by John Updike
This is the document, this diary entry, which George Ticknor Curtis transcribed into his notes from a lost original, and omitted, with his tedious discretion, to quote in his published biography. Yet it is history, Judge Kittera’s paragraph. It survived the holocaust of documents that still rages—documents shredded, pulped, compacted, abandoned to the cleaning crew, bulldozed deep in green plastic bags, mercilessly churned in the incessant cosmic forgetting. Judge Kittera’s paragraph, preserved among Curtis’s notes at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, throws a watery light, as if one of those water bowls which were used in the era before ground glass as lenses, to magnify candlelight and vision both, has been interposed between the weak sun of that December noon and these silhouetted young female figures posing on the blue-and-brown cobbles of the nation’s most populous city. Were their arms full of new-bought items with which to dazzle the Lancaster provincials? Were they accompanied by servants, from the Hemphill household?—for that matter, would Judge Robert Coleman [how many judges there seem to be in this tale, a veritable choir of them!], the richest man in Lancaster, have sent his precious daughters off without an escort?—an obese old Lutheran duenna, say, with a pink wart at the corner of her upper lip, under black mustache-wisps, and dropsical ankles and the start of a goiter, and a sighing sort of philosophy that masks nihilism in pious resignation. Life is full of disappointments, she tells her wards wearily, and Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, feeding the patient pabulum of the old to the appetitive young. If she was along on this trip, she left no trace on the record; household servants were as abundant and as beneath notice in that age as appliances are in this: there may come an energy-starved post-petroleum age that cannot imagine our constant sliding in and out of automobiles, our unthinking daily flicking of a dozen powerful switches. Yet from the record, the perishable record, can be recovered, amid so much eternal shadow, the exact entertainments that betranced Sarah on the fatal night: she saw the celebrated Joseph Jefferson, grandfather of a namesake to become more celebrated yet, and a Mr. and Mrs. Bartley performing in a play, Grecian Daughter; also Collins’ “Ode on the Passions,” and the comic opera Adopted Child. The historical record can also be made to yield the full name of the unlikely Dr. Physick mentioned above: Philip Syng Physick (1768–1837), in 1819 professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a famously deft and mercifully quick performer of hemorrhoidectomies, tonsillectomies, and lithotomies.
[“Ode on the Passions”! I should supply, out of my own spent passions, the hysteria—Ann’s uniquely, in Dr. Chapman’s experience, fatal hysteria. Her father as a heavy on-rolling barrel of righteous molasses has already been evoked. To this add crackling clouds of claustrophobia that does not know itself as feminist. She is squeezed on all sides by patriarchal prohibitions and directives, and the oppressive broad envisioned faces of her mother (a complacent mixture of iron and dough, an obtuse Old face) and her haughty brother Edward, these family faces lowering upon her as if she is a baby in a crib and pressing the air out of her chest, plus the mental picture of Buchanan’s inscrutable askance face and prim white cravat and russet frock coat suggesting, as at the moment by the cemetery fence this past September (see this page), a thin painted cutout of tin leaning above her, a feelingless tilted wall she cannot get through, she cannot: an appalled vision, on a transcendental plane where her consciousness intersects with ours of her, of herself, trapped here in Philadelphia away from the comforting matrix of ruddy dusty Lancaster, as discardable, as doomed to the cosmic forgetting, a minor historical figure, with but one little footnoted life to contribute to the avalanche of recorded events, one glimmering moment in the careless desperate cascade of Mankind’s enormous annals—no, this is too much my terror, my hysteria—my h(i)st(o)ria, the deconstructionists might say, if they, too, and their anti-life con(tra)ceptions were not now becoming at last passé and universally de(r)rided.
[Into this void where history leaves off I must thrust something. Perhaps a little Byron, whose verses Ann has sipped like a fatal nectar—let us say the final, swelling stanza of his “Epistle to Augusta,” written in 1816 (as gaslights were being installed in the New Theatre) but not published until 1830, a year and a decade too late for Ann:
For thee, my own sweet sister, in thy heart
I know myself secure, as thou in mine;
We were and are—I am, even as thou art—
Beings who ne’er each other can resign;
It is the same, together or apart,
From life’s commencement to its slow decline
We are entwined—let death come slow or fast,
The tie which bound the first endures the last!
