Grant: A Novel (50 page)

“Mrs. Cameron’s in the family way, Mr. Trist.”

Trist nodded absently and squinted out through the rain at the streetlamps in Lafayette Square. So many changes; so little change. He had already known why Elizabeth was resting, thanks to gossip at the
Post
, thanks to Henry West’s infallible knowledge of everything that went on in Washington.

“Is she in her dressing room?”

Jewel’s eyes grew big with alarm. “No, sir.”

“I’ll just be a minute. You come too.”

Feeling as though he ought to have malaria again, or at least be shaking with fever, Trist started down the hallway, past the dining room; turned left at a corner; heard Jewel’s shoes padding uncertainly on the carpet behind him.

“This is the door?”

“No, sir.”

Trist turned the knob.

“My semi-ancestor Jefferson,” he said as he stepped across the threshold and Elizabeth Cameron looked up from her
chaise longue
with eyes as huge as Jewel’s, “was fond of rejecting ladies at long distance, by note if possible. He apparently broke the heart of one Maria Cosway in Paris that way.”

“Well.” Elizabeth put down the book she held. The room was alive with the hiss of gas lamps and heaters and the chuckle of rain against the windowsill. “You’re not a real descendant, I guess, so the precedent doesn’t apply. I knew you’d come. It’s all right, Jewel.”

“No, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.” Stubbornly, Jewel proceeded to the foot of the
chaise longue
and busied herself with cushions.

“Can you walk to the parlor?” Trist asked. Elizabeth was propped up against a mound of frilly stuffed pillows; her legs were covered with a blanket; around her shoulders she wore, buttoned modestly to the throat, a quilted bed jacket of exquisitely embroidered Venetian silk that would have cost half a year’s salary for
someone like Trist. A lady in her circumstances, a lady of wealth and station, would be largely confined to beds and
chaise longues
, of course, from now until the day of her lying-in, and for a month afterwards, and for another month after that confined entirely to her bedroom.

“You look well,” she told Trist. “A healthy summer.”

“You look wonderful.”

“I’m very happy.” She smiled for the first time, the wide, white, sharp-pointed smile that came from the Sherman side.

“Why send Henry Adams? Why dismiss me by messenger?”

The smile became smaller. “I can’t, you see, go out.”

“Is he the father?”

Jewel dropped an armful of cushions. Elizabeth laughed, a sensuous, full-throated laugh that made Trist’s chest tighten. Despite the armor of quilts and silk he could still see the swell of her hips and the curve of her breast, and he felt his face as always flush with desire and his blood stir. Love’s first moment after noon, he thought, is night.

“Is that what they say down at your newspaper?” Elizabeth shook her head through her laughter. “Just like the
Post
! No. No, Henry Adams is not the father. My husband is the father. Jewel, you’re to go away right now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There was never a time for us,” Elizabeth told him, “not really,” and smiled and shook her head more slowly, sweetly. Trist put his hand on the doorknob and his mind made one of those illogical, unconnected skips out of the present, back to Henry Adams the day before. As soon bring about a murder as a marriage, Adams had said about his book, which was a quotation from
Esther
. “Are you so very sad?” Elizabeth asked. “
Triste
?”

It took him a moment to answer. “I feel like the man in the story Lincoln used to tell, when he stubbed his toe. He was too big to cry, and it hurt too much to laugh.”

“Lincoln,” she murmured. “The war.” She stretched languorously. In the mirror beside the
chaise
she seemed farther away. A trick of illusion. The first time he had ever seen her face was in a mirror. “Don’t come again, Mr. Trist,” she said.

D
ON CAMERON WAS ONE OF THOSE EXASPERATING MEN WHO
have no idea how long they take to think.

He hadn’t always been that way. Age and alcohol would have done their part, of course, along with the bout of lung fever he claimed to have suffered last summer. Clover Adams regarded him with a mixture of impatience and sympathy and considered that he must have been standing for a full minute already, with his hat in his hand, ready to go out the door, calculating with excruciating slowness the complications of his social calendar.

“Well,” he said finally, “this is December fourth. Just tell your husband I might be free in a week. It all depends on when the Senate adjourns.” Then he looked around with a Cameronesque scowl as if noticing for the first time that Henry Adams wasn’t present.

“My husband is at the German legation,” Clover said, and it cost her some effort to sit politely in the Cameron parlor and explain to the Senator that Henry had gone off to his regular Friday-evening diplomatic reception, but she, Clover, couldn’t bear the thought of so many clacking German tongues and so had come over instead to visit Mrs. Cameron, which she ought to have done anyway, long before. She made a gesture toward the bouquet
of Maréchal Niel roses that the maid was cutting and putting in a vase. She did not look at the window, where she knew her reflection would be small and tired and crowlike, and completely repellent to a man like Cameron.

“Well,” he said again, “I guess I have to go to my own reception.” He put on the hat and nodded to the maid. “Republican caucus at Willard’s. Jewel can take you back to see my wife.”

Jewel picked up the vase of roses and looked solemn. Together she and Clover listened to Cameron’s heavy footsteps in the hallway, then the clatter of the door and chain. Frigid air from the outside swirled into the room and stirred the hem of her skirts. The little black maid cleared her throat; shifted the vase from one arm to the other. Slowly, as slowly as Don Cameron thought, as slowly as an arthritic old lady, Clover came to her feet and started to follow Jewel.

