Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike

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 silkilyclad 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