Grant: A Novel by Byrd Max

Author:Byrd, Max [Byrd, Max]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780345544278
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

A PRIZE INVITATION,” SAID HENRY WEST, SOMEWHERE UP ahead in the dark. “Of course, she’s loony. Her whole family in Boston is loony, religious fanatics half of them, other half in the nuthouse. One of her aunts took poison, famous case. I think baby girl Mrs. Adams even found the body.”

The sun was not yet risen on the morning after his Adams tea, and the air in front of him was cold, dark, full of blurred smells from the nearby Potomac. Trist walked carefully just behind West on the frozen grass of the National Mall, between carelessly stacked piles of lumber and what, when he scraped his ankle and West held up his lantern, turned out to be two massive rows of marble building blocks.

“But there’s no doubt the Adamses are the social center of Washington,” West said over his shoulder, “loony or not. Or ‘Washington village,’ as Adams calls it. Which they manage by being so goddam exclusive they squeak. Won’t go to the White House, even when the President asks them for dinner. Snub Senators, skewer Congressmen. Adams says Senators are like hogs and you have to hit them on the snout with a stick. When Oscar Wilde was here last year, came with their writer friend Henry James, Mrs. Adams absolutely refused to meet him and told everybody”—a mincing falsetto—“ ‘I try to keep far away from thieves and noodles.’ ”

Trist laughed, scraped his ankle again, and stopped. A few stray snowflakes drifted around his face like long, wet feathers. Other lanterns could be seen up ahead, bobbing in the air. Men’s voices floated downhill. The slow tap-tap of a hammer came from the right, where the lantern’s beams revealed a bare dirt path and still more piles of lumber.

“Up here.” West gripped Trist by the elbow and steered him up a slippery hillock of grass and mud. “You go there for Sunday dinner, write up a few notes under the table. Voilà, a Post exclusive, ‘At Home with the Insufferable Adamses.’ ”

Trist shook his head. Pointless in the dark. “I like her,” he said.

West snorted. “I wish there was a Hippocratic oath for reporters. ‘First, Do all the harm you can.’ ”

“Are we there yet?”

“Hold your horses.”

It was always amazing, Trist thought, how fast the sun rose. Already the sky in the east was beginning to glow a soft yellow-white, and a dark rim of trees and rooftops was showing across the horizon. In another hour or two the sun would have dried the grass and burned away the damp haze and the brief March snow would amount to no more than puddles, slivers of coppery water in the mud, Washington would present its usual early-spring panorama of pale green and brown. But for the moment, in the long gray suspension of the dawn, they could have been anywhere—Paris, by the slapping Seine. Boston. Chicago. He blew in his cupped hand for warmth. Possibly not Hawaii.

“We go in here.” West held up the lantern, but lowered his head to pass under a network of wooden scaffolding.

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