The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Until Don made up his mind, Lizzie meant to stay in Italy, subsisting on polenta if she had to. She left Paris in March, and in early April, from Florence, sent an unwelcome bit of news to Lafayette Square: “Stickney is here.” For the next six weeks, while Henry heard nothing, Bay Lodge heard everything. Mr. Stickney and Mrs. Cameron went everywhere together, Bay’s sources reported. “It appears that on the memorial margins of the Arno, Mrs. Cam and Joe flirted together daily for about six weeks—very busy,” Bay wrote to his mother.

  Unaccustomed to silence after fifteen years of hearing from Lizzie every week, Adams was anxious and hurt. “Still no letter!” he wrote after a month without word from Italy. “I am now seriously uneasy. You can judge, when I say that last night, sitting alone at dinner, I heard Martha’s voice calling Dordy. The absurdity made me smile, for even in my advanced imbecility I recognise that it is … I that calls for help, and needs it too.”

  Time deepened his uneasiness and sense of loss. Of all his friends, only John La Farge was well and happy. In March, Clover’s last surviving sibling, Ned Hooper, had hurled himself from a window on the third floor of his house on Beacon Street. Injured but still alive, he was taken to an asylum, and even though he seemed to be recovering, Henry could not help feeling that Ned was fated to follow the same path as his sisters.

  After a winter’s rest in Nassau, Clarence King had come north looking a decade older and helpless against “paroxysms of coughing.” What had first shown up in his chest as a thumbnail-sized patch of tuberculosis was now larger than a hand. “He must go to Arizona at once, and ought to have gone there three months ago,” Henry wrote to Lizzie. Whether he and Hay would ever see him again was a question they preferred not to raise.

  Hay was also unwell, plagued by mysterious attacks of numbness on one side of his body. The president was planning a cross-country trip by rail, and Clara insisted that John go with him. With a shrewdness worthy of Mark Hanna, she saw that the junket would give Hay a rest without creating the public flap that would attend an official leave from the State Department. Hay agreed to go and airily suggested that they carry a silk-lined coffin in the baggage car. “As usual,” Henry noted dryly, “the persons who are needed are hit, while I, who am an unnecessary palaeozoic reptile am only senile.”

  For solace, Henry rode in the silent woods of Rock Creek, where the spring earth was thick with anemones and violets. Remembering that he had first explored Rock Creek when he was thirty-one and “life was all ahead,” he was staggered by the vastness of the changes he had witnessed. In a mere three decades, the world seemed to have “tipped itself over.” Monstrous dynamos, venal senators, the rise of Germany and Russia—all, he said, made him “look with yearning eyes to my happy home at Rock Creek where I can take off my flesh and sit on my stone bench in the sun, to eternity, and see my friends in quiet intervals of thousand-year naps.” But even then he feared he would get no peace. The otherworldly figure at Clover’s grave had become the most famous sculpture in the capital, and Henry’s visits were invariably interrupted by the arrival of tourists, all of whom wanted to know what the figure meant. He felt a particular aversion to the clergymen, who usually came with companions and, “apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism, of denial,” he said. “Like the others, the priest saw only what he brought.” When the Lodges invited Adams to Europe for the summer, he was grateful. Paris, with all its vexations, had begun to seem preferable to the specters hovering over Washington.

  Mrs. Cameron, meanwhile, had ended her affair with Joe Stickney—not out of affection for Adams but from a sense of her own limitations. As she had coldly put it to Adams, the very fact of Martha made it impossible for her to “cut a straight swathe.” Lizzie broke the news to Joe during a stroll on the Ponte Vecchio in early May. Then they boarded a train for Paris, parting somewhere along the way in order to avoid being seen together on their arrival.

  Back in her apartment near the Etoile, Lizzie read through the stack of anxious letters from Lafayette Square and pounced on the detail that meant most to her: Henry was sailing for England on May 15. Hoping to catch him before he left, she dashed off a note directing him to a London shop where her hairbrushes were being rebuilt and a Sloane Square hosiery establishment from which she wanted a dozen pair of “very fine openwork lisle-thread stockings—an-colored and no. 9.”

