Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

For that matter, was there ever a Ford Administration? Evidence for its existence seems to be scanty. I have been doing some sneak objective research, though you ask for memories and impressions, both subjective. The hit songs of the years 1974–76 apparently were

“Seasons in the Sun”

“The Most Beautiful Girl”

“The Streak”

“Please, Mister Postman”

“Mandy”

“Top of the World”

“Just You and Me”

“Rhinestone Cowboy”

“Fame”

“Best of My Love”

“Laughter in the Rain”

“The Hustle”

“Have You Never Been Mellow?”

“One of These Nights”

“Jive Talkin’ ”

“Silly Love Songs”

“Black Water”

“Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart”

“Play That Funky Music”

“A Fifth of Beethoven”

“Shake Your Booty”

“Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”

“Love Is Alive”

“Sara Smile”

“Get Closer”

I don’t recall hearing any of them. Whenever I turned on the radio, WADM was pouring out J. S. Bach’s merry tintinnabulations or the surging cotton candy of P. I. Tchaikovsky, the inventor of sound-track music. No, wait — “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” rings a faint bell, I can almost hum it, and the same goes for “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” if it’s not the same song. In fact, all twenty-five titles give me the uneasy sensation of being the same song. The top non-fiction bestsellers of those years were All the President’s Men, More Joy: Lovemaking Companion to the Joy of Sex, You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis, Angels: God’s Secret Agents, Winning Through Intimidation, Sylvia Porter’s Money Book, Total Fitness in 30 Minutes a Week, Blind Ambition: The White House Years, The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank , and The Hite Report: I read none of them. Fiction, too, evaded my ken; the multitudes but not I revelled in the dramatized information of such chunky, univerbal titles as Jaws, Shogun, Ragtime, Trinity, Centennial , and 1876 , or in the wistful escapism of All Things Bright and Beautiful and Watership Down , which was, I seem very imperfectly to recall, somehow about rabbits. The top TV shows were All in the Family, Happy Days , and Laverne and Shirley: I never watched them, having no TV set in my furtive digs. I would half-hear the interrupting news bulletins on WADM whenever some woman would take a shot at Ford or Ford took a shot at the Cambodians — Cambodia being the heart of the world’s darkness in these years — but otherwise the only news that concerned me was what came over the telephone and up the stairs.

The longer I stayed in my burrow over in Adams, the more visitors I attracted. I was a kind of vacuum nature, especially female nature, abhorred. Students would drop by unannounced: I remember the rasp of my buzzer, the tremulous girlish voice stammering her excuses into the rusty speaker below in the little foyer strewn with advertising handouts and misdelivered mail, my hasty cleanup of dropped underwear and dirty dishes while this student climbed the uncarpeted flights of stairs, her young heart beating like a caged bluebird. These Wayward girls all had cars, not just cars but convertibles in the fall and spring and four-wheel-drive squarebacks in the blizzard season; for them it was no great trick to drive over the bridge and find my place behind the old shoe factory — undone by Italian imports and fractionally given over to little electronics outfits all hoping to become the next Apple — less than a block off the half-boarded-up main shopping drag, called Federal Avenue on the drawing board when the town, little more than a mill, inn, and waterfall when it was named in 1797, was laid out in the 1830’s, under the second Adams’s supplanter Jackson, as an ideal industrialopolis. The city was a worker’s paradise on paper — the proud main drag ending at the main textile factory’s gates; a parallel grand residential boulevard with a mall down the middle like Park Avenue and a big flat Common in between. At the center of a symmetrical web of walks stood a bandstand and a monument to the two Federalist Presidents, Washington and Adams, with a pair of nightgowned beauties who were not Martha and Abigail but the abstract houris of the Republic, Liberty and Equality, in these fallen times much decorated with polychrome graffiti, spray-painted pudenda, invitations to FUCK ME and SUCK MY COCK, and the like. The Jacksonian mapmakers hadn’t quite foreseen the Irish and then the Poles who would replace the Yankee farm girls at the idyllic looms and lasts, or the Hispanics and Asians that had appeared in these recent decades in such bewildering numbers, with their rapid languages and Old World predilection for crimes of passion. But the city has stretched its grid toward the surrounding hills to make more neighborhoods, and put up bi-lingual signs in the welfare office, and hired more dark-skinned counsellors at the high school, and allows the Common to be used for fiestas on saints’ days. Is this the place, Retrospect editors, for me to confess my basic optimism and even exhilaration in regard to the American process? The torch still shines, attracting moths of every shade. Live free or stay home.

Which student was it? My core memory, or impression, generating a radiant halo of verbalization, is of the push of her breast on the back of my arm, above the elbow, as we looked together at her term paper, there by the window with the friable brown shade like a graham cracker, near my desk with its litter of James Buchananiana. Waxy photocopies and scribbled index cards and overdue library books — the disorder sickened me, but I had hopes of pulling out of it a clean narrative thread that would some day gleam in the sun like a taut fishing line.

This unmistakable nudge of lipid tissue was one more bit of confusion I didn’t need. I wanted to step forward, releasing my upper arm from the pressure, but, pinned by my desk chair, I could only lean away, an evasive tactic she easily countered by edging her feet, in their canvas sneakers — this was before the era of bulky, many-ply running shoes and after the heyday of Pappagallo ballerina slippers — a few inches closer to my loafers. “Miss Arthrop”—let us call her Jennifer Arthrop, at a grab — “you don’t have to stand so close.”

“I can’t see , Professor Clayton, if I don’t. I brought only my sunglasses.” Nearsightedness in women, I suppose, is favored by evolution; men are charmed by it, a vision that focuses on the cooking pot, the sewing needle, and immediate male needs. It would be fatal to hunting prowess, however, and in men it must persist through the genes of social parasites.

The document in my hands, a sheaf of 8½″-by-11″ paper covered, back then, with erratic rows of manually typed characters, eludes the eyes of memory, but let us say, donning the corrective lenses of invention, that it was entitled “Protestant-Christian Mythicization as an Enforcer of Male-Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.” Fifteen pages, double-spaced, a term paper for extra credit, from one of my better students. Miss Arthrop came from Connecticut, where her father was a communications-company executive and her mother ran a gift shop. Her excuse for showing up in my divorcing man’s hideout was the slight lateness of her paper, which was due Friday and by Monday would be decisively late and doomed to be docked one grade. Today was Sunday, a gray area. Her admirably firm breast renewed its pressure on the back of my sensitive arm, in its thin shirtsleeve. In desperation I moved away, an awkward half-twist, around my swivel chair toward the window, my knees inches from the spiny, dusty radiator, the half-raised shade revealing the day to be, in the downward space between my building and the factory, a gloomy one. My maneuver left Miss Arthrop standing in her full sweater at the corner of my desk, blinking, suggesting a caryatid from whose head the weighty entablature had been abruptly removed. The sweater was striped and shaggy, as if she were just back from a ski trip. Perhaps she was. Perhaps, when I raised the shade, a row of dripping icicle tips sparkled into view.