The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  A few weeks of thinking about the Hays led Adams to two conclusions: If Clara held together, John would, and if John stayed in the State Department, he might be sufficiently distracted to escape the grief that had permanently crushed Henry Adams. From Bayreuth, where he and the Lodges were listening to Wagner, Henry pointed out that he and Hay were approaching their own Götterdämmerung.

  We might as well go on, as drop off, if we still have a road beneath us. Perhaps one only begins to be useful to others when one ceases to be useful to oneself. At least we make some distant approach then to what religion and philosophy pose for our ideals. I hope you will keep the reins and the road till you are turned out, or fall from your coach-box. You cannot possibly care a straw what road you go; you cannot imaginably have a notion whether one is better, in the long run, than another; you have lived long enough, and are suffering enough now, to know that the whole phantasmagoria can be directed, like a dream, more or less as your mood is, if you don’t struggle; you can gain neither peace nor energy by stopping the machinery.

  Hay suspected that Adams was right but wondered if his nerves could stand the strain. His mind crawled with “hideous forebodings.” All his life, he told Henry, good luck had pursued him “like a shadow. Now it is gone—it seems to me forever. I expect tomorrow to hear bad news, something insufferable.” Hay tried to console himself with the thought that a long life was not so desirable as a happy one, and he told King, Del’s “little life was very happy. He had ease and variety; his family idolized him; everybody liked him and sought his company.” These were the thoughts he tried to think, he said, but they never rang true: “I mock myself. My grief seizes me like a bulldog and will not let me go. God help me!”

  Returning to Lake Sunapee at the end of July, Hay was hurt and bewildered to find that there was still no letter from King. “I have heard nothing from you for ages,” he cried. “I don’t want you to write if it bores you—but if you ever feel like it we should like very much to have news of you.”

  “A fever which has kept my poor head swimming and throbbing has made it impossible to write you coherently,” King explained in a letter begun two days before Hay wrote his lament. “A sense of your sad hours has been with me every hour and was about the only clear impression I had.” Lying in his hammock and staring at mountains he would never climb, he had “all day without interruption to think of you, and wonder at the strange, undiscernable purpose of Providence in taking away a life of such bright promise.”

  For two days, “days of fever and discomfort,” King’s letter lay unfinished. When he picked up his pen again, he pictured the Hays “curtained from the world by those cool draperies” of maple at Sunapee and learning to live with their sorrow. Grief, he thought, was “an unseen companion, domiciled with us, entering into our lives, sitting by our side, and at meat with us, till we are familiar with it and learn at last to love it there, like some mute messenger from beyond the gates.” His deepest regret was that he could not go to them. “What I would give to be well and with you and to take my share of the passing shadow and the coming light. But I am a poor sick old fellow uncertain yet of life or death, suffering more than my lot and simply waiting till nature and the foe have done their struggle.”

  For the moment, the foe had the upper hand. In spite of the Smithfield hams and “very best” California claret, King in his daily fevers had sweated off more than thirty pounds. The Hays had found a San Francisco physician who claimed great success in treating tuberculosis with X rays, but as King now explained to Clara, such treatment was out of the question. His bronchial tubes were clogged by “morbid growths” of an undetermined nature, and until they were understood, the doctors felt it would be “madness to turn them over to the tender mercies of the X rays, which might kill or cure promptly so far as science now knows.”

  Dismal as King’s prospects sounded, he did not expect to die soon. “Even if there is to be a fatal exit to the case, it may last years,” he told Clara. From Pasadena, he planned to go to Phoenix for the winter. The moment his case was pronounced hopeless, he would head for the Southeast, “where Mother can come to me and other friends may drop down on me for a glimpse.”

