Memories of the Ford Administration (27 page)

“Just this one night,” Mrs. Arthrop said, with an enigmatic upturn of her face, as if toward a spotlight still shining upon her girlish performance as Lysistrata. She had been the star where her daughter had a bit part. The world can be cruel to
the young. Think of all those newly hatched leatherback turtles, scrambling to get to the sea’s safety while all up and down the beach the famished gulls are swooping.

Memory fails of exact recall, but we talked, Mrs. A. and I striving to keep Jennifer at the focus, though she kept slipping away, through a short and sullen or else unduly combative answer, while her mother’s thumbs and mine dug into the soft hollow spot crowning our tangerines and undressed the furry segments, juicier than grapes, of their loose and stippled hides. I could not help but be aware of a certain mastery in Mrs. Arthrop’s scarlet-taloned hands and of the way her plump mouth—plump but the lips flat to the face, like Jimmy Carter’s—coped with the little masticatory indiscretion of ejecting the tangerine seeds as each segment was consumed, letting them find their way via her fingers to the cardboard tray. Her lips performed this awkward necessity with a fascinating air of
accomplishment
, of self-appreciation, that produced, along with each ejected seed, a bit of a smile.

Jennifer at last slipped away entirely, seeing a friend leave the television room—
Laverne and Shirley
having yielded up its last tracked laughs and surges of theme music—and rising from our booth to go outside and confer in heated whispers. Her mother and I were left alone. The thin oily sting of tangerine juice and the dull underfoot smell of many much-worn Tretorns serve in this episode as the aromatic accompaniment, the half-heard sound-track music, like the ladies’-room perfumes and smelling salts when Genevieve fainted. I asked, in Jennifer’s abrupt absence, “How
are
the rooms upstairs?”

“Adequate,” Jennifer’s mother enunciated, letting me know she was a woman of the world, who had seen her share of hotel accommodations and was not automatically pleased.
“Rather minimal,” she said, having complacently disposed of another tangerine seed, and then added, as if not wishing to undersell her room’s charms irrevocably, “The window overlooks a pond and a strange long brown sculpture.”

“The students call that the French Fry. It won a competition in the Sixties but keeps coming apart now. The welding was poor, it turns out.” My conversational attempts felt desperate, an idiotic waste of Jennifer’s absence. We could see her through the snack-shop plate glass, whining on and on into this other girl’s—all right, woman’s—ear. My sense of this real woman’s face across from me having attached to it a tag of inviting blankness was succumbing to a sense of her extraordinary fullness; she seemed stuffed
full
, like a thoroughly studied savage, of sociological data—Miss Porter’s School pieties, Northeastern-U.S. upper-middle-class courtship-and-marriage lore, marketing techniques adapted to the small gift shop, standard post-Spock parenting trials and heartbreak—parallel to my own. She, too, remembered the Korean Conflict, the advent of Elvis, the Kennedy assassinations; she, too, had sat in a darkened living room somewhere and watched Nixon blubberingly resign. Even her performance in
Lysistrata
(her round girlish legs exposed, in my mind’s eye, by the unhistorically short chiton with which school-level producers of my youth shamelessly beefed up interest in Aristophanes’ hoary and hieratic old farce) was more vivid to me than that of Jennifer’s generation, overlaid with such Fordisms as feminism and androgyny. Mrs. Arthrop’s little smooth feet would have been bare but for sandals like a web of gold thongs, her unbronzed hair upswept in a Claire Trevor do, her voice pushing out the speeches in a brave adolescent voice just on the edge of authority.

She was reading my mind. Cocking back her hand as if it held a cigarette, she asked me, “The students—do you do a lot of, how shall we say,
mingling
with them, Professor?”

“Not as much as people think,” I told her, somewhat curtly. Her absurd conviction that I had slept with her daughter was making her eyes sparkle as if loaded with belladonna. She was back on stage, legs swinging, voice rising. Her hands were flirting in mid-air with an invisible cigarette. I said, “But you’re not a student, Mrs. Arthrop. You don’t have to keep calling me Professor.”

“What
shall
I call you?”

“Alf. My parents called me Alfred, for political reasons. And you?”

She leaned forward slightly above the table in the booth, here in the steamy late-night student eatery. The high gloss of her face, the fetching little space between her large front teeth, the visible gamble in her bulging hazel eyes seemed to express some numbing animal truth, that my rudimentary brain stem had no word for.

