by John Updike
Mary Jenkins came herself to the door, her round face framed in a lace cap with ruchings. “Dear Mr. Buchanan, come in! Mr. Jenkins is gone for the night with his ailing mother at Windsor Forge, but my sister Grace is here to console me, and now you! Please do come meet her.”
He hesitated, the icy touch of the naked mermaid still tingling in his fingertips, even through his gloves’ thin kid, and the farmhouses and stubbled fields and darkling woods numbly appraised through his carriage window still somehow smeared on his vision, proof of a burgeoning national vastness despite the financial panic, which had flooded the market with so much unwanted property that even sheriffs’ fees could not be realized. “I—I had meant merely to acquaint your good husband with the progress of the Columbia Bridge Company suit, before proceeding to recuperate from nearly a week’s absence in Philadelphia.”
“Recuperate here—we were just sitting in the parlor, too lazy to move. We’ll warm up the teapot again. Or would a cordial better repay your long journey? Grace,” she called from the foyer, into the radiant parlor, “who has come calling but the very man in Lancaster I wanted you most to meet!”
Buchanan’s timorous advance, tall beaver hat in hand, into the sitting room discovered, in a certain mist of historicity, an enchantress sitting on a rose-colored sofa with a serpentine back.
Or perhaps, to give recorded history its due, she had been upstairs, and, in the words of the most vivid, if anonymous and unreliable, account of this incident, Straining her ears to distinguish the voices that came from a downstairs room, Miss Hubley was pleasantly surprised to know that Mr. Buchanan was the caller at the home, and her sense of curiosity, no less than a well-defined personal interest in the caller, manifested itself in a very concrete way.
Hurriedly completing the most tempting toilet that suggested itself to her emotional temperament, Grace Hubley left her bedroom and entered history. Buchanan and his associate [a phantom only this telling evokes; surely not Molton Rogers, off courting Eliza Jacobs, who was to die in childbirth in three brief years, nor the fabulously fat John Passmore, who by 1819 was in fact the Mayor of Lancaster, the little city’s first] were suddenly surprised to hear a gentle footstep on the stair, a swishing of well-set silks and then to be confronted with the charming young lady as she presented herself to the admiring visitor.
Young: Grace Hubley was born on April 27, 1787, making her thirty-two, four days shy of four years older than James Buchanan, and two years older than her sister Mary. So the siren breast exuded the ripe charm of superior experience. In the words of the account, a newspaper article neatly mounted but unascribed in the archives of the Buchanan Foundation at Wheatland, Her culture was further heightened by a period of life spent with relatives in Philadelphia, who introduced her into the social whirl of the city and brought her into close intimate contact with the noted hostesses and gentlemen of that day. That day, this day, be they as they may, a man’s heart beats quicker at the sight of a strange and comely woman, bathed in a light that seems her own. She was fairer than her sister, and the Hubley roundness of face was not yet worn into creased complacence by the satisfactions and cares of the wedded state. Clustered candles, their spotty web of light extended by tin sconces inset with oval mirrors, filled the dainty high-ceilinged room with a fragrance that felt to come from afar, from the sea, a seaweedy sweetness not merely sweet but august, an august incense conveying marine mystery. Buchanan had never viewed the ocean, merely read of its crossing in voyagers’ tales and Shakespeare’s Tempest and seen, in Philadelphia, the two great rivers, the Schuylkill and the yet mightier Delaware, swelling as they neared their rendezvous with the mother of waters. Excursions to the Chesapeake Bay were not uncommon among the prosperous youth of Lancaster, but he was so new to their set, and so industrious in the maintenance of his achieved status, that he had not yet ventured to the shore. The healing mountain waters of Bedford Springs cooled his summer enough, away from the fragrant debris of the tides, the lavish reach of sands, the colossal heedlessness of the endless waves, whose infinity mocks our consciousness.
“My sister, Miss Grace Hubley,” Mary Jenkins was saying through his daze of enchantment. A small fire, the size of a cat, purred in the fireplace. The grouped and reflected candles gave off additional warmth enough to allow Miss Hubley to display, it appeared to the visitor, a generous amount of skin, among the curves of a loosely arranged and resplendent shawl. “And this is Mr. James Buchanan, Junior—a former state Assemblyman and a lawyer whose counsel on many matters is treasured by Mr. Jenkins.”
