Passing Strange (31 page)

In mid-March, after a month in Cuba, Adams and King sailed on: to Puerto Rico, to St. Thomas, where they were stuck for two weeks in a smallpox quarantine, to Martinique, and on through the British West Indies. Finally they landed in the Bahamas. Adams found it dreary, but reported that “King manages to amuse himself with the habits and manners of the Bahama niggers, who are a peculiar type.” After a fortnight around Nassau, they returned to Florida, King’s initial dream of Dominica foiled by inconvenient sailing schedules.
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By late April, Adams had King with him back in Washington, “well and gay,” but worried that his friend might find New York depressing when he finally returned. King ought to leave New York at once, Adams told a friend, “and stay out of it.”
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King seemed “more steady, quiet and sane than I ever knew him,” Adams wrote, “but he has still to face the intense depression which New York never fails to excite in every sane mind.... He had better geologize the negro with me in eastern Cuba.”
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SOMETIME AROUND M AY DAY, King took the train from Washington back to New York, caught a local train to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and transferred to the elevated line that would carry him out to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. King’s “Cuban dream” was over.
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After more than three months, James Todd was home. The children must have looked at him with shy curiosity, Ada with relief. She would not have heard from her husband. No matter how anxious he felt about her welfare, James Todd the Pullman porter could not send his wife a letter postmarked on a distant island. Not even Mr. Pullman’s vast empire extended that far.

“How hard and cold and hateful the whole face of New York is with its veneered parvenues, and its ebb and flow of vulgar, clumsy, jostling peasantry,” Clarence King wrote to Adams from the Century Association after being back in the city for less than two weeks. He would rather be a stowaway in the hold of a southbound steamer “than dwell in the tents of the Metropolitan Club.” He tried his best, he told Adams. “I drivel away like all the rut and the optimistic lie rolls from my sinful tongue in oily stream.” Next week, he would even go to the country home of his old friend, the journalist Whitelaw Reid, “to pass some days amidst marble, truffles, tapestry and nasal commonplace and I am going to be breezy and effective and talk like a genuine ‘American’ and be truly popular.” It would make you sick, he told Adams.
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Every midtown dinner party seemed to demand of King a kind of painful charade. “I shall go to the Metropolitan Club,” he wrote Hay, “and make myself beloved of all the stable boys whom fate has raised to the nth power and chum with all the huxsters manquée and carry off the role of a good sensible American bourgeois cad, to the Queen’s taste.” His intense dislike for “things New Yorkan” had driven him into isolation, and to make a living he would have to crawl out. He “would go back into this hated thing called society and make myself as popular and commonplace and like the average as I can (and I know I can do it) till I get some of the dollars them fellers are in and then!!! Then my beloved tropical islands!!! ”
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King despised the infernal struggle for money. Like his friends, he wondered how someone with his talents could be so bad at making it. To Hay, whose financial generosity kept him afloat, he vowed to try harder, by suppressing his natural inclinations and adopting the cutthroat tactics of the self-made millionaires he viewed with such scorn. “No matter how much I hate the people and the life no one shall see it or know it. I am going in not as a skirmishing amateur in the part but as a man who means blood and loves the road that leads to it,” King wrote. “I have sinned I owe in allowing my nature to influence my life. I shall do it no more till I am able to say to my nature ‘at last it is your turn, be free!’ ... I have been a practical duffer and have not had the real life which my secret soul longs for. Now I am going to be practical all the time with all the energy and the brains I have got left and silence the cries of the soul till I can break the chains.”
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If King had found in Brooklyn the “real life” for which his soul longed, he did not tell Hay.

