Passing Strange (38 page)

And so King wished to appear to his friends: a man of inbred grace and intelligence, unquestioned social superiority, and physical skill; a gentleman who believed in the proper order of things. Yet, for some thirteen years with Ada, he was someone else, and as James Todd he found the physical intimacy and rich emotional life that had eluded the celebrated Clarence King. The great tragedy of his life had nothing to do with his financial insolvency or his unrealized literary promise. It lay, rather, in his inability to breach his divided worlds and do the right thing by the people he loved. And if that inability stemmed in part from personal choice or economic need, it also reflected the constraints of a world that offered few choices to a man like Clarence King who loved a woman like Ada Copeland.

King gave to his family and his closest friends an illusion of openness; his endless willingness to talk and write conveyed a sense of frank emotional intimacy. “I have never known a more perfect human tie than that which bound my son and myself. We were one in heart and mind and soul,” said King’s mother after his death.
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But no one truly knew King, and he could not admit, even to himself, all the seeming paradoxes of his life. The man who had once gained fame by exposing the great diamond hoax of 1872 had for thirteen years mounted a tremendous deception of his own.

His friends, though unaware of his double life, thought “paradox”—that state of “exhibiting inexplicable or contradictory aspects”—lay at the very heart of King’s character. King relied upon paradox, wrote his friend William Cary Brownell. “I fancy he thought that things capable of settlement had been settled long since.” The art of discussion, Brownell added, engaged King more than any resolution or conclusion ever could.
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Henry Adams characterized his old friend in much the same way: “Above all he loved a paradox—a thing, he said, that alone excused thought. No one, in our time, ever talked paradox so brilliant.”
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Or lived it so vividly.

 

 

AT TEN IN THE morning on New Year’s Day 1902, King’s funeral service took place at the Brick Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The skies were fair, but the temperature hovered in the low teens as King’s friends roused themselves from sleep after a subdued and somber New Year’s Eve.
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William Dean Howells recalled it as a day of “intense cold” with a “piercing bleakness of the sunshine.”
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The pallbearers included Arnold and James Hague, Gardiner, Emmons, and George Becker, all friends from the western survey years; Edward Cary, a friend from the Century Association; the eminent painter Albert Bierstadt, just weeks away from death himself; and Henry Adams, who had received news of King’s death while returning home from a trip abroad.
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William Dean Howells sat in the pews along with the painter R. Swain Gifford and a delegation of fifty from the Century. John Hay, for whatever reason, remained in Washington, perhaps tending to urgent matters of state. The mourners took note of what a distinguished gathering it seemed to be. “King had the gift of friendship,” one observed.
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But the assembled crowd remembered the man who had lived by his words with silence. No one delivered a eulogy. Two hymns, a Bible reading, and a brief prayer made up the service, and by 11:00 a.m. it was done. The pallbearers carried the coffin out of the church at Thirty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, and by 1:00 it was on a train to Newport. Emmons and Gardiner, along with the Townsleys, accompanied the body to Mrs. Howland’s house. A dozen people gathered the following morning for a simple service in her parlor. Then King was laid to rest in Newport’s Island Cemetery beside the graves of his two infant sisters and next to the plot reserved for his grieving mother.
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PART THREE

ON A SPRINGLIKE DAY IN MID-MARCH 1902, NOT QUITE THREE months after her husband’s death, Ada walked into the
New York Herald
office at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street to hand the clerk a brief paid advertisement. A day or two later, on March 19, it appeared among the personal announcements on the paper’s front page: “Will C. King’s friend who saw A. Todd and children off on train please call on same? 942 3d Ave.”
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Ada had inserted a similar ad in the paper once before, from Toronto, shortly after learning of her husband’s death.
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When no one replied, she packed up her house and her children to return to New York. With few resources, four small children, and no independent income of her own, she needed help to get to the trust fund her husband had promised her. She had to hope this second ad would work.

While she sorted things out, Ada took temporary lodgings on Third Avenue near Fifty-seventh Street. On a largely white block, crowded with immigrants from Ireland and Germany, her apartment building at number 942 stood out because its residents were nearly all African Americans, mostly small families and the boarders they took in to help ends meet. Whether she and the children occupied their own apartment in the eight-unit building or shared a crowded suite of rooms with others, they likely felt worlds away from their old eleven-room home set among the orchard trees in Flushing. Their rooms perched above a paint store and a commercial space that housed everything from political gatherings to coin-operated peep shows. Instead of keeping an eye on her children as they played in a yard out back, Ada had to mind them out front, as they played alongside the electric street-cars that hurtled up and down the street, beneath the deafening rattle of the Third Avenue elevated train.
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Ada left behind no trace of how she found an apartment here on Manhattan’s East Side. The spare listing of names in the 1900 census, however, hints at a possible family connection. A black Virginia-born waiter named Emanuel Copeland lived in the building. He had moved to New York as a young man, sometime before 1880, and found work as a domestic servant. Perhaps coincidence brought Ada to the same building as this man who shared her maiden name. But when the white Copelands of Troup and Harris counties emigrated from Virginia to Georgia with their slaves in the decades before the Civil War, they left behind broken black families as well as white ones. At least eight Virginia-born black Copelands lived in Harris County during Ada’s childhood there. Scant evidence survives to document whether the former Copeland slaves in Virginia and Georgia maintained their ties across the miles and years. But in New York City, the mere existence of a shared name might compel one southern-born black Copeland to reach out to another.
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ADA’S AD WAS EXPLICIT but discreet. Anyone who knew about her relationship to Clarence King would recognize her at once. But neither the cryptic names—“C. King,” “A. Todd”—nor the reference to an earlier encounter would mean much to anyone not already in the know. Clarence’s letters to Ada always counseled discretion and now, even after her husband’s death, she continued to play along, disclosing nothing that might expose her peculiar family situation to public light. Indeed, she likely resorted to a public ad only because she had no other way to contact her husband’s business associates. Many years later, she maintained that in 1901, just before he left for the Southwest in his futile effort to regain his health, King told her she could turn for help to his friend James Gardiner: “I have left $80,000 with Mr. Gardiner. You need never worry.”
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Such money—the equivalent of more than $2 million in 2007—would certainly erase her financial worries.
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But if she actually knew Gardiner’s full name, she seemed not to know a more private way to find him.

