Memories of the Ford Administration (32 page)

It was during the composition of the preceding scene, let me add for the benefit of my fellow historians, that I was cripplingly struck by the hopelessness, in an era when history has turned away from tales of kings to the common heroes of everyday life, the merchant and the peasant buried
deep in the records of manor-house and guild-hall, and in this ever self-reforming New World nation to the rescue from obscurity of the women and slaves patriarchal historians had hitherto consigned to the shadowy margins of their establishment-prone accountings—the hopelessness, I repeat, of sympathetically animating the fussy, cagey discriminations of a pro-Southern strict constitutionalist whose timorous legalisms were all to be swept away by a bloodbath and Lincoln’s larger, less scrupulous perceptions of the rights and duties of the high office to which he succeeded. American slavery
not a question of general morality, affecting the consciences of men
? In this utterance alone Buchanan forfeits the sympathy of all but the most perversely patient of historians, one who would try to comprehend deeds and opinions within the gloom behind the scenery, the dusty flats and rigging, the intricate weights and counterweights, rather than by the simplifying stagelight of retrospect. Present-day students, adolescents thrust from the jingling nursery of television into the bewildering forest of texts, have no patience with their ancestors and little interest in the erratic half-steps whereby a people effects moral change and whereby well-intentioned men of substance might seek amid agitation and a long stasis of contending equal interests the path of least general harm. Buchanan’s own contemporaries, north and south, cried him down as a traitor. In his last decade his circle of warmth, of human approval, dwindled to a close few—a few Cabinet loyalists, Harriet Lane, Miss Hetty, Hiram Swarr, some servants at Wheatland. The analogies that come to mind, forgive me, are Jesus and Hitler. But, you say, we all come to our Gethsemane, our last bunker. Buchanan’s, I say, came in full view, within history, or almost within it, and coincided with national policy. Never mind: my effort of, if not
rehabilitation, reanimation, loomed as too much for me, for my poor powers, which were diffused by personal concerns, in the era of Gerald Ford’s administration.

The party at which Genevieve was conspicuously absent but which I had to attend was the President’s faculty party, given early each fall, when New England puts its best foot forward, a ruddy brilliance of foliage like the iridescence of a bubble about to burst. I have already mentioned [
this page
] the President’s resplendent purple muu-muu, one of the many flamboyant costumes in which she boldly sought to assert her vast corpulence as a kind of beauty, and also her lilac-tinged crown of inflexible upsweep; I have not mentioned her minuscule husband, a dark-suited satellite of hers, one almost wants to write “parasite,” whose inherited fortune and, considering his cretinous small face, surprisingly clever telephonic manipulation of securities had enabled her to pursue a triumphant though modestly remunerated progress up the ladder of educational administration. She had come to us from a deanship at a California football power located in one of those valleys fed by stolen Colorado water and worked by illegal Mexican immigrants. The languid cynics of our faculty called her the Pep Organizer. Not old, just further advanced in the decade of life wherein I would soon [see
this page
,
this page
] find myself, she still affected the broad clattering bangles and mobile earrings of the Sixties, bedecking herself as if her big body were a year-round Christmas tree. Yet she could be a stern mama, with a West Coast high-tech management style. Like Ford in his Presidency, she had subdued the carnival spirit. She had whipped money out of the parents and the husbands of alumnae, turned Wayward back from ivied insolvency, and spoke winningly of making us a four-year co-ed
institution, with presumably a football team fund-raisers could rally around. There was no excusing oneself from her back-to-school party. I had to go, and Brent Mueller had to go, and both the Wadleighs and even my unorganization-minded Queen of Disorder, as a part-time teacher in the art department, had to. But Genevieve, the care of her two little girls precluding even the most tenuous faculty connection when they came here five years ago, was not invited, and was too separated from Brent to be escorted. There were drinks, hors d’oeuvres served by doe-eyed scholarship students, background music tinkled forth by Ben Wadleigh’s latest keyboard protégé, forced laughter, friendly faces, but no Genevieve. No life, no spirit, no point to the gathering. No bull’s-eye beauty. No expectancy, no suspense. No sense of oneself as a towering sexual presence—Alf the Amorous, hero of one of the sagas that are sung the world over of lovers. Alf and Iseult, with their bed-sword and carbonated potion; Alf and Cleopatra, with the world well lost between them; Alf and Juliet, featuring the fadeout kicker of their double suicide. I felt guilty at Genevieve’s absence, as though I were excluding her. As though, at some deep and (before Freud) inexpressible level, I were participating in her murder, or that of the child—our toddling love—that we had engendered, in these now more than two years of romance. To suppress the presence of her absence I drank more than usual.

