Grant: A Novel (36 page)

“And you got the cashier at the firm too,” Trist said. Because, though he looked twenty years older and seriously dissipated and unfocused, Cadwallader had written a special article for the New York
Herald
three days ago in which he described, with surprisingly sympathetic and eloquent prose, the scene at Grant & Ward the day the General learned he was totally bankrupt again at age sixty-two. According to Cadwallader, Grant had come to the offices late Tuesday morning in a hansom cab, after the Vanderbilt loan on Sunday, unaware that two hours earlier that same morning the Marine Bank had closed its doors and lowered its great iron shutters down to the sidewalk. The crowd of angry men gathered at its Wall Street entrance grew louder and angrier. They made their way up the street to the Broadway intersection, and by the time the General arrived there were so many of them that the police had also gathered, as if to control a mob. The crowd parted long enough to allow Grant to go inside; but inside was no better. The corridors and first-floor offices were jammed with more depositors and creditors, banging on counters, waving certificates, shouting, clamoring for their money.

Buck was waiting at the back, coatless, not even wearing a tie. He was enough like his father at least to give the facts succinctly and simply: “Ward has fled,” he told the General. “Nobody can find our securities.”

And Grant was still Grant. He said nothing whatsoever. He absorbed the news, limped on over to the elevator, and rode up to his second-floor office. All day long people came and went with further details, but the great central fact was that all the money,
every cent, was gone. The Philadelphia trust fund, whose surplus he had put in Grant & Ward. The money Buck and his father-in-law had invested. The savings of every single member of the Grant family. The investments of all the old soldiers and comrades who had sent the General their pension checks and savings books. Every solitary penny gone.

At the end of the afternoon George Spencer, the cashier, came into Grant’s office and told him that Buck had finally located the firm’s securities, locked in a third-floor cabinet, but they were now utterly worthless, and Ward had also made off with Vanderbilt’s personal check.

“Spencer,” said Grant, “how has that man deceived us all in this manner?”

Spencer shook his head, looked down at the piles of ledger books on Grant’s desk. The old West Point mathematician had evidently been trying to work out where the firm’s sixteen
million
dollars in listed assets could have vanished. “I have made it a rule of life,” Grant told Spencer, “to trust a man long after other people gave him up.” He paused. Spencer may have thought of the stories of Grant’s military loyalty to his White House subordinates, no matter how much his enemies attacked them. Or maybe the stories of Grant’s own down-and-out years in St. Louis, begging former colleagues to buy his firewood. “I learned that rule in the war,” Grant said. “But I don’t see how I can trust another human being again.”

Spencer gathered up the useless ledger books and left the room. At the door he stopped and looked back. He saw U. S. Grant slowly bury his head in his hands and his shoulders start to heave. And not many men, if any, have ever seen a sight like that.

“Called Roscoe Conkling in the next day,” Cadwallader said, lighting a foul cigar.

Trist nodded.
That
he
had
reported. Conkling, having resigned in a fit of pique from the Senate, was now a prominent lawyer in New York; but even Lord Roscoe could do nothing to help his old candidate and President. Ferdinand Ward had been running what was called in Wall Street parlance a “bucket shop”—he took the money and tossed the contracts and orders in a bucket—paying dividends out of the original cash deposits, using the rest to maintain a splendid mansion in Brooklyn, a stable of thoroughbreds, a huge country estate in Connecticut.

“You know he once coined a word?” Cadwallader tapped cigar ash onto the remains of his scrambled eggs and looked around at the big half-empty dining room of the Willard. “Grant did. When he was President he used to stroll over here with his bodyguard of a night and smoke a cigar or two, and he said all those lawyers and smooth talkers waiting by the potted palms to hoist a glass with a congressman, they ought to be called ‘lobbyists.’ ”

“Is there anything,” Trist said, leaning back and contemplating Cadwallader’s lined face, his rumpled houndstooth jacket, his genial air of having just stepped off a racetrack, “you don’t know about Grant?”

“I know something about everything. Service at Willard’s Hotel.”

