Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Henry, meanwhile, was a mix of nervousness and detachment. He did what he knew how to do—he read and researched what was happening to his wife. He owned the recently published Body and Will, Being an Essay Concerning Will in Its Metaphysical, Physiological, and Pathological Aspects (1884) by Henry Maudsley, a treatise on the brain-mind connection in which the well-known British mind doctor explored depressive illness. Henry penciled exclamation points in the book’s margins next to specific passages. One passage clearly resonated for him:

  It is a common event in one sort of mental disorder especially at the beginning of it, for the person to complain that he is completely and painfully changed; that he is not longer himself, but feels himself unutterably strange; and that things around him, though wearing their usual aspect, yet somehow seem quite different. I am so changed that I feel as if I were not myself but another person; although I know it is an illusion, it is an illusion which I cannot shake off; all things appear strange to me and I cannot properly apprehend them even though they are really familiar; they look a long way off and more like the figures in a dream . . . it seems as if an eternity of time and an infinity of space were interposed; the suffering that I endure is indescribable: such is the kind of language by which these persons endeavor to express the profound change in themselves which they feel only too painfully but cannot describe adequately.

  Did Henry talk with Clover about any of this? They had at one point shared so much of their reading, sometimes reciting aloud whole books to each other. Perhaps he wouldn’t have wanted to frighten Clover any further, and he had to cope with his own fear about what was happening. His mother’s chronic health complaints had tyrannized him, and this legacy may have made it all the more difficult for Henry to cope with Clover’s suffering. The thing he desperately wanted at this point, besides his wife’s recovery, was to guard their privacy. He never disclosed to his family the seriousness of the situation, merely telling them that Clover wasn’t feeling well. When Henry’s publisher raised the possibility of republishing Esther, whose title character so resembled Clover, Henry pleaded against it. “I am peculiarly anxious not to wake up the critics just now . . . I never had so many reasons for wishing to be left in peace, as now.” On November 4, he admitted to Theodore Dwight, his private secretary, that Clover “goes nowhere,” and four days later, he wrote to Charles Gaskell that “my wife is unwell; we are in mourning.” But despite mentioning, at least briefly, the troubling situation to these friends, he wrote several letters that same month to John Hay that discuss the building and design of the new house while revealing nothing about Clover. He stated only that she sent her “best love” and that he saw “no one” because “my doors are tight shut.”

  By early November, friends started to exchange anxious letters, commenting on Clover’s marked decline. John Field, who along with his wife, Eliza—the subject of one of Clover’s finest portraits—had grown particularly fond of both Clover and Henry, revealed his growing alarm in a series of letters to Theodore Dwight, who was traveling in New York at the time. On November 7, Field wrote that Clover was “very low in mind, and shows it.” Even so, he held out hope that “horseback and fresh air will bring her up before long.” Field’s optimism was short-lived. He had convinced Henry to talk more frankly about Clover, and four days later Field wrote Dwight again. “I saw the Adamses yesterday. She sags—she is very low . . . Adams spoke truly to me, and he seems sad.”

  Then, in late November, Clover seemed to revive. H. H. Richardson arrived just before Thanksgiving, with more architectural drawings for the new house, most likely for interior designs and embellishments. He stayed two days with the Adamses and found Clover “much improved.” She had started to sleep again and she showed something of her earlier strength, engaging in conversation about the almost-finished house and acting more like herself.

  Weeks before, Lizzie Cameron had come back to town. She was having trouble with her marriage and her health. Two months pregnant, she was confined to bed. On a warm evening in early December, Clover, alone, went to see Lizzie to cheer her up, bringing along a large bouquet of yellow Maréchal Niel roses for Lizzie’s bedside table. In the language of flowers, popular at the time, yellow roses signified “I’m yours, heart and soul.” Was Clover’s gesture a kind of reproach, a concession that very soon she would be stepping aside, leaving Henry, “heart and soul,” to Lizzie Cameron?

  Clover’s reprieve of calm, which others had interpreted as newfound energy, had come with her resolve to kill herself. The next morning, Sunday, December 6, began hazy, and colder. Henry left the house for a walk and a quick visit to his dentist about a bothersome tooth. Sunday mornings had previously been the time of the week that Clover set aside to write to her father. She liked to sit at her desk beneath the upstairs windows as she wrote, looking south across H Street to Lafayette Square and to the White House beyond, its roofline visible just beyond the trees. Now there was no letter to write; it was as if the floor of her life had fallen away. At some point she wrote a note to her sister, Ellen, in which she insisted that Henry had been “more patient and loving than words can express.” She tried to protect him from what others might think, protesting that he was “beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even.” If there was also a note for Henry, she told no one, and neither, ever, did he.

  Instead, Clover aimed all the blame at herself. “If I had one single point of character or goodness,” she lamented to her sister, “I would stand on that and grow back to life.” She found instead only grief, hopelessness, and a self-loathing that had turned into something lethal. Completely alone, she cast off the world with all its interests and the love of those closest to her and the profound hurt she could not end any other way. She got a vial of potassium cyanide from the shelf of chemicals she kept on hand to develop her photographs, opened it, and took a swallow. Her tongue and throat burned. The poison cut off her body’s ability to process oxygen, making her choke and gasp for air, in all likelihood triggering convulsions. She lost consciousness and would have died within the half hour.

