Memories of the Ford Administration Read Free Page A

Hampshire’s own, Franklin Pierce, had been the fourteenth, but his Ambassador to England, and then his successor in the Presidential hot seat, had caught the corner of my eye. The only bachelor President, the most elderly up to Eisenhower, the last President to wear a stock, and the last of the doughface accommodators, before the North-South war swept accommodation away. A big fellow, six feet tall, with mismatching eyes, a tilt to his head, and a stiffish courtliness that won my heart. He projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence, where Pierce had the narrowing New England mind, gloomy as an old flint arrowhead. Buchanan’s mind, people complained he couldn’t make it up, and I liked that. There is a civilized heroism to indecision—“the best lack all conviction,” etc. He and his niece Harriet Lane ran the spiffiest White House since Dolley Madison’s, and I liked that, too. I felt lighter when I thought about him. The old gent was so
gallant
, there in the trembling shade of the Civil War. You know how it is, fellow historians—you look for a little patch not trod too hard by other footsteps, where maybe you can grow a few sweetpeas. My efforts, never-ending as research led to more research, and even more research led back to forgetfulness and definitive awareness that historical truth is forever elusive, had begun at about the time we had decided, after Daphne’s wide-eyed arrival on earth, that for their sake and ours we had had enough children. This was a wise decision, but also a pity, for Norma and I had a natural flair for producing children; our sperm and ova clicked even while our libidos slid right past one another, and thebusywork of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and training toddlers gave us the shared sensation of being an ongoing concern.
    “Still,” I had to admit. My attempt at extending our family to include a bouncing book had proved painfully slow and thus far futile. Perhaps Buchanan was the cause of our breakup: I hoped that a change of life might shake free the dilatory, feebly kicking old fetus I had been carrying within me for a decade.
    “Maybe you should give up and try somebody else,” the Queen of Disorder wickedly, if diffidently, suggested. “He’s too dreary.”
    “He’s
not
dreary,” I monogamously insisted. “I
love
him.”
    Somehow—I knew it would—this stung her; her cheeks showed some pink in the room’s sickly, tasselled lamplight. Her blush made her eyes seem greener. In her hurt she sipped the glinting vermouth. I wondered if she had been kidding about her and Ben. She exuded that faint hayey smell women have in summer.
    “You missed Nixon’s resigning,” I told her.
    “We heard some of it on the car radio.”
    On the way to the woods, or wherever. Ben was living in one of the Wayward girls’ dormitories, where guests were forbidden after ten. “We all watched it together,” I said, conjuring up a domestic unity that hadn’t quite existed. “It was sad.”
    “Why?” Norma was a down-the-line liberal. “The only sad thing is it puts that idiot Ford in office.”
    “Ben says he’s an idiot?”
    “
I
say.”
    “You know,” I said, “darling, you ought to be careful in the woods. There’s poison ivy, not to mention snakes.”
    She pushed back from her forehead a piece of her untidywiggly hair and blew upward, as if that would keep it in place. She glanced at the corners of the ceiling again but with a different, less searching quality now; I knew her well enough to see her mind deciding that this homecoming had nothing more in it for her. She was tired and ready for bed. She tossed off the last of the vermouth and said, “You be careful, too. There’s lots of mancatchers out there.”
    Nothing she said was ever not somewhat true. One of my memories of the Ford years—indeed, the one that has next priority in this accounting, elbowing its way to the head of the line—is of a wet cunt nipping, as it were, at the small of