Free Grant: A Novel by Max Byrd Page A

after the banquet in Palmer House suite 45, a spacious set of rooms looking out on State Street, and Twain (resplendent in Turkish slippers and a deep maroon dressing gown he called his “toga”) had waved his hand airily at a breakfast table set for two. On the floor beside it, in a sitting posture, was a life-sized cat made out of pasteboard and tin. “The illuminated cat,” he had announced, and promptly lowered the curtains to demonstrate that the cat, painted over with a thick coat of phosphorus, actually glowed in the dark, like a cat of fire. “Scares away rats and mice at night,” Twain had explained, “beautiful parlor ornament in daylight”—he wanted Trist’s European readers to know that this was American ingenuity and enterprise at their finest. He, Twain, thought he would invest fifty thousand dollars of his own money in it, make a fortune, and retire.
    An irresistible first paragraph—Trist had written it out in French for
L’Illustration
(“
chat de feu
”) and English for one of the London newspapers that sometimes took his articles.
    And the reason he thought of the illuminated cat right now, atnine-twenty-five in the morning after his evening champagne at Don Cameron’s house, was that he was standing on the corner of First Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, in the shadow of the Capitol, and watching the biggest, fattest black rat he had ever seen. It was seated under a luggage wagon from the National Hotel, combing its whiskers, not glowing, but easily twice the size of the cat of fire. When the wagon lurched forward into Pennsylvania Avenue the rat gave Trist one curious, appraising glance and then raced uphill toward the Senate, as though it belonged.
    As perhaps it did, Trist thought, and crossed the street in the same direction.
    At the bottom of a circular carriageway he paused again to look up and admire the Capitol dome—unfinished in 1865 when he had last seen the city, which was then a vast army camp in the process of disbanding. Now the great white dome was splendidly in place, and the once cluttered and overbuilt space around the Capitol was largely cleared and landscaped, though just to the north of the Senate wing two or three stray pigs, Washington’s unofficial garbage disposers, rooted in the brown grass and mud.
    He made his way up past the shabby boarding houses that still lined Constitution Avenue. Inside the Capitol lobby, under the dome, he stopped beside the double-door entrance to the Senate and pulled out his watch. He could go into the visitors’ gallery and observe the session—Don Cameron had arranged a permanent pass—or, better, simply meet him afterwards in the committee room that Cameron and other Grant “Stalwarts” used, next to the Supreme Court chamber. He hesitated. Whiskery men pushed around him on their way to the Senate. Clerks and secretaries threaded their way through knots of tourists. The Rotunda was crowded, noisy, poorly lit.
    “You are standing, Mr. Trist, beneath perhaps the worst executed historical painting in the nation. Not to mention the least accurate.”
    Henry Adams’s voice cut easily through the clamor of the lobby. He pointed his furled umbrella up toward the gilt-framed painting that hung just above their heads. “ ‘The Signing of the Declaration of Independence,’ ” he read. “History at its most fictitious. That’s supposed to be my great-grandfather John Adams over there, but no Adams male has ever reached the middle agewith so much hair. Jefferson over here”—the umbrella swung right—“was in reality quite coarsely redheaded, and entirely feline. Franklin was taller than everybody thinks. The whole thing is a fraud, of course, because the Continental Congress never did assemble for the purpose of signing the Declaration of Independence—they went to the clerk’s office privately, one by one, over the space of two months—and they adopted the resolution on July second, not July fourth. Otherwise—” He