by John Updike
Next Anger rush’d; his eyes, on fire,
In lightnings own’d his secret stings;
In one rude clash he struck the lyre,
And swept with hurried hand the strings.
But no, the dream was true. Ann, retiring to her room at the back of the house, which overlooked a damp little enclosed garden still green with moss and ivy and sinister plants whose verdancy seemed to ape vegetation in wax, grew worse. Her spirits descended as the afternoon waned, as if draining away with the thin slant sunlight that as the hands of the clock crept between four and five winked its last, a lurid orange, in Philadelphia’s thousands of westward-gazing panes. Her younger sister’s gentle yet acute chastisements persisted in her mind, shifting form as she worried at them, remembered phrases coming loose and taking on an independent, wormy life. More than the imputation of selfishness she minded the implication that she had been stupid, throwing away her best chance at marriage because of some frivolous and malicious Lancaster gossip; darker than the shadow of laughable miscalculation loomed that of her dignity’s permanent defacement, a sense of being besmirched by forces that had obscurely enlisted her impetuous and prideful will. She was a Coleman, and the Colemans knew their place, and their place was high; by allowing Buchanan to touch her life with his own wistful, silvery, cautious, yet persistent and cunningly effective pursuit of her hand she had been sunk into a shame of chaos, of mad disquietude, as a poem she could not erase from her mind expressed it, with images of volcanos and cannibalism, mutual hideousness, a turbulent muddy reality just beneath the glitter and comfort of afternoon tea, a lump of death, a chaos of hard clay. She had had a presence, a rôle, and now even her sister, just yesterday a child, felt free to judge her, to pity her even, in this sickening paralysis that had come upon her. Only God, the God above and beyond the quaint God Whom Sarah and their parents worshipped in that ruin of an old colonial church, could lift her situation up from this muck of disgrace: yet when Ann’s mind and soliloquizing never-ceasing inner voice reached out to grasp this one all-powerful possible Redeemer her grip closed upon nothing, nothing but the silence of absence wrought by her old mocking spirit before Buchanan brought indecision and weakness into her life.
Alone in her room, she felt trapped in her own skull, a closed oval chamber maddeningly echoing with images she could not control or organize: her father’s wide face, with its long thin mouth like the lips of a turtle and his powdered hair drawn back into a pigtail; her mother’s like a wrinkled apple pinched heavy-lidded in the frilled netting of her lace bonnet; Buchanan’s strange askance pale visage bent above her like a tavern board swinging out of reach, touched by winds but not by her hands or the caress of her voice. His gentle consideration, his innocent sociability, his gathering prestige—all were now lost to her, and when she asked why, instead of receiving an answer she met herself—willful and proud and careless, as Sarah had said—out walking to deliver an unforgivable letter, in a landscape treeless, manless, lifeless. Her life was over, like a throw of the dice that makes us surrender them. Ann’s brain circled on its oval track and found no way out, no escape that would do her honor. At the window overlooking the dank green garden, an empty dark garden of frozen forms steeped in Philadelphia’s habitual miasma, the daylight in its glassy rectangles turned slowly opaque, sunset orange becoming a sluggish brown tint; from two stories below, travelling up from the ground-floor windows, kitchen sounds quickened and clucked. She must have dozed, for she was watching herself, from a distance so close she admired the rosy texture of her cheek, as a child at Colebrookdale, running barefoot on the moist lawn after fireflies. She caught one, and as it lay with bent black wing, never to fly again, the golden pulsing of its abdomen lit up the creases of her palm.
