Memories of the Ford Administration

by John Updike

  Conscious of concealing some of the truth, Ann bantered with him. “My father is an iron man,” she said. “He does not easily bend. He had fixed his hopes for me upon the son of another ironmaster, so the merged forges could beat out more muskets for the next revolution.”

  “And out of blood more dollars for the Coleman fortune,” Buchanan said, unnecessarily, for a shamed awareness of the violent source of her family’s wealth had been implicit in her self-mocking words. For all his legal canniness, Ann thought, this man had a streak of obtuseness, a patch of dead caution, that prevented him from grasping, as can many coarser men—such as the men in her family—a situation at a glance, and from travelling instantly across a chain of argumentation to the firm ground of a conclusion. Instead, he must test each step, as if earth is all treacherous, and when he did contend on one side, as in his speeches against the Democrats, it was with a shrill excess, as though not convinced of his own sincerity. Her family’s slights, which she had done all she could to hide from him, rankled because he was too willing to detect, with his double vision, a truth behind them. “At last Sunday’s dinner at Colebrookdale,” he complained, “you heard him bait me, albeit jocosely, on the matter of my disciplinary infractions at Dickinson, having as trustee made himself privy to the details—misdemeanors of a dozen years ago, and the stiff-necked faculty as much at fault as myself! And he unreasonably associates me with that auction prank of Jasper’s, and implies impropriety in my election wager with Molton.”

  Ann interrupted this gust of grievances. “My father means to suggest that you have enjoyed a fair portion of tavern society, and that a prospective son-in-law might reconcile himself to enjoying less. And I do agree, Jim. Call me selfish, but I want you with me every minute you can spare from your ambitions. I have pinned my life to yours.” She took his arm to descend the curb; his big body, more corpulent and silkily clad than that of the long-legged legal apprentice she had spied from her window, was comforting in its mute mass, like that of a saddled horse in the instant before she felt herself lifted up from the mounting stool onto its trembling, warm-blooded back.

  They had turned, in their stroll, right at the corner of Lime Street, away from the traffic and the taverns, past the home, at the bottom of the down-sloping block, of Jacob Eichholtz, the portraitist, whose loving brush fixed in paints the fleshy visages of Lancaster’s leading citizens, and toward the cemetery known as Woodward Hill, where, a half-century hence, Buchanan would be laid, with a civic pomp that he had specifically forbidden in his will, a document in which he also exactly designed and inscribed his own tombstone. But today he was alive, alive, and Ann, too, who would lie not long hence in St. James Episcopal Churchyard at Orange and Duke streets; their living, well-clad bodies were linked in luxurious promenade beneath the red oaks and shivering poplars and straight-trunked hickories. Hickory Town had been the homely name whereby Lancaster was first known to white men, ninety years ago. The arboreal foliage had not yet turned, though the dry kiss of sap-ebb was upon it, and a few early fallen leaves scraped beneath the couple’s advancing boots—his buckled, hers laced. They talked merrily of Jasper Slaymaker’s prank, his and John Reynolds’, pulling up in their gig at public auction and shouting out a bid and racing away, not knowing they had been recognized. The auctioneer in all solemnity knocked down their taunt as the winning bid and declared them the owners of a hotel and obsolete ferryboat line in Columbia, to the tune of six thousand seven hundred dollars—to Buchanan a healthy year’s wages, to Ann a laughing matter.

  Dust dulled their boot-tips as the board sidewalks yielded to a path of worn earth that ran along the iron fence of the burial ground. Simple round-topped markers, of slate and a soft soap-white dolomite, stood erect within, the oldest of them bearing names already weathering into oblivion. The proximate quiet of the cemetery soothed our strollers; in their intervals of conversational silence could be heard the chirring of cicadas, laying the summer to rest, and the calls of birds quickening their activity as the day’s heat gently withdrew. A prospect of uninterrupted shade appeared, beneath the arches of elm boughs silently striving for light and air. Ann folded her silken parasol with a snap.