[Or perhaps:]
Returning to the Hemphill house, and finding that Margaret had gone out on a domestic errand, Ann made her way upstairs to the bedroom allotted to her for her stay; but, unable to compose her mind, she sought out her younger sister, Sarah, in the room adjoining. She knocked, and a voice welcomed her from within. Entering the room, which overlooked the front of the house as Ann’s overlooked the back, gave her the momentary illusion of escaping the dreary tumult captive within her skull; the sight of the seventeen-year-old, sitting pertly on the windowseat with her knees drawn up, gazing down at the urban abundance of street traffic, of carriages and barrows, of gentlemen in tall silk hats and peddlers in wool caps pulled close to their heads with tied earflaps, recalled Ann to the fact there there was more, vastly more, to the world than her own romantic plight, with its constant inner thrumming of near-panic, as the ticking minutes sealed into permanency an insufferable, an impossible, an insulting loss.
Her sister’s fresh and guileless face, shining in the afterglow of some reverie, was like a crack of light at the bottom of the door of a closet in which she had been locked as punishment for a deed whose wickedness she could not understand.
“Dreaming of your prince, dear Sally?” The Ann who talked, who brightly teased and lent her animation to the little scenes of family life, was like a parallel self who carried on while the real Ann, the heartsick and affronted Ann, sank ever more drowningly into irrational despair. Her fever had retreated but left in its wake a dry cough and a stronger sense of no longer being quite herself.
“Studying what a great deal of curious people there are in the world!” her sister responded. “Perhaps the people in Lancaster are as curious, but one sees them every day.”
“Yes, whom did I meet right on Walnut Street but Judge Kittera? You remember him?—such a slow-speaking, pontifical Polonius. For the sake of our family connections, I endeavored to put a good face on the encounter.”
“Was that difficult?” Back in Lancaster, Sarah might not have asked so direct and pert a question, but here in strange environs, in the house of a sister enough older to be their mother, their status drew nearer to equality. Also, Ann in her dreary passion looked to Sarah for cheer, for rays from the land of the living, and the maturing child, sensing this, was accordingly flattered and emboldened.
“No,” Ann conceded. She became didactic, feeling Sarah to have been stimulated by the great city to a hunger for those social graces whose absence causes so keen an embarrassment to the untutored but whose acquisition, facilitating that human intercourse whose usual fruit is disappointment, comforts hardly at all. “When you put on a manner, the heart to a degree follows. That is why women, Sally, must always be gay and courteous, even among themselves. It was a grateful relief, in truth, to discourse with one who knew nothing of my disgrace, and who saw me as I once was, with all possibilities still before me.”
Sarah rose to the invitation to protest. “Surely there was nothing to disgrace you in your action of breaking the engagement with Mr. Buchanan. No one in Lancaster would dare to think so.”
Ann sat of weariness upon her sister’s bed. “But everyone thinks it disgraceful that I encouraged the suit of a man so patently unworthy, so uncaring, so vicious. The Jenkinses especially must call me a fool. And I concur in their
verdict. Against all the good advice of my parents and brothers I married my heart to a phantom, a pretender, and now my heart cannot quick enough break the contract.” A satisfying heat enveloped her eyes, and tears needed blinking back.
“Ann, surely you are unfair to Mr. Buchanan. It is your prerogative, but you are unfair. His fault, if fault it was, was excessively scrupulous attention to professional duty; if he has another fault, he is too kind to all sides, being as courteous to his barber and bootblack as to his social equals.”
“Being kind all around is no kindness to me, if I languish neglected while he charms the town.” Thinking this utterance too stiff a lesson, for the soft clay before her, in proper female pridefulness, Ann explained, “It was not simply his dalliance with the elderly Miss Hubley; it was a thousand signs of veneered indifference, even as he professed eternal devotion to me. His last offense merely confirmed all the rest. As my father asserts, and as many gentlemen of substance privately agree, this man knows no devotion but to his own self-interest. His father notoriously rose by sharp practice and his father before him deserted his family back in County Donegal.”
“I have never had a lover,” Sarah said, blushing and gazing down again upon the traffic of Chestnut Street, her near-childish profile grave in the gray windowlight, “but I thought Mr. Buchanan as enamored of you as his cautious nature permitted. He is no pirate or poet; he lacks even our father’s fire; but there was a benevolence to him that would have worn well.”
