Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Trist laughed and watched her shuffle her photographic plates into their carrying box, like big glass cards, and then place the camera and box on the child’s red wagon she used for hauling things from her yard into the building area.

  “Henry sent me over to the Smithsonian the other day,” Clover said. “I was to study their collection of porphyry and jade, because Henry wants one or the other for our dining-room fireplace.” She looked over her shoulder with a nod to indicate the space beside an unfinished retaining wall that was destined to be, Trist supposed, the dining room. “We spend hours each day contemplating the aesthetics of our house, you know. It reminds me of the months we spent when we lived in Boston years ago, helping Richardson design Trinity Church, which was his first big job, and we used to go inside and sketch where the stained-glass windows should go and how the clerestories ought to be placed, and all the paintings, day after day.”

  “Just like the novel Esther,” Trist said without thinking. He instantly regretted it. He had been struggling to lift, awkwardly with his one hand, the last bundle of heavy photographic plates, and his mind had simply skipped a thought. In Esther the heroine helps an architect friend decorate the windows of a city church, her fiancé calls her a “second rate amateur.” He felt his face grow hot. Clover pulled the wagon onto the sidewalk of H Street and appeared to take no notice.

  “And I thought I saw you walking on the grounds with Elizabeth Cameron,” she said, “by the Smithsonian, when I was there.”

  Washington was the smallest city on earth. “I ran into her on the Mall.”

  “Such a beautiful woman,” Clover said, and it was impossible to be sure of her tone. “You men do ‘run into her’ so often, do you not?”

  The construction gate closed with a loud metallic snap. Nearby, the first of the gas streetlamps on H Street flickered to life. Clover began to walk along the sloping brick sidewalk, tugging her wagon. Trist walked beside her in silence. He cradled the extra photographic plates in his arm. It was astonishing to him how quickly her mood had deteriorated at the mere mention of Elizabeth Cameron, Esther—who could say which? Her sadness, he thought, was nearly palpable, it showed in the slump of her tiny shoulders, the listless pace of her feet. At the front steps to her house they paused, but for once she made no motion to invite him in.

  “I can carry these plates to your darkroom,” he offered.

  She took the plates from him. “I suppose Emily Beale will soon be producing little heirs and heiresses for the General,” Clover said. Lights now glowed in the upper windows of Decatur House across the Square. “It’s only natural.” Then she gave him, scarcely visible between the folds of her winter bonnet, a soft, sweet, Clover smile and in a tone of unmitigated despair she added, “If any woman ever tells you that she doesn’t want children, Mr. Trist, don’t believe her. All women want children.”

  IT WAS A REMARK NOT EASILY FORGOTTEN, PARTLY BECAUSE IT was so unexpected, partly because her voice had cracked as she spoke, tears had all but sprung to her eyes. Three days later in New York City, on assignment again for the Post, Trist found himself pondering again The Question of Clover. Was she simply failing in spirit because of her father’s illness? Or was there something else? She had read Esther, he knew. Had she also, like Emily, like himself—like who could say how many other people?—seen in the novel a strange, accidental roman à clef? a hostile reflection of her own life? The homely, unaccomplished woman overshadowed by the youthful beauty and charm of her friend, her Elizabeth Cameron rival? And why in the world had Henry Adams—who never read fiction—pressed the book into Clover’s hands?

  Who wrote Esther?

  It was four P.M., February 3 of the gray, cold New Year of 1885 and Trist was seated at the window of an overheated diner on Second Avenue, sweating in his overcoat, drinking bad coffee, and watching the big illuminated clock on the sidewalk. The Question of Clover. Despite the bad coffee, which tasted like creosote and sugar, he yawned and rubbed his face. Clover. He had taken the last express train from Washington the night before in order to interview Thomas Edison once again first thing this morning, Stilson Hutchins’s orders—the great man was rumored to be refining his miraculous phonograph machine; true—and he had telegraphed a long article back to the Post not more than half an hour ago. And now, in another ten minutes, about the time it would take him to walk to East Sixty-sixth Street, he was going to begin a second article, on his own initiative, with or without Hutchins’s approval.

