1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [145]
Yet behind those strange eyes flashed a wit as keen as Mrs. Frémont’s own. Almost as soon as they began conversing, both felt a marriage of true minds: a sense of communication as free, electric, and unimpeded as a telegraphic transmission. “An enchanted evening,” she would call it. The Gray Eagle was at the dinner table that night, too, as was the Great Pathfinder, but these political giants could only sit and watch as the bons mots flew back and forth between the mistress of Black Point and this odd little creature. Mr. King’s conversation was extraordinary: an incessant running commentary on life’s perplexities, spiced with literary references, antic puns, self-deprecating jokes, mimicry, and even some slightly risqué allusions. Only Jessie Frémont, perhaps, could have kept up with him. King was no less charmed by his new friend—not least because of her responsiveness to his performance. “She is a superb woman,” he wrote. “She is my one admirer in the universe.” Before long he was a regular at the cottage, coming and going almost as if it were his own home and talking with Mrs. Frémont for hours on the veranda.63
They were the same age, thirty-five, but in most respects their lives could hardly have been more different. Unlike the pampered senator’s daughter, the little clergyman had grown up in a modest house in Charlestown, Massachusetts, beside Boston Harbor—“under the shadow of Bunker Hill,” he liked to say—and, being unable to afford the tuition at Harvard, had scrounged an education in lecture halls and free libraries, where he picked up French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and a bit of German by the time he was nineteen.64 While Mrs. Frémont was, naturally, forbidden from speaking before an audience or appearing in print under her own name, Mr. King had built a public career entirely out of words. He wrote, but—much more surprising—he also spoke, in a “manly, sonorous” voice, by turns passionate and playful, that was all the more impressive because it emanated from such a tadpole-like body. Called to the ministry, he had his own pulpit by the age of twenty-four, at a Unitarian church in Hollis Street, Boston. By his early thirties, King was hobnobbing with Emerson, Phillips, Beecher, and the Adamses; he was earning fifty dollars each time he lectured at a college or lyceum; and, inspired by Thoreau, he had just published a little book (half ode and half travel guide) about his rambles in the White Mountains. It was he who would bring Melville to see Mrs. Frémont.65
And then, in April 1860, he suddenly gave it all up—Hollis Street, Bunker Hill, tea with the Adamses—and went to California.66
He did not come to convert the Golden State, Sodom though it may have seemed. Rather, King came to be healed and converted himself. As he wrote to a friend not long before departure: “I do think we are unfaithful in huddling so closely around the cosy stove of civilization in this blessed Boston, and I, for one, am ready to go out into the cold and see if I am good for anything.” In fact, Boston was “cosy” for him only to a point. Emerson might compliment his work; Mr. and Mrs. Adams might enjoy his tea-table chitchat; but their Brahmin circle could never accept the man from Charlestown as its moral and intellectual preceptor.67
Now, just a few weeks later, here he was, taking his tea not in some stuffy Beacon Street parlor but on an airy hilltop above the Pacific, as this brilliant and world-renowned woman spoke with him as few people in Boston ever had: with neither condescension nor deference but frankly, directly, as between equals.
There was so much for them to talk about! He loved California, and hated it. San Francisco appalled him, at first: its swaybacked wooden shanties, its fleas and bedbugs, its streets “bilious with Chinamen.” But the Golden Gate, carpeted with spring flowers