Grant: A Novel (44 page)

He passed by the nearest group of watchers and stopped a few feet from the corner. Grant’s house was brightly lit on the lower floors, dark upstairs; curtains were drawn back. Through a second-story bay window he could see the library, a maid going past a shelf of shiny leather-bound books. On the third floor, peering down through a window, hands clasped behind his back, was a plump, unpleasant-looking man Trist identified after a moment as Adam Badeau, Grant’s occasional assistant, Henry Adams’s onetime friend. Then a handsome black barouche carriage came clop-ping and jingling through the slush up Sixty-sixth Street and wheeled to a skidding halt in front of Grant’s door. A liveried coachman clambered out on the double.

“This is Trist,” Cump Sherman said with his usual bounding energy as the three of them fumbled for seats five minutes later, four-thirty exactly, and the barouche swung smoothly back into traffic. “Dr. George Shrady. I forget your first name, Trist, don’t matter—a reporter.” He turned to Shrady and grinned a wicked yellow-toothed grin like Zeus or one of the Titans about to devour his own children.
“Normally,”
he declared, “I
hate
reporters.”

“As all the world knows,” murmured Shrady. He was a small, thin-shouldered man, clean-shaven except for a huge protruding moustache that resembled, Trist thought, the cowcatcher on a locomotive.

“But I like Trist, Trist writes straight.”

Shrady gripped the side of the swaying carriage and looked at Trist’s empty sleeve and nodded, and the word “veteran,” Trist thought, might as well have formed in gold letters on his brow. They hurtled on down Fifth Avenue, in and out of traffic snarls, pockets of light, flurries of snow, while Sherman puffed fiercely at his cigar and kept up a running commentary on the streets, the theaters they passed, newspaper reporters, women with flat chests, anything and everything that occurred to his quick, cruel, entirely uninhibited brain.

At Gramercy Park the barouche came to a long, sliding halt, spraying two great white fans of snow onto the sidewalk. The liveried footman threw down portable steps, a doorman came rushing out to the General’s carriage from the canopied entrance to
the Player’s Club, and in a matter of moments the three of them were seated in heavy comfortable chairs next to a fireplace in a secluded corner.

Sherman ordered—commanded—whiskeys and ice and stretched out his long legs to the fire.

“Now the doctor,” he said to Trist, but aimed his cigar like a burning pike at Shrady, “agrees—at my reasonable, rational urging—to give you the medical diagnosis exactly, everything he knows, and you have his permission to go out tomorrow and print it in the
Post
or the
Times
or wherever the hell you like, just as long as you correct those goddam bloodsuckers at the
World
.”

Shrady stroked his cowcatcher moustache and smiled faintly at Trist. “They weren’t so far wrong,” he murmured.

“Bloodsuckers.” Sherman snapped his teeth as if he would bite the cigar in half. “Sam Grant never stole a cent in his life.”

“The actual diagnosis is only tentative.” Shrady smoothed a sheet of notes across his lap. “The ulcers in the throat are becoming very active and inflamed. General Grant is experiencing what most of us would call unbearable constant pain.”

Sherman crossed his legs and stared bleakly into the fire.

“Dr. Douglas swabs his throat daily with anodyne mixtures. Three mornings ago we had a dentist in to extract two teeth, and that’s been some help. As you might know, I’m a specialist in epithelial carcinomas. I’ve given a tissue sample from the throat to an expert microscopist—”

“Name?” Trist was writing as quickly as he could in his pocket notebook, but it was awkward, in the deep chairs, with one hand. Sherman reached over and held the notebook steady on Trist’s knee.

“Dr. George B. Elliott. You’ll find him in the Medical Directory.”

“And what did he say?”

“He plans to communicate his results this month.”

“And you asked him to look at what?”

“The capillary blood channels, also the anterior border of the tonsillar cavity, which may already be perforated.”

