Grant: A Novel (13 page)

“Like you.” Calista Halsey sat down at the adjoining desk and uncovered a black-and-gold “Royal” typewriting machine the size of a suitcase.

West grinned up at Trist. “Tomorrow morning, if the weather clears, they’re going to flush the whole building out with a fire hose. Arachnoid Armageddon. Should be a carpet of them ankle-deep in the street.”

“Ugh.” Calista squared a sheet of paper in the machine and poised her fingers over the keyboard.

Both men watched with interest, West because he was the senior political reporter on the Washington
Post
and assistant editor, Trist partly because he was thinking of learning to type himself, one arm or not, but mostly because Calista Halsey looked like an older, softer version, but far less dazzling, of Elizabeth Cameron.

Outside the window, far from clearing, the weather was growing worse. A freakish late-March snowstorm was sweeping a curtain of white up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. A shadowy herdic appeared to be stalled in mud. On the sidewalk, clutching his hat, a lone passerby was pressed close to the glass, evidently reading the late edition of the paper tacked to a set of plywood boards.

Trist sat down, away from the window. Inside, it was pleasantly warm and musty. A row of high wooden filing cabinets behind Calista’s shoulders served as office partition and buffer against drafts. On the other side of the cabinets hung the green-shaded lamps of the composing room, where six or seven middle-aged typesetters hunched over their trays like monks in derby hats and collars. From the rear of the building, whenever somebody opened the doors to the printing annex, came the pungent smells of ink, machine oil, and newsprint.

The Washington
Post
was situated in the exact and shabby center of Newspaper Row at 339 Pennsylvania Avenue, the newest, jauntiest, most flamboyant paper in town. It had been founded in 1877, three years earlier, by a St. Louis man named Stilson K. Hutchins, who had skipped the war—nobody quite knew how—and who thought the nation’s capital desperately needed a new Democratic party newspaper to rival the Republican
Star
. Hutchins’s first issue had been distributed free to every congressman’s desk and every government office in the city, and still was.
He claimed a circulation of fourteen thousand and actually sold, Trist thought, on a very good day about half that number.

A brass bell rang and Calista Halsey did something to the machine and looked up from her typing. “Senator Conkling’s Apollo curl looked exceptionally hyacinthine today, young men. On his vast senatorial brow. If you had a yellow suit and red shoes, Henry, and hair of course, you might catch people’s eyes too.”

“Conkling once wore a yellow silk suit to the Senate,” West told Trist. “Calista nearly fainted. Said he looked like Lord Byron.”

“The last politician to wear a yellow suit in Washington was Martin Van Buren.” Calista tapped two more keys, then snapped out her sheet of paper and rolled in a new one. “Although President Buchanan of the spiders used to wear a yellow frock coat, I’ve heard, and green trousers. He had a matching outfit made for his special friend.”

“Male friend,” West said with a wink at Trist. Henry West was only twenty-eight years old, bald as an egg, but he had an encyclopedic and uncensored knowledge of Washington life. In the three weeks Trist had been coming to use the
Post
’s telegraph he had never yet heard the editor trumped for scandalous information.

“Well, nobody ever wrote about that.” Calista’s fingers began to fly again. “Nobody cared. My father worked on the old Niles
Weekly Register
back then. He said everybody just shrugged. On the other hand, a
woman
’s always fair game.”

“ ‘Mrs. Kate Chase Sprague’ ”—West picked up her first typed page and read aloud—“ ‘denied today that there was anything improper in her friendship with Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, who is, according to Mrs. Sprague, merely one of her husband’s colleagues. Mrs. Sprague further denied that she had gone alone into Senator Conkling’s office for the purpose of making love.’ ”

The typewriter carriage hit the brass bell again and Calista flipped it back with one hand. “I’m a traitor to my sex,” she said cheerfully.

I
T WAS TOO WARM FOR THE SNOW TO STICK LONG TO THE
ground, too cold to turn entirely to rain. Three hours later Trist stopped at the corner of Pennsylvania and Tenth and waited
for a lumber wagon to sway and splash past him. He nodded to a streetwalker under a gas lamp, who showed him a toothless smile and a flash of high-topped shoe and ankle. Fifty feet farther up the slippery sidewalk he gave a coin to a beggar with a “Hungry” placard around his neck, then stamped the slush off his boots and entered Gillian’s Tavern.

