The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  By midsummer, even Hay was nervous about Richardson’s visions of grandeur. “I fear I approach my Waterloo,” he moaned to Adams. His estimate had jumped from $50,000 to $61,000 and seemed to include only “a wall and a roof.” The newspapers had just revealed that the Democratic nominee for president, Grover Cleveland, had long ago fathered a child out of wedlock, and Hay playfully regretted that his architectural follies on Lafayette Square ruled out the possibility of supporting “one of Cleveland’s families.”

  The Adamses’ price had soared, too, from $35,000 to $50,000. Richardson, Henry told Hay, was “an ogre. He devours men crude, and shows the effects of inevitable indigestion in his size.” Hay concurred with a sigh: “Any naturalist, looking at us, would say he was born devourer and we devourees.” Resistance proved futile, and in the space of a few weeks, Hay’s estimate shot up again, to $80,000.

  Construction began in July, while Henry and Clover were at Beverly Farms. Returning to H Street at the end of October, they were cheered by the sight of bricklayers, the perfume of fresh sawdust, and the industrious din of hammer and saw. The Adamses sent progress reports and photographs to the Hays, and Henry imagined the moment when the Hearts would sip Chateau Latour ’64 in the mahogany splendor of the Hays’ dining room. But once the wall studs were up, Adams was assailed by a new worry: size. “Perhaps my wife and I may squeeze into our stye, small as it is,” he told Hay, “but how you and the new baby can live in your confined quarters, I don’t know.”

  The new baby, named Clarence in honor of the fifth Heart, had arrived a few days before Christmas. Too kind to shout his joy to childless friends, Hay settled for telling the Adamses he had been thinking of Henry’s remark that bringing a child into the world entailed even more responsibility than committing a murder. “And lo!” said Hay, “here am I staggering under a fourfold responsibility.” The new father saved his exultation for a letter to W. D. Howells, whose new novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, had been running as a serial in the Century. Hay had just finished reading the last installment to Clara, who was “in bed of a fine boy—a fine boy, mind you. 11-pound Boy, if you please.” As for the novel, the Hays agreed that it was “equal to the very best you had done—which is superlative speech with us.”

  In Washington, snowstorms and squabbles with Richardson delayed construction, but numerous visits from John La Farge during January and February of 1885 seemed to calm Henry’s architectural jitters. Bolstered by La Farge’s confidence in Richardson, Henry began planning embellishments. He envisioned “playful brickwork” for his own house and La Farge stained glass for Hay’s staircase windows.

  Hay had his doubts, having commissioned La Farge to do a window for his church in Ohio. Although the glass had been “solemnly promised” for the previous fall, Hay told Adams, it had not yet been delivered. The building was now completed except for La Farge’s window, “which makes me ashamed to go to Church, and I am consequently fast relapsing into heathendom.”

  On March 4, 1885, resting a beefy hand on a small Bible that had belonged to his mother, Grover Cleveland was sworn in as the twenty-second president of the United States. Against all predictions, voters had forgiven his youthful liaison with an older woman, a widow who had borne him a son. (“Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?” Republicans had taunted. Once the ballots were counted, Democrats had their riposte: “Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!”) As soon as the scandal broke, Cleveland had manfully confessed his part and quietly pointed out that he had supported mother and child for years. The clergy railed against Cleveland’s morals, but much of the public sided with Mark Twain, who felt that there was no sane argument against a bachelor’s relationship with a consenting widow. Those who contended otherwise, Twain tartly observed, knew perfectly well “what the bachelor’s alternative was—and tacitly they seemed to prefer that to the widow.”

  Short, fat, and homely, Cleveland made a comical Romeo, and Henry Adams had laughed himself red over the campaign gossip. But he and Clover were delighted when Cleveland squeaked past their nemesis, James G. Blaine, to become the first Democratic president in twenty-eight years. A few nights after the election, rows of celebratory candles flickered in the Adamses’ H Street windows, sending an unmistakable message across Lafayette Square to Chester Arthur’s White House.

