Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Clover was pleased, rose on her toes. “My sister claims it’s ridiculous any man and woman should be so like one another as we are. My father raised me from a girl. I’ve written him every Sunday of my life since I was married. Twelve years this month.”

  There were dozens of other photographs of relatives, houses, the Adams family retreat at Beverly Farms north of Boston. The earliest picture was of Henry in the stateroom of a Nile River steamer, reading a book on their wedding journey to Egypt. In another, Clover had posed her three Skye terriers around a child’s doll table, in a tea party. The last one, taken evidently just a week or so earlier, showed their friend John Hay standing before their fireplace and holding, with a curious proprietary expression on his face, a copy of the French translation of the novel Democracy. “People do say,” Clover observed with perfect blandness, “that he wrote it, of course.”

  After which, Emily Beale pleaded fatigue and returned to her home to rest, and Clover and Henry and Elizabeth and Trist sat down, awkward somehow, in the parlor again, beneath the portrait of demented King Nebuchadnezzar. But the second round of tea had scarcely been poured when a servant hurried in to announce that Mrs. Bancroft had a crisis in her garden and wished to see the ladies, and in a matter of moments, in a flutter of disappearing coats, hats, parasols, Trist found himself alone with Henry.

  Not precisely, he thought, a consummation devoutly to be wished by either of them. His host, ironic at all times, had been for some minutes now both prickly and ironic. “I must remember to thank you for your Jefferson letters,” he said now to Trist, and added, “Not much use to the historian, I fear.”

  “Ah. Sorry.”

  “They’re merely personal,” said Adams.

  “Too bad I couldn’t offer you something better.” Trist crossed his legs, glanced at the clock. “A photograph of him, say, like Mrs. Adams’s photographs.”

  Adams regarded him for a moment from his tiny chair, then put down his cup. “You cared for her photographs, did you?”

  “They seem charming to me, artistic even.”

  “I don’t see photography in terms of art.” Adams said it bluntly. “Journalism, a hobby perhaps. My wife’s talent seems to me quite ordinary. Perhaps you would like to come into my study and see what I mean.”

  The study lay at the end of a whitewashed corridor and was almost as cluttered as the parlor. Three walls were covered floor to ceiling with shelves of books; even the window seat behind the desk had a foot-high stack of books and journals; two more stacks seemed to hold down corners of the carpet. The desk was disorderly, but in a way that Trist recognized as a writer’s working confusion. Above the fireplace hung a pen-and-ink drawing, signed by William Blake, which portrayed, on inspection, Ezekiel mourning his dead wife.

  “Wedding present,” Adams said, nodding at the drawing, “from Frank Palgrave in London, man who did the Golden Treasury of Poetry. Peculiar taste for a wedding gift, no? yes?” He pushed aside the novel Esther, which Trist had last seen in the Adams hallway. “These are your Jefferson letters, which I will hold on to a little longer, if you don’t mind. These are pages from my chapter attempting—already one falls back on the old vocabulary—a sketch of Thomas Jefferson’s quite impossibly feline character. I’d be grateful if you took it to your home and read them over, for errors. Professor Bancroft does this for me, often, but since you have perhaps the great advantage of having heard, at second hand of course, family anecdotes, perhaps—? In any case, you’ll see that I pursue the motif of painting, not photography, as the only art that might do justice to Jefferson’s, what would I say? His semitransparent shadows?”

  “A very nice phrase.” Trist took the pages with an odd sense that Adams had asked him in for something more.

  “This is what I’ve managed so far.” Adams held up two richly bound red leather books, one in each hand, but made no move to offer them to Trist. “I’ve had my first two volumes of the History privately printed in New York, and bound as you see. Six copies in all. I intend to send them to a few friends for comment or, possibly, pleasure.”

  “But you mean to publish them too, of course, in the regular way?”

  Adams replaced one of the volumes on his shelf; opened the other on his desk and spread it flat. But he didn’t turn it around for Trist to read, or step aside so that Trist could see the opened pages. “I care very little for publication, in fact, Mr. Trist.” He tilted his bald head and smiled a small, pinched smile. “Shocking notion to a journalist, no doubt. Yet I’m almost entirely content to write my books, show them to one or two trusted friends, and for the rest—what do I care really? I never bring a book into the world without a sense of shame. Indeed, to say that I detest my own writing is a mild expression.”

