by John Updike
Brent Mueller, as you doubtless know, although he is now a member of SNEAAH, the Southern New England Association of American Historians, has done well at Yale, publishing that short but trenchant deconstruction of Whitman’s and Emerson’s optimism entitled Other People’s Facts,o delving up from stray phrases the two Protestant white men’s awareness that American expansionism was fuelled by black slavery, child labor, domestic oppression of women, and government-sponsored swindling and slaughter of Native Americans. They knew all this, the sublime scribblers, and achieved optimism by dint of suppressing it, while dark hints leaked out in Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe. Are things now any different? AIDS, famine, boat people, ghetto hopelessness, children by the millions born to misery. If a man had half a heart, he’d drown. Optimism isn’t a philosophical position; it’s an animal necessity, like defecation. As I sat and read Brent’s book, my vision blurred by envy, it seemed a flip negative of my unwritten own, with a perfect title. Brent wrote his book and Genevieve gave birth to two more children, twin boys. Hearing the news back in Wayward, I wondered if, had we married, such double-barrelled fertilization would have been demanded of me. I had been so anxious and guilty about my own children, and to a lesser extent about hers, that I had never actually considered the possibility of ours.
Ours. Would we have named them Ronald and George after the winners, or George and Fritz after the losers? The idea of pushing a duplex stroller, both sons squalling, through the narrow aisles of the supermarket over on 1A intimidates me. There comes a moment when we cease creating ourselves. I have come to lay my bones among you, Buchanan told the assembled folk of Lancaster upon his return home in March of 1861. What I have done, during a somewhat protracted public life, has passed into history. My attempt to bestow upon Buchanan the award of posterity collapsed when I, having imagined an eagle’s-eye view that would make of his life a single fatal moment, found myself merely writing more history, and without the pre-postmodernist confidence of Nevins and Nichols and Catton, yarn-spinners of the old narrative school. My opus ground to a halt of its own growing weight, all that comparing of subtly disparate secondary versions of the facts, and seeking out of old newspapers and primary documents, and sinking deeper and deeper into an exfoliating quiddity that offers no deliverance from itself, only a final vibrant indeterminacy, infinitely detailed and yet ambiguous—as unsettled, these dead facts, as if alive. Where, really, was the Brooklyn, when the batteries of Morris Island fired on the Star of the West? Can it be true, as Klein offhandedly asserts, that Stanton had not opened his mouth during the tense meeting of December 29—the one obviously referred to by Weed? Surely Weed meant the meeting of the 28th, since Floyd had resigned early on the 29th. And could Stanton—he who later contemptuously described these constant meetings debating the President’s course as a fight over a corpse—ever have sat through any meeting without opening his mouth? And can it be true, as Buchanan asserted both during these hectic weeks and afterwards,p that he was serene, and self-convinced, that he felt no shame and terror as he descended at the head of his nation into the coming abyss of battle and blood?
And can it be, by the same token, true that Genevieve and I made love that left us both gasping, a melding so absolute we thought it expedient to stage a revolution, to overthrow our existing marriages and marry? Little trace of our attempt remains—a false start or two in several lawyers’ files, some love letters lost in an attic or turned to ash, a few displaced calcium molecules in my deteriorating memory cells. Our heaving spirits displace little matter; the past, insofar as it consists of human feelings, mostly vanishes, less enduring than recycled nitrogen.
I have found no place, Retrospect editors, in these memories and impressions for the blameless bliss of settling, in my bachelor bed as midnight crept past, under an L.L. Bean puff and a reading light placed just where I wanted it, into the two propped pillows redolent of the Adams laundromat, with a nice musty old book—the abovementioned [this page] Crawford, for instance, with its chummy long title, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumpter, [sic, on the spine] Being an Inside History of the Affairs of South Carolina and Washington, 1860–1, and the Conditions and Events in the South Which Brought on the Rebellion, and its line engravings and yellowing letterpressed pages and sturdy marbled boards with corners and spine of red leather. Crawford was a young military surgeon who had been there, at Moultrie and Sumter in late 1860. How innocent, as I read, scribbling on a pad of yellow paper notes whose meaning I would soon forget, facts seemed; how sweet the clear water at the bottom of the well of time!
