Grant: A Novel (39 page)

“How much do they pay you?” Cameron was blunt as usual.

“Five hundred dollars an article.”

“Not nearly enough.”

“That’s what Mark Twain said.”

“Tell them about Mr. Johnson, Ulys,” said Julia, settling back in her chair, and Grant smiled at the prompting because in all the shock of Grant & Ward and the loss of money and the relentless accusations of theft, in all that humiliating “come-down” as his old mother would have said, Julia never stopped thinking of him
first, what would please him and lift his spirits. He glanced for a moment at Cameron and his pretty young wife, on opposite sides of the room, and then, to please Julia, he told them all about Johnson.

“Professor” Johnson, he had actually taken to calling him, although he couldn’t be thirty years old. Tactful man, sweet-natured. As the Camerons knew, the
Century
intended to run a yearlong series of articles called “Battles and Leaders of the War” and then make a book of them. Grant was to start the series off with an article about Shiloh—they paid him money in advance; it went straight to the grocer’s bill—and so he had got out all his old records and letters and sent them a clear four-page essay not all that different from his official report in April 1862, to tell the truth. And two weeks later young editor Johnson showed up at Long Branch smiling and shaking hands all around and sitting on the porch with lemonade in his hand and the folded pages of the article in his pocket, and Grant had known at once there was trouble.

At Shiloh, General, Johnson said casually when all the small talk was done, you were much criticized for not entrenching against Johnston’s troops.

Well, yes, Grant admitted; he had made a mistake, and he went on to explain about entrenching as a tactic and how they had only come to see how important it was in the Wilderness, he and Lee at about the same time.

Shiloh was, to that point in the war, the bloodiest battle ever fought on the North American continent, Johnson suggested.

And Grant had told him, sipping lemonade, such is the contrast between the times of a man’s life, that on the Sunday night after the first day’s battle he had been sitting on the ground at Shiloh, on the mud in fact, nursing a sore ankle; but it was raining so hard that around midnight he limped over to a log cabin about a mile away for shelter. Except, the cabin was being used as an improvised hospital, and it was full of wounded men stretched out on the floor, dozens and dozens of them, moaning and screaming with pain, and there was a farmer’s bushel basket of amputated limbs in the doorway and surgeons covered with so much blood they looked like cardinals of the church, cutting away on a kitchen door they used as a table. Grant had sent those men into battle, his orders were responsible, and there must have been four or five thousand Union casualties, that day alone. “But I couldn’t stand
the sight of all that pain,” he confessed to Johnson, “I just couldn’t endure it, and I went back out into the rain instead and spent the night under a tree.”

And the battle next day? Johnson asked.

So fierce, Grant told him, he saw at one time what he had never seen before or since: swarms of musket bullets in flight, overhead and visible to the naked eye, like buzzing insects.

And
then
, Grant explained to the Camerons, Johnson finally pulled out his article and said
that
kind of thing was what his readers wanted, and could the General just go over his pages one more time?

“He became your literary tutor!” Elizabeth Cameron declared with a charming little clap of her hands.

“Well, what I wrote at first,” Grant said, “was pretty bad.”

“He told Ulys,” Julia was proud, “he had never seen somebody work so hard and learn so fast.”

“And now I’ve just about decided to write a whole book about my experiences in the war and let the
Century
publish it.”

“How much for the book?” Cameron had finished his drink and was standing with his hands in his pockets, a sure sign that he was impatient to go.

“I have a meeting tomorrow,” Grant told him, “and then I guess I’ll find out.” And the inner voice reminded him that right after the meeting with Johnson he was to see his doctor at last and have his throat examined again, because the soreness now was such, as Don Cameron had remarked after dinner, the General hadn’t touched a cigar all night, and that was not for reasons of economy alone.

At the door Elizabeth Cameron was telling Julia, at female length, about her summer away from Washington, and Grant was standing by, docile husband, when he heard the name Henry Adams and looked up quickly. One of the things people said about Grant, he knew, was that he possessed a remarkable memory, which he supposed was true, and another was that if provoked, though outwardly calm and nerveless, he could be a ferocious hater.

“Henry Adams the journalist,” he said flatly.

