Grant: A Novel (8 page)

Your historians, snug in their college library, will call the Mexican War a dress rehearsal for the Civil War. But your journalists like me will tell you it was actually the last old-fashioned war in history. The soldiers, those that were not perpetually drunk, malaria-ridden, or pondering desertion, fought for individual glory, not for President Polk, certainly not for the Cause. What they wanted, first of all, was to get their names in the official reports to Washington, second to get their names in the newspapers. Many a gift of whiskey was I offered for a special paragraph or two in the Chicago
Times
, concerning little local acts of heroism. And the glory did indeed rain down—Bobby Lee, Pete Longstreet, a Mississippi colonel called Jefferson Davis—name after name gained a brevet promotion or a special citation in Scott’s weekly report.

Not Grant’s name, however. At the start of the invasion Grant had been made quartermaster of his regiment, in charge of the mules and the cooks and the dusty boxes of hardtack that followed the fighting troops. Not much glory in kicking mules.

He begged for reassignment, but he was too competent at his job, and too insignificant and unprepossessing in appearance for his colonel to notice. As often as he could he left his braying charges to the sutlers and raced ahead to join the battle unofficially. I claim our paths crossed once or twice—Grant says no—we both remember the eerie sight of soldiers’ corpses floating in the Rio Grande, rolling and twitching as if they were still alive, because the fish were already nipping their flesh. And the day at Veracruz it was so spellbinding hot that the whole army marched in its underwear (glory!). At Monterrey, behind a barricade, he watched a wounded private who sat down on a boulder with his red sticky guts spilling onto his lap, singing a psalm till he toppled over and died.

Once, in the ironic fashion of life, the Congressman, now a general, who had appointed Grant to West Point came galloping by at the head of a division; two weeks later they buried him in the sand. And once, in the battle of Mexico City, young Grant did get his name in the reports for the commonsense feat of carrying a little Howitzer cannon up to the top of a church and bombarding the Mexicans below.

But when the army captured Mexico City at last and the diplomats set to work, Grant was still a second lieutenant, obscure as ever.

His comrades passed the time of the occupation in fighting duels and chasing señoritas—the Mexican girls used to come in giggling squads to the river’s edge every afternoon and step out of their clothes for a bath; to an Ohio boy a vision right out of Eden—but Grant was too puritan for the one and too sensible for the other. (In 1868, in a spectacular waste of money, the Democrats hired some of Pinkerton’s detectives to follow presidential candidate Grant and see if they could trap him in a bawdy scandal.) He set up a little private bakery next to his quartermaster’s tent, perhaps the only profitable business he’s ever run, and he wrote his weekly letter back to St. Louis. But mostly he sat in his quiet, moody way with a bottle in his hand, staring at life. The liquor started to buzz in his blood. It settled into him like a squatter into an empty house. Grant number two.

T
O THE LADIES,” DON CAMERON SAID WITH A GRIMACE
.

He splashed champagne into a crystal flute, wiped his moustache with his hand, and looked about the room with as little good humor and grace, Trist thought, as he could possibly manage.

“Oh, don’t go,” said Clover Adams. And she raised one tiny palm like a traffic policeman and gestured for Trist to halt. “Do give Mr. Trist some champagne,” she said to Cameron. “How often do we meet somebody who’s actually been to Morocco too? Do stay, Mr. Trist, and talk to us about Morocco.”

“Invite the gardener and the cook, too, why not,” Cameron grumbled, and picked up the telegram the maid had placed on his table and walked over to his chair.

“Mr. and Mrs. Adams,” Elizabeth Cameron informed Trist calmly, standing with her back to the window on Lafayette Square, “spent the last six months abroad.”

“Dangling about every sink pit possible,” said Mr. Adams in a thin, precise British accent. “We travelled not wisely, but too well.” He lifted his own champagne glass with a sardonic nod to Cameron. “To the ladies, of course, and the cook and gardener too.”

