Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Wordlessly, Julia nodded, and she forced herself to concentrate as the doctor described what she must do to ease Ulys’s pain. When he finished, Dr. Douglas regarded them gravely and asked if they understood all that he had told them.

  Fred assured him that they did, but Julia asked, “Is it curable?”

  Dr. Douglas hesitated. “There have been rare cases when it has been cured.”

  “How rare?”

  “Extremely so, madam.”

  Julia took her son’s arm as they left the building, and although they had planned to take the streetcar, Fred took one look at her face and quickly summoned a carriage. “Pa concealed his condition out of a desire to protect us,” he told her as they rode home.

  “He shouldn’t have.” Julia inhaled deeply and shook her head. “Except for the growths in his throat, your father is healthy, temperate, and strong. Why should he not be again?”

  “Mother—” Fred studied her for a moment before closing both of his hands around one of hers. “Dr. Douglas is the foremost throat specialist on the East Coast. He knows this disease, and he said nothing to encourage us to hope for a cure.”

  “He might know cancer, but he doesn’t know your Pa,” Julia countered, a fierce new strength filling her. “I cannot believe that God in his wisdom and mercy would take this great, wise, good man from us, to whom he is so necessary and so beloved. It simply cannot be.”

  Julia persisted in her belief that her victor would triumph over his illness, even after she applied the painkilling opiates for the first time and her heart quaked to behold the three scaly, inflamed lesions far back on the roof of his mouth, the swollen gland on the right side, and the membraneous tissue at the base of his tongue that formed the surface of the carcinoma.

  “I had hoped to spare you all this,” Ulys said ruefully when she had finished.

  “Oh, nonsense,” scoffed Julia, corking the bottles and setting them aside. “We’ve been married thirty-six years. Why should you start sparing me now?”

  Her confidence wavered only slightly when Dr. Douglas froze part of Ulys’s ulcerated throat, excised some of the tissue, and sent it to the renowned physician and microbiologist Dr. George Frederick Shrady, who with absolute certainty confirmed a diagnosis of lingual epithelioma, or cancer of the tongue. After examining Ulys, the stern, forthright physician urged Ulys to give up his cigars, but if he could not, he must limit himself to three a day. Dr. Shrady also advised against surgery, noting that the cancer had already ruptured and spread its poison throughout the surrounding tissue, and nothing would slow the carcinoma’s relentless growth. An operation would only increase Ulys’s discomfort while accomplishing nothing.

  “What he means is that it’s too late,” Ulys told Julia, holding her gaze steadily. “You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Julia said. Surgery would not work, so Dr. Shrady would simply have to find another course of treatment.

  • • •

  As the autumn passed, Ulys worked on his articles for The Century and commenced his memoirs, but all the while the pain in his throat worsened, despite Julia’s faithful applications of the medicines and frequent visits to his doctors. Julia and Ida plied him with wholesome soups and custards, easy to swallow and full of flavor and nourishment, but Ulys could scarcely eat enough to maintain his strength. “If you can imagine what molten lead would feel like going down your throat, that is what I feel when swallowing,” he told Julia as she begged him to take just one more spoonful of beef broth.

  Writing provided Ulys with a distraction from his pain and an ambitious goal to focus his thoughts. From early morning until well into the evening, Ulys toiled away in his second-floor study at the top of the stairs, a knit cap upon his head to ward off the chill of early winter, a shawl wrapped around his throat. Two windows looking out upon Sixty-sixth Street illuminated his desk, tidily arranged with his manuscript pages in the center and neat stacks of notes all around. Upon a nearby folding table, Fred and Badeau had arranged several useful maps for Ulys to consult as he retraced the progress of his armies’ movements.

  Fred worked with his father’s tireless diligence, but Badeau had come to the project somewhat reluctantly. When Ulys first requested his help, Badeau had refused, explaining that he was working on a novel that demanded his full attention, but eventually Ulys persuaded him, even offering a comfortable bedroom in the Grant residence as part of his compensation.

