Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Trist toured the workshops and dynamos with a guide, examined the wall-length charts that showed the location of all the wires and meters in lower Manhattan, and finally emerged on the street again at a little past nine.

  He walked west to 23 Wall Street and looked, for no good reason, at the redbrick offices of J. P. Morgan, who had prophetically underwritten Edison’s company; then started north again, past City Hall Square, past the Ladies’ Mile of clothing shops on Broadway, dark now but thronged with thousands and thousands of shoppers during daylight and next, he was told, on General Edison’s list of targets for illumination.

  At the Hoffman House on Fifth Avenue he went inside and found a booth as far as possible from the long, loud bar. He drank two beers and scribbled his notes on a tablet. Then he put his pencil down, leaned his head back against the booth, and looked very carefully at nothing at all, nothing whatsoever.

  Elizabeth Cameron—his mind started, stopped; stalled. Of the mysterious laws that govern men and women he was still, he thought, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine largely ignorant. What Edison should invent was a machine to turn off desire, to make husbands vanish, shower one-armed adulterous lovers with wealth, station—for the first time in weeks he felt a throb of pain in his nonexistent left arm—with symmetry.

  Some sort of cheer went up in one of the private rooms toward the rear. He pushed his empty beer glass aside and pocketed his notebook. Mark Twain had told him the Hoffman House was the largest saloon in New York. It was surely the noisiest. The booths and tables were dimly lit (gas, not electricity) and stank of spittoons and smoke. Over the bar was a string of elegant crystal gasoliers, and under them a fifty-foot-long painting showed endless sepia-colored nudes peering through bushes at the double-deep row of gentlemen drinking as fast as they could and peering right back. It was a splendid painting; he would buy it for his rooms in Washington. A black-aproned waiter with sideburns down to his jaw paused to help with his coat. “Ladies upstairs, sir,” he muttered in Trist’s ear. “In the back of the cigar store two doors down. Ladies everywhere.”

  The night was cold for early May. He pulled his collar closer and hurried up the sidewalk to Forty-first Street, where patrons from the National Theater spilled onto the sidewalk in a rich dark wave of furs and top hats, and horses and carriages jammed together from curb to curb, filling the air with voices and bells and the clatter of horses’ hoofs.

  In a momentary irony of great city-small world he caught a glimpse of Cump Sherman, of all people, the General’s unmistakable red beard blazing from a carriage window. Then the traffic shifted, a whip cracked, and Sherman was gone.

  At Forty-fifth Street he turned into the modest little hotel that Henry West, with an eye on the Post’s travel budget, had chosen for him. He trudged upstairs to the fourth floor, briefly considered going back out for another beer (ladies everywhere), but looked at his watch, calculated (accurately) how much money he had already spent in New York, and sat down instead on the edge of the bed.

  No electricity this far uptown, though both J. P. Morgan’s and William Vanderbilt’s mansions on Fifth Avenue were said to have private Edison systems. Trist adjusted the lamp on the wall to reduce the faint, cloying scent of gas and opened his book.

  He had seen the novel Esther twice in Henry Adams’s house, and out of curiosity had bought a copy himself at a bookshop on Broadway that afternoon. The Post paid five dollars extra for “filler” reviews that could take up space in the slow Sunday edition, or the Century magazine might run it for three dollars more. When the bellboy knocked on the door with his telegram Trist was just beginning chapter two; drowsy, half-asleep, he carried the yellow envelope back to the lamp and turned up the gas, because Western Union printing, as always, was dim.

  RUMORS GRANT AND WARD BUST STOP STAY IN

  NEW YORK TILL TUESDAY STOP WEST.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFTERWARDS, CADWALLADER, THOUGH NO LONGER WRITING regularly for the Herald or any other newspaper, pieced the story together this way.

