Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  “Absolutely,” West said, “fucking glorious.”

  “Vaut le voyage.”

  “Worth the trip.”

  “How high are we?”

  West leaned a little farther out. “Four hundred feet, more or less.” He shifted his weight, and the wooden platform under them rocked unsteadily. On the Mall below they could just make out a few shadowy workmen tramping uphill.

  “Now when I was a boy”—West stopped to strike a match against the stone—“I called this the ‘hour of work.’ ” He waved the match under a cigar. “Because my father always got up before sunrise to light the fire in the kitchen, and I could hear him from my bed, rattling pans and closing doors, and I used to think when I get big that’s what I’ll do too, get up before everybody else in the world, bring everything to life.” He exhaled smoke with a long sigh and rested both elbows on the rampart. “No dome on the Capitol when you were a soldier boy.”

  Trist shook his head. “They didn’t finish the dome till the end of the war.”

  “At Cold Harbor,” West said, “you attacked just about this time of day, I think.”

  Trist looked off to the right, where a sailboat was shaking out canvas on the river. A seagull coasted in front of them, fell away.

  “Four-thirty in the morning,” he said. “Those were the General’s orders. It was darker than this.”

  West blew a smoke ring that flattened in the breeze and became a feather, a snowflake. “Well, what you have, my friend, is one brilliant idea—book of pious battlefield engravings, a little patriotic narration, some interviews with the just and unjust alike, as Lucy Hayes used to say. Twenty-year anniversary of the Wilderness campaign and the end of the war. Nostalgia fever. I tell you, ever since Sherman published his Memoirs, we can’t get enough of anniversaries and reminiscences, fight the goddam war all over again.”

  Trist walked along the platform until he was facing due north, toward the White House and Lafayette Square. Henry Adams’s house he could identify by the two vacant lots to one side, and St. John’s church on the corner. Elizabeth Cameron’s house was lost in shadow.

  “I grew up in Pennsylvania,” West said, joining him. “Had an aunt lived near Gettysburg. When I went to visit as a boy you could still plow up a skull sometimes or a set of bones. My aunt told me that after the battle, for weeks, when it rained the ground would turn swampy and soft and there would be hands and arms and legs just sticking up out of the fields, like somebody had planted them.”

  “Well, they had a bumper crop at Gettysburg,” Trist said. “I wasn’t there.”

  West nodded. “Joined in late ’63, am I right? Not long before Grant took command?” When Trist didn’t answer he went on, carefully holding out his cigar and studying the ash as he spoke. “Know the single most important decision a writer makes?”

  Trist turned his head.

  “The most important decision a writer makes,” West said firmly, “is which person you write in, first or third.”

  Trist turned all the way now to look at him. After four years West was, if anything, balder than ever. Permanent wrinkles had started to line his forehead and scalp, giving his head the appearance of a rumpled corduroy rug. While Trist watched he pulled his old cloth cap from his coat pocket and put it on again. In a window of the White House, through the gray air, there suddenly appeared the unmistakable yellow glow of an Edison electric bulb.

  “Read your first two chapters last night,” West said.

  “Draft chapters.”

  “Draft chapters. Smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

  “All a writer ever asks,” Trist said, now genuinely curious about where West was going, “is total, complete, unconditional praise. Henry Adams,” he added for some reason, “told me yesterday he just tosses his sentences up in the air and they land on their feet like cats.”

  “Well, the fact is,” West said, “with all due unconditional praise, you write pretty dry about the war. Facts, figures, dates—big fence to keep the reader out.”

  “European readers,” Trist began, and it was in his mind to argue, to explain that the project, his own idea, dreamed up in a bare brown patch of London winter, was meant to be translated and sold all over Europe, where the Civil War (and Grant) still exerted as much fascination as ever; his old magazine L’Illustration was paying part of the costs, the London Times the rest, and the Post had already tentatively agreed to run Sunday installments at home. But West knew all of that. Second most important decision: A writer doesn’t argue or explain.

