Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

The Minister’s response to this word-picture was so gratifying, forcing the gentleman to squeeze the mirth from his abdomen with several lurches of his large and well-upholstered frame, that Hawthorne added, to modulate the conversation back into sobriety, “They must exist, but I have not happened to see any thin, ladylike old women, such as are so frequent among ourselves.”

His slender Ann would be one such, Buchanan thought, soberingly. A life with her at his side, as time worked its gradual way with their bodies, felt suddenly to have been within reach, and narrowly missed. He found himself, for the moment, unable to speak, to this handsome reserved Yankee with his deepset, heavy-browed eyes, the wonderful eyes , Elizabeth Peabody had once exclaimed, like mountain lakes seeming to reflect the heavens .

Hawthorne sensed the snag in the Minister’s social flow, and motionlessly waited. He was not one of those men, those lusty Southerners given easy initiations in slave shacks and river-town brothels, who found Buchanan’s failure to marry comic and odd. He knew from his own experience how easily a man might remain a bachelor, never gathering the energy for the leap, the days and years blending one into another, as they had in the Mannings’ house at 12 Herbert Street, he writing his dim delicate tales in his little room under the eaves, his mother distant and discordant in her antique widow’s weeds, his sister Ebe his only soulmate, little sister Louisa their only emissary to the people of the town, their shopper and gossip, his mother and Ebe and he venturing forth only at dusk for a walk along the wharves, skirting woodland and marshy pastures, strolling sometimes as far as Gallows Hill, where the witches had been hanged and flung into their graves, returning by way of proud streets lined with the redbrick mansions of Salem’s China merchants. But for the energy of another family — the intellectual busybody Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her two sisters — he might be immured there yet, in a kind of betranced obscure disgrace; Lizzie Peabody called him out into daylight, and little Sophia, the invalid youngest, seized him, no longer young, with the talons of love. That first visit, Sophia later told her husband, Lizzie had rushed upstairs, where her sister was sequestered with one of her migraines, and cried Oh Sophia, Mr. Hawthorne and his sisters have come, and you never saw anything so splendid — he is handsomer than Lord Byron! You must get up and dress and come down . Somehow certain of her prey even then, Sophia had laughed off the command: I think it would be rather ridiculous to get up. If he has come once he will come again . And this proved true. Like everyone else — the tale was folklore in political circles — Hawthorne knew that Buchanan’s life had early taken a stain: the lovers’ quarrel, the unexpected and unexplained death, the refused plea to attend the funeral, the grieving family’s curse, and the survivor’s curious escape into public life. No doubt it had been the making of Buchanan as a politician, just as those dozen closeted years had been his own making as an artist. In this dismal chamber FAME was won . Fortune warps us to fit its ends.

“In the same fashion, you never see a fat plowhorse in the United States. We work them too hard,” Buchanan responded, apropos of American women, their thinness. The old man had shaken off his reverie, and now was attentive, cocking his white-haired head, to another ornament of the Consul’s apartment, a colored, life-size lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest hideousness of aspect, occupying the place of honor above the mantel-piece and darkened, since his aborted term, by five years of oily smoke from the coal grate. “I hope, Mr. Hawthorne, your appointment calendar doesn’t run as tardy as your Presidential portraits; you are two Presidents behind.”

“We are a war or two behind as well,” Hawthorne said, indicating another wall adornment, some rude engravings of our naval victories in the War of 1812 .

“Old Zack,” Buchanan mused. “Some say he was poisoned, by an agent of the South, when he showed himself to be a Free-Soiler at heart. Had he lived, he would have vetoed the Compromise of 1850, with civil war the likely result.”

Hawthorne politically kept to himself his opinion, that the celebrated Compromise had been mere fiddle-faddle, a futile placation of the South’s irrepressible fears, as it saw slavery crowded into an increasingly minor fraction of a country tripled in size since 1800. All of Cuba, with the Mosquito Coast thrown in, could not right the balance.

“I have always supported,” Buchanan stated, “extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. All those territories below 36° 30′, as they apply for admittance, to vote for or against slavery as they please. None will vote for it, and that includes Kansas. What the South needs from the North at this juncture is not lectures and pamphlets urging the slaves to massacre the planter and his sleeping babes, but indulgence, as we would show a man ill beyond recovery — as we show defenseless minorities in our midst like the Mennonites and the Jews.” He may have heard in his own voice an un-needed note of lecture, for he became confidential and faintly apologetic again, shifting his weight forward in the rickety petitioners’ chair to declare, “But by a quirk of fate my views have rarely been put to the test of a heated public vote: I was not yet in the Congress when the Missouri Compromise was passed, I was Minister to Russia during the worst of the nullification struggle, I was out of office and tending my garden in Lancaster by 1850, and I have been lifted above the vicious Kansas-Nebraska debate by my mission here.”

“A charmed life,” Hawthorne murmured.

“I was early wounded in life’s lists,” Buchanan confided, as if assuming his tale to be known, “and have been a peacemaker ever since. At times I had to differ with Jackson and Polk, and two flintier heads the country hasn’t seen since the first John Adams, but I always avoided a break.”

“It may be, sir, that fate has reserved you for a great task not far ahead.”

Buchanan’s color rose slightly. “Impossible, my dear friend. I have put in for my recall next October. Firmly and gladly, I intend to retire forever from public life. I am sixty-three years old, and have many familial responsibilities, though none of my own making; I possess a pleasant country estate that hasn’t known my step for it will be upwards of three years, and, if I may dare say this to you, whose words have been graced by the divine breath, I have some writing I wish to do — a memoir of my times, especially the administration of Mr. Polk. Though never possessed of genius, I have been in my plodding fashion a man of the written word, who has preferred written communication to any other form. When Henry Clay wished to heap scorn on me, he would merely say, ‘He writes letters! ’ Well, I admit it — many the night I have fallen asleep at my desk, writing. When passions have evaporated, and what we strive to achieve has been undone by history, the words we write remain, and will plead for us.”

“For some blessed few,” Hawthorne amended. “For the rest, books find a grave as deep as any. But your retirement, sir — will the people permit it? If our friend the General, who has conducted his duties under a stifling weight of personal sorrow and domestic pall, fails of renomination in the cry over Kansas — ” He let the thought complete itself. Another thought crossed his mind: that he was meant to relay Buchanan’s protestations of final retirement to General Pierce; but he dismissed the notion. But it is a very vulgar idea, — this of seeing craft and subtlety, when there is a plain and honest aspect .