by Max Byrd
The Washington Post devoted the left-hand side of its front page to more or less factual political news, the right-hand side to sensational cases of rape or murder, preferably both. Page two contained numerous nasty, sneering pro-Democrat editorial paragraphs, almost all written, as everybody knew, by Stilson Hutchins, and two full columns of patent-medicine advertisements and bits and pieces of miscellaneous and local news. There was one running story on the back, been there for weeks, about a White House clerk named Chapman who seduced female job applicants in his office and was, the Post gleefully pointed out every day, a Republican appointee. There was also a very funny series about the awful Washington water supply and the four different colors of Washington drinking water, depending on the daily state of contamination of the Potomac. Cadwallader believed he could recognize a reporter’s work by his style, and he was next to certain the clever story about water was the work of the clever one-armed young veteran, Nicholas Trist.
He chuckled through Chapman’s latest denial, then went to the front page to see what they said about the convention, although it was still two days till the opening gavel and most papers weren’t doing anything but describing the carnival atmosphere and the dead-certain third nomination of U. S. Grant. He knew Trist was writing part-time now for the Post. And sure enough, on page one, column three, his eye went straight to a short political bulletin, with the initials “N.T.” at the end (next to a column that had a typical Post headline: BUTCHERED BY HIS BETTER HALF).
But Trist’s was a quick, concise, completely original and serious story. Nineteen of the forty-two members of the Pennsylvania Republican delegation, supposedly under Don Cameron’s iron rule, were secretly ready to bolt from Grant and throw their support, after the first ballot, to James A. Garfield. Unlike most reporters, Trist was sure enough of his facts to name names. The rebels, he wrote, were led by a Philadelphia banker named Wharton and a professor of medieval history named Henry Lea.
Cadwallader’s first thought was that professors had no business at all in politics—that consummate little snob Henry Adams had tried to meddle in the election of 1872, with pathetic results—professors were not a competent class, professors couldn’t cross the street together safely. His second thought was that Don Cameron was going to holler like a stuck pig.
TEN BLOCKS AWAY AND FOUR HOURS LATER, THE VERY SAME image occurred to Trist. A stuck pig in a poke.
He leaned against a corridor wall in the gallery level of Exposition Hall and watched as Don Cameron, porcine of bulk and violently red of cheek, jerked his cigar from his mouth and turned to shout at one of his aides.
Trist was too far away to hear what Cameron said, and the corridor was too crowded for him to move closer. Downstairs, in the main auditorium, an orchestra was tuning up for the evening’s concert, and to add to the din, outside on the street a peripatetic brass band was coincidentally marching by. He considered for a moment trying to push his way up to Cameron’s side. But half the Pennsylvania delegation seemed to have jammed themselves into the narrow corridor, and the crisis of the Philadelphia banker and the nineteen Garfield defectors was evidently going to be dealt with in private—so a furious and beleaguered Cameron had informed him earlier. No further story was likely that night. Trist wiped his brow, turned around, and collided gently with the Senator’s wife.
“Mr. Trist.”
“I do apologize—I wasn’t looking.”
“My husband—” She broke off as Cameron abruptly spun on his heel and disappeared into a door beneath a banner with Grant’s famous slogan of 1868: LET US HAVE PEACE.
“I think,” she said, and they were now both pushed to one side by yet another squadron of hats, elbows, cigars hurrying down the corridor. Elizabeth Cameron held on to her hat with one hand and braced herself with the other. “I think,” she said wryly, “I’ve just lost my husband.”
The orchestra downstairs could suddenly be heard quite clearly: “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.”
“Well, I could try and find him for you,” Trist said, but doubtfully. The corridor was busier than ever, the door to the traitorous Pennsylvania delegation had by now been slammed emphatically shut. By unspoken agreement they both edged closer to the stairs.
