Passing Strange (26 page)

King’s surviving correspondence with his friends catalogs his continuing spinal pain, his struggles with depression, his worries about his mother, and the vicissitudes of his work life. But still not a word about his married life. By asking his friends’ indulgence for his various health and financial worries, he suggested a source for his distracted inattentiveness and frequent absences and deflected probing questions about his personal affairs. His friends knew that he moved his mother back to Newport so that he could go down to Mexico during the summer of 1889 to tend to a mine, but then he disappeared from their lives for a while. He resurfaced in New York in the fall, elusive as ever, canceling dates at the last moment, pleading the necessity to be elsewhere, compelling his friends to write to business managers to figure out where he was. “I have drudged away here, sometimes worn down to the quick of my nerves,” he wrote to Hay from New York in October 1889, “and then coming up again all right.” He felt “low” in spirit, he explained, and missed Hay’s companionship. He again dreamed of moving to Washington with his mother and half sister, Marian, because, he wrote to Hay, “I would rather have you than all New York.” King did seem in the “depths of low spirits,” Henry Adams reported to a friend, and very “low in mind.” Adams surmised the problem must be money.
²⁹

It was, in part. But it was also more complicated than that. King threw out hidden clues to his friends. In October 1889, after Adams completed the first volume of his massive
History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison,
King made light of his own inability to sit down and write any of the “vast historical works” he always had in mind.
³⁰
Writing to Hay about the depression that descended upon Adams when he finished his book, King said, “It’s evidently a horrible thing to finish one’s magnum opus. I who will never begin mine may always have the gentle tonic of perpetual gestation, the soft genial pride of an important bellyful, with none of the throes of printing and none of the ghastly hollowness of collapsing sides. Can a man have a second magnum opus? Is the intellectual womb capable of a second fecundation?”
³¹
The teasing metaphor of the pregnant man hinted at King’s powerful secret: James Todd had become a father.

Ada Todd gave birth to a son sometime in 1889; no surviving documents record the precise date.
³²
Clarence named him Leroy, a variation of
le roi,
French for “the king,” an inside joke that only King could appreciate. Just as the pseudonymous James Todd honored his true father by becoming a “James,” his son honored them both by becoming a “King.” The echo of names proved prescient: Clarence King disappeared from young Leroy’s life just as his own China-trader father had disappeared from his: in a dutiful search for money.

 

 

“NOW IN MIDDLE AGE, I am poor,” the forty-seven-year-old King complained to Adams in September 1889, “and what is worse, so absorbed in the hand to mouth struggle for income that I see the effective literary and scientific years drifting by empty and blank, when I am painfully conscious of the power to do something had I the chance.”
³³
In November he borrowed another $11,000 from Hay (nearly $255,000 in 2007 dollars).
³⁴
Later that year, he went west to check out a mining project in Colorado. He returned to New York early in the new year, expecting to set off for Florida and Cuba, but turned west again to investigate some mining prospects in California, where the memories of his earlier ventures left him feeling “rheumatic and gray and dull.” From California during the bleak winter of 1890, King came close to unburdening himself of his secrets, half-begging Hay to press him to reveal what weighed so heavily on his spirit. “When can I be with you long enough to open up my soul to you,” he wrote, “for there grows over me a dread but you should forget what sort of fellow there still is under all the load of hard things which cover me up and hide me. . . . I wish I could write as I feel but that no longer seems possible.”
³⁵

In March 1890 King turned to Hay for another loan, explaining that he had left some money behind to see his mother and half brother, George, through the winter, but needed an additional $450 by April to help George continue his painting studies in Paris.
³⁶
Alluding to the collateral he put up for previous loans, King reminded Hay that all his “bric a brac” was “yours long ago as everything else I have belongs to you.”
³⁷
Hay, ever generous, sent the money to George Howland in Paris. In May King signed a promissory note to Hay for a stunning $26,000 (nearly $611,000 in 2007 dollars), backing it up with two chattel mortgages. The debt incurred since his wedding, only one and a half years before, now totaled more than $43,000 (over $1 million now).
³⁸
“He handles vast interests,” Hay wrote of King to William Dean Howells, “but cares so little for money that he gains very little. A touch of Avarice would have made him a Vanderbilt—a touch of plodding industry would have made him anything he chose.” Hay puzzled over his talented friend: why did his brilliance and charm not bring him economic rewards? “I fear he will die without doing anything,” Hay wrote, “except to be a great scientist, a delightful writer, and the sweetest natured creature the Lord ever made.”
³⁹

