by John Updike
“This entire gathering is scandalized,” Ben assured us in his fruity choirmaster tones. I looked at him through Norma’s eyes and saw that he was lovable—pompous but clever, fruity but massive, artistic as was she, and light, like her an adept of the unsaid and the ignored. The waterbug approach to life, merely dimpling the surface tension as you move along. Me, I had been naïve, perhaps, and coarse, to attempt to penetrate, to sink, to pearl-dive into the past. It was cheerful, standing here with the Wadleighs as if we were two couples, Ben taller than I and Wendy shorter than Norma. The Claytons, bracketed. The Wadleighs were pulling, plainly, for us to get back together again, and thus again be accessible. Their dyad loved our dyad. We mischievously buzzed together a bit, and noticed that the party was thinning around us, to the point that Madame President’s husband came up and attached himself to us with suckers of small talk. We thanked the host and hostess and went our ways. Not quite our separate ways, for the Wadleighs had a shared home of glass and redwood, high above the river, and Norma and I moved together through the dark and the rustle of the first soft fallen leaves on the dried-out small-town grass (so different in quality from over-trodden city grass, or the untrodden grass of the country). Norma’s body beside mine felt like a gentle revenant. I muttered to her that I’d like to see the Volvo’s scratch and, sensing beneath her insouciance that this already rusting injury to her automobile brought her as close to tears as the inky baby’s feet, offered to come home with her a minute, to check on Daphne’s fever and search through my old desk. I might find some notes in it (ran my secret agenda) that would definitively unlock the mystery of James Buchanan. My practice of history was superstitious as well as unsystematic.
Stars, there must have been stars above the mansard roof—Orion’s belted sprawl, the Big Dipper balanced on its handle, the whole heartbreakingly random array sparkling in anticipation of first frost. Did our breaths show white? Too early, perhaps. I do remember how, several hours later, after we had made love on our former bed, that redwood box bought at Furniture in Parts, the Queen of Disorder turned her head on the pillow and said casually, in her most merely observational voice, “You’ve gotten better at it.”
A motherly remark, complimenting a child come home with a new prowess. My sword had been tempered in Genevieve’s sheath, and my technique honed to something like her own sharp-edged perfection. Before, sex had been muddle and melt to me. Before, I had fucked with just my prick—the tingling glans, readying to spurt, eagerly pushing ahead. Now I used my entire pelvis, the whole lower half of my trunk, repeatedly lowering myself as if into an onyx bathtub, in cold control while I sweated like a gymnast. Sex is impersonal, a well-oiled machine that works best sealed into darkness. The Perfect Wife had taught me that, and the imperfect one responded. I was the piston, she was the cylinder. A deep hostility kept us slick, and slightly startled. When with two shudders—hers involuntary, mine deliberate, like driving home a nail—we finished, Norma looked up at me with resentful eye-whites and pinched the skin of my sides, where the ribs turn the corner, so it hurt. Then she let go and turned her face on the pillow and paid me her compliment.
I remember, too, before we went to bed, entering the house with her, the big house quiet, my nose wrinkling and twisting into a sneeze at the cat dander, and feeling that at this unaccustomed hour of visitation I had surprised the furniture—the butterfly chair, the foam-rubber sofa and easy chair with their scarf-patched worn spots, the paper lampshade globes from Taiwan—in a huddle of conspiracy, these inanimate things conspiring to reconstruct the past, to dam the flow of time with their fragile, obstinate shapes.
The time is strange—the party couldn’t have gone past seven-thirty, and yet in memory it seems to be after ten. Stealthily we had climbed to the second floor. Andrew had moved to the third floor, setting up an independent domain in the low-ceilinged rooms there, whence descended, at various times, the throb of rock tapes, the rhythmic rumble of his exercise bicycle, and the clunk of the weights he had taken to lifting. He was building his body into something beautiful. His mother was under orders not to disturb him, and though from the driveway, crackling to a stop in our separate automobiles, we had seen his lit windows burning like angry eyes in the mansard roof, we did not climb the second flight of stairs, which led twistingly up from the second-floor landing. Disapproval of us emanated from above.
