Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Ellen had developed an inner strength that helped foster the growth of both her sisters and her own children, but she could not defeat her own ill health no matter how hard she tried. Several years before her marriage, Ellen had contracted consumption, at the time the more common name for tuberculosis, and she went through numerous cycles of sickness and remission. The gap between Ned’s birth in 1839 and Clover’s four years later indicates that her illness had flared up for a time—her first two pregnancies may have reignited a simmering tubercular infection. Her illness may also explain why she felt Clover was her “lucky” child—she probably hadn’t anticipated another because of her illness. In any case, by the time Ellen was pregnant with Clover in the spring of 1843, she was in remission, writing in mid-May to her sister Caroline, who was staying for several weeks with the Emersons in Concord, that “I long since abandoned the black couch, am now restored to the usual duties of a mistress and parent and member of society . . . I am getting strong, ride, and walk.”

  But Ellen’s letters soon enough vacillate between reporting that she’s feeling better and that she’s feeling worse. “Air, give me air / I am fainting here,” she pleads in an undated poem.

  Tuberculosis was the most potent killer in antebellum America, responsible for one-fifth of all deaths. Its symptoms were specific: fatigue, pallor, bloody cough, fever, swollen glands, and dramatic weight loss. But treatments varied greatly. If a total cure remained unlikely, remission always seemed a possibility, within reach of just one more new regimen, one more medicine. Doctors prescribed everything from iodine, mercury, nitric acid, cod liver oil, bed rest, and a bland nutritious diet to vigorous exercise, including riding horseback, which was thought to jostle and clear the lungs. Doctors also recommended a change of climate, particularly when the patient was a well-born New Englander who could afford an escape from damp air and a drafty house.

  By early 1848, Ellen and her husband, desperate about the state of her health, fled Boston’s forbidding weather in the hopes that the warmer climate of Savannah, Georgia, might help her condition improve. They took along their oldest children but decided that Clover, not yet five, was too young for the arduous journey and left her behind with her twenty-two-year-old Aunt Susan and grandfather Sturgis, both of whom had a special fondness for the child. After arriving in Georgia, Ellen thanked her sister Susan “for your attentions to my baby—I love to hear all she says.” In April, Ellen asked her father that no one correct Clover’s pronunciation—“I shall be very sorry to find her precocious in that respect when I return”—later exclaiming to him that she was “delighted to hear so good account from my Clover.” In another letter, she included a note for her daughter, who was learning to read. Calling her “my precious silver grey,” the color of a horse, she wrote, “I love you as much as ever. I hear you are well and good.” She added, “I see your little stems of legs trotting up and down stairs.”

  Ellen and Robert Hooper expressed a measured hope about her health to her father. Robert wrote first, to say they had made “frequent excursions in the saddle and I think that at each successive one Ellen goes further and returns less fatigued than at the preceding. I perhaps deceive myself but if I do not, Ellen is better than when we left home.” Ellen concurred: “I think I am much better.” She was eager to allay the fears of her father: “I cough hardly at all,” she assured him, “and I hope to throw off the remnant. But I am satisfied it was best to have come.” By mid-June, however, when Ellen went with her family to Horn Pond at Woburn for a stay at her father’s summer home, she was no better. Captain Sturgis worried to Caroline that Ellen “is about the same as when you saw her,” saying, “I hope to get her in a better state by the pure air of Woburn, though I am not free from serious apprehensions about her.”

  At a certain point, Ellen knew she was dying. Her poems are filled alternately with the dread of leaving—“Oh no, too soon, too perfect, and too deep / Must come the sleep of Death to my young heart”—and a resolution to find strength in the inevitable: “Now I think I’ve stood so long / By my own cold clay, / I can back with spirit strong / And bear what for me may—.”Ellen asked that her letters be kept for her daughters, hoping her words might one day “have interest” for them, but also gave them permission to set her writing aside—“If they do not wish the trouble of looking them over, they can burn them unread.” She must have been acutely aware that she was leaving her children to an unbridgeable sadness. On Friday, November 3, 1848, Ellen was at home with her husband and her sister Susan at her bedside. There is no record of who else might have been there or where the Hooper children were that day. At four-thirty in the afternoon, Ellen briefly woke and said with a weak voice: “Patience! Patience!” Robert, wishing at this point for his wife to find release after her long illness, asked, “Cannot you go to sleep?” She replied, “It is not time yet.” But a half hour later, at five o’clock, Ellen died. She was thirty-six years old.

