The Senator's Wife (23 page)

The Tom who existed now was used to this, to his compatriots in the new country he lived in. He probably wouldn't notice any of the things that so disturbed her. He would be in them. Of them. He would be one of them. It seemed almost unbearable. She didn't want to think of him this way. She
wouldn't
think of him this way. She couldn't.

And then she remembered something from the literature they'd sent her. She interrupted Mrs. Davidson in the middle of what she was saying. “You have a day-care program too, don't you?”

O
VER THE NEXT
week or so, Mrs. Davidson and the staff at Putnam managed the details. They coordinated with the hospital in Washington, where Tom was still doing his poststroke rehab. Together they agreed on another ten days of work there. Then he'd come to Putnam for at least a week as an inpatient. Then, if he was progressing as well as he had seemed to be, he could come home, home to Delia. He could live with her and continue to use the rehabilitation facility, but as an outpatient.

Delia mentioned none of this to Nancy when they talked. She just spoke of the quality of the place, of the programs, of the various levels of care. She couldn't face another struggle with her daughter right now. She let Nancy believe she was implementing the plan they'd agreed on, which was, of course, already a compromise on Nancy's part, as Nancy saw it. The time to tell her, Delia thought, would be when it was a fait accompli, when Nancy could see how well it was going.

In the meantime, Delia was busy with her own arrangements. She hired a driving service to take Tom over and back to his five days at Putnam each week once he'd come to stay with her. She called the student employment agency at the college and listed a caregiver's job for the afternoons starting in mid-June—she wanted to go on working at the Apthorp house this summer, so she'd need someone to come and stay with Tom then—there was a gap of about an hour and a half between the time he would come home from Putnam and the time she'd get back from her docent's job. Also she'd need help getting Tom upstairs for a shower a few times a week at the minimum, and there might be odd tasks around the house she could think of.

She decided to conduct interviews for the job—it seemed important the person be someone that Tom might like. There were three young men who called her in response to the ad. She arranged to have them come seriatim on a Wednesday afternoon.

She was nervous ahead of time. She dressed carefully—a white linen shirt and black slacks, sandals. She chose bangle-y jewelry for her wrists—youthful jewelry, as she thought of it. She knew this was ridiculous, but she felt she ought to try. She didn't want them discouraged too much by her in advance of what was bound to be discouraging about Tom. She spiffed the room up a bit, and bought Coke and chips, which not one of them touched.

She had decided beforehand that she would choose on the basis of two qualities, physical strength and the degree of relaxation the young men had around her.

But they were all enormous, and they all said they did one sport or another. All strong then, she assumed. Two of them, though, were formal and embarrassed in her company, each in a different way—one too polite and ingratiating, the other too distant, as though a person as old as she was somehow a different species, not amenable to idle conversation or laughter. Talking with them was exhausting to Delia, since she had to do all the work.

The third one, Matthew, seemed unafraid and curious, and he'd heard of Tom. Tom would like that. And though he was shy, though he kept calling her Mrs. Naughton even after she'd asked him several times to call her Delia, he was, in his youthful fashion, interesting. He also didn't know what he wanted to be or do as an adult, and Delia liked that. Young people ought to be more indecisive, she thought, since they knew so little.

She told him a bit about Tom, about how he hadn't known either what he wanted when he was Matthew's age, how he'd traveled around the country as a young man, doing pickup work. How he'd fought fires and worked briefly as a boxer in a border town in Texas. As she was describing this, she had a momentary vision of the young Tom, that tall brave boy, off on his own.

“That is so cool,” Matthew said. He had a big square head and a face that might be handsome in a few years if what gave it thickness now was just baby fat—you couldn't tell about that.

“Hardly,” Delia said. “It always sounded to me a bit like a cockfight. They just threw them into the ring together for the pleasure of betting on it. The bloodier the better. He got five dollars if he won, and nothing if he didn't. Of course five dollars was a great deal in the Depression.”

“But nothing was nothing then too,” he answered.

