The Senator's Wife (26 page)

“But when I spoke to Nancy . . . to your daughter . . .”

Delia smiled, a worn smile. “Nancy would have chosen that, but it wasn't her choice to make, you see.”

“But, isn't he . . . ? She said he was, pretty . . .”

“Damaged. Yes. He is, that's true. But he's already made progress. Good progress. And they think there's a chance for a reasonable recovery. And he's
himself,
which is what's important to me.”

“So, he can talk?”

“Well, some.” Delia smiled. “You might not call it talking. But he can . . . communicate. He knows me, he has wishes and wants that he signals me. Like our little friend here.” She patted Asa. His head was tucked under her chin.

Meri was surprised, surprised and then impressed with Delia, that she'd won, that she could be so stubborn, so powerful. Meri would have bet on Nancy.

“And more,” Delia said now, her face lifting. “He's funny, sometimes. He's happy every now and then. He's there, you can see it in his eyes. Behind his eyes.” Delia shrugged. “It makes it all seem eminently doable.”

“But, by yourself, Delia?” she said.

“Oh, I'll have help. Tom, in case you hadn't noticed, is loaded.” She raised her eyebrows significantly. “And
I
have access to that. That part will be the easy part.”

“And the hard part?”

“This,” Delia said, holding the baby out a little, looking at him. His head lolled. “This dependence. This helplessness.” She smiled at Meri. “Only instead of sustaining myself, as you must do, by dreaming of who he'll
become,
your fine boy, I'll dream of who Tom was, once upon a time.”

They talked a while more. Delia said she was still working at the Apthorp house, that she was going to continue to work. Meri told her a little of the labor and birth, and about Elizabeth's visit. Delia offered to babysit too, and insisted that they set a time. Meri said she'd check with Nathan. Maybe they could have a quick dinner out somewhere in a couple of weeks.

“Or not so quick,” Delia said. “Think about that.”

It wasn't until Delia was gone, until the house was suddenly silent but for Asa's little rooting noises against her shoulder, that she thought about what Delia had said about Asa and Tom, that she realized, almost startling herself with it, that she hadn't once dreamed of Asa as becoming anyone other than who he was. She hadn't imagined a life, a future for him beyond this, beyond here, where she was stuck, with him.

M
ERI HAD READ
that when babies were troubled sleepers, riding in the car could be helpful. They'd been given a car seat by one of Nathan's colleagues, and Nathan had installed it, but it hadn't occurred to Meri until now to do anything other than errands with Asa; and in truth, Nathan had been the main shopper, the errand runner, since Asa was born.

One day, though, when Asa seemed inconsolably tired and yet couldn't stop crying long enough to drop off, she took him to the car, strapped him into his seat in the back, and drove to the highway at the edge of town. He was asleep before she got there.

Once she pulled into the rushing traffic, though, she was frightened by its speed, and also by her inability to turn and monitor Asa at all. She took the second exit she came to, to Route 43 North and Correy. It seemed to her she'd heard of it. Someone she'd met in the past year must live there.

She got on a two-lane road, winding through fields and little villages where she had to slow down to twenty-five. As she came into Correy, she remembered: it was a colleague of Nathan's who lived here. She and Nathan had gone to her house in the winter sometime, driving here through the dark one evening. The whole night seemed years ago.

The hills, which looked blue and distant from Williston, were closer here. They loomed over the town. The fields she passed through were small, prettier than the vast squared acreage of the Midwest—wedged in odd, organic shapes, their boundaries ending at streams, hills, the edges of towns, tree lines. She passed several men out on large, rusty red tractors, mowing hay. Asa, tilted awkwardly in his car seat, seemed happily silent.

And then he'd been silent for so long that she leaned back to look at his face, and saw that he was awake, that he was staring out the window above him. At what? She leaned forward and looked up out the windshield as she drove. The shapes of the trees and the clouds, she supposed. Or more likely, the way the darkness of the trees alternated with the blue light of the open sky.

He didn't fuss for almost two hours. By then they were in a village almost at the state line. Meri pulled off in a turnout overlooking what was called a scenic vista, and nursed him. He was so hungry that he sucked for almost twenty minutes on each breast.

She was hungry too, she realized. When he was finished, when she'd burped him and changed him, she turned the car around, back the way she'd come. She stopped in the first village they passed through and went into the country store. Asa was on her shoulder. She picked out two candy bars, ones she had liked in her youth, a Butterfinger and an Almond Joy. There was a young girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen at the cash register, apparently manning the store alone. She was a pale redhead, with freckles and white eyebrows and lashes. As Meri was paying for the candy, she asked, “How old's your baby?”

