Grant: A Novel (7 page)

Slowly, as the brandy did its work, Trist found the room growing hotter and darker. Sherman’s white face became a starburst of disorder. Twain sipped water, studied Ingersoll’s every gesture. The oration moved ponderously through the topic of the volunteers,
how they had risked everything to defend their country, how they had entered the war certain of victory, fallen away into the bleak discouragement of the middle years—Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg—watched with awe as this calm man before them, the Supreme Volunteer, rose out of undeserved obscurity and took the helm.

Against his will Trist found himself straining forward, listening. As always, whenever he thought about the war, the result was a bundle of contradictions—butcher versus hero, ruined bodies versus freed slaves, a saved Union, a country to run away from.

The private from Illinois pushed the brandy toward him. You go to war because of your father, Trist suddenly thought, men always had. Ingersoll reached Gettysburg with its twenty thousand dead—the father Trist had never known had been a soldier; his stepfather had been a Jeffersonian patriot, dedicated with all his heart to the new Jeffersonian nation; as a diplomat, he had settled the Mexican War single-handedly, writing the treaty himself, and then congressional politics had done him out of a job and a pension, and he had died living on next to nothing, but still a patriot to his bones. He had driven Trist to the recruitment station in Hartford; his last political act had been to vote for Grant’s second term in 1872. On the platform Grant’s small, hard profile caught the light and held it. Ingersoll’s high voice went on relentlessly, naming battle after bloody battle in the final year.

Trist drained his brandy. Next to him Twain scratched a note to himself in a small leather pad. Grant was a volunteer, Ingersoll told them, Sherman, Sheridan, every soul in uniform tonight—when they marched out to save their land, ready to give the last full measure of devotion, “at that sacred moment blood was water,” he cried, “money was leaves, and life was only common air until one flag”—his right hand swooped and swung to the Stars and Stripes suspended above the General’s head—“until
one
flag floated over a Republic
without
a master, and without a
slave
!”

Before his hand could drop, the audience was on its feet clapping and stamping and waving their napkins in a snowstorm of applause.

There were five more speakers before Twain. At intervals he turned to Trist and said something so low and fleeting that Trist could only pretend to hear. Once, in a lull, the drunken private asked if he had written out his speech, and Twain explained in his
soft drawl that he never wrote things out, but instead arranged his silver and plates in a mnemonic system. A cup placed here meant such-and-such a joke, a fork turned sideways meant change the subject. “What’s your toast?” the soldier asked, but Twain merely shook his head and drank his water.

By two o’clock in the morning the banquet hall was a limp haze of smoke and exhaustion. At speaker number fourteen Twain slipped away. Trist made his way back to Cadwallader’s side just as Sherman rose to his feet for the last introduction.

“Cameron married his niece,” Cadwallader whispered. “Sherman’s.”

Sherman was motioning to the top of the table. Somebody else—General Sheridan? Ingersoll?—was offering to boost Twain up, but the writer waved them both aside and stayed behind the table. Unhurried, he moved a few leftover glasses and spoons in an aimless pattern on the rumpled cloth. Then he reached into the shadows and brought out a chair and used it to climb onto the table all by himself, just to the left of the seated Grant. He pulled long and deep on his cigar and gazed about the room.

The last clatterings and clinkings faded away. “The Babies,” Twain said in a leisurely tone. His voice was unremarkable, yet carried to the corners of the hall. “My toast is, ‘The Babies, As They Comfort Us in Our Sorrows, Let Us Not Forget Them in Our Festivities.’ ”

He paused and flicked a little ash into a saucer. “I like that,” he said. Another pause. “We haven’t all been generals or heroes or statesmen, but when the toast works down to the babies, why, we stand on common ground.” For the first time since the speeches had started, Grant actually moved his head and looked up. Twain looked down at him, utterly deadpan. “Well,” he said slowly, “we’ve
all
been babies.” Grant’s beard parted in a smile.

Afterward, when he tried to remember it, Trist couldn’t be sure precisely what Twain had said—they had all been babies, babies tyrannized comically even over soldiers and heroes: “You could face the death storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for blow, but when
he
clawed your whiskers and pulled your hair and twisted your nose, you had to take it. When
he
ordered his pap bottle, and it wasn’t warm, did you talk back? Not you. You went to work and
warmed
it.” By the end of the first two minutes Twain had his audience helpless with laughter, even Grant, who
was rolling about in his chair like everyone else. At the end of every sentence he stopped and looked languidly about the room, expressionless, while the laughter continued to build. He’s routed Grant, Trist thought, changed places with him.

Toward the end he turned his attention briefly from Grant to Sheridan. “As long as you’re in your right mind,” he told the crowd, “don’t ever have twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot.”

Slowly, carefully, he built to a long climax. He asked them to picture the future rulers of the country, those who would inherit the great flag of the Republic that Colonel Ingersoll had saluted, when it flew fifty years hence over a nation of two hundred millions—at this very moment, Twain said, those illustrious leaders were no more than
babies
lying in their cradles. Imagine a future Admiral Farragut
teething
, a future
President
pulling at his tiny tufts of hair, a future great astronomer reaching for his wet nurse. “And in still one more cradle,” he said, “somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious Commander in Chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth.” The laughter died away. The crowd stirred uneasily. Grant’s countenance grew blank as Twain’s. The toast seemed suddenly to hover on the brink of catastrophic insult. “An achievement,” Twain continued, “which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest of this evening turned
his
whole attention to some fifty-six years ago.”

A kind of shuddering silence fell over the room. Twain looked down at the table and used his shoe to move a spoon an inch to one side. A flag rustled and snapped in a current of stale air. He surveyed the room slowly, left to right. Raised his cigar to his lips, took it away.