  On Sunday, May 4, Ferdinand Ward appeared unexpectedly in the late afternoon at Grant’s house on East Sixty-sixth Street. “Buck” Grant (so called because he had been born in Ohio, the “Buckeye State”; a certified idiot) showed him into the parlor and skeetered off to find his father. When the General came in and sat down and spread his hands on his knees expectantly, Ward, as charming and silver-tongued as ever, smiled with his eyes and his teeth and said the firm had come to a little bump in the road.

  Father and son cocked their heads like a pair of dim-witted puppies.

  Fact was, Ward said, the Marine National Bank was experiencing difficulties.

  “What’s that got to do with us?” asked Buck.

  Ward was patient, of course. He explained that the Marine Bank held some six hundred and fifty thousand dollars of Grant & Ward money on deposit. But yesterday, Saturday, the City of New York, which also banked there, had withdrawn three hundred thousand dollars to pay off bonds; this left the bank rather badly short of cash. If there were another large withdrawal in the next few days, the bank would be hard pressed to pay, and Grant & Ward—he gave them a Pearl Street smile—would be … crippled.

  The General was as calm and direct as if he were taking a subordinate’s report at Vicksburg. “What do you want us to do?”

  Ward liked directness. It was how he did business himself, he said. What they should do was, among the three of them, raise three hundred thousand dollars as a loan and deposit it right away in the Marine Bank, where one of their special partners, Jim Fish, was president. He, Ward, was sure he could raise a hundred and fifty thousand. Now if the General and Buck could do the same, why, it would be a loan for one day only, Monday. The bank would haul in its creditors and pay them back without fail on Tuesday.

  “But,” said Buck, “this is Sunday.”

  Ward had noticed that.

  “Where in the world could we find a loan like that on Sunday?”

  Ward continued to smile and nod his head and drink the glass of sweet sherry Grant’s old black manservant had brought him on a polished tray.

  About an hour later—Grant’s house is conspicuous, people watch it off and on all day long, to catch a glimpse of him—about an hour later Grant himself came down the front steps, limping. He had slipped on the ice beside these very steps back in December and hurt his leg, and now and then still walks with a cane. The house itself is an ugly four-story redbrick affair that he purchased three years earlier, in 1881, and furnished lavishly with so many mementos and souvenirs of the war that visitors often think they’ve wandered by mistake into a military museum. The money for the house itself had come from a hundred-thousand-dollar trust fund raised by the owner of the Philadelphia Ledger after Grant lost his try for a third presidential nomination. The chief subscribers to the trust were millionaires like J. P. Morgan, who thought Grant had been a wonderful President and deplored the fact that ex-Presidents didn’t receive a government pension. (In New York a second trust fund was soon established, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars this time, and its chief subscribers were the railroad scoundrel Jay Gould and William Henry Vanderbilt, who remarked apropos to the Times that “Grant is one of Us.”)

  Now he could have called for his carriage, of course, or even a public taxi, but for some reason the General hobbled on his own power down the street to Fifth Avenue; hesitated for a time on the corner, then turned south. A group of small boys followed him silently right down to number 640, which occupies, as everybody knows, the entire block between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets. One of Vanderbilt’s Irish stablehands came out and chased the boys away with a whip, cursing.

  Inside the house, William Henry V. bestrode his leather chair like a paunchy colossus. He watched Grant lower himself into another chair on the other side of the fireplace and hand his hat and scarf to the butler; then he arranged his fat little Vanderbilt hands on the arms of his chair and listened.

  Grant has always possess
ed a remarkable memory. He now repeated Ward’s information just about word for word, arrived at the sum of one hundred fifty thousand dollars, and stopped.

  The other thing that everybody knows about him, besides his address, is that William Vanderbilt is as cranky and unpleasant as fifty million dollars can make you. When Grant was finished, he pursed his lips and frowned and flipped one pink hand over, like a chop on a grill. “Well, I don’t care anything about the Marine Bank,” he said. “It can fail. And as for Grant & Ward—I wouldn’t lend it a dime.” Grant sat in his chair and didn’t move a muscle. “But I’ll lend you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Vanderbilt said. “Personally, a loan from me to you.”

  He picked up a silver bell and rang for his checkbook.

