In August 1884, during a long summer at Beverly Farms, Henry announced to John Hay, “My wife and I are becoming green with mould. We are bored to death with ourselves, and see no one else. At long intervals we chirp feebly to each other; then sleep and dream sad dreams.” Clover mentioned photography less and less, and by then, she’d stopped keeping track of her photographic work in her notebook. She wrote to Anne Palmer of the quiet summer days, with Henry working at his desk until “riding time” as she studied Greek. They had few visitors. Henry and Clover’s routine changed little when they returned to H Street later that fall. Henry wrote to a friend, “I never feel a wish to wander, and for eight months at a time never even enter a railway train. My wife is worse than I am. Nothing will induce her to contemplate any change except final cremation, which has a certain interest of new experience.” Perhaps what was becoming hardest of all was something Henry had already described in Esther the year before—“the worst part of their depression was that each was determined to hide it from the other.” These two had lost their way of finding each other at the end of the day.
In December, Henry wrote to Lizzie with a flirtatious flourish: “I shall dedicate my next poem to you. I shall have you carved over the arch of my stone door-way. I shall publish your volume of extracts with your portrait on the title-page. I am miserable to think that none of these methods can fully express the extent to which I am Yours, Henry Adams.”
PART IV: Mysteries of the Heart
Nothing is much worth saying between man and woman except the
single phrase that concentrates the whole relation in three words.
—HENRY ADAMS TO ANNE PALMER, DECEMBER 5, 1886
CHAPTER 19
Turning Away
BY EARLY JANUARY of 1885, Henry had finished his manuscript on the second administration of Thomas Jefferson (eventually volume four of his History) and had the pages typeset. The past five years had been extraordinarily productive. He had not only reached the midway point in his History, but he had also finished biographies of Albert Gallatin and the Virginian states’ rights advocate John Randolph, as well as his two novels, Democracy and Esther. Even so, Henry felt a pervading sense of depletion and ennui. In a note to George Bancroft, he wrote appreciatively of Bancroft’s revision of his own monumental American history. “In you,” Henry observed, “I detect no sign of the weariness and languor which mark the close of other men’s histories, and which, I regret to say, have descended on the middle of mine.” He also admitted to his publisher, Henry Holt, that his experiment with Esther had been a failure, which “is disappointing”—as far as he could tell “not a man, woman or child has ever read or heard of Esther.”
When John La Farge, the American painter and master designer of stained glass windows, came for a visit in mid-February, Clover took his picture as he sat in a leather chair. In one hand he held a book, which he was reading; in the other, a lit cigar. Shelves of books lined the walls in the background. The balance of the composition and La Farge’s casual demeanor emphasize his even-tempered nature, and the photograph was for Henry, as he would write later, “the only portrait” of La Farge “as he showed himself always to me.”
In late winter, Clover reported on the inauguration of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to reach the White House in over twenty years. She had followed the 1884 election with keen interest, at one point apologizing to her father at the end of a long letter, “Excuse so much politics but it absorbs our minds.” She and Henry were appalled by the machine politics of the Republican Party and how the party of Lincoln had been damaged by politicos and a corrupt patronage system. Rejecting the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine, Henry voted for Cleveland, as did other so-called Mugwumps—those who had bolted from the party and demanded large-scale reform of the civil service and government finance. At one point, Henry described himself to friends as a “free-trade Democrat.” As Clover explained to her father, there had been “no alternative” for those “independents and Republicans who have any decency but to bolt” when the party nominated Blaine, a politician—in her words—“tattooed with corruption.” She hoped that after defeat, the “rotten old soulless party may be laid in its grave.”
Writing on March 5, a Thursday instead of her usual Sunday morning, Clover began a letter to her father announcing that “Grover Cleveland is safely installed over the way.” Two decades before, she had described in close detail General Grant’s victory parade through the streets of Washington. Now, with reporting skills considerably more acute, she gave a full account, knowing how much her father would enjoy witnessing the inaugural parade and celebrations through his daughter’s eyes.
