From: Alfred L. Clayton, A.B. ’58, Ph.D. ’62

To: Northern New England Association of American Historians, Putney, Vermont

Re: Requested Memories and Impressions of the Presidential Administration of Gerald R. Ford (1974–77), for Written Symposium on Same to Be Published in NNEAAH’s Triquarterly Journal, Retrospect

I REMEMBER I was sitting among my abandoned children watching television when Nixon resigned. My wife was out on a date, and had asked me to babysit. We had been separated since June. This was, of course, August. Nixon, with his bulgy face and his menacing, slipped-cog manner, seemed about to cry. The children and I had never seen a President resign before; nobody in the history of the United States had ever seen that.

Our impressions—well, who can tell what the impressions of children are? Andrew was fifteen, Buzzy just thirteen, Daphne a plump and vulnerable eleven. For them, who had been historically conscious ten years at the most, this resignation was not so epochal, perhaps. The late Sixties and early Seventies had produced so much in the way of bizarre headlines and queer television that they were probably less struck than I was. Spiro Agnew had himself resigned not many months before; Gerald Ford was thus our only non-elected President, unless you count Joe Tumulty in the wake of Wilson’s stroke or James G. Blaine during the summer when poor Garfield was being slowly slain by the medical science of 1881, while Chester Arthur (thought to be corrupt, though he was an excellent fisherman and could recite yards of Robert Burns with a perfect Scots accent) hid in New York City from the exalted office he would finally accede to. If my children were like me, they were relieved to have a national scandal distract us from the scandal that sat like a clammy great frog, smelling of the swamp of irrecoverable loss, in the bosom of our family: my defection, my absence from the daily routine after dominating all the years of their brief lives with my presence, my coming and going, my rising and setting, my comforting and disciplining; my driving them to school and summer camp, to the beach and the mountains, to Maine and Massachusetts; my spelling of their mother in her dishevelled duties from breakfast to bedtime, from diaper-changing to, lately, sitting nervously in the passenger’s seat while Andrew enjoyed his newly acquired driver’s permit. I was the lonely only child of an elderly Republican couple, and fatherhood had been a marvel to me, an astonishing amusement; my teaching schedule at Wayward Junior College, then an all-female junior college beside the once-beautiful Wayward River here in southernmost New Hampshire, permitted an almost constant paternity, or it might be more accurate to say a fraternity—a coming-and-going facetious chumminess more like an elder brother’s than like a progenitor’s. Lacking siblings, I had, with my wife’s offhand compliance, created them. Born in 1936, in northern Vermont, where the mountains begin to flatten out and slouch toward Canada, I was named by my staunch parents after that year’s affable but unsuccessful candidate against Roosevelt, and became a father at the mere age of twenty-two, my first year in graduate school. The obstetrician, a stout woman wearing a lime-green skullcap, emerged from the depths of Cambridge City Hospital, wiped her hands like a butcher on his bloody apron, and shook mine with the stern words, “You have a son.” Buzzy followed when I was twenty-five and still not a Ph.D., and dear Daphne—the smallest at birth, a mere seven pounds ten, and the brightest-eyed ever after—two years later still, in 1963, the autumn Kennedy was shot and the second fall term of my first instructorship, at verdant and frosty Dartmouth. Salad days! Days of blameless leafing out! I had all the equipment of manhood except a grown man’s attitude. My queen, my palely freckled and red-headed bride, still had her waist then, her lissome milky legs, and an indolent willingness to try anything. Lyndon Johnson’s supercharged Sixties were about to break upon us like a psychedelic thunderstorm. We reined in our fertility, and hunkered down for happiness.

[Retrospect editors: Don’t chop up my paragraphs into mechanical ten-line lengths. I am taking your symposium seriously, and some thoughts will run long as rivers in thaw, and others will snap off like icicles. Let me do the snapping, please.]

So I sat among my children less like a villain than like a fourth victim, another child of the gathering darkness (why did Nixon wait until the evening to quit? to avoid looking like a daytime soap opera?) and of the hurt and headless nation. This pose, of my being one more hapless inhabitant of our domestic desolation rather than the author of it, was in fact convenient for us all, freeing my children to like me still and to welcome my visits from my ascetic little bachelor pad across the river, in the quintessentially depressed industrial city of Adams—a one-mill hamlet renamed in 1797, honoring the harassed second President, a local boy of sorts—and to enjoy as best they could their visits to me and the meager entertainments Adams afforded: a bowling alley, a lakeside beach of imported sand, a Chinese restaurant where Daphne once got a fortune cookie without a fortune slip in it and burst into tears, thinking it meant she was about to die, and one surviving movie house in the depleted downtown, of the marqueed, velvety, rococo-lobbied type that in small cities everywhere was fast disappearing, passing to boarded-up, graffitiferous extinction through a lurid twilight as a triple-X triple-feature sex cinema. (Sex still had a good name during the Ford Administration. Betty Ford had been a footloose dancer for Martha Graham and announced at the outset of the administration that she and Gerald intended to keep sleeping in the same bed. Their children came and went in the headlines with lives that bore little more looking into than the lives of most young adults. In those years one-night stands, bathhouses, sex shops abounded. Venereal disease was an easily erased mistake. Syphilis, the clap—no problem. Crabs, the rather cute plague of Sixties crash pads, had moved on as urban rents went up, and herpes’ welts and blisters had yet to inflict their intimate sting. The paradise of the flesh was at hand. What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower and racy under Kennedy had become, under Ford, almost compulsory. Except that people were going crazy, as they had in ancient Rome, either from too much sex or from lead in the plumbing. Ford, a former hunk, got to women in a way Nixon hadn’t. Twice, I seem to remember, within a few weeks’ time, a female went after him with a gun; Squeaky Fromme was too spaced to pull the trigger, and Sara Jane Moore missed at close range. [Retrospect eds.: Check facts? Whole parenthesis might come out, if there are space pressures. But you asked for impressions.] I had no television in my exiguous fourth-floor digs—a long room where I had rigged a desk of two filing cabinets and a hollow door, and a square room almost completely filled by a double bed, each room with one window overlooking a narrow side street in the shadow of a deserted textile mill—and was dependent for news upon the hourly summaries and rare special bulletins on the area’s only classical-musical station, WADM, plus headlines glimpsed on other people’s newspapers, and out-of-date newsmagazines in the waiting rooms of dentists, lawyers, opticians, etc., consulted during the twenty-nine months of the Ford Administration.) In that dear dying movie house, whose name was Rialto, with its razored plush seats and flaking gilt cherubs, my three fuzzy-headed cherubs and I saw The Godfather: Part II and Jaws. Both terrified me and Daphne, though the boys pooh-poohed us. By the time of Jaws Andrew was big enough, with a driver’s license, to be humiliated by going to the movies with his father. And though Jaws packed them in, up into the raised loge seats and the precipitous balcony, the Rialto’s fate was sealed; within months it went X-rated.

Snap.

As I sat there watching Nixon resign I had the illusion that the house we were in, a big Victorian with a mansard roof, a finished third floor, and a view from the upper windows of the yellow-brick smokestacks of the college heating plant, was still mine; its books, a collection beginning with our college textbooks, felt like mine, and its furniture, a child-abused hodgepodge of airfoam-slab sofas and butterfly chairs with canvas slings and wobbly Danish end tables and chrome-legged low easy chairs draped on their threadbare arms with paisley bandanas and tasselled shawls, felt still like mine, along with the cat hairs on the sofa and the dustballs under it, the almost-empty liquor bottles in the pantry and the tattered Japanese-paper balls that did here and there for lampshades, all of it in our wedded style, my wife’s and mine, a unisex style whose foundation was lightly laid in late-Fifties academia and then ornamented and weathered in the heats and sweats of Sixties fringe-radicalism. I had left my wife but not our marriage, its texture and mind-set, and it was far from dawned upon me that this house, this hairy fringy nest she and I had together accumulated one twig at a time, not to mention these three hatchlings so trustfully and helplessly and silently gathered here beside me in the flickering light of one man’s exploding ambition and dream (he was resigning, Nixon explained, for the good of the nation and not out of any personal inclination: “I have never been a quitter,” he shakily said, scowling. “To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body”)—that this house was gone, cast off, as lost to my life as my childhood home in the hamlet of Hayes, my college rooms in Middlebury, our graduate-student quarters in Cambridge in a brick apartment building down Kirkland Street from the then-Germanic Museum, or the little apple-green Cape-and-a-half, our first bona-fide house, with a yard, a basement, and a letter slot, that the university rented to us in Hanover, right off Route 120, a stone’s throw from the Orozco murals. In this living room I was, in truth, on a par with a televised image—a temporary visitant, an epiphenomenon.

[Retrospect: Sorry about all the decor. But decor is part of life, woven inextricably into our memories and impressions. When I first received NNEAAH’s kind and flattering request to contribute to its written symposium, I ventured to the library and flipped through a few reference books, the kind of instant history that comes from compiling old headlines, and was struck by how much news is death, pure and simple. In these transition months of 1974, who wasn’t dying? Chet Huntley and Georges Pompidou, Juan Perón and Earl Warren, Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother, Walter Lippmann and Jack Benny, with Generalissimo Franco seriously ailing and Evel Knievel far from well. Evel Knievel failed to ride a rocket across a canyon in Idaho; Pompidou was reported as saying, “Every politician (Tous les politiciens) has his problems (ont leurs problèmes). Nixon has Watergate (Nixon a Watergate), and I am going to die (et je vais mourir).” Surely, Retrospect editors, you don’t want this sort of thing, which any sophomore with access to a microfilm reader that hasn’t broken its fan belt can tote up for you. You want living memories and impressions: the untampered-with testimony of those of us fortunate enough to have survived, unlike those named above, the Ford Administration. I was greatly moved, the other night, by a twitchy black-and-white film from 1913 of the survivors of Pickett’s charge, meeting as old men on the Gettysburg battlefield fifty years later. The Southerners pretended to charge again, hobbling forward on canes, and the Northerners scrambled out from behind the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge and embraced them. Tears, laughter. Young killers into dear old men. Enough time slides by, we’re all history, right? And if you want to feel really sick, NNEAAH, think of the time that will keep sliding by after you’re dead. After we’re dead, I should say. If I’ve misjudged my assignment, please trim this response to suit your editorial requirements.]

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. And then as in an optical illusion the eye makes what it can of the spots. The Queen of Disorder came back around midnight, let’s say. It was August, a muggy month in our river valley, but summer was already pulling in at the edges, with all the lawns parched and the cicadas in full cry. She must have been wearing a little pale-flowered cotton dress on her generous but still lithe figure, with shoelace shoulder straps, and it must have crossed my mind that she had taken this dress off that night and then put it back on to come home. Home—she had suffered some losses but kept that word, that reality. “How were the kids?” she would have asked.

“Good. Sweet. We watched Nixon and tried to play Mille Bornes until Daphne got cranky.”

Daphne’s mother shrugged off a little loose-knit white sweater hung around her shoulders like a cape. The freckles on her bare shoulders were clustered thick enough to simulate a tan. Glancing at a corner of the ceiling as if a cobweb there had suddenly taken her interest, she asked, a bit timidly, “They talk?”

“No,” I said.

“Even after Daphne went to bed? The boys?”

“No, Norma. What is there to say? I let them watch Hawaii Five-O with me and then tucked them in. I did prayers with Daphne but the boys told me you’ve quit the prayers.”

“Have I?” she asked, turning her head to look at another cobweb. Her hair was the color of a dried—the health-food stores say sulphured—apricot held up to the light, and kinky, so that even when ironed hair had been the thing, along with sandalwood love beads and dirty bare feet, Norma had had a woolly look. I pictured her hair spread out on a pillow like spilled pillow stuffing and her date’s meaty hands digging into its abundance. An abundance below, too, gingery, tingly, and in her armpits in those barefoot years when it was fashionable not to shave. Her shins then had become scratchy like a man’s chin. I had grown a beard that came in thin and goatish. We used to go skinnydipping with friends at a lake up above Hanover and, stoned enough to feel the walls of my being transparent like those of a jellyfish, and to imagine we were all one big loving family, I had turned to a woman on the sand beside me and must have somehow begged for a compliment on Norma’s generous figure, for I remember this other woman’s dry sarcastic voice cutting through my shimmering jellyfish walls: I’m so happy for you, Alf. “It just seemed hypocritical,” my Queen of Disorder said, “with us the way we are. Nothing sacred, and all.”

“How was Ben?” Benjamin Wadleigh had been her date. Chairman of the music department, head of the Choral Society, a tall topheavy man with big puffy white hands that plunged into a piano’s keys as if into mud, squeezing, kneading. He was recently separated from his tiny wife, Wendy, and a long-time admirer of my bushy, milky-skinned, big-breasted mate. “Where do you two do it, at eleven at night?”

“We use the woods,” she said, in such a way I couldn’t tell if she were joking. “Or the back of his station wagon. Necessity is the mother, et cetera. Want a drink?” She was drifting toward the pantry with all its nearly empty bottles. The two cats, hearing her voice, had come out of where they had been hiding during my stay, and rubbed around her legs in a purring braid, a furry double helix, of affection. I was allergic to cat dander and tended to kick at the creatures when they sidled close. Their purrs made me aware again of the throbbing background of cicada song—a sound like no other, which the brain in radio fashion can tune in and out.

“No way,” I said, rising from my Danish easy chair. It had a cracked teak arm I had always been regluing when I lived here. I tried to brush tenacious cat hairs from the seat of my pants. I had new loyalties: my dark-eyed mistress watched my connubial visits like a hawk, and expected minute-by-minute accountings. “I’m trying to lead an orderly life,” I explained, not unapologetically.

“Is that what it is?” Two inches of silvery pale-green vermouth, near enough the color of her eyes, had appeared in her hand, in a smeared orange-juice glass she had fished unwashed from the dishwasher. She bent her face and voice toward me and said, “Alf, you must talk to them, they’re confused and hurt and always after me with questions—‘What didn’t he like about us?’ ‘Can she really be that great?’ ‘Won’t he ever get it out of his system and come back?’ ”

I resented her trying to mar with female talkiness the manly silence, the smooth scar tissue, the boys and I had grown over my defection.

“The boys, especially,” she went on. “Daphne’s the healthiest, because she’s so open and still childlike. But the boys—I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. They’re very considerate of me, tiptoeing around as if I’m sick, not blaming me for doing this stupid thing of losing you, trying to do all the jobs around the place that you used to do …”

She would let her sentences trail off, inviting her conversational partner to be creative. Her canvases, when she found time to paint, were always left unfinished, like Cézanne’s. A blank corner or two left for Miss Manners. Her own face, too, was generally left blank, without even lipstick as makeup. When she attempted mascara, she looked like a little girl gotten up as a witch. In the silly Sixties, she went in for pigtails, and to make a special effect, for a party, she would do one half of her hair in a braid and let the other half bush out. Her hair—have I made this clear?—was not exactly curly, it was wiggly, and in tint not exactly dried-apricot orange but paler, so that her pubic hair did not so much contrast with her flesh as seem to render it in a slightly different shade. Now, with Ben’s lively juices still swimming in her, she was bringing home to me—filling in with color the dim black-and-white hollow haunted feeling with which I had watched Nixon on television—the feeling of shame, shame as a bottomless inner deepening, a palpable atmosphere slowing and thickening one’s limbs as the gravity on Saturn would, shame my new planet, since my defection, leaving my house hollow and (that Anglo-Saxon word of desolate import) blafordleas, lordless. But, as with many of her actions, Norma disdained completion. Having brought me to the point where I wanted to crawl up the stairs and awaken my children and beg their forgiveness, she glanced down at the cracked and oft-glued arm of the chair I had vacated and idly asked, “What were you reading?”

