Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

by John Updike

  Walking nervously about a little, to keep my distance and to conceal and stifle the involuntary beginnings of an erection, I riffled through her paper’s pages. McKinley a fervent Ohio Methodist. Mother hoped he would become a minister. His famous description to a delegation of Methodists in 1898 of going down on his knees to the Almighty and coming to the decision to possess the Philippines. Sexual significance of going down on one’s knees. Contemporary cartoons portraying Philippines as lightly clad maiden being taken from senile Spanish king by virile U.S. figure. McKinley’s confessing, And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly, as if after coitus. Vaginal innuendo of Dewey Bay. Feminine images of Samoa (divided with Germany in 1899) and Hawaii, whose annexation was pushed by McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Zoftig Queen Liliuokalani. Blatant phallocentrism of Roosevelt’s Big Stick. Insistent binaries of his public discourse: hard/soft, strong/weak, bold/timid, square/round. Be like the soldier and the hunter. Sexist characterization of Latin (soft-weak-round) country of Colombia, reluctant to cede canal rights (virginity): You could no more make an agreement with the Colombian rulers than you could nail currant jelly to the wall. Evident sexual symbols of nailing jelly and dredging canal. Miss Arthrop’s deconstruction was getting me excited. TR’s desire to de-phallusize (Miss Arthrop’s word) William Howard Taft, his former protégé turned ingrate and foe, with the homoerotic announcement I am stripped to the buff. His seeing the U.S. itself (Colombia by another name) as a woman, to be “controlled,” like his celebrated liberated daughter, Alice: I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.

  I had perused many such papers before, but never with the solemnly watchful authoress and I a few strides from my unmade bed. The trouble with systematic feminism is that it heightens rather than dampens one’s phallocentricity. It makes more difficult the sexual forgetting we depend upon for decent everyday social intercourse. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her breasts, the rounded shelf of them within the fuzzy sweater, and the curve of her hip, which we shall dress for this remembrance in elasticized ski pants. There was something unkempt and doughy about late-adolescent girls that usually, mercifully, kept them from being attractive to me; against the age-old abstract ideal of the jeune fille stood the disconcerting particularity of every instance, the unique female individual with a chin too sharp, some baby fat still to lose, a dreadful vulgar near-childish voice, or an unairbrushed pimple beside her slightly bulbous nose. Their minds, probed, revealed ungainly abysses that sent me scurrying back from the edge.

  In that far-off Ford era—a benighted, innocent time—the college had, believe it or not, no announced policy on fornication between faculty and students. In the Sixties, indeed, gentle and knowing defloration had been understood by some of the younger, less married faculty gallants as an extracurricular service they were being salaried to perform. By barbaric standards derived from a rural or tribal world of numb animality, females of eighteen had reached consensual age, and good luck to them. The social experiment that had begun in bohemia and continued in communes and culminated in co-ed dormitories had discovered what pre-Gutenbergian societies already knew: sex, like eating, has a limit; a point of saturation can be reached, and all the screwing in the world will not rattle bank foundations or bring down the walls of the Pentagon. The earth only seems to move. Puritanism had overstated the gravity of the matter. The United States of the Ford era had absorbed the punch of widespread fornication and found itself still walking and talking, disappointingly enough. So there was no consolidated prohibition, nor likelihood of a subsequent rape or sexual-harassment suit, to prevent me from elaborating on Miss Arthrop’s nudge. There were only the scattered contraindications of my formal vows to the Queen of Disorder, given in a very low Congregational church service, and my informal vows of deathless fealty to the Perfect Wife, given in many a heated darkness, and the nagging aftertaste of several incidental nibbles at Wendy Wadleigh, plus my inkling that this dogged, slightly pasty girl with the weekend submission was not quite what she seemed. She was, speaking of unideal jeunes filles, ten or fifteen pounds on the heavy side—not that the Ford era, as I remember it, had anything like the horror of overweight evinced in the anti-inflationary Reagan years or in the Coolidge-Hoover period of ascetic Prohibition.

