Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel Read online

  Memories of the Ford Administration is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992 by John Updike

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1992.

  Portions of this novel originally appeared in American Heritage and The Boston Phoenix.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Lancaster County Historical Society: Excerpts from “James Buchanan and Ann Coleman” by Philip Shriver Klein from the Journal of the Lancaster County (PA) Historical Society, Vol. LIX, No. 1 (1955). Reprinted by permission.

  Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC: Excerpt from “Yesterday,” words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, copyright © 1965 by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: Excerpts from The Emergence of Lincoln by Allan Nevins, copyright © 1950 by Allan Nevins and copyright renewed 1978 by Mary R. Nevins. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64594-8

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photo: United States President James Buchanan © SuperStock/SuperStock (right), United States

  President Gerald Ford © Bettmann/Corbis (left), Frame © Huseyin Turgut Erkisi

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  First Page

  Brief Bibliography

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  I am well aware that the reader does not require information, but I, on the other hand, feel impelled to give it to him.

  —ROUSSEAU, The Confessions

  Man in his essence is the memory [or “memorial,” Gedächtnis] of Being, but of Being.*

  —HEIDEGGER, The Question of Being

  * As quoted in the preface to Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, by the translator from the French, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who supplied the refinement in brackets and presumably the translation from the German, which coincides in this sentence (but not everywhere) with that of Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback.

  From: Alfred L. Clayton, A.B. ’58, Ph.D. ’62

  To: Northern New England Association of American Historians, Putney, Vermont

  Re: Requested Memories and Impressions of the Presidential Administration of Gerald R. Ford (1974–77), for Written Symposium on Same to Be Published in NNEAAH’s Triquarterly Journal, Retrospect

  I REMEMBER I was sitting among my abandoned children watching television when Nixon resigned. My wife was out on a date, and had asked me to babysit. We had been separated since June. This was, of course, August. Nixon, with his bulgy face and his menacing, slipped-cog manner, seemed about to cry. The children and I had never seen a President resign before; nobody in the history of the United States had ever seen that.

  Our impressions—well, who can tell what the impressions of children are? Andrew was fifteen, Buzzy just thirteen, Daphne a plump and vulnerable eleven. For them, who had been historically conscious ten years at the most, this resignation was not so epochal, perhaps. The late Sixties and early Seventies had produced so much in the way of bizarre headlines and queer television that they were probably less struck than I was. Spiro Agnew had himself resigned not many months before; Gerald Ford was thus our only non-elected President, unless you count Joe Tumulty in the wake of Wilson’s stroke or James G. Blaine during the summer when poor Garfield was being slowly slain by the medical science of 1881, while Chester Arthur (thought to be corrupt, though he was an excellent fisherman and could recite yards of Robert Burns with a perfect Scots accent) hid in New York City from the exalted office he would finally accede to. If my children were like me, they were relieved to have a national scandal distract us from the scandal that sat like a clammy great frog, smelling of the swamp of irrecoverable loss, in the bosom of our family: my defection, my absence from the daily routine after dominating all the years of their brief lives with my presence, my coming and going, my rising and setting, my comforting and disciplining; my driving them to school and summer camp, to the beach and the mountains, to Maine and Massachusetts; my spelling of their mother in her dishevelled duties from breakfast to bedtime, from diaper-changing to, lately, sitting nervously in the passenger’s seat while Andrew enjoyed his newly acquired driver’s permit. I was the lonely only child of an elderly Republican couple, and fatherhood had been a marvel to me, an astonishing amusement; my teaching schedule at Wayward Junior College, then an all-female junior college beside the once-beautiful Wayward River here in southernmost New Hampshire, permitted an almost constant paternity, or it might be more accurate to say a fraternity—a coming-and-going facetious chumminess more like an elder brother’s than like a progenitor’s. Lacking siblings, I had, with my wife’s offhand compliance, created them. Born in 1936, in northern Vermont, where the mountains begin to flatten out and slouch toward Canada, I was named by my staunch parents after that year’s affable but unsuccessful candidate against Roosevelt, and became a father at the mere age of twenty-two, my first year in graduate school. The obstetrician, a stout woman wearing a lime-green skullcap, emerged from the depths of Cambridge City Hospital, wiped her hands like a butcher on his bloody apron, and shook mine with the stern words, “You have a son.” Buzzy followed when I was twenty-five and still not a Ph.D., and dear Daphne—the smallest at birth, a mere seven pounds ten, and the brightest-eyed ever after—two years later still, in 1963, the autumn Kennedy was shot and the second fall term of my first instructorship, at verdant and frosty Dartmouth. Salad days! Days of blameless leafing out! I had all the equipment of manhood except a grown man’s attitude. My queen, my palely freckled and red-headed bride, still had her waist then, her lissome milky legs, and an indolent willingness to try anything. Lyndon Johnson’s supercharged Sixties were about to break upon us like a psychedelic thunderstorm. We reined in our fertility, and hunkered down for happiness.