“Almost a month,” Meri said. And then realized. “A little over a month, actually.”

“He's
so cute,
” the girl said, leaning over to smile at Asa. She had braces on her teeth, and Meri felt a tug of sympathy for her, for her homeliness.

“Thank you,” Meri answered.

As she bent over Asa putting him back in his car seat, she looked closely at him, trying to be objective. Was he cute?

He was better than he'd been at first. He'd fattened and filled out. The patchy dark hair was mostly gone and thin, paler hair glinted blond on his scalp. His slate-blue eyes staring up at her seemed to be taking something in, or trying to. His limbs had the beginning of real flesh, rounded flesh, on them. “Asa,” she said, and he frowned and opened his mouth.

S
O NOW SHE
drove almost every day, unless it was raining or she had things she had to get done in the house. She liked to go slowly, to look around her at the lazy town greens, at the sudden, shocking abject poverty that presented itself—rusted cars and appliances in a yard, clothes hung to dry on a porch slowly listing sideways away from a house with almost no paint left. Cars piled up behind her, and she pulled over when she could to let them pass. Then she started out again, looking, trying to imagine the lives, the way they might play out in places like the ones she saw.

Asa rode silently, sleeping or looking, his eyes perhaps trying to make sense of all this. She saw them moving, saw his hands and feet lift and move in what must have been his version of excitement—or interest, anyway. She felt a sense of companionship with him in those moments: he'd been feeling trapped too. She'd been able at last to offer him something he liked.

Sometimes Meri brought food with her. Sometimes she stopped in a store and bought something—fruit, if she was feeling virtuous and they had it. More often chips or a candy bar or a can of cashew nuts. Occasionally she stopped at a little coffee shop or an inn for a sandwich and something to drink.

She was at such a shop one afternoon, a rectangular box of a room with a few booths along one long wall and a counter along the other and three square tables pushed up next to the plate-glass window at the front. She was sitting at one of these. She'd ordered some tea and half a tuna sandwich, which came with a pickle and potato chips. Asa had been asleep when she came in, and he slept long enough to let her eat part of the sandwich. But then his nickering complaint in the Snugli began. Quickly, so he wouldn't start shrieking, she slipped him out of the little pack, laid him back across her left arm, and with her right hand, lifted up her shirt by his head.

He turned to her and immediately found her nipple—he was getting better at this, at least some of the time. Meri turned her body away from the window. She was able to reach over Asa with her free hand and have a sip of tea, grab a chip from time to time. But mostly she held him, watching him intently as she often did, as though she could somehow discover who he was and how to love him by looking at the way he performed his small repertoire of behaviors.

She had just had the thought—which made her smile, a little sadly—that to an observer she would be a picture of maternal devotion, nursing as she was, turned to watch her tiny child, when the door opened and an elderly couple entered. They were overdressed for the hot day, for the shop. They paused just inside the door. Tourists, Meri thought. They had the air of surveying the narrow room, likely making a decision about where to sit, something a local wouldn't have had to do. They murmured to each other, and started toward one of the two other little tables by the window.

Meri was still watching them, so she saw the quick recoil on the old woman's part, how her fat placid face was made suddenly ugly when she realized what Meri was doing, when she took in the bit of exposed flesh of Meri's breast, the way the baby's face was pushed into her. Meri saw how she turned, how her husband bumped into her from behind, how they awkwardly moved back from the tables, their bodies almost tangling—the woman's voice lowered, trying to urge him away, far enough away so that she could explain to him the impossibility of sitting where they'd planned to sit.

It would have been comical, Meri thought, if . . . if what?

If it weren't also shocking to her that she, that she and Asa, could be the cause of such revulsion. She felt a sudden sense, the first sense she'd had, of being somehow
in it together.
Asa included in the old lady's disgust. Asa, wronged.

Asa, asleep now, his full lips open, her body's milk a watery white in his mouth.

That night at about ten, she was nursing Asa again, in bed. She'd waked him up to do this, actually, in hopes that she would only have to get up once more before his day started at five or so. But this meant that he kept falling away from her breast, nodding off. She picked him up and burped him vigorously against her shoulder, in part to wake him again. Then she cradled him. “Come on, baby,” she said. “Let's do a little
work
here.”

At one of the moments when his head had fallen heavily back once more from her wet nipple, she looked up and saw Nathan watching them. Something in his face made her think of the old woman earlier, in the coffee shop. The idea frightened her.