Yesterday we took our breakfast at eleven, and at twelve mounted Prince and Daisy and started out to see the show . . . First we went down to the State Dept. and up Penn. Avenue past the grand stand—the dense crowd opening for us—then up F. St. till we could tap the Avenue again at 11th St. and cross it so as to get over to the Smithsonian grounds—as we squeezed thro’ and stood in the middle of the Avenue. It was a sight worth seeing from the Treasury to the Capitol one great black sea—we rode fast to the south side of the Capitol under the hill—suddenly the cannon gave the signal that the speech was over—we pressed up to the great square east and caught the whole picture—wound our way in and out among the regiments waiting to start and finally got into a little triangle about 15 feet or less from the line of March just as they turned the slope from the Capitol. There must have been from 25 to 35,000 troops . . . one band would pass playing “Dixie” and the next playing “The Union Forever, Hurrah! Boys, Hurrah” and marching thro’ “Georgia” and every one looked gay and happy as if they thought it was a big country and they owned it. We sat and watched it for about an hour and a half and the big drums banged under the horses’ noses and the fifes screamed in their ears—but like the crushed tragedian they “rather like it” . . . We did not go to the ball—contented ourselves with a fine display of fireworks which being just south of the White House were nearly as good from my bedroom windows as from there.
Three days later, Clover wrote her father again, opening with a reminder that she had sent him an “‘extra’ on Thursday as part of my office duty being your special Washington correspondent.” She regaled him, as usual, with snippets of what she found amusing. “Last Sunday evening,” she reported, her friend the southern lawyer Mr. Lowndes had “dropped in and chatted in company with General [James H.] Wilson,” commander of the Union troops that captured Columbus, Georgia, on April 16, 1865, nearly the last battle of the war. When Wilson left, Lowndes turned to Clover and asked who he was, to which she replied, “‘The man who captured Jeff Davies.’ ‘Oh,’ said Lowndes, ‘he captured me in North Carolina once.’”
Despite this jocular tone, Clover ended the same letter with an anxious request: “Take care of yourself.” Dr. Hooper’s health was starting to fail from heart disease. He was in his mid-seventies and had suffered from severe angina for some time, but his condition over the past few months had worsened precipitously. Ned Hooper had built a new home in Cambridge, on Fayerweather Street, right next to Ellen and her husband, Whitman Gurney. The two older siblings moved their father from his Beacon Hill residence to the Gurney home so they could all tend him more closely.
By March 7, Henry wrote an anxious note to John Hay: “Bunged up by the nastiest cold I have had for years, I write in double straits because my wife may have to go to Boston next week, and possibly I may go with her, or for her.” Six days later, Henry and Clover left Washington for New York, with Clover going on alone to Cambridge to be with her father. Henry met with John Hay, Clarence King, H. H. Richardson, John La Farge, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who were all in New York at the same time. Henry soon after traveled back to Washington with Hay to oversee house building and to avoid what he dreaded most: deathbed vigils. During the next six weeks, Henry visited Cambridge only twice. He said he was eager not to get in the way. Sometimes he felt sorry for himself. At one po
int, at loose ends and alone in Washington, he complained to Rebecca Dodge that “nobody wants me in either place. They won’t take me for a nurse, and I can’t live all alone in a big, solitary house when it rains and I can’t ride.”
In Cambridge, Clover stayed with Ned and his five daughters, and every morning she walked next door to the Gurneys’ to be at her father’s bedside. Dr. Hooper refused to employ trained nurses, so his children took turns day and night, coordinating his feeding and bathing—all the tasks of attending the dying. Once, to break the fear-drenched monotony, Clover arranged for one of Henry’s nephews studying at Harvard to come for a party so that Ned’s five motherless daughters could learn to dance. But other than that exception to routine, Clover stayed at her father’s bedside. Did she reminisce with him? Did she read aloud from her mother’s poems? When Clover’s mother faced her own death she had written, “So methinks do the children of earth groan under / the experiences of a life or an age of evil and awake at / last deep and safe in the beginning and heart of all.” Did this comfort Clover and her family? For six weeks the daughter’s world contracted to the size of her father’s sickroom.
