Even for Adams, this was highfalutin, thought Hay. Admittedly the two men had obviously run amok in the islands of the South Pacific, paying court to old-gold women, but to make a universal system out of two inhibited nineteenth-century American gentlemen’s good luck was, perhaps, too much.
“In any case, our friend was to find his ideal, his inspiration, and in 1883, he married her.”
Hay nearly fell from the window seat. “Clarence King was married?”
Adams gave a maddeningly diffident bob of his pink-bald head. “In Twenty-fourth Street, in New York, he married one Ada Todd, by whom he was to have five children.”
“In secret!” Hay had the sense of going mad.
“In such secrecy that he never actually told Ada his true name until the very end. He called himself James Todd, and he settled her, and their children, in a lovely rural New York retreat called Flushing.”
“Henry, if you have turned to novel-writing again…”
“No, no. Truth is bizarre enough for the mere historian. King was still able to produce sufficient money to keep his family in comfort in their Horatian rusticity, where the ginkgo trees run riot, and loyal servitors were able to maintain them in Arcadian if anonymous comfort.”
As Hay grew more and more impatient, Adams grew more lyric. “As you might suspect-I saw your face subtly change when I used the word ‘anonymous.’ There were excellent reasons why King did not want the world-or even the Hearts, sad to tell-to know of his secret life. Ada was his ideal, of course, an earth goddess, essential, a custodian of cosmic energy…”
“Henry, in God’s name-”
“John.” Adams raised a hand in gentle remonstrance. “I’ve not finished with the secret life. Just before King went west again, he decided that it would be best for his family-still called Todd-to move to that part of the world which currently gives you so much trouble, over the infamous Alaskan boundary…”
“Canada?”
“Our Lady of the Snows, yes. He moved the lot of them to Toronto, where the sons have been enrolled in,” Adams glanced at the paper on his lap, “something called the Logan School…”
“Why Canada?”
“Because there is a tolerance there quite unlike our own-oh, fierceness on the subject of identity, one might say. Our national disapproval of any and every misalliance.”
Hay nodded. “I can understand that, particularly now that he has given her his name. He has, hasn’t he?”
Adams nodded. “If she wants to use it, of course. He also made it clear in his will, which you’ll get a copy of, in due course. You are a trustee…”
“Why do you have a copy, and I don’t?”
“A friend-our friend, Gardiner-gave me this early draft. Once the will is probated, and King’s bric-a-brac is sold, the widow will be able to live in moderate comfort as Mrs. Todd or Mrs. King, in Toronto or Flushing or…”
“This sounds like one of poor Stephen Crane’s stories. The gentleman and the fallen lady, the illegitimate family, the false names…”
“Oh, it’s a much bolder story than anything Mr. Crane put his hand to. You see, dear John, King’s perfect woman, mother of his five children, emblem of the original universal goddess for whom the male has no use once his biological function is complete, this glorious creature from pre-history, this Ada Todd, is a Negress.”
Hay exhaled suddenly; and all the blood went from his head. For an instant, he thought he might faint. Then he rallied. “Clarence King married a Negress! But-that’s impossible.”
“You did not go to Tahiti.” Smugly, Adams gazed into the fire, framed by luminous Mexican jade.
“But you did, and I fail to see a dusky Mrs. Henry Adams on these premises…”
“Only because I moved on-and up. To the Virgin of Chartres, to another more perfect avatar of the primal goddess, who…”
“I’ll be damned,” said John Hay, as William slowly opened the door to the study and said, “The young ladies would like to pay their respects…”
Adams rose; and assumed his avuncular mask, though a certain unfamiliar gleam in his eye suggested that there was still something demonic latent in his nature.
The room was filled by three girls. Hay had never been able to figure just how it was that his two daughters and their friend Alice Roosevelt could take up so much space, breathe so much air, create so much atmosphere-for want of a better word-but they did.
The three swarmed over Uncle Henry; receiving chaste touches of his hands, now raised in papal blessing. Helen was more and more like Clara, while Alice was like himself. The President’s Alice was, happily, not like her father, except for a thin mouth full of large snaggled teeth. Alice Roosevelt was more handsome than pretty, with a slender figure, and gray marbly eyes; she stood very straight, and comported herself like the regal princess she saw herself as. She was also given to demonstrations of manic energy, and there were already signs of a dexterous, most undemocratic-yet hardly royal-wit. Henry Adams affected to find her intimidating. Eager to please, she proceeded to intimidate Uncle Henry. “You must come to the party. It’s not every day I have a debut in the White House…”
“I am too old, dear child…”
“Of course you are. So we’ll prop you up like who was it at the feast?”
“Themistocles…”
“Mr. Hay, make him come!” Alice Roosevelt turned to Hay, one arm raised high like the goddess of victory.
“I’ll do what I can.”
Helen threw herself, with rather too much of a crash, into the chair opposite Adams, the large chair consecrated to her mother, who was still larger, Hay was relieved to note, than their daughter. He was also relieved that Helen would marry Payne Whitney the following month. Were she to become even larger… He dared not think of what it would be like to live in a house between that massive Scylla, his wife, and a prospective spinster of equal grandeur, Helen, as Charybdis.
“Everyone else is coming.” Alice Roosevelt perched on a stool. “Of course, it will be boring. Father and Mother refuse to spend money. Other girls get a cotillion. Do I? Of course not! Simple Republican Alice gets only a dance, and punch. Not even champagne. Punch!” she exclaimed, as her father might have shouted “Bully!”
“Surely punch is suitable for young people.” Hay, making kindly grandfatherly sounds, could think only of voluptuous black women, heavy-breasted and sinuous, crabs to his relevant shell, to appropriate Henry’s ugly image. How lucky King had been. Even as he was dying, he had had “a woman,” and, apparently, such a woman as the unadventurous Hay had not known since he was a very young man, living a bachelor life in Europe. Was it now too late? Of course, he was dying, but then King had been dying, too. Where there was a will, there was Eros. There was, also, Thanatos, he grimly completed his reverie. He would never again touch warm silken skin.
“We’re to have a hardwood floor in the East Room instead of that awful mustard carpet, and those round seats with the palms sprouting out of them. It’s a horrible house, isn’t it, Uncle Henry?”
“Well, it has never been a fashionable house,” Adams began.
“Father is going to redo everything, as soon as he makes Congress cough up the money. It’s intolerable, all of us upstairs, and Father’s office, too, in such a small place. We’re going to do over the entire floor, from west to east…”
“And where will the President have his office?” In Hay’s memory, every administration had tried to change the White House; and except for the odd Tiffany screen, nothing much had been altered since Lincoln’s time.