Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  What he and Lincoln had in common, Grant thought, was an infinite capacity for loneliness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NOW,” SAID HENRY WEST, WELL LAUNCHED ON A MONOLOGUE, “people claim he just gets drunk on millionaires. Before the war he needed whiskey. During the war he needed whiskey. But after, when he was in the White House, he apparently stopped drinking—cold stopped, just like that. Hasn’t touched a drop in years. So the irony is, he was almost brought down as President by the Whiskey Ring.”

  Trist shaded his eyes with his hand and came to a halt at the curb. Not long after he had left Washington for Paris the Post had moved its offices from 331 Pennsylvania Avenue to a new building at the corner of Tenth and D. Next door Hutchins had constructed a second building to house the National Electric Light Company, which he partly owned and whose first act apparently had been to install overpoweringly bright electric streetlamps at each corner of the intersection. It was seven o’clock at night just now, but looked like mid-August noon on the planet Edison. A similar set of lights illuminated the west front of the Capitol, a faint but lurid glow now over the rooftops behind them. The two men blinked in the glare, waited for a horsecar to rattle by, then crossed to Tenth.

  “But then again, you weren’t here when he was President.” West made it sound vaguely like an accusation.

  “No. Leading a life of pleasure in the Old World.”

  “Well, the Whiskey Ring came at the end of Grant’s second term. Some of the internal-revenue supervisors out west got in league with the local whiskey distillers and pocketed all the taxes. The Chief Clerk of the Treasury went to jail, and Grant’s little brother Orvil almost did. They indicted his private secretary, too, General Babcock, noble veteran like yourself. But Grant wrote a testimonial letter and the jury let him off.”

  “I only remember Black Friday.”

  “My favorite.” West nodded approval. They passed a streetwalker stranded like a mermaid in a pool of electric light. “Much gaudier than the Whiskey Ring. And the poor old Crédit Mobilier was just a bunch of crooked bookkeepers. Your modern up-to-date voter has to be a connoisseur of corruption. That’s the new Pension Building over there, ugliest pile of bricks in Washington. The only thing wrong with it, Phil Sheridan claims, is they made it fireproof.”

  Trist laughed, and they crossed the next street. Grant and his scandals. Out of sheer force of habit he started to dredge up details. Crédit Mobilier was railroads and bribery. Black Friday had been the day in September of ’69 when Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the gold market in New York. Apparently they’d thought Grant was simply too dull and slow-witted to stop them, and afterward most journalists, predisposed to admire the sharp-witted and the larcenous, had decided they were absolutely right. Henry Adams had written a savage and much reprinted article about Grant’s incompetence.

  “But, you know, Grant”—Trist halted on the sidewalk and looked up in wonder at the newest product of American technology, the electric billboard, where Edison’s great invention was illuminating a brilliantly colored green-and-yellow jar of Heinz’s Pickles—57 Varieties! Why in the world would he defend Grant? “In fact, Grant was innocent every time, wasn’t he? It was the people around him who were dishonest. As far as I remember, he actually outsmarted Fisk and Gould. He went over to the Treasury and released government gold on the market when they didn’t expect it, and Black Friday turned out to be a fizzle.”

  “Shouldn’t have been consorting—lovely word—with known millionaires, that’s what started all his troubles. Something about being so poor and inept at business before the war, and Papa Grant being so good at it—all those tycoons just licked him up and down like a sucker. Still do. Jim Fisk owned a beautiful sailing yacht back then, and each stateroom had its own canary, and each canary was named after one of Fisk’s pals. So there was the canary John D. Rockefeller, the canary J. P. Morgan, the canary Leland Stanford, and also, you will not be amazed to learn, the canary General Grant.”

  They stopped again while Trist adjusted his collar. He needed one of the new snap buttons for his coat, West had informed him earlier, and another set for his shoes. Latest thing in fashion, invented by a one-armed veteran just like Trist.

  “I don’t believe,” Trist objected, “the canaries.”

  West shrugged; grinned.

  “And I thought about Democracy all week and I still don’t see Mrs. Adams in it either.”

