Grant: A Novel (4 page)

B
UT IN THE MORNING, AWAKENING BOLT UPRIGHT AND FEVERLESS
, he climbed out of bed and started to dress for work.

At the Baltimore and Ohio Railway Station on C Street, three blocks north of the Capitol, he swung quickly down from the back
of his omnibus. He walked as fast as he could over a muddy ramp and up through a canopied entrance porch into the terminal. It was six-fifteen and the first trains from Baltimore were already clanking and hissing to a halt. He squeezed past a crew of sleepy porters stacking baggage. A conductor in earmuffs waved him on. Three or four uniformed announcers stood by a gilded booth and shouted train numbers through cardboard megaphones. Trist dodged to one side to let a pair of Negro women in old blue army greatcoats hurry by, pulling a steel tub of sausage meat between them, and then he slowed, stumbled on the boardwalk, and came to a complete, mystified halt. In front of him, spread in a line before the main platform gate, several dozen men in coats and melon hats blocked his way. And every one of them was holding out a pocket watch and staring up at a row of clocks.

Trist turned and looked up with them. Seven clocks—he counted—seven big black-and-white railroad clocks hung just over their heads, suspended by pipes from a steel girder that ran cross-ways under the roof. The nearest clock said “Washington—Richmond Line.” He put down his grip and stood on his toes to read the others. “Baltimore and Ohio Co.,” which was twenty minutes faster. Then “Philadelphia—Penn. Central,” “New York Central,” five minutes earlier than Philadelphia.

Trist lowered his head and saw that, like an automaton, he had his own watch open.

“My husband says that going between Washington and San Francisco you could reset your watch two hundred times if you wanted. Because since the war every railroad company operates its own particular clock. Seven different lines use this station, I think.”

Mrs. J. Donald Cameron stood beside him, dressed in a deep emerald-green coat that clung to her bust and a black travelling bonnet tied under her chin that did not, quite, obscure the matching green of her eyes. “Some Senators want to pass a bill for one single national time, but the Western states don’t want it. He pointed you out to me,” she said. Farther down the platform Cameron was arguing loudly with a porter. “Since, of course, we’ve never met before.”

Trist felt his neck and cheeks flush as if he were a schoolboy. He put away his watch.

“Have we, Mr. Trist?” she said with a cool, expressionless face.

Actaeon had been torn apart by dogs, he remembered now, that was the true story of how he died in the myth: transformed into a stag, hunted by dogs, the last thing he had seen in life was the goddess herself, now fully clothed, smiling down at him. There was no other word for Mrs. Cameron but dazzling. He cleared his throat, listened for the baying of hounds. “Well, if we had,” he said solemnly, holding out his hand, “I would certainly remember.”

T
HE MOST PUBLIC GODDAM BANQUET OF THE CENTURY WAS
scheduled in fact to be a Grand Old Army reunion in honor of ex-President Ulysses S. Grant, just returned a month ago from his round-the-world tour and using the banquet, the cynical said, merely to drum up support for a third presidential term.

Sylvanus Cadwallader, decidedly among the cynical, watched the ex-President pass down the hallway of the Palmer House Hotel surrounded by a skulk of yapping politicians—Cadwallader paused to savor his noun; a skulk was a group of foxes—and made a note of the room they entered. Parlor Suite 21. He consulted the confidential list that had cost him five dollars and two pint bottles of E. C. Booz & Company bourbon whiskey in bribes, all of which he planned to charge, as usual, to the Chicago
Times
. Cadwallader had been a newspaperman since 1850, starting in the small somnolent towns of northern Wisconsin and Michigan. He had long ago found that a reporter’s best friend, next to a good dictionary, was a generous budget of bribes. Parlor Suite 21 belonged to J. D. Cameron and party.

He leaned against the corridor wall and scribbled a little shorthand memo to himself. It was no news that Grant was sitting down in consultation with Don Cameron. The Camerons, old
Simon and young Don, owned Pennsylvania as far as Republican politics went. Young Don had even served for a time like his daddy, a most undistinguished time, as Grant’s Secretary of War. But Cadwallader was much more interested in writing down his personal impressions of Grant, while they were fresh.

