Grant: A Novel (23 page)

“Well, he said he would rather cut off his right hand.”

“And Julia heard him?”

“She said, ‘Don’t you
want
the nomination, Victor?’—that’s her pet name for him, ‘Victor.’ ” Washburne drummed the table with his fingers. Something else he already knew. “And the General said, ‘Since my name is up, I would rather be nominated, but I won’t do anything to push it along.’ And Mrs. Grant carried on and on about cabals and Garfield”—Young hesitated—“and you, and finally the General said, ‘Julia, I am amazed at you’ and left the room.”

“That can’t be all.” Washburne rapped his cup with a spoon and when a sleepy black face appeared at the door, he pointed at his empty plate.

“Well, he wrote Senator Cameron a letter. He says if it seems as though he won’t be nominated after all, his friends should withdraw his name.”

Washburne looked at his watch.

“And Mrs. Grant said confidentially when I was leaving, to tell Senator Cameron
not
to withdraw his name, ever.” Young finished his coffee and bobbed his head two or three times and sat back and didn’t say anything else. Washburne recognized the moment.
Reporters were worse than politicians with their
quid pro quo
, and Young, who might have a bad case of Grant hero worship, wasn’t any fool. Clearly, he hadn’t seen Cameron yet today, and clearly what he would like in exchange for these little communications was an exclusive word or two about Washburne’s personal motives and intentions in the convention, because Washburne had, as everybody understood, between twenty-five and thirty favorite-son votes for himself, and Washburne also had a thousand reasons to be grateful to Grant for kindnesses received. Why wouldn’t he just send his votes over to Grant right now and start the stampede himself? Washburne listened to the growing silence between them. He was an old man now, he thought, and politically obscure. Gratitude was not the same as loyalty. There was a cynical French saying: “Something in our best friend’s misfortune does not altogether displease us.” He could help Grant, he guessed. But he wouldn’t.

Who wrote
Democracy
?

If you take the book simply as a
roman à clef
, a mischievous portrait of present-day Washington society life, this is an entertaining and interesting question, and there is no doubt that trying to guess his (or her) name has been a favorite dinner table pastime from Capitol Hill to Lafayette Square.

And yet beneath its local and topical interest,
Democracy
is a serious story of a woman forced to choose between two men, one a powerful but corrupt Senator, the other a veteran of the Civil War, now a mild but ineffectual lawyer in Washington. The woman herself, Mrs. Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, is a wealthy widow who has come to the Capital with the idea of putting her own hand, the author says in an impressive image, on “the massive machinery of society.” Mrs. Lee is, in other words, “bent on getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government. What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests, the interests
of 40 millions of people and a whole continent … What she wanted was POWER.”

The author, whoever it is, deserves much credit for opening a genuine debate on the place of give-and-take in democratic government as opposed to high and unyielding principles and ideals that may be admirable but fail to accomplish useful work. Much credit also for a finely observant (and malicious) wit: the President and his wife are thinly disguised portraits of General and Mrs. Grant: “they stood stiff and awkward by the door, both their faces stripped of every sign of intelligence, while the right hands of both extended themselves to the column of visitors with the mechanical action of toy dolls.” The corrupt Senator (James G. Blaine?) rises to flattery “like a two-hundred-pound salmon to a fly.”

And finally, the heroine Madeleine Lee is a compelling portrait (not, so far, identified as anyone real) who combines wit and energy with an almost self-destructive weakness. When she lost both her husband and her child, her sister tells the lawyer, “Madeleine was excessively violent and wanted to kill herself, and I never heard anyone rave as she did about religion and resignation and God.”

The romantic plot, it must be said, resolves itself intelligently. The style is polished and bright, reminding one of Trollope for literary excellence. But the curious and even contemptuous detachment of the narrator’s voice, elegant but aloof and mournful, may strike some readers as a flaw. No wonder, perhaps, the author chooses to remain unknown. It is a voice that seems to shrink back from life, impotent. It makes the strangest possible contrast with the passion of its fascinating heroine.

—BY NICHOLAS TRIST

“No need to wait for me, thank you,” Elizabeth Cameron said, “thank you very much.” She folded the clipping into her leather pocket book and stepped down from the carriage.

“Yes, ma’am. You sure you all right here, ma’am? By you-self?”

The driver was a black man well over sixty, with a face as wrinkled as a walnut and a jagged white knife scar that ran from his ear to his jaw. Back in Ohio she would have found him frightening. She would never have walked boldly up to his hackney, all on her own.

“I tell you what, ma’am. I’m going to wait just over there, take
a rest, if you change your mind.” He pointed his whip handle toward a clump of wet sycamores at the farthest edge of the park; tipped his hat; clattered away.

Elizabeth adjusted the strings of her bonnet and looked around at the wide expanse of grass. Centennial Park was divided from the lake and the beach by Michigan Avenue. At one end, through the restless gray curtain of drizzle, you could see the upper floors and roofs of the commercial district—a giant American flag marked the Grand Pacific Hotel—and at the other end a little rise of lawn led to a knoll framed by still more dark sycamores.

She looked down to be sure that her pocket book was snapped shut, then started along the pathway toward the knoll. The pocket book contained a tablet and pencil, a watch on a ribbon, some money, the clipping from the Washington
Post
. Shouts reached her from the other side of the knoll. She slowed her pace.

