The Molten Notebook

Several mysteries converge at the grave of Clover Adams. Her husband, the eminent historian Henry Adams, destroyed her letters and photos after her suicide in 1885 and never spoke of her again — even in his famous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

A forgery of her grave marker later appeared in a Baltimore cemetery. Nicknamed the Black Aggie, the replica inspired so many horror stories and break-ins that the cemetery had it taken away. It now stands near the White House in Lafayette Square  — across the street, coincidentally, from the home of a woman who exchanged passionate letters with Henry Adams before and after his wife’s death.

As for the original grave marker, you can see it any day at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. It needs no back story to seem mysterious.

A tall ring of yew trees block it from view. You have to hunt for the steps that lead up to the rose-marble dais. There you can sit on a polished bench with eagle’s wings and view The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding, better known as the Adams Memorial.

Henry Adams, after returning from a trip to Japan, asked the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to base a memorial sculpture on icons of Kannon, the boddhisattva of compassion. A friend of Adams showed the sculptor the picture to the right — a 16th-centry painting of Kannon by Kano Motonobu. Known in Chinese as Guanyin, her full name means “observing the cries of the world.”

Saint-Gaudens cast a bronze of a seated woman in a cloak and hood. Her posture and the massy folds of her robes lend an air of strength in repose. Her heavy-lidded eyes are downcast, her hand raised against her face. Does she meditate or grieve? Is the hand raised to draw the hood toward her face or push it back?

When it was first displayed in 1891, onlookers called the statue “Grief.” Irritated, Adams wrote to the sculptor’s son Homer:

Do not allow the world to tag my figure with a name! … Your father meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx.

Visiting the grave last Saturday, I had no answers. Rainwater pooled in a fold of the statue’s robe. The bronze felt warm to the touch. A fly hovered over her shoulder and I thought of Dickinson:

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

More scraps of poems floated down like colorful bits of paper.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves… And no birds sing.

Further Reading

• The Adams Memorial was featured in an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.”