Grant: A Novel (20 page)

“Lizzie Cameron,” Cadwallader said, chewing a breadstick.

John Sherman waved at Cadwallader, nodded to half a dozen other men. Somebody stood up to shake his hand. A booth of
diners far in the back broke into applause. Elizabeth Cameron looked straight ahead, chin high. Did she see him?
Would
she see him? In another moment the procession had disappeared around a corner, into a private room.

Cadwallader, as he might have expected, was a rapid drinker, greedy eater. He ordered oyster stew as a first course. A bearded waiter in both tuxedo and full-length white apron—with an effort Trist put Elizabeth Cameron out of his mind and made a mental note for
L’Illustration
—ladled it from a huge steaming tureen into a china bowl the size of a derby hat. Then fish; then slices of both pork and beef, mountains of white potatoes covered with redeye gravy and also (another mental note) grated cheese. The waiters knew Cadwallader. They came at a steady pace, heels clicking like ponies on the tessellated marble floors. Trist poked at his chicken, watched the never-ending stream of chattering delegates and wives going back and forth. At the end of the pie and whiskey course Cadwallader belched softly, signalled for the check; pushed back his chair.

“Contrast,” he said, rising with a little wobble. “Secret of great prose. Show you something.”

Outside the rain had stopped for the moment. In the early-evening darkness State Street smelled fresh, newly washed. Cadwallader walked slightly ahead, slightly unsteadily, and in answer to Trist’s question merely repeated, “Show you something.”

They entered the Palmer House Hotel by a side door. Cadwallader stopped in the middle of the corridor to drink two swallows from a hammered brass flask, then led Trist down one hall, down another, past the barbershop, which was still open, catering to a lonely unshorn Western delegate. At a double door marked only “Storage” he greeted by name a watchman sitting on a stool and offered him a pull at his flask.

“Going up on Friday,” Cadwallader told Trist when the watchman had let them in and turned on the two wall-mounted gas lamps. “Supposed to go up last week, but they had hell’s own problem with some kind of switch.”

It was a fair-sized room, crowded with surplus hotel equipment: stacked chairs and tables, boxes of linen, broken sets of trays and dishes. Along the right-hand wall were a large black metal box shaped like a Dutch oven, a tangle of copper-colored wires, and what appeared to be several dozen two-by-four six-foot-long
planks studded with oversized gas-lamp bulbs, but on closer inspection had no gas-pipe fitting and no on-and-off cock.

“Secret of prose,” Cadwallader said, “is contrast. You write well, Trist, damn nice for all that time in France, but you keep missing your chances. Point about Blanche Bruce ain’t that he’s coal-black. Point is, he’s coal-black in a room full of white reporters and white manipulators,
starched-white
Massachusetts abolitionists. Point about Roscoe Conkling ain’t that he looks like a bird of paradise that’s wandered into a country barnyard—although that’s contrast—point is, U. S. Grant is the quietest, dullest, most self-effacing little brown rooster in the barn, but look how his chosen number-one campaign spokesman is Conkling—what does that tell you about Grant? What does it tell you about
Conkling
?”

Cadwallader pulled one of the chairs off its stack and sat down. He wiped sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, then used the handkerchief to clean the mouth of his flask.

“These are Brush arc lights,” he said.

“Electric lamps.” Trist stooped to look at them with new curiosity.

“Not Edison’s,” Cadwallader said. Thomas Edison had invented a highly publicized electric lamp and J. P. Morgan had recently announced he was going to finance it, but Edison had many serious rivals. Trist had read of whole city blocks in the Midwest being illuminated by Charles F. Brush’s arc-lamp system, first in Cleveland, last month in Wabash, Indiana, while Edison was apparently still testing and refining.