Another memory of the Ford era that returns to me now concerns the same bed, the same time, but Genevieve is with me. Susan and Laura must have been spending the night with the diabolically patient Brent, or else with a non-teen-age babysitter who could stay past midnight, for we had allowed ourselves the luxury of drowsing and dozing after intercourse. Usually, one or the other of us had to jump up and rush to the next appointment. I can fix the date exactly: Tuesday, October 21, 1975, edging into October 22nd, at around quarter to one. We had fallen asleep, sated and drained by sex and guilt, and were awoken by a tumult on the streets below, of blaring car horns and shouts of drunken jubilation from the throats of men pouring out of the bar whose neon sign fizzled a few doors down from my windows. Carlton Fisk had won the hard-fought, extra-innings sixth game of the World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox, by hitting a home run off the left-field foul pole. It was called the Greatest Game Ever Played in the papers next day and Fisk later contributed his account to history: Freddie Lynn was on deck. He was hitting after me that game for some reason. I don’t know why, but he was and I can remember standing in the on-deck circle before the inning started, and you just had a feeling something good was going to happen. And I told Freddie, “Freddie, I’m going to hit one off the wall. Drive me in.” And that was the way it ended. Genevieve and I, locked into our own black-and-white blend of hell and paradise, were far from following baseball that fall, but the hullabaloo below my two windows united us with a celebrating New England at that wee hour. Then, as I recall, she got out of bed, her wonderful white body stamped on my retinas like a pulsating after-image, and dressed herself. Feeling drugged, I dressed, too, and we walked through the litter of broken beer bottles and fallen maple leaves to her car parked over on Federal and she drove alone back across the river. And that was the way it ended. The next day, we lost the seventh game and the series to a broken-bat single, 4–3.
What I had not quite counted on: the children left me, one by one, after I had returned to the nest.
Andy did Duke and found history as an area of concentration too fussily factual and English too theory-ridden and both too “political” in some sense that had come along since my own collegiate days. But he fell in love with French, of all things, and took two graduate years at the Sorbonne, finished his Ph.D. at Michigan State, and wound up teaching Racine, Simenon, and the conditional subjunctive to the blond and blue-eyed children of Texas oil money at a trim college called Trinity in San Antonio. He brought back a French wife from the Sorbonne years and now my grandchildren stare at me semi-trustfully (they only see me once or twice a year; Andy and Nathalie spend summers near her parents in Grenoble) with Genevieve’s dark precision, beneath decisive, no-nonsense eyebrows.
Buzzy flunked out of UNH—not easy to do—and has become a successful auto mechanic in Portsmouth, with a beer belly, a scrawny wife from Seabrook, and a twenty-five-foot power boat with which he thunderously churns the waters of the Piscataqua and Wayward rivers, cruises the Maine coast, and circumnavigates the Isles of Shoals. He loves that boat, with its endless engine troubles. Though they have been working at it (so to speak) for years, he and Ruth Ann cannot seem to conceive. Norma blames nuclear radiation, but the plant didn’t begin to operate until Ruth Ann was twenty, and living in Rye Beach. Furthermore, she had an abortion in high school, thanks to a broken condom and the captain of the track team. Buzzy is now thirty, and tho
ugh he is the closest child to us geographically, he is the most remote culturally, and when we sit together, he and I, while our wives are cooking up something in the kitchen or having one of their fertility powwows, the silence, not quite comfortable but full of mutual forgiveness, returns from those nights when I used to visit his room, not knowing how to apologize for living a mile away, across the bridge, beyond the range of his telescope. We see few signs in us of my being his father and he my son, but our love is the stronger, and the more awkward, for that, like sexual attraction between strangers.
