Grant: A Novel (38 page)

“Whom the gods would destroy,” declared Mrs. Beale more briskly than ever, leading them back into the house for tea, “they first make authors.”

On the steps of the house Trist held the door for Emily. She stopped and smiled up at him—a girl of smiles and songs today, he thought—and they paused to look back companionably together at the quiet square.

“Henry Adams has taken
ten years
to write his
History
,” she said, “and he’s not finished yet.”

“He changes his clothes too often.”

She laughed easily—a girl of laughter too—and held out her ring to be admired again. “You told me you were going to write a review of that book
Esther
. So I actually went and read it myself, and I’ve been looking for your review all summer.”

Trist propped himself against the open door and looked down at her curiously. From inside the house someone called to them to hurry in. “Well, I didn’t know what to write about it,” he said finally, not quite truthfully. “It’s a very strange book.”

“It is a book,” said Emily, suddenly somber and showing her mother’s talent for precise summary, “about a homely young woman with an invalid father and her friend, a younger, very beautiful and charming woman, and how the homely woman is filled with despair and doubt because her friend is so lovely.”

“Yes.”

Emily’s smile had now completely vanished. “It made me think,” she said, “of Clover Adams and Elizabeth Cameron.”

General Grant began to write despatches, and I arose to go, but resumed my seat as he said, “Sit still.” My attention was soon attracted to the manner in which he went to work at his correspondence. At this time, as throughout his later career, he wrote nearly all his documents with his own hand, and seldom dictated to anyone even the most unimportant despatch. His work was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly, but without any marked display of nervous energy. His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as the ink from his pen; he was never at a loss for an expression, and seldom interlined a word or made a material correction. He sat with his head bent low over the table, and when he had occasion to step to another table or desk to get a paper he wanted, he would glide rapidly across the room without straightening himself, and return to his seat with his body still bent over at about the same angle at which he had been sitting when he left his chair. Upon this occasion he tossed the sheets across the table as he finished them, leaving them in the wildest disorder. When he had completed the despatch, he gathered up the scattered sheets, read them over rapidly, and arranged them in their proper order.

–COLONEL HORACE PORTER
Wilderness campaign

E
STHER
WAS, IN FACT, A FAR STRANGER BOOK THAN EMILY
Beale’s summary suggested. In the first place, there was no author called Frances Snow Compton, as far as Trist could discover. In New York City, where he now had acquaintances at two or three publishing houses, nobody had ever heard of her. At the
Century
magazine, Compton was completely unknown. And as for the novel itself, the heroine Esther Dudley was a young woman in her late twenties, and Frances Snow Compton evidently hated her—
“She has a bad figure,”
the first chapter said by way of introduction.
“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.”

Trist put down the book and pondered the idea of an author who wants to break her heroine in halves.

In his notebook he had jotted down dozens of other references to Esther’s homely appearance—she was short, gloomy; dressed badly:
“Why, Esther,”
drawls one of the men when she appears in a new robe,
“take care, or one of these days you will be handsome.”

Nor is she particularly intelligent:
“Her mind is as irregular as her face,”
remarks a friend. She is only a
“second rate amateur”
painter, hopeless compared to a male artist.
“Esther,”
observes the
author,
“like most women, was timid, and wanted to be told when she could be bold with perfect safety.”

By contrast, the ingénue, young Catherine Brooke, just arrived in New York from the West, is quick and bright and “
fresh as a summer morning, pretty as a fawn
.” All the men in the book are in love with Catherine. Frances Snow Compton herself is enraptured—“
No one could resist her hazel eyes and the elegant curve of her neck,”
she trills when Miss Brooke steps onto the stage;
“her pure complexion had the transparency of a Colorado sunrise.”

Bilge, Trist thought, and stood up and tossed the book onto his desk. Bilge and syrup, enough to make you gag. Henry West hadn’t wanted Trist’s review for the
Post
, pointing out that he’d never seen an advertisement anywhere for the book or heard of the author. As far as West knew, nobody in the world but Trist and Henry Adams had ever bought a copy.

