Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TO THE LADIES,” DON CAMERON SAID WITH A GRIMACE.

  He splashed champagne into a crystal flute, wiped his moustache with his hand, and looked about the room with as little good humor and grace, Trist thought, as he could possibly manage.

  “Oh, don’t go,” said Clover Adams. And she raised one tiny palm like a traffic policeman and gestured for Trist to halt. “Do give Mr. Trist some champagne,” she said to Cameron. “How often do we meet somebody who’s actually been to Morocco too? Do stay, Mr. Trist, and talk to us about Morocco.”

  “Invite the gardener and the cook, too, why not,” Cameron grumbled, and picked up the telegram the maid had placed on his table and walked over to his chair.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Adams,” Elizabeth Cameron informed Trist calmly, standing with her back to the window on Lafayette Square, “spent the last six months abroad.”

  “Dangling about every sink pit possible,” said Mr. Adams in a thin, precise British accent. “We travelled not wisely, but too well.” He lifted his own champagne glass with a sardonic nod to Cameron. “To the ladies, of course, and the cook and gardener too.”

  Trist looked at him curiously. He had only stopped by to deliver a courtesy copy of his interview with Mark Twain in Chicago three days ago—an interview now telegraphed and presumably being set in type in Paris—but he had heard the names in the anteroom and it was hard not to come in, hard not to be curious. Mr. Adams was Henry Adams, and Henry Adams was invariably identified in the press at home and abroad as the wealthy and brilliant grandson and great-grandson of Presidents, Washington City’s foremost “intellectual” (to use the fashionable new word). He stood no taller than his wife, neither of them much above five feet tall Trist estimated, but where she was lively and energetic, her husband wore an air of weary, languid disapproval that made him seem even smaller. He had a round head and a high, bald, shining forehead; he kept both hands close to his chest, where his coat buttoned; the skin of his face was so soft and pink that he looked unnervingly like a baby with a beard. He had in fact once been pointed out to Trist at the beginning of the war, in the bar of Willard’s Hotel, talking with Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay. But then Adams had gone off with his father Charles Francis Adams to the American legation in London, Hay had gone back to the President’s Palace, and Trist …

  “We know all about you, Mr. Trist, from General Beale.” Mrs. Adams boldly handed him a glass of champagne. “We live across the way—1607 H Street. The Senator and the General give the Square ton, and now here you are to give us—”

  “Goddam bad news,” Cameron said and stood up. “My brother-in-law,” he told his wife.

  “Wayne McVeagh,” Adams murmured to his wife.

  “Wants to change the unit-rule vote in Chicago. Make Pennsylvania the same as Maine. This is Tilden and Blaine ganging up on Grant.”

  “We mean to discuss Morocco, not Chicago,” Clover Adams interposed firmly. “My husband and I were in Spain two months ago, Mr. Trist, pawing through Spanish archives, and for some reason now forgotten decided on impulse to press on to Africa.”

  Trist drank a swallow of Cameron’s champagne (Cameron left the room flapping the telegram against his leg).

  “Well, I don’t actually know much about Morocco,” Trist said. “The magazine I work for sent me to Tetuán a few times.”

  “We went to Tetuán,” Clover Adams said.

  “A sky so blue,” Henry Adams told Elizabeth Cameron, “one can scoop it out with a spoon.”

  “We stayed in a Moorish house,” Clover said, “kept by a Jew. I was the first American woman ever to come to Tetuán, so they carried me off to meet the Ketib’s wife—very handsome woman about fifty, she had bare feet dyed the color of henna and a great grinning red-turbaned Negress who fanned her and screamed with amusement at me every three minutes. I loved Morocco, but Henry liked Spain.”

  “A good-natured, dirty people, the Spanish,” Adams said, “always apologetic, if one doesn’t somehow insult them.” He turned his round head toward Trist, who wondered for a moment if he was about to be insulted. “From North Africa to Chicago, Mr. Trist—which did you find more exotic?”

  “I knew he would get back to Chicago,” Clover said with mock petulance. “Henry’s obsessed with General Grant and the nomination.”

