By early 1883, the contentment Clover had shared with Henry three years before on their European travels seemed at a far remove. Her restlessness grew. Most painfully, Clover had begun to doubt whether she was any longer Henry’s “first heart.”
CHAPTER 12
The Sixth Heart
HENRY ADAMS ALWAYS had an alert eye for female beauty. To Charles Gaskell he once wrote, “I make it a rule to be friends with all the prettiest girls, and they like me much better than they did five-and-twenty years ago, and talk more confidentially of their doings.” He called such young women the “Birds of Paradise.” His shows of gallantry probably threw off more light than heat, but even so, Clover must have found her husband’s attentions to younger women unnerving. She had never ceased to feel self-conscious about her appearance, particularly her long Hooper nose. Just as she did not seek to be photographed, Clover never had her portrait painted, though it was almost de rigueur for women in her social class and she could have engaged any of the leading portraitists of her day, including John Singer Sargent.
Clover never openly admitted to jealousy—maybe it was too hard to voice or too dangerous to leave evidence of such an emotion for someone to discover later. She did, however, make an oblique reference to what was troubling her by early 1883. In a long letter to her friend Anne Palmer, Clover reminisced about her romantic trip with Henry through Europe in 1879–80, recalling in particular a carriage ride on a clear, warm August day through the rolling Scottish countryside near Dunkeld. While Henry drove, as Clover remembered it to Anne, she read aloud a Shakespeare sonnet (Sonnet 90), and the two memorized it during the ride:
Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss.
Ah do not, when my heart hath ’scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune’s might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.
What Clover so enjoyed about being with Henry was exactly this: a shared love of both literary expression and landscape. Shakespeare’s heightened language, read aloud in the haunting beauty of Scotland—she described it to Anne as “interlined with purple hills and rushing streams and heather and weather”—exemplified this perfectly. But Clover’s backward glance to this moment almost three years in the past was tinged with sadness. The sonnet speaks of injured love as something expected, perhaps unavoidable. Was she preparing herself for this sort of rejection?
Then, in the same letter, Clover broke away from her reverie and announced to Anne that she empathized with the Greek figure Clytemnestra. Clover had continued studying ancient Greek, working her way through the plays of Aeschylus in the original language. She had started with the first play in the Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon, wherein the great king returns from battle to his wife, Clytemnestra, accompanied by the lovely and conspicuously younger Cassandra, who sits alongside him in his carriage. “The result of a month’s wrestling with Agamemnon has brought me to feel great sympathy with Clytemnestra,” Clover announced to Anne. “Put yourself in her place—suppose your husband undertook to go after a pre-historic Mrs. Langtry taking in all the nicest men in town.” Mrs. Lillie Langtry, a former mistress of the Prince of Wales who scandalized New York during her acting debut in 1882 and whose behavior Henry thought revolting, posed no threat to Clover.
But Elizabeth Cameron probably did.
Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, the niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman, was—like Lillie Langtry—a celebrated beauty. Lizzie, as everyone called her, had “a strong face, a pointed chin, small mouth, lovely hazel eyes of an almond shape that was typical of the Shermans.” She was so attractive, one relative remembered, that she made “most women look like 35 cents” by comparison. Photographs taken of her by Frances Benjamin Johnston capture her abundant curls, along with her impossibly slender waist and a come-hither look directed boldly at the camera. A British noblewoman once called her “a dangerously fascinating woman.”
Lizzie had first come to Washington from Ohio in early 1878 when she was just twenty. She had been sent to the capital by her family, who hoped to avert her from marrying a young man at home whom they deemed unsuitable. In Washington she was to stay under the watchful eye of another uncle, John Sherman, who was by then secretary of the Treasury in the Hayes administration. General Sherman noted her arrival to the social scene at once, saying in a letter to his wife, “Lizzie is here and she is as fresh and beautiful as ever.”