“And if the child is but a prophecy of the man”—the longest, most agonizing pause yet; then a headlong rush of words—“there are mighty few who will doubt that he
succeeded
.”

In the detonation of laughter and cheers that followed, as Grant actually stood to shake Twain’s hand and Sherman clasped him in a rolling, wrestling bear hug, Trist felt a grip on his arm. “Stole my idea,” Cadwallader complained thickly. “Grant in his cradle, goddam Twain.”

When Twain finally made his way past their table, heading toward the exit, still surrounded by shoulder-pounding admirers, he stopped and leaned over to grab Cadwallader’s lapel. “Did you see Grant break up? Didn’t I
fetch
him? Didn’t I make his bones ache?” To Trist: “Didn’t I nearly
kill
him?”

THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT

W
ELL, MEXICO MADE HIM; MEXICO WRECKED HIM
.

I myself despise the whole damn hotfooted Mexican country, have from the first minute I crossed the border as a young “special correspondent,” and that was not two full months after Lieutenant U. S. Grant himself marched in, in the year of decision 1846, part of old Zachary Taylor’s so-called “Army of Observation.”

Actually, I came to despise the state of Texas first and simply enlarged my dislike to cover Mexico too, both of them dried-up oceans of sand and thorns, under a sun so hot it seemed like a maniac slinging coals of fire. (Phil Sheridan once told me if he owned Texas and Hell, he’d live in Hell and rent out Texas.)

But Grant—Grant fell in love with every part of it. I have heard him wax almost lyrical (for Grant) over the beauty of the little Mexican town of Matamoros on the Rio Grande. He talks about the red-tiled roofs, the red and yellow flowers on the white
walls, even the soft, tranquil nights, he says, full of perfume. I sometimes think the human personality is like one of those little Russian dolls, every time you open it there’s another one inside. This wasn’t your Grant of Cold Harbor and the Wilderness. This was the dreamy boy from Ohio popping up, who went through West Point skipping his lessons to read the romantic novels of Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton; Grant number one.

West Point, of course, had been his awful father’s idea, not for the glory and prestige of a military career—in those old peacetime days there wasn’t any—but because the education was free, and Jesse Grant never spent a dime he didn’t have to.

Grant himself has told me the story more than once—home he came for Christmas in 1838, back from the latest school he’d been attending, age seventeen, and there was his father opening an official-looking blue envelope from Washington City. “Ulysses,” Jesse said—nobody alive ever called him “Hiram”—“I believe you’re going to receive the appointment.”

“What appointment?”

“To West Point. I applied for it.”

“But I won’t go!”

But Jesse folded his arms and said grimly he thought he would, and Grant likes to add, dryly,
“and I thought so too, if he did.”

An undistinguished time he had of it, however, hardly living up to Jesse’s boasts about young ’Lyss’s “genius.” The only subjects he ever did well in were mathematics and drawing—an officer has to be able to see and draw the land in front of him, that was how Colonel Alexander Hamilton brought himself to George Washington’s attention—and Grant did very badly indeed in French (though in Mexico he learned to speak Spanish quite well); middling in military deportment. (The cadets of Grant’s era all spoke with awe of an earlier cadet who had passed through four straight years without a single demerit, Bobby Lee.) Grant hated the discipline, hated being addressed as “Animal,” as all the plebes were, found the rigmarole of army customs pointless. In his first year he read in the papers that Congress was thinking of abolishing the Academy. Though not otherwise a religious person, he prayed assiduously for that to happen.

He graduated twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine and was assigned to the Infantry and posted away to St. Louis. There he passed the time drilling his troops and courting his roommate’s
sister. Julia Dent lived with her parents just close enough for a young second lieutenant to ride over after the day’s work and linger chatting in the Missouri twilight until a disapproving father grudgingly asked him in for supper. (About West Point I will only add that in all the mathematics textbooks today the standard solution to a certain problem in analytic geometry is credited to one U. S. Grant. His famous old professor Dennis Mahan, author of a dozen books on mathematics and physics, wrote analyses of every cadet who passed through his class; Grant’s “mental machine,” Mahan claimed, was of the “powerful low-pressure class, which condenses its own steam and consumes its own smoke.” I have no idea what he meant.)

Missouri twilight; copper-colored, flame-throwing Mexican noon. Where West Point was an episode, an interlude, Mexico was an education.

An education in injustice, first of all, because it seemed to Grant, as it did to me, that from start to finish the Mexican War was totally wrong, morally wrong, the calculated and indefensible invasion of a weak country by a stronger one, for no better reason than greed for land. One way or another, President James Knox Polk meant to “adjust” the disputed boundary between Mexico and the brand-new state of Texas and in the process simply seize all of California to the west, to make it safe for expansion and slavery. Generals who disagreed were swiftly shelved. Generals who looked as if they might become presidential rivals next election year—a lesson in politics and war not lost on Grant—found themselves out of command. While the diplomats played out their charade, Polk quietly massed his troops at Corpus Christi. And then on March 11, 1846, Zachary Taylor raised his glove and gave the order, and the American Army set out at a run for the Rio Grande.

At the first little battle of Palo Alto, the Mexicans fired their muskets at four hundred yards—might as well have fired from the moon—and discharged a few ancient, creaking cannons. (The advancing Americans stood in the dried grass and watched the cannonballs slowly bouncing and skipping toward them, then just took a step or two out of the way.) Nonetheless there were casualties. Grant wrote home to his fiancée Miss Dent that a nine-pound shot hit one Captain Page in the face, and “the under jaw is gone all the way to the windpipe and the tongue hangs down upon the throat” (a Grant love letter).