Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

by John Updike

  My husbandly instinct was to defend Norma, to explain that I had felt no great pain, that it takes two to disempower, that we had evolved a style together, since our laid-back Cambridge days, of mutual benign neglect; but since the Perfect Mistress was spending the night, wifelily enough, and deserved a husband’s consideration from me, I suppressed this instinct with a sip of our leftover wine. “What else did the faculty say about us?” I asked.

  Genevieve didn’t quite like this thrust of my curiosity, as exploiting her uncharacteristic lapse of discretion, but she had to play along, for the same reasons I was trying to keep smooth our perilous attempt tonight at playing house. At the center of our scandal, with centrifugal spouses, we were stuck with each other as surely as the principals of an arranged marriage. She said reluctantly, “They said what a gifted artist Norma was, and what a pity she never finished a canvas, and how brilliant you were, and what a shame that you could never finish your book on Buchanan.”

  I expected her to go on, as the Queen of Disorder would have, wanderingly pursuing her thoughts to a provocative aporia or a trailing-off that, by our old habits, chimed stimulatingly with an unspoken intuition of mine. But this new woman’s style was to stop when she had nothing clear and certain to say. It put more of a conversational burden on me than I was accustomed to. I volunteered, “I probably don’t want to finish it. I’m scared of being separated from him.”

  “From Buchanan?” she said, in genuine surprise. We could still surprise each other; that was nice.

  “Yes. I love him,” I said, feeling the wine, and hoping I wasn’t boozily slipping into rubbing her too much the wrong way. But how could she be jealous of a long-dead man? Dust, he was now, in Woodward Hill Cemetery, dust and bones and bits of skin, like a mylodon.

  Her smile appeared and disappeared quickly, signalling woman-warmth beneath the surface of the room’s dimness, a dimness splotched with bluish and yellowish patches of light from nighttime Adams. “Is he lovable?” she sensibly asked.

  “Not very,” I admitted, then backtracked, “but yes, very. He was stiff and conscientious and cautious. His Presidential addresses are so dry you could learn to hate him. But then you don’t, you get to feel a mind underneath the words, making sense, trying to pull off a balancing act. All these nineteenth-century people made sense, in a way we can’t any more. They still had a language you could build with. But anybody,” I went on, placing a preliminary hand on the small of her back, its little pad of buttock-fat pushed upward by her posture as she sat, legs crossed yoga-style, on my bed, “can love a lovable person. The challenge is, for the historian, to love the unlovable. He was scared of the world, Buchanan. He thought it was out to get him, and it was. He was right. He tried to keep peace. That whole decade of Presidents did, Fillmore and Pierce and Buchanan—try, I mean—and they succeeded, they did keep the South placated, and in the Union, which was important, since if war had come in 1850 instead of 1860, the outcome might have been very different; the South had all its assets in place—the military tradition, the great officers, the down-home patriotism, King Cotton—and the North still needed to grow. And precious little thanks they’ve got from history for it—the doughface Presidents. History loves blood. It loves the great blood-spillers. Poor Buchanan was ahead of his time, trying to bring mankind up a notch, out of the blood. On the other hand, you’d have to say, he loved power, that spidery kind of power politicians had back then, just a few of them pulling all the strings; he was Polk’s Secretary of State, and Polk was not afraid to spill blood. The way the two of them jockeyed Mexico into war was really rather shameful, and tricky, too, since the Mexican government kept changing, you could almost say there was no government to make war on. Neither was Jackson, of course, afraid of blood. Buchanan became a Jacksonian, because Jackson was the force, the only force really, once the aristocrats fizzled out with Quincy Adams; a whole political party, the Whigs, rose up with no point to it at all except being against him, Jackson; they took the name Whig to imply that Jackson was a Tory. King Andrew, they called him. The Whigs have a sadness to them; their great men, Webster and Clay, never got to be President and the two Presidents they did elect, Harrison and Taylor, were both generals who died almost as soon as they got into office; it was like a curse. Buchanan became a Jacksonian for his own political survival, but Jackson made him nervous, the same way God did. It was a locker-room kind of thing, the way I picture it; to show his contempt Jackson sent him to Russia. That’s what you did with political friends you didn’t like, you made them Minister to Russia. You put them in the icebox. A lot of Pennsylvanians got to be Ambassador to Russia, because in national politics nobody ever knew quite what to do with Pennsylvania; it was enormous, it sat there in the middle of everything, the Keystone State supposedly, but it couldn’t seem to get an act together. Henry Adams says somewhere Pennsylvania was so busy being the ideal American state it never distinguished its interests from those of the whole Union. The reason,” I wound up, my hand having found its way down into her dear little underpants, silky, her skin silky, too, my hand the meat of a silk sandwich, “I can’t finish the damn Buchanan book is that I have too much to say, and yet nothing really new. Just the old facts, churned up again.”

