Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

But no, the dream was true. Ann, retiring to her room at the back of the house, which overlooked a damp little enclosed garden still green with moss and ivy and sinister plants whose verdancy seemed to ape vegetation in wax, grew worse. Her spirits descended as the afternoon waned, as if draining away with the thin slant sunlight that as the hands of the clock crept between four and five winked its last, a lurid orange, in Philadelphia’s thousands of westward-gazing panes. Her younger sister’s gentle yet acute chastisements persisted in her mind, shifting form as she worried at them, remembered phrases coming loose and taking on an independent, wormy life. More than the imputation of selfishness she minded the implication that she had been stupid, throwing away her best chance at marriage because of some frivolous and malicious Lancaster gossip; darker than the shadow of laughable miscalculation loomed that of her dignity’s permanent defacement, a sense of being besmirched by forces that had obscurely enlisted her impetuous and prideful will. She was a Coleman, and the Colemans knew their place, and their place was high; by allowing Buchanan to touch her life with his own wistful, silvery, cautious, yet persistent and cunningly effective pursuit of her hand she had been sunk into a shame of chaos, of mad disquietude , as a poem she could not erase from her mind expressed it, with images of volcanos and cannibalism, mutual hideousness , a turbulent muddy reality just beneath the glitter and comfort of afternoon tea, a lump of death, a chaos of hard clay . She had had a presence, a rôle, and now even her sister, just yesterday a child, felt free to judge her, to pity her even, in this sickening paralysis that had come upon her. Only God, the God above and beyond the quaint God Whom Sarah and their parents worshipped in that ruin of an old colonial church, could lift her situation up from this muck of disgrace: yet when Ann’s mind and soliloquizing never-ceasing inner voice reached out to grasp this one all-powerful possible Redeemer her grip closed upon nothing, nothing but the silence of absence wrought by her old mocking spirit before Buchanan brought indecision and weakness into her life.

Alone in her room, she felt trapped in her own skull, a closed oval chamber maddeningly echoing with images she could not control or organize: her father’s wide face, with its long thin mouth like the lips of a turtle and his powdered hair drawn back into a pigtail; her mother’s like a wrinkled apple pinched heavy-lidded in the frilled netting of her lace bonnet; Buchanan’s strange askance pale visage bent above her like a tavern board swinging out of reach, touched by winds but not by her hands or the caress of her voice. His gentle consideration, his innocent sociability, his gathering prestige — all were now lost to her, and when she asked why, instead of receiving an answer she met herself — willful and proud and careless, as Sarah had said — out walking to deliver an unforgivable letter, in a landscape treeless, manless, lifeless . Her life was over, like a throw of the dice that makes us surrender them. Ann’s brain circled on its oval track and found no way out, no escape that would do her honor. At the window overlooking the dank green garden, an empty dark garden of frozen forms steeped in Philadelphia’s habitual miasma, the daylight in its glassy rectangles turned slowly opaque, sunset orange becoming a sluggish brown tint; from two stories below, travelling up from the ground-floor windows, kitchen sounds quickened and clucked. She must have dozed, for she was watching herself, from a distance so close she admired the rosy texture of her cheek, as a child at Colebrookdale, running barefoot on the moist lawn after fireflies. She caught one, and as it lay with bent black wing, never to fly again, the golden pulsing of its abdomen lit up the creases of her palm.

Her sisters, first Sarah, then Margaret, looked in at her. The clicks of the latch sounded like the blows of a forge; the waves of heat within her had intensified their flutter; she was in a sweat, between her breasts and under her arms; the muslin of her dress was soaked; there was a horizon of nausea, and below the waist she had a strange numbness, a feeling of floating off. Their concerned sisterly words, the tea a servant brought, the stout maid, called Abigail, who helped her change into a dry chemise, were all less real than the race within her head, where the same few thoughts went round and round and created a tightening fury at her parents and her scorned suitor for trapping her within their narrow expectations, their fixed and selfish conceptions of the right life. She could not breathe. A rigidity among her ribs forced pain out her back, between her shoulder blades. When Margaret looked in the second time, a mere bluish shadow in the room’s muddy light, Ann could only speak in brief utterances, between efforts of gathering breath, of scooping it up like water in a small flat spoon.

Margaret had grown broad with middle age and in a voice almost as positive as a man’s announced that she and Mr. Hemphill had decided to send for their doctor, Dr. Chapman.

The thought of his attendance pleased Ann. Since childhood she liked it, at home, when the doctor visited, with his black bag, and invaded her bedroom, where no other strange man was welcome. When Margaret had left the room, Ann closed her eyes and was again at Colebrookdale, skimming through an endless milky June evening with Edward and Thomas and Harriet. Harriet died. She was only eleven. The doctor’s visits did her no good. Death cannot be so bad, it happens to everyone. In her white dress, glimmering like the fireflies, her dead sister seems so free. Ann cannot believe Buchanan lets her suffer like this — that he condemns her to lie here locked into her angry decision, her frail skull held in a blacksmith’s vise.

A servant girl brings a candle in. The flame in its curved glass shade appears faint, a guttering hollow at the center of the circles Ann’s blurred vision spins. Perhaps she will go blind. People do. Just this afternoon, before meeting Judge Kittera, she had seen a blind man begging on Chestnut Street. The room’s windows have gone dark, above the now invisible garden, its frozen green forms lurking under a whitening moss of frost. One of the evil plants has a trick of curling its leaves as tight as little cigars in the cold. The God Who says so often No can say No to sight as well. He gave us the miracle of sight, somehow contained in the pierced jelly of the eyeball, and He can take it away. There are many blind, as there are many poor. In Philadelphia she has been shocked by the beggars; you see none in Lancaster, just men who go from farm to farm for odd work, and sleep in the barns, wild animals of a human sort, avoiding your eye when you look at them.

Dr. Chapman has come: a commotion at the front door, a murmur of talk in the hall, a company of footsteps on the stairs. His shadow moves into the light of the candle placed on the high bedside table, with its concentric rings as of water disturbed, and is suddenly vivid, taking up space in front of her eyes — a large, carefully moving man with ginger-red hair pulled straight back from his broad forehead and tied at the back with a dirty ivory-colored ribbon. He stands above her with a comforting bulk, his embroidered waistcoat and carelessly tied jabot glimmering between long unbuttoned lapels of a rusty-scarlet cloth. He rests the backs of his knuckles upon her forehead, takes her damp wrist in his cool thick fingers, and stares a long thoughtful while into the pierced jelly of her eyes. “Fretting has made you feverish,” he pronounces.