  Ephraim Peabody, who had officiated at the Hoopers’ wedding eleven years before and who by the time of Ellen’s death had become the minister at King’s Chapel, presided at her funeral. She was buried three days later next to her brother, William Junior, in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, in the Sturgis family plot. A small marble headstone with a rounded top and the etched initials E.S.H. marks her grave. That night, Peabody recalled the events of the day: “To-day I read beside her coffin, amidst her mourning friends, the words of Christ: ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’” He noted that in her last year, beset by discouragement and crushing pain, any easy religious sentiment had been burned away and she had became “almost a mystic.”

  Ellen’s youngest sister, Susan, wrote to a close friend in the days following the funeral. “How the sunlight crinkles up the wall in the early afternoon and the nightly shadows fall so heavy on my heart because her low voice is hushed forever.” She spoke of a loss for which she could find no end: “[Ellen] heard my prayers, when I was a child, and took care of me and [then] she was my baby for many years up to the hour I saw her die. She was mother and sister and home to me. She was beautiful and kind and delicate and lovely and she is dead and the world does seem very dark and empty without her and the wound deepens every day.” Reverend Peabody worried about Robert Hooper, imagining that “his saddest days were yet to come” and that memories of the past would not be able to shut out a looming “loneliness of the present.”

  To have death settle in so close must have been terrifying to five-year-old Clover. She had neither the capacity to reason nor the comfort of an adult’s religious faith, and, unlike her Aunt Sue, she had no way to make an account of her loss with words. She likely had a child’s belief that wishing can bring back the dead, that magic or good behavior can find a remedy. Clover’s older sister, Ellen, would mention her mother in letters, remembering the sound of her low voice and how she expressed herself. Ned later collected his mother’s poetry and had eight copies of the collection privately printed as a memorial to her. By contrast, there is little record that Clover wrote or talked about her mother.

  But when Clover finally started taking photographs thirty-five years after her mother’s death, she often captured images of maternal figures, as if to bring her own mother back into view and back to life.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Hub of the Universe

  IN 1847, THE YEAR BEFORE Clover’s mother died, Clover’s Aunt Sue had married Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, a leading surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. The newlyweds set up housekeeping at 2 Chauncy Place, around the corner from the Hoopers. With jet-black hair and large hooded eyes, Sue was an attractive woman and fragile, given to occasional bouts of moodiness and self-doubt. She seems to have had neither Caroline’s ambition and focus nor Ellen’s penchant for domestic life, but she was tender-hearted, and after her beloved sister’s death, she promised to “take all the care I can here of [Ellen’s] little child . . . I love Clovy. I would give a world to have her and keep her—she’s just like Ellen, I do think s
he is.” By all accounts, Aunt Sue indeed took special care, letting Clover stay at her house for extended visits. In the year after Ellen’s death, she took note of Clover’s play-acting, telling her sister Caroline that the young girl “dresses up like a beggar-woman and remarks plaintively that her destitute infants ‘ain’t dot no party-dresses.’” This vignette of a young girl, bereft of her mother, play-acting poverty and want struck the attentive aunt as both “sad and touching.”

  Apart from such family visits, Clover lived with her father, brother, and sister at the family home at 44 Summer Street. Ned Hooper would remember that his father’s “religious feelings were strong and constant,” but that he “rarely expressed them otherwise than by his personal character and conduct.” Clover’s father didn’t go much to church, though he owned pew number 45 in King’s Chapel. He never remarried, which was unusual for a man with three small children. Dr. Hooper seems to have kept his grief mostly to himself, prizing a muted toleration of catastrophe as part of genteel tradition. In the top drawer of his desk, he kept a piece of paper on which he had written in French a statement by George Sand: “good breeding meant that we hid our suffering.”