  “You could deconstruct them,” she suggested, my backrub warming her voice, making it more languid.

  I resented her reference to her husband’s dark art. “I don’t know how,” I said. “As I understand it, if you deconstruct history you take away its reality, its guilt, and for me its guilt is the most important thing about it—guilt and shame, I mean, as a final substratum of human reality.”

  “Is that what I mean to you?” she asked, smiling, lulled by my hand, which was now two hands, the left nestling itself into the split lap her yoga posture made. “Guilt and shame? That’s so sad, Alf. That’s not at all what you’re taught when you’re raised Catholic. God came down and died to save us. The world is His gift, given twice. Enjoy it.”

  “I do, I do. How is our friend Brent?” I asked, a bit cruelly, as if she had mentioned him.

  “The same. Very matter-of-fact. A little cold since I turned down his last offer.” He kept making her offers; the last one, that if she would return to him he would give up his teaching post and take her away from Wayward. He had said, Genevieve had reported, that this was what I wanted also, her going away, though it was impossible for me to say so. She had asked me, over the phone, sounding frightened, if this was true. It was true, a certain relief had touched me at the thought of him whirling her off, but I said No, it certainly was not, and this was true also. The thought of her vanishing from my life hit me with a thud that obliterated all else: let the world crash and burn instead, with all our children in it.

  “What’s with him and the Wadleighs?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t dare ask,” she said, rather dryly. She stiffened her back and lifted my left hand from her lap, where it had found its way up a silken length of thigh to the crotch of her underpants, which felt damp. “Nothing, I’m sure. Brent is very straight. Don’t forget, we’re both from the square old Midwest. Once we were married, it never occurred to him to be unfaithful. It made him terribly easy to fool,” she went on to confess. “I felt so guilty.”

  I liked that: I wanted her to share my guilt. It disturbed me that she saw us as engaged, step by step, in a reasonable transition, with Brent and Norma as obstacles not insurmountable. It made for a certain lack of resonance in her perfection. Perhaps perfection does not resonate. I had never told her of my experience with Jennifer Arthrop and of my sensation that the girl was Brent’s doxy and delegate, sent to entrap me.

  She had removed my hand for a reason. “Let me check if the girls are asleep,” she said, reverting to a conspiratorial whisper. She left the bed and I luxuriated in the certainty of her return. I could see her shadow bending low over the girls; I heard her making efficient noises in the kitchen, improving on my tidying up, and then the bathroom toilet flushed. The bathroom was reached th
rough the kitchen, an arrangement that concentrated the plumbing and left the rest of the apartment free for the higher human functions. I nearly dozed in my contentment, wound around with the audible strands of our temporary cohabitation. Laura or Susan stirred in her sleep, moaning distinctly the words, “Bad dog,” and somewhere far off in Adams a police siren soothingly ululated. Not our problem. Somebody else’s mess.

  My temporary wife startled me by returning to our bed-filled bedroom electrically naked, her immaculate whiteness slashed by shadows cast by windowlight. She carried against her breasts the folded clothes she had shed; her pubic triangle pierced her pallor as if die-punched. She was sturdy, Genevieve, with shoulders a shade squarer and wider than on most women, and breasts like a Greek statue’s, wide-spaced and firm, neither big nor small, with nipples that stiffened and puckered in erotic response so amusingly she sometimes caressed them herself, to get the effect, teasing them with her fingertips in and out of my lips as they hardened. In the room’s cubist shuffle of dark and light her shoulder blades and pelvis crests showed edges, so her nudity had a structure, a knit, a poignance of anatomy like that of a clumsily carved Eve huddling forward clutching a giant fig leaf on a medieval portal. But to my touch she was all silky and ferny, a branching tree of yielding surprises, queenly in her skin’s broad gleam, girlish in her compliant acrobatics, a perfect blend of attentive nerve and rounded muscle, with this something solid to her, almost as of a man more finely made, so that I had the sense, always, of being met. Fully met, somehow, though here in this shadowy chamber, while we suppressed our noises lest we wake her girls, what I saw were bright pieces—the curve of a buttock, the teeth of her open mouth, the glint of her ring on her hand on my erect prick.

