The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  She is certainly not handsome; nor would she be called quite plain, I think. She is 28 years old. She knows her own mind uncommon well. She does not talk very American. Her manners are quiet. She reads German—also Latin—also, I fear, a little Greek, but very little. She talks garrulously, but on the whole pretty sensibly. She is very open to instruction. We shall improve her. She dresses badly. She decidedly has humor and will appreciate our wit. She has enough money to be quite independent. She rules me as only American women rule men, and I cower before her. Lord! how she would lash me if she read the above.

  Though Clover’s intellect was “quick and active,” Henry had observed that she lacked thorough knowledge of any subject. Her mind, like the minds of other women he had known, struck him as “a queer mixture of odds and ends, poorly mastered and utterly unconnected.” (Henry James, who shared Adams’s reservations, had once declared Clover that rarest of creatures, a woman with “intellectual grace.”)

  Like virtually all of her female contemporaries on Beacon Hill, Clover had not gone to college, which was held to be injurious to girls by subjecting them to pressure and anxiety at the moment Nature had reserved for perfecting their reproductive systems. In 1872, Edward H. Clarke, a prominent Boston physician, warned the New-England Women’s Club that invalidism and early menopause occurred more frequently among female college graduates than other women, and he painted a hellish prospect for those who stopped menstruating before Nature intended. Skin toughened, the body hardened, maternal instincts dwindled, and one acquired an “Amazonian coarseness and force.” Altogether, said Dr. Clarke, such females were “analogous to the sexless class of termites.”

  Boston feminists, Julia Ward Howe among them, were quick to react. Mrs. Howe, who had turned her reforming energies from abolitionism to women’s suffrage, urged that men and women be educated together in order to enjoy each other to the fullest in marriage. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a novelist, argued that women were less likely to be harmed by education than by “the change from intellectual activity to intellectual inanition…. The sense of perplexed disappointment, of baffled intelligence, of unoccupied powers, of blunted aspirations … is enough to create any illness which nervous wear and misery can create.”

  Clover’s aunt Carrie Tappan counted herself one of the baffled and blunted. After a childhood of rowing and riding with boys, she felt betrayed when they went off to Harvard without her. Barred from academic pursuits, she wrote melancholy poetry and turned her inquisitiveness to the shadowy, faintly disreputable world of psychic phenomena.

  Clover’s school days were passed very happily at a progressive Cambridge establishment run by the wife of Louis Agassiz, a distinguished Harvard naturalist who had taught paleontology to Henry Adams. Like her sister Ellen and the daughters of many Boston notables, Clover studied the classics, learned French and German, and was introduced to the sciences by Professor Agassiz himself.

  If Clover yearned for more education when she met Henry, she did not say so, and once he proposed, she yearned only to share her joy. “I love you more because I love Henry Adams very much,” she sang to a friend. In a letter to her sister, she recounted a dream in which the two of them sat side by side, separated by a high wall of ice. Ellen’s ice melted with her marriage to Whitman Gurney, but Clover’s ice was in the shade and could not thaw. Then a blinding sunset forced her to cover her eyes. When she took her hands from her face, “there sat Henry Adams holding them and the ice has all melted away and I am going to sit in the Sun as long as it shines thro’.”

  As a marriage prospect, Clover’s greatest attraction was money, which Henry, with a comfortable income of his own, did not need. For Clover, the heady truth was that Henry Adams loved her for herself. A “charming blue,” one of his friends had dubbed her, and in fact he was captivated by her bluestocking qualities—her wide curiosity and a healthy scorn of convention.

  Clover’s gift to Henry was a new and enfolding sense of well-being. The Hoopers accepted him as he was—undoubtedly a delectable shock to one accustomed to the rigors of a family in which self-improvement was a relentless imperative. The Hoopers, believing that the fortune accumulated by their seafaring ancestors was meant to be enjoyed, cared more for pleasure than influence and freely indulged their passion for art. Ned was a founding trustee of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, an early enthusiast of Winslow Homer, and one of the first Americans to appreciate the eerie engravings of William Blake. Fascinated by their taste, grateful for their affection, Henry gave the Hoopers an unabashed adoration that Charles Adams would never forgive.

