“Tell me about the Five Hearts,” said Holmes as they left Philadelphia. For this conversation, the detective had crossed the aisle and was sitting uncomfortably close to James, knee to knee as it were, and was perched on the north-facing seat across from the south-facing writer. Holmes leaned on his northern-European-style walking stick. James wished that he had brought a stick to the compartment, if only to use as a barrier between them.
James set his palms firmly on his knees as if that created a structure separating them further. “In truth,” he said, “they referred to their small group not as the Five Hearts but as the Five of Hearts.”
“Tell me then about the Five of Hearts,” said Holmes.
“In truth, it was Clover Adams’s salon,” said James. “A very uniquely American salon, I might say.”
“How so?”
James paused a second to comprehend exactly what he had meant. “It was not, as are so many scores of salons I’ve known in France and Italy and elsewhere, centered on things or people literary, nor upon artists and art, nor upon that most central trinity of salons—money, aristocracy, or notoriety, although the Adamses might not be found wanting in any of the three of those categories.”
“Really?” said Holmes. “I thought there was no aristocracy in the United States of America.”
James smiled almost pityingly at the younger man. James was turning fifty in a few weeks and Holmes had mentioned that he was currently thirty-eight years old, turning thirty-nine in April, but at this moment Henry James felt very much the wiser, older gentleman. “Every society has its subtle aristocracies, Mr. Holmes . . . er . . . Mr. Sigerson. If not based on birth, then upon wealth. If not upon wealth, then upon power. And so forth.”
“Yet isn’t Henry Adams a member of the ruling aristocracy in Washington?” asked Holmes.
James frowned before answering. Was the insufferable detective trying to be provocative? Pretending to be dense? After a few seconds of thought, James decided not. He was simply naïve.
“Henry Adams is a grandson of one American president and the great-grandson of another, both on his paternal side of course, but he has never held any political power of his own. He is rich, yes. He and Clover were at the center of Washington social power in the first half of the eighteen eighties, yes. But while being a member of what French philosophers or Jefferson might have called ‘a natural aristocracy’, Adams never controlled power, per se. I mean, he started as a Harvard professor, for heaven’s sake!”
Holmes nodded. “Let us return to Mrs. Adams. Describe your former friend Clover to me . . . as briefly and succinctly as you can, please.”
James felt his infinitely delicate feathers ruffle again at this peremptory command. “You are asking me to reveal personal details of a dear, departed friend of mine and the wife of a friend of mine, sir,” he said stiffly. “You must remember that I am, while not English by nationality, a gentleman. And there are things which gentlemen simply cannot do.”
Holmes sighed. “Right now, Mr. James, and for the foreseeable future, you are an American gentleman who has agreed to help solve the possible murder—or at least the mystery surrounding someone annually claiming her death to be murder—of a fellow American citizen. In that sense, sir, your responsibilities to your friend as a witness outweigh vague conceptions of gentlemen not discussing their friends. We must both get beyond that if we are to decide whether your friend Clover Adams was murdered or not.”
Easy for you to get beyond it, thought James. You are not a gentleman.
He sighed aloud. “Very well. What do you wish to know about Clover?”
“Her appearance to begin with.”
James felt himself bridle again. “Why should her appearance be a factor, Mr. Ho . . . Mr. Sigerson? Do you have the theory that someone murdered her because of her looks?”
“It is a simple piece of a complex puzzle,” Holmes said quietly. “And somewhere to start. What did Clover Adams look like?”
James paused again. Eventually he said, “Shall we say that Henry Adams did not marry Miss Marian Hooper in June of eighteen seventy-three for her beauty alone. She was . . . plain-looking, although, as Henry himself once wrote to me years ago, she should ‘not quite be called plain’. And she was petite. But Henry Adams, as perhaps you will see, is also a small man by modern standards. But, although it was not unduly sharpened by education, Clover had a lively and intelligent mind.” He hesitated again. “And, I must admit, a quick and acerbic tongue. During the five years they lived in Washington before her death, Clover made many enemies—especially amongst social climbers, shunned senators, and their wives.”
“So you would categorize this Five of Hearts salon at which she was the center as more exclusionary than not?” asked Holmes.
James wished again that he had brought his walking stick into the carriage . . . to lean on as he thought this time. “Yes, definitely,” he replied softly, more to himself it sounded than to the detective sitting across from him. “Henry and Clover Adams—and the other three members of the Five of Hearts—would never invite someone to their inner circle because of that person’s power or notoriety. Rather, they invited artists, writers, minor politicians, and such to the dinners held after the five o’clock daily teas of the inner salon of the Five of Hearts based on that person’s ability to amuse them. I once wrote a story in which I portrayed Clover Adams in the form of a certain Mrs. Bonnycastle and . . .”
James stopped in mid-breath. He was aghast at his own lack of discretion.
“Go on,” said Sherlock Holmes.
James took a breath. Well, he had already crossed the discretionary Rubicon, as it were.
