Grant: A Novel (41 page)

At the parlor entrance Adams stopped, waved a diminutive but lordly hand. “You’ll know many people—the Bancrofts, some necessary Congressmen, Mrs. Cameron—Senator Don, being no mugwump, alas, couldn’t bring himself to celebrate. My wife is by the punch bowl, at the fireplace, talking with the ladies. At every word, of course, a reputation dies.”

He gave a little tight-lipped smile and bow and turned back to the door. Trist made his way over the gorgeous rugs, between knots of milling guests, to the celebration punch bowl, where Clover greeted him warmly, rising on her toes and shaking his hand, and Elizabeth Cameron, by their agreed-on policy, merely smiled politely and murmured his name.

“We are speaking of books,” announced white-haired old Mrs. Bancroft over the noise of the room, “and here you are, an author.”

“Because,” said Clover, “I’ve just received in the mail a gift, a book of privately printed poems by Dr. Mitchell of Philadelphia, and he advises me to thank him
before
reading it, as most of his friends have done.”

“You know so many authors,” Elizabeth said. Without meeting his eyes she handed Trist a cup of pinkish punch liberally sprinkled with floating raisins.

“Not my idea, Mr. Trist.” Clover followed his doubtful gaze. “The cook is a tyrant, I believe she has a brother in the raisin business. But no, I find no advantage in knowing authors. Present company excepted, of course.” She bobbed like a cheerful little doll on a spring. She couldn’t have possibly been more different, Trist thought with some relief, from the day at Arlington, the Esther-like moment of despair. “I’ve told my husband,” she said brightly, “I shall have to give up reading if he brings home any more authors. I can’t read a word of Matthew Arnold’s, now I’ve met him.”

“Do you really know Matthew Arnold?” Trist heard the boyish awe in his voice and blushed; but then, Matthew Arnold, he believed, was one of the great poets of the time, an Olympian.

“I re-ally do,” answered Clover in a teasing mock-British accent that made Mrs. Bancroft guffaw. “He came here last winter on a speaking tour, he has dreadful table manners, and condescends to all Americans.”

“British snob,” muttered Mrs. Bancroft.

“You also know Henry James,” Elizabeth prompted.

“For a hundred years.
He
came here two years ago with that unspeakable noodle Oscar Wilde.”

“Hosscar Wilde,” repeated Mrs. Bancroft.

“I refused to meet him. He went everywhere in a brown plush tunic with a yellow sunflower pinned over his heart. When Henry James told him he was homesick for London, Wilde said, ‘Re-ally?
You care for
places
? The
world
is
my
home.’ I saw Mr. James often, but not his friend Oscar.”

“I’ve just finished reading
The Portrait of a Lady
,” Elizabeth said.

“Did you like it?” Trist asked.

“It was,” Elizabeth said with a charming moue, “awfully
long
.”

Clover bounced on her toes again, almost shaking with nervous energy. “Henry James,” she said, a brilliant smile lighting up her homely face, “always chews, I think, more than he bites off.”

At dinner Trist found himself seated beside a congressman from Louisiana named Carrington, a veteran, as it turned out, of the Confederate Army, who talked at length about the war, his political career since Reconstruction, the battles he and Trist might have fought against each other. At the other end of the table, next to Henry Adams, in a low-cut Parisian gown of rich emerald green that set off her eyes and her upswept hair, Elizabeth Cameron beamed, glowed, radiated pure feminine delight in his company, and Adams responded with such obvious flirtatious pleasure that once or twice Trist looked down toward Clover in near embarrassment. But if Elizabeth was beautiful and her husband flirtatious, Clover seemed to take no notice. Host and hostess, separated by twenty feet of glittering silver and china, chatted away in rapid-fire fashion, high-pitched Boston voices, dominating everyone around them, each oblivious to the other.

When they adjourned after dinner to the parlor again, there was port, brandy, and champagne, and still more guests began to arrive, postprandial, as Adams explained, but not unwelcome.

