The Senator's Wife (19 page)

Tom said he'd encountered that in young people too, especially when he visited college campuses. “It's all they want to hear all about, as though it were some golden age. The sixties, the sixties, the sixties.”

“I was glad when they were over,” Delia said. “It was just so complicated, threading through all that in Washington. And then I moved back here more or less full-time, and that was that, for me. A private life.”

“Do you miss it?” Meri asked. “Washington?”

Tom's gaze was steady on his wife as she answered. “There are things I miss about it,” Delia said. “I had dear friends there. I miss them.” The animation that had lit her face earlier was gone now. “But we see each other now and then, and call. And write.” She lifted her wineglass. “It's true my life is narrower now. But so is everyone's at my age.” And then something livened in her again. “Except, of course, for Tom.”

Tom gave a little snort. After a moment, he turned to Meri. “You haven't said what you're up to in Williston, and I want to know.”

Meri answered quickly, dismissively, describing the program and the kinds of topics it covered. “I'm in charge of the culture beat, mostly,” she said. “The arts, somebody's latest book, but also ‘the culture,’” her hands made quotation marks. “Sort of whatever the latest new
thing
is.”

She stopped. She'd had the sudden thought that Tom might be useful to her, a good connection, a resource. She said, “But sometimes they let me do something political. So maybe I'll end up calling you, eventually. If you'd consent to be called.”

“Of course, I'd be delighted. Remind me to give you my card.”

Meri could hear the perfunctory note in his response. Using a tough moll's voice, she said immediately, “Gimme your card.”

He looked at her sharply, and then he laughed. He had a wonderful laugh, Meri thought. It was like his voice, light and dry, and his head tilted back a little, giving over to it. Meri felt she'd
accomplished
something, provoking his laughter.

He stood up, and reached into his back pocket for his wallet. She had the sense that he was really looking at her for the first time tonight, that she'd moved from invisibility to . . . what? Personhood, anyway. She wondered fleetingly what it would be like to be attractive, sexually, to Tom Naughton, something she clearly wasn't in her present state.

He had come over in front of her now, and he was almost bowing as he handed her the card. She took it, looking up at him. There was a smile playing over his small mouth. He was conceding the point, she thought: he wouldn't have “remembered” to give her the card if she hadn't insisted.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling back. “I'll use it sparingly, if at all.”

“Anytime,” he answered.

She took it in only as Tom moved back to his chair, that Nathan was talking, had been talking, and now she heard him: he was talking about her. He was revising her description of her job, talking about the prison writing program. “. . . you know, some of these guys were in for murder. And she went out there to Goffstown and sat with them and taped these extraordinary interviews. . . .” Meri watched him, his face so earnest as he went on, about the response the radio station had had, the people wanting to donate funds to the writing program.

She saw what he was doing. He didn't want to be seen as having a wife who wasn't smart, who wasn't important in some way. She was
his,
after all. She was part of who he was. She couldn't be
frivolous,
which is how she'd presented herself—because that was how she'd been flirting with Tom.

This, now, was how Nathan did it.

So they were
all
flirting with Tom, she thought. How strange. How funny. She wondered how it would feel to be a person whose attention everyone wanted to have.

Nathan caught her eye, saw something in her gaze, and stopped abruptly.

Delia broke the short silence. She was worried about Brad, about his being a little late.

“It's fine, Dee,” Tom said. His tone was reassuring. “There's no weather. It's just traffic.” He got up and put another log on the fire.

“Are you folks traveling for Christmas?” Delia asked.

Meri gestured at Nathan. “We're going to his mother's house. New Jersey. It's our first joint Christmas with her.” She made a little face. “Nervous-making.”

Nathan looked at her. “Come on, you're not nervous.”

She waited a beat. “Oh, that's right.” She turned to Delia and Tom. “Apparently
not
nervous-making,” she said.

Tom said to Delia, “Remember our first Christmas at your parents’ house?”

Delia smiled at him. “I'd rather not.”

“Were
you
nervous?” Meri asked.

“I wasn't smart enough to be nervous,” he said. “I had no idea.”

“My parents disapproved,” Delia said. “We had just told them we were engaged, and they couldn't have been less pleased.”

“On what grounds?” Nathan asked.

“Mother of God, what wasn't there?” Tom said. “Every prejudice of the day. I was poor, I was Irish, I was Catholic, I was déclassé.” He had a swallow of scotch. “Now, I'd known all that, you couldn't be those things in that day and age without knowing how others thought of you, but I hadn't fully taken in what an unattractive package I was until I arrived to stay at Delia's for two long, long days.”

