Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

The Jenkinses’ house stood on South Duke Street, halfway between the Colemans’ mansion and Buchanan’s bachelor rooms, and it seemed convenient and wise, weary as he was in his jolted bones and his overused eyes and throat from four days of legal investigation and disputation in the pestilentially congested City of Brotherly Love, to give his client hopeful news before betaking himself to East King Street, the comfort of a solitary glass of Madeira, and, after a quick and simple supper fetched up to his quarters by the serving girl, to the Colemans’ for a politic evening call. There were some emotional fences to mend, Buchanan realized. The fall of 1819 had been trying for his fiancée as well as for the nation; his repeated absences upon matters of business had worn upon Ann’s nervous and — an unsympathetic observer might have said — much-indulged disposition. He did not, himself, mind her need for indulgence, any more than a man minds a skittish temper and rolling eye in a finely bred trotter; it savored, to him, of luxury — a luxurious self-regard encouraged by society, as confirmation of her high position, which would merge, once they were married, with his own.

Yet anticipation of the company of Ann’s falsely welcoming parents, along with that of Sarah, her seventeen-year-old sister, who would be unduly and persistently curious about the glamorous details of the metropolis — which the lawyer had been too professionally occupied to sample, but for a bolted meal at a crowded inn and, to clear his head, an evening stroll along Market Street, past the Presidential mansion from which it had been Washington’s wont to set out in a cream-colored French coach, ornamented with cupids and flowers — and perhaps that of brother Edward, saturnine and inflexibly correct, suppressing his cough and any words of overt disapproval while his gaze smoldered in the corner within the leaping shadows cast by the Colemans’ fish-oil lamps, did not, this anticipation, relieve his inner chill: better to warm himself a moment at the Jenkinses’, where his welcome was sincere, forged of long acquaintance, and his attendance carried a clear pecuniary value. A brownish light still figured in the westward sky. Low clouds spit a few dry flakes of early snow. From the semi-circular stone porch that formed the sixth step he saw that it was bright within; though the Jenkinses’ fortunes were presently shaky, they burned the best quality of candles, spermaceti, and had lately acquired an Argand lamp, an ingenious Swiss device, impossible to surpass for illumination, with a glass chimney and a clockwork pump for steadily supplying oil to the circular wick.

Mary Jenkins came herself to the door, her round face framed in a lace cap with ruchings. “Dear Mr. Buchanan, come in! Mr. Jenkins is gone for the night with his ailing mother at Windsor Forge, but my sister Grace is here to console me, and now you! Please do come meet her.”

He hesitated, the icy touch of the naked mermaid still tingling in his fingertips, even through his gloves’ thin kid, and the farmhouses and stubbled fields and darkling woods numbly appraised through his carriage window still somehow smeared on his vision, proof of a burgeoning national vastness despite the financial panic, which had flooded the market with so much unwanted property that even sheriffs’ fees could not be realized. “I–I had meant merely to acquaint your good husband with the progress of the Columbia Bridge Company suit, before proceeding to recuperate from nearly a week’s absence in Philadelphia.”

“Recuperate here — we were just sitting in the parlor, too lazy to move. We’ll warm up the teapot again. Or would a cordial better repay your long journey? Grace,” she called from the foyer, into the radiant parlor, “who has come calling but the very man in Lancaster I wanted you most to meet!”

Buchanan’s timorous advance, tall beaver hat in hand, into the sitting room discovered, in a certain mist of historicity, an enchantress sitting on a rose-colored sofa with a serpentine back.

Or perhaps, to give recorded history its due, she had been upstairs, and, in the words of the most vivid, if anonymous and unreliable, account of this incident, Straining her ears to distinguish the voices that came from a downstairs room, Miss Hubley was pleasantly surprised to know that Mr. Buchanan was the caller at the home, and her sense of curiosity, no less than a well-defined personal interest in the caller, manifested itself in a very concrete way .

Hurriedly completing the most tempting toilet that suggested itself to her emotional temperament , Grace Hubley left her bedroom and entered history. Buchanan and his associate [a phantom only this telling evokes; surely not Molton Rogers, off courting Eliza Jacobs, who was to die in childbirth in three brief years, nor the fabulously fat John Passmore, who by 1819 was in fact the Mayor of Lancaster, the little city’s first] were suddenly surprised to hear a gentle footstep on the stair, a swishing of well-set silks and then to be confronted with the charming young lady as she presented herself to the admiring visitor .

Young: Grace Hubley was born on April 27, 1787, making her thirty-two, four days shy of four years older than James Buchanan, and two years older than her sister Mary. So the siren breast exuded the ripe charm of superior experience. In the words of the account, a newspaper article neatly mounted but unascribed in the archives of the Buchanan Foundation at Wheatland, Her culture was further heightened by a period of life spent with relatives in Philadelphia, who introduced her into the social whirl of the city and brought her into close intimate contact with the noted hostesses and gentlemen of that day . That day, this day, be they as they may, a man’s heart beats quicker at the sight of a strange and comely woman, bathed in a light that seems her own. She was fairer than her sister, and the Hubley roundness of face was not yet worn into creased complacence by the satisfactions and cares of the wedded state. Clustered candles, their spotty web of light extended by tin sconces inset with oval mirrors, filled the dainty high-ceilinged room with a fragrance that felt to come from afar, from the sea, a seaweedy sweetness not merely sweet but august, an august incense conveying marine mystery. Buchanan had never viewed the ocean, merely read of its crossing in voyagers’ tales and Shakespeare’s Tempest and seen, in Philadelphia, the two great rivers, the Schuylkill and the yet mightier Delaware, swelling as they neared their rendezvous with the mother of waters. Excursions to the Chesapeake Bay were not uncommon among the prosperous youth of Lancaster, but he was so new to their set, and so industrious in the maintenance of his achieved status, that he had not yet ventured to the shore. The healing mountain waters of Bedford Springs cooled his summer enough, away from the fragrant debris of the tides, the lavish reach of sands, the colossal heedlessness of the endless waves, whose infinity mocks our consciousness.

“My sister, Miss Grace Hubley,” Mary Jenkins was saying through his daze of enchantment. A small fire, the size of a cat, purred in the fireplace. The grouped and reflected candles gave off additional warmth enough to allow Miss Hubley to display, it appeared to the visitor, a generous amount of skin, among the curves of a loosely arranged and resplendent shawl. “And this is Mr. James Buchanan, Junior — a former state Assemblyman and a lawyer whose counsel on many matters is treasured by Mr. Jenkins.”

The fresh face in the room appeared radiant, in the shifting web of radiance. Miss Hubley’s hair, the same pale brown as Buchanan’s, was done up in a taut nest of braids behind, with ringlets falling free about her face, from a glossy central parting striking in its straight perfection. Her long eyebrows had an inquisitive arch, and her lightly tinted mouth expressed a cushioned pleasure in itself and its flirtatious workings a world of temperament removed from Ann’s angular, impatient lips. When Miss Hubley spoke, it was with an enchanting Southern mulling of the words. “Oh,” she said, “one does not have to be in the Jenkins household many hours to hear tell of Mr. Buchanan. He is the man to be watched, in Lancaster.”