Passing Strange (19 page)

When King returned from Europe in the fall of 1884, he again made his residence in a hotel. He took rooms at the Brunswick, a seven-story brick building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, whose top two floors, arranged in “retreating stories, turned back to catch the sun,” evoked the “picturesque” mansard roofs of Paris.
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Its “beautifully frescoed” dining room rivaled the celebrated restaurant Delmonico’s, which stood across the street. Together, the two establishments anchored this stretch of Fifth Avenue, dubbed “the Belgravia of the American metropolis, the center of its fashion and splendor, the home of its merchant-princes.”
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The Brunswick, too, operated on the European plan, so King had no obligation to take his meals in the hotel’s formal dining room. If he did not wish to find refreshment in the hotel café or bar—a gathering spot for the “
jeunesse dorée
who are interested in sport”—he could just walk out to the street and head elsewhere.
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Like the Brevoort, the Brunswick housed a mix of long- and short-term guests. For about $2 per night guests could have a single room with “gas, service towels, etc.,” but long-term residents paid as much as $40 per night for the suite of rooms and “extra privileges” that made hotel living a comfortable substitute for domestic life.
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The New York City directory for 1890 listed a host of business types as residents of the hotel: the architect George Edward Harding, soon to win attention for his design of the new Postal Telegraph-Cable Company building; Thomas Bullock, president of the Prescott and Arizona Central Railroad; and theater impresario Edward “Ned” G. Gilmore, the manager of Niblo’s Garden, a venue for amusements ranging from highbrow ballets to “dangerous theatrical feats” performed by children.
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The Brunswick offered King a steady flow of social diversions. As the urban headquarters for “coaching,” a “favorite diversion of the wealthy people of the city,” it served as the departure point every morning during the late-spring season for an old-fashioned English coach that carried paying passengers north through Central Park and Harlem to Pelham Bridge and returned them in the late afternoon in time for drinks. On sunny spring afternoons, members of the city’s fashionable coaching club could be seen driving their own four-in-hands out in front of the hotel, dodging the other horse-drawn carriages and delivery wagons along Fifth Avenue. (Prankster Ned Gilmore once slipped a mule-drawn coach into the procession.)
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And on Coaching Day, the last Saturday in May, they would all gather in front of the Brunswick with their brilliantly decorated coaches—“their boxes filled with richly dressed women flashing in silks and jewels”—to move out in parade formation up Fifth Avenue and through Central Park before returning to the Brunswick for their annual banquet.
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A broad swath of the city’s social and business elite passed through the Brunswick meeting rooms and banquet halls: the Lost Cause sympathizers of the New York Southern Society; the Goethe Society; the Rockaway Hunting Club; and the National Electric Association, whose work, claimed King’s old friend, now mayor, Abram Hewitt, would “revolutionize the world and regenerate society.”
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King lived on the periphery of this social world. His life at the Brunswick was intensely private. If anyone ever called on him upstairs in his private rooms, he left no record.

King’s social life took place, instead, at his clubs, and he collected memberships like calling cards. New York boasted more “first class clubs with mansions of their own” than London, a reporter noted in January 1887, and they struggled to maintain their distinctive character in the face of pressure to admit the “business element” that could support those luxurious clubhouses.
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Within a few years of returning to New York from Europe, King belonged to at least seven groups. He moved among the “gilded youth” of the Knickerbocker, and the “men of great wealth” at the Metropolitan. He found the artsy set at the Century, the elite literary enclave founded in 1847, and chatted about the outdoor life with the hunters and fishermen at the exclusive Tuxedo. King could count on finding like-minded Republicans at the Union League Club; old college friends at the Yale Club; fellow adventurers at the American Geographical Society, the only one of his clubs to admit women. King’s membership fees totaled at least $455 a year, an expensive way to keep up social appearances.
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But the clubhouses were an extension of his living quarters at the residential hotels; they became his library and living room, his dining room and study.

King received and entertained friends at his clubs, dealt with his mail there (the postal service even added a late-night delivery to accommodate the clubmen), and used the club rooms to tend to the business arrangements that would keep him flitting from one mining venture to the next during the 1880s and ’90s.
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His public life in the clubs, the illusion that his entire life transpired there, helped ensure that what happened elsewhere unfolded beyond the notice of friends or neighbors, colleagues or associates. By switching his primary base of operations from club to club—he might ask friends to direct his mail to the Century Association or the Knickerbocker, might greet friends at either the Century or the Union League—King could keep even his closest associates wondering where he really was.
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The clubs enabled King’s peripatetic life. But as Edith Wharton wrote in
The Age of Innocence
(1920), her novel of manners about 1870s New York, “the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.”
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Even the club life came to seem confining to King.

 

 

KING COULD BE MADDENINGLY elusive, and not simply because he was often away from New York, chasing down problems at the Sombrerete mine or dashing off to Texas and California in search of equipment and financing.
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Even in the city he seemed hard to find. His friend James Hague noted that King’s many friends often called him to account “for neglected letters, unkept engagements, broken promises and similar offences,” though five minutes of his presence seemed to assure complete forgiveness. “Many of his promises and engagements remained unperformed because it was a physical impossibility to keep them,” wrote Hague. “In his friendly and obliging way he recklessly made many conflicting and interfering appointments, which, without the gift of ubiquity, he could not possibly keep.”
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Family duties, unpaid bills, uncertain business prospects, and chronic illnesses all made it difficult for King to meet his obligations.

At some point, he began to imagine a different life.

