“It was a port in Belgium,” I said professorially, matching her step with a backwards one of my own, edging my pelvis behind the curved edge of my reading chair, that giant brown doughnut of airfoam and Naugahyde [see this page], “where the three United States Ministers to France, Spain, and Great Britain met to discuss the matter of Cuba. The Minister to Great Britain at that time was James Buchanan.”

“Who was James Buchanan?” Miss Arthrop asked.

That tore it. Even though, to be fair, the course of mine she was enrolled in (winter term, three credits) was “The Long Post-Bellum: 1865 to 1914,” this revelation of ignorance so abysmal quite quelled her siren’s song. Further, the revelation was accompanied by a flicker of weird possibility: she had been sent. She hadn’t learned all her post-structuralist cant in any class of mine. She was Brent Mueller’s—what? Pupil, disciple, conquest, cat’s-paw. She had been sent by him to tempt me into betraying his wife, my perfect love. Cold-blooded wickedness! While my mind was spinning, I told her, “The fifteenth President of the United States, just before Lincoln. Born 1791, also in a log cabin. But you haven’t answered my question. In your own terms of phallic aggression, and given that the American South wanted Cuba both as an extension of slave territory and to prevent its becoming another black republic like Haiti, why didn’t Manifest Destiny—a phrase first used, as you know, in 1845, by the journalist John L. O’Sullivan—gobble it up?”

“I don’t know” was all she could say, all I wanted her to say. I had unwomaned her—clapped her into the chastity belt of student inferiority.

“Look at Cuba’s shape,” I instructed her. “Talk about phallic. And what are its main product? Cigars. TR already had his Big Stick, and if there’s one thing one big stick hates, it’s another. We could have spared ourselves Castro, if Cuba had just been shaped like the Virgin Islands.”

The abovesigned is not entirely sure, at this distance of time (but far less time, I may point out, than elapsed between the ministry of Jesus and the composition of the earliest Gospels), that he spoke quite so wittily, with so quick a command of New World geopolitics, but the fending feeling is authentic, and the reality of this child’s sexual aggression, and the momentous way in which her presence transformed my paltry apartment, turning it into a moral arena, a theater of combat in which the door lock and window shade and fake-leather modernist chair all acquired tactical significance. The enemy of my new life had sent this spy to undermine the purity of my position. I was sacrificing my imperfect, though well-settled, marriage for a perfect, though as yet undeveloped, one. Letting this teen-ager (or twenty-year-old, at best) undress and be pierced by my aroused flesh would be a severe and distinct mistake, even if messing with students were not generally poor policy. How can you give a bad grade to a good lay? How can you take respectful lecture notes when the old guy is only so-so in bed?

Yet these my perceptions did not make it easier to evict this feminine intruder from my quarters. She seemed to gain corporeality with every passing minute. The possibility that she was the robotic sex-slave of Brent Mueller, with his taut, aerobically exercised body and brain stocked with the latest academic chic, and had come to me from this cunning cuckold’s couch with duplicitous intent gave her blobby budding womanhood, as it were, some anatomy. Danger added its sharp musk to her bland aroma of willingness, of openness to what the situation might bring. I broke into a fine sweat of wanting. To see those bulky breasts, firm as muscle on her stocky body in its ski togs, with ruddy nipples and rosy areolae, and to touch those mute haunches and buttocks, with fingers curled to scrape my nails in a torturer’s exquisite refinement of epidermal delight … Only feverish pedantic prattle staved off my desire to leap forward into the heavily baited trap. “I myself have always been struck,” I said, trying to keep my breathing under control (I get asthmatic in tight situations), “by the rather sweetly hysterical quality of what McKinley revealed of himself to that delegation of Methodists. He had a nurturing, vulnerable side, McKinley, and I don’t say that just because he was assassinated, which is a cheap way to get sympathy. His wife, Ida, was a dreadful trial to him—she fell apart after her mother and two daughters died within a few years of each other. She became an epileptic; she would throw a fit in the middle of a state dinner. When he saw one coming on, dear President McKinley would jump up, drop a napkin over her face to hide its hideous contortions, and carry her out of the room. Furthermore, she was a possessive, querulous bitch. When he was Governor of Ohio she made him wave to her from his office window with a handkerchief every day at three o’clock. A man who stuck it out with Ida can’t be all evil and phallic, do you think? As to Roosevelt—well, he was compensating. He had been asthmatic and puny as a child—like me, as a matter of fact—and spoke in a rather high, effeminate voice. What I’d love some student to do for me some day is write about effeminacy in the Presidency—the President as national mother. Like LBJ—he loved us all in sorrow, protest though we did. The most motherly, of course, was the one who sent the most American boys to their deaths—Lincoln.”

Jennifer’s pale roundish face had gone as fuzzy as her sweater; the fading light of this winter afternoon was making me, too, feel nearsighted. “Phallic isn’t all bad,” she said, making one more stab at being seductive, at carrying out that child-exploiting fiend Brent Mueller’s perfidious errand.

“Like dirt,” I said, “in the right place.”

“Beg your pardon, Professor Clayton?”

“A saying you’re too young to know,” I said. “Dirt is just matter in the wrong place.”

“My mother is always saying that,” she said. “I just couldn’t hear you exactly—”

“—with the light fading the way it is,” I finished for her. “Tell me about your mother. She runs a gift shop. Do you want to live her life?”

“Not exactly, I guess.” These young unformed minds, they hit on a word, in this case “exactly,” and can’t stop using it, until another theme word comes along. “She got married when she was twenty.”

“Don’t you make that mistake, Jennifer. What I want you to do when you graduate from Wayward is take your credits and get a BA at a good four-year college, preferably co-ed. A single-sex school like this is an anachronism—women don’t need to banish men out to another planet to achieve personhood. A cruel anachronism—it puts too much stress on the opposite-sex faculty members.”

It was cruel of God, had He existed, to put unformed minds in such formed bodies. Jennifer preened, seeming to pour herself upward, so that her breasts within her sweater strained to rise, as if full of helium. “Don’t you want I should stay and have a drinky-poo?” In the Ford era, scandalously, the legal drinking age in all six New England states was a mere eighteen. “Or maybe cookies and milk?” she added, in kittenish parody of any thought of mine that she was too young for all this and alcohol, too.

“Good heavens, my dear girl, no,” I responded, becoming in counter-parody dithery and elderly. “People might talk. You don’t want your reputation ruined. Can’t that still happen? Isn’t there still a marriage market out there, at least a black market? These digs are grown-up territory, I have no idea how you found them.”

“Professor Mueller—” she began, and then saw her mistake.

“He did, did he? Aha. Tell your buddy Brent for me to keep his little aporias over on his side of the river, please.”

“What’s an aporia?”

“A dead end. Not you, Jennifer, but this particular maneuver of your mentor’s. The bastard’s trying to steal his wife back.” Her face, sinking out of sight as winter lowered the lid on the narrow space between my windows and the factory, was clean of any expression. “I look forward to reading your paper—we’ll consider Sunday Friday, so you’ll get full credit. Think about what I said about Presidents as mothers. When all this fuss about sexism is over, we’ll be able to sit down together and see that men and women are just like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. With what Jacques Derrida calls a différance. Not to be confused with what Nietzsche calls ressentiment.”

Impossibly literary, you say? Remember, Retrospect eds., I was hyperstimulated; my skin was tingling, my pulse was well over a hundred. I wanted to put myself into right relation with this girl, to take up her two-breasted challenge, to peel her bulky sweater up over her head, tousling her curly locks and exposing to what was left of daylight the secretly supportive stitching of her bra, and to let myself be, in the time-honored fashion, de-phallusized. We are, each man and woman, doors that open to disclose an Oz, an alternate universe of emerald forests and ruby reception rooms.

Jennifer Arthrop did seem baffled. Our encounter had reached its aporia. My sexually stimulated skittishness must have looked to her like kidding, a professor’s supercilious dismissal when in all good faith she had volunteered to be my blue angel, egg yolk running down my face while I crowed like a rooster. Yet, too, there was a stir of relief in her brutish blurred features as I gingerly worked her toward the door. I hadn’t so much as laid a finger on her, as the phrase goes. I slipped the chain and bolt and exposed a widening slice of uncarpeted hall landing and rickety wooden railing. I ached all over, as another goes. More phrases: Last chance. Money in the bank. In for a penny, in for a pound. The public be damned. An opportunity missed is worth a stitch in the bush. My guest stepped onto the landing quickly, as if ducking into cold water, clutching her blue parka, retrieved from my brown doughnut chair, in her arms, against her flattened breasts. She had been let off the hook, the sexual hook. I said, in a fatherly burr, rubbing my rejection in, “Take care, Miss Arthrop. There’s ice on the outside steps. My landlord is a crippled miser who lives in Massachusetts.”

As she descended the clattering stairs, I heard Jennifer humming, to taunt me back, “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.”

[Or, in another part of the emerald forest:]

Buchanan was in the Court House by nine o’clock that gray morning in late November. A note was handed to him. He read it and turned pale.

