Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Gilder was already hissing with suppressed laughter, Grant observed, but then, veterans of a certain age found everything about the war and the army interesting and entertaining, and meanwhile Johnson was proudly smiling up at the faces in the doorway, as if to show off his discovery.

  “Well, as company supply officer,” Grant said, “Bragg denied his own request as company commander. So on one side of the sheet of paper he wrote his endorsement and approval and on the other side he wrote his denial.”

  Everybody leaned forward expectantly. Grant thought of Mark Twain again, Mark Twain’s advice—always draw out your punch line as long as possible, make them wait on the edge of their chairs. Grant picked up his coffee cup again; and sipped; and paused.

  “And so next day Bragg walked straight across the parade ground to the colonel of his division and gave him the paper and asked for a resolution of the matter. ‘My God,’ said the colonel, ‘you’ve quarreled with every other officer in the whole army, Bragg, and now’ ”—longest possible pause—“ ‘you’re quarreling with yourself!’ ”

  Afterwards everybody congratulated the General for his story, and Gilder said it was exactly what they wanted in the magazine articles and the book memoirs to follow, but they thought it would be better to draw up a separate contract for the book, and unfortunately that would take the lawyers about a month, if Grant didn’t mind.

  Which he didn’t. He had recently sold two small houses in St. Louis that Julia had inherited from her father, and so there was a little money to last through Christmas at least, and he was sure that Johnson and Gilder meant to do well by him, though even as that idea rose up in his mind he remembered Ferdinand Ward for a harsh, bitter instant and how far trust in somebody’s goodwill had taken him then.

  At one o’clock, not having eaten a lunch, he arrived at Dr. Barker’s office on Fifth Avenue for his promised consultation. Brisk, brief, thoroughly professional—Dr. Barker was waiting at the door. Grant loosened his collar, removed his coat and tie.

  How long had he felt the pain in his throat?

  Since June, the episode of the peach.

  And it was still sore now?

  To tell the truth, in the excitement of writing—learning to write—the pain had either gone away or subsided greatly during the summer. But since he’d been back in New York it kept him awake at night, it made him cough in the day, his whole neck—Grant looked at the ceiling and searched for a word—throbbed.

  Barker examined his mouth for a while, thumped his chest, studied for some reason his ears; then wrote on a card and told him to go that day, that very afternoon, six blocks over to the office of Dr. John H. Douglas, who was a specialist in throats.

  On the street again, Grant hesitated. He read the address card over two or three times as he stood on the sidewalk and people streamed around him. Barker’s manner was always brisk and professional, alarming to many patients. Somebody said, passing by him, “Hello, General,” and Grant tipped his black silk top hat, gravely, and finally started to walk.

  Dr. Douglas the General already knew fairly well, from the war. And where Barker was dour and foxy in complexion and wore his sideburns fluffed out like a pair of bushy red spinnakers, Douglas was a more comfortable man to be with, mild and white-haired, with a good full beard like Grant’s own. Barker hadn’t been in the army, but Douglas had served with the Sanitary Commission—they had actually met on the march to Fort Donelson, Grant’s first great victory, in ’62—and Douglas had been at Shiloh and later the Wilderness, in charge of field hospitals for the Army of the Potomac. What he always remembered about Dr. Douglas was his pet remedy for the scurvy, which afflicted more soldiers on long marches than you would like to think: sauerkraut and pickles, prescribed and requisitioned by the barrel.

  At Douglas’s office a nurse was already holding the door open when he arrived—on the desk he saw a telephone, which Barker had in his office too, of course—and the nurse led him past a bench full of waiting patients into an examination room, and there, for the second time that day, he took off his shirt and tie and sat like an old beaver in his undershirt and trousers on a doctor’s chair.

  The first thing Douglas had noticed, the doctor said, when he came in, was that Grant was limping down the hall. “Can’t be your throat causing that,” he commented pleasantly and sat down opposite.