  Trist glanced at Elizabeth Cameron, still standing next to the window, with the dim gaslights of Lafayette Square behind her. The most beautiful women in the world were French. French women wore silks that clung to their skins like a kiss. They adorned their slender necks with sparkling jewels, their hair with fragrant, expensive powders. They pushed up and separated their small round breasts in a heart-stopping scoop of décolletage, with an engineering miracle known to corset makers as le divorce, because it kept asunder what would otherwise be pressed together. But he had never seen any woman, in Paris or wherever, as dazzling as Senator Donald Cameron’s wife. Bad, adulterous thoughts. Poor Actaeon had died a happy man. He put his glass down on a table, beside one of Maudie’s cast-off dolls. To his surprise Elizabeth Cameron picked it up and handed it back to him. “My husband will be busy answering his telegram—do have your drink, Mr. Trist.”

  Henry Adams was watching them both over the rim of his glass. “Not obsessed with General Grant,” he said, as if there had been no interruption, “so much as bored with Europe. My wife and I are the only people we know who find America more amusing than Europe.”

  Clover Adams had wandered to the photograph of the train wreck on the wall. “We saw a train wreck in England,” she said, “in Shropshire. Carnage everywhere.”

  “Chicago, for instance,” Adams said, “was a great triumph for Grant. His name is in all the papers again, his nomination is almost assured. Yet I myself think he may have come home from his world tour too soon, his candidacy may peak before the convention. Certainly he’s left his enemies time to regroup. At any rate, what can be more entertaining than to watch?”

  “My husband,” said Clover, “knew Grant when he was President—”

  “I saw him once, at his Palace. Thereafter I declined to meet him.”

  Trist pictured the taciturn Grant confronted with such a little engine of patrician self-amusement, and he turned to hide his smile. When he looked at Elizabeth Cameron, however, her gaze was fixed, steadily, uncritically, on Henry Adams.

  “It was about somebody’s hair,” Clover said.

  “My friend Motley”—Adams had begun by speaking to Trist, but in the course of things turned naturally to Elizabeth Cameron, so that he seemed now to be addressing her alone—“Motley was made ambassador to England, but Grant disliked him. He recalled Motley because he parted his hair in the middle.”

  The two women laughed. Adams began a longer story. Trist listened with only half a mind. His malaria had entered a new phase, recurring just every four or five days now and much less severely than before; but as always, drink or excess heat seemed to stir it up. He put down his glass again and moved away from the fireplace, where cut logs had been stacked by a prodigal hand. Elizabeth Cameron, still laughing, rested her fingers for a moment on Adams’s arm. In the flickering light of the room her skin was soft, radiant, her eyes as pale as agates. On the other side of the fireplace poor Clover Adams looked like a small black crow.

  “In fact,” Adams was now saying, and as he spoke the idea suddenly occurred to Trist, in a simple, neutral, and unshakable way, that he had never met someone he disliked so much so soon—“in fact, I’m not even registered to vote, so I ought not to have any opinion.” He made a quick, high-pitched sniffing sound that was the opposite of Don Cameron’s habitual snort. “I’m merely an observer of the Great Democratic Experiment. I will say that, whatever he was before the war, when he became President, Grant utterly lost the distinction between right and wrong. This is, of course, the first step to success in politics.”

  “You were in the war, Mr. Trist,” Clover Adams said. “General Beale said you wrote a boo
k of sketches about it. He said you had a most interesting story—you resigned from Yale College in your second year to become a volunteer. Then, of course …” She looked sympathetically at his arm. “Did you serve under Grant?”

  “I suppose everybody did,” Trist replied. He was conscious of trying to appear as boorish and inarticulate as possible, to distinguish himself from Adams. “But Chicago was only the second or third time I ever saw him.”

  “Mr. Trist,” Elizabeth Cameron interjected, surprising Trist again, “unlike most soldiers, evidently doesn’t care to speak of the war.”

  Before Trist could say a word, the hallway door had swung open and Don Cameron walked in.

