Grant: A Novel (48 page)

DEATH COMING VERY NEAR
, headlined the New York
Times
.

On July 21, in anticipation, the
World
began to trim its front page with a thick black border.

On July 23 at eight-fifteen in the morning Trist was startled by the sound of fire bells in the distance. He put down his pen and rubbed his left shoulder. Church bells began to toll, nearby at first, then, as it seemed, from every corner of the huge city, in slow, mournful military cadence. Trist crossed the room to the window. Down on the street, under a bruised gray sky, all traffic had stopped. Nothing moved. On the sidewalks, in doorways, beside their wagons and horses, men and women stood in small silent groups, looking upward and listening. Automatically Trist began to count, because days earlier the formula had been announced to the whole country. A single peal every thirty seconds, sixty-three peals in all, one for every year of U. S. Grant’s life. North and South, the air shook with the iron sound.

Afterwards, Dr. Douglas asked Trist to stop by his Fifth Avenue office when he could. And a few days later he led Trist through his
examining rooms and back to his private desk and showed him the last in his collection of notes. It was dated simply “July, 1865.”

I do not sleep though I sometimes dose off a little. If up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.

W
HAT A PERSISTENT BURDEN GRANT WAS TO HIS GRATEFUL
countrymen,” said Clover Adams. She paused and rubbed her hand back and forth across her forehead and stared vacantly at the window, and had it been anyone else the group would no doubt have passed on quickly to some other topic or speaker. But Clover’s distress was obvious, painful to see, it was unthinkable to hurry her or skip past her. Trist sat with the others around the little tea table in the parlor and waited for Clover to finish her thought.

“An extravagant
person
,” she said after another long moment or two. “And a fool all his life about money.”

“You mean the bankruptcy,” ventured Rebecca Dodge, a middle-aged woman who lived around the corner from Lafayette Square. She had been in the house when Trist arrived, in some capacity between nurse and neighbor, and he had the impression she would be there when he left and there if he ever came again. “With all his Wall Street cronies?” she added after another pause.

“Yes,” said Clover, and stopped, but this time the obsessive rubbing of hand across forehead was too much for Henry Adams’s patience. He put down his teacup and nodded in a brisk, dismissive fashion to Trist.

“Bankruptcy,” he said, getting to his feet, “or something else more disgraceful. I don’t think that was ever quite settled. I admit, the rapidity with which the smallest stockbroker could clean out this man of action knocks my comprehension flat. In ordinary life I should say that a mind so easily deluded could never have marched a sergeant’s guard out of a potato patch.”

“I remember,” Trist said dryly, “that you never thought much of his mind.”

“
I
was thinking,” said Clover, “of his funeral.” As if someone had snapped his fingers and brought her out of a spell, she blinked and sat up straighter and gestured to the hovering black servant for more tea. “We’re something of connoisseurs of funerals in Boston, you know, Mr. Trist. I always used to ask my father every spring for the latest tally of deaths and lunatics, and he would chide me for gloomy tastes, but of course Boston
is
one great charnel house.” She watched her husband pace to and fro beneath the portrait of mad king Nebuchadnezzar. “I was referring to Grant’s funeral, which must have cost the grateful nation an absolute fortune.”

“The largest funeral in history.” Rebecca Dodge was admiring. “Bigger than Lincoln’s even—Mr. Trist wrote a wonderful account of it three days running.” She coughed apologetically in Henry Adams’s direction. “We take the
Post
at our house.”

“Someone,” said Adams from the fireplace, “must.”

“Mr. Trist was quite eloquent about it.”

Adams made a winding circle across the Persian carpet and returned. “It
is
November,” he said, “the gloomy month, I believe Voltaire claimed, when all good Englishmen go out and hang themselves. But I’m sure Mr. Trist would prefer to talk about something more cheerful. Come next door, Mr. Trist, and see what our architect hath wrought in your absence.”

