Grant: A Novel (29 page)

At ten-fifteen the first of his appointments was due to show up, and indeed a little past ten-thirty Nathaniel Wilson Lyon, who had been a skinny redheaded cavalry colonel in the early years of the war, finally did make his appearance, not all that late for New York. Grant greeted him warmly, noted the absence now of red hair and the presence of considerable fleshy padding, and offered him coffee and a cigar. Lyon sat back in the splendid club chair and just plain grinned like a boy.

“Prosperous times, General!” he exclaimed.

Grant lit first Lyon’s cigar, then his own. “Well,” he said modestly. “Prosperous enough, I guess.”

Lyon made a loud pshawing sound like a wet thumb on a hot stove and waved blue Havana smoke away from his eyes. He had been travelling in Europe the past six months, as Grant might recall, but hadn’t he read in the London
Times
, the day before he sailed home, that Grant & Ward now had a rating of fifteen
millions
of dollars?

Pretty close to it, Grant agreed.

And wasn’t that about as spectacular and prosperous a rise as Wall Street had
ever
seen? In less than a year? And wasn’t it a damned good thing, Lyon said, practically bouncing around in his chair, restless and excitable like all good cavalry soldiers, to see the greatest man in the country truly and properly rewarded at last for his selfless service?

There was a good deal more in this vein, and Grant, who was used to it, sat there and listened and nodded with a fixed, polite smile on his face, but in truth paid very little attention. The presiding genius of Grant & Ward was Ward—everybody in New York City was aware of that. Grant had brought his name and all of his
capital to the partnership, but Ward alone had the responsibility for investing the money and Ward alone paid out the monthly dividends, and it was simply wonderful to see how well he did it. The only condition Grant had made was that there be no trading in federal government contracts, no improper use of influence for profit; otherwise, Ward had a free hand, and such was his golden touch, inside a year most of Grant’s family had invested
their
savings too, and now dozens and dozens of old army men like Lyon were also depositing sums of money in their former commander’s firm and collecting dividends at twenty, twenty-five, even thirty percent per annum. And Lyon was partly right at least—after so many years of failed businesses and backbreaking debt—Grant’s mind went back to Galena, to the little hardscrabble cabin he had built by himself in St. Louis—after so many years of that, it was a d——d good thing at last to succeed. He pressed a small electric button on his desk and stood up to refill his visitor’s cup of coffee.

The electric bell was for Ward, of course, and not two minutes passed before there was a knock on the door and then the young executive partner poked his head inside. Another two minutes for introductions and pleasantries before Grant got right down to business.

“Colonel Lyon invested fifty thousand dollars with us last summer, Mr. Ward.”

“Before you got so sick, General Grant.” Ward took the big manila paper envelope Grant handed him and glanced at the notation on the side. “The General,” he told Lyon, “had a very rough bout with pneumonia last December.”

“The General,” Lyon said, basking in reflected glory, “is as tough as they come.”

“Can we bring the Colonel up to date on his money?”

Ward studied the envelope again. Slick black hair, clean-shaven. Dressed extremely well in fine blue suits and English cravats—Grant never paid much attention to his own clothes, but he had a sharp eye, he believed, for other people’s dress. Sherman said Ward reminded him of Uriah Heep, and since Grant had just finished reading
David Copperfield
aloud to Julia, he caught the allusion all right, but rejected the meaning. He watched Ward snap the envelope under his arm and say he’d be right back.

Lyon wanted to talk politics while he was gone—the perfidy of Blaine, the disgrace of having ex-Confederate generals in Congress,
gobbling up federal money like pigs at a trough. Grant was used to this, too, and listened calmly without hearing much, and when Ward walked back in with the envelope still tucked under his arm and a folded check in his hand, he stood up again in pleasurable anticipation.

“We have so many clients,” Ward said, holding out the check. “It took me a minute to find your records, Colonel. Here’s the original investment plus nine months’ dividends.”

