by John Updike
She had held her attitude of repose, one silken sleeve posed along the restless mahogany curve of the sofa’s back, with a deliberate patience, sensing that this greatly endowed and yet spiritually lamed man was attempting a declaration of, for him, dangerous depth. Quickly moving her posed arm to make, with the other, a clench of earnestness in her lap, she mirrored the tilt of his body toward hers and said in a lowered but still singing voice, “It is not a woman’s way, Mr. Buchanan, to make an issue of doubt. Helpless we are born, helpless we die, and betweentimes we live at the mercy of those who are stronger. It is not our task to quarrel with God. Yet life is good, evidently; earth’s abundance and glory are but the outward validation of the love we feel flowing, without stint, from within. There are truths beyond the reach of reason. Surely Miss Coleman, to the degree of intimacy that is already your privilege, relieves your uncertainties, and charms away your doubts.”
“Alas, Miss Hubley, and in the strictest confidence, not only does she herself doubt; she mocks. She is a headlong reader of Lord Byron’s bombastic and cynical scribblings, and I fear has some sympathy for the most vicious anti-principles of the European anarchists!”
“But how can that be? Her family is the richest in Lancaster!”
“You cite as objection the very cause. Only luxury can afford ruinous thoughts. Luxury, and poverty beyond redemption.”
Grace Hubley sat back, thinking that she had gone as far with this initial interview as was practicable; she was aware of hunger clashing with brandy in her stomach, and of a certain weariness this man even in his splendor and susceptibility inspired. He lacked true masculine spontaneity, that possibility of cruelty which brings the final alertness, the last voluptuous rounding, to feminine interest. “Well,” she said in a flattened tone of conclusion and provisional withdrawal, “there are many Christian women, of sound and regular views, who would welcome your attentions, Mr. Buchanan, and throw a soothing light upon the matter of your election.” Having so long waxed flirtatious, she relaxed into theological admonition, continuing, “I fear you vex with your mind what only spirit can decide. You must not bargain with God, as you do with other men of substance. God is not substantial in this sense. He cannot be bargained with. He allows us freedom only to accept or reject Him. Accept Him, sir, simply, without cavil, as a woman does—a woman, of course, of sound disposition and normal attitude.”
Before this insinuation at Ann Coleman could quite register, another sound woman, stout and dutiful Mary Jenkins, appeared; the golden minutes had fled by, the evening dinner hour was at hand. Despite her profuse invitations Buchanan desisted from partaking. He reclaimed his beaver hat and the dove-gray gloves folded within it, stood erect with a creak of his travelled knees, and informed the vision in silk—who wore in his sight yet some aspect of a foe, a combatant in the implicative battles of sexual negotiation—“I will strive to accept your advice, Miss Hubley. This chance encounter has been not merely pleasurable but instructive. Shall it occur again, I wonder?”
“If the Lord wills,” she said prettily, confident that it would.
But it did not; events whirled the possibility away. If Grace Hubley is viewed, under a loving but stern Providence, as the source of Buchanan’s impending misfortune, and of a neurosis that decades later disabled his Presidency and plunged our nation into its bloodiest war, then she deserved to be punished. Not only did she live unwed but she died violently, in utmost pain. As she grew older in life, and thrice had broken engagements that would have brought her respected husbands, she devoted most of her energies to the entertainment of her friends, many of whom were as light-hearted and blithe as she, too, had been. It was on the return from chaperoning a party of young people from the historic old hotel at Wabank that she met her death. Standing with her back to an open-grate fire, in an unsuspecting moment a spark lit upon her dress, and before help could be called she was seared most terribly over the body and died in pitiful agony in a few hours. The date, thanks to a tombstone, is known: November 19, 1861. The Union disasters at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff were already history; her death was a match-flare within a spreading conflagration. But surely Grace Hubley did not, after Buchanan desisted from partaking of dinner with the Jenkins family, and hurriedly departed to his home, where he enjoyed his own solitary meal and performed his toilet for his appointment that evening with his fiancée, execute the melodramatic perfidy described:
Hardly had he left the Jenkins house, when Miss Hubley slipped to her boudoir and hastily penned a note to Miss Coleman that was “the most unkindest cut of all” to the delicate, sensitive nature of the woman who received it. It was short and concise, telling that Mr. Buchanan had stopped at the Jenkins home to see her and “that they had spent a very pleasant afternoon together.”
