Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

by John Updike

  [It appeared to. In 1828 Buchanan, running as a Jackson Democrat, won his fifth term in Congress, and Jackson swept Adams aside in the Presidential election. In the spring of 1830, Buchanan, his Amalgamation party split by patronage disputes and threatened by the rising tide of anti-Masonry, while the Family party boasted control of the Governorship, both Senate seats, and, with Ingham Secretary of the Treasury, a post in Jackson’s Cabinet, announced his retirement from politics—which he had entered, remember, ten years before only as a distraction from [his] great grief, and because [he] saw that through a political following [he] could secure the friends [he] then needed. But did he mean it? With the dissolution of the entire Cabinet—at Van Buren’s suggestion, as a way to end the painful Peggy Eaton affair—there was talk of a Cabinet post for Buchanan, and even of him as Vice-President for Jackson’s second term, now that Calhoun, like Spiro Agnew on the eve of the Ford era, had resigned this office. But what forthcame from Andrew Jackson was a poisoned sweet: Buchanan was invited to become Minister to Russia, a distinct letdown, according to Klein, since this assignment was a sort of genteel exile for those political figures who could neither be ignored or trusted.]

  Between the two acts of The Belle of Amherst, I seem to remember, Genevieve fainted: returning from the lobby where we had chugged down two three-dollar plastic cups of so-called champagne, she murmured to me, “Darling, I’m going to throw up.” As I recoiled from her, she leaned all the more heavily upon me, so heavily that her body tilted like a motorcycle going around a curve and I had to hold her with both arms to keep her from falling beneath the trampling feet of the intermission crowd, anxious to resume its seats and see Julie Harris emote some more. I managed to drag her—she had become remarkably dense and inert, though petite; when we made love she felt as weightless as an acrobat or one of those newly idolized child gymnasts from behind the Iron Curtain—toward the ladies’ room, against the exiting surge of perfumed, “freshened” women there. The painted eyes of these women flared with horror as I barged in with my burden, but then, like a swarm of ants adjusting itself to the sudden fall of a breadcrumb in its midst, they took over. Genevieve was laid upon a rose-colored couch in their facility’s silken anteroom; I discreetly retreated to the doorway, where I could observe, over the shoulders of her multiplying caretakers, that the Perfect Wife looked magnificent—she had become her own effigy in glossy, colorless wax. Her precise, decisively marked features had been transposed to a plane of perfect peace. She was wearing a high-necked brocaded gray dress in the Chinese style, and she later claimed that it was the dress, and the claustrophobia-inducing qualities of Emily Dickinson’s world, that made her faint. But in fact a medical exam, a week later, revealed that she was harboring a duodenal ulcer which had, under the accumulating stress of leaving Brent and waiting for me to disentangle myself from Norma, begun to bleed. No more champagne for her—Maalox and skimmed milk, rather. I felt guilty, of course. But at the moment I was struck by the grandeur of her sudden unconsciousness, so much purer than her restless, grabby sleep. Smelling salts were produced. In memory I lean forward, the more deeply to inhale their bitter ethereal scent amid the compressed perfumes of the other women, there in that silken foyer faintly redolent of female urine and fair bodies overheated by the excitements of the theatre. I am proud, I remember, proud of Genevieve, proud to be her escort. Frighteningly, I seem, bending forward, to dip beneath the anesthesia of daily events into the divine and dreadful gravity of life—this lovely woman laid low, and both of us far from home, matter in the wrong place, here in New York, if that’s where we were.