I had left a book splayed on the arm. It was Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South, edited by Eric L. McKitrick. “An anthology of pro-slavery views before the Civil War,” I explained. “Some of the arguments are quite ingenious, and compassionate. The slaveholders weren’t all bad.”

“Slaveholders never think so,” she said. I felt in this a feminist edge, newly sharpened by my bad and typically male behavior. She softened it with, “Is this still about Buchanan?”

For the last ten years of our life together I had been trying in my spare time and vacations to write some kind of biographical—historical/psychological, lyrical/elegiacal, the sort of thing Jonathan Spence does with the Chinese—opus on James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States. New Hampshire’s own, Franklin Pierce, had been the fourteenth, but his Ambassador to England, and then his successor in the Presidential hot seat, had caught the corner of my eye. The only bachelor President, the most elderly up to Eisenhower, the last President to wear a stock, and the last of the doughface accommodators, before the North-South war swept accommodation away. A big fellow, six feet tall, with mismatching eyes, a tilt to his head, and a stiffish courtliness that won my heart. He projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence, where Pierce had the narrowing New England mind, gloomy as an old flint arrowhead. Buchanan’s mind, people complained he couldn’t make it up, and I liked that. There is a civilized heroism to indecision—“the best lack all conviction,” etc. He and his niece Harriet Lane ran the spiffiest White House since Dolley Madison’s, and I liked that, too. I felt lighter when I thought about him. The old gent was so gallant, there in the trembling shade of the Civil War. You know how it is, fellow historians—you look for a little patch not trod too hard by other footsteps, where maybe you can grow a few sweetpeas. My efforts, never-ending as research led to more research, and even more research led back to forgetfulness and definitive awareness that historical truth is forever elusive, had begun at about the time we had decided, after Daphne’s wide-eyed arrival on earth, that for their sake and ours we had had enough children. This was a wise decision, but also a pity, for Norma and I had a natural flair for producing children; our sperm and ova clicked even while our libidos slid right past one another, and the busywork of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and training toddlers gave us the shared sensation of being an ongoing concern.

“Still,” I had to admit. My attempt at extending our family to include a bouncing book had proved painfully slow and thus far futile. Perhaps Buchanan was the cause of our breakup: I hoped that a change of life might shake free the dilatory, feebly kicking old fetus I had been carrying within me for a decade.

“Maybe you should give up and try somebody else,” the Queen of Disorder wickedly, if diffidently, suggested. “He’s too dreary.”

“He’s not dreary,” I monogamously insisted. “I love him.”

Somehow—I knew it would—this stung her; her cheeks showed some pink in the room’s sickly, tasselled lamplight. Her blush made her eyes seem greener. In her hurt she sipped the glinting vermouth. I wondered if she had been kidding about her and Ben. She exuded that faint hayey smell women have in summer.

“You missed Nixon’s resigning,” I told her.

“We heard some of it on the car radio.”

On the way to the woods, or wherever. Ben was living in one of the Wayward girls’ dormitories, where guests were forbidden after ten. “We all watched it together,” I said, conjuring up a domestic unity that hadn’t quite existed. “It was sad.”

“Why?” Norma was a down-the-line liberal. “The only sad thing is it puts that idiot Ford in office.”

“Ben says he’s an idiot?”

“I say.”

“You know,” I said, “darling, you ought to be careful in the woods. There’s poison ivy, not to mention snakes.”

She pushed back from her forehead a piece of her untidy wiggly hair and blew upward, as if that would keep it in place. She glanced at the corners of the ceiling again but with a different, less searching quality now; I knew her well enough to see her mind deciding that this homecoming had nothing more in it for her. She was tired and ready for bed. She tossed off the last of the vermouth and said, “You be careful, too. There’s lots of mancatchers out there.”

Nothing she said was ever not somewhat true. One of my memories of the Ford years—indeed, the one that has next priority in this accounting, elbowing its way to the head of the line—is of a wet cunt nipping, as it were, at the small of my back as a naked woman settled herself astride my waist to give me an allegedly relaxing shoulder rub. The rub was some kind of reward, a therapeutic interlude in our two-person orgy, yet I have never really liked massages, not really believing in the chiropractic theory behind them, and the sensation, as if of a large French kiss, down toward where my ass divided, made me internally shudder. The fault is mine, my squeamish generation’s. Men born later than the Truman Administration and subjected since early adolescence to open beaver shots in national magazines and to childbirth documentaries that spare the TV viewer nary a contraction will scarcely credit our innocence, inherited from our fathers and their fathers before them, concerning female genitalia. The two sets of lips, major and minor. The frilly look of it, climaxing in a little puckering wave of flesh around the clitoris. Its livid, oysterish, scarcely endurable complexity, which all but gynecologists used to spare themselves, along with the visual ordeal of parturition. Close your eyes and take the plunge, was the philosophy in olden days, and vacate the site as quickly as possible. Nine months later, responsible fatherhood would begin. You have a son. Those were dark ages, when everything was done in the dark, like spermatozoa blindly snaking up the Fallopian tube to the egg. No more: the cunt is no mere fur-rimmed absence in binary opposition to the phallic presence, it is itself a presence, a signified, with an aggressive anatomy of its own. If it is good enough to mop up the ache of an erection, it is good enough to lay down an icy bit of slime on the seducer’s love-flushed skin.

The woman was not, strange to tell, the lady of my dreams, the woman for whom I had left my wife; it was little Wendy Wadleigh, having appeared at my dusty apartment in Adams on I forget what excuse, possibly some kind of reverse-twist consultation about Norma’s relationship with her own estranged spouse, big-headed Ben. I had never quite warmed to Wendy; her legs were too short, her center of gravity was too low, her Debbie Reynolds–style energy was too indiscriminate, the cornflower blue of her eyes too eager and bright. She jogged, she cooked macrobiotic, she played the viola, she tutored dyslexics, she coached the Wayward girls in hockey and lacrosse, she swam at the school pool every day, she wore her pale hair in a shiny little athletic “flip.” But in those far-off Ford days it was assumed that any man and woman alone in a room with a lock on the door were duty-bound to fuck. Hardly half an hour into her visit had come the quick drawing of the khaki shades, the latching of the door’s burglar chain for double security, the knocking of the phone off the hook and the smothering of its automatic squawk beneath a pillow stolen from the suddenly pivotal bed. My rooms in Adams, as stated above [see this page] numbered two, plus a kitchen the size of a bathroom and a bathroom the size of a closet. The two windows’ view was of the back of a factory where a few bluish lights kept watch over long, empty floors still bearing the ghostly footprints of machinery gone south. By pressing one’s face against a pane one could see past the side of a projecting neon restaurant sign two doors away toward a street corner where pre-Japanese autos dragged their rusty lengths through a stoplight. On this main street, tiny people flickered past the mirror-framed entrance to a shoe store that was always threatening final closure. To minimize distraction, I turned off WADM, where somebody’s symphony was repetitively working up to a thunderous dismissal of that particular movement’s themes. Am I alone in thinking of classical music as very slow in saying what it’s getting at? All that passionate searching, and it ends by discovering the tonic where it began. I never listen to it, except when between worlds—driving in the car, or during those transitional Ford years.

In the sudden shades-down gloom, Wendy, suppressing her natural tendency to chatter, rapidly undressed down to her white underwear, which glowed like the soft strips of daylight below the canvas shades’ brown hems. I did the same, mirroring her semi-abandon, keeping on my underpants for now, as if hesitating to unbandage a flaming wound. The ornate etiquette of screwing a woman for the first time! Does the lady expect a condom? Should one offer the use of the bathroom, and use it oneself, as before an extended auto trip? Are there any surface blemishes or peculiarities to be explained, lest they give alarm, or should we let the flesh speak for itself? The awkwardness takes us back to childhood, when one knows no accepted forms. In this abrupt closeness a subtle but immensely actual novelty—in odor, in texture, in erotic slant, and in estimated experience and expectation—looms like an intimidating cliff. Though I had held Wendy in my arms at many a college dance, and in the groping latter stages of many a faculty get-together, when the host, to prolong the already distended evening, fishes out a forgotten Billy Eckstine LP, her body was basically strange to me. Her skin, the broad patch of it between her bra and panties, felt cooler than I had expected, and harder in its curves, especially the adjacent two of her prominent rump. I allowed myself the unprecedented liberty of caressing these, through the silken sheath of her underpants, more bikini than I was accustomed to. It was considerate and perhaps cunning of Wendy to keep her underwear on; as a woman of my generation, she understood, as an undergraduate would not have, my need to be sheltered from too blindingly sudden an exposure to the glories of the female body, and the stimulus that underwear would be for me, with my long gradualist history of forbidden glimpses, up a skirt or through a blouse armhole, and of backseat grapplings with resistant elastics and snaps. Or—why make a maneuver of it?—she herself felt shy, and her sense of etiquette dictated reserving to a later stage of our session removal, by trembling hands working in partnership, of these last garments. For though this was 1974, we had not been born to its freedoms but brought to them through the timidity and tabus of earlier eras. Even the late Sixties had an innocence, an oh-boy Barbarella forced cheer, counting off orgasms like the petals of a daisy, which the thoroughly experienced Ford epoch lacked. Each era simultaneously holds, in the personalities of its citizens, an absorption into mainstream life of previous social frontiers and an exhaustion of the energy that propelled recent breakthroughs and defiances. College kids had already pulled back from revolution and dharma, afraid of finding no place within the slumping economy and of getting shot in futile protest as at Kent State. The late-Fifties hippies were now leathery old carpenters and shepherdesses, child-ridden and LSD-addled, holed up in corners of a factitious rural America. We lay a while kissing, Wendy Wadleigh and I—heavy-petting, as they quaintly used to call it—warming each other up, her mouth getting looser and moister, her body in the warps of erotic space seeming to become a kind of tilted vessel funnelling saliva and spiritual energy through her mouth into mine, right down to my toes as they curled up into the arches of her feet. I began to float in love’s hyperspace; my fingers spelunked their way past the elastic panty-band to the parabolic curves of her aluminum-smooth buttocks and the velvety dimple high between; she arched her back to increase the angle of provocation and our white and gleaming underthings fell from our bodies with a few pokes of her thumbs, like tangerine peels.

[Retrospect eds.: All this strictly should be in the pluperfect, since the narrative begins post-coitally: “… and our white and gleaming underthings had fallen from our bodies with a few pokes, etc.” Adjust if you think crucial. Also, an alternative image for the last might be “… popped from our bodies like the pods of impatiens seeds.” If our readers can be trusted to know how impatiens seeds act.]

I don’t think Wendy had a climax, though her breathing apparatus expressed a lot of ravishment, and her eyes changed color wonderfully, their blue becoming inky at the moment of my entry, and she moved her hips with a great deal of energetic purpose. Not used to her brand of wetness, amazed to be inside her, I no doubt came too soon. That was another elementary fact it took me time to learn: cunts are as individual as faces, and seating oneself inside a new one is a violent chemical event. Her wetness had become so extreme I kept slipping, like a man in smooth-soled boots on a mud-bank, and even before my last throb of ejaculation I was starting to resent this whole act of intercourse, which had been less than half, I felt, my idea.

So, when after some friendly chatter two inches from my face there in my bed she got up on her knees and gave me a backrub like some therapeutic Amazon, I was in no loving mood, and my ooze of resentment like frozen amber has preserved the sensation for nigh onto seventeen years. She was presuming to expand our acquaintanceship into uxorial physical services, when I was still married to one wife and had another—the Perfect Wife—lined up waiting. I itched to buck, to toss off this witchy incubus moistly riding my back, and yet, though sullenly, sank into submission beneath her health-club ministrations, distracted no doubt by a dozen worries—that my perfect and future wife was trying to reach me through the phone that was off the hook, or that one of my abandoned children had drowned in the river or fallen through the ice (the season of this incident is unclear; some bias in my recollecting machinery wants to make it winter, with icicles on the fire escape and boots and mittens among Wendy’s castoffs), or that I have forgotten an appointment over at Wayward with one of my feather-headed tutees, or that I should be correcting term papers or working at my book, my precious nagging hopeless book. For we forget, as we tote up our lives in terms of copulations, how framed and squeezed the act is by less exalted realities—by appointments and anxieties, by the cooking smells arising from the floor below and the rumbling of one’s hungry stomach, by the changes of light and obscure pressures of the day as the afternoon ebbs on the yellowing wallpaper into the gray fuzz of lost time. The day is shot, we say, as of a lackadaisical execution. And all the while behind the sun-dried brown shade near one’s head (subdivided like a graham cracker by the sash rails and mullions) the great sky brims with its unnoticed towers of luminous, boiling cloud. No, only in retrospect, Retrospect, are our amorous encounters ideal, freed of inconvenience. Yet, when all sides concede that fucking Wendy Wadleigh was the last thing I should have been doing, given my carefully worked-out life plan, it remains to extol the marvellous change her eyes would undergo upon what the legal experts call penetration, not just this first time but every time thereafter. I have written cornflower blue but like all color attributions it is a linguistic confection, by which perhaps I, no botanist, mean merely to evoke their petalled quality, the foliation of blue within their irises, that at the moment of nether entry would become religious, supernaturally fond—three-dimensional, you could say*—the widened pupils drillholes into infinity while tawny flecks were hoisted up from their matrix of shining gel like sparks in a hologram. This carnal union pleased her, her eyes declared, and, however distracted and pussy-whipped one felt, one could not but swoon a little.

“Your muscles are so tense,” she said of my back. “Relax, Alfred.” She spoke my full name as if there were a joke in it.

“I’m trying. But I keep wondering what the hell we’re doing. You and I.”

“We’re being loving,” Wendy said, shyly, sensing that I was full of complaints and rebukes, which only post-coital politeness was keeping in. “People need loving, and if their spouses don’t give it to them they seek it elsewhere.”

“Yeah, but, sweet Wendy—”

“You have Genevieve as well as Norma?” she finished for me, supplying the names of the two poles of my not untypical (in the bedevilled Ford era) dilemma.

“Something like that,” I admitted, my face sinking deeper into the pillow. Her thumbs and finger-pads were really going after my trapezii, especially up at the creaky corner where the triangle of muscle ties into the acromial end of the clavicle. Whenever she lifted up to put her little plump weight into it, the wet kiss lower on my back went away, returning when her hands moved lower down, to the latissimae dorsi. I was beginning to like it. “Nice,” I grudgingly admitted.

“See,” she said, reading my mind, that aggravating way women do. “Just accept, Alfred. No complications. No commitments. Seize the day, as Saul Bellow says. Let me give you the gift of me. What else would you like me to do? You have some things you’d like me to do?”

“Don’t you have to go home, Wendy? Aren’t your kids coming back from school soon?”

“Ben’s covering. He wanted to do some work around the house. He’s going stir crazy in that dorm. I told him I was going shopping in Portsmouth. There are some new dress shops.”

“Norma says he and she make love in the woods,” I complained.

“That bother you?” Push. Pinch. “Why should it?” Lift. Kiss. She was a seesaw.

