Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Your muscles are so tense,” she said of my back. “Relax, Alfred.” She spoke my full name as if there were a joke in it.

  “I’m trying. But I keep wondering what the hell we’re doing. You and I.”

  “We’re being loving,” Wendy said, shyly, sensing that I was full of complaints and rebukes, which only post-coital politeness was keeping in. “People need loving, and if their spouses don’t give it to them they seek it elsewhere.”

  “Yeah, but, sweet Wendy—”

  “You have Genevieve as well as Norma?” she finished for me, supplying the names of the two poles of my not untypical (in the bedevilled Ford era) dilemma.

  “Something like that,” I admitted, my face sinking deeper into the pillow. Her thumbs and finger-pads were really going after my trapezii, especially up at the creaky corner where the triangle of muscle ties into the acromial end of the clavicle. Whenever she lifted up to put her little plump weight into it, the wet kiss lower on my back went away, returning when her hands moved lower down, to the latissimae dorsi. I was beginning to like it. “Nice,” I grudgingly admitted.

  “See,” she said, reading my mind, that aggravating way women do. “Just accept, Alfred. No complications. No commitments. Seize the day, as Saul Bellow says. Let me give you the gift of me. What else would you like me to do? You have some things you’d like me to do?”

  “Don’t you have to go home, Wendy? Aren’t your kids coming back from school soon?”

  “Ben’s covering. He wanted to do some work around the house. He’s going stir crazy in that dorm. I told him I was going shopping in Portsmouth. There are some new dress shops.”

  “Norma says he and she make love in the woods,” I complained.

  “That bother you?” Push. Pinch. “Why should it?” Lift. Kiss. She was a seesaw.

  “It seems uncivilized,” I said.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Which question?” She was lulling me, ratcheting me down into my reptile brain. I was so relaxed I had drooled on the pillow, darkening the cotton case in the shape of South America. Bodily fluids had no deadly viral dimension in the dear old Ford days; one dabbled and frolicked in them without trying to picture the microscopic galaxies within, the squadrons of spherical space ships knobby with keys for fatally unlocking our cell walls. The rhythm of Wendy’s ass, dribbling my own sperm, squeezing up and down on top of mine, was proving contagious; I felt desire trickling back, against the gravity of my better judgment.

  “What else you’d like me to do,” she answered.

  Deciding to counterattack, lest my manhood be rocked entirely away, I twisted over, forcing wider the triangle between her round white thighs. Smooth moon-colored thighs, with a fringe of small platinum hairs where her shaving stopped, and the oval gleam of a vaccination scar. Her eyes again changed, observing the restart of my erection. The phallic entity emitted a sour saline smell. “There is something,” I confided to my uninvited drop-in from the moon.

  “What, lover?” How polite she was. How anxious to do the right thing. What did she see in me? A non-husband, I supposed. There is a wonderful weight of grievances non-spouses are out from under.

  “Sit on my face. Sit.” My voice sounded hoarse. I was thirsty, thirsty for forgetfulness, for a smaller world. I wanted to be negated by her vulva.

  Wendy’s eager-to-please face, with its girlish plump cheeks and womanish crow’s feet and hopeful eyes and mussed blond flip, underwent a hesitation, a rapid rethinking, a touch of fright at being here with this gruff stranger. “Oh darling,” she stalled. “I’m all goopy down there.”

  “Well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” I said, or should have said, or seem now as I write this to have said, debonairly. I wormed my body down toward her as, straddling my chest, her thrusting muff the no-color of pewter, she waddled on her knees upward on the swaying, complaining bed.

