Grant: A Novel (24 page)

He sat down at a desk where somebody had knocked a telegraph printer over and left it humming and shaking there like a black metallic electrical insect. Aimlessly he felt in his pocket for the sheet of calculations, found it, found the three separate handwritten notes that had been delivered at slightly hysterical intervals to his hotel Sunday, by an increasingly bemused messenger. The calculations he wadded up and threw on the floor with all the other scraps of paper and garbage; the notes he took out and read again slowly.

He braced himself with his hand on the desk and stood up awkwardly. Then he dropped the three pieces of paper one by one in front of a janitor’s broom.

At nine o’clock promptly the session began. A hasty prayer, a two-minute litany of protocol reminders and announcements. Gavel, gavel. Applause. Alabama’s chairman shot to his feet.

The states were to be polled individually, alphabetically, reading
their breakdown of votes while the clerk at a desk beside Senator Hoar dipped his pen, wrote, dipped again as fast as he could.

At nine-forty-five Conkling stepped into the aisle to give New York’s totals. Typically, he paused until the low background hum had faded into silence, then in a studied, insolent drawl announced, “Two New York delegates are
said
to be for Sherman, seventeen are
said
to be for Blaine. Fifty-one
are
for Grant.”

The Hall crackled with nervous laughter, but Trist, doing his arithmetic, noted for the first time how much the loss of the unit-rule vote had cost the Grant camp. Nineteen more votes from New York, plus Washburne’s elusive twenty to thirty—if Conkling and Cameron had prevailed last week, Grant would be only twenty votes away from nomination. Pennsylvania rose. Twenty-three of its votes defected to Blaine, three to Sherman, one to Garfield. When the West Virginia chairman stood, he tipped his hat mockingly to Conkling and shouted across the Hall: “One delegate is
said
to be for Grant. Eight are
known
to be for Blaine!” At the end of the first ballot Grant had 304 votes—75 short—Blaine had 284, Sherman 93, Washburne 30, Garfield 1. Trist joined the crush outside the telegraph room, but the wires in the East were still down. He took a cup of Sherman coffee in a waxed cardboard mug back to his table, looked up at the galleries in vain for Elizabeth Cameron, settled back for ballot number two.

The second round changed nothing. At eleven
A.M.
Grant received one more vote, 305 now, Blaine two fewer, Garfield his solitary mark from a Pennsylvania delegate who sat with his arms stubbornly crossed, staring straight ahead.

The long morning wore into afternoon; a one-hour recess; voting again. A telegraph line to New York came back into service, but none to Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and in any case there was nothing to report. At ten
P.M.
the convention took its twenty-eighth and last ballot of the evening. The totals were almost precisely what they had been on the first.

In the corridor outside the Pennsylvania office Trist fell into step with Don Cameron, who scarcely glanced at him but did at least mutter his name. The ideal journalist, Trist thought, was part hound, part leech. He matched Cameron stride for stride, down the back stairs, out into the alley where the Senators, committee chairmen, and various other convention dignitaries had a private
rank of carriages and hackneys waiting. Cameron climbed into his personal four-seater landau and shifted around to face the front like an old bear in a leather cave. Trist climbed in after him and pulled the door shut. Cameron raised his head with a snap. “What the hell do you think
you’re
doing?”

Trist gripped the passenger strap next to the window. The landau started forward with the crack of a whip and swayed out into Michigan Avenue like a bouncing black ball.

“There’s a delegate I know,” Trist said over the clop of hooves and the rattle of the windows. “He works for the Illinois Central, and he told me General Grant got on the train secretly this afternoon in Galena, headed north.”

Michigan Avenue was by now a tangled canyon of horses and wheels. Men and women leaving Exposition Hall were streaming across it in all directions, between carriages, in the gutters, up and down the middle of the street. From the elevated landau window the sidewalk looked like a riptide of hats and shoulders. A passing streetlamp lit up Cameron’s big red brick of a face.

“Well, he’s going to Madison, Wisconsin,” Cameron said. “Been scheduled for months for the Grand Old Army reunion dinner.”

“The trains go direct from Galena to Madison,” Trist said.

