Memories of the Ford Administration (22 page)

Hannah Cochran, in the same letter in which she reported that Buchanan was being called
Murderer
, tells her husband,
After Mr. Buchanan was denied his requests, he secluded himself for a few days and then sallied forth as bold as ever. It is now thought that this affair will lessen his Consequence in Lancaster as he is the whole conversation of the town
. However, he soon left town, presumably finding refuge with his family in Mercersburg; in a letter of December 20, 1819, Amos Ellmaker wrote him
to speak of the awful visitation of Providence that has fallen upon you, and how deeply I feel it. The thought of your situation has scarcely been absent from my mind ten days. I trust your restoration to your
philosophy and courage, and to the elasticity of spirits natural to most young men. Yet time, the sovereign cure of all these, must intervene before much good can be done. The sun will shine again—though a man enveloped in gloom always thinks the darkness is to be eternal. Do you remember the Spanish anecdote? A lady, who had lost a favorite child, remained for months sunk in sullen sorrow and despair. Her confessor, one morning, visited her, and found her, as usual, immersed in gloom and grief. “What!” says he; “have you not forgiven God Almighty?” She rose, exerted herself, joined the world again, and became useful to herself and friends
. Ellmaker went on to advise,
I say to give full vent and unrestrained license to the feelings and thoughts natural in the case for a time—which time may be a week, two weeks, three weeks, as nature dictates—without scarcely a small effort during that time to rise above the misfortune; then, when this time is past, to rouse, to banish depressing thoughts, as far as possible, and engage most industriously in business
.

For the elections of 1820, the Federalists of Lancaster needed a candidate for the national Congress, and settled on Buchanan. Years later, in London, conversing with Samuel L. M. Barlow, the same who was to advise Curtis to suppress most of what he knew about the Coleman event, Buchanan gave his willingness to run a coloring of diffidence and personal need:
I never intended to engage in politics, but meant to follow my profession strictly. But my prospects and plans were all changed by a most sad event which happened at Lancaster when I was a young man. As a distraction from my great grief, and because I saw that through a political following I could secure the friends I then needed, I accepted a nomination
. Yet he conducted the campaign with vigor enough to win this ugly chastisement in a published letter signed “Colebrook,” in allusion to his recent tragedy if not in actual identification of one of Ann’s brothers:
Allow me to congratulate you upon the notoriety you have acquired of late. Formerly the smoothness of your looks and your habitual professions of moderation had led those who did not know you to suppose you mild & temperate
.

The words italicized in the preceding pages constitute virtually all the surviving contemporary texts reflecting upon the sudden death of Ann Caroline Coleman and James Buchanan’s behavior in the aftermath. The texts are like pieces of a puzzle that only roughly fit. There are little irregular spaces between them, and through these cracks, one feels, truth slips. History, unlike fiction and physics, never quite jells; it is an armature of rather randomly preserved verbal and physical remains upon which historians slap wads of supposition in hopes of the lumpy statue’s coming to life. One of the joys of doing original research is to observe how one’s predecessor historians have fudged their way across the very gaps, or fault-lines, that one is in turn balked by. History in its jaggedness constantly tears at our smooth conceptions of human behavior. If Buchanan was so deeply stricken by grief, how then did he sally forth
as bold as ever
? In his next year of legal practice, 1820, he won from Judge Alexander L. Hayes of the Lancaster County Court the encomium that
he had never listened to an advocate who was equal to Mr. Buchanan, whether in clear & logical arguments to the Court, or in convincing appeals to the reason and sympathies of the jury
. If Buchanan was so disgraced by his fiancée’s mysterious death, why was he chosen a few months later to run for Congress? He won the election and—a full year later, in December of 1821—went to Washington City to participate in the seventeenth Congress, and within three more years was an important enough player of the national game to be involved in another scandal, of a purely political sort.