Trist looked at him curiously. He had only stopped by to deliver
a courtesy copy of his interview with Mark Twain in Chicago three days ago—an interview now telegraphed and presumably being set in type in Paris—but he had heard the names in the anteroom and it was hard not to come in, hard not to be curious. Mr. Adams was Henry Adams, and Henry Adams was invariably identified in the press at home and abroad as the wealthy and brilliant grandson and great-grandson of Presidents, Washington City’s foremost “intellectual” (to use the fashionable new word). He stood no taller than his wife, neither of them much above five feet tall Trist estimated, but where she was lively and energetic, her husband wore an air of weary, languid disapproval that made him seem even smaller. He had a round head and a high, bald, shining forehead; he kept both hands close to his chest, where his coat buttoned; the skin of his face was so soft and pink that he looked unnervingly like a baby with a beard. He had in fact once been pointed out to Trist at the beginning of the war, in the bar of Willard’s Hotel, talking with Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay. But then Adams had gone off with his father Charles Francis Adams to the American legation in London, Hay had gone back to the President’s Palace, and Trist …

“We know all about
you
, Mr. Trist, from General Beale.” Mrs. Adams boldly handed him a glass of champagne. “We live across the way—1607 H Street. The Senator and the General give the Square
ton
, and now here you are to give us—”

“Goddam bad news,” Cameron said and stood up. “My brother-in-law,” he told his wife.

“Wayne McVeagh,” Adams murmured to his wife.

“Wants to change the unit-rule vote in Chicago. Make Pennsylvania the same as Maine. This is Tilden and Blaine ganging up on Grant.”

“We mean to discuss Morocco, not Chicago,” Clover Adams interposed firmly. “My husband and I were in Spain two months ago, Mr. Trist, pawing through Spanish archives, and for some reason now forgotten decided on impulse to press on to Africa.”

Trist drank a swallow of Cameron’s champagne (Cameron left the room flapping the telegram against his leg).

“Well, I don’t actually know much about Morocco,” Trist said. “The magazine I work for sent me to Tetuán a few times.”

“
We
went to Tetuán,” Clover Adams said.

“A sky so blue,” Henry Adams told Elizabeth Cameron, “one can scoop it out with a spoon.”

“We stayed in a Moorish house,” Clover said, “kept by a Jew. I was the first American woman ever to come to Tetuán, so they carried me off to meet the Ketib’s wife—very handsome woman about fifty, she had bare feet dyed the color of henna and a great grinning red-turbaned Negress who fanned her and screamed with amusement at me every three minutes. I loved Morocco, but Henry liked Spain.”

“A good-natured, dirty people, the Spanish,” Adams said, “always apologetic, if one doesn’t somehow insult them.” He turned his round head toward Trist, who wondered for a moment if he was about to be insulted. “From North Africa to Chicago, Mr. Trist—which did you find more exotic?”

“I knew he would get back to Chicago,” Clover said with mock petulance. “Henry’s obsessed with General Grant and the nomination.”

Trist glanced at Elizabeth Cameron, still standing next to the window, with the dim gaslights of Lafayette Square behind her. The most beautiful women in the world were French. French women wore silks that clung to their skins like a kiss. They adorned their slender necks with sparkling jewels, their hair with fragrant, expensive powders. They pushed up and separated their small round breasts in a heart-stopping scoop of
décolletage
, with an engineering miracle known to corset makers as
le divorce
, because it kept asunder what would otherwise be pressed together. But he had never seen any woman, in Paris or wherever, as dazzling as Senator Donald Cameron’s wife. Bad, adulterous thoughts. Poor Actaeon had died a happy man. He put his glass down on a table, beside one of Maudie’s cast-off dolls. To his surprise Elizabeth Cameron picked it up and handed it back to him. “My husband will be busy answering his telegram—do have your drink, Mr. Trist.”

Henry Adams was watching them both over the rim of his glass. “Not obsessed with General Grant,” he said, as if there had been no interruption, “so much as bored with Europe. My wife and I are the only people we know who find America more amusing than Europe.”

