Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Ulys came to her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t want to be here another four years,” he said simply. “I don’t think I could stand it. Don’t lament over this, I beg you.”

  She placed her hand over his and sighed, too unhappy to speak. She did not like his decision, but she understood it.

  If Ulys had pursued a third term, he almost certainly would have spared the nation a great deal of controversy and turmoil. After election returns in southern states were contested and returning boards held recounts, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the victor over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, but only after the Supreme Court intervened.

  In the last week of February, with the nation still hotly divided over the outcome of the election, Julia passed through the home that had become so familiar to her during her years as First Lady, rooms that had witnessed births, deaths, and a bittersweet wedding, glorious public occasions and private family moments she would cherish forever in her memory.

  Soon it would be their home no longer.

  On Saturday, March 3, Ulys and Julia hosted a state dinner for the president-elect and thirty guests at the White House, and it was on that day in the privacy of the Red Room that Mr. Hayes took his oath of office, amid threats upon his life and concerns that various angry factions would prevent the peaceful transition of power. Mrs. Hayes kindly invited Julia to accompany her to the public inauguration two days later, but Julia could not bear the thought of attending and politely declined. Instead, as her last act as official White House hostess, Julia arranged a sumptuous luncheon for the Hayes family and their companions, and she was waiting in the foyer to welcome them after the inauguration.

  All too soon it was time to depart. Mrs. Hayes, sturdily competent and self-assured, graciously escorted Julia to the door and told her she was welcome to visit anytime.

  “Mrs. Hayes,” Julia said, fighting back tears, “I hope you will be as happy here as I have been for the past eight years.”

  Mrs. Hayes inclined her head, and with nothing more to say, Julia took Ulys’s arm and allowed him to lead her on to their waiting carriage, and a new home, and whatever else might come after.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  JANUARY–OCTOBER 1884

  Jule had intended to let the anniversary pass unacknowledged, but as she and Dorothy sat down to supper together one January evening, she heard herself say, “Today I am twenty years a free woman.”

  Dorothy’s eyes widened. “Oh, Mamma.” She reached across the table and clasped her hand. “I wish you had never been a slave. I can’t bear to think of you subjected to such cruelty.”

  “But I was,” replied Jule, without bitterness. “I and countless millions of others through the generations. I survived. Maybe enduring slavery made me stronger.”

  Dorothy pressed her lips together, waiting for her to say more, but Jule merely smiled fondly and took up her fork, and after a moment, Dorothy did too. Jule disliked talking about slavery times, and in this she was not unusual among folks her age. Dorothy and her brother had learned to listen carefully and quietly whenever she allowed them rare glimpses into her past before her flight to Washington City, before her transformation into Madame Jule, before she became their mother.

  Charles—twenty years old, tall, sober, sharply insightful—would have insisted they mark the occasion with a cake or small glasses of sherry, but he was off at his second year at Howard University, studying to become a lawyer and perhaps someday a judge. Dorothy, recently turned eighteen, eagerly anticipated finishing school come spring. “You could go to the university too,” Jule had told her, or rather implored. She could not bear for her children to squander any opportunity for self-improvement, for advancement in a world that remained adamantly opposed to colored folk rising too high.

  “I want to work with you,” Dorothy would remind her pointedly. “I enjoy it—and be honest, you need me.”

  It was true. Jule had worked hard all her life and was ready to slow down, and Dorothy—a confident, clever, briskly efficient young woman with an excellent head for business—was the person she trusted most to succeed her. For the past two years Dorothy had gradually taken over many of the sales and accounting tasks in the Madame Jule Company, freeing Jule to concoct new products and promote them to the great many clients who regarded Jule as a genius of beauty and grooming.

  Jule still earned a significant portion of her income from wealthy white ladies, but in recent years, her interests had turned to creating balms and tonics suited for the unique needs of women of color. Skin of all tones could be soft, smooth, and luminous, she had told a much younger Dorothy whenever she had tearfully lamented that her lighter-skinned classmates mocked her deep sepia hue. African hair could be glossy and radiant with good health, and needn’t be blond or straight or fine to be beautiful. “We should strive to be well-groomed, dignified, and comely, not lighter,” Jule asserted, unable to refrain from bitterly twisting the last word.