Down the hall, Buzzy’s unconscious breathing filled his little dark room, and the beam of hall-light when we pushed open the door revealed an obsolescing apparatus of boyhood—his telescope; his glass terrarium, whence all the lizards and scorpions had long since decamped; the posters of some rock stars, bare-armed men with stringy hair and leather vests, like muscular miners stripped to forage underground for precious metal; another poster, of a gleaming Italian sports car draped with the body of a young woman spottily clad in leopardskin; his silent boom box with its sleepless red light; a scuffed little bookcase holding a clutch of brave books by Tolkien and Frank Herbert and a curling heap of old school papers; and shelves filled by carefully spaced collections of plastic dinosaurs and tinfoil athletic trophies won at grade school, when he was yet younger, and his hopes for himself were untarnished. We eased shut the door as if on a treasury of sad secrets, leaving a crack of light to show in case a dream’s turmoil awoke him.
Daphne’s room was across the hall, which ended at our—Norma’s—bedroom door. My daughter awoke, or had been awake, and shrieked at the second shadow beside her mother’s. “Who are you?” she asked in the voice of one still asleep, or transported by fever.
“Your father, honey,” I said, whispering to suggest she keep her own voice down, and moving to test her forehead with my hand. But she shrieked with such blank fright, like a stepped-on animal, that I stopped in mid-motion.
“Daphne, it’s Daddy,” Norma explained. “He’s come to see how sick you are.”
Daphne didn’t hear. “You’re an elephant,” the child told me, in a voice that emanated from the whole white blur of her face but did not belong to it, like a voice in a séance. It hesitated, groping to shape a complex concept. “He ate a bad mushroom and got all wiggly and died.”
“Babar,” the Queen of Disorder explained softly behind me. As if it hadn’t been I who had read those books to the children, more often than she.
“Go away,” Daphne told me hollowly, betranced. “You hurt people.”
“Not you,” I told her, my own voice strange, dipping deep into the gravity of parental assurance, “not little Daphne,” and did manage to stretch an arm (like a proboscis, actually) and rest my fingertips on her brow. Its taut curve felt warm and dry. “You have a bug,” I announced.
She stared upward at me, and her fever of delusion broke. “It’s you,” she said, and fetched a mighty, shuddering sigh.
I sat on her bed’s edge, and tucked the covers more neatly around her. “That was mean of you,” I scolded, “to call me an elephant. You have a little bug that makes you hot and tomorrow if it’s not better Mommy will take you to the doctor’s to find out what it is. Now you go to sleep.”
This firm instructional tone, which my old house and its many shadowy needs had called forth, revived after our (Norma’s and my) lovemaking,e when I quickly dressed and hissed downward at my wife as she still lay naked in bed, “Listen. You’ve had over two years to adjust. Get moving on the divorce, for Chrissake, or I’ll start suing on my own. For Ben and whatever else I can dig up. You’re costing me my life, all this stalling and fucking around you’ve been doing.”
