Memories of the Ford Administration (34 page)

She didn’t seem to hear, and said, after a pause, “I’m sorry you’re stuck. You can have your old desk back if you want it.”

Now the Wadleighs came up to us, Ben allowing his pupil to tinkle away on automatic pilot. Wendy had cut her hair short, just like the other athletic coaches, and in her frilly yellow frock looked like a pixie in a buttercup. Couples who stay together in spite of all have a curious merriment about them, as of daredevils shooting the rapids, or of defiantly healthy alcoholics. “You two shouldn’t be talking,” Wendy said gaily, adding with shining eyes, “Alfred
et ux
.”

“This entire gathering is scandalized,” Ben assured us in his fruity choirmaster tones. I looked at him through Norma’s eyes and saw that he was lovable—pompous but clever, fruity but massive, artistic as was she, and light, like her an adept of the unsaid and the ignored. The waterbug approach to life, merely dimpling the surface tension as you move along. Me, I had been naïve, perhaps, and coarse, to attempt to penetrate, to sink, to pearl-dive into the past. It was cheerful, standing here with the Wadleighs as if we were two couples, Ben taller
than I and Wendy shorter than Norma. The Claytons, bracketed. The Wadleighs were pulling, plainly, for us to get back together again, and thus again be accessible. Their dyad loved our dyad. We mischievously buzzed together a bit, and noticed that the party was thinning around us, to the point that Madame President’s husband came up and attached himself to us with suckers of small talk. We thanked the host and hostess and went our ways. Not quite our separate ways, for the Wadleighs had a shared home of glass and redwood, high above the river, and Norma and I moved together through the dark and the rustle of the first soft fallen leaves on the dried-out small-town grass (so different in quality from over-trodden city grass, or the untrodden grass of the country). Norma’s body beside mine felt like a gentle revenant. I muttered to her that I’d like to see the Volvo’s scratch and, sensing beneath her insouciance that this already rusting injury to her automobile brought her as close to tears as the inky baby’s feet, offered to come home with her a minute, to check on Daphne’s fever and search through my old desk. I might find some notes in it (ran my secret agenda) that would definitively unlock the mystery of James Buchanan. My practice of history was superstitious as well as unsystematic.

Stars, there must have been stars above the mansard roof—Orion’s belted sprawl, the Big Dipper balanced on its handle, the whole heartbreakingly random array sparkling in anticipation of first frost. Did our breaths show white? Too early, perhaps. I do remember how, several hours later, after we had made love on our former bed, that redwood box bought at Furniture in Parts, the Queen of Disorder turned her head on the pillow and said casually, in her most merely observational voice, “You’ve gotten better at it.”

A motherly remark, complimenting a child come home with a new prowess. My sword had been tempered in Genevieve’s sheath, and my technique honed to something like her own sharp-edged perfection. Before, sex had been muddle and melt to me. Before, I had fucked with just my prick—the tingling glans, readying to spurt, eagerly pushing ahead. Now I used my entire pelvis, the whole lower half of my trunk, repeatedly lowering myself as if into an onyx bathtub, in cold control while I sweated like a gymnast. Sex is impersonal, a well-oiled machine that works best sealed into darkness. The Perfect Wife had taught me that, and the imperfect one responded. I was the piston, she was the cylinder. A deep hostility kept us slick, and slightly startled. When with two shudders—hers involuntary, mine deliberate, like driving home a nail—we finished, Norma looked up at me with resentful eye-whites and pinched the skin of my sides, where the ribs turn the corner, so it hurt. Then she let go and turned her face on the pillow and paid me her compliment.

I remember, too, before we went to bed, entering the house with her, the big house quiet, my nose wrinkling and twisting into a sneeze at the cat dander, and feeling that at this unaccustomed hour of visitation I had surprised the furniture—the butterfly chair, the foam-rubber sofa and easy chair with their scarf-patched worn spots, the paper lampshade globes from Taiwan—in a huddle of conspiracy, these inanimate things conspiring to reconstruct the past, to dam the flow of time with their fragile, obstinate shapes.