  “I’ll pay you back on Tuesday without fail,” Grant said.

  William Henry grunted.

  As it turned out, Ward was waiting at Sixty-sixth Street when Grant returned. No luck on his side getting that loan. How had the General fared? Grant, who had once gone bankrupt trusting people in the real estate business and later surrounded himself, unknowingly of course, with swindlers in the White House, reached in his pocket for Vanderbilt’s check. I will deposit it myself, Ward told him over another sweet sherry, first thing tomorrow morning.

  WHICH, NATURALLY, HE DIDN’T DO.” TRIST WATCHED WITH awed fascination as Cadwallader shoveled scrambled eggs into his mouth with one hand, toast with the other. Two hands, he thought, not always an advantage.

  “Cashed it himself,” Cadwallader said indistinctly and wiped a massive glob of golden egg from his chin. “Bank went bust, Grant & Ward went bust—you wrote that part up very nice, I saw the Post every morning.”

  “But I missed the whole Sunday visit to Vanderbilt, the silver bell, the check.”

  “Oh, hell, everybody did.” Cadwallader was nonchalant. He mopped up the last of the egg with the last of the toast and sat back, gently belching. One of the Willard Hotel’s legion of green-jacketed waiters sprang to his side with a silver-plated coffeepot in hand. “Grant’s gardener is an old Michigan sergeant I knew back in the war. Vanderbilt has two thirsty veterans on his downstairs staff. Don’t pay them worth a damn. Can’t afford it, ha.”

  “And you got the cashier at the firm too,” Trist said. Because, though he looked twenty years older and seriously dissipated and unfocused, Cadwallader had written a special article for the New York Herald three days ago in which he described, with surprisingly sympathetic and eloquent prose, the scene at Grant & Ward the day the General learned he was totally bankrupt again at age sixty-two. According to Cadwallader, Grant had come to the offices late Tuesday morning in a hansom cab, after the Vanderbilt loan on Sunday, unaware that two hours earlier that same morning the Marine Bank had closed its doors and lowered its great iron shutters down to the sidewalk. The crowd of angry men gathered at its Wall Street entrance grew louder and angrier. They made their way up the street to the Broadway intersection, and by the time the General arrived there were so many of them that the police had also gathered, as if to control a mob. The crowd parted long enough to allow Grant to go inside; but inside was no better. The corridors and first-floor offices were jammed with more depositors and creditors, banging on counters, waving certificates, shouting, clamoring for their money.

  Buck was waiting at the back, coatless, not even wearing a tie. He was enough like his father at least to give the facts succinctly and simply: “Ward has fled,” he told the General. “Nobody can find our securities.”

  And Grant was still Grant. He said nothing whatsoever. He absorbed the news, limped on over to the elevator, and rode up to his second-floor office. All day long people came and went with further details, but the great central fact was that all the money, every cent, was gone. The Philadelphia trust fund, whose surplus he had put in Grant & Ward. The money Buck and his father-in-law had invested. The savings of every single member of the Grant family. The investments of all the old soldiers and comrades who had sent the General their pension checks and savings books. Every solitary penny gone.

  At the end of the afternoon George Spencer, the cashier, came into Grant’s office and told him that Buck had finally located the firm’s securities, locked in a third-floor cabinet, but they were now utterly worthless, and Ward had also made off with Vanderbilt’s personal check.

  “Spencer,” said Grant, “how has that man deceived us all in this manner?”

  Spencer shook his head, looked down at the piles of ledger books on Grant’s desk. The old West Point mathematician had evidently been trying to work out where the firm’s sixteen million dollars in listed assets could have vanished. “I have made it a rule of life,” Grant told Spencer, “to trust a man long after other people gave him up.” He paused. Spencer may have thought of the stories of Grant’s military loyalty to his White House subordinates, no matter how much his enemies attacked them. Or maybe the stories of Grant’s own down-and-out years in St. Louis, begging former colleagues to buy his firewood. “I learned that rule in the war,” Grant said. “But I don’t see how I can trust another human being again.”