  Stalling, sorely tempted for all of the above reservations to launch myself on this little chubby uncharted sea, I asked her, “Why do you think, Miss Arthrop, Cuba was never annexed, either in the wake of the Spanish-American War or earlier, prior to the Civil War, when filibusters were all over Central America and the Ostend Manifesto, in 1854, urged that Cuba be either purchased from Spain or, that failing, taken by force?”

  She moved a step away from the icicle-fringed window, so that her entire side—thigh, haunch, thick waist, and soft shoulder—took a long lick of light, and her eyes, now in bars of icicle-shadow, had a melting look. These nearsighted, un-bespectacled eyes, in her plump face, seemed watery and small yet held an appeal, the call of uncharted salt waters, taken with a breeze of willingness emanating from her shaggy striped sweater, her tight forest-green ski pants, her dingy Tretorn tennis shoes, which the Wayward girls wore summer and winter, in sunshine or slush. “Who was Ostend?” she asked, in a soft, croaky voice, as if her vocal cords were dried out by the heat of my room. The radiator valve had broken and could not be turned off; on all but the coldest nights I left the bedroom window open a few inches.

  “It was a port in Belgium,” I said professorially, matching her step with a backwards one of my own, edging my pelvis behind the curved edge of my reading chair, that giant brown doughnut of airfoam and Naugahyde [see this page], “where the three United States Ministers to France, Spain, and Great Britain met to discuss the matter of Cuba. The Minister to Great Britain at that time was James Buchanan.”

  “Who was James Buchanan?” Miss Arthrop asked.

  That tore it. Even though, to be fair, the course of mine she was enrolled in (winter term, three credits) was “The Long Post-Bellum: 1865 to 1914,” this revelation of ignorance so abysmal quite quelled her siren’s song. Further, the revelation was accompanied by a flicker of weird possibility: she had been sent. She hadn’t learned all her post-structuralist cant in any class of mine. She was Brent Mueller’s—what? Pupil, disciple, conquest, cat’s-paw. She had been sent by him to tempt me into betraying his wife, my perfect love. Cold-blooded wickedness! While my mind was spinning, I told her, “The fifteenth President of the United States, just before Lincoln. Born 1791, also in a log cabin. But you haven’t answered my question. In your own terms of phallic aggression, and given that the American South wanted Cuba both as an extension of slave territory and to prevent its becoming another black republic like Haiti, why didn’t Manifest Destiny—a phrase first used, as you know, in 1845, by the journalist John L. O’Sullivan—gobble it up?”

  “I don’t know” was all she could say, all I wanted her to say. I had unwomaned her—clapped her into the chastity belt of student inferiority.

  “Look at Cuba’s shape,” I instructed her. “Talk about phallic. And what are its main product? Cigars. TR already had his Big Stick, and if there’s one thing one big stick hates, it’s another. We could have spared ourselves Castro, if Cuba had just been shaped like the Virgin Islands.”

  The abovesigned is not entirely sure, at this distance of time (but far less time, I may point out, than elapsed between the ministry of Jesus and the composition of the earliest Gospels), that he spoke quite so wittily, with so quick a command of New World geopolitics, but the fending feeling is authentic, and the reality of this child’s sexual aggression, and the momentous way in which her presence transformed my paltry apartment, turning it into a moral arena, a theater of combat in which the door lock and window shade and fake-leather modernist chair all acquired tactical significance. The enemy of my new life had sent this spy to undermine the purity of my position. I was sacrificing my imperfect, though w
ell-settled, marriage for a perfect, though as yet undeveloped, one. Letting this teen-ager (or twenty-year-old, at best) undress and be pierced by my aroused flesh would be a severe and distinct mistake, even if messing with students were not generally poor policy. How can you give a bad grade to a good lay? How can you take respectful lecture notes when the old guy is only so-so in bed?

