Grant: A Novel (28 page)

“Are we there yet?”

“Hold your horses.”

It was always amazing, Trist thought, how fast the sun rose. Already the sky in the east was beginning to glow a soft yellow-white, and a dark rim of trees and rooftops was showing across the horizon. In another hour or two the sun would have dried the grass and burned away the damp haze and the brief March snow would amount to no more than puddles, slivers of coppery water in the mud, Washington would present its usual early-spring panorama of pale green and brown. But for the moment, in the long gray suspension of the dawn, they could have been anywhere—Paris, by the slapping Seine. Boston. Chicago. He blew in his cupped hand for warmth. Possibly not Hawaii.

“We go in here.” West held up the lantern, but lowered his head to pass under a network of wooden scaffolding. To his left now was an open door and, just growing visible in the milky light, what appeared to be a ship’s prow made out of stone.

They stepped inside. Blacker, colder; another lantern, hanging from a beam overhead, pulled wooden steps out of the darkness. With a grunt, West started to climb.

“Remember your catechism?”

The railing was on the left-hand side. Trist held on awkwardly, arm stretched across his chest. “Eight hundred ninety-eight steps. Five hundred eighty-seven feet.”

“
When
they finish.” West swung the lantern out to show the
rough surface of the stone walls on either side of the steps. “
If
they finish.”

Twenty feet up the steps had begun to narrow claustrophobically, and at the same time to zigzag back and forth as they rose. West’s lantern clattered around a corner and vanished. “Washington’s Monument,” his disembodied voice called down, wheezing. “Father of his goddam country. Thirty-six years’ parturition—you didn’t think I knew that word. You’re a good sport, Trist.”

“You’re a lousy climber, West.”

From time to time they passed a window slit on the outside wall, and each would pause to peer out at the rapidly dawning sky. It was the only time to see it, Henry West had insisted last night, three large beers into their reunion at Gillian’s Tavern. It was his favorite view in the world, and thanks to the
Post
’s ceaselessly boosting coverage of the monument’s progress, he, West, was friendly with all the construction workers, including one cordially corrupt young foreman, who was glad to allow him “on site,” as they put it, any time, day or night.

The lantern faded around another corner, leaving Trist in a pleasant musty darkness that smelled of stone dust and cut wood. He stumbled and clutched the handrail; one-armed man, he thought, in the country of the blind. He turned the next zigzag and felt a sudden push of cool, fresh air. You could do the same thing in Paris, he remembered, climb the inside steps to the top of Notre Dame or Saint-Sulpice, though not at dawn, and look out at the medieval rooftops and cramped black alleys below, a gargoyle’s-eye view of the Old World. But when he rounded the last corner here and stepped up to the open platform at the end of the stairs, it was not the Old World but the New he saw before him, and bald, unsentimental Henry West, cap off for some reason, leaning against the stone rampart and looking due east toward the great white dome of the Capitol, caught now in the sheer radiance of the rising sun, while all below them the streets and buildings of the city were still faintly gray, unresolved, coming into focus, and the smooth, broad back of the Potomac wound off to the right, like the river of Time itself, disappearing into the blue-green Virginia horizon of the past.

“Absolutely,” West said, “fucking glorious.”

“Vaut le voyage.”

“Worth the trip.”

“How high are we?”

West leaned a little farther out. “Four hundred feet, more or less.” He shifted his weight, and the wooden platform under them rocked unsteadily. On the Mall below they could just make out a few shadowy workmen tramping uphill.

“Now when I was a boy”—West stopped to strike a match against the stone—“I called this the ‘hour of work.’ ” He waved the match under a cigar. “Because my father always got up before sunrise to light the fire in the kitchen, and I could hear him from my bed, rattling pans and closing doors, and I used to think when I get big that’s what I’ll do too, get up before everybody else in the world, bring everything to life.” He exhaled smoke with a long sigh and rested both elbows on the rampart. “No dome on the Capitol when you were a soldier boy.”