  Trist could only make a feeble murmur of protest.

  “You are now a reporter again for the Washington Post, I understand? Lizzie Cameron told me.”

  Trist folded the sheets of paper with Adams’s “sketch” of Jefferson and placed them in his jacket pocket. “I always miscalculate expenses, I suppose.” The thought occurred to him that Henry Adams, born to wealth and privilege, had probably never calculated expenses of any kind, at all. “My battlefields book is going to need more time. I have to revisit some of the sites. The photographer is costly. So I’ve signed on with the Post as a kind of temporary special correspondent, yes.”

  Adams opened the door to the parlor and held out his stiff arm like a miniature butler. “I never read the Post. I am, despite your friends Senator Cameron and General Grant, a Republican to my core. Although perhaps this year, if Cleveland is nominated, I may, for once, deviate.”

  “I’m going to New York next week. I’ll tell you what I learn about Cleveland.”

  “Travel, Mr. Trist,” said Adams as he closed the door behind them, “even to New York, is one of the two great consolations of life. I see the ladies returning en force. We should sit down and finish our tea.”

  But Trist was beginning to catch the rhythm of Adams’s habitually ironic, habitually self-deprecating voice. “What is the other consolation then?”

  “The first five or ten years of a happy marriage,” Adams replied as he sat down and picked up his cup. “I hear their rustle-rustle at the door, Mr. Trist.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  MARK TWAIN LIKED TO INVITE HIMSELF TO LUNCH WITH General Grant about once a month. Or in any case, as often as he could come down from his palatial home in Hartford to New York City and turn himself loose, as he said, on an unsuspecting metropolis.

  The lunches were not elaborate affairs. Usually Twain simply called at the offices of Grant & Ward at 2 Wall Street and the General sent out for sandwiches and coffee and the two of them dined in shirtsleeves at his desk. Each smoked two or three companionable cigars. Twain reported on the progress of his latest investments—he was going to start a publishing company, he had invented a children’s board game for learning English history, also a self-pasting scrapbook and a new kind of grape-pruning shears, he was sponsoring a Connecticut genius named Paige (wonderful, prophetic name), who had invented a revolutionary typesetting machine for books. Grant listened and puffed and laconically reported in turn that Ferdinand Ward was also a genius and Grant & Ward were still setting Wall Street records, though the Mexican railroad project was as far as ever from reality. Sometimes they talked politics—the mugwump Twain supported the Democrat Grover Cleveland—Grant remained a loyal Republican. Sometimes, too, they talked about the war; and on that subject, if no other, Grant usually held forth at length and the former Confederate private listened.

  These facts and more Trist learned from Twain himself at a table in the bar of Delmonico’s Restaurant on Madison Square, in the late afternoon of April 28, following (Twain carefully explained) only the second such lunch of the year.

  “Missed January, of course,” he said, “because the General still had his pneumonia, and then February—” He paused to tap cigar ash into a sterling-silver ashtray placed at his elbow by Ch
arles Delmonico himself, and at precisely that moment somebody at the bar called, “Hey, Mark!” Twain (was it Twain or Clemens?) gave a world-weary sigh, patted Trist on the shoulder, and got to his feet, and Trist leaned back and watched him work his way down the row of barstools, shaking hands like a politician, with a word or a joke or a waggish wag of his red head for every hanger-on in the room.

  They had run into each other by chance in the offices of the Century magazine, where Twain (it was surely Twain), with a politician’s memory, had instantly recalled Chicago, their interview, the illuminated cat (“not prospering,” he confided glumly). Everybody in the magazine had known Twain—no surprise—but so had people in the streets as they walked to Delmonico’s, even the hackney drivers and the newsboys standing in the sunshine by the Union Hotel, who likewise waved their hands and shouted, “Hey, Mark!” As writers went, Trist thought with more than a twinge of envy, the forty-eight-year-old author of Tom Sawyer and The Innocents Abroad had achieved an astonishing level of popular celebrity.