  The unswervingly Republican Hay had campaigned for Blaine in Ohio, and Clarence King, just home from Europe, had also hoped for a Blaine victory. “I have always maintained that America was an utter and absolute failure socially, but a considerable success politically,” he told Hay after the election. “It looks as if that last saving feature might break down too and then there would be left only cooking and personal friendship to cheer us up…. I wonder how dear Mrs. Adams will enjoy her Grover?”

  On Inauguration Day, dear Mrs. Adams enjoyed her Grover immensely. Four years before, when Garfield took the oath of office, Henry and Clover had stayed home by the fire. This time they went to the parade and watched Robert E. Lee’s son, a Harvard classmate of Henry’s, riding at the head of a Virginia regiment in rebel gray. Close behind marched a corps of Freedmen, bayonets glinting in the sun. One band played “Dixie,” the next rendered “The Union Forever.” As Clover told her father, “everyone looked gay and happy—and as if they thought it was a big country and they owned it.” In the evening, the Adamses eschewed the inaugural ball but posted themselves at an upstairs window to watch the fireworks bursting over the White House.

  Cleveland’s inauguration was to be the last festive occasion in Clover’s life. A day or two later, word came from Boston that her father had suffered a serious attack of angina pectoris. Clover and Henry hurried to Cambridge, where Dr. Hooper was being nursed by her brother Ned and sister Ellen. The scene could have been lifted from the pages of Esther. Like Esther Dudley’s father, Dr. Hooper was dying, and there was nothing for his daughter to do but watch and wait.

  After a brief stay, Henry went back to Washington. He visited Clover three times during the next several weeks, and from Lafayette Square he wrote her almost daily. “Madam,” his first letter began. “As it is now thirteen years since my last letter to you, possibly you may have forgotten my name. If so, please try and recall it. For a time we were somewhat intimate.” Striking a cadence more like Clover’s than his own, he described the scene he had found on his return: “Peace filled my mind when I heard the busy hammer resounding under our snow-covered roof, and saw that our topmost floor was going ahead just as fast as though the sun was out and birds began to sing.” He sent his love to the Hoopers, adding, “There remains at the bottom of the page just a little crumb of love for you, but you must not eat it all at once. The dogs need so much!”

  Since the Adamses were rarely apart and since the letters they wrote each other before their marriage no longer exist, Henry’s missives to Cambridge in March and April of 1885 are the only record of the way in which he expressed his feelings for his wife. His omissions are telling. Perhaps fearing that Clover’s deep attachment to her father would set loose a grief too great for either of them to manage, he carefully avoided any subject likely to trigger a thought of her impending loss. Nor could he bring himself to declare his love with the relaxed, unabashed sentimentality John Hay used in writing to Clara. Henry’s letters often close with love to Clover and her family, and once he mustered a shout of “Love, love, love!” But it was a month before he dared to express the depth of his feelings, and he could not do it without resorting to a metaphor memorable less for its passion than its stiff intellectuality. His “solitary struggle with platitudinous atoms, called men and women by courtesy,” he said, had led him to wonder: “How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere? Social chemistry—the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules—is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life.”

  For the most part, Henry kept up a cheerful patter, filling sheet after sheet of his creamy stationery with a
mix of progress reports on their house, political gossip, news of friends, and notes on the flowers of spring. “The dogs and I have just come in from picking some violets for you, which we have put in your little Hizan tea-pot on our desk,” he reported after one outing. Home from a long afternoon ride on April 9, he filed a dispatch filled with botanical minutiae of the sort she appreciated: “A few maples show a faint flush here and there, but not a sign of leaf is to be seen, and even the blood-root and hepatica hid themselves from my eyes. A few frogs sang in the sun, and birds sang in the trees; but no sign of a peach-blossom yet, and not even the magnolias and Pyrus Japonica have started. In 1878 the magnolias were in full flower and killed by frost on March 25, and in 1882 the frost killed them on April 10…. So you have not yet lost much spring.”

