Authors: Max Byrd
T
WO OR THREE TIMES,” SAID ELIZABETH CAMERON, “HE’S
asked me where I’ve been, what I was doing.”
“And you said you’d been having tea, of course, with Henry Adams.”
If she heard the note of sarcasm in Trist’s voice, she gave no sign of it. She shook her head and paused in the middle of the path to adjust her fur collar, and Trist (as if he were Boojum or Possum on a leash) paused obediently with her. Over the soggy black winter treetops of the Mall, not a quarter of a mile away, rose the gleaming white stone shaft of the Washington Monument. Its shape gave him sexual thoughts. He looked at Elizabeth Cameron in her trim, tight-fitting jacket, her full skirt like a swaying bell over her hips; anything in her presence gave him sexual thoughts.
“I don’t know what could possibly be keeping them. I walked through once and there was nothing to see but old bones and buffalo skins.” She wore a neat round fur hat to match the collar, something expensive, of Russian design. Her cheeks were flushed with the afternoon chill, her eyes bright with health and energy. It was the first time since the Adamses’ celebration party two weeks ago that he’d managed to see her, and even so, respectable as
mummies, they were only to walk along the frozen Mall while Maudie Cameron visited an exhibit with her school in the Smithsonian Institution.
“They’re absolutely late.” Elizabeth pulled out a beautiful little gold watch on a locket chain and frowned at it, prettily.
“We could meet in New York,” Trist said. “The
Post
sends me there almost every week, or I could take a room in the Willard—”
“The Willard!” She laughed and tucked away the timepiece. “Where half my husband’s friends spend their days in the bar, watching the lobby.”
It was cold in the shadows of the Smithsonian’s redbrick towers. They reached the end of the path and walked out onto the grass and into the sunshine. Clouds were building along the northern curve of the Potomac and the light was beginning to fail, but from the center of the Mall the newly completed Monument could still be seen in all its glory. Elizabeth had been in Pennsylvania with the Senator, so while they waited for the unpunctual Maudie, Trist described for her the pleasures of covering the story three days ago when the capstone of the shaft was officially put into place—rain had turned the ground at the base of the Monument into a freezing cauldron of mud, none of the speeches could be heard; the wind-speed indicator at its top had registered sixty miles an hour, though nobody had calculated it down at the bottom, next to the speaker’s platform. He was conscious of trying to charm her, divert her, win her attention. When she turned to him and smiled her dazzling, distant smile, he felt like a trout on a hook.
“Clover Adams meant to come and photograph it.” He ventured perversely onto the subject of Henry and Clover Adams again. In Lafayette Square, Emily Beale had told him, people now gossiped openly about Henry Adams’s infatuation with
La Doña
Cameron. He would be damned if he would think of Henry Adams as a rival. “But the weather was so bad, she didn’t come, of course. And now she’s lost interest.”
“Clover’s not herself,” Elizabeth said serenely. “Everybody says so.”
“Her father isn’t well.” From the massive arched doors of the Smithsonian emerged a party of girls in blue-and-white school uniforms. Trist instantly picked out fifteen-year-old Maudie—could
it be true? fifteen?—unmistakable with Don Cameron’s bushy dark hair and clumsy height.
“Clover’s father,” said Elizabeth. “I think you’d better go before Maudie sees us—her father is a kind of gentle, tyrannical monster. He lives for her alone. He came here last winter, and the two of them together, you should have seen them, inseparable. It’s a wonder”—she turned to go, and her bland gaze swept past him like water over a stone—“a wonder Henry isn’t jealous.”
W
HAT HE REALLY WANTS TO DO,” SAID CLOVER ADAMS, “IS
station a guard around these ruins.”
“These ruins” were in fact the stone foundations and rising brick walls of the Hay and Adams houses, going up side by side next door to 1607 H Street, but proceeding so slowly that a full year after signing the contracts, the builders had only just now completed the second-story exterior walls. It was Clover’s habit, she told Trist, to come out and practice her photography on the interesting contrasts of scaffolds and bricks left by the workmen at the end of the day. Henry preferred to watch the construction from his study window and rush out ten times a morning to offer advice and caution.
“And at night,” she said, “he imagines noises, vandals, all sorts of catastrophes. I suppose,” she added doubtfully, “we could put Boojum or Possum out as watchdogs.”
Trist glanced over to the adjoining yard, where Boojum and Possum were lying fast asleep under a rosemary bush.
