CHAPTER 23

“Let Fate Have Its Way”

FOR CHRISTMAS, 1885, ONLY THREE WEEKS after Clover’s death, Henry gave Lizzie Cameron a piece of Clover’s jewelry, saying, “This little trinket which I send you was a favorite of my wife’s. Will you keep it and sometime wear it to remind you of her?” In the months that followed, Lizzie Cameron seemed quickly to replace Clover in key ways. She and Henry could be seen riding on horseback on the same pathways in Washington he’d taken with Clover. Henry refused to return to Pitch Pine Hill in Beverly Farms, the summer home he and Clover had designed together, but he had the house opened and ready for the Hooper family and for friends to use. Lizzie took him up on his offer for her to stay, residing there for several late-summer months in 1886 and again the next summer, writing Henry long letters while looking out to the Atlantic through the upstairs windows of Clover’s bedroom, where Clover had spent many despairing hours not so long before. Lizzie would return to Pitch Pine Hill numerous times. She would even try to learn photography in the 1890s, telling Henry about the process and using the third-floor darkroom, designed by Clover, at 1603 H Street.

But it was the birth of Lizzie’s only child, Martha, on June 25, 1886, less than seven months after Clover’s death, that accelerated rumors about Henry’s fierce and growing attachment to Lizzie. Henry became completely besotted with the child, having her over for daily visits, getting specially designed toys made for her, making the knee-hole under his enormous desk a secret playroom for her, with a sign in red ink that read MME. MARTHA, MODISTE. The fact that Lizzie had a child at all was surprising, given the deteriorated state of her marriage to Don Cameron, who already had six adult children. Henry’s attachment to the child only amplified speculation that Martha Cameron was actually Henry Adams’s child. Later, even Henry’s biographer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ernest Samuels, would fuel suspicion. Samuels, who got very little wrong in his three-volume biography of Henry, unaccountably puts Martha’s birth year as 1887, though he corrected the mistake later in his single-volume edition of the biography.

Yet ample evidence suggests otherwise. Henry and Lizzie had almost no chance to meet alone when Clover was alive, given how seldom Clover and Henry were physically separated. Henry was a puritan in many respects. Despite his strong feelings, strict social decorum seems to have governed the conduct of his relationship with Lizzie while Clover was alive. Finally, Lizzie and Henry were not in the same place at the time of Martha’s conception. During August and September of 1885, Clover and Henry were at Beverly Farms while Lizzie was in California, traveling with her husband. The Camerons and Shermans apparently did not doubt that Don Cameron was, indeed, the father. Cameron may have hidden his surprise but not his pleasure in having a child in his fifties. Finally, although Henry may have wanted to have Lizzie “carved over the arch of my stone doorway,” Lizzie seems to have been interested in much less. A longtime friend remembered that though Lizzie “liked to flirt and tease, to kiss and cajole, she never went all the way.”

 

By early 1890, though, something had shifted between Henry and Lizzie. What had started ten years before as a diverting flirtation and then a more serious infatuation had turned into something more profound, something Henry couldn’t and didn’t want to shake off. He had fallen irretrievably in love. In August 1890, after putting the final polish on the proofs of the last three volumes of his monumental History, Henry embarked on a fourteen-month sojourn in the South Seas. He and his traveling companion, John La Farge, traveled from San Francisco to Hawaii, then to Samoa, Tahiti, and Fiji; they also visited Australia, Batavia, and Singapore. From Ceylon (current-day Sri Lanka), they crossed the Indian Ocean by steamer, proceeded across the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, and landed finally in Marseille, France. The trip was a retreat from his Washington life and an attempt to distract himself from his deepening feelings for Lizzie, to whom he wrote sonnets and lengthy missives throughout his travels. He and Lizzie planned to meet in Paris sometime in mid-October of 1891. From Samoa he wrote, “I read your letters over and over”; from Papeete on the island of Tahiti, “I need not tell you how much I wish I could have been with you at Christmas”; and upon leaving the island in early June 1891, “My only source of energy is that I am actually starting on a ten-thousand-mile journey to see—you!” Lizzie wrote in mid-August, confirming her plans to be in Paris in two months, promising, “I shall see you—and shall take you home.” Sailing to Ceylon, Henry wrote with increasing excitement, “In another week or ten days, if you have kept your plans exactly as I have, you may expect to see me walking into your parlor,” concluding with a flourish, “In a week, look out!” When he finally arrived in Paris on October 10, he breathlessly announced to Lizzie in a note delivered by messenger that he would “wait only to know at what hour one may convenablement pay one’s respects to you. The bearer waits an answer.”