The time is strange—the party couldn’t have gone past seven-thirty, and yet in memory it seems to be after ten. Stealthily we had climbed to the second floor. Andrew had moved to the third floor, setting up an independent domain
in the low-ceilinged rooms there, whence descended, at various times, the throb of rock tapes, the rhythmic rumble of his exercise bicycle, and the clunk of the weights he had taken to lifting. He was building his body into something beautiful. His mother was under orders not to disturb him, and though from the driveway, crackling to a stop in our separate automobiles, we had seen his lit windows burning like angry eyes in the mansard roof, we did not climb the second flight of stairs, which led twistingly up from the second-floor landing. Disapproval of us emanated from above.

Down the hall, Buzzy’s unconscious breathing filled his little dark room, and the beam of hall-light when we pushed open the door revealed an obsolescing apparatus of boyhood—his telescope; his glass terrarium, whence all the lizards and scorpions had long since decamped; the posters of some rock stars, bare-armed men with stringy hair and leather vests, like muscular miners stripped to forage underground for precious metal; another poster, of a gleaming Italian sports car draped with the body of a young woman spottily clad in leopardskin; his silent boom box with its sleepless red light; a scuffed little bookcase holding a clutch of brave books by Tolkien and Frank Herbert and a curling heap of old school papers; and shelves filled by carefully spaced collections of plastic dinosaurs and tinfoil athletic trophies won at grade school, when he was yet younger, and his hopes for himself were untarnished. We eased shut the door as if on a treasury of sad secrets, leaving a crack of light to show in case a dream’s turmoil awoke him.

Daphne’s room was across the hall, which ended at our—Norma’s—bedroom door. My daughter awoke, or had been awake, and shrieked at the second shadow beside her mother’s.
“Who are you?” she asked in the voice of one still asleep, or transported by fever.

“Your father, honey,” I said, whispering to suggest she keep her own voice down, and moving to test her forehead with my hand. But she shrieked with such blank fright, like a stepped-on animal, that I stopped in mid-motion.

“Daphne, it’s Daddy,” Norma explained. “He’s come to see how sick you are.”

Daphne didn’t hear. “You’re an elephant,” the child told me, in a voice that emanated from the whole white blur of her face but did not belong to it, like a voice in a séance. It hesitated, groping to shape a complex concept. “He ate a bad mushroom and got all wiggly and died.”

“Babar,” the Queen of Disorder explained softly behind me. As if it hadn’t been I who had read those books to the children, more often than she.

“Go away,” Daphne told me hollowly, betranced. “You hurt people.”

“Not you,” I told her, my own voice strange, dipping deep into the gravity of parental assurance, “not little Daphne,” and did manage to stretch an arm (like a proboscis, actually) and rest my fingertips on her brow. Its taut curve felt warm and dry. “You have a bug,” I announced.

She stared upward at me, and her fever of delusion broke. “It’s you,” she said, and fetched a mighty, shuddering sigh.

I sat on her bed’s edge, and tucked the covers more neatly around her. “That was mean of you,” I scolded, “to call me an elephant. You have a little bug that makes you hot and tomorrow if it’s not better Mommy will take you to the doctor’s to find out what it is. Now you go to sleep.”

This firm instructional tone, which my old house and its
many shadowy needs had called forth, revived after our (Norma’s and my) lovemaking,
^e
when I quickly dressed and hissed downward at my wife as she still lay naked in bed, “
Listen
. You’ve had over two years to adjust. Get moving on the divorce, for Chrissake, or I’ll start suing on my own. For Ben and whatever else I can dig up. You’re costing me my life, all this stalling and fucking around you’ve been doing.”