Trist shook his head. “They didn’t finish the dome till the end of the war.”

“At Cold Harbor,” West said, “you attacked just about this time of day, I think.”

Trist looked off to the right, where a sailboat was shaking out canvas on the river. A seagull coasted in front of them, fell away.

“Four-thirty in the morning,” he said. “Those were the General’s orders. It was darker than this.”

West blew a smoke ring that flattened in the breeze and became a feather, a snowflake. “Well, what you have, my friend, is one brilliant idea—book of pious battlefield engravings, a little patriotic narration, some interviews with the just and unjust alike, as Lucy Hayes used to say. Twenty-year anniversary of the Wilderness campaign and the end of the war. Nostalgia fever. I tell you, ever since Sherman published his
Memoirs
, we can’t get enough of anniversaries and reminiscences, fight the goddam war all over again.”

Trist walked along the platform until he was facing due north, toward the White House and Lafayette Square. Henry Adams’s house he could identify by the two vacant lots to one side, and St. John’s church on the corner. Elizabeth Cameron’s house was lost in shadow.

“I grew up in Pennsylvania,” West said, joining him. “Had an aunt lived near Gettysburg. When I went to visit as a boy you could still plow up a skull sometimes or a set of bones. My aunt
told me that after the battle, for weeks, when it rained the ground would turn swampy and soft and there would be hands and arms and legs just sticking up out of the fields, like somebody had planted them.”

“Well, they had a bumper crop at Gettysburg,” Trist said. “I wasn’t there.”

West nodded. “Joined in late ’63, am I right? Not long before Grant took command?” When Trist didn’t answer he went on, carefully holding out his cigar and studying the ash as he spoke. “Know the single most important decision a writer makes?”

Trist turned his head.

“The most important decision a writer makes,” West said firmly, “is which person you write in, first or third.”

Trist turned all the way now to look at him. After four years West was, if anything, balder than ever. Permanent wrinkles had started to line his forehead and scalp, giving his head the appearance of a rumpled corduroy rug. While Trist watched he pulled his old cloth cap from his coat pocket and put it on again. In a window of the White House, through the gray air, there suddenly appeared the unmistakable yellow glow of an Edison electric bulb.

“Read your first two chapters last night,” West said.

“Draft chapters.”

“Draft chapters. Smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

“All a writer ever asks,” Trist said, now genuinely curious about where West was going, “is total, complete, unconditional praise. Henry Adams,” he added for some reason, “told me yesterday he just tosses his sentences up in the air and they land on their feet like cats.”

“Well, the fact is,” West said, “with all due unconditional praise, you write pretty dry about the war. Facts, figures, dates—big fence to keep the reader out.”

“European readers,” Trist began, and it was in his mind to argue, to explain that the project, his own idea, dreamed up in a bare brown patch of London winter, was meant to be translated and sold all over Europe, where the Civil War (and Grant) still exerted as much fascination as ever; his old magazine
L’Illustration
was paying part of the costs, the London
Times
the rest, and the
Post
had already tentatively agreed to run Sunday installments at home. But West knew all of that. Second most important decision: A writer doesn’t argue or explain.

“First person,” Trist said.

“What you want to do”—West stood up straighter, worked his hands—“is turn it into a
personal
tour, if you get what I mean—veteran goes back to his old battlefields twenty years later, revisits his past, sees his old self, old comrades. You can tell us what it was like to lose old Buster there.” Unlike most people, who never referred at all to his arm one way or the other, West was capable of being cheerfully, crudely direct. “Tell us what the war was
like
. All these generals writing memoirs now, it’s ‘Fourth Encalibrated Diocletian Regiment, Ninth Army, Tenth Division’ or else ‘enfilade and scarpis won the day’—nothing comes alive, nothing
dies
. You want to write it up straight, detailed, make it the real thing, reality.”

By now the sun had cleared the eastern trees, a low orange disk gathering speed, beating dents in the iron-gray surface of the river. Telegraph wires floated in long silver nets above the streets. The air was filled with rising birds. Trist narrowed his eyes against the glare.