There was much more, similarly technical and unusable in a general newspaper story, but under Sherman’s prodding Shrady outlined the basic facts. The doctor suspected cancer of the throat—they wouldn’t be certain until the microscopist reported—if
Grant had sought out proper medical attention in the summer, things might be better now, but this was probably wishful thinking. If it was cancer, it was fatal, and the General was going to undergo—he was already suffering it—indescribable agony. The sheer pain was a nightmare for him. Almost worse was the unremitting feeling of choking and gagging, which made it nearly impossible for him to eat, drink, or sleep. They had considered a surgical operation to remove what they could of the ulcers and bring him some comfort, but the risk was great and the General insisted on having his faculties clear.

“Writing his memoirs.” Sherman sat back and lit a new cigar off the old one. Trist nodded. Everybody remotely connected with the
Century
had heard the story of Grant’s book and the pirate publisher Mark Twain. “Wants to save his family,” Sherman grumbled. “He won’t take money from anybody, after all that
stuff
when he was President, turned me down when I offered him half my pension. Childs down in Philadelphia wanted to start a trust fund—no. What you boys don’t appreciate”—in the smoky darkness of the club disembodied hands took away their glasses, deposited fresh ones—“is how goddam
hard
it is, in his
head
, for Sam Grant to write about the
past
. I hate reporters,
he
hates retracing his steps, oldest superstition he has, thinks it’s like retreating. Nearly got him shot once at Vicksburg, he wouldn’t ride back to his tent the way he’d come. Writing his memoirs—hell!”

“General Grant is a sensitive man,” Shrady said.

Sherman snorted. Sherman leaned forward and drove a bony finger so hard into Shrady’s shoulder that the little doctor jumped in his chair. “
Sensitive
. Back at Shiloh in ’62, after the first day and we had taken such a beating you don’t ever want to think about it, we were down about as far as an army can go,
I
wanted to retreat. So did every other officer on the staff. I went out looking for him, and when I found him, old sensitive Grant, he was standing under a tree in the rain, smoking a cigar, and I padded right up through the mud and got ready to tell him we had to turn tail or else lose the whole goddam army, that was what his staff thought. Then something made me stop, I didn’t say a word—and you don’t know how hard
that
is for
me
—and I just stood there under the tree, unnaturally quiet, smoking my cigar too. Finally I said, ‘Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?’

“ ‘Yes,’ he said. He pulled at his cigar for a while and all I could
see in the darkness was the little red glow at the tip. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Lick ’em tomorrow, though.’ ”

Shrady smiled and shook his head. “You weren’t at Shiloh?” he asked Trist.

“Cold Harbor.”

“Our troops at Shiloh,” Sherman said, “were so raw we had to walk around in the camp and show them how to load and aim. ‘It’s just like shooting squirrels,’ Grant told them, ‘only these squirrels have guns.’ ”

Shrady smiled again. “The General’s a humorous man, if you stop and listen.”

“Buckner came to see him yesterday,” Sherman told Trist. “Man he defeated at Donelson. Made a special secret trip up from Kentucky. All the Confederates love Grant, you know. He could have humiliated them at Appomattox, he could have crushed them and slaughtered them like cattle, made old Bobby Lee strip down to ashes and sackcloth, and you know, as soon as it was won, he just said, ‘Let there be peace,’ and he stopped the killing.” Sherman’s cigar blazed like a flare. “I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

“How long?” Trist asked Shrady.

“Anybody else,” answered the little doctor, “would be dead in a matter of weeks. I think he keeps himself going by sheer willpower, to write his book.”

The Question of Clover seemed a long way off. Elizabeth Cameron seemed a long way off, except that Cump Sherman had his niece’s trick of lifting his chin when he spoke, a sensual flash of the eye that made Trist finish his whiskey in a gulp and hold out his glass for another.

“I did something the other night,” said Shrady. He too had been drinking steadily. Only Sherman seemed unaffected, burning alcohol like air. Shrady leaned forward confidentially. “General Grant can’t sleep because of the choking sensation in his throat, he wakes up gasping, terrified he’s going to smother. When it got too bad, I went in his bedroom and rearranged his pillow and made him lie on his side, with his hand tucked under the bolster. And I stroked his head and told him to close his eyes and go to sleep the way he did when he was a baby.”