“It seems uncivilized,” I said.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Which question?” She was lulling me, ratcheting me down into my reptile brain. I was so relaxed I had drooled on the pillow, darkening the cotton case in the shape of South America. Bodily fluids had no deadly viral dimension in the dear old Ford days; one dabbled and frolicked in them without trying to picture the microscopic galaxies within, the squadrons of spherical space ships knobby with keys for fatally unlocking our cell walls. The rhythm of Wendy’s ass, dribbling my own sperm, squeezing up and down on top of mine, was proving contagious; I felt desire trickling back, against the gravity of my better judgment.

“What else you’d like me to do,” she answered.

Deciding to counterattack, lest my manhood be rocked entirely away, I twisted over, forcing wider the triangle between her round white thighs. Smooth moon-colored thighs, with a fringe of small platinum hairs where her shaving stopped, and the oval gleam of a vaccination scar. Her eyes again changed, observing the restart of my erection. The phallic entity emitted a sour saline smell. “There is something,” I confided to my uninvited drop-in from the moon.

“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 éminence 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.

Buchanan entered Dickinson’s junior class in 1807, with nineteen others. (How sweetly the smallness of the numbers speaks for the youth of our nation, a mere Atlantic apron of cultivation and settlement upon the immense land the coming century would see plundered!) The college was struggling, in a wretched condition, Buchanan confided to his self-sketch; and I have often since regretted that I had not been sent to some other institution. There was no efficient discipline, and the young men did pretty much as they pleased. To be a sober, plodding, industrious youth was to incur the ridicule of the mass of the students. Without much natural tendency to become dissipated, and chiefly from the example of others, and in order to be considered a clever and spirited youth, I engaged in every sort of extravagance and mischief in which the greatest [illegible] of the college indulged. On a Sunday morning in September, before James was to return for his senior year, a letter arrived which his father opened and, without a word, passed on to him; it was from Dr. Davidson, the principal of Dickinson, saying that, but for the respect which the faculty entertained for my father, I would have been expelled from college on account of disorderly conduct. That they had borne with me as best they could until that period; but that they would not receive me again, and that the letter was written to save him the mortification of sending me back and having me rejected. The mortification! The shame! The kindly Dr. King, a Dickinson trustee, intervened, giving James a gentle lecture—the more efficient on that account [—] and pledging himself to Dr. Davidson on the young man’s behalf; Buchanan was accepted back for his senior year, and graduated in 1809.

The boy and the college, however, still had difficulties. At the public examination, previous to the commencement, I answered every question without difficulty which was propounded to me. He thought he deserved highest honors; the Dickinson faculty, however, awarded him none, assigning as a reason for rejecting my claims that it would have a bad tendency to confer an honor of the college upon a student who had shewn so little respect as I had done for the rules of the college and for the professors. I have scarcely ever been so much mortified at any occurrence of my life as at this disappointment.

Dare we dawdle a moment longer by the embers of Buchanan’s formative years, as rather delectably recalled by himself? An especially intimate and lively passage attempts to animate his relation with his mother. For her sons, he wrote in retrospect (probably well before 1828, for though the sketch ends there, it exists in several installments and tones, including an off-putting leap into the third person), as they successively grew up, she was a delightful and instructive companion. She would argue with them, and often gain the victory; ridicule them in any folly or eccentricity; excite their ambition, by presenting to them in glowing colors men who had been useful to their country or their kind, as objects of imitation, and enter into all their joys and sorrows. More intimately still: I have often myself, during the vacations at school and college, sat down in the kitchen and whilst she was at the wash tub, entirely from choice, have spent hours pleasantly and instructively conversing with her. We sniff here the comforting pungence of lye and the invigorating tang of heterosexual debate. What woman henceforth will entertain, ridicule, inspire, empathize as this one did? Is it not the biological cruelty of mothers to leave, so to speak, too big a hole? Buchanan all his life was to manifest conspicuous pleasure in the company of women, bantering with Southern politicians’ witty wives right to the moment of secession. And his loyalty to his Southern advisers, long after their advice had become duplicitous, has a flavor of the Dickinson episode—a wish to be considered a clever and spirited youth, one of the guys. The wish to be liked, the wish to be great: they can co-exist in one heart, but do not inevitably harmonize. Anti-oedipally, he left college feeling but little attachment towards the Alma Mater.

He apprenticed in law to James Hopkins, of Lancaster. Thus he came east; he crossed the Susquehanna, by ferry. There would soon be a bridge, between Columbia and Wrightsville; a lawsuit involving its financing in the wake of the Panic of 1819 would distract him from his courtship of Ann Coleman, and its burning in 1863 possibly saved his house from being razed by Lee’s army. But these contingencies are in the future, not yet history. Lancaster, with six thousand inhabitants, considered itself a metropolis, the biggest inland city in the United States. The nation’s first turnpike, a gravelled, stump-free road from Lancaster to Philadelphia, had been opened by its private promoters the year Buchanan was born—born at a western stage of the Great Wagon Road which the turnpike improved and replaced. Eighteen years later, he arrived in Lancaster to learn the law. I determined that if severe application would make me a good lawyer, I should not fail in this particular; and I can say, with truth, that I have never known a harder student than I was at that period of my life. I studied law, and nothing but law, or what was essentially connected with it. I took pains to understand thoroughly, as far as I was capable, everything which I read; and in order to fix it upon my memory and give myself the habit of extempore speaking, I almost every evening took a lonely walk and embodied the ideas which I had acquired during the day in my own language.

A lonely walk. A bell about his neck in the forest. An Elysian landscape wherein one could declaim aloud to oneself and not be heard. When Hopkins’ preceptorship ended early in 1812, and Buchanan turned twenty-one, he went west, against his father’s advice, by horseback, to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to investigate a tract of land to which his father had a partial, disputed title. Had he stayed, would he have become a Clay, a Lincoln? Possibly, that summer, he encountered Thomas Lincoln, who, according to Klein (Buchanan’s autobiography says nothing of this excursion), lived near Elizabethtown and was on the court docket for some land-title cases at this time. Lincoln might very well have had in tow his three-year-old son, Abraham. When he himself was three, Buchanan very likely saw George Washington passing through Cove Gap on his way to squelch the Whiskey Rebellion. From President Washington to President Lincoln in one patriotic lifetime. The Elizabethtown land case had been in litigation since 1803, and Kentucky already had plenty of lawyers. Years later, Ben Hardin recalled Buchanan’s telling him I went there full of the big impression I was to make—and whom do you suppose I met? There was Henry Clay! John Pope, John Allan, John Rowan, Felix Grundy—why, sir, they were giants, and I was only a pigmy. Next day I packed my trunk and came back to Lancaster—that was big enough for me.

He was admitted to the Lancaster bar on November 17, 1812. He hung out his shingle on East King Street, advertising himself in the papers on February 20, 1813, as being available two doors above Mr. Dutchman’s Inn, and nearly opposite to the Farmers Bank. He was appointed, young as he was, prosecutor for Lebanon County, eliciting a letter from his overbearing father advising him to show compassion & humanity for the poor creatures against whom you may be engaged. In 1813 he made $938. In 1814 he made $1,096. He and the town’s jovial 400-pound prothonotary, John Passmore, bought the office building on East King Street, which included a tavern. Four hundred pounds: another giant. Giants were common in that miniature America—a trick of scale, perhaps. After Jackson, an irascible giant, they thinned out. Polk was “Little Hickory.” Douglas was “The Little Giant.” Lincoln obtained giant-hood but by taking giant woes upon himself; it was a gigantism of suffering, reinforced by chronic constipation, depression, and fits of noble prose. Buchanan was six feet tall, a goodly size but in human scale. In 1814, at a Fourth of July barbecue, he gave a rousing speech denouncing Madison’s bungling of the current war against the British. James Madison was a true giant, but physically too small for the fact to be universally recognized. Buchanan was the president of the local Washington Association, an organization for young Federalists; Madison was, of course, a Democratic-Republican, of the awkwardly named opposition party born of Jefferson’s resistance to what he felt were monarchical, unduly centralist, anti-democratic, anti-republican, and anti-French tendencies in the Washington Administration. Democratic-Republicans would rather make war on Great Britain than on Napoleon. The Federalists nominated Buchanan for state Assemblyman. The day after his nomination news arrived that the British had burned Washington. The young office-seeker’s first campaign duty, then, was to volunteer in the general mobilization and march to the defense of Baltimore. His company, calling itself the “Lancaster County Dragoons,” was beseeched for volunteers for a secret mission; he volunteered, and their secret mission proved to be not fighting the British but stealing sixty horses from the residents of the countryside, always preferring to take them from Quakers, says Klein, not citing his source. The lowly mission was accomplished; the British withdrew from Baltimore, having inspired the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The dragoons were disbanded; Buchanan came home and was elected Assemblyman. In Lancaster the Federalists always won but their fortunes, sagging lately, were restored by anti-war sentiments. Buchanan’s full-of-advice father wrote him: Perhaps your going to the Legislature may be to your advantage & it may be otherwise. If his father had been less advisory, would Buchanan have been a stronger man, leaning less on others? Would he have been less secretive? He hid his thoughts from even his Cabinet, it was said of his time in the White House. Parents do pry. Our first lies are to them. Buchanan did his duties in Harrisburg. A tall, broad-shouldered young man with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and fine features (Klein), he gave his maiden speech on February 1, 1815, against conscription and Philadelphia’s privileged set, championing the West against the East and the poor against the rich. He was told he should become a Democrat. A friendly Democrat, William Beale, state Senator from Mifflin County, called upon me, and urged me strongly during this session to change my party name, and be called a Democrat, stating that I would have no occasion to change my principles. In that event, he said he would venture to predict that, should I live, I would become President of the United States. To demonstrate his Federalism Buchanan gave another Fourth of July speech in Lancaster, attacking the Democrats as demagogues and factionaries and friends of the French, possessed by blackest ingratitude and diabolic passions. He got re-elected but the speech created an enmity among the Jeffersonians that lasted all his political life. Even his rabidly pro-Federalist father thought his attack was too severe, and Buchanan allowed, There are many sentiments in this oration which I regret, but goes on in his memoir to quote cherished bits, such as this of the citizens aroused by the British invasion: They rushed upon their enemies with a hallowed fury which the hireling soldiers of Britain could never feel. They taught our foe that the soil of freedom would always be the grave of its invaders.

The rules forbade running for Assemblyman a third time. He was out of politics. He thought of going to Philadelphia to practice and his father talked him out of it. He had a bilious fever; he was prone all his long life to illnesses of stress. Staying in Lancaster, he worked at the law. A local judge judged of him, He was cut out by nature for a great lawyer, and I think was spoiled by fortune when she made him a statesman. In the years 1816–18 he thrice successfully defended the Federalist-appointed judge Walter Franklin against impeachment charges brought by the Democratic legislature, arguing the case with what a witness called great ingenuity, eloquence, and address. He based his case on the United States Constitution and its separation of powers. He was always to take a lawyer’s careful approach to government, seeking shelter within the Constitution. That the Constitution, like the Judeo-Christian Deity, encompassed ambiguities and mysteries—invitations to men to improvise—was not borne in upon him. He was, we might imagine, in the infatuated stage of what was to be described, on the floor of the Cincinnati Convention in 1856, as a consummated marriage: Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to the Constitution, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy!

His income rose from $2,246 in 1815 to $7,915 in 1818. He was a rising young man, still in his twenties, not only a Mason but a Junior Warden, and then a Worshipful Master. He achieved entry to Lancaster’s highest social circles. Candlelit balls in the great room of the White Swan Inn, starlit sleigh rides through the wooded farmland—harness bells jingling, horse flanks steaming, young faces tingling, hands entwining beneath the heaped furs and buffalo robes. The stars overhead in their frosted robe of eternity, a lit house and hot punch and mince cakes at their destination, one of the ironmasters’ stone mansions. Buchanan’s partner at law, Molton Rogers, son of the Governor of Delaware, began courting Eliza Jacobs, daughter of Cyrus Jacobs, the master of Pool Forge. Rogers suggested that Buck join them some evening as an escort for Ann Coleman, Eliza’s cousin. Their mothers were sisters, daughters of James Old of Reading. Jacobs and Robert Coleman had alike labored for Old and alike wooed a daughter. Jacobs fancied himself a rough-cut farmer and stayed on his Pool Forge acres, near Churchtown. Coleman had citified ambitions and had moved his large family, the same year young Jamie had begun his preceptorship with Hopkins, to an imposing brick town house within a half-block of Lancaster’s Centre Square. Coleman had been Old’s accountant, and had become an associate judge, a church warden, a trustee of Dickinson College. Marital ambition had no higher to climb, in this Pennsylvania countryside, than an ironmaster’s daughter. Klein, a considerable extrapolator, says of Ann, A willowy, black-haired girl with dark, lustrous eyes, she was by turns proud and self-willed, tender and affectionate, quiet and introspective, or giddy and wild. His “James Buchanan and Ann Coleman” (Lancaster County Historical Society Journal, Vol. LIX, No. 1, 1955), in which he gives John Passmore’s weight as 450 pounds, expresses it thus: She was by all accounts a slim, black-haired beauty with dark, lustrous eyes in which one might read wonder, doubt, or haughtiness as the mood suited. Her portrait, which hangs now in the master bedroom at Wheatland, her frustrated lover’s restored home—a national shrine with costumed guides and postcards for sale—tells us little of this except the black hair. She has a long nose and lace collar and a stray ringlet on her forehead, and even in the stiff style of early-nineteenth-century portraiture she seems a little too alert-eyed and high-browed, a bit menacingly apprehensive beneath the high arch of her long brows; her shapely small mouth is poised as if on the cusp of a querulous remark. Klein goes on, in his high-stepping style, That she remained unmarried at twenty-three may have been because she was emotionally unstable, but more likely it was due to the stubborn insistence of her parents that she make an advantageous marriage. Her father was not only the richest man in Lancaster County but one of the richest in these young United States. Yet why would he or, by some accounts, her mother object to Buchanan, who was already a man of substance and reputation, as full of propriety and promise as a plum is full of juice?

Here we come to history’s outer darkness, where my book was to take on its peculiar life. For a long time, on the safe excuse of further research, I circled, fiddled, held fearfully back, until a deconstructionist arrived in the English department—a certain Brent Mueller, who while landlocked at some Midwestern teachers’ college had deconstructed Chaucer right down to the ground, and also left Langland with hardly a leg to stand on. Brent, a pleasant enough, rapid-speaking fellow with the clammy white skin of the library-bound and the stiff beige hair of a shaving brush, explained to me that all history consists simply of texts: there is no Platonically ideal history apart from texts, and texts are inevitably indefinite, self-contradictory, and doomed to a final aporia.

So why not my text, added to all the others? I leaped in. I began, I should say, to leap in, to overcome my mistaken reverence for the knowable actual versus supposition or fiction, my illusory distinction between fact and fancy. Here, dear NNEAAH and editors of Retrospect, in continuance of my faithful if prolonged answer to your inquiry, is a section of my text, composed under the benign overarch of the Ford Administration, and no doubt partaking of some of that Administration’s intellectual currents.