  Speaking of theatre, Wayward had a Drama Society that put on plays in the fall and spring. Let me, patient Retrospect editors, set the scene. Time: Spring in New England, with cleansing winds, and nodding jonquils and asphalt roads still whitened by winter’s salt. Place: The Student Center, our newest building, erected in what retrospectively seemed the boom times of Lyndon Johnson, a five-story structure with a colonial-brick outside and a Bauhaus-cement inside. The ground floor was a kind of mall, with the campus bookstore, some shops offering such rudiments of attire and furniture as hadn’t been brought from home, a combination grocery and drugstore, and a pizza parlor with six round metal tables that ventured out onto the cement paving in imitation of a European sidewalk café. On the second floor, reachable by several broad, neo-fascist flights of outdoor steps as well as by interior stairways and elevators, was the college dining hall, offering three square cafeteria meals a day, and on the third floor—the hot center of student nightlife—a combination lounge and amusement gallery, a central array of already exhausted and seam-split sofas and chairs surrounded, at a distance in the barren open space, by recreational resources—a darkened gallery of chirping video games, a coffee-and-snack shop that stayed open until midnight, a row of sleepless junk-food-vending machines, and a room holding abused Ping-Pong and billiard tables, both perennially short of balls. Our girls gathered here, not all six hundred at once but many, some with male dates but not many: even on Saturday nights the lounge was what my father’s jocosely male-chauvinist generation would have called a hen party—a gynous concentration, in torn jeans, sloganned T-shirts, and grubby salt-and-slush-soaked sneakers, emitting a high-pitched babble and a subliminal scent that bombarded my pheromone receptors with as much radiation as if I were a Ukrainian peasant on the day Chernobyl let loose.

  I can see, dear NNEAAH, how this last sentence above might misread in a scholarly journal, and if it offends your taste, or threatens your parsimonious subvention from the Granite State’s pinched educational budget, of course strike it out; but I am trying at your behest to remember the Ford era, and the senses are Mnemosyne’s handmaidens. The aroma of a hundred young females lying sprawled and jabbering, munching and straw-sucking and with loud excessive animation presenting their cases, their agendas, their hopes and disappointments to one another like so many amateur actresses trying out for the starring role—this scent is an avenue to truth, historical truth as it has become, with the passage of a decade and a half. A nobler teacher, it may be, would have sensed only their minds; his thoughts would have flown to what lay between their ears rather than between their legs and erected fantasies about their term papers and future professions. But it was not clear, in the Ford era, that Woman’s proper destiny was to toil on Wall Street or fly a helicopter into Iraq—there was still in the air, left over from the lotus-eating Sixties, a belief that being, not doing, was the point of it all and that psychosexual fulfillment, in a practical form as vague as possible, was the aim of education.

  At any rate, am I my reptile brain’s keeper? I confess: I had no special reason to be passing through the Student Center; I was cruising it. My bachelor habits had come to include working late in my office in Harrison Hall—named after neither the quickly deceased William Henry nor his equally forgettable grandson Benjamin but after Georgiana Harrison, Wayward Junior College’s militantly unwed founder and first President, who brought her father’s mill-money, earned by the sweat of sallow maidens manning mechanical looms in twelve-hour stretches, across the river and sank it into the neo-Georgian apparatus of a liberating two-year education. Bleary from my attempts to breathe life into the tortuous career of James Buchanan, between nine and ten I would leave Harrison Hall to its ticking radiators or dripping air-conditioners, depending on the season, and walk toward the faculty parking lot on the far side of the campus. The bucolic randomness of our campus paths presented no unequivocal route; it was as direct as any other to walk through the Student Center, inhaling the aura and bringing a pause to the gabble of the students. They were, as young animals and as cloistered women, immensely sensitive; their pooled sensibilities rippled in the slightest breeze. To be fair to myself, there was something reassuring in passing in out of the damp dark through this cheery, shrill American scene—the video games chirrupping, the Ping-Pong and billiard balls clicking—on my way to my mobile cave of a car and thence to my modest rooms across the ri
ver, there to field a harrowing and hard-to-terminate phone call from either Genevieve or Norma, both sopranos (a mezzo and a coloratura, remember?—see this page–this page) singing, subtextually, the same aria: Perchè devo dormire sola? Why wasn’t I with, both voices asked without asking, her or her? The Student Center was a kind of last port, gaudily commercial and communal, on the edge of my choppy personal sea.