“Company’s going to put them up in the Palmer House lobby, spell out ‘U. S. Grant’ behind the registration desk. Then probably do it again in Cincinnati for one of the Democrats.” Cadwallader put away his flask and stretched out his left hand to touch the nearest lamp. In his black-and-white houndstooth jacket, his unshined shoes, his battered old slouch hat, he looked more like a carnival pitchman down on his luck than a writer, a friend of cabinet officers and hotel watchmen—contrast, Trist thought wryly—but there was no mistaking the boozy sincerity in his voice. “This is the real story,” he said, stroking the glass bulb, “what’s being unleashed by people like Brush and Edison. It won’t matter a plugged nickel who they finally nominate here. Those old boys are living in the past—they can’t think of anything but
Civil War generals. World stopped for them in ’65, started for everybody else.”

“I was in the war,” Trist said. He pulled out a chair for himself and straddled it, facing Cadwallader. An insane conversation, in a half-dark storage closet.

“You’re the younger generation. Besides, you didn’t think the Civil War was the number one high and bright point of your life, did you? You were at Cold Harbor. Buried your arm there. Then you saw the mess they made
after
the war. What did Emerson say? Generation of young men with knives in their brains. You’re pretty clever, friend Trist. But you’re a watcher like me, not a doer.”

“You’re a drunk watcher.”

Cadwallader grinned and poked the glass bulb harder with his finger.
“Fiat booze,”
he said.

“Is Grant going to win?”

“Think of a whole city,” Cadwallader said. “Think of Chicago or New York lit up at night from one end to the other, like a hundred thousand angels come down to earth at the flick of a switch.” He pushed an unconnected lever with a snap. “Keep your eye on Washburne,” he said.

T
HE NEXT TWO DAYS PASSED IN A BLUR OF INACTIVITY—A
phrase Trist rather liked, but Hutchins irritably edited out. Still, it was accurate enough, he thought, as a description of the massive, epic tedium inside Exposition Hall.

Outside
the Hall on opening day—contrast—the streets were choked, hot, clear weather had returned, and enterprising boys set up stands on one corner, hawking “Blaine lemonade.” New York Stalwarts for Grant marched about, six abreast like a drill team. Volunteers handed out free banners and badges—Red for Sherman; Red, White, and Blue for Grant—walking canes, even umbrellas. The first delegates crowding up on Wednesday morning already showed signs of wear and tear. Many had arrived in Chicago two and three days early, and they were bleary-eyed from hours without sleep, hours of arguing in hotel lobbies, waiting in endless lines for food, beds, even drink. At the entrance to the Hall there was still more waiting in line as guards bent officiously and inspected each credential.

Once inside, the wilting delegates faced a badly ventilated hothouse jammed with narrow row after row of straight-backed wooden chairs (ten thousand seats, no cushions). At eleven o’clock on Wednesday the mayor of Chicago and a legion of minor party
officials began their welcoming speeches. A few privileged characters like Conkling roamed the Hall at will, but most of the ten thousand sat bumpishly and listened, fanning themselves, drinking yet more lemonade from the Negro boys with trays.

In the afternoon, welcoming speeches gave way to reports from committees. Fewer delegates kept to their seats. Some slept. Some stretched out on leather settees that had mysteriously appeared along one wall, under the portrait of Rutherford B. Hayes. Trist sat at the reporters’ table just below the speakers’ raised podium and scribbled long, unprintable descriptions of the Hall, which he tore up, started again. At three o’clock a reporter from the New York
Tribune
held up a hand-lettered sign announcing that the temperature inside the room was 96 degrees.

In the evening he attended John Sherman’s “hospitality suite,” now moved to the Palmer House—no sign yet of electric lamps—and caught another glimpse of Elizabeth Cameron, passing from one room to the next; but when he made his way around the bowl of “Sherman punch” and tried to reach her, his way was blocked by the swirling skirts of “Sherman ladies,” and a moment later she was gone.

On Thursday morning the day dawned even hotter. By ten o’clock the convention had entered into the drawn-out business of certifying delegations, but so acid with sarcasm and bad temper was the atmosphere that Conkling rose to suggest, sensibly, they adjourn till evening and cooler temperatures. It was inadvertently the first—and stupidest possible—test of Grant’s delegate strength. Out of dislike for Lord Roscoe’s imperious manner or out of sheer inertia, the anti-Grant forces combined to defeat the motion, and the convention remained in pointless, droning, steaming session until seven-thirty in the evening, when a Blaine man, stripped to sweat-soaked shirtsleeves, finally moved for adjournment.

