Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

That foot had to have been there, that night — or did they all wear socks, or knitted footwarmers, or moccasins imitated from the redmen? On the matter of nightgowns, I discovered that the first historical mention of one is in connection with Anne Boleyn, who didn’t live to be old, either. [4] Even as I write, dear fellow New Hampshire historians, a young lady of our state, exactly Ann Coleman’s last age of twenty-three, one Pamela Smart, a high-school media counsellor, has been indicted and convicted of seducing (with the aid of a videotape of 9½ Weeks , described in Halliwell’s Film Guide as a “Crash course in hot sex for those who wish to major in such studies”) a fifteen-year-old student with the successful aim of getting him and his thuggish pals to murder her husband. She remained impassive during her trial, but in a subsequent hearing, as her late husband’s aggrieved father prolongedly hectored her from the witness stand, she jumped up and in her thrilling young voice exclaimed, “Your Honor, I can’t handle this.” We all saw it on television; one had to love her for it. Her utterance brings me as close as I am apt to get to the truth of Ann Coleman’s conjectured and disputed suicide: Your Honor, she couldn’t handle it. I mean, I can taste that foot — skinny shapely foot with its ankle, intricately functional in its tendons and capillaries and twenty-six bones (see Gray’s Anatomy: seven tarsal, five metatarsal, and three in each phalange, except for only two in the big toes, an odd modification that makes possible the à pointe position in classical ballet), the blind armies of cells all wanting to live and carry on in bonded league their functions for another fifty years. I love that blue-veined foot. Live, Ann! Rewrite history!!]

The melodramatic yet perversely vivid account quoted above [this page ff. and this page] goes on, with serene inaccuracy, having established Buchanan in a Downingtown inn, where the feeble street lamps were beginning to glow: It was not yet dark, and a funeral was passing, evidently for Lancaster. Buchanan looked at it idly. “Who is dead?” he asked. None of the idlers knew, but a man coming in from the street to refresh himself at the bar said that the procession had stopped further uptown, and that the undertaker had told him it was Ann Coleman, a Lancaster girl, who had died in Philadelphia while she was visiting friends .

When he heard it Buchanan groaned and grew white, but stood motionless staring out of the window into the gathering night that shut the dark procession in dusky gloom .

An especially confused memory from the Ford years — probably their second winter, to judge by the weather and a certain weariness that had settled over the situation — concerns a visit by my mother to my old mansard-roofed, shawl-bestrewn house in Wayward, where Norma and my children still held out, in my guilty mind’s eye an embattled and tattered band of defenders within a doomed fort. Somehow, the Queen of Disorder, in her style of ingenuous dishevelment, had set it up that my mother would spend some nights there but since she was my mother I owed it to all of them to be there, too. It all made sense, when she explained it to me, and made no sense when I explained it to Genevieve, who was horrified and indignant. Each woman’s reasoning seemed irresistible when I was within her gravitational field, and quickly evaporated when I free-floated — when I was, say, driving across the concrete bridge between Adams and Wayward, or pondering a discarded Oui in a Federal Street laundromat, amid the slosh of a hundred soiled underpants.

The inconvenient family occasion must have been, I can only think, my mother’s eightieth birthday. She had been born when Cleveland was President the second time. I had been born when she was all of forty-one and long resigned to a childless but not unfulfilling career as a small-town fourth-grade schoolteacher and faithful helpmeet to my father, who with his two relatively disreputable brothers owned and operated a feed-and-grain-and-hardware business in my tiny native town of Hayes, Vermont, north of Montpelier and south of Mount Elmore. She did the accounts and helped out behind the counter on Saturdays, though of course she couldn’t handle the sacks of horse feed. It was still half a horsedrawn world when I was born, and remained so until after 1945. In my little corner bedroom, with its scorched brown wallpaper and round black stovepipe (which, passing through on its way from the kitchen to the roof, provided my only heat), I would wake and fall asleep to the drowsy clipclop of the farmers’ wagons come down from the surrounding hills, where cows stood stiff-legged in rocky pastures steep enough to become ski slopes. A single gas station, with a variety of brands of gasoline offered in a rusty row of glass-headed pumps, served all the internal-combustion engines in town, and herds of sheep were sometimes driven up the main street, swamping wheeled traffic. People kept chickens and put up fruit preserves until the Fifties, when I went off south to Middlebury College. By then, New Yorkers buying up old farmhouses for summer retreats and ski chalets began to control the landscape. Still, the city folks needed hardware, too — power mowers and chain saws and bushwhackers instead of scythes and hay rakes. If hay sales fell off, the pet food picked up. My father did all right to the end, and died the same year as John Kennedy, suddenly, though not as suddenly. His heart had been giving him warnings and carried him off in the middle of a barn dance; he and my mother had been members of the Hayes and Calais Hoedown Association since they had been young marrieds. The last words he heard on earth were “Do-si-do your partner.” A beautiful marriage, and precocious, timorous I its single, unhoped-for fruit. Looking back on myself from the perspective of mid-life rebellion, I saw an elderly sort of child, dutiful but allergic to animals and ragweed and fond of huddling indoors next to my hot stovepipe. My mother retired from teaching a few years before my father dropped dead, and kept on at the feed store a few years more, before my uncles, deep into drink and private debt, decided to sell out to a skimobile dealer from Burlington. When they and their wives retired with their loot to Florida she went with them, disappointing me considerably: I had assumed she was as much a part of Hayes as the welded cannonballs beside the Civil War monument, and would never leave my father to sleep alone through the snowbound winters beneath the two-toned (rough and polished granite) marker with its single CLAYTON and its two first names, Theodore and Elvira, the latter expectantly blank in its terminal digits.

She had now been a widow for a dozen years. Up north, she had been as comfortably fat as an Eskimo, and at first Florida, where eating is the main physical recreation, had fattened her even further; she had grown paradoxically pale in the clammy, murmurous shelter of air-conditioned apartments. But now the anorexia of old age had whittled away some of the soft excess of those early retirement years, and her tint had become the glassy yellow-gray of the hardened tropical white; her Northern skin had acquired in Florida a lizardlike texture, deeply wrinkled nowhere but finely granulated all over.

If this was indeed her eightieth-birthday party, there must have been candles, and crêpe-paper hats and poppers, and shy little presents purchased on adolescent budgets and loosely wrapped by fumbling fingers. My mother’s mountain dryness and her schoolteacherish airs had repelled the children when they were younger — they had preferred my father’s false-front spirit of fun, the beady-eyed back-at-you boosterism of a small-town merchant. But with him gone over a decade, and me gone over a year, my three children had warmed to her, as a relic of a lost Norman Rockwell type of family. Her living so long seemed to acquire the selfless motive of sustaining their rôles as grandchildren, while an absent father and absent-minded mother had undermined their status as children.