Read Online Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike - Free Book Online
Authors: John Updike
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whose stiff matted bodies crows tear at in the tall pasture-grass, cawing. A line occurred to her from a poem of Lord Byron’s of a fascinating morbidity, from a slender edition of
The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems of 1816
into whose burgundy-red covers the acid sweat of her fingers during the summer past had worn ovals of a paler red,
I had a dream, which was not all a dream
, and then another,
The bright sun was extinguished
. Ann wanted to scream. Buchanan’s static image filled the field of her vision, leaning toward her respectfully,tenderly, regretfully, in the wake of his forked offer of allegiance and absence—his tidy curvaceous nimble lips, his ponderous possessive face, his touchingly mismatched eyes, his rising crest of oak-colored hair. Claws clamped her heart; beaks tore at it.
Happy were those
, came to her amid the waves of heat, of unreality,
who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch
. She felt trapped within the coffin of a book. This man was a single stiff page. She feared the book was about to slam shut on her, though for him it would go on and on, through foreign lands and ever higher offices, a saga of endurance.
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea
—how terrible, poets should not be allowed to frighten young women like that, perhaps in England, among the gentry, where life was all a game, but not here, here in these forested States, where life was simple and hard and serious, on land just lately seized from the savage redmen and soaked with their blood, as the turning leaves each year demonstrated. Still Buchanan hung there, speechless, waiting for a sign of her love, her loyalty though he must be much away from Lancaster on legal business. Perhaps the hot waves within her were magnifying time, subdividing each moment of this hazed warm late afternoon, late in summer, late in the day, with its narrow bird-chirps and minutely veined elm leaves overhead.
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe
.
The upstairs front parlor, where Ann found the peace to be alone with her books, the clatter of King Street noticeable only when two drunken men began to shout together, the airfragrant of cold ashes and furniture wax and stale potpourri and sun-warmed plush, had fallen away, the very walls with their wallpaper of red stripes and blue-and-gold medallions had fallen away dizzyingly, when she read these last words, their terror collected in the mysterious
She
with its Godlike capital letter. A world without clouds, without winds—but of course, the world within the coffin would lack everything.
Buchanan, politely troubled by her silence, sensing her disturbance if not her premonition, presumed to touch again the back of her hand, her four pink-nailed fingers where they rested on the cloth of his coatsleeve, and at this touch she took on flesh again, she took on life, her heart moving her blood through the supple conduits of her tall young body, maintaining in her slender skull the polychrome light of consciousness. Her universe shrank to these soft, familiar environs, and her condition to that of a woman on the verge of married life, soon to have a house of her own, with waxed furniture, and respectful servants, and crackling fires in the fireplaces, and windows to keep clean with vinegar and water as Mother directed her maids to do, a cup of vinegar to every bucket of water. It was Byron’s dreadful vision now that seemed illusory, a dream indeed. Talking and walking at a slower pace, as if together recovering from a slight case of ague, Buchanan and Ann made their sauntering way north on South Queen Street to Centre Square, as candles were beginning to be lit in the dusky rear rooms of the staid houses of brick and limestone, then right a half-block to the Coleman residence, where Ginger, a manumitted black slave said to have had an Onondaga grandmother, served them
The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems of 1816
into whose burgundy-red covers the acid sweat of her fingers during the summer past had worn ovals of a paler red,
I had a dream, which was not all a dream
, and then another,
The bright sun was extinguished
. Ann wanted to scream. Buchanan’s static image filled the field of her vision, leaning toward her respectfully,tenderly, regretfully, in the wake of his forked offer of allegiance and absence—his tidy curvaceous nimble lips, his ponderous possessive face, his touchingly mismatched eyes, his rising crest of oak-colored hair. Claws clamped her heart; beaks tore at it.
Happy were those
, came to her amid the waves of heat, of unreality,
who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch
. She felt trapped within the coffin of a book. This man was a single stiff page. She feared the book was about to slam shut on her, though for him it would go on and on, through foreign lands and ever higher offices, a saga of endurance.
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea
—how terrible, poets should not be allowed to frighten young women like that, perhaps in England, among the gentry, where life was all a game, but not here, here in these forested States, where life was simple and hard and serious, on land just lately seized from the savage redmen and soaked with their blood, as the turning leaves each year demonstrated. Still Buchanan hung there, speechless, waiting for a sign of her love, her loyalty though he must be much away from Lancaster on legal business. Perhaps the hot waves within her were magnifying time, subdividing each moment of this hazed warm late afternoon, late in summer, late in the day, with its narrow bird-chirps and minutely veined elm leaves overhead.
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe
.
The upstairs front parlor, where Ann found the peace to be alone with her books, the clatter of King Street noticeable only when two drunken men began to shout together, the airfragrant of cold ashes and furniture wax and stale potpourri and sun-warmed plush, had fallen away, the very walls with their wallpaper of red stripes and blue-and-gold medallions had fallen away dizzyingly, when she read these last words, their terror collected in the mysterious
She
with its Godlike capital letter. A world without clouds, without winds—but of course, the world within the coffin would lack everything.
Buchanan, politely troubled by her silence, sensing her disturbance if not her premonition, presumed to touch again the back of her hand, her four pink-nailed fingers where they rested on the cloth of his coatsleeve, and at this touch she took on flesh again, she took on life, her heart moving her blood through the supple conduits of her tall young body, maintaining in her slender skull the polychrome light of consciousness. Her universe shrank to these soft, familiar environs, and her condition to that of a woman on the verge of married life, soon to have a house of her own, with waxed furniture, and respectful servants, and crackling fires in the fireplaces, and windows to keep clean with vinegar and water as Mother directed her maids to do, a cup of vinegar to every bucket of water. It was Byron’s dreadful vision now that seemed illusory, a dream indeed. Talking and walking at a slower pace, as if together recovering from a slight case of ague, Buchanan and Ann made their sauntering way north on South Queen Street to Centre Square, as candles were beginning to be lit in the dusky rear rooms of the staid houses of brick and limestone, then right a half-block to the Coleman residence, where Ginger, a manumitted black slave said to have had an Onondaga grandmother, served them
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