Franklin Pierce’s Presidency brought William King the Vice-Presidency, Buchanan the mission to London, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had written Pierce’s campaign biography, the very remunerative post of American Consul in Liverpool. Hawthorne’s journal for January 6, 1855, records a visit paid him by the Minister, who had come to Liverpool with his niece and hostess, Harriet Lane, because she was to be the bridesmaid at the wedding of an American girl resident there. The Minister called on his consul, who had abandoned the seclusion—first single, then wedded—that had nurtured his masterpieces in order to serve in this post of busy intercourse with men of all stations. One wonders how aware Buchanan was of the genius of his underling;
The Scarlet Letter
came out, with considerable praise and publicity, in 1850, one of the years when Buchanan, semi-retired at Wheatland, had
leisure for reading. Certainly Harriet Lane had read some Hawthorne, for, having met her at a dinner in Liverpool on January 9th, the author rather dourly recorded in his diary,
She paid me some compliments; but I do not remember paying her any
. His impression, superficially favorable, of the vigorous, violet-eyed, twenty-five-year-old woman carries a note of reservation; one can feel the great dreamer’s fine nature rather cringe:
Miss L—— has an English rather than an American aspect,—being of stronger outline than most of our young ladies, although handsomer than English women generally, extremely self-possessed and well-poised, without affectation or assumption, but quietly conscious of rank, as much as if she were an Earl’s daughter.… I talked with her a little, and found her sensible, vivacious, and firm-textured, rather than soft and sentimental
. Viewed through the same silken weave of Hawthorne’s sometimes feline style, Buchanan comes off rather better:
I like Mr. ———. He cannot exactly be called gentlemanly in his manners, there being a sort of rusticity about him; moreover, he has a habit of squinting one eye, and an awkward carriage of his head; but, withal, a dignity in his large person, and a consciousness of high position and importance, which gives him ease and freedom. Very simple and frank in his address, he may be as crafty as other diplomatists are said to be; but I see only good sense and plainness of speech,—appreciative, too, and genial enough to make himself conversable
.

Their conversation would have taken place in Hawthorne’s office in the unprepossessing consulate housed in
a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories high … at the lower corner of Brunswick Street … in the neighborhood of some of the oldest docks
. The gouty, top-hatted Minister would have had to maneuver his corpulent person up
a narrow and ill-lighted staircase
giving onto
an equally narrow and ill-lighted passageway
crowded, most mornings, with
beggarly and piratical-looking
scoundrels … purporting to belong to our mercantile marine
. Dealing with
these specimens of a most unfortunate class of people
composed, according to the opening pages of the memoiristic sketches collected as
Our Old Home
, much of Hawthorne’s duties
—the scum of every maritime nation on earth; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation of the world with England. Not one in twenty
, he tells us,
was a genuine American
, but all looked to the American Consul for relief from their misery and indigence
—shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, and clothing; invalids asking permits for the hospital; bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers; drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men
. Through this crowd of brutalized unfortunates, most of them wearing red flannel shirts, Buchanan, in cravat and morning coat, would have eased his way, to reach the outer office manned by vice-consuls and clerks, and then the inner sanctum,
an apartment of very moderate size, painted in imitation of oak, and duskily lighted by two windows looking across a by-street at the rough brick-side of an immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier structure than ever was built in America
. Buchanan’s squinting eye was taken, it may be, by the large map of the United States on one wall, cartographed as it had been twenty years ago.

“Your portrait of our homeland lacks Texas, and all the California territory that we wrested from Mexico,” he genially pointed out, once the initial civilities had been pronounced. The men had met before, at the end of last April, when the Minister waited in Liverpool for the arrival of his niece, Miss Lane.
I had the old fellow to dine with me
, the writer wrote his publisher,
and liked him better than I expected
.

“Were we to draw the map twenty years hence, I fear it might show even less territory than is displayed here,” Hawthorne ventured, the mellifluidity of his voice to some extent masking the pessimism of the prediction. Since he regarded his rôle of Consul with a certain amusement, as something of an imposture, he did not greatly fear offending his superior. Further, the older man’s manner had a holiday joviality—a holiday abroad from seeking his political fortunes, and a holiday in Liverpool from his London responsibilities. And people forgive a known writer a great deal, such forgiveness constituting an inexpensive form of patronage of the arts.

Buchanan had lit a cigar, and smokily tut-tutted, “Oh come, Mr. Hawthorne, not as bad as that. With a little connivance and compromise, we shall pull the Union through. If you would mute your vociferous friends the abolitionists, and we somewhat quench our friends the fire-eaters, the plain economics of it, as they emerge in the West, will render the slavery question obsolete.”