  Yet these my perceptions did not make it easier to evict this feminine intruder from my quarters. She seemed to gain corporeality with every passing minute. The possibility that she was the robotic sex-slave of Brent Mueller, with his taut, aerobically exercised body and brain stocked with the latest academic chic, and had come to me from this cunning cuckold’s couch with duplicitous intent gave her blobby budding womanhood, as it were, some anatomy. Danger added its sharp musk to her bland aroma of willingness, of openness to what the situation might bring. I broke into a fine sweat of wanting. To see those bulky breasts, firm as muscle on her stocky body in its ski togs, with ruddy nipples and rosy areolae, and to touch those mute haunches and buttocks, with fingers curled to scrape my nails in a torturer’s exquisite refinement of epidermal delight … Only feverish pedantic prattle staved off my desire to leap forward into the heavily baited trap. “I myself have always been struck,” I said, trying to keep my breathing under control (I get asthmatic in tight situations), “by the rather sweetly hysterical quality of what McKinley revealed of himself to that delegation of Methodists. He had a nurturing, vulnerable side, McKinley, and I don’t say that just because he was assassinated, which is a cheap way to get sympathy. His wife, Ida, was a dreadful trial to him—she fell apart after her mother and two daughters died within a few years of each other. She became an epileptic; she would throw a fit in the middle of a state dinner. When he saw one coming on, dear President McKinley would jump up, drop a napkin over her face to hide its hideous contortions, and carry her out of the room. Furthermore, she was a possessive, querulous bitch. When he was Governor of Ohio she made him wave to her from his office window with a handkerchief every day at three o’clock. A man who stuck it out with Ida can’t be all evil and phallic, do you think? As to Roosevelt—well, he was compensating. He had been asthmatic and puny as a child—like me, as a matter of fact—and spoke in a rather high, effeminate voice. What I’d love some student to do for me some day is write about effeminacy in the Presidency—the President as national mother. Like LBJ—he loved us all in sorrow, protest though we did. The most motherly, of course, was the one who sent the most American boys to their deaths—Lincoln.”

  Jennifer’s pale roundish face had gone as fuzzy as her sweater; the fading light of this winter afternoon was making me, too, feel nearsighted. “Phallic isn’t all bad,” she said, making one more stab at being seductive, at carrying out that child-exploiting fiend Brent Mueller’s perfidious errand.

  “Like dirt,” I said, “in the right place.”

  “Beg your pardon, Professor Clayton?”

  “A saying you’re too young to know,” I said. “Dirt is just matter in the wrong place.”

  “My mother is always saying that,” she said. “I just couldn’t hear you exactly—”

  “—with the light fading the way it is,” I finished for her. “Tell me about your mother. She runs a gift shop. Do you want to live her life?”

  “Not exactly, I guess.” These young unformed minds, they hit on a word, in this case “exactly,” and can’t stop using it, until another theme word comes along. “She got married when she was twenty.”

  “Don’t you make that mistake, Jennifer. What I want you to do when you graduate from Wayward is take your credits and get a BA at a good four-year college, preferably co-ed. A single-sex school like this is an anachronism—women don’t need to banish men out to another planet to achieve personhood. A cruel anachronism—it puts too much stress on the opposite-sex faculty members.”

  It was cruel of God, had He existed, to put unformed minds in such formed bodies. Jennifer preened, seeming to pour herself upward, so that her breasts within her sweater strained to rise, as if full of helium. “Don’t you want I should stay and have a drinky-poo?” In the Ford era, scandalously, the legal drinking age in all six New England states was a mere eighteen. “Or maybe cookies and milk?” she added, in kittenish parody of any thought of mine that she was too young for all this and alcohol, too.

  “Good heavens, my dear girl, no,” I responded, becoming in counter-parody dithery and elderly. “People might talk. You don’t want your reputation ruined. Can’t that still happen? Isn’t there still a marriage market out there, at least a black market? These digs are grown-up territory, I have no idea how you found them.”

