Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

the sun—its daily arc levellingtoward the equinox above the roofs, shingled in slate or split cedar—blocked by his large head. A chill gripped her heart at this eclipse, with the reflection that this imposing man, who had taken her eye when, at the age of thirteen, herself newly moved to Lancaster, she had watched him from the upstairs parlor windows, a long-legged youth with a dutiful, obedient, ambitious hurry to him, striding to the Court House in Centre Square in the service of James Hopkins, his preceptor at law—that this man was truly a shadow, an opaque phantom looming abruptly large in her life. Two seasons ago, he had been a mere name, a dim figure in the gossip of her friends, the Jenkinses and Jacobses, spoken of with warmth and respect and yet a hint of sly amusement, whether layable to some eccentricity of Buchanan’s person or to the inferiority of his self-made, hard-fisted father’s antecedents was not clear. Though a legal and political eminence, he lacked, in Lancaster County terms, real wealth or status. Now it seemed she had conjured this shadow up, in something like three dimensions, through a weakness of her will, a crack in her self-esteem. Since childhood Ann had battled waves of obscurely caused distemper—a pettishness, a sense of unjust confinement, a nagging disorientation sometimes severe enough to keep her in bed. The reality around her, like a bread lacking the ingredient needed to make it rise, did not seem real enough, though other people appeared to be fully, even passionately engaged in its show of reward and punishment, failure and success.
    Her fiancé was favoring her with the details of a pending lawsuit, of great importance, for it threatened the existence of the Columbia Bridge Company, which had so recently erected, at the site of the old Wright’s ferry, the first span across themighty Susquehanna River, an internal improvement crucial to the commonwealth’s and indeed the nation’s western development. “A threat to this company,” he said, “is a jeopardy not only to the public weal but to the private fortunes of our friends, for William Jenkins and his Farmers Bank are heavily invested in the company’s continuing to thrive. I foresee, my dear Ann, if Jenkins favors me with the grave responsibility of fending off this potentially ruinous suit, many hours in my office this autumn and more than one tedious journey to the courts in Philadelphia.”
    What was he trying to tell her? That, having attained the promise of her hand, he must abandon her for men’s business? By encouraging his suit, in despite of doubts voiced within her family and her circle of female friends, she had exposed herself to ridicule, and his duty now was to stand near her, as a solemn safeguard of the wisdom of her choice.
    They had turned back from her doorway eastward on King Street, pausing on the corner of South Duke. On the unpaved streets, their reddish earth packed to a dusty smoothness by the accelerated traffic of summer, buggies passed almost silently, the black-painted spokes of their high wheels shimmering to disks of semi-transparency, and the trotting horses’ fetlocks angulating like ratcheted clock parts, faster than the eye could follow. The sidewalks, away from the paving stones rimming the cobbles of Centre Square, were boards irregularly laid, and the young couple’s heels rang on these thick planks pit-sawed from giants of oak and ash and walnut within Penn’s great woods.
    “Am I to take this speech to mean,” Ann asked, softening her voice so that his head deferentially leaned lower, “that I must prepare myself for large remissions in your attendance?Having endured,” she went on, regretting the petulant edge she heard in her own voice, yet finding its total suppression impossible to achieve, “your long visit to your family in Mercersburg this August, followed by a bachelor holiday at Bedford Springs, I had hoped we might be much together in the coming social