After a month in the mountains, they made a radical change of plans. Thinking about the death of Dr. Hooper, Henry concluded that he did not want to venture too far from his own father, who had been in failing health for most of the year. To his surprise, Clover was willing to go to Beverly Farms, which put him within easy reach of his parents in Quincy.
The summer passed with agonizing slowness, and Clover, despite her determination not to mourn, slid deeper into depression. She was having “a wretched summer, in the gloomiest state of mind,” her brother-in-law Whitman Gurney told a friend. He was touched to see that her “general depression has been accompanied by the greatest sweetness towards us.” Henry told one of his English friends that Clover had been “out of sorts for some time past, and, until she gets quite well again, can do nothing.” To John Hay, Henry confided that his hands were “full,” but he offered no details.
Henry and Clover’s new house had become a torment to them, and the North Shore of Boston furnished little relief since Whitman and Ellen Gurney had commissioned Richardson to build them a house nearby in Pride’s Crossing. Henry thought it looked like a cave and wondered whether his did, too. On edge, he hounded Richardson.
“If it was any other fellow I couldn’t think anything about it,” the architect growled in return. “I’d know I was right but I always feel when I am with you or writing to you about the house that there’s something that might ‘go off’ and the tendency is to muddle me.” A day later, receiving yet another Adams fusillade, Richardson escalated his sarcasm. “For God sake excuse my pleasant letter of yesterday,” he roared. He also volunteered that whatever Henry’s qualms, he himself had been feeling “quite easy about the houses since I heard that your brother Charles had seen them and didn’t like ’em.”
Hay’s reports of the cost of furnishings filled Henry with anxiety. In New York, Richardson had taken the Hays to what Hay called a “$1,000 store” since there seemed to be nothing for sale for less than that. Clover seemed unable to engage herself with the decisions she and Henry needed to make, and when Henry tried to think about wallpaper, curtains, and carpets, his mind went blank.
The Adamses also found themselves at odds over an ornamental detail for their façade. The two low arches and their supporting capitals, all made of stone, were to be accented with carvings of birds, mythological creatures, leaves, and flowers. From the beginning, they had planned to add to the carving over the years, and Henry had even promised, only half in jest, to include Lizzie Cameron’s likeness in the stonework. Soon after Henry and Clover arrived at Beverly Farms in July, Henry asked their friend Theodore Dwight of the State Department library to look after their new house. “[I]f you see the workmen carving a Christian emblem, remonstrate with them like a father,” he ordered. Henry wanted a peacock, and Richardson had favored a lion. Apparently Clover told Richardson she wanted a cross. When Dwight reported that a cross had indeed made its appearance, Henry felt he had no choice but to accept defeat. “Your account of the cross and the carving fills my heart with sadness and steeps my lips in cocaine,” he told Dwight. Earlier he had vowed to “plaster it over with cement,” but now, he felt, “I can neither revolt nor complain, though the whole thing seems to me bad art and bad taste. I have protested in vain and must henceforth hold my tongue.” He asked Dwight to say nothing about it since their “dear Washingtonians chatter so much that one is forced to deny them food for gossip.”
The cross in the carved stonework of the Adamses’ facade was Clover’s idea. Henry considered it “bad art and bad taste.”LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The cross rose between the two arches and served as a backdrop for a carved medallion of a winged beast. The motive for Clover’s insistence on it remains a mystery, as does the reason behind Henry’s declaration that it was “prophetic of the future” and filled him “with terror.” If Clover was suffering through a religious crisis akin to the one described in Esther, neither she nor Henry breathed a word of it. But Henry’s novel had foreseen another aspect of Clover’s emotional breakdown with uncanny accuracy. “Everything seems unreal,” Esther had said to the minister after she learned that her father was dying. “Your voice sounds far-off, as though you were calling to me out of distance and darkness. I hardly know what we are saying, or why we are here. I never felt so before.” In the long, excruciating summer at Beverly Farms, Clover was overpowered by the same sense of unreality. “Ellen I’m not real,” she often cried to her sister. “Oh make me real—you are all of you real!”