Lizzie’s father, Charles, the eldest Sherman brother, had never made enough money to suit her mother, Eliza, who had social ambitions for her children. To remedy this, the Sherman brothers stepped in to arrange a more advantageous marriage for Lizzie, to James Donald Cameron, a millionaire widower with six children. Cameron (his intimates called him “Don”) was a newly elected senator from Pennsylvania, a replacement for his father, Simon Cameron, the Pennsylvania senator who had served as secretary of war under Lincoln until he was forced out of the cabinet because of mismanagement and corruption. The fact that Senator Cameron was also twenty-four years older than his prospective bride seemed not to bother the Sherman family, though newspapers took note, one calling the match “Beauty and the Beast.”
The couple had had a lavish wedding in May 1878, and they then moved to Scott Circle, several blocks north of the Adamses, on a street that was connected to Lafayette Park by Sixteenth Street. The marriage was disastrous from the start. Don Cameron, tall and thin, sporting an enormous mustache, had interest in politics, poker, and little else. Taciturn, brusque, and stained by the reputation of his powerful father, who still controlled his career, the senator sank into alcoholism, which got neither worse nor appreciably better.
To escape, Lizzie Cameron, age twenty-three, started going to the Adamses for tea and conversation in early 1881, befriending both Clover and Henry. She’d meet Emily Beale, who was three years older, and together they’d stroll across the street to 1607 H Street, the Beales’ family dog in tow (once, to Clover’s delight, the dog arrived all on his own to her tea table at the usual time). They’d rap their umbrellas on Henry’s first-floor study window to be let in for a visit, telling Clover it was better than ringing the doorbell because Henry couldn’t make the excuse that he was busy. “Miss Beale and Mrs. Don Cameron come to tea every day and are great fun; the latter is very pretty,” Clover reported early in their acquaintance.
But though Clover and Lizzie became friends, Henry’s connection to Lizzie grew deeper and more powerful. On a lonely day in early March 1883, missing Hay, King, and other friends, Henry wrote to Hay, “If it were not for dear Mrs. Don I should be sad.” The next month, he wrote about Lizzie to Hay again, saying, “I adore her, and respect the way she has kept herself out of scandal and mud, and done her duty by the lump of clay she promised to love and respect.” When Lizzie and her husband were preparing for a European tour, Henry eagerly tried to smooth the path for her, even as he kept a careful distance from her husband. Henry explained to Hay that he didn’t want to “saddle his friends” by giving formal social introductions for the Camerons, but he urged Hay, who was traveling in England, to “tell our friends to show her kindness.” Henry asked Charles Gaskell to look out for “my dear little friend Mrs. Don Cameron,” and to James Russell Lowell, who was in London at the time, Henry gave special instructions. “She is still very young,” Henry confided, but she was also “most sympathetic and American” and because of her husband’s “pretty poor” character, he worried she would be lo
nely. Henry asked Lowell to “take Mrs. Don to some big entertainment and point out to her the people she wants to see or know,” then confided, “You will fall in love with her, as I have.” Henry and Clover missed meeting Lizzie at the train station for her send-off, but Henry’s explanation did not clarify much: “Our feelings overcame us. Will you forgive?”
Henry needed no forgiveness from Lizzie. The strain was on his wife. Clover and Lizzie liked each other, enjoyed each other’s company, wrote letters, and exchanged gossip. Once Clover wrote to her father how Lizzie and Emily Beale came to “tea every day and are great fun.” There’s no such direct record of Lizzie’s feelings for Clover, though she must have been grateful for Clover’s welcome and offer of friendship. Even so, Clover was too astute not to notice the growing attraction and bond between her husband and Lizzie. Noticing inspired worry, and Clover’s worst fear—loss—arose as a possibility. As was her habit, she escaped fear by turning to a different subject and exercising her knack for mockery. In mid-March, Clover wrote to her father about “a somewhat ghastly tea at ex-Secretary McCulloch’s—Calvinist divines sleek and smug with their wives, Indiana friends of the hostess, newspaper feminine correspondents whom I’ve been carefully dodging for six winters.” Two weeks later, another typical sign of Clover’s darker moods surfaced: boredom and restlessness. She wrote, “We’ve had no gaiety this last week; only one or two things offered, which did not tempt me.”
