by Max Byrd
And Twain stopped dead in his tracks, blessing Providence.
Because in the light of the next streetlamp he recognized the decorous, satanic, three-named profile of Richard Watson Gilder, publisher of the goddam Century magazine and common thief.
The next morning, promptly after breakfast, Twain took a taxi up to East Sixty-sixth Street and had himself ushered into the library, where Grant was sitting in one of his leather club chairs, talking with his son Fred; and of course they were polite and greeted him cordially, but the General was also in a businesslike mood, and as Twain afterwards reported to his wife, Grant said in substance something pretty much like: “Sit down and keep quiet over there until I sign a contract.” And he added, apparently so as not to seem abrupt and impolite, that it was a contract for a book of memoirs he was going to write.
This, of course, was what the Orphic prophets had referred to, and this was why they had appeared in the mystical darkness just when they did.
Twain sat down in his own club chair, lit a cigar, and waved the match imperially in the air to put it out. “Don’t sign it yet, General,” he said. “Let Fred read it out loud to me first.”
Grant looked at Twain, then looked at Fred. When he didn’t say anything, Fred cleared his throat and began to read. After two or three paragraphs Twain waved his hand again.
“They plan to pay you ten percent royalty, General?”
“Ten percent, yes.”
“Fred, strike out ten percent. Put twenty percent instead.” Fred lowered the sheet of paper and rubbed his jaw. “Better still,” Twain said, “put seventy-five percent of the net returns in its place.”
Grant demurred. He made little motions of discomfort that only served to prove to Twain that he was fundamentally the most modest and unassuming man in America. “They’ll never pay those terms,” he objected.
“Now, General, the Century company is a great magazine company, nobody can teach them anything about magazines. But they have about the same experience publishing books as I have flying backwards and they’re offering you mighty poor terms in my experience. There’s not a regular book publisher in the country who wouldn’t do better.”
Grant shook his head. They were going to run his articles about the war in the Century magazine, he said; they had been extremely kind and patient with him—they had come to him out of the blue, when he was in desperate need of money, and he thought he ought to sign the contract just as it stood.
“Well, the other problem I heard”—Twain crossed his legs, puffing smoke like a cannon—“was the clause that charges the publisher’s office expenses against your ten percent royalty. They ought to pay that themselves.”
He didn’t want to rob them of their profits, the General said.
“To rob a publisher, bless your heart,” Twain said with a little wink at Fred, “is an impossibility never yet achieved, and if achieved it ought to be rewarded with double halos in Heaven.”
Fred put the contract down on the desk. Grant reached in his coat pocket as if for a cigar, but then stopped. “I guess you have a publisher in mind,” he said.
“The American Publishing Company,” Twain replied instantly, “of Hartford, of which your humble servant is a stockholder and director—”
“And a favorite author,” Fred murmured, because the American Publishing Company had published Twain’s first book, The Innocents Abroad, and almost all the others after that. He left the contract where it was on the desk and walked over to a row of uniformly bound gray books, lined up on a shelf next to an imported set of Dickens. He picked out one of them at random, Tom Sawyer, and handed it to his father.
“They are a subscription publisher,” Grant said, but there was nothing in his tone to indicate disapproval, merely a fact. You could do business with two kinds of publishers in America, the high-toned literary ones like Ticknor & Fields in Boston that published Emerson and Longfellow and sold their books in bookstores only, and subscription publishers like the American Publishing Company that had an army of canvassers going door to door in every small town in the country, selling Bibles and cookbooks and popular writers like Mark Twain. Many ambitious writers looked down on subscription publishing. Grant had no such pretensions, he explained, but he didn’t want to be disloyal either.
“Well, as to that,” Twain said, “I guess you don’t remember I proposed you write your memoirs three years ago—”
“He did,” Grant said to Fred.
“At luncheon one day in that reptile den of Ward’s. I said you ought to write it and you said you didn’t need the money and you weren’t a literary man.”
