Grant: A Novel (30 page)

For all his casual irreverence, West had a bulldog kind of stubbornness.
They drank a few moments in companionable silence, then he leaned forward and poked Trist in the ribs with a finger.

“I spend half my day talking about U. S. Grant,” he grumbled, “like back then, and he ain’t even running for
nomination
now.”

“Most famous man in the world.”

“Fact is, you can’t decide whether Grant was corrupt or incompetent until you decide how smart you think he is.”

“Henry Adams swears he doesn’t think at all, he’s ‘preintellectual.’ ”

West laughed into his beer and then wiped his dripping moustaches with a sleeve. “You tell me how a man can lead an army of five hundred thousand men and defeat Bobby Lee and
not
think.”

Trist shook his head and finished his beer. A hovering waiter started to come forward, but Trist waved him away. It was too early to leave for the Adamses’, he thought, too late to have another drink. Henry West was now identifying the drinkers at the bar as either Congressmen or pimps by the slouch of their backs. Newspaper Row was situated in the middle of the Washington district that had been known in the war as Hooker’s Division, because General Joe Hooker seemed to have enlisted as many whores as soldiers at his headquarters there. Trist’s mind moved in a series of elliptical skips that reminded him of his woozy malarial fever days—whores, pimps, “hookers”—in Paris the most expensive courtesans were known as
grandes horizontales
, in Colorado after the war he had seen a sign in a Chinese brothel: “10¢ Lookee, 25¢ Feelee, 50¢ Doee.” Beside him West said something droll and unprintable about Congressmen with hands in their pockets. The canary Nick Trist. First person. His mind began another wild skip of association, which he stopped in midflight, by sheer force of will.

Twenty minutes later he paid his hackney driver and descended awkwardly to the sidewalk in front of 1607 H Street. Then stopped and listened for a moment to the sound of barking dogs coming down from the second-floor windows. He squinted at his watch.

“Goddam kennel in there,” said Don Cameron’s voice behind him. “What the hell do they call them?”

“Boojum,” said Elizabeth Cameron, “Marquis, Possum.”

“It’s Trist.” Cameron leaned forward and stared. The march of electric streetlamps had not yet reached Lafayette Square, so Trist
was unable to see clearly how much Elizabeth blushed, or how much his own hand shook as they greeted, nodded, smiled. Inside the house, while he was still awkwardly unfastening his coat, she disappeared at once—“First thing women do,” said Cameron, pulling out a cigar, then glowering at it. “They spend two hours getting ready for a party, then they arrive and right away they go upstairs to do their face. Can’t smoke here, dammit.”

“You look well, Senator.”

Cameron’s face, in Henry Adams’s softly lit hallway, was redder and beefier than ever. He wore his hair long now, curled around his collar Western-style, and when he smiled (grimaced) one incisor was missing. But otherwise he was the same vaguely menacing, highly physical presence he had always been.

“Well,
you
look,” Cameron began, but before he could say another word Clover Adams was at his side, rising on her toes, smiling her homely crow’s smile, touching each of them by the arm. “Come inside, drink,
boire
”—she pulled them into the parlor where tea had been served to Trist three days before, and in another minute Trist found himself standing next to the fireplace and the portrait of mad Nebuchadnezzar, holding a glass of champagne. In front of him a stooped and gray-bearded man he recognized as the historian Professor Bancroft advanced; took Trist’s glass of champagne from him, shook his hand in greeting, gave back the glass. “George Bancroft,” he said. “Mrs. Bancroft.” A white-haired woman peered around his shoulder like a mouse. “Met you at Beale’s three years ago.”

“The historian’s memory,” said his wife proudly. “My dear,” she added, clutching Clover’s arm as she passed, “you have more beautiful
things
in this house every day. I dislike auctions very much, but I mean to go to yours after you die.”

Clover stood for a moment, modest, blushing, uncharacteristically silent—write
Democracy
? That most unblushing, ironic of books? Trist dismissed the idea on the spot. Clover rose on her toes and gestured toward an open door. “Henry’s in the dining room,” she said, “supervising the food. We eat buffet-style tonight because General Sherman is coming—yes!—but we don’t know when, he’s on the train from New York.”

