Still, Issa was bothered by frequent headaches, and Willie noted that she hadn’t been “entirely herself” for some time. In March 1892 they suffered a crushing blow when little Preston choked to death on a piece of food. By June, Nisba and Curry were making plans to come home, and Willie wrote that Issa seemed “better today than she had been for several months.” A week later, she had a serious attack of dysentery. By June 30, she seemed better, but Willie was still rushing home from the office. On July 5, he wrote, “I hardly know exactly what to write … Your mother is comfortable … but her stomach refuses everything.” On July 14, she rallied enough to write her daughters a brief letter, signing it, as both she and Willie always did, “With a heart full of love.” Later that day, Issa Breckinridge died at the age of forty-nine, most likely from cancer, which had been slowly consuming her for more than a year.
* * *
Nisba returned home to a shattered family. Her mother was dead. Her brother Robert had jumped ship and disappeared. Ella and her husband were still reeling from Preston’s death. Her father, undoubtedly suffering from a mix of grief and guilt, emptied the Capitol Hill townhouse and took up residence in a boardinghouse. Desha was at the University of Virginia, having finally “made up his mind to go work at his law,” according to his father. After failing at running a lumber mill, he sauntered down to Charlottesville apparently unconcerned with either his domestic duties or the family’s finances.
Nisba continued to search for some way to be in the world. Her father seemed on the mark when he told her she had “veracity, courage, affection, high principles and unusual loftiness of character and purpose,” but was also “nervous, excitable, [and] intense.” Before her mother’s death, she had been planning to go to the University of Michigan Law School, but Issa’s passing put that on hold. Her friend Helen Shafer, one of her former professors who had become the president of Wellesley, recommended her for a fellowship with the College Settlements Association, which would let her work for a year in one of the settlement houses that were being founded in the gritty areas of the big cities to tackle the social problems caused by urbanization—as well as to give educated young women like Nisba something to do in the new field of social work. By working to solve social problems, said Jane Addams, who had recently founded Hull House in Chicago, women like Nisba, who had the “advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study,” could replace the family claim with a “social claim” of public service. Willie, however, wasn’t big on his daughter going to live in some seedy neighborhood. “Bowery boys can be found everywhere,” he told her dismissively, and she didn’t pursue the fellowship.
As she drifted through the fall of 1892, rattling around the family’s nearly empty house, Nisba did find one friend with whom she could share her hopes and thwarted desires: Madeline McDowell, the daughter of another prominent Lexington family. Madge was more social and outgoing than Nisba—she had already turned down two marriage proposals—but like Nisba she was ambitious and restless with the life of a southern belle. She provided a much needed shoulder to lean on after Issa’s death, when, Nisba said, the “day to day was often so exhausting.”
Nisba seemed stalled professionally and personally. She’d had two romances, one with Thomas Hunt Morgan, her classmate at the Agricultural and Mechanical College, who would go on to become a pioneering geneticist, but they didn’t blossom. “Neither really loved me, though each for the moment thought that he did,” she would later lament. Now twenty-seven, it didn’t seem that marriage was in the cards for Nisba.
When the Pollard scandal broke, it only added another layer of uncertainty and angst to Nisba’s unsettled life. The accusations against her beloved father understandably hit Nisba hard, and, combined with her poor health, threatened to overwhelm her. Two weeks after Madeline filed her suit, Desha wrote to his father that he was worried about his sister, saying she seemed “more pulled down than she had been in a long time.”
Neither Willie nor Desha likely understood the full weight of what was dragging Nisba down. Unbeknownst to them, three years earlier, in the fall of 1890, Aunt Mollie had told Nisba and her mother that Willie was having an affair with a clerk named Madeline Pollard, gossip that she apparently had picked up at the Interior Department, where she and Madeline both worked. “But when she tried to warn my mother and then tried to warn me, we refused to listen,” remembered Nisba. “He was devoted, he was endlessly kind, and there could not be in our minds any question of his fidelity.” Instead of heeding her warning, they cut Aunt Mollie out of their lives. When the scandal broke, Nisba must have known that everything Mollie had said was true—that her father had been having an illicit relationship with a young woman who was the same age she was; that the person she looked up to more than any other, who was her guidestar, whose judgment she had deferred her own ambitions to, was a cheat and a liar and had most certainly been selfish in the gratification of his desires.
