Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  West wrinkled his nose at the sow. “All right for money, Nick? Hutchins won’t pay for a week.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good writer ought not to starve. Come by tomorrow, we’ll draw up a contract, right after the mystic communion of editors.” From the light of Gillian’s front window he waved again, then disappeared.

  Trist stood and watched the empty street a moment longer. In the nearest window, a Going-Out-of-Business dry-goods store, his darkened reflection took off its hat, wiped its brow with relief like a stage comedian; grinned faintly. “Grant’s Luck,” they had called it in the war—just keep on moving, never stop, see what happens, forty dollars a week. He pulled up his collar. If West could manage it. “Don’t count your spiders before they hatch,” he told the face in the window, which nodded back, soberly.

  Two blocks farther north bigger, brighter globe-shaped streetlamps cast their light on pedestrians, polished carriages, well-dressed couples going in and out of restaurants. He passed Harvey’s Seafood Establishment, with a glimpse between red velvet curtains of a black-and-white tessellated floor. On the next block was the gaslit marquee for Ford’s New Opera House, formerly Ford’s Theatre, where the latest revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, complete with live bloodhounds, would just about at that moment—Trist squinted at the theater clock—have entered its last irresistible, melodramatic act. He had been told that Harriet Beecher Stowe still received $20,000 a year from royalties, but now claimed that God, not she, had actually written the book; either way, a Good Writer, not starving. At the end of the block, on the opposite side of the street, he passed the house marked by a plaque where Lincoln had been carried from the theater to die—his mind flickered back to Clover Adams and 1865, and himself far up the same street, plastered and bandaged like a one-armed ghost—and then he crossed a set of unsteady wooden planks serving as a makeshift bridge over a ditch full of sewage and snow and reached the open, windy spaces of New York Avenue.

  In New York City itself there was a new apartment building located so far from everything else, on Seventy-second Street, that it was called “The Dakota.” He had seen it ten days ago, on a trip with Don Cameron. Washington, in fact, had more empty spaces than New York. Washington, in fact, sometimes seemed like a whole city of empty spaces, punctuated now and then by a cluster of freestanding buildings that might have been dropped at random, straight out of the sky. He turned right, trudged alongside a huge vacant lot, a bleak rectangle of blackness surrounded by shadows and trees. Overhead, a few last flakes of snow drifted, shivering; stiff white moths. Somebody struck a match far back in the darkness and he heard menacing guttural voices.

  At the corner of Fourth and Rhode Island Avenue, two or three doors down from his boarding house, Trist stopped again. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to calculate. Forty dollars a week, if West could pull it off … April, May, June. Since Christmas he had made a number of short, expensive excursions with Cameron to see the Grant nomination machine in action, twice to New York, which gobbled money like candy, once to the strange Dutch-African city of Philadelphia where his mother had been born and his grandmother had known Thomas Jefferson; and there was still Chicago and the convention to come. He blew white puffs of breath into the black air. He had seen Clover Adams twice; Elizabeth Cameron how many times? He went to Lafayette Square as often as possible, they talked, laughed, he told stories, she dazzled. Why did you come back, Mr. Trist? Why would you ever leave again?

  Two tramps emerged from the shadows and muttered a step or two in his direction. He turned and walked up the little rise that led to his door, next to a billboard for something called “Marlowes’s Electric Corsets”—how could you not love America?—fumbled for his key. Behind him, unseen but felt, stretched a whole great mysterious continent, like the curving dark presence of an immense inland ocean. In Paris he had almost forgotten it existed. In the night, in the passing winter mood, the whole scene appeared spectral, ghostlike, shrouded in snow and fog.

  He didn’t believe in ghosts, he decided sleepily. If there were ghosts, they were only phantom versions of all the possible selves you might have become, possible lives you might have led, had chance or war decided something different. One arm; two arms. Trist’s luck. The last thought that came unbidden into his mind was of Elizabeth Cameron.

