Джон Апдайк: Memories of the Ford Administration

“What, lover?” How polite she was. How anxious to do the right thing. What did she see in me? A non-husband, I supposed. There is a wonderful weight of grievances non-spouses are out from under.

“Sit on my face. Sit.” My voice sounded hoarse. I was thirsty, thirsty for forgetfulness, for a smaller world. I wanted to be negated by her vulva.

Wendy’s eager-to-please face, with its girlish plump cheeks and womanish crow’s feet and hopeful eyes and mussed blond flip, underwent a hesitation, a rapid rethinking, a touch of fright at being here with this gruff stranger. “Oh darling,” she stalled. “I’m all goopy down there.”

“Well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” I said, or should have said, or seem now as I write this to have said, debonairly. I wormed my body down toward her as, straddling my chest, her thrusting muff the no-color of pewter, she waddled on her knees upward on the swaying, complaining bed.

The bed, let me tell you, had been my first marital bed, an ascetically simple steel frame and box spring and foam mattress purchased at a warehouse store in Keene. Retired in favor of a stylish redwood box bought at Cambridge’s Furniture in Parts, it had been stored up on the third floor in the Wayward house; I had been allowed (Norma in the crunch proved quite possessive and not as disorderly as I would have liked in sorting out our common property) to take it when I moved, along with two old folding director’s chairs, a doughnut-shaped foam-rubber reading chair covered in crumbling Naugahyde, a gate-leg table I had inherited when my mother moved to Florida, a patchily threadbare Oriental rug from the same source, my door-top desk and supporting filing cabinets, a spotty gilt-framed mirror the Queen of Disorder had never liked the way she looked in, several of her unfinished paintings to remember her by, and a cardboard carton full of random plates and cups and cutlery and kitchen equipment, including a wonderfully useless old-fashioned conical potato-masher with its perforated conical “female” complement. The Perfect Wife pointed out to me that I was being used as a trashman. I could have trucked it all myself, in my gallant Corvair convertible — a by now rusting and shimmying relic of the Sixties, shaped like a bathtub with a rear-end engine — but for the bed and a green foldout sofa, as heavy with its hinged inner works as a piece of cast-iron machinery, that dated back to our Dartmouth days. Stallworth and Sons, who handle most of the college’s moving, sent their smallest truck for the little trip across the river, and old Gus Stallworth himself came along, with one of his sons. Gus must have been seventy, but he could still hold up his end of a metal-webbed Hide-a-Bed or a full four-drawer filing cabinet without taking the wet cigar butt from his mouth. A lifetime of lifting had compacted his inner organs and made him dense as an ingot. His sons were taller, with more air and still-fermenting malt in them, but the same leaden patience with inanimate things characterized all their professional movements, in and out of the collapsing home and up the ramp into the truck body with its pads and ropes and resonant emptiness. It was terrible, to watch them plod back and forth noncommittally, pulling my meager furnishings, my sticky Olivetti, my olive-drab typing table, my gooseneck lamp, my cartons of scrambled research notes, out of what was becoming, with each subtraction, Norma’s house. The Stallworths had moved us in but eight brief years ago this coming August. My wife and children couldn’t bear to watch my departure, and had left the premises. I was alone with the Stallworths, suppressing my desire to cry out something like “No, stop , it’s all a mistake, a crazy overreaching, I belong here , these things belong here, embedded in the mothering disorder, gathering dustballs and cat hair, blamelessly sunk in domestic torpor and psychosexual compromise!” Father and son plodded on, grunting and muttering, in clothes the color of cement, slaves to the erotic whims of the educated classes.

Norma let me take only the books connected with my work, including the little library on James Buchanan I had collected — the twelve volumes in dreary green, reprinted by Antiquarian Press, of The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence , as edited by John Bassett Moore; a darling little chunky copy, with embossed brown cover, water stains, and tissue-protected engraved portrait, of R. G. Horton’s campaign biography of 1857; the two maroon volumes, again a photocopy reprint, of Curtis’s biography of 1883, fetched forth by Harriet Lane Johnston’s fervent desire to see her uncle done justice; Philip Gerald Auchampaugh’s scattered, defensive James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession , a dove-gray paperback; Philip Shriver Klein’s biography President James Buchanan , unrivalled since 1962, in a Scotch-taped jacket of sprightly blue and white, decorated with the seal of the United States; also decorated with this seal, and a number of other patriotic designs, a precious copy, bound in faded black, of the 835-page report of the Covode Investigation, printed and widely distributed as anti-Buchanan propaganda in 1860, by the House of Representatives; pre — Civil War histories by Allan Nevins, Roy Franklin Nichols, Avery Craven, Bruce Catton, and Kenneth M. Stampp; biographies in aggressive modern jackets of such figures as Stephen Douglas, Buchanan’s bête noire , and John Slidell, his é minence grise; pamphlets and booklets concerning Wheatland and old Lancaster; bushels, in liquor boxes deprived of their dividers, of notes upon which indecipherability was growing like a species of moss; and in several boxes emptied of clean typing paper my often-commenced, ever-ramifying, and never-completed book. It was not exactly a biography (Klein had done that definitively, though I had often wished that he, with his unique accumulation of information, had elected to write the more extensive work his preface tells us he had originally intended) but a tracing of a design, a transaction, the curious long wrestle between God and Buchanan, who, burned early in life by a flare of violence, devoted his whole cunning and assiduous career thereafter to avoiding further heat, and yet was burned at the end, as the Union exploded under him. The gods are bigger than we are, was to be the moral. They kill us for their sport.

My book began with Buchanan’s pious and fearful upbringing in a log cabin, at a trading post, Stony Batter, in the mountainous middle of Pennsylvania, so lonely a spot that his mother, legend went, hung a bell about the child’s neck lest he wander too far into the forest and become lost. Down from that wooded fastness — a wild and gloomy gorge , Klein poetically puts it, hemmed in on all but the eastern side by towering hills and now far removed from any center of commercial activity — the family, enlarged by the arrival, after Jamie in 1791, of five girls, descended to civilization, to a farm in the little town, solidly Scotch Presbyterian, of Mercersburg. The future President’s father, also called James, was locally considered a hard man, who gave credit at the store he kept but never extended it. “ The more you know of mankind ,” he would say , Klein says, “ the more you will distrust them .” A big grim businessman, like Kafka’s father — a sheltering insensitive mountain of a father. The boy’s mother, née Elizabeth Speer, was, like many a mother in the biography of a successful man, sensitive, spiritual, fond of poetry. She could recite with ease , her son wrote in an autobiographical sketch, passages from Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, and Thomson . Klein writes, on unstated authority, Her ambition was to get to Heaven; her life a quiet acceptance of every event . She was young James’s first tutor; then he attended, at the age of six, the Old Stone Academy in Mercersburg. Mercersburg’s Presbyterian pastor, Dr. John King, of whom Buchanan was later to write he had never known any human being for whom [he] felt greater reverence , urged that the boy be sent, at the age of sixteen, to Dickinson College, in Carlisle, though James Buchanan, Sr., claimed to need his eldest’s help in the store and on the farm. Mother hoped that Jamie would enter the ministry but Father advocated preparation for the law.