  For ten days the newlyweds stayed at Cotuit Point on Cape Cod, walking in the woods, calling on friends, and lolling on a large yacht left at their disposal by Clover’s uncle. They kept their sexual discoveries to themselves, but for Henry at least, the experience came as a relief. Just before asking Clover to marry him, he had wondered anxiously how men and women reconciled themselves to sexual intimacy, which he referred to as “the brutalities of marriage.” The reassuring surprise of life with Clover was that she seemed as familiar as his oldest furniture. “It is rather a sell to find that marriage is a very quiet institution,” he wrote a friend a few weeks after the wedding.

  Henry and Clover Adams crossing the Atlantic on their honeymoon, as sketched in pencil by Clover.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Clover was less serene. She wrote chipper notes home, but she deeply missed her father and worried because she knew he missed her. Widowed for nearly twenty-five years, Dr. Hooper was more attached to Clover than to his other children. Clover was five when her mother died—four years younger than Ned, five years younger than Ellen—and she had always lived at home. Her father’s closest companion, Clover rode with him, managed his household, and served as hostess when his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came for dinner. At sixty-two he was unlikely to return to medicine, the career for which he had trained but never practiced except as a volunteer.

  While there was little Henry could do to ease the pain of separation, he showed a tender understanding of the tie between father and daughter. “I wish it were in my power to make the loss of Clover less trying to you,” he wrote Dr. Hooper the day after the wedding, “but I know no other way of doing it than by making her as happy as I can.”

  The first sign of Clover’s unhappiness spilled out inadvertently during the ocean voyage that followed their Cape Cod idyll. In a cartoon depicting the miseries of seasickness, Clover sketched two figures lying stiffly in coffinlike berths on opposite sides of the state-room. With his eyes closed and hat on, Henry wears a distinctly comic expression, but Clover, hair disheveled and body tightly bound by blankets, stares wide-eyed into infinity. Intending the drawing for her father’s amusement, Clover seemed to have no sense of the panic and isolation it revealed.

  Still, homesickness did not entirely rule out happiness, and Clover’s letters often contained evidence of both. From Lake Como she reported that Henry rowed her “for hours in and out of strange places, picturesque villas with stone saints and popes guarding the entrance, here a cove, there a waterfall. When we are hungry, we land and ransack a town for figs, and so the day slips by.” Yet she was glad to learn that her father missed her, she said, “because I long to see you, and it wouldn’t be nice to have it all on my side.”

  In Geneva, where Charles Francis Adams, Sr., was representing the United States at the arbitration of a dispute with England, Clover had her first encounter with Henry’s parents. It did not go well. Afraid that the dresses in her trunks were too plain for the ballrooms frequented by the diplomatic corps, Clover begged to be excused from these formal occasions. She had her way, but the elder Adamses did not hide their displeasure. Henry’s mother, Clover noted, was “quite disgusted.”

  By early December, Henry and Clover were ready for the most adventurous stretch of their honeymoon, a three-month cruise on the Nile. Henry had learned the rudiments of photography especially for the excursion, and Clov
er planned to sketch and keep a journal. But from their first day in Cairo’s dusty streets, which teemed with bad-tempered camels, veiled women, swarthy complexions, and a babble of alien tongues, Clover felt menaced. A visit to a mosque took on the character of a nightmare. Dervishes in long gowns and high white hats “spun round and round” while other “wild creatures” snorted like beasts and swung themselves “backward and forward, almost touching the ground with their heads.” For more than half an hour they whirled faster and faster until she felt “surrounded by maniacs.” Apologizing to her father for a lapse in correspondence, she explained, “I have found it impossible to get my ideas straightened out at all.” As she contemplated the long voyage that lay ahead, she was filled with anxiety. “I can’t imagine how anybody can write letters from the Nile, as everyone knows about the Pyramids and Sphinxes and ruins, and it is so useless to try and say anything new about them.”

