Memories of the Ford Administration Read Online Free PDF Page A

Retired in favor of a stylish redwood box bought at Cambridge’s Furniture in Parts, it had been stored up on the third floor in the Wayward house; I had been allowed (Norma in the crunch proved quite possessive and not as disorderly as I would have liked in sorting out our common property) to take it when I moved, along with two old folding director’s chairs,a doughnut-shaped foam-rubber reading chair covered in crumbling Naugahyde, a gate-leg table I had inherited when my mother moved to Florida, a patchily threadbare Oriental rug from the same source, my door-top desk and supporting filing cabinets, a spotty gilt-framed mirror the Queen of Disorder had never liked the way she looked in, several of her unfinished paintings to remember her by, and a cardboard carton full of random plates and cups and cutlery and kitchen equipment, including a wonderfully useless old-fashioned conical potato-masher with its perforated conical “female”complement. The Perfect Wife pointed out to me that I was being used as a trashman.I could have trucked it all myself, in my gallant Corvair convertible—a by now rusting and shimmying relic of the Sixties, shaped like a bathtub with a rear-end engine—but for the bed and a green foldout sofa, as heavy with its hinged inner works as a piece of cast-iron machinery, that dated back to our Dartmouth days. Stallworth and Sons, who handle most of the college’s moving, sent their smallest truck for the little trip across the river, and old Gus Stallworth himself came along, with one of his sons. Gus must have been seventy, but he could still hold up his end of a metal-webbed Hide-a-Bed or a full four-drawer filing cabinet without taking the wet cigar butt from his mouth. A lifetime of lifting had compacted his inner organs and made him dense as an ingot. His sons were taller, with more air and still-fermenting malt in them, but the same leaden patience with inanimate things characterized all their professional movements, in and out of the collapsing home and up the ramp into the truck body with its pads and ropes and resonant emptiness. It was terrible, to watch them plod back and forth noncommittally, pulling my meager furnishings, my sticky Olivetti, my olive-drab typing table, my gooseneck lamp, my cartons of scrambled research notes, out of what was becoming, with each subtraction, Norma’s house. The Stallworths had moved us in but eight brief years ago this coming August. My wife and children couldn’t bear to watch my departure, and had left the premises. I was alone with the Stallworths, suppressing my desire to cry out something like “No,
stop
, it’s all a mistake, a crazy overreaching, I belong
here
, these things belong here, embedded in the mothering disorder, gathering dustballs and cat hair, blamelessly sunk in domestic torpor and psychosexual compromise!” Father and son plodded on,grunting and muttering, in clothes the color of cement, slaves to the erotic whims of the educated classes.
    Norma let me take only the books connected with my work, including the little library on James Buchanan I had collected—the twelve volumes in dreary green, reprinted by Antiquarian Press, of
The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence
, as edited by John Bassett Moore; a darling little chunky copy, with embossed brown cover, water stains, and tissue-protected engraved portrait, of R. G. Horton’s campaign biography of 1857; the two maroon volumes, again a photocopy reprint, of Curtis’s biography of 1883, fetched forth by Harriet Lane Johnston’s fervent desire to see her uncle done justice; Philip Gerald Auchampaugh’s scattered, defensive
James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession
, a dove-gray paperback; Philip Shriver Klein’s biography
President James Buchanan
, unrivalled since 1962, in a Scotch-taped jacket of sprightly blue and white, decorated with the seal of the United States; also decorated with this seal,