“I should say that they were not unkind people,” Delia said. “They were just frightened for me.”

“The papist, the lowlife, was taking their lovely girl away,” Tom said.

Delia rolled her eyes.

“Would
ruin
her.” He smiled. “Conversion, God help us, was a possibility.” And he went on, talking about Delia's parents, the impossible stiffness of the visit, the long silent meals, his early departure.

Meri watched them both, their pleasure in passing the subject back and forth, their ease with what must have been this hard part of their history. She was wondering whether she and Nathan would ever be able to be as playful about the differences between them. The parallel differences, actually—she, the Tom character, the lowlife, the outsider. Nathan was as patrician as Delia really, as completely comfortable with himself.

Suddenly there were voices outside, and before they could get up, they heard the door open and a young voice calling, “Grandma?”

Delia was up instantly. Moving quickly as a girl, she disappeared around the corner to the hall. Tom stood too, and went more slowly around the corner. Then Meri saw the kids in the wide doorway to the hall—three kids, the oldest in her early teens, Meri thought, the youngest maybe eight or so. They were shimmying out of their coats and talking rapidly, mostly to Delia, who was still out of sight behind them. One of them, the youngest, sat on the little couch and began to heel off his boots. Now a man's voice, a woman's, could be heard in the mix.

Nathan and Meri were standing up in the living room. Nathan said, “We should go, no?”

“Absolutely.” But they stood awkwardly a minute longer, listening to the family assembling in the hall, not wanting to interrupt the moment of reunion.

Delia came back, leading the others in to introduce them all. Nathan and Meri said hello to everyone and almost simultaneously began to make their excuses. Tom went to get their coats. The kids in their stocking feet had come into the living room and were unloading the bags of presents they'd carried in with them, arranging the bright-colored packages under the tree.

While Meri talked to Brad's wife—Susan—asking her about the drive down, Tom reappeared, holding her coat. Meri turned and let him help her into it. Awkwardly, bumpily, they moved into the hall. The kids made no show of sociability, but the four adults trailed out with Meri and Nathan, Delia in the lead.

“I'm so glad you could get over while Tom was here,” she said. “He's leaving after dinner tonight, so it really was right now or never. It's wonderful you were free at
exactly
the time that would work.”

“We wouldn't have missed it,” Nathan said.

“Same for us,” Brad said. “It's a miracle when we get to see him at all, so this is really great, short as it is.” He was smiling, almost shyly, at his father.

“Where are you headed now?” Nathan asked Tom.

“Oh, I've got to get to New York for some business first thing in the morning. I've got a car coming, after dinner. Poor guy's probably sitting in some bar watching sports till it's time.” He turned to Brad. “He brought me down from Boston this afternoon.”

“Hey, he's getting paid to watch those sports,” Brad said. “Not a bad gig at all.”

As they left, stepping out into the cold night air, Meri looked back for a moment through the glass pane of the closed door. Brad and his mother had turned back into the house behind Tom, and Brad had his arm around Delia. Their heads were bent down, almost touching each other.

“I need food!” Nathan said as soon as they opened their own door. They both headed back for the kitchen, Nathan dropping his coat on a dining room chair on the way. “Too much booze on an empty stomach.”

Meri stopped in the pantry. “We've got pasta,” she called out. “Fusilli and penne.”

“Let's do penne.” He was already clattering pots and pans. “Fast and easy. We can have oil and olives and herbs.”

“We've got lemons too,” Meri said. “I'll zest one, if you like.”

When she came into the kitchen with the box of pasta, the lemon, the herbs, he was already carrying a pot full of water from the sink to the tiny stovetop. He turned the flame on under it, and they worked in silence for a few minutes at the door-table.

Nathan said, “Big lie there, did you notice?” He had started to pit the olives.

“What? That he came down this afternoon?”

“Yep.” He looked up, frowning. “When we know for a fact he was there last night.” His hands stopped moving. “What would be the point of that, you think?”

Meri knew that this was the moment when she could confess what she knew. When she could tell the sad story of how Delia and Tom had separated so painfully years ago, how they'd painfully come back together and created a new way of being married, which was private, just for themselves. When she could say, “They're supposed to be just friends. That's what the kids think.”

This was the moment when she could speak also of what she'd done, of how she'd come to know all this. When she could tell him how sorry she was, how ashamed.

