The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Elizabeth Sherman Cameron. Unhappily married, she looked to Henry Adams for understanding and companionship but did not love him as deeply as he loved her.ARLINE BOUCHER TEHAN

  Adams was waiting on the pier when her ship moored in Southampton. He helped Lizzie to London and on to Paris, where the doctors assured her that she needed nothing but rest. As Henry reported to Nannie Lodge, “there is no incurable trouble; only nervous collapse, which is the slowest of all things to repair itself.” He dared not voice his terror that Lizzie’s psyche might prove as unsalvageable as Clover’s. Two years before, when Lizzie’s conflicts with Don precipitated a milder breakdown, Adams had warned her that she was “walking into nervous collapse. Most women do as they approach middle life. My own existence went to pieces on the same rocks…. As I have said again and again, you have merely to sit still and let things pass—they cannot hurt you.”

  With several nieces and their schoolmates coming for the summer, Henry had rented a rambling house in a village outside Paris and persuaded Lizzie and her entourage to join them. Lizzie rested, and Henry’s most ambitious outings were his occasional rides among the cedars of Lebanon and purple beeches in the neighboring forest. Cecil Spring Rice, the first of his breakfast-table nephews, came down from Berlin to cheer them up. By summer’s end, Lizzie had gained weight and could walk a mile, but neither Henry nor Springy approved of her mental condition. As Adams told Hay, “her head still goes to pieces at the least strain, and I venture to predict that the winter at home, under existing circumstances, will finish her career as anything but an invalid. The heart weakness can hardly fail to become chronic and aggravated.” To Henry’s dismay and against the advice of her French physicians, Lizzie made plans to return to the United States.

  The rapprochement was doomed from the start. Landing in New York in mid-December, Lizzie and Martha learned that they would pass Christmas in a hotel. Don spent lavishly on flowers to brighten their rooms and quickly forged an alliance with Martha by giving her a puppy. With Lizzie, he was noncommittal and uncommunicative; she had no idea whether he wanted a reconciliation or not. “The eggs I am walking on have not smashed, but the tension keeps me so absorbed I cannot concentrate on anything else,” she wrote her very dearest. To keep friction at a minimum, she dined out twice a day, visited John La Farge in his studio, and went to the theater almost every night. Come morning she could barely recall “what it all was,—where I have been,—whom I have seen.”

  In January, when the Camerons moved on to Washington and Lizzie found herself reduced to the role of guest in the world where she had once starred as hostess, she was in a state of constant irritation. Apart from a novelist named Edith Wharton, whom she found intelligent and pretty, she met no one she wanted to know. “I lunch, dine, go to balls, but I see no one interesting, no one whom I want to bring home with me and talk to,” she grumbled. “I think one must leave society and go among the freaks to find originality or amusement.”

  After a bitter quarrel in February, Don went off to Pennsylvania to sulk, and Lizzie organized her own expedition to Boston to prolong their time apart. The heaviest burden fell on Martha. Depressed and anxious, the twelve-year-old had no appetite but was gaining weight at alarming speed. “It is very distressing to me,” Lizzie told Henry. “I like grace too much to reconcile myself to those enormous hips.” Martha did not like them either and worried that she was abnormal.

  Longing for respite from the “howling swells” who filled her evenings, Lizzie found her way to a ladies’ lecture on architecture. When the speaker began to discourse on the Gothic, she leaped to share the enthusiasm she had caught from Adams. “I tried to explain that it was not just ornament but fundamental construction,” she wrote to her mentor. “But they refused to listen.” America was impossible. After the Maine blew up in Havana in February 1898, she panicked: What if the United States declared war on Spain before she could get back to Europe? “Oh! Dordy Dordy, how I want to see you just now. The summer is long in coming—and when it comes what will it bring?”

