled, “[Y]ou are Beauty; I am the Beast.”
A few days later, Adams wrote a breezier letter to Hay, recapping his recent activities, including his stay in Paris. “I could find nothing new that pleased me either in art or literature,” he reported, “and as for society nothing of the satisfactory sort was within the bounds of my imagination; but a fortnight or so passes quickly even if nothing is the result.” Of his rendezvous with Lizzie, he mentioned merely that her company served to “beguile my ennui at intervals.” Adams and Hay were confidants in many things, but the particulars of their respective relationships with Lizzie Cameron evidently were not among them.
Adams did not return to Washington until the following February. In the meantime, Hay and Lizzie saw each other often. In late November and early December, while Clara was still in Cleveland, Hay hosted at least two dinner parties at which Lizzie was a guest. After one of them, Lizzie wrote to Adams, reciting the guest list, which included the Blaines, the Roosevelts, and the Lodges. “We all talk to each other and dine with each other just as we have done for two years past,” she said, noting too that Hay was looking much better than when she had last seen him in London. Hay wrote Adams a few days later, remarking that “the women looked extremely pretty in their new gowns. Mrs. Cameron’s Parisian bravery causes all the others to die with envy.”
After the New Year, as the season for balls and diplomatic receptions picked up its pace, Hay seemed never to stray far from the women he admired. At one debutante ball he sat with Nannie Lodge, discussing civil service reform with Charles Bonaparte, the Baltimore-born great-nephew of Napoleon I. “Or at least, I think it was Civil Service—we complimented her eyes,” he joked. He was not so captivated by Nannie that he
did not notice Lizzie in a beautiful black satin gown, dancing with the Turkish minister. “Mrs. Cameron is at her best, which is superlative enough,” he reported to Adams. “One never sees her, though, except through a fluttering haze of dagoes and dudes.”
In late January, after another evening during which he had been unable to talk to Lizzie with any satisfaction, he took a walk around the square to gather his thoughts. Returning home, he put pen to paper, pouring out emotions that had been building up since the previous spring. The letter carries no salutation, no signature, and no address—suggesting that it was delivered by hand. “Good night, my tantalizing goddess,” he began. “A dozen times this day I have been at the point of believing that you are not really so complicated as you seem, but that last half hour threw me into the wildest confusion again. I give it up. I will not try to comprehend you. Still less can I criticize you. I shall never know you well enough to do either. After you were gone the usual outcry of admiration broke forth. I said, ‘She has an absolutely different manner in speaking to each man in the room.’ . . . Upon my word I believe if you spoke to a thousand men, you would naturally, by some divine gift of sympathy—or else by some benign science of cruelty—assume to each one of them the form, the eyes, and voice of his ideal. And yet it seems to me that you cannot be to others anything different from what you are to me. A form of perfect grace and majesty, a face radiant with a beauty so gloriously vital that it refreshes and stimulates every heart that comes within its influence; a voice, a laughter so pure and so musical that it carries gladness in every vibration of the air. You sweet comrade, you dear and splendid friend, who is worthy to be your friend and comrade? I am humbled to the ground before you.”
He went on to summon the memory of their time together in England, when he allowed himself to believe he might hold her undivided affection. “What can restore the sweet serenity of that early worship?” he wondered. “My proud goddess, my glorious beauty, my grand, sweet woman, I want to shut my eyes to everything about you here, and adore you as I did at Dulwich, as I did on the terrace by the Thames. Why is it different now? You were surrounded then by adorers bien autrement formidables than the people who obscure you here. Yet I did not mind—any more than a devout person objects to a church being full. Now I feel that your altars are in danger of profanation—the worship itself is threatened.”
In the end, he could only blame himself. “Perhaps the fault is all in me: the resentment may be purely personal, because I have lost the place I have held dear. You know you appointed me No. 3. I can remember the day and the hour, opposite the Knightsbridge Barracks. As nearly as I can now compute I am No. 13—if indeed I am on the list at all. I do not care what my exact number is—I would as soon be 13 as 4—since I have dégringolé [tumbled] from my own place. A true presentiment—which I did not then appreciate—impelled me to worry you to say you would be the same, when we met again. As if promises could avail anything against ‘the strong god Circumstance.’ But I shall never cease to praise and bless you, dear, for what you were, and what you will always be in those sweet memories of Ultramar which I shall carry with me to my dying day.”
Apparently she had given him the same treatment she had given Adams two months earlier—and Hay had responded in a similar fashion. Also like Adams, Hay kept coming back for more. At the end of January, he, Clara, and the Lodges were guests at the Camerons’ new house on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The three couples evidently got along cordially. “I shall remember the week as a bright spot in my life,” Hay wrote, thanking the senator. As for Lizzie, she seemed to have added another tame cat to her menagerie. Hay basked in whatever attention she would give him, knowing that he would be demoted further when Adams arrived in mid-February.
Once Adams was home, they all behaved fairly well through the rest of the winter and spring. In June, Lizzie and Martha again took up residence in Adams’s house in Beverly Farms—without him. “It is rather funny that your house is the only place I have ever had the home feeling,” she wrote him. “If I didn’t like you so well the sense of obligation would be intolerable.”