  On December 10, the Adamses set out on their chartered boat, the Isis, a modern version of an ancient shallow-water craft known as a dahabeah. Flat-bottomed and fitted with two masts, dahabeahs could be sailed, rowed, poled, or towed. With a crew of at least twelve, the Isis afforded numerous pleasures, and on many days Clover surrendered to them. The food she found “worthy of Paris,” the climate sunny and soft. In the long stretches of river between ruins, she and Henry read on deck, and as Christmas drew near, the crew festooned their cabin with palm fronds. When the Isis tied up along the banks, the Adamses frequently dined with other Americans. On many days they hiked and picnicked with Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Ward of New York, and from time to time they met up with the family of an energetic, bespectacled fourteen-year-old, also from New York: armed with a rifle he had received for Christmas, young Theodore Roosevelt shot his first bird and declared himself “proportionately delighted.” Henry might have joined the lad with the rosy cheeks and large, brilliant teeth, but his own shooting gear, ordered months before in London, had failed to turn up.

  The Adamses did not see him, but Ralph Waldo Emerson was also on the Nile, traveling with his daughter and cursing Egypt as an affront to his New England soul. He loathed the tawny landscape, the cloudless sky, the absence of trees. The trip was “a perpetual humiliation, satirizing and whipping our ignorance,” he scratched in his journal. “The people despise us because we are helpless babies who cannot speak or understand a word they say; the Sphinxes scorn dunces; the obelisks, the temple-walls defy us with their histories which we cannot spell.”

  When other travelers told the Adamses of the old philosopher’s testiness, Clover was shocked. “I confess that temples do begin to pall—but that is an aside—so much the worse for me!” she told her father. “How true it is that the mind sees what it has means of seeing. I get so little, while others about me are so intelligent and cultivated that everything appeals to them.” Where Emerson at seventy could admit that he disliked Egypt precisely because it humiliated him, Clover felt the same humiliation and blamed herself.

  She begged her father not to show her “silly and homesick” letters to anyone and worried that Henry’s family would be offended by her silence. But, she told Dr. Hooper, “I cannot write except to you who are used to my stupidity and shortcomings.” By this time, she was agonizing over more than epistolary failures. “I must confess I hate the process of seeing things which I am hopelessly ignorant of, and am disgusted by my want of curiosity. I like to watch pyramids, etc., from the boat, but excursions for hours in dust and heat have drawbacks to people so painfully wanting in enthusiasm as I am.” Unable to compose a proper account of her visit to Luxor, she lamented, “I never seem to get impressions that are worth anything, and feel as if I were blind and deaf and dumb too.” No journal would be kept, no sketches made.

  Several biographers have intimated that Clover suffered a nervous collapse on the Nile. Clearly the experience was an ordeal. But the only evidence of a breakdown is slight and oblique. For several weeks it appears that Clover wrote no letters; at least none have survived. Henry’s correspondence also dropped off. In a note to a friend he mentioned that he had thought of writing an essay on Egyptian law but had given it up. “I have too much on my hands,” he said, declining to elaborate.

  Whatever the nature and the depth of Clover’s despair, her spirits lifted on the Nile island of Philae, with its enormous sandstone boulders and colorful temples. For more than a week, she and Henry strolled among Philae’s painted columns and Coptic shrines and basked in the sunshine of roofless temples. They rowed a bit and dined often with several American families, including the Wards and Roosevelts. Clover found the climate perfect and the ruins, set against deep-blue mountains, superb. South of Philae the Nile had been closed to tourists because of cholera, but when the quarantine was lifted and the Adamses extended their stay, Clover expressed no dismay.

  By mid-March, when they boarded a steamer for Naples, Clover regretted “leaving palms and camels and turbans forever.” Egypt was “a great success,” she concluded. “We feel as if we had had a great bath of sunshine and warmth and rest, and are quite made over new.” She even declared herself finished with homesickness. Henry, rarely mentioned in her bleakest letters, reappeared as her tender and devoted companion, buying her a Bedouin necklace and engaging himself with the question of where they would live when they returned to Boston.