“Service at Willard’s Hotel.”

“Look at them poised in their thousands, ready to pour me coffee. Used to be terrible service, till a few years back a California congressman got fed up and shot a waiter dead on the spot, improved things something wonderful. Hence the expression ‘stiffing the waiter.’ ”

Trist grinned, not believing a word of it (though later he learned it was all true), and Cadwallader tapped ash on his plate. “Pay the bill, my dear, and walk me safely to the street.”

On Pennsylvania Avenue he pulled out a dog-eared address book, which he proceeded to consult in the middle of the sidewalk. He had quit the Chicago
Times
two years ago, he said, and taken a state government post in Michigan, dealing (unclearly) with insurance and veterans’ pensions, and his trip to Washington was mostly concerned with that.

“You get tired of writing,” he told Trist and snapped his address book shut. “You just plain run out of words. Use ’em up. I had a little project, a book I started—which way is Louisiana Avenue? I used to know this town.”

Trist pointed toward the Capitol. Cadwallader took him by the arm and started to shuffle, and Trist was suddenly reminded of his stepfather’s last, failing years, and then of boys in the war, and then of limping Grant again, the wounded giant, and as if he were reading his mind Cadwallader shook his head as they walked and said, “Well, the humiliation is pretty bad, I should think—half the country believes he stole that money, the rest just say poor old
inept
Grant, broke again. He went home that Tuesday, you know,
emptied his wallet on the table, and Julia’s purse, counted his money on hand. A hundred and eighty dollars, all he had left in the world. Now he’s got to do something to put food on the table for his family, poor devil.” He stopped again in the middle of the sidewalk, indifferent to the pedestrians around him. “You’re good enough company, Trist, and not that bad a writer, but I never can tell whether you admire Grant or hate him.”

Trist blinked in surprise and said nothing.

“He clipped your wing at Cold Harbor.” Cadwallader nodded at the empty sleeve.

For one ridiculous moment Trist looked at the sleeve as well, as if to confirm that it was empty. “I used to think the newspapers were right,” he said slowly, “that Grant was just a butcher.”

“And then you got to know newspapermen,” Cadwallader said sardonically.

“And then I got older. I think if they had assassinated Grant instead of Lincoln, we would have lost the war. I don’t hate him.”

“Well, you can feel sorry for him anyway,” Cadwallader said. “I do. Had everything the country could offer—general, president, millionaire—and lost it. Bust. Now he’s all the way back to hardscrabble. That girl over there seems to know you.”

Trist turned and saw Elizabeth Cameron standing beside her carriage on the other side of Fourteenth Street, gloved hand raised in greeting. Cadwallader reached into the limitless pockets of his disreputable jacket and came up with a gold-plated toothpick. He grinned around it like an alligator. “Senator Cameron’s pretty young wife,” he said.

T
HE SUMMER OF 1884 CAME EARLY, UNSEASONABLY MILD AND
inviting. Toward the end of May, Trist counted out his savings on the table, Grant-fashion, stared a long blank time at the dusty pyramid of notes and photographs on his desk; then abruptly applied for a two-month leave of absence from the
Post
. Since his March trip to Fredericksburg and the Spotsylvania Court House, he had actually written nothing, nothing at all, not one syllable or page of the promised book on battlefields—he glanced at the calendar beside the basin on the shelf—due now in three weeks.

“How does it feel to produce a book?” Elizabeth Cameron had demanded of him one afternoon, propping herself up on her elbow and admiring what he had taken to calling the Leaning Tower of Notes.

“Like giving birth to a grand piano,” Trist answered, and she had laughed and called him back to bed, and that night he had read the account of Ulysses and the sirens in a schoolboy’s Homer he had bought at a sale. Ulysses, he thought, glumly poking at his scant pages; a step up from poor old baffled Actaeon.

Three days after Trist began his leave, Don Cameron took his family away to Pennsylvania for the summer; shortly after that, Henry and Clover Adams likewise retired to their seaside house in
Massachusetts, to be near Clover’s father; Congress stumbled to the end of its session, President Chester A. Arthur wandered back to New York City for a rest; and Ulysses—Ulysses, Trist thought with another glance at the battered Greek textbook, took to the road.