In the middle of September of 1819, under a late-summer sky of a powdery blue, in the rose-red little city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania—incorporated as a city just the previous year, and within the past decade the very capital of the commonwealth—a tall fair man and a thin dark woman shorter than he but tall for her sex could have been seen walking together along East King Street with all outward signs of affection and attachment. They moved—her face frequently upturned toward his, till instinctive decorum dictated she again lower her eyes, and his head somewhat curiously tilted and given to an occasional twitch, as if making a minor readjustment of perspective or as if better to hear the murmuring words of his vivacious and intense companion—past arrays of three- and four-story buildings built of brick or closely cut limestone, some heightened by dormers and decorated by wooden merchants’ signs carved and painted to simulate the forms of lions and stags, leopards and eagles, Indian chiefs and European kings and other such of the emblems that once haunted New World dreams. The gentleman wore a russet frock coat with claw-hammer tails and an ivory-colored silk waistcoat embroidered along the button-tape, a white shirt with upstanding collar, and a loosely but studiously tied linen cravat. His tight-fitting buckskin breeches descended into jockey boots of black leather, with downturned buff cuffs. The lady’s dress of dotted lawn was high-waisted in the Empire style, tied beneath her breasts with a tasselled pink gown-cord. Over it she wore a grape-colored cape of light cloth trimmed in black velvet. A gauzy frill wreathed her throat; a small cockleshell-shaped bonnet of close-woven straw, with a pleated taffeta ribbon, defended her face from the sun, here in this latitude but a half-degree north of the Mason-Dixon Line; in addition, she carried a lime-green parasol of moiré silk. This enviable couple were James Buchanan, one of Lancaster’s leading bachelors, an accomplished lawyer and experienced politician, and Ann Coleman, the city’s pre-eminent unmarried heiress. They had become engaged this summer, so their public appearance together was the opposite of scandalous. The parrot-bright signboards, the dimpled small window-lights of the basking brick housefronts, the subdued glisten of the slightly hazy day could be imagined to be smiling down upon them.

Buchanan, having overcome his customary reluctance to exchange the security of his heaped desk for the uncertainties of the wider world, had departed his office on East King Street—two doors down from the Dutchman’s Inn, where he had found lodgings when first arrived in Lancaster nearly ten years ago—and had called for Ann at the Coleman town house in the next block, at the corner of Christian Street. In this latitude, at this hour of five o’clock, as Ann looked up toward the steady, gentle, finicking, rather high-pitched voice emanating from her escort, she saw the sun—its daily arc levelling toward the equinox above the roofs, shingled in slate or split cedar—blocked by his large head. A chill gripped her heart at this eclipse, with the reflection that this imposing man, who had taken her eye when, at the age of thirteen, herself newly moved to Lancaster, she had watched him from the upstairs parlor windows, a long-legged youth with a dutiful, obedient, ambitious hurry to him, striding to the Court House in Centre Square in the service of James Hopkins, his preceptor at law—that this man was truly a shadow, an opaque phantom looming abruptly large in her life. Two seasons ago, he had been a mere name, a dim figure in the gossip of her friends, the Jenkinses and Jacobses, spoken of with warmth and respect and yet a hint of sly amusement, whether layable to some eccentricity of Buchanan’s person or to the inferiority of his self-made, hard-fisted father’s antecedents was not clear. Though a legal and political eminence, he lacked, in Lancaster County terms, real wealth or status. Now it seemed she had conjured this shadow up, in something like three dimensions, through a weakness of her will, a crack in her self-esteem. Since childhood Ann had battled waves of obscurely caused distemper—a pettishness, a sense of unjust confinement, a nagging disorientation sometimes severe enough to keep her in bed. The reality around her, like a bread lacking the ingredient needed to make it rise, did not seem real enough, though other people appeared to be fully, even passionately engaged in its show of reward and punishment, failure and success.

Her fiancé was favoring her with the details of a pending lawsuit, of great importance, for it threatened the existence of the Columbia Bridge Company, which had so recently erected, at the site of the old Wright’s ferry, the first span across the mighty Susquehanna River, an internal improvement crucial to the commonwealth’s and indeed the nation’s western development. “A threat to this company,” he said, “is a jeopardy not only to the public weal but to the private fortunes of our friends, for William Jenkins and his Farmers Bank are heavily invested in the company’s continuing to thrive. I foresee, my dear Ann, if Jenkins favors me with the grave responsibility of fending off this potentially ruinous suit, many hours in my office this autumn and more than one tedious journey to the courts in Philadelphia.”

What was he trying to tell her? That, having attained the promise of her hand, he must abandon her for men’s business? By encouraging his suit, in despite of doubts voiced within her family and her circle of female friends, she had exposed herself to ridicule, and his duty now was to stand near her, as a solemn safeguard of the wisdom of her choice.

They had turned back from her doorway eastward on King Street, pausing on the corner of South Duke. On the unpaved streets, their reddish earth packed to a dusty smoothness by the accelerated traffic of summer, buggies passed almost silently, the black-painted spokes of their high wheels shimmering to disks of semi-transparency, and the trotting horses’ fetlocks angulating like ratcheted clock parts, faster than the eye could follow. The sidewalks, away from the paving stones rimming the cobbles of Centre Square, were boards irregularly laid, and the young couple’s heels rang on these thick planks pit-sawed from giants of oak and ash and walnut within Penn’s great woods.

“Am I to take this speech to mean,” Ann asked, softening her voice so that his head deferentially leaned lower, “that I must prepare myself for large remissions in your attendance? Having endured,” she went on, regretting the petulant edge she heard in her own voice, yet finding its total suppression impossible to achieve, “your long visit to your family in Mercersburg this August, followed by a bachelor holiday at Bedford Springs, I had hoped we might be much together in the coming social season. My parents crave to know you better; my sisters and brothers wish always to have their good opinions of you confirmed.”

He slightly flushed, and coolly smiled. “That is, to have, you are too gracious to say, the unflattering opinions that reach their ears dispelled.” His posture straightened; he stared ahead; Ann allowed this demonstration of wounded dignity to pass her notice in silence. Their leisurely pace, rendered a bit crabwise by their sideways attentiveness, carried them past Demuth’s Tobacco Shop, its signboard since 1770 a carven bewigged dandy holding an open snuff-box, and the inn named the William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, which even at this early hour was buzzing, behind its drawn shutters, of the evening mood. Across the street, another inn, the Leopard, emitted its own growl of growing merriment, and high up under the left eave of the—in the reduced scale of a North American settlement—grand stone façade of the Bausman house, a small sculpted face, known locally as the Eavesdropper, smilingly stared toward the conversing couple with blank stone eyes.

“Dear Ann, I must work,” Buchanan protested. “I must improve my lot to such a station that our wedding, if not precisely between equals by the world’s crass standards, is close enough to quell comment. Your brother Edward has been all too disposed to give ear to those who slander me as seeking your fortune. He has welcomed the poison into your family, and furthers its spread in the town.”

There was a subdued fire in this man, Ann reflected, that might warm them both, if she fan it gently. “Edward is not well,” she explained simply. “In his infirmity and rage at his own body, he vexes matters that do not concern him. He and Thomas, being just above me in age, and my constant playmates once Harriet died, imagine I am still theirs to control, and no man who proposed to be more than brother to me would please them.”

“They scorn me and provoke me,” Buchanan went on, forgoing some of his usual circumspection and showing, she felt, an unbecoming womanish pitch of complaint, “and encourage your father in his dislike.”

The vigor of his petulance heightened the color of his face—a plump face, with an extra chin softly cradled in the wings of his upstanding collar and with dents of an almost infantile dulcity at the corners of his lips—and imparted a slightly alarming rolling aspect to his eyes, which were a clear pale blue but mismatched by a cast in the left, which led it to wander outwards and to gaze, it seemed, past her head to interests beyond. At times he frightened her with what he saw and what he didn’t; he did not realize, in the case at hand, that it was her mother more than her father who had objected to their engagement. “He’s not a man,” her mother had pronounced more than once, pinching shut her toothless mouth on the verdict. “Such a popinjay wouldn’t have lasted an hour at my father’s furnace.” There was something in these iron people, Ann had been made aware, that stiffened at the approach of her swain with his artful, patient, silvery voice. Buchanan, in love with his own poeticizing mother, didn’t see that a woman could be as stout an enemy as a man.

Conscious of concealing some of the truth, Ann bantered with him. “My father is an iron man,” she said. “He does not easily bend. He had fixed his hopes for me upon the son of another ironmaster, so the merged forges could beat out more muskets for the next revolution.”

“And out of blood more dollars for the Coleman fortune,” Buchanan said, unnecessarily, for a shamed awareness of the violent source of her family’s wealth had been implicit in her self-mocking words. For all his legal canniness, Ann thought, this man had a streak of obtuseness, a patch of dead caution, that prevented him from grasping, as can many coarser men—such as the men in her family—a situation at a glance, and from travelling instantly across a chain of argumentation to the firm ground of a conclusion. Instead, he must test each step, as if earth is all treacherous, and when he did contend on one side, as in his speeches against the Democrats, it was with a shrill excess, as though not convinced of his own sincerity. Her family’s slights, which she had done all she could to hide from him, rankled because he was too willing to detect, with his double vision, a truth behind them. “At last Sunday’s dinner at Colebrookdale,” he complained, “you heard him bait me, albeit jocosely, on the matter of my disciplinary infractions at Dickinson, having as trustee made himself privy to the details—misdemeanors of a dozen years ago, and the stiff-necked faculty as much at fault as myself! And he unreasonably associates me with that auction prank of Jasper’s, and implies impropriety in my election wager with Molton.”

Ann interrupted this gust of grievances. “My father means to suggest that you have enjoyed a fair portion of tavern society, and that a prospective son-in-law might reconcile himself to enjoying less. And I do agree, Jim. Call me selfish, but I want you with me every minute you can spare from your ambitions. I have pinned my life to yours.” She took his arm to descend the curb; his big body, more corpulent and silkily clad than that of the long-legged legal apprentice she had spied from her window, was comforting in its mute mass, like that of a saddled horse in the instant before she felt herself lifted up from the mounting stool onto its trembling, warm-blooded back.

They had turned, in their stroll, right at the corner of Lime Street, away from the traffic and the taverns, past the home, at the bottom of the down-sloping block, of Jacob Eichholtz, the portraitist, whose loving brush fixed in paints the fleshy visages of Lancaster’s leading citizens, and toward the cemetery known as Woodward Hill, where, a half-century hence, Buchanan would be laid, with a civic pomp that he had specifically forbidden in his will, a document in which he also exactly designed and inscribed his own tombstone. But today he was alive, alive, and Ann, too, who would lie not long hence in St. James Episcopal Churchyard at Orange and Duke streets; their living, well-clad bodies were linked in luxurious promenade beneath the red oaks and shivering poplars and straight-trunked hickories. Hickory Town had been the homely name whereby Lancaster was first known to white men, ninety years ago. The arboreal foliage had not yet turned, though the dry kiss of sap-ebb was upon it, and a few early fallen leaves scraped beneath the couple’s advancing boots—his buckled, hers laced. They talked merrily of Jasper Slaymaker’s prank, his and John Reynolds’, pulling up in their gig at public auction and shouting out a bid and racing away, not knowing they had been recognized. The auctioneer in all solemnity knocked down their taunt as the winning bid and declared them the owners of a hotel and obsolete ferryboat line in Columbia, to the tune of six thousand seven hundred dollars—to Buchanan a healthy year’s wages, to Ann a laughing matter.

Dust dulled their boot-tips as the board sidewalks yielded to a path of worn earth that ran along the iron fence of the burial ground. Simple round-topped markers, of slate and a soft soap-white dolomite, stood erect within, the oldest of them bearing names already weathering into oblivion. The proximate quiet of the cemetery soothed our strollers; in their intervals of conversational silence could be heard the chirring of cicadas, laying the summer to rest, and the calls of birds quickening their activity as the day’s heat gently withdrew. A prospect of uninterrupted shade appeared, beneath the arches of elm boughs silently striving for light and air. Ann folded her silken parasol with a snap.

As if released by the closing of the catch, Buchanan resumed his complaint, in a voice tense with self-pleading: “Your father thinks I bend too much. Disliking my maiden speech in the Assembly as too proximate to the Democratic creed, he liked no better my Fourth of July attack upon the last administration for its French-inspired demagoguery, its wanton destruction of the national bank and, with it, all restraints on credit. Ever since partaking of radicalism at Princeton, Madison has had a passion for the godless doctrines of French rationality; he took us into a disastrous war as little better than Napoleon’s cat’s-paw. Monroe, though a blander cup of tea, has been poured from the same Paris pot; his wife and daughter Eliza Hay have turned Washington into a veritable Versailles of backbiting and empty etiquette. This continent was meant to be an escape from Europe, not a provincial imitation of it. Like all the sound men of Lancaster, I am a Federalist to the bone, in the conservative and balanced style of the deathless Washington. Property rights, but not rule by the rich. Personal rights, but not radical mobocracy and incessant revolution. Washington’s noble example and the beautifully wrought balances of the Constitution indicate the same middle path between impractical extremes, and if for following this path—sometimes broad, and sometimes painfully narrow—I must be the object of calumny and cheap ridicule from all sides, from men of iron as well as men of straw, so be it,” he went on, a sideways glance at his companion asking acknowledgment of his sly allusion to the Colemans. “Thank God in His Providence,” Buchanan concluded, “that with my second term in the Assembly I am forever finished with public office; my wife will never be exposed, dearest Ann, to the humiliations and manifold thanklessness of politics.”

“Are you indeed finished with public office? I sense in you a quest for the widest audience, a will more subtle than my father’s but no less relentless.”

“Rest assured: the domain of local law, and the domestic hearth ruled by you, will form sphere enough for me and my moderate abilities. There is a rapacity,” he went on, relaxed and thoughtful with her to a degree she could not but observe with gratification, “and a growing coarseness to public life whose tenor I detest. As these colonies grow westward, and the coastal cities become richer, and more various in their immigrants, the common man in his natural greed and low appetites becomes the index of measure; the gentility of the founders is running thin. Little Maddy was the last of the original creative spirits, and Monroe will be the last President in knee breeches. The present era of good feeling is but a lull before the storm, when the West must declare itself to be a child either of the North or of the South. Eleven slave states, eleven free, and Missouri. The Missouri question is a reef upon which the whole ship, so bravely patched and launched, may split in two; our American problem is, we have land and climate enough for a number of nations, and seek to be only one.”

“Perhaps,” Ann offered, in keeping with the new freedom of intercourse his largeness of assertion invited, in a realm beyond the regions of petty quarrel and divergent loyalty, “my family but wait for more fervent signs of affection and trust from you. My father is more nakedly self-made than yourself, and my brother Edward is tormented by his curse of doubtful health.”

“Once we are securely wed,” Buchanan affirmed, pressing the hand of hers resting upon his arm with his free hand, while maintaining with two gloved fingertips his grip upon a slender walking stick, its silver knob in the shape of a fox’s smiling head, “the flow of good will shall be less forced. A settled deed argues for its own acceptance; an established union dictates its terms for peace. Until our marriage, we are vulnerable to interference. Your family’s claim to loyalty inevitably distresses you; their call upon your affections dates back to your infancy, where my claims are but newly placed, and rest unsteadily upon matters of seemingly voluntary choice.”

Seemingly because of his Presbyterian fatalism, that saw all glimmering moments caught in an inflexible web of divine predestination? The Colemans were of the Episcopal church, removed from Papism and Puritan gloom both. “And when shall we arrive at this blessed established state?” Ann asked, her own voice tense and rising. “We are not young; you were all of twenty-eight this April, and next month I will be twenty-three. The girl-friends of my childhood are already all wed. The strictest propriety does not ask that we wait longer than a season or two more.”

“The season cannot be this fall,” he stated, suddenly firm, with that impenetrable bluntness lawyers can muster. “This Columbia Bridge Company tangle, added to other concerns of my practice, will take all but a few of my hours; the financial distress Monroe and his Yankee Richelieu, Quincy Adams, have allowed to fall upon the nation has made work for lawyers if no one else.”

