Grant: A Novel (9 page)

T
HE BEST THING IN HIS INTERVIEW WITH MARK TWAIN, TRIST
thought, had nothing to do with Grant.

They had met as arranged the morning after the banquet in Palmer House suite 45, a spacious set of rooms looking out on State Street, and Twain (resplendent in Turkish slippers and a deep maroon dressing gown he called his “toga”) had waved his hand airily at a breakfast table set for two. On the floor beside it, in a sitting posture, was a life-sized cat made out of pasteboard and tin. “The illuminated cat,” he had announced, and promptly lowered the curtains to demonstrate that the cat, painted over with a thick coat of phosphorus, actually glowed in the dark, like a cat of fire. “Scares away rats and mice at night,” Twain had explained, “beautiful parlor ornament in daylight”—he wanted Trist’s European readers to know that this was American ingenuity and enterprise at their finest. He, Twain, thought he would invest fifty thousand dollars of his own money in it, make a fortune, and retire.

An irresistible first paragraph—Trist had written it out in French for
L’Illustration
(“
chat de feu
”) and English for one of the London newspapers that sometimes took his articles.

And the reason he thought of the illuminated cat right now, at
nine-twenty-five in the morning after his evening champagne at Don Cameron’s house, was that he was standing on the corner of First Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, in the shadow of the Capitol, and watching the biggest, fattest black rat he had ever seen. It was seated under a luggage wagon from the National Hotel, combing its whiskers, not glowing, but easily twice the size of the cat of fire. When the wagon lurched forward into Pennsylvania Avenue the rat gave Trist one curious, appraising glance and then raced uphill toward the Senate, as though it belonged.

As perhaps it did, Trist thought, and crossed the street in the same direction.

At the bottom of a circular carriageway he paused again to look up and admire the Capitol dome—unfinished in 1865 when he had last seen the city, which was then a vast army camp in the process of disbanding. Now the great white dome was splendidly in place, and the once cluttered and overbuilt space around the Capitol was largely cleared and landscaped, though just to the north of the Senate wing two or three stray pigs, Washington’s unofficial garbage disposers, rooted in the brown grass and mud.

He made his way up past the shabby boarding houses that still lined Constitution Avenue. Inside the Capitol lobby, under the dome, he stopped beside the double-door entrance to the Senate and pulled out his watch. He could go into the visitors’ gallery and observe the session—Don Cameron had arranged a permanent pass—or, better, simply meet him afterwards in the committee room that Cameron and other Grant “Stalwarts” used, next to the Supreme Court chamber. He hesitated. Whiskery men pushed around him on their way to the Senate. Clerks and secretaries threaded their way through knots of tourists. The Rotunda was crowded, noisy, poorly lit.

“You are standing, Mr. Trist, beneath perhaps the worst executed historical painting in the nation. Not to mention the least accurate.”

Henry Adams’s voice cut easily through the clamor of the lobby. He pointed his furled umbrella up toward the gilt-framed painting that hung just above their heads. “ ‘The Signing of the Declaration of Independence,’ ” he read. “History at its most fictitious. That’s supposed to be my great-grandfather John Adams over there, but no Adams male has ever reached the middle age
with so much hair. Jefferson over here”—the umbrella swung right—“was in reality quite coarsely redheaded, and entirely feline. Franklin was taller than everybody thinks. The whole thing is a fraud, of course, because the Continental Congress never did assemble for the purpose of signing the Declaration of Independence—they went to the clerk’s office privately, one by one, over the space of two months—and they adopted the resolution on July second, not July fourth. Otherwise—” He spread his arms in a gesture of unruffled tribulation. Trist smiled and craned his head to look at the painting again.

“The artist, John Trumbull, was also blind in one eye. Come walk with me a little, Mr. Trist,” Adams said. “As the feller says, ‘I would have speech with thee.’ ”

I
WOULD HAVE HIM TO DINNER,” CLOVER ADAMS SAID. “I WOULD
sit him down at the table next to anybody, if that’s what you want.”