They all knew what the rules were. After Hay had bared his soul to her in February, she must have told him not to expose himself in that way again, for that summer, when Adams injured his leg in a riding accident, Hay wrote to Lizzie: “This letter ought not to be charged against me, as I only write to tell you how Mr. Adams is.” After a hasty medical report, he signed off, “Just think! I am closing this letter without a single word of Tra-la-la!” When she scolded Adams for not responding quickly enough to her letters of sympathy—and her offer to care for him during his convalescence—he replied, “The first law of tame cats is that under no circumstances must they run the risk of boring their owners by writing more than once a month or so. You never consider that a tame cat’s business is to lie still and purr.”
Hay, however, would not give up the pursuit. In June, he saw Lizzie briefly at the wedding of Cabot and Nannie Lodge’s daughter in Nahant. A few weeks later, he wrote Adams, “I was sorely tempted to run down to Beverly and see Mrs. Cameron, but I had a list of agenda as long as my arm . . . so I came away without visiting that shrine.” In August, he tried again to tempt the Camerons to buy property on Lake Sunapee, though he admitted the notion might seem far-fetched to the owners of a winter retreat in South Carolina and vast estates in Pennsylvania. “We like the place more and more,” he wrote Lizzie of New Hampshire. “We like the gentle squalor of it, and the incredible idleness. There is absolutely nothing to do from morning till night. I hardly dare to recommend it to princesses and goddesses.”
But he did succeed in persuading the Camerons to accept an invitation to the Fells. For the first time in their lives, they were just four—Hay and Clara, Cameron and Lizzie (plus Martha and the Hay children)—and somehow the two-day stay went smoothly. Lizzie had always gone out of her way to compliment the stout, matronly, and habitually reserved Clara. “Mrs. Hay is looking too stunning,” she had told Adams the previous winter. “She is really superb.” The senator was an agreeable enough fellow when he was not drinking heavily. And while he was not entirely oblivious to his wife’s flirtations with other men, for the most part he too was a tame cat. Once when he had tried to rein her in at a dinner party, she had put him in his place. “I just intimated that he must not make me pay for his jealousies,” she told Adams, “and I must talk to whomever I pleased whenever I pleased.”
Still, Hay must have had supreme mastery of his emotions for neither Cameron nor Clara to suspect his true disposition toward Lizzie. Proper manners went only so far; mere glances, even the avoidance of glances, would have spoken volumes to a spouse who harbored the slightest doubt of a partner’s faithfulness. Their friend Henry James had written entire novels that turned on words unspoken between lovers. But if Clara noticed, she held her peace. If Cameron truly cared, he would have done something about it long before.
After the New Hampshire visit, Lizzie sent a favorable report to Adams. “Our little trip to the hills was a great success,” she wrote. “The Hays were kindness itself, and if Mrs. is a poor hostess for a gathering of dip[lomat]s and notables in Washington, she makes up for it in the country to simple folk like ourselves.” Lizzie loved everything about the Fells. “One can scarcely conceive a wilder spot. . . . That lake is exquisite,” she gushed. She also mentioned, “Mr. Hay looks so well that if he tells you he is dying tomorrow you must believe him even less than usual.”
Hay was equally pleased: “Don was grumpily good natured and la Dona was radiantly lovely. They pretended to like the place and commissioned me to ask the price of farms.” In the end, he wrote Lizzie, offering to lease a portion of his own property—“on reasonable terms, say a nickel a year, and then you would have all your money to squander on your house. . . . You could have free range over the whole place and be everywhere welcome as flowers in May.”
Living on the same square with her in Washington was challenging—and frustrating—enou
gh. How they could ever live side by side in the wilds of New Hampshire was something neither of them could fully imagine. Needless to say, nothing came of their summer fancy.
WHILE HAY WAS SAVORING the peace and quiet of the Fells, national politics had broken into its quadrennial lather. Hay had never particularly taken to President Harrison and would have preferred that his friend and neighbor James Blaine vie for the Republican nomination in 1892. Instead, Blaine resigned as secretary of state and retired from politics. In June, the party, with some ambivalence, renominated Harrison; to Hay’s delight, the delegates replaced incumbent Vice President Levi Morton with Whitelaw Reid. “It is the general judgment that Harrison is a good, safe candidate,” Hay wrote Reid after the Republican Convention, “and you are universally regarded as giving the ticket a great reinforcement.” Later in the summer, Hay presented the Reids with a puppy, bred from a collie brought back from Scotland. Reid named the new family member Harrison.
The election of 1892 was a rematch of four years earlier. This time, however, it was Grover Cleveland who was on the outside, knocking to get in. The McKinley Tariff Act had helped many industries, but working-class Americans believed that it made too many imported goods unaffordable. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act, intended to stabilize the currency, was attacked as a “cowardly makeshift.” Violent strikes at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills in Pennsylvania; a hoarsening resentment of the wealthy by labor and the mostly agrarian Populists; plus a president who caused “a chattering of teeth among warm-blooded Republicans of the East”—all these factors worked in Cleveland’s favor.
All the Great Prizes Page 33
