Memories of the Ford Administration (7 page)

“The season cannot be this fall,” he stated, suddenly firm,
with that impenetrable bluntness lawyers can muster. “This Columbia Bridge Company tangle, added to other concerns of my practice, will take all but a few of my hours; the financial distress Monroe and his Yankee Richelieu, Quincy Adams, have allowed to fall upon the nation has made work for lawyers if no one else.”

“Oh”—an exclamation of disappointment escaped her lips. “Must I spend another winter as a spinster?” She felt her heart sink at the prospect of gray wet weeks and months still closeted with her parents, while her five brothers and four sisters, the living remainder of fourteen births, haunted the house, coming and going, George with death already in his jaundiced and skeletal face, Edward arrogant and sardonic in his smoldering fury of unhealth, Thomas more playful in his authority over the sister just beneath him in the chain of births, all with their prating wives, women as complacent as dough, while her silly sister Sarah, the fourteenth child, wide-eyed and giddy at the onset of womanhood, professed to be in love with what she fancied to call God. All of these kin, it seemed to Ann, implied, in their tactful avoidances as well as in open teasing and quarrel, disapproval of her marital choice, and through their coughs and courtesies and heavy family odor they sifted upon her head a drizzle of foreboding, an unspoken opinion that this tall smooth speaker of many politic words was not what he gaudily seemed, in his russet tailcoat and impeccably tied cravat, but was instead treacherous, a finagler, a twister in pursuit of her fortune and the Coleman connection, and less than a man.
He’s not a man
. He was some other kind of creature, a half-man, a chimera bred of these changing modern times, a pretender, so that her betrothal had a doomed flavor, a taste of mistakenness that tightened her throat and at idle moments of the day threatened to pinch
tears from her eyes, sharpened her words with ill temper, and bade her imagine pity and concern in the faces of those in the house who loved her, including the servants and the children of her older siblings. Her imagination was steeped for long idle hours in the hectic substances of books—romances and rhymed effusions quickly printed in Philadelphia and Baltimore from English texts hurried like contraband to these artless shores—and imaginings flared within her in strange heated waves, so that after an afternoon dreaming another’s dream in the upstairs parlor she distrusted her thoughts and even the reports of her senses, which without actual distortion came to her overlaid by a cold dim quality, like moonlight, of illusion.
Even now, in this outdoor moment, underneath the many green trembling leaves and beside the iron fence cast in a pattern of circles and spears, the man beside her, leaning down in expectance of her response to his blunt demand for delay, appeared to loom with an illusionary thinness, like a large occluding emblem of painted tin, of less thickness than King Street’s signboards and the tombstones of slate in the burying ground. They represented people, these stone silhouettes, once as alive as she, Ann thought, and many younger than she—her sister Harriet had been younger—and now dead in their coffins, rotting into bits like those starved lambs whose stiff matted bodies crows tear at in the tall pasture-grass, cawing. A line occurred to her from a poem of Lord Byron’s of a fascinating morbidity, from a slender edition of
The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems of 1816
into whose burgundy-red covers the acid sweat of her fingers during the summer past had worn ovals of a paler red,
I had a dream, which was not all a dream
, and then another,
The bright sun was extinguished
. Ann wanted to scream. Buchanan’s static image filled the field of her vision, leaning toward her respectfully,
tenderly, regretfully, in the wake of his forked offer of allegiance and absence—his tidy curvaceous nimble lips, his ponderous possessive face, his touchingly mismatched eyes, his rising crest of oak-colored hair. Claws clamped her heart; beaks tore at it.
Happy were those
, came to her amid the waves of heat, of unreality,
who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch
. She felt trapped within the coffin of a book. This man was a single stiff page. She feared the book was about to slam shut on her, though for him it would go on and on, through foreign lands and ever higher offices, a saga of endurance.
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea
—how terrible, poets should not be allowed to frighten young women like that, perhaps in England, among the gentry, where life was all a game, but not here, here in these forested States, where life was simple and hard and serious, on land just lately seized from the savage redmen and soaked with their blood, as the turning leaves each year demonstrated. Still Buchanan hung there, speechless, waiting for a sign of her love, her loyalty though he must be much away from Lancaster on legal business. Perhaps the hot waves within her were magnifying time, subdividing each moment of this hazed warm late afternoon, late in summer, late in the day, with its narrow bird-chirps and minutely veined elm leaves overhead.