  As if released by the closing of the catch, Buchanan resumed his complaint, in a voice tense with self-pleading: “Your father thinks I bend too much. Disliking my maiden speech in the Assembly as too proximate to the Democratic creed, he liked no better my Fourth of July attack upon the last administration for its French-inspired demagoguery, its wanton destruction of the national bank and, with it, all restraints on credit. Ever since partaking of radicalism at Princeton, Madison has had a passion for the godless doctrines of French rationality; he took us into a disastrous war as little better than Napoleon’s cat’s-paw. Monroe, though a blander cup of tea, has been poured from the same Paris pot; his wife and daughter Eliza Hay have turned Washington into a veritable Versailles of backbiting and empty etiquette. This continent was meant to be an escape from Europe, not a provincial imitation of it. Like all the sound men of Lancaster, I am a Federalist to the bone, in the conservative and balanced style of the deathless Washington. Property rights, but not rule by the rich. Personal rights, but not radical mobocracy and incessant revolution. Washington’s noble example and the beautifully wrought balances of the Constitution indicate the same middle path between impractical extremes, and if for following this path—sometimes broad, and sometimes painfully narrow—I must be the object of calumny and cheap ridicule from all sides, from men of iron as well as men of straw, so be it,” he went on, a sideways glance at his companion asking acknowledgment of his sly allusion to the Colemans. “Thank God in His Providence,” Buchanan concluded, “that with my second term in the Assembly I am forever finished with public office; my wife will never be exposed, dearest Ann, to the humiliations and manifold thanklessness of politics.”

  “Are you indeed finished with public office? I sense in you a quest for the widest audience, a will more subtle than my father’s but no less relentless.”

  “Rest assured: the domain of local law, and the domestic hearth ruled by you, will form sphere enough for me and my moderate abilities. There is a rapacity,” he went on, relaxed and thoughtful with her to a degree she could not but observe with gratification, “and a growing coarseness to public life whose tenor I detest. As these colonies grow westward, and the coastal cities become richer, and more various in their immigrants, the common man in his natural greed and low appetites becomes the index of measure; the gentility of the founders is running thin. Little Maddy was the last of the original creative spirits, and Monroe will be the last President in knee breeches. The present era of good feeling is but a lull before the storm, when the West must declare itself to be a child either of the North or of the South. Eleven slave states, eleven free, and Missouri. The Missouri question is a reef upon which the whole ship, so bravely patched and launched, may split in two; our American problem is, we have land and climate enough for a number of nations, and seek to be only one.”

  “Perhaps,” Ann offered, in keeping with the new freedom of intercourse his largeness of assertion invited, in a realm beyond the regions of petty quarrel and divergent loyalty, “my family but wait for more fervent signs of affection and trust from you. My father is more nakedly self-made than yourself, and my brother Edward is tormented by his curse of doubtful health.”

  “Once we are securely wed,” Buchanan affirmed, pressing the hand of hers resting upon his arm with his free hand, while maintaining with two gloved fingertips his grip upon a slender walking stick, its silver knob in the shape of a fox’s smiling head, “the flow of good will shall be less forced. A settled deed argues for its own acceptance; an established union dictates its terms for peace. Until our marriage, we are vulnerable to interference. Your family’s claim to loyalty inevitably distresses you; their call upon your affections dates back to your infancy, where my claims are but newly placed, and rest unsteadily upon matters of seemingly voluntary choice.”


  Seemingly because of his Presbyterian fatalism, that saw all glimmering moments caught in an inflexible web of divine predestination? The Colemans were of the Episcopal church, removed from Papism and Puritan gloom both. “And when shall we arrive at this blessed established state?” Ann asked, her own voice tense and rising. “We are not young; you were all of twenty-eight this April, and next month I will be twenty-three. The girl-friends of my childhood are already all wed. The strictest propriety does not ask that we wait longer than a season or two more.”

  “The season cannot be this fall,” he stated, suddenly firm, with that impenetrable bluntness lawyers can muster. “This Columbia Bridge Company tangle, added to other concerns of my practice, will take all but a few of my hours; the financial distress Monroe and his Yankee Richelieu, Quincy Adams, have allowed to fall upon the nation has made work for lawyers if no one else.”