“Ann,” she said. She lowered the hand holding the imaginary cigarette to the silver-starred Formica tabletop, the same motion carrying her eyelids down as if she were fighting a blush.

Oh. Ah. “Ann,” I repeated. That tore it.

Buchanan was waltzing with the Czarina of Russia. Pleasantly plump in his arms she was, the back of her gown of dove-gray silk moist with imperial sweat beneath his hand, here amid the thousand mirrored and refracted candles of the Winter Palace, above the intricately parqueted ballroom floor, while the inflexible Russian winter immobilized, in
white chains of snow, the world beyond the tall windows, which were steamed by the hard-breathing gaiety within. Since the days at Dickinson when he notoriously danced on tavern tables, Buchanan enjoyed the self-forgetful methodical whirl of dancing, whether in the stately strides of the polonaise or the looping interlocked triangulations of the waltz. “
Vous dansez très bien, monsieur l’envoyé extraordinaire
,” the empress confided to him, as the orchestra of Parisian musicians, bored and weary, pale and unhappy, with frazzled jabots and blue noses, here in this frostbitten extremity of civilization, lifted the melody to yet a higher plane of irresistibly urging rhythm, thrusting on every third beat.
“Peu d’hommes aussi grands que vous le feraient avec une telle grâce.”

Forgetful, in the ecstasy of the music, of the sacred dignity of the majestic person so plump and responsive in his arms, he ventured a small joke:
“J’ai appris à danser avec Andrew Jackson. Mon président fait ceux qui le suivent très agiles. Après l’avoir suivi, les pieds sont pleins de la grâce.”

She perhaps did not understand so political a jest, though her life had been lived in palaces. Her father was King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, an uninspired monarch who, after the crushing defeat at Jena (1806) and the humiliating Treaty of Tilsit (1807), ruled, like royalty all across Europe, in terror of the shades of Napoleon and Jacobinism. Her husband at the time of their marriage, on July 1 (Old Style), 1817, was the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, and had no prospects of being czar, since, though his oldest brother, reigning as Alexander I, was childless, another older brother, Constantine, stood next in the line of succession. Nicholas, anticipating a life of luxuriant aristocracy, with a smattering of military duty (for which he possessed a certain grim aptitude), threw himself into the joys of family life and, to assuage his wife’s
homesickness, imported the Prussian paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, amassing an unsurpassed collection of this exemplary Romantic. The future holds strange treasures; Constantine, having married a Polish wife and taken up residence in Poland, secretly renounced the throne in 1823, so that when Alexander died on December 1 (New Style), 1825, Nicholas became emperor without the fact’s being widely known, Constantine having not deigned to make a public announcement. Army officers professedly loyal to Constantine, but in truth concerned to bring about the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of representative government, staged the Decembrist mutiny, which Nicholas, known as a military martinet, stoutly faced down and quelled. The new czar’s regime thus got off to a reactionary start, and continued by forbidding foreign travel, founding the secret police (the notorious “third section”), and promoting the ideas of nationality (
narodnost
), autocracy, and Orthodox Christianity.
Nicholas was not blind to the evils of Russian society
, one source tells us,
but he feared that changes would be worse yet
.

The czarina, realizing that she was being, albeit in full propriety, flirted with, by this tall American in a well-cut but, among the ubiquitous military uniforms glistening with brass and braid, somber black suit, responded, “
Assez de grâce, peut-être, pour vous porter jusqu’à la présidence de votre grand pays, dans la manière du Général Jackson?
”

Seven years younger than Buchanan, the czarina was to die seven years before him. She had the Germanic, faintly sallow and low-albedo complexion of the better-kept women of Lancaster County, though separated from these females by five thousand miles and twenty degrees of latitude; to this extent Buchanan felt familiar with her. And she with him, for at their very first encounter, upon his presentation, she
talked
very freely
, as his dispatch to President Jackson declared:
She spoke on several subjects, and with great rapidity. Amongst other things she observed we were wise in America not to involve ourselves in the foolish troubles of Europe; but she added that we had troubles enough among ourselves at home, and alluded to our difficulties with some of the Southern States
. Her observations on this score must have struck Buchanan as reckless or unduly ominous, for he
endeavored in a few words to explain this subject to her; but she still persisted in expressing the same opinion, and, of course
, [he]
would not argue the point
. He was disposed to argue, for he goes on in his dispatch, with some feeling,
The truth is, that the people of Europe and more especially those of this Country, cannot be made to understand the operations of our Government. Upon hearing of any severe conflicts of opinion in the United States, they believe what they wish, that a revolution may be the consequence. God forbid that the Union should be in any danger!
Evidently, she foresaw another American revolution, and he did not; and she was right.

