Grant: A Novel (18 page)

“You ought to go down to Galena, Caddy, interview Grant, that’s what.
That
’s a story.”

“Well, he won’t come up to Chicago, you’re right.”

“Damn shame how he treated you after the war, Caddy.”

Cadwallader merely nodded and closed down his face a little (like Grant) and went on out.

On La Salle Street the sun was shining and hot, just the way late May ought to be, and the streets were full of traffic and more convention hangers-on and about seven thousand yards of banners and bunting on every window and storefront from the Grand Pacific to Exposition Hall. Cadwallader hunched his papers tighter under his arm and started to walk in the opposite direction, toward the lake.

At two or three intersections he paused to watch some of the marching brass bands that were out on the streets, practicing, raising hell by weaving between streetcars and carriages, scaring the horses. Somebody had told him there were more than twenty such bands in town already, and most of them weren’t officially attached to any candidate, so they just went in and out of the hotel lobbies whenever they felt like it, on a lark, and played patriotic songs and collected tips and drinks and generally contributed to the
vox humbug
. God bless our Cump, he thought, and sat down on a bench just above the sandy strip of beach at the corner of Michigan and Fourth.

Usually it was windy by the lake in the afternoon, but May had been so hot the winds had never really got into a Chicago rhythm. Today it was blistery and still as a steam bath. Cadwallader loosened his collar and took off his coat and opened the first of his papers. He always read the New York
Times
, though he thought the prose was so dry and bad it sounded like a woodchuck gnawing a sausage. And he read the New York
Tribune
, since he was ostensibly one of their correspondents. But this afternoon the first paper he pulled out of his stack was the Washington
Post
, whose owner was a maniac but had a good eye for writers.

He put his coat on top of the other papers. A barge full of something black and smelly was hovering offshore, under a cloud of flapping white seagulls, and there were toy boats and paddle-steamers and more barges farther away on the horizon, busy as a city street. Down at the water’s edge a woman with a white parasol stood holding her little girl’s hand and looking out. Nobody ever stands the other way, Cadwallader thought, with their backs to the water, staring at the land. He wondered if that were a profound observation. Decided not.

The Washington
Post
devoted the left-hand side of its front page to more or less factual political news, the right-hand side to sensational cases of rape or murder, preferably both. Page two contained numerous nasty, sneering pro-Democrat editorial paragraphs, almost all written, as everybody knew, by Stilson Hutchins, and two full columns of patent-medicine advertisements and bits and pieces of miscellaneous and local news. There was one running story on the back, been there for weeks, about a White House clerk named Chapman who seduced female job applicants in his office and was, the
Post
gleefully pointed out every day, a Republican appointee. There was also a very funny series about the awful Washington water supply and the four different colors of Washington drinking water, depending on the daily state of contamination of the Potomac. Cadwallader believed he could recognize a reporter’s work by his style, and he was next to certain the clever story about water was the work of the clever one-armed young veteran, Nicholas Trist.

He chuckled through Chapman’s latest denial, then went to the front page to see what they said about the convention, although it was still two days till the opening gavel and most papers weren’t doing anything but describing the carnival atmosphere
and the dead-certain third nomination of U. S. Grant. He knew Trist was writing part-time now for the
Post
. And sure enough, on page one, column three, his eye went straight to a short political bulletin, with the initials “N.T.” at the end (next to a column that had a typical
Post
headline:
BUTCHERED BY HIS BETTER HALF
).

But Trist’s was a quick, concise, completely original and serious story. Nineteen of the forty-two members of the Pennsylvania Republican delegation, supposedly under Don Cameron’s iron rule, were secretly ready to bolt from Grant and throw their support, after the first ballot, to James A. Garfield. Unlike most reporters, Trist was sure enough of his facts to name names. The rebels, he wrote, were led by a Philadelphia banker named Wharton and a professor of medieval history named Henry Lea.

