Memories of the Ford Administration (21 page)

After an hour or two I found that not only could I not sleep, I could not breathe. The wealth of animal hair and dander under my nose had reawakened my childhood asthma. To those allergens were added stabs of local unsilence (floor creaks, contraction in the cooling and heating system, scurries of nocturnal rodentia in the walls, not to mention the whispers and muffler-snorts of belated traffic from the winding streets of Wayward as our great honeycomb of nubile females dismissed its last drones) and a panicked sense of
being in the wrong place
, of being dirt as defined above [
this page
]. The harder I tried to suck in breath, the harder this normally unconscious feat became. My spine seemed to be closing with my sternum like the chamber walls in that horror-story of Poe’s. Absurdly, in my panic and chilly sweat, I found myself reminded, speaking of dirt in the wrong place, of Jennifer Arthrop’s visit a year before and wanted to fuck her, to finish the scene another way, a way that seemed more fitting than her awkward exit, and did so, in my head, while my hand performed wonders on my disbelieving, drowsy prick and my
lungs, momentarily self-forgetful, supplied oxygen to my agitated organism.

But once the little bliss of ejaculation (and what a curious bliss it is—like turning a somersault, it seemed to me as a boy, or like meeting a giant in a narrow mountain tunnel where he has to hunch—a somehow
icy
sensation, in tight-knit adolescence) was the second time achieved, my respiratory distress returned, so badly I had to get out of bed, wrapping a moth-bally blanket about me, and walk around the room inspecting Norma’s paintings by cobalt-blue moonlight. Around three, exhausted and breathless to the point of insanity, I tiptoed forth and crept up the complaining stairs and down the long hall to my former bedroom. Its door was ajar, and I stood in its maw for a minute, listening to the rasp of my wife’s deep sleep, sensing the infrared blob of her body warmth, but then thought of Genevieve, similarly asleep in another de-husbanded cell of our community, and wondered really what Norma could do for me at this point, self-drained as I genitally was, and self-exempted from restful wedlock. I made my way back downstairs, snubbing with a barefoot kick the wagging, purring advances of the awakened animals, and closed my door in the hope that my ghostly excursion would have quieted my spirit enough for it to squeeze past my laboring lungs into sleep. But it had not. My breathing got worse; my bones ached in an invisible bear-hug. I began to fear I really might smother—s(Mother), to deconstruct the crisis a little. Her presence, though unconscious, beneath this roof threw onto my moral condition a starker northern light than was usually shed among the friendly obfuscations of the college environment, where we all stood pre-acquitted by the great liberations of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, who to such universal amazement and relief had shifted villainy from
the individual to the society. Not that my mother, herself an exile from the cozy simplicities of Hayes, was overtly judgmental; it was
her in me
that was condemning me to be garrotted, the traditional Spanish penalty for robbery, for being caught in the wrong house. I later tried to transfer my sensations of suffocating moral impossibility onto Ann Coleman, in a composition already quoted, and so have perhaps included enough about them in this semi-solicited bundle of memories, impressions, and aborted history.

After four o’clock, moving with the slow-motion efficiency of a zombie, I pantingly dressed myself, slipped from the darkened house into my dormant Corvair, and beneath a setting gibbous moon drove through unpopulated streets across the empty bridge to the hospital in Adams, lit up on its urban hillside like a sinking ship. Gasping, joking, bathing myself in humiliation as a chicken bathes in dust, I was processed by the night nurse and a poor unshaven interne in rumpled green scrubs. His giant yawns displayed a mouth of healthy yellow molars. He gave me a shot of adrenaline and, when my breathing had miraculously returned to the realm of possibility, a quite unnecessary EKG, the chilly gel of whose electric contacts I took to be his punishment for my waking him.

Released, I took in the view of spired Adams and inhaled God’s misty air. The moonless dawn held a surprisingly busy stir of early traffic. I drove back to Wayward in time to share a cup of coffee with my mother, an early riser. I had picked up some doughnuts at a just-opening Korean bakery on Federal Street, and she was old-fashioned enough to see them as a delicacy and not a hazard to her health. She was all sympathy and fine fettle, as if my night of misery had restored her to active motherhood.

