The other newcomer, appointed to the U.S. Civil Service Commission by President Harrison, was Theodore Roosevelt, just turned thirty. He arrived in Washington on a Monday morning in May 1889, inspected the three offices set aside for the commissioners, and took the biggest one for himself. Before the week was out, Roosevelt had dined with the Lodges, where he encountered Henry Adams, whom he had met years before on the Nile, when Roosevelt was a boy and Adams was on his honeymoon. To Adams, the barrel-chested young dynamo from New York was an object of pity. At the North American Review, Adams had championed civil-service reform for years to no avail. Seeing the idealistic gleam in the eyes behind the pince-nez and listening as the innocent declared his determination to wipe out the evils of patronage, Henry had only one thought: “the poor wretch.”
Though Roosevelt was no less sure of his godliness than Cabot Lodge, he had none of Lodge’s remoteness. To grasp the difference between the two, one had only to ride with them in Rock Creek Park. Both were excellent horsemen, but Lodge moved with the grace of an English country squire while Roosevelt favored the thundering style he had acquired among the buffalo herds and cowboys of the Wild West.
Roosevelt’s uninflected exuberance would eventually grate on Henry’s nerves, but for the moment Adams was taken with the young commissioner and his “sympathetic little wife,” Edith. The three quickly discovered their shared affinity for Cecil Spring Rice, who had been best man at the Roosevelts’ wedding. When Adams learned that Theodore and Edith had not yet found a house in Washington, he tried to persuade them to move into 1603 H Street. They declined but soon joined the Lodges, Hays, and Camerons as part of the breakfast ensemble.
Bored by the political fulminations of Lodge and Roosevelt, Henry repeated scarcely a word of their doings in his letters. But he was instantly curious about their experiences as authors. Lodge’s Life of George Washington and the first volume of Roosevelt’s Winning of the West appeared to wide acclaim in 1889, and Adams marveled to discover that they enjoyed the hoopla. “[B]oth Cabot and Teddy Roosevelt are on the shop-counters in apparent self-satisfaction,” he wrote to Hay, adding that he felt “sick” to think it would soon be his turn for “that disgusting and drivelling exhibition of fatuous condescension.”
Henry’s protest was sincere—to a point. He had concealed the authorship of Democracy and Esther for several reasons, including a wish to avoid publicity. But his complaint to Hay veiled deeper fears of rejection. Though he feigned indifference to public approval and dismissed the nine-volume History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as “my poor, stupid maunderings,” he could hardly have felt apathetic about the appearance of a work that had consumed a decade of his life. Nonetheless, in the fall of 1889, when his first two volumes were greeted by virtually unanimous praise, he held his pose, stubbornly refusing to confess his pleasure.
While John La Farge moaned that Henry’s history chronicled the most tedious era of America’s past, the fact was that Adams had set out to probe an intriguing pair of questions: Who were these new Americans, and what would become of them? To find out, he had consulted periodicals, travel books, census figures, speeches, economic data, diplomatic and military archives, letters, diaries, memoirs, congressional records, and court proceedings. The result was a saga as remarkable for its detail as its sweep. Introducing President Thomas Jefferson, he focused on his clothing, noting that
Jefferson, at moments of some interest in his career as President, seemed to regard his peculiar style of dress as a matter of political importance, while the Federalist newspapers never ceased ridiculing the corduroy small-clothes, red-plush waistcoat, and sharp-toed boots with which he expressed his contempt for fashion.
For eight years this tall, loosely built, somewhat stiff figure, in red waistcoat and yarn stockings, slippers down at the heel, and clothes that seemed too small for him, may be imagined … sitting on one hip, with one shoulder high above the other, talking almost without ceasing to his visitors at the White House. His skin was thin, peeling from his face on exposure to the sun, and giving it a tettered appearance. This sandy face, with hazel eyes and sunny aspect; this loose, shackling person; this rambling and often brilliant conversation, belonged to the controlling influences of American history, more necessary to the story than three-fourths of the official papers, which only hid the truth.