The upstairs front parlor, where Ann found the peace to be alone with her books, the clatter of King Street noticeable only when two drunken men began to shout together, the air
fragrant of cold ashes and furniture wax and stale potpourri and sun-warmed plush, had fallen away, the very walls with their wallpaper of red stripes and blue-and-gold medallions had fallen away dizzyingly, when she read these last words, their terror collected in the mysterious
She
with its Godlike capital letter. A world without clouds, without winds—but of course, the world within the coffin would lack everything.

Buchanan, politely troubled by her silence, sensing her disturbance if not her premonition, presumed to touch again the back of her hand, her four pink-nailed fingers where they rested on the cloth of his coatsleeve, and at this touch she took on flesh again, she took on life, her heart moving her blood through the supple conduits of her tall young body, maintaining in her slender skull the polychrome light of consciousness. Her universe shrank to these soft, familiar environs, and her condition to that of a woman on the verge of married life, soon to have a house of her own, with waxed furniture, and respectful servants, and crackling fires in the fireplaces, and windows to keep clean with vinegar and water as Mother directed her maids to do, a cup of vinegar to every bucket of water. It was Byron’s dreadful vision now that seemed illusory, a dream indeed. Talking and walking at a slower pace, as if together recovering from a slight case of ague, Buchanan and Ann made their sauntering way north on South Queen Street to Centre Square, as candles were beginning to be lit in the dusky rear rooms of the staid houses of brick and limestone, then right a half-block to the Coleman residence, where Ginger, a manumitted black slave said to have had an Onondaga grandmother, served them Cantonese tea, sailed to them through three oceans, with a side glass of peach brandy, brewed by North Carolina Moravians, for the gentleman.

• • •

I also remember, not exactly from the Ford years but from Nixon’s last Presidential April [
Retrospect
eds.: CK but Easter ’74 April 14th by my perpetual calendar], stamped as sharply on my memory as a tin weathervane, the silhouette of the Perfect Wife,
Genevieve Mueller, as she stood, in a smart spring outfit consisting of a boxy hound’s-tooth-checked jacket and pleated white wool skirt, on the street in front of her house in Wayward under the giant surviving elm there on the corner. She was poised to cross over to her own front door, we had made no plans to meet, I just happened to have run in the car to the town’s three-store (gas station, grocery
cum
minimal hardware, and drugstore also stocking newspapers, magazines, paperbacks, plastic toys, and tennis balls) downtown for the Sunday paper and circled back toward my house by way of her house, an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim, and set back from the road by a breadth of front lawn and some struggling azaleas, a modest symmetrical house made majestic for me by the extravagant extent of my longing and covetousness. Many the night, swinging out of my most direct path home after dropping off a babysitter, I had thought of Genevieve lying in there asleep in the arms of that methodical Midwestern deconstructionist and nearly wept with envy at the imagined bliss concealed by their darkened upstairs windows. Since those nights of barren yearning—my arc of automotive divagation described in snow and spring rain, under summer’s thick canopy of leafiness and then the recklessly spilled salt of stars glimpsed through nets of disencumbered twigs—she and I had suddenly, recently managed, under cover of the
bustle of an academic community, to make contact, to confess our mutual discontents, to make love, to fall in love, to exchange feverish pledges whose exact meaning and circumstantial redemption remained cloudy in my mind. This cloudiness was to be rapidly dispersed. I braked to a stop, exhilarated not only by the sight of my beloved’s perfect figure, so trim and compact and smartly stamped, in its black-and-white checks, on the tender surface of the sacred morning, beneath the persistent elm’s great vase-shape mistily brimming with pale-chartreuse buds, but by the resinous eager tang of spring in the air, inviting me to be, late-thirtysomething though I was, eternally young. I was full of the sap of recent sexual conquest. Life felt sweet. Genevieve was wearing high heels, in two sharply contrasting tones, and all around her Nature, too, was standing on tiptoe. With one of her unsmiling stares—her eyes were the deep brown of black coffee, in a face of luminous unblemished pallor, with a slight bony arch to her long-nostrilled nose—she came around to the driver’s side of my car, my [see
this page
] piratical, debonairly unsafe, gallantly rusted Corvair. My top was down. [I would write, “She stepped off the curb and came around to the, etc.” except that the informal town of Wayward, like the Lancaster of my imagining, was short on curbs and sidewalks, and had none here, where the elm tree’s roots would in any case have posed a problem for the pavers.]