Her sisters, first Sarah, then Margaret, looked in at her. The clicks of the latch sounded like the blows of a forge; the waves of heat within her had intensified their flutter; she was in a sweat, between her breasts and under her arms; the muslin of her dress was soaked; there was a horizon of nausea, and below the waist she had a strange numbness, a feeling of floating off. Their concerned sisterly words, the tea a servant brought, the stout maid, called Abigail, who helped her change into a dry chemise, were all less real than the race within her head, where the same few thoughts went round and round and created a tightening fury at her parents and her scorned suitor for trapping her within their narrow expectations, their fixed and selfish conceptions of the right life. She could not breathe. A rigidity among her ribs forced pain out her back, between her shoulder blades. When Margaret looked in the second time, a mere bluish shadow in the room’s muddy light, Ann could only speak in brief utterances, between efforts of gathering breath, of scooping it up like water in a small flat spoon.
Margaret had grown broad with middle age and in a voice almost as positive as a man’s announced that she and Mr. Hemphill had decided to send for their doctor, Dr. Chapman.
The thought of his attendance pleased Ann. Since childhood she liked it, at home, when the doctor visited, with his black bag, and invaded her bedroom, where no other strange man was welcome. When Margaret had left the room, Ann closed her eyes and was again at Colebrookdale, skimming through an endless milky June evening with Edward and Thomas and Harriet. Harriet died. She was only eleven. The doctor’s visits did her no good. Death cannot be so bad, it happens to everyone. In her white dress, glimmering like the fireflies, her dead sister seems so free. Ann cannot believe Buchanan lets her suffer like this—that he condemns her to lie here locked into her angry decision, her frail skull held in a blacksmith’s vise.
A servant girl brings a candle in. The flame in its curved glass shade appears faint, a guttering hollow at the center of the circles Ann’s blurred vision spins. Perhaps she will go blind. People do. Just this afternoon, before meeting Judge Kittera, she had seen a blind man begging on Chestnut Street. The room’s windows have gone dark, above the now invisible garden, its frozen green forms lurking under a whitening moss of frost. One of the evil plants has a trick of curling its leaves as tight as little cigars in the cold. The God Who says so often No can say No to sight as well. He gave us the miracle of sight, somehow contained in the pierced jelly of the eyeball, and He can take it away. There are many blind, as there are many poor. In Philadelphia she has been shocked by the beggars; you see none in Lancaster, just men who go from farm to farm for odd work, and sleep in the barns, wild animals of a human sort, avoiding your eye when you look at them.
Dr. Chapman has come: a commotion at the front door, a murmur of talk in the hall, a company of footsteps on the stairs. His shadow moves into the light of the candle placed on the high bedside table, with its concentric rings as of water disturbed, and is suddenly vivid, taking up space in front of her eyes—a large, carefully moving man with ginger-red hair pulled straight back from his broad forehead and tied at the back with a dirty ivory-colored ribbon. He stands above her with a comforting bulk, his embroidered waistcoat and carelessly tied jabot glimmering between long unbuttoned lapels of a rusty-scarlet cloth. He rests the backs of his knuckles upon her forehead, takes her damp wrist in his cool thick fingers, and stares a long thoughtful while into the pierced jelly of her eyes. “Fretting has made you feverish,” he pronounces.
She tells him her breathing is difficult and describes her sensations of simultaneous numbness and heat. The panicked race, herself against herself, in her head, and her sense of some sourceless refusal and insult compressing her spirit unbearably. He seats himself beside her bed on a brocaded side chair that has been brought. Dr. Chapman is trying to be a father to her, she perceives through the ribbed blur of candlelight—as if a father’s heaviness is not already part of her complaint. “Your frame is resisting some recent event,” he tells her solemnly. “You must relax into God’s hands. Repose within the inevitable is the sine qua non of the healthy soul.”
“How do we know the inevitable, unless we strive to change it and fail?”
“Strive we all must, Miss
Coleman; but we cannot overnight change our natures, or the nature of God’s arrangements in this fallen world of clay. Mrs. Hemphill tells me you have lately met disappointment in a romantic attachment.”
“It was I who pronounced the disappointment; the gentleman, I now think, has been misjudged.”