  The bed, let me tell you, had been my first marital bed, an ascetically simple steel frame and box spring and foam mattress purchased at a warehouse store in Keene. Retired in favor of a stylish redwood box bought at Cambridge’s Furniture in Parts, it had been stored up on the third floor in the Wayward house; I had been allowed (Norma in the crunch proved quite possessive and not as disorderly as I would have liked in sorting out our common property) to take it when I moved, along with two old folding director’s chairs, a doughnut-shaped foam-rubber reading chair covered in crumbling Naugahyde, a gate-leg table I had inherited when my mother moved to Florida, a patchily threadbare Oriental rug from the same source, my door-top desk and supporting filing cabinets, a spotty gilt-framed mirror the Queen of Disorder had never liked the way she looked in, several of her unfinished paintings to remember her by, and a cardboard carton full of random plates and cups and cutlery and kitchen equipment, including a wonderfully useless old-fashioned conical potato-masher with its perforated conical “female” complement. The Perfect Wife pointed out to me that I was being used as a trashman. I could have trucked it all myself, in my gallant Corvair convertible—a by now rusting and shimmying relic of the Sixties, shaped like a bathtub with a rear-end engine—but for the bed and a green foldout sofa, as heavy with its hinged inner works as a piece of cast-iron machinery, that dated back to our Dartmouth days. Stallworth and Sons, who handle most of the college’s moving, sent their smallest truck for the little trip across the river, and old Gus Stallworth himself came along, with one of his sons. Gus must have been seventy, but he could still hold up his end of a metal-webbed Hide-a-Bed or a full four-drawer filing cabinet without taking the wet cigar butt from his mouth. A lifetime of lifting had compacted his inner organs and made him dense as an ingot. His sons were taller, with more air and still-fermenting malt in them, but the same leaden patience with inanimate things characterized all their professional movements, in and out of the collapsing home and up the ramp into the truck body with its pads and ropes and resonant emptiness. It was terrible, to watch them plod back and forth noncommittally, pulling my meager furnishings, my sticky Olivetti, my olive-drab typing table, my gooseneck lamp, my cartons of scrambled research notes, out of what was becoming, with each subtraction, Norma’s house. The Stallworths had moved us in but eight brief years ago this coming August. My wife and children couldn’t bear to watch my departure, and had left the premises. I was alone with the Stallworths, suppressing my desire to cry out something like “No, stop, it’s all a mistake, a crazy overreaching, I belong here, these things belong here, embedded in the mothering disorder, gathering dustballs and cat hair, blamelessly sunk in domestic torpor and psychosexual compromise!” Father and son plodded on, grunting and muttering, in clothes the color of cement, slaves to the erotic whims of the educated classes.

  Norma let me take only the books connected with my work, including the little library on James Buchanan I had collected—the twelve volumes in dreary green, reprinted by Antiquarian Press, of The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, as edited by John Bassett Moore; a darling little chunky copy, with embossed brown cover, water stains, and tissue-protected engraved portrait, of R. G. Horton’s campaign biography of 1857; the two maroon volumes, again a photocopy reprint, of Curtis’s biography of 1883, fetched forth by Harriet Lane Johnston’s fervent desire to see her uncle done justice; Philip Gerald Auchampaugh’s scattered, defensive James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession, a dove-gray paperback; Philip Shriver Klein’s biography President James Buchanan, unrivalled since 1962, in a Scotch-taped jacket of sprightly blue and white, decorated with the seal of the United States; also decorated with this seal, and a number of other patriotic designs, a precious copy, bound in faded black, of the 835-page report of the Covode Investigation, printed and widely distributed as anti-Buchanan propaganda in 1860, by the House of Representatives; pre–Civil War histories by Allan Nevins, Roy Franklin Nichols, Avery Craven, Bruce Catton, and Kenneth M. Stampp; biographies in aggressive modern jackets of such figures as Step
hen Douglas, Buchanan’s bête noire, and John Slidell, his éminence grise; pamphlets and booklets concerning Wheatland and old Lancaster; bushels, in liquor boxes deprived of their dividers, of notes upon which indecipherability was growing like a species of moss; and in several boxes emptied of clean typing paper my often-commenced, ever-ramifying, and never-completed book. It was not exactly a biography (Klein had done that definitively, though I had often wished that he, with his unique accumulation of information, had elected to write the more extensive work his preface tells us he had originally intended) but a tracing of a design, a transaction, the curious long wrestle between God and Buchanan, who, burned early in life by a flare of violence, devoted his whole cunning and assiduous career thereafter to avoiding further heat, and yet was burned at the end, as the Union exploded under him. The gods are bigger than we are, was to be the moral. They kill us for their sport.

