Grant: A Novel (34 page)

“But you mean to publish them too, of course, in the regular way?”

Adams replaced one of the volumes on his shelf; opened the other on his desk and spread it flat. But he didn’t turn it around for Trist to read, or step aside so that Trist could see the opened pages. “I care very little for publication, in fact, Mr. Trist.” He tilted his bald head and smiled a small, pinched smile. “Shocking notion to a journalist, no doubt. Yet I’m almost entirely content to write my books, show them to one or two trusted friends, and for the rest—what do I care really? I never bring a book into the world without a sense of shame. Indeed, to say that I detest my own writing is a mild expression.”

Trist could only make a feeble murmur of protest.

“You are now a reporter again for the Washington
Post
, I understand? Lizzie Cameron told me.”

Trist folded the sheets of paper with Adams’s “sketch” of Jefferson and placed them in his jacket pocket. “I always miscalculate expenses, I suppose.” The thought occurred to him that Henry Adams, born to wealth and privilege, had probably never calculated expenses of any kind, at all. “My battlefields book is going to need more time. I have to revisit some of the sites. The photographer is costly. So I’ve signed on with the
Post
as a kind of temporary special correspondent, yes.”

Adams opened the door to the parlor and held out his stiff arm like a miniature butler. “I never read the
Post
. I am, despite your friends Senator Cameron and General Grant, a Republican to my core. Although perhaps this year, if Cleveland is nominated, I may, for once, deviate.”

“I’m going to New York next week. I’ll tell you what I learn about Cleveland.”

“Travel, Mr. Trist,” said Adams as he closed the door behind them, “even to New York, is one of the two great consolations of life. I see the ladies returning
en force
. We should sit down and finish our tea.”

But Trist was beginning to catch the rhythm of Adams’s habitually ironic, habitually self-deprecating voice. “What is the other consolation then?”

“The first five or ten years of a happy marriage,” Adams replied as he sat down and picked up his cup. “I hear their rustle-rustle at the door, Mr. Trist.”

M
ARK TWAIN LIKED TO INVITE HIMSELF TO LUNCH WITH
General Grant about once a month. Or in any case, as often as he could come down from his palatial home in Hartford to New York City and turn himself loose, as he said, on an unsuspecting metropolis.

The lunches were not elaborate affairs. Usually Twain simply called at the offices of Grant & Ward at 2 Wall Street and the General sent out for sandwiches and coffee and the two of them dined in shirtsleeves at his desk. Each smoked two or three companionable cigars. Twain reported on the progress of his latest investments—he was going to start a publishing company, he had invented a children’s board game for learning English history, also a self-pasting scrapbook and a new kind of grape-pruning shears, he was sponsoring a Connecticut genius named Paige (wonderful, prophetic name), who had invented a revolutionary typesetting machine for books. Grant listened and puffed and laconically reported in turn that Ferdinand Ward was also a genius and Grant & Ward were still setting Wall Street records, though the Mexican railroad project was as far as ever from reality. Sometimes they talked politics—the mugwump Twain supported the Democrat Grover Cleveland—Grant remained a loyal Republican. Sometimes,
too, they talked about the war; and on that subject, if no other, Grant usually held forth at length and the former Confederate private listened.

These facts and more Trist learned from Twain himself at a table in the bar of Delmonico’s Restaurant on Madison Square, in the late afternoon of April 28, following (Twain carefully explained) only the second such lunch of the year.

“Missed January, of course,” he said, “because the General still had his pneumonia, and then February—” He paused to tap cigar ash into a sterling-silver ashtray placed at his elbow by Charles Delmonico himself, and at precisely that moment somebody at the bar called, “Hey, Mark!” Twain (was it Twain or Clemens?) gave a world-weary sigh, patted Trist on the shoulder, and got to his feet, and Trist leaned back and watched him work his way down the row of barstools, shaking hands like a politician, with a word or a joke or a waggish wag of his red head for every hanger-on in the room.

They had run into each other by chance in the offices of the
Century
magazine, where Twain (it was surely Twain), with a politician’s memory, had instantly recalled Chicago, their interview, the illuminated cat (“not prospering,” he confided glumly). Everybody in the magazine had known Twain—no surprise—but so had people in the streets as they walked to Delmonico’s, even the hackney drivers and the newsboys standing in the sunshine by the Union Hotel, who likewise waved their hands and shouted, “Hey, Mark!” As writers went, Trist thought with more than a twinge of envy, the forty-eight-year-old author of
Tom Sawyer
and
The Innocents Abroad
had achieved an astonishing level of popular celebrity.

But far more surprising was the fascination Twain himself revealed for
other
celebrities. When he returned to the table and picked up his Scotch old-fashioned again, he quickly reverted to the subject of Grant and their intimate lunches, then to the various financiers, playwrights, actors, tycoons, dignitaries of every stripe that he, Twain, personally knew, knew
of, intended
to know.

“Your Henry Adams, for example,” he said, “exclusive fellow?”

“Well, retiring, quiet.”

“He and John Hay—I know John Hay pretty well—and Clarence King, they all have a secret club. The ‘Five of Hearts,’ because their wives are in it too.”

“I didn’t know.”

“And Edison—you say you’re going down to New Jersey to see him tomorrow?”

