Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  On the fourth of July, they celebrated Independence Day quietly, reminiscing about Vicksburg and marking the birthdays of Nellie and their grandson Ulysses S. Grant III. Ulys was surprised and pleased to receive a telegram from the emperor of Japan, and he dispatched Fred to send a reply before he settled down to his writing again. It pained Julia to see how thin he had become, his bony, almost translucent hand gripping the pen, the dark hollows of his cheeks. He was starving to death, and it wrenched her heart to watch him waste away.

  “I fear the worst the day the general completes his book,” she overheard Dr. Douglas tell Dr. Shrady one afternoon as Ulys and Fred and Dawson toiled over the manuscript, and she was obliged to go off by herself into the pine forest, sink onto a soft mat of brown pine needles, and weep as if her heart were breaking, for surely it was.

  The next day, the air smelled heavy with rain. After breakfast, where Ulys sat lost in thought at the table while his family quietly ate, he asked Harrison to wheel him out to a clearing with a broad view of the sky so he could watch the thunderclouds roll in. He asked Julia to accompany them, so although the iron-gray skies and the distant rumble of thunder provoked her anxiety, she agreed.

  They went along in silence until Ulys gestured for Harrison to stop. As soon as he saw that Ulys was as comfortable as his affliction would allow, Harrison strolled a discreet distance away to give the couple privacy, ready to return swiftly if Julia called for him.

  “Married almost thirty-seven years,” Ulys rasped, “and still we require a chaperone.”

  Julia laughed, but it came out as a sob, full of grief and fear and longing. “I don’t know what sort of trouble they fear we’d get into,” she said, as breezily as she could manage. “I’ve grown too stout to squeeze into that bath chair with you.”

  “If we put our minds to it,” Ulys whispered hoarsely, “I’m sure we could think of something.”

  This time Julia’s laugh was genuine, and it rang out pure and true. Hearing it, Ulys smiled and asked her to sing for him, and so she did, all the sweet, plaintive, romantic tunes from their courtship long ago.

  When her last melody faded away, Ulys said, “Do you remember how your father and my parents objected to our marriage?”

  “I do.” Julia reached for his hand. “I suppose we proved them wrong.”

  A faint smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Your father offered me Nell instead.”

  “Yes, and you’ve teased her about it ever since.”

  “Your father insisted that you wouldn’t care for the military life,” Ulys reminisced in a voice scarcely louder than a breath. “He said you wouldn’t like all the traveling, and yet you followed me throughout the war, and to the White House, and all around the world.”

  “I would follow you now if I could,” she said with sudden vehemence, her tears spilling over.

  “Julia, you don’t mean that.”

  “I do. I’ve always hated being left behind. You know that.” Kneeling beside his chair, she pressed the back of his hand to her lips, her forehead, her heart. “Who am I without you, Ulys?”

  He regarded her silently for a long moment, marshaling his strength, his eyes tender, sad, and full of enduring love. “You are Mrs. Grant,” he told her. “You’ll always be my dear little wife. Don’t I always go ahead and find a place for us, and call you to me when the time is right?”

  “Yes.” Julia fought back her despair for his sake. “You always have.”

  “Julia—” He coughed then and his voice failed him, but she already knew all he wanted to say.

  • • •

  A few days later, Julia was sitting quietly on the front porch, resting her eyes, an unfinished letter to her sister Emma on the table beside her, when she heard Ulys shift in his chair. She glanced up as he handed a sheet of paper to Dawson, then settled back, smiling almost sadly, though his eyes shone with contentment. “It’s finished,” he whispered. “There is nothing more I could do to it now.”

  Julia’s heart was heavy as she congratulated him.

  After examining Ulys the next morning, Dr. Douglas took Julia aside and warned her that Ulys had expressed his readiness to die, since he could not be cured, and she must prepare herself. She almost laughed. What else had she been doing all those many months if not that?