Henry sent letters almost daily, and Clover did likewise, though her side of the correspondence is missing. He talked of social gossip, of gas pipes and hammering workmen, of the horrid late-winter weather, of friends stopping by to ask after the Hooper family. He reported on Edith Newbold Jones’s engagement to Teddy Wharton and that Lizzie Cameron was “in despair because Don has decided to take her with him to California. I fancy she will be gone before you return.” On a Saturday evening in late March, Henry asked Clover to imagine him “seated by the library fire, writing this on my knee while Boojum snores at my feet.” He admitted to feeling “low in mind” and finding it hard to work, and that one bad day was saved when H. H. Richardson walked in. “I was mighty glad to see him,” Henry wrote with relief. But Henry didn’t tell his wife he missed her. Instead, the weather or the dogs were miserable: “The day is gloomy with rain. The dogs and I try to be gay, but Possum is in very low spirits.”
Henry’s weaving of daily gossip provided distraction, normalcy. It had been their habit as a couple to treat light things seriously and serious things lightly. But beneath the banter, Henry worried about Clover’s reaction to losing her father. He had already imagined the circumstance in Esther—midway through the novel, Esther’s father dies of heart problems, and in her grief, Esther cannot sleep, feels disoriented and unspeakably “weary,” and eventually slips into “days of vacancy, with no appetite for work and no chance for amusement.” Henry’s worry made him awkward, ill at ease. He addressed Clover affectionately: “Dear Mistress,” “Dear Angel,” and once, “Dear Aspasia,” a reference to Pericles’ beautiful mistress. After six weeks, he wished “for his wife again,” asking, “How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere?” But he wrote to her in the third person, not addressing her with the more intimate “you.” When Clover’s father was dying, Henry did not give what she needed most: reassurance of his love and his confidence that she was strong enough to bear her loss and would be all right. Lost in his own fear, he did not or could not see her as she was.
By early April of 1885, Dr. Hooper could no longer digest food. On April 13, he lost consciousness and died, with his family surrounding him. He had been “unselfish and brave and full of fun” until his death, Clover later said, never having lost his “humor and courage.” It was these two qualities—humor and courage—that Clover so prized. He was buried alongside his wife, Ellen, who had died thirty-seven years before, in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
Clover had felt enormously proud of her father. He’d been a trustee of venerable Boston institutions, including the Public Library, the Athenaeum, and the Museum of Fine Arts. After he donated Washington Allston’s Saint Peter and the Angel in Prison to the Worcester Asylum, the institution commended his “kind heart and generous hand” in the local newspaper. But most of all, Dr. Hooper had been a good father. When Clover’s brother, Ned, wrote to his father from his post in South Carolina during the Civil War, asking him to take care of his fiancée, Fanny, living nearby in Brookline, Ned revealed his debt: “You must take good care of her for me—as good as you have always taken of me.” Shortly before leaving for her honeymoon in June 1872, Clover said to her father, “It seems to me more than I deserve to go from the care of such a kind father to a good husband and I am very grateful.” And all her weekly letters in the years after were a testament to her devotion and their close bond. In her father’s later years, Clover protected him more, knowing he fretted about her. She hadn’t told him about her and Henry’s trip to Niagara Falls in 1879 until she got there, knowing that he was “of an anxious make.” But if he worried about Clover, he had not intruded on her life. In fact, Henry marveled at one point that Clover’s father interfered “as little in his children’s affairs as I can conceive possible.”