In mid-June, within six weeks of arriving home from Cuba, King was off again, to check out some mines in the upper Columbia River region of the Pacific Northwest for prospective investors in Chicago. James Todd presumably told his family he would be off on a long train trip west.
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Ada might have felt apprehensive, her customary worry over her husband’s frequent absences now compounded by worry over her family’s safety. A fatal shooting down the street in late May—the consequence of a landlord-tenant dispute among Italian immigrants in a boardinghouse—ended in a violent scuffle with the police in broad daylight, right on Ada’s corner.
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But her husband left. By mid-July King was in Colville, Washington, investigating a mine. He had hoped to break away for a bit to join John Hay and Henry Adams, who were vacationing in Yellowstone National Park. But a Pullman strike derailed his plans. Angered by layoffs and wage cuts precipitated by the company’s response to the financial crisis of 1893, the Pullman workers had gone on strike in May 1894, and by late June sympathetic railroad workers across the country were boycotting trains carrying Pullman cars. For once, Clarence King and James Todd could share the same excuse for not showing up on time.
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In this “glorious sea of mountains I am pacified and the tranquility of my soul comes back,” King wrote to Adams. But he dreamed at night of the sailing ship that would carry him back to the tropics.
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King seemed distant to his friends that summer of 1894 he spent away from New York. “You have often complained that I told too little of my life in my letters,” King wrote to Hay from Spokane. “That old habit of silence about myself (on paper) has come in well these days when there is only a dull and sad story to tell.”
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Adams hung about the Knickerbocker Club for three days in late September waiting for King to reappear so that they could plan a fall trip to Trinidad and Martinique. Alexander Lancaster assured him his employer would show up any moment. But King never appeared; a large stack of mail sat waiting for him, unopened, at the Century.
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And then he returned “in fine form,” John Hay thought, and too busy “trying to make a living or swindle some foreigner” to accompany Adams to the Caribbean.
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King felt tortured by “neuralgia”—presumably a recurrence of the nerve pain in his back—as he engaged in the “more or less fruitless struggle for mere board money.” He dreamed of going to Santo Domingo or Venezuela, but for now would settle for South Carolina, simply to be warm. But even there he could not travel until he had made enough money to pay for his trip and to cover the living expenses for his mother and stepbrother while he was away. He was detained, he told Adams, “by the vulgar problem of the daily loaf.”
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He headed back west to investigate some mining ventures in the fall of 1894, but returned to New York as depressed as ever, just after Christmas and a holiday spent with his mother in Newport. “This place will not do for me!” he wrote to Adams. “I must avoid it in the future! Really I am more at home with populists than these hard mechanical victims of respectability.”
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King faced more than the usual family dramas that Christmas with his mother. Mrs. Howland had just testified for a friend in a peculiar legal case revolving around a secret identity, a mental breakdown, and an illicit family that might have made King wince at its uncanny similarity to the hidden drama of his own double life. One imagines Mrs. Howland eager to talk about her minor role in the unfolding scandal and her son loath to hear a word about it.

Mrs. Howland had traveled to Boston in early December to testify in the sensational case of William H. King, who was not a close relative but a member of another Newport family involved in the China trade whose “family connections were such as to afford him access to the highest social circles of that period.” William King had alarmed his family with the “eccentric” ways he spent his China-trade money on the Continent. In 1866, as he was about to wed, his brothers dramatically appeared to whisk him off to an insane asylum. For twenty-seven years he lived at the McLean Asylum near Boston, and then in August 1893—just a few months before Clarence King’s breakdown at the lion house—a mysterious Mrs. E. Webster Ross of Boston filed legal papers to secure William King’s release. She refused to disclose her connection to the man but maintained he was illegally detained. The courts rebuffed her, and William’s family moved him to an asylum in Newport. Mrs. Webster persisted in her claims, but the courts refused to admit her as a party to the case unless she disclosed her connection to King. Finally, she presented herself as his niece, and thus his would-be heir. And then she made an even more startling claim: she was his daughter. The
New York Times
reported in early December 1894 that Mrs. Ross “avers that King and her mother signed in Boston a marriage agreement which they regarded as a common-law marriage and that she is the offspring of the union.”
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To support her claim, she summoned witnesses. As the
Times
reported, “Mrs. Ross names as a witness Mrs. F. K. Howland of [Newport], a highly-respected lady, mother of Clarence King, the scientist of New-York.”
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The odd parallels must have stunned Clarence King: a Newport King committed to an asylum, a common-law marriage, an unacknowledged child, a man imagined as a bachelor revealed as a family man, the idea of a secret life unfolding unbeknownst to one’s family. It is difficult to imagine how Clarence and his mother talked about the case that Christmas in Newport. Or, indeed, how they talked about it later. When William King died in 1897, his estate was worth some $30 million. Mrs. Ross came forward with a new story. The deceased was not actually “William H. King,” member of the Newport family. That King had disappeared in China in the 1840s (just as Clarence’s father had), and Ross’s uncle took his name when he fled the United States to avoid prosecution for a crime. She now said the man incarcerated all those years was Pelatian Webster Gordon, and she was his only living heir.
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King likely felt discomfited by the stories of madness and illicit children. His mother, though, had to come to terms with being deceived by someone she trusted.