The groggy day crept by. I realized I had, by an underground
procedure, passed from Norma’s troubled realm to my mother’s more ancient queendom. She settled me upstairs in her room, the guest room, in her temporary bed, an old cherry fourposter I had once mistakenly bid for and won at an auction in White River Junction, when we were furnishing our first house, the apple-green Cape-and-a-half in Hanover. As the day progressed, my mother brought me toast and tea in the intervals of my dozing, and displayed me to my children as a man who had suffered enough. Propped up on pillows, books and teacups scattered around my knees, I lay on the high mattress with that curious elevated feeling, of hollow triumph, which a sleepless night bestows. When not attending to me, the old lady was conducting negotiations in the kitchen with Norma. In mid-afternoon my mother announced, “We’ve decided to move me over to Adams, to your place. It may be the last chance I’ll ever have to spend a night in a bachelor’s quarters.” So as darkness returned I returned with the source of my being to grubby, comfy Adams.

And here, before driving her the next morning to Logan Airport and the plane back to Tampa, I gave her my bed, polluted by more than one partner, and slept in deep comfort on the futon, still redolent of Genevieve’s dulcet dark-eyed little girls’ guiltless slumbers. My mother, too, slept well for a change. “I never liked to complain,” she said the next morning, “but Norma’s housekeeping has always made me nervous. You never know what you’ll find in the kitchen drawers, or what animal’s going to jump into bed with you.” This was, as directly as she could give it, her blessing on my leaving. Nothing in nature, not even the expansive force of water as it turns into ice, is as relentless as a mother’s love for a son. We had had a good time the night before, dopey as I was; we warmed up two Stouffer’s TV dinners and laid in a fresh supply
of cinnamon doughnuts, and sat up talking about the old days in Hayes—nothing special, just the streets themselves, house by house, store by store, and what had happened to the people, most of them dead or moved away by now, faces and names with a storybook quality for me, my first experience of humanity. The muscular ogres clanging metal down at the garage, the hunchbacked dwarf who ran the notions shop, the widow’s evil eye at the lace window of the unpainted frame house. When between us we recovered a lost name, or pictured together an all-but-forgotten house or storefront, we would laugh with sheer joy, having defeated time. These exertions of remembering made my mother younger; animated expressions flitted down from a vanished Vermont and alighted, girlish migrants, upon her sallow, granulated Florida face.

Retrospect
, I would reinvent our conversation and fill in more details, but this episode, once I convulse in my estranged wife’s fragrant studio, kidnap my mother, and filially install her in my tawdry love nest, belongs outside our assigned venue, the Gerald Ford era—its impact, significance, and influence.
My mother and I properly belong to the Roosevelt administrations, particularly the second term, in which I learned to talk and navigate three-dimensional space and developed my sense of a solitary self distinct from her warm, nurturing body. By the time of the 1938 Congressional elections, in which the Republicans (it is sometimes forgotten) gained seventy-five seats in the House and seven in the Senate, I had, under her guidance, with the help of a bottle whose rubber nipple tasted artificial and sour and whose milk was either too hot or too cold, given up suckling.
That, and my exit from her womb the month before Landon awoke and found himself to be a loser, presumably fortified me for all the
weanings with which life abounds. And yet, when my mother died in 1978, in the hopeful early reign of the evangelical engineer Carter, I was taken unaware by what a loss it was. Who now would remember me as a Keds-shod boy padding along the brick sidewalks of our tilted, maple-shaded downtown? Who was left to share cinnamon doughnuts with me as if they were, far from “junk food,” a gourmet treat? The dear soul had left me alone with my eventual death. The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

The rest [apropos of JB] is history. Buchanan heard the news of Ann Coleman’s death not at some fabulized Downingtown inn but in the place where he usually was during the late months of 1819, at the Court House in Lancaster’s Centre Square, tending to business. Earlier that week, while Ann was recovering, under the Hemphills’ care, from her flight by carriage to Philadelphia, he had succeeded in getting an out-of-court settlement of the Columbia Bridge Company case. Klein tells us,
It was a great triumph for him
. Alas, Buchanan’s patient life’s many triumphs—he never lost an election, for instance, whether for Pennsylvania Assemblyman or for U.S. Congressman, Senator, and President—were destined to be bitterly qualified. For much of December 6th (a Monday) he had been at the prothonotary’s office, writing four times, in the spidery legible hand that would not much change in the all but fifty years to come, the words
December 6
^th
1819. I agree that the amount of the above award shall be collected in three equal instalments from its date with interest; but that if any of the said instalments shall remain unpaid for Twenty days after it shall be due then execution may be issued for the
amount of said instalment
. Signed by
Christ. Bachman
, significant party to this inscrutable action, and by
James Buchanan
as
Atty for Pltfs
. What a relatively smug and composed young maestro of finicking legal procedures it was who penned those words, not once but four times, as we can see on two facing pages of the large ledger of that year’s transactions kept by the Lancaster Historical Society! Four days later, on December 10th, Buchanan was writing to Robert Coleman, Ann’s formidable and now deeply wounded father,
My dear Sir:

You have lost a child, a dear, dear child. I have lost the only earthly object of my affections, without whom life now presents to me a dreary blank. My prospects are all cut off, and I feel that my happiness will be buried with her in the grave. It is now no time for explanation, but the time will come when you will discover that she, as well as I, have been much abused. God forgive the authors of it. My feelings of resentment against them, whoever they may be, are buried in the dust. I have now one request to make, and, for love of God and of your dear, departed daughter whom I loved infinitely more than any other human being could love, deny me not. Afford me the melancholy pleasure of seeing her body before its interment. I would not for the world be denied this request
.

I might make another, but, from the misrepresentations which must have been made to you, I am almost afraid. I would like to follow her remains to the grave as a mourner. I would like to convince the world, and I hope yet to convince you, that she was infinitely dearer to me than life. I may sustain the shock of her death, but I feel that happiness has fled from me forever. The prayer which I make to God without ceasing is, that I yet may be able to show my
veneration for the memory of my dear departed saint, by my respect and attachment for her surviving friends
.

May Heaven bless you, and enable you to bear the shock with the fortitude of a Christian
.

I am, forever, your sincere and grateful friend
,
James Buchanan

This letter was sent by messenger and refused at the door. Unopened, it found its way into what Curtis ceremoniously calls
the private depositaries at Wheatland;
thus it escaped the fire Buchanan’s executors submissively imposed upon his other preserved memorabilia of the unhappy Ann Coleman affair [see
this page
–
this page
]. Our impression upon reading this heartbroken effusion is not entirely favorable; there are too many
dear
s in it, and rather too political a wish
to convince the world
, by marching in her funeral train. It is, however, a Romeo’s lament compared with the other supposed document from Buchanan’s pen in these thunderstruck days, an obituary that appeared in the Lancaster
Journal
on December 11th:

The quotation, in its curious double quotation marks, is unattributed but comes from Young’s much-loved
Night Thoughts
(comp. 1742–45). The printer’s devil from the
Journal
’s office, sent for the copy, recalled finding Buchanan
so disturbed by grief that he was unable to write the notice
. Lancaster in the wake of Ann
§
Coleman’s death was swept by talk of her suicide and of Buchanan’s culpability:
I believe that her friends now look upon him as her Murderer
, Hannah Cochran wrote to her husband on December 14th. Buchanan had taken refuge with Judge Walter Franklin, whom he had three times defended from impeachment, and who, in this fiercely small world, lived next to the Colemans’ house on East King Street. Some think that Franklin wrote the obituary, Buchanan being too
disturbed by grief
. There is a florid touch to it, an upward reach, which does not seem quite like our earthbound hero, his imagination flattened like the “J” of his unvarying signature. In the obituary’s notion that for all the smiles of fortune her native modesty
made her unconscious of her own attractions
,
something actual in the case strives to break through; Curtis, who knew people who knew Ann, says that she was described to him
as a very beautiful girl, of singularly attractive and gentle disposition, but retiring and sensitive
. She was shy; was she also, as the Pennsylvania Dutch put it, “queer,” that is, anti-social? We can no more easily conceive of Ann happy with congenial spirits in the bosom of God than Ann happy among the bucolic busybodies of old Lancaster. She resists, in the mind’s eye, community. In the portrait of her that hangs in Buchanan’s bedroom at Wheatland, her long nose seems willful, her wide stare not inviting, her one stray curl a touch distraught. Those born rich are harder to please than those born poor; Buchanan all his long life acted delighted to be here, here in this vale of tears, a born crony and ballroom flirt, tickled to be consorting with his fellow mortals, be they the Czarina of Russia or the black barber in Lancaster who pronounced in eulogy,
Why, sir, he didn’t know what it was to give a rough answer to man, woman, or child
. A humble pleasure in human society: it is an absurdity that tends to promote life, like a belief in God. Buchanan had it, and Ann didn’t; in this they were like the fish and the bird of the fable who fell in love.