Franklin Pierce’s Presidency brought William King the Vice-Presidency, Buchanan the mission to London, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had written Pierce’s campaign biography, the very remunerative post of American Consul in Liverpool. Hawthorne’s journal for January 6, 1855, records a visit paid him by the Minister, who had come to Liverpool with his niece and hostess, Harriet Lane, because she was to be the bridesmaid at the wedding of an American girl resident there. The Minister called on his con
sul, who had abandoned the seclusion—first single, then wedded—that had nurtured his masterpieces in order to serve in this post of busy intercourse with men of all stations. One wonders how aware Buchanan was of the genius of his underling; The Scarlet Letter came out, with considerable praise and publicity, in 1850, one of the years when Buchanan, semi-retired at Wheatland, had leisure for reading. Certainly Harriet Lane had read some Hawthorne, for, having met her at a dinner in Liverpool on January 9th, the author rather dourly recorded in his diary, She paid me some compliments; but I do not remember paying her any. His impression, superficially favorable, of the vigorous, violet-eyed, twenty-five-year-old woman carries a note of reservation; one can feel the great dreamer’s fine nature rather cringe: Miss L—— has an English rather than an American aspect,—being of stronger outline than most of our young ladies, although handsomer than English women generally, extremely self-possessed and well-poised, without affectation or assumption, but quietly conscious of rank, as much as if she were an Earl’s daughter.… I talked with her a little, and found her sensible, vivacious, and firm-textured, rather than soft and sentimental. Viewed through the same silken weave of Hawthorne’s sometimes feline style, Buchanan comes off rather better: I like Mr. ———. He cannot exactly be called gentlemanly in his manners, there being a sort of rusticity about him; moreover, he has a habit of squinting one eye, and an awkward carriage of his head; but, withal, a dignity in his large person, and a consciousness of high position and importance, which gives him ease and freedom. Very simple and frank in his address, he may be as crafty as other diplomatists are said to be; but I see only good sense and plainness of speech,—appreciative, too, and genial enough to make himself conversable.
Their conversation would have taken place in Hawthorne’s office in the unprepossessing consulate housed in a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories high … at the lower corner of Brunswick Street … in the neighborhood of some of the oldest docks. The gouty, top-hatted Minister would have had to maneuver his corpulent person up a narrow and ill-lighted staircase giving onto an equally narrow and ill-lighted passageway crowded, most mornings, with beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels … purporting to belong to our mercantile marine. Dealing with these specimens of a most unfortunate class of people composed, according to the opening pages of the memoiristic sketches collected as Our Old Home, much of Hawthorne’s duties—the scum of every maritime nation on earth; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation of the world with England. Not one in twenty, he tells us, was a genuine American, but all looked to the American Consul for relief from their misery and indigence—shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, and clothing; invalids asking permits for the hospital; bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers; drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men. Through this crowd of brutalized unfortunates, most of them wearing red flannel shirts, Buchanan, in cravat and morning coat, would have eased his way, to reach the outer office manned by vice-consuls and clerks, and then the inner sanctum, an apartment of very moderate size, painted in imitation of oak, and duskily lighted by two windows looking across a by-street at the rough brick-side of an immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier structure than ever was built in America. Buchanan’s squinting eye was taken, it may be, by the large map of the United States on one wall, cartographed as it had been twenty years ago.
“Your portrait of our homeland lacks Texas, and all the California territory that we wrested from Mexico,” he genially pointed out, once the initial civilities had been pronounced. The men had met before, at the end of last April, when the Minister waited in Liverpool for the arrival of his niece, Miss Lane. I had the old fellow to dine with me, the writer wrote his publisher, and liked him better than I expected.
“Were we to draw the map twenty years hence, I fear it might show even less territory than is displayed here,” Hawthorne ventured, the mellifluidity of his voice to some extent masking the pessimism of the prediction. Since he regarded his rôle of Consul with a certain amusement, as something of an imposture, he did not greatly fear offending his superior. Further, the older man’s manner had a holiday joviality—a holiday abroad from seeking his political fortunes, and a holiday in Liverpool from his London responsibilities. And people forgive a known writer a great deal, such forgiveness constituting an inexpensive form of patronage of the arts.
Buchanan had lit a cigar, and smokily tut-tutted, “Oh come, Mr. Hawthorne, not as bad as that. With a little connivance and compromise, we shall pull the Union through. If you would mute your vociferous friends the abolitionists, and we somewhat quench our friends the fire-eaters, the plain economics of it, as they emerge in the West, will render the slavery question obsolete.”
“I fear, sir,” said the darkly handsome, high-browed Consul (whose diffident manner yet hinted at a certain premature fatigue), “that the question has become a passion, on both sides, which there will be no quenching but with blood. Senator Douglas, in laying the Kansas territory open to squatter sovereignty, has created there a witch’s brew, to which flock fanatics and madmen and all of Missouri’s gun-toting riffraff.”
