Grant: A Novel (45 page)

The memory made her smile, and she decided she would tell the story to her father in the morning. She would also tell him the latest remark that was sweeping New York and Washington, where the antitobacco crusaders liked to stop men on the street and tell them how much they spent if they smoked just ten cigars a week, and then they would hold up a dollar bill and shout, “Put
that
in your pipe and smoke it!”

Her mood began to sink again. She caught herself in the mirror rubbing her right hand back and forth across her forehead, an obsessive gesture her older sister Nella had warned her against.

She stopped and lowered her hand to her side and simply stood in the center of the room. In the silence she could hear the wind and the sea in the distance. “Clover is as good as
pie,”
her grandfather Sturgis used to say. Her brain skipped to another association, sea captain, sea;
thalassa, thalassa
, the sea, the “wine-dark sea” in Greek that her grandfather had sailed across. She had been trying to learn Homeric Greek for years. On the table next to her bed this very moment was the little two-volume edition of the
Iliad
in Greek that she carried everywhere. Henry liked to laugh and say that she would never master it, that women were not rational and steady enough to learn Greek; not, she thought with a momentary flare of temper, that
he
could read it anymore himself, despite his lofty Harvard education. She had been denied Harvard altogether, of course, because she was a girl, but Nella’s husband taught classics there and he was always willing to help.

She thought of Henry and Greek and the sea. His brother Charles Francis had told Henry not to marry her, she knew, because, as Charles said in his inimitable sarcastic way, “all the Hoopers are crazy as coots.” On the chest of drawers was a little clay model of the boat she and Henry had taken up the Nile on
their honeymoon. There, in the middle of all those sun-bleached and crumbling pagan temples she had experienced what she knew was a nervous collapse, though nobody ever said so. It was only her reaction … What was Henry’s phrase? Her virginal reaction to “the brutalities of marriage.”

For some reason she had left her letter box next to the little ship model. On top of the box was the letter she had received that very day from Henry, the first letter he had written her since they were married, because until now they had never in fact spent more than a night apart.

She picked it up and read the first few lines again.

She smiled to herself and opened the box to put it away.

Inside the box, a slippery tooled-leather case with brass lock and key that she had bought on that same honeymoon, she saw all the other letters and scraps of paper she had saved, like a good New Englander, since girlhood. There was a letter she had jointly written with her grandfather Sturgis, with her four-year-old scrawl at the bottom of the sheet, C
LOVER
. There was another letter from about the same time:
DEAR FATHER I LOVE YOU
——
CLOVER
. Not on impulse, but observing her distant fingers as if they belonged to someone else, she watched herself rifle suddenly back toward the center of the box and pull out a handwritten document that she hadn’t seen in years. It was addressed to her cousin Annie Hooper, and it was written in the form of a parody of a will, complete with detailed instructions for her funeral. Clover was thirteen when she wrote it. The first half consisted of her bequests—a ring and a tea caddy to Annie—the second half was an elaborate account of how she had died.

On the night of the sixth of January 1857, Clover Hooper passed the evening at Number 56, Beacon St. Her house was at 107, the same street. It was a bitter cold night and the wind howled most fearfully. As the time drew near for her departure, she felt a presentiment of death stealing up on her, and was loth to depart, but at last summoning
up all her courage, she set forth, attended only by one of the masculine tribe. She had passed in safety the three first crossings below Charles Street when arriving at the last crossing a sudden gust of wind caught her nose—that being the most conspicuous feature of her body—and whirling her through the air dashed her upon the frozen waters of Back Bay. The servant was seized by a contrary wind and drowned in the waters of the River Charles. A milkman riding in from the country on Wednesday morning discovered her body laying upon the ice. On looking at the face, he discovered that it was minus a nose and whilst returning in perplexity to the land he perceived a nose minus a head.… A coroner’s inquest will be held upon the body this afternoon at 3 o’clock precisely. Price of tickets 25 cts children half price viz 12 cts … A customary speech of hers was it’s a weary world we live in, and her last speech just before reaching the 4th crossing was changed to it’s a windy world we live in.

It had all been a girl’s silly secret, of course, between her and her giggling cousin Annie, one of the two actual secrets Clover could remember ever having in her life. She was not a secretive person. Henry was. When Henry had written
Democracy
he only told four people in the world—herself, of course, John Hay, Clarence King, Henry Holt the publisher—and made them all swear to keep it a secret. Secrets made you feel superior, she thought now. Secrets let you make jokes of other people.

She started to fold the sheet of paper, but paused to look at her funny bold handwriting at the top, so unlike her present scrawl. “Will” was a curious word, it could be either noun or verb. Like Henry’s irony, it had at least two meanings. A wife knows a husband’s voice, she thought, anywhere. Clover replaced the sheet of paper in the box and closed it. Slowly, steadily, while the sea whispered in the distance, she rubbed her hand back and forth across her forehead.

