PART THREE
Ada King
9
On Her Own
ON A SPRINGLIKE DAY IN MID-MARCH 1902, NOT QUITE THREE months after her husband’s death, Ada walked into the New York Herald office at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street to hand the clerk a brief paid advertisement. A day or two later, on March 19, it appeared among the personal announcements on the paper’s front page: “Will C. King’s friend who saw A. Todd and children off on train please call on same? 942 3d Ave.”1 Ada had inserted a similar ad in the paper once before, from Toronto, shortly after learning of her husband’s death.2 When no one replied, she packed up her house and her children to return to New York. With few resources, four small children, and no independent income of her own, she needed help to get to the trust fund her husband had promised her. She had to hope this second ad would work.
While she sorted things out, Ada took temporary lodgings on Third Avenue near Fifty-seventh Street. On a largely white block, crowded with immigrants from Ireland and Germany, her apartment building at number 942 stood out because its residents were nearly all African Americans, mostly small families and the boarders they took in to help ends meet. Whether she and the children occupied their own apartment in the eight-unit building or shared a crowded suite of rooms with others, they likely felt worlds away from their old eleven-room home set among the orchard trees in Flushing. Their rooms perched above a paint store and a commercial space that housed everything from political gatherings to coin-operated peep shows. Instead of keeping an eye on her children as they played in a yard out back, Ada had to mind them out front, as they played alongside the electric street-cars that hurtled up and down the street, beneath the deafening rattle of the Third Avenue elevated train.3
Ada left behind no trace of how she found an apartment here on Manhattan’s East Side. The spare listing of names in the 1900 census, however, hints at a possible family connection. A black Virginia-born waiter named Emanuel Copeland lived in the building. He had moved to New York as a young man, sometime before 1880, and found work as a domestic servant. Perhaps coincidence brought Ada to the same building as this man who shared her maiden name. But when the white Copelands of Troup and Harris counties emigrated from Virginia to Georgia with their slaves in the decades before the Civil War, they left behind broken black families as well as white ones. At least eight Virginia-born black Copelands lived in Harris County during Ada’s childhood there. Scant evidence survives to document whether the former Copeland slaves in Virginia and Georgia maintained their ties across the miles and years. But in New York City, the mere existence of a shared name might compel one southern-born black Copeland to reach out to another.4
ADA’S AD WAS EXPLICIT but discreet. Anyone who knew about her relationship to Clarence King would recognize her at once. But neither the cryptic names—“C. King,” “A. Todd”—nor the reference to an earlier encounter would mean much to anyone not already in the know. Clarence’s letters to Ada always counseled discretion and now, even after her husband’s death, she continued to play along, disclosing nothing that might expose her peculiar family situation to public light. Indeed, she likely resorted to a public ad only because she had no other way to contact her husband’s business associates. Many years later, she maintained that in 1901, just before he left for the Southwest in his futile effort to regain his health, King told her she could turn for help to his friend James Gardiner: “I have left $80,000 with Mr. Gardiner. You need never worry.”5 Such money—the equivalent of more than $2 million in 2007—would certainly erase her financial worries. 6 But if she actually knew Gardiner’s full name, she seemed not to know a more private way to find him.
Ada’s ad found its intended target. Gardiner sent his secretary Howard Dutcher to Ada’s Third Avenue apartment .7 Dutcher called on Ada as Gardiner’s agent. Nonetheless, he might have known King himself, since he moved in similar circles as a member of the Union League Club and secretary of the Mexican Coal and Coke Company.8 Dutcher would seem an improbable figure to comfort the grieving Ada Todd. Several years later, in divorce proceedings, his wife would accuse him of conducting a not-very-secret affair with their maid and characterize him as an abusive drunk who once beat her so badly she “was unable to appear in public for some time.”9
Nonetheless, Dutcher did as he was told. He asked Ada for evidence that she was “Mrs. Todd” and took the letters from Clarence that she offered as proof.10 Then, on Gardiner’s behalf, he struck up a financial agreement with the new widow and began delivering to her monthly checks of $65 (about $1,600 in 2007 dollars). He also set about finding her a better place to live.11 By the summer of 1902, Ada and the children were back in Flushing, in a single-family house at 42 Kalmia Street for which someone else paid the rent. In July 1903, acting on Gardiner’s orders but without Ada’s knowledge, Dutcher purchased the home for approximately $2,200, and two months later he transferred the deed to Gardiner.12 Ada’s monthly stipend dropped to $50. She knew nothing about the ownership of the house or the precise source of her monthly check. She understood only that her husband’s friend Mr. Gardiner looked after her and took care of the house payments and taxes. With good reason, she imagined that the money for the house, as well as her monthly stipends, came directly from her husband’s estate.13
Kalmia Street was an unpaved dirt road, a block long, extending between Golden Avenue and Jamaica Avenue, just east of the marshland along Flushing’s Mill Creek. It lay a mile and a half south of the Todds’ North Prince Street residence, in a newer, less-settled part of town. Indeed, when she moved in, Ada had only one other neighbor on the north side of the street. Her frame house, two stories high in the front and one story high in the back, had a stable in the backyard, an accommodation to a soon-to-fade mode of transportation on the streets of New York. It sat on a lot twenty-five feet wide, but with the adjacent lots still undeveloped, the yard had a spacious feel.14
The Kalmia Street house did not measure up to the large house on North Prince Street, but it offered more space and privacy than Ada’s cramped apartment on Third Avenue. Fireplaces graced the downstairs living spaces, a bay window brought morning light into the dining room, and the kitchen opened onto an enclosed sunporch at the back of the house. Little touches—like the stained glass in the vestibule door and the handsome carved wooden banister that led upstairs to the three bedrooms—gave the modest house an air of elegance.15 Moreover, the house boasted a convenient location, close enough to a world of shops and schools that Ada knew and relatively far from the handful of Gardiner intimates who now knew of Ada’s existence.