“It was in a story called ‘Pandora’,” said Henry James. “But you must understand that I never base any of my fictional characters on actual living or deceased persons. They are always . . . an amalgam . . . of experience and pure fiction.” This was as disingenuous as Henry James could get. All of his important characters—and most of his minor ones—were based exactly and precisely upon living or deceased personages from his own life and experience.
“Of course,” purred Holmes, sounding as disingenuous as Henry James felt.
“At any rate, in this short story, I described Mrs. Bonnycastle as a ‘lady of infinite mirth’ and her salon as one which ‘left out, on the whole, more than it took in’.”
“But you’ve already told me that the actual Clover Adams was not exactly a lady of infinite mirth,” interrupted Holmes. “You’ve explained that she had been, since childhood, visited by deep and frequent spells of melancholy.”
“Yes, yes,” James said impatiently. “One omits certain features of a character for a short story. Had Mrs. Bonnycastle been a central character in a novel . . . well, we would have had to explore all sides of her. Even those that seem, upon first glance, to be mutually contradictory.”
“Please go on,” said Holmes almost contritely. “You were describing your fictional treatment of Clover Ada . . . of Mrs. Bonnycastle’s salon.”
“I remember writing that the very rare senator or congressman whom they allowed to visit was invariably inspected with . . . I remember the precise words, Mr. Holmes . . . ‘with a mixture of alarm and indulgence’.”
Holmes smiled thinly. It looked as if he wanted to ask James whether the writer could remember, verbatim, large tracts from his dozens of books and hundreds of short stories, but he obviously did not want to derail the conversation again. “Go on, please,” he said.
“I know,” continued James, “that my good friend Henry Adams recognized himself in the story, ‘Pandora’, when I described Mr. Bonnycastle as having once said to his wife, in a fit of unusual broad-mindedness—‘Hang it, let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the president!’ ”
“And did they regularly invite the president?” asked Holmes.
James made an almost impolite noise. “Not that worm James Garfield,” said the writer, “although I imagine that Garfield would have galloped barefoo
t across Lafayette Square to the Adamses’ home should he have ever been tendered. But they did, or at least Henry did—I believe for the first time with their architect, Richardson—cross the street to visit the White House once Grover Cleveland came to power in March of eighteen eighty-five. Only a few months before Clover’s death.”
Holmes raised a single finger. “Pardon me for interrupting again, James. But this is something else about America that confuses me a trifle. It was my understanding—at least in my childhood—that unlike Her Majesty or most other royalty worldwide, American presidents were elected for a limited period of time. Four years was my hazy recollection. Yet President Cleveland was in office when Clover Adams died in eighteen eighty-five and, correct me if I am wrong, he is in office now in the spring of eighteen ninety-three. Have the Americans discovered the benefits of lifetime public service?”
Can any grown Englishman really be so ill-informed? wondered Henry James.
As if reading James’s mind, Holmes smiled and said, “During a railway voyage in a recent case set far out on distant moors, one not mentioned—so far at least!—in his published chronicles of our adventures, I had the opportunity to reveal to Dr. Watson that, until he had mentioned it in passing that day, I had no idea that the Earth went around the sun. I may have learned it at one time, I explained to Watson, but—as with all things that do not relate directly to my profession and avocation of detective work—I quickly put it out of my mind. I can, you shall find, be rather singularly focused. So you will have to make allowances for me at times, sir.”
“But for a man who brags of being set so firmly behind The Times . . .” James began and stopped. Holmes could not possibly be telling the truth here. And James wanted no argument. Not yet.
“Mr. Grover Cleveland,” he began again, “is in the unique position of being the only President of the United States who has served two non-consecutive four-year terms. He was in office between March eighteen eighty-five and March of eighteen eighty-nine. After a four-year interval where a certain Benjamin Harrison served in the office, Mr. Cleveland was elected again just last November and was sworn into office again only a few weeks ago.”
Holmes nodded briskly. “Thank you. And please return to your description of all five of the Five of Hearts.”
James looked around. “I fear that the dining car will be closing for luncheon service soon. Perhaps we could have a late lunch and continue our discussion there?”
CHAPTER 8
James chose trout for lunch; he didn’t care that much for trout, but eating it always reminded him that he was “home” in the United States. Actually, nothing outside the window of the moving dining car gave him any sense of being “home”. The trees along the rail line here as they moved from New Jersey toward Baltimore were too small, too tightly clustered, and too obviously just stands of new growth where farms had spared a patch of forest. The farmhouses were of wood and often needed new coats of paint. Some of the barns sagged. It was a tapestry of American chaos overlaid on a layer of poverty; England and Italy and France had more than enough poverty, Henry James knew well enough, but it rarely manifested itself as sagging, unpainted, wildly planted chaos. In England—in most of James’s Europe—the old and poor and rundown were picturesque, including the people.
