Memories of the Ford Administration (11 page)

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.

“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
phal
lic. And what are its main product? Ci
gars
. 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?