Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

[“Ode on the Passions”! I should supply, out of my own spent passions, the hysteria — Ann’s uniquely, in Dr. Chapman’s experience, fatal hysteria. Her father as a heavy on-rolling barrel of righteous molasses has already been evoked. To this add crackling clouds of claustrophobia that does not know itself as feminist. She is squeezed on all sides by patriarchal prohibitions and directives, and the oppressive broad envisioned faces of her mother (a complacent mixture of iron and dough, an obtuse Old face) and her haughty brother Edward, these family faces lowering upon her as if she is a baby in a crib and pressing the air out of her chest, plus the mental picture of Buchanan’s inscrutable askance face and prim white cravat and russet frock coat suggesting, as at the moment by the cemetery fence this past September (see this page), a thin painted cutout of tin leaning above her, a feelingless tilted wall she cannot get through, she can not: an appalled vision, on a transcendental plane where her consciousness intersects with ours of her, of herself, trapped here in Philadelphia away from the comforting matrix of ruddy dusty Lancaster, as discardable, as doomed to the cosmic forgetting, a minor historical figure, with but one little footnoted life to contribute to the avalanche of recorded events, one glimmering moment in the careless desperate cascade of Mankind’s enormous annals — no, this is too much my terror, my hysteria — my h(i)st(o)ria, the deconstructionists might say, if they, too, and their anti-life con(tra)ceptions were not now becoming at last passé and universally de(r)rided.

[Into this void where history leaves off I must thrust something . Perhaps a little Byron, whose verses Ann has sipped like a fatal nectar — let us say the final, swelling stanza of his “Epistle to Augusta,” written in 1816 (as gaslights were being installed in the New Theatre) but not published until 1830, a year and a decade too late for Ann:

[Or perhaps:]

Returning to the Hemphill house, and finding that Margaret had gone out on a domestic errand, Ann made her way upstairs to the bedroom allotted to her for her stay; but, unable to compose her mind, she sought out her younger sister, Sarah, in the room adjoining. She knocked, and a voice welcomed her from within. Entering the room, which overlooked the front of the house as Ann’s overlooked the back, gave her the momentary illusion of escaping the dreary tumult captive within her skull; the sight of the seventeen-year-old, sitting pertly on the windowseat with her knees drawn up, gazing down at the urban abundance of street traffic, of carriages and barrows, of gentlemen in tall silk hats and peddlers in wool caps pulled close to their heads with tied earflaps, recalled Ann to the fact there there was more, vastly more, to the world than her own romantic plight, with its constant inner thrumming of near-panic, as the ticking minutes sealed into permanency an insufferable, an impossible, an insulting loss.

Her sister’s fresh and guileless face, shining in the afterglow of some reverie, was like a crack of light at the bottom of the door of a closet in which she had been locked as punishment for a deed whose wickedness she could not understand.

“Dreaming of your prince, dear Sally?” The Ann who talked, who brightly teased and lent her animation to the little scenes of family life, was like a parallel self who carried on while the real Ann, the heartsick and affronted Ann, sank ever more drowningly into irrational despair. Her fever had retreated but left in its wake a dry cough and a stronger sense of no longer being quite herself.

“Studying what a great deal of curious people there are in the world!” her sister responded. “Perhaps the people in Lancaster are as curious, but one sees them every day.”

“Yes, whom did I meet right on Walnut Street but Judge Kittera? You remember him? — such a slow-speaking, pontifical Polonius. For the sake of our family connections, I endeavored to put a good face on the encounter.”

“Was that difficult?” Back in Lancaster, Sarah might not have asked so direct and pert a question, but here in strange environs, in the house of a sister enough older to be their mother, their status drew nearer to equality. Also, Ann in her dreary passion looked to Sarah for cheer, for rays from the land of the living, and the maturing child, sensing this, was accordingly flattered and emboldened.

“No,” Ann conceded. She became didactic, feeling Sarah to have been stimulated by the great city to a hunger for those social graces whose absence causes so keen an embarrassment to the untutored but whose acquisition, facilitating that human intercourse whose usual fruit is disappointment, comforts hardly at all. “When you put on a manner, the heart to a degree follows. That is why women, Sally, must always be gay and courteous, even among themselves. It was a grateful relief, in truth, to discourse with one who knew nothing of my disgrace, and who saw me as I once was, with all possibilities still before me.”

Sarah rose to the invitation to protest. “Surely there was nothing to disgrace you in your action of breaking the engagement with Mr. Buchanan. No one in Lancaster would dare to think so.”

Ann sat of weariness upon her sister’s bed. “But everyone thinks it disgraceful that I encouraged the suit of a man so patently unworthy, so uncaring, so vicious. The Jenkinses especially must call me a fool. And I concur in their verdict. Against all the good advice of my parents and brothers I married my heart to a phantom, a pretender, and now my heart cannot quick enough break the contract.” A satisfying heat enveloped her eyes, and tears needed blinking back.

“Ann, surely you are unfair to Mr. Buchanan. It is your prerogative, but you are unfair. His fault, if fault it was, was excessively scrupulous attention to professional duty; if he has another fault, he is too kind to all sides, being as courteous to his barber and bootblack as to his social equals.”

“Being kind all around is no kindness to me, if I languish neglected while he charms the town.” Thinking this utterance too stiff a lesson, for the soft clay before her, in proper female pridefulness, Ann explained, “It was not simply his dalliance with the elderly Miss Hubley; it was a thousand signs of veneered indifference, even as he professed eternal devotion to me. His last offense merely confirmed all the rest. As my father asserts, and as many gentlemen of substance privately agree, this man knows no devotion but to his own self-interest. His father notoriously rose by sharp practice and his father before him deserted his family back in County Donegal.”

“I have never had a lover,” Sarah said, blushing and gazing down again upon the traffic of Chestnut Street, her near-childish profile grave in the gray windowlight, “but I thought Mr. Buchanan as enamored of you as his cautious nature permitted. He is no pirate or poet; he lacks even our father’s fire; but there was a benevolence to him that would have worn well.”

“Why, you are pontifical as well, little Sally! All those sermons of Dr. Clarkson’s I thought you were dreaming through have gone to your brain, and to your tongue.” Sarah was pious, more tenderly than her parents’ conventional devotions would have demanded. She had been much affected by the recent demolition of the old stone St. James Church, with its rotting pews and royal mementos, and excited by the prospect of a new and more glorious edifice, to whose erection her father was the greatest contributor.