They were quickly caught up in the social events of the capital. “The town is filling fast and we expect an interesting winter,” Clover wrote in mid-November. Dinner guests included James Lowndes, a lawyer and former colonel for the Confederacy; Aristarchi Bey, the Turkish minister; Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, still a favorite of Clover; neighbor Emily Beale; the Bonapartes; Jushie Yoshida Kiyonari, the Japanese minister, and his wife. Clover found General Ambrose Burnside, a senator from Rhode Island, a “nice old fellow and his dinner[s] very funny and informal . . . ; everyone stretches across the table and all talk at once.”
There was much to discuss late in 1880 in Washington, principally the shifting political scene after November’s election. John Hay thought no one since John Quincy Adams had entered office more qualified than President-Elect James Garfield, a Republican from Ohio with eighteen years’ experience in Congress who’d won a slim victory over his Democratic rival, General Winfield Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg. The transition of power brought with it a turnover in the staffing of important posts, a process Clover followed with avid interest, writing her father that the “air is full of rumours of the coming Cabinet.”
Clover paid particular attention to gossip about James D. Blaine, a senator from Maine, former Speaker of the House, and leader of the so-called Half-Breeds, a faction of the Republican Party that advocated civil service reform. The Half-Breed opposition to the Stalwart faction of the GOP, which had supported a third term for President Grant, had split the party, making room for Garfield to capture the nomination. Upon his election, Garfield named the shrewd, smooth-talking Blaine—Clover called him a “pretentious blatherskite”—as his secretary of state, though Blaine had been damaged earlier by never-proven accusations of receiving financial kickbacks from the railroad companies. On hearing of Blaine’s appointment, Clover remarked that “it’s a gross insult to the moral sense of the community, and a beginning which makes even friends and supporters of Garfield shake their heads and say, ‘Who’s next?’” Henry called the selection a “thunder-clap.” Blaine’s taint of corruption, his double dealing in regards to reform, and his antipathy toward their friend Carl Schurz were enough to poison Clover and Henry’s opinion of him. They had refused to recognize Blaine and his wife socially. Now, with Blaine in the Garfield administration, Clover found herself in a difficult position: “For us it will be most awkward; never having called on them before, it will simply be impossible to make up to them now, and as we are on terms of great intimacy with several of the head officials in the State Department the position is not easy.” Two weeks later, when a comment Clover made at a large dinner hosted by the Beales was repeated in the Boston Herald, the incident reminded her that on such occasions “one must always be on . . . guard.”
Clover and Henry found refuge from Washington’s ever-present “whispering gallery” with a small group of friends—John Hay, his wife, Clara, and Clarence King—with whom they could talk freely. For a brief time during the winter of 1880–81, all five of the “Five of Hearts,” as they came to be known, lived in the same place at the same time and got in the habit of seeing one another almost every day. Though the origin of this group moniker remains unknown, it captured the immense pleasure they took in one another’s company.
John Hay, born the same year as Henry, had grown up in Illinois, attended Brown University, and studied law at his uncle’s law firm, located next door to Abraham Lincoln’s practice in Springfield. At twenty-two, after working as a campaign aide in the 1860 election, Hay followed the new president to Washington as his assistant secretary, living in a corner room upstairs in the White House. He would recount those years with Lincoln in a massive ten-volume biography cowritten with John Nicolay. Hay’s subsequent career as a diplomat took him to Paris, Madrid, and Vienna, followed by six years as an editor at the New York Tribune. By 1874, his marriage to Clara Stone, the daughter of the Cleveland industrialist Amasa Stone, had made Hay independently wealthy. Hay first met Henry Adams in 1861 when both were in Washington, but their close friendship, which would provide ballast for both men, began in the late 1870s, when Hay went back to Washington to serve as assistant secretary of state under William Evarts in the Hayes administration.
Clara Hay, deeply religious and the most conventional of the group (in Clover’s words, “a handsome woman—very”), rarely said a word. Not that she had much of a chance. Hay liked to chat “for two,” as Clover noted. Henry later wrote that Hay’s table talk, impossible to capture on the page, was “frivolous and solemn, quick and unaffected, unconscious, witty, and altogether unlike the commonplace.” Teddy Roosevelt, under whom Hay later served as secretary of state, agreed, observing that Hay “really did say things which every one of us would like to say but never think of until after the opportunity for saying them is passed.” Hay was fastidious, affectionate, somewhat shy, generous, sidelined at times by waves of self-doubt and undefined illnesses. His talent was tempered, as one Washington journalist recalled, by “a touch of sadness.” When asked later in life to write his autobiography, he replied, “I am inclined to think that my life is an oughtnottobiography.” For all his good humor, his manner had a distinct formality. “No matter how intimate you were or how merry the occasion,” one friend remembered, “nobody ever slapped John Hay on the back.”
The group’s “fifth heart” was the rugged, handsome, peripatetic Clarence King, the one everyone thought most likely to succeed at anything he decided to do. A Yale graduate in chemistry, he became, at the age of twenty-five, the U.S. Geologist in charge of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel and spent six years exploring and mapping vast reaches of the American West. King was also an enigma, a keeper of secrets. He later fathered five children with Ada Copeland, an African American woman in New York whom he married, posing as a black man with the alias James Todd. But King didn’t inspire suspicion among his friends—only envy and worry. They fretted about his whereabouts, his health, and his ever-shaky finances, which he blamed on his never-ending duty to a dependent and demanding mother.