  Every day Ulys followed a diligent routine of researching, outlining, writing, editing, and revising. Working from a nearby room, Fred and Badeau compiled research, read sections as Ulys completed them, verified facts with their records, jotted notes in the margins, and returned pages to Ulys for revision. Julia often observed the men as they worked, watching quietly as Ulys sat at his desk bent over his manuscript, the nib of his pen scratching on the paper, Harrison keeping vigil in the corner he had claimed as his own.

  Julia knew that the faithful Harrison was much more than a valet to Ulys. A man of color not yet forty, in the years he had been in Ulys’s employ, Harrison had been his messenger, confidante, devoted friend, and increasingly, his nurse. He applied the soothing opiates to Ulys’s throat more often than Julia did, and twice a day, he brought a glass of milk on a tray to the study and insisted Ulys drink it. Harrison was protective of Ulys’s time, and Julia was grateful for the solicitous yet firm way he managed to keep interruptions at bay and tried to ensure that Ulys received adequate rest.

  But as the cancer grew, Ulys’s throat gradually constricted and his breathing became more labored. He developed a chronic cough, his throat burned with pain, and his voice began to fail. Julia felt as if a knife turned in her heart to watch him suffer so, and from day to day her moods shifted dramatically between sunny optimism and the bleakest despair. She threw herself into a vigorous regimen of prayer, convinced that only that could save her beloved husband, and that it surely would, if her faith did not waver.

  With the onset of winter, Ulys rarely went out, but occasionally friends would call, and he would interrupt his work long enough to cordially shake hands and converse as much as he was able. Good friends quickly discerned that he was unwell, kept their visits short, and required him to say almost nothing, but invariably a well-meaning admirer would linger until Ulys was hoarse and weary.

  One caller who could never overstay a visit was the writer and humorist Mark Twain, who like Julia had been born and raised in Missouri. Ulys and Twain—whose real name was Samuel Clemens, although his many admirers, including the Grants, addressed him by his pseudonym—had shaken hands but had exchanged hardly a word the first two times they had met, once at a reception in Washington in the winter of 1866, and later at a White House levee during Ulys’s first term. They did not become friends until ten years later, when Twain was asked to deliver a toast at the Army of the Tennessee’s banquet in Ulys’s honor at the Palmer House in Chicago. As he confided to Julia several years after the fact, Twain had watched as Ulys listened impassively to one laudatory toast after another, and he resolved to make the famously stoic general laugh. He succeeded, too, and in quintessential Mark Twain fashion, by following up another speaker’s toast “to the Ladies” with his own “to the Babies,” whom he pointed out had never been mentioned at a banquet and had been denied that honor too long.

  “In still one more cradle, somewhere under the flag,” Twain declared as his toast reached its conclusion, “the future illustrious commander in chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find some way to get his big toe into his mouth, an achievement which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest of this evening turned his attention to some fifty-six years ago.”

  The crowd, which had been guffawing only seconds before, fell into a stunned, embarrassed silence.

  But Twain was
not finished. “If the child is but a prophecy of the man,” he said, his voice ringing with good cheer, “there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”

  Ulys was the first to laugh, loudly and heartily, slapping his knee. The rest of the gentlemen in the smoke-filled banquet hall soon joined in, and all raised their glasses to toast “the Babies”—and the stoic former president had proven that he could laugh at himself.

  After the Grants moved to New York, Twain called on Ulys often to reminisce about the war, chat about mutual friends, and discuss Twain’s writing career. In October of 1881, over a lunch of bacon, baked beans, and coffee, Twain urged Ulys to write his memoirs, to preserve for future generations the story of his life, his battles, and his presidency. Ulys refused, despite assurances that the book would have enormous sales and that Twain would employ his hard-won experience to protect Ulys from signing a contract with an unscrupulous publisher. Ulys insisted that he would never write his memoirs, and when he changed the subject, Twain did not persist.