  My book began with Buchanan’s pious and fearful upbringing in a log cabin, at a trading post, Stony Batter, in the mountainous middle of Pennsylvania, so lonely a spot that his mother, legend went, hung a bell about the child’s neck lest he wander too far into the forest and become lost. Down from that wooded fastness—a wild and gloomy gorge, Klein poetically puts it, hemmed in on all but the eastern side by towering hills and now far removed from any center of commercial activity—the family, enlarged by the arrival, after Jamie in 1791, of five girls, descended to civilization, to a farm in the little town, solidly Scotch Presbyterian, of Mercersburg. The future President’s father, also called James, was locally considered a hard man, who gave credit at the store he kept but never extended it. “The more you know of mankind,” he would say, Klein says, “the more you will distrust them.” A big grim businessman, like Kafka’s father—a sheltering insensitive mountain of a father. The boy’s mother, née Elizabeth Speer, was, like many a mother in the biography of a successful man, sensitive, spiritual, fond of poetry. She could recite with ease, her son wrote in an autobiographical sketch, passages from Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, and Thomson. Klein writes, on unstated authority, Her ambition was to get to Heaven; her life a quiet acceptance of every event. She was young James’s first tutor; then he attended, at the age of six, the Old Stone Academy in Mercersburg. Mercersburg’s Presbyterian pastor, Dr. John King, of whom Buchanan was later to write he had never known any human being for whom [he] felt greater reverence, urged that the boy be sent, at the age of sixteen, to Dickinson College, in Carlisle, though James Buchanan, Sr., claimed to need his eldest’s help in the store and on the farm. Mother hoped that Jamie would enter the ministry but Father advocated preparation for the law.

  Buchanan entered Dickinson’s junior class in 1807, with nineteen others. (How sweetly the smallness of the numbers speaks for the youth of our nation, a mere Atlantic apron of cultivation and settlement upon the immense land the coming century would see plundered!) The college was struggling, in a wretched condition, Buchanan confided to his self-sketch; and I have often since regretted that I had not been sent to some other institution. There was no efficient discipline, and the young men did pretty much as they pleased. To be a sober, plodding, industrious youth was to incur the ridicule of the mass of the students. Without much natural tendency to become dissipated, and chiefly from the example of others, and in order to be considered a clever and spirited youth, I engaged in every sort of extravagance and mischief in which the greatest [illegible] of the college indulged. On a Sunday morning in September, before James was to return for his senior year, a letter arrived which his father opened and, without a word, passed on to him; it was from Dr. Davidson, the principal of Dickinson, saying that, but for the respect which the faculty entertained for my father, I would have been expelled from college on account of disorderly conduct. That they had borne with me as best they could until that period; but that they would not receive me again, and that the letter was written to save him the mortification of sending me back and having me rejected. The mortification! The shame! The kindly Dr. King, a Dickinson trustee, intervened, giving James a gentle lecture—the more efficient on that account [—] and pledging himself to Dr. Davidson on the young man’s behalf; Buchanan was accepted back for his senior year, and graduated in 1809.

  The boy and the college, however, still had difficulties. At the public examination, previous to the commencement, I answered every question without difficulty which was propounded to me. He thought he deserved highest honors; the Dickinson faculty, however, awarded him none, assigning as a reason for rejecting my claims that it would have a bad tendency to confer an honor of the college upon a student who had shewn so little respect as I had done for the rules of the college and for the professors. I have scarcely ever been so much mortified at any occurrence of my life as at this disappointment.