Many years earlier, in an essay on Hawthorne (who had been an early passion of his), James had made the mistake of writing to American readers that American soil and history were a sad, blank slate for any American writer, poet, or artist: New England, he had pointed out, lacked Europe’s all-important castles, ancient ruins, Roman roads, abandoned sheepherders’ cottages, and defined social classes capable of appreciating art. American artists of any sort, he’d suggested, could never achieve a real mastery of their art by reacting to the vulgar, pressing, profit-centered, and always-pressing new the way writers and artists in Europe could react romantically to the old.
Certain American reviewers, editors, and even readers had taken him to task for these less-than-praise-filled paragraphs. In their eyes, James knew, America, even without any true history, could do no wrong and the vulgar and ever-shifting “newness” that he hated so profoundly—primarily as an impediment to his and any American writer’s art—was an aphrodisiac to their Philistine and America-tuned senses.
James remembered writing, in 1879 or thereabouts, putting down his thoughts on Hawthorne and his contemporaries—“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature” and “One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.” Perhaps this is why he had added, in Chapter VI of his Hawthorne book—“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”
No, it had not made him popular to American readers and reviewers.
Now James shrugged and set all that ancient emotion away from his thoughts as he finished his trout and sipped the last of his less-than-mediocre white wine.
Holmes had ordered only tea and then let the poor American imitation of his choice sit unsipped in its Pennsylvania and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad–crested cup. James was not certain that he’d seen the detective actually eat anything since their dinner in Paris on the evening of March 13, now eleven days in the past, and was beginning to wonder how the gaunt detective stayed alive.
“We were talking about Mrs. Clover Adams,” Holmes said so suddenly that it startled James.
“Were we? I thought we had moved on to her husband and other members of the Five of Hearts.” James made sure that no one was seated in their half of the emptying dining car or any waiter within earshot before he spoke. And even then he spoke very softly.
“You mentioned that Clover made enemies, partially through excluding people from her salon, but also with her wit . . . perhaps you said because of her ‘sharp tongue’,” said Holmes. “Can you give me some examples of her saying or writing specific things that hurt specific people?”
James dabbed at his lips with the linen napkin as he thought about this. Then, in a choice so rare as to be all but unique, he chose to share a story in which he had been the butt of the joke.
“The last time I was here in America,” he said, “a decade ago, I wrote to Clover before boarding my ship back to England and in that missive I explained to her that I had chosen her to receive my last note from our common country because I considered that she—Clover—how did I put it? ‘Because I consider you the incarnation of your native land’ is the precise wording, I think. Clover wrote back at once, saying that she considered my gesture ‘a most equivocal compliment’ and, she continued, ‘Am I then vulgar, dreary, and impossible to live with?’ ”
James looked up at Holmes but the detective showed no response. Finally Holmes said, “So the lady did have wit and a sharp tongue. Do you have another example?”
James quenched a sigh. “What good do such stories do now, sir?”
“Clover Adams was a victim of a murder,” said Holmes. “Or at least of someone’s cruel hoax that she was murdered. In either case, learning who the lady’s enemies were—even enemies created by the sharpness of her own acerbic wit—is the obvious way to approach this case.”
“Unless, of course, as was the case in this instance, it was not murder at all but rather a suicide,” said James. “In which case your list of suspects in the so-called ‘case’ is quickly narrowed to one name. Elementary, my dear Mr. Holmes.”
“Not always,” Holmes said cryptically. “I have investigated obvious suicides that were the result of other people’s murderous schemes. But please continue.”
James did sigh now. “My other friends in the Five of Hearts had, for years, expressed their admiration, if not outright adoration, of my fiction,” he said. “Henry Adams, John Hay, Clarence King, even C
lara Hay, were genuinely enthusiastic about my stories and novels. Clover Adams was always . . . more reserved. At one point, an interlocutor who . . . shall we say . . . knew the lady well said that in an argument with her husband and John Hay on the literary merits, or lack of same, of a certain Henry James, Clover was quoted as saying, ‘The problem with Harry’s fiction isn’t that he doesn’t chaw what he bites off, but, rather, that he chaws more than he bites off.’ ”
“Droll,” said Holmes. “And I presume the American colloquial dialect was meant to be part of the humor.”
James said nothing.
“I am surprised that someone close to both of you chose to report that particular bon mot to you,” said Holmes.
James remained silent. It had been told to him in one of the finest of London’s clubs by no less than Charles F. Adams, Henry Adams’s brother—a man whom Henry James had always found to be vulgar in the extreme. Charles Adams had a cruel sense of humor, so unlike his brother’s generosity, and enjoyed—James knew—seeing the edge of that humor embarrass or hurt others. Yet James had no doubt that Clover had said precisely those words; it was her dismissive style and, yes, her Boston Brahmin’s use of rude American dialect. It had hurt James’s feelings extremely upon the hearing. But he had kept Clover as his friend, and that barb—and others Charles Adams and others had relayed to him—had done nothing significant to lessen his sorrow when James had learned of her death more than seven years earlier.