Grant: A Novel (33 page)

First person.

Trist put down his pen and read his paragraph over; then folded it once with his elbow and placed it in his thick manuscript notebook. When the knock on the door sounded, he had already drawn out another sheet of paper and picked up his pen, and Elizabeth Cameron, closing the door quickly behind her, leaned her back against it, cocked her head in her new spring bonnet, and smiled.

“A writer not tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth,” she teased. “Stop the presses.”

She pulled off the floppy bonnet with an easy, practiced motion and tossed it to the floor as she crossed the room, and together they swayed, spun, fell laughing onto the bed. She was, in Washington, in the more or less civilized setting of his rented room, with real mattress, pillows, clean sheets, even more uninhibited a lover than before. She pushed him aside and sat up, then unfastened catches front and rear, twisted, wriggled her dress from her shoulders and rolled under the covers. When she sat astride him and lowered her breast to his mouth she murmured “Sweet, sweet” and then “yes” and at the last moment, shuddering, “Love, love,
love
.”

“A noisy girl,” she said later, holding the sheets demurely to her chin.

Trist poured tea from the little pot he kept on a kerosene burner (strictly illegal) and carried her cup back to bed.

“It’s your Sherman side. The wild woman of Wyoming.”

“Say that three times,” she said and kissed him. While he was back at the burner pouring a second cup for himself, she added, “My Uncle Cump is notorious that way, you know.”

“I drink more tea in Washington,” Trist told her, “than I ever do in London.”

“Uncle Cump has dozens of women, in towns all over the country. They write him notes at his hotel after he gives a speech, and they pursue him like demon lovers—one of them’s a sculptress right here in Washington—that’s where he went after Mrs. Adams’s dinner—and I think the old-time generals actually trade the ladies around among themselves, even with the Confederates.
After all, they all went to West Point together, a thousand years ago.”

“Your Uncle Cump is married,” Trist said as he sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Ah.”

“And about as inconspicuous as a comet.”

“Ah again.” She let the sheet drop a few inches, leaned forward. Her fingers traced a slow line from his naked stomach to the top of his thigh; lower. “We are not alone, Mr. Trist,” she whispered.

At ten minutes to five she looked at her watch, gave a little yelp, and hurried out of the bed. “Dinner at Mrs. Adams’s house,” she said, gathering dress, bonnet, shoes, white silk items he couldn’t quite, from the bed, classify or describe. “A command appearance, because their famous Boston architect is here this week and Clover means to have him show the plans and a wooden model
and
, if the weather holds take us over the site. ‘My modest mausoleum,’ she calls it. So there’ll be Clover, Henry, the Beales, the Bancrofts, two or three of their tame Senators.”

“You will charm them with your hat.” Trist stretched his arm and placed the bonnet upside down on her hair. She tugged the laces together under her chin, stared at him, then made a face and crossed her eyes.

At the door she stood in front of the mirror and smoothed her skirt.

Trist touched her cheek gently. “In Chicago,” he said, “you were so fearful.”

She looked down at her shoes, up at the mirror. “That was three years ago,” she said in the brisk voice he had heard before. She smoothed her skirt again. “And I’m still fearful.”

“We’re very careful.”

She studied her mouth in the mirror; rubbed a spot on her cheek. “When he has enough whiskey in him, my husband is a very jealous man. He hates it when I have lunch with any of the Sherman men. Or tea with Henry Adams.”

“And me?”

She stood back from the mirror and tied the laces of her bonnet in a quick, decisive bow. “I don’t think he sees you,” she replied, “actually. You’re not wealthy, you don’t have a house or a
carriage or belong to a club or own a state, you don’t write books he would ever read.”

“We live in different worlds,” Trist said, and hated the stiffness in his own voice, but Elizabeth seemed scarcely to hear.

“Yes,” she said, and opened the door. “Yes.”

E
LIZABETH CAMERON WAS NEVER, EVER GOING TO CHANGE
.