“Tell you a secret,” Henry West said, and grinned. “That anonymous novel you liked so much when you were here, did a review for Hutchins?”

“Democracy.”

“They say Clover Adams wrote it.”

E
VERY MORNING OF THE WORKDAY WEEK, MONDAY TO FRIDAY
, Ulysses S. Grant, banker and broker, observed a little private ritual at his desk.

On the green blotter, next to the framed photograph of Julia, stood a handsome glass jar, picked up somewhere on his travels in India, brass-trimmed on the bottom and topped with a polished conical lid; and inside the jar, no matter how early or late Grant arrived at the office, were invariably twenty-five fresh, fine new Havana cigars. These were the gift of Ferdinand Ward, “the Young Napoleon of Finance” and executive partner of Grant & Ward, Inc., which Ward personally counted out and placed in the jar and which Grant then, for some reason he had never bothered to analyze, always counted out again for himself.

Two days after Trist climbed to the top of the unfinished Washington Monument, a hundred and seventy-five miles to the north at Number 2 Wall Street, Grant sat down heavily in his chair, hitched up the knees of his trousers, and as usual counted his cigars. Twenty-five. He glanced at his clock and picked out the first of what his son Buck called “the day’s fruits.” Then lit it with an extra-long wooden match, inhaled the finest smoke in the world, and leaned back.

Buck’s voice he could actually hear now, or thought he could, downstairs on the first floor where Grant & Ward had their main offices. On the second floor, where he sat, there was of course nothing but storage closets and his own private suite, whose letters on the ground-glass door said not “Grant & Ward,” but “Mexican Southern Railroad Company,” an entirely separate and unsalaried (and so far unprofitable) venture, but one close to his heart, a pure expression, as several admiring newspaper articles had put it, of Grant’s lifelong friendship for the Mexican people.

Friendship for the Mexicans he had in abundance; actual work, he acknowledged, not much. Negotiations for land and rights-of-way, not to mention heavy construction equipment, not to mention Spanish-speaking engineers, certainly not to mention some unrecorded financial transactions with members of the Mexican government—none of these things proceeded very quickly in the best of times, or even lately, in the doldrums of March, proceeded at all.
Harper’s Weekly
had just last month warned its readers that Mexican railway stock was an exceedingly risky investment. Luckily, Grant thought, he had no need for a Mexican profit. Or for advice from
Harper’s Weekly
. He swivelled the other way, to look at his wall of books and paintings and the beautifully constructed club leather chair for visitors that Ward had presented him the day they signed their partnership agreement.

In 1861, at Cairo, Illinois, he remembered, he had taken up his first executive office in a bank. It had been the Citizens Bank of Cairo, confiscated from the citizens for army headquarters in the Illinois-Kentucky Department, and he had arrived there September 4, 1861, as brigadier general in command, thanks to Elihu Washburne, who had finally convinced the War Department in Washington that an old West Pointer might still be of use. Nobody in the building had looked up or paid the slightest attention when Grant walked through the door—he had never in his life, he thought, had the knack of catching people’s eye—and the colonel in temporary charge had actually threatened to arrest him for an imposter. But when they got all
that
straightened out, Grant had quietly set up shop behind one of the tellers’ counters and started in to work. Just like now.

He smiled to himself and tapped cigar ash into a silver tray that Julia had bought for him at Bloomingdale’s store. Not quite
like now. No Bloomingdale’s in Cairo, Illinois, then, not much of anything in fact except mosquitoes the size of rats, and green canal mud everywhere from the levees that the Confederates had broken up before they left—along the riverfront and even in the lower streets of the town there had been a peculiarly unpleasant mixture of rank water and pestilence, dead mules floating by, and pigs, and unfriendly secesh locals staring at the Union soldiers and muttering threats. What was it Cadwallader had written in his paper?—
“If the angel Gabriel should alight in Cairo the natives would steal his trumpet before he could blow it.”
Well, not in a bank.