  [Retrospect editors: Don’t chop up my paragraphs into mechanical ten-line lengths. I am taking your symposium seriously, and some thoughts will run long as rivers in thaw, and others will snap off like icicles. Let me do the snapping, please.]

  So I sat among my children less like a villain than like a fourth victim, another child of the gathering darkness (why did Nixon wait until the evening to quit? to avoid looking like a daytime soap opera?) and of the hurt and headless nation. This pose, of my being one more hapless inhabitant of our domestic desolation rather than the author of it, was in fact convenient for us all, freeing my children to like me still and to welcome my visits from my ascetic little bachelor pad across the river, in the quintessentially depressed industrial city of Adams—a one-mill hamlet renamed in 1797, honoring the harassed second President, a local boy of sorts—and to enjoy as best they could their visits to me and the meager entertainments Adams afforded: a bowling al
ley, a lakeside beach of imported sand, a Chinese restaurant where Daphne once got a fortune cookie without a fortune slip in it and burst into tears, thinking it meant she was about to die, and one surviving movie house in the depleted downtown, of the marqueed, velvety, rococo-lobbied type that in small cities everywhere was fast disappearing, passing to boarded-up, graffitiferous extinction through a lurid twilight as a triple-X triple-feature sex cinema. (Sex still had a good name during the Ford Administration. Betty Ford had been a footloose dancer for Martha Graham and announced at the outset of the administration that she and Gerald intended to keep sleeping in the same bed. Their children came and went in the headlines with lives that bore little more looking into than the lives of most young adults. In those years one-night stands, bathhouses, sex shops abounded. Venereal disease was an easily erased mistake. Syphilis, the clap—no problem. Crabs, the rather cute plague of Sixties crash pads, had moved on as urban rents went up, and herpes’ welts and blisters had yet to inflict their intimate sting. The paradise of the flesh was at hand. What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower and racy under Kennedy had become, under Ford, almost compulsory. Except that people were going crazy, as they had in ancient Rome, either from too much sex or from lead in the plumbing. Ford, a former hunk, got to women in a way Nixon hadn’t. Twice, I seem to remember, within a few weeks’ time, a female went after him with a gun; Squeaky Fromme was too spaced to pull the trigger, and Sara Jane Moore missed at close range. [Retrospect eds.: Check facts? Whole parenthesis might come out, if there are space pressures. But you asked for impressions.] I had no television in my exiguous fourth-floor digs—a long room where I had rigged a desk of two filing cabinets and a hollow door, and a square room almost completely filled by a double bed, each room with one window overlooking a narrow side street in the shadow of a deserted textile mill—and was dependent for news upon the hourly summaries and rare special bulletins on the area’s only classical-musical station, WADM, plus headlines glimpsed on other people’s newspapers, and out-of-date newsmagazines in the waiting rooms of dentists, lawyers, opticians, etc., consulted during the twenty-nine months of the Ford Administration.) In that dear dying movie house, whose name was Rialto, with its razored plush seats and flaking gilt cherubs, my three fuzzy-headed cherubs and I saw The Godfather: Part II and Jaws. Both terrified me and Daphne, though the boys pooh-poohed us. By the time of Jaws Andrew was big enough, with a driver’s license, to be humiliated by going to the movies with his father. And though Jaws packed them in, up into the raised loge seats and the precipitous balcony, the Rialto’s fate was sealed; within months it went X-rated.

  Snap.

  As I sat there watching Nixon resign I had the illusion that the house we were in, a big Victorian with a mansard roof, a finished third floor, and a view from the upper windows of the yellow-brick smokestacks of the college heating plant, was still mine; its books, a collection beginning with our college textbooks, felt like mine, and its furniture, a child-abused hodgepodge of airfoam-slab sofas and butterfly chairs with canvas slings and wobbly Danish end tables and chrome-legged low easy chairs draped on their threadbare arms with paisley bandanas and tasselled shawls, felt still like mine, along with the cat hairs on the sofa and the dustballs under it, the almost-empty liquor bottles in the pantry and the tattered Japanese-paper balls that did here and there for lampshades, all of it in our wedded style, my wife’s and mine, a unisex style whose foundation was lightly laid in late-Fifties academia and then ornamented and weathered in the heats and sweats of Sixties fringe-radicalism. I had left my wife but not our marriage, its texture and mind-set, and it was far from dawned upon me that this house, this hairy fringy nest she and I had together accumulated one twig at a time, not to mention these three hatchlings so trustfully and helplessly and silently gathered here beside me in the flickering light of one man’s exploding ambition and dream (he was resigning, Nixon explained, for the good of the nation and not out of any personal inclination: “I have never been a quitter,” he shakily said, scowling. “To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body”)—that this house was gone, cast off, as lost to my life as my childhood home in the hamlet of Hayes, my college rooms in Middlebury, our graduate-student quarters in Cambridge in a brick apartment building down Kirkland Street from the then-Germanic Museum, or the little apple-green Cape-and-a-half, our first bona-fide house, with a yard, a basement, and a letter slot, that the university rented to us in Hanover, right off Route 120, a stone’s throw from the Orozco murals. In this living room I was, in truth, on a par with a televised image—a temporary visitant, an epiphenomenon.