Back on H Street at the beginning of November, Henry and Clover found their new house nearing completion. Floors were varnished, wallpaper was hung, and dogwood blossoms were being chiseled into the stone fireplace in the dining room. Taking a walk through Hay’s house, Henry estimated that John and Clara and their four “heartlets” would be able to take possession by New Year’s Day if they didn’t mind living upstairs while the workmen put the last touches on the library and the foyer.
To Henry’s disappointment, the newspapers had not yet reviewed Richardson’s Lafayette Square duet. He and Hay were left with no public reaction but “grim silence” until mid-November, when Frank Carpenter, the capital correspondent of the Cleveland Leader, filed a breathless account of the mansion soon to be inhabited by Colonel and Mrs. John Hay of Euclid Avenue. Touring the house for his Ohio readers, Carpenter began with the price tag: an eye-popping $100,000. The bricks were custom-made, wider and longer than common brick. The cavernous foyer, paneled with South American mahogany, gleamed like a new piano. Above the wainscoting, walls of terra-cotta red reached to a high ceiling crisscrossed with great rafters of mahogany. The grand stairway was “so wide that ten persons could walk up abreast without jostling.” Carpenter gaped at the dining room, which was larger and more elegant than the state dining room of the White House. Nearly every room boasted an ornately sculpted fireplace. Throughout the house the floors were laid double, Carpenter marveled, “and you cannot see a crack anywhere. A footfall hardly sounds on them.” The house was graced by three bathrooms, one tiled in porcelain. “There is a big bathtub in this room, a set of marble wash basins with silver spigots having hot and cold water, and the cute little bath in which to wash your feet. This last is stationary, and the idea seems [to be] that one should sit on the corners of the wash basin and dip his feet into it.” The bathrooms, like the other rooms of the house, were equipped with electric bells. Carpenter concluded that the cost was “not much in comparison with several millions, and a man of John Hay’s money can afford to own and run a house like this.”
The Hay house, facing Sixteenth Street. Abutting it, with two stone arches fronting on H Street, is the Adams house. The white-pillared dwelling just beyond was the home of Henry and Clover Adams from 1880 through 1885.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“The shy reserve with which this writer goes into my bathtubs is very winning,” Hay said when he sent the item to the Adamses. “Since this thing was printed, every charity sharp and confidence man in Cleveland has been after me, trying to get his share before the fool and all his money were parted.” On a more somber note, Hay said he and Clara hoped the cool weather of autumn would make Clover feel “more robust.”
The change of seasons did nothing to lift Clover’s spirits. Numb with depression, she could barely speak, much less join in the laughter over Hay’s new celebrity in Cleveland. When she tried to talk, she often broke off and rubbed her hand against her forehead, as if she had lost the point of her thought. “I see little or no one, and my doors are tight shut,” Henry told Hay. At the end of November, when the English elections forced his old friend Robert Cunliffe out of Parliament, Henry sent his consolations and observed that the defeat would give Cunliffe time to travel. But, he hastened to add, “I hardly want you to come here just now, for my own plans and prospects are a little unsettled and I could not enjoy your visit as I would like.” He explained that Clover had been “as it were, a good deal off her feed this summer” and showed “no such fancy for men
ding as I could wish.”
One of the few friends they saw was Rebecca Dodge, whom Clover had befriended after seeing her out walking in Lafayette Square. Miss Dodge called every day, and during one visit managed to coax a smile from Clover. Profoundly grateful, Henry followed Miss Dodge to the door and told her he would never forget it.