  President McKinley and his railroad caravan left Washington at the end of April. Eager to expand foreign trade and annoyed by senatorial lassitude in the matter of commercial treaties, the president was taking his case to the people. With the author of the Open Door at his elbow, he planned to tell his audiences that he wanted to open doors for American goods all over the world. Railroads and steamships, telegraphs and telephones had created a new world, he believed: “We have overcome distance,” and the powers of the earth were now “tied together.” Global trade was not an end in itself but a step toward the larger goal of world peace: “There is nothing in this world that so much promotes the universal brotherhood of man as commerce.”

  Secretary of State Hay played his part with ease if not with relish. “I have grown quite an adept at saying a word or two absolutely without meaning and without cerebral expense,” he bragged to Adams after ten days on the road. “And the peril to my immortal soul when they ask me what I think of their city. I hastily run over all the advantages of London and Paris and Tadmor in the wilderness, and say their town combines all their charms and none of their faults—which is swallowed even as a turkey gobbles a June-bug.” Whenever the train was in motion, he and Clara rested in their car, and despite his own ennui, he was pleased to see that she enjoyed the hoopla.

  In New Mexico and Arizona, the tracks were lined with children waving flags and chanting “We want statehood!” as the presidential convoy rolled by. “What can they mean by it except that all the adult males want to be Senators?” Hay joshed. As the train neared Phoenix, his interest began to perk up. King was only sixty miles away, in Prescott.

  Except for the winter in Nassau, King had worked without rest since 1897. He first signed on as a consultant for yet another silver mine in Mexico and begged Adams to go with him. “It is hard lines to go alone for the only real fun is to watch the other fellow,” he said. When he finished his chores in Zacatecas, they could bask at Acapulco. “I will even execute in advance an assignment of half the brown girls we meet. Moreover I will be a second La Farge and never tell.” But Adams had already made plans to go to Europe.

  From Mexico, King headed north to a job in Telluride, Colorado, where a mild case of heart failure kept him in bed most of the time. Undaunted, he wrote his reports in bed, where he also claimed to be sketching out a series of literary studies of the American female.

  When 1897 ended with little gain, King was disappointed and defensive. “Does success and does honor act as good medicine for the insides?” he asked his friend, Ambassador John Hay. “Tell me a little of the way it feels, and what it does to you—this eminence in your career! And say if you enjoy its multifariousness as much as I do the silent spaces of the desert where most of my days are spent.” For the last few years, King confessed, he had been

  as lonely and isolated as an anchorite. Months go by with no one to talk to but a peon, and I have made the remoteness complete by never having a newspaper sent on my track. And perhaps I oughtn’t to admit it, but I have grown to love the uncomplicatedness of it all. You have always thought my alleged savagery of soul a mere attitudinizing but you were wrong. I could not play the primitive like Thoreau in somebody’s vegetable garden but I could live and die for the crowd if only you and Henry would come and camp with me now and again.

  For the next two years King hopscotched from Arizona copper mines to coal deposits in Colorado to a mining lawsuit in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Early in 1900 he was hired as an expert witness in a legal battle between two copper baronies in Montana,
where he awed his employers with his long hours, painstaking preparation for the trial, and immaculate wardrobe. He still traveled with a valet, as he had since the Fortieth Parallel survey, and each morning his man sent him off to the mines in well-pressed overalls.

  In June, after a dash to the Klondike for a look at the gold rush, King stopped in Seattle for a few days with the brother of an old friend. When King talked of his affinity for dark-skinned women, his host assumed he was being treated to King’s famous wit and pronounced the conversation “delicious humbuggery.” King was unable to persuade him otherwise.