  As the new houses moved along, he described water pipes and furnaces and consulted her on “the great bell question”—the matter of where to put the electric bells for summoning the servants. He also sought and received her approval for a fireplace faced with a sea-green Mexican onyx, a stone he had discovered during a visit to the Smithsonian. Hay, he reported, was unhappy with his low, cave-like front entrance and protested that it would turn his children into troglodytes. Unconvinced by Henry’s reassurances, Hay had fretted until someone else dropped by and raved about the house. “At this the dear Hay cheered up amazingly,” Henry told Clover. It was Henry’s opinion that the Adamses’ house was handsomer than its companion piece, but he confidently predicted to Clover that the pair would create “a sensation.”

  Politics, with the change of administrations, was a source of endless anecdotes, including a baseless newspaper story that Henry Adams of Massachusetts had been appointed minister to Chile. Henry told Clover that the new president was greatly admired for staying on his feet when he received callers, a tactic that kept their visits wondrously short. As for the old president, Chester Arthur, he had pained a Washington hostess by walking off with an irreplaceable porcelain menu-card holder, mistaking it for a souvenir. Sharing the gaffe with Clover, Henry asked, “Does not this give an exquisite measure of the great booby’s savoir vivre?”

  In the company of H. H. Richardson, Henry paid a call at the White House—his first in almost a decade. They went over at nine o’clock on a Saturday night in late March, making the block-long journey by carriage, undoubtedly at Richardson’s insistence. Miss Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, the sister and official hostess of the bachelor president, ushered them into the Red Room. Under a ceiling of copper and bronze stars flickering in the gaslight, they found the chief executive surrounded by a small group of female visitors. Although Cleveland was not as gargantuan as Richardson, it was easy to believe the newspaper reporter who reckoned that a line drawn from the outermost point of his paunch to the small of his back would measure at least two feet. Like the architect, the president believed that one should never walk if one could ride.

  Richardson lumbered off with Miss Rose to inspect the White House conservatory while Henry stayed to chat with the president and his guests. The Pompeiian red walls intensified Cleveland’s pallor, and the mouth under the dark mustache rarely voiced a thought or framed a smile. Faced with this silence, Henry gathered only one impression to send to Clover: “We must admit that, like Abraham Lincoln, the Lord made a mighty common-looking man in him.”

  Miss Rose was another matter. Thirty-nine and unmarried, she had been a professor in Buffalo. In the White House, she spent most of her time in her study, which looked north across Lafayette Square to the windows of Henry’s library. A fervent champion of temperance, she had once written an article exhorting young women to frown at young men who joked about the cause. Once the male was made to feel that no lady would tolerate such behavior, she wrote, “alcohol will tremble on its throne, and the liquor traffic will hide its cancerous face.” The amused John Hay had forwarded Miss Rose’s sermon to Adams with the instruction, “Read and tremble!”

  Back from the conservatory, Miss Rose deposited Richardson with her brother and fastened upon Adams, managing to arouse all of his ambivalence about women with intellectual ambitions. It was vastly entertaining to find a “sister professor” playing first lady, and as she talked about her new book on George Eliot, he was surprised to see how seriously she took her work. Miss Rose carried “an atmosphere of female college about her thicker than the snow storm outside my window,” Henry wrote to Clover the next day. In spite of his condescension, Henry concluded that he liked Miss Rose. She had expressed a wish to meet Clover, and Henry hoped they would see more of her.

  Around Lafayette Square, the Adamses’ friends responded to Dr. Hooper’s illness and Clover’s absence with cascades of affection. “Please tell your father that I have become quite a dog’s-tail of interest on his account,” Henry wrote to Cambridge. “Lovely women, senators and cabinet ministers invade my privacy to ask about him, and hail me on the street to know the latest advices from you.” For future conclaves of the Five of Hearts, Clarence King sent the Adamses a porcelain tea service with tray, pot, sugar bowl, creamer, and five cups and saucers. “All are prettily decorated with little bunches of roses,” Henry told Clover, “and each has on it a rose clock-face with the hands pointing to five o’clock.” He neglected to mention that all of the pieces except the tray were shaped like hearts.