“Why, you are pontifical as well, little Sally! All those sermons of Dr. Clarkson’s I thought you were dreaming through have gone to your brain, and to your tongue.” Sarah was pious, more tenderly than her parents’ conventional devotions would have demanded. She had been much affected by the recent demolition of the old stone St. James Church, with its rotting pews and royal mementos, and excited by the prospect of a new and more glorious edifice, to whose erection her father was the greatest contributor.
“You mustn’t mock my faithfulness,” the girl carefully replied, with a flash of independent poise that Ann even in her distraction had to admire. “Did you love the church as I do, you might be more steady in your affections, and less hasty in your treatment of Mr. Buchanan.”
“Stop saying his name! I am steady, so steady my spirits are sunk beneath this break, though my head and all its advisers know it to be best.”
“Perhaps the heart knows better than the head.”
“Don’t torment me with that possibility—I am in torment enough!”
At this outbreak Sarah rose from the windowseat and embraced her sister, lightly, with an inflection almost motherly, mixed with a younger sister’s shyness. “The break can be repaired,” she urged. “The day after tomorrow, we return, and the whole matter may have acquired a different mood. Mr. Buchanan will be true; he can see that you acted to please Papa more than yourself. When Papa has cooled, he will relent, and give you back your happiness. He has no just reason to block your engagement; many a father in Lancaster would rejoice to see his daughter betrothed to such a worthy man.”
“Why hasn’t he followed me here, if he is so true?”
Sarah knew which man was meant, amid this forest of male pronouns. “You have rejected him,” she pointed out. “It has become a test of prides, yours against his. Yours is a woman’s pride, and it should yield.”
“Who taught you such doctrine? Why should a woman always be the one to yield?”
“Yielding is part of our natures, since our calling is not to fight wars but to nurture families. Mama often yields to Papa, and loses nothing by it. Indeed, she gains, in coin of his gratitude, and in spiritual capital.”
“Mr. Buchanan”—Ann pronounced the name firmly, as if trying its syllables on again—“is not Papa, nor am I Mama, though we are both ironmasters’ daughters.”
Her sister’s cheek dimpled. “Your iron is more finely wrought, so you have sought a more refined mate, and now you have spurned him for not being heavy enough.”
Ann’s fingertips kneaded her high rounded forehead, with its single stray ringlet. “Sally, all your admonitions are giving me a most terrible mal de tête. The fever I caught in the coach keeps returning in fits. Last night, I slept hardly at all, unable to stop my mind from churning. It is not so easy to undo things as you suggest. Papa still forgives you everything, as one does a child; me he will forgive nothing, nothing that embarrasses him in the public eye, as this engagement and its outcome has. Really, I must hide my head; I think I will let you and the Hemphills enjoy the theatricals tonight without my gloomy company.”
“Oh, Annie—it’s Mr. Jefferson, with his funny English accent! And Collins’ ‘Passions,’ set to music! ‘Exulting, trembling, raging, panting,’ ” she quoted, for comic effect.
Ann granted her a smile, but wanly. These heated waves of disquiet had commenced within her again, waves that seemed to signal a derangement, a seasickness of the soul. “I will go rest now, dear Sally. When Margaret returns, please tell her I am asleep, and pray that it be true.”
With woeful measures wan Despair
Low sullen sounds his grief beguil’d;
A solemn, strange, and mingled air;
’Twas sad by fits, by starts was wild.
The same untrustworthy source that retailed with a unique anecdotal richness the chance meeting with Grace Hubley a few weeks before raises the possibility that Buchanan did pursue Ann. One account of the tragedy that seems to have the quality of authenticity claims that before her death Buchanan received a note from his fiancee to come to Philadelphia to see her.
And so the story runs that he prepared post-haste to make the journey. Ordering his horse and gig in readiness, Buchanan soon was on his way down the Philadelphia and Lancaster pike.
One by one the historic taverns that dotted the historic King’s highway was [sic] passed, and few were the stops made that eventful morning, which Buchanan believed was speeding him on his way to a reconciliation with Ann Coleman.
