Grant: A Novel Read online

  Trist turned and looked up with them. Seven clocks—he counted—seven big black-and-white railroad clocks hung just over their heads, suspended by pipes from a steel girder that ran cross-ways under the roof. The nearest clock said “Washington—Richmond Line.” He put down his grip and stood on his toes to read the others. “Baltimore and Ohio Co.,” which was twenty minutes faster. Then “Philadelphia—Penn. Central,” “New York Central,” five minutes earlier than Philadelphia.

  Trist lowered his head and saw that, like an automaton, he had his own watch open.

  “My husband says that going between Washington and San Francisco you could reset your watch two hundred times if you wanted. Because since the war every railroad company operates its own particular clock. Seven different lines use this station, I think.”

  Mrs. J. Donald Cameron stood beside him, dressed in a deep emerald-green coat that clung to her bust and a black travelling bonnet tied under her chin that did not, quite, obscure the matching green of her eyes. “Some Senators want to pass a bill for one single national time, but the Western states don’t want it. He pointed you out to me,” she said. Farther down the platform Cameron was arguing loudly with a porter. “Since, of course, we’ve never met before.”

  Trist felt his neck and cheeks flush as if he were a schoolboy. He put away his watch.

  “Have we, Mr. Trist?” she said with a cool, expressionless face.

  Actaeon had been torn apart by dogs, he remembered now, that was the true story of how he died in the myth: transformed into a stag, hunted by dogs, the last thing he had seen in life was the goddess herself, now fully clothed, smiling down at him. There was no other word for Mrs. Cameron but dazzling. He cleared his throat, listened for the baying of hounds. “Well, if we had,” he said solemnly, holding out his hand, “I would certainly remember.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MOST PUBLIC GODDAM BANQUET OF THE CENTURY WAS scheduled in fact to be a Grand Old Army reunion in honor of ex-President Ulysses S. Grant, just returned a month ago from his round-the-world tour and using the banquet, the cynical said, merely to drum up support for a third presidential term.

  Sylvanus Cadwallader, decidedly among the cynical, watched the ex-President pass down the hallway of the Palmer House Hotel surrounded by a skulk of yapping politicians—Cadwallader paused to savor his noun; a skulk was a group of foxes—and made a note of the room they entered. Parlor Suite 21. He consulted the confidential list that had cost him five dollars and two pint bottles of E. C. Booz & Company bourbon whiskey in bribes, all of which he planned to charge, as usual, to the Chicago Times. Cadwallader had been a newspaperman since 1850, starting in the small somnolent towns of northern Wisconsin and Michigan. He had long ago found that a reporter’s best friend, next to a good dictionary, was a generous budget of bribes. Parlor Suite 21 belonged to J. D. Cameron and party.

  He leaned against the corridor wall and scribbled a little shorthand memo to himself. It was no news that Grant was sitting down in consultation with Don Cameron. The Camerons, old Simon and young Don, owned Pennsylvania as far as Republican politics went. Young Don had even served for a time like his daddy, a most undistinguished time, as Grant’s Secretary of War. But Cadwallader was much more interested in writing down his personal impressions of Grant, while they were fresh.

  He enjoyed numbers. He thought numbers anchored unsteady minds in reality, so he closed his eyes and did a little calculation. He had known the ex-President … almost twenty years. For a period of thirty-one months during the war he had been, if not daily, at least weekly in his presence, and there had been a stretch of time, before Ingratitude Did Its Fateful Work, when he and Grant could have been said to be intimate friends. He licked the tip of his pencil and flipped a page. Grant was fifty-seven years old, four years older than Cadwallader. The General had put on weight during his world tour: he moved now with a fleshy ponderousness that came of too many days behind a banquet table instead of on top of a horse. The skin was softer, the hair and beard grayer. But the face was still Sphinx-like, blank and unsmiling. There was still the same small wart just above the right moustache line—Lincoln had had it, too, and so had Cromwell, if Cadwallader remembered correctly—the same nearly horizontal slash of the mouth. Grant’s eyes used to be his most expressive feature: dark gray, surprisingly animated. But he had passed by too quickly for Cadwallader, pressed against the wall by all the foxes, to see his eyes clearly. Unmistakable was the square jaw and the wide forehead. Unmistakable, too, was the fact that Grant had been saying nothing and everybody else had been yammering like geese.