  But far more surprising was the fascination Twain himself revealed for other celebrities. When he returned to the table and picked up his Scotch old-fashioned again, he quickly reverted to the subject of Grant and their intimate lunches, then to the various financiers, playwrights, actors, tycoons, dignitaries of every stripe that he, Twain, personally knew, knew of, intended to know.

  “Your Henry Adams, for example,” he said, “exclusive fellow?”

  “Well, retiring, quiet.”

  “He and John Hay—I know John Hay pretty well—and Clarence King, they all have a secret club. The ‘Five of Hearts,’ because their wives are in it too.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “And Edison—you say you’re going down to New Jersey to see him tomorrow?”

  Trist nodded. Henry West had originally sent him to New York to write a story for the Post on Governor Grover Cleveland, whose public admission of having fathered an illegitimate child was rapidly becoming the kind of campaign issue the Post delighted in; but then he had telegraphed that morning to ask Trist to stay on and write a feature about Thomas Alva Edison and his Menlo Park laboratory for the Sunday edition.

  “I might come down with you,” Twain said in his slow Missouri drawl. “Like to meet him.”

  But in the end it was not so much literary or even electrical celebrity that seemed to matter to Twain—by degrees he brought the conversation back to Grant and the war and the phenomenon above all of what he called the “self-invented” man, that strange American ability to be two completely different people in one lifetime. Sam Grant had been a total failure, did Trist know that? Before the war he was a nothing, a nobody, ordinary and obscure. The truth was—Twain lowered his voice to a whisper—he did drink, before the war. Maybe even once or twice during the war. And yet in the fiery crucible of battle Grant had actually created a whole new self—a second nature—Sam Grant was a flop, U. S. Grant turned out to possess the mysterious powers of a giant.

  “Odd how you both have the same first name,” Trist observed as they parted at the restaurant door. “Sam Grant, Sam Clemens.”

  “Noticed it myself,” Twain agreed.

  “Except almost nobody calls you ‘Sam.’ ”

  Twain nodded. “Howells does. My wife calls me ‘Youth.’ Sometimes Grant’s wife calls him ‘Victor.’ ” He raised one hand to wave to a passing admirer on the sunlit sidewalk. “I’m a self-invented man, too, you know. Respectable Old Sam Clemens blushes to his eyebrows when he thinks of that terrible ruffian Twain.”

  There was something so comical and outrageous in Twain’s deadpan drawl and hangdog wag of his head that Trist burst out laughing.

  Twain watched him complacently. “You can live a small life, Trist,” he said, and paused to puff at his cigar, “or a big one.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  IN THE WAR THE GUNPOWDER USED IN MUSKETS AND RIFLES always left long tattered sheets of greasy black smoke hanging in the air, a foul, sticky smear that clung tenaciously to the hair and skin. In a matter of minutes it would deposit a black film on every soldier’s face and hands, so that sometimes a charging line of infantry looked bizarrely like a row of poorly made-up actors in a minstrel show.

  Trist glanced at one of the murky alleys that opened into this part of lower Broadway, and the pair of dirty-faced newsboys standing at its mouth, hawking their papers, and he thought of the smoke in the war, and then by a natural logic of other black things: the coffee beans that every soldier had carried in his knapsack and ground with his musket butt on a stone and often ate raw, out of his hand. The “war paint” some troops made by breaking open cartridge papers and rubbing their cheeks with black powder. “Shadow soup,” which certain army cooks were said to fix by boiling water with the shadow of a chicken over it (add salt and serve). The secret of prose is contrast, Cadwallader had told him back in Chicago. Like so much else that Cadwallader said it was badly overstated and still probably true. At the far end of Broadway Trist could already see the brilliant white glow of a string of Edison electrical streetlamps, not orange-tinted like the ones in Washington, but intensely, purely white, so painfully bright that the rest of the city around them looked, by contrast, infernally black.