Cameron struck a match.

“If he’s stopped in Chicago tonight,” Trist said, “Senator Cameron would know. If he’s planning to show his face at the convention tomorrow, his campaign manager would be the
first
to know.”

Cameron snorted. The tip of his cigar glowed in the dark like a coal.

“The telegraph line is open to Washington now,” Trist said. “I can sell an exclusive to the
Post
and the wire services; it’ll be in every paper in Chicago tomorrow—you can have the convention hall packed to the rafters.”

Cameron exhaled smoke and assumed the conspicuously insincere frown of a politician calculating. “Not a goddam word for publication,” he said, “unless I tell you different.”

At a three-story brick house just one block away from the lake the carriage wheeled over flying gravel, then mud, then clattered to a stop in a courtyard in the rear.

Inside the house Cameron motioned Trist toward a side parlor.
Trist took a seat by a window with a silhouetted view of a railroad line, on stilts, that ran between the beach and the first row of lakefront houses. He listened to murmurs from across the hall, stood up to inspect a bookshelf. Twenty-four iron-black volumes of classic English poets, as alike as bars in a cage. He picked up John Dryden, put him back. An Irish maid came in to offer him cakes and coffee, and when she left he waited two minutes, then pulled the door open and stepped into the hall.

The house belonged to a friend of the Grants, that much was clear, which made sense because it was impossible to imagine the General, in the middle of the convention, simply driving up to a Chicago hotel and quietly taking a room for the night. Through the closed door the murmurs were more distinct. Trist recognized Cameron’s baritone grumble, a woman’s voice, two other men.

As he hesitated, hand on the knob, thinking Cameron would have his head, the door suddenly swung open and revealed Mrs. Julia Grant, turning sideways in a noisy rustle of wide skirts and bustle. She halted instantly at the sight of Trist, then managed a thin, unwelcoming smile before disappearing up the stairs.

“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” Cameron blocked the door.

“Let him come in,” said an unexcited voice in the parlor.

Trist stepped into a room more or less the twin of the one he had just left; same view of the lake and the railroad, same horsehair sofa, red plush chairs. There was a matching bookshelf, but filled with china bric-a-brac, not poets, and standing beside it and switching his cigar to shake hands was U. S. Grant.

It was only the second or third time Trist had actually seen his former commander up close—Chicago in November had hardly counted, a few quick words on the run—and just as before, his reaction was one of vague disappointment. The General was of average height, about five feet eight, average weight. His shoulders were stooped. He was carelessly dressed in an old frock coat, shiny at the elbows, and a black necktie. The beard was full and unevenly trimmed, the hair ordinary brown with streaks of gray. When you came into Andrew Jackson’s presence, Trist’s stepfather used to say, it was like an electric shock to the system—bone, flesh,
lightning
—Jackson’s secret of leadership was that he conveyed a sensation of raw physical force (with a touch of backwoodsman’s pure lunacy) that made most men back away in something like fear. Grant shook
hands and sat mildly down in one of the red plush chairs; picked up his porcelain coffee cup, crossed his legs like a farmer on his porch.

“Nicholas Trist,” Cameron said belatedly. A lanky middle-aged man on the sofa, presumably the owner of the house, stood up and also held out his hand.

“You write for a French magazine,” Grant said. “I remember we met in Chicago. There was a fine French journalist named Clemenceau in Washington after the war. Best reporter in the city. Now he’s a politician.”

“I write for the Washington
Post
now, as regards the convention.”

“The Washington
Post
,” said Grant, “is not much impressed with me.”

“No, sir.”

“They enjoy my malapropisms,” Grant told Cameron. “Once I said it was a pleasure to be received so warmly at a certain reception, the
Post
went on for a month about being
received
at an occasion for
receiving
.”

“Trist is new to the
Post
,” Cameron said, which was, Trist figured, about as far in the direction of an endorsement as Cameron was likely to go.

“Well, I don’t have a statement for you, Mr. Trist.”

In retrospect it could have been Grant’s calm, imperturbable tone, or the sight of him so close, or simply fifteen years of more or less suppressed memory. “Goddammit,” Trist said in a flat, cold voice.

