Memories of the Ford Administration (16 page)

At this outbreak Sarah rose from the windowseat and embraced her sister, lightly, with an inflection almost motherly, mixed with a younger sister’s shyness. “The break can be repaired,” she urged. “The day after tomorrow, we return, and the whole matter may have acquired a different mood. Mr. Buchanan will be true; he can see that you acted to please Papa more than yourself. When Papa has cooled, he will relent, and give you back your happiness. He has no just reason to block your engagement; many a father in Lancaster would rejoice to see his daughter betrothed to such a worthy man.”

“Why hasn’t he followed me here, if he is so true?”

Sarah knew which man was meant, amid this forest of male pronouns. “
You
have rejected
him
,” she pointed out. “It has become a test of prides, yours against his. Yours is a woman’s pride, and it should yield.”

“Who taught you such doctrine? Why should a woman always be the one to yield?”

“Yielding is part of our natures, since our calling is not to fight wars but to nurture families. Mama often yields to Papa, and loses nothing by it. Indeed, she gains, in coin of his gratitude, and in spiritual capital.”

“Mr. Buchanan”—Ann pronounced the name firmly, as if trying its syllables on again—“is not Papa, nor am I Mama, though we are both ironmasters’ daughters.”

Her sister’s cheek dimpled. “Your iron is more finely wrought, so you have sought a more refined mate, and now you have spurned him for not being heavy enough.”

Ann’s fingertips kneaded her high rounded forehead, with its single stray ringlet. “Sally, all your admonitions are giving me a most terrible
mal de tête
. The fever I caught in the coach keeps returning in fits. Last night, I slept hardly at all, unable to stop my mind from churning. It is not so easy to undo things as you suggest. Papa still forgives you everything, as one does a child; me he will forgive nothing, nothing that embarrasses him in the public eye, as this engagement and its outcome has. Really, I must hide my head; I think I will let you and the Hemphills enjoy the theatricals tonight without my gloomy company.”

“Oh, Annie—it’s Mr. Jefferson, with his funny English accent! And Collins’ ‘Passions,’ set to music! ‘Exulting, trembling, raging, panting,’ ” she quoted, for comic effect.

Ann granted her a smile, but wanly. These heated waves of disquiet had commenced within her again, waves that seemed to signal a derangement, a seasickness of the soul. “I
will
go rest now, dear Sally. When Margaret returns, please tell her I am asleep, and pray that it be true.”

The same untrustworthy source that retailed with a unique anecdotal richness the chance meeting with Grace Hubley a few weeks before raises the possibility that Buchanan did pursue Ann.
One
account of the tragedy that seems to have the quality of authenticity claims that before her death Buchanan received a note from his fiancee to come to Philadelphia to see her
.

And so the story runs that he prepared post-haste to make the
journey. Ordering his horse and gig in readiness, Buchanan soon was on his way down the Philadelphia and Lancaster pike
.

One by one the historic taverns that dotted the historic King’s highway was
[
sic
]
passed, and few were the stops made that eventful morning, which Buchanan believed was speeding him on his way to a reconciliation with Ann Coleman
.

By dinner hour the “Half-Way House” at Downingtown was reached and the journey halted a brief period for the meal. Dinner was over and Buchanan stood slightly apart from the other patrons of the inn staring out into the streets where the feeble street lamps were beginning to glow
.

Strange day, to pass from morning to dinner hour so quickly, with only the halfway point reached. Surely by dinner hour the lone rider had reached his destination, the Hemphill house in Philadelphia, and, after the appropriate ceremonies at the door, in which a lover’s urgency brushed aside an elder sister’s protective hesitancy and a brother-in-law’s guarded reservations, Buchanan found the form that was the object of his passions prostrate upon a couch, irresistibly attired in the filmy Empire style, with a full-length shawl to ward off a chill from the velvet-curtained window.

“I have come,” he said simply. He looked magnificent, in his voluminous travelling cloak, with his tall figure and his large fair head tilted slightly forward at an attentive angle, to correct the almost non-existent flaw in his vision.

“I wrote my imploring note,” she explained, in a faint yet distinct voice, “because my heart demanded justice for itself. I was wrong, wrong to be jealous of your entirely decorous call upon the Jenkinses. I have been wrong to let my parents’ and brothers’ sullen disfavor color my own emotional complexion. My affections have one rightful owner, James Buchanan, and he is you.”

“And I have been wrong,” Buchanan stated with thrilling warmth and timbre, as his impressive and graceful figure swooped to perch on a corner of the couch, covered in embossed wool moreen, where the curve of her muslin-veiled hip permitted some few inches of perching room, “to allow my pursuit of legal eminence to remove me from your side, and to dilute the constant attendance to which our announced attachment absolutely entitled you. If you were, dear angel, to favor me by renewing that attachment—the object of fervent prayers that have risen unceasingly from my breast since your harsh first note and your abrupt departure from Lancaster—I would abandon every ambition but that of serving your happiness.”

“My happiness resides,” Ann stated, lifting up her torso’s gentle weight on the prop of a pink and shapely elbow, “nowhere but in pleasing you, and in winning the right to your attendance when the press of your duties permits.”

They embraced, in an ardent compaction of cloth and hair and underlying flesh, of December cold borne in the folds of his costume and of bodily fever lingering in her delicate limbs, and repledged mutual fidelity. Henceforth he devoted himself to a discreet local practice—wills, bankruptcy, and land disputes—that rarely transported him beyond the rectilinear circuits of central Lancaster, and whose moderate remunerations were handsomely supplemented by portions of the Coleman fortune as it fell, under the melancholy necessities of death, to the heirs; genially Buchanan devoted himself to catering to the whims and passions of his increasingly plump and complacent wife, as their connubial blessings mounted to the number of seven—three boys and four girls, all well favored of feature and all miraculously spared, in the uncertain medical
climate of the time, any fatal malady. The lacuna in local Federalist-party circles that Buchanan’s withdrawal from active politics occasioned was quickly repaired; Edward Coleman, Ann’s inimical brother, was significantly placated by his election to the national Congress in 1820 and a rapid advancement to the ranks of Senator and, crowningly, to the post of Grand Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant from Illinois, became the fifteenth President of the United States in the election of 1856. With his fabled gift of close-reasoned oratory and bold yet tactful manner of dealing man to man, a son of the West cherished by the South and esteemed by the North, he recouped the contentious term of the weak-willed Pierce; Douglas managed to stifle the influence of abolitionist and fire-eater alike while superintending the passing of slavery, via the bloodless and infallible operations of popular suffrage, from the territories and the border states, along with the gradual abatement of the vainly agitated fugitive-slave question. Slavery, isolated in an arc of southernmost states while the burgeoning industrial and commercial prosperity of the Midwestern and Middle Atlantic regions pulled the nation forward, was recognized as an anomaly bound to fade away. Not only was it inhumane, it was economically disadvantageous; wage labor was cheaper and more scientific. In November of 1860, Douglas, who had given up alcohol and fatty red meats for a purifying diet of seafood and undercooked vegetables, had little trouble defeating both the Deep South’s candidate, Senator Jefferson Davis, and the Republican aspirant, a little-known one-term Representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. By the time of Douglas’s Second Inaugural in 1861, both the United States and Mr.
and Mrs. James Buchanan—forty years wed—had all but forgotten, as if dreamed in a delirium, these moments when, in the music of the passions,

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.