But she didn't say any of it, of course. She couldn't. Nathan would never understand how she could have done what she did or why she felt so compelled by Delia, by her life. Why she let herself open the drawer, take the letters out, read them. She could never explain it, because she wasn't sure herself. And if she said something like, “I was lonely, Nathan. I
am
lonely. I'm lonely and scared,” he would think that she was only trying to excuse herself for what he would see as a reprehensible act. For what she saw as a reprehensible act too.

And was it that she was lonely? Was it that she was scared? She wasn't really sure that either was the reason, that either was true. For how could she be lonely or scared? She was married, married to someone she loved. She was going to have his child. She lived with him in a beautiful house, they were making a delicious supper together. They would sit down and eat it and talk, and perhaps, later on tonight, make love. She looked over at him. He was bent over the table again now, his long, delicate fingers working carefully with the olives, his face sober at his task.

“Maybe there's no point,” she said. “Maybe some people just like to keep things private.
Secret,
I guess you'd say.”

CHAPTER NINE

Delia, Early May 1994

I
S THIS
M
RS
. N
AUGHTON
?” The voice at the other end of the line was female, distinctly American, older.

Delia had just come in. She was standing at the desk in the entryway to her apartment in Paris. It was raining out, and she was damp—she hadn't had time to change her clothes. “It is,” she said.

“Ah. This is . . . well, you don't know me, but I'm a friend of Tom's, of your husband. I'm Alison Miller.”

Delia didn't know the name. Her throat seemed to have dried up. She heard her voice as a croak. “Yes?”

“It's about Tom. I'm afraid . . .” And then she said in a rush, “Oh, he's
alive.
I'm sorry. I should have started with that. He
is
alive.”

Delia sat down, hard, so hard that she nearly dropped the phone.

“But he's had a stroke,” the woman was saying, this Alison person. “He's here, in Washington, in the hospital.”

Delia was supposed to talk, she was supposed to say something. “But he's . . . he is, all right?”

“Well, no. He's in intensive care. They don't know, I guess, no one seems to know, if he's all right. I guess . . . it seems that it's not easy to tell right away how bad these things are.”

“He's had a stroke?” It was as though Delia's brain was catching up, a half minute behind what this woman was saying.

“Yes. They're doing all they can, but they can't say, yet, how he'll be.”

“But, is he conscious?” She was seeing Tom, or she was trying to see him, and this seemed important to her, to know this, as a way of imagining what had happened to him.

“Sort of. He seems, almost not conscious. Perhaps, I don't know, he's in a kind of shock.” Her voice rose at the end of the sentence. When Delia didn't say anything, she said again, “I don't know.”

Delia was too confused for the moment to respond. She could hear the drumming of the rain on the balcony, the hum of the refrigerator from her kitchen. Her umbrella was dripping slowly onto the floor next to her in the foyer. She'd need to wipe that up.

After a few seconds, Alison Miller's voice continued. “I think—well, they think too—that someone needs to be here who can . . . someone from the family. With the power to make decisions.”

“Well, yes. One of the children would . . . do the children know?”

“No. I . . . No, I didn't. That would be . . . I just thought to call you.”

Delia cleared her throat. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Would you tell me your name once more?”

“I'm Alison Miller. I'm a friend of Tom's.”

“And you took him to the hospital?”

“I called the ambulance, yes, and came in with him.”

Delia was beginning to make sense, a kind of sense, of all this, though she wasn't certain what was being asked of her. “Do you know . . . I mean, had Tom made any arrangement? In case of such an event?”

“Arrangement?” Now Alison Miller sounded confused.

“Yes. What . . . ?”

Alison Miller's voice was dry, suddenly: “I think the
arrangement,
as you put it, was immortality.”

Delia was silent.

And now the woman said, more gently, “There was no arrangement, as far as I can tell.” There was a silence. “Mrs. Naughton,” she said, “you need to come home.”

“Home?”

“You need to come to Washington. Tom needs you.”

“But Tom and I, we are not—”

“I know that. I know. But there is no one else.”

“But are you . . . ?” The rulelessness of her life with Tom had left her unable to be certain of anything in this moment.

“No,” she said. “No. Not me.” And then she said again, “There is no one else.”

