Grant: A Novel (19 page)

“I have only a girl’s perspective,” she said as he caught up. They stopped at a corner and watched Roman candles pulse and flutter up over rooftops, green and red puffs, blocks away; neither of them mentioned Don Cameron somewhere in the vast bulk of brick and masonry behind them. “When I was not quite twelve my uncle invited me on a four-month trip to the Yellowstone River in Montana—he was inspecting army camps and we rode horseback and slept in tents all the way.”

“Rugged country.” Trist took her elbow and steered her out of the path of whooping Republican delegates marching six abreast and shouting “Blaine of Maine” slogans. Away from the lakefront, Chicago was a city of endless wooden tenements, soot, overloaded wagons, its streets were forever littered with boxes and crates, it had a raw, brutal un-Washingtonian feel to it, of commerce and hard weather and life perpetually in motion. But tonight in the heat and high spirits of the convention, dense with promenaders, dazzling with lights, it seemed as gay and pleasure-bound as Venice. The Blaine delegates thrust them aside, into an arched doorway, where they were pressed so close together for a moment that their shoulders and arms touched and recoiled with an electric shock.

They pushed back into the street.

Near the entrance to the Palmer House they slowed to a breathless stop in the darkness, fifty yards or so from the torchlit portico of the hotel. Elizabeth Cameron leaned against a solitary sycamore tree, planted against all odds in a square of the sidewalk, and fanned herself with one hand.

“Not quite the Montana wilderness,” Trist said, nodding at the tree.

Her hair was in loose curls around her neck; in the flickering light of the torches her cheeks were flushed. Don Cameron is an ass, Trist thought. Because of the clatter of horses and carriages in front of the Palmer House he had to lean in and ask her to repeat what she had said.

“Several years ago”—another pause while a wagon rumbled by—“several years ago I went back, after … a disappointment.”

“To Montana?”

“My married sister Mary and I.” She turned, straightened her dress; wrinkled her nose at the pungent aromas of horse sweat, smoke, burning kerosene somewhere. Chicago after all, not Venice. “My brother-in-law Colonel Miles was leading troops against the Indians, on the Tongue River, and we stayed in his headquarters, which was actually nothing but a log cabin with a flat tin roof in the middle of the woods. Most glamorous, Mr. Trist—I loved every minute. We went about with an armed escort, we saw Indian braves in full war regalia, and once we came up just at the end of a skirmish the troopers had fought with some of Sitting Bull’s stragglers. We went to Sioux powwows, we camped
with the Crow Indians—Colonel Miles said we’d been where no white woman had ever gone before.”

“You were very adventurous,” Trist said, and meant it.

“Well, it was wonderful, the most exciting time of my life. Colonel Miles invites me to come back, but of course, now—” She shrugged.

There were two Elizabeth Camerons, Trist thought. One was a cool, formal, married woman, older and stiffer than her twenty-four years. But that woman was back in Washington, in the overfastidious world of Henry Adams. This Elizabeth had a wide, sensuous tilt to her mouth, her skin was flushed and prickly, as if with heat, her voice so low that it was scarcely more than a murmur.

“But that wasn’t at all what you saw,” she said, “I suppose, at the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, those places you couldn’t hear them sing about. We were just girls, my sister and I, tourists. What you saw was what my uncle saw.”

Trist was silent.

“There was one curious episode,” she said, so close now that her dress brushed against his arm, he could smell her scent again. “On that second trip to Montana I wasn’t yet married—Mary and I travelled on a steamer up the Missouri from Sioux City, and the name of the boat oddly enough was the
Senator Don Cameron
.”

“An omen,” Trist said.

“Do you think so?”

He held his hand up to her face and slowly bent forward and kissed her. She sighed deep in her throat and pressed against him, and for a long moment the city moved in circles around them, rattling, clattering, a distant background of wobbling lights and dizzy motion. He kissed her lips, neck, his hand went to her breast. She moaned and cupped it with her own, and he tasted salt, honey. She trembled and moved against him harder.

“Come back to my room.”

“No!”
She pulled back, then came forward again and kissed him again with her whole mouth and body and whispered, “My aunt will be waiting,” and then before he could take a step she was hurrying up the sidewalk, into the light, head down. A liveried doorman from the Palmer House moved toward her, raising his hat.

W
HY, THE
DON CAMERON
SANK,” CADWALLADER SAID. “THAT
was four years ago at least—hit a snag in the river above Sioux City, went down like a box of rocks. Another boat came by and rescued everybody—the
William T. Sherman
as a matter of fact—but the
Don
was gone. Two of the Sherman girls were on it, Lizzie and Mary, I think, made all the papers, and of course Lizzie
married
him next year, didn’t learn a thing. What the hell makes you ask about that?”

“Just reading.” Trist looked down and shuffled his notes one-handed like a card shark. “Old clippings.”

“Well, the real Don Cameron’s about to sink too, take my word.” Cadwallader picked up his pencil and nodded in the direction of Cameron at the other end of the room. Trist picked up his own pencil. In the main auditorium of Exposition Hall, reporters were scheduled tomorrow to have special reserved tables and chairs just under the speaker’s platform, in the center of the hall. But here, in what was essentially only a peripheral meeting room, the press was shoved together at the rear, backs to the wall, a good ninety feet from the long mahogany conference table where Don Cameron and the rest of the Republican National Committee officers were in the process of taking their seats.

“Where’s Henry West?” Cadwallader asked out of the corner of his mouth.

