Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  EXTRACT FROM A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK, 1884

  From Esther: A Novel, Chapter One

  “Miss Esther Dudley is one of the most marked American types I ever saw.”

  “What are the signs of the most marked American type you ever saw?” asked Hazard.

  “In the first place, she has a bad figure, which she makes answer for a good one. She is too slight, too thin; she looks fragile, willowy, as the cheap novels call it, as though you could break her in halves like a switch. She dresses to suit her figure and sometimes overdoes it. Her features are imperfect. Except her ears, her voice, and her eyes which have a sort of brown depth like a trout brook, she has no very good points.”

  “Then why do you hesitate?” asked Strong, who was not entirely pleased with this cool estimate of her cousin’s person.

  “Miss Dudley interests me,” replied the painter. “I want to know what she can make of life. She gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid-ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is doing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second rate amateur and will never be anything more.…”

  CHAPTER ONE

  TO THE SURPRISE OF NEARLY EVERYONE WHO KNEW HIM, Henry Adams had actually bought a typewriting machine, late in the year 1883.

  Not for his personal correspondence, of course. There a quill pen was still required by courtesy and decorum, and not for the first draft of any really serious work such as his History. And not, certainly, for the purposes of his friend Henry James, who didn’t manipulate the instrument himself, but did send his manuscripts out now to a public stenographer’s office to be “typed.”

  “It’s been the ruin of poor Harry,” Adams declared with a quick little grimace of satisfaction. “Thanks to the stenographer he can revise his novels effortlessly, over and over, and every draft is apparently more complicated and convoluted than the one before. Some of his sentences begin to seem to me like the whorl in a seashell, one long dizzy spiral. A literary historian might say his ‘style’ has been completely changed by technology. So you’re back, eh, Mr. Trist?” As if Trist had merely stepped around the corner. “From Paris, is it? Or London now?”

  “London now, for several years.” Trist acknowledged his backness with a handshake. “Miss Beale said you would be through with your work for the day.”

  Adams turned his whiskery little terrier smile on Emily Beale. “She knows our routine by heart, Miss Beale does. My wife and I ride in Rock Creek from nine to eleven every morning, I write until four.”

  “Then you serve,” said Emily, bending to inspect the typewriting machine, which was resting disassembled on a black lacquered Hitchcock chair beside the fireplace, “the most expensive and delicious teas in Washington. Naturally, I’m not supposed to drink them.”

  “Our Miss Beale has been unwell of late,” Adams told Trist.

  “Our Miss Beale is under orders to return straight home and rest.” She poked one finger delicately at the keyboard. “Did you break it, Mr. Adams, like a cowboy riding his horse?”

  Trist laughed. Adams kept a straight face. “I would prefer another analogy. Perhaps Beethoven pounding his piano, Miss Beale.”

  “Miss Beale apologizes.”

  “It is merely,” Adams said fastidiously, “due to be cleaned.”

  Emily Beale had in fact been very sick. For nearly half of the year 1883, she had been confined to an invalid’s room in a New York residential hotel, where surgeons and doctors visited daily and treated her, painfully, for what she would only describe in her letters to Trist as “female complaints.” She looked gray, thin, washed out; far older than her twenty-one years. She stayed a few moments longer, bantering with Adams, but the fatigue in her eyes was unmistakable and at quarter to four she left.

  Adams closed the door behind her; returned to the parlor and rubbed his hands together awkwardly. “You were never here before, I think.”

  “Never inside. Often passed by.”

  “Let me ring,” Adams said, “for some of our expensive tea.” He moved toward a servants’ bellpull. Trist watched him automatically, for a moment, then let his glance stray. He’d once interviewed a French police detective who had described to him the best way to examine a strange room: divide the space in front of you into quadrants, proceed left to right, low to high, focus on the single most important object. The parlor of 1607 H Street was a long, well-lit, hopelessly cluttered collection of … possessions. The furniture was a mixture of odd pine hand-me-downs from New England and beautifully crafted French antiques. The carpet on which he stood was a Shiraz, others lay scattered in oriental profusion: Cashmere, Kurdistan, Bokhara. Every mantel and shelf held bric-a-brac, porcelains, Japanese and Chinese vases. Trist had been in enough Parisian salons to recognize some of the paintings: sketches by Watteau, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Raphael. A water-color above a leather chair was surely by Turner. The single most important object in the room was a large drawing over the fireplace representing the mad king Nebuchadnezzar, from the Old Testament, crouching on his hands and knees in a field and eating grass. The single most curious fact was that every chair and sofa had had its legs sawed down almost to the floor, to match the scale of their diminutive possessors.