There was no brooking the note of domestic command in Adams’s voice. He tugged at the points of his vest, scowled at Rebecca Dodge and then his wife, and then held his arm out rigidly straight, like a miniature butler, to show Trist the way out of his home.

It was, in fact, very late in November, and outside on H Street the afternoon sun was no more than a distant orange lamp. Burning leaves somewhere farther off gave the day an autumnal tang. They had scarcely stepped from the porch to the sidewalk before Adams’s scowl had cleared.

“In the company of women,” he murmured as he held the gate for Trist.

“Your wife,” Trist began, but Adams wagged his tiny hand in a peremptory cutting off of the subject.

“My wife,” he interrupted, “is very glad to see you again. She likes your stories of journalistic derring-do. You made her smile, for which I’m grateful. The truth is, Mr. Trist, my wife and I are becoming green with mould. We’re bored to death with ourselves, and since her father’s death we see almost no one. At long intervals we chirp feebly to each other, then sleep and dream sad dreams. And that is enough of myself and my wife. Come, inspect the house.”

Obedient, wryly amused at his obedience, Trist followed the little bobbing figure of Adams down the muddy, leaf-strewn sidewalk until they reached the corner of H and Sixteenth Streets, opposite St. John’s church.

He had seen the house before, of course; all of Washington had been observing and criticizing for months the Hay-Adams Houses. But standing on the sidewalk next to Adams and looking up, he felt again how right Clover Adams had been when she said the architect inclined to the vastly monumental. The two buildings, each four stories high and seamlessly joined, were constructed of dark red bricks and massive cut blocks of gray quarried stone. John Hay’s house was around the corner and hard to see, except for a tangle of pointed turrets on the roof. The roof of the Adams house directly above them was a simpler affair, steeply gabled at both ends. Beneath it, rows of undersized windows were set far back in the thick Romanesque walls. On the fourth floor the windows were rounded at the top to give a medieval effect. The whole great structure seemed to rest its weight on two arched bays at ground level, so low and flat that they almost concealed the relatively modest front door. Up close, Trist felt as if he were walking into a crypt.

“We plan to move in, Mr. Trist, at the end of December.” Adams fumbled in his topcoat for keys. “At least
I
do. My wife is much less enthusiastic.” He held up a brass key ring with a little pointlessly triumphant smile, and Trist remembered yet again how much he disliked Henry Adams, how much he liked his poor, distressed wife. “The architecture and design,” Adams said while he selected his key, “have been altogether a masculine affair, I’m
afraid, and Mrs. Adams doubtless feels left out. I would say I’ve interfered unforgivably with her female nest-making impulse, except, of course, the making of houses has always been in some sense the real province of men. You recall, of course, our mutual friend Saint Thomas of Monticello entertained himself in a similar way all his life.”

“I once thought,” Trist said as they entered the empty house, “we might all make an excursion together down to Monticello—Mrs. Cameron talked about it—the way the characters plan to do in
Democracy
.”

“Your favorite novel, yes. Only the new Hebraic owner of Monticello has gutted the inside and rendered it almost unrecognizable, or so I’m told. This is the parlor-elect.”

Trist stepped into a room at least twice as long as their present parlor at 1603 H Street. A huge arched fireplace, already furnished with two or three birch logs on a grate, occupied one end. Two diminutive Adams-sized wooden chairs were drawn up before it, in the center of an unswept bare stone floor. Light poured in from tall clear windows that opened onto a garden, now yellow mud. Adams led him down to the fireplace, out through a temporary plywood door, and up a set of stairs to the library. Room by room, heels clicking, hands gesturing like a schoolmaster’s, he described his original aesthetic intentions, the architect Richardson’s apostasies, the various compromises arranged, evaded. At the very top floor, where the clerestory windows still lacked glass, he motioned for Trist to lean out and enjoy the view and, at the southern end of Lafayette Square, the contrast with the plain columns and simple flat roof of the White House, dwarfed and almost literally in the shadow of Adams’s creation.