  Cadwallader read over what he had written, struck out the geese as one animal figure too many, and slipped the notebook into his pocket. He would expand and revise it later on into something florid, the way the Times liked it. Easy enough, because U. S. Grant was a subject that always set his pen to smoking.

  Which reminded him to mention the inevitable cigar clamped between Grant’s teeth. He pulled out the notebook to add it. General Grant had very likely started smoking his trademark black cigars when he was a chubby babe in his cradle—Cadwallader had said that very thing to Mark Twain last night in the Palmer House bar, and that Grant-intoxicated man had nodded thoughtfully two or three times and allowed it was a striking image.

  Cameron’s door opened again. Cadwallader leaned forward expectantly. But neither Grant nor Don Cameron came out, only a tall, skinny-boned young man, sweating as if he’d just left a steam bath. The young man stopped in the middle of the hall, opposite the door, and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Bodyguard, Cadwallader thought first. Then, looking more closely at the coat sleeve: veteran.

  “When I was with General Grant at City Point, Virginia, in 1864,” Cadwallader said, strolling over and uncorking a reserve bottle of E. C. Booz whiskey, “he had a guard posted outside his tent to keep away all the curiosity seekers who kept trying to get in and see him.” Cadwallader paused and took a swig of the whiskey. Up close the boy had a simple malarial pallor, common as a cold these days. “One day a strange comical old fellow, looked like an undertaker, came up from the James River docks and tried to reach the General’s tent by ducking under a hedge. By granny, those guards were on him in a flash, guns out and cocked, and they damned near frog-marched him off under arrest, except just then the General poked out his head and said, ‘My god, boys, that’s President Lincoln!’ ”

  Cadwallader chuckled and rubbed the top of the bottle with his sleeve. “Maybe he didn’t say ‘My god’—Grant don’t swear, ever. But the rest is true. I didn’t see you go in before.” He nodded his head toward Parlor Suite 21. “So my first idea was that you must be guarding Don Cameron and not General Grant. I know that’s Cameron’s suite.”

  “Cameron’s suite, but I’m not a bodyguard.”

  From yet another pocket Cadwallader came up with a cigar and a yellow-tip phosphorus match. “Well, I can see that now.” He lit the match with a single practiced snap of his thumbnail. “Ever since Lincoln, half the Congress thinks they need a personal guard from Pinkerton’s. The vanity of U.S. Senators needs to be measured in some special grandiose unit. A ‘Jumbo’ maybe, like Barnum’s elephant. Or a boxcar, or a Goliath. Now your Senator Cameron I would estimate at twenty ‘Jumbos’ worth of vanity, minimum, which puts him about average for the Senate.” Cadwallader leaned forward through a wreath of smoke. “Journalist?” he guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “Got the noble fraternal look,” Cadwallader explained. “Who do you work for?”

  “A couple of foreign magazines, French.” Nicholas Trist wiped his face again, then put away the handkerchief and took out a packet of medicinal powder and opened it with his teeth. His voice, Cadwallader thought, had a fine malarial rasp. Pity about the missing arm, but then that was about as common as a cold these days too. “The main one’s called L’Illustration, from Paris. I came over to write about the campaign.”

  Cadwallader handed him the bottle to wash
the powder down. Then out of habit he held out his business card with the two quill pens crossed like swords and the plain Times Roman type that said “Sylvanus Cadwallader. Special Correspondent, Chicago Times, New York Herald.” “Skedaddled to France after the war, I suppose,” Cadwallader said. “Lots of you boys did.”

  “Land of opportunity.”

  Cadwallader chuckled and recorked the bottle. “Well,” he said, starting to saunter away, “you let me know if I can be of any help to our good French friends. The old-timer always knows where the bodies are buried, and that’s a true thought.”