Clover seemed at ease in her letters to him. She may have concealed her darker moods and feelings; she may have felt an obligation to take care of him, to ensure he wasn’t lonely. But if she chafed or rebelled against their closeness, she registered this neither in her letters nor in her photographs. When she lost her mother, her father stayed close by; he had secured for her much of what had been good in her life. More than that, he had always held his younger daughter steadily in his gaze: he was clearly proud of her, and he occasionally urged her to live by the highest standards, warning her, for instance, that she was sometimes too judgmental. And it was all of this, this safe harbor, this easy back-and-forth intimacy, that she now lost.
Clover didn’t articulate her grief in this way. Instead, she did what she’d learned to do when faced with incomprehensible loss—she shrank back and turned away. As she told Anne Palmer in the days following her father’s funeral, “No one fills any part of his place to me but Henry so that my connection with New England is fairly severed.” On the surface, this seems contrary to fact: she still had many friends and family members, including her sister and brother-in-law, her brother, and his five daughters living in and near Boston. Yet her statement tells the truth of an emotion: to lose both parents, at any age, is to be orphaned, to feel at least in part like an abandoned child. This, to Clover, was an overwhelming and dangerous feeling.
CHAPTER 20
“Lost in the Woods”
AFTER RETURNING TO Washington, Clover felt “tired out in mind and body.” Her usual escape from the hot weather, Boston’s North Shore, no longer held much appeal. Too many memories crowded in of the leisurely afternoons she’d spent there with her father in Beverly Farms, only a short walk through the woods from Pitch Pine Hill. A tour of Europe would be a distraction but was out of the question. Clover had decided long ago that she no longer enjoyed overseas travel. She was curious, however, to see for herself the American West. She’d enjoyed many descriptions of its landscape and stories of its native people in her conversations with Clarence King, who would often bring her mementos from his various western tours: an antler’s head, a woven Paiute basket—and, once, an oversize glass-plate negative from one of his surveyor’s giant cameras.
Now, in the wake of her grief, Clover wanted an adventure, something out of the ordinary, a chance to do what she so enjoyed—spending the day outdoors, on horseback. She and Henry planned to stay in Washington until mid-June and then, when the weather warmed, to take a train west for a six-week excursion through the Rockies and Yellowstone National Park, which had become a popular destination for wealthy easterners since its opening in 1872. As she reported to Anne Palmer, they hoped to “camp out” in the Rocky Mountains, “taking our own outfit—horses, tents, etc.” More than anything, she was determined to move forward. Her husband, observing her resolve, told John Hay with obvious relief that Clover seemed “in better condition than I feared.”
Yet Clover’s forward-looking posture was just that: a posture. Anger simmered just beneat
h her grief. She’d long had a habit of teasing and making jokes; for her it was a way to make light of hard things. This sense of humor was part of her charm and made her a delightful companion at dinner parties. But, as her father had warned her, this tendency could harden into sarcasm and push people away. After her father’s death, Clover’s wit soured, and Anne Palmer, her closest friend, became an early casualty.
Clover and Anne had enjoyed a steady friendship for six years, since 1879. They shared a love of art, flowers, and social gossip, and a similar sense of humor, trading puns and anecdotes in their letters. Clover never had to compete with a husband and children for her friend’s attention, and Anne’s obvious motherly qualities—her kindness and patience, her careful attention to others’ needs—had been a boon to Clover.
Now all of this seemed at risk. In the early spring, Anne had announced her engagement and upcoming marriage to an Englishman, Edward Nelson Fell. Clover had had no time to reply promptly because just then she had been taking care of her dying father. But at the end of April, she at last responded to her friend’s happy news. She began by saying she was “very glad” to hear of Anne’s engagement, and was confident that her friend would not have agreed to marry “anyone if you could possibly have helped it.” At twenty-eight, Anne was the same age Clover had been when she had married thirteen years before, and Clover knew too well that “the freedom of an American spinster becomes wearing as she drifts towards her thirties.” She joked that Anne’s wedding announcement gave her “a weapon for all time.” Perhaps Clover was masking her vulnerability, her fear of more change and loss coming so soon after her father’s death, in this clever banter.
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