“It’s a pity. We were supposed to go to the concert”—Elizabeth held up two green pasteboard tickets and made a rueful “best-laid plans” kind of face. “But now—”
The pause hung in the air. Trist cleared his throat. “If you’d like an escort,” he said.
She cocked her head in a way that Emily Beale might have called flirtatious. “No stories to file, Mr. Trist? No meetings, deadlines?”
“Everything done, shipshape.”
“I thought journalists worked till all hours, Mr. Trist.”
“My motto is ‘Don’t Get It Right—Get It Written.’ ”
She laughed and held out her arm. “I haven’t seen you for weeks, Mr. Trist,” she said.
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STAIRS THEY EMERGED INTO THE WIDER, calmer passageway that ringed the great open space of the convention auditorium. Trist looked at her tickets and turned to the right. “I would have been lost in two minutes,” she murmured.
He knew what she meant. He had already written a description of the building for the Post—the largest amphitheater in Chicago, maybe in the country, able to hold ten thousand people on the main floor, another four or five thousand in the balconies and galleries. Workmen had been busy for a week installing flags and banners, an enormous canvas screen painted to be an American flag had been draped from floor to ceiling at one end, and since this morning they had added wooden arches and trellises along the walls, potted evergreen trees, and numerous giant oil portraits of Republican worthies behind the speaker’s platform, including Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Conkling, and even, benign and smiling in one corner, Don Cameron. To test the acoustics, a patriotic concert had been scheduled for that night and the Chicago Symphonia installed, Trist was amused to notice, right beneath the portrait of Grant, who was known to dislike every form of music. On the central platform the orchestra finished tuning up with a whinny of violins and a brass burst of trumpets.
An usher led them down a long sloping aisle, then stood aside to show them their seats. Trist put the ticket stubs in his pocket, pulled his hand out again, and fumbled for change. Elizabeth Cameron waited beside him, unconcerned.
In Washington, he thought, they always met in somebody’s house, somebody’s safe little drawing room or parlor. Here—he found himself suddenly tongue-tied, awkward as a schoolboy. They sat down side by side, leg by skirt on their wooden chairs.
He muttered something pedantic and stupid—in Europe they didn’t number the selections in a printed musical program, as the new practice was in America. The first time he’d heard someone call a song a “number,” he’d been as puzzled as Rip Van Winkle.
Elizabeth smiled and whispered “droll Mr. Trist,” but just at that moment the bandleader strode to the front and bowed, and then the auditorium lights went down.
The first few selections were all sentimental favorites, each one greeted with applause—“Annie Laurie,” “Greensleeves,” “There Is a Happy Land,” “Finnegan’s Wake.” In the heat of the room, in the dark, Trist was acutely conscious of Elizabeth Cameron inches away. The curves of her face caught and held what light there was. Her hair spilled in dark curls onto her shoulders. He inhaled a scent from her skin of soap and lemon verbena. When he moved in his seat her skirt yielded softly to his hip and leg.
At the first interval they stood and looked about irresolutely.
“It’s terribly hot, Mr. Trist—perhaps?”
Numerous small black boys were selling flavored ices from trays around their necks, but they were all confined to an area next to an outside exit. By the time they had reached the nearest of them, and Trist had fumbled again in his pocket for change, the bandleader was back on his podium again, clapping his hands for silence.
“Our next selection,” he called out in a booming voice, �
�is in honor of our brave boys.”
“War songs,” Elizabeth whispered. The gas-jet lights around them began to fade. In the growing darkness neither of them took a step.
“Back in the great and terrible Battle of the Wilderness,” the bandleader said. A spotlight bathed him in a garish yellow light. Trist put his unfinished ice on an empty stool. “May 1864,” the bandleader said. “A certain brigade of the Ninth Corps had just broken the Rebel line and started forward, when the threat of a flank attack threw them all back in disorder. After a desperate retreat, the brigade re-formed and turned to face the enemy, but the prevailing mood was one of despair. Just at this moment a soldier in the Forty-fifth Pennsylvania launched into song.”