Delia laughed, and he looked so pleased—he blushed!—that that was it for her. They made their arrangements, they talked about a salary.

A few days later, Matthew and a friend of his came to rearrange things in the house for her. They carried the dining room table and chairs to the basement, and they moved a double bed into the dining room from one of the guest rooms. They brought a bureau down too, and the rocker from the living room, replacing it with a wing chair from Delia's bedroom. There were a few extra lamps in the basement that Delia had them cart up, and two bedside tables. They put a little chest in the first-floor lavatory so Tom would have a place to keep his toiletries, and Delia cleared all the old coats out of the hall closet so she could hang his clothes there.

In addition, she had bought what she thought of as a booster chair for the toilet from a medical supply house, and a tray with fold-down legs on it so he could eat in bed if he was tired.

And every fourth or fifth day through all this she flew to Washington to see Tom, to arrange with her lawyer and Tom's for her to take over the decision making, the finances, to talk to his doctors and his therapists about how he was doing.

What she heard about his state, and what she could see for herself, was that his progress was steady. He was walking, with a cane on good days, with his walker when he was tired. He was eating well, and swallowing real food, which was important. If he went very slowly, he was able to read simple texts. He could print with his right hand, though it looked like the work of a child. His speech lagged behind, but he knew what he wanted to say and understood what others were saying to him if they spoke slowly and simply. The focus of his ongoing rehab would be speech therapy and increasing his strength.

But what was most important to Delia in all of this was that he seemed to be
there
again, in his gestures, in his face. That he could signal to her his pleasure when she came into his room, that his mouth tightened sometimes in the old way—ruefully, wryly. That he reached to push her hair off her face when she bent to help him. He was himself. He was becoming himself.

O
N MAY 31
, four weeks to the day after his stroke, Delia flew back to New England with Tom. A driver met them at the airport and took them directly to Putnam. When they pulled up under the blue canopy and the driver came around to help Tom out of the car, he was confused. He seemed suddenly lost. He grabbed her arm.

“Hoooom,” he said to Delia insistently. She had told him she was bringing him home, but she'd also told him about Putnam.

“In a week or so,” she said. “In a week or so I'll take you home.”

“Hoomm, nao.” Home now. It was like lowing, the noise he made, and Delia felt on the edge of tears.

But he fell silent once he was in the wheelchair, and he said nothing as Mrs. Davidson greeted him, as they rolled him down to the rehab ward, as the driver settled him into a chair in his room. Delia was talking to him off and on through this, explaining over and over that he wouldn't be long here, that it would be only days, really, until he could be in Williston.

He wouldn't, or couldn't, answer. When she left him, he was sitting in the dark green armchair in his room, his face haggard with exhaustion. He didn't meet her eye when she said good-bye.

Even so, Delia was excited, full of the same fierce energy that had carried her through these weeks, these days, the trips back and forth, the work of making the house ready for Tom. She had felt—she felt now—that she was living in the past, the present, and the future all at once, a sense of elation at returning to a happy time in her life. She knew she was wound up, she knew she should try to tame it, but she didn't want to.

On the way home, she asked the driver to stop and wait for her at the gourmet shop. Inside, she bought some triple crème cheese, some olives, and the crackers she liked best.

At home, after she'd prepared her plate and poured a glass of wine, she started to carry them to the living room, where she often sat to eat her minimal supper, but changed her mind as she passed the open door to the transformed dining room. She went in and set the plate down on the tray table by the rocker. She turned on the radio. On the jazz show she liked, someone was playing boogie-woogie piano. She sat in her rocker in the half-light. Slowly, enjoying the ritual of it, she spread a cracker with the buttery cheese and bit into it. Self-indulgence, Delia knew, the cheese so rich you could imagine it clogging your arteries even as you swallowed it. She sipped the wine and tilted back in the rocker.