Perhaps the whole Court House, built in 1787 to replace the one that burned in 1784, turned pale. Through the Palladian windows of its upstairs reference library, where the handwritten, canvas-bound judgments and appeals were pulled from sagging pine shelves and lay about carelessly splayed and abandoned on oak reading tables, the sun showed as a sore white spot in the drearily overcast sky. The clerks, messengers, and fellow lawyers in Buchanan’s vicinity, not to mention that populace of cadgers and adaptable hirelings who collect wherever momentous business is being conducted, turned pale in sympathy, recognizing this moment as a critical one, with historical ramifications. The letter was written on stationery of blue wove paper, in Ann Coleman’s large impatient handwriting, with crossings to the “t”s and finishing strokes to the terminal “e”s whose emotional vehemence had ruthlessly splayed the goose quill.

My dear James Buchanan:

Indications mount that your regard for me is less warm and sincere than the solemn pledge of marriage demands. I have been informed, alas from a source I cannot doubt, that while I at my home around the corner joyously awaited your return from Philadelphia, you paid a prolonged call upon Mrs. William Jenkins and her sister, Miss Grace Hubley—a sociable call prolonged past dark, to the hour of supper.

Consulting with my parents, I asked that the lamps of welcome in our house be snuffed. I have not slept, and write you now by morning light. This instance of your neglect, though not, it might be said, grievous by itself, confirms in an unignorable manner the many intimations of indifference I have this fall received from you. When I sought to express my feelings of abandonment, you pled preoccupation with the quantity of new legal business occasioned by the national distress, and I composed myself to be, for this interval, accessory to your ambition. Undoubtingly I scorned those voices close to me insisting that the object of your regard was not my welfare but my riches.

Your earnestness, your industry, your reticence, even your intervals of melancholy and self-distrust—such seemed to me the proper costume of a man’s soul, a soul that might merge with mine, providing shelter to my frailty and substance to my longings. I opened to you as to none other—for each bud flowereth but once. With what dreadful fatality, then, with what terror and shame, have these autumnal months borne in upon me the conclusion that my warmth accosts in you a deceptive coolness as unalterable as the mask of death. Had my affection been received by you as a treasure confided, and not as an adornment bestowed, you would not be flaunting your new prestige before the sisters Hubley nor flirting about Lancaster in the dozens of sprightly incidents obliging gossip reports to me. Did you truly love me, your bones of their gravity would have torn you from such unfaithful lightness!

I foresee your protestations, your skillful arguments. I hear your voice plead circumstance and good intentions. Believe me, the barrier to our united happiness lies fixed. Our engagement is broken. I shall return to your rooms on King Street all the effects, epistolary and material, of our attachment, and will look for the mutual return of mine, to my home but a few steps away. I do not wish, nor, since you claim to be a gentleman, do I expect, to meet you, as more than a nodding acquaintance, again.

In sincere sorrow,
Ann Caroline Coleman

Her full name, to add to the insult of claim to be a gentleman. Yet on a separate, smaller piece of paper, tinted rose, as keepsake or partial retraction, a few lines of poetry copied in her hand:

            “How should I greet thee?—

               With silence and tears.”

            “My soft heart refused to discover

               The faults which so many could find”

            “Oh! snatched away in beauty’s bloom,

            On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;

               But on thy turf shall roses rear

               Their leaves, the earliest of the year;

            And the wild cypress wave in tender gloom.”

            “For the sword outwears its sheath,

               And the soul wears out the breast,

            And the heart must pause to breathe,

               And Love itself have rest.”

Thanks to this last, much-quoted stanza Buchanan was able to recognize these fragments as from the profane works of that aristocratic scribbler Lord Byron, who had inclined so many susceptible young hearts to apostasy and melancholy posing. Of Ann’s wayward habits, her weakness for the candied poison of this satirical and corrupt acolyte of the tyrant Napoleon had struck him as the least charming, and the most needful to be discouraged once she had been his lawful wife. The United States were no place for foppish anarchy. When he thought of his mother’s hard life at Stony Batter—the laundry-boiling, the chicken-gutting, the eye-stinging stenches of woodsmoke and lye and the carrion of drying pelts, the tumult of horses and hound dogs outside the open cabin door, the thump and skidding of barrels and crates and the drovers’ foul language from which neither her ears nor his as a child could be shielded, and the pious poetry of Milton and measured lines of Pope with which she exercised her sweet voice in a moment of evening quiet, by the flutter of a kindle-light stuck between the stones of the fireplace—when he thought of this in contrast with Ann’s pampered and pettish existence he had to suppress a certain indignation, it was true. Yet now these verses were offered to him as a last thin bridge across an abyss of separation, and had something plaintive and adhesive about them inviting him, even as she decreed his abolition, to resume pursuit. Well, he would give her flouncing anger a few days to cool, and the tongues of Lancaster to cease wagging, and then see about crossing this bridge. Buchanan was a proud man. He had not marched to Baltimore in 1812 and in a downpour seized horses for the Third Cavalry—he had not as a lone rider made his way through Kentucky’s dark and bloody ground and back—he had not three times outwitted the Democrat enemies of Judge Franklin in the state legislature to go begging forgiveness from this ironmaster’s daughter. He had excited her affection, he was certain, and the female soul, conservative by nature, does not quickly turn from an established love. A few days’ delay in response could do him no harm. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, his mother had more than once quoted to soothe his youthful hurts.

All this, in a few seconds’ reaction, on the level of conscious estimation and calculation. But underneath, a sickening sliding. His color was the pallor of a man who had consumed a bad oyster an hour before, or who had just been summoned to a deadly duel. The humiliation. The shame. How could they not meet and he not be cut off from all the bright circles of Lancaster society? All around him, through the rectilinear streets of a town without privacy, there were ears anxious to hear, lips ready to crow. His reputation was destroyed by this repudiation. A gloomy acid taste, a hatred for all the iron Colemans, rose at the back of his throat and had to be swallowed back, there amid the library shelves, the splayed books, the slowly resumed activity, as his pallor ebbed. Why would God give him this slap? It felt in his heart like the thud of a keg of cut nails falling from the back of a Conestoga wagon, splitting the staves and leaving a dent in the earth as deep as a tin water dipper. God had not struck him so hard since 1808, when his father opened the letter from Dickinson. Then, too, a terrible taste and disbelief had arisen in the back of his throat. Before that, there had been the death of baby Elizabeth. That was in 1801. They had moved to Mercersburg by then, and his father had a farm as well as a store. His new sister—he already had three—slept in a rocking cradle in a corner of his mother’s room. Looking down at her day by day, wondering why her bed always smelled like the straw when the stable hadn’t been cleaned, little Jamie watched his sister fight for breath within the cradle. Her bright blue eyes looked angry, sinking into her face, in their orbits of bone, as her cheeks grew lean and creased. She looked less and less like a baby and more like an old person, or an old angry monkey. Her hands curled on her chest and her eyes got dull as drops of candlewax, and there came a morning when she was waxy all over, and the spark of life had gone to Heaven to join the soul of his sister Mary, who had died the year he was born as if to give him room. Elizabeth was his mother’s name, as his name was his father’s. Elizabeth’s angry blue mouth, with its dry squawks and yellow spit-up, had become triangular, a sharp hole leading downward to nothing, and something terrible—the adamant No that God could pronounce—entered her brother’s stomach like a stone, like the fall of a keg of nails. That very day, it seemed in his faulty memory, his mother in her sorrow had baked buttery sweet corn cakes, as if to reward the other of her children—Jamie and Jane and Maria and Sarah—for continuing to live.

I remember, or seem to, a moment—it must have been at least a year into the Ford Administration, since it bespeaks an advanced state of domestic rearrangement—when Genevieve and I tucked her two little girls into bed on a futon spread on the living-room floor of my apartment in Adams. The girls, Laura and Susan, were nine and six. The Perfect Wife and I had cooked them a perfect children’s dinner—well-done hamburgers, unfrozen peas and French fries, and popsicles for dessert, let’s say—in my closet of a kitchen, with its hidden troops of roaches that would parade forth at night. We all played some sort of board game—I forget the details, it was based on the fuzzy zoömorphs of Sesame Street, and involved spinning a dial that kept sticking at the same slice of directive pie—and put the girls to bed and then went to bed ourselves. Just as if we were really married and formed a legitimate family.

Tears start up at so pretty and perilous a memory. The girls gravely stared up at us, their glossy bangs brushed to a glow—Laura had her father’s sandy-brown hair, Susan her mother’s straight pure black, almost Chinese in luster—and their eyes shared the wide-awake look of the little pet dolls and stuffed animals tucked beneath the L. L. Bean puff with them. Laura clutched a plastic glamour-girl with spun-glass hair and long stiff pink plastic legs, and Susan a limp lamb with dirty wool. Matter in the wrong place. Their being there, on my floor, blew, as a phrase of the era went, my mind. Simultaneously host and interloper, destroyer and nurturer, I fussed over technicalities. Would they be too warm, with the radiator I couldn’t turn off? I’d leave the window open a crack. Should I leave the bathroom light on, so they could find it in the dark? I would, but I’d close the door all but a crack, so the light wouldn’t shine in their faces. Would the sound of city traffic and the flickering neon sign of the restaurant keep them awake? I’d lower the shade and maybe close the window entirely, then. “Your mommy and I will be right in that other room, in case you need us for anything.”

“You can close your door,” Laura told me, with what I imagined was precocious understanding of our need for privacy. Perhaps in retrospect it was her need to stop my fussing.