  Hay’s desolation thickened in the August heat. Sick of hearing “the commonplaces of consolation,” he told Adams that he finally understood what a “dunce” he had been to use them with friends. Del’s smiling face followed him everywhere, and he wished that fate had taken him instead of his son. Though he said nothing about resigning from the State Department, he loathed it with almost morbid intensity. “The meanness of men—the medium in which we all must work, grows more intolerably bitter,” he wrote Whitelaw Reid on the last day of August. “I can no longer take comfort in regarding the politicians as black beetles working out the law of their being. Their greed and malice worry me and break my rest. Moral integrity and a sense of humor will carry you a long way; but when your sense of humor fails—woe unto you!”

  Clarence King toward the end of his life, in John Hay’s library.FROM CLARENCE KING MEMOIRS, COURTESY OF THE JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

  One week later, Hay was jolted by another calamity. On Friday, September 6, in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, a deranged anarchist fired two shots into President McKinley at point-blank range. The assailant, a twenty-eight-year-old mechanic named Leon Czolgosz, had concealed his revolver in a handkerchief. Arrested at once, Czolgosz identified himself as Fred Nieman—Fred No-man. He had shot the president, he said, because he “didn’t believe one man should have so much service and another man should have none.”

  One bullet had merely grazed the president’s ribs and had fallen out of his clothing as the doctors prepared him for surgery. The second, which could not be found, had pierced both walls of the stomach. The surgeons treated the wounds, closed the incision, and sighed with relief. President McKinley was sure to recover. Newspaper reporters old enough to remember the long demise of President Garfield in 1882 were assured that times had changed: improved antiseptic technique had made abdominal surgery a routine procedure.

  Henry Adams learned of the attack the next morning, over breakfast in Stockholm. It made him uneasy, he wrote Hay, but behind his uneasiness, “silent and awful like the Chicago express, flies the thought of Teddy’s luck!”

  Vice President Theodore Roosevelt hurried to Buffalo, as did Hay, who could not rid himself of the thought that McKinley was as doomed as Garfield and Lincoln. On Tuesday, heartened by the doctors’ prognosis, Roosevelt headed for a family vacation in the Adirondacks. Hay left for Washington on Wednesday, wiring Clara that he would return to Sunapee over the weekend. On Thursday, with fresh assurances from the physicians, Hay composed a memorandum telling the embassies that recovery was now beyond question. But a “black cloud of foreboding” kept him from sending it, and on Friday word came that McKinley’s death was imminent. At six in the evening the president asked for a prayer. In the early hours of September 14, 1901, he died whispering the words of his favorite hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  Three presidents had died by assassination, Hay noted, and it had been his “strange and tragic fate” to serve them all. And once again, as he had after the death of Vice President Hobart in 1899, Secretary of State Hay stood next in line for the presidency.

  Reading Adams’s letter from Stockholm, Hay shivered at “the awful clairvoyance” of the remark about Teddy’s luck. “Well, he is here in the saddle again,” Hay sighed. The moment Roosevelt arrived in Union Station, he had collared Hay and told him he must stay on. “I saw of course it was best for him to start off that way,” Hay told Adams, “and so said I would stay, forever, of course, for it would be worse to say I would stay a while, than it would be to go out at once. I can still go at any moment he gets tired of me, or when I collapse.”

  There were more horrors to come—the death of Hay’s old White House colleague and fellow Lincoln biographer, John George Nicolay, and the sad
finale of Clarence King. Over the years Hay had perpetrated a raft of ingenious ruses in order to put money in King’s pockets, and the settlement of Del’s financial affairs inspired him to one more. He sent King a keepsake of Del in the form of a check.

  Deeply touched, King said he spent hours thinking of Hay’s “superhuman” kindness and of his own financial bungling. “In my present condition of uncertainty of folded hands and days of reflection I have been trying to understand why a man as well endowed with intelligence as I should have made such a failure in money matters.” During the last several years, he had built his consulting practice to the point where it covered the $10,000 a year he needed to care for his mother and her household, and the $2,000 it took to “keep a decent position” for himself. According to his check stubs, he had spent $275,000 on his dependents over thirty-five years, but he could not fathom why he had not made “abundant money” besides. Casting about for explanations, he supposed he had “stayed too long in pure science and got a bent for the philosophical and ideal side of life too strong for any adaptation to commercial affairs.” He could have joined a college faculty and “abandoned the family to sink but really whenever the moment came I could not do it.” Nor did he see how he could have succeeded in literature: “that door seemed always shut in my face.”