What his friends knew of King was what he showed them: his considerable personal talents. Henry had known King since the summer of 1871, the year before his marriage to Clover, when they’d camped together in the Uinta mountain range in Utah Territory. Finding a new friend as winning and gifted as King was “a miracle,” Henry wrote. King, who’d been leading the fortieth parallel survey from the Sierras to eastern Wyoming since 1867, knew “America, especially west of the hundredth meridian, better than anyone.” Hay, who’d become friends with King earlier over drinks and cigars in New York, said King “resembled no one else whom we have ever known.” Hay marveled at King’s humor, his grasp of art and literature, and his “intelligent sympathy which saw the good and the amusing in the most unpromising subjects.” King had, according to Hay, “an astonishing power of diffusing happiness wherever he went.” Clover joked at Hay’s tendency to effuse, especially about King, saying at one point that, for Hay, the younger man was “like the sun in heaven.” She added dryly, “I never imagined such frantic adoration could exist in this practical age.” But Clover herself was not immune to King’s considerable charms. They shared a passion for art and exchanged letters about current women’s fashion, and whenever he returned to H Street after a western tour, he brought her something, once giving her “a basket made by the sister of a [Paiute] Indian chief,” Clover reported, “who was buried in Mr. King’s dress coat.”
With these friends, Clover felt recognized, known, seen, and able to lay aside the filigreed screen of elite social life. She called Clarence King “our prop and stay.” John Hay, who would remain Henry’s closest friend, called Clover the “first heart,” a gesture of affection she cherished. His ease and warmth were what she craved, and perhaps his own struggles with self-doubt helped him recognize what wasn’t so obvious about Clover—her sharp wit often covered a deep craving for reassurance and tenderness.
With an office next
door to the White House in the State, War, and Navy Building (currently known as the Old Executive Office Building), Hay would stroll through Lafayette Park to join Clover and Henry for five o’clock tea. Hay’s wife, Clara, often came along as well , though at times she had to return to Cleveland to tend the Hay children and her parents. Already the author of two highly respected books, Mountaineering the Sierra Nevada in 1872 and Systematic Geology in 1878, King now came by H Street after he finished his work as first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, which mapped and investigated geological and mineral resources. Tea at Clover’s small round table turned into dinner, which turned into late-night conversations, as the Five of Hearts gathered around the fireplace in low-slung red leather chairs. It was always “a good deal of good talk,” as Clover told her father.
But fear and runaway sorrow intruded on Clover’s idyllic domestic scene. Her sister-in-law, Fanny Hooper, was sick with a gasping cough she couldn’t shake. “Is there disease in either lung or is it merely an obstinate cough such as we all struggle with at times,” Clover had asked nervously from London the previous spring, clearly haunted by the memory of her own mother’s fatal cough thirty-two years before. She speculated with her father that the physical strain of bearing five children in seven years had been “too much” for Fanny, fearing she’d contracted the dreaded scourge of tuberculosis, a possibility that the doctors later confirmed. What was to happen to Ned’s five little girls who, at the time, ranged in age from two to nine? But by August, Clover had written with relief, “It’s nice to hear of Fanny as riding and getting stronger,” a sentiment she echoed in a missive the following week: “It’s nice to have such good news of Fanny.”
Now, in late February of 1881, Clover’s father wrote to her about Fanny’s “increased suffering,” and Clover announced she wanted to go to Cambridge to help. She waited for her father to give her a cue as to what she should do. “Write or telegraph me if we can be of any earthly use either to Fanny, Ned, or the children or to help lighten Ellen’s care,” Clover pleaded on a Wednesday. “I will be nurse or read story books all day long or play games or anything to fill any gaps. Henry and Mr. King will do nicely together and I can leave at two hours’ notice. If we were in trouble Ned would find fifty ways of helping us, and we feel like two brutes to keep five hundred miles off and do nothing.”
The following Sunday morning, February 27, Clover wondered why she hadn’t heard word from her father and worried about how the unfolding family tragedy might be affecting her sister, Ellen, who lived in Cambridge next door to Ned and Fanny: “I’ve been half expecting a summons from you by mail or telegraph in answer to my note of Tuesday,” Clover queried. “I should think Ellen needed reinforcement by this time; the continued strain of responsibility and sympathy must be very wearing.” That same morning, several hours later, two telegrams arrived, from Dr. Hooper and Ned. Her family had kept from her the news that Fanny had died two days before. Clover missed Fanny’s death and would be unable to attend her funeral, which had been planned for later that same Sunday afternoon.
Her family’s decision to exclude her in this way, to reject her offer of help, must have been intensely painful. Perhaps Clover worried that she had failed somehow by not returning from Europe the previous spring and summer, when first told of Fanny’s illness. There was no real explanation.