Dr. Chapman likes hearing this; his thick hands lift from the knees of his old-fashioned breeches in a reflex of salutation, and then settle again, as his deep, unhurried voice states, “Then so inform him, when circumstances permit. Or do not, as Providence wills. You are young, and the young heart exaggerates—indeed, it must exaggerate, to propel the body into the great task before it. The task, I mean, of procreation, and all it entails of social establishment. Our flights of poesy and yearning work toward a practical end. We wish to make a place in the world, and to please our Father on high, Who commands His creatures to be fruitful and multiply. The fair sex especially has been burdened with the wish to be fruitful. But these matters of carnal affection, my many years of clinical observation suggest, work themselves out by internal imperative, and are not so much at the mercy of exterior chance as we suppose. I know the gentleman in question only by repute, and the repute is mostly to the good; but even a small qualm, on your part, at this initiatory stage, needs respecting, since the long years of marriage tend to magnify each of the couple to the other, like mites made horrific under the microscope. Qualms will come, but better later than sooner.”
Reflecting, Ann supposes, upon a sour experience of his own, Dr. Chapman softly snorts, and raises his hands up on his fingertips upon the platform of his thick thighs, so that the elbows of his arms point outward. The features of his face, unevenly blanched by the candlelight, lift as if to say “Ah!,” and then collapse back into briskness. “My dear young lady, I beg you, respect your own impulses and intuitions, and do not condemn your body to a war with your protesting spirit. To bring the two into more harmonious association, I will prescribe an anodyne. Have you had experience of laudanum?”
The exotic word in the doctor’s sonorous pronunciation looms like an angel above their two consulting heads. She answers so softly he has to lean forward, his elbows pointing outward still farther. “Once or twice, some years ago, for a toothache, and more recently for the monthly distress, with its accompanying sharp temper.”
“The elixir holds miraculous powers of ease,” Dr. Chapman avows, glancing around at the cluster of concerned family forming one large shadow near the door. “It solidifies the bowels, erases pain, and dissolves the cankers of the soul.” His voice has become more consciously beautiful and rounded. He produces from an unfolding bag of black leather a corked vial shaped like a small man of thin glass, with rounded shoulders and a pear-shaped head capped by the cork. The yellow tint within the liquor, as of suspended dust like the spinning golden flecks in the water of a muddy-bottomed spring, casts an amber glow on the physician’s face as he holds the vial up to the candle. “The cure of Paracelsus,” he intones. “Named by him after laudere, to give praise. But not compounded of gold dust and melted pearls as the rascal claimed. Tincture of opium, opium in alcohol. The dose must be exact. The drink holds peace but also a demon.” The physician turns his head—his wiry ginger hair shows a halo of dancing filaments—and addresses the clump of shadows behind him. “Mrs. Hemphill, does this house contain a dropper, and a teaspoon?”
Scurryingly, these are fetched, and all in awed silence watch as the physician counts out the drops one by one into the spoon. “Eighteen, nineteen …” The shadows of his brows and nose restlessly change shape on his face; his concentrated, lidded irises are pricked by the reflected candle-flame; each hesitant sphericle from the dropper holds a spark for its trembling instant. “… twenty-four, twenty-five. And if the dose does not induce relaxation within the half-hour, twenty-five again. But no more upon that until morning,” Dr. Chapman warns, almost savagely, uplifting that great haloed head, its upper lip split by shadow like a lion’s. “Nervous stress untouched by such a dose is not amenable to chemistry. An excess—” Lest he alarm the patient, he halts himself, and in truth there is no need to complete the thought. In this era suicide by laudanum is a commonplace of hushed parlor gossip, even in innocent inland Lancaster, though its written report was generally suppressed by the superstitious journals of the time, to whom the taking of life was God’s abundantly exercised prerogative. Ann from her infatuated reading of the living British poets would have been acquainted, no doubt, with the heretical charms of being snatched away in beauty’s bloom, of emptying some dull opiate to the drains and sinking Lethe-wards.
