Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

How can she sleep with her mind in such a dismal storm? She thinks of the blessèd surcease sealed into the little cloudy bottle, its nipped-in neck and impish cork of a hat. Sleep without it seems an impossible deed, like a cork staying under the water, like the sleep of a man to be hanged in the morning. Tomorrow morning and all its rattling chain of days dragging thereafter menace her mind with a kind of thunder. This pummelling in her head is spreading through her frame, a terrible pulsing, a sick fire vibrating in her veins. Her legs feel hot, and keep moving restlessly on their own, while the room’s growing cold assaults her face and sends her hands skittering back under the covers. Where are the servants? She can no longer hear the running brook of conversation from far downstairs. Sarah and the Hemphills — can they still be at the theatre? Is there no end of empty vain entertainment? She must be her own servant. Twenty-five drops: that much more Dr. Chapman had allowed. Triumphantly, like a traveller arriving at the end of her journey, Ann worries off the cork. But she is unable, on the high bedside stand, to find the doctor’s glass dropper, though the teaspoon is there, glinting, long in its handle, like the whip in her dream. With trembling, shivering hands she pours a small amount into the spoon’s shallow bowl. She tries to remember how full the spoon was at her first dose, and rather than administer too little she pours the laudanum, which has the viscidity of pear juice, until its glinting mound of liquid cohesion finds its limit at the spoon’s edge. She wills her hand not to shake. The thrashing in her head, a circular beating of crow’s wings of thought, continues. She greets again the taste of veiled bitterness, and sees the wry face she catches herself making, as if a mirror faces her from somewhere in the bedroom. She carefully replaces the spoon and lets her head sink back into the two pillows, stuffed with goosedown. Her body is hideous, she thinks, like a long sinuous animal with which she is engaged in a struggle, an octopus of veins dangling down from the deceptive dark jewels of the eyes, the high white forehead where God sets His kiss of divine likeness. We are Godlike in our brows, but the brows of cows are broader still. The Hindoos worship cows, she has read, and the British missionaries cannot make them stop, with all their Bibles.

Impatiently she waits for the languorous well-being, the quelling of the fire in her veins, the cutting of inner knots to arrive; it is slow. The problem of Buchanan refuses to subside, but keeps rising up like a painted figure on a spring, his head performing that little twisting motion to adjust his imperfect eye. She had him, he loved her, she loved him, she pushed him away. The world seems all very mechanical. You push a thing down, and something else pops up. Her thoughts become masculine, leading her down bypaths of reasoning like the strained shouted arguments of two lawyers arguing in court, on and on, to no purpose but increasing their fees. She must unite with her fiancé, is the decision, and she will begin tomorrow by setting into backwards motion her flight from Lancaster and the breach of her engagement. At the same time, she must have rest, or will be quite unable to perform, to organize her life on its new basis of bravery and loyalty to her husband-to-be. The back of her mouth has a film on it, a bubble of slime that tickles, and that her coughing does not loosen. Her skull feels thin as a blown egg. She lifts her head from its depression in the damp nest of down and gazes upon the homunculus of the bottle. He is her friend, her only attendant. His body of glass is cool, but the handle of the spoon is strangely warm. She is more proficient now in loosening the cork. She is generous with herself, as those who have loved her — her father, her mother, her suitors, her sisters — would want her to be. Miraculous powers of ease . When the dilatory Abigail at last enters the room, or Meg and Sally come back from the theatre babbling of gaslights, Ann does not want to be awakened. She wishes to be alone with the images her mind is making, intimate images like the flickering of a snake’s tongue in one of her sinuses. Dreams, it is sleep’s dreams we wish to reach, the deep free flowing of their images, on the far side of an oblivion we dread to cross and from which our nerves pull back like the horse whose strong stale Ann had scented.

Now the divine presence is manifesting itself; the giant hand is sensibly beneath her, even to the grain of its warm skin; everything is as it should be, bathed in a triumphant love that knows no interruption. The sun shines night and day, though our globe keeps turning its face into darkness. How marvellous, Ann reflects, that a fact so blazingly obvious — God’s tireless inexhaustible love — should be hidden from us in all but a few moments of our earthly lives. Thus, chinks in the walls of a cellar admit stark evidence of day. The expansion of the benigner feelings incident to opium , Thomas De Quincey is writing across the sea at about this time, is no febrile access, no fugitive paroxysm; it is a healthy restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation from pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just and good . Goodness and the lucid perception of goodness fill Ann like a magic liquid poured into a woman-shaped flask, and then like iron gone solid in its motionless mold of sand and clay.

[ Retrospect editors: feel free to delete or improve this passage, assuming you have the space to print it. It gave me much trouble. Had my book ever been completed and published, it would have given me more. The present tense forced itself upon me, as a way of drawing closer to Ann — the anti-historical tense of perpetual motion, of resurrection. The De Quincey quote may be a mistake, but one’s instinct with these paper dolls is to pin them to the bulletin board with tacks of contemporaneous quotation. Dr. Chapman may owe too much to Shakespeare’s prating apothecaries, but I decided to ride with it, gleaming philters and all. I would rather have done without dialogue entirely — it makes her sound too reasonable, too unhysterical — yet there had to have been voices around her in her crisis. Would Ann in fact have been alone long enough to take the laudanum? In Judge Kittera’s paragraph there is a curious progression of time: in the evening … After night … until midnight, when she died . How many witnesses attended, as her pulse gradually weakened ? People in history are more alone than we think — General Wolfe, for instance, died not in the midst of Benjamin West’s panorama but over by a little bush in a corner of the battlefield, attended by a mere two men. How sadly alone Marilyn Monroe was in her dazed last days, for all her celebrity and lovers in high places! I worried a lot about the room temperature. How cold might it have been, indoors in Philadelphia on December 8th? Not as cold as New Hampshire, but not Southern, either. Wood fires, at any rate, and not coal? The Franklin stove in widespread use at the time? But perhaps not in bedrooms, especially guest bedrooms? And anent the chamber pot, which had to have been there — would she squat down to it, like Molly Bloom, or would it have been more discreetly placed, in the elegant town house of One-Speech Hemphill, in a cabinet commode? In the DAR’s collection of period rooms in Washington, I have seen a chamber pot that moved in and out of a commode on little brass casters. As you can see, I preferred Ann simply to squat. The touch of cold on her skin brought her to life for me. I began to fall in love with her then. I felt the very closest to her in that glimpse of her blue-veined bare foot, arching to hop itself back into bed.