“Oh”—an exclamation of disappointment escaped her lips. “Must I spend another winter as a spinster?” She felt her heart sink at the prospect of gray wet weeks and months still closeted with her parents, while her five brothers and four sisters, the living remainder of fourteen births, haunted the house, coming and going, George with death already in his jaundiced and skeletal face, Edward arrogant and sardonic in his smoldering fury of unhealth, Thomas more playful in his authority over the sister just beneath him in the chain of births, all with their prating wives, women as complacent as dough, while her silly sister Sarah, the fourteenth child, wide-eyed and giddy at the onset of womanhood, professed to be in love with what she fancied to call God. All of these kin, it seemed to Ann, implied, in their tactful avoidances as well as in open teasing and quarrel, disapproval of her marital choice, and through their coughs and courtesies and heavy family odor they sifted upon her head a drizzle of foreboding, an unspoken opinion that this tall smooth speaker of many politic words was not what he gaudily seemed, in his russet tailcoat and impeccably tied cravat, but was instead treacherous, a finagler, a twister in pursuit of her fortune and the Coleman connection, and less than a man. He’s not a man. He was some other kind of creature, a half-man, a chimera bred of these changing modern times, a pretender, so that her betrothal had a doomed flavor, a taste of mistakenness that tightened her throat and at idle moments of the day threatened to pinch tears from her eyes, sharpened her words with ill temper, and bade her imagine pity and concern in the faces of those in the house who loved her, including the servants and the children of her older siblings. Her imagination was steeped for long idle hours in the hectic substances of books—romances and rhymed effusions quickly printed in Philadelphia and Baltimore from English texts hurried like contraband to these artless shores—and imaginings flared within her in strange heated waves, so that after an afternoon dreaming another’s dream in the upstairs parlor she distrusted her thoughts and even the reports of her senses, which without actual distortion came to her overlaid by a cold dim quality, like moonlight, of illusion. Even now, in this outdoor moment, underneath the many green trembling leaves and beside the iron fence cast in a pattern of circles and spears, the man beside her, leaning down in expectance of her response to his blunt demand for delay, appeared to loom with an illusionary thinness, like a large occluding emblem of painted tin, of less thickness than King Street’s signboards and the tombstones of slate in the burying ground. They represented people, these stone silhouettes, once as alive as she, Ann thought, and many younger than she—her sister Harriet had been younger—and now dead in their coffins, rotting into bits like those starved lambs whose stiff matted bodies crows tear at in the tall pasture-grass, cawing. A line occurred to her from a poem of Lord Byron’s of a fascinating morbidity, from a slender edition of The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems of 1816 into whose burgundy-red covers the acid sweat of her fingers during the summer past had worn ovals of a paler red, I had a dream, which was not all a dream, and then another, The bright sun was extinguished. Ann wanted to scream. Buchanan’s static image filled the field of her vision, leaning toward her respectfully, tenderly, regretfully, in the wake of his forked offer of allegiance and absence—his tidy curvaceous nimble lips, his ponderous possessive face, his touchingly mismatched eyes, his rising crest of oak-colored hair. Claws clamped her heart; beaks tore at it. Happy were those, came to her amid the waves of heat, of unreality, who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch. She felt trapped within the coffin of a book. This man was a single stiff page. She feared the book was about to slam shut on her, though for him it would go on and on, through foreign lands and ever higher offices, a saga of endurance. Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea—how terrible, poets should not be allowed to frighten young women like that, perhaps in England, among the gentry, where life was all a game, but not here, here in these forested States, where life was simple and hard and serious, on land just lately seized from the savage redmen and soaked with their blood, as the turning leaves each year demonstrated. Still Buchanan hung there, speechless, waiting for a sign of her love, her loyalty though he must be much away from Lancaster on legal business. Perhaps the hot waves within her were magnifying time, subdividing each moment of this hazed warm late afternoon, late in summer, late in the day, with its narrow bird-chirps and minutely veined elm leaves overhead.

The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

The upstairs front parlor, where Ann found the peace to be alone with her books, the clatter of King Street noticeable only when two drunken men began to shout together, the air fragrant of cold ashes and furniture wax and stale potpourri and sun-warmed plush, had fallen away, the very walls with their wallpaper of red stripes and blue-and-gold medallions had fallen away dizzyingly, when she read these last words, their terror collected in the mysterious She with its Godlike capital letter. A world without clouds, without winds—but of course, the world within the coffin would lack everything.

Buchanan, politely troubled by her silence, sensing her disturbance if not her premonition, presumed to touch again the back of her hand, her four pink-nailed fingers where they rested on the cloth of his coatsleeve, and at this touch she took on flesh again, she took on life, her heart moving her blood through the supple conduits of her tall young body, maintaining in her slender skull the polychrome light of consciousness. Her universe shrank to these soft, familiar environs, and her condition to that of a woman on the verge of married life, soon to have a house of her own, with waxed furniture, and respectful servants, and crackling fires in the fireplaces, and windows to keep clean with vinegar and water as Mother directed her maids to do, a cup of vinegar to every bucket of water. It was Byron’s dreadful vision now that seemed illusory, a dream indeed. Talking and walking at a slower pace, as if together recovering from a slight case of ague, Buchanan and Ann made their sauntering way north on South Queen Street to Centre Square, as candles were beginning to be lit in the dusky rear rooms of the staid houses of brick and limestone, then right a half-block to the Coleman residence, where Ginger, a manumitted black slave said to have had an Onondaga grandmother, served them Cantonese tea, sailed to them through three oceans, with a side glass of peach brandy, brewed by North Carolina Moravians, for the gentleman.

• • •

I also remember, not exactly from the Ford years but from Nixon’s last Presidential April [Retrospect eds.: CK but Easter ’74 April 14th by my perpetual calendar], stamped as sharply on my memory as a tin weathervane, the silhouette of the Perfect Wife, Genevieve Mueller, as she stood, in a smart spring outfit consisting of a boxy hound’s-tooth-checked jacket and pleated white wool skirt, on the street in front of her house in Wayward under the giant surviving elm there on the corner. She was poised to cross over to her own front door, we had made no plans to meet, I just happened to have run in the car to the town’s three-store (gas station, grocery cum minimal hardware, and drugstore also stocking newspapers, magazines, paperbacks, plastic toys, and tennis balls) downtown for the Sunday paper and circled back toward my house by way of her house, an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim, and set back from the road by a breadth of front lawn and some struggling azaleas, a modest symmetrical house made majestic for me by the extravagant extent of my longing and covetousness. Many the night, swinging out of my most direct path home after dropping off a babysitter, I had thought of Genevieve lying in there asleep in the arms of that methodical Midwestern deconstructionist and nearly wept with envy at the imagined bliss concealed by their darkened upstairs windows. Since those nights of barren yearning—my arc of automotive divagation described in snow and spring rain, under summer’s thick canopy of leafiness and then the recklessly spilled salt of stars glimpsed through nets of disencumbered twigs—she and I had suddenly, recently managed, under cover of the bustle of an academic community, to make contact, to confess our mutual discontents, to make love, to fall in love, to exchange feverish pledges whose exact meaning and circumstantial redemption remained cloudy in my mind. This cloudiness was to be rapidly dispersed. I braked to a stop, exhilarated not only by the sight of my beloved’s perfect figure, so trim and compact and smartly stamped, in its black-and-white checks, on the tender surface of the sacred morning, beneath the persistent elm’s great vase-shape mistily brimming with pale-chartreuse buds, but by the resinous eager tang of spring in the air, inviting me to be, late-thirtysomething though I was, eternally young. I was full of the sap of recent sexual conquest. Life felt sweet. Genevieve was wearing high heels, in two sharply contrasting tones, and all around her Nature, too, was standing on tiptoe. With one of her unsmiling stares—her eyes were the deep brown of black coffee, in a face of luminous unblemished pallor, with a slight bony arch to her long-nostrilled nose—she came around to the driver’s side of my car, my [see this page] piratical, debonairly unsafe, gallantly rusted Corvair. My top was down. [I would write, “She stepped off the curb and came around to the, etc.” except that the informal town of Wayward, like the Lancaster of my imagining, was short on curbs and sidewalks, and had none here, where the elm tree’s roots would in any case have posed a problem for the pavers.]

“I told him,” she said.

“You told him?” I repeated inanely. I could not tell if the smell of fear—electric, like that of ozone—was mine or hers. “You told him what?” I did not have to ask who the “him” was.

“About us.”

I could not stop thinking of how lovely Genevieve looked, there in the feathery sunlight underneath the elm, on an Easter morning when the whole town seemed to have been cleared, as if for shooting a movie—not another car in sight, not a bird cackling to clutter the sound track. She kept looking down the street, as if toward the director.

“You did?” Now my voice did sound sick. My whole world, disorderly or not, had been pulled out from under me.

Her focus slightly changed, shortened, to take in my face. The sunlight had that white sharp quality it has in the spring, before the leaves come out. Each pebble on the street, gritty with the past winter’s sand and salt, threw a crescent-shaped shadow. My mind crackled with irrelevant thoughts, such as what a pleasant spacious country America was, with its freedoms and single-family homes, and that I should have received this fatal news in a more dignified position than sitting here helpless in my jaunty old bathtub of a horseless carriage. Genevieve was speaking very rapidly, rather breathlessly. “Was that wrong? He’s been sensing something lately, and we got to talking last night, and he was so innocent, it seemed cruel not to tell him. Wasn’t that right?”

I loved her so much, she looked so perfect, her face just slightly wider than ideal, like a child’s, that I foolishly smiled and nodded, feeling fuzzy all through, like the elm. “And what did he say?”

“Well,” she said, and looked over me and my car down toward the street, toward the center of town. She was obviously dressed for church, and perhaps he was coming from church, with their two little girls. It was hard to picture him as a churchman, even on Easter morning, since his professional career was based upon the exposure of meaningless binaries and empty signifiers. “We said many things. We were up until three, hashing over our whole marriage. But basically he said, Fine, if that’s what I want and if you’ll marry me.”

The Perfect Wife. Mine. It was locked in. I was on my way to Paradise. I felt rushed, a bit, like the good thief on the cross. Still, it was a direction. All I had to do was dispose of my own wife and children. They had been deconstructed, but didn’t know it yet. I would have to tell them. The wife, the kids. It was a not uncommon crisis in this historical era, yet there is a difference between an event viewed statistically, as it transpired among people who are absorbed into a historical continuum, and the same event taken personally, as a unique and irreversible transformation in one’s singular life, with reverberations travelling through one’s whole identity, to the limits of personal time. Since history always posits more time, backwards and forwards, in that respect it is less serious than a single, non-extendable life.

The Perfect Wife and her imperfect husband had come to the college three years before. They were seven or eight years younger than we, and the departments, small as the college is, don’t instantly mingle. But as time went on I had opportunity enough to observe her, and to judge her a jewel beyond price. I took note of her faultless figure, the breasts and hips emphatic but every ounce under control, and her exquisite, if slightly mannish, clothes, and her crisp but tender nurture of her two little girls, one of whom was a comically exact copy of her, in her husband’s pallid coloring, while the other, with Genevieve’s black eyes, brows, and hair, had a considerable portion of Brent’s dogmatic angularity, jutting jaw, and furrowed, troubled, skeptical forehead. At the Wayward College indoor pool, during faculty-use hours, Genevieve was as neat a nymph as a trademark artist ever penned, favoring a square-cornered swimcap of white rubber and a black single-piece bathing suit more stunning in its professional severity than any belly-baring bikini. At faculty parties, she was the model of woolen-clad, single-braceleted correctitude, alertly receptive while conversing with the President in her lavender upswept hair and regal purple muu-muu (the President, not Genevieve), amiably reserved and faintly teasing with the gangling young instructors and their giggly common-law brides, and cheerfully frontal with her husband’s academic equals. Me, I usually viewed her in profile, admiring her pursed considering lips, her single flashing eye beneath the dense clot of curved lashes, and her scarcely perceptible nasal curve, which I saw as Mediterranean, a genetic trace inherited from the fabled age of matriarchal queendoms, of calmly murderous white goddesses. We at first avoided one another at these gatherings; there was a dangerous magnetism both felt from the start. Her conversation, when we dared politely talk, seemed a bit flat, factual, and (with my wife’s wandering indirections as background noise) unsubtle; but I blamed this on mental contamination by her husband, with his pugnacious monosyllable of a monicker and his boyish thrust of stiff beige hair above his slanting forehead. He was contentious, dismissive, cocky, and a great hit with the students; he played to them with a televisable glibness and catered to their blank, TV-scoured brains by dismissing on their behalf the full canon of Western masterpieces, every one of them (except Wuthering Heights and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass) a relic of centuries of white male oppression, to be touched as gingerly as radioactive garbage. In faculty meetings he spoke, though less than half a generation younger than I, with the brash authority of the New Thinking; gray heads bowed and made way, in this quaint institution devoted to the interim care of well-bred, well-off girls en route from their fathers to their husbands, for “studies” whose ideal texts were the diaries, where they could be found, of black female slaves. He was active, dynamic, persuasive, and committed. He took teaching too seriously, it seemed to me—as a species of political activity, as an opportunity for the exercise of power, even while decrying the white male power of bygone generations. Never mind; I invited him to be my opponent at tennis and squash, as a way of drawing closer to his wife. (Genevieve in tennis whites! With a heartbreaking little black hem to her socklets!! Her backhand was even better than her forehand, and after we became lovers she confided to me that she had been a natural left-hander, made over into a rightie by the penmanship instructors of a regressive, nun-run private school in lower Wisconsin.) When it came to dinner at their home, I marvelled at her impeccable housewifery, her gourmet cooking, her poignantly staged presentation of her little girls, in not only clean pastel gowns but miniature satiny bed-jackets, for their good nights to the guests. She had managed to instill in her household a European sense of children as graceful adornments to the parents, as opposed to our ugly American democratic style, with even an infant given his noisy vote in all proceedings. As to decor, in my own house there was simply too much—too many pictures on the wall, too many worn-out rugs overlapping on the floor, too much carelessly inherited furniture, too many shawls and cats shedding threads and hairs on the sofa cushions, too many half-empty bottles in the pantry and half-read books piled up everywhere, even in the bathrooms—whereas here there was just enough of books, tables, vases, chairs, a cool sufficiency with poverty’s clean lines, a prosperity short of surfeit. Even the grounds around their modest home, on a street of older houses unevenly redeemed from Depression-era decay, some having replaced the original clapboards with shingles and some with aluminum siding, showed Genevieve’s will toward order—the flower beds weed-free, the ornamental plantings bark-mulched. And when it came at last to lovemaking, on the hard floors and rented couches that adultery utilizes faute de mieux, hers was quick, firm, adventurous, definitive. There was none of that female maze and endocrinal grievance I had to work through with the Queen of Disorder. I pictured my wife’s psychosexual insides as a tidal swamp where a narrow path wound past giant nodding cattails and hidden egret-nests, with a slip into indifference gaping on both sides; Genevieve’s entrails were in comparison city streets, straight, broad, and zippy. If she had been in the least disappointing in this regard, I might not have found myself at this pebbly elm-shadow-striped corner, facing a fait accompli.

If you’ll marry me. They had cut a deal. They were a team, a pair of scissors. Snip here, snip there. The second thread was mine, a sensitive loose end.