At some point King must have confided in his old boyhood friend—in a quiet conversation, one imagines, rather than through a written disclosure, and with strict admonishments to keep secret the stunning news. Gardiner himself might have been the man who carried letters and money to Ada during King’s prolonged absences, or saw her and the children off on the train to Toronto, and if not him, a trusted associate working on his behalf. When King died, he stepped in to help Mrs. Howland with her duties as executrix of her son’s estate. But he kept the news of King’s secret family close to the vest. Half a century later, Gardiner’s daughter claimed that her father’s black servants knew about King and his secret life. But they, too, kept silent.16
Gardiner was discreet. He intended to preserve King’s reputation and to spare Mrs. Howland from scandal. But King’s messy financial affairs made it essential that Gardiner speak to Hay, to whom King was so hopelessly in debt. Whether Hay told Adams remains unknown; a government official would know better than to commit the revealing words to paper. But King’s startling private life seemed to remain more or less a secret, never getting into the papers or becoming a topic of public speculation. Whatever Hay, and possibly Adams, knew about King they kept to themselves. In a memorial address prepared for the Century Association, Adams remarked, “We were his slaves, and he was good to us. He was the ideal companion of our lives.”17 If he felt stunned or disappointed
by his friend’s behavior, he gave no hint.
Almost immediately, King’s friends set out to memorialize him. Frank Emmons sat down to write a memoir of King for the Engineering and Mining Journal within forty-eight hours of his friend’s death and sent it off in the mail even before the funeral.18 Three weeks later, Rossiter Raymond proposed to James Hague that they collaborate with Gardiner and Emmons to create a biographical volume on King’s life.19 The Century Association assumed sponsorship of the project, and Hague agreed to head the special memorial committee that would compile a book of “personal memoirs” solicited from King’s intimates.20 Henry Adams took his time, laboriously writing out his recollections in longhand. “Of course I cannot, or perhaps I ought to say brutally—will not—write anything about King that shall not be carefully prepared and compared,” he wrote to Hague. “One must do one’s utmost for such an object.”21 John Hay carefully typed his memories on little six-by-four-inch pieces of paper.22 Raymond submitted an essay he had prepared for the American Institute of Mining Engineers, and Emmons adapted his memorial tribute for the American Journal of Science. Daniel Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins University, submitted a brief contribution. Longer tributes came from Hague, William Dean Howells, John La Farge, and a handful of old Century Association friends. Gardiner, for whatever reason, contributed nothing.
Hague opened the book with King’s own short story “The Helmet of Mambrino,” the tale of the author’s search for Don Quixote’s helmet that originally appeared in Century Illustrated Magazine in 1886. King’s friends had always hailed it as sparkling proof of his literary genius. The poet Edmund Clarence Stedman argued that King captured “the very soul of Spain in the flask of his translucent English.”23 John Hay ventured that the “exquisite idyll of The Helmet of Mambrino” proved that no one felt more keenly than King “the melancholy charm of Castile.”24 One friend went so far as to say that the story “disclosed the exquisite delicacy of [King’s] literary touch, which rivaled that of Howells or James, and an even rarer quality of wit than Bret Harte’s.”25 But the overly effusive praise failed to mask a widespread disappointment that King left behind so little writing. “It makes me wonder at geology,” Henry Adams wrote, “when I think that this is all that remains of the most remarkable man of our time.”26
His friends illustrated the story with a photograph of the author dressed for his quixotic search in the tight-fitting green velvet suit he had worn on his romp through Spain. Arms akimbo, hands tucked awkwardly into the small, waist-high pockets, King gazes at the camera with an amused grin, his dark hat set rakishly off center on his head.27 In both words and image, he projected his puckish charm from beyond the grave.
