Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike Page B

behind, with ringlets falling free about her face, from a glossy central parting striking in its straight perfection. Her long eyebrows had an inquisitive arch, and her lightly tinted mouth expressed a cushioned pleasure in itself and its flirtatious workings a world of temperament removed from Ann’s angular, impatient lips. When Miss Hubley spoke, it was with an enchanting Southern mulling of the words. “Oh,” she said, “one does not have to be in the Jenkins household many hours to hear tell of Mr. Buchanan. He is the man to be watched, in Lancaster.”
    “I am a diligent lad from the Tuscaroras, Miss Hubley, and claim to be no more than that. In the glitter of this gracious city, I cast a dull but faithful gleam.” Yet he seated himself—in an armless oval-seated side chair with tapered curved legs whose neo-Grecian fluting was echoed in the rails of the back, which had a lyre-shaped splat—near the end of the damask-covered pink Chippendale sofa where Grace Hubley shimmeringly perched. An iridescent silk shawl of Persian pattern, such Oriental fabrics being fashionable in Europe ever since Napoleon’s Egyptian foray, permitted glimpses in the warm candlelight of her plump shoulders’ ivory skin and of the powdered embonpoint the décolletage of her high-waisted gown of
well-set silks
revealed. He bent low, placing his beaver hat, with its own fashionable iridescence, between his boots, his Philadelphia boots, of a thinner black leather than his Lancaster boots, their tops cut diagonally in the hussar style.
    “You disclaim, to elicit flattery,” his new companion gailyaccused him. “You have lost your mountain manners, if ever you had them.”
    “My dear mother is a woman of some graces, who loved the old poets as well as the Bible, and my father a man of sufficient means to send me to college, though he missed my strong back on his farm. He began on the road to prosperity as the sack-handler in a frontier trading post; in his youth in County Donegal, his own father had deserted him, and when the dust of our Revolution settled he quit his dependency on his dead mother’s brother, and sailed.” Lest this self-description which he impulsively confided seem boastful, he added, “But the simple Christian virtues remain my standard of success, and when my second term in the Assembly ended three years ago last June, I with great pleasure surrendered all political ambition.”
    Mary Jenkins loyally protested, “Yet the Judge Franklin case has kept you in the public eye, and there is talk,” she explained to her sister, giving their guest the dignity of the third person, “of the Federalists putting up Mr. Buchanan for the national Congress in next year’s election. And just the other day he and Mr. Jenkins and James Hopkins were appointed to form a committee to advise our Congressman on the question of slavery in Missouri.”
    Buchanan hastened to disclaim, “Lancaster is a small city, Miss Hubley, and a few dogs must bark on many street corners.”
    “I assume you will advise to vote
against
extending slavery; I think it wicked,
wicked
, the way those planters want to spread their devilish institution over all of God’s terrain!”
    Such fire of opinion, the tongue and heart outracing reason, attracted Buchanan, and alarmed him. “We do so advise, Miss Hubley, though in terms less fervently couched thanyour own. Myself, since the Constitution undeniably sanctions slavery, I see no recourse but accommodation with it
pro tempore
. A geographical compromise, such as rumor suggests Senator Clay will soon propose, to maintain the balance of power within the Senate, would, I am convinced, allay the sectional competition that has heavily contributed to the present panic of selling and suing. For unless the spirit of compromise and mediation prevail, this young nation may divide in three, New England pulling one way and the South the other, and the states of middling disposition shall be left as ports without