Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Now, of the mischievous laws that govern men and women yours truly knows just about next to nothing. There have been great men—I think of Hamilton, Franklin, Cump Sherman (especially)—who have also been perfect grinning tomcats. And there have been others who were either undersexed (Jefferson) or so utterly devoted to one woman as to defy human nature. Jackson was like that. Grant still is.

  In 1843, at the age of eighteen, Julia Dent had a plump figure, small hands and feet; a bright, flirtatious way of chatter. She also had (has) a bad squint in her left eye that the idiot father said came from carrying her as a baby out of a warm bath into a cold room. Grant had first been interested, evidently, in her sixteen-year-old sister Nellie, but when Julia finally showed up, returned from a long visit to relatives, sitting on a horse like a girl who was born to the saddle, Ulysses spun like the needle on a compass and it was only Julia ever after. He proposed in a wagon, fording a stream, remarking (as the water rose up over the wheels) that she could always count on him to take care of her. And Julia responded cheerfully (water almost to her shoes) that it would be a charming thing to be engaged, secretly from her father, but married, no, not yet.

  Secretly from her father, of course, because Grant was poor; a Yankee with suspected abolitionist leanings; and entirely colorless and unimpressive in appearance (the “little man with the big epaulets,” Pete Longstreet used to call him).

  And not yet, because she wasn’t sure, she was having too much fun.

  What did he see in her? Well, the physical, I guess. Grant and Julia have never gone to a meal together, not even breakfast, without his taking her arm and giving her a kiss. In the war more than once I found them sitting on a log by his tent, just holding hands. In his first term as President, Julia got up her courage and made a surgeon’s appointment to have her eye fixed, and the morning she was to leave, Grant came in and kissed her hands and said he’d always loved her just the way she was, so why not unpack her suitcase and cancel the operation. She did. And, too, she is talkative, comfortable, a little inclined to frivolity—all the things Hannah Grant was not.

  And what did she finally see in him?

  Not greatness. Not glory. Not, certainly, the President’s Palace one day.

  Three short words, I suppose: He needed her.

  In the Mexican War (not a writer) Grant wrote Julia every single week. He wrote her he had been terrified since childhood he would die of consumption. He wrote her he kissed every letter before he sent it, kissed her ring every day. He walked out into the blistering sun and cut flowers for her and put the petals in his envelopes. He painted watercolors of the scenery for her.

  Sometimes, like a mooncalf—we are still talking about the “Butcher of Cold Harbor”—he mailed her letters with mostly blank spaces and said they expressed his love, for which no words could be found (his mother’s son). I suppose there was never a younger, lonelier, sadder-eyed boy in the world than U. S. Grant in the forties and it would have taken a heart of stone to send him away.

  They were married in St. Louis right after the war, after a three-year courtship, Colonel Dent complaining all the way to the altar, Jesse and Hannah Grant not even in attendance because the Dents were a slave-owning family. Then the young couple trooped off to the end of the world, known as Sackets Harbor, New York, on the frozen shores of Lake Ontario. There Julia got pregnant and set about to become a mother and Grant got so bored with army routine he couldn’t stand it, and started to dream of Mexico again and those sweet brown bottles of liquor that used to console his being.

  He joined the local Sons of Temperance lodge and signed the teetotal pledge. Raced his horses up and down the street. Broke his pledge. Made it again. I know witnesses who remember seeing him march in Temperance parades wearing the red-white-and-blue purity sash across his chest and the big red pin in his lapel that must have looked to the gods of rum like a bull’s-eye target.

  Now this was a serious matter. Never underestimate the sublime self-righteousness of the American public. All over the country men were flocking that year to join the Temperance movement—P. T. Barnum did (he was right, my old dad liked to cackle: a sucker born every minute); young Lincoln did; the man in the President’s Palace this very moment, Rutherford Hayes, did, which is why the irreverent (God bless them) call his wife “Lemonade Lucy.” In the army an enlisted man who drank too much could end up with his head shaved, a dishonorable discharge in his pocket, and the letters HD for “Habitual Drunkard” branded on his hip, as if he were some kind of cider-swilling maverick cow. An officer like Grant would escape the head shave and the branding iron, but lose his commission in disgrace. Julia fretted. Grant stared at the snow. Rubbed his mouth.