On November 5, less than three weeks later and once again separated from Lizzie, Henry wrote to her in a much-altered mood. “A long, lowering, melancholy November day,” his letter begins. Henry’s time with Lizzie in the City of Light was over, and things had not gone well. He presumably had hoped for time alone, a tête-à-tête during which he could declare his feelings for her and learn—at last—what was really in her heart. But their days were taken up by distractions and other people, including Lizzie’s daughter, Martha, and her step-daughter, Rachel Cameron. As Henry would later rather ruefully admit to Rebecca Dodge, “Mrs. Cameron and Martha were a great comfort to me as long as they stayed, though I saw much more of the two Miss Camerons than of Mrs. Cameron.” Apparently, Lizzie had again eluded him.

After Henry, Lizzie, and the two Cameron daughters traveled from Paris to London, Lizzie sailed for America and Henry traveled to stay with his friend Charles Gaskell at Wenlock Abbey. It was from there that he started writing Lizzie on that “melancholy November day” a letter that took him a week to finish as he sorted out his feelings. He was miserable, spending afternoons riding “over sodden fields, in the heavy air, talking with Gaskell in our middle-aged way about old people, mostly dead.” He felt haunted by his days in Paris with Lizzie and their awkward parting in London, reminding her that she “saw and said that my Paris experiment was not so successful as you had meant it to be.” He doubted himself: “Perhaps I should have done better not to have tried it, for the result of my six months desperate chase to obey your bidding has not been wholly happy.” A part of him wanted to apologize for inflicting his feelings on her: “I ought to spare you the doubtful joy of sharing my pleasures in this form.” A larger part wanted her to share in his misery, which he justified: “But you, being a woman and quick to see everything that men hide, probably know my thoughts better than I do myself and would trust me the less if I concealed them.”

Henry tried all kinds of tactics but got surer of his feelings as he wrote, even as he hurled himself at their mutual impasse. “No matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask, I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have. Sooner or later the end of such a situation is estrangement, with more or less disappointment and bitterness.” That was the central conundrum—Henry wanted more of Lizzie than she wanted to offer, and he could find no path through. “I am not old enough to be a tame cat,” he declared, but “you are too old to accept me in any other character.” He felt self-conscious about their dilemma, admitting as much when he gave Lizzie permission to “laugh at all this, and think it one of my morbid ideas.” But he also didn’t care to pose: “So it is; all my ideas are morbid, and that is going to be your worst trouble, as I have always told you.” What he wished for was one chance to “look clear down to the bottom of your mind and understand the whole of it.”

Henry concluded his long missive to Lizzie with some of the most gorgeous sentences of his entire canon—they are direct and emotionally transparent. At fifty-three, he finally found a voice for the desiring heart and dropped his guise of irony and self-defeat. As he had learned in the years following Clover’s death, to hold back and not speak of his feelings was far worse than being seen as a fool.

 

I lie for hours wondering whether you, out on the dark ocean, in surroundings which are certainly less cheerful than mine, sometimes think of me and divine or suspect that you have undertaken a task too hard for you; whether you feel that the last month has proved to be—not wholly a success, and that the fault is mine for wanting more than I had a right to expect; whether you are almost on the verge of regretting a little that you tried the experiment; whether you are puzzled to know how an indefinite future of such months is to be managed; whether you are fretting, as I am, over what you can and what you cannot do; whether you are not already a little impatient with me for not being satisfied, and for not accepting in secret, as I do accept in pretence, whatever is given me, as more than enough for any deserts or claims of mine; and whether in your most serious thoughts, you have an idea what to do with me when I am again on your hands. I would not distress you with these questions while you were fretted, worried and excited by your last days here; but now that you are tossing on the ocean, you have time to see the apocalyptic Never which has become yours as well as mine. I have dragged you face to face with it, and cannot now help your seeing it. French novels are not the only possible dramas. One may be innocent as the angels, yet as unhappy as the wicked; and I, who would lie down and die rather than give you a day’s pain, am going to pain you the more, the more I love.

 

Henry felt uncertain as to whether he should send the letter, but then decided to do so. “To the last moment I doubt the wisdom of sending this letter; but Kismet! Let fate have its way.”

Henry’s chaste romance with Lizzie would in some ways prove a trap, insofar as it deepened his emotional withdrawal and isolation. It kept tidal feelings of loss awfully close—he wanted more than Lizzie could give. When she urged him to move on and marry again, he foreclosed the suggestion with the clearest declaration: “Marry I will not.” When Henry had fallen most deeply in love with her, Lizzie backed off, and if she didn’t exactly turn away from him, she imposed discipline. She was in an impossible corner—separated from her husband most of the time, raising Martha alone, she loathed letting go of Henry’s attention and friendship. But she kept in mind the price paid for indiscretion in a world—to borrow Edith Wharton’s phrase—“without forgiveness.” Lizzie was, above all, practical. She had sacrificed much for her social position and likely knew the consequences of losing it. She knew too that her unavailability made Henry’s worshipful longing only more romantic for them both, and if she was never fully his, he could also never really leave her.