The hired photographer had long since handed over his battlefield photographs and disappeared. Trist was to make a preliminary selection, and these would be winnowed down in turn by his editors in London and then delivered to the engravers for reproduction. All that was needed now was one good push, one good look at the landscape again, a last hundred pages or so of narration and captions.

He began by travelling north to Gettysburg, less than an hour’s carriage ride from the Camerons, where he paced restlessly through the military cemetery and looked about at the scattered monuments and weathered bronze tablets that various regiments, Southern and Northern alike, had erected here and there in the bare fields. No one could tell him exactly where Lincoln had stood to give his speech. No one could tell him how to write a chapter that was anything more than the desiccated facts, figures, dates that Henry West had warned against—
“The battle of Gettysburg was fought on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863; to see where Pickett’s gallant charge was beaten back, the visitor should walk one mile south on Cemetery Ridge, turn to the right at the marker.”
He wadded up sheets of paper and threw them in his wake like bobbing corks.

From Gettysburg he took a train south to Antietam. He unfolded his maps and notebooks again and worked out where the famous bloody cornfield had been, where the swarm of bees had comically stopped the battle, where incompetent McClellan had stood on a hill with his hand in his tunic like Little Napoleon and watched his lambs march off to slaughter, six thousand of them in a day.

Trist hadn’t fought at Antietam. He had still been an almost-boy sitting in a classroom in Connecticut. Nor had he fought at Ball’s Bluff farther down the river toward Washington, or the Second Bull Run or Chancellorsville, and somehow, as if that mattered, everything he wrote now grew stiffer and stiffer, more and more lifeless. Dust flowed from his pen.

On a cloudless hot afternoon near Manassas Creek, two weeks into the trip, he sat on a rock and watched for an hour while an
old man and his grandson walked from one end of the battlefield to the other, maps in hand. Now and then they paused and drew on the ground with their sticks, or looked across with wary expressions to a dark stand of timber on the east, as if Jeb Stuart’s cavalry might still come charging at any second out of the shadows. But there were only field hawks circling in the sky, an occasional misguided rabbit that peered from the brush. On the main road, carriages bound for Washington hurried by in the heat, their spoked wheels turning in the strange backward blur of something going forward too fast.

Trist tried to remember anecdotes. In a lull between the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, one of the artillery companies had fixed up a local good-natured dog with a can tied to his collar, and the dog trotted cheerfully back and forth all day between Rebel and Union lines, carrying packs of cards and clean socks and clothing one way, tobacco and cured beef the other. Once—Trist was there and witnessed it himself—the skirmish lines were close enough that the soldiers traded insults with each other between shots, and one Connecticut boy grew so angry and personal with his Confederate counterpart that both finally flung down their rifles in a blazing, sputtering fury and came out in a clearing together, and all the firing for hundreds of yards just stopped while those two boys went at each other with their fists, and when they were finished (a draw, both with bloody noses and black eyes) they withdrew to their lines and started shooting to kill again.

At the Rapidan River below Manassas, on impulse, he crossed a little bridge and entered the Wilderness forest on foot, just as he had in the spring of 1864. In the tangled brush and second-growth pine that grew right up to the edge of the road, untouched or cleared for twenty years, he found broken wagon wheels, bones, bits of skull, rusted canisters. When they had begun to fight, when Lee’s army had come screaming in like banshees on Grant’s flank: so thick and terrible was the gunfire that the trees, the brush, the very leaves and grass on the ground burst into flames. The whole battlefield burned like tinder. Fire running out of control would reach the dead and wounded lying underfoot, heat would make the cartridges in their belts explode, dead bodies would jerk and roll about with the explosions, men with broken legs or backs,
crawling through the flames, would scream as their own ammunition blew holes in their flesh. At night, in an impenetrable black smoke, they could hear men crying for water, or mercy, or a bullet, and then the flames would start up again and drown their pleas.