He enjoyed numbers. He thought numbers anchored unsteady minds in reality, so he closed his eyes and did a little calculation. He had known the ex-President … almost twenty years. For a period of thirty-one months during the war he had been, if not daily, at least weekly in his presence, and there had been a stretch of time, before Ingratitude Did Its Fateful Work, when he and Grant could have been said to be intimate friends. He licked the tip of his pencil and flipped a page. Grant was fifty-seven years old, four years older than Cadwallader. The General had put on weight during his world tour: he moved now with a fleshy ponderousness that came of too many days behind a banquet table instead of on top of a horse. The skin was softer, the hair and beard grayer. But the face was still Sphinx-like, blank and unsmiling. There was still the same small wart just above the right moustache line—Lincoln had had it, too, and so had Cromwell, if Cadwallader remembered correctly—the same nearly horizontal slash of the mouth. Grant’s eyes used to be his most expressive feature: dark gray, surprisingly animated. But he had passed by too quickly for Cadwallader, pressed against the wall by all the foxes, to see his eyes clearly. Unmistakable was the square jaw and the wide forehead. Unmistakable, too, was the fact that Grant had been saying nothing and everybody else had been yammering like geese.

Cadwallader read over what he had written, struck out the geese as one animal figure too many, and slipped the notebook into his pocket. He would expand and revise it later on into something florid, the way the
Times
liked it. Easy enough, because U. S. Grant was a subject that always set his pen to smoking.

Which reminded him to mention the inevitable cigar clamped between Grant’s teeth. He pulled out the notebook to add it. General Grant had very likely started smoking his trademark black cigars when he was a chubby babe in his cradle—Cadwallader had said that very thing to Mark Twain last night in the Palmer House bar, and that Grant-intoxicated man had nodded thoughtfully two or three times and allowed it was a striking image.

Cameron’s door opened again. Cadwallader leaned forward
expectantly. But neither Grant nor Don Cameron came out, only a tall, skinny-boned young man, sweating as if he’d just left a steam bath. The young man stopped in the middle of the hall, opposite the door, and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

Bodyguard, Cadwallader thought first. Then, looking more closely at the coat sleeve: veteran.

“When I was with General Grant at City Point, Virginia, in 1864,” Cadwallader said, strolling over and uncorking a reserve bottle of E. C. Booz whiskey, “he had a guard posted outside his tent to keep away all the curiosity seekers who kept trying to get in and see him.” Cadwallader paused and took a swig of the whiskey. Up close the boy had a simple malarial pallor, common as a cold these days. “One day a strange comical old fellow, looked like an undertaker, came up from the James River docks and tried to reach the General’s tent by ducking under a hedge. By granny, those guards were on him in a flash, guns out and cocked, and they damned near frog-marched him off under arrest, except just then the General poked out his head and said, ‘My god, boys, that’s President Lincoln!’ ”

Cadwallader chuckled and rubbed the top of the bottle with his sleeve. “Maybe he didn’t say ‘My god’—Grant don’t swear, ever. But the rest is true. I didn’t see you go in before.” He nodded his head toward Parlor Suite 21. “So my first idea was that you must be guarding Don Cameron and not General Grant. I know that’s Cameron’s suite.”

“Cameron’s suite, but I’m not a bodyguard.”

From yet another pocket Cadwallader came up with a cigar and a yellow-tip phosphorus match. “Well, I can see that now.” He lit the match with a single practiced snap of his thumbnail. “Ever since Lincoln, half the Congress thinks they need a personal guard from Pinkerton’s. The vanity of U.S. Senators needs to be measured in some special grandiose unit. A ‘Jumbo’ maybe, like Barnum’s elephant. Or a boxcar, or a Goliath. Now your Senator Cameron I would estimate at twenty ‘Jumbos’ worth of vanity, minimum, which puts him about average for the Senate.” Cadwallader leaned forward through a wreath of smoke. “Journalist?” he guessed.

“Yes.”