Lyon, Grant knew, owned a string of three or four hardware and dry-goods stores in southern Ohio; at his level he was a shrewd, experienced businessman, just as he had been a shrewd, hard-to-fool cavalry commander. He put on his reading glasses, then unfolded the check, then looked up at Grant with a whistle. “Ninety-seven thousand dollars!”

“March comes in like a Lyon,” Grant said, enjoying the play on words.

“We try to take good care of the General’s special friends,” Ward said.

Lyon tapped the check against the center of his palm; looked at Ward; looked at Grant. “Well, I’d be a goddam fool to desert my old general now,” he said, and the boyish grin came back again, bigger than ever, making him look (this time Grant was glad to think of his own allusion) like Huckleberry Finn in the book
Tom Sawyer
, all he needed was a straw between his teeth and a fishing pole in his hand. “You take this check, Mr. Ward,” he said, “and reinvest the whole kit and caboodle, every dime, every solitary dime!”

When they were both gone Grant took a last sip of coffee and walked around the corner of his desk. There, slipped into the edge of the blotter next to the cigars, Ward had also left his personal dividend check for March, which Grant opened and smoothed on the blotter. Three thousand dollars. Paid like clockwork every month, along with numerous bonuses and special distributions. Without counting Julia’s investment in the firm, or Buck’s or Fred’s, he himself was now worth, he calculated, a clear one million, eight hundred thousand dollars.

He replaced the check on the blotter and continued on to the window behind the desk, where he parted the velvet curtain slightly and looked down at the splendid, busy intersection of Broadway and Wall Street.

One reason he and Lincoln had gotten on so well, he thought, was that both of them believed in Fate. Grant, of course, had taken his belief from his mother. Where Lincoln had imbibed it Grant never knew, but more than once the two of them had stood in the mud at City Point, Virginia, in the winter of ’64, and talked about the mysterious movements of Fate and Necessity that had chosen them each for his role in the great and bloody national drama. And more than once Lincoln had told him that when the war ended, he, Lincoln, ended too. The single consolation Grant had for Lincoln’s death was that he knew that Lincoln would have understood it as the wise and irresistible disposition of Fate; Fate and its higher purposes.

Down on Broadway there was a fine tangle of horsecars and wheels and axles going on now. Some of the drivers had hopped down into the middle of the street and rolled up their sleeves, ready to fight. Irish, he thought, catching the faint hubbub of their voices through the glass. Or Italians. Hard to know at this distance. Italians lived uptown in squalid tenements, ten to a room, shouting, singing, never silent for a minute. The Irish drank.

He walked back to the desk for a new cigar, number four of the day, and looked down at the check again; felt his mood lighten. Whatever else it had in mind, Fate, he thought wryly, striking his match, inhaling deeply, had evidently decided that he, Grant, was going to end his days as a very rich man.

What he and Lincoln had in common, Grant thought, was an infinite capacity for loneliness.

N
OW
,” SAID HENRY WEST, WELL LAUNCHED ON A MONOLOGUE
, “people claim he just gets drunk on millionaires. Before the war he needed whiskey.
During
the war he needed whiskey. But
after
, when he was in the White House, he apparently stopped drinking—cold stopped, just like that. Hasn’t touched a drop in years. So the irony is, he was almost brought down as President by the Whiskey Ring.”

Trist shaded his eyes with his hand and came to a halt at the curb. Not long after he had left Washington for Paris the
Post
had moved its offices from 331 Pennsylvania Avenue to a new building at the corner of Tenth and D. Next door Hutchins had constructed a second building to house the National Electric Light Company, which he partly owned and whose first act apparently had been to install overpoweringly bright electric streetlamps at each corner of the intersection. It was seven o’clock at night just now, but looked like mid-August noon on the planet Edison. A similar set of lights illuminated the west front of the Capitol, a faint but lurid glow now over the rooftops behind them. The two men blinked in the glare, waited for a horsecar to rattle by, then crossed to Tenth.

“But then again, you weren’t here when he was President.” West made it sound vaguely like an accusation.

