Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  “Are you, in fact … an author, Mr. Trist?” The governess had put down her knitting and was making apologetic little flutters with her hands. “I understood you were Senator Cameron’s escort to Chicago.”

  “Journalist,” Trist said. In the mirror, by a species of optical illusion, he swayed on his feet.

  “Yes. Well.” Doubtful flutters now. “I can ring for the Senator’s wife—she knows the Senator’s schedule, but he should be home himself any moment.”

  “You’re per-spiring,” Maudie announced, coming closer. “And your eyes are red.” She cocked her head like a sparrow on a curb. “And you haven’t got one arm at all.”

  “Maudie—”

  “I wonder,” Trist said unsteadily to the governess, and stopped to rub his brow with his hat. “A little touch of illness from the ship,” he said, “overheated, ocean voyage.” He gestured vaguely toward the window, which opened onto the redbrick elegance of Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C., at present not overheated but overcast with low, fat afternoon clouds the color of avocados, at present showing no ship at all anchored under its leafless gray trees. In the center of the Square a colossal bronze statue of his stepfather’s old boss Andrew Jackson reared his horse and tipped his tricorn hat to a squadron of pigeons.

  The governess had tended a hundred feverish children. She pulled a silken bell cord behind the whiskey decanter and scooped young Maudie out of harm’s way, germ’s way. Instructions flew. Doors rapidly opened and closed; a black maid in a black uniform hurried down a hallway in front of him, pointed wordlessly to a door, and disappeared. Trist nodded his thanks to the empty corridor, then slumped his back against the wall.

  In one pocket of his coat he had seventy-three dollars in new American greenbacks, a handful of useless French sous, and six paper packets of Dr. Susens’ Patented Tropical Miracle Quinine Powder. In the other pocket he had a dented brass flasket of miracle brandy. The sweat was now running down his cheeks and neck and under his shirt; he was starting to melt from the top down, like a candle. This was the classical pattern—Fever first, then Dizziness, Chills, Trembling Extremities, La Nausée. Dr. Susens listed the symptoms briskly and unsympathetically on the packet and recommended one dose every four hours, taken with two tumblers of water. Trist used his teeth to tear open a packet, licked the bitter quinine crystals from his hand like a dog, and then uncapped the flasket and swallowed steadily for as long as he could stand it, till brandy spilled over his chin and leaked out his pores. The Arab doctor had suggested a mixture of arsenic powder and chalk instead of quinine, but in the war Trist had seen arsenic used as a poison as well as a medicine; if he was going to poison himself, it might as well be with brandy.

  He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and braced himself against the wall. Brandy worked fast. He could already feel his veins start to crackle and light up like burning twigs. Quinine made him excitable. He glanced at the dark little privy behind him—what else did you expect of a United States Senator in the year 1879 if not modern indoor plumbing?—and then pushed away from the wall and began to walk. Because he ought to be there, waiting, when Senator Cameron arrived, a journalist ought to be on time and waiting.

  He passed one closed door, a second, turned a corner, and stopped. In a house ten minutes and lost. Trist took another swallow of brandy. The corridor was at least fifty feet long and ended at a heavily curtained window. There were three dim gas lamps spaced on brackets along the wall, but they did little to dispel the inky gloom. Trist had the sensation of walking downhill, as if into a mine. He passed another mirror where somebody’s flushed and overheated face floated in the black glass like a burning moon. In his first command in the war, in the summer of 1863, three-fourths of his troops had caught either dysentery or malaria. He blinked at a pencil-thin streak of light creeping under the bottom of a door six feet away. In the war, Senator Cameron’s father had been something important in Lincoln’s cabinet. Trist moved toward the light and tried to remember the story. The older Cameron was a Pennsylvania politician with a reputation for wholesale thievery. When Lincoln asked a colleague if Simon Cameron was likely to keep it up in Washington, the colleague had scratched his head and said, well, Simon probably wouldn’t steal a red-hot stove. When Cameron demanded an apology, the colleague declared, I did not say you wouldn’t steal a red-hot stove.