  He crossed to the east side of Broadway, dodging between two horse-drawn omnibuses rattling at frantic New York speed in opposite directions, and came up beside yet another alley, where a pale girl no more than ten or twelve stood holding a wooden board with boutonnieres of artificial red flowers. Ten cents. He bought one and let her pin it to his collar, a solemn, wordless exchange. Despite the hour—automatically he looked up at one of the big clocks set on a high iron pedestal, still faintly luminous at seven-thirty in the evening. Despite the hour, he thought, the sidewalks were jammed with busy, fast-moving crowds of pedestrians and shoppers, the streets with traffic. Every doorway or alley mouth held somebody peddling something. Beggars in old flat blue army caps crouched on the curb, men in glossy top hats hurried east and west, up and down, the whole long street surged and heaved with restless “electrical” energy.

  He stepped up his pace, turned to the left again, and caught a whiff of the Fulton fish market. The Edison lights grew even brighter. Warehouses and offices began to replace the shops and restaurants of the Broadway district. The streets were filled now with workers, finished for the day, streaming toward the enormous new Brooklyn Bridge above Fulton Street. In Washington—contrast—at this time of night there would be only scattered taxis and private carriages and a few stray clerks or black servants out on the street, a sleepy, small-town atmosphere compared to the push and shove of New York.

  A stray thought crossed his mind, as if at an angle. If he were Henry Adams and rich enough to live in luxury anywhere in the world, why of all places would he choose Washington? Placid, pleasant, undemanding Washington?

  He turned left again at Nassau Street and almost stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to shade his eyes.

  You must go back to New York, Edison had said at the end of their interview yesterday in New Jersey (a man accustomed to giving orders) and see my installation at the Pearl Street station. And Henry West, by return telegraph, had not only agreed but insisted.

  Trist had told Henry Adams the plain truth. He had indeed miscalculated his expenses, especially photography and travel, and he was more and more dependent on his part-time income from the Post. And besides, he had already written one long feature on Edison—in 1881, at the Exposition d’Électricité in Paris, Edison had swept every prize and award the French could think to offer, and Trist had covered half the pages of L’Illustration one month with Edisonian lore and information, though of course Edison’s lieutenants, not the great man himself, had made the trip to Paris.

  Go to 257 Pearl Street, he had been instructed. Show them this note. Go straight on down into the basement.

  Contrast. The Paris Exposition had been held in the vast Palais d’Industrie next to the Tuileries gardens, an enormous steel-and-glass str
ucture that housed not only room after room of newly invented electrical devices but also—this was France, after all—numerous exhibits of a purely irrational and decorative nature. The entrance hall had been given over to a full-sized reproduction of a Normandy lighthouse, three stories tall, with a revolving electric lamp at the top and an artificial seacoast at the bottom made up of rocks, waterfalls, waves, sailboats, and three or four electrical “canoes” that circled the lighthouse base. In the exhibit rooms proper, under a fully inflated dirigible airship, complete with electric propeller, you could see Edison’s phonographs, his improved telephones, his strings of dazzling electric lamps, whose circuits a lady or gentleman could adjust at will by the touch of a switch. If you chose, you could also pick up the telephone and hear a voice ten blocks away at the Opéra begin to sing, or (at another booth) connect yourself to the Comédie-Française, where an actor politely asked whether you preferred to hear him recite Molière or Racine.

  But the Pearl Street headquarters of the Edison Electric Company in Manhattan was a grimy old warehouse sans poésie, reinforced by heavy timbers and steel, that housed workshops and toolrooms on the upper floors and six gigantic subterranean dynamo engines, each supported in turn by a wilderness of cables, wires, pipes, coal bins, and water pumps. Not a lighthouse or dirigible in sight. Edison had contracted to furnish electrical power, including light, to a square-mile area bounded by Spruce, Wall, Nassau, and Pearl Streets, and to replace the gas lamps in every single building with his own electrical ones, and it was, as far as Trist could tell, his genius at organization as much as invention that had made the experiment succeed. The dynamo rooms were deafening and filthy, but they supplied the power. The gas lines under the cobblestone streets had been uncovered and next to them workmen had simply buried parallel insulated pipes of bundled electrical wires, and every building in the district had been given a free supply of patented carbonized lamps (a dollar a bulb to replace) which fit in the old gas fixtures. When you climbed back out of the dynamo rooms and looked down Pearl Street to the west, the effect was a fairyland—streets brilliantly clear and lit, window after window glowing with pure white light, the stars themselves eclipsed by Edison.