The potent tawny liquid, forming by cohesion its tremulous mound in the spoon’s small bowl, glints as a housemaid, freckled plump Abigail, lifts it toward Ann’s parted lips. The doctor has surrendered the operation as too intimate for a man still as robust as he, upon a young patient so replete with attractions, though distraught. The coolness of the pewter couches the insistent push of the liquid. The servant tips up the spoon’s handle, and Ann swallows. Alcohol’s sweetish sting masks a foreign bitterness, an Asian hint of something forced unripe, of green poppy-heads slashed. The attentive doctor has observed the dose, and now stands up with a peculiar loud exhalation of finality, a habit of his at wretched bedsides where he has done all of the little that medicine of this era can do.
Civil courtesies follow, and promises to return on the morrow, and murmured details of a light domestic watch to be set about the patient. The crowd of family ebbs away. The little man-shaped vial remains on the high bedside table in the corner of Ann’s vision. Sarah, too, remains in the room at first. She says, “I do hope, dear sister, no words of mine have added to your afflictions. I spoke more than I knew, and carelessly, not gauging the true depth of your misery.”
“You heard the good Dr. Chapman,” Ann responds, with a show of spirit. “Our impulses and intuitions must be yielded to, yours as well as mine.”
“Not where my interest is so much less than yours, and so little of the consequences are mine. If I urged Mr. Buchanan back upon you, forgive me such interference. He would not want your health endangered, even if it mean his own doom.”
Ann answers wearily, tired of reasoning on this topic. “In truth, I wonder if my unhappy mood doesn’t stem merely from the exertions of travel, worsening this spell of ague, and from the contrast of the Hemphills’ so very settled state with my own. I feel all the respectable Colemans condemning me. I chose Mr. Buchanan in spite of them, and then I have cut him off just as they were growing resigned. And he—he would have so enjoyed being one of us.”
“We all want only your happiness, be it single or wedded.”
“And what of your happiness, this very evening? You mustn’t miss the theatre; the curtain can’t be more than an hour off. Do leave me, Sally.”
“Oh, we couldn’t dare go without you.”
“Please, do; I would very much prefer it. Margaret and Mr. Hemphill have been long planning this outing, and it would humiliate me to take back to Lancaster the tale of how my poor nerves prevented you from enjoying your first night at the theatre. Perhaps the Hemphills can find a swain among their acquaintances, to sit beside you in my seat. Oh, do go, Sally, so I can rest. I feel the cure of Paracelsus working in me. An undeserved sense of well-being suffuses my limbs, and a bliss as if a knot inside me has been cut. Go enjoy Mr. Jefferson, and all those passions. As your elder sister, I command you.”
“Then, if you command me, I will ask the Hemphills to prepare to go out,” Sarah agrees, her eyes sparkling as if already bathed in the light in the theatre lamps; yet, training herself to the patience of womanhood, she sits some minutes more, as Ann’s eyes close, and her breathing softly rasps on the deep-seated tides of self-forgetfulness.
Lethe-wards the drug takes Ann, but not safely through the night. She awakes with the candle burnt down by a finger’s length in its curvaceous glass shade, and the shield-back side chair with the brocaded seat, where both Sarah and Dr. Chapman had sat, empt
y. The exposed brocaded pattern centers a blue rose, of a strange midnight blue, as of a cabbage that frost has blackened. Every sensory impression wears a haloed intensity. From the front of the downstairs, at the other extreme of the house, comes a murmur scarcely more articulate than the incessant prattle of a brook, yet with the intermittences and eager resumptions of human speech. Her sister and brother-in-law have gone out to the theatre, presumably, with Sarah. Those of their children still at home must be, like Ann, in bed. So this conversation must be the servants making themselves at home in the master’s absence, or some guests to whom Ann was not introduced, or a conversation reverberating from an adjacent house on the street. The thought that Mr. Buchanan has come to plead his case and carry her off she suppresses, though her pulse races at the possibility, as too good to be true.
