Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“You mustn’t mock my faithfulness,” the girl carefully replied, with a flash of independent poise that Ann even in her distraction had to admire. “Did you love the church as I do, you might be more steady in your affections, and less hasty in your treatment of Mr. Buchanan.”

“Stop saying his name! I am steady, so steady my spirits are sunk beneath this break, though my head and all its advisers know it to be best.”

“Perhaps the heart knows better than the head.”

“Don’t torment me with that possibility — I am in torment enough!”

At this outbreak Sarah rose from the windowseat and embraced her sister, lightly, with an inflection almost motherly, mixed with a younger sister’s shyness. “The break can be repaired,” she urged. “The day after tomorrow, we return, and the whole matter may have acquired a different mood. Mr. Buchanan will be true; he can see that you acted to please Papa more than yourself. When Papa has cooled, he will relent, and give you back your happiness. He has no just reason to block your engagement; many a father in Lancaster would rejoice to see his daughter betrothed to such a worthy man.”

“Why hasn’t he followed me here, if he is so true?”

Sarah knew which man was meant, amid this forest of male pronouns. “ You have rejected him ,” she pointed out. “It has become a test of prides, yours against his. Yours is a woman’s pride, and it should yield.”

“Who taught you such doctrine? Why should a woman always be the one to yield?”

“Yielding is part of our natures, since our calling is not to fight wars but to nurture families. Mama often yields to Papa, and loses nothing by it. Indeed, she gains, in coin of his gratitude, and in spiritual capital.”

“Mr. Buchanan”—Ann pronounced the name firmly, as if trying its syllables on again — “is not Papa, nor am I Mama, though we are both ironmasters’ daughters.”

Her sister’s cheek dimpled. “Your iron is more finely wrought, so you have sought a more refined mate, and now you have spurned him for not being heavy enough.”

Ann’s fingertips kneaded her high rounded forehead, with its single stray ringlet. “Sally, all your admonitions are giving me a most terrible mal de tête . The fever I caught in the coach keeps returning in fits. Last night, I slept hardly at all, unable to stop my mind from churning. It is not so easy to undo things as you suggest. Papa still forgives you everything, as one does a child; me he will forgive nothing, nothing that embarrasses him in the public eye, as this engagement and its outcome has. Really, I must hide my head; I think I will let you and the Hemphills enjoy the theatricals tonight without my gloomy company.”

“Oh, Annie — it’s Mr. Jefferson, with his funny English accent! And Collins’ ‘Passions,’ set to music! ‘Exulting, trembling, raging, panting,’ ” she quoted, for comic effect.

Ann granted her a smile, but wanly. These heated waves of disquiet had commenced within her again, waves that seemed to signal a derangement, a seasickness of the soul. “I will go rest now, dear Sally. When Margaret returns, please tell her I am asleep, and pray that it be true.”

The same untrustworthy source that retailed with a unique anecdotal richness the chance meeting with Grace Hubley a few weeks before raises the possibility that Buchanan did pursue Ann. One account of the tragedy that seems to have the quality of authenticity claims that before her death Buchanan received a note from his fiancee to come to Philadelphia to see her .

And so the story runs that he prepared post-haste to make the journey. Ordering his horse and gig in readiness, Buchanan soon was on his way down the Philadelphia and Lancaster pike .

One by one the historic taverns that dotted the historic King’s highway was [ sic ] passed, and few were the stops made that eventful morning, which Buchanan believed was speeding him on his way to a reconciliation with Ann Coleman .

By dinner hour the “Half-Way House” at Downingtown was reached and the journey halted a brief period for the meal. Dinner was over and Buchanan stood slightly apart from the other patrons of the inn staring out into the streets where the feeble street lamps were beginning to glow .