I laughed in complicity. “Thanks, Laura, but there is no door, funnily enough. There isn’t room to swing a door, the bed takes up all of the bedroom, and there’s the radiator on this side, so somebody who lived here before me took the door off the hinges and threw it away.”

“Wasn’t that against the law?” little Susan asked.

“You mean,” I said, “like taking the little ticket off a pillow?”

The two girls stared up at me in silence, not seeing the joke. But I was a new factor in their lives, and they wanted to be careful, respectful.

Where was their real, their validated, father? It comes to me: he was up in the mountains, skiing. The faculty couples had taken pity on him, and he was always being invited places—sailing, skiing, three days of tennis camp. He was Mr. Popular. On this occasion, while we mice played, he was with, I am almost certain, the Wadleighs. They had gotten back together, after a year of outside skirmishes and consultation with financial advisers; her money had worked its way into their marital interstices like a tenacious glue; he had too many pianos to move out. In addition to their modernist house above the river they owned a condo in a postmodern complex above Conway, near Wildcat. So Brent was tearing up the slopes with the Wadleighs while his perfect wife and I were playing house in the slums of Adams. Not slums, exactly, since the entire city, some would say, was a slum. Only the boldest of our Wayward girls ever crossed the bridge alone, to buy snowboots or have her typewriter repaired, and it was a roguish date indeed who took one of them barhopping through the string of ethnic cafés threaded among the all-but-abandoned mills.

From the teetering height of my corrupt adulthood I gazed down at the staring small girls. Laura, with Brent’s coarse beige hair, had more of Genevieve’s delicacy of feature—the sloe eyes, the starry eyelashes, the high-arched nose with its pinched nostrils—and Susan’s black hair, silkier even than her mother’s, framed a brow and jaw prominent and squared off like Brent’s. But, then, Genevieve’s jaw did not recede, either; her chin was spade-shaped [Eds.: Have I said this?], with a delicious kissable flat spot, almost a dent, smaller than a dime, in the center. In fact the girls were still unformed and traces of their parents eddied within a pure potentiality that confronted me with a strong sense of separate identity, of genetic synthesis hurled forward into a world that would eventually leave me behind. But for now I towered over them. The girls had always been friendly, if shy, with me; to them I was a man who had come to comfort and entertain their mother in the vacuum their father had left. I was taken for the cure where in truth I was the malady. This deception, which I could not practice on my own, older children, saddened yet gratified me; in this embarrassing time of transition the only unblaming eyes turned upon me belonged to the two persons I had most injured. More guilty-making still, they were charming preadolescent miniatures of my mistress and lacked any of the awkward hormonal overdrive and overweight beginning to afflict my Daphne, who had turned twelve since I had left.

“Sweet dreams, guys,” I said to my tiny guests, my future stepdaughters, and, villain though I was, I didn’t quite have the effrontery, or the physical elasticity, to bend down and kiss them good night. I retired to the kitchen’s penitential space to wash the dishes while the Perfect Mother kneeled on the futon between the girls and murmured to them the day’s last reassurances, ending with a sweet, wispy lullaby and prayer. She said prayers with them, a fact I found as exciting as the breadth of her spread derrière as she bowed low, mingling her hair with her daughters’.

How far I had moved into a new self! My own children a mile distant going to bed without prayers, in a hollow cold house made huge by its lack of a resident man, and I posing as a paternal angel here in my overheated lair, my male fulfillment purchased at the cost of a blighting blow to all these budding lives. It gave my stomach abrasive butterflies that had rubbed its lining raw. The round white dishes, coming clean one by one in the watery suds of the porcelain sink, where in a few hours the cockroaches would hold their nocturnal rally, belonged to a different universe from myself; I could never come clean.

And yet … domestic/erotic rearrangements like this happened all the time. The Queen of Disorder was no saint. With Ben Wadleigh stuffed back for the while into his marriage with Wendy, my own wife disappeared into the night on the arm of a variety of beaux, including, the children told me in scandalized tones, a lunk much younger than herself, who claimed to be a carpenter, and we all knew what that meant in the Ford era—it meant dropout, it meant hippie, it meant upper-class kid who had fried his brain on drugs. Norma had agreed in principle to a divorce, but in her disorderly way was languidly slow about taking legal steps, and I didn’t have the heart to hurry her. It was enough that, living with the children, she looked worse in their eyes than I did, a prodigal out of sight over in Adams, showing up at the house now and then to devour the fatted calf.

When the plates were all stacked in the rubber-coated rack like ceramic baleen, behind a shark’s grin of washed silver, I stepped stealthily back into the dimmed living room and met Genevieve’s image halfway. Her slightly wide face, her slender hands to which her wedding ring still clung, the triangle of white wool turtleneck in the V of her black cashmere sweater floated in the jagged shadows of the room like dry spots in an overinked newspaper halftone. [Retrospect eds.: if too many similes, delete some, much as the heartless mother birds of some species allow the weaker chicks to be pushed from the nest by the stronger.] Embracing Genevieve, I was always slightly shocked by how real she was—the bony plates of her back, the muscular volume of her thorax, the ovoid solid of her head with its volatile, vulnerable, avid facial components. We kissed always as if erasing some regret that might otherwise be spoken. We kissed at this moment lightly, since her girls were presumably still awake and watching. We had a third of a bottle of white wine left over from dinner; we took it and the two wineglasses drying in the rack into the bedroom. Since there was no other furniture in the room, we sat together on the bed; since there was no door, we kept our voices low. City lights, including the flickering neon up the street, below sill level, filled the narrow room with swatches of overheard (as it were) luminosity, doubled in complexity by the half-drawn shade.

“What’s the matter, Alf?” she asked softly. “You seem so sad.”

“I’m not sad,” I lied, knowing the truth would eventually out, just as our underpants would come off, “just being quiet. Your girls were so sweet, tonight. They trust me.” Speaking in husky lowered voices changed the quality of our statements, gave them urgency; we were uttering passwords in a film noir.

Her smile added its glimmer to the room, beneath her eyeball whites with their highlights. I could never imagine how people could, with their naked thumbs, gouge out others’ eyeballs, though the event has ample historical verification. “Why wouldn’t they? You’re very trustworthy.”

She was often a little in advance with her assertions; she meant that I would become trustworthy, when I was their legal stepfather. “Ask my own children about that,” I blurted.

Her smile glimmered out, but not dangerously. She had been here before. “You’re supporting them,” she argued. “You visit them. You visit them a lot, and I never complain.” Her recitation had a lilt to it, like the lullaby she sang the girls, night after night. She stepped up the tempo. “You give them nearly all your money, and you’re being very patient with their mother. You’re being saintly, Alf.”

I had to laugh at this last, though the shadow-pits of her eye sockets, the bone cups holding their vulnerable plums, were brimmingly solemn. The soreness in my stomach was easing. The good old talking cure. “My children are sweet, too,” I said. “They never accuse me, or ask me how come.” This was not quite true: lately Daphne, the baby of the three but a woman in bud, had begun to probe the issues that the two boys stoically ignored.

Genevieve took a fresh tack, in a voce no longer so sotto. Her mother’s instinct told her her girls were asleep. “They don’t have to ask, Alf. They could see the way their mother treated you. You were lower than the cats in that household hierarchy. Everybody at Wayward could see it; it was one of the first things people on the faculty gossipped with us about when we came here, how disempowering of you Norma was.”

My husbandly instinct was to defend Norma, to explain that I had felt no great pain, that it takes two to disempower, that we had evolved a style together, since our laid-back Cambridge days, of mutual benign neglect; but since the Perfect Mistress was spending the night, wifelily enough, and deserved a husband’s consideration from me, I suppressed this instinct with a sip of our leftover wine. “What else did the faculty say about us?” I asked.

Genevieve didn’t quite like this thrust of my curiosity, as exploiting her uncharacteristic lapse of discretion, but she had to play along, for the same reasons I was trying to keep smooth our perilous attempt tonight at playing house. At the center of our scandal, with centrifugal spouses, we were stuck with each other as surely as the principals of an arranged marriage. She said reluctantly, “They said what a gifted artist Norma was, and what a pity she never finished a canvas, and how brilliant you were, and what a shame that you could never finish your book on Buchanan.”

I expected her to go on, as the Queen of Disorder would have, wanderingly pursuing her thoughts to a provocative aporia or a trailing-off that, by our old habits, chimed stimulatingly with an unspoken intuition of mine. But this new woman’s style was to stop when she had nothing clear and certain to say. It put more of a conversational burden on me than I was accustomed to. I volunteered, “I probably don’t want to finish it. I’m scared of being separated from him.”

“From Buchanan?” she said, in genuine surprise. We could still surprise each other; that was nice.

“Yes. I love him,” I said, feeling the wine, and hoping I wasn’t boozily slipping into rubbing her too much the wrong way. But how could she be jealous of a long-dead man? Dust, he was now, in Woodward Hill Cemetery, dust and bones and bits of skin, like a mylodon.

Her smile appeared and disappeared quickly, signalling woman-warmth beneath the surface of the room’s dimness, a dimness splotched with bluish and yellowish patches of light from nighttime Adams. “Is he lovable?” she sensibly asked.

