Passing Strange (32 page)

When he traveled, King often felt vital and necessary; his expertise had real value in the business world. But the long hours on trains, the nights alone, could also make him feel worn out and lonely, driven to despair by his unending need for money. “My darling, I knew all your feelings,” King wrote to Ada from one of his fruitless business trips. “I knew just how you love me and how you miss me and how you long for the days and nights to come again when we can lie together and let our love flow out to each other and full hearts have their way. Your letter gave me true joy. I read it over and over and felt like a new man.”
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IN LATE 1896 OR early 1897, despite the tightening vise of his financial woes, King helped Ada and the children move to a quiet residential district of large single-family homes on the Long Island Rail Road line a good distance from the rough chaos of Hudson Avenue or the more tempered atmosphere of Skillman Street, farther still from his midtown Manhattan clubs. That distance might help King relax a bit about the possibility that his two worlds might collide. Certainly, the new house would make Ada the instant envy of the neighbors she left behind. The two-and-a-half-story unattached brick and frame house stood on a spacious lot (75 by 138 feet) at 48 North Prince Street in Flushing, set high on a gentle rise of land among the trees of the old Prince family nursery. Next door, at number 42, stood a veritable three-story mansion, with a circular drive, a carriage house out in back, and an impressive four-story tower that faced the street. The two yards ran back to the railroad tracks, where the children could see and hear the commuter trains bound for Manhattan pulling in and out of the nearby station. In their spacious new eleven-room house on a block of tree-filled yards, the Todd children tasted an unfamiliar sort of freedom. They might not be old enough to explore the neighborhood on their own, but they could race out the back door to run in the grass, make noise without disturbing the neighbors downstairs, and find places to hide and play in their own big house. Flushing took pride in itself as “one of the garden spots of Queens”—counting its trees among “its greatest attractions”—and retained the feel of a village. A contemporary guidebook pronounced the community’s population, “if the term may be used in this country, somewhat aristocratic.”
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With their move to Flushing, the Todds acquired more than a nicer house. They obtained new social identities. For Ada, it was largely a matter of social class. Here, in this freestanding house, she quickly established herself as a middle-class matron, well supported by her husband, who devoted her days to her three children and to preparations for the fourth, already on the way. For her husband, though, the move affected not just his economic identity but his alleged profession and, eventually, the very story of who he was.

When an agent stopped by the Todds’ new home to gather information for an 1898 business and residential directory of Queens, someone—most likely Ada—reported that James Todd was a “clerk.”
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Either James or Ada could be the original source of the story. If James had told his wife about a new job, we might imagine that the would-be railroad worker realized the implausibility of a porter footing the bill for such a large rented home, wanted to assure his wife he would stop all his traveling, or perhaps just sought to stay home more himself. Maybe he worried that his more worldly neighbors in Flushing would doubt that such a light-skinned man could really be a Pullman porter. Or perhaps he felt tired of inventing exotic travel stories for his children. In any case, his new neighbors knew James Todd as a “clerk,” a job title that could describe a wide range of work, but seemed to support a stable and respectable middle-class life.

Down the block, on South Prince Street, lived another clerk named James Todd, a coincidence that likely bemused the neighbors even if it confused the local postal carrier. And on North Prince Street lived immigrants from Germany, England, Ireland, and Poland, families supported by men who had found work as policemen, machinists, and clerks. Just to the south of the Todd house, in the large mansion on the corner, lived an extended family of German immigrants, some seventeen people in all, including three servants and three boarders. Frederick Kirpae, the self-styled professor of music who headed the household, might have been the music teacher Ada hired for her children. His seven- and eight-year-old daughters—almost the same age as Grace and young Ada—likely became their playmates. Just north of the Todds’, at number 50, lived Mary Chase, a widow from Rhode Island who ran a small boardinghouse and employed a live-in black housekeeper, the widowed Deborah Peterson. Peterson was the only other black resident of the street. Queens was 98 percent white, North Prince Street not much different.
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On April 26, 1897, a lovely spring day, Ada gave birth to her fifth child, a boy named Wallace Archer Todd.
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Perhaps her husband was with her, perhaps not. It was the sort of day that presented Clarence King with stark options.

