Grant: A Novel (46 page)

As it happened, however, his train from Washington was late. Consequently he had to stand on the sidewalk opposite Grant’s house, stamping his feet in the snow, and listen to three different accounts of Twain’s visit (including a brief and entirely fictitious interview, described with a straight face and whiskey breath by the man from the New York
World
).

Trist nodded politely. Peered as instructed at the two second-floor bay windows, which the
World
assured him was Grant’s library and where, three days earlier, the General’s silhouette behind a curtain had been carefully analyzed to produce the immortal headline:
GRANT SMOKES A CIGAR!

By six-thirty snow had begun to fall and he was shivering with cold. The crowd had dwindled to fewer than a dozen stalwarts, standing like a mute glee club in a semicircle at the foot of Grant’s steps. The reporters closed their notebooks in boredom and began to drift away. Against his better judgment Trist drank two brandy smashes around the corner with a man he knew from the Associated Press. He turned down a third because he was already yawning and had to be up again first thing in the morning, on the train back to Washington if need be.

“For the pension vote?” asked his friend, and Trist pictured the tedious rattling train ride and sat down again and changed his mind about the third brandy.

He had never quite intended to be a newspaper reporter, he thought. He watched the waiter refill their glasses and set a wooden bowl of pretzels on the table. His idea after the war, as he recalled it, had been something more along the lines of a darkly brooding one-armed Byronic poet, irresistible to women, preposterously rich, forever twenty-three. But reality—poor old unimaginative reality—had turned into something else: pretzels, obscurity, a job that, since he had thrown over his battlefields book, was in danger of becoming routine. A small life.

And yet he had to give reality its due—the Grant story was far from routine, the Grant story had suddenly blown up in the country’s face like a delayed bombshell from the Civil War. Without
anyone’s quite knowing how, Grant’s Last Battle had become the biggest newspaper event since Appomattox.

The pension vote, for example—on February 16 the House of Representatives in a fit of partisan spite had turned down a proposal that the bankrupt Grant be restored to the retired army list and thereby given a pension. The outraged mood of Grant’s friends—and Dr. George B. Elliott’s official diagnosis of cancer, reported by Trist himself—had turned Congress upside down; a reconsideration vote was promised. Meanwhile, Henry West wanted Trist on the spot in New York.

“Where the circus is,” said his friend from the AP with a weary grin.

“Reporter Finishes His Drink,” Trist said and downed his brandy smash with one long swallow and hoped that reality wouldn’t include a hangover.

The pension vote was put off. Next morning Trist was back at East Sixty-sixth Street, furry of tongue, shivering in the cold.

Meanwhile, the pressure of newspaper attention was forcing all kinds of changes. Because of the confusion over reports of Grant’s health, his team of six doctors had decided that very morning to issue a daily bulletin to the press, something that hadn’t been done since President Garfield had been shot in 1881. And to ensure complete fairness, three official “bulletin boys” were installed right in Grant’s front hall—Trist and a crowd of some two or three hundred people watched them file in from the street—representing Western Union, the Associated Press, and the United Press. Any medical despatches would be handed to all three simultaneously, the door flung open at a signal, and all three would then presumably sprint away like crazy to their bosses.

Other arrangements were equally Barnumesque. On the east side of Madison Avenue, the eight major New York papers had pooled their resources and rented the basement of a small house. Here they were joined by a growing number of out-of-town papers like the
Post
. Special telegraph wires were strung to downtown desks and offices. A telephone line was promised. Reporters took turns going up to Sixty-sixth Street and monitoring the Grant home like sentinels.

On Trist’s second day the police set up wooden sawhorse barriers at each end of the block in an effort to control the traffic. Yet despite the sawhorses, dozens of carriages squeezed past and
waited alongside the curb, surrounded by people peering in the windows while the carriage occupants in turn stared up at the house. The bolder ones often got out and rang Grant’s bell.

Those who were admitted—Mark Twain was a daily visitor, also Adam Badeau, said to be helping Grant write his book—were besieged by shouting reporters as they left. On March 1 Senator Jerome Chaffee, Buck Grant’s father-in-law, caused a sensation by quoting the General as saying, “I am not better. I am going to die. Every moment is a week of agony.” But General Horace Porter the next day denied that Grant ever complained of his illness at all, and General “Black Jack” Logan declared that Grant’s suffering had wonderfully cleared his mind for writing.

On March 3, the day before Grover Cleveland was to be sworn in as President, the House of Representatives had still not managed to reconsider Grant’s pension. Under heavy pressure from Cump Sherman and the press, the Speaker of the House announced at the last possible moment that they would convene again on March 4, but date all business as having been transacted on March 3. Trist caught the earliest train of the day from New York and raced up the steps of the Capitol well before nine
A.M.
, but the House, despite the glowering presence of Sherman in the gallery, was still debating a series of minor questions—a change in rules, a disputed election in Iowa. A coterie of disgruntled Confederate veterans blocked all other matters.

At noon the House would be constitutionally unable to act. Grant supporters crowded the gallery, muttering ominously, and filled the corridors outside the chamber’s doors. At quarter past eleven one of the Iowans abruptly took the floor and, pointing at the clock, declared that he would never stand in the way of the welfare of the country’s Greatest Living Patriot—at which point a wild, tumultuous cheer broke out, the Speaker hammered the vote, and the whole room shook with repeated cries of “Aye!”

But the Senate had not yet convened that day. Worse still, the Capitol building was now in a state of roiling chaos, thanks to the inauguration ceremonies set to begin at noon, in the Senate chamber itself. Those Senators already inside scrambled for their seats, others fought their way up the steps and through the hallways in a mad rush—the President
pro tem
chased away carpenters still building the inaugural platform just below his podium, then banged his gavel and signaled for a voice vote on the
amended retirement list for the army, just received from the House, and moments later, at exactly five minutes till twelve, at a desk in an adjacent room, outgoing President Chester A. Arthur signed the last bill of his administration. In New York, Mark Twain told reporters waiting on the stoop that Mrs. Grant had read the telegram to the General herself and then cried, “Our old commander is back!” and the whole household (the stern old commander excepted) had let out a whoop of joy!

Trist’s story for the
Post
that day, featuring a rare interview with the journalist-hating Sherman, was picked up and reprinted by two hundred papers across the country, almost as many as his “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” story of the previous fall—when he reached New York again next morning he was greeted with champagne in the basement on Madison Avenue and, a few hours later, an invitation to interview Grant himself later in the week.

The invitation was Mark Twain’s doing, and less an act of cordiality, Trist thought cynically, than of publicity for Grant’s book, and in any event it was immediately postponed for a week, and then delayed indefinitely by Grant’s fluctuating health.

By the middle of March, he was writing a daily report for the
Post
and two European press services, and the scene along East Sixty-sixth Street had settled into a colorful permanent uproar. Three or four times a day delivery carts fought their way through the crowds on the pavement and the parked carriages and unloaded crate after crate of gifts for the General—horse blankets, war bonnets, old swords, dozens of mailbags of letters with home remedies and herbal extracts. A fanatic named “Java John” tried to wrestle his way in the front door, and when the police pulled him away, he screamed to the press that Grant would be saved only if he stopped drinking coffee. Another man, dressed in a faded blue sergeant’s uniform, dropped to his knees on the doormat and prayed at the top of his lungs till he, too, was hauled away. A reporter for the
Tribune
fell out of a tree in the yard next to Grant’s and broke his arm and had to be treated by Grant’s own doctors.

Yesterday [Trist wrote on March 17] in a kind of symbol of national reconciliation, the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederate general who died at Shiloh, came to offer their best wishes to General Ulysses S. Grant.

This morning telegrams arrived from Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard. Later your reporter watched General Ely Parker go up the stairs just after Mark Twain and Senator Chaffee. Parker is a full-blooded Iroquois Indian, whom Grant promoted for bravery at Vicksburg and who stood by the General’s side at Appomattox and was mistaken by Robert E. Lee for a black man.

The whole country, it might be said, or at least the generation of men who fought in the Civil War, seems to have taken Grant’s struggles as the chance to review their own and the nation’s past. Some days East Sixty-sixth Street looks like American History’s own parade ground.

WHAT THE HELL EVER HAPPENED TO “GRANT THE BUTCHER”?
Stilson Hutchins telegraphed Trist irritably from Washington.

A
ND LAST BUT NOT LEAST,” TWAIN SAID WITH THE SUBTLEST
possible change of tone, “this is Adam Badeau, the General’s personal research assistant.”

“And also the friend of Henry Adams.” Trist smiled and held out his hand. “I’ve heard him mention your Washington days together.”

Badeau wore wire-rimmed glasses, a neat, closely trimmed beard, and slicked-back hair. His air of fussy precision was the exact and chilly opposite of Mark Twain’s casual, cigar-puffing
bonhomie
. He shook hands with obvious distaste. “I haven’t seen Henry Adams in a decade,” he said.

“Trist is here to write about how the General writes.” Twain was already holding the door open to Badeau’s cubicle, where Trist could see a collection of reference books, two or three oversized cardboard portfolios of maps, and a typewriter. “Badeau checks facts,” he told Trist, “and goes over the General’s prose every day with a set of pruning shears.”

This was so clearly not Badeau’s idea of what he did that he turned away without a word and sat down at his desk. Twain was unruffled. He led Trist into Grant’s bedroom, which adjoined the library and was separated from Mrs. Grant’s room by folding
doors; then into Fred Grant’s study, facing onto East Sixty-sixth Street and furnished, like Badeau’s, with reference books and maps. And finally, like a genial host in a country house, he took Trist’s arm and opened the door again to the library.

It was, as Trist later informed his readers in the
Post
, a spacious, comfortable room, lined with books and paintings of military subjects. Two bay windows, stretching from floor to ceiling, looked down on the street and let in a full measure of afternoon sunlight. There were four or five leather club chairs arranged in one corner, a big globe on a stand, and vases of cut flowers on tables and shelves here and there, a weekly gift from George Childs, the Philadelphia tycoon.

Grant had placed his desk in the center, under a gas-chandelier, a simple mahogany rectangle bare of everything except stacks of notes in various categories and a green leather-framed blotter. Next to the desk, incongruously, was an old folding card table, rather battered and worse for the wear. On this the General kept manila writing paper, pens and ink, and a little box of children’s wax crayons, which he used to mark Union and Confederate positions on his own set of maps. The only book on the desk or table was a well-thumbed copy of Sherman’s
Memoirs
.

“Well, I think I remember you from Chicago,” Grant said as they came up to him. He struggled to his feet, shook hands, and allowed his black valet to ease him back into the chair. “Cold Harbor.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a long, not quite comfortable pause.

“I believe you’re a friend of Senator Cameron.”

“The Senator brought me over to report on the campaign in 1880.”

“And his beautiful young wife,” Grant said. He gestured with a small pale hand to a chair for Trist.

“I know her too, of course,” Trist replied.

“Trist is a social butterfly,” Twain said, sitting down and starting to tap one foot on the carpet. “He also knows Henry Adams down in Washington.” He crossed his legs and waved his cigar in the presumed direction of Washington. “Just reminded me out in the hall. Only man I’m acquainted with, General, that goes harmlessly between Henry Adams and
you
.”