Ada’s ad found its intended target. Gardiner sent his secretary Howard Dutcher to Ada’s Third Avenue apartment .
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Dutcher called on Ada as Gardiner’s agent. Nonetheless, he might have known King himself, since he moved in similar circles as a member of the Union League Club and secretary of the Mexican Coal and Coke Company.
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Dutcher would seem an improbable figure to comfort the grieving Ada Todd. Several years later, in divorce proceedings, his wife would accuse him of conducting a not-very-secret affair with their maid and characterize him as an abusive drunk who once beat her so badly she “was unable to appear in public for some time.”
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Nonetheless, Dutcher did as he was told. He asked Ada for evidence that she was “Mrs. Todd” and took the letters from Clarence that she offered as proof.
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Then, on Gardiner’s behalf, he struck up a financial agreement with the new widow and began delivering to her monthly checks of $65 (about $1,600 in 2007 dollars). He also set about finding her a better place to live.
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By the summer of 1902, Ada and the children were back in Flushing, in a single-family house at 42 Kalmia Street for which someone else paid the rent. In July 1903, acting on Gardiner’s orders but without Ada’s knowledge, Dutcher purchased the home for approximately $2,200, and two months later he transferred the deed to Gardiner.
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Ada’s monthly stipend dropped to $50. She knew nothing about the ownership of the house or the precise source of her monthly check. She understood only that her husband’s friend Mr. Gardiner looked after her and took care of the house payments and taxes. With good reason, she imagined that the money for the house, as well as her monthly stipends, came directly from her husband’s estate.
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Kalmia Street was an unpaved dirt road, a block long, extending between Golden Avenue and Jamaica Avenue, just east of the marshland along Flushing’s Mill Creek. It lay a mile and a half south of the Todds’ North Prince Street residence, in a newer, less-settled part of town. Indeed, when she moved in, Ada had only one other neighbor on the north side of the street. Her frame house, two stories high in the front and one story high in the back, had a stable in the backyard, an accommodation to a soon-to-fade mode of transportation on the streets of New York. It sat on a lot twenty-five feet wide, but with the adjacent lots still undeveloped, the yard had a spacious feel.
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The Kalmia Street house did not measure up to the large house on North Prince Street, but it offered more space and privacy than Ada’s cramped apartment on Third Avenue. Fireplaces graced the downstairs living spaces, a bay window brought morning light into the dining room, and the kitchen opened onto an enclosed sunporch at the back of the house. Little touches—like the stained glass in the vestibule door and the handsome carved wooden banister that led upstairs to the three bedrooms—gave the modest house an air of elegance.
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Moreover, the house boasted a convenient location, close enough to a world of shops and schools that Ada knew and relatively far from the handful of Gardiner intimates who now knew of Ada’s existence.

At some point King must have confided in his old boyhood friend—in a quiet conversation, one imagines, rather than through a written disclosure, and with strict admonishments to keep secret the stunning news. Gardiner himself might have been the man who carried letters and money to Ada during King’s prolonged absences, or saw her and the children off on the train to Toronto, and if not him, a trusted associate working on his behalf. When King died, he stepped in to help Mrs. Howland with her duties as executrix of her son’s estate. But he kept the news of King’s secret family close to the vest. Half a century later, Gardiner’s daughter claimed that her father’s black servants knew about King and his secret life. But they, too, kept silent.
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Gardiner was discreet. He intended to preserve King’s reputation and to spare Mrs. Howland from scandal. But King’s messy financial affairs made it essential that Gardiner speak to Hay, to whom King was so hopelessly in debt. Whether Hay told Adams remains unknown; a government official would know better than to commit the revealing words to paper. But King’s startling private life seemed to remain more or less a secret, never getting into the papers or becoming a topic of public speculation. Whatever Hay, and possibly Adams, knew about King they kept to themselves. In a memorial address prepared for the Century Association, Adams remarked, “We were his slaves, and he was good to us. He was the ideal companion of our lives.”
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If he felt stunned or disappointed by his friend’s behavior, he gave no hint.

Almost immediately, King’s friends set out to memorialize him. Frank Emmons sat down to write a memoir of King for the
Engineering and Mining Journal
within forty-eight hours of his friend’s death and sent it off in the mail even before the funeral.
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Three weeks later, Rossiter Raymond proposed to James Hague that they collaborate with Gardiner and Emmons to create a biographical volume on King’s life.
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The Century Association assumed sponsorship of the project, and Hague agreed to head the special memorial committee that would compile a book of “personal memoirs” solicited from King’s intimates.
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Henry Adams took his time, laboriously writing out his recollections in longhand. “Of course I cannot, or perhaps I ought to say brutally—will not—write anything about King that shall not be carefully prepared and compared,” he wrote to Hague. “One must do one’s utmost for such an object.”
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John Hay carefully typed his memories on little six-by-four-inch pieces of paper.
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Raymond submitted an essay he had prepared for the American Institute of Mining Engineers, and Emmons adapted his memorial tribute for the
American Journal of Science.
Daniel Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins University, submitted a brief contribution. Longer tributes came from Hague, William Dean Howells, John La Farge, and a handful of old Century Association friends. Gardiner, for whatever reason, contributed nothing.