The Camerons had separate bedrooms, naturally. The half-open door to the Senator’s revealed odd corners of heavy dark furniture and scattered objects masculine and leather. A smell of hair oil and bourbon just lingered in the air. Jewel swept past without a glance and knocked on the closed door on the left.

“I am,” cried Elizabeth Cameron, bounding up straight on her
chaise longue
and holding out both her arms to Clover, “so glad you’ve come!”

And of course for the next five minutes Clover was
so
glad, too, did exactly what was expected of her, did it to the letter. Sat at the side of the
chaise
and admired the handsome new bed jacket Elizabeth wore, light green in color to match her eyes, a present from Don; handled the delicate little knitted stockings and slippers under way for the baby-to-be; listened to an unnecessarily intimate account of the complications of Elizabeth’s “illness.” Twice she caught herself rubbing her forehead, and once or twice, evidently, she lost track of the conversation for a moment.

“The roses,” she explained in one of those awkward pauses, “came from Mrs. Bancroft’s greenhouse.”

“Dear Mrs. Bancroft,” said Elizabeth. Discussion of Mrs. Bancroft’s health, her eleven grandchildren, the prospects for more. Names were mentioned. The Camerons had gone all the way to California at the end of the summer, for the sake of the Senator’s lungs, and some Western relatives had proposed the name Martha, if it were a girl, James for a boy.

“We meant to go to the new Yellowstone Park,” Clover interrupted, more sharply than she intended, “in June. Henry made all the arrangements. Clarence King found us a guide, a mule train, six whole weeks of camping.”

“But you didn’t go,” Elizabeth said kindly, “did you? I’m so sorry about your father. I wrote you a letter.”

“I didn’t think,” Clover murmured, and must have said something else to finish the sentence, but her mind drifted off, her attention wandered. There was no point in trying to tell someone like Elizabeth Cameron how grief felt, how a void had simply opened up in her life, like an abyss at her feet. They had canceled Yellowstone because she couldn’t bear the strain of the trip, and instead for a month they huddled in one of those empty, melancholy resorts in West Virginia, White Sweet Springs, riding sometimes, taking their meals in the hotel, reading. By early July neither she nor Henry could stand it a moment longer and so they had done what she swore not to do, gone back to Beverly Farms, where her father’s house was, and all her girlhood and his grave and the cold ocean again,
thalassa, thalassa
. She was forty-two years old.

It was very hard, she thought, blinking at Elizabeth. It was a hard thing to ask her to come and visit such a beautiful young woman, about to become a mother, the Princess of Lafayette Square.

Her fingers rattled the teacup so badly the little black maid jumped forward nervously, as if to catch it when it fell. Clover set the cup down on the table. Automatically picked up the book beside it.

“General Grant’s
Memoirs
,” said Elizabeth, whose uncle and brother-in-law were generals too. “Just published this week. Mrs. Grant sent us a copy.”

“He wrote it while he was dying of cancer,” Clover said, to show she kept up, was
au courant
. “Practically the whole world was watching. He wrote it, so to speak”—she lifted her head and in the mirror looked defiant—“out in the open, to save his wife.”

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5. CLOVER MARKED IT
on the calendar in her sitting room upstairs at 1607 H Street. The weather was dreary, cold. The great bulk of the two
new unoccupied houses threw a shadow across her back garden, all the way to Mr. Corcoran’s fence on the other side. At three o’clock Henry looked in to say good-bye—his tooth was still hurting, it had hurt him all night long, and his dentist had finally sent round a boy to say come and see him, even on a Saturday.

Clover heard the murmur of voices down below in the stable. The carriage rolled out, splashed away through the mud. On her desk in all sorts of uncooperative piles lay the papers she was supposed to put in order for their move. Her photographic records. Household receipts. Books of architectural drawings. The stiff cardboard folders with her father’s letters, all the bank cheques, business letters, invitations, everything.

Everything. From a great distance, as if she were a cloud floating high above, she saw her hands sort through the envelopes and come to a stack labeled simply “Lafayette Square,” tied with a red silk ribbon, which the hands, still small as a child’s and far away, carefully untied with a will of their own. Notes from the Bancrofts, the Beales. Copies of notes sent, drafts of letters. Henry had the historian’s horror of throwing away any single scrap of paper.
Dear Mrs. Cameron
, this one said, written in Henry’s neat, careful hand, a draft but almost like printing, much clearer and more precise than Clover’s messy scrawl,
December 7, 1884—

Of all things on earth
, runs the line at the end of
Esther
, and Clover had no idea why her mind would remember it just now,
to be half married must be the worst torture
.

The smallest stack on her desk was the collection of letters, also tied with a red ribbon, from Thomas Jefferson to some forgotten ancestor of Mr. Trist in Philadelphia. No more than eight or nine letters in all, written on still crisp eighteenth-century French stationery. Henry had literally thrust them at her before he left, to give to Mr. Trist when he called. And of course, being
curious, being a woman, being a historian’s wife, had she not looked at them? Had she not turned the old sheets of paper over to read Jefferson’s quaint old-fashioned handwriting? Had she not found in the center, misplaced surely somehow from Henry’s business correspondence—but placed exactly where she must find it—a letter to Henry Holt the publisher in New York, dated January of this year while her father was sick and dying in the charnel house of Boston, and had she not taken the deepest breath of her life and read it and learned her husband’s secret at last?