Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“What’s the matter, Alf?” she asked softly. “You seem so sad.”

“I’m not sad,” I lied, knowing the truth would eventually out, just as our underpants would come off, “just being quiet. Your girls were so sweet, tonight. They trust me.” Speaking in husky lowered voices changed the quality of our statements, gave them urgency; we were uttering passwords in a film noir .

Her smile added its glimmer to the room, beneath her eyeball whites with their highlights. I could never imagine how people could, with their naked thumbs, gouge out others’ eyeballs, though the event has ample historical verification. “Why wouldn’t they? You’re very trustworthy.”

She was often a little in advance with her assertions; she meant that I would become trustworthy, when I was their legal stepfather. “Ask my own children about that,” I blurted.

Her smile glimmered out, but not dangerously. She had been here before. “You’re supporting them,” she argued. “You visit them. You visit them a lot, and I never complain.” Her recitation had a lilt to it, like the lullaby she sang the girls, night after night. She stepped up the tempo. “You give them nearly all your money, and you’re being very patient with their mother. You’re being saintly, Alf.”

I had to laugh at this last, though the shadow-pits of her eye sockets, the bone cups holding their vulnerable plums, were brimmingly solemn. The soreness in my stomach was easing. The good old talking cure. “My children are sweet, too,” I said. “They never accuse me, or ask me how come.” This was not quite true: lately Daphne, the baby of the three but a woman in bud, had begun to probe the issues that the two boys stoically ignored.

Genevieve took a fresh tack, in a voce no longer so sotto . Her mother’s instinct told her her girls were asleep. “They don’t have to ask, Alf. They could see the way their mother treated you. You were lower than the cats in that household hierarchy. Everybody at Wayward could see it; it was one of the first things people on the faculty gossipped with us about when we came here, how disempowering of you Norma was.”

My husbandly instinct was to defend Norma, to explain that I had felt no great pain, that it takes two to disempower, that we had evolved a style together, since our laid-back Cambridge days, of mutual benign neglect; but since the Perfect Mistress was spending the night, wifelily enough, and deserved a husband’s consideration from me, I suppressed this instinct with a sip of our leftover wine. “What else did the faculty say about us?” I asked.

Genevieve didn’t quite like this thrust of my curiosity, as exploiting her uncharacteristic lapse of discretion, but she had to play along, for the same reasons I was trying to keep smooth our perilous attempt tonight at playing house. At the center of our scandal, with centrifugal spouses, we were stuck with each other as surely as the principals of an arranged marriage. She said reluctantly, “They said what a gifted artist Norma was, and what a pity she never finished a canvas, and how brilliant you were, and what a shame that you could never finish your book on Buchanan.”

I expected her to go on, as the Queen of Disorder would have, wanderingly pursuing her thoughts to a provocative aporia or a trailing-off that, by our old habits, chimed stimulatingly with an unspoken intuition of mine. But this new woman’s style was to stop when she had nothing clear and certain to say. It put more of a conversational burden on me than I was accustomed to. I volunteered, “I probably don’t want to finish it. I’m scared of being separated from him.”

“From Buchanan?” she said, in genuine surprise. We could still surprise each other; that was nice.

“Yes. I love him,” I said, feeling the wine, and hoping I wasn’t boozily slipping into rubbing her too much the wrong way. But how could she be jealous of a long-dead man? Dust, he was now, in Woodward Hill Cemetery, dust and bones and bits of skin, like a mylodon.

Her smile appeared and disappeared quickly, signalling woman-warmth beneath the surface of the room’s dimness, a dimness splotched with bluish and yellowish patches of light from nighttime Adams. “ Is he lovable?” she sensibly asked.

“Not very,” I admitted, then backtracked, “but yes, very. He was stiff and conscientious and cautious. His Presidential addresses are so dry you could learn to hate him. But then you don’t, you get to feel a mind underneath the words, making sense, trying to pull off a balancing act. All these nineteenth-century people made sense, in a way we can’t any more. They still had a language you could build with. But anybody,” I went on, placing a preliminary hand on the small of her back, its little pad of buttock-fat pushed upward by her posture as she sat, legs crossed yoga-style, on my bed, “can love a lovable person. The challenge is, for the historian, to love the unlovable. He was scared of the world, Buchanan. He thought it was out to get him, and it was. He was right. He tried to keep peace. That whole decade of Presidents did, Fillmore and Pierce and Buchanan — try, I mean — and they suc ceed ed, they did keep the South placated, and in the Union, which was important, since if war had come in 1850 instead of 1860, the outcome might have been very different; the South had all its assets in place — the military tradition, the great officers, the down-home patriotism, King Cotton — and the North still needed to grow. And precious little thanks they’ve got from history for it — the doughface Presidents. History loves blood. It loves the great blood-spillers. Poor Buchanan was ahead of his time, trying to bring mankind up a notch, out of the blood. On the other hand, you’d have to say, he loved power, that spidery kind of power politicians had back then, just a few of them pulling all the strings; he was Polk’s Secretary of State, and Polk was not afraid to spill blood. The way the two of them jockeyed Mexico into war was really rather shameful, and tricky, too, since the Mexican government kept changing, you could almost say there was no government to make war on. Neither was Jackson, of course, afraid of blood. Buchanan became a Jacksonian, because Jackson was the force, the only force really, once the aristocrats fizzled out with Quincy Adams; a whole political party, the Whigs, rose up with no point to it at all except being against him , Jackson; they took the name Whig to imply that Jackson was a Tory. King Andrew, they called him. The Whigs have a sadness to them; their great men, Webster and Clay, never got to be President and the two Presidents they did elect, Harrison and Taylor, were both generals who died almost as soon as they got into office; it was like a curse. Buchanan became a Jacksonian for his own political survival, but Jackson made him nervous, the same way God did. It was a locker-room kind of thing, the way I picture it; to show his contempt Jackson sent him to Russia. That’s what you did with political friends you didn’t like, you made them Minister to Russia. You put them in the icebox. A lot of Pennsylvanians got to be Ambassador to Russia, because in national politics nobody ever knew quite what to do with Pennsylvania; it was enormous, it sat there in the middle of everything, the Keystone State supposedly, but it couldn’t seem to get an act together. Henry Adams says somewhere Pennsylvania was so busy being the ideal American state it never distinguished its interests from those of the whole Union. The reason,” I wound up, my hand having found its way down into her dear little underpants, silky, her skin silky, too, my hand the meat of a silk sandwich, “I can’t finish the damn Buchanan book is that I have too much to say, and yet nothing really new. Just the old facts, churned up again.”