  As King crisscrossed the West, he was desperately lonely for Ada. “I cannot tell you how delighted I was to see your handwriting again,” he wrote from one of his trips. “To see something you had touched was almost like feeling the warmth of your hand. My darling, tell me all about yourself. I can see your dear face every night when I lay my head on the pillow and my prayers go up to Heaven for you and the little ones. I feel most lonely and miss you most when I put out the light at night and turn away from the work of the day. Then I sit by my window in the starlight and look up at the dark night sky and think of you. Lonely seems my bed! Lonely is my pillow! I think of you and dream of you and my first waking thought is of your dear face and your loving heart.”

  At the end of the summer King managed a quick visit to Lake Sunapee, where he spoke enthusiastically of a wealth of new schemes, literary as well as geological. “He has a new book all ready to print, in fact it is all done but the writing,” Hay reported to Adams. “Whether it will get any further you can judge as well as I. It is awfully good literature, at least, to hear him talk about it.”

  King’s final assignment, accepted against the advice of the doctor who discovered his tubercles, was an evaluation of a lead mine in Missouri. An appraisal slated to last ten days stretched on for a month because of mishaps and rainy weather, and King’s disease flourished in the dampness. It was “virtually suicide for him to stay there,” a colleague declared. “He realized this himself but his sense of duty held him to the spot.” Four years of dogged work had brought Clarence King nothing but an advanced case of tuberculosis.

  May 8, 1901, was the last day King would spend in New York. He spent it with Ada and the children at their house in Flushing, still keeping up the pretense that he was James Todd. After dinner, in the living room, he told her that he wanted them to move to Toronto. They would find less racial prejudice in Canada, there was an excellent school for their children, and they would no longer have to answer the questions of neighbors curious about the comings and goings of the white Mr. Todd. If anyone in Toronto asked about him, he said, “tell them that you and your husband have agreed to separate and that you do not like to discuss your family matters.” Money would be no problem: there was $80,000, enough for the rest of their lives. He had left it in the hands of his oldest friend, James Gardiner, who knew of Ada and the children.

  Why Clarence King urged Ada Todd to uproot the family and leave the country remains open to conjecture, but there can be little doubt that such a move would have greatly reduced her chances of discovering his true identity after his death.

  Though Hay and King did not connect during the president’s swing through Arizona, King had other pleasures, including a comfortable house, a cook, and the company of his manservant. Finding the libations and comestibles of Prescott beneath the standards of any self-respecting gourmand, he asked a friend in San Francisco to ship him eight high-grade hams (Smithfield if possible but definitely not “any Chicago make”), twenty-five pounds of bacon (“English or Irish preferred”), a box of “best” macaroni, several bottles of “best European olive oil” and “best old cider vinegar,” five or six pounds of “best” prunes, and six dozen pints of “very best” California wine. No microbe known to man had been able to down his spirits, he said, “and I propose to keep gay to the last.”

  In early June, when a heat wave overtaxed his heart, King moved to Pasadena, California. The new abode was impressively large but stuffed with the “most vulgar dodgy little bits of ‘art furniture’ from Grand Rapids,” he reported to Clara Hay. “Not a thing one can sit on, not a piece that is not the most hideous mockery of taste.” The books in the library appeared to have been “bought by the yard,” and the walls were grimly festooned with leather hides bearing portraits of Indian chiefs and Evangeline “burnt in with a hot poker.” But the rent was cheap, and King spent most of his days outdoors in a hammock, staring beyond the palms and eucalyptus trees at the blue-gray mountains in the distance.

  By the middle of June, Hay was back at his desk in the State Department, feeling cheerier than he had in months. The roaring throngs who greeted McKinley at every stop had also been generous with praise for Hay. In a few days, when Harvard blessed him with an honorary LL.D., his stock would rise again. And to his vast delight, the president had just named twenty-four-year-old Del Hay an assistant secretary, the same post John Hay had held in the Lincoln White House. Henry Adams might have thought that the world had “tipped itself over” in the last thirty years, but to the beaming John Hay, it seemed to have come full circle.