Emily Beale held her teacup poised just at her lips, without tasting (though Clover Adams was known to spend a fortune on her teas), and waited delightedly for Elizabeth Cameron to reply. Emily had been away from Washington for three full months in California, which was the same as the other side of the moon, and they had only arrived home late last night, much too late to call on anybody. But today was another matter. She was not about to waste another morning without real society.

“At heart, you know, I really am a democrat,” Clover continued when Elizabeth Cameron said nothing. “In my family we never make any fuss about mingling with servants”—this was true, Clover had been so friendly last year with two Irish carpenters doing work for her that she had actually gone to visit their wives, and Henry had been
furious
. “Besides,” Clover said, “if Mr. Bancroft
requests
him—”

“Well, not ‘request’ exactly.” Elizabeth put down her cup and shook her head slightly, so that a few long strands of black hair came loose from her bun, and Emily wondered for a moment (as she had, often, before) what the beautiful Elizabeth Cameron would look like if she wore her hair long and loose, down past her shoulders, like some of the women they had seen in Paris.

“He only said that the name ‘Trist’ was a very old name—”

“It means ‘sad,’ ” Emily contributed, “in French.”

Elizabeth smiled kindly at her. “And he does
look
sad, doesn’t he?”

Emily nodded and raised the teacup back to her lips;
almost
raised her knees to her chin like a little girl. At the age of eighteen she still felt young and unformed in the company of such matrons, though Elizabeth was only twenty-two or twenty-three. Clover, of course, was forty, fifty.…

“Mr. Bancroft only said it was very likely he came of the Trist family that intermarried with the Jeffersons, before the war.”

“Henry said the same thing. He said if he were
that
kind of Trist, he might have family papers for the Book.”

“The Book,” Elizabeth and Emily murmured in unison. Henry Adams had recently published a life of somebody Emily had never heard of, Albert Gallatin, who had once been Secretary of Treasury. But it was understood by everybody in Lafayette Square that Henry’s
real
book was a massive, endless history of Thomas Jefferson (the Adams family enemy) and James Madison when they were presidents. He had gone all over Europe poking in archives. He disappeared most mornings into his study and wrote for hours. Emily had an impression—more than an impression, since she had once, by total accident, found two or three sheets of paper in
dialogue
—that he wrote other things as well, to amuse himself. But “the Book” was sacred.

Clover stood up to hand around a plate of seed cakes, and Emily took the opportunity to glance into the next room, where Clover had set up some of her photography apparatus. Amid the dozens of bookshelves in the sitting room—the Adamses had books the way other houses had ants—she had already hung two or three of her new photographs, including an incredibly stern portrait of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Both disapproved, Emily knew,
thoroughly
disapproved, of Clover.

She glanced back to see Clover and Elizabeth bent side by side over the tray of cakes as Clover explained something about the recipe, which was undoubtedly her own original creation. It was a cruel contrast, there was no denying that—for all her brilliance Clover Adams was a flat, plain woman with pallid skin and a hooked nose. Next to Elizabeth she looked drab. But then, next to Elizabeth most women looked drab; drab as cabbages. (Irresistibly, Emily turned half an inch to glimpse her own profile in the windowpane.)
Whatever it was that sent men weak and trembling to their knees, Elizabeth Cameron had it.

“In Europe,” Emily said, taking a cake, “when he worked for Papa, Mr. Trist generally didn’t eat with us.” She pictured Trist as he had been in Paris and wondered if he were still clean-shaven—most of the men in America, young or old, had more facial hair than goats did. “But I think that was
his
preference, because of his arm. He went to Yale College, you know, for a little while, and he published a book of stories after the war.” She ate a mouthful of very dry cake and said, as she usually did, one more thing than she should. “I thought he was handsome, but so pale he didn’t look truly well.”

“I fear he’s given to drinking sprees à la Grant,” said Clover, whose father was a doctor and who often diagnosed people quite sharply.

But the subject of Grant was one to be avoided whenever possible—Emily had been well-schooled by her father in neighborly good manners about this. While the Beales counted General and Mrs. Grant as almost their closest family friends, and the Camerons and Grants were political allies, Henry Adams’s scorn for the ex-President was a Washington byword. If there was to be harmony in Lafayette Square, all you could do was bite your tongue.

“Well.” Elizabeth rose and smoothed the folds of her blue over-skirt. She had really the perfect figure, Emily thought, including a full and voluptuous (she chose the word with relish from her limited but specialized French vocabulary)
poitrine
. “Well, it’s all a moot point. My husband is going to Scranton tomorrow. Until the June convention I doubt we’ll entertain at all. If Mr. Bancroft wants to meet Mr. Trist, I can just send him around with a letter of introduction.”

In the windowpane, as she too rose, Emily tried to gauge the fullness of her own
poitrine
. “It will be very nice to see Mr. Trist again,” she said, and pulled her shoulders back.

T
HE CAPITOL BUILDING HAD A BASEMENT ROOM CALLED
“The Hole in the Wall,” one floor under the Senate, next to the steam heat boilers, which served coffee, slowly, and whiskey right away.

Henry Adams led Trist down a set of narrow wooden steps and through its padded door. A sign on the wall said M
EMBERS OF
C
ONGRESS
O
NLY
, but the grandson and great-grandson of presidents ignored it and chose a table in a corner.

The room, little larger than a vestibule, also contained a bartender’s counter, dumbwaiter, and nine or ten wooden tables. Adams pulled off his gloves and hat, gave them to a passing waiter, and held up two fingers for coffee; and then, over the clatter of plates and voices, leaned forward and explained. The speech he wanted to have with Trist concerned his unusual family name—Adams was embarked on a history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations (it would take him, he said complacently, a decade to write), and he was intrigued by the possibility that Trist was descended from the very same Pennsylvania Trists so prominent in Jefferson’s last years. And if so, by the possibility of undiscovered family papers, family archives … Nicholas Trist II had, after all, been a diplomat of some distinction.

Trist likewise leaned forward into the clatter, not a little surprised. His father and mother had both died when he was a boy. His father’s brother had married one of Jefferson’s granddaughters, Virginia Randolph, and that family had generously taken him in, reared him, sent him off north to college, and that was all he knew. Nicholas Trist II and his wife had both died in 1874, poor, disappointed, patriotic. He had a stepbrother living in Philadelphia. He himself had only visited Monticello once, many years ago, but the Trist family proper had apparently known Jefferson since—

“Since 1775,” Adams told him, and took coffee from the waiter. “When Jefferson boarded with the widow Mrs. Elizabeth Trist in Philadelphia during the Second Continental Congress. My great-grandfather knew her. You should have a Southern accent, Mr. Trist.”

“I admire the chameleon.”

Adams smiled and spooned sugar unhurriedly into his coffee. “I sometimes think,” he said in his own incongruous British accent, “that before the war—I mean the last war—America was populated by only two or three hundred people, all of them constantly tangling their feet in each other’s lives. Jefferson, you know, was once warned of a British raid on his house, led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton, and the man who rode all night to warn him, a kind of tidewater Paul Revere, was named Jack Jouett. Afterwards, Jouett moved to Kentucky, where he turned out to be the lawyer for Rachel Jackson’s divorce before she married Andrew Jackson, a divorce precipitated by the brother of Jefferson’s private secretary William Short. Jackson, of course, hired your stepfather, or uncle rather, as his own private secretary, who had earlier married Jefferson’s granddaughter. Tarleton’s mistress in Paris was the best friend of Jefferson’s English mistress.” He paused and arched one eyebrow. “You’re amused, Mr. Trist?”