Sherman groaned and turned away.

“The Butcher of Cold Harbor,” Shrady said to Trist. Stilson
Hutchins would pay an enormous bonus for something like that, Trist thought, any paper in the country would, the old warrior reduced to babyhood, Grant’s Last Battle. He thought of Mark Twain’s Chicago speech: Grant in his cradle, clutching his toe. He looked at Sherman, still staring miserably into the fire. Somebody else could write it. He closed his notebook and slowly put it away.

B
Y WEDNESDAY EVENING, TWO DAYS LATER, THE UNCERTAIN
snow that had fallen on New York had drifted lazily north across New England, then blown eastward into the dreary Atlantic. At Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, on the rugged coast above Boston, the storm had barely touched down. The ground outside their house, Clover Adams thought, looked like a brown cake, badly frosted.

She repeated the description to her father, who was lounging sleepily in his favorite chair by the fireplace. He had a plaid blanket drawn up to his chin, and on his head the battered black derby hat he now insisted on wearing indoors and out, so that really all she could see was his face, from chin to eyebrows. At her little joke his jaw dropped and his mouth went slack in an invalid’s half-smile, but his eyes remained closed. For all she knew he hadn’t heard a single word, only the sound of her voice.

The sea coals in the fireplace crackled. Someone out in the kitchen shifted a load of china, and she frowned at the clatter. Otherwise, father and daughter sat together quietly side by side, as they had all day, as they had for the last three days, and doubtless would again tomorrow until it was time to catch her train and return to Henry and Lafayette Square.

Dr. Hooper began to snore. Clover studied his skin color, parchment pale, very bad even for winter. His big crow’s beak of a nose, one of the few features they had in common, stood out more prominently than ever. Ugly blue veins mottled his cheeks. Her father was seventy-five years old and he had been the true anchor of her life since her mother had died when Clover was only five and he had retired from the practice of medicine to care for her, and now she was realist enough to know that he was failing; slowly, inexorably failing. Henry criticized her for not thinking logically through her figures of speech. Well, then. The true anchor was slipping, the good ship Clover was coming adrift.

She gripped the back of her neck with one hand and looked at the clock on the mantel and let her gaze travel restlessly over to the framed souvenir photograph beside it, the Gettysburg battlefield, Little Round Top. Her father had bought the photograph on a visit some years back, when a memorial to the doctors who served there was dedicated, and it was actually one of the earliest things that had sparked her interest in photography. She noted automatically the contrasts of light and shadow in the composition and the thin streaks of discoloration where the print had faded. She shuddered. She wondered, far from the first time, how her gentle, self-effacing, self-sacrificing father had stood it, how he had managed to keep his sanity in the Dantesque horrors of the army field hospital where he had worked, he once told her, thirty-six hours straight, performing amputations, removing bullets, nursing the dead.

The thought of Gettysburg reminded her of poor Nicholas Trist, and she stood up abruptly and paced a tight little circle on the carpet. Nicholas Trist, whose torn and wounded arm somebody like her father had once clasped hard and held down on a table with bloody surgeon’s hands and started to cut—steel knife, white bone—and then to saw and then to
hack;
her mind coiled to shriek and she
made
it stop. The thought of Gettysburg also reminded her of the scene in that horrible novel
Esther
where the old father dies, and what was more horrible and more prophetic still, talks about Gettysburg in his last moments. She swept the photograph from the mantel with a crashing noise that woke her father, and an instant later she was pulling the bell cord over and over and over again to summon the nurse and servants.

Upstairs in her own room on the second floor, she took
her green velvet dress with the gold brocade and the label “M. Worth—Paris” and wrapped it herself in tissue paper. On the wall above her chest of drawers hung a small oil painting of her maternal grandfather Sturgis, who had been a merchant sea captain and travelled all over the world, three times to China. He had admired Andy Jackson when nobody else in New England did, he had lived a hard life. He had also been famous for the time a political opponent in the Massachusetts legislature mocked his lack of education by speaking on the floor in Latin, and Captain Sturgis had calmly stood up and replied in Algonquin.