The celebratory events of the day might have drawn him to Manhattan. Tens of thousands of Civil War veterans and curious residents, lured by cut-rate train fares, had gathered to celebrate the dedication of the new Riverside Drive memorial to President Grant. The
New York Times
reported that American flags flew “from one end of the Greater New York to the other with a profusion that causes every patriot’s heart to fill with pride.” Aging soldiers, recalling the defining moment of their youth, donned old uniforms to walk the streets. The temporary tomb that had marked Grant’s grave since his death in 1885 came down on April 26, the day of Wallace’s birth. The next day, some one million onlookers lined the streets as fifty-five thousand men paraded to the presidential reviewing stand in Riverside Park where William McKinley, the last Civil War soldier to serve as president, watched the unveiling of the new tomb.
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In the celebratory spirit of the day, few paid attention to the social and political failure of emancipation or the dismal state of race relations in an increasingly segregated nation.

 

 

ON THE DAY THE old tomb came down, some of the dignitaries in town for the Grant event gathered farther downtown at Madison Square Garden to attend a performance of Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. King enjoyed Cody’s show, and James Hague’s children long recalled their delight in attending a performance with him. King secured seats so close to the arena that one of the Indian performers, who recognized him, pulled his horse up in front of the children to greet them with a memorable “How.”
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On this particular afternoon, the audience included two Union soldiers, General Nelson A. Miles and General Oliver Otis Howard, who had gone on to high-ranking commands in the Indian Wars. Their onetime nemesis Chief Joseph also sat in the stands. Joseph was one of the genuine heroes of the Indian Wars, his epic 1877 flight from General Howard and two thousand American troops already the stuff of legend. He had led between six hundred and seven hundred Nez Percé men, women, and children nearly 1,200 miles across the Northwest before surrendering to General Miles just thirty miles short of the Canadian border he had hoped to cross to safety. And now he was here, with the generals, at the matinee. Joseph shook the generals’ hands. Buffalo Bill rode up to the chief and pronounced him “the Napoleon of them all.” But Joseph declined General Howard’s invitation to ride with him in the grand parade the next day, joking that he was too heavy to ride. He said he had to get out of New York because he could not breathe. His memory seemed more acute than the generals’; there would be no lighthearted rewriting of the past for him.
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King might have spent those nostalgia-washed days of late April in the reviewing stands of Riverside Park, in the crowds at Madison Square Garden, or at one of the festive receptions at the Union League Club, where he could relive his own memories of the 1860s and ’70s, when he had been such a commanding presence in the public eye. Alternatively, he could have stayed in Flushing, close to Ada and their newborn son. But if he was in New York at all, he was soon gone, returning to the West, the one place where his own particular talents should have equipped him to succeed. What the “clerk” James Todd told his wife he would be doing on an extended trip away from home cannot be known. But by the ninth of May he was in Arizona, en route to California and the Pacific Northwest.
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In midsummer, King collapsed with mild heart failure in Telluride, Colorado, where he went for the North American Exploration Company.
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By August he was in Seattle, outfitting an expedition for the Klondike and expressing cautious optimism about the prospects for the Alaskan goldfields. “The rush in many respects is most illogical,” he said, correctly predicting that many of the would-be argonauts would never get to the goldfields before the winter snows. “Yet it is readily to be accounted for if the accounts of the new district are true, as I have no reason to doubt they are.” He allowed himself an uncharacteristic moment of ebullience about the American future: “I believe we are about to enter a century which will open up vast resources and will be the grandest the earth has ever known. Before the end of the twentieth century the traveler will enter a sleeping car at Chicago, bound via Bering Straits for St. Petersburg, and the dream of Governor Gilpin [the first territorial governor of Colorado] will be realized.” America would at last have her passage to India.
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But not in King’s lifetime. He gained nothing from his investigation of the Klondike, from the ensuing trips to Mexico, to California, to the copper fields of Arizona. Over the last few years, he confessed to Hay, he had been as “lonely and isolated as an anchorite” and in his own odd way had come to love the “uncomplicatedness” of it all. “You have always thought my alleged savagery of soul a mere attitudinizing but you were wrong.”
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His friends sensed a mounting despair. “What an abject idiot he is not to chuck it all and come to us, as I am eternally begging him,” John Hay, who had recently been appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, wrote to Henry Adams in 1897.
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King could collect fees as an expert witness: he testified before the Supreme Court of British Columbia in April 1899 and in a fight between two of the copper titans of Butte, Montana, in February 1900. He could sustain his occasional enthusiasms: he ventured to the Klondike himself in the summer of 1900 and returned, said a friend, “simply bubbling over with pleasure.” And he could keep up outward appearances. In January 1900 he dined with President and Mrs. McKinley at a supper hosted by John Hay, who was now secretary of state and the man who presided over the cabinet. From the nation’s capital, King headed west to Butte with his valet, Alexander Lancaster, who saw to it that he went into the mines each day in clean and neatly pressed clothes.
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All the while, though, he dreamed of Ada. From Butte, King wrote to her, explaining that he had been ill from a dog bite. He promised to write more regularly now and to telegraph soon to let her know what to do about renting the house for another year. Then he put aside business. “Ah, my darling, I lie in the lonely hours of night and long to feel your warm and loving arms about me and your breath on my face and the dear pressure of your lips against mine.” Tired, weary, ground down from his unending search for money, King looked homeward for comfort. “My dearest, I love you with all the depth and warmth of my whole heart and will till I die. I pray for you all. God bless you.”
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A few months later, on his way to Alaska that summer of 1900, King passed ten days in Seattle, dining each night with an old friend at the Rainier Club, a West Coast version of his New York haunts. King’s dinner companion, Alexander Becker, recalled that when a mutual friend from the East joined them for several days, King delighted in teasing the easterner, “especially on his pretended preference for colored women—a bait to which our friend would rise every time; and I am not sure which he enjoyed the more keenly—our friend’s indignant wrath and protestations, or my appreciation of his delicious humbuggery.”
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Far from home, King flirted with disclosure, testing how his friends might react if he revealed the truth about his own “preference for colored women.” As always, though, he stopped short.