  “I fell on the sidewalk just before Christmas,” Grant told him, “right in front of my house.” Barker had been the first doctor in the United States to use a hypodermic needle—learned about them in Europe—and Douglas was just as up-to-date. While they bantered quietly about the condition of sidewalks on East Sixty-sixth Street, the doctor pulled out an elaborate system of linked mirrors from a drawer, all of them about the size of a quarter, and started to look in Grant’s throat.

  “You hurt that same leg in New Orleans. After Vicksburg, if I remember. Fell off a horse.” Douglas put a wooden tongue depressor gently on Grant’s lips. Outside on Fifth Avenue—Grant could see the reflection in another mirror strapped to the doctor’s forehead—carriages and buses floated by, a garment-company wagon seemed stuck in traffic, but it was all strangely noiseless, taking place in miniature, like some remote and mysterious version of ordinary life. “You ought to fall on the other leg sometime,” Douglas said, moving his instruments around, “give every limb its chance.”

  Grant started to smile, as far as he could with all that hardware in his mouth, but at that same moment Douglas stiffened a little, somebody else might never have noticed, and the instruments and mirrors stopped right where they were.

  It was still warm for late October. Out on the street, in a leafy yellow sunshine, you could see deliverymen in their cloth caps and big shoes unloading crates and wearing just short sleeves instead of a coat. On the wallpaper of the examination room a fat black fly crawled lazily sideways, also silent.

  “I’m going to give you a prescription,” Douglas said slowly.

  “Sauerkraut and pickles?”

  Douglas didn’t smile back. He stretched his arm over to a white enamel tray for another of his miniature mirrors, this one on a metal stem like a child’s lollipop.

  “Muriate of cocaine,” he said. “It should bring you relief from the pain. And I’m going to swab the area with lodoform, which clears up congestion.”

  He held out the little mirror and Grant could see on its concave surface a reflection of the other mirror in Douglas’s hand, and see as well that the trouble wasn’t his throat at all. It was the root of the tongue that was red and inflamed, with hard white scales scattered all over the right side. On the top of his mouth, where the hard palate joined soft tissue, three small dark red warts hung straight down like stalactites; like segments of the claw of a crab.

  Douglas pulled the mirror back.

  “Is it cancer?”

  Douglas unstrapped the mirror from his forehead and laid it on the tray. Then he lined up the interlocking system of mirrors beside it. Then he drew a prescription tablet from his pocket, and a pencil, and for a moment he held the pencil poised, as if he were about to write. “General, the disease is serious, epithelial in character, and sometimes capable of being cured.”

  “I see.”

  “The epithelium is the tissue that lines a membranous surface.” Douglas nodded once, not at Grant but at something unseen on the floor, on the wall. He began to write his prescription.

  Grant reached slowly for his coat and his tie. In the war, he thought, certain kinds of bullet wounds were always fatal, even if they didn’t seem so bad at first. You would see men shot in the stomach—not bleeding much, able to stand—but they would look down at their bellies and hold them, and then look up at you, and they knew; both of you knew. Sometimes you would say to encourage them, It’s all right, you’ll be all right, you might be cured; but you never believed it, nobody ever believed it. Outside on Fifth Avenue the garment wagon had got unstuck and was moving nicely along with the rest of the traffic, bouncing horses, swaying cabs,
some boys on bicycles, a signboard man on wobbly stilts. But even with the mirrors put away there was no sound, everybody and everything moved in utmost silence, as though something in the construction of the building or the position of the observer kept normal life at a distance. “We won’t tell Julia,” Grant said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS TEN FULL DAYS AFTER HER RETURN FROM PENNSYLVANIA and New York before Elizabeth Cameron came to Trist’s rooms on Vermont Avenue. And even then, the meeting was hasty, awkward, not at all (Trist thought as he splashed cold water on his face) satisfactory.

  Of the mysterious laws that govern men and women, he concluded, he actually now knew less than before. Marriage, of course, had never been a possibility, not for a moment. She understood it perfectly, the Sherman in her relished the game, the pleasure. The Cameron kept her cautious. He was the one writing love letters at his desk, and one-armed sonnets, tearing them up, staring all day at moonish, mawkish daydreams. In French romantic geometry, the perfect figure was the triangle, the most stable thing on earth, until the woman changed her mind. What Trist wanted to be was Parisian, cool and indifferent. What he was turning out to be was earnest, American.

