Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“The Colemans are seldom challenged, it is true,” he said, permitting himself the manner if not the substance of irony in such a serious connection. “Even at the age of seventy-one, the Judge keeps a good grip on his interests, and his grown sons greatly extend his influence.”

“Mary tells me all Lancaster thinks you are a knight errant to brave the Coleman castle and carry away the languishing princess.” When this apparition laughed, the shadowed space between her breasts changed shape. Her voice formed cushions in the air, into which Buchanan sank gratefully after days of nasal legal prating in an oppressive metropolis.

“She would not languish long, were this particular knight to take a fatal lance.”

Grace Hubley thoughtfully pursed her plump, self-pleasing lips. “It makes a woman unsteady, perhaps, to have too many attractions; it prevents in her mind the resigned contentment of a concluded bargain.” Here she spoke, less mischievously than usual, from experience, absorbed and foreshadowed: we are told Grace Hubley was a young woman of three negative romances, not including the part she played in the Buchanan-Coleman episode. Thrice engaged to be married, misfortune and a fickleness of temperament ordained her ultimately to spinsterhood .

Buchanan, too, may have suffered from a surfeit of attractiveness. A decade later, he excited the Washington journalist Anne Royall to gush, in the third volume of her Black Book (1828–29), No description that the most talented writer could give, can convey an idea of Mr. Buchanan; he is quite a young man (and a batchelor, ladies) with a stout handsome person; his face is large and fair, his eyes, a soft blue, one of which he often shuts, and has a habit of turning his head to one side . He had been his mother’s first son and, with the death of his older sister, Mary, in the year he was born, her eldest child. Five sisters followed, four of them surviving to form playmates and an audience. His capacity for basking in female approval was essentially bottomless, and Ann Coleman’s good opinion had to it a certain bottom, reinforced by her family. Grace Hubley, in turn, we are told, possessed a beauty and vivaciousness of disposition that made her the pet adorable of her acquaintance . Her feathery banter was to his vanity, we might conceive, as a deep barrel of sifted flour is to a man’s forearm. He stirred her, he took her tinge. The shadows the Colemans cast in his head were dispersed by the light of this social conversation very adroitly guided by the keen objective mind of Miss Hubley. Golden minutes fled by on winged feet . As the embrace of the November evening tightened around them, and the windows of the tall sitting room with its fine provincial furniture gave back only tremulous amber reflections of the lights burning within, and Mary Jenkins absented herself to supervise details of the impending meal, possibly the conversation between these two strangers, the pet adorable and the favorite son, whose ages flanked the turning point of thirty, deepened in intimacy and dared probe the innermost source of consolation and anxiety harbored by Americans of the early nineteenth century, the strenuous maintenance of which so remarkably consumed and yet also supplied their energy — the Christian faith. Struck by her repeated righteous rejection of black slavery in all its forms, indeed scandalized by her airy, quick-tongued condemnation of an institution so extensively and venerably bound up in the nation’s laws of property and means of production, he ventured, “Miss Hubley, I envy you the clarity of your views. God’s design, it is evident, presents no riddles to your vision.”

“What riddles there are, Mr. Buchanan, I leave to the Lord to solve.” By this hour her own sipping had moved from tea to a brandy cordial in a tulip-shaped glass, and a certain rosy warmth and confident languor broadened her gestures, beneath the loosening exotic length of Persian shawl.

He inclined his stout handsome person forward from the delicate lyre-back chair with fluted legs, so that his vision won for its field slightly more of the radiant expanse of Miss Hubley’s bosom. “May I ask — ” He hesitated. “I ask in all respectfulness, with full solemnity — have you known, then, an inner experience of election, that supports this lovely certainty of yours?”

She adjusted her shawl, to achieve an inch more concealment, then relaxed into self-exposition, saying, “I would not express it in so political a phrase — but for as long as I can remember, I have sensibly felt the closeness of the Lord. He looks over me — He approves of me — He rebukes me — He enjoys me.”

“Ah, I do envy you. My own mother could not speak with a more serene assurance.”

“But is not this true of everyone, Mr. Buchanan? At least, of the white and educated race?”

“You ask, I cannot answer,” admitted the future statesman, lowering his gaze in an approach to shame. “My own sad case may be singular. Parson and evangelist and deacon all alike speak of some necessary factual encounter, some near-sensory experience of Jesus, which I cannot in unhappy honesty wring from hours of prayer, or find even in my memories of childhood. The forest surrounding Stony Batter, the curses of the drovers and the misery of their animals, even the bland and randomly changing temper of the skies above seemed then to bespeak an inscrutable indifference, the cool tenor of which no intensity of yearning on my part could alter. The Presbyterian faith teaches of foreordained election and its opposite; can it be, I must ask myself, that my deadness of heart in this regard is sign of some eternal negation — an incurable absence of the quality, grace, which your very name proclaims?”

She had held her attitude of repose, one silken sleeve posed along the restless mahogany curve of the sofa’s back, with a deliberate patience, sensing that this greatly endowed and yet spiritually lamed man was attempting a declaration of, for him, dangerous depth. Quickly moving her posed arm to make, with the other, a clench of earnestness in her lap, she mirrored the tilt of his body toward hers and said in a lowered but still singing voice, “It is not a woman’s way, Mr. Buchanan, to make an issue of doubt. Helpless we are born, helpless we die, and betweentimes we live at the mercy of those who are stronger. It is not our task to quarrel with God. Yet life is good, evidently; earth’s abundance and glory are but the outward validation of the love we feel flowing, without stint, from within. There are truths beyond the reach of reason. Surely Miss Coleman, to the degree of intimacy that is already your privilege, relieves your uncertainties, and charms away your doubts.”

“Alas, Miss Hubley, and in the strictest confidence, not only does she herself doubt; she mocks. She is a headlong reader of Lord Byron’s bombastic and cynical scribblings, and I fear has some sympathy for the most vicious anti-principles of the European anarchists!”

“But how can that be? Her family is the richest in Lancaster!”

“You cite as objection the very cause. Only luxury can afford ruinous thoughts. Luxury, and poverty beyond redemption.”

Grace Hubley sat back, thinking that she had gone as far with this initial interview as was practicable; she was aware of hunger clashing with brandy in her stomach, and of a certain weariness this man even in his splendor and susceptibility inspired. He lacked true masculine spontaneity, that possibility of cruelty which brings the final alertness, the last voluptuous rounding, to feminine interest. “Well,” she said in a flattened tone of conclusion and provisional withdrawal, “there are many Christian women, of sound and regular views, who would welcome your attentions, Mr. Buchanan, and throw a soothing light upon the matter of your election.” Having so long waxed flirtatious, she relaxed into theological admonition, continuing, “I fear you vex with your mind what only spirit can decide. You must not bargain with God, as you do with other men of substance. God is not substantial in this sense. He cannot be bargained with. He allows us freedom only to accept or reject Him. Accept Him, sir, simply, without cavil, as a woman does — a woman, of course, of sound disposition and normal attitude.”