  West’s shrug came a little more slowly. “Well, that’s what everybody says. She’s witty. She’s got the sharpest tongue in the city—it’s a woman’s book—feline, all those little asides about fashion and marriage. I know a guy in Henry Holt’s, the publisher, swears she wrote it.”

  Trist opened his mouth to object, couldn’t think of a logical objection. Democracy was in its twelfth phenomenal printing, sixth translation, an international success; librarians routinely catalogued it under John Hay or Clarence King. It was a brilliant novel, and it belonged to her world for sure. But whatever else she was, bright, sensitive little Clover Adams was not an anonymous person.

  “Well, I’ll ask her when I see her,” he said, and Henry West snorted.

  At Gillian’s Tavern they went, not to a booth, but straight to the long mahogany bar itself, where Trist ordered only the mildest lager beer, since he was indeed walking on from the tavern to Henry Adams’s house for a “quiet soirée,” as Clover Adams had put it in her note (not anonymous). But the bar was crowded from one end to the other, a phalanx of shoulders and hats and foul-smelling cigars at rakish angles, and they quickly moved back to their accustomed corner in the rear.

  For all his casual irreverence, West had a bulldog kind of stubbornness. They drank a few moments in companionable silence, then he leaned forward and poked Trist in the ribs with a finger.

  “I spend half my day talking about U. S. Grant,” he grumbled, “like back then, and he ain’t even running for nomination now.”

  “Most famous man in the world.”

  “Fact is, you can’t decide whether Grant was corrupt or incompetent until you decide how smart you think he is.”

  “Henry Adams swears he doesn’t think at all, he’s ‘preintellectual.’ ”

  West laughed into his beer and then wiped his dripping moustaches with a sleeve. “You tell me how a man can lead an army of five hundred thousand men and defeat Bobby Lee and not think.”

  Trist shook his head and finished his beer. A hovering waiter started to come forward, but Trist waved him away. It was too early to leave for the Adamses’, he thought, too late to have another drink. Henry West was now identifying the drinkers at the bar as either Congressmen or pimps by the slouch of their backs. Newspaper Row was situated in the middle of the Washington district that had been known in the war as Hooker’s Division, because General Joe Hooker seemed to have enlisted as many whores as soldiers at his headquarters there. Trist’s mind moved in a series of elliptical skips that reminded him of his woozy malarial fever days—whores, pimps, “hookers”—in Paris the most expensive courtesans were known as grandes horizontales, in Colorado after the war he had seen a sign in a Chinese brothel: “10¢ Lookee, 25¢ Feelee, 50¢ Doee.” Beside him West said something droll and unprintable about Congressmen with hands in their pockets. The canary Nick Trist. First person. His mind began another wild skip of association, which he stopped in midflight, by sheer force of will.

  Twenty minutes later he paid his hackney driver and descended awkwardly to the sidewalk in front of 1607 H Street. Then stopped and listened for a moment to the sound of barking dogs coming down from the second-floor windows. He squinted at his watch.

  “Goddam kennel in there,” said Don Cameron’s voice behind him. “What the hell do they call them?”

  “Boojum,” said Elizabeth Cameron, “Marquis, Possum.”

  “It’s Trist.” Cameron leaned forward and stared. The march of electric streetlamps had not yet reached Lafayette Square, so Trist was unable to see clearly how much Elizabeth blushe
d, or how much his own hand shook as they greeted, nodded, smiled. Inside the house, while he was still awkwardly unfastening his coat, she disappeared at once—“First thing women do,” said Cameron, pulling out a cigar, then glowering at it. “They spend two hours getting ready for a party, then they arrive and right away they go upstairs to do their face. Can’t smoke here, dammit.”

  “You look well, Senator.”

  Cameron’s face, in Henry Adams’s softly lit hallway, was redder and beefier than ever. He wore his hair long now, curled around his collar Western-style, and when he smiled (grimaced) one incisor was missing. But otherwise he was the same vaguely menacing, highly physical presence he had always been.