As Hague gathered material for the book and marketed it through direct solicitations to libraries and associates of King’s, Mrs. Howland watched anxiously over the editors’ shoulders.28 “I have been very careful with my papers,” she told one of Clarence’s friends, “and had a special Yale locked cupboard built in my chamber closet to hold them—all on the subject of Clarence’s life and death. I wanted them at hand and yet secure.” The self-appointed keeper of her son’s flame, she begged to read the essays submitted for the book in order to assure their accuracy and apologized that she did not feel quite up to writing herself “as my grief sweeps me away when I attempt it.”29 When the book appeared in March 1904, she thanked the editors: the volume “brought solace to a heart much saddened by the untimely breaking of a tie that was almost ideally perfect in its strength and tenderness.”30
Clarence King Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino remains a key source of anecdotal information about its subject’s life. The contributors preserve the flavor of King’s talk, the quality of his presence, the sheer energy and vivacity that characterized his public life. More than anything, they convey their extraordinary and admiring devotion to a man who seemed so much more capable than they. Even those who did not know King, noted a critic in the New York Tribune, “will feel, when they put down this memorial, that they have made a valuable friend.”31 King, said a reviewer for the New York Times, had a “genius for friendship.”32
Unable to contribute a personal reminiscence herself, Mrs. Howland channeled her grief into an effort to reissue Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, which had gone out of print. Within weeks of her son’s death, she had Hague rummaging through King’s storage lockers with King’s servant, Alexander Lancaster, in search of the original printing plates. The plates never turned up, but she and Hague nonetheless prevailed upon Scribner’s to republish the book. The publishers released it in November 1902, less than a year after King’s death, touting it as a “classic of humor, of romantic adventure and of nature description rivalling Ruskin in vividness and power.”33 A “genuine classic of American literature,” proclaimed the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Its style of description and narrative combines a virility and picturesqueness with a flueness [sic] of language rare in the chronicles of explorers; its adventures are thrilling, yet told with singular modesty and respect.”34
King’s friends gave some thought to publishing a book of his letters. Gardiner told Hay that “in earlier years [King] wrote many interesting letters to his mother.” But in the spring of 1904, Mrs. Howland was “run over” in the street in Newport, by a horse-drawn carriage one presumes, and became too frail to go through the old papers she had so carefully preserved in her bedroom safe. Around the same time, Hay lost many of his letters from King to a leaky roof. The project went nowhere. 35
KING LEFT HIS FINANCIAL affairs in a mess. The outdated will written before his marriage left everything to his mother, but it seemed uncertain that he had any assets at all. Two mortgages executed in 1890 and secured with personal property gave John Hay an interest in King’s extensive art collection and about $76,000 in National Bank of El Paso stock (presumably worthless since the bank collapse in 1893) as security for three loans that totaled $43,000. No records of security for Hay’s subsequent loans survive; without any real estate to his name, King would have secured those with personal property, too, if they were backed up at all. Fortunately for Mrs. Howland, King’s creditor could afford to be magnanimous: he had no compelling need to call in his old loans. Two months after King’s death, Hay entered into a trust agreement with Gardiner, transferring to him whatever interest he might have in the King estate, the funds to be used for the benefit of King’s mother. In March 1902 Mrs. Howland submitted her son’s will for probate. In its final accounting of the estate, the Surrogate’s Court of New York County declared in June 1903 that the estate had no assets at all.36 Mrs. Howland’s eventual stipend came from Hay, not her son. She had known nothing of her son’s indebtedness, she wrote to Hay. “It was from mistaken kindness and the ever watchful tenderness with which he sought to guard my declining years.”37
Ada knew nothing of her husband’s debts or the disposition of his estate, nothing of the agreement between Hay and Gardiner. And no one informed her when Gardiner put King’s art collection up for auction in March 1903 through the American Art Association. For two nights, crowds of art patrons and King associates filled Mendelssohn Hall on Fortieth Street, near Broadway, to bid on King’s pictures. Some came to ogle the eleven Claude Monets up for sale from another collector. Others showed up to obtain a memento of King or get a glimpse of what he had kept in storage for so many years. His sixty-nine watercolors included a small Turner of an English seaside scene, a picture of a water lily by his friend John La Farge, some landscapes by Gustave Doré, and dozens more works by minor nineteenth-century European painters that he had purchased in the early 1880s. King’s twenty-six oil paintings included landscapes by his friends—Albert Bierstadt, Gilbert Munger, and R. Swain Gifford—and a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish religious paintings that he had purchased abroad. King never lived with the things he amassed. He had no gentleman’s house to house his gentleman’s collection. 38 In the home he shared with Ada Todd there hung only a picture of little valu
e, a large reproduction print of a floral still life by the nineteenth-century French artist François Rivoire, housed in a heavy period frame. Ada held on to it for the rest of her life.39
The sale of the paintings realized nearly $35,000; the books, textiles, and Asian art auctioned off to “large and fashionable” afternoon crowds brought in still more.40 Many years later, the auction would prove a point of contention in Ada’s claims to her husband’s estate. To whom did the art truly belong? Had it been left in trust for Ada? Or did it belong to King’s benefactor, John Hay?41
Unaware of the various legal and financial proceedings involving her husband’s estate, Ada pressed her own claims. In May 1902, just a few weeks after locating Gardiner through her newspaper ad, she visited him at his office at 14 Church Street in Manhattan. According to her, he confirmed that he held a fund in trust for her and the children.42 When Gardiner again sent Dutcher to her home to interview her in 1903, she turned over several letters from King reiterating the existence of the trust. She never saw those letters again.43
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