“Not very,” I admitted, then backtracked, “but yes, very. He was stiff and conscientious and cautious. His Presidential addresses are so dry you could learn to hate him. But then you don’t, you get to feel a mind underneath the words, making sense, trying to pull off a balancing act. All these nineteenth-century people made sense, in a way we can’t any more. They still had a language you could build with. But anybody,” I went on, placing a preliminary hand on the small of her back, its little pad of buttock-fat pushed upward by her posture as she sat, legs crossed yoga-style, on my bed, “can love a lovable person. The challenge is, for the historian, to love the unlovable. He was scared of the world, Buchanan. He thought it was out to get him, and it was. He was right. He tried to keep peace. That whole decade of Presidents did, Fillmore and Pierce and Buchanan—try, I mean—and they succeeded, they did keep the South placated, and in the Union, which was important, since if war had come in 1850 instead of 1860, the outcome might have been very different; the South had all its assets in place—the military tradition, the great officers, the down-home patriotism, King Cotton—and the North still needed to grow. And precious little thanks they’ve got from history for it—the doughface Presidents. History loves blood. It loves the great blood-spillers. Poor Buchanan was ahead of his time, trying to bring mankind up a notch, out of the blood. On the other hand, you’d have to say, he loved power, that spidery kind of power politicians had back then, just a few of them pulling all the strings; he was Polk’s Secretary of State, and Polk was not afraid to spill blood. The way the two of them jockeyed Mexico into war was really rather shameful, and tricky, too, since the Mexican government kept changing, you could almost say there was no government to make war on. Neither was Jackson, of course, afraid of blood. Buchanan became a Jacksonian, because Jackson was the force, the only force really, once the aristocrats fizzled out with Quincy Adams; a whole political party, the Whigs, rose up with no point to it at all except being against him, Jackson; they took the name Whig to imply that Jackson was a Tory. King Andrew, they called him. The Whigs have a sadness to them; their great men, Webster and Clay, never got to be President and the two Presidents they did elect, Harrison and Taylor, were both generals who died almost as soon as they got into office; it was like a curse. Buchanan became a Jacksonian for his own political survival, but Jackson made him nervous, the same way God did. It was a locker-room kind of thing, the way I picture it; to show his contempt Jackson sent him to Russia. That’s what you did with political friends you didn’t like, you made them Minister to Russia. You put them in the icebox. A lot of Pennsylvanians got to be Ambassador to Russia, because in national politics nobody ever knew quite what to do with Pennsylvania; it was enormous, it sat there in the middle of everything, the Keystone State supposedly, but it couldn’t seem to get an act together. Henry Adams says somewhere Pennsylvania was so busy being the ideal American state it never distinguished its interests from those of the whole Union. The reason,” I wound up, my hand having found its way down into her dear little underpants, silky, her skin silky, too, my hand the meat of a silk sandwich, “I can’t finish the damn Buchanan book is that I have too much to say, and yet nothing really new. Just the old facts, churned up again.”

“You could deconstruct them,” she suggested, my backrub warming her voice, making it more languid.

I resented her reference to her husband’s dark art. “I don’t know how,” I said. “As I understand it, if you deconstruct history you take away its reality, its guilt, and for me its guilt is the most important thing about it—guilt and shame, I mean, as a final substratum of human reality.”

“Is that what I mean to you?” she asked, smiling, lulled by my hand, which was now two hands, the left nestling itself into the split lap her yoga posture made. “Guilt and shame? That’s so sad, Alf. That’s not at all what you’re taught when you’re raised Catholic. God came down and died to save us. The world is His gift, given twice. Enjoy it.”

“I do, I do. How is our friend Brent?” I asked, a bit cruelly, as if she had mentioned him.

“The same. Very matter-of-fact. A little cold since I turned down his last offer.” He kept making her offers; the last one, that if she would return to him he would give up his teaching post and take her away from Wayward. He had said, Genevieve had reported, that this was what I wanted also, her going away, though it was impossible for me to say so. She had asked me, over the phone, sounding frightened, if this was true. It was true, a certain relief had touched me at the thought of him whirling her off, but I said No, it certainly was not, and this was true also. The thought of her vanishing from my life hit me with a thud that obliterated all else: let the world crash and burn instead, with all our children in it.

“What’s with him and the Wadleighs?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t dare ask,” she said, rather dryly. She stiffened her back and lifted my left hand from her lap, where it had found its way up a silken length of thigh to the crotch of her underpants, which felt damp. “Nothing, I’m sure. Brent is very straight. Don’t forget, we’re both from the square old Midwest. Once we were married, it never occurred to him to be unfaithful. It made him terribly easy to fool,” she went on to confess. “I felt so guilty.”

I liked that: I wanted her to share my guilt. It disturbed me that she saw us as engaged, step by step, in a reasonable transition, with Brent and Norma as obstacles not insurmountable. It made for a certain lack of resonance in her perfection. Perhaps perfection does not resonate. I had never told her of my experience with Jennifer Arthrop and of my sensation that the girl was Brent’s doxy and delegate, sent to entrap me.

She had removed my hand for a reason. “Let me check if the girls are asleep,” she said, reverting to a conspiratorial whisper. She left the bed and I luxuriated in the certainty of her return. I could see her shadow bending low over the girls; I heard her making efficient noises in the kitchen, improving on my tidying up, and then the bathroom toilet flushed. The bathroom was reached through the kitchen, an arrangement that concentrated the plumbing and left the rest of the apartment free for the higher human functions. I nearly dozed in my contentment, wound around with the audible strands of our temporary cohabitation. Laura or Susan stirred in her sleep, moaning distinctly the words, “Bad dog,” and somewhere far off in Adams a police siren soothingly ululated. Not our problem. Somebody else’s mess.

My temporary wife startled me by returning to our bed-filled bedroom electrically naked, her immaculate whiteness slashed by shadows cast by windowlight. She carried against her breasts the folded clothes she had shed; her pubic triangle pierced her pallor as if die-punched. She was sturdy, Genevieve, with shoulders a shade squarer and wider than on most women, and breasts like a Greek statue’s, wide-spaced and firm, neither big nor small, with nipples that stiffened and puckered in erotic response so amusingly she sometimes caressed them herself, to get the effect, teasing them with her fingertips in and out of my lips as they hardened. In the room’s cubist shuffle of dark and light her shoulder blades and pelvis crests showed edges, so her nudity had a structure, a knit, a poignance of anatomy like that of a clumsily carved Eve huddling forward clutching a giant fig leaf on a medieval portal. But to my touch she was all silky and ferny, a branching tree of yielding surprises, queenly in her skin’s broad gleam, girlish in her compliant acrobatics, a perfect blend of attentive nerve and rounded muscle, with this something solid to her, almost as of a man more finely made, so that I had the sense, always, of being met. Fully met, somehow, though here in this shadowy chamber, while we suppressed our noises lest we wake her girls, what I saw were bright pieces—the curve of a buttock, the teeth of her open mouth, the glint of her ring on her hand on my erect prick.

“Darling,” I breathed. “Do me a favor.”

“What, darling?”

“Take off your wedding ring.”

She hesitated. “Why?”

I gripped her skull to put my lips tight against her ear. Her fine black hair brushed stickily against my mouth, the underside of my nose. “So you’ll be totally naked. So you’ll be totally mine. This way you’re half his.”

She shook her head like a dog, to free her ear from my lips, her skull from my hands. She stared at me and said, in an indolent, neutral voice, “Well, as long as you let Norma keep stalling the divorce you’re half hers.”

“She’s agreed. She’s getting it. She’s just slow. Jesus, let her be.” Anger had risen in me, curdling the love-juice. Even in the midst of our lovemaking Genevieve was pressing our bargain. I tried to pull off her ring. She bent her face to our hands and bit my finger, hard. I pulled my fist away and swung it into her side, below the ribs, where the body is soft and undefended and liquid, a collection of squids, snails, and jellyfish. She rolled away with a muffled grunt but then spread her legs and without words bid me to get on top of her and fuck. She came quickly, one beat ahead of me, as if to put me in my place. I poured what felt like a river into her hot insides. No condoms then, no fear of the microscopic. The dangers were all macrocosmic, vague and huge; Brent’s psychological presence felt to me like a mountain. At his base we lay spent, and slippery with little rivers of complex molecules. Her wedding ring was still on. I wondered if I didn’t like her best that way, gold-shackled to another man while I pumped her perfect cunt full. As stated above [this page], in the Ford era, bodily fluids were still sacred and pure. I drowsily wanted to drink all of Genevieve—the dew on her upper lip and along the hairline, the bitter swamp of her armpits, the slick lake of her belly, the sweat of her feet. I suppose I wanted to drink my own sperm out of her, where she was goopy, in Wendy’s word. I recall another woman, somewhere in the tangle under Ford, crying out, as I uncoiled and kissed her mouth after muff-diving for a goodly while, “I’m kissing my own cunt!” These are deep waters, where we meet ourselves coming at us wearing scuba-gear.

Sorry, Retrospect. I didn’t mean to rattle on in this unprintable way. I meant to end the passage with the word “met,” italicized. My mistress, Brent Mueller’s wife, squarely met me in those spottily lit sexual catacombs celebrated (see Romeo and Juliet) for missed appointments.