The first few notes were unmistakable. Behind the bandleader a solitary young man rose into the spotlight and began to sing in a sweet, clear tenor:
“We’ll rally round the flag,
Boys, we’ll rally once again,
Shouting the Battle-cry of Freedom!”
“And his words were picked up by the others, and soon the entire brigade was singing the defiant chorus and charging back again into the heroic fray—join in with us! Sing!”
The crowd came to its feet with a roar and a cheer and the huge auditorium rocked with sound:
“The Union forever!
Hurrah boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star,
While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,
Shouting the Battle-cry of Freedom!”
Behind them two of the ices boys flung open a door to the sidewalk outside. Instantly, without thinking, Trist turned and walked toward it—in a moment he was on the street, under a hot gas lamp, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. When he looked up, Elizabeth Cameron was standing a few feet away, studying him with a curious gaze.
“You’re not nostalgic, Mr. Trist,” she said, “for the war. I’ve noticed before.”
“Touch of malaria,” he muttered. “Comes back sometimes.” He felt the handkerchief, sopping wet. “I tend to agree with your Uncle Cump.”
“ ‘War is pure hell,’ ” she quoted.
“Pardon your language,” Trist said and was rewarded with an utterly dazzling smile.
“Do you want to go back in?”
“Actually, Mrs. Cameron, I don’t feel much like a musical person. Not really. Not tonight.”
Around them on the street and brick sidewalks it was as if the convention had taken over the city. There were men and women walking, laughing on the sidewalks, in the street—some carried banners and badges, next to the entrance more little boys had gathered with trays of ices, and through the door, from the interior of the Hall, came the martial thump of drums. It was the women, Trist thought, who were the great surprise. Women seemed to be everywhere, escorted, unescorted, amused, part of the show. In the Palmer House Hotel, opposite “Grant for President” headquarters, a Women’s Suffrage committee had opened a booth. In front of them right now three women in bustles and hats with dyed feathers came giggling out of a side door, a restaurant, unattended. It was not quite so odd, he thought, today, tonight, to be standing in a city street with somebody else’s wife.
Elizabeth Cameron had already turned and started toward the brighter lights of the State Street intersection.
“I have only a girl’s perspective,” she said as he caught up. They stopped at a corner and watched Roman candles pulse and flutter up over rooftops, green and red puffs, blocks away; neither of them mentioned Don Cameron somewhere in the vast bulk of brick and masonry behind them. “When I was not quite twelve my uncle invited me on a four-month trip to the Yellowstone River in Montana—he was inspecting army camps and we rode horseback and slept in tents all the way.”
“Rugged country.” Trist took her elbow and steered her out of the path of whooping Republican delegates marching six abreast and shouting “Blaine of Maine” slogans. Away from the lakefront, Chicago was a city of endless wooden tenements, soot, overloaded wagons, its streets were forever littered with boxes and crates, it had a raw, brutal un-Washingtonian feel to it, of commerce and hard weather and life perpetually in motion. But tonight in the heat and high spirits of the convention, dense with promenaders, dazzling with lights, it seemed as gay and pleasure-bound as Venice. The Blaine delegates thrust them aside, into an arched doorway, where they were pressed so close together for a moment that their shoulders and arms touched and recoiled with an electric shock.
They pushed back into the street.
Near the entrance to the Palmer House they slowed to a breathless stop in the darkness, fifty yards or so from the torchlit portico of the hotel. Elizabeth Cameron leaned against a solitary sycamore tree, planted against all odds in a square of the sidewalk, and fanned herself with one hand.
“Not quite the Montana wilderness,” Trist said, nodding at the tree.
Her hair was in loose curls around her neck; in the flickering light of the torches her cheeks were flushed. Don Cameron is an ass, Trist thought. Because of the clatter of horses and carriages in front of the Palmer House he had to lean in and ask her to repeat what she had said.
