by Max Byrd
“Well,” he said again, “I guess I have to go to my own reception.” He put on the hat and nodded to the maid. “Republican caucus at Willard’s. Jewel can take you back to see my wife.”
Jewel picked up the vase of roses and looked solemn. Together she and Clover listened to Cameron’s heavy footsteps in the hallway, then the clatter of the door and chain. Frigid air from the outside swirled into the room and stirred the hem of her skirts. The little black maid cleared her throat; shifted the vase from one arm to the other. Slowly, as slowly as Don Cameron thought, as slowly as an arthritic old lady, Clover came to her feet and started to follow Jewel.
The Camerons had separate bedrooms, naturally. The half-open door to the Senator’s revealed odd corners of heavy dark furniture and scattered objects masculine and leather. A smell of hair oil and bourbon just lingered in the air. Jewel swept past without a glance and knocked on the closed door on the left.
“I am,” cried Elizabeth Cameron, bounding up straight on her chaise longue and holding out both her arms to Clover, “so glad you’ve come!”
And of course for the next five minutes Clover was so glad, too, did exactly what was expected of her, did it to the letter. Sat at the side of the chaise and admired the handsome new bed jacket Elizabeth wore, light green in color to match her eyes, a present from Don; handled the delicate little knitted stockings and slippers under way for the baby-to-be; listened to an unnecessarily intimate account of the complications of Elizabeth’s “illness.” Twice she caught herself rubbing her forehead, and once or twice, evidently, she lost track of the conversation for a moment.
“The roses,” she explained in one of those awkward pauses, “came from Mrs. Bancroft’s greenhouse.”
“Dear Mrs. Bancroft,” said Elizabeth. Discussion of Mrs. Bancroft’s health, her eleven grandchildren, the prospects for more. Names were mentioned. The Camerons had gone all the way to California at the end of the summer, for the sake of the Senator’s lungs, and some Western relatives had proposed the name Martha, if it were a girl, James for a boy.
“We meant to go to the new Yellowstone Park,” Clover interrupted, more sharply than she intended, “in June. Henry made all the arrangements. Clarence King found us a guide, a mule train, six whole weeks of camping.”
“But you didn’t go,” Elizabeth said kindly, “did you? I’m so sorry about your father. I wrote you a letter.”
“I didn’t think,” Clover murmured, and must have said something else to finish the sentence, but her mind drifted off, her attention wandered. There was no point in trying to tell someone like Elizabeth Cameron how grief felt, how a void had simply opened up in her life, like an abyss at her feet. They had canceled Yellowstone because she couldn’t bear the strain of the trip, and instead for a month they huddled in one of those empty, melancholy resorts in West Virginia, White Sweet Springs, riding sometimes, taking their meals in the hotel, reading. By early July neither she nor Henry could stand it a moment longer and so they had done what she swore not to do, gone back to Beverly Farms, where her father’s house was, and all her girlhood and his grave and the cold ocean again, thalassa, thalassa. She was forty-two years old.
It was very hard, she thought, blinking at Elizabeth. It was a hard thing to ask her to come and visit such a beautiful young woman, about to become a mother, the Princess of Lafayette Square.
Her fingers rattled the teacup so badly the little black maid jumped forward nervously, as if to catch it when it fell. Clover set the cup down on the table. Automatically picked up the book beside it.
“General Grant’s Memoirs,” said Elizabeth, whose uncle and brother-in-law were generals too. “Just published this week. Mrs. Grant sent us a copy.”
“He wrote it while he was dying of cancer,” Clover said, to show she kept up, was au courant. “Practically the whole world was watching. He wrote it, so to speak”—she lifted her head and in the mirror looked defiant—“out in the open, to save his wife.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5. CLOVER MARKED IT on the calendar in her sitting room upstairs at 1607 H Street. The weather was dreary, cold. The great bulk of the two new unoccupied houses threw a shadow across her back garden, all the way to Mr. Corcoran’s fence on the other side. At three o’clock Henry looked in to say good-bye—his tooth was still hurting, it had hurt him all night long, and his dentist had finally sent round a boy to say come and see him, even on a Saturday.