  Working their way north, they stopped in Rome, where they encountered their peripatetic friend Henry James, who had recently forsaken America for Europe. Homesick and aching with uncertainty over the “desolate exile” he had chosen for himself, James could not decide how he felt about the Adamses. He told one correspondent that “Henry A. can never be in the nature of things a very spacious or sympathetic companion and Mrs. A. strikes me as toned down and bedimmed from her ancient brilliancy.” To his brother William, however, he said he found Professor Adams “improved,” and he intuited that Clover, though her wit had been “clipped a little,” had been “expanded in the ‘affections’” by marriage.

  Like other Americans, the Adamses made their way to the Roman studio of William Wetmore Story, an expatriate sculptor. “Oh! how he does spoil nice blocks of white marble,” Clover moaned. Nor did she approve of the paintings of Elihu Vedder, another American settled in Rome. No longer signs of discontent, these dislikes were the confident judgments of a practiced connoisseur. From the moment the Adamses landed in Italy until they sailed home from England, Clover’s letters brimmed with happy accounts of her purchases of ancient Italian terra-cotta figures, watercolors, Oriental rugs, and Japanese bronzes. Twenty-five crates of treasure would follow them home.

  In Paris they settled into a sunny hotel on the Rue de Rivoli long enough to install plants on the balcony and hang their new watercolors. Their only unpleasantness arrived in the form of Henry’s brother Charles. More than a year had passed since the wedding at Beverly Farms, but Charles had not lost his sneer. After surprising them early one morning, Charles told his wife he had torn Henry “out of the arms of his Clover, for he’s always in clover now (Joke! ha! ha!)!” Marriage had turned Henry into “a damned solemn, pompous little ass,” he fumed. Clover, who clung to Henry’s hand and chattered more than Charles thought fitting, was “an infernal bore.”

  Arriving in Massachusetts in August 1873, Henry and Clover went straight to Dr. Hooper at Beverly Farms. A few days later, Henry journeyed to Quincy alone to see his parents. He expected that he and Clover would soon pay a visit together, but for the moment they were absorbed in life at Beverly and the logistics of setting up a household in Boston. Their new quarters at 91 Marlborough Street were not far from 114 Beacon Street, the home of Clover’s father.

  3

  The King of Diamonds

  No one was better equipped than Clarence King to understand the closeness between Clover Adams and her father. Born January 6, 1842, in Newport, Rhode Island, Clarence King was the son of James Rivers King, a China trader, and Florence Little King, a deeply religious woman with a taste for Romantic poetry. In 1
848, James died in China. When the boy’s infant sister died soon afterward, the grieving Florence resolved to devote her life to her son. It was a vow she kept, and it forged a bond her son never managed to break.

  Determined to give the boy a superior education in spite of her limited means, Florence moved from one Connecticut town to another in search of fine public schools. Away from the classroom, Clarence spent hours roving through woods and fields, coming home with detailed descriptions of nature and dozens of questions. Florence encouraged these explorations, found science books for him, and read him poems about God and the majesty of Nature.

  In the spring of 1859, on the eve of his graduation from Hartford High School, Clarence withdrew because of “illness.” Quite unexpectedly he decided against going to college, moved to Brooklyn, and went to work for a flour broker in Manhattan. Though he found business “distasteful,” he was determined to make his own way, he wrote to his closest school friend, James Gardiner. “I feel that I am my own man dependent on no one, and if I fail no one but myself is to blame. Then again if I succeed it is owing entirely to myself for not a soul has aided me.”

  The cause of this sudden display of independence was a man named George Howland. A moderately prosperous New York businessman, a widower with one son, Howland wanted to marry Florence King, who saw no reason to discourage the arrangement. Loathing the prospect of sharing his mother with a stepfather and a stepbrother, seventeen-year-old Clarence intended to break away. To underscore the separation, he announced that he had chosen a new name for himself: henceforth he wanted to be known as “Clare,” not “Clarence.”

  To the complicated hurts of his altered relationship with his mother were added the torments of sexual longing. The ideals of purity that he and Gardiner had piously set forth for themselves in Hartford seemed hopelessly unattainable in New York, where there was “more than one seductive, wicked, beautiful, fascinating, jolly, voluptuous, apparently modest artful woman to one poor chicken here; they show you their necks and bosoms without intending to and all sorts of abominable wiles they practice on a fellow that are mighty inflaming.”