As to Daphne, I assume she is happy in her second marriage, though with people who live in New York it is difficult to tell: the high energy level they must maintain acts as a mask. Geoff, her husband, works on Wall Street, or near it, glued between a secretary pool and a computer screen, pondering how to milk still more lucre from the staggering old cow of American capitalism. I seem to be enough of a liberal to dislike these money men, who have turned Roosevelt’s willingness to take on debt in a national emergency into, a half-century later, a game, the debt game, a numbers racket. I try not to let my dislike show, but Norma says it does and that Daphne is very hurt, and they spend most of their holidays with his parents in Greenwich. Daphne has produced a daughter, a little milky miracle with a wisp of pale-apricot-colored hair on her broad blue scalp and hands with the repellent texture of wilted gardenias. I preferred her first husband, a shaggy ex-hippie from Maine, ten years her senior. He was running a secondhand bookstore, mostly student texts, in Middletown, Connecticut, where she had gone to Wesleyan, after two years of living at home with us and attending Wayward. He had a touching stammer, as if the words he wanted to say were suddenly too brutal, or revelatory, for utterance. The divorce came within a year, on the grounds of mental cruelty, and cost as much as their wedding. Norma says the trouble with Ralph was that he was too much like me—a typical closed-up Yankee. I don’t feel closed-up to myself—just to other people.
Wayward in the early Eighties went co-ed and became one more third-rate four-year college. I’ve thought of leaving but, frankly, nobody wants me, with no major publications to my credit. [Retrospect eds.: You can change all that! Excuse this end-of-the-tale sentimental tone; I’ve been responding to your query so long I feel we’re old friends. Cut, trim, chasten my prose ad libitum, as suits your editorial requirements.] Since males were admitted (up to 43 percent of student body, at last fall’s enrollment), the tone of the college has changed—louder, coarser, more naïve, less serious, more like the world outside. The girls—women—have lost something: if nothing else, the chance to take on male rôles, like Jennifer Arthrop as Cinesias. And we males of the faculty have lost a part of our rôle as educators, the need and opportunity to be chivalrous, mounted as we were on the caparisoned stallions of our manhood above the unarmored mob of questing young females. Just the sound, in chapel, of the massed female voices on the hymns and responses, so open and silvery, vulnerable and strong, would drive me to near-tears and the thought that perhaps the old anthropologists were right, we are half-angels after all.
Norma and I are fairly content. College people acquire a certain grim yet jaunty expertise at aging, at growing grayer with each year’s fresh installment of ever-young, ever-ignorant students. We roll with the annual punch. Alone in this big house (which we couldn’t sell anyway, in the depressed present market), she and I at moments feel as shy with one another as honeymooners, without a honeymoon’s great icebreaker. The children gone, we haven’t replaced the cats as they’ve died off, so there is less dander and hair, and we’re able to afford a once-a-week cleaning woman now. When my mother died in 1978, she left the Florida condo free and clear and a surprising number of CDs and tax-free municipals, plus a lot of AT&T and John Deere my father had bought when the shares were a few dollars apiece. Once males were enrolled at Wayward, Norma’s approach to art appreciation was thought to be a bit too indirect and intuitive, and the President—herself a woman, you will remember—in the nicest possible way let her go. So my former Queen of Disorder has more time for housework. She has given up smoking and put on thirty pounds. We see a lot of the Wadleighs. Wendy was also let go, as hockey-and-dyslexia coach, when the boys flooded into Wayward. Norma spends whole afternoons over there, in that redwood house above the river, with all its pianos. Wendy is “into,” as my generation can’t stop saying, the body—she bicycles in spandex shorts and walks with dumbbells in her fists and at well over fifty has the waist of a nineteen-year-old. She drives all the way down to Boston twice a week to take a course in how to be a therapeutic masseuse, and gives Norma long backrubs that leave my wife languid and (she humorously complains) achy.
Where have these last fifteen years gone? What a quick idle thing a life is, in retrospect. How quickly we become history, while wanting always to be news. When you make the mental effort to lift yourself a little off the planet, and you see our particular species gobbling up all the land, so that soon there won’t be any other big animals left, just rats and ants and poisoned mussels, all that earth and oxygen and airspace to give Homo sapiens sapiens room to breed and eat and starve and build and war and watch TV and listen to the radio, you see that the human race is just one immense waste of energy. The lifeless surfaces of Mars and Io must sigh in relief.