On Friday, December 4, the Adamses paid an evening visit to Lizzie Cameron, who was not feeling well. Although Clover had sent her a large bouquet of roses and had come several times with Henry to ask after her, these kindnesses did nothing to alleviate Clover’s overwhelming sense of unworthiness. In vain she struggled to find “one single point of character or goodness” on which to stand and “grow back to life.” Henry was the soul of tenderness—“more patient and loving than words can express,” Clover wrote her sister in a letter that would never be mailed. “God might envy him—he bears and hopes and despairs hour after hour.”
On Sunday morning, December 6, the Adamses had their customary late breakfast. In response to Henry’s questions, Clover said she felt somewhat better. Henry, bothered by a toothache, had made arrangements to see his dentist. As he left the house, he met a caller, probably Rebecca Dodge, who asked whether Clover wanted company. Henry went up to her room to inquire and found Clover slumped on the floor before the fire. Unable to revive her, he carried her to a sofa and ran for a doctor. It was too late. The potassium cyanide, a chemical for retouching photographs, had done its work in an instant.
Rebecca Dodge wanted to help. Henry, stunned, could make only one request: “Don’t let any one come near me.”
12
Hearts That Ache
The details of the next twenty-four hours are scant. An undertaker, summoned from Pennsylvania Avenue, laid out Clover’s body in the bedroom she had shared with Henry. Telegrams were dispatched to the Hoopers and the Adamses. Nicholas Anderson tried to call and was turned away. Some discreet person—Rebecca Dodge, perhaps, or the physician—told newspaper reporters that Clover had died of “paralysis of the heart.”
Since nothing is known of the first night Henry spent in the house with his dead wife, one can do no more than guess at his feelings. If only he had put the potassium cyanide out of reach. If only he had not left Clover alone, particularly on a Sunday morning, the time she had always reserved for writing to her father. If only he had sought the help of a specialist in nervous disorders. If only he had not written the merciless, Esther.
In the morning the Washington Post carried the news of Mrs. Adams’s “heart paralysis” on the front page. Friends hastened to Henry’s door but were denied entry. Worried, they watched his house, and word soon spread through the neighborhood that Henry Adams could be seen at an upstairs window, staring forlornly at the bare trees of Lafayette Park.
At noon the door was opened to Ned Hooper and Ellen and Whitman Gurney, just arrived from Boston. To the Gurneys, who had spent the summer near the Adamses, Clover’s suicide seemed almost inevitable. “It has been a terrible summer … for poor Clover, and one can hardly wish her otherwise than at rest,” Whitman told one of his friends. Ellen, writing to their summer neighbor Mrs. James Elliot Cabot, remarked that the shock was “largely for you outside—we had been consumed with anxiety—and probably others think that if we had only done this or that and have shown feeling! We did the best we knew how—and we know no better now. I think any other course would have been cruelty.”
The most obvious “other course”—one that Ellen apparently considered cruel—would have been a mental hospital. Dr. Hooper’s children had often gone with him when he volunteered his medical services at an asylum near Boston, and the family appreciated the value of such institutions, but Clover and her siblings lived in terror of the emotional ills that stalked their maternal relatives. In Clover’s eyes, suicide was preferable to madness. When an artist of her acquaintance killed himself in 1879, she mused that the act might have “saved him years of insanity, which his temperament pointed to.”
Apart from mental hospitals, the Adamses could have consulted S. Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia physician and man of letters who specialized in anxiety, hysteria, depression, and other nervous afflictions. Mitchell had treated John Hay and frequently joined the Adamses for tea when he came to Washington. He once charmed Clover by presenting a volume of his poems with the advice that she thank him before reading it in case she found it wanting. But if the Adamses knew much about Mitchell’s “rest cure” for women (which Sigmund Freud later used in combination with psychoanalysis), it is unlikely that they would have considered it for Clover. The cure consisted of four to six weeks in bed accompanied by a strong dose of what the doctor called “moral medication.” Self-control was the secret, he lectured; neurosis, like a bad temper, could be held in check. Mitchell made his patients promise to “fight every desire to cry, or twitch, or grow excited.” After weeks of confinement they were eager to rejoin the world, and if they had learned their lesson well, they thought less about changing their circumstances than accepting them. Neither Henry nor Clover would have tolerated a point of view that assigned so little value to the patient’s feelings.* Whatever the reasons for deciding that Clover’s situation precluded outside help, Henry had the full support of Ellen and Ned when he entrusted Clover’s recovery to his own tenderness and the restorative powers of time. When months passed with no sign of a cure, he resolved to wait years.