Ann Coleman—gone to Philadelphia! Overwrought, red-nostrilled with the beginnings of a cold, she boarded the stagecoach for the arduous day-long journey along the turnpike early on the morning of Saturday, December 4th. The coming day was yet only an unhealthy blush low in the eastward sky, a crack of sallow light beneath a great dome of darkness to which stars still clung, like specks of frozen dew, though the moon had fled. Raw damp cold snatched at her hands, her ankles. Her skin felt hypersensitive; she possibly had a fever, to go with the sniffles. Her head felt peculiar—its sharp perceptions detached from herself, like a spectator from a show. The earth was hard with frost, and at the landing stage outside the White Swan Hotel, phenomena—the creaking undercarriage of the coach caked in frozen mud; the slamming doors decorated with the images of English racehorses within oval frames; the nervous scraping shoes of the real, harness-scarred horses; even the angry shouts in German of the coachman to the baggage-handlers, mere boys prodded from their warm beds by hope of a few pennies—sounded loud and cumbersome and out of control. Her younger sister, Sarah, was with Ann: this is history, as is the scarcely believable fact that Sarah, six years in the future, was to meet her death in Philadelphia at Ann’s present age of twenty-three, under circumstances uncannily similar. Whatever Robert Coleman’s proportional part, in relation to his wife’s Berks County prejudices and the flighty moods of his high-strung daughter, in the breaking of Ann’s engagement to the handsome, industrious young lawyer from Mercersburg, it was Coleman alone who, six years later, banished from Sarah’s life the Reverend William Augustus Muhlenberg, for no greater sin than the young clergyman’s insisting, as early as 1822, upon holding evening services at St. James Episcopal Church. In those days prosperous men, white, Protestant, and landowning, rolled across lesser lives like barrels loaded to the bursting of their staves with a self-righteousness thick as molasses.

Born the last day of July in 1802, Sarah was but seventeen in 1819, all rosy cheeks and babbling lips between her bonnet and the bow of her silken bonnet-strings. She was developing a pretty mouth, Ann observed, the upper lip bent above the lower with the soft protuberant fit of a snapdragon that opens when you pinch it. A shallow dimple came and went in Sarah’s cheek as her lips gushed chatter and visible vapor. She was the chubbier sister, her hair curlier, her mind frothier and more pliant; her cheeks red, her eyes bright as if with tears, she was excited to silliness by this adventure, a visit to their sister Margaret, who lived in a grand brick town house on Chestnut Street with her husband, Judge Joseph Hemphill, known across the jocular commonwealth as “Single-Speech Hemphill,” because his maiden speech in the Seventh U.S. Congress proved to be also his last. The young ladies from Lancaster were to shop, and visit the theatre, and, the weather and their dispositions permitting, promenade among the splendid Georgian buildings testifying to Philadelphia’s colonial prominence and the decade when it served as the nation’s capital. Gaslights,† and throngs in fancy attire, and shops stocked with European finery! Their father has concocted this pleasure-trip to distract Ann from her grief and grievance, Sarah realizes, but dimly, so dazed is she by the vision of Philadelphia, by the endlessly various and promising adult life opening up behind the immediate prospect. Not for her, this morning, the stone in Ann’s belly, the sick despair. Even as the cold of the dark December morning drives the older sister’s hands deeper into her muff of marten fur, a hollow unease within Ann shades toward nausea and faintness. Perhaps she is pregnant—but no, this is not history, it is idle rumor. Buchanan was a virgin—our only virgin President! Ann is rendering him such, demasculating him forever, at this moment, as she sets her foot in the carriage that is bearing her out of his life, and out of history.

Their valises are loaded into the coach. Perhaps it was still a hulking, springless stage wagon, with canvas top and open sides and crude bench seats; but I would rather hand my ladies up into a new-fangled so-called Concord coach, its egg-like shape inspired by the “tallyho” coaches depicted in British Regency prints, with high, wide-tired wheels to negotiate stumps and boulders left in the roadway. To cushion some of the shocks the “rocker-bottom” body was hung on “thorough-braces”—multi-ply leather straps that caused the coach body to nod and sway back and forth like the violent pitching of a vessel, one traveller recorded, with a strong wind ahead. Seasickness was inevitable, even for passengers less frail and morose than Ann Coleman, and even if by rare good fortune none of her fellow passengers, as the mileposts lumbered by, required the comfort of tobacco within the closed carriage, or smelled cheesily of the need of a bath, or belched the fumes of half-digested ale. The sixty-nine miles from Lancaster to Philadelphia constituted an ordeal, albeit in a Concord coach made prettily of white oak, upholstered in silk, and painted on its inside panels with mythological subjects, beguiling the jostling captives of the journey with the pink apparitions, amid blue billows and white columns, of Eros and Psyche, Venus and Mars, Artemis and Actaeon. Ann arrived in Philadelphia sicker than when she had mounted the carriage in Lancaster’s Centre Square. Her nose ran steadily; her temples ached; the back of her throat felt raw; her brow felt hot to her older sister’s hand. Ann was shivering, in an era when any chill might presage a disease that would run a fatal course, and she went immediately to bed.

And yet, four days afterwards, on the 8th of December, she was promenading on the streets of Philadelphia and encountered a friend of the Coleman family, Judge Thomas Kittera, who was to write in his diary the next day, At noon yesterday I met this young lady on the street, in the vigour of health, and but a few hours after[,] her friends were mourning her death. She had been engaged to be married, and some unpleasant misunderstanding occurring, the match was broken off. This circumstance was preying on her mind. In the afternoon she was laboring under a fit of hysterics; in the evening she was so little indisposed that her sister visited the theatre. After night she was attacked with strong hysterical convulsions, which induced the family to send for physicians, who thought this would soon go off, as it did; but her pulse gradually weakened until midnight, when she died. Dr. Chapman, who spoke with Dr. Physick, says it is the first instance he ever knew of hysteria producing death. To affectionate parents sixty miles off what dreadful intelligence—to a younger sister whose evening was spent in mirth and folly, what a lesson of wisdom does it teach. Beloved and admired by all who knew her, in the prime of life, with all the advantages of education, beauty and wealth, in a moment she has been cut off.

This is the document, this diary entry, which George Ticknor Curtis transcribed into his notes from a lost original, and omitted, with his tedious discretion, to quote in his published biography. Yet it is history, Judge Kittera’s paragraph. It survived the holocaust of documents that still rages—documents shredded, pulped, compacted, abandoned to the cleaning crew, bulldozed deep in green plastic bags, mercilessly churned in the incessant cosmic forgetting. Judge Kittera’s paragraph, preserved among Curtis’s notes at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, throws a watery light, as if one of those water bowls which were used in the era before ground glass as lenses, to magnify candlelight and vision both, has been interposed between the weak sun of that December noon and these silhouetted young female figures posing on the blue-and-brown cobbles of the nation’s most populous city. Were their arms full of new-bought items with which to dazzle the Lancaster provincials? Were they accompanied by servants, from the Hemphill household?—for that matter, would Judge Robert Coleman [how many judges there seem to be in this tale, a veritable choir of them!], the richest man in Lancaster, have sent his precious daughters off without an escort?—an obese old Lutheran duenna, say, with a pink wart at the corner of her upper lip, under black mustache-wisps, and dropsical ankles and the start of a goiter, and a sighing sort of philosophy that masks nihilism in pious resignation. Life is full of disappointments, she tells her wards wearily, and Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, feeding the patient pabulum of the old to the appetitive young. If she was along on this trip, she left no trace on the record; household servants were as abundant and as beneath notice in that age as appliances are in this: there may come an energy-starved post-petroleum age that cannot imagine our constant sliding in and out of automobiles, our unthinking daily flicking of a dozen powerful switches. Yet from the record, the perishable record, can be recovered, amid so much eternal shadow, the exact entertainments that betranced Sarah on the fatal night: she saw the celebrated Joseph Jefferson, grandfather of a namesake to become more celebrated yet, and a Mr. and Mrs. Bartley performing in a play, Grecian Daughter; also Collins’ “Ode on the Passions,” and the comic opera Adopted Child. The historical record can also be made to yield the full name of the unlikely Dr. Physick mentioned above: Philip Syng Physick (1768–1837), in 1819 professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a famously deft and mercifully quick performer of hemorrhoidectomies, tonsillectomies, and lithotomies.

[“Ode on the Passions”! I should supply, out of my own spent passions, the hysteria—Ann’s uniquely, in Dr. Chapman’s experience, fatal hysteria. Her father as a heavy on-rolling barrel of righteous molasses has already been evoked. To this add crackling clouds of claustrophobia that does not know itself as feminist. She is squeezed on all sides by patriarchal prohibitions and directives, and the oppressive broad envisioned faces of her mother (a complacent mixture of iron and dough, an obtuse Old face) and her haughty brother Edward, these family faces lowering upon her as if she is a baby in a crib and pressing the air out of her chest, plus the mental picture of Buchanan’s inscrutable askance face and prim white cravat and russet frock coat suggesting, as at the moment by the cemetery fence this past September (see this page), a thin painted cutout of tin leaning above her, a feelingless tilted wall she cannot get through, she cannot: an appalled vision, on a transcendental plane where her consciousness intersects with ours of her, of herself, trapped here in Philadelphia away from the comforting matrix of ruddy dusty Lancaster, as discardable, as doomed to the cosmic forgetting, a minor historical figure, with but one little footnoted life to contribute to the avalanche of recorded events, one glimmering moment in the careless desperate cascade of Mankind’s enormous annals—no, this is too much my terror, my hysteria—my h(i)st(o)ria, the deconstructionists might say, if they, too, and their anti-life con(tra)ceptions were not now becoming at last passé and universally de(r)rided.