The late-nineteenth-century American city offered a stage for social reinvention: a place where freedpeople could reimagine their lives without the shackles of slavery; European immigrants could refashion themselves as Americans; small-town migrants could embrace all the new possibilities of urban life. “Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!” enjoined the New York poet Walt Whitman.
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One could be one person at home; another on the streets or in the workplace. A fair-skinned person of mixed race might live with her black family at night and pass as a white worker during the day. A dutiful wage earner might live with his wife and children but pursue secret homosexual assignations after dark. The immigrant youth might speak her native tongue at home but use English to fit in at school. In New York such double lives were enabled by the sheer numbers of people on the streets, the ways in which one could travel about on public transportation, the distinctive character of different neighborhoods, the continual influx and outflow of residents. One could shed one’s personal history like a snake sheds its skin, to emerge new, unmarked—with a different name, an invented past, an imagined story—ready to glide into a future of endless possibilities. “In a great city,” the memoirist “Earl Lind” wrote at the close of the century, “the temptation to a double life is exceptional.”
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“Far stronger,” he said, “than in a village.”
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It is not entirely clear just how Clarence King’s double life began. Missing the thrill of an explorer’s life, emboldened by the privacy afforded him by his residential hotels and gentlemen’s clubs, perhaps he resumed his nighttime rambles when he returned to New York from Europe. Slumming had become increasingly popular on that side of the Atlantic, too. Within a few years, guidebooks would respond to the new demand with carefully plotted “nocturnal rambles” for those interested in Manhattan’s lowlife thrills. “If you are in search of evil in order to take part in it,” teased one guidebook writer, “don’t look here for guidance. This book merely proposes to give some hints as how the dark, crowded, hard-working, and sometimes criminal portions of the city look at night.” The guidebook directed the enterprising tourist to the Bleecker Street station at the intersection with South Fifth Avenue, not far from where King had once begun his own nighttime rambles with his secretary, Edgar Beecher Bronson. Keep your eyes open, the writer cautioned. This neighborhood “is largely inhabited by negroes, mainly of a very low class, becoming still more low and vicious as you go down Sullivan and Thompson Sts., below Bleecker; and a large proportion of the white residents, American, Italian, French, and Irish, are fond of shady places and shady ways.”
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No stories survive to tell of King’s nocturnal rambles through the streets of New York during the mid- and late 1880s, the years he moved in and out of the Brunswick Hotel. But years later, it would become evident that he was spending time far from the attentive gaze of friends or the watchful eyes of servants.

Perhaps he found one neighborhood to frequent, watching carefully how its inhabitants moved through the streets, went about their work, tended to their families. Perhaps the idea crept up on him slowly, or maybe it hit him with all the suddenness of a Sierra storm. But at some point, he began to imagine that he could slip the bounds of upper-class respectability to live as someone else, not just on his nighttimes rambles but in a deeper, more sustained way. He would not only flee his past—he would invent a different one.

 

 

KING HAD BECOME USED to being the eligible man at New York dinner parties, though his closest friends had given up on finding him a mate. John Hay tried once in 1879 when they bunked together in Washington, D.C. Having heard that a particularly attractive young woman named Emily Beale was interested in King, Hay asked his friend his opinion. King replied, “To see her walk across a room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin on end and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward.”
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So much for that.

King wrote about women, though, especially to Hay, and sometimes joked about his search for the “sixth heart.”
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“I dragged myself out to dinner,” King wrote him in the spring of 1885, and sat between “two girls of this favored land. They were in fine form . . . and screamed scraps of subjects at me in their macaw voices till they left my slow faculties in a state of irritated daze.” The New York woman seemed to have a mind that was a “mere crazy quilt of bright odds and ends, snips of polite error patched in with remnants of truth which don’t show the whole pattern, little rags of scandal & c &c all deftly sewed together in a pretty chromatic chaos well calculated to please a congenital dude but fatiguing to a lover of natural women, such as I am.”
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But King seemed unable to find his “natural women” in New York, at least among his society set. As the coaching season wound down in late June 1886, King complained to Hay that the society world contained just two types of women, “those who have got their gowns and fled and those who are fretting and fuming and being fitted.”
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To another friend, he sneered, “New York society reminds me of nothing so much as a simian circus.”
¹⁰⁵
He fled for Lake George, to spend time with his half siblings, George and Marian. But the women there seemed equally inane, their attempts at conversation as absurd as the city women’s obsessions with fashion. King reported to Hay that he actually tried to speak to a woman he met, but “it is as if she had picked up an education at Macy’s when they were selling off for below cost, a world of snips of unseasonable information. She has something quite apropos but utterly mistaken about everything.” It fatigued him to correct her, as if she were “a very bad proof.”
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King searched farther afield for his natural woman. And so, in the summer of 1887, once again ensconced at the Brunswick after a trip to Mexico, Texas, and California to tend to his Mexican mining interests, King shared with Hay the story of Luciana. Ever the buoyant storyteller, he used charm and wit to put a gloss on a story that hinted at real and deeper desires.

 

 

KING HAD BECOME ENGROSSED that spring in Helen Hunt Jackson’s recent novel
Ramona,
the romantic love story of a young mixed-race woman raised among the Californio elite and her Indian husband. Jackson hoped her book would do for the Indian what Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had done for the slave, inspiring her readers to take action on behalf of the oppressed. King thought her story about the injustices visited upon the Mission Indians to be the “gospel truth.” But like most readers he focused less on the politics than on the romance, and he wished for “a few more jets of melted lava in the love passages.”
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In the summer of 1887, when he met Luciana, King was actually staying at Camulos, the California ranch reputed to be the setting for Jackson’s story. Immersed in the aura of Jackson’s romance and drawing on her story for imaginative resonance, King made his escapades seem more fictive than real, an amusing story that would vaporize into ethereal anecdotes in the hot, humid air of a New York summer.