  The ground-floor mall was darkened and locked after nine. I climbed the wide Mussolini-style steps toward a bank of glowing glass doors where the silhouettes of hyperactive girls flickered in a frieze of shadowplay, and entered the young-hearted hubbub. Often I stopped at the third-floor snack shop for a tuna-salad sandwich or honey-and-raisin roll to tide me through the night in Adams. One night, inside the steamy door to this mini-eatery, next to a darkened chamber wherein slumped rows of frizzy-haired students were hooting at the Milwaukee imbroglios of Laverne and Shirley, I bumped into Jennifer Arthrop. Not literally, luckily, for she was balancing a frail cardboard tray on which a scalding paper cup of coffee loomed above a jumbo-size chocolate-chip cookie. In the months, or was it years, since I had eased her from my digs and the vicinity of my bed, I had seen her in class and in the halls of our intimate institution, but encountering her at this nocturnal hour, when the juices of human contact flow thickest, set off a spark; I could see the shock in her near-sighted eyes and feel it, like the kick of an electric resuscitator, in my heart. Again luckily, she had eaten more than one chocolate-chip cookie since our parting, and her doughy overweight somewhat neutralized my nostalgic pang of appetite.

  But I had underestimated the complexity of our encounter. “Professor Clayton,” she mouthed, getting her social bearings, “I’d like you to meet my mother.” Indeed there was, behind her, her cardboard tray holding a dainty can of apple juice and a healthful tangerine, an older version of herself. The two women’s heads were at the same height, but Mrs. Arthrop’s curls were artfully tinged a metallic bronze, to hide filaments of silver no doubt, and had a firmer, more settled look on her scalp. Her toothy smile, springing forward even before we were introduced, seemed too ready until I remembered, She runs a gift shop. “My mother’s come up from Connecticut to see me in Lysistrata,” Jennifer explained, with a touch of nasal petulance. “We’ve just come from dress rehearsal. She’s staying upstairs.”

  The two top floors of the Student Center, I neglected to explain, were a campus hotel, with rooms for visiting parents, speakers, overseers, and salesmen of newly revised textbooks boasting a simplified and corrected canon.

  “Jennifer has told me all about the course she took from you last year, Professor Clayton,” Jennifer’s mother gushed at me. “She loved it, the way you bring the Presidents to life.”

  “Well, Presidents are people, too,” I snapped, my intense little vision of a bean-sprouts-on-rye sandwich and a cottage-shaped half-pint carton of milk in a take-out bag slowly fragmenting under the impact of this encounter.

  Jennifer’s mother laughed as if I had said something rather naughty. Her teeth were remarkably large, and square, without being at all buck or false-looking; when her lips closed over them, it was an act of containment that gave her mouth a composed presence I found exciting. Her lips were full, and at the end of a long day away from home had lost lipstick on all but their edges, like a drawing of lips in red ink. Her round yet not fat face had the gloss and glow of youth, with an albedo higher than Jennifer’s, who for all her youthful amplitude and thrustingness of figure had something unripened about her, something sullen and light-absorptive, whereas her mother’s mature face gleamed with decades of moisturizer and anti-wrinkle cream. I calculated that Mrs. Arthrop, whose twenty-year-old daughter might have been born when she was herself twenty, need not be much older than I, who had celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday (falling in October—see this page) by passing from a twilight supper catered by Norma and attended by the children in my old house, the cake arriving from the kitchen wearing a crown of candle-flame that three breaths by me, suddenly asthmatic, could not extinguish, so that dismay was kindled on the faces of Andy, Buzzy, and Daphne, who knew this meant bad luck and cancelled everybody’s wishes—by passing, I say, with singed eyebrows from this ex-domestic feast of melting ice cream to a nocturnal celebration at Genevieve’s, sneaking in the back door and accepting toilet-paper-wrapped presents (a Bic pen, a Magic Rub eraser) from the two little girls before my perfect almost-wife tucked them in and came back downstairs in a filmy black nightie to serve up, in deference to her ulcer, two champagne glasses filled with white milk—a rather stunning visual effect—and two ambrosial macaroons, a feast for dieting gods, consumed by the light of a single tall candle whose phallic hint was soon taken by living flesh. My mistress lay on her modernist, goosedown-filled sofa and let the folds of black film drift up her white waist so I could eat my fill of her musky slit; a few macaroon crumbs from the corners of my mouth were suspended like stars in her tingling pubic cloudlet. My prick kept tapping my belly like a doorknocker, it was so hard.