“ ‘Disillusioned,’ ” said Henry West, shoving a pitcher of beer along the table but not looking up. “Seven letters.”

“Newspaperman.” Trist sat down in the booth beside him and found an empty glass.

“You’re late.” West printed “cynical” in the white squares of his word puzzle. “We put it to press half an hour ago, every salacious, libelous, beautifully chosen word.”

“I was collecting interplanetary mail at Willard’s. Is it true Mark Twain wrote
The Gilded Age
in here?”

West raised his head with an expression of mild surprise. “Mark Twain writes everything with a typewriter now, didn’t you know? Wave of the future.”

“I was told he wrote it in two months one summer, at a table on the sidewalk right outside. Made fifty thousand dollars.”

“They rejected another article, right?
L’Illustrate
?”

“
L’Illustration
.” Trist poured himself beer. On the street outside two derby hats and a bonnet passed by, topped like cakes with snow. Inside, the stink of cigar smoke and spittoons made his eyes hurt. In Paris there would have been a zinc counter, gay colors, tables full of ladies; no spittoons.
L’Illustration
had in fact rejected three of the last four articles Trist had sent them, as West well knew—“too
American
,” Trist’s Paris editor had cabled with a sneer, as if they could be anything else—and now his arrangement with them seemed suddenly to hang by a thread. “Thirty-three hundred also beautifully chosen words, ‘General Hancock the Superb, Grant’s Democratic Rival.’ ”

“You showed me that,” West said. “It was too damned good for Frenchmen—I’ll get Hutchins to buy it, he wants to start a Sunday edition. You’re too damned good, period. I went to the Library of Congress and looked at your book of stories.”

It was Trist’s turn to blink in surprise.

“And you wrote six months for the Associated Press, right? Before
Illustrate
?”

“In Paris, part-time.”

“Hutchins hates the AP because they’re so expensive—he steals all his foreign news from the
Star
.” West waved for another pitcher of beer. “I have a proposition for you.”

At one end of the bar a big waiter in shirtsleeves and apron was setting out platters of cheese. Somebody invisible began slowly to pick out notes on the house piano, one by one. “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”

“Hutchins has another project,” West continued. “Hutchins has five or six thousand projects—he wants to publish a handbook for the election.
The Washington Post Political Manual, Election of 1880
. And he wants his name on the cover but he don’t want to write it.”

“A manual, like a farmer’s almanac?”

“Give the man a beer.” West took the pitcher from the waiter and refilled Trist’s glass. “He wants a farmer’s almanac for voters—graphs, statistics, party platforms, candidate statements. A brief history of presidential elections. Hutchins fancies himself a Jeffersonian. He thinks the true democratic voter is one of Nature’s noble yeomen, plows in his field, reads a little Homer in Greek at dinner, and studies the facts and casts his vote rationally and theoretically. Hutchins wants to be the man who sells him the facts. It’s actually not a bad idea—use the
Post
’s presses, same distribution, fifty cents a copy, corner the market, amazing nobody ever thought of it before. He wants me to find him a writer.”

“I’ll be back in Paris before the election.”

“Forty dollars a week, part-time job. Finish in August.”

“And I just find some Homeric-Jeffersonian statistics in the library and write them up?”

“Immigration, tariff, whatever the noble voter might want to know. Hutchins already has a table of contents. Pure, objective, God-fearing facts is all he needs. And if they happen to dribble mud on our leaders Grant and Conkling, so much the better.”

Trist started to shake his head.

“It is,” West reminded him, grinning, “a Democratic paper.”

Which was so wildly and completely true that Trist couldn’t help laughing. He might have the odd Jeffersonian idea, but in a town of militant partisans, Stilson Hutchins stood all alone. By his personal order the
Post
invariably referred to Republican President Hayes as “His Fraudulency” or “the bogus President”—Hutchins shared the widespread conviction that Hayes had stolen the election
of 1876 from Samuel Tilden—and only two days ago he had run a headline over some presidential remarks: T
WADDLE
O
F
T
HE
F
RAUD
.

“Bash Grant nicely, pass right on over to the regular staff in the fall. Stranger things have happened.”

“I won’t be here in the fall.”

“I know, you got
der wanderlust
, Nick, you think you’re a French bohemian. I think you’re a
patriot manqué
.”