The fresh face in the room appeared radiant, in the shifting web of radiance. Miss Hubley’s hair, the same pale brown as Buchanan’s, was done up in a taut nest of braids behind, with ringlets falling free about her face, from a glossy central parting striking in its straight perfection. Her long eyebrows had an inquisitive arch, and her lightly tinted mouth expressed a cushioned pleasure in itself and its flirtatious workings a world of temperament removed from Ann’s angular, impatient lips. When Miss Hubley spoke, it was with an enchanting Southern mulling of the words. “Oh,” she said, “one does not have to be in the Jenkins household many hours to hear tell of Mr. Buchanan. He is the man to be watched, in Lancaster.”
“I am a diligent lad from the Tuscaroras, Miss Hubley, and claim to be no more than that. In the glitter of this gracious city, I cast a dull but faithful gleam.” Yet he seated himself—in an armless oval-seated side chair with tapered curved legs whose neo-Grecian fluting was echoed in the rails of the back, which had a lyre-shaped splat—near the end of the damask-covered pink Chippendale sofa where Grace Hubley shimmeringly perched. An iridescent silk shawl of Persian pattern, such Oriental fabrics being fashionable in Europe ever since Napoleon’s Egyptian foray, permitted glimpses in the warm candlelight of her plump shoulders’ ivory skin and of the powdered embonpoint the décolletage of her high-waisted gown of well-set silks revealed. He bent low, placing his beaver hat, with its own fashionable iridescence, between his boots, his Philadelphia boots, of a thinner black leather than his Lancaster boots, their tops cut diagonally in the hussar style.
“You disclaim, to elicit flattery,” his new companion gaily accused him. “You have lost your mountain manners, if ever you had them.”
“My dear mother is a woman of some graces, who loved the old poets as well as the Bible, and my father a man of sufficient means to send me to college, though he missed my strong back on his farm. He began on the road to prosperity as the sack-handler in a frontier trading post; in his youth in County Donegal, his own father had deserted him, and when the dust of our Revolution settled he quit his dependency on his dead mother’s brother, and sailed.” Lest this self-description which he impulsively confided seem boastful, he added, “But the simple Christian virtues remain my standard of success, and when my second term in the Assembly ended three years ago last June, I with great pleasure surrendered all political ambition.”
Mary Jenkins loyally protested, “Yet the Judge Franklin case has kept you in the public eye, and there is talk,” she explained to her sister, giving their guest the dignity of the third person, “of the Federalists putting up Mr. Buchanan for the national Congress in next year’s election. And just the other day he and Mr. Jenkins and James Hopkins were appointed to form a committee to advise our Congressman on the question of slavery in Missouri.”
Buchanan hastened to disclaim, “Lancaster is a small city, Miss Hubley, and a few dogs must bark on many street corners.”
“I assume you will advise to vote against extending slavery; I think it wicked, wicked, the way those planters want to spread their devilish institution over all of God’s terrain!”
Such fire of opinion, the tongue and heart outracing reason, attracted Buchanan, and alarmed him. “We do so advise, Miss Hubley, though in terms less fervently couched than your own. Myself, since the Constitution undeniably sanctions slavery, I see no recourse but accommodation with it pro tempore. A geographical compromise, such as rumor su
ggests Senator Clay will soon propose, to maintain the balance of power within the Senate, would, I am convinced, allay the sectional competition that has heavily contributed to the present panic of selling and suing. For unless the spirit of compromise and mediation prevail, this young nation may divide in three, New England pulling one way and the South the other, and the states of middling disposition shall be left as ports without a nation to supply their commerce. Disunited, our fair States may become each as trivial as Bavarian princedoms!”
Grace said, theatrically addressing her sister, “Oh, I do adore men, the sensible way they put one thing against another. Myself, Mr. Buchanan, I cannot calmly think on the fate of those poor enslaved darkies, the manner in which not only the men in the fields are abused but the colored ladies also—I cannot, it is a weakness of my nature, I cannot contemplate such wrongs without my heart rising up and yearning to smite those monstrous slavedrivers into the Hades that will be their everlasting abode!”