The Ford years. What else can you say about them/him? Or, really, any of them? These men, our Presidents, do their confused best, toward the end of their lives usually, and there’s no proving that different decisions would have produced better results. They were constrained by invisible walls, assumptions and pressures that have melted into air, that were always air—Zeitgeist, Volksgeist. Time was on the North’s side, and as Trescot said in his account, Besides, like the Northern members of his Cabinet, he [JB] was a Northern man. If this revolution was checked he and they would claim credit for their firmness, if it succeeded they were to remain at the North and must be supported by Northern opinion. The half-degree between Lancaster and the Mason-Dixon Line was, in the end, crucial. Perhaps I would have succeeded if I had tried a book about Pierce, but his administration was relatively dull (not one Cabinet change in four years!) and his household gloomy and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Roy Nichols had already written creditable biographies. I was drawn to the unknown—the unpossessed—in scholarship as in love. I loved Buchanan because he was a virgin.
Gerald Ford, it remains to say, is the only non-assassinated President whose name ends with “d,” the only Nebraska native and Michigan politician to attain the office, and the only skier. Oh, perhaps Kennedy and Roosevelt in the course of their privileged boyhoods strapped on some boards, but only Ford flashed down the slopes while President, creating a wholly new protection problem for the Secret Service.
I remember (this is the end, Retrospect, and remember, you asked) taking a run under Ford, on I forget what mountain. At the top, at the clattering terminus of the upper lift, where the pines were stunted and ice was prevalent and the trails were narrow, a taste of fear made the high air hard to breathe as I buckled on my skis, bending over to fasten my safety straps in this era before retractable ski brakes, my only companions on the dazzling windswept summit seeming to be whooping adolescent boys and leather-faced ski bums whose tans stopped at their goggles. Nervously I picked my way down the first glazed turns, trying to stay to the edges where the snow could still grab, the whole purple-blue valley yawning in the tree-gaps like a view from an airplane, and then I gathered looseness and confidence on the broader middle slopes. I began to swing from side to side as if striding through air, singing to give myself rhythm. I had discovered as a boy on the tilted fields around Hayes that singing helped your skiing, almost any tune, strangely enough, if you shifted weight—boot to boot, edge to edge—on the beat. This day, as I remember, the tune was a Beatles oldie, but not such an oldie then; “Yesterday,” I sang, “all my troubles seemed so far away,” keeping my chest to the valley, “now it looks as though they’re here to stay,” my knees bent and thrusting, my mittened
black hands in front of me as the poles pricked the snow alternately, elbows in. “I beleeeve in yesterday!” The held notes gave the ski tails time to turn and say swish. I felt weightless, and seemed to be carving a swanky great signature in the moguls and swales of the middle run. A quickening of tempo forced me to wedel: “Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say. I said something wrong, and now I long, for yesterday-ay-ayy-ayyy.” Then came a flat lookout at the top of the beginner’s slope, and I rested my trembling legs a moment, the lodge as small beneath me as a matchbox, its vicinity crawling with colored dots. I shoved off, and gathered speed, my knees and feet absolutely together, the whole trick of it absurdly simple, a matter of faith and muscle memory, and, as I with one concluding wiggle-waggle swooped to a stop in a plume of slush, there they all were, my life’s companions, at an outdoor picnic table, their parkas off and jumbled with the wine bottles and picnic hampers: Norma and my children in woolly sweaters cats had napped on, and Genevieve looking terrific in her white cashmere and black headband, and Brent smugly polluting the mountain air with pipe smoke, and the Wadleighs in typically jolly matching Day-Glo yellow high-waisted ski pants with red suspenders, and assorted pink-cheeked children, their lips flecked with relish and mustard, and some other adults, the German professor and his Jewish wife, he still skiing in knickers and long-thongs and she togged out in a camel loden coat as if to go shopping at Bloomingdale’s, and a pair of freckled second wives, and poor elegant Mario Alvarez before his disgrace and abashed return to Providence.