Memories of the Ford Administration (15 page)

Their valises are loaded into the coach. Perhaps it was still a hulking, springless stage wagon, with canvas top and open sides and crude bench seats; but I would rather hand my ladies up into a new-fangled so-called Concord coach, its egg-like shape inspired by the “tallyho” coaches depicted in British Regency prints, with high, wide-tired wheels to negotiate stumps and boulders left in the roadway. To cushion some of the shocks the “rocker-bottom” body was hung on “thorough-braces”—multi-ply leather straps that caused the coach body to nod and sway back and forth
like the violent pitching of a vessel
, one traveller recorded,
with a strong wind ahead
. Seasickness was inevitable, even for passengers less frail and morose than Ann Coleman, and even if by rare good fortune none of her fellow passengers, as the mileposts lumbered by, required the comfort of tobacco within the closed carriage, or smelled cheesily of the need of a bath, or belched the fumes of half-digested ale. The sixty-nine miles from Lancaster to Philadelphia constituted an ordeal, albeit in a Concord coach made prettily of white oak, upholstered in silk, and painted on its inside panels with mythological subjects, beguiling the jostling captives of the journey with the pink apparitions, amid blue billows and white columns, of Eros and Psyche, Venus and Mars, Artemis and Actaeon. Ann arrived in Philadelphia sicker than when she had mounted the carriage in Lancaster’s Centre Square. Her nose ran steadily; her temples ached; the
back of her throat felt raw; her brow felt hot to her older sister’s hand. Ann was shivering, in an era when any chill might presage a disease that would run a fatal course, and she went immediately to bed.

And yet, four days afterwards, on the 8th of December, she was promenading on the streets of Philadelphia and encountered a friend of the Coleman family,
Judge Thomas Kittera, who was to write in his diary the next day,
At noon yesterday I met this young lady on the street, in the vigour of health, and but a few hours after
[,]
her friends were mourning her death. She had been engaged to be married, and some unpleasant misunderstanding occurring, the match was broken off. This circumstance was preying on her mind. In the afternoon she was laboring under a fit of hysterics; in the evening she was so little indisposed that her sister visited the theatre. After night she was attacked with strong hysterical convulsions, which induced the family to send for physicians, who thought this would soon go off, as it did; but her pulse gradually weakened until midnight, when she died. Dr. Chapman, who spoke with Dr. Physick, says it is the first instance he ever knew of hysteria producing death. To affectionate parents sixty miles off what dreadful intelligence—to a younger sister whose evening was spent in mirth and folly, what a lesson of wisdom does it teach. Beloved and admired by all who knew her, in the prime of life, with all the advantages of education, beauty and wealth, in a moment she has been cut off
.

This is the document, this diary entry, which George Ticknor Curtis transcribed into his notes from a lost original, and omitted, with his tedious discretion, to quote in his published biography. Yet it is history, Judge Kittera’s paragraph. It survived the holocaust of documents that still rages—documents shredded, pulped, compacted, abandoned to the cleaning
crew, bulldozed deep in green plastic bags, mercilessly churned in the incessant cosmic forgetting. Judge Kittera’s paragraph, preserved among Curtis’s notes at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, throws a watery light, as if one of those water bowls which were used in the era before ground glass as lenses, to magnify candlelight and vision both, has been interposed between the weak sun of that December noon and these silhouetted young female figures posing on the blue-and-brown cobbles of the nation’s most populous city. Were their arms full of new-bought items with which to dazzle the Lancaster provincials? Were they accompanied by servants, from the Hemphill household?—for that matter, would Judge Robert Coleman [how many judges there seem to be in this tale, a veritable choir of them!], the richest man in Lancaster, have sent his precious daughters off without an escort?—an obese old Lutheran duenna, say, with a pink wart at the corner of her upper lip, under black mustache-wisps, and dropsical ankles and the start of a goiter, and a sighing sort of philosophy that masks nihilism in pious resignation.
Life is full of disappointments
, she tells her wards wearily, and
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof
, feeding the patient pabulum of the old to the appetitive young. If she was along on this trip, she left no trace on the record; household servants were as abundant and as beneath notice in that age as appliances are in this: there may come an energy-starved post-petroleum age that cannot imagine our constant sliding in and out of automobiles, our unthinking daily flicking of a dozen powerful switches. Yet from the record, the perishable record, can be recovered, amid so much eternal shadow, the exact entertainments that betranced Sarah on the fatal night: she saw the celebrated Joseph Jefferson, grandfather of a
namesake to become more celebrated yet, and a Mr. and Mrs. Bartley performing in a play,
Grecian Daughter;
also Collins’ “Ode on the Passions,” and the comic opera
Adopted Child
. The historical record can also be made to yield the full name of the unlikely Dr. Physick mentioned above: Philip Syng Physick (1768–1837), in 1819 professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a famously deft and mercifully quick performer of hemorrhoidectomies, tonsillectomies, and lithotomies.