Nay, rather than believe such outright and useless malice one would cling to the muffled but musical sentence with which George Ticknor Curtis disposed of the scandal in his authorized (by Buchanan’s younger brother Edward and his niece Harriet Lane Johnston) Life of 1883: It is now known that the separation of the lovers originated in a misunderstanding, on the part of the lady, of a very small matter, exaggerated by giddy and indiscreet tongues, working on a peculiarly sensitive nature. Whose tongues? Jenkins tongues, Rogers tongues, Jacobs, Reynolds, Boyd, Shippen, Slaymaker? A town has many tongues, and twice as many eyes and ears.
Curtis knew more than he told, but he had not seen the packet of mementos so precious to Buchanan that the careful old man dispatched them to a New York bank for safekeeping when Pennsylvania, and Wheatland with its reviled occupant, were menaced by an invasion of Confederate troops. In his retirement, the former President had been shown a gossipping article on the Ann Coleman incident, and, in Curtis’s words, He then said, with deep emotion, that there were papers and relics which he had religiously preserved, then in a sealed package in a place of deposit in the city of New York, which would explain the trivial origin of this separation. His executors found these papers inclosed and sealed separately from all others, and with a direction upon them in his handwriting, that they were to be destroyed without being read. They obeyed the injunction, and burnt the package without breaking the seal.
Another burning, and not from a stray spark. Why did he religiously preserve these papers and relics, if the executors were truly to burn them? Surely he wanted us—posterity, to whom he would be history—to know the facts of the matter. Mr. Buchanan had a habit of preserving nearly everything that came into his hands. Curtis was the third chosen biographer, and the first not to be overwhelmed by the mass of Buchanan papers. The initial choice, Mr. William B. Reed of Philadelphia, a personal friend … in whom he had great confidence, was appointed in Buchanan’s will, but was prevented by private misfortune from doing anything more than to examine Mr. Buchanan’s voluminous papers. Edward and Harriet, eager to have their brother and uncle vindicated and explained, found another writer. After Mr. Reed had surrendered the task which he had undertaken, the papers were placed in the hands of the late Judge John Cadwallader of Philadelphia, another personal friend of the President. This gentleman died before he had begun to write the proposed work. Curtis, a New Englander, Harvard graduate, and lawyer turned professional writer, who had never met Buchanan, persevered, in patient legalistic fashion. He had written a fuller account of the Coleman incident, and showed it to Samuel L. M. Barlow, his friend and Buchanan’s, for approval. Barlow, would you believe, did not approve: he wrote Curtis, I am clearly of the opinion that you should not print any considerable portion of what you have written on the subject of his engagement to Miss Coleman.… In this view Mrs. Barlow agrees fully. Oh, Mrs. Barlow, what a toad you are, lurking in the garden of history!
We are left, like our hero, in the dark. Night came to the so-called city of Lancaster as decisively as to a village. Only the taverns in and around Centre Square cast much light through their windows onto the sidewalks of rough planking, which thudded hollowly beneath the heels of Buchanan’s hastening boots. Th
e tilted attic roof of blue-black clouds at whose eaves a brown sunset had wanly peeped now was breaking up, disclosing spatterings of dry cold stars. The afternoon’s feeble spittings of snow had yielded to crystalline air tasting of woodsmoke, fresh horse dung, and evening ale. He could see his breath before his face. Guilt of an unformulated and foreboding sort revolved in his stomach with what it sourly contained of tea, port, Lititz pretzels, and a lonely supper. It has never been ascertained just whether or no Buchanan was received by his fiancée that evening. If he was, the dullest of imaginations can readily picture the chill that must have characterized the greeting. Considering the modest, sensitive nature of the young woman, it seems improbable that she could have faced the torture of a meeting. From whatever direction he approached the Coleman house, its façade was dark; its front door felt closed to him. The panes of its parlor windows held only light reflected from afar, like the residue of liquid that is left in an emptied dish. The future statesman hesitated outside, divided between longing for a lamp of recognition to flare within Ann’s house and a certain fear of the same flare, and at last retired, his dignity and weariness intact, to his bachelor lodgings.