  In the winter of 1849 Julia went back to St. Louis for her lying-in. Grant took temporary quarters by himself in Detroit. At some point while he was living there he slipped on an icy sidewalk in front of a house and hurt his leg and sued the owner of the house for negligence; which owner promptly defended himself in court by declaring that if Grant and the other soldiers would only keep sober they wouldn’t fall down on the street.

  The jury peered at Grant, nodded its head; awarded him the whopping and derisory sum of … six cents.

  There must have been some little tension, because Julia came home briefly, then travelled back to St. Louis again with her new baby boy and stayed away eight long months and rarely wrote, and Grant grew quieter and quieter, watching the snow pile up.

  California would be worse. California would take him down to skin and bones. In another six months, Sackets Harbor, New York (ice, snow, depression) would look like Paradise.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FOR SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE WAR IT WAS COMMON TO SEE young men on the streets everywhere, in buildings and offices, with only one arm or leg. Most large cities had schools for teaching soldiers how to hammer and saw again, or drive a wagon or hitch a horse. In New York there had been a contest in 1866 for the best examples of “wrong-handed” penmanship, and Trist, left-handed before Cold Harbor, had actually won fourth prize (awarded by the gray-bearded old poet William Cullen Bryant, who was drunk). But now, oddly enough, Trist thought, it was uncommon to see an amputee veteran.

  He put down his pencil, stretched and yawned, and walked across the newsroom to the cluster of desks by the window where Henry Lichfield West, two-handed, was balancing a mug of coffee on his stomach and leaning back in his chair. West swung a wet shoe onto the desk with a thump. “The Presidential Palace,” he announced to Trist. Then he stopped to take a slurp of coffee from his mug. “Or ‘White House,’ to use the up-to-date term, is overrun with spiders. Head groundsman told me. Worst infestation since the days of James Buchanan. All kinds of spiders, big ones, fat ones, brown, black, purple, thousands and thousands of nasty, creeping little bugeyed pests.”

  “Like you.” Calista Halsey sat down at the adjoining desk and uncovered a black-and-gold “Royal” typewriting machine the size of a suitcase.

  West grinned up at Trist. “Tomorrow morning, if the weather clears, they’re going to flush the whole building out with a fire hose. Arachnoid Armageddon. Should be a carpet of them ankle-deep in the street.”

  “Ugh.” Calista squared a sheet of paper in the machine and poised her fingers over the keyboard.

  Both men watched with interest, West because he was the senior political reporter on the Washington Post and assistant editor, Trist partly because he was thinking of learning to type himself, one arm or not, but mostly because Calista Halsey looked like an older, softer version, but far less dazzling, of Elizabeth Cameron.

  Outside the window, far from clearing, the weather was growing worse. A freakish late-March snowstorm was sweeping a curtain of white up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. A shadowy herdic appeared to be stalled in mud. On the sidewalk, clutching his hat, a lone passerby was pressed close to the glass, evidently reading the late edition of the paper tacked to a set of plywood boards.

  Trist sat down, away from the window. Inside, it was
pleasantly warm and musty. A row of high wooden filing cabinets behind Calista’s shoulders served as office partition and buffer against drafts. On the other side of the cabinets hung the green-shaded lamps of the composing room, where six or seven middle-aged typesetters hunched over their trays like monks in derby hats and collars. From the rear of the building, whenever somebody opened the doors to the printing annex, came the pungent smells of ink, machine oil, and newsprint.

  The Washington Post was situated in the exact and shabby center of Newspaper Row at 339 Pennsylvania Avenue, the newest, jauntiest, most flamboyant paper in town. It had been founded in 1877, three years earlier, by a St. Louis man named Stilson K. Hutchins, who had skipped the war—nobody quite knew how—and who thought the nation’s capital desperately needed a new Democratic party newspaper to rival the Republican Star. Hutchins’s first issue had been distributed free to every congressman’s desk and every government office in the city, and still was. He claimed a circulation of fourteen thousand and actually sold, Trist thought, on a very good day about half that number.

