Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Born the last day of July in 1802, Sarah was but seventeen in 1819, all rosy cheeks and babbling lips between her bonnet and the bow of her silken bonnet-strings. She was developing a pretty mouth, Ann observed, the upper lip bent above the lower with the soft protuberant fit of a snapdragon that opens when you pinch it. A shallow dimple came and went in Sarah’s cheek as her lips gushed chatter and visible vapor. She was the chubbier sister, her hair curlier, her mind frothier and more pliant; her cheeks red, her eyes bright as if with tears, she was excited to silliness by this adventure, a visit to their sister Margaret, who lived in a grand brick town house on Chestnut Street with her husband, Judge Joseph Hemphill, known across the jocular commonwealth as “Single-Speech Hemphill,” because his maiden speech in the Seventh U.S. Congress proved to be also his last. The young ladies from Lancaster were to shop, and visit the theatre, and, the weather and their dispositions permitting, promenade among the splendid Georgian buildings testifying to Philadelphia’s colonial prominence and the decade when it served as the nation’s capital. Gaslights, [3] Installed in Philadelphia’s New Theatre in 1816, their first commercial use in America. Their very first use had occurred ten years earlier, when David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, bravely utilized gas to light his home and the street directly in front. Across the water, London first publicly installed gas in 1807, and Paris adopted it for street lighting in 1818. and throngs in fancy attire, and shops stocked with European finery! Their father has concocted this pleasure-trip to distract Ann from her grief and grievance, Sarah realizes, but dimly, so dazed is she by the vision of Philadelphia, by the endlessly various and promising adult life opening up behind the immediate prospect. Not for her, this morning, the stone in Ann’s belly, the sick despair. Even as the cold of the dark December morning drives the older sister’s hands deeper into her muff of marten fur, a hollow unease within Ann shades toward nausea and faintness. Perhaps she is pregnant — but no, this is not history, it is idle rumor. Buchanan was a virgin — our only virgin President! Ann is rendering him such, demasculating him forever, at this moment, as she sets her foot in the carriage that is bearing her out of his life, and out of history.

Their valises are loaded into the coach. Perhaps it was still a hulking, springless stage wagon, with canvas top and open sides and crude bench seats; but I would rather hand my ladies up into a new-fangled so-called Concord coach, its egg-like shape inspired by the “tallyho” coaches depicted in British Regency prints, with high, wide-tired wheels to negotiate stumps and boulders left in the roadway. To cushion some of the shocks the “rocker-bottom” body was hung on “thorough-braces”—multi-ply leather straps that caused the coach body to nod and sway back and forth like the violent pitching of a vessel , one traveller recorded, with a strong wind ahead . Seasickness was inevitable, even for passengers less frail and morose than Ann Coleman, and even if by rare good fortune none of her fellow passengers, as the mileposts lumbered by, required the comfort of tobacco within the closed carriage, or smelled cheesily of the need of a bath, or belched the fumes of half-digested ale. The sixty-nine miles from Lancaster to Philadelphia constituted an ordeal, albeit in a Concord coach made prettily of white oak, upholstered in silk, and painted on its inside panels with mythological subjects, beguiling the jostling captives of the journey with the pink apparitions, amid blue billows and white columns, of Eros and Psyche, Venus and Mars, Artemis and Actaeon. Ann arrived in Philadelphia sicker than when she had mounted the carriage in Lancaster’s Centre Square. Her nose ran steadily; her temples ached; the back of her throat felt raw; her brow felt hot to her older sister’s hand. Ann was shivering, in an era when any chill might presage a disease that would run a fatal course, and she went immediately to bed.

And yet, four days afterwards, on the 8th of December, she was promenading on the streets of Philadelphia and encountered a friend of the Coleman family, Judge Thomas Kittera, who was to write in his diary the next day, At noon yesterday I met this young lady on the street, in the vigour of health, and but a few hours after [,] her friends were mourning her death. She had been engaged to be married, and some unpleasant misunderstanding occurring, the match was broken off. This circumstance was preying on her mind. In the afternoon she was laboring under a fit of hysterics; in the evening she was so little indisposed that her sister visited the theatre. After night she was attacked with strong hysterical convulsions, which induced the family to send for physicians, who thought this would soon go off, as it did; but her pulse gradually weakened until midnight, when she died. Dr. Chapman, who spoke with Dr. Physick, says it is the first instance he ever knew of hysteria producing death. To affectionate parents sixty miles off what dreadful intelligence — to a younger sister whose evening was spent in mirth and folly, what a lesson of wisdom does it teach. Beloved and admired by all who knew her, in the prime of life, with all the advantages of education, beauty and wealth, in a moment she has been cut off .

This is the document, this diary entry, which George Ticknor Curtis transcribed into his notes from a lost original, and omitted, with his tedious discretion, to quote in his published biography. Yet it is history, Judge Kittera’s paragraph. It survived the holocaust of documents that still rages — documents shredded, pulped, compacted, abandoned to the cleaning crew, bulldozed deep in green plastic bags, mercilessly churned in the incessant cosmic forgetting. Judge Kittera’s paragraph, preserved among Curtis’s notes at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, throws a watery light, as if one of those water bowls which were used in the era before ground glass as lenses, to magnify candlelight and vision both, has been interposed between the weak sun of that December noon and these silhouetted young female figures posing on the blue-and-brown cobbles of the nation’s most populous city. Were their arms full of new-bought items with which to dazzle the Lancaster provincials? Were they accompanied by servants, from the Hemphill household? — for that matter, would Judge Robert Coleman [how many judges there seem to be in this tale, a veritable choir of them!], the richest man in Lancaster, have sent his precious daughters off without an escort? — an obese old Lutheran duenna, say, with a pink wart at the corner of her upper lip, under black mustache-wisps, and dropsical ankles and the start of a goiter, and a sighing sort of philosophy that masks nihilism in pious resignation. Life is full of disappointments , she tells her wards wearily, and Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof , feeding the patient pabulum of the old to the appetitive young. If she was along on this trip, she left no trace on the record; household servants were as abundant and as beneath notice in that age as appliances are in this: there may come an energy-starved post-petroleum age that cannot imagine our constant sliding in and out of automobiles, our unthinking daily flicking of a dozen powerful switches. Yet from the record, the perishable record, can be recovered, amid so much eternal shadow, the exact entertainments that betranced Sarah on the fatal night: she saw the celebrated Joseph Jefferson, grandfather of a namesake to become more celebrated yet, and a Mr. and Mrs. Bartley performing in a play, Grecian Daughter; also Collins’ “Ode on the Passions,” and the comic opera Adopted Child . The historical record can also be made to yield the full name of the unlikely Dr. Physick mentioned above: Philip Syng Physick (1768–1837), in 1819 professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a famously deft and mercifully quick performer of hemorrhoidectomies, tonsillectomies, and lithotomies.