Grant: A Novel (15 page)

“James G. Blaine, the pride of Maine,” said West, whose knowledge of scandalous information extended well beyond Washington, “blew up at a dinner party, said
he
was the wicked senator in it—”

“Ratcliffe.”

“—a wonderful name—Blaine swore only an intellectual or a venomous female could have written it. The President’s supposed to be Grant, General Beale is in it, or his house anyway, the
good
character is Luke Lamar from Mississippi. Blaine says
he
thinks Clarence King wrote it, and he cut him dead when he saw him.”

“I heard John Hay.”

“Also John Hay, Henry James,
maybe
Miss Lorna Sedgewick,
maybe
Miss Harriet Loring—nothing sells like a mystery. Hutchins told you to review it, I hope?”

Trist nodded. “Give the readers what they want.”

West flipped to the middle of the book and read aloud: “ ‘
Ratcliffe’s eyes were cold, steel gray, rather small, not unpleasant in good humor, diabolic in a passion, but worst when a little suspicious; then they watch you as though you were a young rattle-snake, to be killed when convenient
.’ ” He snorted. “Could be anybody.” He turned back to the first chapter: “ ‘
For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter
in Washington
.’ ” He closed the book with a snap. “For reasons which many persons think profound, I need a drink.”

Trist grinned and shook his head. In two weeks’ time, not counting work on
Democracy
, he had spent nine full afternoons in the dank, gloomy reading room of the Library of Congress, written four background chapters for Hutchins’s election manual (the latest on “Perils of Immigration”), and done absolutely nothing for
L’Illustration
. Hutchins was pleased with his chapters, looked for more every day, and now assigned, as tidbits, little moneymaking extras like the book review, not to mention one or two stories an issue that the regular reporters were too busy to tackle. Yesterday Trist had written a paragraph about crumbling asphalt on Fourteenth Street. Tomorrow he was to do the opening of the new Thomas Cook Travel Office on Tenth Street. But today—he looked at his watch, two-twenty-five—today was his own. Today he was invited to visit Decatur House for tea, where General Grant, now visiting the Beales, might—or might not—offer an exclusive interview for European readers. At the door West gave him back the book and scowled up at the brilliant April sunshine. “Another goddam beautiful day,” he said.

From the offices of the
Post
to Lafayette Square was at most a twenty-minute walk. The weather had changed completely, in fickle Washingtonian fashion, from winter-spring to summer. The low blue hills of Virginia dozed on the other side of the Potomac. A few paddle steamers and sailboats floated on the river’s back, nearly motionless. Even the constant traffic of wagons, herdics, and omnibuses on the avenue itself seemed slower, lazier; Southern. He passed saloons that had thrown their doors and windows open to let the fresh air in. Several cafés were bravely setting out tables and umbrellas on the sidewalk. At Twelfth Street one of the city’s numerous photograph shops had installed an open-air display of pictures—he glanced at train wrecks, actresses, Famous Race Horses and Noted Statesmen—overhead a telegraph line repairman swung contentedly in a dense black cradle of wires, looking down at the street like an amiable bearded spider.

At Lafayette Square, just past the big granite hip of the Treasury Department, Trist stopped and checked his watch, pointlessly. Looked to the left at the drowsy front porch of the White
House; the elegant redbrick town houses in facing rows on two sides of the square, the yellow Adams house on the top, a hundred yards or so away.

He opened the iron gate and sat down on the nearest bench, under an elm whose green branches hung so low they partially obscured the statue of Andy Jackson and the occasional passerby on one of the diagonal paths. He might just as well have accused himself of deliberately arriving early, lying in wait. He did; he was.

At a minute or two past three, while the bells on St. John’s church were still ringing, Elizabeth Cameron stopped in front of a puddle twenty feet from his bench. She was dressed in a blue striped polonaise and a pouf bustle and a patterned scarf tossed around her shoulders with a jaunty flair. She frowned at the puddle and lifted the hem of her skirt with one hand.

