Grant: A Novel (51 page)

Henry was still away at the dentist when Mr. Trist arrived at four o’clock. Clover gave him tea and they sat together quietly in the parlor. They commented on the weather, he told her a complicated story about Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and then she stood up abruptly, without thinking at all, and handed him the portfolio of
Jefferson’s letters and insisted he examine them to be certain none was missing.

He demurred at first, of course; he was sure Mr. Adams had been scrupulously careful with the documents. But Clover was firm and repeated her insistence. He looked at her, she thought, strangely, but nodded and began to untie the ribbon.

For a minute or two there was nothing to hear but the crackling of logs in the fireplace. Nothing to see but his bowed head as he balanced the letters awkwardly on his lap and turned and glanced at the sheets of paper one by one. She rubbed her forehead so hard that it hurt. Trist came to the center of the stack and stopped. He read very slowly. Then he raised his head, and from the expression on his face she knew that he hadn’t guessed either. They had both read
Esther
, she and Trist, but neither of them had guessed that Henry was the author.

Clover made herself lower her hand from her forehead. “I remember that we talked about that book, Mr. Trist. The heroine is rather inadequate, wouldn’t you say?”

He murmured something she didn’t hear.

“Inadequate,” she repeated more loudly. “And unsatisfactory as a woman, to a man. The beautiful young girl in the book reminded me of Mrs. Cameron.” Her hands had nothing to do. They made foolish wringing gestures. She looked over at the table by the end of the sofa where she had placed a vase of roses for herself, nobody had brought them. “Fiction is not always false,” she added, pleased to be saying something intelligent, paradoxical. “A fiction is not always a lie. It can send a message. It can explain someone’s feelings. Of course I knew that he liked her, all of you men like her. I even thought at one time, Mr. Trist, that you and Mrs. Cameron …”

Trist put the Jefferson letters in his jacket pocket, then slipped the letter from Henry Adams to his publisher back in its envelope. “What do you want me to do with this?” he asked quietly.

“We have a curious sympathy for one another, no, Mr. Trist? The company of the wounded.” She held out her hand for the envelope, very calm, scarcely trembling. “I want you to do nothing with the letter. It’s a secret, our secret, you must promise. Henry wrote a clever book in private, that’s all.” Her voice seemed to rise and crack. “The book has nothing at all to do with my marriage.”

In the hallway Trist shrugged on his coat and prepared to say
good-bye, but Clover, standing by the foot of the stairs, suddenly buckled at the knees and started to fall. She clutched the banister with both hands. As he hurried forward to help her she pushed him away with a shriek. “Please don’t touch me, Mr. Trist—I should die if anyone touched me!”

A
T NOON, SUNDAY THE 6TH OF DECEMBER, CLOVER AND HENRY
finished a late breakfast in the morning room. The day was warmer, the sun was brighter. She had slept quite well, she told him, she was feeling much better than before. He looked at his watch; patted his lips with a napkin. He would just take a walk by himself, he said, for an hour or so.

Upstairs at her desk, where she used to write her Sunday letters to her father, Clover cleared a space in the papers and books and began a letter to her sister Ellen Gurney in Boston.
If I had a single point of character or goodness
, she wrote,
I would stand on that and grow back to life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can express—God might envy him. He fears and hopes and despairs hour after hour—Henry is beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even
.

She read the letter over and stared for a long time at the blue sky over the garden. Then she folded the sheet of paper, unsigned, and placed it under the corner of her blotter.

Downstairs the packing men had not yet started work on her photographic darkroom. The little closet was just as crowded and jumbled as ever with frames and cameras and a whole table of nothing but tin basins and glass vials. From the cabinet next to the door she took a bottle of potassium cyanide that she used in developing her prints. She filled a vial with water and stirred in the colorless salts. Upstairs in her own room again she stood before the fireplace with the vial in her hand. The mixture had a strong bittersweet smell, like almonds. Three houses down and across the street the bells of St. John’s church began to toll and she lifted the vial slowly and swallowed it all.