Delia had to buy a first-class ticket, the only space available on the next morning's flight out. She was seated next to someone famous, someone whose face she knew, she knew very well, but couldn't place. He drank three glasses of champagne quickly, and once the plane was in the air, put a mask over his eyes, tilted his seat back, and went to sleep. After a while he began to snore, to snore in what Delia thought of as a feminine way—little fluttery spurts, as though each breath were a great surprise to him, something to exclaim over.
Gasps
of snoring, nothing like the steady, deep rasps Tom produced.

Sleep wasn't possible for Delia, although to her surprise, she'd slept well last night. And now, sitting on the plane, she remembered that she'd had a dream. She'd dreamed of Tom. She began retrieving it bit by bit. An odd dream. Well, weren't they all? She was with him in a clearing in a wood—a kind of glade. She saw it suddenly. It had been like a scene from Bergman, struck with a kind of holy celluloid light, the way his dream sequences often were—full of yearning and nostalgia. She couldn't have said what she and Tom were doing there, but when she'd waked, it was with a feeling of joy. Within seconds, though, lying in her dark bedroom, listening to the rain outside, she'd remembered the reality: that he was ruined, he was dying.

Or not. She didn't know. That was the problem, wasn't it?

Immediately after she got off the phone with Alison Miller, she'd called the doctor—a man named Ballantyne, whose number Alison Miller had given her. She'd had to wait a long time while he was paged. Twice someone clicked onto the phone to ask if he could call her back, but Delia said no, she'd hold.

When he finally came on the line he was noncommittal. For now it was better not to speculate. “The next few days,” he said, “will tell the tale.” This phrase struck Delia, it seemed so old-fashioned and familiar. It was something her mother had said to her, something she herself had said occasionally to one of the children when she didn't know how to answer a question.

After Delia had hung up, she sat for a long time in the hallway in her wet shoes. It was too much, too much to take in. The woman—a friend? a lover? Tom, in some kind of limbo, where no one could tell how he would be, who he would be, when he emerged.

She'd called the hospital again this morning before she'd left for the airport, but it was still night in Washington and there was no further news. The nurse or receptionist answering the phone had sounded irritated with her, as though she should have known better than to call asking for information at such an hour. She spoke to Delia as you would speak to a child, and in response Delia had felt like a child—shamed, but angry too.

She'd calmed herself by carefully setting the table on the balcony for her usual breakfast. She'd had to wipe the table and chair dry with a towel. Then she brought out a tray with the croissant, the seedless raspberry jam, the rich dark coffee with steamed milk. She sat down and laid her napkin across her lap.
The consolation of the daily,
she thought.

There were children playing in the courtyard below, their shrill voices rising. The sky was a pale blue above her, with smears of thin high clouds moving fast across it. She was aware of actually enjoying the musical ticking of the spoon stirring the little lump of brown sugar into her coffee, the sound of the china cup clinking lightly against its saucer as she set it down.

That world, so fresh, so perfect, washed so clean by the rain, seemed unconnected to this one—this plane with its stale air, with this unkind person sleeping next to her.

And this world in turn seemed not possibly to be leading to the one she would arrive in later today. To Tom, lying damaged in a bed in a hospital. To the hospital itself and its terrible life—the routines, the boredom, the anxiety. To the questions she would be in charge of finding the answers to.

Tom. Tom, whose face stayed blank when she tried to think of him as he might be now. She could only remember him in motion—talking, laughing.

Oh! In the dream—Delia's lips parted, thinking of it—they'd been practicing cartwheels. How silly! But she remembered the sensation of it, the wild physical abandon of throwing yourself forward in space, of flipping upside down—as wild as sex, really. She remembered too that it was understood between them that they had come to the woods to do this in private so that they wouldn't embarrass the children, who didn't know they had this skill, who wouldn't have liked seeing them do it in any case.

She leaned forward to look out the window at the cottony fields of sunstruck clouds below her.

T
OM WAS LYING
propped up in bed, his eyes open, conscious.

Conscious, but absent, Delia thought: he seemed not to notice her as she approached, he seemed not to hear her voice when she spoke. Or perhaps to hear it from some great distance he'd traveled. He turned now to its sound, turned slowly, his eyes not homing in on her, but moving around. It made her think of the way children follow sound in their infancy, vague as to its purpose or its source. Tom had just that blank, swimming gaze.

She spoke again. “Tom. Dear. It's me. It's Delia.”

He frowned. That was all.

He was wearing a patterned hospital johnny. His arms appeared skinny and flaccid, emerging from its wide sleeves. His hands lay curved and useless-looking on the sheet pulled up to his belly. His hair was in disarray, spiky, and Delia, unable to stand this, smoothed it. She stroked his face. His eyes closed. He leaned his face to her hand. “Unnnnh,” he said.