  A brass bell rang and Calista Halsey did something to the machine and looked up from her typing. “Senator Conkling’s Apollo curl looked exceptionally hyacinthine today, young men. On his vast senatorial brow. If you had a yellow suit and red shoes, Henry, and hair of course, you might catch people’s eyes too.”

  “Conkling once wore a yellow silk suit to the Senate,” West told Trist. “Calista nearly fainted. Said he looked like Lord Byron.”

  “The last politician to wear a yellow suit in Washington was Martin Van Buren.” Calista tapped two more keys, then snapped out her sheet of paper and rolled in a new one. “Although President Buchanan of the spiders used to wear a yellow frock coat, I’ve heard, and green trousers. He had a matching outfit made for his special friend.”

  “Male friend,” West said with a wink at Trist. Henry West was only twenty-eight years old, bald as an egg, but he had an encyclopedic and uncensored knowledge of Washington life. In the three weeks Trist had been coming to use the Post’s telegraph he had never yet heard the editor trumped for scandalous information.

  “Well, nobody ever wrote about that.” Calista’s fingers began to fly again. “Nobody cared. My father worked on the old Niles Weekly Register back then. He said everybody just shrugged. On the other hand, a woman’s always fair game.”

  “ ‘Mrs. Kate Chase Sprague’ ”—West picked up her first typed page and read aloud—“ ‘denied today that there was anything improper in her friendship with Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, who is, according to Mrs. Sprague, merely one of her husband’s colleagues. Mrs. Sprague further denied that she had gone alone into Senator Conkling’s office for the purpose of making love.’ ”

  The typewriter carriage hit the brass bell again and Calista flipped it back with one hand. “I’m a traitor to my sex,” she said cheerfully.

  IT WAS TOO WARM FOR THE SNOW TO STICK LONG TO THE ground, too cold to turn entirely to rain. Three hours later Trist stopped at the corner of Pennsylvania and Tenth and waited for a lumber wagon to sway and splash past him. He nodded to a streetwalker under a gas lamp, who showed him a toothless smile and a flash of high-topped shoe and ankle. Fifty feet farther up the slippery sidewalk he gave a coin to a beggar with a “Hungry” placard around his neck, then stamped the slush off his boots and entered Gillian’s Tavern.

  “ ‘Disillusioned,’ ” said Henry West, shoving a pitcher of beer along the table but not looking up. “Seven letters.”

  “Newspaperman.” Trist sat down in the booth beside him and found an empty glass.

  “You’re late.” West printed “cynical” in the white squares of his word puzzle. “We put it to press half an hour ago, every salacious, libelous, beautifully chosen word.”

  “I was collecting interplanetary mail at Willard’s. Is it true Mark Twain wrote The Gilded Age in here?”

  West raised his head with an expression of mild surprise. “Mark Twain writes everything with a typewriter now, didn’t you know? Wave of the future.”

  “I was told he wrote it in two months one summer, at a table on the sidewalk right outside. Made fifty thousand dollars.”

  “They rejected another article, right? L’Illustrate?”

  “L’Illustration.” Trist poured himself beer. On the street outside two derby hats and a bonnet passed by, topped like cakes with snow. Inside, the stink of cigar smoke and spittoons made his eyes hurt. In Paris there would have been a zinc counter, gay colors, tables full of ladies; no spittoons. L’Illustration had in fact rejected three of the last four articles Trist had sent them, as West well knew—“too American,” Trist’s Paris editor had cabled with a sneer, as if they could be anything else—and now his arrangement with them seemed suddenly to hang by a thread. “Thirty-three hundred also beautifully chosen words, ‘General Hancock the Superb, Grant’s Democratic Rival.’ ”

  “You showed me that,” West said. “It was too damned good for Frenchmen—I’ll get Hutchins to buy it, he wants to start a Sunday edition. You’re too damned good, period. I went to the Library of Congress and looked at your book of stories.”

  It was Trist’s turn to blink in surprise.

  “And you wrote six months for the Associated Press, right? Before Illustrate?”

  “In Paris, part-time.”

  “Hutchins hates the AP because they’re so expensive—he steals all his foreign news from the Star.” West waved for another pitcher of beer. “I have a proposition for you.”

