Grant: A Novel (35 page)

Go to 257 Pearl Street, he had been instructed. Show them this note. Go straight on down into the basement.

Contrast. The Paris Exposition had been held in the vast Palais d’Industrie next to the Tuileries gardens, an enormous steel-and-glass structure that housed not only room after room of newly invented electrical devices but also—this was France, after all—numerous exhibits of a purely irrational and decorative nature. The entrance hall had been given over to a full-sized reproduction of a Normandy lighthouse, three stories tall, with a revolving electric lamp at the top and an artificial seacoast at the bottom made up of rocks, waterfalls, waves, sailboats, and three or four electrical “canoes” that circled the lighthouse base. In the exhibit rooms proper, under a fully inflated dirigible airship, complete with electric propeller, you could see Edison’s phonographs, his improved telephones, his strings of dazzling electric lamps, whose circuits a lady or gentleman could adjust at will by the touch of a switch. If you chose, you could also pick up the telephone and hear a voice ten blocks away at the Opéra begin to sing, or (at another booth) connect yourself to the Comédie-Française, where an actor politely asked whether you preferred to hear him recite Molière or Racine.

But the Pearl Street headquarters of the Edison Electric Company in Manhattan was a grimy old warehouse
sans poésie
, reinforced by heavy timbers and steel, that housed workshops and toolrooms on the upper floors and six gigantic subterranean dynamo engines, each supported in turn by a wilderness of cables, wires, pipes, coal bins, and water pumps. Not a lighthouse or dirigible in sight. Edison had contracted to furnish electrical power, including light, to a square-mile area bounded by Spruce, Wall, Nassau, and Pearl Streets, and to replace the gas lamps in every single building with his own electrical ones, and it was, as far as Trist could tell, his genius at organization as much as invention
that had made the experiment succeed. The dynamo rooms were deafening and filthy, but they supplied the power. The gas lines under the cobblestone streets had been uncovered and next to them workmen had simply buried parallel insulated pipes of bundled electrical wires, and every building in the district had been given a free supply of patented carbonized lamps (a dollar a bulb to replace) which fit in the old gas fixtures. When you climbed back out of the dynamo rooms and looked down Pearl Street to the west, the effect was a fairyland—streets brilliantly clear and lit, window after window glowing with pure white light, the stars themselves eclipsed by Edison.

Trist toured the workshops and dynamos with a guide, examined the wall-length charts that showed the location of all the wires and meters in lower Manhattan, and finally emerged on the street again at a little past nine.

He walked west to 23 Wall Street and looked, for no good reason, at the redbrick offices of J. P. Morgan, who had prophetically underwritten Edison’s company; then started north again, past City Hall Square, past the Ladies’ Mile of clothing shops on Broadway, dark now but thronged with thousands and thousands of shoppers during daylight and next, he was told, on General Edison’s list of targets for illumination.

At the Hoffman House on Fifth Avenue he went inside and found a booth as far as possible from the long, loud bar. He drank two beers and scribbled his notes on a tablet. Then he put his pencil down, leaned his head back against the booth, and looked very carefully at nothing at all, nothing whatsoever.

Elizabeth Cameron—his mind started, stopped; stalled. Of the mysterious laws that govern men and women he was still, he thought, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine largely ignorant. What Edison should invent was a machine to turn off desire, to make husbands vanish, shower one-armed adulterous lovers with wealth, station—for the first time in weeks he felt a throb of pain in his nonexistent left arm—with symmetry.

Some sort of cheer went up in one of the private rooms toward the rear. He pushed his empty beer glass aside and pocketed his notebook. Mark Twain had told him the Hoffman House was the largest saloon in New York. It was surely the noisiest. The booths and tables were dimly lit (gas, not electricity) and stank of spittoons and smoke. Over the bar was a string of elegant crystal
gasoliers, and under them a fifty-foot-long painting showed endless sepia-colored nudes peering through bushes at the double-deep row of gentlemen drinking as fast as they could and peering right back. It was a splendid painting; he would buy it for his rooms in Washington. A black-aproned waiter with sideburns down to his jaw paused to help with his coat. “Ladies upstairs, sir,” he muttered in Trist’s ear. “In the back of the cigar store two doors down. Ladies everywhere.”

The night was cold for early May. He pulled his collar closer and hurried up the sidewalk to Forty-first Street, where patrons from the National Theater spilled onto the sidewalk in a rich dark wave of furs and top hats, and horses and carriages jammed together from curb to curb, filling the air with voices and bells and the clatter of horses’ hoofs.

In a momentary irony of great city-small world he caught a glimpse of Cump Sherman, of all people, the General’s unmistakable red beard blazing from a carriage window. Then the traffic shifted, a whip cracked, and Sherman was gone.

At Forty-fifth Street he turned into the modest little hotel that Henry West, with an eye on the
Post
’s travel budget, had chosen for him. He trudged upstairs to the fourth floor, briefly considered going back out for another beer (ladies everywhere), but looked at his watch, calculated (accurately) how much money he had already spent in New York, and sat down instead on the edge of the bed.

No electricity this far uptown, though both J. P. Morgan’s and William Vanderbilt’s mansions on Fifth Avenue were said to have private Edison systems. Trist adjusted the lamp on the wall to reduce the faint, cloying scent of gas and opened his book.

He had seen the novel
Esther
twice in Henry Adams’s house, and out of curiosity had bought a copy himself at a bookshop on Broadway that afternoon. The
Post
paid five dollars extra for “filler” reviews that could take up space in the slow Sunday edition, or the
Century
magazine might run it for three dollars more. When the bellboy knocked on the door with his telegram Trist was just beginning chapter two; drowsy, half-asleep, he carried the yellow envelope back to the lamp and turned up the gas, because Western Union printing, as always, was dim.