Trist nodded. Henry West had originally sent him to New York to write a story for the
Post
on Governor Grover Cleveland, whose public admission of having fathered an illegitimate child was rapidly becoming the kind of campaign issue the
Post
delighted in; but then he had telegraphed that morning to ask Trist to stay on and write a feature about Thomas Alva Edison and his Menlo Park laboratory for the Sunday edition.

“I might come down with you,” Twain said in his slow Missouri drawl. “Like to meet him.”

But in the end it was not so much literary or even electrical celebrity that seemed to matter to Twain—by degrees he brought the conversation back to Grant and the war and the phenomenon above all of what he called the “self-invented” man, that strange American ability to be two completely different people in one lifetime. Sam Grant had been a total failure, did Trist know that? Before the war he was a
nothing
, a nobody, ordinary and obscure. The truth was—Twain lowered his voice to a whisper—he
did
drink, before the war. Maybe even once or twice
during
the war. And yet in the fiery crucible of battle Grant had actually created a whole new self—a second nature—Sam Grant was a flop, U. S. Grant turned out to possess the mysterious powers of a giant.

“Odd how you both have the same first name,” Trist observed as they parted at the restaurant door. “Sam Grant, Sam Clemens.”

“Noticed it myself,” Twain agreed.

“Except almost nobody calls you ‘Sam.’ ”

Twain nodded. “Howells does. My wife calls me ‘Youth.’ Sometimes Grant’s wife calls him ‘Victor.’ ” He raised one hand to wave to a passing admirer on the sunlit sidewalk. “I’m a self-invented man, too, you know. Respectable Old Sam Clemens blushes to his eyebrows when he thinks of that terrible ruffian Twain.”

There was something so comical and outrageous in Twain’s deadpan drawl and hangdog wag of his head that Trist burst out laughing.

Twain watched him complacently. “You can live a small life, Trist,” he said, and paused to puff at his cigar, “or a big one.”

I
N THE WAR THE GUNPOWDER USED IN MUSKETS AND RIFLES
always left long tattered sheets of greasy black smoke hanging in the air, a foul, sticky smear that clung tenaciously to the hair and skin. In a matter of minutes it would deposit a black film on every soldier’s face and hands, so that sometimes a charging line of infantry looked bizarrely like a row of poorly made-up actors in a minstrel show.

Trist glanced at one of the murky alleys that opened into this part of lower Broadway, and the pair of dirty-faced newsboys standing at its mouth, hawking their papers, and he thought of the smoke in the war, and then by a natural logic of other black things: the coffee beans that every soldier had carried in his knapsack and ground with his musket butt on a stone and often ate raw, out of his hand. The “war paint” some troops made by breaking open cartridge papers and rubbing their cheeks with black powder. “Shadow soup,” which certain army cooks were said to fix by boiling water with the shadow of a chicken over it (add salt and serve). The secret of prose is contrast, Cadwallader had told him back in Chicago. Like so much else that Cadwallader said it was badly overstated and still probably true. At the far end of Broadway Trist could already see the brilliant white glow of a string of Edison
electrical streetlamps, not orange-tinted like the ones in Washington, but intensely, purely white, so painfully bright that the rest of the city around them looked, by contrast, infernally black.

He crossed to the east side of Broadway, dodging between two horse-drawn omnibuses rattling at frantic New York speed in opposite directions, and came up beside yet another alley, where a pale girl no more than ten or twelve stood holding a wooden board with boutonnieres of artificial red flowers. Ten cents. He bought one and let her pin it to his collar, a solemn, wordless exchange. Despite the hour—automatically he looked up at one of the big clocks set on a high iron pedestal, still faintly luminous at seven-thirty in the evening. Despite the hour, he thought, the sidewalks were jammed with busy, fast-moving crowds of pedestrians and shoppers, the streets with traffic. Every doorway or alley mouth held somebody peddling something. Beggars in old flat blue army caps crouched on the curb, men in glossy top hats hurried east and west, up and down, the whole long street surged and heaved with restless “electrical” energy.

He stepped up his pace, turned to the left again, and caught a whiff of the Fulton fish market. The Edison lights grew even brighter. Warehouses and offices began to replace the shops and restaurants of the Broadway district. The streets were filled now with workers, finished for the day, streaming toward the enormous new Brooklyn Bridge above Fulton Street. In Washington—contrast—at this time of night there would be only scattered taxis and private carriages and a few stray clerks or black servants out on the street, a sleepy, small-town atmosphere compared to the push and shove of New York.

A stray thought crossed his mind, as if at an angle. If he were Henry Adams and rich enough to live in luxury anywhere in the world, why of all places would he choose Washington? Placid, pleasant, undemanding Washington?

He turned left again at Nassau Street and almost stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to shade his eyes.

You
must
go back to New York, Edison had said at the end of their interview yesterday in New Jersey (a man accustomed to giving orders) and see my installation at the Pearl Street station. And Henry West, by return telegraph, had not only agreed but insisted.

Trist had told Henry Adams the plain truth. He had indeed
miscalculated his expenses, especially photography and travel, and he was more and more dependent on his part-time income from the
Post
. And besides, he had already written one long feature on Edison—in 1881, at the Exposition d’Électricité in Paris, Edison had swept every prize and award the French could think to offer, and Trist had covered half the pages of
L’Illustration
one month with Edisonian lore and information, though of course Edison’s lieutenants, not the great man himself, had made the trip to Paris.