  “First person,” Trist said.

  “What you want to do”—West stood up straighter, worked his hands—“is turn it into a personal tour, if you get what I mean—veteran goes back to his old battlefields twenty years later, revisits his past, sees his old self, old comrades. You can tell us what it was like to lose old Buster there.” Unlike most people, who never referred at all to his arm one way or the other, West was capable of being cheerfully, crudely direct. “Tell us what the war was like. All these generals writing memoirs now, it’s ‘Fourth Encalibrated Diocletian Regiment, Ninth Army, Tenth Division’ or else ‘enfilade and scarpis won the day’—nothing comes alive, nothing dies. You want to write it up straight, detailed, make it the real thing, reality.”

  By now the sun had cleared the eastern trees, a low orange disk gathering speed, beating dents in the iron-gray surface of the river. Telegraph wires floated in long silver nets above the streets. The air was filled with rising birds. Trist narrowed his eyes against the glare.

  “Tell you a secret,” Henry West said, and grinned. “That anonymous novel you liked so much when you were here, did a review for Hutchins?”

  “Democracy.”

  “They say Clover Adams wrote it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  EVERY MORNING OF THE WORKDAY WEEK, MONDAY TO FRIDAY, Ulysses S. Grant, banker and broker, observed a little private ritual at his desk.

  On the green blotter, next to the framed photograph of Julia, stood a handsome glass jar, picked up somewhere on his travels in India, brass-trimmed on the bottom and topped with a polished conical lid; and inside the jar, no matter how early or late Grant arrived at the office, were invariably twenty-five fresh, fine new Havana cigars. These were the gift of Ferdinand Ward, “the Young Napoleon of Finance” and executive partner of Grant & Ward, Inc., which Ward personally counted out and placed in the jar and which Grant then, for some reason he had never bothered to analyze, always counted out again for himself.

  Two days after Trist climbed to the top of the unfinished Washington Monument, a hundred and seventy-five miles to the north at Number 2 Wall Street, Grant sat down heavily in his chair, hitched up the knees of his trousers, and as usual counted his cigars. Twenty-five. He glanced at his clock and picked out the first of what his son Buck called “the day’s fruits.” Then lit it with an extra-long wooden match, inhaled the finest smoke in the world, and leaned back.

  Buck’s voice he could actually hear now, or thought he could, downstairs on the first floor where Grant & Ward had their main offices. On the second floor, where he sat, there was of course nothing but storage closets and his own private suite, whose letters on the ground-glass door said not “Grant & Ward,” but “Mexican Southern Railroad Company,” an entirely separate and unsalaried (and so far unprofitable) venture, but one close to his heart, a pure expression, as several admiring newspaper articles had put it, of Grant’s lifelong friendship for the Mexican people.

  Friendship for the Mexicans he had in abundance; actual work, he acknowledged, not much. Negotiations for land and rights-of-way, not to mention heavy construction equipment, not to mention Spanish-speaking engineers, certainly not to mention some unrecorded financial transactions with members of the Mexican government—none of these things proceeded very quickly in the best of times, or even lately, in the doldrums of March, proceeded at all. Harper’s Weekly had just last month warned its readers that Mexican railway stock was an exceedingly risky investment. Lucki
ly, Grant thought, he had no need for a Mexican profit. Or for advice from Harper’s Weekly. He swivelled the other way, to look at his wall of books and paintings and the beautifully constructed club leather chair for visitors that Ward had presented him the day they signed their partnership agreement.

