Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Forgive me, NNEAAH, and editors of Retrospect; I’ve not forgotten it was Ford you requested my impressions of, not Carter. But what did Ford do ? As I’ve said, I was preoccupied by personal affairs, and had the radio in my little apartment turned to WADM — all classical, with newsbreaks on the hour of only a minute or two. [17] Not, in fairness, that I was entirely oblivious to popular music. It was the Ford era that saw the rise of Pachelbel’s Canon in D on the charts; I know because the tune, with its low, slow, trickling theme of infinite forestallment, became something like our, my and Genevieve’s, romantic anthem, along with The Divine Miss M , a cassette I gave her on our affair’s first Christmas, for its terrific one-two punch of “Do You Want to Dance?” followed by Midler’s ding-dong belting-out of “Chapel of Love.” Going to get ma-a-arried … As far as I could tell, Ford was doing everything right — he got the Mayaguez back from the Cambodians, evacuated from Vietnam our embassy staff and hangers-on (literally: there were pictures of people clinging to the helicopter skids in the newsmagazines in my dentist’s office), went to Helsinki to meet Brezhnev and sign some peaceable accords, slowly won out over inflation and recession, restored confidence in the Presidency, and pardoned Nixon, which saved the nation a mess of recrimination and legal expense. As far as I know, he was perfect, which can be said of no other President since James Monroe. Further, he was the only President to preside with a name completely different from the one he was given at birth — Leslie King, Jr. “President King” would have been an awkward oxymoron.

There was a picturesque little layer of snow in Washington on television, so there must have been mounds of it in New Hampshire, and ice in the river, black and creaky, and bare twigs making a lace at the windows. Twigs. Our nest. Where was Norma? My still regnant Queen of Disorder? Not within the frame of this memory, somehow. She could have been painting in her alluringly odoriferous studio, or drifting through one of her do-it-yourself lectures on art appreciation over at the college, but my memory places her in the kitchen, tossing together a meal for us all as she sips her lucid green vermouth, the same tint as her eyes. But wait — the 20th of January was a Thursday, according to my perpetual calendar, so Buzzy and Daphne must have been at school, puzzling their way through the post-noon lessons, or gobbling up the beef-barley soup and American chop suey the school cafeteria provides on Thursdays. Perhaps we were all watching Carter’s stroll on the evening-news rerun, and Norma was in the kitchen, cooking our dinner. She wandered in to join us. She held against the bib of her apron a curved wooden sculpting tool, with a serrated edge, that she used as a stew stirrer. She looked over our shoulders and said, “After Watergate, I don’t see how the Republicans will ever elect another President.”

This may have been the only thing I ever heard her say that was not even somewhat true. Now memory jump-shifts us to the kitchen, just the two of us, amid the soft sizzle and bubble of a meal minutes from consumption. I possibly whispered, “How do you think they seem?”

“Who?” The hand, winter-chapped and rather red and broad compared to Genevieve’s, that was holding the gravy-stained modelling tool pushed a bothersome wiggle of hair back from her forehead, and to keep it in place — an ineffective trick of hers I had forgotten — Norma blew sharply upward, from a protruded lower lip.

“The chil dren, of course,” I said. “Now that I’m back. They don’t seem especially grateful.”

“Oh, Alf, they are , they’re thrilled. They just can’t express it all the time, every minute. But Daphne is very happy, and is sleeping much better. All the time you were gone, she had insomnia. She was worried you’d get robbed and murdered over there in that slum.”

“It wasn’t a slum. It was an old-fashioned blue-collar downtown. And Buzzy? Are his marks going up?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s too early to tell. They just got back from Christmas vacation.”

“And you? You, dear Norma?”

She sensed my need and came a step closer to me, there among the sizzling and bubbling. “Of course. Very happy,” she said, but with an undercurrent of diffidence, I thought. “You’ve made an honest woman of me again.” Meaning she had stopped sleeping with the men who had moved into the vacuum I had left. “Though I must say” (like Carter, she was a touch too honest) “it takes some readjustment after all that — what did the existentialists call it? — dreadful freedom.” When she and I and our generation are all dead, who will remember the existentialists? Who will break their eyeballs on Heidegger and Sartre and try to grasp the priority of existence over essence and the towering, eggplant-colored mystery of Dasein ? What generation will ever again frame these basic questions in non-electronic terms? “One does adjust, awful to admit,” Norma concluded, meaning, I took it, to sleeping around.