  Early one morning three years and a month later, Twain called at the Grant residence, his manner to Julia as courtly as ever, although he seemed a trifle harried. “Is the general in?” he inquired as Julia showed him inside.

  “He’s in the library with Fred going over some documents,” Julia told him. Ulys rarely left the house anymore, knowing that his appearance would incite speculation. His doctors came to him, and he declined invitations with the excuse that his writing demanded all his attention. “I’m sure they’d welcome your company.”

  “My dear lady,” he asked urgently, seizing her hands. “Are those documents by any chance from the Century Company?”

  “Why, yes,” she replied, surprised. “It’s a publishing contract.”

  “For his memoirs, I presume. Has he signed it yet?”

  “Probably not. He and Fred wanted to give it one last careful examination.”

  “Thank you, madam.” Twain planted a swift kiss on the back of her hands and strode off toward the library.

  Bemused, Julia watched him disappear around the corner, wondering what possessed him.

  The gentlemen remained sequestered in the library for quite some time, long enough for Julia’s curiosity to prompt her to bring them some tea and cake, which she knew Ulys would refuse. She found the men in the midst of an earnest discussion about the publication of Ulys’s memoirs, and she quickly deduced that Twain had urged Ulys not to sign the contract, which he decried as insultingly stingy. He instead wanted Ulys to enter into an agreement with the American Publishing Company of Hartford. They had published several of Twain’s novels quite successfully and, Twain insisted, they would certainly offer Ulys a far more generous, more lucrative arrangement than the Century Company had.

  “Smith and Gilder were my benefactors in my time of great need, and it seems disloyal to desert them.” Ulys coughed hoarsely, and concern flashed across Twain’s features. Ulys had been careful to conceal the nature of his affliction, giving neither the public nor his friends any indication that he suffered from more than a bad cold.

  “If they can offer terms as good as the American Publishing Company, you won’t have to,” said Fred. “This isn’t a matter of sentiment, but of pure business, and should be examined from that point of view alone.”

  Julia was inclined to agree, but before she could venture an opinion, Ulys said, “Yes, but I feel a certain loyalty to the Century Company because they came to me first.”

  “In that case,” declared Twain, smiling beneath his thick brown mustache, “I’m to be the publisher because I came to you first. It was little more than three years ago in this very room that I urged you to write your memoirs and offered to help you do it.”

  Ulys looked thunderstruck. “Well, that’s true,” he acknowledged.

  Julia lingered as long as she reasonably could, pouring tea and offering cake, and she left the room just as Twain turned the conversation to the benefits of subscription rather than trade publication. Later, after the men emerged from the library and saw Twain to the door, Fred told her that Ulys had agreed to set aside the Century Company’s contract for a day and seriously consider his friend’s proposal.

  Ulys slept unusually well that night, and so when Twain returned the next morning, he found him in good spirits. This time, Julia accompanied the gentlemen when they retired to the library, and she listened intently as Twain made his case for Ulys’s memoirs.

  “My good friend General Sherman published his memoirs several years ago,” Ulys said, “a two-volume set, very well made. He told me that his profits were twenty-five thousand dollars. Do you believe I could get as much out of my book?”

  “I’m sure you’ll make an even greater profit.”

  Julia drew in a slow, quiet breath—but she let it out, deflated, when Ulys gingerly shook his head. “I don’t think you can be right about that.”

  “I’m certain that I am.” Twain slapped his palms flat on his knees. “I’ll tell you what, General Grant. Forget about my publisher. Sell your memoirs to me. I’ll pay you twice what General Sherman got for his book. Take my check for fifty thousand dollars and let’s draw up the contract right now.”

  Julia gasped. Ulys stared at Twain, stunned, but eventually he shook his head, wincing from the pain. “I can’t do that. We’re friends, and I would hate it if you failed to make a profit. I could never allow a friend to run such a risk.”

