Memories of the Ford Administration (36 page)

“In the same fashion, you never see a fat plowhorse in the United States. We work them too hard,” Buchanan responded, apropos of American women, their thinness. The old man had shaken off his reverie, and now was attentive, cocking his white-haired head, to another ornament of the Consul’s apartment,
a colored, life-size lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest hideousness of aspect, occupying the place of honor above the mantel-piece
and darkened, since his aborted term, by five years of oily smoke from the coal grate. “I hope, Mr. Hawthorne, your appointment calendar doesn’t run as tardy as your Presidential portraits; you are two Presidents behind.”

“We are a war or two behind as well,” Hawthorne said, indicating another wall adornment,
some rude engravings of our naval victories in the War of 1812
.

“Old Zack,” Buchanan mused. “Some say he was poisoned, by an agent of the South, when he showed himself to be a Free-Soiler at heart. Had he lived, he would have vetoed the Compromise of 1850, with civil war the likely result.”

Hawthorne politically kept to himself his opinion, that the celebrated Compromise had been mere fiddle-faddle, a futile
placation of the South’s irrepressible fears, as it saw slavery crowded into an increasingly minor fraction of a country tripled in size since 1800. All of Cuba, with the Mosquito Coast thrown in, could not right the balance.

“I have always supported,” Buchanan stated, “extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. All those territories below 36° 30′, as they apply for admittance, to vote for or against slavery as they please. None will vote for it, and that includes Kansas. What the South needs from the North at this juncture is not lectures and pamphlets urging the slaves to massacre the planter and his sleeping babes, but indulgence, as we would show a man ill beyond recovery—as we show defenseless minorities in our midst like the Mennonites and the Jews.” He may have heard in his own voice an un-needed note of lecture, for he became confidential and faintly apologetic again, shifting his weight forward in the rickety petitioners’ chair to declare, “But by a quirk of fate my views have rarely been put to the test of a heated public vote: I was not yet in the Congress when the Missouri Compromise was passed, I was Minister to Russia during the worst of the nullification struggle, I was out of office and tending my garden in Lancaster by 1850, and I have been lifted above the vicious Kansas-Nebraska debate by my mission here.”

“A charmed life,” Hawthorne murmured.

“I was early wounded in life’s lists,” Buchanan confided, as if assuming his tale to be known, “and have been a peacemaker ever since. At times I had to differ with Jackson and Polk, and two flintier heads the country hasn’t seen since the first John Adams, but I always avoided a break.”

“It may be, sir, that fate has reserved you for a great task not far ahead.”

Buchanan’s color rose slightly. “Impossible, my dear friend. I have put in for my recall next October. Firmly and gladly, I intend to retire forever from public life. I am sixty-three years old, and have many familial responsibilities, though none of my own making; I possess a pleasant country estate that hasn’t known my step for it will be upwards of three years, and, if I may dare say this to you, whose words have been graced by the divine breath, I have some writing I wish to do—a memoir of my times, especially the administration of Mr. Polk. Though never possessed of genius, I have been in my plodding fashion a man of the written word, who has preferred written communication to any other form. When Henry Clay wished to heap scorn on me, he would merely say, ‘He writes
letters!
’ Well, I admit it—many the night I have fallen asleep at my desk, writing. When passions have evaporated, and what we strive to achieve has been undone by history, the words we write remain, and will plead for us.”

“For some blessed few,” Hawthorne amended. “For the rest, books find a grave as deep as any. But your retirement, sir—will the people permit it? If our friend the General, who has conducted his duties under a stifling weight of personal sorrow and domestic pall, fails of renomination in the cry over Kansas—” He let the thought complete itself. Another thought crossed his mind: that he was meant to relay Buchanan’s protestations of final retirement to General Pierce; but he dismissed the notion.
But it is a very vulgar idea,—this of seeing craft and subtlety, when there is a plain and honest aspect
.

The other’s animation increased, and his pink color sharpened. “My mind is fully made up; I will never be a candidate; and I have expressed this decision to my friends in such a way as to put it out of my power to change it. I admit, I would have been glad of the nomination for the Presidency in 1852,
and would not have refused it in ’48 or ’44; but now it is too late, I am too old. My time has come for reflection and repose, and to improve my relation with my Maker, for we shall shortly, I devoutly trust, meet face to face.”