  He fit his key into the lock.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I HAVE LONG SINCE MADE UP MY MIND NOT TO SEEK THE acquaintance of poets”—here Henry Adams paused, sipped from his sherry glass, patted his lips with his handkerchief—“it spoils their poetry. I knew Swinburne twenty years ago and have needed twenty years to get over it.”

  General Beale smiled the quick, tight little grimace that meant he hadn’t quite got the joke. Senator Cameron smirked. Clover Adams rose up and down on her toes. And only Emily Beale and Elizabeth Cameron truly laughed out loud. Adams lifted his chin in preparation for another witticism. Meanwhile the others began to drift away, rudely in Emily’s opinion, across the drawing room and toward the food.

  And to tell the truth, Emily herself was listening with only half a mind—something now about spiders and the White House—as she tried at the same time to smile, surreptitiously adjust her left shoulder strap, and also remember exactly what Godey’s Lady’s Book had said just that month about the tightness of a young lady’s corset. Spiders. She leaned her head admiringly toward Adams, observing the bald spot in the center of his lacquered hair, and caught her mother’s eye across the room. A tight corset, Godey’s had pronounced, against all fashionable doctrine, will turn a young lady’s nose bright red—the result of stagnation of the blood in that prominent and important feature; her mother had flung down the article in a fury, cinched up the laces herself, and marched out muttering that young ladies ought to listen to their mothers, not cheap magazines, and in her family her daughter would always appear properly dressed, and no, she could not pass around cigarettes at the party like a maid, her father would die.

  Henry Adams had evidently changed the subject. Senator Cameron reappeared, glowering as usual, and Adams turned his wise little head—did it ever bother him and Clover to be the shortest people they knew? even Emily was taller—turned his head up to the Senator, and drawled in his Boston-Oxford accent that Standard Oil had now done everything possible for the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it, didn’t he agree? And Emily held her breath for an instant till Cameron laughed, and then the rest of them joined in, with as much relief as pleasure. In the mirror her nose looked distinctly crimson.

  “I see you’ve invited the Press,” Adams drawled, and General Beale, hovering nearby with an oyster canapé raised to his mouth, had to put it down and follow Adams’s pointed gaze. Through the window, out on the muddy paths of Lafayette Square, they could all see the tall, quite handsome and romantic (so Emily thought) figure of Nicholas Trist approaching. He wore a slouch hat and dark cape over his shoulders to hide his one arm. While they watched, he stopped at the corner under a lamp for a carriage to pass. On Emily’s right, Elizabeth Cameron moved away with a sudden swish of skirts.

  “Met him in Europe,” Emily’s father said, and gulped the oyster.

  “He writes about Grant,” Senator Cameron added, with, for him, surprising cordiality. “Some French magazine. From what I’ve read, pretty damned smart.”

  “Oh, as to that …” Adams turned away after Elizabeth.

  General Edward Beale had bought the nicest and most distinguished house on Lafayette Square, the old Decatur House as Washingtonians still knew it, from the far-off days when it belonged to Captain Stephen Decatur, of Tripoli War fame. And he felt obligated by his position to give more parties than he liked, Emily thought, to more people than he liked—at the last Boxing Day reception there had been so many guests, a positive “rout,” that they still had a dozen unclaimed coats and muffs packed away in a third-floor closet.

  Tonight, however, was calmer, her mother’s idea of a quiet party: just the Adamses, Professor and
Mrs. Bancroft, the Camerons, four or five people from Ohio, some of her father’s business friends; and now—but before she could step into the hallway and greet Mr. Trist (in French; her mind searched helplessly for something more sophisticated than “bonsoir”), her brother Truxton intercepted her at the side door and hurried her off into the kitchen to help with the salads on dishes of ice that were her mother’s speciality. By the time she slipped away again, Nicholas Trist was installed in the other drawing room with a plate of salad balanced before his chest, listening to Senator Cameron and two Ohioans talk about General Grant for President, who was coming next month to stay as a guest of her father.

