by John Updike
The rest [apropos of JB] is history. Buchanan heard the news of Ann Coleman’s death not at some fabulized Downingtown inn but in the place where he usually was during the late months of 1819, at the Court House in Lancaster’s Centre Square, tending to business. Earlier that week, while Ann was recovering, under the Hemphills’ care, from her flight by carriage to Philadelphia, he had succeeded in getting an out-of-court settlement of the Columbia Bridge Company case. Klein tells us, It was a great triumph for him. Alas, Buchanan’s patient life’s many triumphs—he never lost an election, for instance, whether for Pennsylvania Assemblyman or for U.S. Congressman, Senator, and President—were destined to be bitterly qualified. For much of December 6th (a Monday) he had been at the prothonotary’s office, writing four times, in the spidery legible hand that would not much change in the all but fifty years to come, the words December 6th 1819. I agree that the amount of the above award shall be collected in three equal instalments from its date with interest; but that if any of the said instalments shall remain unpaid for Twenty days after it shall be due then execution may be issued for the amount of said instalment. Signed by Christ. Bachman, significant party to this inscrutable action, and by James Buchanan as Atty for Pltfs. What a relatively smug and composed young maestro of finicking legal procedures it was who penned those words, not once but four times, as we can see on two facing pages of the large ledger of that year’s transactions kept by the Lancaster Historical Society! Four days later, on December 10th, Buchanan was writing to Robert Coleman, Ann’s formidable and now deeply wounded father, My dear Sir:
You have lost a child, a dear, dear child. I have lost the only earthly object of my affections, without whom life now presents to me a dreary blank. My prospects are all cut off, and I feel that my happiness will be buried with her in the grave. It is now no time for explanation, but the time will come when you will discover that she, as well as I, have been much abused. God forgive the authors of it. My feelings of resentment against them, whoever they may be, are buried in the dust. I have now one request to make, and, for love of God and of your dear, departed daughter whom I loved infinitely more than any other human being could love, deny me not. Afford me the melancholy pleasure of seeing her body before its interment. I would not for the world be denied this request.
I might make another, but, from the misrepresentations which must have been made to you, I am almost afraid. I would like to follow her remains to the grave as a mourner. I would like to convince the world, and I hope yet to convince you, that she was infinitely dearer to me than life. I may sustain the shock of her death, but I feel that happiness has fled from me forever. The prayer which I make to God without ceasing is, that I yet may be able to show my veneration for the memory of my dear departed saint, by my respect and attachment for her surviving friends.
May Heaven bless you, and enable you to bear the shock with the fortitude of a Christian.
I am, forever, your sincere and grateful friend,
James Buchanan
This letter was sent by messenger and refused at the door. Unopened, it found its way into what Curtis ceremoniously calls the private depositaries at Wheatland; thus it escaped the fire Buchanan’s executors submissively imposed upon his other preserved memorabilia of the unhappy Ann Coleman affair [see this page–this page]. Our impression upon reading this heartbroken effusion is not entirely favorable; there are too many dears in it, and rather too political a wish to convince the world, by marching in her funeral train. It is, however, a Romeo’s lament compared with the other supposed document from Buchanan’s pen in these thunderstruck days, an obituary that appeared in the Lancaster Journal on December 11th:
Departed this life, on Thursday morning last, in the twenty-third year of her age, while on a visit to her friends in the city of Philadelphia, Miss Anne C. Coleman, daughter of Robert Coleman, Esquire, of this city. It rarely falls to our lot to shed a tear over the mortal remains of one so much and so deservedly beloved as was the deceased. She was everything which the fondest parents or fondest friend could have wished her to be. Although she was young and beautiful, and accomplished, and the smiles of fortune shone upon her, yet her native modesty and worth made her unconscious of her own attractions. Her heart was the seat of all the softer virtues which ennoble and dignify the character of woman. She has now gone to a world where in the bosom of her God she will be happy with congenial spirits. May the memory of her virtues be ever green in the hearts of her surviving friends. May her mild spirit, which on earth still breathes peace and good-will, be their guardian angel to preserve them from the faults to which she was ever a stranger—
“ ‘The spider’s most attenuated thread
Is cord, is cable, to man’s tender tie
On earthly bliss—it breaks at every breeze.’ ”
The quotation, in its curious double quotation marks, is unattributed but comes from Young’s much-loved Night Thoughts (comp. 1742–45). The printer’s devil from the Journal’s office, sent for the copy, recalled finding Buchanan so disturbed by grief that he was unable to write the notice. Lancaster in the wake of Ann§ Coleman’s death was swept by talk of her suicide and of Buchanan’s culpability: I believe that her friends now look upon him as her Murderer, Hannah Cochran wrote to her husband on December 14th. Buchanan had taken refuge with Judge Walter Franklin, whom he had three times defended from impeachment, and who, in this fiercely small world, lived next to the Colemans’ house on East King Street. Some think that Franklin wrote the obituary, Buchanan being too disturbed by grief. There is a florid touch to it, an upward reach, which does not seem quite like our earthbound hero, his imagination flattened like the “J” of his unvarying signature. In the obituary’s notion that for all the smiles of fortune her native modesty made her unconscious of her own attractions, something actual in the case strives to break through; Curtis, who knew people who knew Ann, says that she was described to him as a very beautiful girl, of singularly attractive and gentle disposition, but retiring and sensitive. She was shy; was she also, as the Pennsylvania Dutch put it, “queer,” that is, anti-social? We can no more easily conceive of Ann happy with congenial spirits in the bosom of God than Ann happy among the bucolic busybodies of old Lancaster. She resists, in the mind’s eye, community. In the portrait of her that hangs in Buchanan’s bedroom at Wheatland, her long nose seems willful, her wide stare not inviting, her one stray curl a touch distraught. Those born rich are harder to please than those born poor; Buchanan all his long life acted delighted to be here, here in this vale of tears, a born crony and ballroom flirt, tickled to be consorting with his fellow mortals, be they the Czarina of Russia or the black barber in Lancaster who pronounced in eulogy, Why, sir, he didn’t know what it was to give a rough answer to man, woman, or child. A humble pleasure in human society: it is an absurdity that tends to promote life, like a belief in God. Buchanan had it, and Ann didn’t; in this they were like the fish and the bird of the fable who fell in love.