“And yet, cotton will not grow in Kansas. The Missouri Compromise, I have always stated,” Buchanan affirmed, leaning deeper into the creaking Windsor armchair that amid these worn furnishings did for the seat of honor, “should never have been revoked. Douglas thought to throw a sop to the Southern half of the Democracy and advance his Presidential prospects for ’56, but in truth he has split the party in two, and in the bargain finished off the Whigs. The Know-Nothings are high in the saddle now, and opposition to Kansas-Nebraska has bred a new national party, I am informed, that calls itself by Jefferson’s old name of Republican. So much for personal ambition, Mr. Hawthorne, when it entwines itself with matters of grand policy. Douglas will never be President now; he has awakened too much hatred.” The old man’s effortful gaze wandered to the top of the Consul’s bookcase, where stood a fierce and terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a military collar which rose above his ears, and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold.
The Consul followed his visitor’s eye, gauged its speculative and even alarmed expression, and offered by way of agreement, “Senator Douglas is no Jackson, though he might hope to be. As an idea, squatter sovereignty has a Jacksonian ring.”
“Jackson was a great hater,” Buchanan sighed, amid a fresh effusion of tobacco smoke, “but he had the South with him. The curious condition of our Union is, no election can be won without the South, and none with the South alone. That is the bill, and the nation has few to fill it.”
Hawthorne, though fastidiously aloof from most public enthusiasms, was in his consular capacity politician enough to know that the substantial old gentleman sitting before him was already being spoken of as the only possible candidate for the torn Democracy. [Retrospect eds.: the word is used of course in the old sense of the Democratic party. Footnote? Or generally understood among our learned readership?] “It was perhaps a fortunate wind, Mr. Minister,” he rather wickedly suggested, the tone of address warning his guest of a construable presumption, “which brought you to service in London. Had you been still in the Senate, how would you have voted, sir, on this ill-begotten Kansas-Nebraska Bill?”
Buchanan, with a cool deliberation that the Consul had to admire, levelled his crooked glance upon his questioner, and stated, “Between us—I would have had no choice, but to vote, as would have you if in elected office, with our benefactor and chosen leader, General Pierce, who made support of the bill a point of loyalty to his administration. Nevertheless, the popular-sovereignty provision was a grave and needless mistake, hastily inserted in the late stages of working out the legislation. Douglas wished the territory to organize in the swiftest manner, to keep it from becoming Indian territory and blocking a railroad centered upo
n Chicago in his own state. In his haste to profit Illinois and himself, he upset three decades of precarious balance. Compared with Jackson, whose personal friendship it was my honor to claim, Douglas is an unprincipled dwarf—pardon my bluntness—who is frequently drunk, most harmfully upon the sound of his own voice.” The old man settled back into the consular office’s audibly protesting guest chair, smiling at his own indiscretion. Yet he judged it time to change the topic. “In art,” he said, “I take it there is never this distinction, to be often found in political service, between formally assenting to a thing, and inwardly assenting to the wisdom of it.”
“In art,” Hawthorne admitted, “we are sometimes invited to trim our texts, for a general good. For instance, my preface to The Scarlet Letter, which with great good nature but excessive accuracy sketched my former associates in the Salem customhouse, made such a fierce local stir that I was urged to withdraw it from subsequent editions; but I resisted those pleas. A compromised work of art becomes on the instant worthless, since we look to art for an otherworldly integrity.”
“If in politics we so severely rejected all compromise, I fear chaos would come to the affairs of men.”
“As it yet may, in spite of much compromise.”
“As it yet may,” the old man agreed, to speed the conversation along, for he had another instance of scandalous muddle to cite. “Less than three months ago, I participated—most unwillingly, mind you—with the Minister to France, Mr. Mason, and the Minister to Spain, Mr. Soulé, in a conference in Ostend and then Aix-la-Chapelle, which had been convened to draft a confidential report to Mr. Marcy and General Pierce upon the matter of purchasing Cuba from a bankrupt Spanish throne.”