  Trist pushed the door open and walked into a lady’s dressing room illuminated by two gas lamps that framed yet another mirror. The window on the right was blocked by dark velvet drapes. Beneath it was a blue-and-yellow Empire sofa, then a walnut armoire, a folded green dress on a chair, a row of women’s high-button leather shoes on the carpet. Seated on a bench in front of the mirror was a young woman of perhaps twenty-two, with soft black hair curled into a bun on the top of her head, from the waist up entirely naked.

  Against the murky shadows of the rest of the room her skin was radiantly white, lit up from within. Her shoulders were slender. Her back was straight, the indentation of her spine looked like a smooth recessed column of muscle. When she lifted her hands to her hair, her breasts rose in the mirror, their tips stiff, red-hot.

  A clock in the shadows ticked. Somewhere in the house a dog barked.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” she said quietly, without turning, and Trist thought, yes he had, he had made a grave mistake; in the myth, poor stupid Actaeon had blundered into a sacred grove and seen a goddess bathing, for which he was transformed into a stag and killed.

  Light blew off her body like foam from a wave.

  In the corridor he turned left, turned right, met the black maid who had been sent to find him, and reentered the cozy parlor precisely at the moment Senator J. Donald Cameron of Pennsylvania spun furiously around on his heel and snarled, “Where the hell’s my wife?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BLACK MAID CROSSED THE ROOM SERENELY AND DID something delicate and domestic to a vase of cut flowers by the window. “Oh, she’s still down in her sanctum gettin’ dressed, Mr. Senator Don. The young ladies needs their beauty time.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Trist. Nick the hell Trist.”

  Cameron stared at him as if he had just gotten sick all over the rug.

  “Then you’re goddam late,” Cameron said. “You were supposed to be here yesterday morning, nine o’clock sharp.”

  Over the maid’s shoulder, two or three streetlamps flickered to life in Lafayette Square. Sarcasm was not a good start; a bad start. Trist heard his voice explaining apologetically, with passable sincerity, that he was very sorry indeed, the ship’s crossing had been delayed in France, they’d only docked in Baltimore that day. The quinine fizzed in his blood like an electrical charge. When—or in senatorial language—when the hell had it turned so dark? And how exactly had feverish young Actaeon been killed? He couldn’t remember. Torn apart by senators, no doubt, beaten to death by streetlamps.

  The maid gave her flowers one last encouraging pat on the head and left the room. Cameron, who had already snorted once, snorted again and strode to the decanter, where he found a single glass among the porcelain cats and dogs and poured himself a whiskey large enough to cure all four kinds of malaria at once.

  “If you’re sick,” he said to Trist, “then I don’t want you around my family. I don’t want you anywhere.”

  “I’m fine. I’m ready to start right now.”

  Cameron didn’t look mollified. He drained off his whiskey in three quick swallows and instantly poured himself another. Trist tried not to lick his lips. What had they called whiskey in the army? Oil of gladness? The Senator was a big, beefy, black-moustached man in his middle forties who might have been pickled half his life in oil of gladness.

  “General Beale said he gave you a letter of recommendation.”

  In an inside pocket, behind the malaria packets, was his set of credentials. Trist fumbled for a moment, then handed the letter to Cameron, also his certificate of Good Character from the editor in chief of L’Illustration in P
aris, written by himself and signed, as best Trist could recall, on the haunch of a giggling blond gymnaste in a hotel de l’après-midi on the rue de Varenne. Also his official and out-of-date correspondent’s card from the Revue des deux mondes that simply gave his name and the two severe titles: Écrivain. Éditeur. Good Character threw a brief sop to honesty. “I actually only met General Beale last summer, when he was travelling in Paris.”

  “He knew your father,” Cameron said, reading.

  “Stepfather.”

  The Cameronian snort again. The Senator wiped his drooping moustaches with a sleeve. “Beale says you’ve lived in Europe ten years.” His tone suggested that this was either an impossibility or an oversight.

  “Off and on.”