“I told him,” she said.

“You told him?” I repeated inanely. I could not tell if the smell of fear—electric, like that of ozone—was mine or hers. “You told him what?” I did not have to ask who the “him” was.

“About us.”

I could not stop thinking of how lovely Genevieve looked, there in the feathery sunlight underneath the elm, on an Easter morning when the whole town seemed to have been cleared, as if for shooting a movie—not another car in sight, not a bird cackling to clutter the sound track. She kept looking down the street, as if toward the director.

“You
did?
” Now my voice did sound sick. My whole world, disorderly or not, had been pulled out from under me.

Her focus slightly changed, shortened, to take in my face. The sunlight had that white sharp quality it has in the spring, before the leaves come out. Each pebble on the street, gritty with the past winter’s sand and salt, threw a crescent-shaped shadow. My mind crackled with irrelevant thoughts, such as what a pleasant spacious country America was, with its freedoms and single-family homes, and that I should have received this fatal news in a more dignified position than sitting here helpless in my jaunty old bathtub of a horseless carriage. Genevieve was speaking very rapidly, rather breathlessly. “Was that wrong? He’s been sensing something lately, and we got to talking last night, and he was so innocent, it seemed cruel not to tell him. Wasn’t that right?”

I loved her so much, she looked so perfect, her face just slightly wider than ideal, like a child’s, that I foolishly smiled and nodded, feeling fuzzy all through, like the elm. “And what did he say?”

“Well,” she said, and looked over me and my car down toward the street, toward the center of town. She was obviously dressed for church, and perhaps he was coming from church, with their two little girls. It was hard to picture him as a churchman, even on Easter morning, since his professional career was based upon the exposure of meaningless binaries
and empty signifiers. “We said many things. We were up until three, hashing over our whole marriage. But basically he said, Fine, if that’s what I want and if you’ll marry me.”

The Perfect Wife. Mine. It was locked in. I was on my way to Paradise. I felt rushed, a bit, like the good thief on the cross. Still, it was a direction. All I had to do was dispose of my own wife and children. They had been deconstructed, but didn’t know it yet. I would have to tell them. The wife, the kids. It was a not uncommon crisis in this historical era, yet there is a difference between an event viewed statistically, as it transpired among people who are absorbed into a historical continuum, and the same event taken personally, as a unique and irreversible transformation in one’s singular life, with reverberations travelling through one’s whole identity, to the limits of personal time. Since history always posits
more
time, backwards and forwards, in that respect it is
less
serious than a single, non-extendable life.