[Into this void where history leaves off I must thrust something. Perhaps a little Byron, whose verses Ann has sipped like a fatal nectar—let us say the final, swelling stanza of his “Epistle to Augusta,” written in 1816 (as gaslights were being installed in the New Theatre) but not published until 1830, a year and a decade too late for Ann:

              For thee, my own sweet sister, in thy heart

              I know myself secure, as thou in mine;

              We were and are—I am, even as thou art—

              Beings who ne’er each other can resign;

              It is the same, together or apart,

              From life’s commencement to its slow decline

              We are entwined—let death come slow or fast,

            The tie which bound the first endures the last!

[Or perhaps:]

Returning to the Hemphill house, and finding that Margaret had gone out on a domestic errand, Ann made her way upstairs to the bedroom allotted to her for her stay; but, unable to compose her mind, she sought out her younger sister, Sarah, in the room adjoining. She knocked, and a voice welcomed her from within. Entering the room, which overlooked the front of the house as Ann’s overlooked the back, gave her the momentary illusion of escaping the dreary tumult captive within her skull; the sight of the seventeen-year-old, sitting pertly on the windowseat with her knees drawn up, gazing down at the urban abundance of street traffic, of carriages and barrows, of gentlemen in tall silk hats and peddlers in wool caps pulled close to their heads with tied earflaps, recalled Ann to the fact there there was more, vastly more, to the world than her own romantic plight, with its constant inner thrumming of near-panic, as the ticking minutes sealed into permanency an insufferable, an impossible, an insulting loss.

Her sister’s fresh and guileless face, shining in the afterglow of some reverie, was like a crack of light at the bottom of the door of a closet in which she had been locked as punishment for a deed whose wickedness she could not understand.

“Dreaming of your prince, dear Sally?” The Ann who talked, who brightly teased and lent her animation to the little scenes of family life, was like a parallel self who carried on while the real Ann, the heartsick and affronted Ann, sank ever more drowningly into irrational despair. Her fever had retreated but left in its wake a dry cough and a stronger sense of no longer being quite herself.

“Studying what a great deal of curious people there are in the world!” her sister responded. “Perhaps the people in Lancaster are as curious, but one sees them every day.”

“Yes, whom did I meet right on Walnut Street but Judge Kittera? You remember him?—such a slow-speaking, pontifical Polonius. For the sake of our family connections, I endeavored to put a good face on the encounter.”

“Was that difficult?” Back in Lancaster, Sarah might not have asked so direct and pert a question, but here in strange environs, in the house of a sister enough older to be their mother, their status drew nearer to equality. Also, Ann in her dreary passion looked to Sarah for cheer, for rays from the land of the living, and the maturing child, sensing this, was accordingly flattered and emboldened.

“No,” Ann conceded. She became didactic, feeling Sarah to have been stimulated by the great city to a hunger for those social graces whose absence causes so keen an embarrassment to the untutored but whose acquisition, facilitating that human intercourse whose usual fruit is disappointment, comforts hardly at all. “When you put on a manner, the heart to a degree follows. That is why women, Sally, must always be gay and courteous, even among themselves. It was a grateful relief, in truth, to discourse with one who knew nothing of my disgrace, and who saw me as I once was, with all possibilities still before me.”

Sarah rose to the invitation to protest. “Surely there was nothing to disgrace you in your action of breaking the engagement with Mr. Buchanan. No one in Lancaster would dare to think so.”

Ann sat of weariness upon her sister’s bed. “But everyone thinks it disgraceful that I encouraged the suit of a man so patently unworthy, so uncaring, so vicious. The Jenkinses especially must call me a fool. And I concur in their verdict. Against all the good advice of my parents and brothers I married my heart to a phantom, a pretender, and now my heart cannot quick enough break the contract.” A satisfying heat enveloped her eyes, and tears needed blinking back.

“Ann, surely you are unfair to Mr. Buchanan. It is your prerogative, but you are unfair. His fault, if fault it was, was excessively scrupulous attention to professional duty; if he has another fault, he is too kind to all sides, being as courteous to his barber and bootblack as to his social equals.”

“Being kind all around is no kindness to me, if I languish neglected while he charms the town.” Thinking this utterance too stiff a lesson, for the soft clay before her, in proper female pridefulness, Ann explained, “It was not simply his dalliance with the elderly Miss Hubley; it was a thousand signs of veneered indifference, even as he professed eternal devotion to me. His last offense merely confirmed all the rest. As my father asserts, and as many gentlemen of substance privately agree, this man knows no devotion but to his own self-interest. His father notoriously rose by sharp practice and his father before him deserted his family back in County Donegal.”

“I have never had a lover,” Sarah said, blushing and gazing down again upon the traffic of Chestnut Street, her near-childish profile grave in the gray windowlight, “but I thought Mr. Buchanan as enamored of you as his cautious nature permitted. He is no pirate or poet; he lacks even our father’s fire; but there was a benevolence to him that would have worn well.”

“Why, you are pontifical as well, little Sally! All those sermons of Dr. Clarkson’s I thought you were dreaming through have gone to your brain, and to your tongue.” Sarah was pious, more tenderly than her parents’ conventional devotions would have demanded. She had been much affected by the recent demolition of the old stone St. James Church, with its rotting pews and royal mementos, and excited by the prospect of a new and more glorious edifice, to whose erection her father was the greatest contributor.

“You mustn’t mock my faithfulness,” the girl carefully replied, with a flash of independent poise that Ann even in her distraction had to admire. “Did you love the church as I do, you might be more steady in your affections, and less hasty in your treatment of Mr. Buchanan.”

“Stop saying his name! I am steady, so steady my spirits are sunk beneath this break, though my head and all its advisers know it to be best.”

“Perhaps the heart knows better than the head.”

“Don’t torment me with that possibility—I am in torment enough!”

At this outbreak Sarah rose from the windowseat and embraced her sister, lightly, with an inflection almost motherly, mixed with a younger sister’s shyness. “The break can be repaired,” she urged. “The day after tomorrow, we return, and the whole matter may have acquired a different mood. Mr. Buchanan will be true; he can see that you acted to please Papa more than yourself. When Papa has cooled, he will relent, and give you back your happiness. He has no just reason to block your engagement; many a father in Lancaster would rejoice to see his daughter betrothed to such a worthy man.”

“Why hasn’t he followed me here, if he is so true?”

Sarah knew which man was meant, amid this forest of male pronouns. “You have rejected him,” she pointed out. “It has become a test of prides, yours against his. Yours is a woman’s pride, and it should yield.”

“Who taught you such doctrine? Why should a woman always be the one to yield?”

“Yielding is part of our natures, since our calling is not to fight wars but to nurture families. Mama often yields to Papa, and loses nothing by it. Indeed, she gains, in coin of his gratitude, and in spiritual capital.”

“Mr. Buchanan”—Ann pronounced the name firmly, as if trying its syllables on again—“is not Papa, nor am I Mama, though we are both ironmasters’ daughters.”

Her sister’s cheek dimpled. “Your iron is more finely wrought, so you have sought a more refined mate, and now you have spurned him for not being heavy enough.”

Ann’s fingertips kneaded her high rounded forehead, with its single stray ringlet. “Sally, all your admonitions are giving me a most terrible mal de tête. The fever I caught in the coach keeps returning in fits. Last night, I slept hardly at all, unable to stop my mind from churning. It is not so easy to undo things as you suggest. Papa still forgives you everything, as one does a child; me he will forgive nothing, nothing that embarrasses him in the public eye, as this engagement and its outcome has. Really, I must hide my head; I think I will let you and the Hemphills enjoy the theatricals tonight without my gloomy company.”

“Oh, Annie—it’s Mr. Jefferson, with his funny English accent! And Collins’ ‘Passions,’ set to music! ‘Exulting, trembling, raging, panting,’ ” she quoted, for comic effect.

Ann granted her a smile, but wanly. These heated waves of disquiet had commenced within her again, waves that seemed to signal a derangement, a seasickness of the soul. “I will go rest now, dear Sally. When Margaret returns, please tell her I am asleep, and pray that it be true.”

            With woeful measures wan Despair

               Low sullen sounds his grief beguil’d;

            A solemn, strange, and mingled air;

               ’Twas sad by fits, by starts was wild.

The same untrustworthy source that retailed with a unique anecdotal richness the chance meeting with Grace Hubley a few weeks before raises the possibility that Buchanan did pursue Ann. One account of the tragedy that seems to have the quality of authenticity claims that before her death Buchanan received a note from his fiancee to come to Philadelphia to see her.

And so the story runs that he prepared post-haste to make the journey. Ordering his horse and gig in readiness, Buchanan soon was on his way down the Philadelphia and Lancaster pike.

One by one the historic taverns that dotted the historic King’s highway was [sic] passed, and few were the stops made that eventful morning, which Buchanan believed was speeding him on his way to a reconciliation with Ann Coleman.

By dinner hour the “Half-Way House” at Downingtown was reached and the journey halted a brief period for the meal. Dinner was over and Buchanan stood slightly apart from the other patrons of the inn staring out into the streets where the feeble street lamps were beginning to glow.