Grant looked down at Tom Sawyer in his lap; opened it somewhere in the middle.
“And so,” Twain said, “by all rights, General, I was first in the field and you wouldn’t be disloyal in the least to let me telegraph Hartford and get their offer.”
“You ought to have been a lawyer, I guess,” said Fred, shaking his head in admiration.
Twain thought of several jokes he could make in reply, but this wasn’t the time for jokes. One look at Grant’s serious face told him that. His mouth pinched behind the beard, his eyes solemn and distant, the General did not look well, that was a fact; and another fact was that sometimes even Mark Twain, he thought to himself, knew when to be quiet.
“I believe,” said Grant, “I can let this lie for twenty-four hours while we give it some thought.”
TWAIN WAS SCARCELY ABLE TO WAIT THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. That night he gave another performance at Chickering Hall with Cable, who was even more irritating and incompetent than usual, but aside from the casual remark to a stagehand as he was going on that “Cable’s way of reading would fatigue a corpse,” Twain was in a strangely ebullient state of mind. Two weeks ago in St. Louis, he’d been so vexed by Cable’s tardiness and general air of unforgivable Presbyterian piety, he had actually worked himself into a tantrum and clubbed a window shutter off its hinges with his fists. But this time he only nodded a pleasant good-night, went back to his hotel and drank three Scotches, and turned up precisely at nine the next morning at East Sixty-sixth Street.
“I talked to Sherman yesterday,” was the first thing Grant said when Twain entered the library. “He told me his profits on his memoirs were twenty-five thousand dollars. Now, do you believe I could get that much from the American Publishing Company, as an advance payment?”
“I want you to forget the American Publishing Company.” Twain beamed at Fred; he sat down in his leather chair and accepted a cup of coffee from Harrison, Grant’s black valet who had a soft Missouri accent that was a comfort and a pleasure to hear. “In the first place, Sherman’s book was published by Scribner’s and it ought to have been published by subscription and then he would have made ten times that much. In the second place, I don’t know what I was thinking, telling you to go to the American when I’ve just up and left them myself and started my own firm.”
“Charles Webster Company,” said Fred.
“I started it,” Twain said firmly. “I set up my business manager Charley Webster in it, just to publish my own books on my own terms, that’s all we do. First one comes out in February, called Huckleberry Finn, and the next book I want to publish after that is the Memoirs of U. S. Grant.”
Grant took his own coffee cup from Harrison and sipped and pursed his lips, as if at the taste, though the taste, Twain thought, was perfectly fine.
“That’s your book, General,” he said, risking a little humor.
But Grant’s face was still solemn. He shook his head. He glanced at the tall window where the curtains were drawn back and a few stray snowflakes were starting to drift over the street. “I can’t let a friend of mine take a risk of money,” he said finally, and his voice was so low and scratchy that Twain knew he was thinking of Ward again, and Vanderbilt’s famous Sunday loan, and all the sad, humiliating story of his finances that had been spelled out day after day in the papers. Grant was not outwardly dramatic, Twain thought, that was one of the
impressive things about the man, to have accomplished what he had accomplished with so little fuss—but he could appreciate somebody else’s sense of drama. Twain reached in his coat pocket and pulled out his cheque-book with a flourish, then his pen, and although he had originally intended to write $25,000, there was something so fine and touching about the sight of the grand old hero before him brought low by villainy, he doubled the sum on the spot.
There was more convincing to do, of course. Fred Grant wanted to talk with the Century again, the General himself insisted on sending for his friend George Childs from Philadelphia, who was an expert businessman, and he had to leave the house briefly in any case for an eleven o’clock appointment with his doctor. Twain waved aside all problems. He had no quarrel with the Century; indeed, they were about to run three chapters of Huckleberry Finn in the magazine. George Childs could come and pore over Webster’s accounts like a Philadelphia bloodhound. Meanwhile, the $50,000 cheque would sit in escrow and the General could pull out his own pen and start the ink flying.