This was Emily Beale’s view, and Emily Beale was twenty-one years old—almost twenty-two—and experienced in the ways of the world.

She watched Mr. Trist balance his teacup and saucer with his sad one hand and listen, nodding, to Clover Adams’s description of the recent “Architectural Visitation” and all its delays and outrages. On the other side of the Adamses’ parlor Henry and Elizabeth sat chatting cozily side by side on the sofa; but Elizabeth’s eye kept straying to Trist, from time to time Elizabeth turned or twisted her shoulders on the sofa almost as if to show her torso and present herself.

In Paris two years earlier, Emily knew, Elizabeth had gotten herself into a peck of trouble. It was one thing to be madly flirtatious in Washington, where the men lived just for politics. But in Paris, while Senator Don was travelling around Europe on government business, Elizabeth had beguiled a Russian prince-in-exile named Orloff, who invited her one day to a
rendezvous
in a private room in the rue Royale, and when Elizabeth had refused to grant what Emily’s mother always called “the last favor,” Orloff had flung her into the corridor half naked, and it had taken the
embassy itself to hush up the scandal, from the French
and
Senator Don. Elizabeth needed men, Emily thought, as Elizabeth gazed an instant too long at Mr. Trist, the way a cat needed birds. But Elizabeth needed safety and social position—and money—even more, and that was something
else
that wouldn’t change.

“Emily, dear, come back to earth.” Clover Adams put her cup on the table and beckoned Emily to follow her into the “studio.” With a last glance at Henry and Elizabeth, curled up now on the sofa like a pair of gossiping sisters, he carefully braced his one hand on the chair arm and stood. Poor, Emily thought, Mr. Trist.

The “studio” was, in fact, only a kind of glorified storage room for Clover’s chemicals and cameras—the new house, whose foundations they could see through the window, bright and cheerful in the April sunshine, would have a special room designed just for photography. Some of her less elaborate equipment, Clover explained to the two of them, she kept upstairs in her bedroom, the rest down here. She pulled out albums and folders from a set of overcrowded shelves as fast as her hands could fly. There was a notebook in which she wrote, in a large and loopy hard-to-read script, the particulars for each photograph she had taken since 1882: date, subject, exposure, light conditions, chemicals mixed for development. She riffled its pages and thrust it back. There was another notebook of short “aesthetic” observations—the nature of shadows, the difficulty with indoor photography—and there were, of course, wrapped individually in clean white tissue paper, like big white teeth, Clover said, the photographs themselves.

The first that she handed to Trist was of her parents-in-law in Massachusetts, the redoubtable Charles Francis and Abigail Adams, staring at the camera (or photographer, Trist thought) with ill-concealed dislike.

“This is
my
father,” she said, and unwrapped a portrait of an elderly man in a derby hat and handsomely tailored country coat and trousers, sitting on a carriage behind a horse.

“A doctor,” Emily Beale remarked, in the wary voice, Trist thought, of one much acquainted with doctors.

“An ophthalmologist, in fact.” Clover took back the photograph and studied it a moment before rewrapping. “He was a volunteer surgeon at Gettysburg. He wrote me wonderful letters about the troops when he was caring for them—I was still at
Professor Agassiz’s school for girls in Cambridge—but that was the first time he had actually practiced medicine since my mother’s death. He went out of sheer duty and humanity. She died of tuberculosis, you know; I was only five. Then
her
mother died not long after that, and my Aunt Sturgis before I was twelve, and my Uncle Hooper—sometimes I think, my dear Emily, Boston is just one big charnel house. Henry and I have made up our minds that when we die we’ll be buried right here and not shipped back to Boston like canned terrapin.”

Trist guessed that Emily might profit from a change of topic. He reached for a photograph.

“That is our Neo-Agnostic Architect Richardson on an earlier visit, Mr. Trist. You see the monk’s cowl he wears, I don’t exaggerate.”