Strange day, to pass from morning to dinner hour so quickly, with only the halfway point reached. Surely by dinner hour the lone rider had reached his destination, the Hemphill house in Philadelphia, and, after the appropriate ceremonies at the door, in which a lover’s urgency brushed aside an elder sister’s protective hesitancy and a brother-in-law’s guarded reservations, Buchanan found the form that was the object of his passions prostrate upon a couch, irresistibly attired in the filmy Empire style, with a full-length shawl to ward off a chill from the velvet-curtained window.

“I have come,” he said simply. He looked magnificent, in his voluminous travelling cloak, with his tall figure and his large fair head tilted slightly forward at an attentive angle, to correct the almost non-existent flaw in his vision.

“I wrote my imploring note,” she explained, in a faint yet distinct voice, “because my heart demanded justice for itself. I was wrong, wrong to be jealous of your entirely decorous call upon the Jenkinses. I have been wrong to let my parents’ and brothers’ sullen disfavor color my own emotional complexion. My affections have one rightful owner, James Buchanan, and he is you.”

“And I have been wrong,” Buchanan stated with thrilling warmth and timbre, as his impressive and graceful figure swooped to perch on a corner of the couch, covered in embossed wool moreen, where the curve of her muslin-veiled hip permitted some few inches of perching room, “to allow my pursuit of legal eminence to remove me from your side, and to dilute the constant attendance to which our announced attachment absolutely entitled you. If you were, dear angel, to favor me by renewing that attachment—the object of fervent prayers that have risen unceasingly from my breast since your harsh first note and your abrupt departure from Lancaster—I would abandon every ambition but that of serving your happiness.”

“My happiness resides,” Ann stated, lifting up her torso’s gentle weight on the prop of a pink and shapely elbow, “nowhere but in pleasing you, and in winning the right to your attendance when the press of your duties permits.”

They embraced, in an ardent compaction of cloth and hair and underlying flesh, of December cold borne in the folds of his costume and of bodily fever lingering in her delicate limbs, and repledged mutual fidelity. Henceforth he devoted himself to a discreet local practice—wills, bankruptcy, and land disputes—that rarely transported him beyond the rectilinear circuits of central Lancaster, and whose moderate remunerations were handsomely supplemented by portions of the Coleman fortune as it fell, under the melancholy necessities of death, to the heirs; genially Buchanan devoted himself to catering to the whims and passions of his increasingly plump and complacent wife, as their connubial blessings mounted to the number of seven—three boys and four girls, all well favored of feature and all miraculously spared, in the uncertain medical climate of the time, any fatal malady. The lacuna in local Federalist-party circles that Buchanan’s withdrawal from active politics occasioned was quickly repaired; Edward Coleman, Ann’s inimical brother, was significantly placated by his election to the national Congress in 1820 and a rapid advancement to the ranks of Senator and, crowningly, to the post of Grand Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant from Illinois, became the fifteenth President of the United States in the election of 1856. With his fabled gift of close-reasoned oratory and bold yet tactful manner of dealing man to man, a son of the West cherished by the South and esteemed by the North, he recouped the contentious term of the weak-willed Pierce; Douglas managed to stifle the influence of abolitionist and fire-eater alike while superintending the passing of slavery, via the bloodless and infallible operations of popular suffrage, from the territories and the border states, along with the gradual abatement of the vainly agitated fugitive-slave question. Slavery, isolated in an arc of southernmost states while the burgeoning industrial and commercial prosperity of the Midwestern and Middle Atlantic regions pulled the nation forward, was recognized as an anomaly bound to fade away. Not only was it inhumane, it was economically disadvantageous; wage labor was cheaper and more scientific. In November of 1860, Douglas, who had given up alcohol and fatty red meats for a purifying diet of seafood and undercooked vegetables, had little trouble defeating both the Deep South’s candidate, Senator Jefferson Davis, and the Republican aspirant, a little-known one-term Representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. By the time of Douglas’s Second Inaugural in 1861, both the United States and Mr. and Mrs. James Buchanan—forty years wed—had all but forgotten, as if dreamed in a delirium, these moments when, in the music of the passions,

            Next Anger rush’d; his eyes, on fire,

               In lightnings own’d his secret stings;

            In one rude clash he struck the lyre,

               And swept with hurried hand the strings.

But no, the dream was true. Ann, retiring to her room at the back of the house, which overlooked a damp little enclosed garden still green with moss and ivy and sinister plants whose verdancy seemed to ape vegetation in wax, grew worse. Her spirits descended as the afternoon waned, as if draining away with the thin slant sunlight that as the hands of the clock crept between four and five winked its last, a lurid orange, in Philadelphia’s thousands of westward-gazing panes. Her younger sister’s gentle yet acute chastisements persisted in her mind, shifting form as she worried at them, remembered phrases coming loose and taking on an independent, wormy life. More than the imputation of selfishness she minded the implication that she had been stupid, throwing away her best chance at marriage because of some frivolous and malicious Lancaster gossip; darker than the shadow of laughable miscalculation loomed that of her dignity’s permanent defacement, a sense of being besmirched by forces that had obscurely enlisted her impetuous and prideful will. She was a Coleman, and the Colemans knew their place, and their place was high; by allowing Buchanan to touch her life with his own wistful, silvery, cautious, yet persistent and cunningly effective pursuit of her hand she had been sunk into a shame of chaos, of mad disquietude, as a poem she could not erase from her mind expressed it, with images of volcanos and cannibalism, mutual hideousness, a turbulent muddy reality just beneath the glitter and comfort of afternoon tea, a lump of death, a chaos of hard clay. She had had a presence, a rôle, and now even her sister, just yesterday a child, felt free to judge her, to pity her even, in this sickening paralysis that had come upon her. Only God, the God above and beyond the quaint God Whom Sarah and their parents worshipped in that ruin of an old colonial church, could lift her situation up from this muck of disgrace: yet when Ann’s mind and soliloquizing never-ceasing inner voice reached out to grasp this one all-powerful possible Redeemer her grip closed upon nothing, nothing but the silence of absence wrought by her old mocking spirit before Buchanan brought indecision and weakness into her life.

Alone in her room, she felt trapped in her own skull, a closed oval chamber maddeningly echoing with images she could not control or organize: her father’s wide face, with its long thin mouth like the lips of a turtle and his powdered hair drawn back into a pigtail; her mother’s like a wrinkled apple pinched heavy-lidded in the frilled netting of her lace bonnet; Buchanan’s strange askance pale visage bent above her like a tavern board swinging out of reach, touched by winds but not by her hands or the caress of her voice. His gentle consideration, his innocent sociability, his gathering prestige—all were now lost to her, and when she asked why, instead of receiving an answer she met herself—willful and proud and careless, as Sarah had said—out walking to deliver an unforgivable letter, in a landscape treeless, manless, lifeless. Her life was over, like a throw of the dice that makes us surrender them. Ann’s brain circled on its oval track and found no way out, no escape that would do her honor. At the window overlooking the dank green garden, an empty dark garden of frozen forms steeped in Philadelphia’s habitual miasma, the daylight in its glassy rectangles turned slowly opaque, sunset orange becoming a sluggish brown tint; from two stories below, travelling up from the ground-floor windows, kitchen sounds quickened and clucked. She must have dozed, for she was watching herself, from a distance so close she admired the rosy texture of her cheek, as a child at Colebrookdale, running barefoot on the moist lawn after fireflies. She caught one, and as it lay with bent black wing, never to fly again, the golden pulsing of its abdomen lit up the creases of her palm.

Her sisters, first Sarah, then Margaret, looked in at her. The clicks of the latch sounded like the blows of a forge; the waves of heat within her had intensified their flutter; she was in a sweat, between her breasts and under her arms; the muslin of her dress was soaked; there was a horizon of nausea, and below the waist she had a strange numbness, a feeling of floating off. Their concerned sisterly words, the tea a servant brought, the stout maid, called Abigail, who helped her change into a dry chemise, were all less real than the race within her head, where the same few thoughts went round and round and created a tightening fury at her parents and her scorned suitor for trapping her within their narrow expectations, their fixed and selfish conceptions of the right life. She could not breathe. A rigidity among her ribs forced pain out her back, between her shoulder blades. When Margaret looked in the second time, a mere bluish shadow in the room’s muddy light, Ann could only speak in brief utterances, between efforts of gathering breath, of scooping it up like water in a small flat spoon.

Margaret had grown broad with middle age and in a voice almost as positive as a man’s announced that she and Mr. Hemphill had decided to send for their doctor, Dr. Chapman.

The thought of his attendance pleased Ann. Since childhood she liked it, at home, when the doctor visited, with his black bag, and invaded her bedroom, where no other strange man was welcome. When Margaret had left the room, Ann closed her eyes and was again at Colebrookdale, skimming through an endless milky June evening with Edward and Thomas and Harriet. Harriet died. She was only eleven. The doctor’s visits did her no good. Death cannot be so bad, it happens to everyone. In her white dress, glimmering like the fireflies, her dead sister seems so free. Ann cannot believe Buchanan lets her suffer like this—that he condemns her to lie here locked into her angry decision, her frail skull held in a blacksmith’s vise.

