Grant: A Novel (40 page)

Douglas pulled the mirror back.

“Is it cancer?”

Douglas unstrapped the mirror from his forehead and laid it on the tray. Then he lined up the interlocking system of mirrors beside it. Then he drew a prescription tablet from his pocket, and a pencil, and for a moment he held the pencil poised, as if he were about to write. “General, the disease is serious, epithelial in character, and sometimes capable of being cured.”

“I see.”

“The epithelium is the tissue that lines a membranous surface.” Douglas nodded once, not at Grant but at something unseen on the floor, on the wall. He began to write his prescription.

Grant reached slowly for his coat and his tie. In the war, he thought, certain kinds of bullet wounds were always fatal, even if they didn’t seem so bad at first. You would see men shot in the stomach—not bleeding much, able to stand—but they would look down at their bellies and hold them, and then look up at you, and they knew; both of you knew. Sometimes you would say to encourage them, It’s all right, you’ll be all right, you might be cured; but you never believed it, nobody ever believed it. Outside on Fifth Avenue the garment wagon had got unstuck and was moving nicely along with the rest of the traffic, bouncing horses, swaying cabs, some boys on bicycles, a signboard man on wobbly stilts. But even with the mirrors put away there was no sound, everybody and everything moved in utmost silence, as though something in the construction of the building or the position of the observer kept normal life at a distance. “We won’t tell Julia,” Grant said.

I
T WAS TEN FULL DAYS AFTER HER RETURN FROM PENNSYLVANIA
and New York before Elizabeth Cameron came to Trist’s rooms on Vermont Avenue. And even then, the meeting was hasty, awkward, not at all (Trist thought as he splashed cold water on his face) satisfactory.

Of the mysterious laws that govern men and women, he concluded, he actually now knew less than before. Marriage, of course, had never been a possibility, not for a moment.
She
understood it perfectly, the Sherman in her relished the game, the pleasure. The Cameron kept her cautious.
He
was the one writing love letters at his desk, and one-armed sonnets, tearing them up, staring all day at moonish, mawkish daydreams. In French romantic geometry, the perfect figure was the triangle, the most stable thing on earth, until the woman changed her mind. What Trist wanted to be was Parisian, cool and indifferent. What he was turning out to be was earnest, American.

The next day he saw her hurrying down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol in a carriage with Henry Adams.

“My husband,” said Clover Adams in a distracted manner, “spends
all
his spare time with Elizabeth Cameron. And Senator Don, too, of course.” She steadied the wooden legs of her camera
tripod and adjusted a brass lever. “Elizabeth’s young and charming.” Clover pushed the brass lever into place with a snap. “And beautiful, as any fool can see. And that’s what you men like, I know. Henry and John Hay always talk to each other about the ‘beauties’ of the new social season when they think I don’t hear them.” She paused to straighten the big camera on top of the tripod and shake out its black felt hood. “But Elizabeth is intelligent, and her house is really a kind of political
salon
—she was quoted the other day in the New York
Herald
about Grover Cleveland and Blaine. Though I’m afraid she’s drawn a blank in poor Don. Duller and drunker every minute. In any case, there is Henry
chez
Cameron day and night. And meanwhile here I am spending all
my
time—”

“With a handsome one-armed reporter,” Trist said.

“I was going to say, in cemeteries.” Clover showed him for an instant her sweet, homely smile, then disappeared at once under the hood of the camera. Clover always wears her bonnet tied very tight under her chin, Emily Beale had once remarked to Trist, and she pushes it forward in such a way that it really conceals her face; and in all the hundreds and hundreds of photographs she’s taken and collected at 1607 H Street, the only one of
her
has her face in a shadow, completely obscured.

Under the hood Clover moved the camera a few inches to her right, so that the long row of tombstones in Arlington Cemetery seemed to approach her lens at an angle, not straight on.

“I’ve been out here to photograph this plot three times,” she said in a muffled voice. “I still haven’t got it right.”

“You’re very dedicated.”

“I’m very morbid. Hand me the first plate, Mr. Trist, don’t touch its center, please.”

