by John Updike
Heavy in every languid limb, her chemise damp from her unnatural sleep, Ann pushes herself from the warm bed and squats on the cold-lipped chamber pot, relieving her bladder in a stream whose pungence rises to her nostrils with the sharpness of horse stale. A sign of unhealth, so strong an odor. But perhaps it is the drugged enlargement of her senses that makes it strong. Her body in its febrility feels the chill of the room as an assault on her skin, against which her circulating blood cannot generate a defense. Involuntarily she shivers, so that her hands jump back and forth in the watery air. As her mind clears of its dreams—plausible dramas sinking rapidly into oblivion, leaving behind shreds that melt as her mind tries to grasp them: her father and mother present in the Jenkinses’ front parlor on South Duke Street, her father holding a teacup poised beneath his double chin, the saucer several buttons below, her mother on the sofa in her lace cap, Ann feeling her breast bursting with pent-up rage, the handle of a riding crop long and leathery in her hand, all discussing some issue (there were others present, Slaymakers and Jacobses) involving Mr. Buchanan, how a prankish bid of his at an auction had caused all the banks in Lancaster to fail, and a terrible vastation of financial panic to fall upon the entire town, while she was crying that it had not been his fault, he had simply misjudged, in the eagerness of his desire to be accepted by his peers and fellow Masons; and then they were outdoors, or rather she was outdoors alone, in a little close place of frozen ferns and ivy and mossy bricks, all rising around her like the walls of a well, to a spot of sky no bigger than the moon, a man’s cut-out shadow at the top, gazing silently down, and she tried to scream for help and the silence that emerged from her locked throat must have been what woke her so suddenly—as her mind clears, she sees the horror in her hopeless social humiliated situation. She remembers walking beside Buchanan so that they seemed a pretty couple limned in a fine print of Lancaster, formerly Hickory Town, and she cannot believe, yet must believe, that such a promenade will never occur again, and they will nevermore cut such a dual figure together. All sorts of plausible visions—herself as mistress of his house, a house finer than any of her vulgar, bullying father’s houses, with a more European accent to the furnishings, and volumes of French, Rousseau and Voltaire, in a glass-fronted bookcase, and willows on a wide lawn leading down a soft dusty road—have vanished, without a trace.
She must change. This damp chemise will be her death. Where are all the others? Philadelphia feels deserted. But two / Of an enormous city did survive, / And they were enemies. She remembers flannel nightgowns folded on a shelf in the cedar closet of this room. She pulls off her chemise and steps to the blue window, as naked in the fireless chamber as a Greek slave of marble, and looks down into the mossy garden; its forms are motionless, scribbled with shadows cast by moonlight, colorless. The room’s cold hugs her bare body; her teeth chatter and her slender arms twitch of their own. Why has she been abandoned? Shouldn’t some servant have lit a fire? Frost ferns have begun to sprout in the corners of the panes. She slips the flannel gown over her head, over her dark long hair, and chases herself back to bed, to its clammy sweated sheets of Irish linen, a dim shadow scrabbling at her bare feet. These toes, we have not seen them before, the pale ankles, straight and strait, fed by pale-blue veins. Her body is in its prime, a woman’s still firm as a girl’s, perfect in its anatomy though wracked in its nerves, which are the veins of her spirit.
Back in bed, shivering and giddy, she feels the languor of the anodyne come and go in her limbs, mingled with a growing depression and agitated sense of helplessness. Some impassable issue of pride, a pure image of herself now forever stained, has blocked her thoughts, bounced them back into her brain, the crackling ambit of her head, where split shadows begin to revolve again. What a peace it would make if she were to sleep forever! What a revenge upon the world that has cornered her in this narrow space: the crowds of contending vain wills that hem her in would as one grieve the sudden absence in their midst, an absence suddenly pure and irreproachable, beyond rebuke and change.