Strange day, to pass from morning to dinner hour so quickly, with only the halfway point reached. Surely by dinner hour the lone rider had reached his destination, the Hemphill house in Philadelphia, and, after the appropriate ceremonies at the door, in which a lover’s urgency brushed aside an elder sister’s protective hesitancy and a brother-in-law’s guarded reservations, Buchanan found the form that was the object of his passions prostrate upon a couch, irresistibly attired in the filmy Empire style, with a full-length shawl to ward off a chill from the velvet-curtained window.

“I have come,” he said simply. He looked magnificent, in his voluminous travelling cloak, with his tall figure and his large fair head tilted slightly forward at an attentive angle, to correct the almost non-existent flaw in his vision.

“I wrote my imploring note,” she explained, in a faint yet distinct voice, “because my heart demanded justice for itself. I was wrong, wrong to be jealous of your entirely decorous call upon the Jenkinses. I have been wrong to let my parents’ and brothers’ sullen disfavor color my own emotional complexion. My affections have one rightful owner, James Buchanan, and he is you.”

“And I have been wrong,” Buchanan stated with thrilling warmth and timbre, as his impressive and graceful figure swooped to perch on a corner of the couch, covered in embossed wool moreen, where the curve of her muslin-veiled hip permitted some few inches of perching room, “to allow my pursuit of legal eminence to remove me from your side, and to dilute the constant attendance to which our announced attachment absolutely entitled you. If you were, dear angel, to favor me by renewing that attachment — the object of fervent prayers that have risen unceasingly from my breast since your harsh first note and your abrupt departure from Lancaster — I would abandon every ambition but that of serving your happiness.”

“My happiness resides,” Ann stated, lifting up her torso’s gentle weight on the prop of a pink and shapely elbow, “nowhere but in pleasing you, and in winning the right to your attendance when the press of your duties permits.”

They embraced, in an ardent compaction of cloth and hair and underlying flesh, of December cold borne in the folds of his costume and of bodily fever lingering in her delicate limbs, and repledged mutual fidelity. Henceforth he devoted himself to a discreet local practice — wills, bankruptcy, and land disputes — that rarely transported him beyond the rectilinear circuits of central Lancaster, and whose moderate remunerations were handsomely supplemented by portions of the Coleman fortune as it fell, under the melancholy necessities of death, to the heirs; genially Buchanan devoted himself to catering to the whims and passions of his increasingly plump and complacent wife, as their connubial blessings mounted to the number of seven — three boys and four girls, all well favored of feature and all miraculously spared, in the uncertain medical climate of the time, any fatal malady. The lacuna in local Federalist-party circles that Buchanan’s withdrawal from active politics occasioned was quickly repaired; Edward Coleman, Ann’s inimical brother, was significantly placated by his election to the national Congress in 1820 and a rapid advancement to the ranks of Senator and, crowningly, to the post of Grand Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant from Illinois, became the fifteenth President of the United States in the election of 1856. With his fabled gift of close-reasoned oratory and bold yet tactful manner of dealing man to man, a son of the West cherished by the South and esteemed by the North, he recouped the contentious term of the weak-willed Pierce; Douglas managed to stifle the influence of abolitionist and fire-eater alike while superintending the passing of slavery, via the bloodless and infallible operations of popular suffrage, from the territories and the border states, along with the gradual abatement of the vainly agitated fugitive-slave question. Slavery, isolated in an arc of southernmost states while the burgeoning industrial and commercial prosperity of the Midwestern and Middle Atlantic regions pulled the nation forward, was recognized as an anomaly bound to fade away. Not only was it inhumane, it was economically disadvantageous; wage labor was cheaper and more scientific. In November of 1860, Douglas, who had given up alcohol and fatty red meats for a purifying diet of seafood and undercooked vegetables, had little trouble defeating both the Deep South’s candidate, Senator Jefferson Davis, and the Republican aspirant, a little-known one-term Representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. By the time of Douglas’s Second Inaugural in 1861, both the United States and Mr. and Mrs. James Buchanan — forty years wed — had all but forgotten, as if dreamed in a delirium, these moments when, in the music of the passions,