  He spread the New York World on the counter and read the headline one more time: GEN. GRANT VERY ILL. The World was a scrappy, unreliable paper, with something of a vendetta against Grant because of his friendship with Roscoe Conkling. Its editors had been among the first to suggest that the General himself had been part of the Grant & Ward criminal conspiracy and had fleeced his investors for his own secret profit, and no amount of protest from Grant’s friends had done anything to change their story. But today at least the World seemed to have limited itself to verifiable facts. The article under the headline quoted a Philadelphia source as saying that “General Grant has been obliged to decline Mr. George W. Childs’s invitation to visit him, on account of ill-health.” It reminded readers that Grant’s friend General Beale in Washington had also released a letter testifying to Grant’s poor health and blaming it on the stress of the Grant & Ward debacle. And it added with some clinical precision that Grant was presently troubled, according to his doctors, with an “epithelial soreness at the root of the tongue, which causes him great pain when he swallows.” Dr. John H. Douglas acknowledged that the General hadn’t smoked a cigar since November 20th and was now receiving daily treatments at his office to clear away mucous obstructions in the throat.

  Trist watched the clock’s hands jerk toward four-fifteen. He paid for his coffee, braced his hand on the counter, and stood. The Question of Clover would have to wait. General Sherman had told him four-thirty sharp, and Trist had yet to meet anyone who didn’t think Cump Sherman always meant, absolutely and ferociously, exactly what he said.

  He walked four blocks up Second Avenue, under the bone-rattling screech of the Elevated Railway, and then turned west down Sixty-sixth Street. Here the sidewalks were still covered with inch-deep slush from a recent snowstorm. Edison’s electric cables hadn’t yet reached this far uptown. Trist passed beneath a series of hissing, flickering old-fashioned gas lamps, in a vague and shadowy black-and-white atmosphere that reminded him inevitably of Europe, of wet stone and foggy parks and the dank little flat off Primrose Hill in London that he had rented long-term and then impulsively abandoned, to become American again. As he neared Grant’s well-publicized address at number 3, he was not entirely surprised to see a dozen or so silent figures hunched together under the nearest lamp. There was nobody in the world, Don Cameron liked to say, as famous as Grant. After the article that morning people would come, of course, just to stare at his house, at his empty front steps, just for the sheer morbid pleasure of his celebrity.

  He passed by the nearest group of watchers and stopped a few feet from the corner. Grant’s house was brightly lit on the lower floors, dark upstairs; curtains were drawn back. Through a second-story bay window he could see the library, a maid going past a shelf of shiny leather-bound books. On the third floor, peering down through a window, hands clasped behind his back, was a plump, unpleasant-looking man Trist identified after a moment as Adam Badeau, Grant’s occasional assistant, Henry Adams’s onetime friend. Then a handsome black barouche carriage came clop-ping and jingling through the slush up Sixty-sixth Street and wheeled to a skidding halt in front of Grant’s door. A liveried coachman clambered out on the double.

  “This is Trist,” Cump Sherman said with his usual bounding energy as the three of them fumbled for seats five minutes later, four-thirty exactly, and the barouche swung smoothly back into traffic. “Dr. George Shrady. I forget your first name, Trist, don’t matter—a reporter.” He turned to Shrady and grinned a wicked yellow-toothed grin like Zeus
or one of the Titans about to devour his own children. “Normally,” he declared, “I hate reporters.”

  “As all the world knows,” murmured Shrady. He was a small, thin-shouldered man, clean-shaven except for a huge protruding moustache that resembled, Trist thought, the cowcatcher on a locomotive.

  “But I like Trist, Trist writes straight.”

  Shrady gripped the side of the swaying carriage and looked at Trist’s empty sleeve and nodded, and the word “veteran,” Trist thought, might as well have formed in gold letters on his brow. They hurtled on down Fifth Avenue, in and out of traffic snarls, pockets of light, flurries of snow, while Sherman puffed fiercely at his cigar and kept up a running commentary on the streets, the theaters they passed, newspaper reporters, women with flat chests, anything and everything that occurred to his quick, cruel, entirely uninhibited brain.

