In the early afternoon of December 6, just weeks before the Adamses were to occupy their new home, Clover ingested a vial of potassium cyanide which she had kept in the house for developing photographs. The toxin deprives the brain of oxygen and almost certainly killed her within minutes. Her state of mind on that fatal day eludes the biographer as it apparently eluded her husband. During a typical Sunday noon breakfast a solicitous if not especially worried Henry inquired of her health. Apparently satisfied with the reply, he decided to care for his own—a bothersome toothache sent him, after dining, on foot to visit Dr. Edward Maynard, an F Street dentist.1 Hardly had he left the house, however, when a caller for Clover approached Henry. In company now, he returned to see if his wife wished to receive a visitor. Entering her upstairs room, he discovered Clover unconscious on the floor before the fire. He immediately moved her onto a nearby couch and attempted to revive her; perhaps, though desperately demanding a physician, he now realized that she was dead.
Three torturous days later, Henry’s 16th Street neighbor Nicholas Anderson noted with some concern that a grieving Adams preferred isolation to consolation: “I called as soon as I heard it, and offered to do all that I could, but Henry refused to see anyone. I appreciate his state of mind, but I am sorry he would not let me show my sympathy by my acts. Until his family arrived he saw, as far as I can learn, no one whatever, and I can imagine nothing more ghastly than that lonely vigil in the house with his dead wife. Poor fellow! I do not know what he can do.”2
It is difficult to believe that Clover’s suicide caught her intimates wholly unawares. Her intense devotion to Dr. Hooper and sporadic despondency were long matters of hushed observation. Her sister Ellen protested to one correspondent after the 6th, “We had been consumed with anxiety—and probably others think that if we had only done this or that and have shown feeling! We did the best we knew how—and we know no better now.” From a greater remove, Clover’s old friend Henry James took the suicide in stride, calling it a case of “hereditary melancholy” and writing somewhat impassively to E. L. Godkin, “Poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence.” Not long after, James drew upon Clover’s suicide for his story “The Modern Warning” (1888), in which Clover’s “conflict” between father and husband is replayed in Agatha Grice’s struggle to be loyal to both her beloved American brother and her new English spouse. The men’s rivalry is framed on the cultural differences between the two countries, a favorite James theme and perhaps a topic of discussion whenever he and Clover convened. Distraught, Agatha swallows poison in her upstairs room; a loyal servant provides the official narrative: “She has taken something, but only by mistake.”3
It seems certain that the death of Dr. Hooper earlier in the year initiated Clover’s final slide. Theirs was a complicated and not altogether healthy relationship; with no practice to occupy his hours the doctor depended heavily on the attentions of his three children. The precise emotional demands this placed on Clover can only be conjectured, though it is worth recalling that her one previous breakdown, if that is what transpired, occurred shortly after her marriage. Her endearingly addressed letters to “My Angel Pa” and “Dearest Pater” typically prefaced equally endearing sentiments. In one message written during her wedding trip, she seemed almost to be asking a lover for his forgiveness and promising ongoing fidelity: “I miss you very, very much, and think so often of your love and tenderness to me all my life, and wish I had been nicer to you. But I’ll try to make up my shortcomings when I come home, and you must keep my place open and let me come into it again.”4 Having never remarried after the 1848 death of his wife, Dr. Hooper seems to have come to depend on Clover, and she on him, in a loving but cloying, self-conscious, and ultimately exhausting bond.