Hawthorne involuntarily cast down the famous lamps of his eyes at this flare of piety, and said so softly the other had to strain to hear, “I pray not shortly. Come what may, Mr. Buchanan, you are at this moment the only Democrat whom it would not be absurd to talk of for the office.”

And the old man’s blush deepened further. His lips parted and merely trembled, groping for an evasion that would yet do justice to
the high vision of half his lifetime
. The blush of excited ambition stained all his face, between the white linen of his old-fashioned stock and his crest of upstanding white hair. Visibly he calmed himself, pondering with his ungainly squint the one English object in the room,
a barometer hanging on the wall, generally indicating one or another degree of disagreeable weather, and so seldom pointing to Fair, that I began to consider that portion of its circle as made superfluously
. “Do you know any French, Mr. Hawthorne?”

“Un peu.”
There had been readings of Montaigne, Rousseau, Racine, Voltaire under the eaves, in books Ebe brought back from the Salem Athenaeum, and then, the weeks he stayed with Horatio Bridge in Augusta, his nightly conversations with Bridge’s tutor and boarder Monsieur Schaeffer, a little blond, cross-eyed Alsatian who would return from a day of trying to drum French into young Maine blockheads with the cry “
Je hais les Yankees!
”

“There is a profound wisdom,” Buchanan told Hawthorne, “in a remark of La Rochefoucauld with which I met the other day—‘
Les choses que nous désirons n’arrivent pas’—comprenez?
”

“Thus far.”

The accent that had served in the Court of St. Petersburg was carefully distinct, testing each word like a man advancing over thin ice.
“
—
‘n’arrivent pas, ou, si elles arrivent, ce n’est, ni dans le temps, ni de la manière qui nous auraient fait le plus plaisir.’ Oui? Comprenez-vous? C’est une vérité dure, n’est-ce pas?”

“C’est dure, c’est triste, mais vrai. C’est la vie.”

“
La vie humaine depuis la Chute—depuis
Adam and Eve, eh?” And the old fellow laughed, a high-pitched laugh wheezily withdrawn as soon as it was offered, mixed with a shriek from the tormented chair as if its runged and spindled wood were inhabited by the agonies of all the wriggling supplicants who had ever sat there in its hard embrace. Hawthorne felt on his neck a chill of the uncanny—the shriek seemed to have arisen not within the fusty official chamber but within his own haunted, reverberant skull.

When was it? My memory wants to assign our exchange to a raw gray day of earliest spring, with soot-besprinkled tatters of unmelted snow huddling beneath the Muellers’ bushes and against the northern side of their cellar bulkhead, but by the logic of sequential event it must have been fall—late fall, let’s say—after Election Day. The Ford era is drawing to a close; Ford has lost, albeit narrowly; the leaves so ruddily, rosily, goldenly translucent on the day of the President’s cocktail party have fallen. More than fallen, they are raked and bagged or mulched and already rotting back into the sweet, misty earth. The maples and beeches and few surviving elms of southern New Hampshire—a woodsy state that like Pennsylvania has in over two hundred years contributed but one son to the Presidency, a state too good, one might say, to make
great men, who extract such a toll from the rest of us; a state where Mt. Washington, that bitter blowy dome of rock, has never been renamed Mt. Pierce—stood silvery-bare along the meandering Wayward River, which having once powered and cleansed a few mills to the north was now free to pour itself uselessly into the sea.
Live Free or Die
is our motto; low taxes, our boast. We are the Union’s fourth most industrialized state. Though not so gothic as Maine, we have our pockets of rural poverty and sad fits of sex-motivated murder. Our highways have an honest tackiness; no curried Vermont, its green hills plump with New York money, this. No two streets of Wayward were parallel, and half had no sidewalks. Genevieve’s house, you will not have forgotten [see
this page
], stood across the street from a great old elm and was
an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim
, symmetrical and modest yet rendered majestic for me by its enclosing of her live body and ardent, orderly spirit. Lately, I rarely got inside it. Brent came and went, visiting their two daughters, and Genevieve thought it would be too confusing for them if another man made equally free with the front door and back door. Also, the neighbors would notice my car, a conspicuously aging old Corvair convertible, if it were frequently parked where her front lawn blurred into the asphalt street, and who knows what neighborly evidence her husband’s lawyers might call upon in a pinch? In the Ford era, superstitious dread of lawyers and stockbrokers as potential sources of financial ruin had not been superseded by fear of failing banks and outlandish hospital bills, as in the present, Bush era.

