Grant: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

as Grant’s Secretary of War. But Cadwallader was much more interested in writing down his personal impressions of Grant, while they were fresh.
    He enjoyed numbers. He thought numbers anchored unsteady minds in reality, so he closed his eyes and did a little calculation. He had known the ex-President … almost twenty years. For a period of thirty-one months during the war he had been, if not daily, at least weekly in his presence, and there had been a stretch of time, before Ingratitude Did Its Fateful Work, when he and Grant could have been said to be intimate friends. He licked the tip of his pencil and flipped a page. Grant was fifty-seven years old, four years older than Cadwallader. The General had put on weight during his world tour: he moved now with a fleshy ponderousness that came of too many days behind a banquet table instead of on top of a horse. The skin was softer, the hair and beard grayer. But the face was still Sphinx-like, blank and unsmiling. There was still the same small wart just above the right moustache line—Lincoln had had it, too, and so had Cromwell, if Cadwallader remembered correctly—the same nearly horizontal slash of the mouth. Grant’s eyes used to be his most expressive feature: dark gray, surprisingly animated. But he had passed by too quickly for Cadwallader, pressed against the wall by all the foxes, to see his eyes clearly. Unmistakable was the square jaw and the wide forehead. Unmistakable, too, was the fact that Grant had been saying nothing and everybody else had been yammering like geese.
    Cadwallader read over what he had written, struck out the geese as one animal figure too many, and slipped the notebook into his pocket. He would expand and revise it later on into something florid, the way the
Times
liked it. Easy enough, because U. S. Grant was a subject that always set his pen to smoking.
    Which reminded him to mention the inevitable cigar clamped between Grant’s teeth. He pulled out the notebook to add it. General Grant had very likely started smoking his trademark black cigars when he was a chubby babe in his cradle—Cadwallader had said that very thing to Mark Twain last night in the Palmer House bar, and that Grant-intoxicated man had nodded thoughtfully two or three times and allowed it was a striking image.
    Cameron’s door opened again. Cadwallader leaned forwardexpectantly. But neither Grant nor Don Cameron came out, only a tall, skinny-boned young man, sweating as if he’d just left a steam bath. The young man stopped in the middle of the hall, opposite the door, and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
    Bodyguard, Cadwallader thought first. Then, looking more closely at the coat sleeve: veteran.
    “When I was with General Grant at City Point, Virginia, in 1864,” Cadwallader said, strolling over and uncorking a reserve bottle of E. C. Booz whiskey, “he had a guard posted outside his tent to keep away all the curiosity seekers who kept trying to get in and see him.” Cadwallader paused and took a swig of the whiskey. Up close the boy had a simple malarial pallor, common as a cold these days. “One day a strange comical old fellow, looked like an undertaker, came up from the James River docks and tried to reach the General’s tent by ducking under a hedge. By granny, those guards were on him in a flash, guns out and cocked, and they damned near frog-marched him off under arrest, except just then the General poked out his head and said, ‘My god, boys, that’s President Lincoln!’ ”
    Cadwallader chuckled and rubbed the top of the bottle with his sleeve. “Maybe he didn’t say ‘My god’—Grant don’t swear, ever. But the rest is true. I didn’t see you go in before.” He nodded his head toward Parlor Suite 21. “So my first idea was that you must be guarding Don Cameron and not General Grant. I know that’s Cameron’s suite.”
    “Cameron’s suite, but I’m not a bodyguard.”
    From yet another pocket Cadwallader came up with a