There you have my attempt, Retrospect editors, to work into the fabric of reconstruction the indeterminacy of events. As in physics, the more minutely we approach them, the stranger facts become, with leaps and contradictions of indecipherable quanta. All we have are documents, which do not agree. Was there, we might legitimately ask, ever an actual afternoon when Buchanan met Grace Hubley? We first hear of it in an article, maddeningly undated and somewhat edited in quotation by Klein, written by Blanche Nevin, a daughter of the Reverend John W. Nevin—an intimate of Buchanan’s seven years of retirement and the deliverer of the President’s funeral sermon in 1868—and of Martha Jenkins Nevin, whose father had been William Jenkins’ brother Robert. In other words, Blanche Nevin’s mother had been Mary Jenkins’ and Grace Hubley’s niece-in-law; her account has the authenticity of family lore. Some time after the engagement had been announced, Mr. Buchanan was obliged to go out of town on a business trip. He returned in a few days and casually dropped in to see … [ellipses not mine] Mrs. William Jenkins, with whose husband he was on terms of intimate friendship. With her was staying her sister, Miss Grace Hubley,… [see bracketed disclaimer above] a pretty and charming young [for young see discussion on this page] lady. From this innocent call the whole trouble arose. A young lady [a different young lady, presumably] told Miss Coleman of it and thereby excited her jealousy. She was indignant that he should visit anyone before coming to her. On the spur of the moment she penned an angry note and released him from his engagement. The note was handed to him while he was in the Court House. Persons who saw him receive it remarked afterward that they noticed him turn pale when he read it. Mr. Buchanan was a proud man. The large fortune of his lady was to him only another barrier to his trying to persuade her to reconsider her rejection of himself.
For that matter, was there ever a Ford Administration? Evidence for its existence seems to be scanty. I have been doing some sneak objective research, though you ask for memories and impressions, both subjective. The hit songs of the years 1974–76 apparently were
“Seasons in the Sun”
“The Most Beautiful Girl”
“The Streak”
“Please, Mister Postman”
“Mandy”
“Top of the World”
“Just You and Me”
“Rhinestone Cowboy”
“Fame”
“Best of My Love”
“Laughter in the Rain”
“The Hustle”
“Have You Never Been Mellow?”
“One of These Nights”
“Jive Talkin’ ”
“Silly Love Songs”
“Black Water”
“Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart”
“Play That Funky Music”
“A Fifth of Beethoven”
“Shake Your Booty”
“Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”
“Love Is Alive”
“Sara Smile”
“Get Closer”
I don’t recall hearing any of them. Whenever I turned on the radio, WADM was pouring out J. S. Bach’s merry tintinnabulations or the surging cotton candy of P. I. Tchaikovsky, the inventor of sound-track music. No, wait—“Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” rings a faint bell, I can almost hum it, and the same goes for “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” if it’s not the same song. In fact, all twenty-five titles give me the uneasy sensation of being the same song. The top non-fiction bestsellers of those years were All the President’s Men, More Joy: Lovemaking Companion to the Joy of Sex, You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis, Angels: God’s Secret Agents, Winning Through Intimidation, Sylvia Porter’s Money Book, Total Fitness in 30 Minutes a Week, Blind Ambition: The White House Years, The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, and The Hite Report: I read none of them. Fiction, too, evaded my ken; the multitudes but not I revelled in the dramatized information of such chunky, univerbal titles as Jaws, Shogun, Ragtime, Trinity, Centennial, and 1876, or in the wistful escapism of All Things Bright and Beautiful and Watership Down, which was, I seem very imperfectly to recall, somehow about rabbits. The top TV shows were All in the Family, Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley: I never watched them, having no TV set in my furtive digs. I would half-hear the interrupting news bulletins on WADM whenever some woman would take a shot at Ford or Ford took a shot at the Cambodians—Cambodia being the heart of the world’s darkness in these years—but otherwise the only news that concerned me was what came over the telephone and up the stairs.