She set Asa down in the little bassinet by the bedside and crawled back over to Nathan. She curled against him. He put his arm around her in what felt like a comradely, comforting way, nothing more. His book lay facedown across his lap. They hadn't made love since well before Asa's birth, though the doctor had told Meri several weeks ago that it would be all right now. Suddenly it seemed urgent to Meri that they should, that Nathan should want her.

She opened her nightgown, she began to stroke her breasts, her body. “Nathan,” she whispered.

But he didn't respond. Or rather, he responded by setting his free hand over her moving ones, stilling them. They sat there for a moment, and then Meri turned away. She sat up straight.

“Meri,” he said.

She looked at him.
Let him,
she thought. Let him explain this.

“I want you. I do,” he said. “It's just that it's so . . . Your whole body is so much, for the baby now. So . . .
functional.
And I'm just feeling it might be easier for me to wait. Just for a while. Just to wait for a while.”

She began to cry, silently at first, and then sobbing loudly. She knew what her face looked like, doing this, and she simply didn't care. There was nothing left, nothing to think of as connected to what had once made her pleased with herself physically, to what had made her feel she owned herself, was in charge of herself, could use herself as she wished. To what had made her feel safe, with Nathan. Why not weep if that's what she felt like? Nathan was right—she lived for the baby now, a baby she couldn't know, in spite of her best efforts, and who couldn't know her, except as she failed him.

Nathan had his arms around her again, he'd pushed his book aside. His breath, his voice were in her ear. “Shhh, love. Shhh, Meri. Please. Please.”

But Meri was beyond consolation. Her voice soared in its grief. In his bassinet by the bed, Asa woke and added his song to hers.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Delia, June 1994

D
ELIA HAD BEEN
in a state of controlled excitement since the moment she woke, around five this morning—woke, thinking
this is the day,
the day he comes home. Now in the car, he'd fallen asleep. She looked over at him from time to time as they drove along. His mouth sagged open. He looked like an old, old man, hardly recognizable as her Tom, the Tom who had always appeared to be years younger than he was, so that sometimes in Washington, people had been confused about what her relationship to him might be: “You're his
wife
?” She'd occasionally been prickly in response.

How strange life was, she thought, that she should be the strong one now, the young one, and he the old man. She pulled into the driveway. She turned off the ignition and looked over at him once more. He was white, his face was sunken. It was so suddenly silent without the noise of the engine. Didn't he hear the difference?

It seemed not.

She got out and opened the back door, pulled the walker out from the backseat and unfolded it. She came around to Tom's door and opened it. She leaned in, she gently pulled on his arm, saying his name, and then she was frightened for a moment. Was he
there
? Had he had another stroke?

But he opened his eyes and saw her, standing above him, holding his walker. “Deeehl,” he croaked.

“Yes,” she said. “When you're ready.”

He moaned, and sat still for a full minute, breathing heavily, regularly, as though to locate himself, as though to gather strength. Then in one long effort, he hurled his body back against the seat and turned it, swinging his bad leg along with his hands.

He was sitting sideways now, facing out of the car, his feet on the ground. He looked around him, at the oak tree, at the lawn, at the old brick house. “Home,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered. “Finally.”

Delia waited a minute or two for him to catch his breath, and then she pushed the walker up to him, around his legs. He leaned forward and put his hands on the top bar. He sat like that for a moment.

“You're tired today,” she said.

“Mmmmh.” He nodded his head. He tilted it a little to look up at her.

“There's no rush,” she said. “We can take forever, if we like. We've
got
forever, you know.”

He smiled at her. They waited, not talking. The breeze shook the trees, a door banged somewhere, and she thought she could hear the baby next door cry in that creaky, halfhearted newborn way, but it stopped quickly.

His grip tightened and he started to pull himself up. His body moved, his arms tensed, he came forward, but he seemed unable to get beyond the halfway point. Delia reached for his upper arms and pulled too, pulled him toward her. He was heavy. For a moment it seemed they would fall back into the car, both of them and the walker between them—they were in a ridiculous state of equipoise, their startled eyes looking fully at each other: can we make it?

But then the balance shifted, they teetered slightly Delia's way, and he was up, resting his weight heavily on the walker. They were nearly embracing. He was panting a little, and Delia realized she was too.

She laughed then, in relief, and at the comedy of it. “Graceful, aren't we?” she asked.

He nodded. He was smiling. “Dhans,” he blurted. Dance.

“
You
say it's a dance,” she answered. “Thousands wouldn't.”

When they had recovered, he rolled slowly up the walk, and then she helped him carefully ascend the stone steps. She was grateful for their wasteful width and depth.