  Emily busied herself with bric-a-brac on the mantel and tried not to stare. The rules of etiquette for women, she had often complained to her mother, were irrational, vexatious, and tyrannical—the Law of the Napkin, for instance (wad or fold), the Nine Rules of Posture. Do Not Interrupt Older Men. When she was younger she had attended for six long months a Young Lady’s Saturday Course in which she learned that if she met a gentleman at the foot of a flight of stairs, he was to precede her up, lest she go first and reveal her ankles; she was to avoid swaying when she played the piano; not lean her head against wallpaper, not say “You know” or “says I” or point or say “pooh.” She moved a ceramic cat along the mantel and, without pointing or staring, managed to study Trist’s face.

  He did look, she thought, much thinner and paler than when they had met him in Paris last summer; but then, her father said he’d suffered a bout of malaria and still wasn’t fully recovered. His blond hair was longer. His eyes were darker. He shifted his plate slightly, glimpsed her in the mirror, and (she ducked her head) winked.

  As soon as dessert and port were served, by family tradition in the second-floor drawing room, the conversation switched, at last, from General Grant and politics. Professor Bancroft, so old he might have been made of dust, took his place in the center of the sofa, alone, the privilege of age, and cleared his throat. He raised his glass and started to discourse on the history of the house, a subject that always pleased her father, who made everybody shush and draw nearer. The very window on their right, Bancroft was saying—Emily felt her eyes begin to dull—had been cut out by Martin Van Buren when he lived here as Vice President, so that he could see Andrew Jackson’s signals to summon him to the President’s Palace. Jackson himself used to come over at night and play pinochle.

  “And Thomas Jefferson, of course, dined here often.” Bancroft licked his old dry lips as if at the idea. He was ancient enough, Emily thought, to have dined with Jefferson.

  Downstairs she had brought Nicholas Trist a second plate of salad where he was talking to Elizabeth, and conversed very smoothly (couramment) with him in French. But there was no more chance of that now. Now Trist was listening to the history lecture, standing with some Ohioans at the end of the sofa, very straight and tall. He was also looking over Bancroft’s white head directly toward Elizabeth Cameron standing at the other end of the sofa. While Emily watched, Elizabeth glanced at him, looked down; looked away. The best book Emily had read in years was Vanity Fair, where the heroine defies all rules and comes to a tragic end. The next best book had just been published, Democracy, in which, all the political stuff aside, the great idea was that opposites attract, true love is always disguised.

  Elizabeth would never defy the rules, Emily thought, Elizabeth loved her social position, Elizabeth loved to be safe. But Nicholas Trist was handsome, serious, opposite—she looked at his poor empty sleeve, neatly folded and pinned, and thought how Desdemona had loved Othello for the dangers he had passed, and then thought of Senator Cameron and danger (a bourbon bottle!) and the idea was so ludicrous she had to pinch her nose and stifle a laugh, and Elizabeth and Nicholas Trist, who had been looking at each other again and starting to whisper, actually turned in unison to look at her, and even Professor Bancroft raised his head.

  “Monticello,” said Henry Adams very clearly, ignoring them all, “is presently owned by a Jew.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE BOOK DEMOCRACY, WHICH SO INTRIGUED EMILY BEALE, had been published two weeks earlier by Henry Holt and Company of New York, but oddly enough with no author’s name on the title page, only the curious and uninformative subtitle: An American Novel.

  Nick Trist pushed everything else to one side on his desk and turned pages till he reached the point he had marked last night with a penciled asterisk, chapter five, in which the highly civilized Mrs. Lee goes to visit General Grant’s White House:

  Washington more than any other city in the world swarms with simple-minded exhibitions of human nature; men and women curiously out of place, whom it would be cruel to ridicule and ridiculous to weep over. One evening Mrs. Lee went to the President’s first evening reception. She accepted Mr. French for an escort, and walked across the Square with him to join the throng that was pouring into the doors of the White House. They took their places in the line of citizens and were at last able to enter the reception-room. There Madeleine found herself before two seemingly mechanical figures, which might be wood or wax, for any sign they showed of life. These two figures were the President and his wife; they stood stiff and awkward by the door, both their faces stripped of every sign of intelligence, while the right hands of both extended themselves to the column of visitors with the mechanical action of toy dolls. Mrs. Lee for a moment began to laugh, but the laugh died on her lips. To the President and his wife this was clearly no laughing matter. There they stood, automata, representatives of the society which streamed past them. Madeleine seized Mr. French by the arm.

