he tried to teach them both Latin but gave up in frustrated rage. “We simply weren’t ready for Latin yet, or at least I wasn’t,” she recalled. “We exasperated Father terribly. He was a scholar—very tense and high-strung—and he cared. As he was a professor, it was hard to have subnormal children.”
Her mother, who was prone to debilitating migraines and would often take to bed for long “rest cures,” was too involved with her own travails to provide her children with maternal love. There were nursemaids for the children and housekeepers, and when Clover’s mother was confined to bed under her pillowy white bedspread, an efficient domestic manager named Miss MacMillan would arrive and put the house in order. But Clover’s mother would go into rapid decline as soon as Miss MacMillan departed, overwhelmed by the obligations of family life.
Clover’s emotional touchstone in her family was her younger brother, Paul, a beautiful and sensitive boy the nursemaids enjoyed dressing like a girl. While still quite young, he began demonstrating precocious artistic skill, drawing “the most astonishing [pictures], queer animals always, each one different from the last and exhibiting the most extraordinary amount of skill and imagination.” But their father thought Paul’s nursemaids had turned him into a “sissy.” He seemed too fragile for the rough-and-tumble of college life when he went away to Princeton in 1918, and at the end of his freshman year, he dropped out.
On the eve of Allen and Clover’s wedding—which was held in October 1920 on the wooded estate of Todd family friends outside Baltimore—Paul sent word that he did not feel hearty enough to attend the festivities. “He said he didn’t feel well enough and we thought it rather queer,” Clover later noted in her diary, “but we were always all of us not being well and having all sorts of inhibitions and neurotic feelings.”
Clover later tormented herself for not being more attuned to her brother’s emotional condition as she prepared for her wedding. But she herself was in a state of great anxiety. “To me it was a terrible strain being engaged, trying all the time to act the way you suppose a normal person would act, instead of simply jumping out the window the way you naturally would. So I wasn’t thinking very much about my brother.” That December, when the newly wed couple arrived in Constantinople, Allen’s next diplomatic port of call, Clover heard that Paul had suffered a nervous breakdown and been confined to a fashionable sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. In November 1921, after being discharged, the twenty-one-year-old was found dead in bushes alongside a road not far from the sanitarium. He had shot himself between the eyes with a revolver.
Paul’s death plagued Clover for many years. “In a certain sense I suppose I did kill [Paul], at least I let him die, yes, certainly I let him die without lifting a finger,” she wrote nearly three decades later in a therapeutic journal she was keeping.
Clover quickly learned that the man she married was simply not suited to help someone with as much inner turmoil as she suffered. She was tortured by feelings of worthlessness, which Allen did little to allay. Throughout most of their early married life, Clover underwent Freudian analysis with various psychoanalysts in New York, and at one point she committed herself to a sanitarium for six weeks. “I started Freudian analysis,” she wrote in a journal many years later, “because I was suffering so much that it was not possible to live unless I did.”
Clover and Allen’s oldest daughter, Martha (“Toddie”), also grappled with psychic demons throughout her life—bouts of manic depression that became so severe that she submitted to multiple rounds of electroshock therapy. In some ways, Toddie was the most like her father—energetically outgoing and self-confident. But his daughter’s troubles failed to engage Dulles. Nor did he display much interest in his children’s accomplishments, including those of his son and namesake, Allen Jr., even when the boy began to shine at Exeter, where the headmaster said he was the brightest student in the school.
Dulles seemed a guest in his own family home—amiable but detached. It was clear to his daughter Joan that “his life was somewhere else.”
“My father was a benign figure at home,” she remembered. “He was friendly, but he was clearly not interested in us … I don’t remember any anger. He never scolded us when we weren’t doing well enough in school, or asked us how we were doing.”
The one time Joan saw her father cry was after he heard on the radio about the fall of France to Hitler’s troops. She watched this rare display of emotion with “astonishment” as her father wept in his library. But she had no idea why this dramatic bulletin—among everything else in his eventful life—had so profound an effect on him. He never discussed politics or world events at home, even though it was the fuel of his career. “At breakfast he would have the New York Times and I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about his attitude toward anything. He’d be buried in the newspaper.”
There’s a “price,” Joan added, for this sort of emotional anesthesia in a family, for never “talking in the home about your life and your politics and what’s going on”—about anything that truly matters. “I think it’s devastating.”
Dulles carefully insulated Clover from his life. He would fly off to distant locations at a moment’s notice and not tell her where he was going or for how long. It had nothing to do with intelligence protocol, insisted Joan. “It was just the way he operated.”
Mary felt that Dulles kept his professional life from Clover because he was afraid that she was too morally sensitive and would disapprove of his undercover work. But he seldom showed much of a protective instinct toward his wife. Dulles would fill his letters home to Clover with references to his many dalliances and infatuations with other women. The life he evoked in this correspondence was filled with beautiful countesses and expertly mixed cocktails, and was certain only to cruelly reinforce Clover’s domestic confinement.
Eleanor Dulles once remarked on the difference between her two brothers. Foster, who was inseparable from his own wife, Janet, would go out of his way to help anyone in the family who was in distress. The pious older brother would even secure an abortionist—in his day, not an easy or legal task—if it came to that, she said. “As for Allen,” added Eleanor, “when anyone was in trouble, Allen seemed always to be off somewhere, lying under a palm, getting himself fanned.”
Clover tried to keep the distress of her marriage from her children. Despite her husband’s frequent absences—and his constant social demands when he was home—she ran the family households in Manhattan and Long Island with calm efficiency. She took pains to compensate for his emotional shortcomings. In a letter she wrote Joan in February 1945, soon after reuniting with Allen in Bern, she tried to put his extreme self-absorption in the best possible light for their daughter. By then, Dulles had been away from home for over two years, during which time he had no contact with his children as they navigated their way through adolescence.
“Dad asked for news of you both very especially—[you] and Allen—and your coming of age,” Clover wrote. “Otherwise it would not be possible for you to imagine how engrossed he is in his work, and how he neither thinks, speaks or asks of anything else. There is no doubt he is different from most but I do believe that he does everything that he does, not only because he likes it, but as a way of showing his affection for us, paying us the compliment of believing that what we want is for him to do something worthwhile in the world. Everyone here adores him and he has done incalculable good.”
But many years later, Clover would write a more honest assessment of her husband in a diary that she left for her children. By then, she felt no obligation to window-dress their marriage.