Hannah Cochran, in the same letter in which she reported that Buchanan was being called Murderer, tells her husband, After Mr. Buchanan was denied his requests, he secluded himself for a few days and then sallied forth as bold as ever. It is now thought that this affair will lessen his Consequence in Lancaster as he is the whole conversation of the town. However, he soon left town, presumably finding refuge with his family in Mercersburg; in a letter of December 20, 1819, Amos Ellmaker wrote him to speak of the awful visitation of Providence that has fallen upon you, and how deeply I feel it. The thought of your situation has scarcely been absent from my mind ten days. I trust your restoration to your philosophy and courage, and to the elasticity of spirits natural to most young men. Yet time, the sovereign cure of all these, must intervene before much good can be done. The sun will shine again—though a man enveloped in gloom always thinks the darkness is to be eternal. Do you remember the Spanish anecdote? A lady, who had lost a favorite child, remained for months sunk in sullen sorrow and despair. Her confessor,
one morning, visited her, and found her, as usual, immersed in gloom and grief. “What!” says he; “have you not forgiven God Almighty?” She rose, exerted herself, joined the world again, and became useful to herself and friends. Ellmaker went on to advise, I say to give full vent and unrestrained license to the feelings and thoughts natural in the case for a time—which time may be a week, two weeks, three weeks, as nature dictates—without scarcely a small effort during that time to rise above the misfortune; then, when this time is past, to rouse, to banish depressing thoughts, as far as possible, and engage most industriously in business.
For the elections of 1820, the Federalists of Lancaster needed a candidate for the national Congress, and settled on Buchanan. Years later, in London, conversing with Samuel L. M. Barlow, the same who was to advise Curtis to suppress most of what he knew about the Coleman event, Buchanan gave his willingness to run a coloring of diffidence and personal need: I never intended to engage in politics, but meant to follow my profession strictly. But my prospects and plans were all changed by a most sad event which happened at Lancaster when I was a young man. As a distraction from my great grief, and because I saw that through a political following I could secure the friends I then needed, I accepted a nomination. Yet he conducted the campaign with vigor enough to win this ugly chastisement in a published letter signed “Colebrook,” in allusion to his recent tragedy if not in actual identification of one of Ann’s brothers: Allow me to congratulate you upon the notoriety you have acquired of late. Formerly the smoothness of your looks and your habitual professions of moderation had led those who did not know you to suppose you mild & temperate.
The words italicized in the preceding pages constitute virtually all the surviving contemporary texts reflecting upon the sudden death of Ann Caroline Coleman and James Buchanan’s behavior in the aftermath. The texts are like pieces of a puzzle that only roughly fit. There are little irregular spaces between them, and through these cracks, one feels, truth slips. History, unlike fiction and physics, never quite jells; it is an armature of rather randomly preserved verbal and physical remains upon which historians slap wads of supposition in hopes of the lumpy statue’s coming to life. One of the joys of doing original research is to observe how one’s predecessor historians have fudged their way across the very gaps, or fault-lines, that one is in turn balked by. History in its jaggedness constantly tears at our smooth conceptions of human behavior. If Buchanan was so deeply stricken by grief, how then did he sally forth as bold as ever? In his next year of legal practice, 1820, he won from Judge Alexander L. Hayes of the Lancaster County Court the encomium that he had never listened to an advocate who was equal to Mr. Buchanan, whether in clear & logical arguments to the Court, or in convincing appeals to the reason and sympathies of the jury. If Buchanan was so disgraced by his fiancée’s mysterious death, why was he chosen a few months later to run for Congress? He won the election and—a full year later, in December of 1821—went to Washington City to participate in the seventeenth Congress, and within three more years was an important enough player of the national game to be involved in another scandal, of a purely political sort.
