Memories of the Ford Administration Read Free

creatures when they sidled close. Their purrs made me aware again of the throbbingbackground of cicada song—a sound like no other, which the brain in radio fashion can tune in and out.
    “No way,” I said, rising from my Danish easy chair. It had a cracked teak arm I had always been regluing when I lived here. I tried to brush tenacious cat hairs from the seat of my pants. I had new loyalties: my dark-eyed mistress watched my connubial visits like a hawk, and expected minute-by-minute accountings. “I’m trying to lead an orderly life,” I explained, not unapologetically.
    “Is that what it is?” Two inches of silvery pale-green vermouth, near enough the color of her eyes, had appeared in her hand, in a smeared orange-juice glass she had fished unwashed from the dishwasher. She bent her face and voice toward me and said, “Alf, you
must
talk to them, they’re confused and hurt and always after me with questions—‘What didn’t he like about us?’ ‘Can she really be that great?’ ‘Won’t he ever get it out of his system and come back?’ ”
    I resented her trying to mar with female talkiness the manly silence, the smooth scar tissue, the boys and I had grown over my defection.
    “The boys, especially,” she went on. “Daphne’s the healthiest, because she’s so open and still childlike. But the boys—I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. They’re very considerate of me, tiptoeing around as if I’m sick, not blaming me for doing this stupid thing of losing you, trying to do all the jobs around the place that you used to do …”
    She would let her sentences trail off, inviting her conversational partner to be creative. Her canvases, when she found time to paint, were always left unfinished, like Cézanne’s. A blank corner or two left for Miss Manners. Her own face, too, was generally left blank, without even lipstick as makeup.When she attempted mascara, she looked like a little girl gotten up as a witch. In the silly Sixties, she went in for pigtails, and to make a special effect, for a party, she would do one half of her hair in a braid and let the other half bush out. Her hair—have I made this clear?—was not exactly curly, it was
wiggly
, and in tint not exactly dried-apricot orange but paler, so that her pubic hair did not so much contrast with her flesh as seem to render it in a slightly different shade. Now, with Ben’s lively juices still swimming in her, she was bringing home to me—filling in with color the dim black-and-white hollow haunted feeling with which I had watched Nixon on television—the feeling of
shame
, shame as a bottomless inner deepening, a palpable atmosphere slowing and thickening one’s limbs as the gravity on Saturn would, shame my new planet, since my defection, leaving my house hollow and (that Anglo-Saxon word of desolate import)
blafordleas
, lordless. But, as with many of her actions, Norma disdained completion. Having brought me to the point where I wanted to crawl up the stairs and awaken my children and beg their forgiveness, she glanced down at the cracked and oft-glued arm of the chair I had vacated and idly asked, “What were you reading?”
    I had left a book splayed on the arm. It was
Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South
, edited by Eric L. McKitrick. “An anthology of pro-slavery views before the Civil War,” I explained. “Some of the arguments are quite ingenious, and compassionate. The slaveholders weren’t all bad.”
    “Slaveholders never think so,” she said. I felt in this a feminist edge, newly sharpened by my bad and typically male behavior. She softened it with, “Is this still about Buchanan?”
    For the last ten years of our life together I had been tryingin my spare time and vacations to write some kind of biographical—historical/psychological, lyrical/elegiacal, the sort of thing Jonathan Spence does with the Chinese—opus on James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States. New