  “My wife,” Adams said when tea had been presented, hecatombs of cake and sugar offered, “is in her room writing a letter to her father, which filial duty she performs every Sunday at eleven, the hour of worship, but yesterday we were for once engaged. Her father,” he added, studying Trist over the rim of his teacup, “who art in Boston. We never did embark on our Jeffersonian business, Mr. Trist.”

  “No, I went off to Chicago to the convention, and then home.”

  “And now you’re back, for the same melancholy reason.”

  Trist shook his head. He tasted the tea—thought his stepfather had been right as usual, all tea is muck—and considered for the first time that he really was back, that he really had crossed the Atlantic again, drifted to Washington as before, settled down (far down) in an American chair in an American home, just as if four years had never passed. He had landed at Baltimore only yesterday, taken a room at the Willard this morning. “Reason I’m here,” he said, and realized that he disliked Adams’s droll, ironic cock of the head as much as ever, “my stepbrother died last year, and I found in some of his papers a whole set of Jefferson’s letters to Mrs. Trist, from Paris.”

  “So you aren’t reporting the Republican high jinks for our French—or English—friends this time around. But of course, there’s hardly any suspense, is there? Grant is sick with pneumonia, Blaine is certain to be the presidential nominee, and the poor Democrats will win at last with Mr. Cleveland.”

  This was so succinct, and accurate, that Trist could do no more than nod in agreement. The maid had placed the table for his cup on his left; he reached awkwardly across his knees (what kind of person cut every chair down to his own size?) and chest.

  “And you can’t have voyaged so far just to offer me—so kindly—your manuscripts?”

  “Mr. Trist,” said Clover, bounding into the room like a ball, surrounded by a whirling, yapping blur of little dogs—“Possum! Boojum! Marquis! Down, you canine wretches—Mr. Trist, quel plaisir, welcome! General Beale, your second greatest admirer—Emily is first—told me all about it. Henry”—still bouncing on her toes, practically flying from handshake to teacup to chair, she waved him back to his seat, held her cup chin high with both hands while dogs scrambled back and forth on her lap. “Mr. Trist is a famous journalist now, Henry, he writes travel books, there was a splendid one last year about Egypt—Henry never reads travel books I’m afraid—you look very well, Mr. Trist, older, wiser, stouter, I like your completely clean-shaven style. Bit more gray in the hair, I think, yes. Emily says you’ve come back to write a book about the Virginia battlefields, and, what is most exciting to me, you’re going to tour t
hem with a photographer! Have I got all that right?”

  “Battlefields, yes, gray hair. Famous, no.”

  “Oh, don’t be modest, Mr. Trist, modesty is the most boring of virtues. I’m a photographer myself. If Henry would allow it, we’d decorate this room from top to bottom with my pictures. As it is, we make do with mad Babylonian kings and landscapes. Of course Henry wants your letters.”

  “Of course I do,” said Adams after a moment.

  In the reception hall, tea finished, dogs banished out of sight, Trist paused to shrug on his coat and button it one-handed at the collar, cape-style. Behind him Adams murmured a polite good-bye and disappeared, presumably to his study. At the window Clover lifted the corner of a lace curtain, peered, shivered.

  “Another book,” she said, turning brightly back to him. From a side table she held up a mottled gray cover for Trist to see. Esther: A Novel.

  “ ‘By Frances Snow Compton,’ ” he read.

  “Whoever she is.” Clover replaced it on the table. “Henry leaves improving books here, where I’ll see them coming in, as one of his subtle little instructions for me to read it. Married life, as no doubt you’ll find out one day, Mr. Trist, is a series of unspoken communications, like red Indians with their smoke signals. Put on your hat and I’ll walk outside and show you a sight.”