The Muellers’ front lawn looked not merely raked but scrubbed, and their azalea bushes were each wrapped in burlap.
Standards were being upheld. The great old elm wore a blue plastic box on its side, dropping some kind of palliative into its poisoned capillaries, and its dead branches blended with its living in the seasonal leaflessness. The day persists in feeling like spring in my mind, one of those unnumbered dull days that carry us to our deaths, spring the least satisfactory of our New England seasons, the air suffused with the gray hopelessness of nature sluggishly rousing itself and endeavoring yet again to replace one generation of weeds with another, while winter’s winds continue to blow in from the Atlantic.

Yet, once inside her house, having knocked and opened the front door in a single motion, I was heartened by the Perfect Wife’s arrangements, her ubiquitous clarifying touch. The glass table with its ice-green edges on its sturdy chrome X. The Aubusson rug with its distinctly Seventies harmonies of salmon and washed-out lime green. The abstract prints on the walls, trying spottily to mirror my head, on the surface of their slashing blacks and whites. The clean panes of the living-room windows.
^f
The ricochet of earth-tones off the square edges, with rolled seams, of her sofa and easy chairs. The dining room, where eight rush-seated chairs of stained
beech waited on tiptoe for the next dinner party, around a polished table in whose center a turquoise glass vase with spiralled ribbing held a dainty spray of brown-and-yellow asters, the year’s brittle last blooms. Everywhere, the glisten of cleanliness, the absence of clutter. Not a dog hair or dust mouse to be glimpsed; it was all as purely intentional as an architectural sketch, with human figures stylishly scribbled in to indicate the scale—ovals for heads, stick legs for men and triangular skirts for women, coded signs the lines of perspective pass right through.

Genevieve was wearing snug white Calvin Klein slacks, the hip pockets like tattoos stitched onto buttocks of bright cloth, and a black cashmere turtleneck in which her hair remained caught, as if she had just put the sweater on and not yet taken the moment to free and flip out from the elastic neck her silky black tresses. It gave her an electric androgynous look, as of a page in a modernist production of Shakespeare. Her feet—I don’t think I misremember this—were bare, as if, again, she had rushed into this costume a second before making her appearance on stage. Perhaps my letting myself in immediately after knocking had rushed her. As I say, I was rarely invited to her home, as our affair wore itself into grooves. She came to me in Adams, or we took little trips, and found a motel not too close to the highway, or too painfully seedy. Roadside cabins were not bad, with their quick electric heat and back view of laurel or lilac in the shelter of the pines; in Ramada Inns, the halls were too full of boozy salesmen’s banter. My mistress seemed, in her Rosalindish costume, so perfect, so svelte and compact, I hesitated to embrace her; it seems an illusion—as if up-to-date computer trickery has enhanced my clumsy old memory-tape—that we did embrace. Her dear
sturdy, wide-shouldered body, given a yearning athletic thrust by the tiptoe stretch of her bare feet, came tight against mine and clung with an ominous finality.

She had summoned me, by telephone at my office. Her voice had sounded especially humorless and direct. She was calling from work. She had taken a job, finding her academic husband’s grudging dole inadequate, in a Portsmouth boutique founded by the sister of another faculty wife—the leaning professor of biology’s tennis-burnished second bride. The shop was in Portsmouth’s renovated wharf section, old brick warehouses refitted to hold the new commercial wine, in this case the post-counterculture tweeds, jumpers, and smart suits. Sensible, subdued clothes were back in style. Genevieve acted not merely as a saleswoman but, as the weeks elicited her flair and sense of fashion, an assistant manageress and advisory buyer. She was succeeding, but it meant she was gone most days, and in returning had to rush about, retrieving the girls from the neighbor or babysitter that had taken them in after school, and laying out a supper, and catching up on the tasks which when a mere housewife she had stretched to fill the day.