As a man of liberal racial thought (and a generous one at that), Hay might have understood King’s true dilemma. Though never a radical abolitionist, Hay grew up with strong sentiments against the “defiant and ungrateful villainy” of slavery and, as Lincoln’s private secretary, watched the president struggle over the issue of freeing the slaves. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, struck Hay as “lightning from a clear sky” that “[melted] with a flash four million shackles.”
⁴⁰
Later, as an essayist and a historian—penning among other works a ten-volume history of Lincoln with coauthor John Nicolay—he continued to focus on the vexing American dilemma of race. In 1879 he helped lead a relief effort in Cleveland to support the black Exodusters fleeing the Deep South for Oklahoma and Kansas. Later, he contributed generously to a Washington, D.C., group that established a model tenement program for the urban black poor. Though his racial views hardened in the 1890s, he remained in the public eye a powerful friend of blacks. Twice, Tuskegee Institute honored his service by inviting him to speak, and in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1894, a group of citizens established in his honor the John Hay Normal and Industrial School.
⁴¹

Given Hay’s deep personal friendship and his civic interest in the affairs of black Americans, why did King not share his secret? One imagines he feared disappointing the admiring friend who was bankrolling his life. But it likewise seems possible that Hay himself steered away from intimate talk, for he, too, had a secret. His wife, Clara, was the model of domestic respectability, and her family money allowed him to pursue the life of the gentleman scholar and diplomat. But since 1887 Hay had been in love with Nannie Lodge, the witty and charming wife of Massachusetts congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, a woman different in every regard from the pious Mrs. Hay. Hay’s secret affair did not cross the bounds of race or class as King’s marriage did, but it likewise threatened the stability of public reputations and professional lives. Henry Adams knew about Mrs. Lodge, and so did his own close companion, Elizabeth Cameron. But Hay confided in no one else.
⁴²
For all their camaraderie and the seeming closeness of their long relationship, Hay and King shared a friendship defined and circumscribed by secrets.

In New York, King shuddered at his “real apathy of soul, and indifference of heart to the world,” confiding to Hay that he went about his work “mechanically” and beset by loneliness.
⁴³
If his depression was real, his seeming openness was not. As always, King’s words led his friends to imagine that his life held few pleasures, that his problems were largely financial. Hay perceived that every financial struggle of King’s “gets him deeper in the mire, costs him something of life as well as money.”
⁴⁴
By late spring 1890, however, Ada Todd was pregnant with her second child. Of that world of physical intimacy, that part of his life where he found a comforting and affirming joy, King continued to tell his friends nothing. Hay thought it would benefit King’s “immortal soul” to just “drop everything” and sail away to the South Pacific with Henry Adams.
⁴⁵
But King could not go.

He sailed, instead, to England in June with his valet, Alexander Lancaster. Like James Marryatt, who played a similar role during the survey years, Lancaster was black. A light-skinned man of mixed racial ancestry, Lancaster was born in April 1863 in Petersburg, Virginia, a year before the town came under siege by Union troops.
⁴⁶
His mother, like Ada’s, was most likely a slave. The details of his early life and the circumstances of his initial meeting with King remain unclear, but he remained in King’s employ until at least 1900.
⁴⁷
Lancaster’s life, King told a friend, “was in his work.”
⁴⁸
It was either Lancaster or Marryatt, that friend later recalled, who “came to be an invaluable assistant in geological underground work, observing with great acuteness, although without scientific knowledge, indications which more learned men might have overlooked.”
⁴⁹