Emily had rather boldly unwrapped the photograph of Dr. Hooper again. “You do look alike, you two,” she said wistfully. General Beale was a tall, strapping man, athletic of build, square of shoulder; he didn’t in the least resemble his now invalid daughter.

Clover was pleased, rose on her toes. “My sister claims it’s ridiculous any man and woman should be so like one another as we are. My father raised me from a girl. I’ve written him every Sunday of my life since I was married. Twelve years this month.”

There were dozens of other photographs of relatives, houses, the Adams family retreat at Beverly Farms north of Boston. The earliest picture was of Henry in the stateroom of a Nile River steamer, reading a book on their wedding journey to Egypt. In another, Clover had posed her three Skye terriers around a child’s doll table, in a tea party. The last one, taken evidently just a week or so earlier, showed their friend John Hay standing before their fireplace and holding, with a curious proprietary expression on his face, a copy of the French translation of the novel
Democracy
. “People do say,” Clover observed with perfect blandness, “that he wrote it, of course.”

After which, Emily Beale pleaded fatigue and returned to her home to rest, and Clover and Henry and Elizabeth and Trist sat down, awkward somehow, in the parlor again, beneath the portrait of demented King Nebuchadnezzar. But the second round of tea had scarcely been poured when a servant hurried in to announce
that Mrs. Bancroft had a crisis in her garden and wished to see the ladies, and in a matter of moments, in a flutter of disappearing coats, hats, parasols, Trist found himself alone with Henry.

Not precisely, he thought, a consummation devoutly to be wished by either of them. His host, ironic at all times, had been for some minutes now both prickly and ironic. “I must remember to thank you for your Jefferson letters,” he said now to Trist, and added, “Not much use to the historian, I fear.”

“Ah. Sorry.”

“They’re merely personal,” said Adams.

“Too bad I couldn’t offer you something better.” Trist crossed his legs, glanced at the clock. “A photograph of him, say, like Mrs. Adams’s photographs.”

Adams regarded him for a moment from his tiny chair, then put down his cup. “You cared for her photographs, did you?”

“They seem charming to me, artistic even.”

“I don’t see photography in terms of art.” Adams said it bluntly. “Journalism, a hobby perhaps. My wife’s talent seems to me quite ordinary. Perhaps you would like to come into my study and see what I mean.”

The study lay at the end of a whitewashed corridor and was almost as cluttered as the parlor. Three walls were covered floor to ceiling with shelves of books; even the window seat behind the desk had a foot-high stack of books and journals; two more stacks seemed to hold down corners of the carpet. The desk was disorderly, but in a way that Trist recognized as a writer’s working confusion. Above the fireplace hung a pen-and-ink drawing, signed by William Blake, which portrayed, on inspection, Ezekiel mourning his dead wife.

“Wedding present,” Adams said, nodding at the drawing, “from Frank Palgrave in London, man who did the
Golden Treasury of Poetry
. Peculiar taste for a wedding gift, no? yes?” He pushed aside the novel
Esther
, which Trist had last seen in the Adams hallway. “These are your Jefferson letters, which I
will
hold on to a little longer, if you don’t mind.
These
are pages from my chapter attempting—already one falls back on the old vocabulary—a
sketch
of Thomas Jefferson’s quite impossibly feline character. I’d be grateful if you took it to your home and read them over, for errors. Professor Bancroft does this for me, often, but since you have perhaps the great advantage of having heard, at second hand
of course, family anecdotes, perhaps—? In any case, you’ll see that I pursue the
motif
of painting, not photography, as the only art that might do justice to Jefferson’s, what would I say? His semitransparent shadows?”

“A very nice phrase.” Trist took the pages with an odd sense that Adams had asked him in for something more.

“This is what I’ve managed so far.” Adams held up two richly bound red leather books, one in each hand, but made no move to offer them to Trist. “I’ve had my first two volumes of the
History
privately printed in New York, and bound as you see. Six copies in all. I intend to send them to a few friends for comment or, possibly, pleasure.”