The longer I stayed in my burrow over in Adams, the more visitors I attracted. I was a kind of vacuum nature, especially female nature, abhorred. Students would drop by unannounced: I remember the rasp of my buzzer, the tremulous girlish voice stammering her excuses into the rusty speaker below in the little foyer strewn with advertising handouts and misdelivered mail, my hasty cleanup of dropped underwear and dirty dishes while this student climbed the uncarpeted flights of stairs, her young heart beating like a caged bluebird. These Wayward girls all had cars, not just cars but convertibles in the fall and spring and four-wheel-drive squarebacks in the blizzard season; for them it was no great trick to drive over the bridge and find my place behind the old shoe factory—undone by Italian imports and fractionally given over to little electronics outfits all hoping to become the next Apple—less than a block off the half-boarded-up main shopping drag, called Federal Avenue on the drawing board when the town, little more than a mill, inn, and waterfall when it was named in 1797, was laid out in the 1830’s, under the second Adams’s supplanter Jackson, as an ideal industrialopolis. The city was a worker’s paradise on paper—the proud main drag ending at the main textile factory’s gates; a parallel grand residential boulevard with a mall down the middle like Park Avenue and a big flat Common in between. At the center of a symmetrical web of walks stood a bandstand and a monument to the two Federalist Presidents, Washington and Adams, with a pair of nightgowned beauties who were not Martha and Abigail but the abstract houris of the Republic, Liberty and Equality, in these fallen times much decorated with polychrome graffiti, spray-painted pudenda, invitations to FUCK ME and SUCK MY COCK, and the like. The Jacksonian mapmakers hadn’t quite foreseen the Irish and then the Poles who would replace the Yankee farm girls at the idyllic looms and lasts, or the Hispanics and Asians that had appeared in these recent decades in such bewildering numbers, with their rapid languages and Old World predilection for crimes of passion. But the city has stretched its grid toward the surrounding hills to make more neighborhoods, and put up bi-lingual signs in the welfare office, and hired more dark-skinned counsellors at the high school, and allows the Common to be used for fiestas on saints’ days. Is this the place, Retrospect editors, for me to confess my basic optimism and even exhilaration in regard to the American process? The torch still shines, attracting moths of every shade. Live fre
e or stay home.
Which student was it? My core memory, or impression, generating a radiant halo of verbalization, is of the push of her breast on the back of my arm, above the elbow, as we looked together at her term paper, there by the window with the friable brown shade like a graham cracker, near my desk with its litter of James Buchananiana. Waxy photocopies and scribbled index cards and overdue library books—the disorder sickened me, but I had hopes of pulling out of it a clean narrative thread that would some day gleam in the sun like a taut fishing line.
This unmistakable nudge of lipid tissue was one more bit of confusion I didn’t need. I wanted to step forward, releasing my upper arm from the pressure, but, pinned by my desk chair, I could only lean away, an evasive tactic she easily countered by edging her feet, in their canvas sneakers—this was before the era of bulky, many-ply running shoes and after the heyday of Pappagallo ballerina slippers—a few inches closer to my loafers. “Miss Arthrop”—let us call her Jennifer Arthrop, at a grab—“you don’t have to stand so close.”
“I can’t see, Professor Clayton, if I don’t. I brought only my sunglasses.” Nearsightedness in women, I suppose, is favored by evolution; men are charmed by it, a vision that focuses on the cooking pot, the sewing needle, and immediate male needs. It would be fatal to hunting prowess, however, and in men it must persist through the genes of social parasites.
The document in my hands, a sheaf of 8½″-by-11″ paper covered, back then, with erratic rows of manually typed characters, eludes the eyes of memory, but let us say, donning the corrective lenses of invention, that it was entitled “Protestant-Christian Mythicization as an Enforcer of Male-Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.” Fifteen pages, double-spaced, a term paper for extra credit, from one of my better students. Miss Arthrop came from Connecticut, where her father was a communications-company executive and her mother ran a gift shop. Her excuse for showing up in my divorcing man’s hideout was the slight lateness of her paper, which was due Friday and by Monday would be decisively late and doomed to be docked one grade. Today was Sunday, a gray area. Her admirably firm breast renewed its pressure on the back of my sensitive arm, in its thin shirtsleeve. In desperation I moved away, an awkward half-twist, around my swivel chair toward the window, my knees inches from the spiny, dusty radiator, the half-raised shade revealing the day to be, in the downward space between my building and the factory, a gloomy one. My maneuver left Miss Arthrop standing in her full sweater at the corner of my desk, blinking, suggesting a caryatid from whose head the weighty entablature had been abruptly removed. The sweater was striped and shaggy, as if she were just back from a ski trip. Perhaps she was. Perhaps, when I raised the shade, a row of dripping icicle tips sparkled into view.