Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Was it a trick of vision, or was Norma’s pale blur of a face stuck in the corner of my eye, fixed in contemplation of me, seen afresh by my mother’s adoring light? The old lady had at last wound down, and lifted a forkful of birthday cake to her open mouth. With a self-conscious scrape in his throat Andrew pushed back to leave the table; his younger brother imitated the gesture. Daphne’s bright eyes dimmed and her rosy cheeks paled as she realized the storytelling was over, taking with it the warm illusion of a family intact through the generations. Norma’s face jumped alarmingly nearer the corner of my eye and in a whisper insisted, “Talk to Buzzy; he’s been getting terrible school reports.”

Then, how eerie it was, not to leave the house, with apologies spoken and unspoken, but to stay, as if I were my younger, monogamous self’s ghost. While my mother finished her cake and Norma lit a cigarette and poured herself another dab of white wine, I helped Daphne clear the dishes, and in the kitchen loudly admired a streaky watercolor of a horse she had painted, pinned to the refrigerator door with magnets that looked just like cookies — Oreos and, especially convincingly, chocolate chips. She had begun to take riding lessons at a stable in the next town, toward Seabrook. What would girls that age do without horses? Society’s engines of sublimation and education were still running in my absence, on reduced, one-parent fuel. Andrew called me outdoors to move my ’69 Corvair, my unsafe bachelor chariot, so he could extricate from the driveway what had become his and Norma’s ’72 Volvo. I went out without putting on a coat; I shivered and told him, “Don’t stay out late.”

“I won’t,” he said, as if I still had some authority over him. Our breaths made manly barks of vapor in the night air, there by the massed brittle-leaved rhododendrons and the slanting cellar bulkhead. The cellar was especially thick with guilt for me, as if all my derelict household duties had settled there, gathering dust and rust.

“How — ” My breath hung suspended. “How is everybody doing, do you think?”

He knew what I meant. “O.K.,” he said. “We’re adjusting.”

His phrase put a chill into me, through the thickness of my cotton shirt. Was I adjusting, too? When big fingers came and pulled off the grasshopper’s legs, did I merely shrug and smile now? Was I taking my revenge, at last, for all that premature tender-heartedness?

“Don’t worry about it, Dad,” Andrew told me. “Everything’s cool. What a man’s gotta do, he’s gotta do. At least you’re still around. Some of my friends’ dads have cleared right out.”

“It’s a sad world,” said I, feebly.

Andy, too, was underdressed for the cold, in the high-school baseball team’s little green windbreaker (he played second base for the JVs), and he beat his arms across his chest, so his voice came out jiggling. “It’s lonelier for Buzzy and Daphne; they can’t get out yet, they’re pretty much stuck with Mom after school. But they’ll grow up, they’ll get over it.”

“They will?” It came out as a question, not an affirmation. “How about your mother? Lonely for her, too?”

I had worked myself up into wanting all the hard answers. What if the Gobble-uns did get me?

The boy looked away. “She gets out now and then. Dad, I got to run.”

“She does? Where does she go? Who with?”

“Beats me. Some jerk or other. They’re all odious.”

This was a parting shot; we hung there, wondering if we should kiss, and decided against it. The Volvo door slammed. We had bought that station wagon the year of Nixon’s landslide because it somehow showed you were a liberal, against Vietnam and for abortion and conservation, but it had always seemed to me to give a bumpy ride and mediocre mileage. I didn’t miss it.

Back inside the house, I visited my mother where she had settled with a black cup of coffee — no decaf or watery herbal brew for her — in the library. She seemed small, huddled in the wing chair bought secondhand in Central Square in Cambridge, with its silvery-blue velvet worn white where my head and wrists had rubbed off all the nap. She was shrinking; her hands were packages of bones wrapped in mottled paper. All around her stood my old books, left over from college and graduate school, packed and unpacked and repeatedly arranged by me in orderly rows, Trevelyan and the Beards and Gibbon and Churchill, Europe Since Napoleon by Thomson and History of Japan by Sansom, The Medieval Mind by Taylor in two volumes and also in two The Growth of the American Republic by Morison and Commager — stately volumes bound in stamped cloth of ivy green or navy blue, word-palaces of whose contents I had retained little but the confidence that, if needs be, I could again tread the maze and find the chamber where the necessary information would be waiting like the gilded treasures encased in a seldom-visited, sleepily guarded museum room. Paperbacks like Cash’s The Mind of the South and Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 varied with their livelier spines the chronological logic of the rows. Already, especially where my Buchanan project had plucked some volumes and left gaps, anomalous books had drifted in — the paperback mysteries the Queen of Disorder would read in bed, and slick-jacketed novels by Anne Tyler and Barbara Pym and Lois Gould, and alien tutelary tomes such as What to Listen for in Music , by Aaron Copland, and A History of Western Music , by one Donald Jay Grout, presumably left over from her involvement with the affable Ben Wadleigh. I itched to edit and rearrange these shelves, but I was not ready to replace what I had taken, nor were the books left mine to touch.

I said to my mother, with false cheer, “How’re you holding up? Not every day a body turns eighty.”

“Thank the Lord. I hope He doesn’t afflict me with too many more birthdays.”

“Don’t say that, Mother. The children were enchanted tonight — we all were — by your liveliness, your wit, your gift of recall. Though you didn’t have to work so hard selling my virtues; they don’t need to be sold, they’d like to have me back.”

“Norma, too?”

“Sure. At least I assume so.” I had never doubted it — was there room to doubt?

“Well, then, what’s the problem?”

“ I’m the problem. I like it out there, out of this house. I’m moving my Buchanan book along at last. I’m getting my”—in the Ford era, though much was permitted, one didn’t say “shit” to one’s octogenarian mother — “act together.”

Perhaps if I had said “shit” it would have brought us to a new level of frankness and intimacy. But Vermont proprieties still ruled our relationship, and she was feeling the weight of her eighty years. My mother sighed and said, “That Buchanan. I never knew anybody had a good word to say for him until you took him up. He tried to ship the whole country south, Republican gospel had it when I was a girl.”

“A totally unfair charge,” I said. “He tried to hold the country together was his only sin. But we New Englanders finally got our way, Mom. We got our war.” I saw she wasn’t following this, and told her, “Go to bed whenever you’re ready. I have to go say good night to Buzzy.”

As I climbed the familiar stairs, with its pair of creaking landings, I could hear Norma singing to Daphne, sweetly, if not as sweetly as Genevieve to her two daughters. A mezzo versus a coloratura. A History of Western Music: that rankled. Possibly the Wadleighs had reconstituted their marriage on the then-fashionable “open” basis. Wendy had come calling on me once or twice in the year past, letting one thing lead to another, and I had flattered myself that she was cheating on Ben; if he knew of these visits, it became, repulsively, as if I were fucking him, too. Sex is always to some extent group sex. Odious , in Andrew’s sudden heartfelt word.