  “Darling,” I breathed. “Do me a favor.”

  “What, darling?”

  “Take off your wedding ring.”

  She hesitated. “Why?”

  I gripped her skull to put my lips tight against her ear. Her fine black hair brushed stickily against my mouth, the underside of my nose. “So you’ll be totally naked. So you’ll be totally mine. This way you’re half his.”

  She shook her head like a dog, to free her ear from my lips, her skull from my hands. She stared at me and said, in an indolent, neutral voice, “Well, as long as you let Norma keep stalling the divorce you’re half hers.”

  “She’s agreed. She’s getting it. She’s just slow. Jesus, let her be.” Anger had risen in me, curdling the love-juice. Even in the midst of our lovemaking Genevieve was pressing our bargain. I tried to pull off her ring. She bent her face to our hands and bit my finger, hard. I pulled my fist away and swung it into her side, below the ribs, where the body is soft and undefended and liquid, a collection of squids, snails, and jellyfish. She rolled away with a muffled grunt but then spread her legs and without words bid me to get on top of her and fuck. She came quickly, one beat ahead of me, as if to put me in my place. I poured what felt like a river into her hot insides. No condoms then, no fear of the microscopic. The dangers were all macrocosmic, vague and huge; Brent’s psychological presence felt to me like a mountain. At his base we lay spent, and slippery with little rivers of complex molecules. Her wedding ring was still on. I wondered if I didn’t like her best that way, gold-shackled to another man while I pumped her perfect cunt full. As stated above [this page], in the Ford era, bodily fluids were still sacred and pure. I drowsily wanted to drink all of Genevieve—the dew on her upper lip and along the hairline, the bitter swamp of her armpits, the slick lake of her belly, the sweat of her feet. I suppose I wanted to drink my own sperm out of her, where she was goopy, in Wendy’s word. I recall another woman, somewhere in the tangle under Ford, crying out, as I uncoiled and kissed her mouth after muff-diving for a goodly while, “I’m kissing my own cunt!” These are deep waters, where we meet ourselves coming at us wearing scuba-gear.

  Sorry, Retrospect. I didn’t mean to rattle on in this unprintable way. I meant to end the passage with the word “met,” italicized. My mistress, Brent Mueller’s wife, squarely met me in those spottily lit sexual catacombs celebrated (see Romeo and Juliet) for missed appointments.

  Ann Coleman—gone to Philadelphia! Overwrought, red-nostrilled with the beginnings of a cold, she boarded the stagecoach for the arduous day-long journey along the turnpike early on the morning of Saturday, December 4th. The coming day was yet only an unhealthy blush low in the eastward sky, a crack of sallow light beneath a great dome of darkness to which stars still clung, like specks of frozen dew, though the moon had fled. Raw damp cold snatched at her hands, her ankles. Her skin felt hypersensitive; she possibly had a fever, to go with the sniffles. Her head felt peculiar—its sharp perceptions detached from herself, like a spectator from a show. The earth was hard with frost, and at the landing stage outside the White Swan Hotel, phenomena—the creaking undercarriage of the coach caked in frozen mud; the slamming doors decorated with the images of English racehorses within oval frames; the nervous scraping shoes of the real, harness-scarred horses; even the angry shouts in German of the coachman to the baggage-handlers, mere boys prodded from their warm beds by hope of a few pennies—sounded loud and cumbersome and out of control. Her younger sister, Sarah, was with Ann: this is history, as is the scarcely believable fact that Sarah, six years in the future, was to meet her death in Philadelphia at Ann’s present age of twenty-three, under circumstances uncannily similar. Whatever Robert Coleman’s proportional part, in relation to his wife’s Berks County prejudices and the flighty moods of his high-strung daughter, in the breaking of Ann’s engagement to the handsome, industrious young lawyer from Mercersburg, it was Coleman alone who, six years later, banished from Sarah’s life the Reverend William Augustus Muhlenberg, for no greater sin than the young clergyman’s insisting, as early as 1822, upon holding evening services at St. James Episcopal Church. In those days prosperous men, white, Protestant, and landowning, rolled across lesser lives like barrels loaded to the bursting of their staves with a self-righteousness thick as molasses.