Contemplating Pierre L’Enfant’s ambitious plans for the city of Washington, Adams was struck by the “contrast between the immensity of the task and the paucity of means,” a gap which led visitors in 1800 to suspect that “the nation itself was a magnificent scheme.”
As a New Englander and an Adams, Henry could not bring himself to make heroes of Jefferson and Madison, both Virginians. Adams was willing to grant the success of Jefferson’s first term, but only because it allowed him to crow that the triumph owed less to Jeffersonian ideals than to his embrace of such notions as a strong central government. Madison was stingingly portrayed as the man who mismanaged the War of 1812. Adams was swayed less by the American victory than by the British burning of the White House, Madison’s humiliating flight from the capital, and New England’s threat to secede.
Closing his history with an essay on American character in 1817, Adams observed that the traits of “intelligence, rapidity, and mildness seemed fixed … and were likely to become more marked as time should pass.” He still wondered what this new race would become. “They were intelligent, but what paths would their intelligence select? They were quick, but what solution of insoluble problems would quickness hurry? … They were mild, but what corruptions would their relaxations bring? … What interests were to vivify a society so vast and uniform? What ideals were to ennoble it? What object, besides physical content, must a democratic continent aspire to attain? For the treatment of such questions, history required another century of experience.”
Adams had written a classic, and his fellow historian Francis Parkman was one of the first to tell him so. “If the public is not an ass, as it is apt to be, it will see that you have laid it under a great and lasting obligation,” he predicted. John Hay pronounced Henry’s style “perfect, if perfect is a proper word applied to anything so vivid, so flexible, and so powerful. I never expected to read anything which would give me so much pleasure.”
The achievement seemed to delight everyone but the author. “It is evidently a horrible thing to finish one’s magnum opus,” King told Hay after hearing from Adams in the fall of 1889. “I who will never begin mine may always have the gentle tonic of perpetual gestation, the soft genial pride of an important bellyful, with none of the throes of printing and none of the ghastly hollowness of collapsing sides…. I wonder if after all my crippled life isn’t well enough and if the peace of obscurity which gathers about me, isn’t worth as much as anything I might achieve if fate were suddenly to undo my fettered hands.” As unhappy as he was, King said, “I am a comic opera beside Henry Adams whose grim gray scorn of this universe seems to me very ashen and disembodied.”
Although some of Henry’s gloom could be traced to his self-consciousness in the face of publicity, his largest regrets sprang from a sense that the volumes written after Clover’s death did not measure up to the ones written before: “the light has gone out,” he told Lizzie. “I am not to blame. As long as I could make life work, I stood by it, and swore by it as though it were my God, as indeed it was.”
Once the first two volumes appeared, Adams announced that he was putting down his pen. “With the year 1890 I shall retire from authorship,” he told Henry Holt, who had published Democracy and Esther. “As an occupation I can recommend it to the rich. It has cost me about a hundred thousand dollars, I calculate, in twenty years, and has given me that amount of amusement. In JuIy I sail from San Francisco for new scenes and adventures.”
China promised not only a change of scene but much-needed release from the growing tensions of clandestine love. Between Lizzie’s determination
not to divorce Don and Henry’s resolve not to sully her reputation, there was little room for expression or growth. Their love was like some rootbound plant. Even the most innocuous encounters had to be arranged from the point of view of the tale bearers. In the summer of 1889, when Lizzie announced that she planned to visit Newport en route to Beverly Farms, he suggested she send Martha to him in Quincy. “You can pick her up in passing,” he proposed. “We will give you quarters for a night, if it is proper.” At fifty-two, he considered himself “much too dull, too solemn and too old to be suspected of impropriety,” but he urged her to consult the matrons of Newport if she had any doubt on the point. She decided not to visit him. That fall, in order to escort Lizzie and Martha from Boston to New York, where he would hand them over to Don, he felt obliged to cast himself as gallant friend of the family. He managed to steal a few hours with Lizzie among the Rembrandts of the Metropolitan Museum, but he was careful to include John La Farge in the excursion.