Becker later recalled with pleasure the week he spent with King in Seattle following the geologist’s trip to the goldfields, never suspecting his friend had withheld from him any confidences. “We were almost inseparable,” he wrote, “. . . and there were few matters of interest in any line in the past, present, or future, that we did not discuss more or less fully but always with a rare unity and sympathy of feeling that was simply delightful.” As a physician, Becker marveled at King’s robust health. He “thumped and pounded and listened” to his chest and pronounced that he’d never found “more perfect thoracic contents.” King seemed “really pleased” at the verdict.
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IN FLUSHING, ADA TODD, the “clerk’s” wife, had settled into the big house on North Prince Street with two black live-in servants, Phoebe Martin and Clarine Eldridge, to help with the daily chores. Born in 1867 and already widowed, Martin was a New Yorker, perhaps the same “Phebe Martin” who lived previously in the tenement at 149 West Twenty-fourth Street, where Ada and James had married in Annie Purnell’s apartment in 1888. Eldridge, born in New York in 1886, was just a girl.
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To watch her four children, Ada hired a young woman named Henrietta (later Henrietta Williams), an old acquaintance who, as a child, had attended the Todd wedding. All told, Ada Todd later recalled, she had five servants, “including a nurse and music teacher for her... children, and a cook, a maid, and a laundress.”
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She had known Henrietta, and in all likelihood Phoebe, for a long time, since before her fortunes changed. And in hiring them, as well as a young adolescent who probably had few options in life, she created an extended-family household in her big North Prince Street house that blurred the sharp lines between employer and employee. Many among New York’s African American elite preferred English servants to African American domestics, on the grounds that black employees did not always show proper deference to black employers.
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But Ada Todd chose a different path, perhaps recalling herself what it felt like to be a young black woman alone in the city, to work for someone else, to have little space or privacy of her own.