Memories of the Ford Administration (12 page)

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:

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.