  At Gramercy Park the barouche came to a long, sliding halt, spraying two great white fans of snow onto the sidewalk. The liveried footman threw down portable steps, a doorman came rushing out to the General’s carriage from the canopied entrance to the Player’s Club, and in a matter of moments the three of them were seated in heavy comfortable chairs next to a fireplace in a secluded corner.

  Sherman ordered—commanded—whiskeys and ice and stretched out his long legs to the fire.

  “Now the doctor,” he said to Trist, but aimed his cigar like a burning pike at Shrady, “agrees—at my reasonable, rational urging—to give you the medical diagnosis exactly, everything he knows, and you have his permission to go out tomorrow and print it in the Post or the Times or wherever the hell you like, just as long as you correct those goddam bloodsuckers at the World.”

  Shrady stroked his cowcatcher moustache and smiled faintly at Trist. “They weren’t so far wrong,” he murmured.

  “Bloodsuckers.” Sherman snapped his teeth as if he would bite the cigar in half. “Sam Grant never stole a cent in his life.”

  “The actual diagnosis is only tentative.” Shrady smoothed a sheet of notes across his lap. “The ulcers in the throat are becoming very active and inflamed. General Grant is experiencing what most of us would call unbearable constant pain.”

  Sherman crossed his legs and stared bleakly into the fire.

  “Dr. Douglas swabs his throat daily with anodyne mixtures. Three mornings ago we had a dentist in to extract two teeth, and that’s been some help. As you might know, I’m a specialist in epithelial carcinomas. I’ve given a tissue sample from the throat to an expert microscopist—”

  “Name?” Trist was writing as quickly as he could in his pocket notebook, but it was awkward, in the deep chairs, with one hand. Sherman reached over and held the notebook steady on Trist’s knee.

  “Dr. George B. Elliott. You’ll find him in the Medical Directory.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He plans to communicate his results this month.”

  “And you asked him to look at what?”

  “The capillary blood channels, also the anterior border of the tonsillar cavity, which may already be perforated.”

  There was much more, similarly technical and unusable in a general newspaper story, but under Sherman’s prodding Shrady outlined the basic facts. The doctor suspected cancer of the throat—they wouldn’t be certain until the microscopist reported—if Grant had sought out proper medical attention in the summer, things might be better now, but this was probably wishful thinking. If it was cancer, it was fatal, and the General was going to undergo—he was already suffering it—indescribable agony. The sheer pain was a nightmare for him. Almost worse was the unremitting feeling of choking and gagging, which made it nearly impossible for him to eat, drink, or sleep. They had considered a surgical operation to remove what they could of the ulcers and bring him some comfort, but the risk was great and the General insisted on having his faculties clear.

  “Writing his memoirs.” Sherman sat back and lit a new cigar off the old one. Trist nodded. Everybody remotely connected with the Century had heard the story of Grant’s book and the pirate publisher Mark Twain. “Wants to save his family,” Sherman grumbled. “He won’t take money from anybody, after all that stuff when he was President, turned me down when I offered him half my pension. Childs down in Philadelphia wanted to start a trust fund—no. What you boys don’t appreciate”—in the smoky darkness of the club disembodied hands took away their glasses, deposited fresh ones—“is how goddam hard it is, in his head, for Sam Grant to write about the past. I hate reporters, he hates retracing his steps, oldest superstition he has, thinks it’s like retreating. Nearly got him shot once at Vicksburg, he wouldn’t ride back to his tent the way he’d come. Writing his memoirs—hell!”

  “General Grant is a sensitive man,” Shrady said.

  Sherman snorted. Sherman leaned forward and drove a bony finger so hard into Shrady’s shoulder that the little doctor jumped in his chair. “Sensitive. Back at Shiloh in ’62, after the first day and we had taken such a beating you don’t ever want to think about it, we were down about as far as an army can go, I wanted to retreat. So did every other officer on the staff. I went out looking for him, and when I found him, old sensitive Grant, he was standing under a tree in the rain, smoking a cigar, and I padded right up through the mud and got ready to tell him we had to turn tail or else lose the whole goddam army, that was what his staff thought. Then something made me stop, I didn’t say a word—and you don’t know how hard that is for me—and I just stood there under the tree, unnaturally quiet, smoking my cigar too. Finally I said, ‘Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ he said. He pulled at his cigar for a while and all I could see in the darkness was the little red glow at the tip. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Lick ’em tomorrow, though.’ ”

  Shrady smiled and shook his head. “You weren’t at Shiloh?” he asked Trist.