Clover heard the murmur of voices down below in the stable. The carriage rolled out, splashed away through the mud. On her desk in all sorts of uncooperative piles lay the papers she was supposed to put in order for their move. Her photographic records. Household receipts. Books of architectural drawings. The stiff cardboard folders with her father’s letters, all the bank cheques, business letters, invitations, everything.
Everything. From a great distance, as if she were a cloud floating high above, she saw her hands sort through the envelopes and come to a stack labeled simply “Lafayette Square,” tied with a red silk ribbon, which the hands, still small as a child’s and far away, carefully untied with a will of their own. Notes from the Bancrofts, the Beales. Copies of notes sent, drafts of letters. Henry had the historian’s horror of throwing away any single scrap of paper. Dear Mrs. Cameron, this one said, written in Henry’s neat, careful hand, a draft but almost like printing, much clearer and more precise than Clover’s messy scrawl, December 7, 1884—
Dear Mrs. Cameron—
I shall dedicate my next poem to you. I shall have you carved over the arch of my stone door-way. I shall publish your volume of extracts with your portrait on the title-page, I am miserable to think that none of these methods can fully express the extent to which I am
Yours Henry Adams
Of all things on earth, runs the line at the end of Esther, and Clover had no idea why her mind would remember it just now, to be half married must be the worst torture.
The smallest stack on her desk was the collection of letters, also tied with a red ribbon, from Thomas Jefferson to some forgotten ancestor of Mr. Trist in Philadelphia. No more than eight or nine letters in all, written on still crisp eighteenth-century French stationery. Henry had literally thrust them at her before he left, to give to Mr. Trist when he called. And of course, being curious, being a woman, being a historian’s wife, had she not looked at them? Had she not turned the old sheets of paper over to read Jefferson’s quaint old-fashioned handwriting? Had she not found in the center, misplaced surely somehow from Henry’s business correspondence—but placed exactly where she must find it—a letter to Henry Holt the publisher in New York, dated January of this year while her father was sick and dying in the charnel house of Boston, and had she not taken the deepest breath of her life and read it and learned her husband’s secret at last?
6 Jan. ’85
My dear Holt,
My experiment has failed. The failure is disappointing because it leaves the matter as undecided as ever to me. So far as I know, not a man, woman or child has ever read or heard of Esther. I wanted to see if my book would sell without any advertising or reviews, by word of mouth only. My inference is that America reads nothing—advertised or not—except magazines.
My object in writing now is to ask you to make another experiment. I want to test English criticism and see whether it amounts to more than our own. Can you republish Esther in England? I will supply you, privately, with the required amount of money.
I see no reason for your giving yourself unnecessary trouble to hide matters from your brother. The secret, though interesting to me, is not so serious to you as to exact your unnecessary labor. By all means let him know about it, if you like. All I ask is that he should fully understand that no one except yourself has been told it, and that it is to remain absolutely between him and me.
Yrs as ever
Henry Adams
Henry was still away at the dentist when Mr. Trist arrived at four o’clock. Clover gave him tea and they sat together quietly in
the parlor. They commented on the weather, he told her a complicated story about Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and then she stood up abruptly, without thinking at all, and handed him the portfolio of Jefferson’s letters and insisted he examine them to be certain none was missing.
He demurred at first, of course; he was sure Mr. Adams had been scrupulously careful with the documents. But Clover was firm and repeated her insistence. He looked at her, she thought, strangely, but nodded and began to untie the ribbon.
For a minute or two there was nothing to hear but the crackling of logs in the fireplace. Nothing to see but his bowed head as he balanced the letters awkwardly on his lap and turned and glanced at the sheets of paper one by one. She rubbed her forehead so hard that it hurt. Trist came to the center of the stack and stopped. He read very slowly. Then he raised his head, and from the expression on his face she knew that he hadn’t guessed either. They had both read Esther, she and Trist, but neither of them had guessed that Henry was the author.
Clover made herself lower her hand from her forehead. “I remember that we talked about that book, Mr. Trist. The heroine is rather inadequate, wouldn’t you say?”