The world had changed complexion; in an instant, the intoxicating spring air had become a wet hot washrag pressed against my face—the pressure of the actual, the mortal, the numinously serious. I didn’t know what to say, there with her perfection, so black and white, so anxious and unsmiling, before me. She spoke again, her eyes wider, as if to take into accounting some new margin to me. “Did I do the wrong thing? I thought we had agreed.”

We had agreed we were in love, lovely, too lovely ever to lose each other. I just wasn’t quite ready for the agreement’s translation into practical terms, into legal action involving realtors, judges, mellifluous lawyers, abandoned children. Yet I had no heart to say so, no heart but to say comfortingly, she being the child in sight, “No, that was right. It sounds as though you were very honest and brave.”

She tensely, tersely nodded, tucking that admitted fact away. I was giving myself away by inches.

“Where is Brent now?”

“He’s at church,” Genevieve answered. “The communion line was huge, and I said I’ll walk home to get the lamb roast in. They’ll probably swing by the drugstore for the paper.”

She glanced at me for a response, but I was silently smiling with an absurd élan, the fruit of too many Hollywood movies viewed in adolescence. When in crisis, double the cool. Cary, Gary, Alan, Errol. Meanwhile my stomach seemed to be swallowing me through an enormous trapdoor.

“I was going to call you tomorrow at your office. He said he wouldn’t move out until school was over. We won’t tell the girls until then so as not to ruin their grades. So you have until June to tell Norma.”

My part was all written; I was a character in their play. “I didn’t know Brent went to church,” I said.

“Only once a year, as a favor to me and the girls.”

“He loves you.”

“He says so.” A flicker of something—in the air, on my face—brought the forward momentum of her smoothly working brain to a small halt. “Do you want to back out?” she asked, in a voice moved up a notch in volume, for clarity. “You may, Alf.” Her voice dipped into tenderness, just as a gauzy cloud overhead dimmed the white sunshine of this day that had left winter behind. “You mustn’t do what feels wrong to you.”

“You and I feel right,” I tried weakly to explain. “It’s just that it—”

“It’s too much,” she finished for me. “It is a lot. I think I’ll go ahead with my side in any case; he and I have gone too far.”

He and I—the phrase made my blood fizz with jealousy. And the thought of Genevieve’s freeing herself to roam the Ford era’s sexual jungle was intolerable, in the totally eclipsing way that the thought of death is. I would have this woman if it killed me, I resolved. And no matter who else it killed. “You and he are going to keep living together till June?” I asked.

She blinked; her lashes on a Sunday morning were not so long and clotted as in party makeup. Each lash was distinct, giving her a starry-eyed look. “That was his proposal,” she said.

“You two are going to keep fucking?”

“Are you and Norma?”

“I haven’t told her yet. The situations aren’t parallel. We don’t fuck that much anyway. We think about it, and drift away. You and that prick really do it. You really just upped and told him about us. I can’t believe it.” I couldn’t believe, either, that I was showing this anger; but having committed myself, just then, to die for her if necessary gave me the right.

The Perfect Wife’s chin, level with my eyes, was shaped like the tip of a valentine or slightly blunted shovel and held a small depression, too shallow to be called a dimple; now this evanescent shadow began to tremble. I had stung her, already exhausted by her session with Brent, to tears. And Easter morning wasn’t going to hold its breath forever: A back door somewhere slammed. A bird, descended from the dinosaurs, issued several clauses of a long territorial proclamation. My foot lightly raced my engine. Brent was about to turn the corner in their military-tan Peugeot, armed with two little girls in frilly dresses. Theirs, too, was a nuclear family I was smashing. I felt sick to the point of self-extinction but the day with its hard-to-believe old message kept buoying me up, in my hollowing new knowledge. I was the new man, called into being. “Sorry,” I said to Genevieve, of my outburst. The sight of her face—its pearl-like clarity of skin and faintly childish breadth—often stirred in me a paternal gravity, a Gregory Peck–like timbre of sorrowing masculinity. “Everything’s fine. I love you. I’m glad you told. Somebody had to get the ball rolling. Be brave, darling. I’d love to be your husband.” And I myself rolled off, moving homeward at half-speed through Wayward’s familiar streets, wobbly pocked salt-peppered streets like an old pair of corduroy trousers, worn to the warp and weft above the knees, that you put on morning after morning, your change and wallet already in the pockets.

With the apparition of feminine perfection out of sight behind the corner, I could imagine myself back to normal, a pleasant pagan family man carrying home to a house already littered with our culture’s bulletins this Sunday’s Manchester Union-Leader and New York Times, deliciously loaded with Nixon’s ramifying deceptions: grand jury, Judge Sirica, Leon Jaworski, House Judiciary Committee, and furthermore he owed half a million in underpaid taxes. I must tell Norma I was leaving her, Norma and the children. But when? Our life together was so full of appointments and engagements. Just this afternoon, I had promised to take Andy and Buzzy, and Daphne if she bawled loud enough when we told her it was too adult, to something sinister called Chinatown, and later that afternoon we were invited for cocktails and heavy hors d’oeuvres (meaning we could stay deep into the night, sufficiently fed) to the Wadleighs’. All the music department would be there, and some of the prize music students, exotic as alpacas with their long necks and golden brushed hair, and a smattering from the other departments, and we would all get nicely enlightened and gemütlich on Jim Beam bourbon and Gallo white wine, with semi-surreptitious intakes on a communal toke of fascistically banned pot, and big-headed Ben would begin to play one of his several pianos, as if with three or four furious hands, there in the Wadleighs’ glass-and-redwood modern domicile, built with Wendy’s money (her mother had been a Sears, or maybe a Roebuck) high above the river, and the students would shyly get out their guitars and in sweet thready voices sing the protest songs that had outlasted America’s Vietnam involvement, and who could miss such a party? Not me. I wondered if the Muellers would be there, and if Genevieve, mia promessa sposa, would give me any kind of a betrothed glance. As I imperfectly remember, they were, and she didn’t. Not a glance. The perfect pretender.

The twelve hours’ carriage ride from Philadelphia still jolted queasily in Buchanan’s bones, further stiffened by the damp chill of late November, as, darkness having already descended, he climbed the six granite steps to William Jenkins’ front door. Beneath its semi-circular fanlight, between its sidelights of leaded clear glass, the door was freshly painted black in the latest Lancaster style, setting off quite brilliantly the polished brass knocker in the shape of a mermaid suspended head down, her bare breasts doing the knocking: a fanciful conceit from which the gentleman’s hand instinctively flinched, accustomed to calling at this house though he was.

The Jenkinses’ house stood on South Duke Street, halfway between the Colemans’ mansion and Buchanan’s bachelor rooms, and it seemed convenient and wise, weary as he was in his jolted bones and his overused eyes and throat from four days of legal investigation and disputation in the pestilentially congested City of Brotherly Love, to give his client hopeful news before betaking himself to East King Street, the comfort of a solitary glass of Madeira, and, after a quick and simple supper fetched up to his quarters by the serving girl, to the Colemans’ for a politic evening call. There were some emotional fences to mend, Buchanan realized. The fall of 1819 had been trying for his fiancée as well as for the nation; his repeated absences upon matters of business had worn upon Ann’s nervous and—an unsympathetic observer might have said—much-indulged disposition. He did not, himself, mind her need for indulgence, any more than a man minds a skittish temper and rolling eye in a finely bred trotter; it savored, to him, of luxury—a luxurious self-regard encouraged by society, as confirmation of her high position, which would merge, once they were married, with his own.

Yet anticipation of the company of Ann’s falsely welcoming parents, along with that of Sarah, her seventeen-year-old sister, who would be unduly and persistently curious about the glamorous details of the metropolis—which the lawyer had been too professionally occupied to sample, but for a bolted meal at a crowded inn and, to clear his head, an evening stroll along Market Street, past the Presidential mansion from which it had been Washington’s wont to set out in a cream-colored French coach, ornamented with cupids and flowers—and perhaps that of brother Edward, saturnine and inflexibly correct, suppressing his cough and any words of overt disapproval while his gaze smoldered in the corner within the leaping shadows cast by the Colemans’ fish-oil lamps, did not, this anticipation, relieve his inner chill: better to warm himself a moment at the Jenkinses’, where his welcome was sincere, forged of long acquaintance, and his attendance carried a clear pecuniary value. A brownish light still figured in the westward sky. Low clouds spit a few dry flakes of early snow. From the semi-circular stone porch that formed the sixth step he saw that it was bright within; though the Jenkinses’ fortunes were presently shaky, they burned the best quality of candles, spermaceti, and had lately acquired an Argand lamp, an ingenious Swiss device, impossible to surpass for illumination, with a glass chimney and a clockwork pump for steadily supplying oil to the circular wick.

Mary Jenkins came herself to the door, her round face framed in a lace cap with ruchings. “Dear Mr. Buchanan, come in! Mr. Jenkins is gone for the night with his ailing mother at Windsor Forge, but my sister Grace is here to console me, and now you! Please do come meet her.”

He hesitated, the icy touch of the naked mermaid still tingling in his fingertips, even through his gloves’ thin kid, and the farmhouses and stubbled fields and darkling woods numbly appraised through his carriage window still somehow smeared on his vision, proof of a burgeoning national vastness despite the financial panic, which had flooded the market with so much unwanted property that even sheriffs’ fees could not be realized. “I—I had meant merely to acquaint your good husband with the progress of the Columbia Bridge Company suit, before proceeding to recuperate from nearly a week’s absence in Philadelphia.”

“Recuperate here—we were just sitting in the parlor, too lazy to move. We’ll warm up the teapot again. Or would a cordial better repay your long journey? Grace,” she called from the foyer, into the radiant parlor, “who has come calling but the very man in Lancaster I wanted you most to meet!”

Buchanan’s timorous advance, tall beaver hat in hand, into the sitting room discovered, in a certain mist of historicity, an enchantress sitting on a rose-colored sofa with a serpentine back.

Or perhaps, to give recorded history its due, she had been upstairs, and, in the words of the most vivid, if anonymous and unreliable, account of this incident, Straining her ears to distinguish the voices that came from a downstairs room, Miss Hubley was pleasantly surprised to know that Mr. Buchanan was the caller at the home, and her sense of curiosity, no less than a well-defined personal interest in the caller, manifested itself in a very concrete way.

Hurriedly completing the most tempting toilet that suggested itself to her emotional temperament, Grace Hubley left her bedroom and entered history. Buchanan and his associate [a phantom only this telling evokes; surely not Molton Rogers, off courting Eliza Jacobs, who was to die in childbirth in three brief years, nor the fabulously fat John Passmore, who by 1819 was in fact the Mayor of Lancaster, the little city’s first] were suddenly surprised to hear a gentle footstep on the stair, a swishing of well-set silks and then to be confronted with the charming young lady as she presented herself to the admiring visitor.

Young: Grace Hubley was born on April 27, 1787, making her thirty-two, four days shy of four years older than James Buchanan, and two years older than her sister Mary. So the siren breast exuded the ripe charm of superior experience. In the words of the account, a newspaper article neatly mounted but unascribed in the archives of the Buchanan Foundation at Wheatland, Her culture was further heightened by a period of life spent with relatives in Philadelphia, who introduced her into the social whirl of the city and brought her into close intimate contact with the noted hostesses and gentlemen of that day. That day, this day, be they as they may, a man’s heart beats quicker at the sight of a strange and comely woman, bathed in a light that seems her own. She was fairer than her sister, and the Hubley roundness of face was not yet worn into creased complacence by the satisfactions and cares of the wedded state. Clustered candles, their spotty web of light extended by tin sconces inset with oval mirrors, filled the dainty high-ceilinged room with a fragrance that felt to come from afar, from the sea, a seaweedy sweetness not merely sweet but august, an august incense conveying marine mystery. Buchanan had never viewed the ocean, merely read of its crossing in voyagers’ tales and Shakespeare’s Tempest and seen, in Philadelphia, the two great rivers, the Schuylkill and the yet mightier Delaware, swelling as they neared their rendezvous with the mother of waters. Excursions to the Chesapeake Bay were not uncommon among the prosperous youth of Lancaster, but he was so new to their set, and so industrious in the maintenance of his achieved status, that he had not yet ventured to the shore. The healing mountain waters of Bedford Springs cooled his summer enough, away from the fragrant debris of the tides, the lavish reach of sands, the colossal heedlessness of the endless waves, whose infinity mocks our consciousness.

“My sister, Miss Grace Hubley,” Mary Jenkins was saying through his daze of enchantment. A small fire, the size of a cat, purred in the fireplace. The grouped and reflected candles gave off additional warmth enough to allow Miss Hubley to display, it appeared to the visitor, a generous amount of skin, among the curves of a loosely arranged and resplendent shawl. “And this is Mr. James Buchanan, Junior—a former state Assemblyman and a lawyer whose counsel on many matters is treasured by Mr. Jenkins.”

The fresh face in the room appeared radiant, in the shifting web of radiance. Miss Hubley’s hair, the same pale brown as Buchanan’s, was done up in a taut nest of braids behind, with ringlets falling free about her face, from a glossy central parting striking in its straight perfection. Her long eyebrows had an inquisitive arch, and her lightly tinted mouth expressed a cushioned pleasure in itself and its flirtatious workings a world of temperament removed from Ann’s angular, impatient lips. When Miss Hubley spoke, it was with an enchanting Southern mulling of the words. “Oh,” she said, “one does not have to be in the Jenkins household many hours to hear tell of Mr. Buchanan. He is the man to be watched, in Lancaster.”

“I am a diligent lad from the Tuscaroras, Miss Hubley, and claim to be no more than that. In the glitter of this gracious city, I cast a dull but faithful gleam.” Yet he seated himself—in an armless oval-seated side chair with tapered curved legs whose neo-Grecian fluting was echoed in the rails of the back, which had a lyre-shaped splat—near the end of the damask-covered pink Chippendale sofa where Grace Hubley shimmeringly perched. An iridescent silk shawl of Persian pattern, such Oriental fabrics being fashionable in Europe ever since Napoleon’s Egyptian foray, permitted glimpses in the warm candlelight of her plump shoulders’ ivory skin and of the powdered embonpoint the décolletage of her high-waisted gown of well-set silks revealed. He bent low, placing his beaver hat, with its own fashionable iridescence, between his boots, his Philadelphia boots, of a thinner black leather than his Lancaster boots, their tops cut diagonally in the hussar style.

“You disclaim, to elicit flattery,” his new companion gaily accused him. “You have lost your mountain manners, if ever you had them.”

“My dear mother is a woman of some graces, who loved the old poets as well as the Bible, and my father a man of sufficient means to send me to college, though he missed my strong back on his farm. He began on the road to prosperity as the sack-handler in a frontier trading post; in his youth in County Donegal, his own father had deserted him, and when the dust of our Revolution settled he quit his dependency on his dead mother’s brother, and sailed.” Lest this self-description which he impulsively confided seem boastful, he added, “But the simple Christian virtues remain my standard of success, and when my second term in the Assembly ended three years ago last June, I with great pleasure surrendered all political ambition.”

Mary Jenkins loyally protested, “Yet the Judge Franklin case has kept you in the public eye, and there is talk,” she explained to her sister, giving their guest the dignity of the third person, “of the Federalists putting up Mr. Buchanan for the national Congress in next year’s election. And just the other day he and Mr. Jenkins and James Hopkins were appointed to form a committee to advise our Congressman on the question of slavery in Missouri.”

Buchanan hastened to disclaim, “Lancaster is a small city, Miss Hubley, and a few dogs must bark on many street corners.”