Dr. Hooper’s sinking health (a case of coronary heart disease) brought Clover to Cambridge in early March, and she came alone. Aside from a brief trip to Manhattan two years earlier, she had never been apart from Henry. Now, on this trip north, he accompanied her as far as New York before, as arranged, and following a “pleasant dinner” with Hay and King, turning back. Over the next few days he wrote her constantly. Compared to his later, longer, and more effusive communications to Elizabeth Cameron, these spousal missives are by turns careful and correct, though never less than loving. He described the ongoing progress of their new home, acquainted her with local gossip—including the engagement of New York socialite Edith Jones (soon to be Wharton) to a Bostonian—and detailed the exploits of their trea-sured Skye terriers, Boojum, Possum, and Marquis: “The dogs and I have just come in from picking some violets for you.” After a week, Clover requested Henry’s company in Cambridge and he quickly made arrangements to join her. “My private relations have not run so happily,” he informed a friend at the time, “for my poor father is a complete wreck, and my mother almost a cripple; while, only within a few weeks my wife’s father has broken down, and my wife has gone to Boston to be with him in his last moments. I must follow her tomorrow.”5 But once there, Henry could realize no role. Presumably he sought to be solicitous and protective of Clover, while she perhaps felt his presence intrusive. She promptly sent him back to Washington.
Three days after he left, however, she suddenly asked him to return—only to telegraph the following day and just as suddenly request that he not. Clover’s changeable behavior concerned Henry and he insisted on seeing the situation in Cambridge for himself. “After hesitating a moment, I have decided to obey your order; but tomorrow I mean to go, no matter what you say”—and he did. Following a few days in Cambridge, however, he was again turned out. By this time Clover had been gone a month and Henry allowed to a friend, “I bolt forward and back like a brown monkey.” Understandably frustrated, he observed further, “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.” A few days later, on April 12, he wrote with some annoyance to Clover, “So another day has passed. Uneasy as I am about you, and unable to do anything here, I go on from hour to hour and make no engagements at all.” The following day, Dr. Hooper died; Henry then made his fourth trip north in five weeks, for the funeral. Nothing would ever be the same, he later wrote, “after that May in 1885.”6
Taking into account the tragic ends of Clover’s siblings, family illness must be considered the compelling factor in her death. Not quite two years after Clover’s passing, the recently widowed Ellen walked along the tracks of the Fitchburg Railroad and into the path of an oncoming train. Several years later her brother, Edward, leaped from the third-floor window of his Beacon Street home. He died some weeks later in an asylum, having refused to take food; the press cooperatively described the cause of death as “a short illness.” There is the additional possibility that Clover feared a disposition to mental breakdown and killed herself as a shield to institutionalization. Charles Francis’s enfeebling dementia—the Governor went into a slow decline commencing at about the age of sixty-four (1871), gradually losing his memory—may have weighed on her mind. The evidence is slight, though she referred on at least one occasion to death being preferable to illness, remarking in 1879 of the apparent drowning suicide of a friend, the painter William Morris Hunt, that perhaps the act had “saved him years of insanity, which his temperament pointed to.”7
Many decades later, in a private communication, the distinguished Adams scholar Ernest Samuels reflected on Clover’s complicated mental health inheritance. “The gossip of the time,” he wrote, “seems to have regarded the Hooper family as touched in some way with hereditary eccentricity.… They were one of the most distinguished families of Marblehead and, by the union with the Sturgises, an equally ancient family in New England history, formed one of the remarkable clans in Boston life.… There was a certain amount of inbreeding in this ruling society.” Of course the Adamses also constituted an “ancient family in New England history” and it too struggled with mental health. Henry’s great-uncle Charles Adams died of alcoholism at the age of thirty; his uncles George Washington Adams and John Adams II also died young of alcohol-related illnesses or, in George’s case, of a suspected alcohol-related suicide. Their early deaths suggest something of the colossal expectations of being an Adams and perhaps contextualize as well Henry’s efforts to retreat, both physically and emotionally, from the Boston pressure cooker. He could, of course, do only so much. “The Adamses themselves pose all sorts of interesting psychological problems,” Samuels noted in the same letter containing his thoughts on Clover’s health. “The almost hysterical pessimism of Henry Adams’s later letters suggest[s] an almost abnormal state of mind. This is also true of the letters of his younger brother Brooks Adams.”8
Other factors that may have caused Clover varying degrees of distress include her childless marriage (a niece recalled her once saying that all women wanted children), doubts about her abilities as a photographer, and an apparent dislike of her physical appearance. Few photographs of Clover exist and none that draw attention to her habitually screened face. She noted of an 1883 self-portrait (apparently destroyed), “Marian Adams in study—15 sec—hideous but good photo.” Given her symptoms, there is a possibility that she suffered from cyclothymia, a chronic mood disorder milder than bipolar disorder. Someone with cyclothymia might feel stable for a period of time before experiencing an emotional high that can then decelerate to an emotional low. A few weeks before Clover’s death, Henry’s brother Charles visited the couple and came away remarking on her despondency: “She sat there, pale and care-worn, never smiling, hardly making an effort to answer me, the very picture of physical weakness and mental depression.”9
There is further the suggestion that the impending move into a “permanent” home upset Clover. She once called the yet-to-be erected structure on H Street “a modest mausoleum” and seemed to see its completion as part of a larger and unwanted culmination: “we can have nothing to look forward to beyond the grave.”10 The house, which Henry moved into less than a month after her death, might have implied a commitment to the future that she refused to make.
