by Norman Lock
Ellen noticed my discomfort and changed the subject to—of all things—baseball. The Finches were fanciers of this democratic pastime, which Walt Whitman praised. I marveled at them as they argued in the vernacular of the sport the merits of the new Metropolitan Club, the legality of the Reserve Clause, and the morality of Candy Cummings’s skewball. On Saturday afternoons, in season, the three of them would ride the elevated train to 110th Street to watch the Metropolitans play the Gothams at the new Polo Grounds.
I handed round cigars—Ellen pretended to be hurt that I had not thought to bring her one—and we began to discuss our remove to San Francisco.
“Martin tells me you’re in favor of it,” I said, careful to blow my cigar smoke toward the open window for fear of offending her.
“Very much so,” she said, turning serious. “It will be good for him to get away from the city. We know he’s been unhappy at the pier.” She stopped and looked at me. I held her gaze, and she went on. “Uncle Myer will help him get started—and you, also, if you decide to go.”
“We hope to join you as soon as we’re able,” said Franklin, holding his cigar at arm’s length and squinting at the ember. “We’re all eager to start a new life out there.”
“Out there.” He could have been talking about Outer Mongolia or one of Saturn’s moons.
Martin beamed at one and then the other, and then all three of them turned their faces to me.
“I’ve made up my mind to go,” I said, as if I were Napoléon announcing the invasion of Russia to his field marshals.
“Hooray!” cried Ellen.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Franklin. “I wouldn’t feel right about letting my little brother go alone.”
So I am to be a chaperone, I said to myself, watching Martin’s face struggle between pleasure and embarrassment.
“Didn’t I tell you?” asked Martin of them both. What he’d told them, he didn’t say, but I guessed it had to do with our being friends.
Franklin poured four small glasses of brandy. We drank to one another; then he corked the bottle and returned it to the sideboard. There would be no drunken carousal that night.
ON THE OMNIBUS HOME to Mrs. McFadden’s boarding-house, I became excited by the prospect of leaving everything behind me. In the Finches’ kitchen, I had felt as if I were already becoming someone else—felt as devout Christians must after gnawing on the body of Christ. I could sense something clean and sweet beginning to transpire in me, as if a spring, long blocked by debris, had been made to flow again. Twice on the ’bus, I surprised myself and the other passengers with a bark of laughter, so very buoyant was my mood.
Lying in bed, I became aware, as if for the first time, of the odor of Mrs. McFadden’s greasy cooking, the stink stealing into the room from the privy, and the sour smell of men who wash infrequently. My gut griped in protest. Soon, I told myself, you’ll be standing in Golden Gate Park and breathing salt air born on the winds from the Pacific Ocean. In a month, we’ll have put a continent between New York City and ourselves.” Startled by my use of the most intimate of pronouns, I shook my head like a dog with a flea in its ear and waited for sleep to come. When it did, I was on board an opulent Pullman car, on a transcontinental train, which seemed to have no need of tracks. I was rushing toward the Mississippi and thence across the vast and unknowable American continent toward San Francisco, where the Orient begins and John Gibbs would hold no sway.
U. S. Grant’s Home at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street, Near the Central Park, April 30, 1882
I was shown into the front room by the Irish housekeeper, whose insolent manner proclaimed her superiority to anyone who had business with a former president chiefly remembered for Black Friday, the Salary Grab, the Delano Affair, the Whiskey Ring, and other scandals that flourished during his administration, though not with his consent or knowledge. Grant had failed at almost everything he’d turned his hand to, except war, which chooses heroes and casualties according to the same eccentric law by which a fatal bullet finds one man and not another.
Everything in that room appears now with the stark clarity that memory will sometimes confer on the past. As he had during my previous visit, Grant sat slouched on a horsehair sofa, as if he were again astride his old warhorse Cincinnati. In the light of the window, I could see dust motes and wreathes of smoke rising from a cigar clamped in the mouth of a visitor who’d arrived before me. He was carelessly dressed in a white serge suit; his vest bore charred traces of tobacco embers. Around his neck, the general wore a piece of flannel smelling of liniment and camphor. He was suffering from a sore throat. He had an unlit cigar between his teeth and gave every indication of enjoying the stranger’s tobacco smoke vicariously, and now and again, he would sniff deeply to give his nose the pleasure denied his mouth. I could see that it pained him to talk.