A month after the scandal broke, on September 20, she wrote to Madge about how disappointed she was to not be able to go to law school, which she had hoped she could do with her friend, or if not, “do some work along the same line in Social study.” She had been offered a fellowship to study sociology under the eminent economist Richard Ely at the University of Wisconsin but turned it down because the funding was too low—only $150. “I shall do some work on getting other good chances,” she told her father. By mid-January, Nisba had decided to go to the University of Michigan, but as always, finances were a concern. She wrote to her father she would need about one hundred dollars, which “seems a great deal with your other expenses.” The sudden death of her friend Helen Schafer derailed those plans. Nisba went to Oberlin, Ohio, for the funeral and to spend time with Schafer’s family.
Willie was relieved that she wouldn’t be going to Michigan. “I am very anxious about Nisba. More so than I have ever been,” he wrote to Desha on January 22. He said that it “absolutely pained” him to think of her going to Ann Arbor and that he wished she would go to Staunton, where Ella and Lynman had finally established a household. “Yet I hate to say this because she has been so self-sacrificing and I am under so many obligations to her,” he wrote. On January 27, Nisba wrote to her father that she felt as he did about going to Michigan, but she seemed completely adrift. “To tell the truth Papa, I don’t know just yet what to do,” she wrote, saying that although she was “very well and able to work,” she felt “dazed.”
Her father had no answer for her. In Washington, Willie was now consumed with preparations for the trial. If there was one thing that had seemed to be on his side—besides his fame and popularity—it was time. The Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, where the suit had been filed, was chronically backlogged. When Madeline filed suit in August, it was widely predicted that the court wouldn’t get to it for at least a year—it took two years for Mary Oliver’s suit to come to trial. Breckinridge thought he had plenty of time to prepare a defense. But the courts were reorganized right before Thanksgiving, and cases began moving much faster through the system. Even then, Enoch Totten, the savvy defense lawyer Breckinridge hired, predicted the case wouldn’t come to trial “until some time in the summer, probably next fall.” He recommended holding off on the taking of depositions so as to not tip their hand to Pollard’s lawyers. But Totten was proved wrong, and by late January 1894 Breckinridge’s team was scrambling to pull together a defense for a trial that looked likely to happen sometime in March.
Breckinridge, however, was almost completely hamstrung by a lack of capital. While it was common knowledge that he wasn’t a rich man, few realized the depths of his money problems. He had been “in the red” quite literally for years, with the red ink indicating an overdrawn account showing up regularly on the monthly balance sheet of his congressional checking account. By the fall of 1893, Breckinridge was in debt to merchants and tradespeople, large and small. He owed Miss Lydia Fox, a stenographer, $20.80 (about $500 today) for thirteen days of work the previ
ous winter and spring. “I wrote to you some little time ago enclosing my little bill,” she wrote delicately, “but not hearing from you, think my letter must have miscarried.” He owed Brooks Brothers $38; they had sent the bill twice. He owed the Hoffman House in New York City $77.27; his check had bounced and the hotel had “sent several letters in regard to the matter, but as of yet have not received any reply,” wrote the manager. He owed the Belt Electric Line Company of Lexington $26.68 for five months of his light bill. He had bills outstanding from a plumber and the Hygienic Ice Company of Washington, D.C., from 1892. He got a letter from a Lexington lawyer seeking collection on behalf of Mr. J. B. Spencer, a “very worthy liveryman,” saying it would be “a great hardship on Mr. Spencer, who is of small means, to lose the amount of this bill.”