Inside the house he moved down the front hall and then paused, as though awaiting instructions.

Delia pointed the way: to the lavatory. “You need to pee, and then you can lie down for a bit. I'll show you your room.”

He stopped and looked at her, as though startled, or offended. At what? Perhaps he didn't like her playing the nurse.

Too bad, she thought. Too bad for both of us. “Those are the rules, I'm afraid,” she said firmly. “You pee on a schedule now. And it's time.”

He turned away. He wheeled slowly to the lav and went in. This was a triumph, she'd been told, that he was continent, that he could manage this on his own—though they'd also told her that some of this was keeping to a regular schedule. That would be part of her job, and Matt's.

When he came out, she was standing in the doorway to the dining room.

“Come see,” she said. She couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice.

She stood aside as he rolled in. “We set it all up for you,” she said.

He sat down at the edge of the bed, resting his arms on the walker, while she moved slowly around the room, pointing everything out. He watched her steadily. She wasn't sure how much he was taking in. She talked slowly, keeping her vocabulary simple, gesturing—at the bed, the bureau, the rocker, the pictures she'd hung on the wall, the radio on the bedside table. She tapped it. “This is a very fancy number, I'll have you know,” she said. “Much more expensive, and, we hope, much better than the one I have in the kitchen.”

He nodded, a kind of thanks.

“Do you like it?” she asked. She was nervous about this, she realized.

“Unnh,” he said. “Yessh.”

“Good. I had two young men as my slaves for hours getting it just so. I enjoyed it, actually.”

He smiled at her, but he looked tired. Exhausted, really.

“Do you want to eat in here?” she asked. “I've got a tray I can bring things in on if you want to stay here. Or we can eat in the kitchen.”

“Here,” he said.

Delia helped him swing his legs up on the bed, and propped him up with pillows. She took his shoes off.

“Do you want the radio on?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Music? Or the news?” she asked.

“Nhooos,” he said.

She turned it on, adjusted the volume down, and found the news station. Before she left the room, she kissed him. He reached up and touched her face. “Stay,” he said clearly.

“I'll be right back,” she said. “I'm going to get us something to eat.”

In the kitchen Delia moved around rapidly. She'd boiled eggs early this morning and made egg salad. She'd brewed tea and put it in the refrigerator. She'd mashed strawberries and sprinkled sugar on them. Now it took her only a few minutes to assemble sandwiches and pour iced tea for them both. She set out the ice cream to soften.

After she'd served him, she brought the tray table for herself into the room so she could eat with him. The radio was still on, and she and Tom talked only occasionally. He commented on the news with grunts, with monosyllables. The Clintons had been questioned at the White House about Vincent Foster's death, about Whitewater. The wife of O. J. Simpson had been murdered, and he was a suspect. Two more candidates had announced they would run in the Virginia primary along with Chuck Robb and Ollie North. His head swung in apparent disbelief, and she laughed.

The news was over, and the jazz program came on. When they'd finished eating, she moved his tray to the bureau, and he lay back again. He fell asleep nearly instantly.

She sat for a while in the rocker, watching him. Slowly the room got fully dark. She knew she should wake him, that she needed to get him into his pajamas, to have him go to the bathroom one last time. Then she would go upstairs to her own bathroom, to wash her face and brush her teeth, to change out of her dress.

But just let me sit here for a while longer, she thought.

There was no danger of her falling asleep. She was excited and alert. She was thinking about waking up tomorrow and coming downstairs to find Tom, to greet him, to have breakfast with him. She was thinking about Matt, who would be coming over to meet Tom in the afternoon. She was thinking about the days spooling out from now on, with Tom always at their center.

Finally she got up, she turned the lamp on, she reached over and gently moved his shoulder, said his name.

He turned to her, and his voice was surprised and tender. “Delia!” he said.

“Yes. You're home, darling. And we need to get you ready for bed.”

Slowly, laboriously, he stood up. He let her do the work of removing his clothes—he seemed more incapacitated than usual in his fatigue. She wouldn't again let him fall asleep without getting him ready, she thought.

She was moved to see him naked—his skinny old body with the drooping dusky genitals, the pouches at his breasts. She kept whispering slow encouragement, explaining each step. His damaged limbs were heavy and awkward, and he seemed unable to help lift them as she pulled his pajamas on. She minded none of this, though she supposed there would be times to come when she would.