  “Oh”—an exclamation of disappointment escaped her lips. “Must I spend another winter as a spinster?” She felt her heart sink at the prospect of gray wet weeks and months still closeted with her parents, while her five brothers and four sisters, the living remainder of fourteen births, haunted the house, coming and going, George with death already in his jaundiced and skeletal face, Edward arrogant and sardonic in his smoldering fury of unhealth, Thomas more playful in his authority over the sister just beneath him in the chain of births, all with their prating wives, women as complacent as dough, while her silly sister Sarah, the fourteenth child, wide-eyed and giddy at the onset of womanhood, professed to be in love with what she fancied to call God. All of these kin, it seemed to Ann, implied, in their tactful avoidances as well as in open teasing and quarrel, disapproval of her marital choice, and through their coughs and courtesies and heavy family odor they sifted upon her head a drizzle of foreboding, an unspoken opinion that this tall smooth speaker of many politic words was not what he gaudily seemed, in his russet tailcoat and impeccably tied cravat, but was instead treacherous, a finagler, a twister in pursuit of her fortune and the Coleman connection, and less than a man. He’s not a man. He was some other kind of creature, a half-man, a chimera bred of these changing modern times, a pretender, so that her betrothal had a doomed flavor, a taste of mistakenness that tightened her throat and at idle moments of the day threatened to pinch tears from her eyes, sharpened her words with ill temper, and bade her imagine pity and concern in the faces of those in the house who loved her, including the servants and the children of her older siblings. Her imagination was steeped for long idle hours in the hectic substances of books—romances and rhymed effusions quickly printed in Philadelphia and Baltimore from English texts hurried like contraband to these artless shores—and imaginings flared within her in strange heated waves, so that after an afternoon dreaming another’s dream in the upstairs parlor she distrusted her thoughts and even the reports of her senses, which without actual distortion came to her overlaid by a cold dim quality, like moonlight, of illusion. Even now, in this outdoor moment, underneath the many green trembling leaves and beside the iron fence cast in a pattern of circles and spears, the man beside her, leaning down in expectance of her response to his blunt demand for delay, appeared to loom with an illusionary thinness, like a large occluding emblem of painted tin, of less thickness than King Street’s signboards and the tombstones of slate in the burying ground. They represented people, these stone silhouettes, once as alive as she, Ann thought, and many younger than she—her sister Harriet had been younger—and now dead in their coffins, rotting into bits like those starved lambs whose stiff matted bodies crows tear at in the tall pasture-grass, cawing. A line occurred to her from a poem of Lord Byron’s of a fascinating morbidity, from a slender edition of The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems of 1816 into whose burgundy-red covers the acid sweat of her fingers during the summer past had worn ovals of a paler red, I had a dream, which was not all a dream, and then another, The bright sun was extinguished. Ann wanted to scream. Buchanan’s static image filled the field of her vision, leaning toward her respectfully, tenderly, regretfully, in the wake of his forked offer of allegiance and absence—his tidy curvaceous nimble lips, his ponderous possessive face, his touchingly mismatched eyes, his rising crest of oak-colored hair. Claws clamped her heart; beaks tore at it. Happy were those, came to her amid the waves of heat, of unreality, who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch. She felt trapped within the coffin of a book. This man was a single stiff page. She feared the book was about to slam shut on her, though for him it would go on and on, through foreign lands and ever higher offices, a saga of endurance. Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea—how terrible, poets should not be allowed to frighten young women like that, perhaps in England, among the gentry, where life was all a game, but not here, here in these forested States, where life was simple and hard and serious, on land just lately seized from the savage redmen and soaked with their blood, as the turning leaves each year demonstrated. Still Buchanan hung there, speechless, waiting for a sign of her love, her loyalty though he must be much away from Lancaster on legal business. Perhaps the hot waves within her were magnifying time, subdividing each moment of this hazed warm late afternoon, late in summer, late in the day, with its narrow bird-chirps and minutely veined elm leaves overhead.

  The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,

  And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

  Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

  The upstairs front parlor, where Ann found the peace to be alone with her books, the clatter of King Street noticeable only when two drunken men began to shout together, the air fragrant of cold ashes and furniture wax and stale potpourri and sun-warmed plush, had fallen away, the very walls with their wallpaper of red stripes and blue-and-gold medallions had fallen away dizzyingly, when she read these last words, their terror collected in the mysterious She with its Godlike capital letter. A world without clouds, without winds—but of course, the world within the coffin would lack everything.