He murmured something she didn’t hear.
“Inadequate,” she repeated more loudly. “And unsatisfactory as a woman, to a man. The beautiful young girl in the book reminded me of Mrs. Cameron.” Her hands had nothing to do. They made foolish wringing gestures. She looked over at the table by the end of the sofa where she had placed a vase of roses for herself, nobody had brought them. “Fiction is not always false,” she added, pleased to be saying something intelligent, paradoxical. “A fiction is not always a lie. It can send a message. It can explain someone’s feelings. Of course I knew that he liked her, all of you men like her. I even thought at one time, Mr. Trist, that you and Mrs. Cameron …”
Trist put the Jefferson letters in his jacket pocket, then slipped the letter from Henry Adams to his publisher back in its envelope. “What do you want me to do with this?” he asked quietly.
“We have a curious sympathy for one another, no, Mr. Trist? The company of the wounded.” She held out her hand for the envelope, very calm, scarcely trembling. “I want you to do nothing with the letter. It’s a secret, our secret, you must promise. Henry wrote a clever book in private, that’s all.” Her voice seemed to rise and crack. “The book has nothing at all to do with my marriage.”
In the hallway Trist shrugged on his coat and prepared to say good-bye, but Clover, standing by the foot of the stairs, suddenly buckled at the knees and started to fall. She clutched the banister with both hands. As he hurried forward to help her she pushed him away with a shriek. “Please don’t touch me, Mr. Trist—I should die if anyone touched me!”
AT NOON, SUNDAY THE 6TH OF DECEMBER, CLOVER AND HENRY finished a late breakfast in the morning room. The day was warmer, the sun was brighter. She had slept quite well, she told him, she was feeling much better than before. He looked at his watch; patted his lips with a napkin. He would just take a walk by himself, he said, for an hour or so.
Upstairs at her desk, where she used to write her Sunday letters to her father, Clover cleared a space in the papers and books and began a letter to her sister Ellen Gurney in Boston. If I had a single point of character or goodness, she wrote, I would stand on that and grow back to life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can express—God might envy him. He fears and hopes and despairs hour after hour—Henry is beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even.
She read the letter over and stared for a long time at the blue sky over the garden. Then she folded the sheet of paper, unsigned, and placed it under the corner of her blotter.
Downstairs the packing men had not yet started work on her photographic darkroom. The little closet was just as crowded and jumbled as ever with frames and cameras and a whole table of nothing but tin basins and glass vials. From the cabinet next to the door she took a bottle of potassium cyanide that she used in developing her prints. She filled a vial with water and stirred in the colorless salts. Upstairs in her own room again she stood before the fireplace with the vial in her hand. The mixture had a strong bittersweet smell, like almonds. Three houses down and across the street the bells of St. John’s church began to toll and she lifted the vial slowly and swallowed it all.
EPILOGUE
Paris Late October 1891
AUTUMN DRIFTS DOWN TOWARD PARIS ALONG THE VALLEY OF the Seine, from the gray, wet coasts of Normandy, cooling the land, sending ripples of soft, sober-colored light and shadow southward. Most years the season changes in the calm leisurely fashion of a leaf falling gently from a tree.
In the first week of October 1891—Trist stopped writing and hastily shoved his pencil and notebook into his jacket pocket, but not before Sophie Liane Ledoiné stopped in front of him, folded her arms across her décolleté, and formed her lips into an exquisitely exaggerated, irresistibly kissable pout that, Trist assumed, Sophie had learned, like every French woman, as an infant.
“Do you know, Monsieur Trist, what the Duke of Gloucester said when Edward Gibbon gave him a copy of the Decline and Fall of Rome?”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
Sophie stuck out the tiny pink tip of her own. “He said, ‘Another damned thick square book—always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?’ ”
“How is it, Madame Ledoiné, you know so much more about English literature than I do?”