  “Well, you look,” Cameron began, but before he could say another word Clover Adams was at his side, rising on her toes, smiling her homely crow’s smile, touching each of them by the arm. “Come inside, drink, boire”—she pulled them into the parlor where tea had been served to Trist three days before, and in another minute Trist found himself standing next to the fireplace and the portrait of mad Nebuchadnezzar, holding a glass of champagne. In front of him a stooped and gray-bearded man he recognized as the historian Professor Bancroft advanced; took Trist’s glass of champagne from him, shook his hand in greeting, gave back the glass. “George Bancroft,” he said. “Mrs. Bancroft.” A white-haired woman peered around his shoulder like a mouse. “Met you at Beale’s three years ago.”

  “The historian’s memory,” said his wife proudly. “My dear,” she added, clutching Clover’s arm as she passed, “you have more beautiful things in this house every day. I dislike auctions very much, but I mean to go to yours after you die.”

  Clover stood for a moment, modest, blushing, uncharacteristically silent—write Democracy? That most unblushing, ironic of books? Trist dismissed the idea on the spot. Clover rose on her toes and gestured toward an open door. “Henry’s in the dining room,” she said, “supervising the food. We eat buffet-style tonight because General Sherman is coming—yes!—but we don’t know when, he’s on the train from New York.”

  Both Bancrofts had something to say about trains, New York, unpunctual generals. Trist listened politely, glanced as often as he could around the room. It was a party of thirty people at least, few of whom he recognized. Young Emily Beale, looking unwell still, sat in a chair while her father stood with one hand protectively on her shoulder. Don Cameron glowered in his best party manner at a small, highly moustached man with bright eyes and a German accent, identified later as the more or less famous civil service reformer Carl Schurz. Others appeared to be senators, neighbors, a few members of the German diplomatic legation. In the British fashion the Adamses made no effort to introduce anyone.

  “Who is that couple?” Trist boldly asked Clover Adams as she came up to him again. She frowned and touched his arm. “Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler,” she murmured. In the dining room, just visible from where they stood, Henry Adams’s bald white pate bobbed like a cork between two taller, stouter guests. “Mr. Schuyler works in the State Department library,” Clover said. “He helps Henry sometimes with research. Very dull man. His wife is even worse. Never gossips. For social purposes I prefer—don’t you, Mr. Trist?—the vicious and the frivolous.”

  Trist laughed out loud, turned to place his empty glass on a tray, and found himself in mid-laugh face-to-face at last with Elizabeth Cameron.

  “Well, you two,” said Clover beside him, “old pards.” She gave one more bounce, a pat on Trist’s arm, and headed toward the unvicious Schuylers.

  “Mr. Trist,” said Elizabeth Cameron, “again.”

  Whatever he had rehearsed or imagined or thought of beforehand to say, whatever he had remembered of her black hair, the curve of her throat, or the curl of her lip—all of it flew out of his head in an instant. He felt the flush steal across his face, burning. Just as he knew she would, Elizabeth Cameron burst in his mind like a star.

  “The proverbial bad penny,” he replied in a voice unsurprisingly thick. “I just keep turning up.”

  “Mrs. Adams,” Elizabeth said, looking toward Clover now on the other side of the room—abruptly she changed her mind about the sentence. “I was just back there in the study with Mr. Adams. He was showing me some old manuscripts. He’s hard at work on his History, he says.”

  “Well, he was hard at work on it when I was here three years ago.”

  “Was it so long, Mr. Trist?”

  “Two and a half years since Chicago.”

  “Chicago,” she murmured, and reached down to the tray for a glass of champagne. “How silly of you to stay away so long.”

  It was foolish to say, as people did, that looks never mattered. There were beautiful women who locked their hips and rounded their shoulders forward, as if they were determined to hate themselves, and Trist had known some of these in Paris. There were women, especially in America, who were nervous, warm, quick to smile, quick to touch, who nonetheless carried their bodies as if they were fortresses, to be stormed and defended. And there were beautiful women, sometimes, who came bearing themselves like a gift, a Renaissance Quattrocento painting, like light made flesh.