After he'd used the bathroom, after she'd helped him brush his teeth and lie down again, after she'd pulled the sheet and light blanket over him and kissed him just as she used to do for the children each night—after all this, she went upstairs. She wandered the rooms on the second floor as though she were a stranger in her own house, seeing everything for the first time. She looked at her own bedroom, made so comfortable for one person to live in, to grow old in. She went into the guest rooms, peering closely at the pictures of her grandchildren at various stages, at the wedding photos of the kids, all of them so happy to be recklessly hurtling forward into their versions of marriage. She went into her own study and examined the pictures there. The little framed prints of Rodin's erotic watercolors which she'd bought in Paris to discipline herself about Tom's affair with Carolee and the ones after it. The photo on her desk of herself at a family reunion with the kids and their families, as though Tom, the old progenitor, didn't exist.

From next door she heard the faint catlike mewling of the baby, and she thought of Meri. How strange that their lives should be so seemingly parallel in this moment. She remembered calling it
mired,
but she hadn't meant that, not really. Neither of them was mired, though surely it would feel that way every now and then. But Meri would fall in love with her little boy in her own time; and she, of course, had never stopped loving Tom.

After she'd gotten ready for bed, she still felt wakeful. She tried to read, but she was too excited. She looked at the clock. It was only ten-thirty. Perhaps not too late. She dialed Madeleine Dexter's number.

Madeleine said she was in bed, but not asleep yet, which Delia knew was likely a lie. But she needed to talk. She told Madeleine about Tom's arrival home. She summarized his progress, the therapies to come, “among them what they call ‘alternate forms of communication,’ whatever that may mean.”

“But what
does
it mean?” Madeleine asked.

“Oh, who knows?” Delia said. “I just feel—I guess I need to feel, that he will talk normally again.” She could imagine it, that they would one day sit again at the kitchen table and talk as they had in the past. He would make her laugh, he would laugh at himself.

“But perhaps what they're saying is that maybe that's not going to happen.”

Delia didn't answer.

“Am I right, do you think?” Madeleine's voice was gentle, careful.

“I suppose,” Delia said. “I suppose that's what they mean. But what could they be talking about? Notes?”

“I like notes,” Madeleine said. “I have notes from Dan and sometimes when I'm lonely, I read through them. It's comforting.”

“That's different.”

“Of course it's different. But it's real. It's real too.”

“But Tom is alive.”

“But he's been changed, Delia. It's not going to be as it was.”

“They say he's making great strides,” Delia said. “His progress is very, very good.”

“But there may be some limits on that. It sounds like they're saying that too.” Delia was silent, and Madeleine waited for a long moment before she went on. “Sweetie,” she said. “I think you feel as though you've waited all these years, and now it's somehow going to
have
to work. He's safe, you're getting him back, so it has to be as it was. But the
reason
it's safe, my darling, the reason you're getting him back, is that it's not as it was.”

Delia was silent. She knew Maddy was right. She wanted her not to be.

Maddy's voice was soft, loving, when she spoke again. “You're just a little crazy right now, I think.”

C
RAZY INDEED
.

The next day at the Apthorp house, which was at its busiest time of year right now—the alumni in town for reunions, the tourist season just starting—Delia came into the gift shop to gather the small crowd waiting for the four o'clock tour. It was her second week back at work.

As Delia introduced herself, they turned to her from the books for sale, from the case of Anne Apthorp's letters, from the postcard racks. It was a mixed group of ten or twelve people, including two men her own age wearing straw boaters, striped blazers, and badges that said “Class of 44.” They looked like elderly twins, carefully dressed by some demented mother, Delia thought. There were also a family with teenage kids, a couple of women who seemed to be together, and—her breath stopped for a moment—there was Billy Gustafson, Delia would have known him anywhere, her first true love in high school.

“Oh!” she cried, delighted, and crossed the room to him. He was the same—the same silky black hair, the dark eyebrows that almost met over his nose, the same wide, amused mouth—though as she approached him eagerly she could see a look of increasing perplexity, almost fear, cross his face.

And then, just as she was reaching out to touch his sleeve, to claim him, she remembered: of course this wasn't Billy! Billy was her age, gray or white, transformed, withered—if he was alive at all. Her hand flew up, her mouth opened. This young man—this boy, really—was too young by fifty years, sixty years.

“Oh, I'm so
sorry,
”
Delia said.

Her quickened breath was audible to everyone, she was sure. She needed to talk, to say something to make him more comfortable, to make them all more comfortable. “I thought you were someone else, but now, up close, I see you're not.” She laughed, carelessly, she hoped, though her heart seemed to be pounding. “You're
you,
of course!Please forgive me.”