“Sweetheart,” she answered.

But when his eyes opened, they still didn't quite fix on her. He looked only puzzled. The blankness of his stare, the way his face drooped, his apparent inability to understand anything going on around him—all these made him seem animal to Delia. Like a large, sad, frightened animal.

It was better not to speak at all, she thought. She knew something about strokes. Several friends had had them, and her father had died of one, lying speechless and motionless in a hospital bed for more than a week. Delia knew that it was conceivable that nothing made sense to Tom right now. Her appearance here, her words. The very
here
of it, in fact—the hospital itself. Did he have any understanding of where he was? of how he got here? Possibly not. That must be more frightening than anything.

She decided that she wouldn't speak again. She'd just be here, a presence. A reassuring presence, she hoped. But silent. She'd save her speaking for the doctors.

She pulled a chair close to the bed and leaned over Tom, holding his hand, stroking his head, as that had seemed to comfort him. And it did again. He turned into her hand, his mouth resting on her palm like a kiss. She thought of his kissing her hand like this at various times. Seizing it, opening it, pressing his lips to her palm in passion, in sorrow—and over and over through the years, in apology.

But his face was dead now—no emotion—and there was nothing at all to read in his lips’ touch. His eyes closed again. After a few minutes, saliva started to pool in her palm. She pulled her hand away, wiped it on the sheet.

D
ELIA HAD CALLED
Madeleine Dexter from Paris. She knew she didn't want to stay in a hotel, or in Tom's house. Madeleine lived in Georgetown, near the hospital. She was an old friend, one of the earliest friends Delia had made in Washington, way back when Tom was first a congressman. For the last few decades, Delia had seen her only once a year or so, usually in New York, where they met to see a play they were both interested in, or a show at the Metropolitan Museum. They always stayed at the same hotel and had dinner together. Between them as they talked they usually drank at least a bottle of wine, and then a smaller bottle of dessert wine. They caught each other up on the children, on their marriages, on the shape of their lives and their feelings about that.

Madeleine had known Tom and had loved him too, though more than once she had said to Delia—and reported that she'd said to him—that she could “skin him alive” for what he'd done to his marriage. She was one of the few people Delia could talk to about the complexities of what Madeleine called “your arrangement.”

She was alone now. Her husband, who had worked in the State Department, had died a few years earlier. Dan.

She opened the door and held her arms wide for Delia to step into. She was a short, plump woman with one of those enormous bosoms that occupy the entire space between the shoulders and the waist. Delia felt it like a large soft pillow pushing against her own more meager front.

“Ah, Delia,” she said as they stepped back from each other. Her face was round and full, prettier now than it had been in her youth, when it had been her figure that had attracted men. “Let's face it,” she had said more than once. “I was stacked.”

Now she held her head tilted up to see Delia through the lower lenses of her bifocals. “Here you are, darling. Here you are, and with a chicken—actually, a
rooster
, I guess I should say—come home at last to roost.” She smiled. “Yes, of all things.”

Delia smiled back. “It's true, I'm afraid. And I'm Henny Penny. Or maybe Chicken Little. And it seems the sky
is
falling.”

“Was it awful?”

“It seemed so to me. He just seemed . . . ruined.”

“Oh, Dee.”

“But the nurses say you can't tell yet. That there are good signs, that he has good responsiveness. He's moving everything, though not perfectly. And I haven't talked to the doctor yet. So I don't know. I truly, truly don't know a thing.”

“That must be harder than anything.”

“Well, not than anything, but it's hard.”

“But is he . . . alert?” Madeleine asked.

Delia laughed dryly. “Not so's you'd notice, I guess. Anyway, I need to change. I need to shower. I'm exhausted.”

“Of course, of course,” Madeleine said. “You know the way. I'll be in the kitchen, fixing us supper for whenever you're ready. Just take your time, my darling.”

Delia carried her suitcase down the long hallway. The apartment, deeply carpeted everywhere, curtained in multiple layers at all the windows, swallowed every noise. As she unpacked in the chintzy, plush guest bedroom, Delia could smell garlic, herbs—maybe tarragon. She was hungry, she realized. And so tired. Several times she had to stop and sit at the edge of the bed for a moment, feeling a yearning as strong as her hunger just to lie down. But as soon as she stopped, the image that rose in her mind was Tom—the new Tom—and she didn't like thinking of him.