“I also like the juxtaposition,” Clover said, adjusting her camera tripod, “of snow on top of the bricks.” Together they stood behind the big black camera box and looked up at the array of intersecting gables and pointed turrets, lightly frosted with white, that made up the far wall of what would be John Hay’s house on Sixteenth Street. The effect the architect Richardson had aimed at was evidently a mixture of Romanesque mass and Gothic height; the combination so far was about as American and modern as a medieval abbey. Trist couldn’t imagine two structures more out of place in the prevailing redbrick and Federal styles of Lafayette Square. He was hardly surprised that a number of neighbors had already protested.
He walked a few steps farther into the muddy construction site. It was easy to see the truth of what Elizabeth Cameron had said. Clover Adams was not herself. Always thin, she had clearly lost weight. Her thick skirt enveloped her like a shapeless bag. Her dark bonnet seemed bigger, more concealing than ever. From time to time she stopped, even in the middle of a sentence, and simply fell silent. Silence, Trist thought, was not an Adams trait, husband or wife.
“I saw Emily Beale yesterday,” Trist now said, to fill one such silence. Clover crossed her arms in contemplation of the snow and bricks. Trist rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the sinking sun beyond the trees on the Georgetown horizon. “Or Emily McLean, I should say. It’s going to be hard to think of her as a married woman, I guess.”
“She has taken to redoing her face so often,” Clover said, “she looks like a ceiling by Michelangelo.”
Trist frowned into the sun. “I understand you were in Massachusetts, seeing your father, when she was married.”
“My poor father is not well at all. He has
angina pectoris
. My sister and brother do their best, but they’re witless about medical care. He really needs
me
.” She shook her head and turned back to her camera. “I took six photographs last week in the same kind of light, Mr. Trist, and none of them developed properly.” She began to disassemble the bulky camera and tripod, and Trist came over to help as best he could. “At Beverly Farms I played the piano quite a good deal for my father,” Clover said as they stooped together. Her hands moved quickly, decisively. “He always likes to hear me play, even though I’m not very good.” She glanced up and smiled, and there was a momentary flash of her old gay irony. “We share the same high musical taste, I’m afraid—his favorite song and mine is ‘Give My Chewing Gum to My Sister, I Shall Never Want It More.’ ”
Trist laughed and watched her shuffle her photographic plates into their carrying box, like big glass cards, and then place the camera and box on the child’s red wagon she used for hauling things from her yard into the building area.
“Henry sent me over to the Smithsonian the other day,” Clover said. “I was to study their collection of porphyry and jade, because Henry wants one or the other for our dining-room fireplace.” She looked over her shoulder with a nod to indicate the space beside
an unfinished retaining wall that was destined to be, Trist supposed, the dining room. “We spend
hours
each day contemplating the aesthetics of our house, you know. It reminds me of the months we spent when we lived in Boston years ago, helping Richardson design Trinity Church, which was his first big job, and we used to go inside and sketch where the stained-glass windows should go and how the clerestories ought to be placed, and all the paintings, day after day.”
“Just like the novel
Esther
,” Trist said without thinking. He instantly regretted it. He had been struggling to lift, awkwardly with his one hand, the last bundle of heavy photographic plates, and his mind had simply skipped a thought. In
Esther
the heroine helps an architect friend decorate the windows of a city church, her fiancé calls her a “second rate amateur.” He felt his face grow hot. Clover pulled the wagon onto the sidewalk of H Street and appeared to take no notice.
“And I thought I saw you walking on the grounds with Elizabeth Cameron,” she said, “by the Smithsonian, when I was there.”
Washington was the smallest city on earth. “I ran into her on the Mall.”
“Such a beautiful woman,” Clover said, and it was impossible to be sure of her tone. “You men do ‘run into her’ so often, do you not?”
The construction gate closed with a loud metallic snap. Nearby, the first of the gas streetlamps on H Street flickered to life. Clover began to walk along the sloping brick sidewalk, tugging her wagon. Trist walked beside her in silence. He cradled the extra photographic plates in his arm. It was astonishing to him how quickly her mood had deteriorated at the mere mention of Elizabeth Cameron,
Esther
—who could say which? Her sadness, he thought, was nearly palpable, it showed in the slump of her tiny shoulders, the listless pace of her feet. At the front steps to her house they paused, but for once she made no motion to invite him in.
