Grant: A Novel (14 page)

At the corner of Fourth and Rhode Island Avenue, two or three doors down from his boarding house, Trist stopped again. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to calculate. Forty dollars a week, if West could pull it off … April, May, June. Since Christmas he had made a number of short, expensive excursions with Cameron to see the Grant nomination machine in action, twice to New York, which gobbled money like candy, once to the strange Dutch-African city of Philadelphia where his mother had been born and his grandmother had known Thomas Jefferson; and there was still Chicago and the convention to come. He blew white puffs of breath into the black air. He had seen Clover Adams twice; Elizabeth Cameron how many times? He went to Lafayette Square as often as possible, they talked, laughed, he told stories, she dazzled.
Why did you come back, Mr. Trist? Why would you ever leave again?

Two tramps emerged from the shadows and muttered a step or two in his direction. He turned and walked up the little rise that led to his door, next to a billboard for something called “Marlowes’s Electric Corsets”—how could you not love America?—fumbled for his key. Behind him, unseen but felt, stretched a whole great mysterious continent, like the curving dark presence of an immense inland ocean. In Paris he had almost forgotten it existed. In the night, in the passing winter mood, the whole scene appeared spectral, ghostlike, shrouded in snow and fog.

He didn’t believe in ghosts, he decided sleepily. If there were
ghosts, they were only phantom versions of all the possible selves you might have become, possible lives you might have led, had chance or war decided something different. One arm; two arms. Trist’s luck. The last thought that came unbidden into his mind was of Elizabeth Cameron.

He fit his key into the lock.

I
HAVE LONG SINCE MADE UP MY MIND NOT TO SEEK THE
acquaintance of poets”—here Henry Adams paused, sipped from his sherry glass, patted his lips with his handkerchief—“it spoils their poetry. I knew Swinburne twenty years ago and have needed twenty years to get over it.”

General Beale smiled the quick, tight little grimace that meant he hadn’t quite got the joke. Senator Cameron smirked. Clover Adams rose up and down on her toes. And only Emily Beale and Elizabeth Cameron truly laughed out loud. Adams lifted his chin in preparation for another witticism. Meanwhile the others began to drift away, rudely in Emily’s opinion, across the drawing room and toward the food.

And to tell the truth, Emily herself was listening with only half a mind—something now about spiders and the White House—as she tried at the same time to smile, surreptitiously adjust her left shoulder strap, and also remember exactly what
Godey’s Lady’s Book
had said just that month about the tightness of a young lady’s corset. Spiders. She leaned her head admiringly toward Adams, observing the bald spot in the center of his lacquered hair, and caught her mother’s eye across the room. A tight corset,
Godey’s
had pronounced, against all fashionable doctrine, will turn a
young lady’s nose bright red—the result of stagnation of the blood in that prominent and important feature; her mother had flung down the article in a fury, cinched up the laces herself, and marched out muttering that young ladies ought to listen to their mothers, not cheap magazines, and in her family her daughter would
always
appear properly dressed, and no, she could not pass around cigarettes at the party like a maid, her father would die.

Henry Adams had evidently changed the subject. Senator Cameron reappeared, glowering as usual, and Adams turned his wise little head—did it ever bother him and Clover to be the shortest people they knew? even Emily was taller—turned his head up to the Senator, and drawled in his Boston-Oxford accent that Standard Oil had now done everything possible for the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it, didn’t he agree? And Emily held her breath for an instant till Cameron laughed, and then the rest of them joined in, with as much relief as pleasure. In the mirror her nose looked distinctly crimson.

“I see you’ve invited the Press,” Adams drawled, and General Beale, hovering nearby with an oyster canapé raised to his mouth, had to put it down and follow Adams’s pointed gaze. Through the window, out on the muddy paths of Lafayette Square, they could all see the tall, quite handsome and romantic (so Emily thought) figure of Nicholas Trist approaching. He wore a slouch hat and dark cape over his shoulders to hide his one arm. While they watched, he stopped at the corner under a lamp for a carriage to pass. On Emily’s right, Elizabeth Cameron moved away with a sudden swish of skirts.

“Met him in Europe,” Emily’s father said, and gulped the oyster.

“He writes about Grant,” Senator Cameron added, with, for him, surprising cordiality. “Some French magazine. From what I’ve read, pretty damned smart.”

“Oh, as to that …” Adams turned away after Elizabeth.

General Edward Beale had bought the nicest and most distinguished house on Lafayette Square, the old Decatur House as Washingtonians still knew it, from the far-off days when it belonged to Captain Stephen Decatur, of Tripoli War fame. And he felt obligated by his position to give more parties than he liked, Emily thought, to more people than he liked—at the last Boxing Day reception there had been so many guests, a positive “rout,”
that they still had a dozen unclaimed coats and muffs packed away in a third-floor closet.