• • •
I remember at some point in all this going to New York with Genevieve for a few days. Women love New York, God knows why. All those clothes in the windows, or the other women in their clothes on the streets. That buzz and rub of other presences which women need, in ballrooms or seraglios; that being on display. Perhaps amid the towering verticals and the rectilinear recessions of the Manhattan grid a woman feels framed, set off, mounted to admire. Genevieve looked so sunny and crisp and carefree and glowing, striding beside me as we walked up a little slope on Madison, a sloping block that holds at its crest the brownstone palace from whose two great wings once Cardinal Spellman and Bennett Cerf each directed their empires and where now, I believe, the queen of tax evasion has imposed a glitzy hotel, so sunny and crisp and carefree, I say, that I kissed her, kissed Genevieve right there, as we walked, to her surprise. In New York, Nature reaches us from underneath, in the slope of the land once full of Dutch farms; they can’t quite pave away the slope, it is Nature, and we were Nature, she and I, fresh from our lovemaking and showering in the hotel room. Mine, this thirty-two-year-old woman was mine, hundreds of miles away from Wayward and Adams and the old brown slave of a river between, mine in some summery bare-armed dress of hers, her black hair still damp from the shower and glistening like snow with microscopic rainbows, like fresh powder in the morning before the ski tracks pack it and the blue shadows of the firs are still long, mine among these millions of strangers, mated with me, and guilt-free. Live free and die, our state motto could run. I kissed her. It was summer, but not sticky. I want to make it the summer of the bicentennial, near the epic day of the tall ships and the cloudless sky that stretched from coast to coast, all our national troubles having momentarily blown over, but that seems too close to the end of the Ford era; more likely it was ’75, perhaps a sparkling interval in early fall, six seasons since the spring when in smart checked woolens she had announced to me under the bud-nubbly elm that she had told Brent and the skids to divorce were greased. Surely since then we had earned our freedom—our sexual secretions weighed out in children’s tears, our scandal fading into the college wallpaper, our names inscribed as Mr. and Mrs. Clayton in the hotel register. In those Ford-dominated years the custom took hold in the castle keeps of hotel management for a man to register and a mere plural number of guests to be noted, whether he was accompanied by another man, a foundling child, a tame kangaroo, or (as in my case) a gorgeous woman; but I had gone whole hog, slashing M/M in front of my name, making her mine legally, as she soon would be, once Norma focused on her lawyer’s appointments and Brent relaxed his clenched jaw. He and the two girls were visiting his parents in Minnesota. They were sectarian Lutherans of the strictest variety and had to be very gently led up to the facts of his dissolving marriage. Hence Genevieve was free to come with me to this Northeastern States’ Historian’s Association (NSHA) Conference—on “Cold-War Deformations of Developing-World Economies and Elites,” if I remember the topic—held in a big hotel, on the Avenue of the Americas, with a sugary scent to its wall-to-wall carpeting and in its atrium lobby the largest chandelier outside of Leningrad. Genevieve and I stayed in a little hotel, on West Fifty-first Street, used mostly by Europeans on bargain tours, blocks away from the intellectual hubbub of my fellow academics, and I skipped most of the meetings, panels, debates, and well-received papers. Life must now and then be allowed to take precedence over history—else there will be no new history.
Genevieve looked pleased but not entirely by my impulsive kiss, so quickly delivered she had not had time to pucker her lips over the teeth of her smile. A tiny bubble of my saliva winked on one of her incisors, making an infinitesimal rainbow here in the sunshine, in the long slot of light the skyscrapers had let through onto this block of Madison. Then a diagonal shadow fell across our progress like a police barricade. Her smile had turned a shade uncertain. “Why did you do that?” She was very appearance-conscious, I tended to forget; she had been educated by nuns.
“You looked so adorable,” I tried to explain. “I feel so proud to be with you.” I was embarrassed. “You’re perfect.”
The shadow on her face was slow to lift. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“You are. For me at least.” I was beginning to feel silly. Far above us, beneath a set of dissipating jet trails, a towering glass box had taken a bite out of the sun. Down here on the grid, amid the grit and greed, hundreds of grayish pedestrians hurried along, oblivious of our love, my kiss, her qualm. She entwined her hand with my arm and recomposed the moment, but I did not forget this revelation of imperfect fit, I being happier, fuller of us, than she.
What did we do those three days and nights of married life? What others do—ate, and slept, and went to a movie (Tommy, perhaps, of which I remember nothing but a gargantuan piano, a man on stilts, and Elton John in some very uncomfo
rtable-looking costume) and a show (The Wiz, of which I mostly recall the numerous view-occluding Afros in the audience). On the last day we hurriedly bought souvenir presents for our five children, I-♥-NY rag dolls for her girls, rude T-shirts and Statue of Liberty snowballs for my mixed-sex trio, these last trinkets a pale echo of an enchanting miniature trylon and perisphere my parents had brought me, when I was four, from the 1939–40 World’s Fair. It lit up, somehow, and had a curving ramp of many tiny bas-relief people, streaming into the future, which was now. No—which had never been. World war, Holocaust, cold war, oil spills, famine, massacre, serial killing, man the vermin of the planet: the innocent future I had seen in that glowing souvenir, with a helicopter in every garage, had never come.