The Perfect Wife and her imperfect husband had come to the college three years before. They were seven or eight years younger than we, and the departments, small as the college is, don’t instantly mingle. But as time went on I had opportunity enough to observe her, and to judge her a jewel beyond price. I took note of her faultless figure, the breasts and hips emphatic but every ounce under control, and her exquisite, if slightly mannish, clothes, and her crisp but tender nurture of her two little girls, one of whom was a comically exact copy of her, in her husband’s pallid coloring, while the other, with Genevieve’s black eyes, brows, and hair, had a considerable portion of Brent’s dogmatic angularity, jutting jaw, and furrowed, troubled, skeptical forehead. At the Wayward College indoor pool, during faculty-use hours, Genevieve was as neat a nymph as a trademark artist ever penned, favoring a square-cornered
swimcap of white rubber and a black single-piece bathing suit more stunning in its professional severity than any belly-baring bikini. At faculty parties, she was the model of woolen-clad, single-braceleted correctitude, alertly receptive while conversing with the
President in her lavender upswept hair and regal purple muu-muu (the President, not Genevieve), amiably reserved and faintly teasing with the gangling young instructors and their giggly common-law brides, and cheerfully frontal with her husband’s academic equals. Me, I usually viewed her in profile, admiring her pursed considering lips, her single flashing eye beneath the dense clot of curved lashes, and her scarcely perceptible nasal curve, which I saw as Mediterranean, a genetic trace inherited from the fabled age of matriarchal queendoms, of calmly murderous white goddesses. We at first avoided one another at these gatherings; there was a dangerous magnetism both felt from the start. Her conversation, when we dared politely talk, seemed a bit flat, factual, and (with my wife’s wandering indirections as background noise) unsubtle; but I blamed this on mental contamination by her husband, with his pugnacious monosyllable of a monicker and his boyish thrust of stiff beige hair above his slanting forehead. He was contentious, dismissive, cocky, and a great hit with the students; he played to them with a televisable glibness and catered to their blank, TV-scoured brains by dismissing on their behalf the full canon of Western masterpieces, every one of them (except
Wuthering Heights
and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass) a relic of centuries of white male oppression, to be touched as gingerly as radioactive garbage. In faculty meetings he spoke, though less than half a generation younger than I, with the brash authority of the New Thinking; gray heads bowed and made way, in this quaint institution devoted
to the interim care of well-bred, well-off girls en route from their fathers to their husbands, for “studies” whose ideal texts were the diaries, where they could be found, of black female slaves. He was active, dynamic, persuasive, and committed. He took teaching
too
seriously, it seemed to me—as a species of political activity, as an opportunity for the exercise of power, even while decrying the white male power of bygone generations.
Never mind; I invited him to be my opponent at tennis and squash, as a way of drawing closer to his wife. (Genevieve in tennis whites! With a heartbreaking little black hem to her socklets!! Her backhand was even better than her forehand, and after we became lovers she confided to me that she had been a natural left-hander, made over into a rightie by the penmanship instructors of a regressive, nun-run private school in lower Wisconsin.) When it came to dinner at their home, I marvelled at her impeccable housewifery, her gourmet cooking, her poignantly staged presentation of her little girls, in not only clean pastel gowns but miniature satiny bed-jackets, for their good nights to the guests. She had managed to instill in her household a European sense of children as graceful adornments to the parents, as opposed to our ugly American democratic style, with even an infant given his noisy vote in all proceedings. As to decor, in my own house there was simply too much—too many pictures on the wall, too many worn-out rugs overlapping on the floor, too much carelessly inherited furniture, too many shawls and cats shedding threads and hairs on the sofa cushions, too many half-empty bottles in the pantry and half-read books piled up everywhere, even in the bathrooms—whereas here there was just enough of books, tables, vases, chairs, a cool sufficiency with poverty’s clean lines, a prosperity short of surfeit. Even the grounds around their modest home, on a street of older
houses unevenly redeemed from Depression-era decay, some having replaced the original clapboards with shingles and some with aluminum siding, showed Genevieve’s will toward order—the flower beds weed-free, the ornamental plantings bark-mulched. And when it came at last to lovemaking, on the hard floors and rented couches that adultery utilizes
faute de mieux
, hers was quick, firm, adventurous, definitive. There was none of that female maze and endocrinal grievance I had to work through with the Queen of Disorder. I pictured my wife’s psychosexual insides as a tidal swamp where a narrow path wound past giant nodding cattails and hidden egret-nests, with a slip into indifference gaping on both sides; Genevieve’s entrails were in comparison city streets, straight, broad, and zippy. If she had been in the least disappointing in this regard, I might not have found myself at this pebbly elm-shadow-striped corner, facing a fait accompli.