  What it brought was the long house party in the English countryside at Surrenden Dering. Every day for three months Lizzie Cameron wore an air of gaiety, and only the perspicacious Henry James glimpsed the truth behind the mask. Even before Surrenden, Lizzie had decided she could not bear another winter in the United States. In April, as soon as she arrived in Paris, she found an apartment for herself and Martha at 50 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and signed a lease. “The amount it will cost me is small for the peace of mind it may bring,” she told Henry. “So altogether I thought it best. When I return I must put some furniture in it, then either of us can use it au besoin. I do hope you will think it right.”

  The key word was “either.” Mr. Adams and Mrs. Cameron would not occupy the apartment together. Henry’s extravagant sense of propriety also demanded that as long as Don Cameron was elsewhere, it would be indelicate of Mr. Adams to spend too much time in Paris with Mrs. Cameron, even in an apartment of his own. And so began the most peculiar phase of their peculiar liaison. For the next two decades they rarely saw each other for more than a few weeks at a stretch and always in the company of other people, whose presence lent the air of innocence on which he insisted. Each summer when Adams went to Paris, Lizzie traveled, sometimes in Europe, sometimes taking Martha home to see Don. In the fall, when they returned for Martha’s school year, Adams lingered a bit then left for Washington, usually planning his arrival for sometime after December 6, his “haunting anniversary.”

  During the winter of 1898-99, her first in Paris, Lizzie reveled in her new freedom and the elegance of her gold-and-white drawing room. Martha, thriving in her convent school, stood first in all her classes. Whenever Lizzie thought of going back to America, she shuddered. “I wonder how a horse feels after a summer in the pasture when the harness goes on again,” she asked Henry. In the spring, she could hardly wait for Adams’s arrival. “I shall be hanging over the balcony edge waiting for you when your cab drives up,” she promised. “… And do you think it proper to stop with me? I do!”

  Where Adams stayed is not clear, but he soon joined the Lodges for a tour of Italy and Sicily. For a time Lizzie hoped to meet up with them, and then, in the middle of May 1899, decided that her duty compelled her to take Martha home to see her father. “My instinct tells me that I am to go, that I must go,” she explained. “And I spend my days hoping that I am above the natural animal and have no instinct left. If you knew how I hate it! I love this Paris appartement, and the independence, and the liberty,—and the balcony and the birds—how can I leave! You and I could do so much this summer!”

  In New York, Don—looking “very hay-seedy indeed,” in Lizzie’s opinion—announced that they were going to Saratoga Springs for his gout. Beyond that he had made no plans. A summer of “wandering from hotel to hotel is clearly before us,” Lizzie seethed. Saratoga was either “painfully funny” or “funnily painful”—she could not decide. Why, she begged of Henry Adams, “do we like feeding in long trough-like rooms, black with flies and negro waiters? And sitting infinite hours, in infinite dozens of rocking chairs rocking infinite miles, on a piazza half a mile long? And the coarseness, the loudness, the cheapness of type, of the people. It is appalling. Have I forgotten?”

  As they gypsied about, Don’s moods swung so wildly and so rapidly that Lizzie was perpetually off balance. Pleased with himself for the success of several recent business ventures, including an investment in a new typewriter, Don was often the soul of amiability. But when Lizzie raised a question about Martha’s inheritance, he flew into a rage. His will, written years before, provided for the children of his first marriage but had not been revised to include Martha. Angered by the suggestion that he did not love Martha, Don refused to say what, if anything, he planned to do. Lizzie was left to worry that if Don died without changing the will, his heirs would feel no obligation to the child of his estranged wife.

  Moving from Saratoga to Saranac and from New York to Cl
eveland and Washington, the Camerons were pursued by letters in an unmistakably feminine hand, which Lizzie recognized. Several years before, Don and this woman had got into what Lizzie called “a scrape,” and Lizzie deduced that she had “some claim upon him,” most likely a child. Sensing that Don lived in perpetual dread of a scandal, Lizzie even managed to feel sorry for him. But her sympathy turned to pique when Don announced that they could not stay in Henry Adams’s empty house in Washington because “it might not be proper.” Clover Adams’s old friend Anne Palmer Fell was right, Lizzie decided: “one must not be a female if one would have success or happiness.”