At one point, crowded into a second parlor opened just for the occasion, Trist overheard Clover behind him, talking with some of the new arrivals. Her manner, if anything, was more energetic than ever, yet also, to Trist’s ear, now curiously strained and frayed. She was telling a joke, an elaborate story—Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the vulgarity of New Yorkers, a concert she had attended, a particularly tender and hushed moment in the music—then a penetrating nasal voice: “I always cook mine in vinegar.”

Her guests laughed, tiny Clover bobbed on her spring, but when she turned and started to walk past Trist her unguarded face was empty.

In an alcove off the passage to Clover’s darkroom, where he
had retreated for air, Trist encountered Adams himself returning from some hostly errand. Trist stepped aside to let him pass, but Adams was in no hurry, in a mood, in fact, to stop and talk. “A quiet celebration,” he said, gesturing toward the noisy party in the next room. “Just right. I can’t feel the slightest sympathy for the defeated viper Blaine, can you, Mr. Trist?”

Trist had drunk far more champagne than he intended. “I’ve always heard that Blaine was Senator Ratcliffe in the book,” he said impulsively.

“
Democracy
?” A surprised look, an ironic tilt of the tiny Adams’s head.

“
Democracy
, yes. Can you believe, Mr. Adams, that it’s still in print, five years later?”

“There is no accounting for literary taste.
C’est la vie sportive
, Mr. Trist.” A little pause, a further tilt of the head, as if he were seeing Trist for the first time. “Do you know,” he said slowly, “I’ve even heard the absurd rumor that my wife is the author of that novel.”

“And she’s not?”

“My wife,” replied Adams with a smile, “couldn’t write for publication if she tried.”

“Ah.” Trist stood up straighter, abruptly sober.

“I’m sorry Senator Cameron didn’t come tonight,” Adams said over the rising noise from the other rooms and a clatter of dishes from the nearby kitchen. “Did I tell you how friendly we are now, Mr. Trist? I’m like a tame cat around his house. We disagree on presidential politics, naturally, but otherwise Don and I stroll from room to room with our arms about each other’s necks, chatting happily.” Another pause, a sip of his own champagne. “I should prefer to accompany Mrs. Don in that attitude, of course, but he insists on my loving him for his own sake.”

Trist murmured something, anything. Adams looked past him into the parlor, where Emily Beale had just entered with her publisher fiancé John Roll McLean. “Tedious young man.” Adams put his glass on a shelf and frowned in McLean’s direction. From an open door the smell of Clover’s photographic chemicals made him wrinkle his nose. “Poor Emily. I see you met Carrington at dinner, the veteran bore?”

“He said we almost met, in fact, in ’64.”

“With your prehistoric friend Grant.” In the parlor Elizabeth
Cameron was embracing Emily, smiling at McLean. Trist drew in his breath and felt his face flush hot and cold at the same time. Under the pinned-up sleeve his left shoulder began to ache. “Who’s started to write a book of memoirs,” Adams added. “Or so I read in the daily press.” He tugged at the points of his little stiff black vest, as if to face down the daily press. “Now he’ll see what a battle really is, yes, Mr. Trist? Blank page versus brain, not for the weak or the faint, not for mere generals.”

Elizabeth Cameron was slowly turning in their direction. Her eyes slipped past Trist, she made a motion with her glass toward Adams. “
La Doña
calls,” Adams said, and started to move away, then hesitated, and in a gesture remarkably like his wife’s, put a tentative, almost gentle hand on Trist’s arm. “My conceit, Mr. Trist,” he said softly, “you understand, is due not to my admiration of myself, but my contempt for everyone else.”

And suddenly Trist had had enough—enough irony, archness, the hothouse atmosphere of too many bodies and books, too much talk. He hurried into the parlor past a startled Elizabeth. Emily Beale called his name. In the hallway he fumbled for his hat and coat, thrust a coin into the servant’s hand, and stepped outside into the mild November night.

Behind him voices rose and fell. He walked to the edge of the porch and gripped the stair railing with what he knew Emily Beale called his sad one hand. Over his shoulder he could see dark party-going silhouettes against a white curtain. Ahead of him lay the gaslit vacancy of Lafayette Square. He took a deep breath and let the night shadows fall into place. Through a partially opened window he heard Henry Adams again, urbane as a glacier. “I sometimes think,” he was saying, “my wife is my oldest piece of furniture.”

