Grant: A Novel (12 page)

And besides, he thought, pacing restlessly back to the window, the real story was far too big and complicated for an uneducated bumpkin scribbler like himself, and he hated to spoil it by telling it wrong. The real story was that the Civil War had completely split the nineteenth century in half, like a steel wedge in a stump, two different countries, two different times, and somebody born today—or a relative boy like that reporter Trist—would have no idea at all of life in an American river town, back when the country was raw and men like Grant were formed.

Cadwallader fumbled in his vest for a cigar. Down on the street an old man in a faded greatcoat and kepi was hobbling along past a horse trough, and it made him think of his father. His father and his grandfather. He thought of fifty generations of fathers and grandfathers, in fact, who had never travelled faster than a horse or a sail could carry them, never communicated with another person except by voice or pen; never expected to, never
dreamed
of a world much different from the one they were born into. Yet right now, if he wanted to, he could follow that old man down the street and go in an office and send a telegraphic message around the
globe, in less than a minute. In certain Eastern cities you could actually talk on a wire instrument strung between two buildings. You could put fresh butchered beef in one of Gus Swift’s refrigerated railroad cars and drive it from Chicago to San Francisco—two thousand miles—then take it out and eat it. There was a great story waiting for someone to tell it, not about the war, but about the reborn nation, on the other side of the war.

Somebody else. Not him. Cadwallader blew his nose on his sleeve and noticed with regret that he was now making the same fluxible morning noises that his father used to make.

He crossed over the bare floor to the chest of drawers and rummaged until he found a half-empty bottle of E. C. Booz and poured two lovely inches of it into his toothbrush mug. When he was a boy in Ripley, Ohio, the owner of the village grocery and dry-goods store kept a little oak-charred cask of whiskey on the counter, and a tin cup on a string, and any customer, man or boy, who could reach that high was welcome to refresh himself with a nip.

Cadwallader refreshed himself with a nip. He peered back at the window. The sky was louring. The wind was growing angry. Second-half-of-the-century weather.

He stood with the toothbrush mug in his hand and drank a little and thought Mark Twain was a thief and a genius; thought Grant had looked well, well and prosperous at the banquet; thought a story should be about love and whiskey.

THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT

L
OVE, THEN. LOVE FIRST: ULYSSES AND PENELOPE
.

Back in the summer of 1843—unlike him, I don’t mind a bit retracing my steps—when the Mexican War was still just a rumor and a grumble on the horizon, Brevet Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, fresh out of West Point, said good-bye to his family in Ohio and took the steamboat down the Mississippi to his first official army assignment. Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, was widely considered desirable duty in those days, partly because it was set on what looked like a rich man’s estate of beautiful hills and meadows next to the river, and really because the city of St. Louis was only nine miles north. This was the do-nothing peacetime army, remember. Most of the soldiers drilled and yawned and polished their buckles lackadaisically till supper, then jumped on their horses and galloped off to study St. Louis’s rather fleshy and metropolitan charms.

But not Second Lieutenant Grant. Too shy. Too puritanical. Besides, even before he left West Point his mathematics teacher had pulled him aside and promised that when the first opening appeared, if Grant kept up his standards, he intended to appoint him his Assistant Professor. Much to be preferred to grunting and sweating with the infantry. Much to be preferred by somebody who didn’t think he truly belonged in the army at all. Grant bought a big lined notebook, cracked open his old math primer.

But a young man of twenty-one does not live by binomial theorems alone. Grant’s West Point roommate Fred Dent came through Jefferson Barracks one day on his way somewhere else and took him over to a home-cooked dinner at the family farm, not five miles away as it happened. It had the grandiose name of “White Haven,” and a population of eighteen slaves, two parents, and three young daughters. And that was the end of mathematics.

The father, Colonel Dent, was no colonel, no military man at all, but he was, till the day of his death, one of Nature’s prime and matchless jackasses, worse even than Jesse Grant, and that is saying a mouthful. Colonel Dent had made a small fortune before the War of 1812, cheating Indians on the frontier mainly, and then returned to his native Maryland, where he married an otherwise intelligent Englishwoman named Ellen Wrenshall. After the war, restless like everybody else, he pulled up stakes and started to wander west again; in 1817, more or less on whim, he bought 925 empty acres in Missouri, and there he settled down to amuse himself by suing his neighbors, bullying his slaves, and pretending his poor little pork-and-wheat farm was a Southern gentleman’s plantation. He was all his life violently pro-slavery. I have never yet met anybody outside the family who could actually stand the old man. When Grant was in the President’s Palace … but I jump ahead. Back in 1843 the important thing about Colonel Dent, at least to Grant, was not his politics, but his favorite daughter, Julia.

Now, of the mischievous laws that govern men and women yours truly knows just about next to nothing. There have been great men—I think of Hamilton, Franklin, Cump Sherman (especially)—who have also been perfect grinning tomcats. And there have been others who were either undersexed (Jefferson) or so utterly devoted to one woman as to defy human nature. Jackson was like that. Grant still is.

In 1843, at the age of eighteen, Julia Dent had a plump figure,
small hands and feet; a bright, flirtatious way of chatter. She also had (has) a bad squint in her left eye that the idiot father said came from carrying her as a baby out of a warm bath into a cold room. Grant had first been interested, evidently, in her sixteen-year-old sister Nellie, but when Julia finally showed up, returned from a long visit to relatives, sitting on a horse like a girl who was born to the saddle, Ulysses spun like the needle on a compass and it was only Julia ever after. He proposed in a wagon, fording a stream, remarking (as the water rose up over the wheels) that she could always count on him to take care of her. And Julia responded cheerfully (water almost to her shoes) that it would be a charming thing to be engaged, secretly from her father, but married, no, not yet.