“Well,” I said, indignantly, “if you’d adjusted a little faster I wouldn’t have had to give up Genevieve.”

“Oh, so that’s my rap, is it?” Her hair against the light from the kitchen windows (it has become afternoon again) showed a rim of the palest apricot color; her green eyes, rounded in anger, held thin flecks of gold in their green. “You two did it to yourselves. I didn’t ask you to come back. Love us or leave us, you had your choice. Alf, you were so dithery she had to take measures to protect herself. Brent made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. If he’d have asked me to go to Yale with him, I might have said yes, too.”

“With that anti-intellectual intellectual shit? Now you’re kidding me. Now you’re trying to hurt my feelings.” To show this was a joke, I laughed.

Thus we patched it up, again and again, until the ground became tired, trod into dust, beneath further discussion but not, really, ever not there.

In truth I was disappointed that my family didn’t rejoice more loudly over my return. I could not quite fill the vacuum I had created when I left, as if I had grown smaller while away. And the days, the interminable dailiness of my being back, dulled the shining edge of my re-emergence on the domestic scene. Real life is in essence anti-climactic. Star of the West , for instance, whose dispatch to Sumter with reinforcements climaxed a long struggle within the Buchanan Administration, arrived at Charleston Harbor the day after Jacob Thompson resigned, and failed to return cannon fire from South Carolina batteries on Morris Island. The Star , unlike the warship Brooklyn , for which General Scott, against Buchanan’s better judgment, had substituted the Star , had no guns on board and could not fire back. Nor did gunfire come from the Brooklyn , which had followed, at exactly what distance history does not record; objects bigger than a battleship can slip through its fingers. Major Anderson, who had received no orders and heard only rumors of the Star ’s approach, did not answer with Fort Sumter’s batteries. The Star returned to New York; an informal truce between Governor Pickens and Major Anderson took effect; and the flashpoint in Charleston Harbor was left unignited until after Lincoln had taken office and for a full month had sustained Buchanan’s policy of not supplying Anderson until he asked for aid. On April 12, 1861, as we of the NNEAAH all know, Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard gave the order to fire, and fanatic old fire-eating Edmund Ruffin pulled the lanyard for the first cannon-shot, according to a debatable but indelible legend. Although Major Anderson after thirty-three hours of bombardment surrendered without losing a man, the great bloodbath was on. Buchanan was back in Wheatland, and stayed there, defended by his brother Masons from local threats of violence, and defending himself with his pen against journalistic assaults on his Presidency. Crawford [see this page] in his 1887 edition reproduces, with the photographic means of the time, a letter Buchanan wrote to a John Griffin in June of 1862, stating in his always legible hand, [18] James Buchanan, who served from 1857–1861, is said to have had the neatest handwriting of any President . This encomium from Facts and Fun About the Presidents , by George Sullivan, illustrated by George Roper (New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1987). The same valuable source informs us that Three American Presidents were left-handed: James Garfield, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford . Since 1987, the voters have added a fourth. It will not be long before the public mind will be disabused of the slanders against me & I have not the least apprehension of the award of posterity. I would be the happiest old man in the country were it not for the civil war; but I console myself with the conviction that no act or omission of mine has produced this terrible calamity . I love that: the happiest old man in the country were it not for the civil war . When Lee’s troops invaded Pennsylvania in 1863, Buchanan sent Harriet Lane to safety in Philadelphia but himself remained at Wheatland, awaiting what evil the day might bring. Unlike Black, he supported the necessity for war from the start; unlike Pierce, he never spoke ill of Lincoln. Upon Lincoln’s assassination, he wrote a friend, My intercourse with our deceased President, both on his visit to me after his arrival in Washington, and on the day of the first inauguration, convinced me that he was a man of kindly and benevolent heart and of plain, sincere and frank manners. I have never since changed my opinion of his character . Harriet Lane married Edgar E. Johnston, of Baltimore, on January 11, 1866. James Buchanan died, at Wheatland, on the morning of June 1, 1868, at the age of seventy-seven. His last words were reported by Miss Hetty [see this page] to be Oh Lord, God Almighty, as Thou wilt . An accommodator to the end.