“I assume you will advise to vote against extending slavery; I think it wicked, wicked, the way those planters want to spread their devilish institution over all of God’s terrain!”

Such fire of opinion, the tongue and heart outracing reason, attracted Buchanan, and alarmed him. “We do so advise, Miss Hubley, though in terms less fervently couched than your own. Myself, since the Constitution undeniably sanctions slavery, I see no recourse but accommodation with it pro tempore. A geographical compromise, such as rumor suggests Senator Clay will soon propose, to maintain the balance of power within the Senate, would, I am convinced, allay the sectional competition that has heavily contributed to the present panic of selling and suing. For unless the spirit of compromise and mediation prevail, this young nation may divide in three, New England pulling one way and the South the other, and the states of middling disposition shall be left as ports without a nation to supply their commerce. Disunited, our fair States may become each as trivial as Bavarian princedoms!”

Grace said, theatrically addressing her sister, “Oh, I do adore men, the sensible way they put one thing against another. Myself, Mr. Buchanan, I cannot calmly think on the fate of those poor enslaved darkies, the manner in which not only the men in the fields are abused but the colored ladies also—I cannot, it is a weakness of my nature, I cannot contemplate such wrongs without my heart rising up and yearning to smite those monstrous slavedrivers into the Hades that will be their everlasting abode!”

Buchanan tut-tutted, “Come now, the peculiar institution presents more sides than that. You speak as a soldier’s daughter, Miss Hubley, but here in peaceable Pennsylvania we take a less absolute view. The slavedrivers, for one, are themselves driven, by circumstances they did not create. Chattel slavery, though I, too, deplore its abuses, is as old as warfare, and to be preferred to massacre. In some societies, such as that of ancient Greece, the contract between master and slave allowed the latter considerable advantages, and our Southern brethren maintain that without the institution’s paternal guidance the negro would perish of his natural sloth and inability. At present, our friends in the South see their share of the national fortune dwindling; much of the urgency would be removed from the territorial question, it is my belief, if new territories—to the south of the South, so to speak—were to be mercifully removed”—he made a nimble snatching gesture, startling both members of his little audience—“from the crumbling dominions of the moribund Spanish crown. Cuba, Texas, Chihuahua, California—all begging to be plucked.”

He settled back, pleasantly conscious of the breast-fluttering impression his masculine aggressiveness had made. Now he directed his attention, with a characteristic twist of his head, specifically toward Mrs. Jenkins, who had remained standing, held upright by the strands of hostessly duty. “But I mustn’t tarry, delightful though tarrying be,” he said. “Inform Mr. Jenkins, if you will, that the Columbia Bridge Company matter took some hopeful turns under my prodding, and if he wishes to be apprised of their nature, and of the distance I estimate we have left to travel, he will find me in my chambers tomorrow all day.”

“I will indeed inform him,” the excellent wife agreed. “But please, Mr. Buchanan, you shame me by not letting me offer you a beverage, and then a spot of supper. My sister and I were to sit down to a simple meal—salt-pork roast, fried potatoes, dried succotash, and peach-and-raisin pie. It would brighten our dull fare if you could join us, and would keep you out of the taverns for an evening.”

“People exaggerate my tavern attendance, even in my unattached days,” Buchanan said, in mock rebuke, and with a jerk of his head rested his vision on Miss Hubley’s alabaster upper chest, bare of any locket or sign of affection pledged. His attachment to Ann nagged at him awkwardly; he should be speeding from this house and presenting at the Colemans’ door live evidence of his safe return from Philadelphia.

“Oh, do stay with us,” Grace Hubley chimed. “It would be a kindness even after you are gone, for sisters continually need something to gossip about.”

Between folded wings of peacock-shimmery Persian silk, the woman’s powdered skin glowed in his imperfect vision, which needed for focus constant small adjustments of his head. “I would be honored to serve as helpless fodder for your sororal interchange,” he pronounced, “but there can be no question of imposing my presence for the length of a meal. I will, Mrs. Jenkins,” he announced, relaxing into conviviality, “upon your kind urging have tea to keep Miss Hubley company, and a thimbleful of port to keep company with the tea.”

When Mrs. Jenkins, to arrange these new provisions, left the room, its glittering glow seemed to intensify; the purring blaze in the fireplace—its mantel in the form of a Grecian temple carved with fluted pillars and classic entablature of which the frieze was decorated with acanthus garlands in bas-relief—added its flickers and flares to the eddying web of candlelight. Cocking her head in unconscious imitation of Buchanan’s own, Miss Hubley said prettily, since he had referred to his attached state, “I have heard the most wonderful things concerning Miss Coleman. She is as original as she is beautiful, and her family of an unchallenged prominence.”

“The Colemans are seldom challenged, it is true,” he said, permitting himself the manner if not the substance of irony in such a serious connection. “Even at the age of seventy-one, the Judge keeps a good grip on his interests, and his grown sons greatly extend his influence.”

“Mary tells me all Lancaster thinks you are a knight errant to brave the Coleman castle and carry away the languishing princess.” When this apparition laughed, the shadowed space between her breasts changed shape. Her voice formed cushions in the air, into which Buchanan sank gratefully after days of nasal legal prating in an oppressive metropolis.

“She would not languish long, were this particular knight to take a fatal lance.”

Grace Hubley thoughtfully pursed her plump, self-pleasing lips. “It makes a woman unsteady, perhaps, to have too many attractions; it prevents in her mind the resigned contentment of a concluded bargain.” Here she spoke, less mischievously than usual, from experience, absorbed and foreshadowed: we are told Grace Hubley was a young woman of three negative romances, not including the part she played in the Buchanan-Coleman episode. Thrice engaged to be married, misfortune and a fickleness of temperament ordained her ultimately to spinsterhood.

Buchanan, too, may have suffered from a surfeit of attractiveness. A decade later, he excited the Washington journalist Anne Royall to gush, in the third volume of her Black Book (1828–29), No description that the most talented writer could give, can convey an idea of Mr. Buchanan; he is quite a young man (and a batchelor, ladies) with a stout handsome person; his face is large and fair, his eyes, a soft blue, one of which he often shuts, and has a habit of turning his head to one side. He had been his mother’s first son and, with the death of his older sister, Mary, in the year he was born, her eldest child. Five sisters followed, four of them surviving to form playmates and an audience. His capacity for basking in female approval was essentially bottomless, and Ann Coleman’s good opinion had to it a certain bottom, reinforced by her family. Grace Hubley, in turn, we are told, possessed a beauty and vivaciousness of disposition that made her the pet adorable of her acquaintance. Her feathery banter was to his vanity, we might conceive, as a deep barrel of sifted flour is to a man’s forearm. He stirred her, he took her tinge. The shadows the Colemans cast in his head were dispersed by the light of this social conversation very adroitly guided by the keen objective mind of Miss Hubley. Golden minutes fled by on winged feet. As the embrace of the November evening tightened around them, and the windows of the tall sitting room with its fine provincial furniture gave back only tremulous amber reflections of the lights burning within, and Mary Jenkins absented herself to supervise details of the impending meal, possibly the conversation between these two strangers, the pet adorable and the favorite son, whose ages flanked the turning point of thirty, deepened in intimacy and dared probe the innermost source of consolation and anxiety harbored by Americans of the early nineteenth century, the strenuous maintenance of which so remarkably consumed and yet also supplied their energy—the Christian faith. Struck by her repeated righteous rejection of black slavery in all its forms, indeed scandalized by her airy, quick-tongued condemnation of an institution so extensively and venerably bound up in the nation’s laws of property and means of production, he ventured, “Miss Hubley, I envy you the clarity of your views. God’s design, it is evident, presents no riddles to your vision.”

“What riddles there are, Mr. Buchanan, I leave to the Lord to solve.” By this hour her own sipping had moved from tea to a brandy cordial in a tulip-shaped glass, and a certain rosy warmth and confident languor broadened her gestures, beneath the loosening exotic length of Persian shawl.

He inclined his stout handsome person forward from the delicate lyre-back chair with fluted legs, so that his vision won for its field slightly more of the radiant expanse of Miss Hubley’s bosom. “May I ask—” He hesitated. “I ask in all respectfulness, with full solemnity—have you known, then, an inner experience of election, that supports this lovely certainty of yours?”

She adjusted her shawl, to achieve an inch more concealment, then relaxed into self-exposition, saying, “I would not express it in so political a phrase—but for as long as I can remember, I have sensibly felt the closeness of the Lord. He looks over me—He approves of me—He rebukes me—He enjoys me.”

“Ah, I do envy you. My own mother could not speak with a more serene assurance.”

“But is not this true of everyone, Mr. Buchanan? At least, of the white and educated race?”

“You ask, I cannot answer,” admitted the future statesman, lowering his gaze in an approach to shame. “My own sad case may be singular. Parson and evangelist and deacon all alike speak of some necessary factual encounter, some near-sensory experience of Jesus, which I cannot in unhappy honesty wring from hours of prayer, or find even in my memories of childhood. The forest surrounding Stony Batter, the curses of the drovers and the misery of their animals, even the bland and randomly changing temper of the skies above seemed then to bespeak an inscrutable indifference, the cool tenor of which no intensity of yearning on my part could alter. The Presbyterian faith teaches of foreordained election and its opposite; can it be, I must ask myself, that my deadness of heart in this regard is sign of some eternal negation—an incurable absence of the quality, grace, which your very name proclaims?”

She had held her attitude of repose, one silken sleeve posed along the restless mahogany curve of the sofa’s back, with a deliberate patience, sensing that this greatly endowed and yet spiritually lamed man was attempting a declaration of, for him, dangerous depth. Quickly moving her posed arm to make, with the other, a clench of earnestness in her lap, she mirrored the tilt of his body toward hers and said in a lowered but still singing voice, “It is not a woman’s way, Mr. Buchanan, to make an issue of doubt. Helpless we are born, helpless we die, and betweentimes we live at the mercy of those who are stronger. It is not our task to quarrel with God. Yet life is good, evidently; earth’s abundance and glory are but the outward validation of the love we feel flowing, without stint, from within. There are truths beyond the reach of reason. Surely Miss Coleman, to the degree of intimacy that is already your privilege, relieves your uncertainties, and charms away your doubts.”

“Alas, Miss Hubley, and in the strictest confidence, not only does she herself doubt; she mocks. She is a headlong reader of Lord Byron’s bombastic and cynical scribblings, and I fear has some sympathy for the most vicious anti-principles of the European anarchists!”

“But how can that be? Her family is the richest in Lancaster!”

“You cite as objection the very cause. Only luxury can afford ruinous thoughts. Luxury, and poverty beyond redemption.”

Grace Hubley sat back, thinking that she had gone as far with this initial interview as was practicable; she was aware of hunger clashing with brandy in her stomach, and of a certain weariness this man even in his splendor and susceptibility inspired. He lacked true masculine spontaneity, that possibility of cruelty which brings the final alertness, the last voluptuous rounding, to feminine interest. “Well,” she said in a flattened tone of conclusion and provisional withdrawal, “there are many Christian women, of sound and regular views, who would welcome your attentions, Mr. Buchanan, and throw a soothing light upon the matter of your election.” Having so long waxed flirtatious, she relaxed into theological admonition, continuing, “I fear you vex with your mind what only spirit can decide. You must not bargain with God, as you do with other men of substance. God is not substantial in this sense. He cannot be bargained with. He allows us freedom only to accept or reject Him. Accept Him, sir, simply, without cavil, as a woman does—a woman, of course, of sound disposition and normal attitude.”

Before this insinuation at Ann Coleman could quite register, another sound woman, stout and dutiful Mary Jenkins, appeared; the golden minutes had fled by, the evening dinner hour was at hand. Despite her profuse invitations Buchanan desisted from partaking. He reclaimed his beaver hat and the dove-gray gloves folded within it, stood erect with a creak of his travelled knees, and informed the vision in silk—who wore in his sight yet some aspect of a foe, a combatant in the implicative battles of sexual negotiation—“I will strive to accept your advice, Miss Hubley. This chance encounter has been not merely pleasurable but instructive. Shall it occur again, I wonder?”

“If the Lord wills,” she said prettily, confident that it would.

But it did not; events whirled the possibility away. If Grace Hubley is viewed, under a loving but stern Providence, as the source of Buchanan’s impending misfortune, and of a neurosis that decades later disabled his Presidency and plunged our nation into its bloodiest war, then she deserved to be punished. Not only did she live unwed but she died violently, in utmost pain. As she grew older in life, and thrice had broken engagements that would have brought her respected husbands, she devoted most of her energies to the entertainment of her friends, many of whom were as light-hearted and blithe as she, too, had been. It was on the return from chaperoning a party of young people from the historic old hotel at Wabank that she met her death. Standing with her back to an open-grate fire, in an unsuspecting moment a spark lit upon her dress, and before help could be called she was seared most terribly over the body and died in pitiful agony in a few hours. The date, thanks to a tombstone, is known: November 19, 1861. The Union disasters at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff were already history; her death was a match-flare within a spreading conflagration. But surely Grace Hubley did not, after Buchanan desisted from partaking of dinner with the Jenkins family, and hurriedly departed to his home, where he enjoyed his own solitary meal and performed his toilet for his appointment that evening with his fiancée, execute the melodramatic perfidy described:

Hardly had he left the Jenkins house, when Miss Hubley slipped to her boudoir and hastily penned a note to Miss Coleman that was “the most unkindest cut of all” to the delicate, sensitive nature of the woman who received it. It was short and concise, telling that Mr. Buchanan had stopped at the Jenkins home to see her and “that they had spent a very pleasant afternoon together.”

Nay, rather than believe such outright and useless malice one would cling to the muffled but musical sentence with which George Ticknor Curtis disposed of the scandal in his authorized (by Buchanan’s younger brother Edward and his niece Harriet Lane Johnston) Life of 1883: It is now known that the separation of the lovers originated in a misunderstanding, on the part of the lady, of a very small matter, exaggerated by giddy and indiscreet tongues, working on a peculiarly sensitive nature. Whose tongues? Jenkins tongues, Rogers tongues, Jacobs, Reynolds, Boyd, Shippen, Slaymaker? A town has many tongues, and twice as many eyes and ears.

Curtis knew more than he told, but he had not seen the packet of mementos so precious to Buchanan that the careful old man dispatched them to a New York bank for safekeeping when Pennsylvania, and Wheatland with its reviled occupant, were menaced by an invasion of Confederate troops. In his retirement, the former President had been shown a gossipping article on the Ann Coleman incident, and, in Curtis’s words, He then said, with deep emotion, that there were papers and relics which he had religiously preserved, then in a sealed package in a place of deposit in the city of New York, which would explain the trivial origin of this separation. His executors found these papers inclosed and sealed separately from all others, and with a direction upon them in his handwriting, that they were to be destroyed without being read. They obeyed the injunction, and burnt the package without breaking the seal.