Elizabeth Cameron smiled. “Our neighbor in Lafayette Square.”

“I met Adams once when I was President,” Grant said. “Came
over after dinner one night with Badeau.” Badeau was his former aide, who was even now upstairs helping to arrange the material for the book. “Sneered at me, sneered at Julia.”

“Oh,” said Elizabeth Cameron, flushing. “Oh, surely not.”

“Wrote all sorts of magazine articles attacking me in the White House, after Black Friday he said I was just a pathetic old soldier out of my depth. When my son Buck was at Harvard he took a course in history from Adams, and Adams failed him. Only course Buck ever failed in his life, pettiest thing I ever heard of.”

“Oh, dear.”

“But that’s all right.” Grant smiled and felt at last in his pocket for a cigar. “Now I’m a writer too.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING, OCTOBER 22, GRANT WENT TO THE OFFICES
of the
Century
for a brief, inconclusive meeting with Johnson and Johnson’s boss, a middle-aged man named Richard Watson Gilder, who was eager to sign a contract but still more eager to talk about the way his artillery unit had taken the wrong road in July ’63 and marched northwest instead of southeast and thereby, somehow, missed the entire Battle of Gettysburg.

When Gilder had finished, it became, in an obvious but unspoken kind of fashion, Grant’s turn to tell a story. And as it happened, that very morning he had been working with Badeau on some of the records from Kentucky and Tennessee in 1862, after Shiloh, and so the name Braxton Bragg was already in his mind.

“Confederate general,” Gilder informed young Johnson, nodding sagely. “Good man.”

Grant sipped the coffee the
Century
had provided, felt a little sting in his throat but nothing terrible, and thought, as he began to talk, that here was U. S. Grant, “Silent” Grant, in his old age metamorphosed into a
raconteur
! What would that peerless chatterbox Mark Twain think?

“Bragg,” he said, and noticed that five or six other men, some young, some old, had stopped at the office door and were leaning in to listen. “Bragg was a West Pointer. He fought in the Mexican War when I did. He was always a good soldier, but he was far and away the most argumentative and litigious man I’ve ever known. Before the war he was serving as a company commander in somebody’s division, and also, because we were shorthanded, as the
company supply officer as well. One day as company commander he decided to order new rifles for his troops and he passed his requisition slip on to the supply officer, who was, of course, himself.”

Gilder was already hissing with suppressed laughter, Grant observed, but then, veterans of a certain age found everything about the war and the army interesting and entertaining, and meanwhile Johnson was proudly smiling up at the faces in the doorway, as if to show off his discovery.

“Well, as company supply officer,” Grant said, “Bragg denied his own request as company commander. So on one side of the sheet of paper he wrote his endorsement and approval and on the other side he wrote his denial.”

Everybody leaned forward expectantly. Grant thought of Mark Twain again, Mark Twain’s advice—always draw out your punch line as long as possible, make them
wait
on the edge of their chairs. Grant picked up his coffee cup again; and sipped; and paused.

“And so next day Bragg walked straight across the parade ground to the colonel of his division and gave him the paper and asked for a resolution of the matter. ‘My God,’ said the colonel, ‘you’ve quarreled with every other officer in the whole army, Bragg, and now’ ”—longest possible pause—“ ‘you’re quarreling with yourself!’ ”

Afterwards everybody congratulated the General for his story, and Gilder said it was
exactly
what they wanted in the magazine articles and the book memoirs to follow, but they thought it would be better to draw up a separate contract for the book, and unfortunately that would take the lawyers about a month, if Grant didn’t mind.

Which he didn’t. He had recently sold two small houses in St. Louis that Julia had inherited from her father, and so there was a little money to last through Christmas at least, and he was sure that Johnson and Gilder meant to do well by him, though even as that idea rose up in his mind he remembered Ferdinand Ward for a harsh, bitter instant and how far trust in somebody’s goodwill had taken him
then
.

At one o’clock, not having eaten a lunch, he arrived at Dr. Barker’s office on Fifth Avenue for his promised consultation. Brisk, brief, thoroughly professional—Dr. Barker was waiting at the door. Grant loosened his collar, removed his coat and tie.

How long had he felt the pain in his throat?