  [Retrospect: Sorry about all the decor. But decor is part of life, woven inextricably into our memories and impressions. When I first received NNEAAH’s kind and flattering request to contribute to its written symposium, I ventured to the library and flipped through a few reference books, the kind of instant history that comes from compiling old headlines, and was struck by how much news is death, pure and simple. In these transition months of 1974, who wasn’t dying? Chet Huntley and Georges Pompidou, Juan Perón and Earl Warren, Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother, Walter Lippmann and Jack Benny, with Generalissimo Franco seriously ailing and Evel Knievel far from well. Evel Knievel failed to ride a rocket across a canyon in Idaho; Pompidou was reported as saying, “Every politician (Tous les politiciens) has his problems (ont leurs problèmes). Nixon has Watergate (Nixon a Watergate), and I am going to die (et je vais mourir).” Surely, Retrospect editors, you don’t want this sort of thing, which any sophomore with access to a microfilm reader that hasn’t broken its fan belt can tote up for you. You want living memories and impressions: the untampered-with testimony of those of us fortunate enough to have survived, unlike those named above, the Ford Administration. I was greatly moved, the other night, by a twitchy black-and-white film from 1913 of the survivors of Pickett’s charge, meeting as old men on the Gettysburg battlefield fifty years later. The Southerners pretended to charge again, hobbling forward on canes, and the Northerners scrambled out from behind the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge and embraced them. Tears, laughter. Young killers into dear old men. Enough time slides by, we’re all history, right? And if you want to feel really sick, NNEAAH, think of the time that will keep sliding by after you’re dead. After we’re dead, I should say. If I’ve misjudged my assignment, please trim this response to suit your editorial requirements.]

  Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. And then as in an optical illusion the eye makes what it can of the spots. The Queen of Disorder came back around midnight, let’s say. It was August, a muggy month in our river valley, but summer was already pulling in at the edges, with all the lawns parched and the cicadas in full cry. She must have been wearing a little pale-flowered cotton dress on her generous but still lithe figure, with shoelace shoulder straps, and it must have crossed my mind that she had taken this dress off that night and then put it back on to come home. Home—she had suffered some losses but kept that word, that reality. “How were the kids?” she would have asked.

  “Good. Sweet. We watched Nixon and tried to play Mille Bornes until Daphne got cranky.”

  Daphne’s mother shrugged off a little loose-knit white sweater hung around her shoulders like a cape. The freckles on her bare shoulders were clustered thick enough to simulate a tan. Glancing at a corner of the ceiling as if a cobweb there had suddenly taken her interest, she asked, a bit timidly, “They talk?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Even after Daphne went to bed? The boys?”

  “No, Norma. What is there to say? I let them watch Hawaii Five-O with me and then tucked them in. I did prayers with Daphne but the boys told me you’ve quit the prayers.”

  “Have I?” she asked, turning her head to look at another cobweb. Her hair was the color of a dried—the health-food stores say sulphured—apricot held up to the light, and kinky, so that even when ironed hair
had been the thing, along with sandalwood love beads and dirty bare feet, Norma had had a woolly look. I pictured her hair spread out on a pillow like spilled pillow stuffing and her date’s meaty hands digging into its abundance. An abundance below, too, gingery, tingly, and in her armpits in those barefoot years when it was fashionable not to shave. Her shins then had become scratchy like a man’s chin. I had grown a beard that came in thin and goatish. We used to go skinnydipping with friends at a lake up above Hanover and, stoned enough to feel the walls of my being transparent like those of a jellyfish, and to imagine we were all one big loving family, I had turned to a woman on the sand beside me and must have somehow begged for a compliment on Norma’s generous figure, for I remember this other woman’s dry sarcastic voice cutting through my shimmering jellyfish walls: I’m so happy for you, Alf. “It just seemed hypocritical,” my Queen of Disorder said, “with us the way we are. Nothing sacred, and all.”

  “How was Ben?” Benjamin Wadleigh had been her date. Chairman of the music department, head of the Choral Society, a tall topheavy man with big puffy white hands that plunged into a piano’s keys as if into mud, squeezing, kneading. He was recently separated from his tiny wife, Wendy, and a long-time admirer of my bushy, milky-skinned, big-breasted mate. “Where do you two do it, at eleven at night?”

  “We use the woods,” she said, in such a way I couldn’t tell if she were joking. “Or the back of his station wagon. Necessity is the mother, et cetera. Want a drink?” She was drifting toward the pantry with all its nearly empty bottles. The two cats, hearing her voice, had come out of where they had been hiding during my stay, and rubbed around her legs in a purring braid, a furry double helix, of affection. I was allergic to cat dander and tended to kick at the creatures when they sidled close. Their purrs made me aware again of the throbbing background of cicada song—a sound like no other, which the brain in radio fashion can tune in and out.