Memories of the Ford Administration (6 page)

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 the
mighty 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 season. My parents crave to know you better; my sisters and brothers wish always to have their good opinions of you confirmed.”

He slightly flushed, and coolly smiled. “That is, to have, you are too gracious to say, the unflattering opinions that reach their ears dispelled.” His posture straightened; he stared ahead; Ann allowed this demonstration of wounded dignity to pass her notice in silence. Their leisurely pace, rendered a bit crabwise by their sideways attentiveness, carried them past Demuth’s Tobacco Shop, its signboard since 1770 a carven bewigged dandy holding an open snuff-box, and the inn named the William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, which even at this early hour was buzzing, behind its drawn shutters, of the evening mood. Across the street, another inn, the Leopard, emitted its own growl of growing merriment, and high up under the left eave of the—in the reduced scale of a North American settlement—grand stone façade of the Bausman house, a small sculpted face, known locally as the Eavesdropper, smilingly stared toward the conversing couple with blank stone eyes.

“Dear Ann, I must
work
,” Buchanan protested. “I must improve my lot to such a station that our wedding, if not precisely between equals by the world’s crass standards, is close enough to quell comment. Your brother Edward has been all too disposed to give ear to those who slander me as seeking your fortune. He has welcomed the poison into your family, and furthers its spread in the town.”

There was a subdued fire in this man, Ann reflected, that might warm them both, if she fan it gently. “Edward is not well,” she explained simply. “In his infirmity and rage at his own body, he vexes matters that do not concern him. He and Thomas, being just above me in age, and my constant playmates once Harriet died, imagine I am still theirs to control, and no man who proposed to be more than brother to me would please them.”

“They scorn me and provoke me,” Buchanan went on, forgoing some of his usual circumspection and showing, she felt, an unbecoming womanish pitch of complaint, “and encourage your father in his dislike.”

The vigor of his petulance heightened the color of his face—a plump face, with an extra chin softly cradled in the wings of his upstanding collar and with dents of an almost infantile dulcity at the corners of his lips—and imparted a slightly alarming rolling aspect to his eyes, which were a clear pale blue but mismatched by a cast in the left, which led it to wander outwards and to gaze, it seemed, past her head to interests beyond. At times he frightened her with what he saw and what he didn’t; he did not realize, in the case at hand, that it was her mother more than her father who had objected to their engagement. “He’s not a
man
,” her mother had pronounced more than once, pinching shut her toothless mouth on the verdict. “Such a popinjay wouldn’t have lasted an hour at my father’s furnace.” There was something in these iron people, Ann had been made aware, that stiffened at the approach of her swain with his artful, patient, silvery voice. Buchanan, in love with his own poeticizing mother, didn’t see that a woman could be as stout an enemy as a man.

Conscious of concealing some of the truth, Ann bantered with him. “My father is an iron man,” she said. “He does not
easily bend. He had fixed his hopes for me upon the son of another ironmaster, so the merged forges could beat out more muskets for the next revolution.”

“And out of blood more dollars for the Coleman fortune,” Buchanan said, unnecessarily, for a shamed awareness of the violent source of her family’s wealth had been implicit in her self-mocking words. For all his legal canniness, Ann thought, this man had a streak of obtuseness, a patch of dead caution, that prevented him from grasping, as can many coarser men—such as the men in her family—a situation at a glance, and from travelling instantly across a chain of argumentation to the firm ground of a conclusion. Instead, he must test each step, as if earth is all treacherous, and when he did contend on one side, as in his speeches against the Democrats, it was with a shrill excess, as though not convinced of his own sincerity. Her family’s slights, which she had done all she could to hide from him, rankled because he was too willing to detect, with his double vision, a truth behind them. “At last Sunday’s dinner at Colebrookdale,” he complained, “you heard him bait me, albeit jocosely, on the matter of my disciplinary infractions at Dickinson, having as trustee made himself privy to the details—misdemeanors of a dozen years ago, and the stiff-necked faculty as much at fault as myself! And he unreasonably associates me with that auction prank of Jasper’s, and implies impropriety in my election wager with Molton.”

Ann interrupted this gust of grievances. “My father means to suggest that you have enjoyed a fair portion of tavern society, and that a prospective son-in-law might reconcile himself to enjoying less. And I do agree, Jim. Call me selfish, but I want you with me every minute you can spare from your ambitions. I have pinned my life to yours.” She took his arm to descend the curb; his big body, more corpulent and silkily
clad than that of the long-legged legal apprentice she had spied from her window, was comforting in its mute mass, like that of a saddled horse in the instant before she felt herself lifted up from the mounting stool onto its trembling, warm-blooded back.