  John Hay came to town to check on his house and to see George Nicolay about their life of Lincoln, and he prolonged his stay to keep Henry company. Lizzie and Don Cameron, who were planning a summer in Los Angeles in hopes of clearing up an ailment in Don’s lungs, suggested that the Adamses pay an extended visit. Sensing that Beverly Farms would overflow with painful associations after Dr. Hooper’s death, Henry forwarded the invitation. “Don is to have horses for riding, and to live in the open air,” he said, dangling a temptation he thought Clover would not be able to resist.

  On a wet afternoon at the end of March, Clarence King stopped off for a few hours with Adams on his way to the Sombrerete mine in Mexico. They shared a pot of tea and ventured out in the rain to look at the new houses, which King warmly approved. King also inspected the Adamses’ bric-a-brac and pronounced one of their Turners as good as the pair he owned. “Little was said of politics,” Henry told Clover, “but you will be relieved to hear that he said he could not vote and had not voted for Blaine.” That would have come as news to John Hay, with whom King had commiserated after Blaine’s defeat. But after five years of close friendship, it is unlikely that either Hay or Adams would have been surprised by King’s inconsistency. As Henry told Clover after King’s brief stop, the geologist was as “sympathetic” as ever. Writing to Hay after the election, it was natural for King to share the disappointment of his Republican friend. Four months later, visiting with Adams across from Grover Cleveland’s White House, he found it equally easy to identify with Henry’s pleasure in the Democratic victory.

  In his letters to Cambridge, Henry never flagged in his cheerfulness, but after a month of shuttling between Dr. Hooper’s sickbed and Lafayette Square, he was out of sorts. “I bolt forward and back like a brown monkey,” he complained to a friend. “Nobody wants me in either place. They won’t take me for a nurse, and I can’t live all alone in a big, solitary house when it rains and I can’t ride. Even the gold-fish are bored, and the dogs fight to pass the time.”

  On April 9, Dr. Hooper slipped into unconsciousness. Four days later, Clover said, “he went to sleep like a tired traveller.” Hastening to Cambridge, Henry was surprised to find Clover in good spirits.

  So it seemed. A week after returning to Washington, Clover composed a dry-eyed account of her father’s death, emphasizing his stoicism more than her own feelings. “He was unselfish and brave and full of fun until he lost consciousness, and he kept us all up, as he did not fancy hired nurses we had enough to do all those weeks to keep us sound,” she told Anne Palmer. Of herself, Clover merely remarked that she was “tired out in mind and body.” She described the loss of her father in geographical rather than
personal terms: “No one fills any part of his place to me but Henry so that my connection with New England is fairly severed as far as interest goes.” She and Henry planned to stay in Washington until June, then camp out in Yellowstone, “taking our own outfit—horses, tents etc.” If a suitable tenant turned up, they would rent out their house at Beverly Farms.

  H. H. Richardson ardently hoped that they would leave soon. Having just discovered that Henry’s pronounced opinions came from his reading of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, a French architect and critic famed for his restorations of medieval buildings, Richardson was eager to quash the influence. “It is a common saying in Paris that ‘even well-bred horses shy at his buildings,’” Richardson scolded. “Really Henry in your present unnatural state of semi-artistic exaltation my only hope of finishing your house successfully and pleasing you is to get your consent to a few things I have written for and then God-speed you to the Yellowstone.”

  To miss the black flies and mosquitoes, Henry and Clover postponed their Yellowstone excursion until the end of July. But neither of them had much tolerance for the thick, wet heat of a Washington summer, and on June 10, they and their horses boarded a train for the mountains of West Virginia. They stayed a few days at Sulphur Springs, then moved on to Sweet Springs, settling into a wooden cottage nestled under an enormous oak. They wrote letters, read, rode through hills blazing with laurel and azaleas, and swam in the warm, effervescent waters of the mineral spring next to their cabin.