Repose in God’s hands, the good doctor had directed. Ann tries to imagine giant hands beneath her, gently cupped, the creases visible as if lit by a throbbing firefly. Yet if God’s hands were really there, would innocent children ever perish? Her sister Harriet, and her brother Thomas Bird at the age of two, and brothers Stephen and Robert dead as young men, all gone to their graves like small birds fallen stiff-winged in winter on gravel garden paths. All is as Lord Byron said, a mad disquietude. How did it go?—the wild birds shriek’d / And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, / And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes / Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d / And twined themselves among the multitude. Since Christ died crying out against God on the cross men have tried to believe in eternal light but ere this century began the French anarchs let the darkness in, and Adams and Washington and Tom Paine, too, in rebelling against a king ruling by divine right. Though they build a new St. James of money and stone to replace the old the darkness is here to stay, it is our element, our punishment for wanting to be free, like Adam and Eve at the bidding of the viper.
How can she sleep with her mind in such a dismal storm? She thinks of the blessèd surcease sealed into the little cloudy bottle, its nipped-in neck and impish cork of a hat. Sleep without it seems an impossible deed, like a cork staying under the water, like the sleep of a man to be hanged in the morning. Tomorrow morning and all its rattling chain of days dragging thereafter menace her mind with a kind of thunder. This pummelling in her head is spreading through her frame, a terrible pulsing, a sick fire vibrating in her veins. Her legs feel hot, and keep moving restlessly on their own, while the room’s growing cold assaults her face and sends her hands skittering back under the covers. Where are the servants? She can no longer hear the running brook of conversation from far downstairs. Sarah and the Hemphills—can they still be at the theatre? Is there no end of empty vain entertainment? She must be her own servant. Twenty-five drops: that much more Dr. Chapman had allowed. Triumphantly, like a traveller arriving at the end of her journey, Ann worries off the cork. But she is unable, on the high bedside stand, to find the doctor’s glass dropper, though the teaspoon is there, glinting, long in its handle, like the whip in her dream. With trembling, shivering hands she pours a small amount into the spoon’s shallow bowl. She tries to remember how full the spoon was at her first dose, and rather than administer too little she pours the laudanum, which has the viscidity of pear juice, until its glinting mound of liquid cohesion finds its limit at the spoon’s edge. She wills her hand not to shake. The thrashing in her head, a circular beating of crow’s wings of thought, continues. She greets again the taste of veiled bitterness, and sees the wry face she catches herself making, as if a mirror faces her from somewhere in the bedroom. She carefully replaces the spoon and lets her head sink back into the two pillows, stuffed with goosedown. Her body is hideous, she thinks, like a long sinuous animal with which she is engaged in a struggle, an octopus of veins dangling down from the deceptive dark jewels of the eyes, the high white forehead where God sets His kiss of divine likeness. We are Godlike in our brows, but the brows of cows are broader still. The Hindoos worship cows, she has read, and the British missionaries cannot make them stop, with all their Bibles.
Impatiently she waits for the languorous well-being, the quelling of the fire in her veins, the cutting of inner knots to arrive; it is slow. The problem of Buchanan refuses to subside, but keeps rising up like a painted figure on a spring, his head performing that little twisting motion to adjust his imperfect eye. She had him, he loved her, she loved him, she pushed him away. The world seems all very mechanical. You push a thing down, and something else pops up. Her thoughts become masculine, leading her down bypaths of reasoning like the strained shouted arguments of two lawyers arguing in court, on and on, to no purpose but increasing their fees. She must unite with her fiancé, is the decision, and she will begin tomorrow by setting into backwards motion her flight from Lanc
aster and the breach of her engagement. At the same time, she must have rest, or will be quite unable to perform, to organize her life on its new basis of bravery and loyalty to her husband-to-be. The back of her mouth has a film on it, a bubble of slime that tickles, and that her coughing does not loosen. Her skull feels thin as a blown egg. She lifts her head from its depression in the damp nest of down and gazes upon the homunculus of the bottle. He is her friend, her only attendant. His body of glass is cool, but the handle of the spoon is strangely warm. She is more proficient now in loosening the cork. She is generous with herself, as those who have loved her—her father, her mother, her suitors, her sisters—would want her to be. Miraculous powers of ease. When the dilatory Abigail at last enters the room, or Meg and Sally come back from the theatre babbling of gaslights, Ann does not want to be awakened. She wishes to be alone with the images her mind is making, intimate images like the flickering of a snake’s tongue in one of her sinuses. Dreams, it is sleep’s dreams we wish to reach, the deep free flowing of their images, on the far side of an oblivion we dread to cross and from which our nerves pull back like the horse whose strong stale Ann had scented.
