Grant: A Novel (6 page)

Y
OUR FRIEND MARK TWAIN,” SAID WILLIAM TECUMSEH “CUMP”
Sherman, and he turned his head to the left and covered his mouth, “is a piece of
work
!”

Somebody whooped his name, and Sherman stood up and wagged his cigar and sat down again to a foot-stamping chorus of “Uncle Cump! Uncle Cump!” He leaned over to pour a little more coffee in Grant’s cup. “Twain told me he came up the staircase tonight, into the hall”—Sherman swept his cigar across the spectacularly resplendent banquet room that the Palmer House Hotel claimed was the largest in the world—“found all those women lined up on the stairs to watch us go in. Says, ‘Don’t you think the General ought to come out for
female rights
tonight? Win some
votes
?’ There he is now.”

Grant saw him, three tables away, lanky on his feet, all red hair and red moustaches, glass of water raised in their direction like a gladiator giving a toast. Twain said something to the group at his table and they fell apart in raucous laughter, though you could only tell that from their pantomime, because by now there were five hundred men in the room, and what seemed like five hundred more waiters, and over the noise of the voices and laughter and glasses and silver there was still the orchestra playing every Civil
War march ever written. Twain blew a kiss to Sherman, and the table went to pieces.

“He’s coming over,” Sherman said.

And indeed he was. Grant studied his menu. They had passed the oyster, turtle soup, and salmon courses, and the waiters were starting to fan out with the roast beef servings, and as far as he could tell, Mark Twain had yet to take a bite.

“He’s wild as can be,” Sherman said.

Grant smiled at the thought. He had carried
The Innocents Abroad
with him on his round-the-world tour, and he enjoyed the idea of Mark Twain running wild anywhere. He looked at Sherman, who was now standing up again and leading the orchestra with both arms. He looked past Sherman, down the head table, where little Phil Sheridan, brand-new father of twins and the fiercest cavalryman since Genghis Khan, had scrambled onto a chair and commenced conducting
Sherman
. “Wild as can be,” he said, though nobody heard him.

Twain had stopped at the first row of tables just below the head table—there were six vast rows altogether, Grant had counted them automatically, each one running the length of the room—and he was saying something to Bob Ingersoll, and Ingersoll too was laughing out loud. Grant sipped his coffee and recalled to mind Twain’s first droll words to him that afternoon, when they had all stood together outside to review the parade. Twain had reached out his hand to Grant, but turned his head sideways to Sherman and drawled, “I first met the President back in 1870. I
know
he remembers me. I was the one who didn’t ask him for a job.”

“That was ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ ” Sherman said, dropping into his seat.

Grant nodded. He had never in his life been able to tell one tune from another.

“And here comes Twain.”

A
T THE REPORTERS’ TABLE IN THE EXTREME BACK OF THE BANQUET
hall, next to the kitchen doors, Nicholas Trist leaned forward and tried to see between two blazing chandeliers. In order to accommodate Grant’s banquet the hotel had apparently knocked away one whole wall on the left of the hall to make it
even bigger, and installed what seemed like a regimental band and a small village of extra tables and potted palms. From where he sat Trist could just make out the figures of Grant and Sherman at the head table two hundred feet away and raised on a platform. Both were in uniform, like three-fourths of the other men dining, and both were just now standing up to shake hands with a redheaded man about forty, wearing a full-dress evening suit with a cutaway coat.

“Grant’s meat.” Cadwallader jabbed his fork in the same direction. “Always burnt.” A waiter was depositing slabs of roast beef in front of the two generals. Even from this distance it was evident that Grant’s piece was burned coal black.

“Grant don’t eat chicken,” Cadwallader added. “Claims he can’t eat anything that ever walked on two legs. Has his roast beef cooked till it’s dry. Won’t touch his meat if he sees a drop of blood.”

Trist nodded and made a mental note. French readers would be delighted and appalled.

Cadwallader shaded his eyes against the chandeliers. “They called Grant a ‘butcher’ in the war. Some butcher, can’t stand the sight of blood. That’s Mark Twain the writer up there with him now—
he
fought in the Confederate Army, but just for two months. You don’t like Grant.”

Trist looked up in surprise.