  He had the illusion of seeing her at a distance, through a window from the street. He must have asked her how life in Washington was, though he couldn’t remember doing it, because she was suddenly telling him at pleasant, too-great length about an addition they had made to their home in Lafayette Square, how Maudie hated her school, how all the Senator’s grown-up children disliked her. And she must have asked him in turn about his travels, because, while Henry Adams’s white face passed back and forth three times in the mirror, he heard himself describing the battlefields book and then the move from Paris to London, where society was duller but business was better.

  “So restless,” she said. “Even in Europe, American men are always so restless.”

  In the dining room Henry Adams was now bowing to them both, crooking a finger at Elizabeth.

  She hesitated, lifting her chin, pursing her mouth in a gesture Trist could have sketched from memory. “Mine host.”

  “I didn’t think,” Trist said, not believing that he was actually going to say it, “that I would ever see you again, after Chicago.”

  She leaned forward, so close that Trist could see the swell of her breasts under the soft blue silk of her dress, the faint black hairs on her neck.

  “There is always more order to life than we think, Mr. Trist,” she murmured, turning away, but her hand on his arm as she turned was like a spark to his skin.

  General Sherman was late, hungry, stupendously dramatic. He came through the front door and into the cluttered Adams house like a redheaded bombshell, one hour and thirty goddam minutes late, as he announced, spreading his arms, cursing the trains, dropping a muddy cloak from his shoulders to the carpet as every face in the house turned toward him.

  “Jupiter Pluvius reigns!” he cried, and shook his hands to show how wet they were. As if on cue, lightning cracked, a thunderclap rolled over the roof, and ladies (and Mr. Schuyler) shrieked, and then for the next two tumultuous hours Sherman transformed the house into a theater of personality. If Mars himself had blazed into the fragile porcelain world of the Adamses the effect could have hardly been less shattering. Sherman gathered a drink in each hand, marched from lady to lady introducing himself with a bow and a leer, paused to wrap both arms (not spilling a drop) around his niece in greeting, winked over her shoulder first at Trist, then at Henry Adams, who literally recoiled three steps toward his books. In the second parlor, while one of the ladies played muted but martial chords on a piano, he recited passages from Dickens, Shakespeare. Studying Trist’s empty sleeve, he launched into a series of war stories, each one wilder and funnier than the last. The week before they took Vicksburg, he told General Beale, who stood beaming with an arm around his daughter Emily, the engineers were experimenting with tunnels and explosives. One day they blew up a Rebel hill—no damage, except a nigger cook who was standing nearby was thrown nine
ty feet in the air like a flying black duck, still holding his spoon, and landed on his feet unhurt on the Union side, where he was promptly hired as a cook by Grant.

  “Where did you lose it?” Sherman aimed a ferocious eye at Trist’s arm.

  “Cold Harbor.”

  “Bugger the Rebs,” Sherman said, and refilled Trist’s glass. “When I was in Georgia somebody wrote me a seriously crazy letter—could have been Mark Twain, craziest man I know—said, ‘General, why not fill all your shells and bullets with snuff? When they explode, the Confederates will be sneezing so hard your people can just walk up and take ’em!’ Somebody else said, The war could be over in a week, just make all the Union bayonets one foot longer than the Confederate ones, they’ll never be able to touch you.”

  “Show us, General,” said Clover Adams, who seemed, unlike her husband, charmed and enthralled by so much martial energy, “how you marched through Georgia.”

  Sherman grinned. The Adams servants had set up two long tables of food in the dining room, and another smaller table nearby. From one of the long tables Sherman gathered spoons, knives, a handful of tiny salt and pepper shakers. “Rebels,” he said, lining the pepper shakers up around a soup bowl. “Atlanta. Us. Joe Hood’s troops.” In loud, snapping commands, as if the little spoons and shakers would jump to life and start to march, he maneuvered them left, right, around the defenseless, bewildered bowl. Somebody handed him a candle. Sherman swung it fluttering above Atlanta, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. Clover pushed a teacup forward to represent McPherson. Sherman showed his yellow teeth in a wolf’s smile.

  “You remember what Jeff Davis said when we started?”

  Clover shook her head. To Trist’s surprise it was Henry Adams’s patrician drawl that answered. “He said you would meet the same fate as Napoleon when he invaded Russia.”