“You’ll stay for lunch,” Grant said as he put on his overcoat and limped to the door. “Lew Wallace is coming, and I’ll be back in half an hour. Julia would like it.”
“I’ll wait right here and give young Fred one half-hour’s worth of free moral counsel,” Twain said.
In fact, he hoped that young Fred might say an unguarded word or two about the General’s visits to the doctor, but all of the Grants, when they wanted, were a tight-lipped clan.
At twelve-thirty Lew Wallace arrived for lunch, former Union general and comrade at Shiloh, author now of the recent novel Ben Hur, one of Grant’s oldest friends.
“Did you give Fred any moral counsel?” Grant asked as they all sat down to table.
“I told him a young person should not smoke, drink, or marry to excess,” Twain said.
“Well, I must declare,” said Julia Grant, smiling at everybody in turn, “there’s many a woman in this land that would like to be in my place, and be able to tell her children she once sat elbow to elbow between two such great authors as Mark Twain and General Wallace.”
Twain picked up the cigar he had carried to the table, but out of deference to Mrs. Grant not lighted. He rolled it between his fingers and cocked his face at Grant. “Don’t look so cowed, General,” he said in his slow, raspy drawl. “You’re going to write a book too, and when it’s published you can hold your head up and let on to be a person of consequence yourself.” And winked at Fred.
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO OR THREE TIMES,” SAID ELIZABETH CAMERON, “HE’S asked me where I’ve been, what I was doing.”
“And you said you’d been having tea, of course, with Henry Adams.”
If she heard the note of sarcasm in Trist’s voice, she gave no sign of it. She shook her head and paused in the middle of the path to adjust her fur collar, and Trist (as if he were Boojum or Possum on a leash) paused obediently with her. Over the soggy black winter treetops of the Mall, not a quarter of a mile away, rose the gleaming white stone shaft of the Washington Monument. Its shape gave him sexual thoughts. He looked at Elizabeth Cameron in her trim, tight-fitting jacket, her full skirt like a swaying bell over her hips; anything in her presence gave him sexual thoughts.
“I don’t know what could possibly be keeping them. I walked through once and there was nothing to see but old bones and buffalo skins.” She wore a neat round fur hat to match the collar, something expensive, of Russian design. Her cheeks were flushed with the afternoon chill, her eyes bright with health and energy. It was the first time since the Adamses’ celebration party two weeks ago that he’d managed to see her, and even so, respectable as mummies, they were only to walk along the frozen Mall while Maudie Cameron visited an exhibit with her school in the Smithsonian Institution.
“They’re absolutely late.” Elizabeth pulled out a beautiful little gold watch on a locket chain and frowned at it, prettily.
“We could meet in New York,” Trist said. “The Post sends me there almost every week, or I could take a room in the Willard—”
“The Willard!” She laughed and tucked away the timepiece. “Where half my husband’s friends spend their days in the bar, watching the lobby.”
It was cold in the shadows of the Smithsonian’s redbrick towers. They reached the end of the path and walked out onto the grass and into the sunshine. Clouds were building along the northern curve of the Potomac and the light was beginning to fail, but from the center of the Mall the newly completed Monument could still be seen in all its glory. Elizabeth had been in Pennsylvania with the Senator, so while they waited for the unpunctual Maudie, Trist described for her the pleasures of covering the story three days ago when the capstone of the shaft was officially put into place—rain had turned the ground at the base of the Monument into a freezing cauldron of mud, none of the speeches could be heard; the wind-speed indicator at its top had registered sixty miles an hour, though nobody had calculated it down at the bottom, next to the speaker’s platform. He was conscious of trying to charm her, divert her, win her attention. When she turned to him and smiled her dazzling, distant smile, he felt like a trout on a hook.
“Clover Adams meant to come and photograph it.” He ventured perversely onto the subject of Henry and Clover Adams again. In Lafayette Square, Emily Beale had told him, people now gossiped openly about Henry Adams’s infatuation with La Doña Cameron. He would be damned if he would think of Henry Adams as a rival. “But the weather was so bad, she didn’t come, of course. And now she’s lost interest.”