Both Bancrofts had something to say about trains, New York, unpunctual generals. Trist listened politely, glanced as often as he could around the room. It was a party of thirty people at least, few
of whom he recognized. Young Emily Beale, looking unwell still, sat in a chair while her father stood with one hand protectively on her shoulder. Don Cameron glowered in his best party manner at a small, highly moustached man with bright eyes and a German accent, identified later as the more or less famous civil service reformer Carl Schurz. Others appeared to be senators, neighbors, a few members of the German diplomatic legation. In the British fashion the Adamses made no effort to introduce anyone.

“Who is that couple?” Trist boldly asked Clover Adams as she came up to him again. She frowned and touched his arm. “Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler,” she murmured. In the dining room, just visible from where they stood, Henry Adams’s bald white pate bobbed like a cork between two taller, stouter guests. “Mr. Schuyler works in the State Department library,” Clover said. “He helps Henry sometimes with research. Very dull man. His wife is even worse.
Never
gossips. For social purposes I prefer—don’t you, Mr. Trist?—the vicious and the frivolous.”

Trist laughed out loud, turned to place his empty glass on a tray, and found himself in mid-laugh face-to-face at last with Elizabeth Cameron.

“Well, you two,” said Clover beside him, “old pards.” She gave one more bounce, a pat on Trist’s arm, and headed toward the unvicious Schuylers.

“Mr. Trist,” said Elizabeth Cameron, “again.”

Whatever he had rehearsed or imagined or thought of beforehand to say, whatever he had remembered of her black hair, the curve of her throat, or the curl of her lip—all of it flew out of his head in an instant. He felt the flush steal across his face, burning. Just as he knew she would, Elizabeth Cameron burst in his mind like a star.

“The proverbial bad penny,” he replied in a voice unsurprisingly thick. “I just keep turning up.”

“Mrs. Adams,” Elizabeth said, looking toward Clover now on the other side of the room—abruptly she changed her mind about the sentence. “I was just back there in the study with Mr. Adams. He was showing me some old manuscripts. He’s hard at work on his
History
, he says.”

“Well, he was hard at work on it when I was here three years ago.”

“Was it so long, Mr. Trist?”

“Two and a half years since Chicago.”

“Chicago,” she murmured, and reached down to the tray for a glass of champagne. “How silly of you to stay away so long.”

It was foolish to say, as people did, that looks never mattered. There were beautiful women who locked their hips and rounded their shoulders forward, as if they were determined to hate themselves, and Trist had known some of these in Paris. There were women, especially in America, who were nervous, warm, quick to smile, quick to touch, who nonetheless carried their bodies as if they were fortresses, to be stormed and defended. And there were beautiful women, sometimes, who came bearing themselves like a gift, a Renaissance Quattrocento painting, like light made flesh.

He had the illusion of seeing her at a distance, through a window from the street. He must have asked her how life in Washington was, though he couldn’t remember doing it, because she was suddenly telling him at pleasant, too-great length about an addition they had made to their home in Lafayette Square, how Maudie hated her school, how all the Senator’s grown-up children disliked her. And she must have asked him in turn about his travels, because, while Henry Adams’s white face passed back and forth three times in the mirror, he heard himself describing the battlefields book and then the move from Paris to London, where society was duller but business was better.

“So restless,” she said. “Even in Europe, American men are always so restless.”

In the dining room Henry Adams was now bowing to them both, crooking a finger at Elizabeth.

She hesitated, lifting her chin, pursing her mouth in a gesture Trist could have sketched from memory. “Mine host.”

“I didn’t think,” Trist said, not believing that he was actually going to say it, “that I would ever see you again, after Chicago.”

She leaned forward, so close that Trist could see the swell of her breasts under the soft blue silk of her dress, the faint black hairs on her neck.

“There is always more order to life than we think, Mr. Trist,” she murmured, turning away, but her hand on his arm as she turned was like a spark to his skin.

General Sherman was late, hungry, stupendously dramatic. He came through the front door and into the cluttered Adams house like a redheaded bombshell, one hour and thirty goddam minutes
late, as he announced, spreading his arms, cursing the trains, dropping a muddy cloak from his shoulders to the carpet as every face in the house turned toward him.

