Passing Strange (39 page)

Hague opened the book with King’s own short story “The Helmet of Mambrino,” the tale of the author’s search for Don Quixote’s helmet that originally appeared in
Century Illustrated Magazine
in 1886. King’s friends had always hailed it as sparkling proof of his literary genius. The poet Edmund Clarence Stedman argued that King captured “the very soul of Spain in the flask of his translucent English.”
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John Hay ventured that the “exquisite idyll of
The Helmet of Mambrino
” proved that no one felt more keenly than King “the melancholy charm of Castile.”
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One friend went so far as to say that the story “disclosed the exquisite delicacy of [King’s] literary touch, which rivaled that of Howells or James, and an even rarer quality of wit than Bret Harte’s.”
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But the overly effusive praise failed to mask a widespread disappointment that King left behind so little writing. “It makes me wonder at geology,” Henry Adams wrote, “when I think that this is all that remains of the most remarkable man of our time.”
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His friends illustrated the story with a photograph of the author dressed for his quixotic search in the tight-fitting green velvet suit he had worn on his romp through Spain. Arms akimbo, hands tucked awkwardly into the small, waist-high pockets, King gazes at the camera with an amused grin, his dark hat set rakishly off center on his head.
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In both words and image, he projected his puckish charm from beyond the grave.

As Hague gathered material for the book and marketed it through direct solicitations to libraries and associates of King’s, Mrs. Howland watched anxiously over the editors’ shoulders.
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“I have been very careful with my papers,” she told one of Clarence’s friends, “and had a special Yale locked cupboard built in my chamber closet to hold them—all on the subject of Clarence’s life and death. I wanted them at hand and yet secure.” The self-appointed keeper of her son’s flame, she begged to read the essays submitted for the book in order to assure their accuracy and apologized that she did not feel quite up to writing herself “as my grief sweeps me away when I attempt it.”
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When the book appeared in March 1904, she thanked the editors: the volume “brought solace to a heart much saddened by the untimely breaking of a tie that was almost ideally perfect in its strength and tenderness.”
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Clarence King Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino
remains a key source of anecdotal information about its subject’s life. The contributors preserve the flavor of King’s talk, the quality of his presence, the sheer energy and vivacity that characterized his public life. More than anything, they convey their extraordinary and admiring devotion to a man who seemed so much more capable than they. Even those who did not know King, noted a critic in the
New York Tribune,
“will feel, when they put down this memorial, that they have made a valuable friend.”
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King, said a reviewer for the
New York Times,
had a “genius for friendship.”
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Unable to contribute a personal reminiscence herself, Mrs. Howland channeled her grief into an effort to reissue
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada,
which had gone out of print. Within weeks of her son’s death, she had Hague rummaging through King’s storage lockers with King’s servant, Alexander Lancaster, in search of the original printing plates. The plates never turned up, but she and Hague nonetheless prevailed upon Scribner’s to republish the book. The publishers released it in November 1902, less than a year after King’s death, touting it as a “classic of humor, of romantic adventure and of nature description rivalling Ruskin in vividness and power.”
³³
A “genuine classic of American literature,” proclaimed the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
“Its style of description and narrative combines a virility and picturesqueness with a flueness [
sic
] of language rare in the chronicles of explorers; its adventures are thrilling, yet told with singular modesty and respect.”
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King’s friends gave some thought to publishing a book of his letters. Gardiner told Hay that “in earlier years [King] wrote many interesting letters to his mother.” But in the spring of 1904, Mrs. Howland was “run over” in the street in Newport, by a horse-drawn carriage one presumes, and became too frail to go through the old papers she had so carefully preserved in her bedroom safe. Around the same time, Hay lost many of his letters from King to a leaky roof. The project went nowhere.