  On the morning of July 20, Ulys asked Harrison to take him in the bath chair to the top of the knoll he had climbed the day after they arrived at Mount McGregor. Fred, Jesse, and Dawson accompanied them, while Julia, Ida, and Nellie quickly tidied and aired his bedchamber. Julia waited anxiously all the while he was away, wishing she had gone with them and had not been dissuaded by her sons’ warnings that she would find the climb too difficult.

  When the men returned, Ulys looked pale and weak, although Fred told her he had enjoyed the view and had breathed deeply of the cool, clear air. But the heat and humidity rose with the day, and by evening Ulys was uncomfortable and struggling to breathe, so Harrison settled him on the porch and Dr. Douglas administered morphine. As the family gathered around him, seating themselves in wicker chairs and chatting companionably, Julia took Fred aside and asked him to telegraph Buck to tell him to come in all haste.

  Buck arrived the next morning. Throughout the day and into the evening, Ulys remained awake, smiling at his children and grandchildren, gently pressing Julia’s hand whenever she took his in her own. Once he asked for water, and when the hour grew late, he rose shakily from his chair and whispered that he wanted to lie down. Julia’s heart thumped as she and Fred and Harrison leapt to make everything ready and settle him upon his bed. Ulys had slept in his two leather chairs every night for months, not only for comfort but also out of fear that he would choke to death in the night if he reclined. The danger remained, but apparently Ulys no longer feared it.

  Julia sat vigil at Ulys’s bedside into the early morning hours of July 22. The grandchildren were kept away under the watchful care of their nurse, but the children sat with them from time to time throughout the long day. As night descended, Dr. Douglas ordered the exhausted family to get some sleep, promising to watch over Ulys until they woke in the morning.

  Julia obeyed, and she soon sank wearily into her bed, only to be gently wakened at dawn by the touch of Jesse’s hand upon her shoulder. “Ma,” he said urgently, his voice shaking, “Dr. Douglas says we should come at once.”

  Quickly Julia scrambled out of bed and flew to her husband’s side. Dr. Shrady was there, and Harrison, and as Dr. Douglas explained that Ulys’s breathing had become shallow and faint, Fred, Buck, Jesse, and Nellie gathered around his bed wrapped in shawls and dressing gowns, silent, anguished, their faces wet with tears.

  There was no expiring sigh, no last, raspy breath Julia could later reflect upon as the moment her beloved Ulys passed from life into death. He slipped away so quietly, so peacefully, that they waited a full minute before they accepted that he had truly left them.

  As wrenching sobs broke the solemn hush, Fred crossed slowly to the fireplace and stopped the hands on the mantel clock.

  It was eight minutes past eight o’clock, and Ulys was gone.

  • • •

  Julia was inconsolable.

  She withdrew to her bedchamber and sobbed until she was too exhausted and wracked with despair to release another tear. There were decisions to be made, children and grandchildren to comfort, but she had no strength for that. She was utterly bereft and could not imagine ever being whole again.

  Later that day, cajoled from her room by Nellie and Ida, she sat on the front porch beside Ulys’s bath chair, one hand nestled in the folds of the blanket he had left behind. She imagined that she could still feel his warmth in the soft wool.

  “Mrs. Grant.”

  Jolted from her reverie, she looked up to find Dr. Douglas standing beside her, a folded paper in his hand.

  “Forgive me for disturbing you,
madam,” he said, his voice low and kind. “We found this in the pocket of the general’s dressing gown.”

  Julia blinked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then, with great effort, she reached out to take the paper from him. At the sight of her name in Ulys’s familiar, even script, every loop and whorl and line as well-known to her as his face or his voice or the feel of his beard against her cheek, she knew immediately that he had written the letter knowing that he would be gone when she read it, that she would remain behind, desolate, longing for one last word from him.

  Mt McGregor, Saratoga Co. N. Y.

  June 29th 1885.

  My Dear Wife,

  There are some matters about which I would like to talk but about which I cannot. The subject would be painful to you and the children, and, by reflex, painful to me also. When I see you and them depressed I join in the feeling.