  AND ANOTHER TRUE THOUGHT—NEXT TO THE BUSY TEN-CHAIR hotel barber shop Cadwallader stopped to relight his cigar and stare at the lobby turned to bedlam in front of him. Another true thought was that a bigger, noisier crowd had never invaded the poor old Palmer House Hotel in its poor old life.

  He skirted around a small hecatomb of undelivered luggage and trunks and took up a position beside a potted palm, under an enormous floating banner—the whole ceiling was one unbroken series of flags and banners—that said “VICKSBURG——GRANT——1863.” Everywhere he looked, every nook and corner of the lobby was jammed with middle-aged, gray-haired men. He watched three Republican Congressmen sweep by arm-in-arm. He recognized regimental flags from the Army of the Potomac, the Cumberland, the Tennessee. Clearly, nobody in the country could stay away. Over by the famous State Street revolving doors they were pouring into the building like Hittites.

  Worse yet, Cadwallader thought, more and more of them were showing up in their old blue army uniforms, newly enlarged and refitted paunchwards. (He complacently smoothed the flat-bellied black-and-white houndstooth coat he wore morning and night.) They had their cigars in one hand, their drinks in the other. The spittoons at their feet were an overflowing god-awful brown mess.

  He moved strategically around the potted palm to dodge a shouting bellboy. A brass band was playing patriotic songs. Wives and daughters were making endless circling promenades around the grand staircase and its three tiers of balconies. He pulled back a curtain. Outside, in a black stinging rain, the streets were likewise jammed with people. There hadn’t been so many people on the streets of Chicago since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow had tried to burn the city down, only these people were all waiting—they had been waiting since dawn—just to catch a glimpse of Ulysses S. Grant when he came out to review the parade, even though that wouldn’t start until the rain was over.

  Well, it was Grant’s party. Cadwallader smiled at his pun. Upstairs he found a relatively quiet alcove furnished with a leather chair and table and sat down to rest his feet.

  What had crazy old Sherman said? He would follow Grant into battle as if he were the Savior himself?

  Across the hall a man hurried past with a poster: GRANT WILL!

  Cadwallader smiled again, because that was the headline from one of the best-known dispatches he himself had ever written—at the disastrous Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, when Grant lost fifteen thousand men in two days and everybody else in the country thought he was bound for defeat and disgrace. They talked about George Washington’s will as the thing that had held the new Republic together in the first days of the Constitution. They talked about Andy Jackson’s will that had crushed the Choctaws and the Cherokees, and knocked the British backwards at New Orleans. But they were nothing, Cadwallader thought, nothing compared to the will of U. S. Grant, because he had been there and seen it, and Sherman was almost right.

  Down below, the band was winding in and out of the lobby, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Cadwallader drummed his fingers against the chair arm. Loyalty was a virtue too. They should have invited him into Cameron’s suite for a visit, Grant himself should have spotted him in the hall and sent for him. There were other headlines he could write if he cared to. If he weren’t such a corn-fed, true-blue patriot. Pop goes the—

  “By God, Caddy, I think you’ll be scratching in that notebook when you pass the Pearly Gates!”

  Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, younger brother of William T., had the demented family grin. He stood in front of Cadwallader’s chair, hands on his hips, black silk top hat shoved back on his head like Pericles’s helmet, nodding cordially. Cadwallader put away the notebook he had just pulled out and sprang to his feet.

  “Mister Secretary,” he said with a genial bow. “Here to greet the General, no doubt?”

  Sherman’s grin stayed diplomatically in place. Even around the Sherman family, “the General” referred only to U. S. Grant, and if U. S. Grant had any important rivals for his third presidential nomination in the spring, one of them was John Sherman of Ohio, thirty “Jumbos” minimum.

  “You know my wife, Caddy,” the Secretary said, and Cadwallader bowed again to the voluptuously gowned lady on Sherman’s left arm. “And Mr. Washburne.”

  “Congressman,” said Cadwallader, and shook hands with Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois.

