Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

As she descended the clattering stairs, I heard Jennifer humming, to taunt me back, “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.”

[Or, in another part of the emerald forest:]

Buchanan was in the Court House by nine o’clock that gray morning in late November. A note was handed to him. He read it and turned pale.

Perhaps the whole Court House, built in 1787 to replace the one that burned in 1784, turned pale. Through the Palladian windows of its upstairs reference library, where the handwritten, canvas-bound judgments and appeals were pulled from sagging pine shelves and lay about carelessly splayed and abandoned on oak reading tables, the sun showed as a sore white spot in the drearily overcast sky. The clerks, messengers, and fellow lawyers in Buchanan’s vicinity, not to mention that populace of cadgers and adaptable hirelings who collect wherever momentous business is being conducted, turned pale in sympathy, recognizing this moment as a critical one, with historical ramifications. The letter was written on stationery of blue wove paper, in Ann Coleman’s large impatient handwriting, with crossings to the “t”s and finishing strokes to the terminal “e”s whose emotional vehemence had ruthlessly splayed the goose quill.

My dear James Buchanan:

Indications mount that your regard for me is less warm and sincere than the solemn pledge of marriage demands. I have been informed, alas from a source I cannot doubt, that while I at my home around the corner joyously awaited your return from Philadelphia, you paid a prolonged call upon Mrs. William Jenkins and her sister, Miss Grace Hubley — a sociable call prolonged past dark, to the hour of supper.

Consulting with my parents, I asked that the lamps of welcome in our house be snuffed. I have not slept, and write you now by morning light. This instance of your neglect, though not, it might be said, grievous by itself, confirms in an unignorable manner the many intimations of indifference I have this fall received from you. When I sought to express my feelings of abandonment, you pled preoccupation with the quantity of new legal business occasioned by the national distress, and I composed myself to be, for this interval, accessory to your ambition. Undoubtingly I scorned those voices close to me insisting that the object of your regard was not my welfare but my riches.

Your earnestness, your industry, your reticence, even your intervals of melancholy and self-distrust — such seemed to me the proper costume of a man’s soul, a soul that might merge with mine, providing shelter to my frailty and substance to my longings. I opened to you as to none other — for each bud flowereth but once. With what dreadful fatality, then, with what terror and shame, have these autumnal months borne in upon me the conclusion that my warmth accosts in you a deceptive coolness as unalterable as the mask of death. Had my affection been received by you as a treasure confided, and not as an adornment bestowed, you would not be flaunting your new prestige before the sisters Hubley nor flirting about Lancaster in the dozens of sprightly incidents obliging gossip reports to me. Did you truly love me, your bones of their gravity would have torn you from such unfaithful lightness!

I foresee your protestations, your skillful arguments. I hear your voice plead circumstance and good intentions. Believe me, the barrier to our united happiness lies fixed. Our engagement is broken. I shall return to your rooms on King Street all the effects, epistolary and material, of our attachment, and will look for the mutual return of mine, to my home but a few steps away. I do not wish, nor, since you claim to be a gentleman, do I expect, to meet you, as more than a nodding acquaintance, again.

In sincere sorrow,

Her full name, to add to the insult of claim to be a gentleman . Yet on a separate, smaller piece of paper, tinted rose, as keepsake or partial retraction, a few lines of poetry copied in her hand:

Thanks to this last, much-quoted stanza Buchanan was able to recognize these fragments as from the profane works of that aristocratic scribbler Lord Byron, who had inclined so many susceptible young hearts to apostasy and melancholy posing. Of Ann’s wayward habits, her weakness for the candied poison of this satirical and corrupt acolyte of the tyrant Napoleon had struck him as the least charming, and the most needful to be discouraged once she had been his lawful wife. The United States were no place for foppish anarchy. When he thought of his mother’s hard life at Stony Batter — the laundry-boiling, the chicken-gutting, the eye-stinging stenches of woodsmoke and lye and the carrion of drying pelts, the tumult of horses and hound dogs outside the open cabin door, the thump and skidding of barrels and crates and the drovers’ foul language from which neither her ears nor his as a child could be shielded, and the pious poetry of Milton and measured lines of Pope with which she exercised her sweet voice in a moment of evening quiet, by the flutter of a kindle-light stuck between the stones of the fireplace — when he thought of this in contrast with Ann’s pampered and pettish existence he had to suppress a certain indignation, it was true. Yet now these verses were offered to him as a last thin bridge across an abyss of separation, and had something plaintive and adhesive about them inviting him, even as she decreed his abolition, to resume pursuit. Well, he would give her flouncing anger a few days to cool, and the tongues of Lancaster to cease wagging, and then see about crossing this bridge. Buchanan was a proud man. He had not marched to Baltimore in 1812 and in a downpour seized horses for the Third Cavalry — he had not as a lone rider made his way through Kentucky’s dark and bloody ground and back — he had not three times outwitted the Democrat enemies of Judge Franklin in the state legislature to go begging forgiveness from this ironmaster’s daughter. He had excited her affection, he was certain, and the female soul, conservative by nature, does not quickly turn from an established love. A few days’ delay in response could do him no harm. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof , his mother had more than once quoted to soothe his youthful hurts.

All this, in a few seconds’ reaction, on the level of conscious estimation and calculation. But underneath, a sickening sliding. His color was the pallor of a man who had consumed a bad oyster an hour before, or who had just been summoned to a deadly duel. The humiliation. The shame. How could they not meet and he not be cut off from all the bright circles of Lancaster society? All around him, through the rectilinear streets of a town without privacy, there were ears anxious to hear, lips ready to crow. His reputation was destroyed by this repudiation. A gloomy acid taste, a hatred for all the iron Colemans, rose at the back of his throat and had to be swallowed back, there amid the library shelves, the splayed books, the slowly resumed activity, as his pallor ebbed. Why would God give him this slap? It felt in his heart like the thud of a keg of cut nails falling from the back of a Conestoga wagon, splitting the staves and leaving a dent in the earth as deep as a tin water dipper. God had not struck him so hard since 1808, when his father opened the letter from Dickinson. Then, too, a terrible taste and disbelief had arisen in the back of his throat. Before that, there had been the death of baby Elizabeth. That was in 1801. They had moved to Mercersburg by then, and his father had a farm as well as a store. His new sister — he already had three — slept in a rocking cradle in a corner of his mother’s room. Looking down at her day by day, wondering why her bed always smelled like the straw when the stable hadn’t been cleaned, little Jamie watched his sister fight for breath within the cradle. Her bright blue eyes looked angry, sinking into her face, in their orbits of bone, as her cheeks grew lean and creased. She looked less and less like a baby and more like an old person, or an old angry monkey. Her hands curled on her chest and her eyes got dull as drops of candlewax, and there came a morning when she was waxy all over, and the spark of life had gone to Heaven to join the soul of his sister Mary, who had died the year he was born as if to give him room. Elizabeth was his mother’s name, as his name was his father’s. Elizabeth’s angry blue mouth, with its dry squawks and yellow spit-up, had become triangular, a sharp hole leading downward to nothing, and something terrible — the adamant No that God could pronounce — entered her brother’s stomach like a stone, like the fall of a keg of nails. That very day, it seemed in his faulty memory, his mother in her sorrow had baked buttery sweet corn cakes, as if to reward the other of her children — Jamie and Jane and Maria and Sarah — for continuing to live.