“I can carry these plates to your darkroom,” he offered.
She took the plates from him. “I suppose Emily Beale will soon be producing little heirs and heiresses for the General,” Clover said. Lights now glowed in the upper windows of Decatur House across the Square. “It’s only natural.” Then she gave him, scarcely
visible between the folds of her winter bonnet, a soft, sweet, Clover smile and in a tone of unmitigated despair she added, “If any woman ever tells you that she doesn’t want children, Mr. Trist, don’t believe her. All women want children.”
I
T WAS A REMARK NOT EASILY FORGOTTEN, PARTLY BECAUSE IT
was so unexpected, partly because her voice had cracked as she spoke, tears had all but sprung to her eyes. Three days later in New York City, on assignment again for the
Post
, Trist found himself pondering again The Question of Clover. Was she simply failing in spirit because of her father’s illness? Or was there something else? She had read
Esther
, he knew. Had she also, like Emily, like himself—like who could say how many other people?—seen in the novel a strange, accidental
roman à clef
? a hostile reflection of her own life? The homely, unaccomplished woman overshadowed by the youthful beauty and charm of her friend, her Elizabeth Cameron rival? And why in the world had Henry Adams—who never read fiction—pressed the book into Clover’s hands?
Who wrote
Esther
?
It was four
P.M.
, February 3 of the gray, cold New Year of 1885 and Trist was seated at the window of an overheated diner on Second Avenue, sweating in his overcoat, drinking bad coffee, and watching the big illuminated clock on the sidewalk. The Question of Clover. Despite the bad coffee, which tasted like creosote and sugar, he yawned and rubbed his face. Clover. He had taken the last express train from Washington the night before in order to interview Thomas Edison once again first thing this morning, Stilson Hutchins’s orders—the great man was rumored to be refining his miraculous phonograph machine; true—and he had telegraphed a long article back to the
Post
not more than half an hour ago. And now, in another ten minutes, about the time it would take him to walk to East Sixty-sixth Street, he was going to begin a second article, on his own initiative, with or without Hutchins’s approval.
He spread the New York
World
on the counter and read the headline one more time:
GEN. GRANT VERY ILL
. The
World
was a scrappy, unreliable paper, with something of a vendetta against
Grant because of his friendship with Roscoe Conkling. Its editors had been among the first to suggest that the General himself had been part of the Grant & Ward criminal conspiracy and had fleeced his investors for his own secret profit, and no amount of protest from Grant’s friends had done anything to change their story. But today at least the
World
seemed to have limited itself to verifiable facts. The article under the headline quoted a Philadelphia source as saying that “General Grant has been obliged to decline Mr. George W. Childs’s invitation to visit him, on account of ill-health.” It reminded readers that Grant’s friend General Beale in Washington had also released a letter testifying to Grant’s poor health and blaming it on the stress of the Grant & Ward debacle. And it added with some clinical precision that Grant was presently troubled, according to his doctors, with an “epithelial soreness at the root of the tongue, which causes him great pain when he swallows.” Dr. John H. Douglas acknowledged that the General hadn’t smoked a cigar since November 20th and was now receiving daily treatments at his office to clear away mucous obstructions in the throat.
Trist watched the clock’s hands jerk toward four-fifteen. He paid for his coffee, braced his hand on the counter, and stood. The Question of Clover would have to wait. General Sherman had told him four-thirty sharp, and Trist had yet to meet anyone who didn’t think Cump Sherman always meant, absolutely and ferociously, exactly what he said.
He walked four blocks up Second Avenue, under the bone-rattling screech of the Elevated Railway, and then turned west down Sixty-sixth Street. Here the sidewalks were still covered with inch-deep slush from a recent snowstorm. Edison’s electric cables hadn’t yet reached this far uptown. Trist passed beneath a series of hissing, flickering old-fashioned gas lamps, in a vague and shadowy black-and-white atmosphere that reminded him inevitably of Europe, of wet stone and foggy parks and the dank little flat off Primrose Hill in London that he had rented long-term and then impulsively abandoned, to become American again. As he neared Grant’s well-publicized address at number 3, he was not entirely surprised to see a dozen or so silent figures hunched together under the nearest lamp. There was nobody in the world, Don Cameron liked to say, as famous as Grant. After the article that
morning people would come, of course, just to stare at his house, at his empty front steps, just for the sheer morbid pleasure of his celebrity.