 

After almost thirty thousand miles of traveling, Henry returned to Washington on February 11, 1892. He quickly set off for Rock Creek Cemetery to see, for the first time, the somber bronze statue of a seated figure that now marked Clover’s grave. It had been more than five years since her death. He visited the gravesite again the next month with Clover’s brother, Ned, and her cousin Sturgis Bigelow, the only son of Susan Sturgis Bigelow. Afterward Henry wrote that he’d given the memorial his “final approval,” adding that his “old life” was now “closed around me.”

Henry had commissioned America’s leading sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to create the memorial. Using John La Farge as intermediary, Henry instructed the artist to be inspired by only two sources: Michelangelo’s frescoes of the five seated Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel and photographs of Buddhas, in particular Kwannon—he’d been fascinated by statues of the Buddhist goddess of mercy during his travels in Japan. In a burst of inspiration, Saint-Gaudens wrote a list in his notebook: “Buhda [sic]—Mental repose—Calm reflection in contrast with the violence or force in nature.” But not much happened until two years later, when Saint-Gaudens began sketching on paper and experimenting with clay; he employed both men and women as studio models. Wanting to capture nirvana or a “philosophic calm,” he intended the statue to somehow rise “beyond pain, beyond joy.”

A massive hooded figure, measuring just over six feet in height, sits on a rough-hewn granite rock, deep in contemplation, with downcast eyes; a heavy cloak drapes everything but the face. The right hand is lifted, hovering near the face. Framing the figure is a large slab of polished red marble, capped by a classical cornice, which forms one side of a hexagonal plot designed by Stanford White, an associate of H. H. Richardson. A spacious three-sided marble bench is positioned at a distance from the statue, with loose pebbles covering the space between and a grove of holly trees providing shade and sanctuary.

An idealized portrait of Clover? A requiem of grief? A dream of peace? John Hay was among the first of Henry’s close friends to see the statue after it was installed in March 1891. “The work is indescribably noble and imposing,” Hay assured Henry. “It is, to my mind, St. Gaudens’ masterpiece. It is full of poetry and suggestion. Infinite wisdom; a past without beginning and a future without end; a repose, after limitless experience in this austere and beautiful face and form.” The memorial, both nuanced and extraordinarily self-assured, inspired many responses. Henry was immensely pleased, going often to sit on the benches in front of the statue. He once called it “The Peace of God,” but he placed no identifying plaque or nameplate on the grave. He wanted nothing to get between the viewer and the statue. Once, in response to a letter asking what the statue meant, he explained that everyone “is his own artist before a work of art”; he expanded on this position later when he wrote, “The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer . . . Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.” Perhaps Henry had done with the memorial what Clover had done with her photographs—turned personal loss into something haunting but beautiful. In this way he paid tribute, however belatedly, to his wife’s artistic longing.

In 1905 Henry James finally went to see the hooded figure. He was staying in Washington with his old friend but knew Henry didn’t like to talk about Clover. A mutual friend understood James’s hesitation to ask Adams to accompany him to Rock Creek Cemetery and offered to go with him instead. Henry James had always appreciated Clover—her sharp mind and enigmatic surfaces, her deflecting humor, and what he’d once called her “intellectual grace.” They had shared the habits of close observers and were both, in their own way, portraitists. But if James had found the ecstasy of full expression and artistic freedom, Clover had not. When he finally arrived at her grave, he stood still for a long time under dreary skies, holding his hat in his hand, his boots dusted with a January snow.

Almost thirty-five years after Clover’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt, herself in her early forties, would make her way to Rock Creek Cemetery, where she sat for several hours on the curved marble bench in front of the statue she called by its more common name: “Grief.” She had recently discovered her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer. Beset with loss and unsure of what to do next, she felt a kinship with Clover, a Washington woman from the previous generation who’d also found herself unmoored in her marriage. Roosevelt recalled to a friend that when she felt “very unhappy and sorry for myself . . . I’d come here, alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away somehow feeling better. And stronger.”

 

In later years, when people in Washington and Boston recognized Clover Adams’s name or sat in silence in front of her grave, they knew little about her except that she’d been the wife of Henry Adams and she had killed herself. She would remain as mysterious as the statue erected in her memory, her photographs unseen.