  The next day he saw her hurrying down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol in a carriage with Henry Adams.

  “My husband,” said Clover Adams in a distracted manner, “spends all his spare time with Elizabeth Cameron. And Senator Don, too, of course.” She steadied the wooden legs of her camera tripod and adjusted a brass lever. “Elizabeth’s young and charming.” Clover pushed the brass lever into place with a snap. “And beautiful, as any fool can see. And that’s what you men like, I know. Henry and John Hay always talk to each other about the ‘beauties’ of the new social season when they think I don’t hear them.” She paused to straighten the big camera on top of the tripod and shake out its black felt hood. “But Elizabeth is intelligent, and her house is really a kind of political salon—she was quoted the other day in the New York Herald about Grover Cleveland and Blaine. Though I’m afraid she’s drawn a blank in poor Don. Duller and drunker every minute. In any case, there is Henry chez Cameron day and night. And meanwhile here I am spending all my time—”

  “With a handsome one-armed reporter,” Trist said.

  “I was going to say, in cemeteries.” Clover showed him for an instant her sweet, homely smile, then disappeared at once under the hood of the camera. Clover always wears her bonnet tied very tight under her chin, Emily Beale had once remarked to Trist, and she pushes it forward in such a way that it really conceals her face; and in all the hundreds and hundreds of photographs she’s taken and collected at 1607 H Street, the only one of her has her face in a shadow, completely obscured.

  Under the hood Clover moved the camera a few inches to her right, so that the long row of tombstones in Arlington Cemetery seemed to approach her lens at an angle, not straight on.

  “I’ve been out here to photograph this plot three times,” she said in a muffled voice. “I still haven’t got it right.”

  “You’re very dedicated.”

  “I’m very morbid. Hand me the first plate, Mr. Trist, don’t touch its center, please.”

  Trist stooped to the large wooden box of equipment he had helped her haul to the end of the row. He took the first dark glass photographic plate and held it out between two fingers, and Clover’s hand came out from under the hood and disappeared again. Trist walked a few steps uphill. Arlington Cemetery had a remarkably beautiful view across the Potomac, toward the White House and the National Mall and the still-rising Washington Monument, whose square top was clearly visible here through the laurel trees; from higher up, at the empty Lee mansion, you could also see the Capitol dome and the great brown curve of the Potomac southward toward Mount Vernon. But down in the little valley where Clover had chosen to set her photograph, what the eye took in was not a dreamy, somewhat romantic landscape. There were over sixteen thousand Union soldiers buried here—two thousand of them were unknown by name and had been gathered together in a large granite tomb by the mansion. The rest lay in parallel rows of small white headstones that stretched along the hillside, down into the shaded valley, up again and over into a flat, level field of trimmed and dying grass, so endless and dramatic a sight that it seemed as if Cadmus must have reversed his myth somehow and sown living men to come up dragon’s teeth.

  “Have you ever thought of publishing your photographs?” he asked out loud.

  “Shall I wait until those horses are past?” She pulled her head out from the hood to stare down the ranks of tombstones toward a gravel path where a young woman and a somewhat older man were riding slowly by on two chestnut-colored horses. “Yes,” she answered. “One of the editors at the Century magazine saw my photograph of Professor Bancroft and asked if they could reproduce an engraving of it, and Henry might write a paragraph or two of caption to explain the professor’s work.”

  “It’s a fine portrait.” Trist tried to remember the photograph from his tour of the collection with Emily Beale.

  “Henry said no, of course. What could be more vulgar? ‘My wife doesn’t appear in magazines,’ he wrote them.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m sure Henry was right. I’m sorry you’ve abandoned your book, Mr. Trist.” Clover lifted the edge of the hood and prepared to duck under once more. “It was a splendid idea, I thought.”