  Worst of all, Don gave no hint of their future. Lizzie could not tell whether he expected—or wanted—her and Martha to stay in the United States, or whether he planned to continue subsidizing their life in Paris. In early October, unable to bear the suspense any longer, she tried to tell him she thought it best to go back to France. Don refused to hear her out. He “gets up and leaves the room as soon as I open the question,” Lizzie moaned to Henry. “What am I to do?”

  Martha rescued them by falling desperately ill with a fever of 104 degrees. It passed in a few days but not before frightening her father into submission. He hovered over her bed and obediently did errands for the voyage to Europe. “Don’t leave the appartement, welcome us there like visitors,” Lizzie instructed Henry on November 1. “Two weeks from today we shall be together. I cannot write!”

  Alone in Paris during the months Lizzie and Martha spent in the United States, Henry Adams, to his enormous surprise, felt more contentment than he had known since the happiest days of his marriage. He had begun 1899 in a vile mood. Bored with the chattering young people who filled his house, he longed for deliverance from the condition he had diagnosed as “Avunculitis.” What he wanted was “to go—go—go—anywhere—to the devil—Sicily—Russia—Siberia—China—only to keep going.”

  But as soon as Adams settled in Lizzie’s apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, his “world-hatred,” as Clarence King had called it, melted away. At liberty to fill his days as he pleased, he walked miles through the streets of Paris in a hunt for Gothic spires. He bought architectural photographs by the score, and when the August heat kept him indoors, he plunged into a study of Mont-Saint-Michel. “Paris delights me, but not for its supposed delights,” he wrote to Hay. “It is the calm of its seclusion that charms; the religious rest that it diffuses, and the cloister-like peace that it brings to the closing years of life. I reflect on the goodness of all things, and enjoy the peace of God.”

  He saw almost no one. King’s stepbrother, George Howland, was in Paris with his bride, and much as Adams wanted word of King, he refrained from spoiling a honeymoon with an old man’s invitations to dinner. “I study my French prepositions and walk in the Bois,” he told Lizzie. When Augustus Saint-Gaudens and a young American poet named Joseph Trumbull Stickney came to dine, they had to thread their way through tables and chairs piled high with books on medieval architecture. It was through Saint-Gaudens that Adams discovered the magnitude of his own contentment. The sculptor had taken a studio in Montparnasse but could hardly work because of depression. After listening to his friend’s woes, Henry replied that he himself “never felt any other way and rather liked it; that Michelangelo not only live in it, but made his greatest work out of it, in the Penseroso and Medici tombs; that Albert [sic] Dürer made a picture of it; and that it was really very good fun when you got used to it, and knew what a good fellow it was.” As Adams told Lizzie, it was a delectable turn of the tables: “Is it not humorously ironic, that I, of all people, should act as a tonic to égayer the depressed?”

  When he completed his investigation of spires, he took up stained glass. There were many excursions to Chartres, which impressed him more each time. In late October, entranced by the pure blues streaming through the windows and the hymns sailing through the vast spaces, he “felt the charm” as never before. “Color counts for so much in idolatry,” he observed. “The glass window is as emotional as music.” For the first time since his encounter with the royal family of Tahiti he wanted to write a book. Not a work of any consequence, he assured Lizzie. He would call it Travels in France with Nothing to Say, publish it privately, and present it as a gift when visiting friends in the country.