“Mrs. Cameron,
bonjour
.”

The hand dropped quickly, her right foot swung to the left, and she looked up at him with a perfectly gorgeous smile. “Mr. Trist.”

“I thought you might be going to General Beale’s for tea.”

“I am, yes. My husband is already there. They had a late meal, I think, then a meeting, and I lost track of time.”

“There was a wit in Paris, walking on the Champs-Élysées, knocked down by a workman who was carrying a grandfather clock. ‘Why don’t you wear a wristwatch,’ he said, ‘like everybody else?’ ”

She laughed and brushed back a strand of hair with one hand, and Trist took a step toward her. Her smile vanished in a flash.

“There come the Adamses,” she said.

Around the corner of H Street, mounted on two brown mares, Clover and Henry Adams seemed to see them at exactly the same moment. Sidesaddle, Clover flicked her reins expertly and turned the horse in their direction.

“I thought you were Senator Don,” she said with a nod and a smile to Trist when she reached the gate, “and then not.”

“Quite not,” said Adams, with only a nod, no smile.

Elizabeth busied herself with the muzzle of Clover’s horse. “Mr. Trist is on his way to General Beale’s, for tea. We happened to meet,” she added unnecessarily, “just now.”

“Well, tea,” said Clover, “what is so nice as tea with the Beales? And to have an escort as well.”

“I should have assumed,” Henry Adams said dryly, “that Lafayette Square was a safe enough environs to cross without a bodyguard.”

“General Grant,” Trist began, “is supposed to be at the Beales’—”

“And you’ve come to
interview
him,” Clover interrupted, “a newspaper ‘scoop’—am I right?”

“He came, he saw, he had tea.” Adams seemed unusually dyspeptic. He snapped his riding crop against the mare’s flank, and the horse jerked her head up in surprise, snorting, and took two or three splayed steps backward into the street.

“And I
know
he’s there,” Clover said, bending forward and stroking her own horse’s quivering neck, “because I
saw
him arrive on Sunday. From our front window. A great deal of fuss and far too many black carriages.”

“Mrs. Adams sits at her window on Sunday mornings,” Elizabeth Cameron explained, looking down at the horse’s hoofs. “She smiles and watches the rest of us trudge to church. It’s very wicked of her.”

“It is,” Clover agreed cheerfully. “I sit and watch funerals too, but they make me hungry. The hearses always look like bonbons on wheels.”

“Grant must be planning his campaign strategy. And ‘strategy’ is the right word, for once, eh, Mr. Trist?” Henry Adams nudged his horse forward, inches from Trist, lifted his right hand to shade his eyes against the sun’s glare, and studied the front of the Beale house through the trees. “Since the Democrats are certain to nominate General Hancock.
Duo strategoi
, what?”

“I don’t know the word.” Trist was standing so close that the mare’s big shoulders literally pressed against his flat left shoulder. “Sorry.”

“Greek,” Adams said. “
Stratego
means ‘general’ in Greek. I thought you would know. Two presidential generals,” he repeated for the ladies, with a mock sigh and a shake of his head. “And Garfield waiting in the wings,
another
general. Hancock’s speeches are a wilderness of clichés, Grant scarcely speaks at all except to say, ‘Let us have peace.’ The whole country fights and refights the war as if it had never ended. Meanwhile the world is shifting under our feet.”

“Henry is making a speech,” Clover said.

“We live in the past,” Adams told Elizabeth Cameron. “Heads buried in the sand.”

Not for the first time Trist wondered about the Adamses’ manner of speaking to each other, intimate, parallel, but neither ever quite answering or responding to what the other said. Marital geometry, he thought, parallels that don’t meet.

“That’s kind of a surprising complaint,” he said, “for a former professor of history.”

Adams smiled, a broad, charming, entirely unexpected smile that lit up his face with intelligence. “Touché, Mr. Trist,” he said, and pulled his reins back as if to depart. “I see you’re reading
Democracy
.” He pointed the crop at Trist’s pocket.