  Once, in a rare moment of self-doubt, Jule had asked her pastor if her profession was inherently sinful, if it encouraged vanity and pride. The reverend had sat silently for a moment before responding. “Taking pride in one’s appearance is not the same as being prideful,” he said. “For too long our brothers and sisters have been taught to despise their dark skin. You teach them instead that it deserves admiration and care. I cannot believe this is sinful.”

  Jule’s own skin had taken on a few lines that deepened when she smiled, and her tight curls had become a glossy, silvery white. She doubted anyone who knew her from her slavery days twenty years before would recognize her if they passed on the street, not even Julia.

  Winter softened into a balmy spring. Dorothy finished school and gladly came to work full-time for the Madame Jule Company. Jule found herself with more time to read, to attend lectures, to serve on the board of the orphan asylum where she had discovered her children, and to be active in her church. The Bridge Street Church advocated for many causes dear to Jule’s heart, and often they invited eminent speakers from across the country to address the congregation.

  One Sunday as services were ending, the pastor mentioned that the following week, he would be joined in the pulpit by a renowned minister, former slave, and advocate for civil rights for people of color, the Reverend Gabriel Brown. A frisson of shock and hope ran through Jule, pinning her to her seat long after the rest of the congregation began to file from the church.

  “Mamma?” asked Dorothy worriedly, standing in the aisle, studying her from above. “Is something wrong?”

  “I need to speak to the pastor,” she said, rising, trembling, steadying herself on the back of the pew.

  Dorothy accompanied her outside, where the pastor stood on the front stoop bidding his flock good-bye. “Do you know this Reverend Gabriel Brown?” Jule inquired, breathless from excitement and renewed hope. She had ceased placing advertisements years before when nothing had come of them, and part of her had accepted that she was in all likelihood a widow. And yet his name, his profession, his history—this minister could be her Gabriel.

  “I’ve never met him,” the pastor replied, “but I’m familiar with his writings, and we have mutual acquaintances.”

  “Has he come from Texas?” asked Jule urgently. “Do you know if he sings? Do folks remark about his wonderful voice?”

  “He’s been called a powerful orator, but no one has mentioned his singing to me. And he comes from Virginia, not Texas.” The minister’s brow furrowed. “My dear sister Jule, is something the matter?”

  Virginia, not Texas. “No, Reverend.” Jule wrenched her frown of bitter disappointment into a semblance of a smile. “I thought I might know him is all, but I was wrong.”

  She turned quickly to hide the tears gathering in her eyes—and yet hope did not leave her entirely.

  Never did a week pass more slowly. “Mamma,” Dorothy told her gently one evening as she star
ed unseeing out the window, lost in thought, “this minister is probably not your long-lost husband.”

  “I know that,” Jule replied. “But the sooner Sunday comes, the sooner I’ll know. The sooner I can stop hoping.”

  Through the years, waiting and not knowing and always wondering had tarnished all the bright silver of her happiness. If this Gabriel Brown was not her Gabriel, Jule resolved to accept that he was lost to her forever. Acceptance would change nothing about how she spent her days, but perhaps she could finally bring herself to mourn him properly and leave the past in the past.

  She had intended to arrive a half hour early on the chance that she might be able to meet the illustrious guest before services, but her anxious nerves got the better of her and she arrived ten minutes late. Murmuring apologies to those seated around them, she and Dorothy slipped into their usual pew just as Reverend Brown was introduced. Jule stared at him as he came forward and shook hands with the pastor, desperately searching his face for features reminiscent of the young man she had loved—and finding them. And when he spoke, his voice resonated as her husband’s had, less pure in tone but richer with dignity and gravitas.

  She became aware of Dorothy beside her, glancing from her to the minister and back, her eyes widening as she sensed the intensity of her mother’s response. “Is it he?” she whispered.

  Jule felt as if she were illuminated from within as she nodded, as the tears began to stream down her face. It was Gabriel, her Gabriel.

  He knew her too.