“One,” said Madame Ledoiné, “you’re an American and not expected to know anything except buffalo shooting and Indian fighting. Two, I spent every summer of my girlhood in Devonshire with a private tutor. My father had practical notions of female education. He thought a girl only needed to learn two things well—how to ride a horse and how to speak a foreign language. You’re writing one of your witty articles about the réception, n’est-ce pas?”
Trist reluctantly took his eyes from her lips (and décolleté) and shook his head. At the other end of the Grande Salle de Réception of the Petit Palais museum, the President of the Third French Republic, M. Sadi Carnot, was standing with his ministers before a long line of foreign diplomats, many of them colorfully beribboned or becostumed, all of them shuffling forward for their bow, their handshake, their several well-chosen words of republican greeting and recognition. Three or four times a year, at irregular intervals, the President held this quite informal, for the French, reception of diplomats; his expression on each occasion never varied from the expression he wore now, the bland, professionally insincere smile of a headwaiter uncovering a dish.
“In the old days,” remarked Madame Ledoiné rather wistfully, “when the Emperor received in the Tuileries palace, he always remained in the state room, beside the gold throne.” They both looked at the empty space behind the President, where there was no throne at all, only a ceremonial tricolor flag in a stand. “And the Empress Eugénie always received separately, in the royal drawing room.” They moved their eyes right, where instead of a royal drawing room there was a large open exhibit hall whose walls were covered with hundreds and hundreds of photographs of the American Civil War, an exposition organized by the museum staff, somewhat belatedly, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the war.
Madame Ledoiné sighed and snapped open an eighteenth-century silk fan the color of dusty roses. “You would have enjoyed the Empress; men did.”
Trist nodded in respectful agreement—Madame Ledoiné was an acknowledged expert in what men enjoyed—and thought that people of a certain age in Paris talked about Eugénie and the days before the Commune in the same nostalgic way Americans talked about the vanished world before the war. Decline and Fall was probably the oldest human topic in the world. Madame Ledoiné touched the inside of his wrist lightly with two delicate fingers. Second oldest, he corrected himself.
“Here approacheth your awful M. Hahr.” She narrowed her eyes and frowned prettily over the top of her fan. “Come and see me, mon cher, five to seven, not Thursdays.” She
moved away, leaving Trist to nod and shake hands briskly with Francis P. “Frank” Hahr, First Secretary of the American Legation, a Bostonian and a prude, and, Trist thought, one of President Benjamin Harrison’s more inexplicable diplomatic appointments. Hahr spoke very little French, didn’t drink, and like most prudes had no sense at all of irony. Harrison might as well have sent him to the moon as Paris.
“Found you,” Hahr said when the handshake was done. “Good. Was that Madame Ledoiné?”
“Soi-même.”
“Boucé’s mistress, right? I heard her described the other day as a semi-castor—a ‘half-beaver.’ Is that really the phrase?”
“Well, I wouldn’t use it to her face. She’s also called one of the grandes horizontales, but I guess I wouldn’t say that either.”
“Beaver,” Hahr said in a tone of wonderment. “What a country. I’m supposed to bring you over to the pictures, in case Reid needs an expert comment in French.”
Trist looked past Hahr to the exhibit hall, where the Honorable Whitelaw S. Reid, former editor of the New York Tribune, present United States Ambassador to France, was standing in the middle of a circle of diplomatic admirers. He wore an elegant black swallowtail coat, white tie and shirt, and a brilliantly colored ambassadorial sash of red, white, and blue across his chest. Just beyond his bald head hung one of the featured photographs of the exhibit, nicely illuminated by a rank of suspended Edison lights: U. S. Grant in scuffed boots and a rumpled old private’s uniform, with his three stars sewn rather haphazardly on one shoulder, leaning an arm against a shattered tree at City Point, Virginia, in the fall of 1864. The juxtaposition was almost enough to make Trist forget his resentment at being treated as an embassy errand boy, because of all the unforgiving mugwump Republican writers who had hated Grant and done their best to make his political life miserable; Whitelaw Reid was possibly the most virulent and obsessive. Unless, of course, you counted his friend Henry Adams, who was also there, a full head shorter than Reid, holding a glass of champagne and blinking at the lights.