Now the waiting was over. With Ned and the Gurneys, whose sadness was tinged with relief that Clover’s ordeal had ended, Henry tried valiantly to rise above his misery. From the moment of their arrival, Ellen found him “as steady and sweet and thoughtful as possible.” But later in the day, after his brother Charles appeared, Henry gave vent to a powerful anger. At dinner, to which he defiantly wore a scarlet necktie, Henry ripped the black mourning band from the sleeve of his jacket and hurled it to the floor. To the surprise of family and friends, he decided that Clover would not be buried with Dr. Hooper in Massachusetts. She would lie on a slope in Rock Creek Church Cemetery, a sunny churchyard where they had often gone on horseback in search of the first wildflowers of spring. In life Henry had been unable to separate Clover from her father; in death he could.
Henry implored his fellow Hearts to stay away. Hay and King, who were together in New York, had little choice but to honor their friend’s request. “I hoped all day yesterday and this morning to hear from you, and thought it possible you might summon King and me to be with you at the last,” Hay wrote from the Brunswick Hotel on December 9.
I can neither talk to you nor keep silent. 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 this 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 the harder to bear.
Neither Hay nor King knew that December 9 was the day Henry had set for Clover’s funeral. The brief service, conducted at home by a clergyman who was a friend of the Hoopers, was as private as the Adamses’ wedding at Beverly Farms thirteen years before.
Like Hay, King assumed that the burial would be in Massachusetts. “I had confidently expected that you would have passed through New York en route to lay the form of your wife near Boston and that I should meet you and lay these few words of heartfelt condolence which seem every moment on my lips,” King wrote from the Wall Street office of his mining company. “I think of you all the time and lament that such great sorrow as yours cannot be more evidently and practically shared by
those who love you.”
King included no tribute to Clover in his letter, perhaps because he could not think what to say in view of the news in that morning’s papers. A curious journalist had looked up Clover’s death certificate and discovered that her “heart paralysis” had been induced by a self-administered dose of potassium cyanide. The newspapers showed their annoyance with the deception by taking revenge on the deceased. The Washington Critic rekindled the old rumor that Clover had written Democracy. While her talk was considered “entertaining,” the paper added, she had a reputation for saying “bitter things,” was “generally distrusted,” and had “failed to become popular.” Other papers quickly followed the Critic’s lead, and the legions who had been excluded from the Adamses’ drawing room had the malignant joy of seeing their suspicions confirmed in print. The sniping even undermined the compassion of one of Clover’s oldest friends, Eleanor Shattuck Whiteside. “How often we have spoken of Clover as having all she wanted, all this world could give, except children—and not having any was a greater grief to Mr. Adams than to her,” she wrote. “And now … down comes a black curtain, and all is over. Yet in my unorthodox mind I can’t help hoping that hers was invincible ignorance, and that somehow and somewhere she is learning better things.”
It remained for the Boston Transcript to give Clover her due. Calling her one of Washington’s “most brilliant and accomplished women,” the paper noted that her house “was the pleasantest resort of the cleverest men and women who live in and who visit the capital. She came nearer being the head of an intellectual coterie than any woman there, and to be asked to her home was a privilege which comparatively few obtained, and to which many aspired. [Mr. and Mrs. Adams] took Presidents, and Cabinet officers and senators at their worth, and high rank of itself gave no one a passport to their house.”
The Five of Hearts Page 17