Cadwallader’s first thought was that professors had no business at all in politics—that consummate little snob Henry Adams had tried to meddle in the election of 1872, with pathetic results—professors were not a competent class, professors couldn’t cross the street together safely. His second thought was that Don Cameron was going to holler like a stuck pig.

T
EN BLOCKS AWAY AND FOUR HOURS LATER, THE VERY SAME
image occurred to Trist. A stuck pig in a poke.

He leaned against a corridor wall in the gallery level of Exposition Hall and watched as Don Cameron, porcine of bulk and violently red of cheek, jerked his cigar from his mouth and turned to shout at one of his aides.

Trist was too far away to hear what Cameron said, and the corridor was too crowded for him to move closer. Downstairs, in the main auditorium, an orchestra was tuning up for the evening’s concert, and to add to the din, outside on the street a peripatetic brass band was coincidentally marching by. He considered for a moment trying to push his way up to Cameron’s side. But half the Pennsylvania delegation seemed to have jammed themselves into the narrow corridor, and the crisis of the Philadelphia banker and the nineteen Garfield defectors was evidently going to be dealt with in private—so a furious and beleaguered Cameron had informed him earlier. No further story was likely that night. Trist wiped his brow, turned around, and collided gently with the Senator’s wife.

“Mr. Trist.”

“I do apologize—I wasn’t looking.”

“My husband—” She broke off as Cameron abruptly spun on his heel and disappeared into a door beneath a banner with Grant’s famous slogan of 1868: L
ET
U
S
H
AVE
P
EACE
.

“I think,” she said, and they were now both pushed to one side by yet another squadron of hats, elbows, cigars hurrying down the corridor. Elizabeth Cameron held on to her hat with one hand and braced herself with the other. “I think,” she said wryly, “I’ve just lost my husband.”

The orchestra downstairs could suddenly be heard quite clearly: “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.”

“Well, I could try and find him for you,” Trist said, but doubtfully. The corridor was busier than ever, the door to the traitorous Pennsylvania delegation had by now been slammed emphatically shut. By unspoken agreement they both edged closer to the stairs.

“It’s a pity. We were supposed to go to the concert”—Elizabeth held up two green pasteboard tickets and made a rueful “best-laid plans” kind of face. “But now—”

The pause hung in the air. Trist cleared his throat. “If you’d like an escort,” he said.

She cocked her head in a way that Emily Beale might have called flirtatious. “No stories to file, Mr. Trist? No meetings, deadlines?”

“Everything done, shipshape.”

“I thought journalists worked till
all
hours, Mr. Trist.”

“My motto is ‘Don’t Get It Right—Get It Written.’ ”

She laughed and held out her arm. “I haven’t seen you for weeks, Mr. Trist,” she said.

A
T THE BOTTOM OF THE STAIRS THEY EMERGED INTO THE WIDER
, calmer passageway that ringed the great open space of the convention auditorium. Trist looked at her tickets and turned to the right. “I would have been lost in two minutes,” she murmured.

He knew what she meant. He had already written a description of the building for the
Post
—the largest amphitheater in Chicago, maybe in the country, able to hold ten thousand people on the main floor, another four or five thousand in the balconies and galleries. Workmen had been busy for a week installing flags
and banners, an enormous canvas screen painted to be an American flag had been draped from floor to ceiling at one end, and since this morning they had added wooden arches and trellises along the walls, potted evergreen trees, and numerous giant oil portraits of Republican worthies behind the speaker’s platform, including Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Conkling, and even, benign and smiling in one corner, Don Cameron. To test the acoustics, a patriotic concert had been scheduled for that night and the Chicago Symphonia installed, Trist was amused to notice, right beneath the portrait of Grant, who was known to dislike every form of music. On the central platform the orchestra finished tuning up with a whinny of violins and a brass burst of trumpets.

An usher led them down a long sloping aisle, then stood aside to show them their seats. Trist put the ticket stubs in his pocket, pulled his hand out again, and fumbled for change. Elizabeth Cameron waited beside him, unconcerned.