“Jupiter Pluvius reigns!” he cried, and shook his hands to show how wet they were. As if on cue, lightning cracked, a thunderclap rolled over the roof, and ladies (and Mr. Schuyler) shrieked, and then for the next two tumultuous hours Sherman transformed the house into a theater of personality. If Mars himself had blazed into the fragile porcelain world of the Adamses the effect could have hardly been less shattering. Sherman gathered a drink in each hand, marched from lady to lady introducing himself with a bow and a leer, paused to wrap both arms (not spilling a drop) around his niece in greeting, winked over her shoulder first at Trist, then at Henry Adams, who literally recoiled three steps toward his books. In the second parlor, while one of the ladies played muted but martial chords on a piano, he recited passages from Dickens, Shakespeare. Studying Trist’s empty sleeve, he launched into a series of war stories, each one wilder and funnier than the last. The week before they took Vicksburg, he told General Beale, who stood beaming with an arm around his daughter Emily, the engineers were experimenting with tunnels and explosives. One day they blew up a Rebel hill—no damage, except a nigger cook who was standing nearby was thrown ninety feet in the air like a flying black duck, still holding his spoon, and landed on his feet unhurt on the Union side, where he was promptly hired as a cook by Grant.

“Where did you lose it?” Sherman aimed a ferocious eye at Trist’s arm.

“Cold Harbor.”

“Bugger the Rebs,” Sherman said, and refilled Trist’s glass. “When I was in Georgia somebody wrote me a seriously crazy letter—could have been Mark Twain, craziest man I know—said, ‘General, why not fill all your shells and bullets with
snuff
? When they explode, the Confederates will be
sneezing
so hard your people can just walk up and take ’em!’ Somebody else said, The war could be over in a week, just make all the Union bayonets one foot longer than the Confederate ones, they’ll never be able to touch you.”

“Show us, General,” said Clover Adams, who seemed, unlike
her husband, charmed and enthralled by so much martial energy, “how you marched through Georgia.”

Sherman grinned. The Adams servants had set up two long tables of food in the dining room, and another smaller table nearby. From one of the long tables Sherman gathered spoons, knives, a handful of tiny salt and pepper shakers. “Rebels,” he said, lining the pepper shakers up around a soup bowl. “Atlanta. Us. Joe Hood’s troops.” In loud, snapping commands, as if the little spoons and shakers would jump to life and start to march, he maneuvered them left, right, around the defenseless, bewildered bowl. Somebody handed him a candle. Sherman swung it fluttering above Atlanta, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. Clover pushed a teacup forward to represent McPherson. Sherman showed his yellow teeth in a wolf’s smile.

“You remember what Jeff Davis said when we started?”

Clover shook her head. To Trist’s surprise it was Henry Adams’s patrician drawl that answered. “He said you would meet the same fate as Napoleon when he invaded Russia.”

“And Grant,” said Sherman, cackling, “said, ‘Who’s going to furnish all that Moscow snow in Georgia?’ ” He drove his little army forward, calling out names of battles, set the bowl rocking, said, “Aaaah! Jonesboro!” and suddenly
swept
the Rebel shakers off the tablecloth with a pudding knife and a clatter—“next stop,
Charleston
!”

“Oh, dessert first,” murmured Henry Adams.

On the porch afterwards, as the guests put on their raincoats and tested umbrellas, Sherman lit a cigar in defiance of Jupiter Pluvius.

“Mr. Trist,” said Clover against the steady tattoo of raindrops on the porch roof. As if by signal they all moved closer to the rail and peered over into the darkness at the Hay-Adams empty lot, presumably now a field of mud. At the other end of Lafayette Square, in the civilized and uneasy glow of its gas streetlamps, the White House looked like a watery canvas backdrop. “Mr. Trist,” Clover repeated, “is writing a new travel book about the battlefields of the war, the ones you can visit now as a tourist, a kind of Baedeker-history. He starts out tomorrow for Manassas.”

“Well, I read your book on Egypt,” Sherman said, “brilliant. Better than John Russell Young.”

“You should go with him, General, bring your knives and forks.”

The cigar was a cheerful burning dot in the wet darkness. “Can’t. Going back to New York tomorrow night, dinner with Grant and Ham Fish, his old Secretary of State.” Trist felt his arm gripped by fingers like iron. “But take the ladies with you, Trist, why not? Make an excursion out of it—Mrs. Adams here knows all about the war.” A carriage clattered up H Street and its swinging lantern caught first Sherman’s fierce red hair and beard, and then Elizabeth Cameron standing next to her uncle. Sherman wrapped a long arm around her shoulder and almost pushed her forward into Trist. “And Lizzie—you should have seen Lizzie when she was a girl, out in Wyoming, Trooper Lizzie Sherman that was—take Lizzie too!”