They had turned, in their stroll, right at the corner of Lime Street, away from the traffic and the taverns, past the home, at the bottom of the down-sloping block, of Jacob Eichholtz, the portraitist, whose loving brush fixed in paints the fleshy visages of Lancaster’s leading citizens, and toward the cemetery known as Woodward Hill, where, a half-century hence, Buchanan would be laid, with a civic pomp that he had specifically forbidden in his will, a document in which he also exactly designed and inscribed his own tombstone. But today he was alive, alive, and Ann, too, who would lie not long hence in St. James Episcopal Churchyard at Orange and Duke streets; their living, well-clad bodies were linked in luxurious promenade beneath the red oaks and shivering poplars and straight-trunked hickories. Hickory Town had been the homely name whereby Lancaster was first known to white men, ninety years ago. The arboreal foliage had not yet turned, though the dry kiss of sap-ebb was upon it, and a few early fallen leaves scraped beneath the couple’s advancing boots—his buckled, hers laced. They talked merrily of Jasper Slaymaker’s prank, his and John Reynolds’, pulling up in their gig at public auction and shouting out a bid and racing away, not knowing they had been recognized. The auctioneer in all solemnity knocked down their taunt as the winning bid and declared them the owners of a hotel and obsolete ferryboat line in Columbia, to the tune of six thousand seven hundred dollars—to Buchanan a healthy year’s wages, to Ann a laughing matter.

Dust dulled their boot-tips as the board sidewalks yielded to a path of worn earth that ran along the iron fence of the burial ground. Simple round-topped markers, of slate and a soft soap-white dolomite, stood erect within, the oldest of them bearing names already weathering into oblivion. The proximate quiet of the cemetery soothed our strollers; in their intervals of conversational silence could be heard the chirring of cicadas, laying the summer to rest, and the calls of birds quickening their activity as the day’s heat gently withdrew. A prospect of uninterrupted shade appeared, beneath the arches of elm boughs silently striving for light and air. Ann folded her silken parasol with a snap.

As if released by the closing of the catch, Buchanan resumed his complaint, in a voice tense with self-pleading: “Your father thinks I bend too much. Disliking my maiden speech in the Assembly as too proximate to the Democratic creed, he liked no better my Fourth of July attack upon the last administration for its French-inspired demagoguery, its wanton destruction of the national bank and, with it, all restraints on credit. Ever since partaking of radicalism at Princeton, Madison has had a passion for the godless doctrines of French rationality; he took us into a disastrous war as little better than Napoleon’s cat’s-paw. Monroe, though a blander cup of tea, has been poured from the same Paris pot; his wife and daughter Eliza Hay have turned Washington into a veritable Versailles of backbiting and empty etiquette. This continent was meant to be an escape from Europe, not a provincial imitation of it. Like all the sound men of Lancaster, I am a Federalist to the bone, in the conservative and balanced style of the deathless Washington. Property rights, but not rule by the rich. Personal rights, but not radical mobocracy and incessant revolution. Washington’s noble example and the
beautifully wrought balances of the Constitution indicate the same middle path between impractical extremes, and if for following this path—sometimes broad, and sometimes painfully narrow—I must be the object of calumny and cheap ridicule from all sides, from men of iron as well as men of straw, so be it,” he went on, a sideways glance at his companion asking acknowledgment of his sly allusion to the Colemans. “Thank God in His Providence,” Buchanan concluded, “that with my second term in the Assembly I am forever finished with public office; my wife will never be exposed, dearest Ann, to the humiliations and manifold thanklessness of politics.”

“Are you indeed finished with public office? I sense in you a quest for the widest audience, a will more subtle than my father’s but no less relentless.”

“Rest assured: the domain of local law, and the domestic hearth ruled by you, will form sphere enough for me and my moderate abilities. There is a rapacity,” he went on, relaxed and thoughtful with her to a degree she could not but observe with gratification, “and a growing coarseness to public life whose tenor I detest. As these colonies grow westward, and the coastal cities become richer, and more various in their immigrants, the common man in his natural greed and low appetites becomes the index of measure; the gentility of the founders is running thin. Little Maddy was the last of the original creative spirits, and Monroe will be the last President in knee breeches. The present era of good feeling is but a lull before the storm, when the West must declare itself to be a child either of the North or of the South. Eleven slave states, eleven free, and Missouri. The Missouri question is a reef upon which the whole ship, so bravely patched and launched, may split in two; our American problem is, we have land and
climate enough for a number of nations, and seek to be only one.”

“Perhaps,” Ann offered, in keeping with the new freedom of intercourse his largeness of assertion invited, in a realm beyond the regions of petty quarrel and divergent loyalty, “my family but wait for more fervent signs of affection and trust from you. My father is more nakedly self-made than yourself, and my brother Edward is tormented by his curse of doubtful health.”

“Once we are securely wed,” Buchanan affirmed, pressing the hand of hers resting upon his arm with his free hand, while maintaining with two gloved fingertips his grip upon a slender walking stick, its silver knob in the shape of a fox’s smiling head, “the flow of good will shall be less forced. A settled deed argues for its own acceptance; an established union dictates its terms for peace. Until our marriage, we are vulnerable to interference. Your family’s claim to loyalty inevitably distresses you; their call upon your affections dates back to your infancy, where my claims are but newly placed, and rest unsteadily upon matters of seemingly voluntary choice.”

Seemingly
because of his Presbyterian fatalism, that saw all glimmering moments caught in an inflexible web of divine predestination? The Colemans were of the Episcopal church, removed from Papism and Puritan gloom both. “And when shall we arrive at this blessed established state?” Ann asked, her own voice tense and rising. “We are not young; you were all of twenty-eight this April, and next month I will be twenty-three. The girl-friends of my childhood are already all wed. The strictest propriety does not ask that we wait longer than a season or two more.”