“Clover’s not herself,” Elizabeth said serenely. “Everybody says so.”
“Her father isn’t well.” From the massive arched doors of the Smithsonian emerged a party of girls in blue-and-white school uniforms. Trist instantly picked out fifteen-year-old Maudie—could it be true? fifteen?—unmistakable with Don Cameron’s bushy dark hair and clumsy height.
“Clover’s father,” said Elizabeth. “I think you’d better go before Maudie sees us—her father is a kind of gentle, tyrannical monster. He lives for her alone. He came here last winter, and the two of them together, you should have seen them, inseparable. It’s a wonder”—she turned to go, and her bland gaze swept past him like water over a stone—“a wonder Henry isn’t jealous.”
WHAT HE REALLY WANTS TO DO,” SAID CLOVER ADAMS, “IS station a guard around these ruins.”
“These ruins” were in fact the stone foundations and rising brick walls of the Hay and Adams houses, going up side by side next door to 1607 H Street, but proceeding so slowly that a full year after signing the contracts, the builders had only just now completed the second-story exterior walls. It was Clover’s habit, she told Trist, to come out and practice her photography on the interesting contrasts of scaffolds and bricks left by the workmen at the end of the day. Henry preferred to watch the construction from his study window and rush out ten times a morning to offer advice and caution.
“And at night,” she said, “he imagines noises, vandals, all sorts of catastrophes. I suppose,” she added doubtfully, “we could put Boojum or Possum out as watchdogs.”
Trist glanced over to the adjoining yard, where Boojum and Possum were lying fast asleep under a rosemary bush.
“I also like the juxtaposition,” Clover said, adjusting her camera tripod, “of snow on top of the bricks.” Together they stood behind the big black camera box and looked up at the array of intersecting gables and pointed turrets, lightly frosted with white, that made up the far wall of what would be John Hay’s house on Sixteenth Street. The effect the architect Richardson had aimed at was evidently a mixture of Romanesque mass and Gothic height; the combination so far was about as American and modern as a medieval abbey. Trist couldn’t imagine two structures more out of place in the prevailing redbrick and Federal styles of Lafayette Square. He was hardly surprised that a number of neighbors had already protested.
He walked a few steps farther into the muddy construction site. It was easy to see the tru
th of what Elizabeth Cameron had said. Clover Adams was not herself. Always thin, she had clearly lost weight. Her thick skirt enveloped her like a shapeless bag. Her dark bonnet seemed bigger, more concealing than ever. From time to time she stopped, even in the middle of a sentence, and simply fell silent. Silence, Trist thought, was not an Adams trait, husband or wife.
“I saw Emily Beale yesterday,” Trist now said, to fill one such silence. Clover crossed her arms in contemplation of the snow and bricks. Trist rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the sinking sun beyond the trees on the Georgetown horizon. “Or Emily McLean, I should say. It’s going to be hard to think of her as a married woman, I guess.”
“She has taken to redoing her face so often,” Clover said, “she looks like a ceiling by Michelangelo.”
Trist frowned into the sun. “I understand you were in Massachusetts, seeing your father, when she was married.”
“My poor father is not well at all. He has angina pectoris. My sister and brother do their best, but they’re witless about medical care. He really needs me.” She shook her head and turned back to her camera. “I took six photographs last week in the same kind of light, Mr. Trist, and none of them developed properly.” She began to disassemble the bulky camera and tripod, and Trist came over to help as best he could. “At Beverly Farms I played the piano quite a good deal for my father,” Clover said as they stooped together. Her hands moved quickly, decisively. “He always likes to hear me play, even though I’m not very good.” She glanced up and smiled, and there was a momentary flash of her old gay irony. “We share the same high musical taste, I’m afraid—his favorite song and mine is ‘Give My Chewing Gum to My Sister, I Shall Never Want It More.’ ”