Clover Adams had wandered to the photograph of the train
wreck on the wall. “We saw a train wreck in England,” she said, “in Shropshire. Carnage everywhere.”

“Chicago, for instance,” Adams said, “was a great triumph for Grant. His name is in all the papers again, his nomination is almost assured. Yet I myself think he may have come home from his world tour too soon, his candidacy may peak before the convention. Certainly he’s left his enemies time to regroup. At any rate, what can be more entertaining than to watch?”

“My husband,” said Clover, “knew Grant when he was President—”

“I saw him once, at his Palace. Thereafter I declined to meet him.”

Trist pictured the taciturn Grant confronted with such a little engine of patrician self-amusement, and he turned to hide his smile. When he looked at Elizabeth Cameron, however, her gaze was fixed, steadily, uncritically, on Henry Adams.

“It was about somebody’s hair,” Clover said.

“My friend Motley”—Adams had begun by speaking to Trist, but in the course of things turned naturally to Elizabeth Cameron, so that he seemed now to be addressing her alone—“Motley was made ambassador to England, but Grant disliked him. He recalled Motley because he parted his hair in the middle.”

The two women laughed. Adams began a longer story. Trist listened with only half a mind. His malaria had entered a new phase, recurring just every four or five days now and much less severely than before; but as always, drink or excess heat seemed to stir it up. He put down his glass again and moved away from the fireplace, where cut logs had been stacked by a prodigal hand. Elizabeth Cameron, still laughing, rested her fingers for a moment on Adams’s arm. In the flickering light of the room her skin was soft, radiant, her eyes as pale as agates. On the other side of the fireplace poor Clover Adams looked like a small black crow.

“In fact,” Adams was now saying, and as he spoke the idea suddenly occurred to Trist, in a simple, neutral, and unshakable way, that he had never met someone he disliked so much so soon—“in fact, I’m not even registered to vote, so I ought not to have
any
opinion.” He made a quick, high-pitched sniffing sound that was the opposite of Don Cameron’s habitual snort. “I’m merely an observer of the Great Democratic Experiment. I
will
say that, whatever he was before the war, when he became President, Grant
utterly lost the distinction between right and wrong. This is, of course, the first step to success in politics.”

“You were in the war, Mr. Trist,” Clover Adams said. “General Beale said you wrote a book of sketches about it. He said you had a most interesting story—you resigned from Yale College in your second year to become a volunteer. Then, of course …” She looked sympathetically at his arm. “Did you serve under Grant?”

“I suppose everybody did,” Trist replied. He was conscious of trying to appear as boorish and inarticulate as possible, to distinguish himself from Adams. “But Chicago was only the second or third time I ever saw him.”

“Mr. Trist,” Elizabeth Cameron interjected, surprising Trist again, “unlike most soldiers, evidently doesn’t care to speak of the war.”

Before Trist could say a word, the hallway door had swung open and Don Cameron walked in.

“Telegram’s gone,” he announced. “I’ve told McVeagh what to do, straight.” As he passed with his small quick tread he left a sharp scent of whiskey in the air. “Dinner’s almost ready,” he added, and frowned over his shoulder at Trist. “Senate meets tomorrow at ten for a short session, then a Republican caucus you might want to watch.”

Trist nodded and turned to go.

At that moment the black maid appeared at the double doors leading to the dining room, and half a second later the governess, with little Maudie Cameron at her side, appeared behind her.

“She
insists
on saying good night to Papa,” the governess said, and Maudie skipped free with a yell and ran to her father, who stooped to kiss her.

“Our revels now are ended,” murmured Clover Adams, just loud enough for Trist to hear. The maid stepped aside to reveal the dinner table, and Clover looked automatically at Henry. But her husband had already extended his arm to Elizabeth Cameron with a little sniff and a bow. From the hallway Trist heard his thin, penetrating voice. “My dear Senator, may I borrow your wife?”