Since June, the episode of the peach.

And it was still sore now?

To tell the truth, in the excitement of writing—learning to write—the pain had either gone away or subsided greatly during the summer. But since he’d been back in New York it kept him awake at night, it made him cough in the day, his whole neck—Grant looked at the ceiling and searched for a word—
throbbed
.

Barker examined his mouth for a while, thumped his chest, studied for some reason his ears; then wrote on a card and told him to go that day, that very afternoon, six blocks over to the office of Dr. John H. Douglas, who was a specialist in throats.

On the street again, Grant hesitated. He read the address card over two or three times as he stood on the sidewalk and people streamed around him. Barker’s manner was always brisk and professional, alarming to many patients. Somebody said, passing by him, “Hello, General,” and Grant tipped his black silk top hat, gravely, and finally started to walk.

Dr. Douglas the General already knew fairly well, from the war. And where Barker was dour and foxy in complexion and wore his sideburns fluffed out like a pair of bushy red spinnakers, Douglas was a more comfortable man to be with, mild and white-haired, with a good full beard like Grant’s own. Barker hadn’t been in the army, but Douglas had served with the Sanitary Commission—they had actually met on the march to Fort Donelson, Grant’s first great victory, in ’62—and Douglas had been at Shiloh and later the Wilderness, in charge of field hospitals for the Army of the Potomac. What he always remembered about Dr. Douglas was his pet remedy for the scurvy, which afflicted more soldiers on long marches than you would like to think: sauerkraut and pickles, prescribed and requisitioned by the barrel.

At Douglas’s office a nurse was already holding the door open when he arrived—on the desk he saw a telephone, which Barker had in his office too, of course—and the nurse led him past a bench full of waiting patients into an examination room, and there, for the second time that day, he took off his shirt and tie and sat like an old beaver in his undershirt and trousers on a doctor’s chair.

The first thing Douglas had noticed, the doctor said, when he came in, was that Grant was limping down the hall. “Can’t be your
throat causing
that
,” he commented pleasantly and sat down opposite.

“I fell on the sidewalk just before Christmas,” Grant told him, “right in front of my house.” Barker had been the first doctor in the United States to use a hypodermic needle—learned about them in Europe—and Douglas was just as up-to-date. While they bantered quietly about the condition of sidewalks on East Sixty-sixth Street, the doctor pulled out an elaborate system of linked mirrors from a drawer, all of them about the size of a quarter, and started to look in Grant’s throat.

“You hurt that same leg in New Orleans. After Vicksburg, if I remember. Fell off a horse.” Douglas put a wooden tongue depressor gently on Grant’s lips. Outside on Fifth Avenue—Grant could see the reflection in another mirror strapped to the doctor’s forehead—carriages and buses floated by, a garment-company wagon seemed stuck in traffic, but it was all strangely noiseless, taking place in miniature, like some remote and mysterious version of ordinary life. “You ought to fall on the other leg sometime,” Douglas said, moving his instruments around, “give every limb its chance.”

Grant started to smile, as far as he could with all that hardware in his mouth, but at that same moment Douglas stiffened a little, somebody else might never have noticed, and the instruments and mirrors stopped right where they were.

It was still warm for late October. Out on the street, in a leafy yellow sunshine, you could see deliverymen in their cloth caps and big shoes unloading crates and wearing just short sleeves instead of a coat. On the wallpaper of the examination room a fat black fly crawled lazily sideways, also silent.

“I’m going to give you a prescription,” Douglas said slowly.

“Sauerkraut and pickles?”

Douglas didn’t smile back. He stretched his arm over to a white enamel tray for another of his miniature mirrors, this one on a metal stem like a child’s lollipop.

“Muriate of cocaine,” he said. “It should bring you relief from the pain. And I’m going to swab the area with lodoform, which clears up congestion.”

He held out the little mirror and Grant could see on its concave surface a reflection of the other mirror in Douglas’s hand, and see as well that the trouble wasn’t his throat at all. It was the
root of the tongue that was red and inflamed, with hard white scales scattered all over the right side. On the top of his mouth, where the hard palate joined soft tissue, three small dark red warts hung straight down like stalactites; like segments of the claw of a crab.