Now the divine presence is manifesting itself; the giant hand is sensibly beneath her, even to the grain of its warm skin; everything is as it should be, bathed in a triumphant love that knows no interruption. The sun shines night and day, though our globe keeps turning its face into darkness. How marvellous, Ann reflects, that a fact so blazingly obvious—God’s tireless inexhaustible love—should be hidden from us in all but a few moments of our earthly lives. Thus, chinks in the walls of a cellar admit stark evidence of day. The expansion of the benigner feelings incident to opium, Thomas De Quincey is writing across the sea at about this time, is no febrile access, no fugitive paroxysm; it is a healthy restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation from pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just and good. Goodness and the lucid perception of goodness fill Ann like a magic liquid poured into a woman-shaped flask, and then like iron gone solid in its motionless mold of sand and clay.
[Retrospect editors: feel free to delete or improve this passage, assuming you have the space to print it. It gave me much trouble. Had my book ever been completed and published, it would have given me more. The present tense forced itself upon me, as a way of drawing closer to Ann—the anti-historical tense of perpetual motion, of resurrection. The De Quincey quote may be a mistake, but one’s instinct with these paper dolls is to pin them to the bulletin board with tacks of contemporaneous quotation. Dr. Chapman may owe too much to Shakespeare’s prating apothecaries, but I decided to ride with it, gleaming philters and all. I would rather have done without dialogue entirely—it makes her sound too reasonable, too unhysterical—yet there had to have been voices around her in her crisis. Would Ann in fact have been alone long enough to take the laudanum? In Judge Kittera’s paragraph there is a curious progression of time: in the evening … After night … until midnight, when she died. How many witnesses attended, as her pulse gradually weakened? People in history are more alone than we think—General Wolfe, for instance, died not in the midst of Benjamin West’s panorama but over by a little bush in a corner of the battlefield, attended by a mere two men. How sadly alone Marilyn Monroe was in her dazed last days, for all her celebrity and lovers in high places! I worried a lot about the room temperature. How cold might it have been, indoors in Philadelphia on December 8th? Not as cold as New Hampshire, but not Southern, either. Wood fires, at any rate, and not coal? The Franklin stove in widespread use at the time? But perhaps not in bedrooms, especially guest bedrooms? And anent the chamber pot, which had to have been there—would she squat down to it, like Molly Bloom, or would it have been more discreetly placed, in the elegant town house of One-Speech Hemphill, in a cabinet commode? In the DAR’s collection of period rooms in Washington, I have seen a chamber pot that moved in and out of a commode on little brass casters. As you can see, I preferred Ann simply to squat. The touch of cold on her skin brought her to life for me. I began to fall in love with her then. I felt the very closest to her in that glimpse of her blue-veined bare foot, arching to hop itself back into bed.
That foot had to have been there, that night—or did they all wear socks, or knitted footwarmers, or moccasins imitated from the redmen? On the matter of nightgowns, I discovered that the first historical mention of one is in connection with Anne Boleyn, who didn’t live to be old, either.‡ I mean, I can taste that foot—skinny shapely foot with its ankle, intricately functional in its tendons and capillaries and twenty-six bones (see Gray’s Anatomy: seven tarsal, five metatarsal, and three in each phalange, except for only two in the big toes, an odd modification that makes possible the à pointe position in classical ballet), the blind armies of cells all wanting to live and carry on in bonded league their functions for another fifty years. I love that blue-veined foot. Live, Ann! Rewrite history!!]