Buchanan tut-tutted, “Come now, the peculiar institution presents more sides than that. You speak as a soldier’s daughter, Miss Hubley, but here in peaceable Pennsylvania we take a less absolute view. The slavedrivers, for one, are themselves driven, by circumstances they did not create. Chattel slavery, though I, too, deplore its abuses, is as old as warfare, and to be preferred to massacre. In some societies, such as that of ancient Greece, the contract between master and slave allowed the latter considerable advantages, and our Southern brethren maintain that without the institution’s paternal guidance the negro would perish of his natural sloth and inability. At present, our friends in the South see their share of the national fortune dwindling; much of the urgency would be removed from the territorial question, it is my belief, if new territories—to the south of the South, so to speak—were to be mercifully removed”—he made a nimble snatching gesture, startling both members of his little audience—“from the crumbling dominions of the moribund Spanish crown. Cuba, Texas, Chihuahua, California—all begging to be plucked.”
He settled back, pleasantly conscious of the breast-fluttering impression his masculine aggressiveness had made. Now he directed his attention, with a characteristic twist of his head, specifically toward Mrs. Jenkins, who had remained standing, held upright by the strands of hostessly duty. “But I mustn’t tarry, delightful though tarrying be,” he said. “Inform Mr. Jenkins, if you will, that the Columbia Bridge Company matter took some hopeful turns under my prodding, and if he wishes to be apprised of their nature, and of the distance I estimate we have left to travel, he will find me in my chambers tomorrow all day.”
“I will indeed inform him,” the excellent wife agreed. “But please, Mr. Buchanan, you shame me by not letting me offer you a beverage, and then a spot of supper. My sister and I were to sit down to a simple meal—salt-pork roast, fried potatoes, dried succotash, and peach-and-raisin pie. It would brighten our dull fare if you could join us, and would keep you out of the taverns for an evening.”
“People exaggerate my tavern attendance, even in my unattached days,” Buchanan said, in mock rebuke, and with a jerk of his head rested his vision on Miss Hubley’s alabaster upper chest, bare of any locket or sign of affection pledged. His attachment to Ann nagged at him awkwardly; he should be speeding from this house and presenting at the Colemans’ door live evidence of his safe return from Philadelphia.
“Oh, do stay with us,” Grace Hubley chimed. “It would be a kindness even after you are gone, for sisters continually need something to gossip about.”
Between folded wings of peacock-shimmery Persian silk, the woman’s powdered skin glowed in his imperfect vision, which needed for focus constant small adjustments of his head. “I would be honored to serve as helpless fodder for your sororal interchange,” he pronounced, “but there can be no question of imposing my presence for the length of a meal. I will, Mrs. Jenkins,” he announced, relaxing into conviviality, “upon your kind urging have tea to keep Miss Hubley company, and a thimbleful of port to keep company with the tea.”
When Mrs. Jenkins, to arrange these new provisions, left the room, its glittering glow seemed to intensify; the purring blaze in the fireplace—its mantel in the form of a Grecian temple carved with fluted pillars and classic entablature of which the frieze was decorated with acanthus garlands in bas-relief—added its flickers and flares to the eddying web of candlelight. Cocking her head in unconscious imitation of Buchanan’s own, Miss Hubley said prettily, since he had referred to his attached state, “I have heard the most wonderful things concerning Miss Coleman. She is as original as she is beautiful, and her family of an unchallenged prominence.”
“The Colemans are seldom challenged, it is true,” he said, permitting himself the manner if not the substance of irony in such a serious connection. “Even at the age of seventy-one, the Judge keeps a good grip on his interests, and his grown sons greatly extend his influence.”
“Mary tells me all Lancaster thinks you are a knight errant to brave the Coleman castle and carry away the languishing princess.” When this apparition laughed, the shadowed space between her breasts changed shape. Her voice formed cushions in the air, into which Buchanan sank gratefully after days of nasal legal prating in an oppressive metropolis.
“She would not languish long, were this particular knight to take a fatal lance.”