  “Take me somewhere at once,” said she, “where I can look at it. Here! in the corner. I had no conception how shocking it was!”

  “Gossip turned into art,” Henry West said with a professional mixture of envy and disgust. He scooped the book up and cracked it open on a stack of election-manual papers on the side of the desk. “You know, half of Washington’s accusing the other half of writing this. The damn thing’s gone through three printings already. They should have used asbestos instead of paper.”

  “I heard there was a row in New York.” Trist grinned and leaned back in his chair.

  “James G. Blaine, the pride of Maine,” said West, whose knowledge of scandalous information extended well beyond Washington, “blew up at a dinner party, said he was the wicked senator in it—”

  “Ratcliffe.”

  “—a wonderful name—Blaine swore only an intellectual or a venomous female could have written it. The President’s supposed to be Grant, General Beale is in it, or his house anyway, the good character is Luke Lamar from Mississippi. Blaine says he thinks Clarence King wrote it, and he cut him dead when he saw him.”

  “I heard John Hay.”

  “Also John Hay, Henry James, maybe Miss Lorna Sedgewick, maybe Miss Harriet Loring—nothing sells like a mystery. Hutchins told you to review it, I hope?”

  Trist nodded. “Give the readers what they want.”

  West flipped to the middle of the book and read aloud: “ ‘Ratcliffe’s eyes were cold, steel gray, rather small, not unpleasant in good humor, diabolic in a passion, but worst when a little suspicious; then they watch you as though you were a young rattle-snake, to be killed when convenient.’ ” He snorted. “Could be anybody.” He turned back to the first chapter: “ ‘For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.’ ” He closed the book with a snap. “For reasons which many persons think profound, I need a drink.”

  Trist grinned and shook his head. In two weeks’ time, not counting work on Democracy, he had spent nine full afternoons in the dank, gloomy reading room of the Library of Congress, written four background chapters for Hutchins’s election manual (the latest on “Perils of Immigration”), and done absolutely nothing for L’Illustration. Hutchins was pleased with his chapters, looked for more every day, and now assigned, as tidbits, little moneymaking extras like the book review, not to
mention one or two stories an issue that the regular reporters were too busy to tackle. Yesterday Trist had written a paragraph about crumbling asphalt on Fourteenth Street. Tomorrow he was to do the opening of the new Thomas Cook Travel Office on Tenth Street. But today—he looked at his watch, two-twenty-five—today was his own. Today he was invited to visit Decatur House for tea, where General Grant, now visiting the Beales, might—or might not—offer an exclusive interview for European readers. At the door West gave him back the book and scowled up at the brilliant April sunshine. “Another goddam beautiful day,” he said.

  From the offices of the Post to Lafayette Square was at most a twenty-minute walk. The weather had changed completely, in fickle Washingtonian fashion, from winter-spring to summer. The low blue hills of Virginia dozed on the other side of the Potomac. A few paddle steamers and sailboats floated on the river’s back, nearly motionless. Even the constant traffic of wagons, herdics, and omnibuses on the avenue itself seemed slower, lazier; Southern. He passed saloons that had thrown their doors and windows open to let the fresh air in. Several cafés were bravely setting out tables and umbrellas on the sidewalk. At Twelfth Street one of the city’s numerous photograph shops had installed an open-air display of pictures—he glanced at train wrecks, actresses, Famous Race Horses and Noted Statesmen—overhead a telegraph line repairman swung contentedly in a dense black cradle of wires, looking down at the street like an amiable bearded spider.