Her face, broad and smooth-skinned, was marked by distinct patches of rouge and a narrow, sharply tipped nose,
un peu retroussé
. The value of the diamonds at her throat and in her small tiara would have purchased, at a guess, a thousand serfs.

The miserable, snuffling, ill-clad band of imported French musicians changed from a Viennese to a Königsberg tempo—brisker, more military—and the alleged grace within Buchanan’s feet was laggard, momentarily, as he framed a suitably modest yet sufficiently high-spirited response to the empress’s probe in regard to his ambitions. A reflexive “
Mais non, non
” gained him time to offer her the explanation, “
La grâce seule ne suffit pas: il faut aussi
—” His brain, weary of groping in a second language, hesitated among “good fortune,” “suitable
friends,” and “the people.” None made quite enough sense, in French. He thought of General Jackson—met in many encounters from all of which Buchanan emerged feeling, as from an interview with his father, diminished if not rebuked—and finished simply, “
la force
.”

“La force? La force de la personnalité? La force des alliances politiques?”

She was trying genuinely to understand, he saw, the workings of a system in which birth and inheritance are—inscrutably; blasphemously, even—not the crucial factor. The strange confluences of self-interest and moralism that foment events in a democracy were beyond her but not, as the Decembrists made vivid, beneath royal notice any more; her husband’s personal inquisitions and the hanging of Colonel Pestel and the poet Kondrati Ryleyev would not rid this despotic frozen empire of the warm breath, from the west, of freedom. The pert-nosed empress’s intelligent curiosity for a moment formed, for her partner, here amid the stifling heat and the dizzying whirl of braided uniforms, a small fogged window into the vast dungeon in which all women—Queen Victoria excepted—were condemned to political impotence in this century, constrained to move the levers of power only by moving their men, with charms and beguilements. Poor dear Ann had chafed at this, this natural powerlessness of her sex, save to command men’s feelings and to order the domestic realm.

“
La force du destin
,” Buchanan responded.
“Beaucoup des hommes américains sont capables, mais peu achèvent, dans les chances d’élection, la position plus haute.”
He feared, from the failure of her regal face to pounce upon his meaning, that he had lost her; perhaps
achever
was the wrong verb, and
position
imprecise. And yet, even in his uncertainty, and the possibility
of inadequacy at the highest reach of his mission here in Russia, he retained a sense of masculine comfort with this woman, who had recently risen from her bed of
accouchement
, delivered of another Grand Duke.
She is remarkably fond of dancing in which she excels
, Buchanan wrote Hannah Slaymaker from his apartment on the north side of the Neva. The following year, he wrote John B. Sterigere,
I think I may say, I am a favorite here, & especially with the Emperor and Empress. They have always treated me during the past winter in such a manner as even to excite observation. I am really astonished at my own success in this respect
. Her doughy Germanic softness in his arms, the careful simplicity of her French, the silken patch of moisture beneath his hand, even the slightly puzzled look in her eyes, which were brown shot through with a honied pallor, all catered to his comfort, his feverish illusion, amid the swinging pressures of the dance, of mastery—of their two weights connected by an attraction kept taut. The empress’s lips, thin but rosy, with a dent of latent smile—of self-appreciation—in the corners, were parted as if waiting for him to give her reason to speak. So Buchanan went on, adding a shrug of his arms to the conjoined movements of the waltz, “
Mais nous parlons des possibilités imaginaires. Je voudrais seulement que le traité de commerce et de navigation entre nos pays se conclure; donc, je retournerai à mon état natal de Pennsylvanie, où j’assumerai les devoirs and les plaisirs très modestes du citoyen privé. Ma carrière publique achève
”—yes, this was the correct use of the verb, but for emphasis he amplified—“
fait sa fin avec cette mission ici, en Russie
.”