The long separations imposed by Henry’s three summers in Quincy and the Camerons’ sojourns in Beverly Farms and elsewhere provided at least one consolation: the gossip mills were left without grist. Perhaps during Henry’s long stay in China they would cease to churn altogether.
Limitations and frustrations notwithstanding, Henry was too much in love with Lizzie to stand by his original plan of passing the rest of his days in the Celestial Empire. By the spring of 1890 he had made up his mind to visit the South Seas first then travel to India. From there he would retrace Marco Polo’s route to Peking. He reserved the right to come home if boredom set in, and his breakfast circle understood that “boredom” meant loneliness for Mrs. Cameron.
As his departure approached, Henry grew wistful and tense. “Our little family of Hays, Lodges, Camerons and Roosevelts, has been absolutely devoted to each other, and as I was the one to be lost, I came in for most of the baa-lamb treatment,” he wrote to a friend. For the first time since Clover’s death he found himself among intimates “so closely connected as to see each other every day, and even two or three times a day, yet surrounded by so many outside influences and pressures that they are never stagnant or dull.” Gamely he declared himself “glad to close up my literary existence so cheerily. In Washington nothing lasts; and one should, like a man-of-the-world, bid good-night before the other guests are gone and the hosts are tired.”
Hay saw no profit in Henry’s defection. “That pleasant gang which made all the joy of life in easy, irresponsible Washington, will fall to pieces in your absence,” he mourned. “You were the only principle of cohesion in it. All its elements will seek other combinations except me, and I will be left at the ghost-haunted corner of 16th and H.”
Once again John La Farge would accompany Adams in his wanderings, and once again La Farge’s chaotic business affairs would delay their departure. Henry whiled away the days indexing his history. In the evening he strolled across the square to 21 Lafayette Place for a julep with Lizzie and Don. Chastely they sat on the veranda, watching fireflies and listening to the spirituals that floated through the summer night.
At the end of July, when the heat forced the Camerons to retreat to the mountains of Maryland, Henry paid them a brief visit. Coming home, he found the city “luridly solitary.” The Hays were at Lake Sunapee, the Roosevelts at Oyster Bay. The Lodges were on Boston’s North Shore, near Beverly Farms, as were Spring Rice and the entire British legation.
With La Farge’s promise that they could leave New York on August 16, Henry headed north to Boston, ostensibly to bid farewell to his family. His brother Brooks was using the house at Beverly Farms, which displaced the Camerons, who had settled in a hotel nearby, on the rocky coast at Manchester. A short meeting with Lizzie filled Henry with unappeasable longing. Desperate for one more encounter, he rose at dawn to send her a telegram. Could she see him before he boarded the afternoon train to New York? There was no reply. “I felt that it would not reach you,” he admitted in a note written a few minutes before his train left. “The mere hope of seeing you again made me try the experiment, but it was foolish, for the disappointment is worse than the regret.”
A week later, Adams and La Farge went down to the piers of San Francisco and boarded their steamer for Honolulu. In his last letter before sailing, Henry made no declaration of love except for a restrained “you know in advance all that I have to say.” The night before, descending the hotel staircase, he had been seized by a desire to see Martha, he said, knowing that Lizzie would read herself into the scene. Nor would she miss his presence in the sonnet he enclosed. His subject was Eagle Head, a rocky point near Manchester, where the “flashing sea,” which longed to embrace the cliff, was “Most beautiful flinging itself away.”
* At least no biographer to date has turned up evidence of a physical liaison, and many have tried. In an age when divorce was difficult, scandalous, declassé, and a sure road to social ostracism, some lovers found it nobler—and perhaps even erotic—not to act on their sexual impulses. As the connoisseur Bernard Berenson once explained to a friend, “After all, it is a delightful thing to keep one’s self in hand. I have enjoyed the effort not to possess, no less than the delight in possession. Think of the hundreds of women one has desired without love, and refrained from, even when one could have had them. Such suppressed desire immensely enriches life—and so it should.” (Quoted in Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, 65.)