  “I’m taking a very small risk, I assure you,” Twain replied. “I expect to make one hundred thousand dollars from your book within six months.”

  “Ulys,” Julia murmured, wanting desperately for him to shake Twain’s hand and accept his check.

  Ulys sat for a long while in silence, thinking. “Put your terms in writing. I’ll refer the matter to my friend Mr. George Childs.” Twain inclined his head; the newspaper publisher and philanthropist was known to all as a man of impeccable integrity. “I’ll have him compare the Century Company’s offer to yours and make his recommendation. That’s all I can promise at this time.”

  The two men shook hands on it, and Julia clasped hers together tightly in her lap. With two publishers contending for Ulys’s memoirs, surely the family would be saved from financial ruin.

  Ulys promptly wrote to Mr. Childs in Philadelphia to request that he come to New York to review the two proposals and negotiate the final contract. While Ulys labored over his chapters on the Mexican War, Mr. Childs and his lawyer carefully reviewed the competing proposals. In early December, Mr. Childs was convinced that Twain’s offer was the superior one, but more negotiations followed before the terms were settled and his verdict made official.

  Mark Twain would publish Ulys’s book. Now everything depended upon Ulys completing it.

  • • •

  Writing increasingly exhausted Ulys, and by mid-December, his throat throbbed with pain so intense that relentless nightmares jolted him awake, shouting and disoriented. One harrowing night, Ulys told Julia of a dream in which he was traveling alone in a foreign country. “I carried a single satchel and I was only partially clad,” he said hoarsely, sitting up in bed. “I found to my surprise that I was alone, without money or friends. I came to a fence, but after climbing the stepping stile up one side, I discovered there were no stairs on the other. I went over the fence anyway, only to discover that I had left my satchel on the other side. Then I thought I would return home and borrow the money from you, but when I asked, you replied you had only seventeen dollars, which was not nearly enough. And upon realizing that, I woke.”

  Though Julia assured him that she found no prophetic warnings in his visions, the nightmare visited him again several times thereafter. To anyone else it would sound like a strange, perhaps even silly dream, but Julia easily recognized all the elements of her husband’s worst fears—of being forced to retrace his steps, of poverty, of being unable to provide for her.

 
The dreams and the pain became so severe that Julia and Harrison had to coax Ulys to bed every night. Two great dreads had seized him—that he would choke to death while he slept, and that he would be unable to complete his book, rendering his family penniless and unprotected. By Christmas he had plunged into the deepest melancholy, exhausted, unhappy, and unable to work.

  One night, gasping in pain, exhausted but unable to rest, Ulys was in such deep distress that he asked Julia to summon Dr. Shrady. The physician came at once, applied his medicines, and calmly assured Ulys that the pain would pass and that he should lie down with his head on a cool pillow.

  Julia stood in the doorway and watched silently while the doctor helped her husband into bed. “Pretend you are a boy again,” Dr. Shrady told him. “Curl up your legs, lie on your side, and bend your neck while I tuck the covers around your shoulders.” Obediently, Ulys did as he was instructed. “Now go to sleep like a good boy.”

  Ulys quieted, and Dr. Shrady stood observing him until he fell asleep at last.

  When Dr. Shrady turned to go, he seemed abashed to discover that Julia had witnessed the scene. He stole from the room and joined her in the corridor. “My apologies,” he murmured while Julia softly closed the door, leaving it slightly ajar. “I do hope the general won’t think my methods demeaning. My only intention was to ease his pain.”

  “There isn’t the slightest danger of that,” Julia assured him. “The general is the most simple mannered and reasonable person in the world. He doesn’t like to be treated with unnecessary ceremony.”

  Dr. Shrady regarded her with a potent mixture of sympathy and sternness. “Mrs. Grant, I should warn you that there shall be many more nights like this to come.”

  “I know it.” A slight tremble in her voice betrayed her apprehension. “I also know that he’s lost interest in his book, the one endeavor that gave his days purpose.”