  Spencer gathered up the useless ledger books and left the room. At the door he stopped and looked back. He saw U. S. Grant slowly bury his head in his hands and his shoulders start to heave. And not many men, if any, have ever seen a sight like that.

  “Called Roscoe Conkling in the next day,” Cadwallader said, lighting a foul cigar.

  Trist nodded. That he had reported. Conkling, having resigned in a fit of pique from the Senate, was now a prominent lawyer in New York; but even Lord Roscoe could do nothing to help his old candidate and President. Ferdinand Ward had been running what was called in Wall Street parlance a “bucket shop”—he took the money and tossed the contracts and orders in a bucket—paying dividends out of the original cash deposits, using the rest to maintain a splendid mansion in Brooklyn, a stable of thoroughbreds, a huge country estate in Connecticut.

  “You know he once coined a word?” Cadwallader tapped cigar ash onto the remains of his scrambled eggs and looked around at the big half-empty dining room of the Willard. “Grant did. When he was President he used to stroll over here with his bodyguard of a night and smoke a cigar or two, and he said all those lawyers and smooth talkers waiting by the potted palms to hoist a glass with a congressman, they ought to be called ‘lobbyists.’ ”

  “Is there anything,” Trist said, leaning back and contemplating Cadwallader’s lined face, his rumpled houndstooth jacket, his genial air of having just stepped off a racetrack, “you don’t know about Grant?”

  “I know something about everything. Service at Willard’s Hotel.”

  “Service at Willard’s Hotel.”

  “Look at them poised in their thousands, ready to pour me coffee. Used to be terrible service, till a few years back a California congressman got fed up and shot a waiter dead on the spot, improved things something wonderful. Hence the expression ‘stiffing the waiter.’ ”

  Trist grinned, not believing a word of it (though later he learned it was all true), and Cadwallader tapped ash on his plate. “Pay the bill, my dear, and walk me safely to the street.”

  On Pennsylvania Avenue he pulled out a dog-eared address book, which he proceeded to consult in the middle of the sidewalk. He had quit the Chicago Times two years ago, he said, and taken a state government post in Michigan, dealing (unclearly) with insurance and veterans’ pensions, and his trip to Washington was mostly concerned with that.

  “You get tired of writing,” he told Trist and snapped his address book shut. “You just plain run out of words. Use ’em up. I had a little project, a book I started—which way is Louisiana Avenue? I used to know this town.”

  Trist pointed toward the Capitol. Cadwallader took him by the arm and started to shuffle, and Trist was suddenly reminded of his stepfather’s last, failing years, and then of boys in the war, and then of limping Grant again, the wounded giant, and as if he were reading his mind Cadwallader shook his head as
they walked and said, “Well, the humiliation is pretty bad, I should think—half the country believes he stole that money, the rest just say poor old inept Grant, broke again. He went home that Tuesday, you know, emptied his wallet on the table, and Julia’s purse, counted his money on hand. A hundred and eighty dollars, all he had left in the world. Now he’s got to do something to put food on the table for his family, poor devil.” He stopped again in the middle of the sidewalk, indifferent to the pedestrians around him. “You’re good enough company, Trist, and not that bad a writer, but I never can tell whether you admire Grant or hate him.”

  Trist blinked in surprise and said nothing.

  “He clipped your wing at Cold Harbor.” Cadwallader nodded at the empty sleeve.

  For one ridiculous moment Trist looked at the sleeve as well, as if to confirm that it was empty. “I used to think the newspapers were right,” he said slowly, “that Grant was just a butcher.”

  “And then you got to know newspapermen,” Cadwallader said sardonically.

  “And then I got older. I think if they had assassinated Grant instead of Lincoln, we would have lost the war. I don’t hate him.”

  “Well, you can feel sorry for him anyway,” Cadwallader said. “I do. Had everything the country could offer—general, president, millionaire—and lost it. Bust. Now he’s all the way back to hardscrabble. That girl over there seems to know you.”