I
N GALENA THE NEXT AFTERNOON, FRIDAY, ROCKING GENTLY IN
his chair on his front porch, Grant accepted first the cup of fresh coffee that the colored maid brought out, then the sheaf of new telegrams that his son Jesse laid carefully on his lap.

It was hot in Galena, hot for June, and the paved stretch of street just below the house was shimmering up white worms of
heat, so that it was even hotter up where Grant was, on top of the hill. His own fault, he thought, because of course when he had come back to Washington in ’65, after Appomattox, and they had asked him about running for President, all he wanted, he’d said, was to go home and be mayor of Galena and fix up the sidewalk on the street by his house. Week later he had a new house, gift from the city, with a brand-new sidewalk.

He opened the first telegram in the stack and read it without expression. Conkling had lost another round in the unit-rule voting battle. Cameron thought Garfield had done himself some good with a speech. He shuffled methodically through the rest. Blaine was losing ground. John Sherman’s strength was beginning to fail. Elihu Washburne still insisted on having his name put in nomination as a favorite son of Illinois, which meant thirty-five or forty votes lost on the first ballot anyway. Washburne was loyal to Grant, no question of that, Cameron wrote, but Washburne was old and vain and hankered for the honor of nomination too.

Grant sipped his coffee and listened to the lazy rattle of horses’ hoofs and wagon harnesses down on High Street. Galena was really not much more than a series of ascending shelves and bluffs running east and west from the Mississippi, cut in two by the river, but higher by far over on the northwest side where the cheaper houses were. From the porch of his old house Grant used to look down eighty or ninety wooden steps to West Street, or if the day was clear he could look over roofs and steeples and see a few distant steamboats or sails on the river. Back of the old house was a cemetery, headstones right up against his fence, which had made Julia uneasy and superstitious when they first moved in, back in 1860. On the opposite bank of the river, where he was now, stood the nicer houses, some of them actual two- and three-story white-columned mansions that made people think of Vicksburg and Natchez, though this was Illinois.

Grant took another sip of the coffee and watched a fat brown chicken hawk circling over the street. In the fifties Galena had bet its future on the steamboat, not the railroad, and it probably had fewer people now than it did thirty years ago, thanks to that. About the dullest, sorriest little town he had ever seen, to tell the truth.

He put down the cup and tugged at the points of his vest. Funny kind of loyalty. Washburne was from Galena too. Grant had made Washburne ambassador to Paris his first term in the
White House, because Washburne’s wife was French and he thought Washburne would like it. Anybody would thank him, trading Galena for Paris, he supposed, any day of the month.

“Do you want to go downtown, Pa?” Jesse rapped on the windowsill for the maid to come and take his cup.

Grant nodded and put on his hat. About four o’clock in the afternoon was when the out-of-town newspapers arrived in Galena, and there might be a few more telegrams too, at the Western Union office.

“Do you remember when we moved here, Jesse?”

“You worked in Grandpa’s leather store.”

“Anything else?”

Jesse just shrugged and started on down the steps ahead of him. Grant knew what the boy really remembered: the war. From just before Vicksburg on, he’d kept either Jesse or Fred around headquarters, living right in his tent with him, as often as Julia would let one go—read later that was an ancient tradition, traced all the way back to the Greeks and Persians—the commander of an army always liked to keep a son with him on the field of battle if he could. Near Vicksburg little Fred had even been wounded slightly in the leg by a stray Rebel bullet, something neither father nor son ever bothered to tell Julia. Probably another tradition. What Jesse obviously didn’t remember was their evening ritual in Galena
before
the war, which never varied. When Grant came up the wooden steps home every night from the store, three-year-old Jesse would always be waiting for him in the parlor, and every time he greeted his father with the same words: “Mister, do you want to fight?” And Grant would reply—he could remember the very formula—“Well, I’m a man of peace, but I’ll not be hectored by a person of your size.” And then they would wrestle and caper and roll all over the floor till Grant would give up, flat on his back, and Jesse would run tell Julia he’d won again.