Still another consideration, Henry’s growing professional achievements may have negatively affected Clover’s health. While he wrote several books during their years together, her chief means of artistic expression—photography—garnered little attention. Her images reveal the eye of a sensitive observer, and a few have become iconic representations of Boston’s Brahmin gentry. But she sometimes denigrated her work and it is possible, perhaps even likely, that she believed it amateurish in comparison to her husband’s. That Henry occasionally impugned his own efforts may have set some pernicious example.
It is equally conceivable that his often critical, ironic tone introduced or reinforced certain tensions and silences in their relationship. So much of his energy during this period found an outlet in his scholarship, and what remained in hours, empathy, and awareness can never be fully registered. As if to absolve her husband of blame, Clover, in a final (and never sent) letter to Ellen, assumed alone responsibility for her declining condition—“If I had one single point of character or goodness I would stand on that and grow back to life”—while praising her “patient and loving” spouse: “God might envy him—he bears and hopes and despairs hour after hour.… Henry is beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even.”11
Adams’s anguish no doubt deepened when the press reported Clover’s death as most likely intentional. The initial account, by the Washington Critic, vaguely suggested “Heart Paralysis,” but two days later the paper bluntly raised the question “Was it a case of Suicide?,” before accurately stating, “She came to her death through an overdose of potassium, administered by herself.”12 Now Henry’s family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic knew the truth.
On December 12, Adams purchased lots 202 and 203 in a new section of Rock Creek Cemetery for $400. There, following a small funeral made up of family and friends and officiated by a Cambridge minister brought in by the Hoopers, Clover’s body was interred. Henry subsequently arranged for a headstone, acquired for $411, to mark the grave. “She is laid on a sunny slope in a most peaceful church yard,” Ellen stated, “a place… where the spring comes early.”13
Reluctant to indulge in shock, Adams determined to find some survivant meaning in the future. “You will understand as I do,” he informed John Hay a few days after Clover’s passing, “that my only chance of saving whatever is left of my life can consist only in going straight ahead without looking behind.”14
Most immediately, “going straight ahead” meant moving into the new H Street residence on schedule. Concerned for her brother-in-law, Ellen wrote to Godkin on December 30, “I trust he will be in his new house tonight. The associations of the old were too intense to be safely borne.” Theodore Dwight, a bachelor State Department clerk and Henry’s loyal research assistant, moved in as well, telling one correspondent that he hoped to “help [Adams] by a sort of devoted doglike companionship to support his bereavement.” Just how long that bereavement went on is uncertain. A surface inspection of Henry’s long life after Clover—noting his ever-expanding intellectual interests, global travels, and deeply affectionate friendship with Elizabeth Cameron—might imply an inevitable peace. Yet Henry himself stated otherwise. In the summer of 1901 he wrote to a grieving Clara Stone Hay, whose twenty-four-year-old son Delbert had the previous month accidently dropped from a third-story window to his death. Straining to offer solace, Adams shared an unpleasant fact that promised little light for the community of sufferers: “When I was suddenly struck, sixteen years ago, I never did get up again, and never to this moment recovered the energy or interest to return into active life.”15