“Right age,” Cadwallader said. “Got that missing arm, got veteran written all over you. I look around, you—and maybe me—are the only two people here not having a fall-down hissy fit about being in the same room with our great General. So which one was it? Spotsylvania? the Wilderness? Cold Harbor?”

“Cold Harbor.”

“Hard to forget Cold Harbor.” Cadwallader poured himself more wine. “But Grant was a hero at Vicksburg,” he added in a judicious tone. “Saved the country at Vicksburg.”

Which was absolutely true, Trist thought as he made his way down to the front of the hall, nobody doubted Vicksburg. What interested him more right now, what would interest any reporter, was Mark Twain standing next to U. S. Grant and chattering away like a long-lost friend. Mark Twain the writer was famous all over Europe for
The Innocents Abroad
, which made hilarious fun of American ignorance, and
The Gilded Age
, which made hilarious
fun of American greed. The latest book,
Tom Sawyer
, apparently didn’t make fun of anything, but Trist’s French editor would still be fascinated—an ex-Confederate soldier (where had he fought? get details) and the ex-commanding general of the North: a caption bobbed inevitably to mind: Never the Twain Shall Meet.

Just as he reached the top of the steps, a scowling muscle-bound man in a tuxedo stepped in front of him and blocked the way: a bodyguard for real. Nobody got near the General tonight, Trist was told, back on down, go to your seat.

The clatter of dishes and voices was deafening; the orchestra began to tune up again. Trist tried to make himself heard—General Sheridan turned and glared—the bodyguard took Trist’s business card, slipped it into his pocket without looking, and stood right where he was.

Trist waited an instant longer. He had actually met Grant earlier that day as he passed into Cameron’s suite for what was supposed to be a private conference—met, shaken hands, been dismissed in a minute and a half. Not even his campaign manager, evidently, could force the General to give an interview he didn’t want to give. Trist moved to the right in the hope of catching Grant’s eye. Directly over the head table, amid all the other flags and streamers, flapping in the smoky atmosphere like a ship’s sail, floated a big black-and-white portrait that Trist hadn’t seen from his distant table:
U. S. GRANT——MAN OF DESTINY
.

From this angle the man of destiny looked small, tired, bored. The bodyguard took a warning step toward him. Trist moved farther to his right. In a cleared space in front of the guests of honor Brobdingnagian bakers had placed a white frosted cake molded in the shape of the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg—with little cannons, little flags, little sugar soldiers. Mark Twain was just coming down another set of steps, between the cake and a bristling display of regimental shields and flags. When Trist reached him he squinted down at his card with undisguised impatience.

“I write for two French journals,” Trist told him, bending forward to drown out “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp”—pouring out the flattery like syrup—“my readers would love to hear how a famous writer knows General Grant so well.”

Twain had small, dark, untrustworthy eyes, and up close a
shock of carrot-red hair that was already going gray in patches. He shook his head, looked the other way to greet somebody, and told Trist no press interviews this evening, not even any whiskey—he held up his glass of water—not till after his speech. He studied Trist’s sleeve.

“Veteran?” He had a slow, soft Missouri drawl.

“Yes.”

“Well, come on up and see me tomorrow,” he said, pocketing the card, “after breakfast, suite forty-five, down the hall from Grant.”

A
T TEN O’CLOCK PRECISELY (PALMER HOUSE TIME) CUMP
Sherman rose to his feet, put his hands on his hips, and bellowed at crowd-stopping volume:

“Can you hear me in the middle of the hall?”

“No!”

“Then you’ll have to read about it in the papers!”

There was a printed program of speakers now before each plate—the evening’s star attraction was the long-winded atheist Robert Ingersoll, listed as ninth in order, certain, Trist thought with a sinking heart, to speak for an hour all by himself. Mark Twain, the single Southerner on the program, was listed last.

Sherman rapped on the table. The orchestra whinnied to a halt. The chandeliers and lights began to dim. Trist turned in his chair and saw that along the back of the room women were now filing in and standing in attentive, respectful knots next to the wall. When he turned forward again everything was deep in shadows, except for one great unwavering light focused on the head table, the first speaker opening his notes, and seated beside him, Grant.