“It’s very good, yes.”

“I never read fiction,” Adams said. Then over his shoulder as the horse swung around: “I understand you write sometimes now for the
Post
?”

Trist nodded warily.

“Not,” Adams said, still smiling, “a
great
newspaper.”

O
NE HUNDRED YARDS AWAY, IN THE SECOND-FLOOR DRAWING
room of the Decatur House, great, heroic, impassive Grant crossed in front of the Martin Van Buren window with his cup of coffee in his hand.

He smiled to himself as he sat down in General Beale’s favorite chair. Great, heroic, impassive—powerful adjectives, fresh as his coffee, right out of an article in the New York
World
that very morning by John Russell Young, and Grant supposed they were meant to flatter him, or make him seem imposing and mysterious, “great” enough to attract any undecided Republican votes, “heroic” enough to overcome any third-term objections. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror as he sat down. The idea of writing, he assumed, was to place a grip on reality. He had never thought adjectives had much to do with reality.

“We were talking about the Mexican War,” Beale said to Don Cameron, who stood by a silver coffee urn (one of Mrs. Beale’s outstandingly ugly European purchases) and a porcelain china tea service so far untouched by anybody. Cameron spooned extra sugar into his cup and peered at it, as if in hope of a miracle of transubstantiation, coffee to bourbon. Grant knew the look.

“Well, I don’t remember a damn thing about the Mexican War,” Cameron said. “I was ten years old. But it sure as hell won’t bring us any votes.”

“A politically irrelevant war,” Beale agreed. He puffed his cheeks and pursed his lips like a carp. Beale had recently shaved off his beard, one of the few clean-shaven men his own age that Grant knew, and up close, below his sideburns, you could see little shiny dots of whisker in the skin, like flecks of mica, where the razor had missed. Beale, of course, had run his own irrelevant side-war, so to speak, on the Mexican coast, selling contraband, buying up land, Beale and an Indian scout named Kit Carson, and he had ended up being made governor, if Grant remembered right, of a California district called San Jose.

“I once built a signal fire at San Pasquale,” Beale confided, sitting down next to Grant. “Entirely and completely out of poison oak branches. Dumbest thing I ever did. Thought I had caught Pharaoh’s plague. The smoke was what did it. Took me a week to get over the itch.”

Grant laughed and looked affectionately over at Beale. There was something comfortable and comforting about a man of your own generation. A wealthy man, too, he thought, as he took in the newly remodeled elegance of Beale’s house, with its floral tapestries and its teakwood cabinets and display cases and fine Louis Tiffany lamps, and its splendid view of Lafayette Square and, just in one corner, the President’s Palace, where Grant had once lived; and might live again.

“Now we ought to talk about the convention. Two months is not a long time off.” Businesslike, impatient, Cameron spread some of his papers across the quilted ottoman in front of his chair. He started to go over the delegations again briskly, who was for whom, state by state. Like a commanding general, Grant thought, and smiled again, inwardly. Outwardly, he was sure, nobody could have told that his mind was elsewhere, lazily turning over thoughts, memories, making similes. His mental process, he believed, resembled an old Missouri farmer digging at a stump, slowly prying it up from the dirt, excavating his idea. There were two parts to the world. There was the outward world of mass and line, force and counterforce, noun and verb, that the eye took in and the body felt. And there was the world inside the closed blank sphere of his mind, a kind of fragile white eggshell of consciousness
through which he could see, but dimly; dimly. He knew he seemed silent, impassive; he knew other people mistook that for strength.

Cameron asked him a question about the Illinois delegation and Elihu Washburne, but because he hadn’t quite heard the question he simply sat in his chair with his cup of coffee and said nothing. Cameron fidgeted. Beale looked out the window and waved. The clock on the mantel ticked. Abruptly Cameron went on to his next sheet of paper.

THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT