Grant: A Novel (10 page)

“I hadn’t thought of History as the Muse of Gossip.”

“The Muse of Coincidence, in fact,” Adams corrected primly. “You’re a journalist, Mr. Trist, so you deal merely in personalities. An historian deals in scientific laws. Andrew Jackson is interesting to the historian now only because he anticipates Grant, is in some ways the type and forerunner of Grant. But as personalities they have the same inarticulate,
brutal
quality, do they not?”

Trist glanced at the clock behind the counter. In thirty minutes
or less the Senate would finish its short session, and he ought to be upstairs again, in the committee room. Adams continued to sip his coffee. The man sitting on his throne, Trist thought, dominates the courtier who stands before him. He wanted to leave, but stayed right where he was.

“In Boston,” Adams said, “where they hated him, they still tell stories of Jackson’s visit in 1830—it was enough, apparently, merely to be in his presence. The stiffest old New England Tories melted when he rode by. People who knew him, even Bostonians, were still voting for him twenty years after his death. But you know, Mr. Trist, language is power, historical figures who are not writers, who are mere ‘personalities,’ are at a great disadvantage—a generation later there are no witnesses to their quality. Posterity wonders what in the world made them remarkable. Look at Washington. But Jefferson will last (and be overrated as long as he lasts) because he wrote well. History is indeed one of the Muses, as you say. History pardons the articulate. Jackson will be underrated because he wrote hardly at all.”

Trist slipped a coin onto the table, but still made no move to leave.

Adams patted his lips with a napkin. He had been, Trist knew, a famous professor once at Harvard, a spellbinding lecturer, and despite his absurd accent, his size, his fastidiousness, Elizabeth Cameron had looked at him last night the way Eve must have looked at the serpent. There was no doubt where Henry Adams’s power lay.

“I don’t know of any family papers,” he said, feeling less dislike for Adams; more fear. “I can ask.”

Adams finally stood and held out one arm to the waiter for his gloves and hat. “You’re anxious to be there for Don Cameron,” he said, smiling again but shaking his head. “Posterity
already
wonders what makes Don Cameron remarkable.” He stepped around an overflowing spittoon and led Trist out by another door.

On the broad terrace that crossed the western base of the Capitol he stopped to wipe “spittoon evidence” from his shoe. Trist walked to the balustrade and looked out at the busy mud-brown diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue down the slope of the hill to the right, and the equally brown rectangle of the Mall, running straight ahead until it disappeared in a low, dark Potomac fog. A cold wind whipped gray clouds down to meet it. In the distant center
of the Mall, like an illustration for Adams’s lecture on politics and posterity, sat the dirty half-finished shaft of stones about one hundred feet high, meant to be, someday, George Washington’s national monument. A few cows wandered around its base. The monument had been unfinished when Trist first saw it in 1861; as far as he knew it had been untouched for thirty years.

“I’m told that in Chicago,” Adams said beside him, “General Grant said not a word at his own banquet.”

“Mark Twain was a better interview.”

Adams lifted his little furled umbrella like a pointer. “When I met Grant socially for the one and only time, in the year 1869, I was unmarried and living in a boarding house over there.” The umbrella dipped toward the shabby red roofs of First Street. “A friend of mine on Grant’s staff, a man named Badeau, invited me to spend an evening with the President. We came in after dinner and took our places in a little circle of half a dozen or so intimates. Mrs. Grant strolled in and out and was pleasant—she has a pronounced squint, you may have noticed, one eye like an isosceles triangle.”

In spite of himself Trist laughed.

“But Grant hardly spoke three words.” Adams steered them toward a steep set of stairs, nearly hidden by thick shrubbery, that rose from the terrace up toward the Senate. “About no one man in my lifetime have opinions truly differed so widely. But as far as I can tell, Mr. Trist, whether or not he wins his third term, Grant is also going to leave posterity scratching its head. He has no power of language at all—worse than Jackson, worse than Washington, who was reserved, not mute. He can’t speak, he can’t write. He seems to me”—Adams paused and turned his soft, pink face blandly up to Trist—“
pre
intellectual. He should have worn skins and lived in a cave.”

Trist found his emotions sliding unexpectedly from one side to the other, like a lead weight in a box. Grant was many bad things: “cave dweller” he was not.

But Adams was already going briskly up the stairs, using the umbrella now as a walking stick. “My friend on Grant’s staff,” he said as Trist caught up, “claimed that Grant seemed to the rest of them like some principle of intermittent physical energy.” Adams’s short legs took the steps two at a time. If Grant didn’t speak to him, Trist thought, puffing, it was because he couldn’t get a word
in edgewise. “They followed him because he was successful,” Adams said, “but they never knew
why
he was. They could never detect a process in his thought. They were not sure he
did
think.”

At the main entrance to the rotunda lobby, Adams adjusted his muffler, stamped his feet against the cold, reminded Trist of family papers. “Another Washington specimen,” he said, inclining his head. Next to a closed door Trist recognized the massive bull-necked presence of Senator Roscoe Conkling’s bodyguard, pointed out to him twice the day before. “Ever since Lincoln,” Adams told him, “all the ambitious politicians in Washington believe somebody’s going to assassinate them. Who’d want to shoot Don Cameron?”

“It might make,” Trist said, thinking aloud, “an interesting article.” He looked back at Adams and added wryly, “For a journalist.”

“You must send me something,” Adams said, turning away, “you’ve actually written.”

W
HAT HE HAD ACTUALLY WRITTEN, TRIST THOUGHT, WAS
not much. One interview with Mark Twain, Grant’s unlikeliest friend, sold to two places; one news account of the banquet for a Paris daily that sometimes bought his work; one brisk summary of the Grant “boom” and the mechanics of nomination, sale pending to the same Paris daily.

Ten days after his coffee with Henry Adams he sat down at the table in his little rented parlor and pulled out a sheet of paper.
L’Illustration
took its name from the dozens of small engravings scattered throughout its news stories, and especially the portfolio of full-page engravings at the end of each issue. In Paris he had supplemented his small retainer each month by finding artists and commissioning engravings—the French were extremely fond of pictures of exotic landscapes from faraway countries, ships of all kinds, also (for some reason) bridges; he had once filled an entire portfolio with nothing but engravings of celebrated Chinese bridges. In Washington he had no artists, no supplement (plenty of bridges).

Three articles, three hundred and fifty dollars. His original expense allowance—four hundred dollars. Expected retainer next month—two hundred dollars. He slid his lucky paperweight into
place to hold the paper down and wrote a column of figures for income on the right, added it up. On the left a column of figures of expenses; added. Added again. Puffed out his cheeks and sat back.

He had found a rooming house on Rhode Island Avenue, far enough away from the Capitol to be unfashionable and cheap. All his francs he had withdrawn three months ago from a
compte d’épargne
and used for ship’s fare. The
Revue des deux mondes
would publish one long article after the Republican convention in June and pay the equivalent of five hundred dollars.

Why did you come back, Mr. Trist?
Elizabeth Cameron had asked him.
Was it merely curiosity?

Looking for bridges, he had joked. Bad metaphor. In fact, he had no idea. No real idea. He lifted the paperweight, lowered it again. In the army there had been twenty-four official categories of illness for which a soldier could be put in the hospital. Number nineteen was “homesickness.” He tapped his pencil slowly against the paper, then rose and walked to the window. The ghost nerves in his shoulder tingled, as they sometimes did when he was cold. After the war he had lasted just two weeks in New Haven before he quietly packed his bag and set out to travel west. In Colorado and California he had worked at odd, roughneck jobs and written bad poems at night. In Mexico he was briefly a one-armed
caballero
. In Hawaii he branded cattle on a ranch in sight of a bubbling volcano whose lurid red fire and greasy smoke put him in mind once too often of the war. In North Africa, in Europe—it was hard to remember now; life was lived forward, he thought, but understood backward.

Under the single gas lamp at the corner of the street, snow was falling in small, swirling flakes, confetti. While he watched, three Negro men, hatless, hurried past, laughing. Then a carriage went up Rhode Island Avenue with a steady
clop-clop
of cold metal on hard dirt, a
jink-jink
of harness bells. In Paris the same dirt, same bells; different sound.

H
ENRY,” SAID CLOVER ADAMS, BRINGING HER HORSE TO A HALT
and smiling brightly down at Trist, “met Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston last week, and
Henry
said, ‘Dr. Holmes, you are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.’ And Dr.
Holmes absolutely
shouted
, ‘I am, I am! From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I’m alive! I’m alive!’ ”

Trist smiled back and tried not to stare past her at Elizabeth Cameron, seated sidesaddle on her own horse a dozen yards away and not, apparently, seeing him at all.

“Happy day before New Year’s, Mr. Trist.”

“And to you, Mrs. Adams.”

“What brings you to Lafayette Square on such a cold, cold morning? Seeking fodder for your busy pen? But Congress is adjourned.”

Trist held the horse’s warm muzzle with his hand while it pawed the mud. “Actually, I’ve just mailed off an article so remarkably dull and sober and bad that my editor will have to print it—‘Grant and the Issues: Civil Service Reform.’ ”

“Henry never reads anything he’s written—he swears he detests his every word.”

“And so I’m giving myself the day off, or the morning, or half an hour’s walk.” At the corner of H Street, in front of the Adamses’ sprawling yellow house, Elizabeth Cameron glanced casually in their direction, then turned her attention to a shaggy Skye terrier behind the fence, yapping at a dead leaf.

“We like to go riding by the canal,” Clover Adams said.

“A little isolated.” Reluctantly, Trist brought his eyes back to Clover. The old Chesapeake canal ran alongside the Potomac just north of Georgetown, a beautiful stretch of river and forest, but when he had walked that way himself he had been struck by the menacing number of shacks and tramps among the trees. A great change from before the war. A greater contrast with the genteel book-and-horse world of Adamses and Camerons.

“We could hardly go the other direction,” Clover told him, amused.

As if on a signal they both turned and looked in the other direction. When he had left Washington in 1865 the city still resembled what it had been almost from the beginning, an empty abstract grid of mud lanes meant to be stately avenues and ramshackle wooden structures meant to be a seat of government. Now it had pretty nearly—Twist mixed his metaphors—pulled itself up by the bootstraps. True, there were cows and pigs wandering freely out of alleys; true, only the northern half of Pennsylvania Avenue
was paved (the other half was wooden blocks sunk in mud) and the dingy redbrick and white-frame buildings on either side of it were made to seem even smaller and dingier by the enormous white Roman bulk of the Capitol at the far end. But there were busy hotels, shops, saloons on both sides of the street. The sidewalks fairly bristled with telegraph poles every twenty or thirty yards, and the air overhead was almost darkened by the hundreds of black wires that ran back and forth in incredible profusion. Down the center of the avenue, where the Treasury Department jutted out, two or three elephant-hipped trolley cars were making their way between the paved and unpaved sections. Around them, all the way to the Capitol, moved wagons and carriages, and here and there a few of the funny little wooden-roofed passenger cabs called “herdics.”

“I
like
Washington,” Clover Adams said with a brisk nod of her head. “Washington makes me feel up-to-date. Did you know there are a hundred and forty Bell telephones already installed in this city?”

“I didn’t know.”

“The wires are strung alongside the telegraph lines. One of them goes straight into the President’s office over there and he answers it himself. Evidently he asked Mr. Graham Bell what you should say when you pick up the instrument, and Bell recommended ‘Ahoy! Ahoy!’ So that’s what the President says. In Boston they merely say ‘Hello.’ ” She gave a little flick of her reins and smiled down at him. “Ahoy and good-bye, Mr. Trist.”