[“Ode on the Passions”! I should supply, out of my own spent passions, the hysteria—Ann’s uniquely, in Dr. Chapman’s experience, fatal hysteria. Her father as a heavy on-rolling barrel of righteous molasses has already been evoked. To this add crackling clouds of claustrophobia that does not know itself as feminist. She is squeezed on all sides by patriarchal prohibitions and directives, and the oppressive broad envisioned faces of her mother (a complacent mixture of iron and dough, an obtuse Old face) and her haughty brother Edward, these family faces lowering upon her as if she is a baby in a crib and pressing the air out of her chest, plus the mental picture of Buchanan’s inscrutable askance face and prim white cravat and russet frock coat suggesting, as at the moment by the cemetery fence this past September (see
this page
), a thin painted cutout of tin leaning above her, a feelingless tilted wall she cannot get through, she can
not:
an appalled vision, on a transcendental plane where her consciousness intersects with ours of her, of herself, trapped here in Philadelphia away from the comforting matrix of ruddy dusty Lancaster, as discardable, as doomed to the cosmic forgetting, a minor historical figure, with but one little footnoted life to contribute to the avalanche of recorded events, one glimmering moment in the careless desperate
cascade of Mankind’s enormous annals—no, this is too much
my
terror, my hysteria—my h(i)st(o)ria, the deconstructionists might say, if they, too, and their anti-life con(tra)ceptions were not now becoming at last passé and universally de(r)rided.

[Into this void where history leaves off I must thrust
something
. Perhaps a little Byron, whose verses Ann has sipped like a fatal nectar—let us say the final, swelling stanza of his “Epistle to Augusta,” written in 1816 (as gaslights were being installed in the New Theatre) but not published until 1830, a year and a decade too late for Ann:

[Or perhaps:]

Returning to the Hemphill house, and finding that Margaret had gone out on a domestic errand, Ann made her way upstairs to the bedroom allotted to her for her stay; but, unable to compose her mind, she sought out her younger sister, Sarah, in the room adjoining. She knocked, and a voice welcomed her from within. Entering the room, which overlooked the front of the house as Ann’s overlooked the back, gave her the momentary illusion of escaping the dreary tumult captive within her skull; the sight of the seventeen-year-old, sitting pertly on the windowseat with her knees drawn
up, gazing down at the urban abundance of street traffic, of carriages and barrows, of gentlemen in tall silk hats and peddlers in wool caps pulled close to their heads with tied earflaps, recalled Ann to the fact there there was more, vastly more, to the world than her own romantic plight, with its constant inner thrumming of near-panic, as the ticking minutes sealed into permanency an insufferable, an impossible, an
insulting
loss.

Her sister’s fresh and guileless face, shining in the afterglow of some reverie, was like a crack of light at the bottom of the door of a closet in which she had been locked as punishment for a deed whose wickedness she could not understand.

“Dreaming of your prince, dear Sally?” The Ann who talked, who brightly teased and lent her animation to the little scenes of family life, was like a parallel self who carried on while the real Ann, the heartsick and affronted Ann, sank ever more drowningly into irrational despair. Her fever had retreated but left in its wake a dry cough and a stronger sense of no longer being quite herself.