By dinner hour the “Half-Way House” at Downingtown was reached and the journey halted a brief period for the meal. Dinner was over and Buchanan stood slightly apart from the other patrons of the inn staring out into the streets where the feeble street lamps were beginning to glow.
Strange day, to pass from morning to dinner hour so quickly, with only the halfway point reached. Surely by dinner hour the lone rider had reached his destination, the Hemphill house in Philadelphia, and, after the appropriate ceremonies at the door, in which a lover’s urgency brushed aside an elder sister’s protective hesitancy and a brother-in-law’s guarded reservations, Buchanan found the form that was the object of his passions prostrate upon a couch, irresistibly attired in the filmy Empire style, with a full-length shawl to ward off a chill from the velvet-curtained window.
“I have come,” he said simply. He looked magnificent, in his voluminous travelling cloak, with his tall figure and his large fair head tilted slightly forward at an attentive angle, to correct the almost non-existent flaw in his vision.
“I wrote my imploring note,” she explained, in a faint yet distinct voice, “because my heart demanded justice for itself. I was wrong, wrong to be jealous of your entirely decorous call upon the Jenkinses. I have been wrong to let my parents’ and brothers’ sullen disfavor color my own emotional complexion. My affections have one rightful owner, James Buchanan, and he is you.”
“And I have been wrong,” Buchanan stated with thrilling warmth and timbre, as his impressive and graceful figure swooped to perch on a corner of the couch, covered in embossed wool moreen, where the curve of her muslin-veiled hip permitted some few inches of perching room, “to allow my pursuit of legal eminence to remove me from your side, and to dilute the constant attendance to which our announced attachment absolutely entitled you. If you were, dear angel, to favor me by renewing that attachment—the object of fervent prayers that have risen unceasingly from my breast since your harsh first note and your abrupt departure from Lancaster—I would
abandon every ambition but that of serving your happiness.”
“My happiness resides,” Ann stated, lifting up her torso’s gentle weight on the prop of a pink and shapely elbow, “nowhere but in pleasing you, and in winning the right to your attendance when the press of your duties permits.”
They embraced, in an ardent compaction of cloth and hair and underlying flesh, of December cold borne in the folds of his costume and of bodily fever lingering in her delicate limbs, and repledged mutual fidelity. Henceforth he devoted himself to a discreet local practice—wills, bankruptcy, and land disputes—that rarely transported him beyond the rectilinear circuits of central Lancaster, and whose moderate remunerations were handsomely supplemented by portions of the Coleman fortune as it fell, under the melancholy necessities of death, to the heirs; genially Buchanan devoted himself to catering to the whims and passions of his increasingly plump and complacent wife, as their connubial blessings mounted to the number of seven—three boys and four girls, all well favored of feature and all miraculously spared, in the uncertain medical climate of the time, any fatal malady. The lacuna in local Federalist-party circles that Buchanan’s withdrawal from active politics occasioned was quickly repaired; Edward Coleman, Ann’s inimical brother, was significantly placated by his election to the national Congress in 1820 and a rapid advancement to the ranks of Senator and, crowningly, to the post of Grand Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant from Illinois, became the fifteenth President of the United States in the election of 1856. With his fabled gift of close-reasoned oratory and bold yet tactful manner of dealing man to man, a son of the West cherished by the South and esteemed by the North, he recouped the contentious term of the weak-willed Pierce; Douglas managed to stifle the influence of abolitionist and fire-eater alike while superintending the passing of slavery, via the bloodless and infallible operations of popular suffrage, from the territories and the border states, along with the gradual abatement of the vainly agitated fugitive-slave question. Slavery, isolated in an arc of southernmost states while the burgeoning industrial and commercial prosperity of the Midwestern and Middle Atlantic regions pulled the nation forward, was recognized as an anomaly bound to fade away. Not only was it inhumane, it was economically disadvantageous; wage labor was cheaper and more scientific. In November of 1860, Douglas, who had given up alcohol and fatty red meats for a purifying diet of seafood and undercooked vegetables, had little trouble defeating both the Deep South’s candidate, Senator Jefferson Davis, and the Republican aspirant, a little-known one-term Representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. By the time of Douglas’s Second Inaugural in 1861, both the United States and Mr. and Mrs. James Buchanan—forty years wed—had all but forgotten, as if dreamed in a delirium, these moments when, in the music of the passions,