Trist stooped to the large wooden box of equipment he had helped her haul to the end of the row. He took the first dark glass photographic plate and held it out between two fingers, and Clover’s hand came out from under the hood and disappeared again. Trist walked a few steps uphill. Arlington Cemetery had a remarkably beautiful view across the Potomac, toward the White House and the National Mall and the still-rising Washington Monument, whose square top was clearly visible here through the laurel trees; from higher up, at the empty Lee mansion, you could also see the Capitol dome and the great brown curve of the
Potomac southward toward Mount Vernon. But down in the little valley where Clover had chosen to set her photograph, what the eye took in was not a dreamy, somewhat romantic landscape. There were over sixteen thousand Union soldiers buried here—two thousand of them were unknown by name and had been gathered together in a large granite tomb by the mansion. The rest lay in parallel rows of small white headstones that stretched along the hillside, down into the shaded valley, up again and over into a flat, level field of trimmed and dying grass, so endless and dramatic a sight that it seemed as if Cadmus must have reversed his myth somehow and sown living men to come up dragon’s teeth.

“Have you ever thought of publishing your photographs?” he asked out loud.

“Shall I wait until those horses are past?” She pulled her head out from the hood to stare down the ranks of tombstones toward a gravel path where a young woman and a somewhat older man were riding slowly by on two chestnut-colored horses. “Yes,” she answered. “One of the editors at the
Century
magazine saw my photograph of Professor Bancroft and asked if they could reproduce an engraving of it, and Henry might write a paragraph or two of caption to explain the professor’s work.”

“It’s a fine portrait.” Trist tried to remember the photograph from his tour of the collection with Emily Beale.

“Henry said no, of course. What could be more vulgar? ‘My wife doesn’t appear in magazines,’ he wrote them.”

“Ah.”

“I’m sure Henry was right. I’m sorry you’ve abandoned
your
book, Mr. Trist.” Clover lifted the edge of the hood and prepared to duck under once more. “It was a splendid idea, I thought.”

“It was turning into a gigantic history of the war,” he said, taking another step or two uphill. “And the publisher didn’t like it and I wasn’t the man to write it.” But the couple on horseback had now passed behind a screen of tall hedges and Clover had gone back under her hood without hearing him.

“If you time it for forty-five seconds, please,” she commanded in the same muffled voice, and Trist pulled out his watch.

A breeze stirred the trees and moved down the long slope like an invisible hand, smoothing the grass.

“What will you do now?”

“Stay at the
Post
a while longer—I like the editor I work for,
Henry West. Then go back to Europe, I suppose.” He took another step and tried to see what it was that she saw in the rows and rows of tombstones, the odd, off-center angle, but nothing occurred to him, no profound idea or thought.
The silent majority
, Homer had called the dead.

“Beautiful,” said Clover under the hood. “Perfect.”

Afterwards they strolled, at her suggestion, through the Lee mansion, which dominated the whole enormous cemetery, and though Trist found it a dull and melancholy place—the Lees had been driven away from it in the earliest days of the war, everything had been stripped bare, first by soldiers, then by tourists—Clover insisted on going into each empty, gloomy, cobweb-covered room and looking about. At the front hall on their way out she stopped to sign the cheap little cardboard-bound guestbook that someone had placed on a desk by the door, the single piece of furniture left in the house. “It reminds me,” she said, “of our house going up next door, nothing but walls and a wooden roof.” In a firm hand she wrote
Mrs. Marian Hooper Adams & friend
. “An empty shell is much the same, no matter who owns it.”

“Oh, but your new house is going to be—” Trist opened the front door, searched for a word.

“Impossibly ugly,” Clover said. “Tomblike. No need to flatter, Mr. Trist. Richardson designed Trinity Church in Boston and certain massive classroom buildings at Harvard that people admire, but he’s not an architect of
houses
, not on a human scale, not for me at least. Henry
adores
his work—I dread it.”

At times, Trist thought, Clover spoke to him, and as far as he could tell, to him alone, in a personal, revealing, entirely unironic way. She never spoke this way in front of Henry. His arm, Trist thought, evoked, not her sympathy, but identification. Because for all her brilliant wit and intelligence, you couldn’t be long around Clover Adams without understanding that she, too, was missing a part of herself.