  In 1861, at Cairo, Illinois, he remembered, he had taken up his first executive office in a bank. It had been the Citizens Bank of Cairo, confiscated from the citizens for army headquarters in the Illinois-Kentucky Department, and he had arrived there September 4, 1861, as brigadier general in command, thanks to Elihu Washburne, who had finally convinced the War Department in Washington that an old West Pointer might still be of use. Nobody in the building had looked up or paid the slightest attention when Grant walked through the door—he had never in his life, he thought, had the knack of catching people’s eye—and the colonel in temporary charge had actually threatened to arrest him for an imposter. But when they got all that straightened out, Grant had quietly set up shop behind one of the tellers’ counters and started in to work. Just like now.

  He smiled to himself and tapped cigar ash into a silver tray that Julia had bought for him at Bloomingdale’s store. Not quite like now. No Bloomingdale’s in Cairo, Illinois, then, not much of anything in fact except mosquitoes the size of rats, and green canal mud everywhere from the levees that the Confederates had broken up before they left—along the riverfront and even in the lower streets of the town there had been a peculiarly unpleasant mixture of rank water and pestilence, dead mules floating by, and pigs, and unfriendly secesh locals staring at the Union soldiers and muttering threats. What was it Cadwallader had written in his paper?—“If the angel Gabriel should alight in Cairo the natives would steal his trumpet before he could blow it.” Well, not in a bank.

  At ten-fifteen the first of his appointments was due to show up, and indeed a little past ten-thirty Nathaniel Wilson Lyon, who had been a skinny redheaded cavalry colonel in the early years of the war, finally did make his appearance, not all that late for New York. Grant greeted him warmly, noted the absence now of red hair and the presence of considerable fleshy padding, and offered him coffee and a cigar. Lyon sat back in the splendid club chair and just plain grinned like a boy.

  “Prosperous times, General!” he exclaimed.

  Grant lit first Lyon’s cigar, then his own. “Well,” he said modestly. “Prosperous enough, I guess.”

  Lyon made a loud pshawing sound like a wet thumb on a hot stove and waved blue Havana smoke away from his eyes. He had been travelling in Europe the past six months, as Grant might recall, but hadn’t he read in the London Times, the day before he sailed home, that Grant & Ward now had a rating of fifteen millions of dollars?

  Pretty close to it, Grant agreed.

  And wasn’t that about as spectacular and prosperous a rise as Wall Street had ever seen? In less than a year? And wasn’t it a damned good thing, Lyon said, practically bouncing around in his chair, restless and excitable like all good cavalry soldiers, to see the greatest man in the country truly and properly rewarded at last for his selfless service?

  There was a good deal more in this vein, and Grant, who was used to it, sat there and listened and nodded with a fixed, polite smile on his face, but in truth paid very little attention. The presiding genius of Grant & Ward was Ward—everybody in New York City was aware of that. Grant had brought his name and all of his capital to the partnership, but Ward alone had the responsibility for investing the money and Ward alone paid out the monthly dividends, and it was simply wonderful to see how well he did it. The only condition Grant had made was that there be no trading in federal government contracts, no improper use of influence for profit; otherwise, Ward had a free hand, and such was his golden touch, inside a year most of Grant’s family had invested their savings too, and now dozens and dozens of old army men like Lyon were also depositing sums of money in their former commander’s firm and collecting dividends at twenty, twenty-five, even thirty percent per annum. And Lyon was partly right at least—after so many years of failed businesses and backbreaking debt—Grant’s mind went back to Galena, to the little hardscrabble cabin he had built by himself in St. Louis—after so many years of that, it was a d——d good thing at last to succeed. He pressed a small electric button on his desk and stood up to refill his visitor’s cup of coffee.

  The electric bell was for Ward, of course, and not two minutes passed before there was a knock on the door and then the young executive partner poked his head inside. Another two minutes for introductions and pleasantries before Grant got right down to business.

  “Colonel Lyon invested fifty thousand dollars with us last summer, Mr. Ward.”

  “Before you got so sick, General Grant.” Ward took the big manila paper envelope Grant handed him and glanced at the notation on the side. “The General,” he told Lyon, “had a very rough bout with pneumonia last December.”