  Instead, when not performing his medical duties, Clover’s father devoted his time to his family and to humanitarian work, bringing his “well-balanced and even temperament” to his relations with his children and recruiting from others what he couldn’t provide himself. Betsey Wilder, who became a housekeeper for the Hoopers close to the time of Clover’s birth, became a cherished presence in the family, often accompanying Clover during her summers away from Boston when she was separated from her father. Betsey would be Clover’s most consistent mother figure, though little is known about her except for her devotion to the Hooper children. The Hoopers also depended on nearby family. In addition to Aunt Sue around the corner, Captain Sturgis lived just a few houses down the street, as did the three children of Samuel and Anne Hooper, Clover’s uncle and aunt. William, Annie, and Alice Hooper were more like siblings than cousins to Nellie, Ned, and Clover, and all were close in age; William, the oldest cousin, was ten years older than Clover, who was the youngest. Their double relation gave the six children the same set of grandparents and family history. They lived in the same neighborhood, vacationed together, and, when apart, wrote letters back and forth.

  From age five to twelve, Clover attended Miss Houghton’s school with her sister, Nellie, and, most likely, her cousins Annie and Alice. Not much is known about Miss Houghton or her educational establishment, but the curriculum probably included reading, arithmetic, natural history, composition, American history, and languages, as well as lessons in social refinement for girls: sewing, drawing, music, and dance. At eleven, Clover proudly told Nellie that Miss Houghton had lent her a French novel, Du Château, to read over the summer break. Summers were spent outside the city to get away from its potent smells, stifling heat, and the threat of disease. Clover lived for months at a time with one side of her family or the other, for the first several years after her mother’s death with Grandfather Sturgis at Horn Pond in Woburn and with her Aunt Eunice Hooper at Marblehead, and later in Lenox where Caroline Sturgis, whom Clover called “Aunt Cary,” married since 1847 to William Aspinwell Tappan, had a summer home. Clover’s father at some point would build an unpretentious second home in Beverly Farms on Boston’s rocky North Shore where the family would gather for months at a time.

  The young girl’s summers have the atmosphere of an idyll. When just seven and staying with her Sturgis aunts at Horn Pond, Clover wrote about gathering blackberries with the women in the family: “I got a box full that is to hold a quart. I got my dress stained a great deal which I was very glad of because it looked just as if I had been berrying.” When she was older, she wrote newsy letters from wherever she was ensconced, telling of tea parties with friends, theatricals, dances, hours spent playing the card game whist, and leisurely evening walks. Her summer days matched the description in the opening pages of Henry James’s 1878 novel Daisy Miller: “a flitting hither and thither of ‘stylish’ young girls, a rustling of muslin flounces, a rattle of dance-music in the morning hours.” She always had sewing in hand at the end of the day; one summer she announced to her sister, “I am taking painting lessons which delights both my heart and eyes.” She swam and rowed and at a moment’s notice would saddle her horse for a jaunt along country roads and through nearby woods.

  But there were darker currents. Clover’s Aunt Sue had separated from her husband, Dr. Bigelow, at some point in 1851, a development that Sue tried to write about in a letter to her sister Caroline, saying that “under the present circumstances I find all places where I go quite similar in one respect—i.e.—Henry is not in them—suffice it to say. He is gone and I have consented.” But she could not explain further: “The personal experiences resulting from these facts are not easily narrated in a letter.” As she’d said to a friend a year after her marriage, she felt she’d made a “pact with loneliness.”

  By the spring of 1853, the marriage was irretrievable. On June 9, while staying with her father, Captain Sturgis, at the family’s summer home at Horn Pond, Sue killed herself by drinking arsenic. The next day’s papers reported her “sudden death.” She was twenty-seven years old. Her only child, William Sturgis Bigelow, had just turned three that spring. Rumors circulated: that she was pregnant at the time of her death, that Dr. Bigelow had been unfaithful to her, that Clover had been staying at Horn Pond at the time and had witnessed her Aunt Sue’s death. Whether or not this was the case, the loss devastated Clover, who at the time was nine years old. Her Aunt Sue had stepped in after the death of Clover’s mother, caring for her and showing that she understood her, perhaps in ways that others did not.