“Several years ago”—another pause while a wagon rumbled by—“several years ago I went back, after … a disappointment.”
“To Montana?”
“My married sister Mary and I.” She turned, straightened her dress; wrinkled her nose at the pungent aromas of horse sweat, smoke, burning kerosene somewhere. Chicago after all, not Venice. “My brother-in-law Colonel Miles was leading troops against the Indians, on the Tongue River, and we stayed in his headquarters, which was actually nothing but a log cabin with a flat tin roof in the middle of the woods. Most glamorous, Mr. Trist—I loved every minute. We went about with an armed escort, we saw Indian braves in full war regalia, and once we came up just at the end of a skirmish the troopers had fought with some of Sitting Bull’s stragglers. We went to Sioux powwows, we camped with the Crow Indians—Colonel Miles said we’d been where no white woman had ever gone before.”
“You were very adventurous,” Trist said, and meant it.
“Well, it was wonderful, the most exciting time of my life. Colonel Miles invites me to come back, but of course, now—” She shrugged.
There were two Elizabeth Camerons, Trist thought. One was a cool, formal, married woman, older and stiffer than her twenty-four years. But that woman was back in Washington, in the overfastidious world of Henry Adams. This Elizabeth had a wide, sensuous tilt to her mouth, her skin was flushed and prickly, as if with heat, her voice so low that it was scarcely more than a murmur.
“But that wasn’t at all what you saw,” she said, “I suppose, at the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, those places you couldn’t hear them sing about. We were just girls, my sister and I, tourists. What you saw was what my uncle saw.”
Trist was silent.
“There was one curious episode,” she said, so close now that her dress brushed against his arm, he could smell her scent again. “On that second trip to Montana I wasn’t yet married—Mary and I travelled on a steamer up the Missouri from Sioux City, and the name of the boat oddly enough was the Senator Don Cameron.”
“An omen,” Trist said.
“Do you think so?”
He held his hand up to her face and slowly bent forward and kissed her. She sighed deep in her throat and pressed against him, and for a long moment the city moved in circles around them, rattling, clattering, a distant background of wobbling lights and dizzy motion. He kissed her lips, neck, his hand went to her breast. She moaned and cupped it with her own, and he tasted salt, honey. She trembled and moved against him harder.
“Come back to my room.”
“No!” She pulled back, then came forward again and kissed him again with her whole mouth and body and whispered, “My aunt will be waiting,” and then before he could take a step she was hurrying up the sidewalk, into the light, head down. A liveried doorman from the Palmer House moved toward her, raising his hat.
WHY, THE DON CAMERON SANK,” CADWALLADER SAID. “THAT was four years ago at least—hit a snag in the river above Sioux City, went down like a box of rocks. Another boat came by and rescued everybody—the William T. Sherman as a matter of fact—but the Don was gone. Two of the Sherman girls were on it, Lizzie and Mary, I think, made all the papers, and of course Lizzie married him next year, didn’t learn a thing. What the hell makes you ask about that?”
“Just reading.” Trist looked down and shuffled his notes one-handed like a card shark. “Old clippings.”
“Well, the real Don Cameron’s about to sink too, take my word.” Cadwallader picked up his pencil and nodded in the direction of Cameron at the other end of the room. Trist picked up his own pencil. In the main auditorium of Exposition Hall, reporters were scheduled tomorrow to have special reserved tables and chairs just under the speaker’s platform, in the center of the hall. But here, in what was essentially only a peripheral meeting room, the press was shoved together at the rear, backs to the wall, a good ninety feet from the long mahogany conference table where Don Cameron and the rest of the Republican National Committee officers were in the process of taking their seats.
“Where’s Henry West?” Cadwallader asked out of the corner of his mouth.
“Sick. Mumps.”
“So they sent you instead, man with the inside track to Cameron, very nice. Stilson Hutchins is an idiot, but he’s no fool.”
“Chandler’s here,” Trist said.