Grace Hubley thoughtfully pursed her plump, self-pleasing lips. “It makes a woman unsteady, perhaps, to have too many attractions; it prevents in her mind the resigned contentment of a concluded bargain.” Here she spoke, less mischievously than usual, from experience, absorbed and foreshadowed: we are told Grace Hubley was a young woman of three negative romances, not including the part she played in the Buchanan-Coleman episode. Thrice engaged to be married, misfortune and a fickleness of temperament ordained her ultimately to spinsterhood.
Buchanan, too, may have suffered from a surfeit of attractiveness. A decade later, he excited the Washington journalist Anne Royall to gush, in the third volume of her Black Book (1828–29), No description that the most talented writer could give, can convey an idea of Mr. Buchanan; he is quite a young man (and a batchelor, ladies) with a stout handsome person; his face is large and fair, his eyes, a soft blue, one of which he often shuts, and has a habit of turning his head to one side. He had been his mother’s first son and, with the death of his older sister, Mary, in the year he was born, her eldest child. Five sisters followed, four of them surviving to form playmates and an audience. His capacity for basking in female approval was essentially bottomless, and Ann Coleman’s good opinion had to it a certain bottom, reinforced by her family. Grace Hubley, in turn, we are told, possessed a beauty and vivaciousness of disposition that made her the pet adorable of her acquaintance. Her feathery banter was to his vanity, we might conceive, as a deep barrel of sifted flour is to a man’s forearm. He stirred her, he took her tinge. The shadows the Colemans cast in his head were dispersed by the light of this social conversation very adroitly guided by the keen objective mind of Miss Hubley. Golden minutes fled by on winged feet. As the embrace of the November evening tightened around them, and the windows of the tall sitting room with its fine provincial furniture gave back only tremulous amber reflections of the lights burning within, and Mary Jenkins absented herself to supervise details of the impending meal, possibly the conversation between these two strangers, the pet adorable and the favorite son, whose ages flanked the turning point of thirty, deepened in intimacy and dared probe the innermost source of consolation and anxiety harbored by Americans of the early nineteenth century, the strenuous maintenance of which so remarkably consumed and yet also supplied their energy—the Christian faith. Struck by her repeated righteous rejection of black slavery in all its forms, indeed scandalized by her airy, quick-tongued condemnation of an institution so extensively and venerably bound up in the nation’s laws of property and means of production, he ventured, “Miss Hubley, I envy you the clarity of your views. God’s design, it is evident, presents no riddles
to your vision.”
“What riddles there are, Mr. Buchanan, I leave to the Lord to solve.” By this hour her own sipping had moved from tea to a brandy cordial in a tulip-shaped glass, and a certain rosy warmth and confident languor broadened her gestures, beneath the loosening exotic length of Persian shawl.
He inclined his stout handsome person forward from the delicate lyre-back chair with fluted legs, so that his vision won for its field slightly more of the radiant expanse of Miss Hubley’s bosom. “May I ask—” He hesitated. “I ask in all respectfulness, with full solemnity—have you known, then, an inner experience of election, that supports this lovely certainty of yours?”
She adjusted her shawl, to achieve an inch more concealment, then relaxed into self-exposition, saying, “I would not express it in so political a phrase—but for as long as I can remember, I have sensibly felt the closeness of the Lord. He looks over me—He approves of me—He rebukes me—He enjoys me.”
“Ah, I do envy you. My own mother could not speak with a more serene assurance.”
“But is not this true of everyone, Mr. Buchanan? At least, of the white and educated race?”
“You ask, I cannot answer,” admitted the future statesman, lowering his gaze in an approach to shame. “My own sad case may be singular. Parson and evangelist and deacon all alike speak of some necessary factual encounter, some near-sensory experience of Jesus, which I cannot in unhappy honesty wring from hours of prayer, or find even in my memories of childhood. The forest surrounding Stony Batter, the curses of the drovers and the misery of their animals, even the bland and randomly changing temper of the skies above seemed then to bespeak an inscrutable indifference, the cool tenor of which no intensity of yearning on my part could alter. The Presbyterian faith teaches of foreordained election and its opposite; can it be, I must ask myself, that my deadness of heart in this regard is sign of some eternal negation—an incurable absence of the quality, grace, which your very name proclaims?”