  On hearing of the calamity, Waldo Emerson, as he was known to friends, advised Clover’s Aunt Cary that strength was the family’s only option: “Generally, we must rely on that tough fibre, which makes the substratum of all strong individuals,—whose ‘time and hour wear through the roughest day.’” Yet a young girl who had already lost her mother had no time to develop what Emerson called “a tranquility of the heart too deep to be shaken.”

  The next summer, 1854, Clover’s sister traveled overseas for her Grand Tour of European sights. Dark-haired and petite like her mother, Nellie, age seventeen, took seriously her role as older sister—various family members would, from time to time, give her reports on Clover’s behavior and mood, clearly expecting her interest. Now, in Nellie’s absence, Clover feared her sister might forget her, might abandon her too. She appended an anxious note at the end of a joint family letter: “My dear Miss Hooper,” Clover pleaded archly, “I write to remind you that you have a sister in existence and that sister would be grateful for any consolatory epistle that may convince her that the aforementioned lady is aware of the fact that she has a sister in America.” The next month Clover admitted her jealousy on hearing that Nellie had written a friend “before me so I called you a villain and all kinds of things.” Clover was joking, as was her way, but fear reverberated in her words. She hated being alone.

  The following year, 1855, Clover’s Aunt Cary left for an extended tour of Europe with her husband of seven years and their two young daughters, Ellen and Mary. They didn’t return for five years, staying in Paris, Dresden, Rome, and Florence in the winters and summering in the Apennines and the Alps. Caroline had been far more active in the Transcendental movement than had Clover’s mother. She had grown to be Margaret Fuller’s closest friend and an intimate of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Waldo Emerson called Caroline, with whom he’d had an ardent erotic friendship, “my Muse.” She painted, published books for young readers, and continued writing poetry, and while in Europe she would collect magnificent photographic prints by Giuseppe Ninci and Julia Margaret Cameron. Aunt Cary, who wrote to Clover from Europe and would later invite her to social gatherings, offered Clover a vital link to the lively, intellectual Sturgis side of her family, and what must have been a valued proximity to memo
ries of her mother. Her disappearance from Clover’s daily life for five years must have seemed another severed connection.

  At one point during these years, Clover fought with her cousin Alice Hooper, though the exact nature of the conflict remains unclear. Clover could be sensitive about responses to her letters, and she expected a prompt and fulsome reply; she frequently urged correspondents to answer immediately and write everything they knew. Perhaps Alice hadn’t answered a letter. Or maybe they disagreed over something else. In any case, Clover felt angry enough to declare in a letter, “As for Alice I can hardly bring myself to write her now. Hereafter and forever all my letters will be inscribed to Aunt Anne, Annie, and Willie, give my love to the last 3.” Vacillating between needing too much and an impulse to dismissiveness, Clover pushed away those she loved when her roiling feelings became hard to manage.

  By 1857, the Hooper family had moved away from their home on Summer Street, around the corner from where Aunt Sue had lived, to a distinguished brownstone at 107 Beacon Street, located in a growing neighborhood near the northwest corner of what would soon become the city’s Public Garden. That same year, Boston had begun an ambitious program to fill in the Back Bay, a marshy tidal basin, and thus increase the city’s landmass. Dr. Hooper may have favored the new home’s more spacious proportions and its convenient location. Clover’s cousins, Annie and Alice Hooper, lived up the street at 56 Beacon Street, and the neighborhood was closer to Clover and Nellie’s new school in Cambridge, which the girls had started attending in the fall of 1855. But Clover’s father may have also thought it time to move his young family away from the sorrows of their old neighborhood.

  Something of Clover’s mental and emotional state during these years might be detected in an undated scrap of her writing composed after the move to Beacon Street. Adopting the tropes and imagery of the gothic novels she was probably reading, Clover drafted a spoof of her own death, which she sent off to her cousin Annie Hooper. “The ring accompanying this note,” Clover tells her recipient, “was willed to Annie M. Hooper by the owner M. Hooper [M for Marian, Clover’s little-used given name] on the night preceding her decease. A bronze tea caddy was also included in the bequest on the night of the 6th of January 1857.” As in the opening of a noir murder mystery, the victim—Clover—is brutally killed.