Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

What I had not quite counted on: the children left me, one by one, after I had returned to the nest.

Andy did Duke and found history as an area of concentration too fussily factual and English too theory-ridden and both too “political” in some sense that had come along since my own collegiate days. But he fell in love with French, of all things, and took two graduate years at the Sorbonne, finished his Ph.D. at Michigan State, and wound up teaching Racine, Simenon, and the conditional subjunctive to the blond and blue-eyed children of Texas oil money at a trim college called Trinity in San Antonio. He brought back a French wife from the Sorbonne years and now my grandchildren stare at me semi-trustfully (they only see me once or twice a year; Andy and Nathalie spend summers near her parents in Grenoble) with Genevieve’s dark precision, beneath decisive, no-nonsense eyebrows.

Buzzy flunked out of UNH — not easy to do — and has become a successful auto mechanic in Portsmouth, with a beer belly, a scrawny wife from Seabrook, and a twenty-five-foot power boat with which he thunderously churns the waters of the Piscataqua and Wayward rivers, cruises the Maine coast, and circumnavigates the Isles of Shoals. He loves that boat, with its endless engine troubles. Though they have been working at it (so to speak) for years, he and Ruth Ann cannot seem to conceive. Norma blames nuclear radiation, but the plant didn’t begin to operate until Ruth Ann was twenty, and living in Rye Beach. Furthermore, she had an abortion in high school, thanks to a broken condom and the captain of the track team. Buzzy is now thirty, and though he is the closest child to us geographically, he is the most remote culturally, and when we sit together, he and I, while our wives are cooking up something in the kitchen or having one of their fertility powwows, the silence, not quite comfortable but full of mutual forgiveness, returns from those nights when I used to visit his room, not knowing how to apologize for living a mile away, across the bridge, beyond the range of his telescope. We see few signs in us of my being his father and he my son, but our love is the stronger, and the more awkward, for that, like sexual attraction between strangers.

As to Daphne, I assume she is happy in her second marriage, though with people who live in New York it is difficult to tell: the high energy level they must maintain acts as a mask. Geoff, her husband, works on Wall Street, or near it, glued between a secretary pool and a computer screen, pondering how to milk still more lucre from the staggering old cow of American capitalism. I seem to be enough of a liberal to dislike these money men, who have turned Roosevelt’s willingness to take on debt in a national emergency into, a half-century later, a game, the debt game, a numbers racket. I try not to let my dislike show, but Norma says it does and that Daphne is very hurt, and they spend most of their holidays with his parents in Greenwich. Daphne has produced a daughter, a little milky miracle with a wisp of pale-apricot-colored hair on her broad blue scalp and hands with the repellent texture of wilted gardenias. I preferred her first husband, a shaggy ex-hippie from Maine, ten years her senior. He was running a secondhand bookstore, mostly student texts, in Middletown, Connecticut, where she had gone to Wesleyan, after two years of living at home with us and attending Wayward. He had a touching stammer, as if the words he wanted to say were suddenly too brutal, or revelatory, for utterance. The divorce came within a year, on the grounds of mental cruelty, and cost as much as their wedding. Norma says the trouble with Ralph was that he was too much like me — a typical closed-up Yankee. I don’t feel closed-up to myself — just to other people.

Wayward in the early Eighties went co-ed and became one more third-rate four-year college. I’ve thought of leaving but, frankly, nobody wants me, with no major publications to my credit. [ Retrospect eds.: You can change all that! Excuse this end-of-the-tale sentimental tone; I’ve been responding to your query so long I feel we’re old friends. Cut, trim, chasten my prose ad libitum , as suits your editorial requirements.] Since males were admitted (up to 43 percent of student body, at last fall’s enrollment), the tone of the college has changed — louder, coarser, more naïve, less serious, more like the world outside. The girls — women — have lost something: if nothing else, the chance to take on male rôles, like Jennifer Arthrop as Cinesias. And we males of the faculty have lost a part of our rôle as educators, the need and opportunity to be chivalrous, mounted as we were on the caparisoned stallions of our manhood above the unarmored mob of questing young females. Just the sound, in chapel, of the massed female voices on the hymns and responses, so open and silvery, vulnerable and strong, would drive me to near-tears and the thought that perhaps the old anthropologists were right, we are half-angels after all.

Norma and I are fairly content. College people acquire a certain grim yet jaunty expertise at aging, at growing grayer with each year’s fresh installment of ever-young, ever-ignorant students. We roll with the annual punch. Alone in this big house (which we couldn’t sell anyway, in the depressed present market), she and I at moments feel as shy with one another as honeymooners, without a honeymoon’s great icebreaker. The children gone, we haven’t replaced the cats as they’ve died off, so there is less dander and hair, and we’re able to afford a once-a-week cleaning woman now. When my mother died in 1978, she left the Florida condo free and clear and a surprising number of CDs and tax-free municipals, plus a lot of AT&T and John Deere my father had bought when the shares were a few dollars apiece. Once males were enrolled at Wayward, Norma’s approach to art appreciation was thought to be a bit too indirect and intuitive, and the President — herself a woman, you will remember — in the nicest possible way let her go. So my former Queen of Disorder has more time for housework. She has given up smoking and put on thirty pounds. We see a lot of the Wadleighs. Wendy was also let go, as hockey-and-dyslexia coach, when the boys flooded into Wayward. Norma spends whole afternoons over there, in that redwood house above the river, with all its pianos. Wendy is “into,” as my generation can’t stop saying, the body — she bicycles in spandex shorts and walks with dumbbells in her fists and at well over fifty has the waist of a nineteen-year-old. She drives all the way down to Boston twice a week to take a course in how to be a therapeutic masseuse, and gives Norma long backrubs that leave my wife languid and (she humorously complains) achy.

Where have these last fifteen years gone? What a quick idle thing a life is, in retrospect. How quickly we become history, while wanting always to be news. When you make the mental effort to lift yourself a little off the planet, and you see our particular species gobbling up all the land, so that soon there won’t be any other big animals left, just rats and ants and poisoned mussels, all that earth and oxygen and airspace to give Homo sapiens sapiens room to breed and eat and starve and build and war and watch TV and listen to the radio, you see that the human race is just one immense waste of energy. The lifeless surfaces of Mars and Io must sigh in relief.

The Ford years. What else can you say about them/him? Or, really, any of them? These men, our Presidents, do their confused best, toward the end of their lives usually, and there’s no proving that different decisions would have produced better results. They were constrained by invisible walls, assumptions and pressures that have melted into air, that were always air — Zeitgeist, Volksgeist . Time was on the North’s side, and as Trescot said in his account, Besides, like the Northern members of his Cabinet, he [JB] was a Northern man. If this revolution was checked he and they would claim credit for their firmness, if it succeeded they were to remain at the North and must be supported by Northern opinion . The half-degree between Lancaster and the Mason-Dixon Line was, in the end, crucial. Perhaps I would have succeeded if I had tried a book about Pierce, but his administration was relatively dull (not one Cabinet change in four years!) and his household gloomy and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Roy Nichols had already written creditable biographies. I was drawn to the unknown — the unpossessed — in scholarship as in love. I loved Buchanan because he was a virgin.