  Their eyes met as he preached, and for one long, radiant moment, he fell abruptly silent, staring at her, shocked and disbelieving, but then he caught himself and resumed his sermon, faster than before, as if he could not wait to reach the end. When the choir sang, he bent his head close to the pastor’s and they conferred briefly, urgently. By the last chorus they were both looking straight at Jule, the pastor utterly astonished, Gabriel as if he dared not look away for fear she would vanish.

  The service ended, and although church deacons and respected dowagers gathered around to meet their renowned guest, Gabriel nearly leapt down from the pulpit to come to her, to take her hands, to pull her to her feet.

  “It’s you,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “It’s you. My Jule. My love. My wife.”

  “Gabriel,” she choked out, smiling through her tears. “Oh, praise be to God, at last.”

  Swiftly the story spread through the congregation, and all around them the people erupted in joyful cheers and songs of thanksgiving. Surely the grace of God had descended upon their church that day.

  “I tried to find you,” Jule told him later, at home, when they were alone, Dorothy having kindly gone out to visit a friend to give them time alone, together. “For so many years, I tried.”

  He clasped her hands so tightly that she imagined they might fuse to his, ensuring that they would never be parted again. “And I tried to find you.”

  He had stayed in Texas less than a fortnight before running away, he told her. He assumed Jule would be with Miss Julia, so he tried to reach military headquarters, only to be caught up in the waves of contraband following General Grant’s army. Months later, when he heard that Julia had joined her husband at City Point, he had made his way there, only to discover that Mrs. Grant’s favorite maid had fled long ago. With no other home to return to, he had settled at Freedman’s Village, a contraband camp established on part of General Lee’s captured estate in Arlington, Virginia. There he had tended horses for the Union army and had preached the Holy Gospel until the end of the war, when a benevolent society had sponsored him for the seminary, allowing him to formally continue the studies he had begun in secret as an enslaved child at White Haven.

  “You were so close,” Jule said. “All the while I was in Washington City, you were so close, and I never knew.”

  “I’m closer now,” he said, pulling her into his embrace, kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her lips. “And if you still want me after all these years, I’ll stay.”

  “Of course,” said Jule, laughing at the very idea that she would ever let him go. “Let us never be parted again.”

  “I swear we never will be, while we both live.”

  She kissed him, and as they laughed and cried and held each other, she felt as if she had been a long time traveling and had finally reached the end of the road, only to discover that a new one lay before her, a smooth path, bright with promise and newly beginning, one she never need travel alone.

  • • •

  When Ulys bit into a peach one lovely day in early June of 1884 and complained of excruciating pain, Julia felt no shadow of foreboding that it marked the beginning of the end.

  There was no reason she should have, not when she and Ulys were distracted by what seemed to be more serious concerns. A month before, the brokerage firm managing their finances had gone bankrupt, and they had lost every cent of their investment. Their entire fortune, scrupulously earned and saved over many years, was gone.

  The calamity struck with a force as utterly unexpected as it was swift and devastating. Buck—Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., as he was known to all but family and friends—had attended Exeter and Harvard and had earned his law degree from Columbia. He had married Fannie Josephine Chaffee, the daughter of Colorado senator Jerome B. Chaffee, who had earned a multimillion-dollar fortune from his investments in silver mines. When the financial tycoon Ferdinand Ward proposed that he and Buck establish a Wall Street investment firm, between Ward’s experience, connections, and capital and Buck’s revered Grant name, their success seemed preordained. At Ward’s suggestion, they took on another partner, James D. Fish, a respected New York financier and president of the prestigious Marine Bank. When Grant & Ward quickly found its footing and began to reap astonishing profits, Buck invited Ulys to join as a partner, and after he agreed, many other members of the Grant family entrusted their savings to the firm.

  For three years, Grant & Ward prospered. Every morning, Ulys reported promptly for work at his offices on the second floor of No. 2 Wall Street, cordially greeting the potential investors Ward courted, lending the weight of his august presence to meetings and transactions. To Julia’s delight, Ulys’s initial investment of ten thousand dollars grew to three-quarters of a million, and they were at last free of the lurking fear of debt and poverty. They kept a lavish home on East Sixty-sixth Street in Manhattan, and Ulys gave Julia a generous monthly allowance of one thousand dollars to spend however she pleased, while he indulged his love of good cigars and fine horses.