“General Grant.”
“Mr. Ross.”
“I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not at all.” Grant turned to his other visitor and said, “Mr. Ross works for the Custom Service, alongside Melville.”
“Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ross,” said the gentleman, who seemed more like an impersonator of one than the real McCoy.
“Please call me Shelby.”
“Shelby, I wonder if you know Sam Clemens,” said Grant, gesturing toward the other man, who was eyeing me shrewdly, as if estimating his chances of beating me at Indian arm wrestling. “He’s better known to the public as Mark Twain.”
“It’s a pleasure, Mr. Twain—or Mr. Clemens, I should say,” I replied, flustered. “A very great pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
I had read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and had seen in Tom something of my own youthful cunning and love of flimflam.
“Likewise,” the author replied—gruffly, I thought. He blew more smoke into the room, so that my eyes began to water, and said, “Back before the war, I knew a man from Jackson County, Mississippi, who shared your Christian name.”
“Is that a fact?” I asked, not interested in the coincidence, which was hardly remarkable.
I was there to see Grant, and although I admired the famous writer, I was impatient for him to leave. He showed no intention of doing so, however; instead, he settled in the arm chair and told a story whose preposterousness I considered a waste of the general’s time and mine.
“He was a cardsharp on the Cotton Blossom. Curious fellow—not my sort of man at all. He affected an air of a gentleman gone to seed, who consoled himself with drink. He favored checkered waistcoats, yellow shoes, and bourbon muddled with bitters and sugar. In a pinch, he’d settle for a bottle of cheap rye just to show that, while he might have once belonged to a fine old family of the southern aristocracy, he had lately sunk down into the muck, where the common people live. He was a wizard at cards—none could beat him—and was universally despised for his luck at the table.
“During a game of faro, a man named Dolan, a coarse, ill-mannered type of person from Arkansas, pulled a bowie knife on Shelby and, faster than a ferret inside a lady’s skirt, lopped off both his hands.
“Shelby scarcely turned a hair, and after the blood had been staunched with beefsteaks and his wrists tied off with fancy garters belonging to one of the ‘soiled doves,’ he took off his yellow shoes and socks and proceeded to deal with his toes. Damned if he didn’t win the next three hands, though he hadn’t any! The boys at the table commenced to grumble, and before Shelby knew it, he’d lost his toes to a small hatchet one of the gents had been hiding inside his coat. It didn’t matter a particle to Shelby. The following night, he had himself wheeled into the card room by one of his lady friends. His face split wide open in a grin, he started to play cards with his teeth.
“Shelby cleaned out those gents—red-faced and bilious in defeat—about as quick as a plate of oysters disappears down the necks of visitors to a house of ill repute or pennies from a collection plate passed among Bowery Boys. The mood at the table grew tense, like a frog in the vicinity of a
python or a negro at a Klan convention. A feller who’d lost his pants, so to speak, happened to be a traveling dentist. He kept his instruments close to his vest, and in the time it takes to say good-bye, he’d pulled Shelby’s teeth right out of his head. Witnesses to the atrocity claimed they made a sound like a keel scraping over a gravelly shoal or else lake ice cracking in a thaw. I’ve got one of Shelby’s gold-filled molars on my watch chain; it makes an interesting fob and a provocative topic when conversation stalls.” Clemens hauled his watch out of his vest pocket by the chain, whose fob was a tiny riverboat carved in ivory. “It must be on my other chain.”
“What did he do next?” I asked politely, for I saw that Grant was enjoying the yarn.
“Who?” Scratching his chin, Clemens pretended to have lost the thread.