A
UTUMN DRIFTS DOWN TOWARD PARIS ALONG THE VALLEY OF
the Seine, from the gray, wet coasts of Normandy, cooling the land, sending ripples of soft, sober-colored light and shadow southward. Most years the season changes in the calm leisurely fashion of a leaf falling gently from a tree.

In the first week of October 1891
—Trist stopped writing and hastily shoved his pencil and notebook into his jacket pocket, but not before Sophie Liane Ledoiné stopped in front of him, folded her arms across her
décolleté
, and formed her lips into an exquisitely exaggerated, irresistibly kissable pout that, Trist assumed, Sophie had learned, like every French woman, as an infant.

“Do you know, Monsieur Trist, what the Duke of Gloucester said when Edward Gibbon gave him a copy of the
Decline and Fall of Rome
?”

“It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

Sophie stuck out the tiny pink tip of her own. “He said, ‘Another damned thick square book—always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?’ ”

“How is it, Madame Ledoiné, you know so much more about English literature than I do?”

“One,” said Madame Ledoiné, “you’re an American and not
expected to know anything except buffalo shooting and Indian fighting. Two, I spent every summer of my girlhood in Devonshire with a private tutor. My father had practical notions of female education. He thought a girl only needed to learn two things well—how to ride a horse and how to speak a foreign language. You’re writing one of your witty articles about the
réception, n’est-ce pas
?”

Trist reluctantly took his eyes from her lips (and
décolleté
) and shook his head. At the other end of the
Grande Salle de Réception
of the Petit Palais museum, the President of the Third French Republic, M. Sadi Carnot, was standing with his ministers before a long line of foreign diplomats, many of them colorfully beribboned or becostumed, all of them shuffling forward for their bow, their handshake, their several well-chosen words of republican greeting and recognition. Three or four times a year, at irregular intervals, the President held this quite informal, for the French, reception of diplomats; his expression on each occasion never varied from the expression he wore now, the bland, professionally insincere smile of a headwaiter uncovering a dish.

“In the old days,” remarked Madame Ledoiné rather wistfully, “when the Emperor received in the Tuileries palace, he always remained in the state room, beside the gold throne.” They both looked at the empty space behind the President, where there was no throne at all, only a ceremonial tricolor flag in a stand. “And the Empress Eugénie always received separately, in the royal drawing room.” They moved their eyes right, where instead of a royal drawing room there was a large open exhibit hall whose walls were covered with hundreds and hundreds of photographs of the American Civil War, an exposition organized by the museum staff, somewhat belatedly, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the war.

Madame Ledoiné sighed and snapped open an eighteenth-century silk fan the color of dusty roses. “You would have enjoyed the Empress; men did.”

Trist nodded in respectful agreement—Madame Ledoiné was an acknowledged expert in what men enjoyed—and thought that people of a certain age in Paris talked about Eugénie and the days before the Commune in the same nostalgic way Americans talked about the vanished world before the war. Decline and Fall was
probably the oldest human topic in the world. Madame Ledoiné touched the inside of his wrist lightly with two delicate fingers. Second oldest, he corrected himself.

“Here approacheth your awful M. Hahr.” She narrowed her eyes and frowned prettily over the top of her fan. “Come and see me,
mon cher
, five to seven, not Thursdays.” She moved away, leaving Trist to nod and shake hands briskly with Francis P. “Frank” Hahr, First Secretary of the American Legation, a Bostonian and a prude, and, Trist thought, one of President Benjamin Harrison’s more inexplicable diplomatic appointments. Hahr spoke very little French, didn’t drink, and like most prudes had no sense at all of irony. Harrison might as well have sent him to the moon as Paris.

“Found you,” Hahr said when the handshake was done. “Good. Was that Madame Ledoiné?”

“Soi-même.”

“Boucé’s mistress, right? I heard her described the other day as a
semi-castor
—a ‘half-beaver.’ Is that really the phrase?”