15
An American Gentleman
As California slipped into the fog banks behind Adams and La Farge, John Hay sat on the dark green slopes above Lake Sunapee and took stock of his life. He had a wife and four children who adored him. His bank accounts ran into the millions. For three years he had known immense literary celebrity while the Century magazine serialized the life of Lincoln he had written with John George Nicolay. The figure in his mirror was still trim, the hair still dark brown, the smile as quick and warm as a boy’s. Even age seemed to weigh in his favor: he would soon be fifty-two, the point at which a man’s charms reached their peak—or so he had read in Balzac.
Hay could not taste the joy of any of it. Staring into the black stillness of Lake Sunapee, he saw his life as a failure—the sum total of a long column of blunders, accidents, and missed opportunities. “I cannot tell you how my heart sinks at the thought of your going away without me,” he wrote to Adams. “I recognize it as the last ringing of the bell. I now feel that I shall never go west, and thence east. I shall never see California nor the Isles of the Sea.” Clarence King tried to console him with the promise that they would make their own Pacific odyssey someday, but Hay knew better: “King will never be ready, nor will I.”
Obliged to pass up the trip in order to oversee the construction of a house at Lake Sunapee, Hay gradually surrendered to the pleasures of rowing and swimming with his children and of watching them climb trees, play Indians, and explore the uninhabited islands of the lake. He bandaged their cuts and caressed their bruises and at night sang them Civil War songs in his clear, sweet voice. “Mrs. Hay has once more proved her superiority to me in practical sagacity,” he admitted to Adams. “This sojourn which I regarded with horror has turned out rather agreeable.”
The children seemed as exotic to him as any cannibal Henry Adams might meet in the South Seas. Alice, ten and fearless, plucked green snakes from the hillsides and curled them around her arms as bracelets. Five-year-old Clarence whistled and sang for anyone who would listen, and his sense of humor could not have failed to delight his father. Ill with the chicken pox, he announced that he did not like the name and commanded the family to refer to his affliction as the “Yabbit Pox.”
“Poor old Del,” as his father referred to him, was a bit of a disappointment. Soon to turn fourteen, he was heavyset and sluggish and seemed to be scowling even when he was not. Knowing that he would never distinguish himself as a student, the boy’s parents prayed only that he might learn enough to escape being a dunce. Father and son ventured down to Bosto
n to shop for fishing tackle, but Del enjoyed neither the expedition nor the prospect of Sunapee bass tugging at the line.
Hay’s favorite was Helen, a beguiling, dark-eyed imp of fifteen. She was “useless and incapable as a Sultana,” he told Adams, “but so bright and cheery that she is well worth her keep. I do not think I would like her better if she had the moral worth of a regiment of Cordelias.” As far as a father could tell, Helen’s chief fault lay in her attractiveness to “the measliest set of pinfeather boys” he had ever seen. During Helen’s summer visit with her friend Constance Lodge, a dozen boys vied for the honor of taking her for a walk along the cliffs on her last night in Nahant. She said yes to all of them. When Cabot and Nannie Lodge found out, they insisted that she entertain the boys at the house. On the appointed evening, the youths assembled on the deep porches facing the sea and filled the night with song. Cabot did not realize until very late that the music was intended to camouflage Helen’s comings and goings. She had been taking the boys, one by one, for the promised walk on the cliffs. Amused to find himself outmaneuvered, Cabot contented himself with eavesdropping, and his worries about Helen’s ability to fend for herself must have melted when he heard her explain to an admirer, “I am a tough, and I come from a tough place, and I live in a tough street, and the farther you go the tougher it gets, and I live in the last house.”
The Five of Hearts Page 23