What may have troubled her most was the vanishing possibility that she and Henry would ever have a child. Eleanor Shattuck Whiteside, Clover’s childhood friend from Boston, actually mused that their childlessness may have been “a greater grief” for Henry than for Clover. In Henry’s family, marriage equaled children, and he was worried enough about their childlessness to obtain a copy of the 1873 edition of Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery with Special Reference to the Management of Sterile Conditions, by J. Marion Sims, M.D. If within her own family Clover was protected from feeling too anomalous by the fact that her sister and brother-in-law also had no children, she must have worried that she disappointed Henry, most likely blaming herself for their childlessness, regardless of the actual medical reasons that might have explained it. Clover managed her feelings about such things in a way she’d learned as a child: by turning away. In a chatty letter to her father in the spring of 1883, Clover requested he send along newspaper clippings on the doings of Boston society, but with a caveat: “So give me a marriage and death column, weekly—births, I’m not interested in especially.”
The highlight of the spring of 1883 for Clover turned out to be an out-of-town visit with Anne Palmer, who had stayed in Washington earlier in February. After Anne’s departure, Clover remarked in a letter to her friend that she’d “not laughed since you went—it seems 5000 years since our week of giggling and sunshine.” Anne reciprocated, inviting Clover for a midweek visit to New York City to stay with her and her parents, Susan and Oliver Palmer. At first Clover demurred, claiming she didn’t want to miss out on the blooming wildflowers, that she was busy with the arrival of another puppy, their fourth Skye terrier, “and so on & so on.” But in the next breath, she admitted a restlessness that a trip to New York might cure: “On the other hand, I’ve not seen a locomotive since October and I want a lark . . . I shall stay two days and come back Thursday so if you’re bored it won’t be for long. I’ve no shopping to do, [and] I’ve trimmed my bonnet myself.” She added an afterthought: “H & I have not been separated for eleven years and I want to test his affection.”
Together she and Anne had a wonderful time. They went to Barnum’s Circus, where Clover especially enjoyed the races, and they met with Anne’s parents and mutual friends for various dinners and teas. They spent most of their time, however, looking at art. Anne shared Clover’s passionate interest in the visual arts, and her friends in New York were “various artists and out-of-the-usual-line people.” Their first stop was the sixth annual exhibition by the Society of American Artists, a progressive group that had broken away from the National Academy of Art. Though Clover found the exhibit “very poor,” one painting, in particular, caught her eye: a “very striking full-length portrait of a Miss Burkhardt by John Sargent.” She had met John Singer Sargent once before on the trip to Spain with Henry, but when she saw his Lady with the Rose (1882), she confidently declared him “a promising Philadelphia artist.”
They also stopped by the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Irish-born American sculptor and a friend of Anne’s. Saint-Gaudens was already at work on his bronze memorial to Clover’s cousin, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a magnificent bas-relief that would take the sculptor fourteen years to complete. Anne had viewed a maquette for the memorial and wanted Clover to see it, but, unfortunately for them, Saint-Gaudens was not at his studio when the two women stopped by. They did meet the artist of Reading the Story of Oenone (1882), a painting of “five pretty Greek girls” that the New York Times commended as “one of the centres of attention” at the society’s exhibit. Francis Davis Millet, born in Massachusetts and Harvard-educated, welcomed them into his studio to look at more of his canvases, and they met his wife, Elizabeth, or “Lil,” who was both “pretty and nice,” sitting as her husband’s model with white garments draped about her, in what Clover called an “Eden-like costume.”
Back in Washington, Henry missed his wife, sending her mournful lines from their empty house on H Street: “The dogs are well / So are the horses / So am I / We were very lonely last night / And sat up late working.” After Clover returned home, she reported to her father that “Henry says he’s glad I enjoyed my week, but that it’s his last alone.” She repeated Henry’s reaction to Anne, taking pains to quote his exact words: “my husband was glad I enjoyed my visit as it would not ‘happen again.’” She appears both pleased that he missed her and annoyed that he deemed she not travel again on her own. Her trip to New York had been exactly what she craved—immersion in another place, away from Henry and his needs and concerns.