  Born the last day of July in 1802, Sarah was but seventeen in 1819, all rosy cheeks and babbling lips between her bonnet and the bow of her silken bonnet-strings. She was developing a pretty mouth, Ann observed, the upper lip bent above the lower with the soft protuberant fit of a snapdragon that opens when you pinch it. A shallow dimple came and went in Sarah’s cheek as her lips gushed chatter and visible vapor. She was the chubbier sister, her hair curlier, her mind frothier and more pliant; her cheeks red, her eyes bright as if with tears, she was excited to silliness by this adventure, a visit to their sister Margaret, who lived in a grand brick town house on Chestnut Street with her husband, Judge Joseph Hemphill, known across the jocular commonwealth as “Single-Speech Hemphill,” because his maiden speech in the Seventh U.S. Congress proved to be also his last. The young ladies from Lancaster were to shop, and visit the theatre, and, the weather and their dispositions permitting, promenade among the splendid Georgian buildings testifying to Philadelphia’s colonial prominence and the decade when it served as the nation’s capital. Gaslights,† and throngs in fancy attire, and shops stocked with European finery! Their father has concocted this pleasure-trip to distract Ann from her grief and grievance, Sarah realizes, but dimly, so dazed is she by the vision of Philadelphia, by the endlessly various and promising adult life opening up behind the immediate prospect. Not for her, this morning, the stone in Ann’s belly, the sick despair. Even as the cold of the dark December morning drives the older sister’s hands deeper into her muff of marten fur, a hollow unease within Ann shades toward nausea and faintness. Perhaps she is pregnant—but no, this is not history, it is idle rumor. Buchanan was a virgin—our only virgin President! Ann is rendering him such, demasculating him forever, at this moment, as she sets her foot in the carriage that is bearing her out of his life, and out of history.

  Their valises are loaded into the coach. Perhaps it was still a hulking, springless stage wagon, with canvas top and open sides and crude benc
h seats; but I would rather hand my ladies up into a new-fangled so-called Concord coach, its egg-like shape inspired by the “tallyho” coaches depicted in British Regency prints, with high, wide-tired wheels to negotiate stumps and boulders left in the roadway. To cushion some of the shocks the “rocker-bottom” body was hung on “thorough-braces”—multi-ply leather straps that caused the coach body to nod and sway back and forth like the violent pitching of a vessel, one traveller recorded, with a strong wind ahead. Seasickness was inevitable, even for passengers less frail and morose than Ann Coleman, and even if by rare good fortune none of her fellow passengers, as the mileposts lumbered by, required the comfort of tobacco within the closed carriage, or smelled cheesily of the need of a bath, or belched the fumes of half-digested ale. The sixty-nine miles from Lancaster to Philadelphia constituted an ordeal, albeit in a Concord coach made prettily of white oak, upholstered in silk, and painted on its inside panels with mythological subjects, beguiling the jostling captives of the journey with the pink apparitions, amid blue billows and white columns, of Eros and Psyche, Venus and Mars, Artemis and Actaeon. Ann arrived in Philadelphia sicker than when she had mounted the carriage in Lancaster’s Centre Square. Her nose ran steadily; her temples ached; the back of her throat felt raw; her brow felt hot to her older sister’s hand. Ann was shivering, in an era when any chill might presage a disease that would run a fatal course, and she went immediately to bed.

  And yet, four days afterwards, on the 8th of December, she was promenading on the streets of Philadelphia and encountered a friend of the Coleman family, Judge Thomas Kittera, who was to write in his diary the next day, At noon yesterday I met this young lady on the street, in the vigour of health, and but a few hours after[,] her friends were mourning her death. She had been engaged to be married, and some unpleasant misunderstanding occurring, the match was broken off. This circumstance was preying on her mind. In the afternoon she was laboring under a fit of hysterics; in the evening she was so little indisposed that her sister visited the theatre. After night she was attacked with strong hysterical convulsions, which induced the family to send for physicians, who thought this would soon go off, as it did; but her pulse gradually weakened until midnight, when she died. Dr. Chapman, who spoke with Dr. Physick, says it is the first instance he ever knew of hysteria producing death. To affectionate parents sixty miles off what dreadful intelligence—to a younger sister whose evening was spent in mirth and folly, what a lesson of wisdom does it teach. Beloved and admired by all who knew her, in the prime of life, with all the advantages of education, beauty and wealth, in a moment she has been cut off.