The party. Oh, I could sketch a few of the faculty in attendance, having so jollily limned our Madame President, who drifted back and forth like a bright solid square cloud in her dress the color of the edge of the rainbow, as tan from her August at their cottage on Squam Lake as a Hawaiian queen greeting the missionaries, but you know, dear colleagues of
the NNEAAH, how invariably academic narratives, like Hollywood novels, are populated by gargoyles, to show the writer’s indignant superiority. So I will spare you our German professor’s snaggly yellow teeth and crinkly eyes the bluish gray of crazed glass, and the elderly body that his vanity kept as trim as a youth’s through a fanatic regimen of bicycling, squash, and jogging; and his Jewish wife’s pockmarked flat cheeks and soulful ursine eyes and aggrieved honk of a Bronx accent; and the head of the chemistry department’s bald head fringed by a gray duckling’s down combed upward as if electrified by a fit of terror; and the washed-out beauty of his wife’s face as she flinched at the sound of his booming deaf-man’s voice; and our tieless young mathematician with his asexual leathery leer that hinted of wholly abstract satisfactions; and our gleaming token, our professor of black studies, from Cincinnati, with a radio-quality elocution that could click into an unintelligible jive-talk when he felt hostile; and his elegant Antiguan wife, with skin the color of cocoa butter and teeth as white as coconut meat when she smiled; and our glum squat professor of physics, a drinker but never drunk, so sobering was the effect of his consignment to a scientific backwater like Wayward College; our contrastingly tall, pained professor of biology, pained by his bad back, his spine canted forward by a lifetime at the microscope; and their young and frisky tennis-playing second wives, one-time students who had weathered scandals to be the mothers of second families, their faces starry with the fine creases of actinic damage and flecks of flaking sunburn; not to mention our hippy lady economist, one of the few, a real catch, her body in its snug wool dress sweetly wearing what D. H. Lawrence called (referring to Constance Chatterley)
a certain fluent, down-slipping grace
but her face rendered eerie and alarming by myopia-correcting eyeglasses as thick as bottle bottoms; our pioneering professor of film studies, pale as a spectre, moving in startling optical jerks as if carelessly spliced; jejune boy deans groomed for PR in their studiously baggy Ivy League tweeds; stolid female athletic coaches with butch haircuts and wary, puffy stares amid the chatter; and all the others—associates, assistants, upwards of sixty of us to provide for the education of our six hundred young women. A hard core of twenty were my intimate colleagues and friends, co-survivors of a hundred midnights together, of a thousand mornings entering, egged on by coffee, our parallel cages of long-haired lionesses. More than colleagues, they were my life’s witnesses, tracers of my pilgrim’s progress, cannibal devourers of my vital flesh transmuted into gossip, as I of theirs. They knew I had been holed up two years in Adams and my academic burrow in Harrison Hall; they knew Norma, they knew Genevieve, they knew Brent the crackerjack deconstructor. With them, here, I had nothing to explain; I had merely to put on gray slacks, a button-down shirt, a narrow necktie, and a navy-blue blazer, and come.