“Shelby the cardsharp!” barked Grant, causing the flannel wrap to give up an aromatic ghost of liniment to the rancid atmosphere.
“He quit cards and became a Transcendentalist.”
I didn’t see the joke, but Grant guffawed.
“Somebody open the goddamn window!” he croaked. “It stinks like dirty feet in here.”
I jumped up and opened the window. On Sixty-sixth Street, a teamster was beating his horse.
“Thank you kindly, Shelby.”
“A name can mark a man. Like Ulysses here, who has arrived home at last to the patient Julia, his Penelope, after the wars and strife of public life. Do you find it burdensome to carry a name fit for an allegory, Mr. President, sir?”
“Horseshit!” whinnied Grant.
“I’m not so sure about that, U.S. If a man has a handle, such as you’d encounter in a made-up story, he might come to think of himself as a figment of some damned storyteller’s imagination. He might believe he doesn’t exist in the real world at all.”
Clemens ground his spent cigar into the dirt of the fernery beside his chair and then gave me a look such as an owl would give a mouse. “Now take his moniker.” He cocked a thumb at me. “It could only belong to a cardsharp or an ephebe.”
“You’ve poked enough fun at Shelby for one afternoon!” admonished Grant.
“There’s something prophetic about it,” said Clemens, ignoring his friend.
“I don’t follow you.” I was getting more and more irritated.
Ignoring my vexation, Clemens snuffled, took out a handkerchief, snuffled again for good measure, and said, “Shelby—” He sneezed, blew his nose emphatically, examined his handkerchief, and, like a bad actor playing the blind soothsayer Tiresias, finished his thought: “Shall be—what? Another panic? Another civil war? Certainly not an age of peace.”
“I doubt it,” said Grant, speaking with curious solemnity, as though he had glimpsed the future and found it a cold and desolated place.
“It makes me feel kind of jumpy being in the same room with you, Shelby,” said Clemens, combing his scraggly mustache. “I’d hate to get tangled in one of your prophecies. What a man can’t see won’t hurt him, but I’ve a feeling that if I were to peer into your bloodshot eyes, I’d see myself in a place where the only smoking a man gets to do is when he’s roasting his backside over hellfire.”
“Shelby, what have you to say for yourself?” wheezed Grant, who was again amused.
“General, I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
I didn’t care for Clemens, who was as cruel to me as Huck Finn had been to Jim.
“Friend of Melville’s, you say?” asked Clemens.
“We work together in the West Street customs office.”
“Hmmm. You’re sure you’re not a literary fellow?” he asked suspiciously.
“Heaven forbid!”
“Heaven doesn’t seem to have much say in the matter. Seems like we’re up to our eyes in literary types, not to mention literati, lyceums, and critics. Hardly anybody’s taking up an honest profession these days. Even the old-time gunfighters are selling their memoirs to the penny dreadfuls.” He glanced sharply at Grant, who ignored him.
“I’ve tried honest professions and dishonest ones,” I said flippantly. “But I’d rather shovel shit with a fork than be a writer.”
Clemens nodded, as if I’d said something wise. “I’ve been trying all afternoon to get Grant to let me publish his memoirs. He’s not a writer; therefore, he’s a man whom we can safely turn loose with pen and paper.”
“I don’t have a memoir to publish!” growled the old man.
“You’d be surprised how quickly you’d have one if only you’d make a start. Writing is nothing more than knitting—one strand is truth, the other embellishment.”
Grant snorted and chewed his unlit cigar.
“Only great men and women can be forgiven their immodesty in having written their memoirs.” Clemens turned to me and asked, “Did you happen to see our friend’s piece on Shiloh in Century Magazine?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“The facts were illuminating, even if the literary style was dry as hardtack. If you set your mind to it, I know damned well you can write me the story of your life, Hiram. If you could take Vicksburg while you were drunk, you can write a picayune reminiscence.”
“I wasn’t drunk!” said Grant peevishly. “I had a migraine.”
A man with a headache ain’t half so interesting to the public as an old army soak!”