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KING LEFT HIS FINANCIAL affairs in a mess. The outdated will written before his marriage left everything to his mother, but it seemed uncertain that he had any assets at all. Two mortgages executed in 1890 and secured with personal property gave John Hay an interest in King’s extensive art collection and about $76,000 in National Bank of El Paso stock (presumably worthless since the bank collapse in 1893) as security for three loans that totaled $43,000. No records of security for Hay’s subsequent loans survive; without any real estate to his name, King would have secured those with personal property, too, if they were backed up at all. Fortunately for Mrs. Howland, King’s creditor could afford to be magnanimous: he had no compelling need to call in his old loans. Two months after King’s death, Hay entered into a trust agreement with Gardiner, transferring to him whatever interest he might have in the King estate, the funds to be used for the benefit of King’s mother. In March 1902 Mrs. Howland submitted her son’s will for probate. In its final accounting of the estate, the Surrogate’s Court of New York County declared in June 1903 that the estate had no assets at all.
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Mrs. Howland’s eventual stipend came from Hay, not her son. She had known nothing of her son’s indebtedness, she wrote to Hay. “It was from mistaken kindness and the ever watchful tenderness with which he sought to guard my declining years.”
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Ada knew nothing of her husband’s debts or the disposition of his estate, nothing of the agreement between Hay and Gardiner. And no one informed her when Gardiner put King’s art collection up for auction in March 1903 through the American Art Association. For two nights, crowds of art patrons and King associates filled Mendelssohn Hall on Fortieth Street, near Broadway, to bid on King’s pictures. Some came to ogle the eleven Claude Monets up for sale from another collector. Others showed up to obtain a memento of King or get a glimpse of what he had kept in storage for so many years. His sixty-nine watercolors included a small Turner of an English seaside scene, a picture of a water lily by his friend John La Farge, some landscapes by Gustave Doré, and dozens more works by minor nineteenth-century European painters that he had purchased in the early 1880s. King’s twenty-six oil paintings included landscapes by his friends—Albert Bierstadt, Gilbert Munger, and R. Swain Gifford—and a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish religious paintings that he had purchased abroad. King never lived with the things he amassed. He had no gentleman’s house to house his gentleman’s collection.
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In the home he shared with Ada Todd there hung only a picture of little value, a large reproduction print of a floral still life by the nineteenth-century French artist François Rivoire, housed in a heavy period frame. Ada held on to it for the rest of her life.
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The sale of the paintings realized nearly $35,000; the books, textiles, and Asian art auctioned off to “large and fashionable” afternoon crowds brought in still more.
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Many years later, the auction would prove a point of contention in Ada’s claims to her husband’s estate. To whom did the art truly belong? Had it been left in trust for Ada? Or did it belong to King’s benefactor, John Hay?
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Unaware of the various legal and financial proceedings involving her husband’s estate, Ada pressed her own claims. In May 1902, just a few weeks after locating Gardiner through her newspaper ad, she visited him at his office at 14 Church Street in Manhattan. According to her, he confirmed that he held a fund in trust for her and the children.
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When Gardiner again sent Dutcher to her home to interview her in 1903, she turned over several letters from King reiterating the existence of the trust. She never saw those letters again.
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Despite her monthly stipends and Gardiner’s assurances, Dutcher’s threatening behavior made Ada suspect something was amiss. “Mr. Dutcher said that if I made any outcry or tried to bring this before the court that they would stop giving me anything,” she later said.
⁴⁴
She went repeatedly to Gardiner’s office to press her claim. William Winne, who became Gardiner’s secretary in 1904, assumed the role of Gardiner’s “go-between” with Ada Todd. He recalled “these people coming in the office from time to time making complaints that were unjustified.” Ada would “come in the office and make a rather loud complaint,” he said, “and it was rather objectionable.” To avoid any face-to-face confrontations, he changed the way Ada received her stipends around 1908: he stopped giving checks directly to Todd and arranged for her monthly remittance to be channeled through the Legal Aid Society.
⁴⁵

Between 1902 and 1906, as Gardiner and his associates continued to stonewall her, Ada Todd contacted at least two attorneys. She needed professional counsel to get control of her trust fund or to renegotiate a stipend that would better reflect the income generated by such a sizable estate.