  “Telegram’s gone,” he announced. “I’ve told McVeagh what to do, straight.” As he passed with his small quick tread he left a sharp scent of whiskey in the air. “Dinner’s almost ready,” he added, and frowned over his shoulder at Trist. “Senate meets tomorrow at ten for a short session, then a Republican caucus you might want to watch.”

  Trist nodded and turned to go.

  At that moment the black maid appeared at the double doors leading to the dining room, and half a second later the governess, with little Maudie Cameron at her side, appeared behind her.

  “She insists on saying good night to Papa,” the governess said, and Maudie skipped free with a yell and ran to her father, who stooped to kiss her.

  “Our revels now are ended,” murmured Clover Adams, just loud enough for Trist to hear. The maid stepped aside to reveal the dinner table, and Clover looked automatically at Henry. But her husband had already extended his arm to Elizabeth Cameron with a little sniff and a bow. From the hallway Trist heard his thin, penetrating voice. “My dear Senator, may I borrow your wife?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE BEST THING IN HIS INTERVIEW WITH MARK TWAIN, TRIST thought, had nothing to do with Grant.

  They had met as arranged the morning after the banquet in Palmer House suite 45, a spacious set of rooms looking out on State Street, and Twain (resplendent in Turkish slippers and a deep maroon dressing gown he called his “toga”) had waved his hand airily at a breakfast table set for two. On the floor beside it, in a sitting posture, was a life-sized cat made out of pasteboard and tin. “The illuminated cat,” he had announced, and promptly lowered the curtains to demonstrate that the cat, painted over with a thick coat of phosphorus, actually glowed in the dark, like a cat of fire. “Scares away rats and mice at night,” Twain had explained, “beautiful parlor ornament in daylight”—he wanted Trist’s European readers to know that this was American ingenuity and enterprise at their finest. He, Twain, thought he would invest fifty thousand dollars of his own money in it, make a fortune, and retire.

  An irresistible first paragraph—Trist had written it out in French for L’Illustration (“chat de feu”) and English for one of the London newspapers that sometimes took his articles.

  And the reason he thought of the illuminated cat right now, at nine-twenty-five in the morning after his evening champagne at Don Cameron’s house, was that he was standing on the corner of First Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, in the shadow of the Capitol, and watching the biggest, fattest black rat he had ever seen. It was seated under a luggage wagon from the National Hotel, combing its whiskers, not glowing, but easily twice the size of the cat of fire. When the wagon lurched forward into Pennsylvania Avenue the rat gave Trist one curious, appraising glance and then raced uphill toward the Senate, as though it belonged.

  As perhaps it did, Trist thought, and crossed the street in the same direction.

  At the bottom of a circular carriageway he paused again to look up and admire the Capitol dome—unfinished in 1865 when he had last seen the city, which was then a vast army camp in the process of disbanding. Now the great white dome was splendidly in place, and the once cluttered and overbuilt space around the Capitol was largely cleared and landscaped, though just to the north of the Senate wing two or three stray pigs, Washington’s unofficial garbage disposers, rooted in the brown grass and mud.

  He made his way up past the shabby boarding houses that still lined Constitution Avenue. Inside the Capitol lobby, under the dome, he stopped beside the double-door entrance to the Senate and pulled out his watch. He could go into the visitors’ gallery and observe the session—Don Cameron had arranged a permanent pass—or, better, simply meet him afterwards in the committee room that Cameron and other Grant “Stalwarts” used, next to the Supreme Court chamber. He hesitated. Whiskery men pushed around him on their way to the Senate. Clerks and secretaries threaded their way through knots of tourists. The Rotunda was crowded, noisy, poorly lit.

  “You are standing, Mr. Trist, beneath perhaps the worst executed historical painting in the nation. Not to mention the least accurate.”