“Got the noble fraternal look,” Cadwallader explained. “Who do you work for?”

“A couple of foreign magazines, French.” Nicholas Trist wiped his face again, then put away the handkerchief and took out a packet of medicinal powder and opened it with his teeth. His voice, Cadwallader thought, had a fine malarial rasp. Pity about the missing arm, but then that was about as common as a cold these days too. “The main one’s called
L’Illustration
, from Paris. I came over to write about the campaign.”

Cadwallader handed him the bottle to wash the powder down. Then out of habit he held out his business card with the two quill pens crossed like swords and the plain Times Roman type that said “Sylvanus Cadwallader. Special Correspondent, Chicago
Times
, New York
Herald
.” “Skedaddled to France after the war, I suppose,” Cadwallader said. “Lots of you boys did.”

“Land of opportunity.”

Cadwallader chuckled and recorked the bottle. “Well,” he said, starting to saunter away, “you let me know if I can be of any help to our good French friends. The old-timer always knows where the bodies are buried, and that’s a true thought.”

A
ND ANOTHER TRUE THOUGHT—NEXT TO THE BUSY TEN-CHAIR
hotel barber shop Cadwallader stopped to relight his cigar and stare at the lobby turned to bedlam in front of him. Another true thought was that a bigger,
noisier
crowd had never invaded the poor old Palmer House Hotel in its poor old life.

He skirted around a small hecatomb of undelivered luggage and trunks and took up a position beside a potted palm, under an enormous floating banner—the whole ceiling was one unbroken series of flags and banners—that said “VICKSBURG——GRANT——1863.” Everywhere he looked, every nook and corner of the lobby was jammed with middle-aged, gray-haired men. He watched three Republican Congressmen sweep by arm-in-arm. He recognized regimental flags from the Army of the Potomac, the Cumberland, the Tennessee. Clearly, nobody in the country could stay away. Over by the famous State Street revolving doors they were pouring into the building like Hittites.

Worse yet, Cadwallader thought, more and more of them were showing up in their old blue army uniforms, newly enlarged and refitted paunchwards. (He complacently smoothed the flat-bellied black-and-white houndstooth coat he wore morning and night.)
They had their cigars in one hand, their drinks in the other. The spittoons at their feet were an overflowing god-awful brown mess.

He moved strategically around the potted palm to dodge a shouting bellboy. A brass band was playing patriotic songs. Wives and daughters were making endless circling promenades around the grand staircase and its three tiers of balconies. He pulled back a curtain. Outside, in a black stinging rain, the streets were likewise jammed with people. There hadn’t been so many people on the streets of Chicago since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow had tried to burn the city down, only these people were all waiting—they had been waiting since dawn—just to catch a glimpse of Ulysses S. Grant when he came out to review the parade, even though that wouldn’t start until the rain was over.

Well, it was Grant’s party. Cadwallader smiled at his pun. Upstairs he found a relatively quiet alcove furnished with a leather chair and table and sat down to rest his feet.

What had crazy old Sherman said? He would follow Grant into battle as if he were the Savior himself?

Across the hall a man hurried past with a poster:
GRANT
WILL
!

Cadwallader smiled again, because that was the headline from one of the best-known dispatches he himself had ever written—at the disastrous Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, when Grant lost fifteen thousand men in two days and everybody else in the country thought he was bound for defeat and disgrace. They talked about George Washington’s
will
as the thing that had held the new Republic together in the first days of the Constitution. They talked about Andy Jackson’s
will
that had crushed the Choctaws and the Cherokees, and knocked the British backwards at New Orleans. But they were nothing, Cadwallader thought,
nothing
compared to the will of U. S. Grant, because he had been there and seen it, and Sherman was almost right.

Down below, the band was winding in and out of the lobby, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Cadwallader drummed his fingers against the chair arm. Loyalty was a virtue too. They should have invited him into Cameron’s suite for a visit, Grant himself should have spotted him in the hall and sent for him. There were other headlines he could write if he cared to. If he weren’t such a corn-fed, true-blue patriot. Pop goes the—