  She led the way across the porch and down the steps to the sidewalk, where she turned abruptly to the left. Trist followed slowly, still adjusting his coat. The March afternoon was cloudy, chill. Straight across Lafayette Square, behind a filigree of bare branches, the White House stared back at him. Halfway along a row of handsome redbrick facades, Don Cameron’s house looked quiet and deserted, except for a tradesman’s wagon parked in front. Trist hadn’t seen Elizabeth Cameron either for all those years, not since Chicago, not since—It was inevitable that he would run into her now, sooner or later; it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. He hadn’t crossed the ocean to see her. He was older, wiser, stouter; dazzleproof. Clover Adams waved him forward.

  “This,” she announced as they reached the corner of H and Sixteenth Streets, “is our new purchase.” She nodded her bonnet at the empty lot in front of them, an L-shaped expanse of stumps and mud that stretched from the shrubbery beside the Adams house halfway up the block. “It belonged to our landlord Mr. Corcoran—”

  “Of the famous art collection,” Trist said.

  “Exactly the man. Dull as a bedbug. Former Confederate sympathizer. Spent the war in Europe. He was going to build an apartment house here, which wouldn’t do, of course, all the world staring in our windows, but Henry and his friend John Hay dug in their pockets and bought the whole whacking property and divided it in two. John Hay doesn’t mind the church, so he gets the corner half.” Together they looked at the facing columns and steeple of St. John’s Episcopal Church on the other side of Sixteenth Street. “I couldn’t bear it, all that piety leaking out every Sunday. We’ve hired the same architect to build us adjoining houses, one of Henry’s Harvard friends named Richardson. Very fat, dresses in a cowl like a monk. I hope you’re not religious, Mr. Trist. I come from a family of ministers and Transcendentalists, but somehow it doesn’t take. My evangelical cousin Russell Sturgis said the other day he would only hire a Christian gardener, so I told him I would advertise for an agnostic one.”

  “Did you?”

  She shook her head. “I’m too cowardly. But I do like the story about Mrs. William Travers, who told her husband on Christmas Day she thought their home life should be sweeter and holier. So she hung up in their parlor an illuminated text, ‘God Bless Our House.’ Mr. Travers read it and said he felt regenerated. Next day, going into her dining room, Mrs. Travers practically reeled to the floor when she saw another text he had just put up: ‘God Damn Our Cook.’ ”

  She joined in his laughter, but the wings of her bonnet hid her face so completely in shadow that for a moment the effect was oddly ghostlike, disturbing. Trist made motions of leaving.

  “A rather daring assignment.” Clover put her hand on his arm. “Revisiting your old battlefields, writing about the war.” The bonnet nodded at his left shoulder. “Do you think of it, Mr. Trist—what was Lincoln’s phrase?—as going over ‘consecrated ground’?”

  It had never occurred to her husband, Trist thought, to see a human connection between his book and his past. Clover Adams, for all her bounce and wit, was an acutely sensitive woman. “I have no idea, Mrs. Adams,” he said truthfully, “what I think of the war. I never have.”

  “Or the battlefields or the generals?”

  “Them too.”

  “I was amused,” she murmured, and he caught a glimpse of the parchment white of her face in the bonnet, “in my grim New England way, by the fact that they put wounded soldiers in office buildings and churches here in Washington, but wounded generals they put in the old lunatic asylum at Dupont Circle.” She lifted her tiny hand and moved it back and forth in a kind of waggish blessing. “You must come and see us often, Mr. Trist.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A PRIZE INVITATION,” SAID HENRY WEST, SOMEWHERE UP ahead in the dark. “Of course, she’s loony. Her whole family in Boston is loony, religious fanatics half of them, other half in the nuthouse. One of her aunts took poison, famous case. I think baby girl Mrs. Adams even found the body.”

  The sun was not yet risen on the morning after his Adams tea, and the air in front of him was cold, dark, full of blurred smells from the nearby Potomac. Trist walked carefully just behind West on the frozen grass of the National Mall, between carelessly stacked piles of lumber and what, when he scraped his ankle and West held up his lantern, turned out to be two massive rows of marble building blocks.