“Did you ever read a book called
Esther
?” she asked abruptly two minutes later, not entirely to his surprise. They had stopped again on the edge of the wide brick porch, and she rose on her toes and looked straight up at him.

Trist cleared his throat. “Well, yes. Actually, I saw it on your hallway table in the spring, and I was curious and bought a copy.”

“Do you know the author?”

“Frances Snow Compton. A woman of mystery, evidently.”

Clover started to say something more; closed her mouth, shook her head.

At her carriage, parked behind the house, while the Negro driver loaded her photographic equipment, she strolled away to the nearest row of winding headstones, and appeared to be reading names at random. When she came back she said briskly but calmly, “You’re a friend of the arts, Mr. Trist, I think. Let me take your photograph someday soon, for my collection.”

“Well, if I can have one of you in return,” Trist said gallantly, trying to cheer her up again.

But Clover had already regained her irony if not her cheer. Behind the black crow’s wings of her bonnet she smiled faintly and touched his arm. “I would only break the camera, Mr. Trist.”

I
N THE LATE SUMMER AND FALL OF THAT YEAR, AS WORK ON HIS
book slowed to a halt, Trist had written articles from time to time about the yammering, bad-tempered presidential contest raging between James G. Blaine of Maine, Grant’s old nemesis from the 1880 convention, and the fat, popular, but scandal-bedeviled New York governor Grover S. Cleveland. Six or seven times at least West had sent him hurrying north on a late express to cover a speech by Cleveland for the
Post
, or a predicted eruption of temper by Blaine, caught in a vicious struggle against the “mugwump” rebels in his own camp who loudly and vigorously preferred Cleveland’s progressive views on civil service reform to Blaine’s notorious personal dishonesty.

Once, Trist managed to pry a quotation out of Roscoe Conkling himself, now a private attorney, which was picked up and published in newspapers all over the country (and brought him a small bonus check from Stilson Hutchins himself). Catching the acerbic old warrior on the sidewalk outside his New York office, Trist had bluntly asked Conkling if he planned to campaign for his fellow Republican Blaine. Conkling had stroked his red beard and smiled beatifically. “My friend, you have been misinformed. I have given up criminal law.”

A week before the election Trist had attended a New York meeting where one of Blaine’s Presbyterian supporters, in the candidate’s own smiling presence, had denounced the “Three Rs” of
the Democratic party, “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Unlike most of the weary audience, Trist recognized that with a single disastrous alliterative phrase, Blaine had just lost every Irish Catholic vote in the state of New York. (Was there a politician alive who could resist alliteration?) When he telegraphed his report the
Post
was ecstatic, the mugwumps noisily jubilant; through Henry West, Hutchins made it known that Trist was a crown prince, he could write for the Washington
Post
, under his own byline, for just as long as he liked.

Four days later, exactly two weeks after the photographic visit to Arlington Cemetery, the reform Democrat Grover Cleveland was finally elected President by the extremely narrow margin of just over a hundred thousand votes out of nine and a half million cast; and one week after
that
, though he was a lifelong Republican, the reformer Henry Adams decided to throw a celebration party.

W
E’RE DELIGHTED TO SEE YOU, MR. TRIST,” SAID ADAMS
, opening the door himself and not looking especially delighted. He ushered Trist into the hallway. It was a Boston kind of celebration, Trist decided at once. Adams wore a tiny “Cleveland” badge on his black formal coat, but otherwise his manner was as coolly superior as ever, his patrician speech as arch and fluent. “Come in, come in—coat this way, hat over there. Were you at the victory parade last night, Mr. Trist? They marched right through Lafayette Square, thousands of
hoi polloi
—we kept candles in our windows as a sign of grace—I actually went outside and mingled for ten minutes. Do you know, in Jefferson’s and Jackson’s time the streets would have been absolutely mobbed with drunken voters and casks of whiskey? Men would have carried Old Hickory brooms to sweep the rascals out. Last night was comparatively sober, although our flowers were trampled, and somebody broke down John Hay’s scaffolds.”