  “The General,” Lyon said, basking in reflected glory, “is as tough as they come.”

  “Can we bring the Colonel up to date on his money?”

  Ward studied the envelope again. Slick black hair, clean-shaven. Dressed extremely well in fine blue suits and English cravats—Grant never paid much attention to his own clothes, but he had a sharp eye, he believed, for other people’s dress. Sherman said Ward reminded him of Uriah Heep, and since Grant had just finished reading David Copperfield aloud to Julia, he caught the allusion all right, but rejected the meaning. He watched Ward snap the envelope under his arm and say he’d be right back.

  Lyon wanted to talk politics while he was gone—the perfidy of Blaine, the disgrace of having ex-Confederate generals in Congress, gobbling up federal money like pigs at a trough. Grant was used to this, too, and listened calmly without hearing much, and when Ward walked back in with the envelope still tucked under his arm and a folded check in his hand, he stood up again in pleasurable anticipation.

  “We have so many clients,” Ward said, holding out the check. “It took me a minute to find your records, Colonel. Here’s the original investment plus nine months’ dividends.”

  Lyon, Grant knew, owned a string of three or four hardware and dry-goods stores in southern Ohio; at his level he was a shrewd, experienced businessman, just as he had been a shrewd, hard-to-fool cavalry commander. He put on his reading glasses, then unfolded the check, then looked up at Grant with a whistle. “Ninety-seven thousand dollars!”

  “March comes in like a Lyon,” Grant said, enjoying the play on words.

  “We try to take good care of the General’s special friends,” Ward said.

  Lyon tapped the check against the center of his palm; looked at Ward; looked at Grant. “Well, I’d be a goddam fool to desert my old general now,” he said, and the boyish grin came back again, bigger than ever, making him look (this time Grant was glad to think of his own allusion) like Huckleberry Finn in the book Tom Sawyer, all he needed was a straw between his teeth and a fishing pole in his hand. “You take this check, Mr. Ward,” he said, “and reinvest the whole kit and caboodle, every dime, every solitary dime!”

  When they were both gone Grant took a last sip of coffee and walked around the corner of his desk. There, slipped into the edge of the blotter next to the cigars, Ward had also left his personal dividend check for March, which Grant opened and smoothed on the blotter. Three thousand dollars. Paid like clockwork every month, along with numerous bonuses and special distributions. Without counting Julia’s investment in the firm, or Buck’s or Fred’s, he himself was now worth, he calculated, a clear one million, eight hundred thousand dollars.

  He replaced the check on the blotter and continued on to the window behind the desk, where he parted the velvet curtain slightly and looked down at the splendid, busy intersection of Broadway and Wall Street.

  One reason he and Lincoln had gotten on so well, he thought, was that both of them believed in Fate. Grant, of course, had taken his belief from his mother. Where Lincoln had imbibed it Grant never knew, but more tha
n once the two of them had stood in the mud at City Point, Virginia, in the winter of ’64, and talked about the mysterious movements of Fate and Necessity that had chosen them each for his role in the great and bloody national drama. And more than once Lincoln had told him that when the war ended, he, Lincoln, ended too. The single consolation Grant had for Lincoln’s death was that he knew that Lincoln would have understood it as the wise and irresistible disposition of Fate; Fate and its higher purposes.

  Down on Broadway there was a fine tangle of horsecars and wheels and axles going on now. Some of the drivers had hopped down into the middle of the street and rolled up their sleeves, ready to fight. Irish, he thought, catching the faint hubbub of their voices through the glass. Or Italians. Hard to know at this distance. Italians lived uptown in squalid tenements, ten to a room, shouting, singing, never silent for a minute. The Irish drank.

  He walked back to the desk for a new cigar, number four of the day, and looked down at the check again; felt his mood lighten. Whatever else it had in mind, Fate, he thought wryly, striking his match, inhaling deeply, had evidently decided that he, Grant, was going to end his days as a very rich man.