  “But there’s no doubt the Adamses are the social center of Washington,” West said over his shoulder, “loony or not. Or ‘Washington village,’ as Adams calls it. Which they manage by being so goddam exclusive they squeak. Won’t go to the White House, even when the President asks them for dinner. Snub Senators, skewer Congressmen. Adams says Senators are like hogs and you have to hit them on the snout with a stick. When Oscar Wilde was here last year, came with their writer friend Henry James, Mrs. Adams absolutely refused to meet him and told everybody”—a mincing falsetto—“ ‘I try to keep far away from thieves and noodles.’ ”

  Trist laughed, scraped his ankle again, and stopped. A few stray snowflakes drifted around his face like long, wet feathers. Other lanterns could be seen up ahead, bobbing in the air. Men’s voices floated downhill. The slow tap-tap of a hammer came from the right, where the lantern’s beams revealed a bare dirt path and still more piles of lumber.

  “Up here.” West gripped Trist by the elbow and steered him up a slippery hillock of grass and mud. “You go there for Sunday dinner, write up a few notes under the table. Voilà, a Post exclusive, ‘At Home with the Insufferable Adamses.’ ”

  Trist shook his head. Pointless in the dark. “I like her,” he said.

  West snorted. “I wish there was a Hippocratic oath for reporters. ‘First, Do all the harm you can.’ ”

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Hold your horses.”

  It was always amazing, Trist thought, how fast the sun rose. Already the sky in the east was beginning to glow a soft yellow-white, and a dark rim of trees and rooftops was showing across the horizon. In another hour or two the sun would have dried the grass and burned away the damp haze and the brief March snow would amount to no more than puddles, slivers of coppery water in the mud, Washington would present its usual early-spring panorama of pale green and brown. But for the moment, in the long gray suspension of the dawn, they could have been anywhere—Paris, by the slapping Seine. Boston. Chicago. He blew in his cupped hand for warmth. Possibly not Hawaii.

  “We go in here.” West held up the lantern, but lowered his head to pass under a network of wooden scaffolding. To his left now was an open door and, just growing visible in the milky light, what appeared to be a ship’s prow made out of stone. />
  They stepped inside. Blacker, colder; another lantern, hanging from a beam overhead, pulled wooden steps out of the darkness. With a grunt, West started to climb.

  “Remember your catechism?”

  The railing was on the left-hand side. Trist held on awkwardly, arm stretched across his chest. “Eight hundred ninety-eight steps. Five hundred eighty-seven feet.”

  “When they finish.” West swung the lantern out to show the rough surface of the stone walls on either side of the steps. “If they finish.”

  Twenty feet up the steps had begun to narrow claustrophobically, and at the same time to zigzag back and forth as they rose. West’s lantern clattered around a corner and vanished. “Washington’s Monument,” his disembodied voice called down, wheezing. “Father of his goddam country. Thirty-six years’ parturition—you didn’t think I knew that word. You’re a good sport, Trist.”

  “You’re a lousy climber, West.”

  From time to time they passed a window slit on the outside wall, and each would pause to peer out at the rapidly dawning sky. It was the only time to see it, Henry West had insisted last night, three large beers into their reunion at Gillian’s Tavern. It was his favorite view in the world, and thanks to the Post’s ceaselessly boosting coverage of the monument’s progress, he, West, was friendly with all the construction workers, including one cordially corrupt young foreman, who was glad to allow him “on site,” as they put it, any time, day or night.

  The lantern faded around another corner, leaving Trist in a pleasant musty darkness that smelled of stone dust and cut wood. He stumbled and clutched the handrail; one-armed man, he thought, in the country of the blind. He turned the next zigzag and felt a sudden push of cool, fresh air. You could do the same thing in Paris, he remembered, climb the inside steps to the top of Notre Dame or Saint-Sulpice, though not at dawn, and look out at the medieval rooftops and cramped black alleys below, a gargoyle’s-eye view of the Old World. But when he rounded the last corner here and stepped up to the open platform at the end of the stairs, it was not the Old World but the New he saw before him, and bald, unsentimental Henry West, cap off for some reason, leaning against the stone rampart and looking due east toward the great white dome of the Capitol, caught now in the sheer radiance of the rising sun, while all below them the streets and buildings of the city were still faintly gray, unresolved, coming into focus, and the smooth, broad back of the Potomac wound off to the right, like the river of Time itself, disappearing into the blue-green Virginia horizon of the past.