  Hay was equally mystified and considerably more embittered. “There you have it in the face!” Hay told Adams. “The best and brightest man of his generation, who with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries, with industry that has often sickened me to witness it, with everything in his favor but blind luck, hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering, alone and uncared-for in a California tavern. Ça vous amuse, la vie?”

  The news of King loomed like a nightmare, Adams wrote from Europe. “[W]ith my usual pessimism, I had fully realised the danger, when I bade him good-bye, and both of us knew that it was a chance if we met again. Of late I have found my pessimism rather a serious load. One can afford to be pessimistic only in youth when the world sometimes gets a chance to be gay.”

  Hay’s fury grew with every bulletin from the West. When one of King’s doctors wrote Hay that the patient was the most delightful creature he had ever met and the other called him “a rare sweet soul,” Hay snarled to Adams, “you must admit that you and the Pope and other infallible powers have a queer taste in fates.” A few weeks later, thinking of King’s fevers and the “long torture” still in front of him, Hay added, “If one of us could go out and kill him, it would be a brotherly act.”

  As planned, King moved from Pasadena to Phoenix at the beginning of October. The doctor had prescribed an “uninfected” house, but since the owners of such places were disinclined to rent to tuberculars, it took two exhausting weeks to find new quarters. At last he moved into a comfortable brick cottage that was “as clean as a fresh shaving,” he told Hay. And the climate was “good enough to bottle.”

  Frank Emmons, the Fortieth Parallel survey colleague who had introduced King to Adams, had come West on business and stopped in Phoenix to spend a few weeks helping King. Emmons was shocked to see that King’s lungs produced more than a pint of fluid per day, and knowing his friend’s love of fine food, he understood at once how disheartened King would be in a place where the grocer and the butcher stocked only the cheapest goods. The electricity flickered on and off at will, and even rudimentary services were in short supply. King’s mother talked of coming, but Emmons warned against it. In primitive Phoenix, where one was forced to live “more or less in camping style,” the exacting Mrs. Howland would be sorely out of place.

  King spoke vaguely to Emmons of a “middle-aged lady from Chicago” who might spend the winter with him, which may have been a heavily veiled expression of his wish that Ada come from Toronto. If Emmons knew about Ada, he did not say so in his diary, and events suggest that he did not. King’s mail in Phoenix came to a post office box, and since he could no longer be sure that he or his manservant would be the first to see it, he faced the problem of how to account for envelopes addressed to James Todd. After thirteen years of secrecy, someone had to be told. King found it easier to confess his fraud to Ada than to Emmons.

  In one of his last letters to her, written in October 1901, King revealed his true identity but still held out the false promise of an inheritance from his “aunt”: “You know that it is my strongest desire and intention in life that we should be legally united just as soon as we can do so without risking the loss of the little property which will come to me.” In the meantime, she should take the name King “and have the children’s name changed in the New York State Court at Albany so as all to have my name. I have studied it all out and consulted a good lawyer about it and my only wish before God and for you is to do the very best thing for us all and I am perfectly sure that what I have advised you is best.” Referring to himself as her husband and urging her to do likewise, he also told her to enter the name Clarence King in their family Bible.

  By November, King’s days were ruled by fevers. “That the microbes do not respect an old and tired constitution shows them to be no better than the Supreme Court,” he joked in his last letter to Hay. “You can fancy that it is awfully hard to watch myself waste away till I am little else than bad temper and expectoration. But the sense of humor survives just enough to know that it did not vanish with the calves of my legs or that biceps of which I once felt an ardent pride.”