  Dare we dawdle a moment longer by the embers of Buchanan’s formative years, as rather delectably recalled by himself? An especially intimate and lively passage attempts to animate his relation with his mother. For her sons, he wrote in retrospect (probably well before 1828, for though the sketch ends there, it exists in several installments and tones, including an off-putting leap into the third person), as they successively grew up, she was a delightful and instructive companion. She would argue with them, and often gain the victory; ridicule them in any folly or eccentricity; excite their ambition, by presenting to them in glowing colors men who had been useful to their country or their kind, as objects of imitation, and enter into all their joys and sorrows. More intimately still: I have often myself, during the vacations at school and college, sat down in the kitchen and whilst she was at the wash tub, entirely from choice, have spent hours pleasantly and instructively conversing with her. We sniff here the comforting pungence of lye and the invigorating tang of heterosexual debate. What woman henceforth will entertain, ridicule, inspire, empathize as this one did? Is it not the biological cruelty of mothers to leave, so to speak, too big a hole? Buchanan all his life was to manifest conspicuous pleasure in the company of women, bantering with Southern politicians’ witty wives right to the moment of secession. And his loyalty to his Southern advisers, long after their advice had become duplicitous, has a flavor of the Dickinson episode—a wish to be considered a clever and spirited youth, one of the guys. The wish to be liked, the wish to be great: they can co-exist in one heart, but do not inevitably harmonize. Anti-oedipally, he left college feeling but little attachment towards the Alma Mater.

  He apprenticed in law to James Hopkins, of Lancaster. Thus he came east; he crossed the Susquehanna, by ferry. There would soon be a bridge, between Columbia and Wrightsville; a lawsuit involving its financing in the wake of the Panic of 1819 would distract him from his courtship of Ann Coleman, and its burning in 1863 possibly saved his house from being razed by Lee’s army. But these contingencies are in the future, not yet history. Lancaster, with six thousand inhabitants, considered itself a metropolis, the biggest inland city in the United States. The nation’s first turnpike, a gravelled, stump-free road from Lancaster to Philadelphia, had been opened by its private promoters the year Buchanan was born—born at a western stage of the Great Wagon Road which the turnpike improved and replaced. Eighteen years later, he arrived in Lancaster to learn the law. I determined that if severe application would make me a good lawyer, I should not fail in this particular; and I can say, with truth, that I have never known a harder student than I was at that period of my life. I studied law, and nothing but law, or what was essentially connected with it. I took pains to understand thoroughly, as far as I was capable, everything which I read; and in order to fix it upon my memory and give myself the habit of extempore speaking, I almost every evening took a lonely walk and embodied the ideas which I had acquired during the day in my own language.

  A lonely walk. A bell about his neck in the forest. An Elysian landscape wherein one could declaim aloud to oneself and not be heard. When Hopkins’ preceptorship ended early in 1812, and Buchanan turned twenty-one, he went west, against his father’s advice, by horse
back, to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to investigate a tract of land to which his father had a partial, disputed title. Had he stayed, would he have become a Clay, a Lincoln? Possibly, that summer, he encountered Thomas Lincoln, who, according to Klein (Buchanan’s autobiography says nothing of this excursion), lived near Elizabethtown and was on the court docket for some land-title cases at this time. Lincoln might very well have had in tow his three-year-old son, Abraham. When he himself was three, Buchanan very likely saw George Washington passing through Cove Gap on his way to squelch the Whiskey Rebellion. From President Washington to President Lincoln in one patriotic lifetime. The Elizabethtown land case had been in litigation since 1803, and Kentucky already had plenty of lawyers. Years later, Ben Hardin recalled Buchanan’s telling him I went there full of the big impression I was to make—and whom do you suppose I met? There was Henry Clay! John Pope, John Allan, John Rowan, Felix Grundy—why, sir, they were giants, and I was only a pigmy. Next day I packed my trunk and came back to Lancaster—that was big enough for me.