  Del had caught the president’s notice during 1900, when he went to South Africa to serve as U.S. consul at Pretoria. The English and the Dutch were fighting the Boer War, a conflict in which the United States was committed to a policy of neutrality. Secretary Hay’s critics, pointing to his affection for England and to Del’s inexperience, thought the appointment highly inappropriate. But Del had succeeded—largely by “not shooting off his mouth,” his proud father told one of the skeptics. No one, not even the secretary, knew whether Del’s personal sympathies lay with the Boers or the British.

  Before taking up his new duties at the White House on July 1, Del decided to go up to Yale for his class reunion. Late in the afternoon of June 22, he checked into a room on the third floor of the New Haven House, then joined his fellows from the class of 1898 for dinner and a play. He came back to the hotel at eleven, spent an hour in the smoker, and on the way to his room asked to be awakened at nine the next morning. At two-thirty, he fell out of his window.

  A workman in the streets heard Del’s body hit the pavement, saw the motionless figure in pajamas, and ran into the hotel for help. The night clerk summoned the proprietor, who telephoned the White House, and at three o’clock John Hay was awakened by the jangling of his own telephone.

  Del’s room showed no evidence of foul play or suicide. The only clue, a half-finished cigarette on the window ledge, suggested an accident. The night had been hot and close, and it appeared that Del had dozed off as he sat on the sill for a last smoke before turning in.

  When the anguished Hay reached New Haven and saw only a small bruise on Del’s forehead, he could scarcely believe there was no more life in the husky, six-foot-two frame. He collapsed and was put to bed, leaving his daughter Helen to cope until Clara arrived from Lake Sunapee. After the funeral in Cleveland, the family went straight to Sunapee, where Clara wanted everyone to try to carry on as usual. The children had guests, and Clara stoically decided that Providence had sent Del on long trips to the Philippines and South Africa “just to prepare us for this one, from which he will not return.” John saw no comfort in that thought, nor could he feel the tranquility Clara seemed to draw from the green slopes of Mount Sunapee. “There is not an inch of the ground but is associated with our boy,” he wrote to McKinley. “Every hope of the future was linked with him in one way or another. Time, I know, is the great healer—but have I time to heal?”

  Condolences poured in—from Lizzie Cameron, Andrew Carnegie, Robert Todd Lincoln, President McKinley, Vice President Roosevelt, and eight hundred others. Hay’s old friend Mark Twain wrote to offer “all that I have—the sorrow of one who knows.” His own heart had been “hurt beyond healing” by the death of his daughter five years before, he said. “I will not torture you with words, they would help if they could, but in all the ages they have not availed.” Even the supremel
y eloquent Henry James was dumbstruck. He thought of the Hays “with boundless tenderness, feeling with you from the bottom of my heart. But I can dream of no ‘consoling’ word to say to you.” Remembering a recent evening in London with Del, James guessed at the Hays’ parental pride and hoped it would help them through their “miserable hour.” Nannie Lodge, fearful of saying too much, sent Hay a short note most poignant for its omissions. Her heart was heavy with the knowledge of his anguish, she said, and “I only wish that you could read between these poor lines, all that I long to say.”

  Secretary of State John Hay and his son Del outside the State, War and Navy Building.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  King and Adams telegraphed as soon as they heard the news, and Adams soon followed his wire with letters. “When one is struck by one of these impossible blows, one either has or has not the strength to go on,” he told Hay. “If one has it, one picks oneself up, after a time, and limps along, without help, and never really oneself again, but able to walk. If one hasn’t it, one goes under and no help serves.” Though Adams wished he were with them, he worried that he might do them harm. As he explained to Clara, “It is so long since I have got the habit of thinking that nothing is worthwhile! That sort of habit is catching, and I should not like to risk too close contact at a critical moment with a mind disposed to be affected by it.”

  Biding his time in Paris until he joined the Lodges in Germany, Adams had the sensation that he was a centipede condemned to die limb by limb. Only three days after Del’s death, Ned Hooper, who had languished in an asylum for months, was carried off by pneumonia.