King traveled to England to testify in a trial involving ongoing troubles with the Anglo-Mexican Mining Company and to scout around for investors for another mining project in Idaho (the trip caused him to miss the ceremony at which Brown University awarded him an honorary LL.D.). He then moved on to talk to financiers in Paris, accompanied by his old New York friend Abram Hewitt, who was now retired from his public career as a congressman and short tenure as mayor of New York (1887-88).
⁵⁰
When Hewitt became ill, King insisted he return to England with Lancaster as his personal attendant. In the Paris train station, solicitous officials grabbed their luggage and escorted them to a special railway car, insisting that Lancaster lead the way. Only later did Hewitt and Lancaster learn that the officials had mistaken the servant for “a certain Oriental Prince, who, attended by an English companion, was expected to leave Paris for London by the same train . . . with the result that Alexander was mistaken for the expected Prince and Mr. Hewitt for his gentleman-in-waiting.” One of King’s friends later reported that “Alexander bore with becoming dignity the honors thus unwittingly thrust upon him, while, at the same time, he failed in no respect in his duties to Mr. Hewitt.”
⁵¹
To King’s associates, the mix-up became an amusing story about how clueless the French could be. But Lancaster likely took it as something else. If he did not already know from close observation of King’s life how easily one could assume an alternative identity, he surely did now.

King treated Lancaster as both a companion and an employee, someone who might occasionally be taken into his confidence but who would never cross the bounds of overfamiliarity. Surely Lancaster knew more about his employer’s whereabouts at any given moment than King’s close friends did, or than Ada Todd herself could have known. If he knew his employer’s secret, however, he did not broadcast it.

 

 

IN EARLY JANUARY 1891, with Ada set to deliver her second child in just a few weeks, King traveled to Newport, with “the rather heavy heart I carry about,” for the wedding of his half sister, Marian, and Lieutenant Clarence P. Townsley, an army man.
⁵²
Like King, Townsley knew the West. But as a veteran of the Fourth Artillery’s Apache campaigns of 1881, he knew it better through the sight of a rifle than the eyepiece of a surveyor’s tool. Now, after a tour as a drawing instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he served at Fort Adams, the massive masonry fort that guarded the entrance to Newport Harbor.
⁵³
Marian’s formal gown, Townsley’s military dress, the fashionable crowd, all marked this as a social event vastly different from King’s own wedding in a midtown Manhattan tenement some two years before. The Congregationalist wedding took place at Mrs. Howland’s house, “in the English style, only members of the household being present.” But the
New York Times
pronounced the large reception that followed “quite brilliant,” as Townsley’s military associates mingled with the bride’s Newport friends and family, including her grandmother Sophia Little, now ninety-two and “widely known for her philanthropic work.”
⁵⁴
King might have recalled that no mother or grandmother had witnessed his wedding; no cousins, no neighbors, no old school friends shared his celebratory cake. He returned to New York shortly after the ceremony but fretted about returning to Newport to care for his mother, who worried that Marian’s marriage to a military man promised nothing but “poverty and homeless-ness.” “The grim realities of arithmetic,” Mrs. Howland wrote, “are veiled by the rosy mists of joyful hope.”
⁵⁵
The marriage triggered another bout of fragile health. “My mother suffers from insomnia,” King told Hay, “all of which is due to Marian’s horrible mismarriage. It really is too heartbreaking to see a girl fling herself into the dust.”
⁵⁶
He clung to the high ground and consoled Mrs. Howland over Marian’s seemingly ill-chosen spouse.

 

 

IN THE VERY EARLY morning of January 24, 1891, Ada gave birth to a baby girl at her Hudson Avenue home. Hours later, a tremendous blizzard hit New York, snapping virtually all of the city’s electrical poles, plunging the metropolis into “impenetrable darkness” and leaving the streets an impassable mess of broken wood and tangled wires.
⁵⁷
Manhattan had begun to bury the forest of poles that had sprung up along its streets over the past decade, hiding in underground conduits the thicket of wires put up by competing electrical firms, the nascent telephone and telegraph companies, and the city’s police, fire, and burglar alarm services. But in Brooklyn, the process moved more slowly.
⁵⁸
Toppled electrical wires made Ada’s street perilous and left her apartment cold and dark. Inside, with Leroy and her newborn daughter, she would have only a gas lamp and candles for heat and light. When the white Canadian-born physician P. E. Kidd filed the formal birth certificate two days later, he left blank the space recording the child’s first name. Her father, perhaps delayed by the winter storm, had not yet been to see her or helped to pick her name.
⁵⁹
Like other fathers, he might even have chosen to stay away during the birth, leaving Ada’s care to kindly neighbors, female relatives, a midwife, or a Brooklyn physician like Kidd who could be paid in advance to attend the delivery.