Cameron had been pouring a tumblerful of something at a sideboard. Now he turned around slowly, glass in hand.

“I don’t care two cents about a statement,” Trist said. “The first time I ever saw you was in the Wilderness campaign.”

Grant put his cigar to his mouth, recrossed his legs.

“I missed the ‘Bloody Angle,’ ” Trist said. “But I was in the next regiment to Emory Upton’s at Cold Harbor.”

A train rattled by outside. The man on the sofa said, “Oh, dear” very softly.

“June third, 1864,” Grant said.

“Twenty-first Connecticut Infantry. Sixth Corps.”

“That would have been Colonel Birney’s regiment, I guess.” Grant sat in his chair and looked steadily up at Trist. “Artillery
barrage for five minutes to soften up the line. You started your assault at half past four in the morning, if Birney followed my orders, and I’m sure he did.”

“There was a pasture six hundred yards wide that we had to cross, and a ravine and gun emplacements that none of the commanding generals had bothered to scout when they ordered the attack. Lee’s men were entrenched behind them at the other end of the pasture.”

Grant said nothing.

“We actually reached the trenches, some of us, but then we were driven back to the middle of the pasture and slaughtered like lambs. One of my sergeants back in the third wave said when the Rebels fired it was a burst of flame two miles long, he said it sounded like the judgment trump of the Almighty. I was a captain and I had forty-four men when I started, and six when it was over.”

“You think I owe you something,” Grant said, with no inflection whatsoever in his voice.

“No, sir.”

“Go wait in the carriage, Trist,” Cameron said.

“I think,” Trist said, and stopped. “I have no idea what I think,” he said. His shirt, he realized, was soaked with sweat. In the mirror behind the sideboard he observed with curiosity that his empty left sleeve had come unpinned and his own brown hair had streaks of gray as well, or else the mirror was flawed.

Grant drew at his cigar, expressionless.

“Lost his arm at Cold Harbor,” Cameron said, to Trist’s enormous surprise, and added what he could not possibly have known, but did. “Had to lie out in a field, in a pile of corpses, for a day and night before the doctors found him. Got a brigade citation for bravery.” He looked at Trist. “My wife took some newspapers out of the library.”

Grant said nothing. Cameron put one hand on Trist’s right shoulder and began to steer him toward the door.

“I will tell you, Mr. Trist,” Grant said, “for publication if you like. I don’t intend to go to the convention tomorrow morning.”

“Then,” Trist heard himself say, “there goes your nomination.”

Grant sat in his chair, blank and silent as a wall.

In the carriage Trist slouched against the seat with his head back, rolling gently with the motion of the wheels. They passed the big crenelated Chicago water tower, entered a park. He held
his watch up to the wavering light of a streetlamp and saw that it was already well past midnight. On the opposite seat Cameron pulled out a flask and unscrewed it.

“Is he likely to change his mind?” Trist asked.

“Grant don’t really want to be President,” Cameron said wearily, last surprise of the night. “If they make him President, it just means that they forgive him.”

O
N THE TWENTY-NINTH BALLOT, WHICH WAS THE FIRST BALLOT
of Tuesday morning, it looked for a moment as if Secretary Sherman had begun to gather strength. From 93 votes, his high point on Monday, he rose unexpectedly to 116. Grant stayed steady at 305, Blaine at 278, and Washburne slightly increased to 35. But for all practical purposes nothing had changed.

On the thirtieth ballot Sherman reached 120 votes; delegates here and there began to speak seriously of a real Sherman breakthrough. But on the thirty-first, he lost ground; by the thirty-third he was plainly slipping away.

At noon the convention recessed to take its lunch and digest its staggering ration of rumors and gossip. In an alley outside the Hall, next to a billboard advertising next week’s attraction (a giant mechanical “taffy pull” on the auditorium floor, powered by steam engines) Trist and Cadwallader ate fried chicken from a stall and drank Blaine lemonade. Cadwallader, who had been up at dawn, going from delegation to delegation, reported that the newest scheme from the anti-Grant side was something called the “Wisconsin Plan.”