  He was admitted to the Lancaster bar on November 17, 1812. He hung out his shingle on East King Street, advertising himself in the papers on February 20, 1813, as being available two doors above Mr. Dutchman’s Inn, and nearly opposite to the Farmers Bank. He was appointed, young as he was, prosecutor for Lebanon County, eliciting a letter from his overbearing father advising him to show compassion & humanity for the poor creatures against whom you may be engaged. In 1813 he made $938. In 1814 he made $1,096. He and the town’s jovial 400-pound prothonotary, John Passmore, bought the office building on East King Street, which included a tavern. Four hundred pounds: another giant. Giants were common in that miniature America—a trick of scale, perhaps. After Jackson, an irascible giant, they thinned out. Polk was “Little Hickory.” Douglas was “The Little Giant.” Lincoln obtained giant-hood but by taking giant woes upon himself; it was a gigantism of suffering, reinforced by chronic constipation, depression, and fits of noble prose. Buchanan was six feet tall, a goodly size but in human scale. In 1814, at a Fourth of July barbecue, he gave a rousing speech denouncing Madison’s bungling of the current war against the British. James Madison was a true giant, but physically too small for the fact to be universally recognized. Buchanan was the president of the local Washington Association, an organization for young Federalists; Madison was, of course, a Democratic-Republican, of the awkwardly named opposition party born of Jefferson’s resistance to what he felt were monarchical, unduly centralist, anti-democratic, anti-republican, and anti-French tendencies in the Washington Administration. Democratic-Republicans would rather make war on Great Britain than on Napoleon. The Federalists nominated Buchanan for state Assemblyman. The day after his nomination news arrived that the British had burned Washington. The young office-seeker’s first campaign duty, then, was to volunteer in the general mobilization and march to the defense of Baltimore. His company, calling itself the “Lancaster County Dragoons,” was beseeched for volunteers for a secret mission; he volunteered, and their secret mission proved to be not fighting the British but stealing sixty horses from the residents of the countryside, always preferring to take them from Quakers, says Klein, not citing his source. The lowly mission was accomplished; the British withdrew from Baltimore, having inspired the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The dragoons were disbanded; Buchanan came home and was elected Assemblyman. In Lancaster the Federalists always won but their fortunes, sagging lately, were restored by anti-war sentiments. Buchanan’s full-of-advice father wrote him: Perhaps your going to the Legislature may be to your advantage & it may be otherwise. If his father had been less advisory, would Buchanan have been a stronger man, leaning less on others? Would he have been less secretive? He hid his thoughts from even his Cabinet, it was said of his time in the White House. Parents do pry. Our first lies are to them. Buchanan did his duties in Harrisburg. A tall, broad-shouldered young man with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and fine features (Klein), he gave his maiden speech on February 1, 1815, against conscription and Philadelphia’s privileged set, championing the West against the East and the poor against the rich. He was told he should become a Democrat. A friendly Democrat, William Beale, state Senator from Mifflin County, called upon me, and urged me strongly during this session to change my party name, and be called a Democrat, stating that I would have no occasion to change my principles. In that event, he said he would venture to predict that, should I live, I would become President of the United States. To demonstrate his Federalism Buchanan gave another Fourth of July speech in Lancaster, attacking the Democrats as demagogues and factionaries and friends of the French, possessed by blackest ingratitude and diabolic passions. He got re-elected but the speech created an enmity among the Jeffersonians that lasted all his political life. Even his rabidly pro-Federalist father thought his attack was too severe, and Buchanan allowed, There are many sentiments in this oration which I regret, but goes on in his memoir to quote cherished bits, such as this of the citizens aroused by the British invasion: They rushed upon their enemies with a hallowed fury which the hireling soldiers of Britain could never feel. They taught our foe that the soil of freedom would always be the grave of its invaders.