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When her first two lawyers dropped her case, Ada persisted with a determined self-confidence. By June 1906, she had enlisted the help of Philadelphia attorney Everett J. Waring, one of the most eminent African American attorneys in the country.
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To find a black attorney at all took some doing. Only about ten African American lawyers worked in New York City in 1901, W. E. B. DuBois noted in his study of the “Black North,” and the 1910 federal census recorded just thirty-two black male attorneys in the entire state.
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To find a black attorney in Philadelphia would require even more resourcefulness, and in a period during which residential telephones were a luxury, communication across such a distance would be difficult and expensive. But Ada might imagine that a well-known civil rights lawyer like Waring would be particularly sympathetic to her claims. Not every attorney would take on a case that pitted the word of a penniless and anonymous black woman against a prominent white man and his well-to-do friends. After years of struggle with Gardiner, Todd had to understand that her late husband was white, whatever he had once led her to believe, and had powerful friends who would fight to protect his name. Her very existence threatened not just King’s public reputation but the more private memories of his friends. To acknowledge her prominent role in his life meant facing up to the fact that they had not known their friend Clarence nearly so well as they thought.

Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1859, Waring grew up in relative privilege as the light-skinned son of a mulatto school principal and his white wife. He did not like being called a “colored” man, and in 1878 (or so he claimed) he coined the term “Afro-American.” “Strictly speaking,” he said, “people not white are colored, and ‘colored’ applies to Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Italians, and Spaniards, but these people are known by their ethnic names.” Americans of African descent, he argued, deserved their own ethnic designation as well.
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By the time Ada Todd found him, Waring had become a high-profile advocate for African American clients. He earned his law degree from Howard University in 1885, won admittance to the District of Columbia bar, then joined a test case that successfully challenged a Maryland law restricting blacks from practicing law within the state. On October 10, 1885, he became the first African American admitted to the Maryland bar. Soon afterward, he challenged the legality of the Bastardy Act, a state law that permitted white women—but not black women—to seek financial support from the father of an illegitimate child. Although he lost the case, the experience launched his career in civil rights law.
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Waring’s most celebrated case took him all the way to the nation’s highest court. The case of
Jones v. United States
involved Waring’s client Henry Jones, one of eighteen black employees of the Navassa Phosphate Company accused of murder in the Navassa Island riot of 1889. The island was a tiny speck of Caribbean land, of value only for its rich guano deposits. When a group of black American workers rioted against their white American supervisors in September 1889, the legal issues involved not just their guilt but the jurisdictional question of who owned the island: Haiti or the United States. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, and in 1890 Waring and his associate, Joseph S. Davis, became the first black attorneys to present an oral argument there. Waring lost the case. And his law career in Maryland ended in 1897, with the collapse of an African American- managed bank that he had helped to charter. He retreated briefly to the Midwest, where he became “the only colored man who ever sat on the Bench in the State of Ohio,” then moved back east to Philadelphia to reestablish his law practice. And there, Ada Todd found him.
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Waring’s association with Todd did not last long, however. Perhaps he doubted the legitimacy of her claim or concurred with the probate court that King’s estate had no assets. He represented her during the summer of 1906, but Ada had a new attorney by March 1907, a white Legal Aid Society lawyer named Albert Bridgham.
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Ada’s switch from Waring to a Legal Aid attorney suggests her practical perseverance. If she could not find a lawyer to take her case on a contingency basis, she would find one to work for free, even if it meant giving up a more high-stakes trial. New York’s Legal Aid Society, an outgrowth of the older German Legal Aid Society, had been incorporated in 1890 to “render legal aid, gratuitously if necessary, to all who may appear worthy thereof and who, from poverty, are unable to procure it.” By 1911, the agency handled some thirty-four thousand cases a year.
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With Waring, Ada might have mounted a high-profile case involving issues of race and judicial fairness. With a Legal Aid lawyer, she would appear in court as just one more poor woman pressing for rent money.