By the third interminable oration in praise of the General, Trist could hardly sit still. He pushed away from the table and carried a bottle of brandy to the back of the hall, peering in the shadows as he went for a glimpse of Mrs. Cameron. Out training her hounds, sharpening her arrows. She was actually the widower Cameron’s second wife, that much he knew, younger than Cameron by twenty years. Around other men in the hotel she was mildly flirtatious, sensationally attractive; flirtatious, intelligent,
unhappy—his last adjective surprised him so much that he put down the brandy bottle and walked a few more feet along the wall. Mark Twain emerged from the darkest alcove, next to the kitchen. “Look at Grant,” he whispered, pointing, “cast-iron.” And down at the head table Grant’s face was indeed in its famous “silent” state, which Trist had only seen in photographs: utterly blank. The orator, whoever he was, wheeled at exactly that instant and stretched out his arms dramatically toward the General, and Grant merely stared straight ahead, motionless as the room rose and cheered. “Bulletproof,” Twain groaned, and went away.

At midnight there was a ten-minute intermission. In the lavatory corridor Cadwallader swayed on his feet, drunk, Trist realized, drunk and exhausted. “I
like
your new personal writer,” he informed Don Cameron, who was shoving his big red-faced way back into the hall, and he gripped Trist’s shoulder and gave the Senator a sweaty grin. “Veteran, well-spoken—you treat him right, you hear?”

Cameron was a bad politician, a child could see that, Trist thought, as brusque and rude as money and drink could make him; but he was also chairman of Grant’s campaign committee. Even he knew enough to nod back at the little reporter and pry his mouth into a smile.

“Power of the pen,” Cadwallader told Trist with a smirk. They reclaimed their seats in the banquet hall where the eighth speaker of the night had just gotten to his legs. “Grant needs every kind word in the press that Cameron can buy or borrow.” He sat back heavily, slopped brandy into a water glass. “Book about Grant,” he said, and leaned over confidentially. Applause and laughter were coming from scattered parts of the hall. “
My
book.” Cadwallader closed his eyes, nodded. “
Not
for publication.” Leaned back. “Show you sometime.”

Malarial fever, Trist had learned, could rise and fall like a red-hot tide. He felt a familiar scalding flush, pushed his chair back again, and looked around the room. Mrs. Cameron was nowhere to be seen. Where was Twain? Trist passed unsteadily across the rear of the hall, stumbling like a blind man in the darkness, and found him in the farthest possible corner, at a small table by the wall. Next to him a youngish, drunkish man in a private’s uniform was clutching his head between two hands.

“Vilas is good,” the private whispered miserably to Twain.

Twain aimed his cigar at the speaker. “Colonel Sanderson Vilas,” he muttered to Trist. “From Wisconsin, famous stump speaker and preacher.”

“In Illinois,” the private said, “we think Bob Ingersoll is one hell of a talker.”

Vilas was a small dog-faced man whose neck and chin were lost in his high military collar. He was evidently responding to the toast “Our Gallant Leaders.” Seated beside him in the spotlight, Grant kept his face clamped in an iron calm.

“Here he goes,” Twain said as Vilas began to pace back and forth and pound his open hand with his fist. There was a rising shout from the crowd—

“Get up on the table! On the table!”

From the audience a blur of men suddenly surged forward, around the head table; heads, hands flashed in the spotlight, Vilas disappeared into shadows, reappeared abruptly, lifted on a wave of blue shoulders and carried right up to the top of the table, next to the imperturbable Grant. His shoes snagged on the white tablecloth, and he wobbled dangerously for a moment, straddled a plate, blinked out at the room, then, almost without a pause, he resumed his pounding oration. The hall thundered and cheered.

Lightning flashed in Trist’s skull. He fumbled in his coat for a packet of medicine. A few intelligible words cut through the noise like rockets—“Grant—Heroism—Let Us Have Peace”—and then the room seemed to crash apart in applause.

“Bob can’t touch
that
,” the private wailed.

When Ingersoll did appear, introduced by a disheveled Sherman, he stood for a moment behind the table and looked out at the crowd. Then he grinned and pulled up a chair and climbed onto the table as well (“Now we’ll
all
have to do it,” Twain grumbled). He was an odd, bald figure with a high forehead and small, close-set eyes. He waited for almost a full minute, hands in pockets, audibly jingling coins. “The Volunteers,” he announced, and began his speech.