A servant girl brings a candle in. The flame in its curved glass shade appears faint, a guttering hollow at the center of the circles Ann’s blurred vision spins. Perhaps she will go blind. People do. Just this afternoon, before meeting Judge Kittera, she had seen a blind man begging on Chestnut Street. The room’s windows have gone dark, above the now invisible garden, its frozen green forms lurking under a whitening moss of frost. One of the evil plants has a trick of curling its leaves as tight as little cigars in the cold. The God Who says so often No can say No to sight as well. He gave us the miracle of sight, somehow contained in the pierced jelly of the eyeball, and He can take it away. There are many blind, as there are many poor. In Philadelphia she has been shocked by the beggars; you see none in Lancaster, just men who go from farm to farm for odd work, and sleep in the barns, wild animals of a human sort, avoiding your eye when you look at them.

Dr. Chapman has come: a commotion at the front door, a murmur of talk in the hall, a company of footsteps on the stairs. His shadow moves into the light of the candle placed on the high bedside table, with its concentric rings as of water disturbed, and is suddenly vivid, taking up space in front of her eyes—a large, carefully moving man with ginger-red hair pulled straight back from his broad forehead and tied at the back with a dirty ivory-colored ribbon. He stands above her with a comforting bulk, his embroidered waistcoat and carelessly tied jabot glimmering between long unbuttoned lapels of a rusty-scarlet cloth. He rests the backs of his knuckles upon her forehead, takes her damp wrist in his cool thick fingers, and stares a long thoughtful while into the pierced jelly of her eyes. “Fretting has made you feverish,” he pronounces.

She tells him her breathing is difficult and describes her sensations of simultaneous numbness and heat. The panicked race, herself against herself, in her head, and her sense of some sourceless refusal and insult compressing her spirit unbearably. He seats himself beside her bed on a brocaded side chair that has been brought. Dr. Chapman is trying to be a father to her, she perceives through the ribbed blur of candlelight—as if a father’s heaviness is not already part of her complaint. “Your frame is resisting some recent event,” he tells her solemnly. “You must relax into God’s hands. Repose within the inevitable is the sine qua non of the healthy soul.”

“How do we know the inevitable, unless we strive to change it and fail?”

“Strive we all must, Miss Coleman; but we cannot overnight change our natures, or the nature of God’s arrangements in this fallen world of clay. Mrs. Hemphill tells me you have lately met disappointment in a romantic attachment.”

“It was I who pronounced the disappointment; the gentleman, I now think, has been misjudged.”

Dr. Chapman likes hearing this; his thick hands lift from the knees of his old-fashioned breeches in a reflex of salutation, and then settle again, as his deep, unhurried voice states, “Then so inform him, when circumstances permit. Or do not, as Providence wills. You are young, and the young heart exaggerates—indeed, it must exaggerate, to propel the body into the great task before it. The task, I mean, of procreation, and all it entails of social establishment. Our flights of poesy and yearning work toward a practical end. We wish to make a place in the world, and to please our Father on high, Who commands His creatures to be fruitful and multiply. The fair sex especially has been burdened with the wish to be fruitful. But these matters of carnal affection, my many years of clinical observation suggest, work themselves out by internal imperative, and are not so much at the mercy of exterior chance as we suppose. I know the gentleman in question only by repute, and the repute is mostly to the good; but even a small qualm, on your part, at this initiatory stage, needs respecting, since the long years of marriage tend to magnify each of the couple to the other, like mites made horrific under the microscope. Qualms will come, but better later than sooner.”

Reflecting, Ann supposes, upon a sour experience of his own, Dr. Chapman softly snorts, and raises his hands up on his fingertips upon the platform of his thick thighs, so that the elbows of his arms point outward. The features of his face, unevenly blanched by the candlelight, lift as if to say “Ah!,” and then collapse back into briskness. “My dear young lady, I beg you, respect your own impulses and intuitions, and do not condemn your body to a war with your protesting spirit. To bring the two into more harmonious association, I will prescribe an anodyne. Have you had experience of laudanum?”

The exotic word in the doctor’s sonorous pronunciation looms like an angel above their two consulting heads. She answers so softly he has to lean forward, his elbows pointing outward still farther. “Once or twice, some years ago, for a toothache, and more recently for the monthly distress, with its accompanying sharp temper.”

“The elixir holds miraculous powers of ease,” Dr. Chapman avows, glancing around at the cluster of concerned family forming one large shadow near the door. “It solidifies the bowels, erases pain, and dissolves the cankers of the soul.” His voice has become more consciously beautiful and rounded. He produces from an unfolding bag of black leather a corked vial shaped like a small man of thin glass, with rounded shoulders and a pear-shaped head capped by the cork. The yellow tint within the liquor, as of suspended dust like the spinning golden flecks in the water of a muddy-bottomed spring, casts an amber glow on the physician’s face as he holds the vial up to the candle. “The cure of Paracelsus,” he intones. “Named by him after laudere, to give praise. But not compounded of gold dust and melted pearls as the rascal claimed. Tincture of opium, opium in alcohol. The dose must be exact. The drink holds peace but also a demon.” The physician turns his head—his wiry ginger hair shows a halo of dancing filaments—and addresses the clump of shadows behind him. “Mrs. Hemphill, does this house contain a dropper, and a teaspoon?”

Scurryingly, these are fetched, and all in awed silence watch as the physician counts out the drops one by one into the spoon. “Eighteen, nineteen …” The shadows of his brows and nose restlessly change shape on his face; his concentrated, lidded irises are pricked by the reflected candle-flame; each hesitant sphericle from the dropper holds a spark for its trembling instant. “… twenty-four, twenty-five. And if the dose does not induce relaxation within the half-hour, twenty-five again. But no more upon that until morning,” Dr. Chapman warns, almost savagely, uplifting that great haloed head, its upper lip split by shadow like a lion’s. “Nervous stress untouched by such a dose is not amenable to chemistry. An excess—” Lest he alarm the patient, he halts himself, and in truth there is no need to complete the thought. In this era suicide by laudanum is a commonplace of hushed parlor gossip, even in innocent inland Lancaster, though its written report was generally suppressed by the superstitious journals of the time, to whom the taking of life was God’s abundantly exercised prerogative. Ann from her infatuated reading of the living British poets would have been acquainted, no doubt, with the heretical charms of being snatched away in beauty’s bloom, of emptying some dull opiate to the drains and sinking Lethe-wards.

The potent tawny liquid, forming by cohesion its tremulous mound in the spoon’s small bowl, glints as a housemaid, freckled plump Abigail, lifts it toward Ann’s parted lips. The doctor has surrendered the operation as too intimate for a man still as robust as he, upon a young patient so replete with attractions, though distraught. The coolness of the pewter couches the insistent push of the liquid. The servant tips up the spoon’s handle, and Ann swallows. Alcohol’s sweetish sting masks a foreign bitterness, an Asian hint of something forced unripe, of green poppy-heads slashed. The attentive doctor has observed the dose, and now stands up with a peculiar loud exhalation of finality, a habit of his at wretched bedsides where he has done all of the little that medicine of this era can do.

Civil courtesies follow, and promises to return on the morrow, and murmured details of a light domestic watch to be set about the patient. The crowd of family ebbs away. The little man-shaped vial remains on the high bedside table in the corner of Ann’s vision. Sarah, too, remains in the room at first. She says, “I do hope, dear sister, no words of mine have added to your afflictions. I spoke more than I knew, and carelessly, not gauging the true depth of your misery.”

“You heard the good Dr. Chapman,” Ann responds, with a show of spirit. “Our impulses and intuitions must be yielded to, yours as well as mine.”

“Not where my interest is so much less than yours, and so little of the consequences are mine. If I urged Mr. Buchanan back upon you, forgive me such interference. He would not want your health endangered, even if it mean his own doom.”

Ann answers wearily, tired of reasoning on this topic. “In truth, I wonder if my unhappy mood doesn’t stem merely from the exertions of travel, worsening this spell of ague, and from the contrast of the Hemphills’ so very settled state with my own. I feel all the respectable Colemans condemning me. I chose Mr. Buchanan in spite of them, and then I have cut him off just as they were growing resigned. And he—he would have so enjoyed being one of us.”

“We all want only your happiness, be it single or wedded.”

“And what of your happiness, this very evening? You mustn’t miss the theatre; the curtain can’t be more than an hour off. Do leave me, Sally.”

“Oh, we couldn’t dare go without you.”

“Please, do; I would very much prefer it. Margaret and Mr. Hemphill have been long planning this outing, and it would humiliate me to take back to Lancaster the tale of how my poor nerves prevented you from enjoying your first night at the theatre. Perhaps the Hemphills can find a swain among their acquaintances, to sit beside you in my seat. Oh, do go, Sally, so I can rest. I feel the cure of Paracelsus working in me. An undeserved sense of well-being suffuses my limbs, and a bliss as if a knot inside me has been cut. Go enjoy Mr. Jefferson, and all those passions. As your elder sister, I command you.”

“Then, if you command me, I will ask the Hemphills to prepare to go out,” Sarah agrees, her eyes sparkling as if already bathed in the light in the theatre lamps; yet, training herself to the patience of womanhood, she sits some minutes more, as Ann’s eyes close, and her breathing softly rasps on the deep-seated tides of self-forgetfulness.