It was a very clever book review. She was foolish—
foolish
—to clip it out. The romantic plot resolves itself intelligently, yes. Yes. No.

Uphill she walked more slowly still. Two tramps in soggy clothes passed in the other direction and squinted closely at her, but said not a word. Along another path several women appeared, carrying rolled umbrellas and wicker picnic baskets and apparently trying to herd six or seven little boys, every one of whom was carrying either a wooden bat or a white leather Base-ball. Shouts reached her from the other side of the knoll.

She had seen a great deal of Base-ball in her life, Elizabeth thought, and once or twice, when she was with her brother-in-law Colonel Miles in Montana, she had even been allowed to play, or at least to
bat
at the ball when some of the soldiers pitched it. Soldiers had played the game all the way through the war, her brother-in-law said, sometimes right on a battlefield where there were still unburied corpses and wounded men—her mind veered suddenly toward Nicholas Trist, and she brought it back with an effort of sheer will. When he was President, she made herself remember, General Grant had liked to stroll down to the South Lawn of the White House in the afternoons, and at the makeshift diamond the local Washington boys had laid out the President would pick up a bat and stand there, cigar in his mouth, and hit the ball as the boys threw it. Just like her.

She stopped in the middle of the path. She was flirtatious, she knew it, she admitted it, the vital fascinating heroine was a flirt, a tease, she had kissed other men, she had kissed men even in her own house, even—but never,
never
had she made an actual rendezvous. And Nicholas Trist was not a man to be content with a meeting and another kiss. He was a serious man, with serious needs, that was his appeal. Nicholas Trist had a look of hunger, she thought, and hard intelligence, his wound had made him both hard and vulnerable. Which was nonsense, sentimental nonsense, but true. Every person, she thought, has an outside and an inside, and the two can be hopelessly different. Outside she was flirtatious, charming, men loved to be near her. Inside—inside, she was a jumble of fear and uncertainty, stupidity. In love, she thought, in physical love, a man had to make himself hard, a woman had to make herself soft to receive him.

Under a tree at the very top of the knoll she stopped again. Down below was the roof of the Base-ball stadium where the professional Chicago team was playing Cincinnati, that much she knew from the papers. The part of the field that she could see beyond the roof was still muddy, half shrouded in cool mist, but a few players stood with their hands on their hips in the grass. Another was lining up bats beside a bench.

To meet him she would have to descend the hill and pass the grandstands and the ticket gate and go along the park to the little pond she had described in her note to him. Descend the hill, shatter everything.
Facilis descensus Averni
, one of Henry Adams’s favorite sayings: Easy the way down to disaster. Soft little Henry Adams.

Her face had grown hot and flushed, despite the chill in the air. She looked back at the trees safe behind her and the road, the gray sheet of glass in the distance that was the lake. Her pulse was pounding in her wrist so hard that she tucked her right hand into her armpit to stop it. When she was a girl she and her sister Mary had giggled at the names of the parts of their bodies. “Nipples” was funny, so was “armpit” or “breast” or “loin” or, worst of all, “cunny.” But there was nothing to laugh at now, now that she was a woman. She could feel her nipples stiff and tender against the smooth fabric of her corset. She could feel her loins literally ache. He would have a hotel nearby, a private room. Her husband was a heavy man, she thought, he smelled of bourbon,
hair oil, meat. His weight crushed her breath. Elizabeth took a single step downhill. Her pulse pounded till she trembled. She took another step, a quick shallow breath; then gave a little strangled sigh like a cry of pain and turned on the path and hurried back to her carriage.

W
HEN MONDAY MORNING DAWNED, HOT AND CLEAR AGAIN
, the convention hive came back to life. Long before nine o’clock the cramped streets around Exposition Hall were jammed and buzzing with thousands and thousands of delegates hurrying forward, eager to get inside after the long, free day of Sunday and take their seats and finally, at last, begin to vote.

At the entrance doors, as they massed and waited to show their credentials, rumors flew. Grant had withdrawn. Grant was in Chicago. Henry Cabot Lodge had called on Garfield and asked permission to nominate him, if Grant and Blaine should deadlock. Garfield had accepted. Garfield had refused. The only rumor gaining general credence was that a delegation from Kansas had offered to place Roscoe Conkling’s name in nomination if Grant would withdraw, and Conkling had pulled himself up to his full magnificent height, looked scornfully down his nose, and announced that any man who would desert his chief hardly merited election.

“All this ding-dong about Washburne,” a Pennsylvania delegate told Trist in the reporters’ room outside the main auditorium—“do the arithmetic!”

No need, Trist thought—every person in the Hall seemed to
have a pad of paper, a column of figures. His delegate tore off a sheet of calculations and thrust it in his hand. “Grant on the first.” His voice was already hoarse. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

At half past eight the building was filled to capacity, heaving and buzzing with excitement. Trist pushed his way into the telegraph room with two more last-minute paragraphs for Hutchins, only to find it a blue chaos of cigar smoke, frustrated men, crumpled flimsies. Storms in the North and East had brought down every telegraph wire linking Chicago and New York and Washington. Blaine and Sherman were cut off from their managers, half the Eastern delegations were adrift without instructions.