Memories of the Ford Administration (8 page)

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

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

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

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

“Where is Brent now?”

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

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

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

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

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

“He loves you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You two are going to keep fucking?”

“Are you and Norma?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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