  “It was turning into a gigantic history of the war,” he said, taking another step or two uphill. “And the publisher didn’t like it and I wasn’t the man to write it.” But the couple on horseback had now passed behind a screen of tall hedges and Clover had gone back under her hood without hearing him.

  “If you time it for forty-five seconds, please,” she commanded in the same muffled voice, and Trist pulled out his watch.

  A breeze stirred the trees and moved down the long slope like an invisible hand, smoothing the grass.

  “What will you do now?”

  “Stay at the Post a while longer—I like the editor I work for, Henry West. Then go back to Europe, I suppose.” He took another step and tried to see what it was that she saw in the rows and rows of tombstones, the odd, off-center angle, but nothing occurred to him, no profound idea or thought. The silent majority, Homer had called the dead.

  “Beautiful,” said Clover under the hood. “Perfect.”

  Afterwards they strolled, at her suggestion, through the Lee mansion, which dominated the whole enormous cemetery, and though Trist found it a dull and melancholy place—the Lees had been driven away from it in the earliest days of the war, everything had been stripped bare, first by soldiers, then by tourists—Clover insisted on going into each empty, gloomy, cobweb-covered room and looking about. At the front hall on their way out she stopped to sign the cheap little cardboard-bound guestbook that someone had placed on a desk by the door, the single piece of furniture left in the house. “It reminds me,” she said, “of our house going up next door, nothing but walls and a wooden roof.” In a firm hand she wrote Mrs. Marian Hooper Adams & friend. “An empty shell is much the same, no matter who owns it.”

  “Oh, but your new house is going to be—” Trist opened the front door, searched for a word.

  “Impossibly ugly,” Clover said. “Tomblike. No need to flatter, Mr. Trist. Richardson designed Trinity Church in Boston and certain massive classroom buildings at Harvard that people admire, but he’s not an architect of houses, not on a human scale, not for me at least. Henry adores his work—I dread it.”

  At times, Trist thought, Clover spoke to him, and as far as he could tell, to him alone, in a personal, revealing, entirely unironic way. She never spoke this way in front of Henry. His arm, Trist thought, evoked, not her sympathy, but identification. Because for all her brilliant wit and intelligence, you couldn’t be long around Clover Adams without understanding that she, too, was missing a part of herself.

  “Did you ever read a book called Esther?” she asked abruptly two minutes later, not entirely to his surpris
e. They had stopped again on the edge of the wide brick porch, and she rose on her toes and looked straight up at him.

  Trist cleared his throat. “Well, yes. Actually, I saw it on your hallway table in the spring, and I was curious and bought a copy.”

  “Do you know the author?”

  “Frances Snow Compton. A woman of mystery, evidently.”

  Clover started to say something more; closed her mouth, shook her head.

  At her carriage, parked behind the house, while the Negro driver loaded her photographic equipment, she strolled away to the nearest row of winding headstones, and appeared to be reading names at random. When she came back she said briskly but calmly, “You’re a friend of the arts, Mr. Trist, I think. Let me take your photograph someday soon, for my collection.”

  “Well, if I can have one of you in return,” Trist said gallantly, trying to cheer her up again.

  But Clover had already regained her irony if not her cheer. Behind the black crow’s wings of her bonnet she smiled faintly and touched his arm. “I would only break the camera, Mr. Trist.”

  IN THE LATE SUMMER AND FALL OF THAT YEAR, AS WORK ON HIS book slowed to a halt, Trist had written articles from time to time about the yammering, bad-tempered presidential contest raging between James G. Blaine of Maine, Grant’s old nemesis from the 1880 convention, and the fat, popular, but scandal-bedeviled New York governor Grover S. Cleveland. Six or seven times at least West had sent him hurrying north on a late express to cover a speech by Cleveland for the Post, or a predicted eruption of temper by Blaine, caught in a vicious struggle against the “mugwump” rebels in his own camp who loudly and vigorously preferred Cleveland’s progressive views on civil service reform to Blaine’s notorious personal dishonesty.