• • •

I remember at some point in all this going to New York with Genevieve for a few days. Women love New York, God knows why. All those clothes in the windows, or the other women in their clothes on the streets. That buzz and rub of other presences which women need, in ballrooms or seraglios; that being on display. Perhaps amid the towering verticals and the rectilinear recessions of the Manhattan grid a woman feels
framed
, set off, mounted to admire. Genevieve looked so sunny and crisp and carefree and glowing, striding beside me as we walked up a little slope on Madison, a sloping block that holds at its crest the brownstone palace from whose two great wings once Cardinal Spellman and Bennett Cerf each directed their empires and where now, I believe, the queen of tax evasion has imposed a glitzy hotel, so sunny and crisp and carefree, I say, that I kissed her, kissed Genevieve right there, as we walked, to her surprise. In New York, Nature reaches us from underneath, in the slope of the land once full of Dutch farms; they can’t quite pave away the slope, it is Nature, and we were Nature, she and I, fresh from our lovemaking and showering in the hotel room. Mine, this thirty-two-year-old woman was mine, hundreds of miles away from Wayward and Adams and the old brown slave of a river between, mine in some summery bare-armed dress of hers, her black hair still damp from the shower and glistening like snow with microscopic rainbows, like fresh powder in the morning before the ski tracks pack it and the blue shadows of the firs are still long, mine among these millions of strangers, mated with me, and guilt-free. Live free
and
die, our state motto could run. I kissed her. It was summer, but not sticky. I want to make it the summer of the bicentennial, near the epic day
of the tall ships and the cloudless sky that stretched from coast to coast, all our national troubles having momentarily blown over, but that seems too close to the end of the Ford era; more likely it was ’75, perhaps a sparkling interval in early fall, six seasons since the spring when in smart checked woolens she had announced to me under the bud-nubbly elm that she had told Brent and the skids to divorce were greased. Surely since then we had earned our freedom—our sexual secretions weighed out in children’s tears, our scandal fading into the college wallpaper, our names inscribed as Mr. and Mrs. Clayton in the hotel register. In those Ford-dominated years the custom took hold in the castle keeps of hotel management for a man to register and a mere plural number of guests to be noted, whether he was accompanied by another man, a foundling child, a tame kangaroo, or (as in my case) a gorgeous woman; but I had gone whole hog, slashing M/M in front of my name, making her mine legally, as she soon would be, once Norma focused on her lawyer’s appointments and Brent relaxed his clenched jaw. He and the two girls were visiting his parents in Minnesota. They were sectarian Lutherans of the strictest variety and had to be very gently led up to the facts of his dissolving marriage. Hence Genevieve was free to come with me to this Northeastern States’ Historian’s Association (NSHA) Conference—on “Cold-War Deformations of Developing-World Economies and Elites,” if I remember the topic—held in a big hotel, on the Avenue of the Americas, with a sugary scent to its wall-to-wall carpeting and in its atrium lobby the largest chandelier outside of Leningrad. Genevieve and I stayed in a little hotel, on West Fifty-first Street, used mostly by Europeans on bargain tours, blocks away from the intellectual hubbub of my fellow academics, and I skipped most of the meetings, panels, debates,
and well-received papers. Life must now and then be allowed to take precedence over history—else there will be no new history.

Genevieve looked pleased but not entirely by my impulsive kiss, so quickly delivered she had not had time to pucker her lips over the teeth of her smile. A tiny bubble of my saliva winked on one of her incisors, making an infinitesimal rainbow here in the sunshine, in the long slot of light the skyscrapers had let through onto this block of Madison. Then a diagonal shadow fell across our progress like a police barricade. Her smile had turned a shade uncertain. “Why did you do that?” She was very appearance-conscious, I tended to forget; she had been educated by nuns.

“You looked so adorable,” I tried to explain. “I feel so proud to be with you.” I was embarrassed. “You’re perfect.”

The shadow on her face was slow to lift. “Nobody’s perfect.”

“You are. For me at least.” I was beginning to feel silly. Far above us, beneath a set of dissipating jet trails, a towering glass box had taken a bite out of the sun. Down here on the grid, amid the grit and greed, hundreds of grayish pedestrians hurried along, oblivious of our love, my kiss, her qualm. She entwined her hand with my arm and recomposed the moment, but I did not forget this revelation of imperfect fit, I being happier, fuller of us, than she.

What did we
do
those three days and nights of married life? What others do—ate, and slept, and went to a movie (
Tommy
, perhaps, of which I remember nothing but a gargantuan piano, a man on stilts, and Elton John in some very uncomfortable-looking costume) and a show (
The Wiz
, of which I mostly recall the numerous view-occluding Afros in the audience). On the last day we hurriedly bought souvenir presents for our five
children, I-♥-NY rag dolls for her girls, rude T-shirts and Statue of Liberty snowballs for my mixed-sex trio, these last trinkets a pale echo of an enchanting miniature trylon and perisphere my parents had brought me, when I was four, from the 1939–40 World’s Fair. It lit up, somehow, and had a curving ramp of many tiny bas-relief people, streaming into the future, which was now. No—which had never been. World war, Holocaust, cold war, oil spills, famine, massacre, serial killing, man the vermin of the planet: the innocent future I had seen in that glowing souvenir, with a helicopter in every garage, had never come.