Breckinridge’s congressional salary was $5,000 (about $125,000 today), but it “was not adequate for the support of a family like ours,” remembered Nisba. The impossibility of living on a congressional salary in Washington, where it “would take the best part of a Congressman’s salary to pay his board and whiskey bills,” according to the journalist Frank Carpenter, was a constant refrain at the time. And Issa had insisted on accompanying her husband to Washington when very few congressmen kept their families there, because of the expense. The Breckinridges also liked to live well. In the early 1870s, they had six live-in servants, including the housekeeper Clacy, the parlor maid Easter, the laundress Adelaide, and a cook and a yardman, although by 1880 they made do with Easter, a cook, and a part-time yard man. There were summer trips to Old Point Comfort in Virginia for Issa and the girls and the family’s annual pilgrimage to Boston to visit Nisba at Wellesley. There was Nisba’s tuition at Wellesley and Desha’s at Princeton, as well as stints at private secondary schools for Robert and Ella, and the cost of Herr Muller, the shy, bespectacled German tutor Willie had hired for the children back in Lexington because he wanted them to have “the advantages he had enjoyed from having a German governess.” In addition to a substantial salary, Breckinridge kept a part-time law practice that was fairly robust and he made several thousand dollars a year lecturing. It seems that his money-management skills and the need to keep up appearances, as well as the fact that he was supporting Pollard, were a big part of the family’s money problems.
With the trial drawing close and funds limited, it was clear by late January that the defense team would have to pursue a more aggressive, creative strategy. It was Stoll who came up with the idea of sending someone into the House of Mercy to spy on Madeline. “I am thoroughly convinced that an unprofessional is the best in this case and will make an effort to secure some satisfactory person,” he told his old friend. So the telegram was sent, and Jennie Tucker found herself on the midnight train to Washington.
10
A House of Mercy
It was early on the morning of Tuesday, January 30, 1894, that Jennie’s train snaked its way southward from Baltimore, crossed the Anacostia River, and entered Washington, a broad, low city that still seemed like a mirage in the dawn mists on what had been the nearly empty tidal flats of the Potomac just seventy-five years earlier. One visitor to Washington City in 1827 found it so sparsely populated, amid a handful of government buildings and the “wide formal avenues” that Peter Charles L’Enfant had optimistically laid out, that he thought it “look[ed] as if some giant had scattered a box of his child’s toys at random on the ground.” When the pioneering ophthalmologist and stenographer Isabel Barrows arrived in 1867, she found “a great, sprawling country village” where “clouds of dust rose up from passing wagons” and “cows and geese wander[ed] the paths while pigs rooted in the streets.”
In the years since, Washington had grown in leaps and bounds alongside the federal government and was now the capital city that L’Enfant had envisioned, with grand public buildings and a population closing in on a quarter million. Even then, journalist Frank Carpenter thought the city still had a “fairy-tale sense of instability about it,” as if “it has sprung up in a morning, or rather a whirlwind had picked up some great town, mixed the big houses up with the little ones, then cast the whole together in one miscellaneous mass, keeping intact only the city streets.”
It wasn’t just the physical city that had been transfigured; so, too, had its inhabitants. Beginning in the 1880s, Washington became a fashionable city for the wealthy who had nothing to do with politics, especially the nouveaux riches who had Gilded Age fortunes to spend but not the pedigree to break into the old-name high societies of Philadelphia or Boston or New York. As word of the “capital’s various charms” spread—its permeable high society, its mild winters, its fine paved boulevards perfect for promenading the smartest horses and equipage, its “beautiful homes with large ballrooms”—it became a magnet for the nation’s “rootless rich,” says the historian Kathryn Allamong Jacob. By 1884, Century Magazine could assure its readers that “it is the fashion to go to Washington in the winter as to Newport in the summer.” The change turbocharged the city’s social scene, as both new money and old, official Washington and this unofficial big-spending populace, partook in an annual bacchanal of luncheons and receptions and dinners and balls known as “the season,” which stretched from December until June. In February 1892, upon his return from a sojourn in Europe, Henry Adams lamented the changes that had taken place in the provincial city he knew, where a handful of diplomatic families like his and old-line cave dwellers controlled a fairly parsimonious social scene that ended promptly at Lent: “Houses had been opened up and there was much dining; much calling; much leaving of cards.” Julia Foraker, who first visited the capital as the daughter of a congressman and came back as the wife of a senator, described a “brilliant” social whirlwind in the 1890s, when the “rich, spectacular New York-crowd-with-the-names” came to town, “took big houses [and] gave extravagant parties.”
