Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Retrospect eds.: Check facts? Whole parenthesis might come out, if there are space pressures. But you asked for impressions.] I had no television in my exiguous fourth-floor digs — a long room where I had rigged a desk of two filing cabinets and a hollow door, and a square room almost completely filled by a double bed, each room with one window overlooking a narrow side street in the shadow of a deserted textile mill — and was dependent for news upon the hourly summaries and rare special bulletins on the area’s only classical-musical station, WADM, plus headlines glimpsed on other people’s newspapers, and out-of-date newsmagazines in the waiting rooms of dentists, lawyers, opticians, etc., consulted during the twenty-nine months of the Ford Administration.) In that dear dying movie house, whose name was Rialto, with its razored plush seats and flaking gilt cherubs, my three fuzzy-headed cherubs and I saw The Godfather: Part II and Jaws . Both terrified me and Daphne, though the boys pooh-poohed us. By the time of Jaws Andrew was big enough, with a driver’s license, to be humiliated by going to the movies with his father. And though Jaws packed them in, up into the raised loge seats and the precipitous balcony, the Rialto’s fate was sealed; within months it went X-rated.

Snap .

As I sat there watching Nixon resign I had the illusion that the house we were in, a big Victorian with a mansard roof, a finished third floor, and a view from the upper windows of the yellow-brick smokestacks of the college heating plant, was still mine; its books, a collection beginning with our college textbooks, felt like mine, and its furniture, a child-abused hodgepodge of airfoam-slab sofas and butterfly chairs with canvas slings and wobbly Danish end tables and chrome-legged low easy chairs draped on their threadbare arms with paisley bandanas and tasselled shawls, felt still like mine, along with the cat hairs on the sofa and the dustballs under it, the almost-empty liquor bottles in the pantry and the tattered Japanese-paper balls that did here and there for lampshades, all of it in our wedded style, my wife’s and mine, a unisex style whose foundation was lightly laid in late-Fifties academia and then ornamented and weathered in the heats and sweats of Sixties fringe-radicalism. I had left my wife but not our marriage, its texture and mind-set, and it was far from dawned upon me that this house, this hairy fringy nest she and I had together accumulated one twig at a time, not to mention these three hatchlings so trustfully and helplessly and silently gathered here beside me in the flickering light of one man’s exploding ambition and dream (he was resigning, Nixon explained, for the good of the nation and not out of any personal inclination: “I have never been a quitter,” he shakily said, scowling. “To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body”) — that this house was gone, cast off, as lost to my life as my childhood home in the hamlet of Hayes, my college rooms in Middlebury, our graduate-student quarters in Cambridge in a brick apartment building down Kirkland Street from the then-Germanic Museum, or the little apple-green Cape-and-a-half, our first bona-fide house, with a yard, a basement, and a letter slot, that the university rented to us in Hanover, right off Route 120, a stone’s throw from the Orozco murals. In this living room I was, in truth, on a par with a televised image — a temporary visitant, an epiphenomenon.

[ Retrospect: Sorry about all the decor. But decor is part of life, woven inextricably into our memories and impressions. When I first received NNEAAH’s kind and flattering request to contribute to its written symposium, I ventured to the library and flipped through a few reference books, the kind of instant history that comes from compiling old headlines, and was struck by how much news is death, pure and simple. In these transition months of 1974, who wasn’t dying? Chet Huntley and Georges Pompidou, Juan Perón and Earl Warren, Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother, Walter Lippmann and Jack Benny, with Generalissimo Franco seriously ailing and Evel Knievel far from well. Evel Knievel failed to ride a rocket across a canyon in Idaho; Pompidou was reported as saying, “Every politician ( Tous les politiciens ) has his problems ( ont leurs problèmes ). Nixon has Watergate ( Nixon a Watergate ), and I am going to die ( et je vais mourir ).” Surely, Retrospect editors, you don’t want this sort of thing, which any sophomore with access to a microfilm reader that hasn’t broken its fan belt can tote up for you. You want living memories and impressions: the untampered-with testimony of those of us fortunate enough to have survived, unlike those named above, the Ford Administration. I was greatly moved, the other night, by a twitchy black-and-white film from 1913 of the survivors of Pickett’s charge, meeting as old men on the Gettysburg battlefield fifty years later. The Southerners pretended to charge again, hobbling forward on canes, and the Northerners scrambled out from behind the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge and embraced them. Tears, laughter. Young killers into dear old men. Enough time slides by, we’re all history, right? And if you want to feel really sick, NNEAAH, think of the time that will keep sliding by after you’re dead. After we’re dead, I should say. If I’ve misjudged my assignment, please trim this response to suit your editorial requirements.]

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. And then as in an optical illusion the eye makes what it can of the spots. The Queen of Disorder came back around midnight, let’s say. It was August, a muggy month in our river valley, but summer was already pulling in at the edges, with all the lawns parched and the cicadas in full cry. She must have been wearing a little pale-flowered cotton dress on her generous but still lithe figure, with shoelace shoulder straps, and it must have crossed my mind that she had taken this dress off that night and then put it back on to come home. Home — she had suffered some losses but kept that word, that reality. “How were the kids?” she would have asked.

“Good. Sweet. We watched Nixon and tried to play Mille Bornes until Daphne got cranky.”

Daphne’s mother shrugged off a little loose-knit white sweater hung around her shoulders like a cape. The freckles on her bare shoulders were clustered thick enough to simulate a tan. Glancing at a corner of the ceiling as if a cobweb there had suddenly taken her interest, she asked, a bit timidly, “They talk?”

“No,” I said.

“Even after Daphne went to bed? The boys?”

“ No , Norma. What is there to say? I let them watch Hawaii Five-O with me and then tucked them in. I did prayers with Daphne but the boys told me you’ve quit the prayers.”

“Have I?” she asked, turning her head to look at another cobweb. Her hair was the color of a dried — the health-food stores say sulphured — apricot held up to the light, and kinky, so that even when ironed hair had been the thing, along with sandalwood love beads and dirty bare feet, Norma had had a woolly look. I pictured her hair spread out on a pillow like spilled pillow stuffing and her date’s meaty hands digging into its abundance. An abundance below, too, gingery, tingly, and in her armpits in those barefoot years when it was fashionable not to shave. Her shins then had become scratchy like a man’s chin. I had grown a beard that came in thin and goatish. We used to go skinnydipping with friends at a lake up above Hanover and, stoned enough to feel the walls of my being transparent like those of a jellyfish, and to imagine we were all one big loving family, I had turned to a woman on the sand beside me and must have somehow begged for a compliment on Norma’s generous figure, for I remember this other woman’s dry sarcastic voice cutting through my shimmering jellyfish walls: I’m so happy for you, Alf . “It just seemed hypocritical,” my Queen of Disorder said, “with us the way we are. Nothing sacred, and all.”

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