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON OF FEBRUARY 27, MARK TWAIN
came stepping briskly down the stairs, all business, from General Grant’s second-floor library. At the front entrance hall he stopped and spoke to Grant’s black valet Harrison, who gave a quick respectful bow and hurried off to find Twain’s sealskin overcoat and giant fur hat. A little Irish maid stood solemnly to one side as Twain shot out his cuffs and patted his suit coat with both hands and came up with two cigars, which he placed on the hallway table, a miniature Bible that Cable had made him carry on the train up from Washington that morning, a stiff blue envelope of legal papers, a pocketknife with the blade missing, a set of girl’s jacks, and finally a special reduced-size leather-bound copy of
Huckleberry Finn
, just published the week before.

“Now I forgot to give this to Colonel Fred,” he told the maid. “But it’s for his daughter.”

The girl curtsied and vanished with the book.

Twain tugged his pockets back into shape and then peered into the mirror above the table and straightened his hair and smoothed his moustache.
He
looked fine, he thought, in the pink of health despite six months on the road with “The Twins of Genius”; but Grant upstairs—
Grant upstairs
!

Twain shook his head at the mirror. Only yesterday the lying and venomous and jackass New York newspapers had reported gleefully that the General was better,
much
better,
nearly well
—and so Twain had naturally come bouncing in with his hand stretched out and a grin on his face, full of noisy congratulations. And before he could shut himself up he realized that the object of all these congratulations was coughing and wheezing like a drowning man, and twenty pounds lighter, and pale as paper—“Delighted to hear these reports of your good health!” he had blurted out before he could stop himself, and Grant had just smiled feebly up from his chair and murmured, “Well—if only they were true.”

The shock must have showed on his face, Twain thought. Because while Grant was signing the official contracts that made Charles L. Webster & Company the sole publishers of his memoirs—the reason Twain had interrupted his lecture tour today—while all that legal rigamarole was going on, one of the doctors had taken him aside and said confidentially that the General was in fact extremely ill, and Fred Grant later at the top of the stairs had whispered in his ear that nobody had found the courage yet to tell his father the truth.

But he knew anyway. “I mean you shall have this book,” Grant had said when he finished signing, and it wasn’t about the contract, Twain understood, it was a pledge, a commitment, Grant’s word to him that sick as he was he
would
finish what he had started, and Grant’s word—well, you could go to the bank on Grant’s word. Twain scowled at the mirror. Not the best possible phrase, in the home of Grant & Ward.

Harrison reappeared with his sealskin coat and helped him button it up. Then somebody rang a bell upstairs and Harrison scooted, and Twain was left to see himself out on his own.

Instead, he lingered. He pushed a vase of cut flowers from one corner of the table to the other. He fussed with his coat and patted its pockets too, and came up this time with a volume of Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
, which he had never read before, but Cable had recommended and which had already started him thinking about a new story, man dreams he’s a knight in the Middle Ages, all the problems of suits of armor—no pockets for one thing. Can’t scratch, can’t blow your nose. Always getting struck by lightning. Make him a soldier like Grant.

He walked over to the front door, then stopped. He wished he had brought more copies of
Huckleberry Finn
as gifts, but (he certainly couldn’t tell the General, who was as modest and chaste as a preacher) there had been a terrible to-do over one of the illustrations, and even he, the author, hadn’t received his full allotment of books yet—because at the last minute some disgruntled engraver had inserted a large male sex organ in a picture of old Silas Phelps, chapter XXXII, and there was Aunt Sally smiling sweetly and asking, “Who do you reckon it is?” and they were having to cut out the offending page and replace it by hand, a book at a time, at J. J. Little’s printing plant.

Well. Twain put his hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it. Anybody with any sense would pull out of the deal with Grant. Anybody
sane
would wait to see how sick the General really was, if he
could
write a book in his condition. Anybody
sane
would march back upstairs and
revoke
the contract, since from what Twain had seen today, the General was still three or four long chapters away from the end of volume one, the siege and capture of Vicksburg. Without Vicksburg you couldn’t have volume one, without Appomattox you couldn’t have volume two.

He stood with his hand on the doorknob, listening to the thick, tense silence of an invalid’s house, thinking furiously. The contract in his pocket meant more contracts, orders to presses, binders, shippers. He would have to commit to buying tons of paper, gallons of ink, his salesmen would need cash advances, and brochures and catalogues—if the book never arrived, lawyers would,
bankruptcy
would. What he had done, Twain thought, beginning to sweat in his heavy coat, was harpoon the Leviathan. Then he straightened his back, lifted his chin like a soldier. He told himself honor was a harder master than the law, Grant was a perfectly glorious man, and he turned the knob and opened the door.

The street outside was filled with curiosity seekers, dozens and dozens of them. They stood on the sidewalk and pavement for almost half a block down Sixty-sixth Street, just staring up at the house like morbid penguins. Some of the reporters recognized him and pushed their way forward, waving their notebooks and calling out his name, but for once Mark Twain hurried past the press without a word and climbed into the first free hansom cab he could hail.

H
AD NICHOLAS TRIST ARRIVED HALF AN HOUR SOONER, HE
would have seen Mark Twain for himself.