Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“We all want only your happiness, be it single or wedded.”

“And what of your happiness, this very evening? You mustn’t miss the theatre; the curtain can’t be more than an hour off. Do leave me, Sally.”

“Oh, we couldn’t dare go without you.”

“Please, do; I would very much prefer it. Margaret and Mr. Hemphill have been long planning this outing, and it would humiliate me to take back to Lancaster the tale of how my poor nerves prevented you from enjoying your first night at the theatre. Perhaps the Hemphills can find a swain among their acquaintances, to sit beside you in my seat. Oh, do go, Sally, so I can rest. I feel the cure of Paracelsus working in me. An undeserved sense of well-being suffuses my limbs, and a bliss as if a knot inside me has been cut. Go enjoy Mr. Jefferson, and all those passions. As your elder sister, I com mand you.”

“Then, if you command me, I will ask the Hemphills to prepare to go out,” Sarah agrees, her eyes sparkling as if already bathed in the light in the theatre lamps; yet, training herself to the patience of womanhood, she sits some minutes more, as Ann’s eyes close, and her breathing softly rasps on the deep-seated tides of self-forgetfulness.

Lethe-wards the drug takes Ann, but not safely through the night. She awakes with the candle burnt down by a finger’s length in its curvaceous glass shade, and the shield-back side chair with the brocaded seat, where both Sarah and Dr. Chapman had sat, empty. The exposed brocaded pattern centers a blue rose, of a strange midnight blue, as of a cabbage that frost has blackened. Every sensory impression wears a haloed intensity. From the front of the downstairs, at the other extreme of the house, comes a murmur scarcely more articulate than the incessant prattle of a brook, yet with the intermittences and eager resumptions of human speech. Her sister and brother-in-law have gone out to the theatre, presumably, with Sarah. Those of their children still at home must be, like Ann, in bed. So this conversation must be the servants making themselves at home in the master’s absence, or some guests to whom Ann was not introduced, or a conversation reverberating from an adjacent house on the street. The thought that Mr. Buchanan has come to plead his case and carry her off she suppresses, though her pulse races at the possibility, as too good to be true.

Heavy in every languid limb, her chemise damp from her unnatural sleep, Ann pushes herself from the warm bed and squats on the cold-lipped chamber pot, relieving her bladder in a stream whose pungence rises to her nostrils with the sharpness of horse stale. A sign of unhealth, so strong an odor. But perhaps it is the drugged enlargement of her senses that makes it strong. Her body in its febrility feels the chill of the room as an assault on her skin, against which her circulating blood cannot generate a defense. Involuntarily she shivers, so that her hands jump back and forth in the watery air. As her mind clears of its dreams — plausible dramas sinking rapidly into oblivion, leaving behind shreds that melt as her mind tries to grasp them: her father and mother present in the Jenkinses’ front parlor on South Duke Street, her father holding a teacup poised beneath his double chin, the saucer several buttons below, her mother on the sofa in her lace cap, Ann feeling her breast bursting with pent-up rage, the handle of a riding crop long and leathery in her hand, all discussing some issue (there were others present, Slaymakers and Jacobses) involving Mr. Buchanan, how a prankish bid of his at an auction had caused all the banks in Lancaster to fail, and a terrible vastation of financial panic to fall upon the entire town, while she was crying that it had not been his fault, he had simply misjudged, in the eagerness of his desire to be accepted by his peers and fellow Masons; and then they were outdoors, or rather she was outdoors alone, in a little close place of frozen ferns and ivy and mossy bricks, all rising around her like the walls of a well, to a spot of sky no bigger than the moon, a man’s cut-out shadow at the top, gazing silently down, and she tried to scream for help and the silence that emerged from her locked throat must have been what woke her so suddenly — as her mind clears, she sees the horror in her hopeless social humiliated situation. She remembers walking beside Buchanan so that they seemed a pretty couple limned in a fine print of Lancaster, formerly Hickory Town, and she cannot believe, yet must believe, that such a promenade will never occur again, and they will nevermore cut such a dual figure together. All sorts of plausible visions — herself as mistress of his house, a house finer than any of her vulgar, bullying father’s houses, with a more European accent to the furnishings, and volumes of French, Rousseau and Voltaire, in a glass-fronted bookcase, and willows on a wide lawn leading down a soft dusty road — have vanished, without a trace.

She must change. This damp chemise will be her death. Where are all the others? Philadelphia feels deserted. But two / Of an enormous city did survive, / And they were enemies . She remembers flannel nightgowns folded on a shelf in the cedar closet of this room. She pulls off her chemise and steps to the blue window, as naked in the fireless chamber as a Greek slave of marble, and looks down into the mossy garden; its forms are motionless, scribbled with shadows cast by moonlight, colorless. The room’s cold hugs her bare body; her teeth chatter and her slender arms twitch of their own. Why has she been abandoned? Shouldn’t some servant have lit a fire? Frost ferns have begun to sprout in the corners of the panes. She slips the flannel gown over her head, over her dark long hair, and chases herself back to bed, to its clammy sweated sheets of Irish linen, a dim shadow scrabbling at her bare feet. These toes, we have not seen them before, the pale ankles, straight and strait, fed by pale-blue veins. Her body is in its prime, a woman’s still firm as a girl’s, perfect in its anatomy though wracked in its nerves, which are the veins of her spirit.

Back in bed, shivering and giddy, she feels the languor of the anodyne come and go in her limbs, mingled with a growing depression and agitated sense of helplessness. Some impassable issue of pride, a pure image of herself now forever stained, has blocked her thoughts, bounced them back into her brain, the crackling ambit of her head, where split shadows begin to revolve again. What a peace it would make if she were to sleep forever! What a revenge upon the world that has cornered her in this narrow space: the crowds of contending vain wills that hem her in would as one grieve the sudden absence in their midst, an absence suddenly pure and irreproachable, beyond rebuke and change.

Repose in God’s hands , the good doctor had directed. Ann tries to imagine giant hands beneath her, gently cupped, the creases visible as if lit by a throbbing firefly. Yet if God’s hands were really there, would innocent children ever perish? Her sister Harriet, and her brother Thomas Bird at the age of two, and brothers Stephen and Robert dead as young men, all gone to their graves like small birds fallen stiff-winged in winter on gravel garden paths. All is as Lord Byron said, a mad disquietude . How did it go? — the wild birds shriek’d / And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, / And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes / Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d / And twined themselves among the multitude . Since Christ died crying out against God on the cross men have tried to believe in eternal light but ere this century began the French anarchs let the darkness in, and Adams and Washington and Tom Paine, too, in rebelling against a king ruling by divine right. Though they build a new St. James of money and stone to replace the old the darkness is here to stay, it is our element, our punishment for wanting to be free, like Adam and Eve at the bidding of the viper.