 

 

KING COULD SCARCELY KEEP afloat. Hay saw him in the spring of 1895 and told Adams their mutual friend “was too busy to talk to me much, being engaged in the same futile pursuit of elusive wealth which has been for years so distressing a sight for his friends.”
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By September, Hay reported, he had no idea where King could be: “He has vanished into space.”
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And then he reappeared, “deader broke than ever,” claimed King.
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Adams offered to give him money either for some stories or for the Turner painting
Whaler,
one of the gems of King’s art collection, which was already serving as collateral for a loan King had accepted from Hay. “This is pure friendship on my part,” Adams confessed to Hay. “I want neither the one nor the other.”
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But he forked over $2,200 for the painting (more than $56,000 in 2007 dollars), which King gratefully accepted to “clean up the mosquito swarm of unpaid bills.”
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To Hay, King wrote, “Oh! When shall I be free once again and stand as I once did! ”
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New York “provokes me almost to homicide,” King wrote to Adams in late November 1895. A recent visit with John Hay had made him forget his misery, he said. And he added a cryptic note: “To love someone is the single medicine, and God knows I have reason to love Hay as he will one day see.” King said he was holed up reading Cervantes.
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And then, in December’s dark cold, he headed west to Cripple Creek, Colorado, to render an expert opinion on a mine for a group of London investors.
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Ada provided comfort, as always. “I thank God that even if I am forced to travel and labor far away from you,” her husband wrote to her, “[I] have the daily comfort of remembering that far away in the east there is a dear brown woman who loves me and whom I love beyond the power of words to describe. If it were not for the vision of your dear self, and my absolute confidence in your love and your being true to me in act and thought at all times I fear I should not have the faith and courage to struggle on away from you.”
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KING’S TRAVELS BECOME A continuing catalog of frustrations and disappointments, of complaints and cryptic allusions to his friends. The year 1896 found him back in California and the Pacific Northwest. He was in Brooklyn that summer. Ada’s new pregnancy offered proof of that. But King remained elusive to his closest friends. An exasperated Henry Adams could only hope he would “some day give sign of life.”
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By late 1896, he had heard King was “far away in the west or in Mexico, and stays there to escape New York.”
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When King wrote to Adams in the spring of 1897, asking his old friend to accompany him to Mexico, he promised to “execute in advance an assignment of half the brown girls we meet.” To Adams the note seemed plaintive and sad, a desperate effort to stave off middle age with a kind of playful gesture toward the past. “[I]t was instinctive with him to call for companionship on his own youth, and he was really thinking not of me, but of the pine woods of 1870; the Sierras; the Rockies; and the brown girls. We both knew that it was all over; that thenceforward his energies were to be thrown away; that the particular stake in life for which he had played was lost, by no fault of his, but by those strokes of financial bad luck which brought down fully half of the strongest men of our time.”
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King revealed nothing, of course, of his pregnant wife.