The sky outside was pinkish through the black leaves of the oak tree. She looked slowly around the room. The sheets were neatly tucked in on the bed, the pillows stacked just so. Her father's antique maps, those other versions of the world, were dimly visible on the walls, strange organic shapes, like amoebas. In a week she would have Tom here. He would be home, truly home, for the first time in more than twenty years.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Meri, May 1994

T
HE OUTSIZE
, flat cardboard box was leaned against the curve of the windows next to the front door when Meri arrived home from the grocery store. It was the morning after her last half day of work—a half day, for what would have been the point of staying for the planning meeting when she wasn't planning anything?

She read the return address. It was the crib. Meri had ordered it from one of the many baby catalogs that had been arriving in the mail, unbeckoned, unsolicited, for months now. She had said to Nathan that it was as though the U.S. government had wiretapped her uterus and notified the postal service of its condition before she had even the slightest idea that she was knocked up.

He had laughed and told her how his father, in his last illness, had thought his catheter had been implanted by the IRS and was the means by which they were accessing all his money.

“Citizenship,” she'd said. “It isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

But how timely this arrival was, she thought now, leaving the box on the porch as she went inside. The due date was just ten days off, and they hadn't even really started organizing anything having to do with this baby. Nathan was still finishing up his semester at school, and she had just gotten through her most intensive month at work yet. In addition to her regular load, she'd tried to set up a dozen or so pieces ahead of time—mostly in the arts, since these didn't have to be so tightly connected to the news cycle.

After she'd taken the groceries to the pantry and put them away, she went back out onto the front porch and tilted the box, testing it. It was heavy, but she thought she could manage to get it through the door if she slid it. Bracing her legs apart, she lifted one edge of it up onto the doorsill; and felt a liquid spurt wet her pants.

Meri was immense. Last week, as she'd come into the room where everyone had their cubicles, Jane had looked up at her and said in a tone of mock surprise, “Gosh, Meri, just when I think you couldn't possibly
get
any bigger, what do you go and do?” And several people standing around chimed in: “You. Get. Bigger!”

Meri had given them all the finger. But the truth was that even she was surprised by how huge she was. And by everything else about her that had changed. Her belly button had popped out and was clearly visible under the four maternity dresses she'd bought early this spring—she'd finally had to give up on Nathan's shirts and sweaters. In these last weeks, her ankles and feet had swollen so much that all she could wear were rubber thong sandals. Her immense breasts rested on her huge belly, and she actually had a rash where they all touched each other constantly. She treated this with cornstarch, which gathered unattractively in her flesh's creases, like some exuded grayish matter. Like
smegma,
the all-time ugliest word in the world. In the grocery store just now she'd had to ask someone to lift the cereal down from a not-very-high shelf—her arms couldn't reach that far past her stomach.

And for the last month there had been incontinence, this added blow to her sense of herself as an adult human in charge of her own body. Every time she sneezed or laughed hard, or even sometimes just moved too suddenly, her body released a little trickle of urine.

She went inside now and up the stairs to the bathroom. She rinsed herself off. She got a clean hand towel from the cupboard and went into the bedroom. There, she tossed her panties and the old towel into the laundry basket, and put on a clean pair of panties. She slung the towel across her crotch, then pulled the panties back up, the towel held loosely in place by them, a kind of diaper. She'd gotten used to treating her body this way—casually, scornfully.

She went back down to the front door and finished sliding the box into the house. She shut the door. She got a sharp knife from the kitchen and cut the many places where tape was holding the box together. When she was done, the front flap of the box unfolded slowly away and wafted to the floor, revealing one of the side panels of the slatted white crib, its frame wrapped in a plastic covering.

She cut through the string holding this plastic on, as well as the string holding the side panel to other pieces of the crib behind it in the box. She lifted the panel out. It wasn't bad. She could probably do this, get the crib upstairs and assemble it, the whole thing, if she did it one piece at a time. It seemed a good project for this first empty day alone, a way of definitively turning from her life at work to her new life, with this baby.