Secretly from her father, of course, because Grant was poor; a Yankee with suspected abolitionist leanings; and entirely colorless and unimpressive in appearance (the “little man with the big epaulets,” Pete Longstreet used to call him).

And not yet, because she wasn’t sure, she was having too much fun.

What did he see in her? Well, the physical, I guess. Grant and Julia have never gone to a meal together, not even breakfast, without his taking her arm and giving her a kiss. In the war more than once I found them sitting on a log by his tent, just holding hands. In his first term as President, Julia got up her courage and made a surgeon’s appointment to have her eye fixed, and the morning she was to leave, Grant came in and kissed her hands and said he’d always loved her just the way she was, so why not unpack her suitcase and cancel the operation. She did. And, too, she is talkative, comfortable, a little inclined to frivolity—all the things Hannah Grant was
not
.

And what did she finally see in him?

Not greatness. Not glory. Not, certainly, the President’s Palace one day.

Three short words, I suppose: He
needed
her.

In the Mexican War (not a writer) Grant wrote Julia every single week. He wrote her he had been terrified since childhood he would die of consumption. He wrote her he kissed every letter before he sent it, kissed her ring every day. He walked out into the blistering sun and cut flowers for her and put the petals in his envelopes. He painted watercolors of the scenery for her.

Sometimes, like a mooncalf—we are still talking about the “Butcher of Cold Harbor”—he mailed her letters with mostly blank spaces and said they expressed his love, for which no words could be found (his mother’s son). I suppose there was never a younger, lonelier, sadder-eyed boy in the world than U. S. Grant in the forties and it would have taken a heart of stone to send him away.

They were married in St. Louis right after the war, after a three-year courtship, Colonel Dent complaining all the way to the altar, Jesse and Hannah Grant not even in attendance because the Dents were a slave-owning family. Then the young couple trooped off to the end of the world, known as Sackets Harbor, New York, on the frozen shores of Lake Ontario. There Julia got pregnant and set about to become a mother and Grant got so bored with army routine he couldn’t stand it, and started to dream of Mexico again and those sweet brown bottles of liquor that used to console his being.

He joined the local Sons of Temperance lodge and signed the teetotal pledge. Raced his horses up and down the street. Broke his pledge. Made it again. I know witnesses who remember seeing him march in Temperance parades wearing the red-white-and-blue purity sash across his chest and the big red pin in his lapel that must have looked to the gods of rum like a bull’s-eye target.

Now this was a serious matter. Never underestimate the sublime self-righteousness of the American public. All over the country men were flocking that year to join the Temperance movement—P. T. Barnum did (he was right, my old dad liked to cackle: a sucker born every minute); young Lincoln did; the man in the President’s Palace this very moment, Rutherford Hayes, did, which is why the irreverent (God bless them) call his wife “Lemonade Lucy.” In the army an enlisted man who drank too much could end up with his head shaved, a dishonorable discharge in his pocket, and the letters
HD
for “Habitual Drunkard” branded on his hip, as if he were some kind of cider-swilling maverick cow. An officer like Grant would escape the head shave and the branding iron, but lose his commission in disgrace. Julia fretted. Grant stared at the snow. Rubbed his mouth.

In the winter of 1849 Julia went back to St. Louis for her lying-in. Grant took temporary quarters by himself in Detroit. At some point while he was living there he slipped on an icy sidewalk in
front of a house and hurt his leg and sued the owner of the house for negligence; which owner promptly defended himself in court by declaring that if Grant and the other soldiers would only keep sober they wouldn’t fall down on the street.

The jury peered at Grant, nodded its head; awarded him the whopping and derisory sum of … six cents.

There must have been some little tension, because Julia came home briefly, then travelled back to St. Louis again with her new baby boy and stayed away eight long months and rarely wrote, and Grant grew quieter and quieter, watching the snow pile up.

California would be worse. California would take him down to skin and bones. In another six months, Sackets Harbor, New York (ice, snow, depression) would look like Paradise.

F
OR SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE WAR IT WAS COMMON TO SEE
young men on the streets everywhere, in buildings and offices, with only one arm or leg. Most large cities had schools for teaching soldiers how to hammer and saw again, or drive a wagon or hitch a horse. In New York there had been a contest in 1866 for the best examples of “wrong-handed” penmanship, and Trist, left-handed before Cold Harbor, had actually won fourth prize (awarded by the gray-bearded old poet William Cullen Bryant, who was drunk). But now, oddly enough, Trist thought, it was uncommon to see an amputee veteran.

He put down his pencil, stretched and yawned, and walked across the newsroom to the cluster of desks by the window where Henry Lichfield West, two-handed, was balancing a mug of coffee on his stomach and leaning back in his chair. West swung a wet shoe onto the desk with a thump. “The Presidential Palace,” he announced to Trist. Then he stopped to take a slurp of coffee from his mug. “Or ‘White House,’ to use the up-to-date term, is overrun with spiders. Head groundsman told me. Worst infestation since the days of James Buchanan. All kinds of spiders, big ones, fat ones, brown, black, purple, thousands and thousands of nasty, creeping little bugeyed pests.”