  “Cold Harbor.”

  “Our troops at Shiloh,” Sherman said, “were so raw we had to walk around in the camp and show them how to load and aim. ‘It’s just like shooting squirrels,’ Grant told them, ‘only these squirrels have guns.’ ”

  Shrady smiled again. “The General’s a humorous man, if you stop and listen.”

  “Buckner came to see him yesterday,” Sherman told Trist. “Man he defeated at Donelson. Made a special secret trip up from Kentucky. All the Confederates love Grant, you know. He could have humiliated them at Appomattox, he could have crushed them and slaughtered them like cattle, made old Bobby Lee strip down to ashes and sackcloth, and you know, as soon as it was won, he just said, ‘Let there be peace,’ and he stopped the killing.” Sherman’s cigar blazed like a flare. “I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

  “How long?” Trist asked Shrady.

  “Anybody else,” answered the little doctor, “would be dead in a matter of weeks. I think he keeps himself going by sheer willpower, to write his book.”

  The Question of Clover seemed a long way off. Elizabeth Cameron seemed a long way off, except that Cump Sherman had his niece’s trick of lifting his chin when he spoke, a sensual flash of the eye that made Trist finish his whiskey in a gulp and hold out his glass for another.

  “I did something the other night,” said Shrady. He too had been drinking steadily. Only Sherman seemed unaffected, burning alcohol like air. Shrady leaned forward confidentially. “General Grant can’t sleep because of the choking sensation in his throat, he wakes up gasping, terrified he’s going to smother. When it got too bad, I went in his bedroom and rearranged his pillow and made him lie on his side, with his hand tucked under the bolster. And I stroked his head and told him to close his eyes and go to sleep the way he did when he was a baby.”

  Sherman groaned and turned away.

  “The Butcher of Cold Harbor,” Shrady said to Trist. Stilson Hutchins would pay an enormous bonus for something like that, Trist thought, any paper in the country would, the old warrior reduced to babyhood, Grant’s Last Battle. He thought of Mark Twain’s C
hicago speech: Grant in his cradle, clutching his toe. He looked at Sherman, still staring miserably into the fire. Somebody else could write it. He closed his notebook and slowly put it away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BY WEDNESDAY EVENING, TWO DAYS LATER, THE UNCERTAIN snow that had fallen on New York had drifted lazily north across New England, then blown eastward into the dreary Atlantic. At Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, on the rugged coast above Boston, the storm had barely touched down. The ground outside their house, Clover Adams thought, looked like a brown cake, badly frosted.

  She repeated the description to her father, who was lounging sleepily in his favorite chair by the fireplace. He had a plaid blanket drawn up to his chin, and on his head the battered black derby hat he now insisted on wearing indoors and out, so that really all she could see was his face, from chin to eyebrows. At her little joke his jaw dropped and his mouth went slack in an invalid’s half-smile, but his eyes remained closed. For all she knew he hadn’t heard a single word, only the sound of her voice.

  The sea coals in the fireplace crackled. Someone out in the kitchen shifted a load of china, and she frowned at the clatter. Otherwise, father and daughter sat together quietly side by side, as they had all day, as they had for the last three days, and doubtless would again tomorrow until it was time to catch her train and return to Henry and Lafayette Square.

  Dr. Hooper began to snore. Clover studied his skin color, parchment pale, very bad even for winter. His big crow’s beak of a nose, one of the few features they had in common, stood out more prominently than ever. Ugly blue veins mottled his cheeks. Her father was seventy-five years old and he had been the true anchor of her life since her mother had died when Clover was only five and he had retired from the practice of medicine to care for her, and now she was realist enough to know that he was failing; slowly, inexorably failing. Henry criticized her for not thinking logically through her figures of speech. Well, then. The true anchor was slipping, the good ship Clover was coming adrift.