She lifted the side panel against her hip, her left hand gripping the bottom rail through the opening between the slats, her right hand steadying things. She carried it upstairs, stopping for a long moment to rest on the landing. She took it down the hall to the littlest bedroom, which Nathan had painted a sunny yellow over the semester break after Christmas. They'd bought a bureau, and Nathan had painted that too—white, like the crib they'd ordered. The baby clothes and bedding they'd been given were stacked in its drawers. Some were from Nathan's mother, and some were from a shower Jane had organized at work—true to her word, she'd never mentioned her anger at Meri again, and the shower had been a kind and conciliatory gesture on her part. Meri and Nathan had yet to tally any of this stuff, yet to figure out what else they might need. In fact, most of the presents were still tied in ribbon or encased in plastic.

Before she went downstairs for the next piece, Meri looked around, appraising. It was fresh and pretty, but it also did look a little eggy in here, with these colors. But maybe that was just the mood she was in.

When she'd got everything into the baby's room, including the screwdriver and wrenches the instructions for assembly told her she would need, she went to the linen closet and got a fresh hand towel for between her legs. She could feel that the effort of doing all this had fairly soaked the towel she'd been wearing.

Just as she came back into the baby's room with the dry towel snugged into her panties, there was a motion out the window that caught her eye. Ah, it was Delia! settling into one of the Adirondack chairs in her yard in the weak sunlight. Meri stepped back into what she assumed was the black of the window from the old woman's perspective, and watched her.

She was reading a letter—its envelope lay on her lap and she was wearing her glasses, holding the white paper close to her face. After a moment, she set the pages down in her lap too and leaned back in the chair. She took her glasses off. She held her hand up to the bridge of her nose and massaged it gently. Then her hand fell and she sat utterly still, eyes closed, her face slack, the sunlight glinting off the glasses in her lap.

She'd been home for several weeks. Or back from France, anyway. Not exactly home. Tom's stroke had kept her in Washington most of the time. Meri had hardly seen her, and though she knew it was childish, she couldn't help feeling neglected, cast aside.

M
ERI HAD WALKED
slowly back from work the afternoon that Delia unexpectedly arrived home, looking at the pale green of the tight leaves of the trees overhead, of the shrubs. Here and there a magnolia flared in bloom, and Meri could catch its beery smell as she passed. The first tulips were up.

In her dreamy mood, she came inside. It took her a moment after she started to pry her shoes off to realize that she was hearing voices from Delia's side of the house. Women's voices, rising, falling.

She was confused. Could it be Delia so early? Perhaps something had happened—she'd fallen ill and had to return ahead of schedule. But Delia and who else?

Meri had done the house-sitting chores at Delia's again this spring, though she'd spent less time there than she had in the fall. She'd been busier at work and staying later for one thing, but mostly she was ashamed of her earlier behavior.

Still, she had thought of the letters often, particularly after she met Tom at Christmas. She had thought of their language—the language of deep desire, of yearning and loss—and tried to put it together with the image she had of Tom and Delia from the hour or so she and Nathan had spent with them, the gracious, amusing, poised elderly couple, flirting with each other, flirting with their guests, even as they skillfully managed their visit and then the arrival of their son and his family.

And she always felt a sense of something like hunger every time she walked through the door of Delia's house, though she couldn't have said what for. She'd actually spent a few minutes just the day before sitting in Delia's living room, watching the light fade from the late-afternoon sky through the mostly bare branches of the oak tree in the front yard, her hands on her belly where the baby was restive, elbowing and kicking.

Over dinner that night, she and Nathan had speculated on the voices she'd heard. The next morning Meri had gone across the porch and rung Delia's bell.

A tall, slim woman about fifty answered the door. Her voice was chilly, with a jittery, impatient quality to it. “Yes?” she said. She held the door only partially open, as though she thought Meri was a salesperson, or a Jehovah's Witness. She wore an expensive silk blouse, and her hairdo was expensive too, with carefully frosted highlights.

Meri introduced herself as Delia's neighbor, gesturing at her own side of the house. She asked if Delia was home.

“No,” the woman said. “She's out, doing errands. I'm Nancy Naughton. I'm her daughter. Maybe I can help you?”

Meri explained that she'd been taking care of things while Delia was away, that she'd noticed Delia was back, early, that she hoped everything was all right. Also she wondered whether she should stop her chores.