  “Just saw Bob Ingersoll,” Washburne announced gloomily. Bob Ingersoll, a former Union colonel, was to be the main speaker at the banquet later that night. He was also a notorious atheist and lover of whiskey, and Washburne was both a Methodist and a teetotaler.

  “With that awful Mark Twain,” said Mrs. Sherman. “Mr. Cadwallader,” she began, then broke off with a frown. “I can’t hear myself speak,” she shouted into her husband’s ear. Some spirit—Cadwallader guessed it was not unconnected with E. C. Booz & Co.—had seized the band, which was now marching up the grand staircase and playing a brigade call from General Butterfield’s old command, while all around them grown men were raising their glasses and chanting,

  Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield! Dan,

  Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield!

  Sherman gestured toward a side corridor. At the next alcove Mrs. Sherman tried again. “I have a favor to ask, Mr. Cadwallader,” she said. “The ladies are not permitted at the banquet tonight. I wonder if copies of the speeches—”

  From the top of the staircase now came a new chant, to the deafening tune of the army mess call:

  Soupy, soupy, soupy, without any bean,

  Porky, porky, porky, without any lean,

  Coffee, coffee, coffee, without any cream!

  Mrs. Sherman gave up. “This stupid, stupid war!”

  “Rain’s stopped,” Washburne called from a window. “Grant’s outside!”

  Fifty feet away the band wheeled toward them with a cheer.

  Ulysses leads the van!

  Ulysses is the man!

  VICT-O-RY!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GRANT WAS INDEED OUTSIDE, STANDING IN THE CANOPIED reviewing box that had been erected especially for him on the hotel’s second-floor balcony. Cadwallader pushed out through the revolving doors and into the crowd, and shoved and jostled a hundred yards up State Street. The wind was whipping hard off the lake, ice-cold, and the skies looked as if the rain might start again any minute. But the parade was definitely under way. The first of the Illinois infantry regiments was already marching past to a deafening cheer, flags up, swords up, eyes right. Cadwallader watched from the curb for a moment, but found himself slowly losing ground, crushed back against a lamppost, it seemed, by half the shoulders and elbows in Chicago. The Springfield Marching Band came around the corner playing “John Brown’s Body” out of tune, and he shivered and rubbed his face and thought of his nice warm hotel room on the fifth floor, paid for by the Times. He had stood in the cold outdoors just about long enough, he figured, to get the flavor of the thing.

  Upstairs five minutes later, still shivering, he draped a blanket across his shoulders like an Indian and went over to the window. The Palmer House was nothing if not modern. Under the sill, next to the baseboard, was an iron-pipe central heating contraption for which a new word had recently been coined: “radiator.” He squatted on his heels and turned a knob. Then he held his hands out, palms down, the way you might warm them over a campfire, until he felt the heat begin to spread from the pipes—radiate
—and he braced himself on the wall and creaked to his feet. Fifty-three years old.

  He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and sat down in a straight-backed chair two feet from the radiator. Sylvanus B. Cadwallader had only been thirty-six the year he first met Grant, 1862. Working in Milwaukee as City Editor for the Milwaukee Daily News; in poor health and bored to tears. And he might be there yet, he thought, covered in cobwebs and bent over his desk like Ebenezer Scrooge, except one day early in October, out of the blue, a telegram arrived from the owners of the Chicago Times, and Cadwallader’s world just flipped itself up and over, changed forever. Would he care to go down to Tennessee and write about General Grant’s army for the Times? (And by the way, their previous reporter had been tossed in military prison by General Grant for publishing false information—could Cadwallader possibly get the man out?)

  Cadwallader could and did. If he closed his eyes and shut out the noise from the street below, he could still picture the grimy little yellow stucco depot in Jackson, Tennessee, and hear the old wooden cars of the army train jerking and squealing to a halt. He could still see the pale consumptive face of Grant’s personal aide, Major John A. Rawlins, as the Major sat in his tent on the outskirts of town and scowled his way through Cadwallader’s stack of press credentials and said the General would talk to him some other time. And he could still see Grant’s face when he finally did get to meet him two weeks later.