Frank Carpenter, the Washington correspondent for the Cleveland Leader who wrote the popular “Carp’s Washington Letters” column, reported, “There is enough silk worn here every winter to carpet a whole state; there are pearls by the bushel, and diamonds by the peck.” Carp was especially amused by the craze for extravagant, color-themed entertainments complete with towering sugar-spun sculptures and “monumental floral decorations” to match; he himself attended a red luncheon, a violet dinner, a pink tea, and an orange reception. His wife attended Mrs. Dr. Nathan Lincoln’s “pink and gold” Valentine’s luncheon that featured a life-size sculpture of a white swan filled with maidenhair fern perched on pink silk and lace, “above which poised a big heart of pink carnations pierced with a golden arrow.” After finishing their lunch and their heart-shaped ices, each guest pulled a pink ribbon on a pink Jack Horner pie and “found attached to it a bisque Cupid holding a gold heart.”
The winter Jennie wound her way into Washington, the florists and caterers were quieter than usual. The whole country seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to see what happened with the economy, “drifting in the dead-water of the fin-de-siècle,” as Adams put it. Cleveland had gotten his repeal of the Silver Act after a protracted battle in the Senate, but still the economy sputtered, businesses failed, and unemployment rose. There was in the capital itself “a vast army of unemployed, and men pleading for food who have never before been compelled to seek aid,” the Washington Evening Star reported. For the moment, however, Jennie undoubtedly was preoccupied not with the economy but with the question of how, exactly, she was going to get herself into the House of Mercy. Stoll had told her to make up a “pitiful tale,” but Jennie knew that she would have to come up with more than just some sad story to fool the nuns. “Don’t you know that the ‘pitiful story’ must fit the particular conditions?” she asked Stoll, chiding him for not finding out more about the home. She said she supposed it was like the Young Women’s Christian Association homes that had been established in cities to provide refuge for single working girls. If this was the case, she told Stoll, she would be “delighted,” as she had “always want
ed to study the practical workings of such charitable institutions, and see whether they really accomplish the desired purpose.”
Jennie’s train pulled into the Baltimore & Potomac’s foreboding neo-Gothic station on the northeast corner of the Mall a little after 7:30 a.m., just as the hansom cabs and drays and streetcars would have been clattering to life, filling the streets with an early-morning clamor: the clip-clop of hooves and the clang of trolley bells. As she exited the depot, she passed the ladies’ waiting room, where a bronze star in the floor marked the spot where President James Garfield had been assassinated twelve years earlier, adding to the slightly haunted feeling of the place. Following Stoll’s directions, she went one block north to Pennsylvania Avenue and the St. James Hotel. After she checked in and had breakfast, she took the green cars of the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar toward Georgetown. She disembarked near Washington Circle and found herself standing on K Street in front of a light gray, three-story brick building with a large gilt cross over the front door and a polished brass plaque that read “House of Mercy.” The house had an iron gate in front and “carefully curtained windows” that, she told Stoll, “gave it that no-one-ever-allowed-to-look-out appearance.” If Jennie could have seen around back, she would have realized that this was no YWCA home. The backyard was ringed by a six-foot-high brick wall that had been inlaid with broken glass bottles—with the jagged edges facing up to foil escape.
Afraid that she would lose her nerve, and “overcoming a strong desire to turn and run,” Jennie pulled the bell with a “nervous but determined jerk.” A middle-aged nun answered the door. Feigning a faltering voice, Jennie asked for the matron of the house. “You mean Sister Dorothea,” said the nun, who took Jennie’s card and escorted her to a plainly furnished parlor. The rattle of keys announced the arrival of Sister Dorothea, a sad-faced nun in a long black habit and small white cornette. She asked Jennie what she wanted. Jennie told her that she had come from Boston on account of her health and needed a place to stay until she was well enough to earn money to pay for a boardinghouse. At that, Sister Dorothea led Jennie to her private office. “My child,” she said sternly after closing the door, “you evidently do not understand the character of the house you have come to; you should have gone to the Young Women’s Christian Association. This, my dear, is a home exclusively for fallen women. We do not take anyone into the Home who has not committed this sin. The Home is carried on wholly for the purpose of reclaiming these poor creatures.”
Bringing Down the Colonel Page 16