Rare Birds in a Gilded Age : THE FIVE OF HEARTS; An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends <i> By Patricia O’Toole (Clarkson Potter: $25; 459 pp.) </i>

Henry and Clover Adams considered a bore “an error of aesthetics.” Many called, but few were chosen to grace their home on Washington’s Lafayette Square, and it was probably just as well. Parvenu politicians would have been intimidated by Henry’s blue blood and traumatized by Clover’s acerbic wit. When called “Voltaire in petticoats” by Henry James, she retorted with a thrust at his literary style that is quoted to this day: James, said Clover, “bites off more than he chews.”

In 1880, when Henry was 42 and Clover was 37, they took up with three people who seemed to have little in common with them except age. John Hay was from the Midwest, a place Henry Adams looked down on. A former assistant in the Lincoln White House and a minor diplomat, Hay had been a journalist, and Henry had defined journalism as work for “the educated poor who can’t be artists and won’t be tutors.” Clara Hay was the heiress of an Ohio industrial fortune, and Henry believed that plutocrats were perverting the democratic ideal. Moreover, Clara was placid and motherly and content with woman’s lot, in contrast to the childless Clover and her frustrated feminism.

Their third new friend was the bachelor geologist and mining tycoon Clarence King, a misogynist who detested the New Woman, the spirited, thoroughly modern type who populated the fiction of Henry James--i.e., Clover. The only woman of his own class he could tolerate was the self-effacing Clara Hay, whom he called “calm and grand.”

These seemingly mismatched people nonetheless took to each other with a curious urgency reminiscent of teen-agers forming a secret club. Calling themselves the Five of Hearts, they ordered heart-shaped tea trays and wrote to each other on stationery embossed with the playing card motif: King the bachelor was the single heart in the middle; the married couples were the pairs.

What drew them together? The answer will surprise nostalgia buffs who wish they had lived in the tranquil and uncomplicated 19th Century: The Five of Hearts were what would today be called a “support group.”

John Hay and Henry Adams were passive men. Hay’s submission to his father-in-law’s domination led to bouts of depression then called “Neurasthenie Cephalique,” or weak nerves. “It was the malady of the age,” the author explains, and it “was blamed on modern civilization: steam engines, the rapid spread of information by press and telegraph, science, and ‘the mental activity of women.’ Railroads were unyielding in their demands for human punctuality, cities were noisy, and stock speculation created unbearable tension.” Hay’s symptoms included insomnia, fatigue, noises in the ears, irritability, and phobias ranging from “fear of fears” to “fear of everything.”

Henry Adams’ passivity grew out of a conviction that this same modern world had no use for an aristocrat. Rather than risk the political failure he feared, he announced that all action was futile and withdrew into writing. Inevitably, both Adams and Hay admired the adventurous Clarence King “because his life showed no gap between idea and act: He thought, then he did.”

King, who also felt misplaced in the Gilded Age and thought civilization was a nervous disease, acted out his passivity in more lethal ways. Threatened by women of his own class and their demands for equal rights, he sought primitive Earth mothers among the Indian women on his Western forays. “Dark skins aroused him, as did servants, laborers, and prostitutes.” In 1888, he embarked on a double life, “marrying” a black woman and living with her periodically under the name James Todd.

Clover, the quintessential New Woman of the modern world that all three men had rejected, started coming apart. She took up photography and went at it with a fervor that suggests obsession. “My wife does nothing except take photographs,” Henry complained. One of her pictures was so good that John Hay wanted her to publish it, but Henry vetoed the idea.

In the fall of 1886, Clover sank into a deep depression. Consumed by a sense of unworthiness, she wrote her sister that she was unable to find “one single point of character or goodness” in herself. On the morning of Dec. 6, she drank developing fluid from her lab and died instantly.

Henry buried his grief in a study of the Middle Ages as obsessive as Clover’s photography. “For five years, Henry had lived in two times and places, spending winters in contemporary Washington and summers in medieval France. The deeper he delved into the twelfth century, the more he preferred abbots and troubadours to the politicians who crowded his breakfast table.” Craving the simplicity of an earlier time, he wrote: “Progress has much to answer for in depriving weary and broken men and women of their natural end and happiness; but even now I can fancy myself contented in the cloister, and happy in the daily round of duties.” Rationalizing his treatment of Clover in “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he concluded that the power of the Virgin Mary in the medieval world proved the superiority of woman over the modern machine--a more fastidious version of Clarence King’s preference for primitive Earth mothers over Suffragettes.

King’s life ended in scandal and financial chaos not unlike an S & L crisis. Hay went on to become ambassador to England and secretary of state, suffering psychosomatic ailments all the way. To complete the analogy to our own times, he even had a hostage crisis: the Boxer Rebellion. Henry Adams suffered a stroke after the Age of Technology dealt him a final blow: He had booked passage to Europe on the return trip of the Titanic. Six years later he performed the ultimate act of passivity by dying in his sleep.

So who were the Five of Hearts? With the immediacy of a born historian, Patricia O’Toole shows that in their struggles with depression, anxiety, male passivity, female equality, and alienation from the “modern” age, the Five of Hearts were us.

O’Toole is an exquisite writer, with a novelist’s flair for painting dramatic scenes, such as Clover’s nervous breakdown on her honeymoon in Egypt: “(F)rom their first day in Cairo’s dusty streets, which teemed with bad-tempered camels, veiled women, swarthy complexions, and a babble of alien tongues, Clover felt menaced. A visit to a mosque took on the character of a nightmare. Dervishes in long gowns and high white hats ‘spun round and round’ while other ‘wild creatures’ snorted like beasts. . . . (S)he felt ‘surrounded by maniacs.’ ”

O’Toole also has a perfect eye and ear for cameo portraits. There is Robert Louis Stevenson, dying of tuberculosis and reverting to barbarism in Samoa: “eyes gleaming with fever, overly ruddy cheeks, a frantic restlessness, wild masses of dark hair, sorely in arrears in the matter of baths.” And she quotes William James on Theodore Roosevelt: “still mentally in the Sturm and Drang period of early adolescence.” In one of several laugh-aloud scenes, we find First Lady Ida McKinley taking umbrage at Clara Hay for leaving her sick husband in bed and coming to a White House party alone: “When I put Mr. McKinley to bed, I go to bed with him.” Commented Henry Adams: “Mrs. McKinley’s suggestion that Mrs. Hay was going to bed somewhere else was poetic and even lyric.”

This book’s only fault is that it ends.