  “Journalist in Paris. Three languages. Wrote a book. Wounded at Cold Harbor.” Cameron looked pointedly at the empty left sleeve.

  Trist opened his mouth to say something, decided simply to nod. Cold Harbor.

  “You going to slander Grant?”

  It was a crude but not unintelligent question. Cold Harbor, Virginia, June 3, 1864. The single bloodiest half hour in the history of human warfare. An open-field charge by Union troops against impregnable Confederate trenches, ordered by General U. S. Grant, miles away, sitting in his tent like Achilles, an attack so suicidal and pointless that the night before the battle the soldiers had pinned their names on slips of paper, to identify their corpses in the morning. Cold Harbor was the place where Grant had finally and truly earned his nickname “Butcher.” Trist had been hit by three minié balls in his left arm, another in his ribs, and then lain almost a day and a half out in the open, in no-man’s-land under the broiling Virginia sun, while Grant and Lee exchanged slow, gentlemanly notes about a possible cease-fire for removing the wounded. Sometimes Trist still woke up tangled in his sheets and soaked with sweat and trembling in a way that malaria couldn’t begin to touch.

  “Grant is,” Cameron said, “the most famous man in the world.”

  There was no denying that. Victory obliterated criticism. Ulysses S. Grant was far and away the best-known, best-loved character on the planet, an amazing fact to contemplate. When Grant had left the presidency two and a half years ago and started on a round-the-world tour, he had been greeted at the Liverpool docks by the largest, most enthusiastic crowds in English history. Queen Victoria herself had invited him for dinner. Bismarck had come to his hotel in Berlin and asked advice of the Man Who Freed the Slaves and Saved His Nation.

  “Well,” Trist found his voice, “that’s why I’m supposed to report about him, that’s why the French press wants a correspondent here. I wasn’t planning to write a word about the war. Everybody already knows about Grant in the war. The real story is that nobody in history has ever been President three times.”

  “Nomination first,” Cameron said with brusque practicality. “Then election, then history.” The newly filled whiskey glass made a short amber orbit around the window and Lafayette Square. “Beale lives right over there, on the corner. He bought the Stephen Decatur House. As you probably know. Tedious old fool, but we like his daughter.”

  “Beale’s in California,” Trist said. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “I cabled you my terms,” Cameron said, “nonnegotiable. You wanted an inside look for your magazine, you can come with me anywhere I go as campaign manager. I’ll see if I can get you an interview with the General, but he doesn’t usually give them. If I don’t like what you write I’ll tell you. You pay all your own expenses.”

  “All right.”

  “I guess you can write with one hand.”

  “Yes.”

  Cameron had a big man’s small feet and gingerliness of tread. He moved across the room, holding his glass to his lips so as not to spill a drop, and stopped at a bell cord hanging on the wall. He yanked it hard once. “Women,” he said to the wall in general. “My goddam wife.”

  It seemed like an unanswerable remark. Next to the bell cord was a framed photograph of a train wreck, the third or fourth such photograph Trist had seen since stepping off the ship that morning.

  “And does your wife travel along with the campaign?” he asked, as casually as he could, speaking of train wrecks, speaking of women. Because it had to be Mrs. Cameron, it had to be her “sanctum.”

  Another yank of the cord, a neighborly glower in the direction of General Beale’s house. “You’ve been gone so long, I guess you don’t know, Trist, Chicago may be about the biggest, most public goddam banquet of the century. Beale said you went to Yale.”

  Trist was becoming accustomed to Cameron’s disjointed style of conversation. He risked another nod of his head and was pleasantly surprised to find no pain at all, which meant that the fever was on the run. Bless the brandy, bless the quinine. In the mirror he saw two of himself, but they were both upright and steady.

  “Just for a year,” he said. “I left to join the army. After Cold Harbor I seemed to lose interest.” Cameron showed no reaction. “I had some other questions,” Trist said and patted his coat in vague search of a notebook, pencil.

  But Cameron only shook his big moustaches in impatience. He had already downed his second whiskey. Now he jerked the bell cord again and unsnapped the hunter’s case of a thick gold watch.