On hearing the horrible news, Clover wrote back immediately, but protected herself: “I want to go on and see all of you but after turning it over and over have decided to wait at least a few days. Henry flatly refuses to let me go alone and I am not willing to pull him up from his work. If you had sent us a telegram Friday night we should have gone on, now we think we should be a bore.” On Saturday, March 6, Clover asked to hear “how Ned’s babies get on and who is to take charge” and explained her absence again with the excuse that Henry would not let her go to Cambridge by herself: “I have not the heart to drag him off from his work, in which he is much absorbed.” She adopted an even more distant tone five days later. “Unless I am really needed I don’t fancy the idea of going north in March,” she wrote dully, adding, “I shouldn’t pull well in single harness after so many years’ practice in double.”
How to explain this extraordinary family scene of suffering, rejection, and self-protection? Was it Henry who prevented Clover from seeing her family after Fanny’s death, as she seemed to claim? His letters during these weeks explained how he’d immersed himself in writing—“deep in history,” as he put it—and nowhere does he mention Fanny, Ned, or Clover’s concerns. And surely he loathed deathbed scenes, writing at one point that “of all the experiences of life, there are none whose accumulations are so heavy in their weight on the mind, as the death-beds one has to watch.” Yet if Henry didn’t insist they both go to be with Ned and his girls, he also apparently didn’t actively stop Clover from traveling to see her family during the crisis.
Instead, what may have been some reluctance on Henry’s part and what can only be seen as the Hoopers’ misguided protection of Clover’s emotions gave her a way to dodge her own roiling feelings. She tried to escape sorrow by declaring the priorities of her life with Henry, as if Fanny’s death threatened to engulf her and take these responsibilities away from her. Perhaps what she most wished to avoid were the faces of Ned and Fanny’s young daughters, now bereft of their mother, because in them she would have seen again her own young face. Did Ned, Ellen, and Dr. Hooper intuitively understand her dread of this and, in order to spare Clover (and themselves), thereby neglect to send a telegram on the day of Fanny’s death, knowing their delay would prevent Clover from attending the funeral? Impossible to know. In any case, Clover turned away from them, a withdrawal that may have divided her from her family in a way that was new. As spring approached, her cheerful mood of the previous fall and early winter had darkened.
Overtly restless and bored, Clover directed her attention to her garden, a “patch” measuring seventy-five by fifty feet behind the house; she hired George Bancroft’s expert gardener to plant chrysanthemums, lilies of the valley, and roses to border a lawn with a red maple at its center. She spent many afternoons on horseback, sometimes riding again after five o’clock tea. She kept up with her Greek lessons and decided to read Edward Gibbon’s six-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “a bone which will take months to gnaw.” She was always reading something, telling her father what he might enjoy: Anatole France, William Dean Howells, Goethe. But that spring of 1881 her heart wasn’t really in it, and by May she complained, “It’s read, read, read, till I loathe the very sight of a book.”
After President Garfield took office in March, John and Clara Hay decided to leave for Cleveland, and Clarence King resigned his post as director of the U.S. Geological Survey and headed for the silver mines of Mexico. The Five of Hearts stayed connected, visiting frequently and writing letters to one another on stationery Hay designed, with a five-of-hearts playing card reproduced on the upper left-hand corner. Even so, Clover dreaded the breakup of the group. “In this ever-shifting panorama of course we shall find new combinations, but we shall hardly have the same intimate cozy set that we did,” Clover mourned as her friends left the city. She noted King’s departure to her father at the end of March, only a month after Fanny’s death: “One by one our intimates are gone.”
CHAPTER 11
“Recesses of Her Own Heart”
ONLY MONTHS EARLIER, in the less bereft days of late 1880, Clover had written wryly to her father, “I am much amused but not surprised at your suspecting me of having written Democracy.” She was referring to Henry’s first novel. He had started the manuscript during the late fall of 1878, sending it off to the publisher Henry Holt just before he and Clover left for their European travels in May 1879. Since its anonymous publication earlier in 1880, while the Adamses were safely away in Europe, the scathing satire of Washington politics had caused a sensation, selling out nine printings in its first year alone. A favorite game in Washington parlors and
beyond was guessing the novel’s author and the inspiration for each of its thinly disguised characters. Clover was amused to find herself on a “black list” of possible authors, along with “Clarence King and John Hay!” Only Holt, E. L. Godkin (the founder and editor of The Nation, later editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post), and the rest of the Five of Hearts were in on the ruse.
When the book was released two years later in England, Hay would write Henry from there that people talked about nothing “except the authorship of D.” He told Henry how, while he had been strolling through Kensington Park with Clarence King, Henry James, and William Dean Howells, all in London at the same time, Howells suddenly blurted out to the group that he and Charles Warner (Twain’s co-author of The Gilded Age) had solved the mystery. The Connecticut writer John William De Forest had to be author of Democracy. “We were astonished we had not thought of it before,” said Howells, in Hay’s report. In his reply, Henry would ascribe authorship to Hay, musing with mock sympathy, “Much as I disapprove of the spirit of your book . . . I can see that in English reflection it must become somehow more terrible to its creator than to anyone else.” It was a charade the friends conducted back and forth for years.
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