“What brings you here, Mr. Ross?” asked Grant, hoping to change the subject.
I had gone to see the general for obscure reasons. I told myself I would tell him of my decision to emigrate and ask his advice. But there was no reason why he should care to give it. We’d spoken only once before, and that briefly. Then suddenly I realized that I’d gone there to set the record straight. I needed to unburden myself of the lie I’d told for so long, I had come at last to believe it. During my stay in Sing Sing, I would have time to ponder the meaning of my visit to East Sixty-sixth Street and recognize it as the stirring of conscience, which had lain dormant in whatever bodily organ it resides. I wanted to square myself with my fellow men and—an even more self-important notion—with history, which Grant represented as well as any other Caliban of our ignoble age. I wanted to make a clean break with New York City and the past.
“General, I want to apologize.”
He appeared perplexed by my declaration and even more by the earnestness with which I had uttered it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clemens lean forward expectantly. “Apologize for what, Shelby?” he asked. His unruly mustache twitched in anticipation of a shameful admission.
I ignored him and spoke directly to the general.
“The last time I was here, I lied about having fought in the war. I did no such thing. My father hired a substitute.”
“You’re damned lucky to have been kept out of it!” barked Grant hoarsely. “‘Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars’ is what Thoreau had to say on the subject of patriotism, which he called ‘a maggot in the brain.’”
“‘If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty,’” remarked Clemens, quoting himself with a saturnine air, which would send paying audiences into fits of laughter.
“If everybody who claims to have fought at Gettysburg had truly done so, there’d have been hardly room to swing a cat. Men would have been packed into the real estate like pickles in a jar or herring in a barrel.”
“Hiram, that’s the kind of salt to flavor a tasteless dish of reminiscence!” cried Clemens approvingly.
“Goddamn it, Sam, don’t call me ‘Hiram!’” Incensed, Grant’s ragged voice had nearly formed itself into a shout, such as had hectored the Union troops at the Cumberland to take Fort Donelson from the rebels. Overnight, he’d become the darling of the Union newspapers, which gave him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
He’d been christened “Hiram Ulysses,” Melville said after our March visit, but an Ohio congressman mistook the name when he nominated him for a
dmission to West Point. “U.S. Grant” stuck for the remainder of his life. And by this name, acquired by a misunderstanding, he became identified, personally, with the Union he fought to preserve and unwittingly betrayed.
“Will you get off your high horse, Hiram, and give me some meat to publish? I invested my shirt and my back teeth in Paige’s infernal typesetting machine. It’s got more parts than a mule and is just as stubborn. I doubt the good Lord Himself could have managed, in twice the time He spent on His creation, to contrive a more complicated piece of machinery, not excepting Eve. I’ve lost so much money on that goddamn compositor, I’ve had to go into the publishing business to keep it fed, and my family starved. Publishing is only a little higher in the scheme of things than a flea circus, and a publisher is held in the same esteem as a congressmen or a floosy, both of whom will turn a man’s pockets inside out the minute his eyes are closed.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” replied Grant, who looked as if he’d been run over twice by a brewery wagon. “Now, gentlemen, if you’ll forgive me, it’s time for my nap.”
“I’ll be back to bully you some more,” said Clemens kindly.
“Get the hell out of here, you no-good son of a bitch Johnny Reb!”
Clemens had spent two weeks in the Confederate army before lighting out for Nevada Territory to prospect for silver, which he didn’t find.
“Shelby,” said Grant as I was preparing to leave. “I wouldn’t waste time thinking about that other matter if I were you. Give my regards to Melville. Tell him I’m enjoying his poems.”
The old man put his feet up on the sofa and shut his eyes. We left him to his nap.
“He’s right,” said Clemens. “The pangs of conscience are no worse than hunger, which can be appeased with a twenty-five-cent piece.” He broke into a boyish grin, and his mordancy was dissipated, like Angostura bitters stirred in a glass of gin. “Mr. Ross, I happen to have a pocketful of quarters—a grubstake for liquor and a free lunch at McSorley’s.”