Another burning, and not from a stray spark. Why did he religiously preserve these papers and relics, if the executors were truly to burn them? Surely he wanted us—posterity, to whom he would be history—to know the facts of the matter. Mr. Buchanan had a habit of preserving nearly everything that came into his hands. Curtis was the third chosen biographer, and the first not to be overwhelmed by the mass of Buchanan papers. The initial choice, Mr. William B. Reed of Philadelphia, a personal friend … in whom he had great confidence, was appointed in Buchanan’s will, but was prevented by private misfortune from doing anything more than to examine Mr. Buchanan’s voluminous papers. Edward and Harriet, eager to have their brother and uncle vindicated and explained, found another writer. After Mr. Reed had surrendered the task which he had undertaken, the papers were placed in the hands of the late Judge John Cadwallader of Philadelphia, another personal friend of the President. This gentleman died before he had begun to write the proposed work. Curtis, a New Englander, Harvard graduate, and lawyer turned professional writer, who had never met Buchanan, persevered, in patient legalistic fashion. He had written a fuller account of the Coleman incident, and showed it to Samuel L. M. Barlow, his friend and Buchanan’s, for approval. Barlow, would you believe, did not approve: he wrote Curtis, I am clearly of the opinion that you should not print any considerable portion of what you have written on the subject of his engagement to Miss Coleman.… In this view Mrs. Barlow agrees fully. Oh, Mrs. Barlow, what a toad you are, lurking in the garden of history!

We are left, like our hero, in the dark. Night came to the so-called city of Lancaster as decisively as to a village. Only the taverns in and around Centre Square cast much light through their windows onto the sidewalks of rough planking, which thudded hollowly beneath the heels of Buchanan’s hastening boots. The tilted attic roof of blue-black clouds at whose eaves a brown sunset had wanly peeped now was breaking up, disclosing spatterings of dry cold stars. The afternoon’s feeble spittings of snow had yielded to crystalline air tasting of woodsmoke, fresh horse dung, and evening ale. He could see his breath before his face. Guilt of an unformulated and foreboding sort revolved in his stomach with what it sourly contained of tea, port, Lititz pretzels, and a lonely supper. It has never been ascertained just whether or no Buchanan was received by his fiancée that evening. If he was, the dullest of imaginations can readily picture the chill that must have characterized the greeting. Considering the modest, sensitive nature of the young woman, it seems improbable that she could have faced the torture of a meeting. From whatever direction he approached the Coleman house, its façade was dark; its front door felt closed to him. The panes of its parlor windows held only light reflected from afar, like the residue of liquid that is left in an emptied dish. The future statesman hesitated outside, divided between longing for a lamp of recognition to flare within Ann’s house and a certain fear of the same flare, and at last retired, his dignity and weariness intact, to his bachelor lodgings.

There you have my attempt, Retrospect editors, to work into the fabric of reconstruction the indeterminacy of events. As in physics, the more minutely we approach them, the stranger facts become, with leaps and contradictions of indecipherable quanta. All we have are documents, which do not agree. Was there, we might legitimately ask, ever an actual afternoon when Buchanan met Grace Hubley? We first hear of it in an article, maddeningly undated and somewhat edited in quotation by Klein, written by Blanche Nevin, a daughter of the Reverend John W. Nevin—an intimate of Buchanan’s seven years of retirement and the deliverer of the President’s funeral sermon in 1868—and of Martha Jenkins Nevin, whose father had been William Jenkins’ brother Robert. In other words, Blanche Nevin’s mother had been Mary Jenkins’ and Grace Hubley’s niece-in-law; her account has the authenticity of family lore. Some time after the engagement had been announced, Mr. Buchanan was obliged to go out of town on a business trip. He returned in a few days and casually dropped in to see … [ellipses not mine] Mrs. William Jenkins, with whose husband he was on terms of intimate friendship. With her was staying her sister, Miss Grace Hubley,… [see bracketed disclaimer above] a pretty and charming young [for young see discussion on this page] lady. From this innocent call the whole trouble arose. A young lady [a different young lady, presumably] told Miss Coleman of it and thereby excited her jealousy. She was indignant that he should visit anyone before coming to her. On the spur of the moment she penned an angry note and released him from his engagement. The note was handed to him while he was in the Court House. Persons who saw him receive it remarked afterward that they noticed him turn pale when he read it. Mr. Buchanan was a proud man. The large fortune of his lady was to him only another barrier to his trying to persuade her to reconsider her rejection of himself.

For that matter, was there ever a Ford Administration? Evidence for its existence seems to be scanty. I have been doing some sneak objective research, though you ask for memories and impressions, both subjective. The hit songs of the years 1974–76 apparently were

“Seasons in the Sun”

“The Most Beautiful Girl”

“The Streak”

“Please, Mister Postman”

“Mandy”

“Top of the World”

“Just You and Me”

“Rhinestone Cowboy”

“Fame”

“Best of My Love”

“Laughter in the Rain”

“The Hustle”

“Have You Never Been Mellow?”

“One of These Nights”

“Jive Talkin’ ”

“Silly Love Songs”

“Black Water”

“Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart”

“Play That Funky Music”

“A Fifth of Beethoven”

“Shake Your Booty”

“Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”

“Love Is Alive”

“Sara Smile”

“Get Closer”

I don’t recall hearing any of them. Whenever I turned on the radio, WADM was pouring out J. S. Bach’s merry tintinnabulations or the surging cotton candy of P. I. Tchaikovsky, the inventor of sound-track music. No, wait—“Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” rings a faint bell, I can almost hum it, and the same goes for “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” if it’s not the same song. In fact, all twenty-five titles give me the uneasy sensation of being the same song. The top non-fiction bestsellers of those years were All the President’s Men, More Joy: Lovemaking Companion to the Joy of Sex, You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis, Angels: God’s Secret Agents, Winning Through Intimidation, Sylvia Porter’s Money Book, Total Fitness in 30 Minutes a Week, Blind Ambition: The White House Years, The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, and The Hite Report: I read none of them. Fiction, too, evaded my ken; the multitudes but not I revelled in the dramatized information of such chunky, univerbal titles as Jaws, Shogun, Ragtime, Trinity, Centennial, and 1876, or in the wistful escapism of All Things Bright and Beautiful and Watership Down, which was, I seem very imperfectly to recall, somehow about rabbits. The top TV shows were All in the Family, Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley: I never watched them, having no TV set in my furtive digs. I would half-hear the interrupting news bulletins on WADM whenever some woman would take a shot at Ford or Ford took a shot at the Cambodians—Cambodia being the heart of the world’s darkness in these years—but otherwise the only news that concerned me was what came over the telephone and up the stairs.

The longer I stayed in my burrow over in Adams, the more visitors I attracted. I was a kind of vacuum nature, especially female nature, abhorred. Students would drop by unannounced: I remember the rasp of my buzzer, the tremulous girlish voice stammering her excuses into the rusty speaker below in the little foyer strewn with advertising handouts and misdelivered mail, my hasty cleanup of dropped underwear and dirty dishes while this student climbed the uncarpeted flights of stairs, her young heart beating like a caged bluebird. These Wayward girls all had cars, not just cars but convertibles in the fall and spring and four-wheel-drive squarebacks in the blizzard season; for them it was no great trick to drive over the bridge and find my place behind the old shoe factory—undone by Italian imports and fractionally given over to little electronics outfits all hoping to become the next Apple—less than a block off the half-boarded-up main shopping drag, called Federal Avenue on the drawing board when the town, little more than a mill, inn, and waterfall when it was named in 1797, was laid out in the 1830’s, under the second Adams’s supplanter Jackson, as an ideal industrialopolis. The city was a worker’s paradise on paper—the proud main drag ending at the main textile factory’s gates; a parallel grand residential boulevard with a mall down the middle like Park Avenue and a big flat Common in between. At the center of a symmetrical web of walks stood a bandstand and a monument to the two Federalist Presidents, Washington and Adams, with a pair of nightgowned beauties who were not Martha and Abigail but the abstract houris of the Republic, Liberty and Equality, in these fallen times much decorated with polychrome graffiti, spray-painted pudenda, invitations to FUCK ME and SUCK MY COCK, and the like. The Jacksonian mapmakers hadn’t quite foreseen the Irish and then the Poles who would replace the Yankee farm girls at the idyllic looms and lasts, or the Hispanics and Asians that had appeared in these recent decades in such bewildering numbers, with their rapid languages and Old World predilection for crimes of passion. But the city has stretched its grid toward the surrounding hills to make more neighborhoods, and put up bi-lingual signs in the welfare office, and hired more dark-skinned counsellors at the high school, and allows the Common to be used for fiestas on saints’ days. Is this the place, Retrospect editors, for me to confess my basic optimism and even exhilaration in regard to the American process? The torch still shines, attracting moths of every shade. Live free or stay home.

Which student was it? My core memory, or impression, generating a radiant halo of verbalization, is of the push of her breast on the back of my arm, above the elbow, as we looked together at her term paper, there by the window with the friable brown shade like a graham cracker, near my desk with its litter of James Buchananiana. Waxy photocopies and scribbled index cards and overdue library books—the disorder sickened me, but I had hopes of pulling out of it a clean narrative thread that would some day gleam in the sun like a taut fishing line.

This unmistakable nudge of lipid tissue was one more bit of confusion I didn’t need. I wanted to step forward, releasing my upper arm from the pressure, but, pinned by my desk chair, I could only lean away, an evasive tactic she easily countered by edging her feet, in their canvas sneakers—this was before the era of bulky, many-ply running shoes and after the heyday of Pappagallo ballerina slippers—a few inches closer to my loafers. “Miss Arthrop”—let us call her Jennifer Arthrop, at a grab—“you don’t have to stand so close.”

“I can’t see, Professor Clayton, if I don’t. I brought only my sunglasses.” Nearsightedness in women, I suppose, is favored by evolution; men are charmed by it, a vision that focuses on the cooking pot, the sewing needle, and immediate male needs. It would be fatal to hunting prowess, however, and in men it must persist through the genes of social parasites.

The document in my hands, a sheaf of 8½″-by-11″ paper covered, back then, with erratic rows of manually typed characters, eludes the eyes of memory, but let us say, donning the corrective lenses of invention, that it was entitled “Protestant-Christian Mythicization as an Enforcer of Male-Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.” Fifteen pages, double-spaced, a term paper for extra credit, from one of my better students. Miss Arthrop came from Connecticut, where her father was a communications-company executive and her mother ran a gift shop. Her excuse for showing up in my divorcing man’s hideout was the slight lateness of her paper, which was due Friday and by Monday would be decisively late and doomed to be docked one grade. Today was Sunday, a gray area. Her admirably firm breast renewed its pressure on the back of my sensitive arm, in its thin shirtsleeve. In desperation I moved away, an awkward half-twist, around my swivel chair toward the window, my knees inches from the spiny, dusty radiator, the half-raised shade revealing the day to be, in the downward space between my building and the factory, a gloomy one. My maneuver left Miss Arthrop standing in her full sweater at the corner of my desk, blinking, suggesting a caryatid from whose head the weighty entablature had been abruptly removed. The sweater was striped and shaggy, as if she were just back from a ski trip. Perhaps she was. Perhaps, when I raised the shade, a row of dripping icicle tips sparkled into view.

Walking nervously about a little, to keep my distance and to conceal and stifle the involuntary beginnings of an erection, I riffled through her paper’s pages. McKinley a fervent Ohio Methodist. Mother hoped he would become a minister. His famous description to a delegation of Methodists in 1898 of going down on his knees to the Almighty and coming to the decision to possess the Philippines. Sexual significance of going down on one’s knees. Contemporary cartoons portraying Philippines as lightly clad maiden being taken from senile Spanish king by virile U.S. figure. McKinley’s confessing, And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly, as if after coitus. Vaginal innuendo of Dewey Bay. Feminine images of Samoa (divided with Germany in 1899) and Hawaii, whose annexation was pushed by McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Zoftig Queen Liliuokalani. Blatant phallocentrism of Roosevelt’s Big Stick. Insistent binaries of his public discourse: hard/soft, strong/weak, bold/timid, square/round. Be like the soldier and the hunter. Sexist characterization of Latin (soft-weak-round) country of Colombia, reluctant to cede canal rights (virginity): You could no more make an agreement with the Colombian rulers than you could nail currant jelly to the wall. Evident sexual symbols of nailing jelly and dredging canal. Miss Arthrop’s deconstruction was getting me excited. TR’s desire to de-phallusize (Miss Arthrop’s word) William Howard Taft, his former protégé turned ingrate and foe, with the homoerotic announcement I am stripped to the buff. His seeing the U.S. itself (Colombia by another name) as a woman, to be “controlled,” like his celebrated liberated daughter, Alice: I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.

I had perused many such papers before, but never with the solemnly watchful authoress and I a few strides from my unmade bed. The trouble with systematic feminism is that it heightens rather than dampens one’s phallocentricity. It makes more difficult the sexual forgetting we depend upon for decent everyday social intercourse. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her breasts, the rounded shelf of them within the fuzzy sweater, and the curve of her hip, which we shall dress for this remembrance in elasticized ski pants. There was something unkempt and doughy about late-adolescent girls that usually, mercifully, kept them from being attractive to me; against the age-old abstract ideal of the jeune fille stood the disconcerting particularity of every instance, the unique female individual with a chin too sharp, some baby fat still to lose, a dreadful vulgar near-childish voice, or an unairbrushed pimple beside her slightly bulbous nose. Their minds, probed, revealed ungainly abysses that sent me scurrying back from the edge.

In that far-off Ford era—a benighted, innocent time—the college had, believe it or not, no announced policy on fornication between faculty and students. In the Sixties, indeed, gentle and knowing defloration had been understood by some of the younger, less married faculty gallants as an extracurricular service they were being salaried to perform. By barbaric standards derived from a rural or tribal world of numb animality, females of eighteen had reached consensual age, and good luck to them. The social experiment that had begun in bohemia and continued in communes and culminated in co-ed dormitories had discovered what pre-Gutenbergian societies already knew: sex, like eating, has a limit; a point of saturation can be reached, and all the screwing in the world will not rattle bank foundations or bring down the walls of the Pentagon. The earth only seems to move. Puritanism had overstated the gravity of the matter. The United States of the Ford era had absorbed the punch of widespread fornication and found itself still walking and talking, disappointingly enough. So there was no consolidated prohibition, nor likelihood of a subsequent rape or sexual-harassment suit, to prevent me from elaborating on Miss Arthrop’s nudge. There were only the scattered contraindications of my formal vows to the Queen of Disorder, given in a very low Congregational church service, and my informal vows of deathless fealty to the Perfect Wife, given in many a heated darkness, and the nagging aftertaste of several incidental nibbles at Wendy Wadleigh, plus my inkling that this dogged, slightly pasty girl with the weekend submission was not quite what she seemed. She was, speaking of unideal jeunes filles, ten or fifteen pounds on the heavy side—not that the Ford era, as I remember it, had anything like the horror of overweight evinced in the anti-inflationary Reagan years or in the Coolidge-Hoover period of ascetic Prohibition.

Stalling, sorely tempted for all of the above reservations to launch myself on this little chubby uncharted sea, I asked her, “Why do you think, Miss Arthrop, Cuba was never annexed, either in the wake of the Spanish-American War or earlier, prior to the Civil War, when filibusters were all over Central America and the Ostend Manifesto, in 1854, urged that Cuba be either purchased from Spain or, that failing, taken by force?”

She moved a step away from the icicle-fringed window, so that her entire side—thigh, haunch, thick waist, and soft shoulder—took a long lick of light, and her eyes, now in bars of icicle-shadow, had a melting look. These nearsighted, un-bespectacled eyes, in her plump face, seemed watery and small yet held an appeal, the call of uncharted salt waters, taken with a breeze of willingness emanating from her shaggy striped sweater, her tight forest-green ski pants, her dingy Tretorn tennis shoes, which the Wayward girls wore summer and winter, in sunshine or slush. “Who was Ostend?” she asked, in a soft, croaky voice, as if her vocal cords were dried out by the heat of my room. The radiator valve had broken and could not be turned off; on all but the coldest nights I left the bedroom window open a few inches.