  “Professor Mueller—” she began, and then saw her mistake.

  “He did, did he? Aha. Tell your buddy Brent for me to keep his little aporias over on his side of the river, please.”

  “What’s an aporia?”

  “A dead end. Not you, Jennifer, but this particular maneuver of your mentor’s. The bastard’s trying to steal his wife back.” Her face, sinking out of sight as winter lowered the lid on the narrow space between my windows and the factory, was clean of any expression. “I look forward to reading your paper—we’ll consider Sunday Friday, so you’ll get full credit. Think about what I said about Presidents as mothers. When all this fuss about sexism is over, we’ll be able to sit down together and see that men and women are just like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. With what Jacques Derrida calls a différance. Not to be confused with what Nietzsche calls ressentiment.”

  Impossibly literary, you say? Remember, Retrospect eds., I was hyperstimulated; my skin was tingling, my pulse was well over a hundred. I wanted to put myself into right relation with this girl, to take up her two-breasted challenge, to peel her bulky sweater up over her head, tousling her curly locks and exposing to what was left of daylight the secretly supportive stitching of her bra, and to let myself be, in the time-honored fashion, de-phallusized. We are, each man and woman, doors that open to disclose an Oz, an alternate universe of emerald forests and ruby reception rooms.

  Jennifer Arthrop did seem baffled. Our encounter had reached its aporia. My sexually stimulated skittishness must have looked to her like kidding, a professor’s supercilious dismissal when in all good faith she had volunteered to be my blue angel, egg yolk running down my face while I crowed like a rooster. Yet, too, there was a stir of relief in her brutish blurred features as I gingerly worked her toward the door. I hadn’t so much as laid a finger on her, as the phrase goes. I slipped the chain and bolt and exposed a widening slice of uncarpeted hall landing and rickety wooden railing. I ached all over, as another goes. More phrases: Last chance. Money in the bank. In for a penny, in for a pound. The public be damned. An opportunity missed is worth a stitch in the bush. My guest stepped onto the landing quickly, as if ducking into cold water, clutching her blue parka, retrieved from my brown doughnut chair, in her arms, against her flattened breasts. She had been let off the hook, the sexual hook. I said, in a fatherly burr, rubbing my rejection in, “Take care, Miss Arthrop. There’s ice on the outside steps. My landlord is a crippled miser who lives in Massachusetts.”

  As she descended the clattering stairs, I heard Jennifer humming, to taunt me back, “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.”

  [Or, in another part of the emerald forest:]

  Buchanan was in the Court House by nine o’clock that gray morning in late November. A note was handed to him. He read it and turned pale.

  Perhaps the whole Court House, built in 1787 to replace the one that burned in 1784, turned pale. Through the Palladian windows of its upstairs reference library, where the handwritten, canvas-bound judgments and appeals were pulled from sagging pine shelves and lay about carelessly splayed and abandoned on oak reading tables, the sun showed as a sore white spot in the drearily overcast sky. The clerks, messengers, and fellow lawyers in Buchanan’s vicinity, not to mention that populace of cadgers and adaptable hirelings who collect wherever momentous business is
being conducted, turned pale in sympathy, recognizing this moment as a critical one, with historical ramifications. The letter was written on stationery of blue wove paper, in Ann Coleman’s large impatient handwriting, with crossings to the “t”s and finishing strokes to the terminal “e”s whose emotional vehemence had ruthlessly splayed the goose quill.

  My dear James Buchanan:

  Indications mount that your regard for me is less warm and sincere than the solemn pledge of marriage demands. I have been informed, alas from a source I cannot doubt, that while I at my home around the corner joyously awaited your return from Philadelphia, you paid a prolonged call upon Mrs. William Jenkins and her sister, Miss Grace Hubley—a sociable call prolonged past dark, to the hour of supper.