Tonight, however, was calmer, her mother’s idea of a quiet party: just the Adamses, Professor and Mrs. Bancroft, the Camerons, four or five people from Ohio, some of her father’s business friends; and now—but before she could step into the hallway and greet Mr. Trist (in French; her mind searched helplessly for something more sophisticated than “
bonsoir
”), her brother Truxton intercepted her at the side door and hurried her off into the kitchen to help with the salads on dishes of ice that were her mother’s speciality. By the time she slipped away again, Nicholas Trist was installed in the other drawing room with a plate of salad balanced before his chest, listening to Senator Cameron and two Ohioans talk about General Grant for President, who was coming next month to stay as a guest of her father.

Emily busied herself with bric-a-brac on the mantel and tried not to stare. The rules of etiquette for women, she had often complained to her mother, were irrational, vexatious, and tyrannical—the Law of the Napkin, for instance (wad or fold), the Nine Rules of Posture. Do Not Interrupt Older Men. When she was younger she had attended for six long months a Young Lady’s Saturday Course in which she learned that if she met a gentleman at the foot of a flight of stairs, he was to precede her up, lest she go first and reveal her ankles; she was to avoid swaying when she played the piano; not lean her head against wallpaper, not say “You know” or “says I” or point or say “pooh.” She moved a ceramic cat along the mantel and, without pointing or staring, managed to study Trist’s face.

He did look, she thought, much thinner and paler than when they had met him in Paris last summer; but then, her father said he’d suffered a bout of malaria and still wasn’t fully recovered. His blond hair was longer. His eyes were darker. He shifted his plate slightly, glimpsed her in the mirror, and (she ducked her head) winked.

As soon as dessert and port were served, by family tradition in the second-floor drawing room, the conversation switched, at last, from General Grant and politics. Professor Bancroft, so old he might have been made of dust, took his place in the center of the sofa, alone, the privilege of age, and cleared his throat. He raised his glass and started to discourse on the history of the house, a
subject that always pleased her father, who made everybody shush and draw nearer. The very window on their right, Bancroft was saying—Emily felt her eyes begin to dull—had been cut out by Martin Van Buren when
he
lived here as Vice President, so that he could see Andrew Jackson’s signals to summon him to the President’s Palace. Jackson himself used to come over at night and play pinochle.

“And Thomas Jefferson, of course, dined here often.” Bancroft licked his old dry lips as if at the idea. He was ancient enough, Emily thought, to have dined
with
Jefferson.

Downstairs she had brought Nicholas Trist a second plate of salad where he was talking to Elizabeth, and conversed very smoothly (
couramment
) with him in French. But there was no more chance of that
now
. Now Trist was listening to the history lecture, standing with some Ohioans at the end of the sofa, very straight and tall. He was also looking over Bancroft’s white head directly toward Elizabeth Cameron standing at the other end of the sofa. While Emily watched, Elizabeth glanced at him, looked down; looked away. The best book Emily had read in years was
Vanity Fair
, where the heroine defies all rules and comes to a tragic end. The next best book had just been published,
Democracy
, in which, all the political
stuff
aside, the great idea was that opposites attract, true love is always disguised.

Elizabeth would
never
defy the rules, Emily thought, Elizabeth loved her social position, Elizabeth loved to be safe. But Nicholas Trist was handsome, serious, opposite—she looked at his poor empty sleeve, neatly folded and pinned, and thought how Desdemona had loved Othello for the dangers he had passed, and then thought of Senator Cameron and danger (a bourbon bottle!) and the idea was so ludicrous she had to pinch her nose and stifle a laugh, and Elizabeth and Nicholas Trist, who had been looking at each other again and starting to whisper, actually turned in unison to look at her, and even Professor Bancroft raised his head.

“Monticello,” said Henry Adams very clearly, ignoring them all, “is presently owned by a Jew.”

T
HE BOOK
DEMOCRACY
, WHICH SO INTRIGUED EMILY BEALE
, had been published two weeks earlier by Henry Holt and Company of New York, but oddly enough with no author’s name on the title page, only the curious and uninformative subtitle:
An American Novel
.

Nick Trist pushed everything else to one side on his desk and turned pages till he reached the point he had marked last night with a penciled asterisk, chapter five, in which the highly civilized Mrs. Lee goes to visit General Grant’s White House:

“Gossip turned into art,” Henry West said with a professional mixture of envy and disgust. He scooped the book up and cracked it open on a stack of election-manual papers on the side of the desk. “You know, half of Washington’s accusing the other half of writing this. The damn thing’s gone through three printings already. They should have used asbestos instead of paper.”

“I heard there was a row in New York.” Trist grinned and leaned back in his chair.