“Well, I wouldn’t use it to her face. She’s also called one of the
grandes horizontales
, but I guess I wouldn’t say that either.”

“Beaver,” Hahr said in a tone of wonderment. “What a country. I’m supposed to bring you over to the pictures, in case Reid needs an expert comment in French.”

Trist looked past Hahr to the exhibit hall, where the Honorable Whitelaw S. Reid, former editor of the New York
Tribune
, present United States Ambassador to France, was standing in the middle of a circle of diplomatic admirers. He wore an elegant black swallowtail coat, white tie and shirt, and a brilliantly colored ambassadorial sash of red, white, and blue across his chest. Just beyond his bald head hung one of the featured photographs of the exhibit, nicely illuminated by a rank of suspended Edison lights: U. S. Grant in scuffed boots and a rumpled old private’s uniform, with his three stars sewn rather haphazardly on one shoulder, leaning an arm against a shattered tree at City Point, Virginia, in the fall of 1864. The juxtaposition was almost enough to make Trist forget his resentment at being treated as an embassy errand boy, because of all the unforgiving mugwump Republican writers who had hated Grant and done their best to make his political life miserable; Whitelaw Reid was possibly the most virulent
and obsessive. Unless, of course, you counted his friend Henry Adams, who was also there, a full head shorter than Reid, holding a glass of champagne and blinking at the lights.

“We’ll sneak up on them,” Trist told Hahr, and started to cross the big room by way of the opposite wall.

“You remember the trouble he had with his speech,” Hahr said, trotting beside him, hand diplomatically covering his mouth.

Trist nodded and pushed on through the crowd to the place on the left-hand side where the exposition began its chronological march: photographs of Fort Sumter; a young, raven-haired Lincoln; rows and rows of bloated Union corpses on the grassy fields of the First Bull Run, when Trist was still a student in New Haven, wondering what his duty was. At the opening of the exhibit Whitelaw Reid had attempted to give a speech in French, but had gotten so tangled in mispronunciations and stammers that he’d finally switched in desperation to English. Just as well. The French rather liked Grant, or their memory of him when he had visited Paris in 1877, after his second presidential term. But Reid had gone out of his way to describe the Union victory as the triumph of Northern manufacturing and numbers over Southern agriculture. Grant’s role was merely incidental, he informed them. General Grant was nothing but a lucky blunderer.

They passed a map of Vicksburg, a picture of a Mississippi gunboat, more corpses; then a long stretch of photographs of the Army of the Potomac at Antietam and Gettysburg—all the illustrations for the battlefields book he should have written, Trist thought, long ago, but never had.

“He sees you,” Hahr said with evident relief. And indeed Reid had made a half-turn with his glass and raised one eyebrow to signal, evidently, that Trist should stand close by. “His French really isn’t very good, I’m afraid.”

Trist took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and remembered Mark Twain’s description of his own bad French. He had hardly ever been taken for a Frenchman, Twain declared, except by horses.

“Mr. Adams seems to know you.”

Trist nodded briefly and coolly to Henry Adams, whom he had already encountered two days ago, by accident, on the boulevard Haussmann.

“I
hear,”
Hahr said, happily scandalized, “his wife committed suicide.”

“I wouldn’t say that to
his
face either,” Trist said. The face in question was in fact rather sunburned—Adams had recently travelled all the way from Tahiti—but decades older, sharply creased and fixed in what seemed to be a perpetual melancholy. As far as Trist knew, since the day of Clover’s funeral six years ago Adams had never mentioned her name or referred to her in any way whatsoever. He had commissioned the sculptor Saint-Gaudens to make an enigmatic yet strangely moving statue for her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery. People whispered he ought to have sought medical help for Clover when she first grew depressed, ought never to have left her alone in a house full of dangerous chemicals. The secret of
Esther
was still a secret—Trist’s promise to Clover still a promise—but to his mind the book had always seemed as terrible and deadly to her in the end as cyanide.