Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

The other’s animation increased, and his pink color sharpened. “My mind is fully made up; I will never be a candidate; and I have expressed this decision to my friends in such a way as to put it out of my power to change it. I admit, I would have been glad of the nomination for the Presidency in 1852, and would not have refused it in ’48 or ’44; but now it is too late, I am too old. My time has come for reflection and repose, and to improve my relation with my Maker, for we shall shortly, I devoutly trust, meet face to face.”

Hawthorne involuntarily cast down the famous lamps of his eyes at this flare of piety, and said so softly the other had to strain to hear, “I pray not shortly. Come what may, Mr. Buchanan, you are at this moment the only Democrat whom it would not be absurd to talk of for the office.”

And the old man’s blush deepened further. His lips parted and merely trembled, groping for an evasion that would yet do justice to the high vision of half his lifetime . The blush of excited ambition stained all his face, between the white linen of his old-fashioned stock and his crest of upstanding white hair. Visibly he calmed himself, pondering with his ungainly squint the one English object in the room, a barometer hanging on the wall, generally indicating one or another degree of disagreeable weather, and so seldom pointing to Fair, that I began to consider that portion of its circle as made superfluously . “Do you know any French, Mr. Hawthorne?”

“Un peu.” There had been readings of Montaigne, Rousseau, Racine, Voltaire under the eaves, in books Ebe brought back from the Salem Athenaeum, and then, the weeks he stayed with Horatio Bridge in Augusta, his nightly conversations with Bridge’s tutor and boarder Monsieur Schaeffer, a little blond, cross-eyed Alsatian who would return from a day of trying to drum French into young Maine blockheads with the cry “ Je hais les Yankees! ”

“There is a profound wisdom,” Buchanan told Hawthorne, “in a remark of La Rochefoucauld with which I met the other day — ‘ Les choses que nous désirons n’arrivent pas’—comprenez? ”

“Thus far.”

The accent that had served in the Court of St. Petersburg was carefully distinct, testing each word like a man advancing over thin ice. “—‘n’arrivent pas, ou, si elles arrivent, ce n’est, ni dans le temps, ni de la manière qui nous auraient fait le plus plaisir.’ Oui? Comprenez-vous? C’est une vérité dure, n’est-ce pas?”

“C’est dure, c’est triste, mais vrai. C’est la vie.”

“ La vie humaine depuis la Chute — depuis Adam and Eve, eh?” And the old fellow laughed, a high-pitched laugh wheezily withdrawn as soon as it was offered, mixed with a shriek from the tormented chair as if its runged and spindled wood were inhabited by the agonies of all the wriggling supplicants who had ever sat there in its hard embrace. Hawthorne felt on his neck a chill of the uncanny — the shriek seemed to have arisen not within the fusty official chamber but within his own haunted, reverberant skull.

When was it? My memory wants to assign our exchange to a raw gray day of earliest spring, with soot-besprinkled tatters of unmelted snow huddling beneath the Muellers’ bushes and against the northern side of their cellar bulkhead, but by the logic of sequential event it must have been fall — late fall, let’s say — after Election Day. The Ford era is drawing to a close; Ford has lost, albeit narrowly; the leaves so ruddily, rosily, goldenly translucent on the day of the President’s cocktail party have fallen. More than fallen, they are raked and bagged or mulched and already rotting back into the sweet, misty earth. The maples and beeches and few surviving elms of southern New Hampshire — a woodsy state that like Pennsylvania has in over two hundred years contributed but one son to the Presidency, a state too good, one might say, to make great men, who extract such a toll from the rest of us; a state where Mt. Washington, that bitter blowy dome of rock, has never been renamed Mt. Pierce — stood silvery-bare along the meandering Wayward River, which having once powered and cleansed a few mills to the north was now free to pour itself uselessly into the sea. Live Free or Die is our motto; low taxes, our boast. We are the Union’s fourth most industrialized state. Though not so gothic as Maine, we have our pockets of rural poverty and sad fits of sex-motivated murder. Our highways have an honest tackiness; no curried Vermont, its green hills plump with New York money, this. No two streets of Wayward were parallel, and half had no sidewalks. Genevieve’s house, you will not have forgotten [see this page], stood across the street from a great old elm and was an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim , symmetrical and modest yet rendered majestic for me by its enclosing of her live body and ardent, orderly spirit. Lately, I rarely got inside it. Brent came and went, visiting their two daughters, and Genevieve thought it would be too confusing for them if another man made equally free with the front door and back door. Also, the neighbors would notice my car, a conspicuously aging old Corvair convertible, if it were frequently parked where her front lawn blurred into the asphalt street, and who knows what neighborly evidence her husband’s lawyers might call upon in a pinch? In the Ford era, superstitious dread of lawyers and stockbrokers as potential sources of financial ruin had not been superseded by fear of failing banks and outlandish hospital bills, as in the present, Bush era.

The Muellers’ front lawn looked not merely raked but scrubbed, and their azalea bushes were each wrapped in burlap. Standards were being upheld. The great old elm wore a blue plastic box on its side, dropping some kind of palliative into its poisoned capillaries, and its dead branches blended with its living in the seasonal leaflessness. The day persists in feeling like spring in my mind, one of those unnumbered dull days that carry us to our deaths, spring the least satisfactory of our New England seasons, the air suffused with the gray hopelessness of nature sluggishly rousing itself and endeavoring yet again to replace one generation of weeds with another, while winter’s winds continue to blow in from the Atlantic.

Yet, once inside her house, having knocked and opened the front door in a single motion, I was heartened by the Perfect Wife’s arrangements, her ubiquitous clarifying touch. The glass table with its ice-green edges on its sturdy chrome X. The Aubusson rug with its distinctly Seventies harmonies of salmon and washed-out lime green. The abstract prints on the walls, trying spottily to mirror my head, on the surface of their slashing blacks and whites. The clean panes of the living-room windows. [12] I was reminded, possibly, of washing our windows in Hayes with my mother as a child — the running-down ammonia-tinted suds, the squeak of the slowly soggy-becoming cloth, the growing ache in the forearm, the sunny bite in the air, which in northern Vermont can be cool even in August. A child sees no difference between clean and dirty windows, so the ritual was for me, like so much adult behavior, a purely magical act, an ordeal invented to bring me to my mother’s side and under her fond supervision. Through Genevieve’s ideally transparent panes the outdoors seemed to have crept closer, like a beast about to pounce. The ricochet of earth-tones off the square edges, with rolled seams, of her sofa and easy chairs. The dining room, where eight rush-seated chairs of stained beech waited on tiptoe for the next dinner party, around a polished table in whose center a turquoise glass vase with spiralled ribbing held a dainty spray of brown-and-yellow asters, the year’s brittle last blooms. Everywhere, the glisten of cleanliness, the absence of clutter. Not a dog hair or dust mouse to be glimpsed; it was all as purely intentional as an architectural sketch, with human figures stylishly scribbled in to indicate the scale — ovals for heads, stick legs for men and triangular skirts for women, coded signs the lines of perspective pass right through.