S
YLVANUS B. CADWALLADER COUGHED ONCE AS HARD AS HE
could, a sharp explosive sound like a man punching a paper sack, and then examined the contents of his handkerchief with a thoughtful eye. Not consumption, he decided. Not influenza either. He wadded the sticky rag into a ball and dropped it into his pocket and looked out the window at the acres and acres of snow on brown dirt that was all you ever really saw from November on in the Badger State. He felt pretty sure it was killing him.

He sighed and crossed the room with an old man’s shuffle to the inefficient Franklin stove his landlord had reluctantly installed two weeks before, but it was badly set up, poorly ventilated, and was probably killing him too. What he would do, he thought, was move to California, the way Grant always talked about doing—and Lincoln, too, for that matter; Lincoln always said he wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before he died—move to California, eat oranges every day for breakfast, rustle cattle, learn to swim.

He sat down and reached over the hot plate and took the little cup of camomile tea that, against his better judgment, he was going to drink this morning instead of E. C. Booz. What he needed, what any human being who had lived his whole life in Wisconsin and Illinois needed at the age of fifty-eight, was simply
to be warm. He had read in the New York
Times
the other day that two or three workers had been injured trying to install Edison lights in that city, and one of the rival electric companies in Pennsylvania had promptly said that Edison’s electric circuits were too dangerous for public use and would probably kill the family dog, and somebody in
Edison
’s camp had fired back that you could probably use the
other
company’s electric circuits to execute prisoners in jail, just stick them in a chair and turn on the current. At least, Cadwallader thought, it would be a
warm
way to go, and fast.

He picked up the
Times
he had bought last night but hadn’t read yet, and saw that there was another little paragraph on the front page about General Grant’s ill health, attributed as usual to the shock his system had received when Ferdinand Ward had fleeced and pauperized him. It was amazing to Cadwallader how closely the New York papers watched Grant’s every move, you would think the goddam war was still on. Every morning at eleven, they reported now, for medical treatment the General walked from his house on East Sixty-sixth Street to the Fifth Avenue offices of noted throat specialist John H. Douglas, walked presumably to save the carfare, no thanks to Ward, because Cadwallader well knew that ever since he had hurt his leg falling off a horse in New Orleans in 1863 Grant didn’t really care to walk anywhere at all if he could help it.

Fell off his horse, Cadwallader remembered, because he was drunk.

He put the
Times
aside without reading more. If he went to his desk by the window and opened the bottom drawer, he would find his manuscript on Grant, and no doubt he had written something about the New Orleans episode; he had written two or three chapters, he knew, about Grant’s toots and benders during the war. Cadwallader sipped his camomile tea and made a face.

The
worst
bender Grant had ever gone on, he thought, was during the Vicksburg siege in 1863, when he had suddenly drunk himself pie-eyed one night and jumped on a borrowed horse (name of “Kangaroo”) and galloped off into the woods whooping and waving his hat like a madman. Cadwallader had actually followed him on another horse, and he almost caught up once or twice—but drunk or sober U. S. Grant may have been the best horseback rider the U.S. Army ever saw—and he finally found the
General nearly two full hours later passed out by the side of the road, next to a bayou. Cadwallader had sent one of the soldiers for an ambulance and got Grant back to his headquarters more or less unseen, where his teetotal aide Colonel Rawlins was meanwhile throwing a fit and cursing the air bright blue, and Grant just stepped out of the ambulance wagon, fresh as a rose, nodded to one and all, and strolled off to his tent for bed.

Another time Rawlins issued strictest orders against
any
whiskey in camp, fearing a toot coming on. But one of the Sanitary Commission doctors snuck a bottle of rye into his tent and invited Cadwallader in to share a drop. They had just poured a tin cup full of it and set it on a cracker box to admire when the doctor heard footsteps outside. “Oh, Christ, it’s Rawlins,” he muttered. But in fact it was Grant who stuck his head in. Without one word he reached between them, picked up the cup and drained it, then wiped his mouth dry with his sleeve and disappeared.