“Studying what a great deal of curious people there are in the world!” her sister responded. “Perhaps the people in Lancaster are as curious, but one sees them every day.”

“Yes, whom did I meet right on Walnut Street but Judge Kittera? You remember him?—such a slow-speaking, pontifical Polonius. For the sake of our family connections, I endeavored to put a good face on the encounter.”

“Was that difficult?” Back in Lancaster, Sarah might not have asked so direct and pert a question, but here in strange environs, in the house of a sister enough older to be their mother, their status drew nearer to equality. Also, Ann in her dreary passion looked to Sarah for cheer, for rays from the
land of the living, and the maturing child, sensing this, was accordingly flattered and emboldened.

“No,” Ann conceded. She became didactic, feeling Sarah to have been stimulated by the great city to a hunger for those social graces whose absence causes so keen an embarrassment to the untutored but whose acquisition, facilitating that human intercourse whose usual fruit is disappointment, comforts hardly at all. “When you put on a manner, the heart to a degree follows. That is why women, Sally, must always be gay and courteous, even among themselves. It was a grateful relief, in truth, to discourse with one who knew nothing of my disgrace, and who saw me as I once was, with all possibilities still before me.”

Sarah rose to the invitation to protest. “Surely there was nothing to disgrace you in your action of breaking the engagement with Mr. Buchanan. No one in Lancaster would dare to think so.”

Ann sat of weariness upon her sister’s bed. “But everyone thinks it disgraceful that I encouraged the suit of a man so patently unworthy, so uncaring, so vicious. The Jenkinses especially must call me a fool. And I concur in their verdict. Against all the good advice of my parents and brothers I married my heart to a phantom, a pretender, and now my heart cannot quick enough break the contract.” A satisfying heat enveloped her eyes, and tears needed blinking back.

“Ann, surely you are unfair to Mr. Buchanan. It is your prerogative, but you are unfair. His fault, if fault it was, was excessively scrupulous attention to professional duty; if he has another fault, he is too kind to all sides, being as courteous to his barber and bootblack as to his social equals.”

“Being kind all around is no kindness to me, if I languish neglected while he charms the town.” Thinking this utterance
too stiff a lesson, for the soft clay before her, in proper female pridefulness, Ann explained, “It was not simply his dalliance with the elderly Miss Hubley; it was a thousand signs of veneered indifference, even as he professed eternal devotion to me. His last offense merely confirmed all the rest. As my father asserts, and as many gentlemen of substance privately agree, this man knows no devotion but to his own self-interest. His father notoriously rose by sharp practice and his father before him deserted his family back in County Donegal.”

“I have never had a lover,” Sarah said, blushing and gazing down again upon the traffic of Chestnut Street, her near-childish profile grave in the gray windowlight, “but I thought Mr. Buchanan as enamored of you as his cautious nature permitted. He is no pirate or poet; he lacks even our father’s fire; but there was a benevolence to him that would have worn well.”

“Why, you are pontifical as well, little Sally! All those sermons of Dr. Clarkson’s I thought you were dreaming through have gone to your brain, and to your tongue.” Sarah was pious, more tenderly than her parents’ conventional devotions would have demanded. She had been much affected by the recent demolition of the old stone St. James Church, with its rotting pews and royal mementos, and excited by the prospect of a new and more glorious edifice, to whose erection her father was the greatest contributor.

“You mustn’t mock my faithfulness,” the girl carefully replied, with a flash of independent poise that Ann even in her distraction had to admire. “Did you love the church as I do, you might be more steady in your affections, and less hasty in your treatment of Mr. Buchanan.”

“Stop saying his name! I
am
steady, so steady my spirits are
sunk beneath this break, though my head and all its advisers know it to be best.”

“Perhaps the heart knows better than the head.”

“Don’t torment me with that possibility—I am in torment enough!”