  King’s humor endured to the end. During a fitful, delirious night in December, when he overheard the doctor say that the heroin must have gone to his head, he shot back, “Many a heroine has gone to better heads than mine is now.” King died in his sleep at two o’clock in the morning on December 24. The doctor filled out the death certificate, putting an M on the line for marital status, and telegraphed Ada in Toronto.

  22

  Nearly All the Great Prizes

  A few minutes before ten in the morning on New Year’s Day, Henry Adams and Frank Emmons and eight other pallbearers assembled in Manhattan at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 37th Street to escort King’s coffin up the aisle of the Brick Presbyterian Church. A raw northwest wind warred with the brilliant sunshine, holding the temperature to twelve degrees. Inside the church, the red-and-gilt walls decorated by John La Farge cast a tropical glow that would have delighted Clarence King. At the head of the coffin, atop a bed of palm fronds, lay a large cross of orchids and Southern greenery, from John and Clara Hay.

  As the prayers were read and the hymns were sung, Hay was in Washington, suffering through the pleasantries of a breakfast for the diplomatic corps. La Farge was also away, spending the holidays with his family in Newport. But the church was filled. In the crowd of friends, mining colleagues, and fellow members of the Century Club were W. D. Howells, publisher of King’s youthful mountaineering sketches; landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, who had briefly traveled with the Fortieth Parallel survey; Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune; James Gardiner, who knew the secret of King’s black family; Henry Holt, publisher of Democracy and Esther; Samuel Parsons, the Central Park superintendent who rescued King after his arrest at the zoo; and, from happier times, E. C. Stedman, financier and man of letters, who had crossed the Atlantic with King in 1882, when King, ecstatic at the beginning of his long European idyll, flipped twenty-dollar gold pieces into the air.

  At eleven o’clock the mourners filed out into the bitter wind and a brightness that Howells found piercingly bleak. A hearse waited to take the coffin to Grand Central Terminal for the journey to Newport, where King would be buried. Stedman, pleased by the size of the crowd, remarked that King had had “the gift of friendship.” Like dozens of others who mistook King’s warmth for intimacy, Stedman could not help regretting that his lovable friend had never had a family of his own. King’s devotion to his mother and the Howland children was beautiful, Stedman thought, “but there should have been even dearer ones to bear his name and mourn hi
s loss.”

  Adams, sad and fearful, boarded the first train for Washington. “I have hardly friends enough to go round for many years more, if it is necessary to supply two or three funerals a year, like 1901,” he told Lizzie Cameron, “but I will play out the hand somehow.” Unhappily, Lafayette Square offered no sedatives. “What a place this is for nerves!” he cried after a few days at home. “Mine are twisting and squirming like worms of steel.”

  His deepest anxiety was John Hay. Depressed and assailed by mysterious ills, Hay no longer had the energy for a full day at the State Department. At one o’clock he came home to spend afternoons in his library, where he read dispatches and wrote memoranda under the silent watch of a pair of stuffed cranes perched atop a carved settee. If he felt up to it, he called for Adams at four thirty, and together they set off for a walk up Connecticut Avenue. They talked of Congress, the cabinet, the president, the courts, finance, and foreign affairs. The secretary did not ask the historian’s counsel nor did the historian volunteer it. Half an hour later they returned for tea with Clara, the Five of Hearts now reduced to three.

  To Henry’s surprise, Clara seemed ten years younger. Though he perceived “a shady sub-conscious look about her face which tells her story,” she was full of laughter, eager to speak of Del, and excited by the prospect of a family wedding. In February the Hays’ daughter Helen would marry Payne Whitney, son of a New York tycoon. Judging by the character in the lad’s face, Uncle Henry guessed that Payne would make Helen happy, and it was clear that he would make her rich. “Houses, yachts, jewels rain on her,” Henry reported to Lizzie. So many diamonds had been delivered to 800 Sixteenth Street that Clara, fearing burglars, carried them about in her voluminous skirts.