  When Henry returned, he found her sprawled in front of a chair near an upstairs fireplace. In a rush to revive her, he carried her to a nearby sofa. The bitter smell of cyanide permeated the room. It was, of course, too late. He immediately had telegrams sent to his brothers and to Clover’s brother and sister, Ned and Ellen, but he could not bear to see or talk to anyone. On that Sunday night he wrote a note and had it delivered to Rebecca Dodge: “Wait till I have recovered my mind. I can see no one now. Tomorrow I must be myself; and I can’t think yet. Don’t let any one come near me.” Taking on the mantle of loneliness that had shrouded Clover in the preceding months, Henry sat vigil all day and all night, alone in the house with his wife’s body. Neighbors reported seeing him at an upstairs window, staring out to the street below.

  By the time the Hooper siblings arrived the next day, Henry had regained some of his composure. “God only knows how he kept his reason those hours,” Ellen wrote to a mutual friend, noting that when they arrived on Monday, Henry “was as steady and sweet and thoughtful of us as possible—almost like a child in his touching dependence.”

  The family stayed with Henry until the funeral the following Wednesday. It was small and private, held in the H Street house. The Boston clergyman Edward Hall officiated at the brief service, of which there is no record. That afternoon, in a procession of five black carriages, the family drove Clover’s casket north from Lafayette Square to Rock Creek Cemetery, next to the oldest church in the city. The weather was wretched. Rain poured down so hard, they had to postpone the interment for three days because the ground was too saturated for a burial. On December 12, Clover was buried in a slope of a hill near the graves of Revolutionary War soldiers—it was a place, her sister noted hopefully, where “spring comes early.”

  ***

  The mood resonant in so many of Clover’s photographs reflects what the British poet and critic A. Alvarez called, in another co
ntext, “a terminal inner loneliness.” The people in her images are often separate from each other, they rarely look directly at the camera, and they are often disconnected from or turned away from the viewer. And though Clover transformed what saddened her into something beautiful and something she could share, this transformation of loss—the early loss of her mother, of her Aunt Susan, the absence of children, the fading closeness with Henry, and finally, the loss of her father—did not and could not save her. In the end, she seemed no more than a ghost.

  Creativity can be compensatory, redemptive, a release, a reach toward freedom and hope. But this is not always the case. Artistic expression is not always consolation for emotional pain. Things can sometimes go the other way. Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable. Perhaps this also happened with Clover. On July 26, 1883, just shy of her fortieth birthday, knowing full well that her chances of ever having a child were behind her, Clover wrote to Lizzie Cameron, who was then traveling in Europe. She asked her to “go to the Louvre” and “in the middle of a long gallery find a portrait of a lady in black, young child standing by her, by Van Dyck and tell her how she haunts me.” It was unusual for Clover to use the word haunt. It is more revealing than she usually chose to be. Less than two weeks later, Clover echoed Van Dyck’s masterwork of confident Dutch maternity in a photograph of her friend, Mimi Lyman, and her son, Ted. This picture registers, as do other images in her collection, what she rarely wrote down: what haunted her, what was missing, what was beyond her reach. And as she expressed in her photographs something of her inner life—her sense of loneliness, of being separate and disconnected—she also exposed it to herself.

  It’s no wonder, then, that the chemical that allowed Clover to bring to light in photographs what was too dangerous to put into words was the same one she used to kill herself.

  All photographs by Clover Adams reproduced courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  Henry with Marquis on the back stairs of the Adams house at 1607 H Street, Washington, D.C., May 6, 1883. Clover listed this image on the first page of the notebook in which she kept a detailed record of her photographs.

  Pitch Pine Hill, the summer home in Beverly Farms that Clover and Henry designed, was finished in 1876. It was, according to Henry, “more than all we ever hoped.”

  Henry’s parents, Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks Adams, July 30, 1883.

  Clover left little doubt about her loving feelings for her father in this portrait of him, taken on August 12, 1883.

  “Ellen, Loulie, & Polly on rocks, very nice—time good, 2nd stop, 1 sec.” So wrote Clover of this portrait of three of the five daughters of her brother, Ned Hooper, taken on August 21, 1883.

  Del and Helen Hay, children of John and Clara Hay, October 24, 1883.

  Henry reading a manuscript at his summer desk at Pitch Pine Hill, August 19, 1883. Clover thought his “face good,” but his “dark coat bad.”

  Clover paired Henry with a photograph of an umbrella tree at Smith’s Point near Beverly Farms not once but twice in her album.

  Possum, Marquis, and Boojum, the Adamses’ Skye terriers, at tea.

  The American architect H. H. Richardson, a man who could say, as Clover remarked, “I am my own music.”

  A view of snowy Lafayette Square across the street from the Adamses’ home at 1607 H Street.

  John Hay thought Clover’s photograph of George Bancroft, the leading historian of America, worthy of the cover of Century magazine.

  John Hay, November 27, 1883.

  Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, wife of George Bancroft. Henry wrote that she was “by long odds the most intelligent woman in Washington.”

  Clover labeled her photograph of Grace Minot, one of the young women who frequented the Adamses’ home, with the words “Muse of American History.”

  Clover’s haunting image of Miriam Choate Pratt, Alice Greenwood Howe, and Alice Pratt at Smith’s Point on Boston’s North Shore.

  Virginia farm couple, summer 1885. This is one of the final photographs Clover took on the trip south, which Henry hoped would restore her to health.

  CHAPTER 22

  “That Bright, Intrepid Spirit”

  THOUGH FEW FRIENDS attended the funeral, two of the “Five of Hearts” wrote Henry immediately in a rush of sympathy and a desire to share his burden. Clarence King sent a note from New York as soon as he heard: “I think of you all the time and lament that such great sorrow as yours cannot be more evidently and practically shared by those who love you. But I know too well the indivisibility of grief.” John Hay, also in New York, sent a message to Henry the day of the funeral. “I can neither talk nor keep silent,” Hay wrote, saying that Clover’s death was a loss to him as well. “The darkness in which you walk has its shadow for me also. You and your wife were more to me than any other two. I came to Washington because you were there. And now this goodly fellowship is broken up forever.” He closed with a tribute to Clover. “Is it any consolation,” he asked, “to remember her as she was? That bright, intrepid spirit, that keen intellect, that lofty scorn of all that was mean, that social charm which made your house such a one as Washington never knew before, and made hundreds of people love her as much as they admired her?”

  In the days and weeks after the funeral, Henry immersed himself in the tragedies of Shakespeare, sometimes reciting passages aloud to friends. He saddled up for long horseback rides alone, following the same paths through city streets and wooded trails that he and Clover had so prized. He recalled in a letter to Anna Barker Ward her great kindness to Clover those many years ago on the Nile, saying how much Clover had admired the older woman—the “peace that you have reached in this world was a delight to her.” He reminded Mrs. Ward that she’d been “closely associated with the heaviest trials and keenest pleasures of our life,” an acknowledgment of what seemed now the all-too-clear link between Clover’s troubles on the Nile and her last months of misery. Though the “great calamities in life leave one speechless,” as Henry admitted to Mrs. Ward, he tried to ease his burden by connecting his experience to the wider human scene. After receiving many “messages from men and women whose own hearts were aching,” he was learning that he “did not stand alone in my extremity of suffering.” When the wife of Thomas Bayard, then secretary of state under President Cleveland, died suddenly of a heart attack, Henry reached out to him. Admitting his doubts about whether to say anything at first, he decided to do so because, as he told Bayard, “sympathy has been a relief to me; and in all the world I doubt whether another person exists, beyond your family, who sympathizes with you more keenly than I do.” To Henry Holt, he wrote simply, “What a vast fraternity it is,—that of ‘Hearts that Ache.’”

  Though Henry assured John Hay three days after Clover’s death, the day of the funeral, that he would “come out all right from this,” Henry’s friends worried about him. Henry James told E. L. Godkin, since 1883 the editor in chief of the New York Evening Post, that he was “more sorry for poor Henry than I can say,” adding that he was “too sorry, almost, to think of him.” John Hay told Henry that “we are anxious about you. Tell us, when you can, how it is with you.” Then, in an effort to build up his friend’s courage, Hay observed: “You have a great sorrow, but no man should bear sorrow better than you.” By mid-December Hay wrote again, saying, “You are never out of my mind but I do not write, for lack of language to express my sorrow and sympathy. If I came to you I could only sit with you in silence, like the friends of Job.”

  What Henry wanted most of all, as Whitman Gurney recounted, was to set “his face steadily towards the future.” On December 30, Henry fled from the house he had shared with Clover into his new Richardson-designed house next door, at 1603 H Street, where he spent weeks sorting books and hanging pictures. If Clover had lived only weeks longer, she and Henry would have moved into their new home together. Now, in the wake of her death, Henry p
romised Lizzie Cameron he would live “henceforward on what I can save from the wreck of her life.”

  But Clover’s suicide, with its poison of despair, cleaved Henry’s life into two parts, before and after, and like the biblical wife of Lot fleeing destruction, he couldn’t resist the backward glance. On January 8, 1886, a bitterly cold Saturday, Henry wrote a searching letter to Clover’s closest friend, Anne Palmer Fell, now living with her husband in Florida. In it, he confessed that “I should have written to you before, but have put it off from day to day as a thing that could better wait till I had found out what had happened to me, and where I was.” He found himself confused, disoriented, waiting for Clover to somehow return. “Even now,” Henry wrote, “I cannot quite get rid of the feeling that Clover must, sooner or later, come back, and that I had better wait for her to decide everything for me.” The sensation was “growing weaker” each day, but “the wrench has left me like a child, amusing myself from day to day, without a plan or an interest that grown people commonly affect to have.”

  Though Henry often changed the topic—to a land deal in Florida, rattlesnakes, and lemons—he kept turning back to memories of Clover, revealing to Anne how his grief had cracked him wide open. He was determined to reclaim his happiness with Clover, at least in memory.