“No. Leading a life of pleasure in the Old World.”

“Well, the Whiskey Ring came at the end of Grant’s second term. Some of the internal-revenue supervisors out west got in league with the local whiskey distillers and pocketed all the taxes. The Chief Clerk of the Treasury went to jail, and Grant’s little brother Orvil almost did. They indicted his private secretary, too, General Babcock, noble veteran like yourself. But Grant wrote a testimonial letter and the jury let him off.”

“I only remember Black Friday.”

“My favorite.” West nodded approval. They passed a streetwalker stranded like a mermaid in a pool of electric light. “Much gaudier than the Whiskey Ring. And the poor old Crédit Mobilier was just a bunch of crooked bookkeepers. Your modern up-to-date voter has to be a connoisseur of corruption. That’s the new Pension Building over there, ugliest pile of bricks in Washington. The only thing wrong with it, Phil Sheridan claims, is they made it fireproof.”

Trist laughed, and they crossed the next street. Grant and his scandals. Out of sheer force of habit he started to dredge up details. Crédit Mobilier was railroads and bribery. Black Friday had been the day in September of ’69 when Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the gold market in New York. Apparently they’d thought Grant was simply too dull and slow-witted to stop them, and afterward most journalists, predisposed to admire the sharp-witted and the larcenous, had decided they were absolutely right. Henry Adams had written a savage and much reprinted article about Grant’s incompetence.

“But, you know, Grant”—Trist halted on the sidewalk and looked up in wonder at the newest product of American technology, the electric billboard, where Edison’s great invention was illuminating a brilliantly colored green-and-yellow jar of
Heinz’s Pickles—57 Varieties!
Why in the world would he defend Grant? “In fact, Grant was innocent every time, wasn’t he? It was the people around him who were dishonest. As far as I remember, he actually outsmarted Fisk and Gould. He went over to the Treasury and released government gold on the market when they didn’t expect it, and Black Friday turned out to be a fizzle.”

“Shouldn’t have been consorting—lovely word—with known
millionaires, that’s what started all his troubles. Something about being so poor and inept at business before the war, and Papa Grant being so good at it—all those tycoons just licked him up and down like a sucker. Still do. Jim Fisk owned a beautiful sailing yacht back then, and each stateroom had its own canary, and each canary was named after one of Fisk’s pals. So there was the canary John D. Rockefeller, the canary J. P. Morgan, the canary Leland Stanford, and also, you will not be amazed to learn, the canary General Grant.”

They stopped again while Trist adjusted his collar. He needed one of the new snap buttons for his coat, West had informed him earlier, and another set for his shoes. Latest thing in fashion, invented by a one-armed veteran just like Trist.

“I don’t believe,” Trist objected, “the canaries.”

West shrugged; grinned.

“And I thought about
Democracy
all week and I still don’t see Mrs. Adams in it either.”

West’s shrug came a little more slowly. “Well, that’s what everybody says. She’s witty. She’s got the sharpest tongue in the city—it’s a woman’s book—feline, all those little asides about fashion and marriage. I know a guy in Henry Holt’s, the publisher, swears she wrote it.”

Trist opened his mouth to object, couldn’t think of a logical objection.
Democracy
was in its twelfth phenomenal printing, sixth translation, an international success; librarians routinely catalogued it under John Hay or Clarence King. It was a brilliant novel, and it belonged to her world for sure. But whatever else she was, bright, sensitive little Clover Adams was not an anonymous person.

“Well, I’ll ask her when I see her,” he said, and Henry West snorted.

At Gillian’s Tavern they went, not to a booth, but straight to the long mahogany bar itself, where Trist ordered only the mildest lager beer, since he was indeed walking on from the tavern to Henry Adams’s house for a “quiet
soirée
,” as Clover Adams had put it in her note (not anonymous). But the bar was crowded from one end to the other, a phalanx of shoulders and hats and foul-smelling cigars at rakish angles, and they quickly moved back to their accustomed corner in the rear.