“Ah,” Nancy said. She looked more like her father than like Delia, Meri thought. She was tall, with his long face. But she had neither of her parents’ charm.

Though now she said, “Come in for a few minutes, why don't you?”

She stepped back and gestured into the hall. Meri came across the threshold and followed her into the living room.

“Mother's fine,” she began as they were sitting down. “It's my father, Tom Naughton . . .” She stopped, looking hard at Meri. “Do you know anything about him?”

Meri nodded. “I actually met him once.”

“Oh,”
she said, eyebrows raised, as though surprised by this. But she went right on. “Yes. Well. My father's had a stroke, so she came back from France ahead of time.” She paused. “To
take care of him,
” she said with heavy irony, as though Meri could easily see the absurdity of this.

“Oh!” Meri said. She was thinking of him as he'd been the night she met him, she was remembering him in the photo. “I'm so sorry to hear that.”

Nancy nodded.

“Will he be all right?” Meri asked.

“Oh, who knows?” Nancy Naughton said. “No one can say yet. It's possible that he may be able in the end to manage on his own. But he'll need care for quite a while certainly, and my mother imagines that because technically they're still married, that she's somehow . . . obligated to give him that care.”

“I see,” Meri said, taking it in slowly—the news about Tom, the news about Delia, and then Nancy's attitude toward all of it too. “So she's been with him—Delia—in Washington, then?”

“Yes. She went there straight from France before telling any of us a thing about it. This was Wednesday, three days ago. Stepped off the plane, completely jet-lagged, and started in.” At the end of almost each sentence, Nancy's lips pressed together, a kind of physical punctuation mark. “When I heard, I came out immediately, and I've persuaded her to come home for at least a few days.”

“Ah-ha. To rest.”

“Well, yes. And, I hope, to see the folly of this notion that she's going to be in charge. I mean . . .” She paused and looked hard at Meri. “How well do you know my mother?” she asked abruptly.

Meri lifted her shoulders. “We're neighbors. My husband and I moved in last September. I enjoy Delia. I can't claim to know her well.”

“But you know about her and my father.”

“Well . . . I've surmised a bit. I mean, he doesn't live here with her, obviously.” Meri was blushing.

Nancy's hand moved a little, dismissing any of Meri's conclusions. “My mother is a very loyal person,” she said. “Which is too bad, as my father isn't. He left her years ago, left her for a completely inappropriate choice—a very much younger woman. Which didn't work out, of course. And since then there have been many others.” Her eyebrows rose. “
Many
others. Who also, as it happened, didn't work out. But my mother—and here's the loyalty thing. I mean, they've always stayed friends. She's helped him politically.”

She drew her chin in, doubling it. “Anyway, you can see, I think, how disastrous it would be for her to get sucked into this unattractive proposition—being his caretaker or nurse or whatever, now that he's incapacitated.”

“Yes, of course. Well.” What to say? “Well, I can see that of course that would be . . . upsetting, to you.”

“No, it's
not
upsetting, because it's just unthinkable.” She breathed deeply. “I shouldn't be boring you with all this. Just, that's the story, for the moment.”

“Well, it's not boring, of course,” Meri said. There was an awkward silence. “So Delia's home . . . for a while, then?” she asked finally.

“No, no. Just a few days. Then she insists on going back to Washington. Meanwhile, I'm on the phone, madly trying to make arrangements behind her back, that's how crazy this is. Good enough arrangements that she'll feel comfortable leaving him there.”

“In Washington.”

“Yes.”

“But, in a nursing home?” Meri was thinking of the VA hospital her father had been in at the end of his life. When you came in, you were assaulted by the smell of urine and the braying of men in wheelchairs in the hallways, next to the nurses’ stations, crying out for help—to be changed, to be fed. To go home, now.

“Well, or a retirement community with some nursing care. But a place that will have a rehabilitation center for people like him.”

“But is Delia . . .? I mean, is that what she wants? I can't imagine . . .”