  I have known for a long time that my end was approaching with certainty. How far away I could not venture to guess. I had an idea however that I would live until fall or the early part of winter. I see now, however, that the time is approaching much more rapidly. I am constantly losing flesh and strength. The difficulty of swallowing is increasing daily. The tendency to spasms is constant. From three or four in the afternoon until relieved by morphine I find it difficult to get breath enough to sustain me. Under these circumstances the end is not far off.

  We are comparative strangers in New York City; that is, we made it our home late in life. We have rarely if ever had serious sickness in the family, therefore have made no preparation for a place of burial. This matter will necessarily come up at my death, and may cause you some embarrassment to decide. I should myself select West Point above all other places but for the fact that you would, when the time comes, I hope far in the future, be excluded from the same grounds. I therefore leave you free to select what you think the most appropriate place for depositing my earthly remains.

  My will disposes of my property. I have left with Fred a memorandum giving some details of how the proceeds from my book are to be drawn from the publisher, and how disposed of.

  Look after our dear children and direct them in the paths of rectitude. It would distress me far more to think that one of them could depart from an honorable, upright and virtuous life than it would to know that they were prostrated on a bed of sickness from which they were never to arise. They have never given us any cause for alarm on this account, and I trust they never will.

  With these few injunctions, and the knowledge I have of your love and affection, and of the dutiful affection of all our children, I bid you a final farewell, until we meet in another, and I trust better, world.

  Your loving husband,

  U. S. Grant

  P. S. This will be found in my coat after my demise.

  Epilogue

  1901

  As the wedding day of her granddaughter Vivien approached, Julia accompanied Nellie from their home in Washington to New York to shop for the bride’s trousseau. It should have been a merry occasion, but Nellie’s misgivings about the match had cast a shadow of gloom over her ever since Vivien had accepted Archibald Balfour’s proposal.

  “Tell Vivien how you feel,” Julia urged as their train chugged northward. “If your father and I had been more forthright with you, we could have spared you a world of grief.”

  Nellie gave her a wan smile. “Don’t blame yourself. I wouldn’t have listened. I was too much in love.”

  Julia smiled sympathetically in return, for she doubted that anything more than infatuation had ever existed between Nellie and Algernon, and even that had been fleeting. Five years after Ulys’s death, unable to bear her husband’s cruelty, debauchery, and neglect any longer, Nellie had separated from him—though in truth he had left her long before, living in a separate home on his parents’ estate when he was in England, boldly going about in the company of foreign women when he was traveling abroad, overindulging in drink everywhere. Julia was not ashamed to admit that his death from pneumonia in 1893 had come as relief, for only then had Nellie been free to bring the children to America, where they had lived with Julia quite contentedly ever since. Nellie worried that her own unhappy marriage had made her unreasonably wary and suspicious of her daughter’s suitors, especially Englishmen, but Julia believed that a mother should heed her instincts.

  “Tell her,” Julia repeated emphatically. “I’m not suggesting that you forbid her to marry, only that you express your concerns and let her decide for herself.”

  With a wistful sigh, Nellie promised that she would.

  They checked into a comfortable suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and ventured out to the fine shops up the avenue, and at Madison Square and Gramercy Park. The elms and sycamores lining the sidewalks provided pleasant shade, and the sounds of children playing and gleaming carriages passing offered a charming backdrop for their excursion. When they returned to the hotel with their purchases, they agreed that shopping for a lovely bride-to-be could be a pleasant experience even if one was not fond of the groom.

  “Since we’ve finished our errands,” Nellie said as they rested in their rooms before dressing for dinner, “tomorrow I’d like to spend the day visiting friends, if you’ll forgive me for abandoning you.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Julia assured her, smiling. “Enjoy yourself. I’m sure I’ll find some way to occupy myself.”