How can I recapture, dear colleagues of the NNEAAH, for your written symposium, the numbing wonder and dizzying strangeness of being with another man’s wife hour after hour? I had never tasted a hamburger before eating one with Genevieve in the coffee shop at the Plaza the evening we emerged, blinking in the six-o’clock sunlight, from a late-afternoon showing of loud and garish
Tommy
and, hand in hand, sauntered from the sexual carnival of Broadway, with its fat hookers in vinyl hotpants, over to the relative tranquillity of shopperless Fifth Avenue and on up to the edge of the Park. It cost, the hamburger, $6.50, which seemed a prodigious price back then, in that innocent era before Carter’s inflation, and was too fat with meat and lettuce and sliced onion and tomato and bulky sesame-seed roll to squeeze between my jaws, the way a boy from Hayes had always eaten a hamburger. Charbroiled on the outside, raw as steak tartare on the inside, this hypertrophied Plaza version of a fast food had to be consumed with a fork and knife, piece by piece, as Genevieve showed me, her eloquent narrow hands themselves like expensive implements, her tan fingers tipped with pink polish paler than a blush. Encapsulated with her inside a preview of
our marriage, legitimately at her side in these uncaring multitudes, I felt a continuous tremble in my chest, as if a bubble might pop. With the wonder of a caveman observing his first eclipse I watched her pairs of underpants, lacy and bikini and pastel, go from clean to dirty to clean again, hung to dry on the heated bathroom towel rack; once, when she was in the shower, I snatched a pair from where she had let them drop on the carpet and buried my nose in the faintly stained crotch, as if to imprint forever her musk upon my memory cells.

It was impossible, in the course of our three days, to avoid generating excrement, and we were both shy as cats without a sandbox to scratch. As I followed her into the bathroom in the mornings, my nostrils were struck by the chthonian after-scent, spicier than Norma’s spoor, of what had just passed from one of her seven sacred orifices. (Two nostrils, two ears, and the remaining three do not include the bellybutton, a cul de sac.) There was something Platonic, like a triangle’s chalk ghost upon a scrubbed blackboard, or like the idea of war that haunts a futile peace conference, about our passage, with sometimes averted eyes, through a haze of illicit intimacy. She kept the room thrillingly neat and yet at night would subconsciously scuttle all the way across the king-size mattress to involve me in a panicked embrace, a claustrophobic tangle of sweaty limbs and tangled sheets. She slept naked, whereas I, after a near-Canadian childhood spent mostly under layers of blankets and quilts, needed some weight of cloth, of pajama tops or an undershirt at least, to make me feel safe enough to sleep.
I suppose she slept naked with Brent, and this thought greatly pained me. They were just enough younger than Norma and I to have caught those Sixties liberations in their youth, instead of catching up to them retroactively, when hobbled with children and employment. In her sleep, which I
had never before witnessed, Genevieve sweated, her sleek brunette skin rich in glands, and sometimes thrashed and moaned aloud, with touching infantile whimpering moans, as if her vital force, masked in daylight by a crisp bearing learned from nuns, was unmasked and tormenting her. Yet in the morning she could recall no nightmare, and when my concerned questioning persisted, she would stare at me with an intensified opacity in her coffee-dark eyes, as if I were trying to delve too deep and had offended some Gallic standard of decorum which even the penetrations and exposures of love did not suspend. Her maiden name had been Lavalliere; the notion of an ancestral Frenchness took possession of me, as I had freedom now to notice in her body the delicate traces of a Latin hairiness—the almost invisible dark wisps at the extremities of her upper lip, just above the slightly taut points where her mouth’s orifice terminated, and the distinct shadow, manlike in its bluish glaze, where her armpits were kept shaved. I expressed the infatuated hope that, when we were married, she would let her underarm hair grow out, in two pungent tufts, butterfly-shaped in my mind’s eye, and let her legs become as shaggy as a Gascogne peasant girl’s, so that there would be, by these few multiplied black millimeters, that much more of her, a surplus produced at my bidding, as a sign of my possession. But she shuddered in my arms at the proposal; not even my most delirious transports were about to overwhelm her thoroughly American standards of personal hygiene. There were a number of these tiny collisions, moments unremarked by us but not unnoticed, when my amorous fantasies, which dated back to fantasies bred amid the ethnic simplicities of Hayes, where the “Canuck” girls from the far side of the disused tracks figured as dark and dirty
mysteries, met something proudly otherwise in her. In fact she didn’t come from the backwoods of northern New England but from the highly civilized town of Madison, Wisconsin, state capital and site of a university, where her father had been a professor of Romance languages.