The melodramatic yet perversely vivid account quoted above [this page ff. and this page] goes on, with serene inaccuracy, having established Buchanan in a Downingtown inn, where the feeble street lamps were beginning to glow: It was not yet dark, and a funeral was passing, evidently for Lancaster. Buchanan looked at it idly. “Who is dead?” he asked. None of the idlers knew, but a man coming in from the street to refresh himself at the bar said that the procession had stopped further uptown, and that the undertaker had told him it was Ann Coleman, a Lancaster girl, who had died in Philadelphia while she was visiting friends.
When he heard it Buchanan groaned and grew white, but stood motionless staring out of the window into the gathering night that shut the dark procession in dusky gloom.
An especially confused memory from the Ford years—probably their second winter, to judge by the weather and a certain weariness that had settled over the situation—concerns a visit by my mother to my old mansard-roofed, shawl-bestrewn house in Wayward, where Norma and my children still held out, in my guilty mind’s eye an embattled and tattered band of defenders within a doomed fort. Somehow, the Queen of Disorder, in her style of ingenuous dishevelment, had set it up that my mother would spend some nights there but since she was my mother I owed it to all of them to be there, too. It all made sense, when she explained it to me, and made no sense when I explained it to Genevieve, who was horrified and indignant. Each woman’s reasoning seemed irresistible when I was within her gravitational field, and quickly evaporated when I free-floated—when I was, say, driving across the concrete bridge between Adams and Wayward, or pondering a discarded Oui in a Federal Street laundromat, amid the slosh of a hundred soiled underpants.
The inconvenient family occasion must have been, I can only think, my mother’s eightieth birthday. She had been born when Cleveland was President the second time. I had been born when she was all of forty-one and long resigned to a childless but not unfulfilling career as a small-town fourth-grade schoolteacher and faithful helpmeet to my father, who with his two relatively disreputable brothers owned and operated a feed-and-grain-and-hardware business in my tiny native town of Hayes, Vermont, north of Montpelier and south of Mount Elmore. She did the accounts and helped out behind the counter on Saturdays, though of course she couldn’t handle the sacks of horse feed. It was still half a horsedrawn world when I was born, and remained so until after 1945. In my little corner bedroom, with its scorched brown wallpaper and round black stovepipe (which, passing through on its way from the kitchen to the roof, provided my only heat), I would wake and fall asleep to the drowsy clipclop of the farmers’ wagons come down from the surrounding hills, where cows stood stiff-legged in rocky pastures steep enough to become ski slopes. A single gas station, with a variety of brands of gasoline offered in a rusty row of glass-headed pumps, served all the internal-combustion engines in town, and herds of sheep were sometimes driven up the main street, swamping wheeled traffic. People kept chickens and put up fruit preserves until the Fifties, w
hen I went off south to Middlebury College. By then, New Yorkers buying up old farmhouses for summer retreats and ski chalets began to control the landscape. Still, the city folks needed hardware, too—power mowers and chain saws and bushwhackers instead of scythes and hay rakes. If hay sales fell off, the pet food picked up. My father did all right to the end, and died the same year as John Kennedy, suddenly, though not as suddenly. His heart had been giving him warnings and carried him off in the middle of a barn dance; he and my mother had been members of the Hayes and Calais Hoedown Association since they had been young marrieds. The last words he heard on earth were “Do-si-do your partner.” A beautiful marriage, and precocious, timorous I its single, unhoped-for fruit. Looking back on myself from the perspective of mid-life rebellion, I saw an elderly sort of child, dutiful but allergic to animals and ragweed and fond of huddling indoors next to my hot stovepipe. My mother retired from teaching a few years before my father dropped dead, and kept on at the feed store a few years more, before my uncles, deep into drink and private debt, decided to sell out to a skimobile dealer from Burlington. When they and their wives retired with their loot to Florida she went with them, disappointing me considerably: I had assumed she was as much a part of Hayes as the welded cannonballs beside the Civil War monument, and would never leave my father to sleep alone through the snowbound winters beneath the two-toned (rough and polished granite) marker with its single CLAYTON and its two first names, Theodore and Elvira, the latter expectantly blank in its terminal digits.