  Henry Adams’s voice cut easily through the clamor of the lobby. He pointed his furled umbrella up toward the gilt-framed painting that hung just above their heads. “ ‘The Signing of the Declaration of Independence,’ ” he read. “History at its most fictitious. That’s supposed to be my great-grandfather John Adams over there, but no Adams male has ever reached the middle age with so much hair. Jefferson over here”—the umbrella swung right—“was in reality quite coarsely redheaded, and entirely feline. Franklin was taller than everybody thinks. The whole thing is a fraud, of course, because the Continental Congress never did assemble for the purpose of signing the Declaration of Independence—they went to the clerk’s office privately, one by one, over the space of two months—and they adopted the resolution on July second, not July fourth. Otherwise—” He spread his arms in a gesture of unruffled tribulation. Trist smiled and craned his head to look at the painting again.

  “The artist, John Trumbull, was also blind in one eye. Come walk with me a little, Mr. Trist,” Adams said. “As the feller says, ‘I would have speech with thee.’ ”

  I WOULD HAVE HIM TO DINNER,” CLOVER ADAMS SAID. “I WOULD sit him down at the table next to anybody, if that’s what you want.”

  Emily Beale held her teacup poised just at her lips, without tasting (though Clover Adams was known to spend a fortune on her teas), and waited delightedly for Elizabeth Cameron to reply. Emily had been away from Washington for three full months in California, which was the same as the other side of the moon, and they had only arrived home late last night, much too late to call on anybody. But today was another matter. She was not about to waste another morning without real society.

  “At heart, you know, I really am a democrat,” Clover continued when Elizabeth Cameron said nothing. “In my family we never make any fuss about mingling with servants”—this was true, Clover had been so friendly last year with two Irish carpenters doing work for her that she had actually gone to visit their wives, and Henry had been furious. “Besides,” Clover said, “if Mr. Bancroft requests him—”

  “Well, not ‘request’ exactly.” Elizabeth put down her cup and shook her head slightly, so that a few long strands of black hair came loose from her bun, and Emily wondered for a moment (as she had, often, before) what the beautiful Elizabeth Cameron would look like if she wore her hair long and loose, down past her shoulders, like some of the women they had seen in Paris.

  “He only said that the name ‘Trist’ was a very old name—”

  “It means ‘sad,’ ” Emily contributed, “in French.”

  Elizabeth smiled kindly at her. “And he does look sad, doesn’t he?”

  Emily nodded and raised the teacup back to her lips; almost raised her knees to her chin like a little girl. At the age of eighteen she still felt young and unformed in the company of such matrons, though Elizabeth was only twenty-two or twenty-three. Clover, of course, was forty, fifty.…

  “Mr. Bancroft only said it was very likely he came of the Trist family that intermarried with the Jeffersons, before the war.”

  “Henry said the same thing. He said if he were that kind of Trist, he might have family papers for the Book.”

  “The Book,” Elizabe
th and Emily murmured in unison. Henry Adams had recently published a life of somebody Emily had never heard of, Albert Gallatin, who had once been Secretary of Treasury. But it was understood by everybody in Lafayette Square that Henry’s real book was a massive, endless history of Thomas Jefferson (the Adams family enemy) and James Madison when they were presidents. He had gone all over Europe poking in archives. He disappeared most mornings into his study and wrote for hours. Emily had an impression—more than an impression, since she had once, by total accident, found two or three sheets of paper in dialogue—that he wrote other things as well, to amuse himself. But “the Book” was sacred.

  Clover stood up to hand around a plate of seed cakes, and Emily took the opportunity to glance into the next room, where Clover had set up some of her photography apparatus. Amid the dozens of bookshelves in the sitting room—the Adamses had books the way other houses had ants—she had already hung two or three of her new photographs, including an incredibly stern portrait of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Both disapproved, Emily knew, thoroughly disapproved, of Clover.

  She glanced back to see Clover and Elizabeth bent side by side over the tray of cakes as Clover explained something about the recipe, which was undoubtedly her own original creation. It was a cruel contrast, there was no denying that—for all her brilliance Clover Adams was a flat, plain woman with pallid skin and a hooked nose. Next to Elizabeth she looked drab. But then, next to Elizabeth most women looked drab; drab as cabbages. (Irresistibly, Emily turned half an inch to glimpse her own profile in the windowpane.) Whatever it was that sent men weak and trembling to their knees, Elizabeth Cameron had it.