  At one end of the bar a big waiter in shirtsleeves and apron was setting out platters of cheese. Somebody invisible began slowly to pick out notes on the house piano, one by one. “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”

  “Hutchins has another project,” West continued. “Hutchins has five or six thousand projects—he wants to publish a handbook for the election. The Washington Post Political Manual, Election of 1880. And he wants his name on the cover but he don’t want to write it.”

  “A manual, like a farmer’s almanac?”

  “Give the man a beer.” West took the pitcher from the waiter and refilled Trist’s glass. “He wants a farmer’s almanac for voters—graphs, statistics, party platforms, candidate statements. A brief history of presidential elections. Hutchins fancies himself a Jeffersonian. He thinks the true democratic voter is one of Nature’s noble yeomen, plows in his field, reads a little Homer in Greek at dinner, and studies the facts and casts his vote rationally and theoretically. Hutchins wants to be the man who sells him the facts. It’s actually not a bad idea—use the Post’s presses, same distribution, fifty cents a copy, corner the market, amazing nobody ever thought of it before. He wants me to find him a writer.”

  “I’ll be back in Paris before the election.”

  “Forty dollars a week, part-time job. Finish in August.”

  “And I just find some Homeric-Jeffersonian statistics in the library and write them up?”

  “Immigration, tariff, whatever the noble voter might want to know. Hutchins already has a table of contents. Pure, objective, God-fearing facts is all he needs. And if they happen to dribble mud on our leaders Grant and Conkling, so much the better.”

  Trist started to shake his head.

  “It is,” West reminded him, grinning, “a Democratic paper.”

  Which was so wildly and completely true that Trist couldn’t help laughing. He might have the odd Jeffersonian idea, but in a town of militant partisans, Stilson Hutchins stood all alone. By his personal order the Post invariably referred to Republican President Hayes as “His Fraudulency” or “the bogus President”—Hutchins shared the widespread conviction that Hayes had stolen the election of 1876 from Samuel Tilden—and only two days ago he had run a headline over some presidential remarks: TWADDLE OF THE FRAUD.

  “Bash Grant nicely, pass right on over to the regular staff in the fall. Stranger things have happened.”

  “I won’t be here in the fall.”

  “I know, you
got der wanderlust, Nick, you think you’re a French bohemian. I think you’re a patriot manqué.”

  Trist tasted his beer and made a face. Patriot manqué. Patriot unaware.

  “Another bug in your ear—Grant comes to town in two weeks,” West said.

  “Visiting General Beale.”

  “Your friend General Beale, with whom you have whiskey and tea, my dear, in the drawing room every Sunday.” West ignored Trist’s murmur of protest and propped himself on his elbows, red-faced and genial, bald skull gleaming in the pale blue light of the bar. “If you made like a fly on the wall, wrote up some dirt—don’t shake your head—how a man who lived so long in France has scruples and morals I don’t know. Wrote up something fine and factual on the side: ‘Love Nest in Lafayette Square’—‘Poobahs and Posture Girls.’ Hutchins says 1880 is going to usher in the political millennium.”

  “Meaning Tilden this time.”

  “Or Sam Randall or Hancock the Superb—Tilden’s too old and sick to make a run, I think. But in my opinion Grant don’t have the thing wrapped up, not even the nomination. Whatever it looked like in Europe.” West finished his beer, peered at his watch, and stood, all in one fluent American motion. “Man about a dog,” he explained, swaying.

  Outside, in the muddy alley behind the tavern, they stood companionably side by side and made use of the long wooden trough that the tavern had installed for its customers. Then they walked and stumbled in the dark to the Tenth Street exit, where a stray sow from one of the alley’s numerous shacks had curled up in the mud, partially blocking their way. It was one of the striking features of postwar Washington that while there were houses and districts here and there of conspicuous wealth and beauty, a good part of the city’s population, especially its black population, actually lived in these downtown alleys, in old canvas tents and lean-tos and scrapyard shelters that reminded Trist of the wretchedest kind of army bivouac. On the other side of the street, through a space between roofs, the white dome of the Capitol could be seen in the distance, incongruous, rising into a clearing sky.