Trist tasted his beer and made a face.
Patriot manqué
. Patriot unaware.

“Another bug in your ear—Grant comes to town in two weeks,” West said.

“Visiting General Beale.”

“
Your friend
General Beale, with whom you have whiskey and tea, my dear, in the drawing room every Sunday.” West ignored Trist’s murmur of protest and propped himself on his elbows, red-faced and genial, bald skull gleaming in the pale blue light of the bar. “If you made like a fly on the wall, wrote up some dirt—don’t shake your head—how a man who lived so long in France has scruples and morals I don’t know. Wrote up something fine and factual on the side: ‘Love Nest in Lafayette Square’—‘Poobahs and Posture Girls.’ Hutchins says 1880 is going to usher in the political millennium.”

“Meaning Tilden this time.”

“Or Sam Randall or Hancock the Superb—Tilden’s too old and sick to make a run, I think. But in my opinion Grant don’t have the thing wrapped up, not even the nomination. Whatever it looked like in Europe.” West finished his beer, peered at his watch, and stood, all in one fluent American motion. “Man about a dog,” he explained, swaying.

Outside, in the muddy alley behind the tavern, they stood companionably side by side and made use of the long wooden trough that the tavern had installed for its customers. Then they walked and stumbled in the dark to the Tenth Street exit, where a stray sow from one of the alley’s numerous shacks had curled up in the mud, partially blocking their way. It was one of the striking features of postwar Washington that while there were houses and districts here and there of conspicuous wealth and beauty, a good part of the city’s population, especially its black population,
actually lived in these downtown alleys, in old canvas tents and lean-tos and scrapyard shelters that reminded Trist of the wretchedest kind of army bivouac. On the other side of the street, through a space between roofs, the white dome of the Capitol could be seen in the distance, incongruous, rising into a clearing sky.

West wrinkled his nose at the sow. “All right for money, Nick? Hutchins won’t pay for a week.”

“Fine.”

“Good writer ought not to starve. Come by tomorrow, we’ll draw up a contract, right after the mystic communion of editors.” From the light of Gillian’s front window he waved again, then disappeared.

Trist stood and watched the empty street a moment longer. In the nearest window, a Going-Out-of-Business dry-goods store, his darkened reflection took off its hat, wiped its brow with relief like a stage comedian; grinned faintly. “Grant’s Luck,” they had called it in the war—just keep on moving, never stop, see what happens, forty dollars a week. He pulled up his collar.
If
West could manage it. “Don’t count your spiders before they hatch,” he told the face in the window, which nodded back, soberly.

Two blocks farther north bigger, brighter globe-shaped streetlamps cast their light on pedestrians, polished carriages, well-dressed couples going in and out of restaurants. He passed Harvey’s Seafood Establishment, with a glimpse between red velvet curtains of a black-and-white tessellated floor. On the next block was the gaslit marquee for Ford’s New Opera House, formerly Ford’s Theatre, where the latest revival of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, complete with live bloodhounds, would just about at that moment—Trist squinted at the theater clock—have entered its last irresistible, melodramatic act. He had been told that Harriet Beecher Stowe still received $20,000 a year from royalties, but now claimed that God, not she, had actually written the book; either way, a Good Writer, not starving. At the end of the block, on the opposite side of the street, he passed the house marked by a plaque where Lincoln had been carried from the theater to die—his mind flickered back to Clover Adams and 1865, and himself far up the same street, plastered and bandaged like a one-armed ghost—and then he crossed a set of unsteady wooden planks serving
as a makeshift bridge over a ditch full of sewage and snow and reached the open, windy spaces of New York Avenue.

In New York City itself there was a new apartment building located so far from everything else, on Seventy-second Street, that it was called “The Dakota.” He had seen it ten days ago, on a trip with Don Cameron. Washington, in fact, had more empty spaces than New York. Washington, in fact, sometimes seemed like a whole city of empty spaces, punctuated now and then by a cluster of freestanding buildings that might have been dropped at random, straight out of the sky. He turned right, trudged alongside a huge vacant lot, a bleak rectangle of blackness surrounded by shadows and trees. Overhead, a few last flakes of snow drifted, shivering; stiff white moths. Somebody struck a match far back in the darkness and he heard menacing guttural voices.