This brief release from her marriage thrilled Clover. Now she wrote to her father about being full of enthusiasm for spring and feeling happier: “A blessed rain is soaking the roots of trees and grass today . . . magnolia, japonica, and forsythia make a fine show opposite our windows and the rides are getting better every day.” To Anne, she exclaimed, “It has taken me one week to unpack my mental trunk and set my new ideas in order—how I did enjoy my outing!” Though Clover never elaborated on what her “new ideas” might have been, her trip to New York appears to have sparked her interest in photography. Anne was already an avid amateur photographer. Already the previous year, Clover had written to Anne, “I long to see your photos.” Now, less than three weeks after her trip to New York, on Sunday morning, May 6, 1883, Clover picked up her newly purchased camera and took her first photographs. In the coming months, she would begin to explore through this form of art what her mother had explored in her poetry—a wrestling with loss and a love of beauty woven together with queries about life’s meaning and a woman’s place. And, like her mother, Clover would try to convey what she herself was thinking and feeling—not with words, but with expressive, life-packed images.
Henry, meanwhile, grew restless and unsettled. In a letter to Lizzie Cameron that summer he would write that his wife now did “nothing but photography.”
PART III: Clover’s Camera
Isn’t it odd how much more one sees
in a photograph than in real life?
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
CHAPTER 13
Something New
“WE’VE BEEN RIDING far and hard this last week,” Clover wrote to her father soon after her return to Washington. One day she and Henry rode out twenty miles to Rockville, Maryland, then back home through Bladensburg, “a picturesque old town,” then nine more miles to return home. She organized a three-day excursion to the Luray Cave in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, planning to bring along friends, including Lucy Frelinghuysen, the youngest daughter of the secretary
of state; Captain von Eisendecker, the new German minister, and his young wife; and the charming southern lawyer James Lowndes. To her father she admitted some nervousness about it: “How I wish you were going with us, I know you would enjoy the company and all; it’s my invention, too, so I feel responsible.” She need not have worried. The tour turned out to be a “great success from first to last” and the landscape delighted her: “The Shenandoah River is the most picturesque, the banks lined with flowers, while dogwood and red-bud trees fill all the middle distance.” The next month, Clover observed that the capital continued to attract the most talented people—writers, diplomats, scientists. The tales of western adventure told by Raphael Pumpelly fueled her fascination with the West. Pumpelly, soon to be named director of the New England branch of the U.S. Geological Survey, was currently at work on the Northern Transcontinental Survey for the Northern Pacific Railway. “Mr. Pumpelly to tea and stayed on to dine, was charming as ever,” she told her father. “His account of the Great Northwest on the line of the Northern Pacific is like a fairy tale.”
But photography held Clover’s attention most. Her most successful day in the early weeks of picture taking was also her first, May 6, 1883, when she had some beginner’s luck. Of the six glass-plate negatives she exposed that day, she made prints from all six, crossing out three as failures in her notebook. The two prints she saved depict subjects she found closest at hand: Henry; Marian Langdon, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a family friend; and two of her dogs, Toto and Marquis. In the first exposure, Henry sits rather stiffly in profile on the back-porch stairs of their home at 1607 H Street, his right hand holding the paws of Marquis, who couldn’t keep his head still. Henry, in his tweeds, trimmed beard, and straw hat, is a vision of the leisured class. The pale leather gloves he cradles in his left hand are for fashion, not to protect his hands from calluses. In the next exposure, Marian Langdon sits on the same stairs, holding Marquis; the other dog, Toto, is a blur of movement. Though Clover’s camera is moved back a bit for this shot, in other ways the composition reflects the photograph of Henry; taken together, the two compose an initial sketch of sorts, a first try at picturing a man and a woman of leisure.
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