Free Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike Page B

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 girlsin 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, exoticas 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