“Sick. Mumps.”

“So they sent you instead, man with the inside track to Cameron, very nice. Stilson Hutchins is an idiot, but he’s no fool.”

“Chandler’s here,” Trist said.

“Fiat nox,”
Cadwallader said; snorted; wrote “Let there be bullshit” on his pad.

Trist shifted in his chair and leaned forward. In the last few days he had devoted considerable energy to getting the players straight, the stakes right. Every national newspaper and magazine had already conceded the presidential nomination to Grant, and the National Committee had actually ordered “Grant for President” posters and badges, but the anti-third-term forces were putting up a stubborn struggle. Former Senator William E. Chandler was chief spokesman for perennial candidate James G. Blaine of Maine, the still-indignant villain of
Democracy
, and Chandler was attending an otherwise routine preliminary committee meeting for the sole purpose—everybody in Chicago knew it—of defeating Don Cameron in a crucial vote. The issue was the so-called “unit voting rule” of the convention, according to which states voted by blocs instead of by individual delegates, and Grant’s whole strategy depended on it: With the unit rule gone, dissenting delegates like the nineteen from Pennsylvania might be recognized on the floor and cast their votes for somebody other than Grant. And from all indications, the heavy-handed Cameron was about to lose the battle to keep it.

Whatever Trist had learned so far, however, was inconsequential compared to Cadwallader’s intimate knowledge of names and personalities. While the committee went about its preliminary business—a steady, remorseless series of victories for Chandler—Cadwallader kept up a muttered running commentary that had most of the reporters chuckling into their notebooks. Moments before the final vote of the day, which would not only eliminate the unit rule but also depose Don Cameron from the committee itself, Cadwallader turned around ostentatiously.

“There’s ‘Lord Roscoe,’ ” he said, loud enough to stop conversation all over the room. “Come to watch his horse get beat.”

At the rear, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, Grant’s other campaign manager, always dramatic, always arrogant, had
suddenly appeared in the doorway like Banquo’s ghost. He made no move to speak or step inside. Instead he folded his arms across his massive chest and stared scornfully down the aisle. Cameron grimaced and shook his head. William Chandler stared back at Conkling defiantly, then rapped his gavel for the vote. Conkling vanished again into the corridor. Around the long committee table hands slowly began to rise.

“Chandler wins by nine,” Cadwallader said a moment before the total was announced. “Grant’s in trouble. Let’s go see Senator Don.”

By the time they reached the corridor outside the meeting room Cameron was pushing his way furiously through a knot of hangers-on and sympathizers, marching as fast as he could toward the Pennsylvania office where Trist had seen him last night. When he spotted Trist he walked quickly up.

“Mr. Trist,” he said. He paused, jammed his fists in his coat pockets, and for a split second Trist thought that last night was about to explode in his face, that somehow Elizabeth—Guilt made him stand up straight and square his shoulders. Cameron looked bigger, redder-faced than ever.

“Mr. Trist, you published an interview with me a while ago in which I said I was for Grant and had no second choice, and that I knew he would be nominated by acclamation on the first ballot.”

“I remember.”

“Just print that same interview over and over again and keep on printing it till everybody knows that Grant’s nomination and election, no matter what’s happened today, are as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise.”

Cadwallader had come up with a broken-off bit of toothpick, which he now stuck in the corner of his mouth like a rustic bit of straw. “What about Washburne, Senator? The way I figure, if Washburne don’t drop out and give his votes to Grant, then you don’t have any real chance at all.”

“Tell your friend,” Cameron said to Trist, “that he’s a goddam moron.” And turned on his heel.

When Trist looked back, Cadwallader was chuckling with undisguised satisfaction. He put his arm through Trist’s. “Buy a moron a drink,” he said.

O
NE OF THE GREAT CURIOSITIES OF THE CONVENTION TO
Trist—no one in Europe, he thought, could have believed it—was the large number of black delegates in attendance. Most were from the South. Some were members of Congress. One, the former slave Frederick Douglass of Washington, was scheduled to address the convention. And another, Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, was being seriously proposed in certain quarters as a vice-presidential candidate.

“And every man jack,” Cadwallader said as they sat down at their restaurant table three drinks and two hours later, “has a lily-white ‘minder,’ keep ’em out of trouble, watch their votes, you can count on it.”

“I interviewed Bruce.” Trist picked up a printed leather-bound menu and winced at the prices. The Great Northwestern Steakhouse was Cadwallader’s choice, but not, he had made plain, his treat.

“And I saw that story.” Cadwallader glanced indifferently at the menu, turned in his chair to survey the room. “You were too damn gullible. Blanche Bruce is a sop to New England. Most self-righteous place on earth, New England. Slavery’s gone, but up in Massachusetts they still vote the abolition ticket out of sheer lunatic fanaticism. There comes John Sherman.”

Trist wrote “chicken and rice” on his order slip, the cheapest thing on the list, and the easiest to eat with one hand, then looked up to follow Cadwallader’s gaze. The Great Northwestern was the biggest restaurant in Chicago, and by far the most popular with the convention. Characteristically, Cadwallader had chosen a table next to the door with a view of everybody in the room, coming and going. Secretary of Treasury John Sherman was indeed standing at the double-curtained entrance, shoulders and hair still wet from the rain, waiting stiffly in front of the maitre d’. When he bent forward to listen to something, Trist saw that he was accompanied by his wife, and then, behind her, dressed in a stunning pale blue evening gown with jeweled tiara, his niece.