  “You needn’t trouble yourself to save for the children,” Ulys told her one Thanksgiving as they prepared for a family visit. “Ward is making us not only secure, but wealthy.”

  But in the early months of 1884, Ulys frequently came home from his office with a furrowed brow, troubled by rumors circulating on Wall Street that Ward was mishandling his investors’ funds and that Grant & Ward was on the verge of crumbling.

  Then, on the morning of May 4, a quiet, peaceful Sunday, Ward unexpectedly called at the Grant residence. “The Marine Bank needs a twenty-four-hour loan of one hundred fifty thousand dollars,” Ward told Ulys, his voice trembling with dread. “Our investments are imperiled.”

  Listening just outside the doorway, Julia heard Ulys sigh heavily. “I’ll do what I can,” he said, as Julia had known he would. The firm was in jeopardy, and therefore, so was his good name.

  After seeing Ward to the door, Ulys went out and returned a few hours later, unsmiling, cheeks flushed with embarrassment as if he were a young lieutenant again. In his pocket he carried a check from his old friend and political supporter William Henry Vanderbilt, the enormously wealthy railroad magnate. “He told me he cared nothing for the Marine Bank and very little about Grant & Ward,” he told Julia, “but he cares a great deal about me, and so he offers this as a personal loan.”

  Ulys delivered the check to Ward, but in the days t
hat followed, the Marine Bank closed, creditors would not honor Buck’s checks, angry crowds gathered outside the firm demanding payment—and Ward disappeared with Ulys’s money.

  Grant & Ward went bankrupt. Ulys and every member of the Grant family that had invested in the firm had lost everything.

  Ulys came home despondent from an emergency meeting at No. 2 Wall Street. “I’ve made it a rule of my life to trust a man long after other people have given up on him,” he said dully as he sat in the library, with its shelves full of treasures from their world travels and expensive volumes donated by admirers from Boston. “I don’t see how I can trust any human being again.”

  As the collapse of Grant & Ward and the failure of the Marine Bank shook Wall Street, the press began to speculate about Ulys’s culpability in the financial disaster. “Is Grant Guilty?” The New York Sun queried in a bold, front-page headline. The New York Post savagely editorialized that “General Grant’s influence was used in some highly improper way to the detriment of the government and the benefit of Grant & Ward.” It was not true, of course, but to Ulys, who prized his honor above all else, the criticism was a heavy blow. He took Julia’s hands and solemnly vowed that he would repay every penny of the debt, and he would not rest until he found a new way to provide for her and the children.

  “I know you will, darling,” Julia said soothingly, alarmed by his vehemence. “I’m not afraid.”

  Ulys made no reply except to squeeze her hands once, quickly, and to retire to his study at the top of the stairs. There, with the same determination and resolve he had applied to planning military campaigns from his headquarters at City Point, he tallied his assets—their homes in Philadelphia and Galena, two parcels of undeveloped land in Chicago, and White Haven, which he had purchased several years before. He gathered his mementoes and prizes from the war—the jeweled sword he had won by popular vote at the great Sanitary Fair at Palace Garden, others equally ornate that had been bestowed upon him by the grateful citizens of towns throughout the North, the gold medals, gilded humidors, campaign maps, uniforms, and papers that might be of historic interest. He calculated their worth, and when he found the total insufficient, he and Julia gathered the treasures they had collected on their two-year world tour following his second term as president—teakwood cabinets, jade and porcelain given to them by Chinese statesman Li Hung-chang, an eleven-hundred-year-old gold-lacquer cabinet given to Ulys by the mikado, cloisonné from Japan, enamels and malachite from Russia, jeweled and gilded caskets containing scrolls representing the freedom of cities they had visited, Persian and Turkish rugs, a Bengal tiger skin, two elephant tusks given to them by the king of Siam, a Coptic Bible taken by Lord Robert Napier from King Theodore of Abyssinia, and every other precious memento.