  In fact, she would be glad for some time on her own, for she, too, had a friend she was eager to visit—Mrs. Varina Davis, the widow of the Confederate president.

  • • •

  The boutique on Fifth Avenue was one of Jule’s favorites. Not only did it prominently display the full line of Madame Jule beauty products in a prominent location—and consequently sell more of them than any of her other purveyors—but also the shopgirls never flinched when Jule and her companions swept in through the front entrance rather than humbly knocking on the back door, and the clerks addressed all customers, white and colored alike, with the same solicitous courtesy.

  “It’s because they’re French,” Emma had replied when Jule had written to her longtime friend about the unexpected and much welcome show of respect. Jule had laughed to read it, even though it was unclear from the words on the page whether Emma was joking.

  Though Emma had never visited the boutique, whenever Jule crossed the threshold she was reminded of her dear, absent friend, now a successful dressmaker, contented wife, and devoted mother in Washington City.

  From behind the counter, the proprietress offered a gracious nod when Jule entered with Dorothy, and she raised her elegantly arched eyebrows to indicate that she would join them as soon as she finished assisting a pair of customers. Jule nodded back, and as she turned to inspect the Madame Jule display, her gaze passed over the two ladies making purchases. They were chatting with the proprietress in low, decorous voices, but then the elder of the two, stout and gray haired, let out a light trill of a laugh.

  Jule forgot to breathe.

  Slowly she turned her head just enough to observe the two women from the corner of her eye as they collected their packages, exchanged farewells with the proprietress, and exited the boutique.

  “Mamma?”

  Jule inhaled sharply. “That was her.” Her voice was strangely rough. She cleared her throat and tried again. “That was Mrs. Grant.”

  Dorothy’s eyes widened. “No.”

  “Ah, your mother is quite correct,” said the proprietress as she approached, her sonorous voice graced with the accent of her native country. “It was she. Mrs. General Grant, the late president’s wife. She calls here whenever she visits New York.”

  “And the woman with her,” said Jule, feeling strangely light-headed and unexpectedly sad. “Was that her daughter, Nellie?”

  “Oui. Mrs. Sartoris. Her daughter is getting married soon, and they bought many lovely things for her trousseau.” The p
roprietress smiled. “I am pleased to say both ladies carried away several bottles of Madame Jule beauty potions even as you watched. Mrs. Grant values her privacy or I would have introduced you. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course,” said Dorothy, before Jule could reply. “We wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing Mrs. Grant.”

  If the proprietress detected the sharp, bitter undercurrent in Dorothy’s voice, she gave no sign of it.

  When their business was concluded—orders made, payments accepted, products delivered—Dorothy scarcely waited until the shop door had closed behind them before she whirled upon her mother. “Should I have called after her?” she asked, her shoulders squared, her face ablaze with righteous anger. “Are you sorry you didn’t speak with her?”

  “No, to both questions,” Jules replied shakily. “The very thought of confronting Mrs. Grant in the finest boutique on Fifth Avenue—oh, dear me, no.”

  “If I hurry I might be able to—”

  “Dorothy, dearest, she’s long gone. Even if she weren’t, I wouldn’t have you chase the poor woman through the city.”

  “But she walked right past you. She didn’t even know you.”

  “I wouldn’t expect her to recognize me. Too many years have passed.”

  “You knew her on sight.”

  “Yes, but I’ve seen her pictures in the papers more times than I could possibly count.” Jule smiled, reflecting. “She probably imagines me still as the stubborn little ginger maid who left her at the train station in Louisville, if she thinks of me at all.”

  Sometimes she still imagined them that way—ginger and cream, two little girls with hands clasped, long ago and far away.

  “Come, Dorothy.” Jule linked her arm through her daughter’s and led her off down the street to catch the omnibus that would take them back to Brooklyn. “We don’t want to be late.”

  Dorothy began to protest, but something in Jule’s expression abruptly silenced her. Though her misgivings were obvious, she nodded and said no more about Mrs. General Grant.