A
FTERWARDS, CADWALLADER, THOUGH NO LONGER WRITING
regularly for the
Herald
or any other newspaper, pieced the story together this way.

On Sunday, May 4, Ferdinand Ward appeared unexpectedly in the late afternoon at Grant’s house on East Sixty-sixth Street. “Buck” Grant (so called because he had been born in Ohio, the “Buckeye State”; a certified idiot) showed him into the parlor and skeetered off to find his father. When the General came in and sat down and spread his hands on his knees expectantly, Ward, as charming and silver-tongued as ever, smiled with his eyes and his teeth and said the firm had come to a little bump in the road.

Father and son cocked their heads like a pair of dim-witted puppies.

Fact was, Ward said, the Marine National Bank was experiencing difficulties.

“What’s that got to do with us?” asked Buck.

Ward was patient, of course. He explained that the Marine Bank held some six hundred and fifty thousand dollars of Grant & Ward money on deposit. But yesterday, Saturday, the City of New York, which also banked there, had withdrawn three hundred thousand dollars to pay off bonds; this left the bank rather badly
short of cash. If there were another large withdrawal in the next few days, the bank would be hard pressed to pay, and Grant & Ward—he gave them a Pearl Street smile—would be … crippled.

The General was as calm and direct as if he were taking a subordinate’s report at Vicksburg. “What do you want us to do?”

Ward liked directness. It was how he did business himself, he said. What they should do was, among the three of them, raise three hundred thousand dollars as a loan and deposit it right away in the Marine Bank, where one of their special partners, Jim Fish, was president. He, Ward, was sure he could raise a hundred and fifty thousand. Now if the General and Buck could do the same, why, it would be a loan for one day only, Monday. The bank would haul in its creditors and pay them back without fail on Tuesday.

“But,” said Buck, “this is Sunday.”

Ward had noticed that.

“Where in the world could we find a loan like that on
Sunday
?”

Ward continued to smile and nod his head and drink the glass of sweet sherry Grant’s old black manservant had brought him on a polished tray.

About an hour later—Grant’s house is conspicuous, people watch it off and on all day long, to catch a glimpse of him—about an hour later Grant himself came down the front steps, limping. He had slipped on the ice beside these very steps back in December and hurt his leg, and now and then still walks with a cane. The house itself is an ugly four-story redbrick affair that he purchased three years earlier, in 1881, and furnished lavishly with so many mementos and souvenirs of the war that visitors often think they’ve wandered by mistake into a military museum. The money for the house itself had come from a hundred-thousand-dollar trust fund raised by the owner of the Philadelphia
Ledger
after Grant lost his try for a third presidential nomination. The chief subscribers to the trust were millionaires like J. P. Morgan, who thought Grant had been a wonderful President and deplored the fact that ex-Presidents didn’t receive a government pension. (In New York a second trust fund was soon established, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars this time, and its chief subscribers were the railroad scoundrel Jay Gould and William Henry Vanderbilt, who remarked
apropos
to the
Times
that “Grant is one of Us.”)

Now he could have called for his carriage, of course, or even a public taxi, but for some reason the General hobbled on his own
power down the street to Fifth Avenue; hesitated for a time on the corner, then turned south. A group of small boys followed him silently right down to number 640, which occupies, as everybody knows, the entire block between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets. One of Vanderbilt’s Irish stablehands came out and chased the boys away with a whip, cursing.

Inside the house, William Henry V. bestrode his leather chair like a paunchy colossus. He watched Grant lower himself into another chair on the other side of the fireplace and hand his hat and scarf to the butler; then he arranged his fat little Vanderbilt hands on the arms of his chair and listened.

Grant has always possessed a remarkable memory. He now repeated Ward’s information just about word for word, arrived at the sum of one hundred fifty thousand dollars, and stopped.

The other thing that everybody knows about him, besides his address, is that William Vanderbilt is as cranky and unpleasant as fifty million dollars can make you. When Grant was finished, he pursed his lips and frowned and flipped one pink hand over, like a chop on a grill. “Well, I don’t care anything about the Marine Bank,” he said. “It can fail. And as for Grant & Ward—I wouldn’t lend it a dime.” Grant sat in his chair and didn’t move a muscle. “But I’ll lend
you
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Vanderbilt said. “Personally, a loan from me to you.”

He picked up a silver bell and rang for his checkbook.

“I’ll pay you back on Tuesday without fail,” Grant said.

William Henry grunted.

As it turned out, Ward was waiting at Sixty-sixth Street when Grant returned. No luck on his side getting that loan. How had the General fared? Grant, who had once gone bankrupt trusting people in the real estate business and later surrounded himself, unknowingly of course, with swindlers in the White House, reached in his pocket for Vanderbilt’s check. I will deposit it myself, Ward told him over another sweet sherry, first thing tomorrow morning.

W
HICH, NATURALLY, HE DIDN’T DO.” TRIST WATCHED WITH
awed fascination as Cadwallader shoveled scrambled eggs into his mouth with one hand, toast with the other. Two hands, he thought, not always an advantage.

“Cashed it himself,” Cadwallader said indistinctly and wiped a massive glob of golden egg from his chin. “Bank went bust, Grant & Ward went bust—you wrote that part up very nice, I saw the
Post
every morning.”

“But I missed the whole Sunday visit to Vanderbilt, the silver bell, the check.”

“Oh, hell, everybody did.” Cadwallader was nonchalant. He mopped up the last of the egg with the last of the toast and sat back, gently belching. One of the Willard Hotel’s legion of green-jacketed waiters sprang to his side with a silver-plated coffeepot in hand. “Grant’s gardener is an old Michigan sergeant I knew back in the war. Vanderbilt has two thirsty veterans on his downstairs staff. Don’t pay them worth a damn. Can’t afford it, ha.”