  Buchanan, politely troubled by her silence, sensing her disturbance if not her premonition, presumed to touch again the back of her hand, her four pink-nailed fingers where they rested on the cloth of his coatsleeve, and at this touch she took on flesh again, she took on life, her heart moving her blood through the supple conduits of her tall young body, maintaining in her slender skull the polychrome light of consciousness. Her universe shrank to these soft, familiar environs, and her condition to that of a woman on the verge of married life, soon to have a house of her own, with waxed furniture, and respectful servants, and crackling fires in the fireplaces, and windows to keep clean with vinegar and water as Mother directed her maids to do, a cup of vinegar to every bucket of water. It was Byron’s dreadful vision now that seemed illusory, a dream indeed. Talking and walking at a slower pace, as if together recovering from a slight case of ague, Buchanan and Ann made their sauntering way north on South Queen Street to Centre Square, as candles were beginning to be lit in the dusky rear rooms of the staid houses of brick and limestone, then right a half-block to the Coleman residence, where Ginger, a manumitted black slave said to have had an Onondaga grandmother, served them Cantonese tea, sailed to them through three oceans, with a side glass of peach brandy, brewed by North Carolina Moravians, for the gentleman.

  • • •

  I also remember, not exactly from the Ford years but from Nixon’s last Presidential April [Retrospect eds.: CK but Easter ’74 April 14th by my perpetual calendar], stamped as sharply on my memory as a tin weathervane, the silhouette of the Perfect Wife, Genevieve Mueller, as she stood, in a smart spring outfit consisting of a boxy hound’s-tooth-checked jacket and pleated white wool skirt, on the street in front of her house in Wayward under the giant surviving elm there on the corner. She was poised to cross over to her own front door, we had made no plans to meet, I just happened to have run in the car to the town’s three-store (gas station, grocery cum minimal hardware, and drugstore also stocking newspapers, magazines, pa
perbacks, plastic toys, and tennis balls) downtown for the Sunday paper and circled back toward my house by way of her house, an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim, and set back from the road by a breadth of front lawn and some struggling azaleas, a modest symmetrical house made majestic for me by the extravagant extent of my longing and covetousness. Many the night, swinging out of my most direct path home after dropping off a babysitter, I had thought of Genevieve lying in there asleep in the arms of that methodical Midwestern deconstructionist and nearly wept with envy at the imagined bliss concealed by their darkened upstairs windows. Since those nights of barren yearning—my arc of automotive divagation described in snow and spring rain, under summer’s thick canopy of leafiness and then the recklessly spilled salt of stars glimpsed through nets of disencumbered twigs—she and I had suddenly, recently managed, under cover of the bustle of an academic community, to make contact, to confess our mutual discontents, to make love, to fall in love, to exchange feverish pledges whose exact meaning and circumstantial redemption remained cloudy in my mind. This cloudiness was to be rapidly dispersed. I braked to a stop, exhilarated not only by the sight of my beloved’s perfect figure, so trim and compact and smartly stamped, in its black-and-white checks, on the tender surface of the sacred morning, beneath the persistent elm’s great vase-shape mistily brimming with pale-chartreuse buds, but by the resinous eager tang of spring in the air, inviting me to be, late-thirtysomething though I was, eternally young. I was full of the sap of recent sexual conquest. Life felt sweet. Genevieve was wearing high heels, in two sharply contrasting tones, and all around her Nature, too, was standing on tiptoe. With one of her unsmiling stares—her eyes were the deep brown of black coffee, in a face of luminous unblemished pallor, with a slight bony arch to her long-nostrilled nose—she came around to the driver’s side of my car, my [see this page] piratical, debonairly unsafe, gallantly rusted Corvair. My top was down. [I would write, “She stepped off the curb and came around to the, etc.” except that the informal town of Wayward, like the Lancaster of my imagining, was short on curbs and sidewalks, and had none here, where the elm tree’s roots would in any case have posed a problem for the pavers.]