  “What I expect,” he said, and as he pulled open the parlor door Trist realized that he was being simultaneously accepted and dismissed. “What I expect, Trist, is somebody presentable. Most journalists are riffraff, no manners, you know that, you went to Yale. Most journalists aren’t people I can have around my family.” He studied Trist’s face for a moment. “Be at the B and O station tomorrow morning, six o’clock.” In the hallway he stared at Trist again. “Bring a clean suit.” He unbolted the door to the street. And as an afterthought: “Shave.”

  MALARIA, THE ALGERIAN DOCTOR HAD TOLD HIM, COMES AND goes like a cat.

  Outside, the cool air somehow mysteriously revived his fever. Trist leaned against an ivy-covered column on Cameron’s porch, wiped his brow with the back of his hand, and tried to regain his balance. Across the street, in the damp November twilight, the gas lamps of the Square cast pale slanting reflections off bare branches. The carriages clattering along Pennsylvania Avenue kicked up a brown American smell of horses and mud. Trist shivered. Home again, home again, jiggity-jog.

  He crossed the street and opened the little iron picket gate into the park. At the first bench he came to he sat down. To the left, through the trees, he could just make out the dim white bulk of the President’s Palace, as it used to be called in the far-off days when he was in the army and Lincoln was in the Palace.

  He pulled out his brandy flask, only to discover he had no more brandy. A gust of wind made the glass panes in the nearest streetlamp rattle. He touched his cheek with his hand and wondered if he gave off a kind of orange malarial glow in the dark, like a human jack-o’-lantern.

  He shifted on the bench for a better view of Andy Jackson’s statue. Lafayette Square, of course, had nothing to do with Lafayette. Before the war they had simply called it President’s Square, the social center of Washington. It was down on the southwest corner, if he remembered correctly, in sight of the Palace, that Congressman Dan Sickles had waited one Sunday morning in 1859 for Phil Key, son of Francis Scott Key, who had been, Sickles thought, unduly attentive to his wife. Sickles had shot Key dead on the spot, and the jury had acquitted him, and Congress had promptly commissioned him a brigadier general in the army.

  Washington, Trist’s stepfather used to say, was too small for a city, too large for a lunatic asylum.

  Why in the world had he come back?

  Because he was curious.

  Because you get tired of being bitter and angry and far from home. Trist didn’t exactly hate U. S. Grant, not anymore, and he didn’t blame him anymore for the loss of his arm or the train wreck of his youth. But Grant still baffled him, Grant as an American problem. Grant might have “Saved the Nation,” but he’d been a lazy and incompetent Presiden
t, not corrupt himself but endlessly tolerant of corruption in his cronies and cabinet. His whole second term had been one long scandal—how could he still be so wildly popular? What kind of strange new country would choose Grant the Butcher to be President more times than Washington, more times than Thomas Jefferson?

  Muffled voices could be heard now, from somewhere behind him, and Trist shifted around slowly on the bench. At the top of Cameron’s steps somebody was rapping the brass knocker. When the maid opened the door, Trist could see that it was a couple, elegantly, formally attired, more European than American. The man wore a dark overcoat and Londoner’s silky top hat, the woman was in sable furs. Both were so short that, framed in the doorway, they looked like children in adult clothes, come to a dress-up party.

  He waited to see if anybody else would appear, but the door closed at once, the curtains were quickly drawn. After a moment Trist stood up, exhaled a long gray comma of a breath (like an author), and started down a bare path in the general direction of Willard’s Hotel, where he had left his trunk and a two-dollar deposit for a room.

  In the morning, he thought, he would quit. In the morning he would take an express train back to Baltimore, he would shovel coal back to Paris. At the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, shuddering with fever again, he stopped to grip a lamppost and admire the gleaming rank of politicians’ carriages lined up before Willard’s entrance, just as in the war. At the bright, noisy hotel bar he drank two more glasses of brandy and counted his change in French.

  BUT 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.