In Washington, he thought, they always met in somebody’s house, somebody’s safe little drawing room or parlor. Here—he found himself suddenly tongue-tied, awkward as a schoolboy. They sat down side by side, leg by skirt on their wooden chairs.

He muttered something pedantic and stupid—in Europe they didn’t number the selections in a printed musical program, as the new practice was in America. The first time he’d heard someone call a song a “number,” he’d been as puzzled as Rip Van Winkle.

Elizabeth smiled and whispered “droll Mr. Trist,” but just at that moment the bandleader strode to the front and bowed, and then the auditorium lights went down.

The first few selections were all sentimental favorites, each one greeted with applause—“Annie Laurie,” “Greensleeves,” “There Is a Happy Land,” “Finnegan’s Wake.” In the heat of the room, in the dark, Trist was acutely conscious of Elizabeth Cameron inches away. The curves of her face caught and held what light there was. Her hair spilled in dark curls onto her shoulders. He inhaled a scent from her skin of soap and lemon verbena. When he moved in his seat her skirt yielded softly to his hip and leg.

At the first interval they stood and looked about irresolutely.

“It’s terribly hot, Mr. Trist—perhaps?”

Numerous small black boys were selling flavored ices from trays around their necks, but they were all confined to an area next
to an outside exit. By the time they had reached the nearest of them, and Trist had fumbled again in his pocket for change, the bandleader was back on his podium again, clapping his hands for silence.

“Our next selection,” he called out in a booming voice, “is in honor of our brave boys.”

“War songs,” Elizabeth whispered. The gas-jet lights around them began to fade. In the growing darkness neither of them took a step.

“Back in the great and terrible Battle of the Wilderness,” the bandleader said. A spotlight bathed him in a garish yellow light. Trist put his unfinished ice on an empty stool. “May 1864,” the bandleader said. “A certain brigade of the Ninth Corps had just broken the Rebel line and started forward, when the threat of a flank attack threw them all back in disorder. After a desperate retreat, the brigade re-formed and turned to face the enemy, but the prevailing mood was one of despair. Just at this moment a soldier in the Forty-fifth Pennsylvania launched into song.”

The first few notes were unmistakable. Behind the bandleader a solitary young man rose into the spotlight and began to sing in a sweet, clear tenor:

“And his words were picked up by the others, and soon the entire brigade was singing the defiant chorus and charging back again into the heroic fray—join in with us! Sing!”

The crowd came to its feet with a roar and a cheer and the huge auditorium rocked with sound:

Behind them two of the ices boys flung open a door to the sidewalk outside. Instantly, without thinking, Trist turned and walked
toward it—in a moment he was on the street, under a hot gas lamp, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. When he looked up, Elizabeth Cameron was standing a few feet away, studying him with a curious gaze.

“You’re not nostalgic, Mr. Trist,” she said, “for the war. I’ve noticed before.”

“Touch of malaria,” he muttered. “Comes back sometimes.” He felt the handkerchief, sopping wet. “I tend to agree with your Uncle Cump.”

“ ‘War is pure hell,’ ” she quoted.

“Pardon your language,” Trist said and was rewarded with an utterly dazzling smile.

“Do you want to go back in?”

“Actually, Mrs. Cameron, I don’t feel much like a musical person. Not really. Not tonight.”

Around them on the street and brick sidewalks it was as if the convention had taken over the city. There were men and women walking, laughing on the sidewalks, in the street—some carried banners and badges, next to the entrance more little boys had gathered with trays of ices, and through the door, from the interior of the Hall, came the martial thump of drums. It was the women, Trist thought, who were the great surprise. Women seemed to be everywhere, escorted, unescorted, amused, part of the show. In the Palmer House Hotel, opposite “Grant for President” headquarters, a Women’s Suffrage committee had opened a booth. In front of them right now three women in bustles and hats with dyed feathers came giggling out of a side door, a restaurant, unattended. It was not quite so odd, he thought, today, tonight, to be standing in a city street with somebody else’s wife.

Elizabeth Cameron had already turned and started toward the brighter lights of the State Street intersection.