“I like to think,” Adams said as he thrust his own head out an adjoining window, so that from the ground they must have looked like two comical sparrows, “my ancestors would approve the irony of the location. It was down there that old John Adams, my great-grandfather, stormed out in a titanic fury after Saint Thomas defeated him in the election of 1800. And then, of course, my grandfather John Quincy Adams had to slink away in his own sullen fashion twenty-eight years later, when Saint Thomas’s protégé the unspeakable Jackson defeated
him
.”

“My stepfather worked for Jackson, for a time.” Trist had no idea whether he meant to be informative or stupidly provocative.
He let his eye move from the White House over toward, he guessed, Don Cameron’s roof. Then he stepped back from the window.

Adams lingered a moment longer. “The square is named Lafayette Square,” he said with his bald head still framed in the open space. “But there’s no statue of Lafayette in it, only Andrew Jackson, mounted on an implausible horse.” He rubbed his hands together and turned back. “Yes, I remember—the Muse of Coincidence. I am a historian, after all. The Trists are well-connected to both Jefferson and Jackson. I wonder a little, Mr. Trist, that you never thought of entering politics yourself, after the war.”

“Did you ever think of entering politics?”

“When I first came to Washington, in the early seventies, the idea was in my mind—in my blood, I suppose. An Adams is told in the cradle that he must be great. But I’ve always considered that the late lamented General Grant, by his sheer vulgarity and incompetence, wrecked my own life, and the last hope or chance of lifting society back to a reasonably high plane. Had someone else been President, I might have risked a run for office—as it is, Grant’s administration is to me the dividing line between what we hoped for, and what we’ve got. But you’re like my wife, Mr. Trist, I think. You consider our Civil War a success.”

Trist had never been so conscious of his one arm, his awkward height in relation to Adams, his inarticulateness compared to Adams. He blinked against a sudden cold wind that swept through the room. “The war saved the country.”

“I think not,” Adams replied. “I think it gave birth to an entirely new nation. You don’t like me very much, do you, Mr. Trist?” He gave his small, pointlessly triumphant smile again. “Come back downstairs,” he said, “even so.”

The huge fireplace in the living room contained, next to the birch logs, a tin box of wood shavings. Adams scattered a handful of these over the logs and struck a match. Then he stepped across to a built-in cabinet and removed a port decanter and two elegant leaded glasses.

“Did you ever, Mr. Trist, consider writing fiction instead of journalism?”

Trist was wary. He accepted his glass and sat down in one of the chairs, two men in a vast empty hall, faces barely lit by the
windows and the glow from the little fire. Why bother to write fiction? “No,” he answered.

“In my youth,” Adams told him, “living in Berlin right after the war, I thought about writing a novel. I decided I would have a consumptive heroine, I would base her on a German girl I was flirting with then, and of course ‘finish her off’ in the most approved romantic style. Arsenic, I suppose, or drowning. Not marriage. As for bringing about a marriage, even in my novel, I would almost rather bring about a murder.”

Something in the last sentence snagged at his memory. Trist looked sharply up. But Adams was merely shifting his posture in the wooden chair.

“I told myself,” he added, “I would publish it in the year 1880. I have an odd fondness for the year 1880.”

“And did you?”

Adams’s face looked like a smiling mask of shadows. “I became an historian instead. But I liked the idea of fiction. I liked the idea of being able to express in fiction what one couldn’t say directly.”

Trist had the sensation of going blindfolded through a minefield. He sipped his port and twisted in the cramped Adams-sized chair. “Such as?”

Adams’s hand moved negligently through the gray light. “Such as my view of Grant, other people, the aromatic state of American democracy. But I’ve grown too mellow for fiction now, I suspect. I regard this universe as a preposterous fraud, and human beings fit only for feeding swine. But when this preliminary understanding is conceded, I see nothing in particular to prevent one from taking a kindly view of one’s surroundings.” He sipped his port and appeared to lean back comfortably in the chair. “I’m instructed,” he said, “by Mrs. Cameron to tell you that she doesn’t wish to see you again.”