Talk, we must have talked. Of what? There must have been something, or sixty things—a topic for each mouth. The roar of party conversation hangs in my memory like a surge of music I cannot hum, like a fog that kept me, one summer day, from finding my way into Hampton harbor. A little research reveals possible topics. The death of Mao Tse-tung on September 9th. The stunning defeat, in Sweden on September 19th, of Olof Palme, the first time the Socialists had lost in forty years; the great rightist rollback had begun, and Palme would eventually fall to an assassin’s bullet. Or perhaps we
talked sports: on September 12th, another Swede lost, Borg to Conners, and Evert beat Goolagong for the U.S. Open title—an American sweep. It was a great month for Americans: a Soviet pilot defected with an advanced MiG-25, and Christo completed his two-million-dollar, twenty-four-mile
Running Fence
environmental-artwork in California, and our Space Shuttle was unveiled in the same state, which also enacted, on September 13th, the nation’s first right-to-die law. That summer, the Democrats chose Carter and Mondale, Viking I had landed on Mars, the Israelis had rescued over a hundred hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, Bruce Jenner won the decathlon at the Montreal Olympic Games, and Renee Richards won his/her first tennis match playing as a female. I cannot hear any of this in the rumble of the party, though it all would have been fodder for our swelling hilarity; what I hear instead is a certain mid-Seventies disappointment that the sky had not fallen, that we as a nation, a faculty, a circle of aging adults were obliged to plod on. We had worn love beads and smoked dope, we had danced nude and shat on the flag, we had bombed Hanoi and landed on the moon, and still the sky remained unimpressed. History turned another page, the Union limped on, the dead were plowed under, the illegitimate babies were suckled and given the names of wild-flowers and Buddhist religious states, the bad LSD trips were being paid for by the rich parents who covered the bills from the mental institutions. Young American men and women, sons and daughters of corporation lawyers, had sinned against the Holy Ghost and got up the next morning to take a piss and look in the mirror, to see if there was a difference. There didn’t seem to be. Everything was out of the closet, every tabu broken, and still God kept His back turned, refusing to set
limits. A President had been shot, a war had been lost, our empire had been deemed evil, our heavenly favored-nation status had been revoked, the air had been let out of our parade balloon, and still we bumped on, as we had in 1865, with wandering steps and slow, as out of Eden we took our solitary way. Of course, we had bitten the apple of defeat before—e.g., in 1812–14, up to Jackson’s delusory footnote of a victory at New Orleans—but living history is no older than a living man’s memory, and none of us under forty remembered the poster-plain despair of the Depression, when not just rebellious youngsters but out-of-work workingmen believed that the system was the enemy and Communism might save us. A fellow historian called ours a culture of narcissism. When Father leaves the room the mirrors on the wall begin to stare. The Ford era was a time of post-apocalyptic let-down, of terrifying permissiveness.

Wait—there
was
a topic at the party. Flitting from group to group, tête to tête. Sexual harassment. The term was novel, the idea alien. A first-year Spanish concentrator had complained to the dean that Professor Alvarez—like Genevieve, conspicuously absent from the party—had used his pedagogic leverage to extract sexual favors from a nineteen-year-old student, herself. That she had complained to the authorities and involved her parents (both of them, unhappily, lawyers) was the scandal, not that she had been seduced. It cast a chill into our seraglio, where consensual sex with starstruck maidens was taken as one of the implicit perks for male instructors [see
this page
]. Had not the younger wives among us made their way into marriage along this same academic track? Were not the female students at eighteen as legally adult as a grizzled guru of four decades? Was not the guru’s power as giver of
assignments and grades as legitimately a charm as the dewy youth of his pupil? Is not clout, in short, what men have instead of beauty? What did it mean—harassment, coercion—in the free and open erotic market where every trader must have an asset? Might not the young señorita—Lydia Biddle, to be exact, a nondescript blonde of very average appeal and ability, those who had had her in class agreed—be with equal justice accused of harassing the professor with the textures and perfumes of her fresh ripeness? We were still just emerging from an era when shrieking adolescent girls sexually assaulted rock stars right on the stage, risking electrocution amid the tangle of wires. A good fuck, one of that era’s many gurus averred, never hurt anybody. [CK who? Abbie Hoffman? Bobby Seale? Timothy Leary?] Alvarez was a rather shy, slight man, with the usual Latin mustache and a large family he had left behind in Providence, where he had been an assistant professor at Brown, accepting the promotion in status and salary but not wishing to expose his children to the perils of New Hampshire’s tax-free educational environment. No doubt he had been affected by his pupil’s pallor and very Anglo name—aristocratic Nicholas Biddle, of course, had been Jackson’s chief enemy when the President made war upon the national bank on behalf of the common man and the Western speculator. Lydia Biddle’s charges portended the end of another era, the end of the free flow of love, fertilizing the tracts between races and classes and generations, and the arrival, heralded by the legalisms of the civil-rights battle, of society’s crystallization into strident blocs, all seeking to extend their power with legal threats. Always, in America, with its emphasis on spelled-out rights, there is this final recourse to the law, which lets lawyers rule us, sucking the money from our economy like aphids draining a rose bush. Lydia’s parents
intended to sue for the loss of their daughter’s virginity, if that’s what it had been. A chill, I say, moved through the party. No less an evil presence than Brent Mueller sidled up to me, saying, “Didn’t you have the Biddle girl in ‘American Beginnings’?”