  Any study of the twelfth century and Chartres led quickly to the Virgin Mary, and Henry Adams was uniquely equipped to appreciate her grip on the imagination of medieval France. Like Henry James, he had rejected the masculine worlds of politics and business and cherished the fancy that women, unsullied by struggles for power and money, were the superior sex. For twenty-five years Adams had rarely passed up a chance to argue his case. In his 1876 Lowell Institute lecture on the rights of primitive women, he blamed the inferior status of their modern sisters on the patriarchs of the early Christian church. Enlarging the role of their masculine God, the church fathers had dethroned the strong goddesses favored by the pagans and substituted an ideal of female submissiveness that had persisted into modern times. In Democracy and Esther, he had pitted feminine idealism against masculine power. His heroines met defeat, but they emerged with their integrity unscathed. After Clover’s death, Henry had sought comfort in the companionship of her female friends and in Kwannon, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, whose boundless mercy inspired the sculpture at Clover’s grave. The old queen of Tahiti, graceful and unaffected, gave Adams another paragon of womanhood. Happening onto the Virgin Mary after a lifetime of contemplating ideal forms of femininity, Adams easily recognized her as one more deity for his female pantheon. Though he could no more pray to the Virgin than he could worship the dynamo, she inspired one of his greatest books. The Education of Henry Adams and his great history showed the riches of his intellect, but it was in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres that he revealed his deepest feelings.

  To introduce the world that had created Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Adams posed as an uncle touring France with his nieces. A genial shepherd, Uncle Henry wanted only to share the delights he had found in the French Middle Ages. Pedantry was not to be countenanced, and dates, which he found “stupidly annoying,” would be kept to a minimum. His tourists did not need the facts of the Middle Ages but the feeling, and he often reminded them to feel what they could “and let the rest go.”

  The tour began with the tip of the spire at Mont-Saint-Michel. “The Archangel loved heights,” Adams declared. “Standing on the summit of the tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance, perched on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own in heaven and on earth.” Poised between two worlds, the Archangel represented “Church and State, and both militant. He is the conqueror of Satan, the mightiest of all created spirits, the nearest to God.”

  Though Adams suspected that his young charges would find the Mont a bit austere, he wanted them to savor its blend of Romanesque and Gothic. The “quiet, restrained strength” of the Romanesque, with its rounded arches and castlelike masculinity, and the delicately feminine curves and “vaulting imagination” of the pointed Gothic arch, made “a union nearer the ideal than is often allowed in marriage,” he said. For those who felt the art, there was no discord: “the strength and the grace join hands; the man and woman love each other still.” Mont-Saint-Michel marked a turning point: “What the Roman could not express flowered into the Gothic; what the masculine mind could not idealize in the warrior, it idealized in the woman.”

  Taking his pilgrims to Chartres, Adams hoped that modern prejudices against the Gothic would not sully their pleasures. To most minds, he said, the Gothic meant shadows and fear and death. For Esther Dudley, the protagonist of his second novel, the neo-Gothic cathedral and oppressive theology of the Reverend Stephen Hazard held all of these terrors. But such dread was rooted in misconception, Adams had learned in his studies of the Middle Ages. Gothic art strove to express light, not gloom. Craving “light and always more light”
Gothic architects scoffed at gravity, turning walls into windows and resting ever higher vaults on ever thinner columns.

  The quest for light at Chartres was inspired by the Virgin Mary, and to feel Chartres, one had to accept that it was the work of the virgin, not of human artists. Vividly aware that Mary’s displeasure could damn them for eternity, architects and sculptors and stained-glass masters paid no attention to the needs of the “flat-eared peasants” and “slow-witted barons” who would pray at Chartres. Hence the greatest of the cathedral’s rose windows was set for the gaze of the Virgin, behind the pilgrims kneeling in the nave.

  The Virgin had also supervised the lighting of her palace, and no cathedral had light to rival Chartres. Wanting only to please her, the window makers dispensed with realism and “never hesitated to put their colour where they wanted it, or cared whether a green camel or a pink lion looked like a dog or a donkey provided they got their harmony or value,” Adams explained. To his mind, the most exquisite light in the palace came from the windows in the Virgin’s “boudoir,” as he playfully called the apse.