And Emily Beale, of course. It was the character of Esther, Emily had said, who first made her think of Clover—homely, fragile Esther with her bad figure, devoted to her invalid father, deeply vexed in a vaguely Bostonian way about matters of duty and religion. Esther was a sad black frump, Emily thought, next to the pretty fawn Catherine; just like Clover and Elizabeth.

Trist picked up the novel again and opened it to the last chapter. Wooden characters, turgid prose, nothing at all resembling the wit of
Democracy
. Early on in the book Esther becomes engaged to the pompous clergyman named Hazard, but the only discernible theme in their long-winded romance is that marriage is a stultifying prison—
“As for bringing about a marriage,”
says Esther’s sharp-tongued aunt,
“I would almost rather bring about a murder.”

In the end, poor unattractive Esther loses everything—her beloved invalid father dies, her “second rate” art comes to naught, her fiancé deserts her. “
I loathe and despise myself
,” she whimpers, and Frances Snow Compton, licking her chops, leaves her creation standing miserable and alone at the edge of Niagara Falls.

She should have just pushed her over, Trist decided irritably. Or made her jump. But Compton lacked the authorial nerve, he supposed; or the imagination; or the publisher had interfered at the last moment. It was an angry, frustrated book, there was no denying that; a book that somehow, obliquely but deliberately, sought to cause pain.

Who had written it?

T
WO HUNDRED MILES AWAY ON EAST SIXTY-SIXTH STREET, AT
almost precisely the same moment, Julia Grant came into her husband’s study on the second floor and handed him a yellowing slip of notepaper that she had found while she was sorting her letters.

The date in the corner, he saw, was May 22, 1875, the last year of his second term in the President’s Palace.

She had given it to a servant to carry to him, and on the bottom he had written two lines in pencil and sent it back:

Grant read it over now and looked up with a wry little shake of his head. Julia leaned down, kissed him, smiled.

That evening, in the sitting room, remarkably bare and uncomfortable since it had been stripped clean of military souvenirs, she laughingly repeated to their guests the story of the “warm day or snowing” note. And then by a kind of leap of association she went on to describe the equally hot day last June when the General hurt himself. “What he
did
,” she said, “was bite into a peach—”

“It happened at lunch,” Grant explained.

“And then he bounced up from the table in terrible pain and walked around the room as if he’d been stung—”

“I thought there was an insect in it,” Grant told them, and Elizabeth Cameron frowned and nodded with such a charming look of sympathy that he added as an aside to her, not Don Cameron, who wouldn’t care in the least, that the peach was his favorite fruit.

“Well, I hope you saw a doctor,” Elizabeth Cameron told him.

“He saw Dr. Da Costa, from Philadelphia.” Julia stood and smoothed her skirt like a nervous bride and started to pass around the plate of chewy after-dinner cakes that she had cooked herself,
just as she had cooked the whole meal for the four of them, pork chops, beans, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, everything the General liked, most of which he hadn’t touched. “He comes to Long Branch every summer, and he examined the General’s throat—”

“Right there on the porch,” Grant said, amused at the memory of the dapper little Philadelphia doctor shading his eyes against the bright June sunlight and telling Grant to open wide, while carriages and horses were going by on the street not twenty yards away.

“
He
said the General should go to his regular New York doctor, Dr. Barker.”

“But Barker was in Europe all summer, so I haven’t got around to it yet. And besides”—Grant looked up at Don Cameron, who had refused Julia’s cakes and was now at the sideboard helping himself to some brandy in the unceremonious fashion of an old friend. “Besides, I’ve been busy, as you may know.”

“Heard about it,” Cameron said.

“You’ve become a
writing man
,” Elizabeth said in her lively way. “
Three
magazine articles about the war. We saw them announced in the papers.”

“Well, truly just two and a half.” Of late Grant had developed what he could only describe as a kind of second self or presence in his head that appeared to listen to everything he said and then comment on it. Now, for instance, he heard himself speaking, but inside his consciousness he was remembering how his Secretary of State Hamilton Fish used to tease him for being the most scrupulous and honest man in the world in regard to fact. “One and a half, really. The
Century
magazine asked me to write a few things about the war, and with everything that’s happened”—he shrugged stoically, Julia looked down at the floor—“I thought I would.”