The Senator's Wife (27 page)

She turned away from him to the group, which was watching her curiously. “I'm Delia Naughton,” she said, trying to calm her own voice. “I'm here to lead you through the Apthorp house and to answer any questions you have about it. Please,” she gestured at the doorway, “let's begin.”

She could feel herself settling down as she led them through. She started, as always, in the living room, with the family portraits, talking about their provenance and the questions about their accuracy.

As the tour went on, she monitored herself. She thought she was performing adequately, if not well. As soon as they left, she felt swept with exhaustion. She was grateful they'd been the last group of the day, so that she could go home. Though she remembered now that she had to stop at the supermarket on the way.

The accident was entirely her fault, which is what she said to the woman driving the other car, and to the policeman when he arrived. It occurred at that stretch of mall outside Williston where all the signs and ads made the traffic lights on the side of the road a little hard to spot, though Delia had successfully managed to stop at them hundreds of times before. No, she was inattentive today, lost in thought when she went through the red; and the truth was that if the other driver—Heidi Rosenberg was her name—hadn't been as quick to swerve and brake as she was, it could have been even worse. As it was, Heidi had damage to her fender and right front headlight. Delia's car was worse off—the back door and rear panel were stove in, crumpled.

Both cars were drivable, though, and so after the young policeman had given Delia a ticket, after the little crowd that collected had dispersed, after Delia had sat for a while and
gathered herself,
as she thought of it, she drove very slowly and carefully home, going over it again and again, the feeling of the moment it happened—that everything had suddenly exploded, become senseless and unreal. Each time she thought of it, it made her breathless again.

Matt and Tom, the wide and the skinny, were walking down the sidewalk—she could see them almost all the way to the Sternes’ house as she turned in the driveway. When they got back, she didn't mention the accident to either of them. She and Matt helped Tom make his way upstairs. While Tom showered, Delia waited, resting on her bed, and Matt went outside to mow the front lawn. When Tom was done, he called Delia and she helped him dress; and then she called Matt and they got him back downstairs and settled in his room to watch the Red Sox.

Matt left. Delia made a pasta salad for supper. She set up tray tables and they ate in the living room. They didn't talk much, but the silence felt companionable to Delia. It wasn't until Tom was in bed and she was upstairs that she let herself think about the accident again.

She had been absolutely in dreamland. She was paying
no
attention. She shook her head, and her lips tightened. What would become of them if she couldn't drive safely anymore? She realized that this was what had frightened her most, the notion of their joint helplessness, what that would do to this thing she'd made of their lives. She wouldn't let it happen. She couldn't.

T
HE SUN WAS
still high, slanting through the moving leaves, strobing Delia's face as she walked slowly over the uneven brick sidewalks. They had heaved and cracked here and there under pressure from the root systems of the old trees, whose branches arched out and met in the middle of the wide street. It was July 1, the night of the party her neighbors, the Sternes, threw every year before they went away to their summer house on Cape Cod. They were careful to invite everyone on the street, and Delia always looked forward to this gathering as a way to continue to know the younger and younger families who had laid claim to its houses.

From halfway down the block she could hear the hubbub of voices, the high lift of a throwaway female laugh. She was thinking that she would have a gin and tonic to celebrate. Yes, that's what she'd do.

To celebrate what? Oh, summer, let's say. The end of the week. Tom, resting on his bed in the dining room, waiting for her return.

They'd talked yesterday about the possibility of his coming along with her. They could have used the wheelchair or driven down with the walker in the car, or his cane.

But Tom had said no, he didn't want to spoil her fun. Though what he'd actually said was, “Shpa! Phnn!” He'd shaken his head, hard, his lips pressing together, and said it again, a little more clearly.

She got it, as she did more and more now. She told him he couldn't spoil her fun, her fun was in being with him.

Bullshit, he said, (“Buh! Shi!”), and then his mouth tightened into the familiar small smile that almost always made her smile back.

It was just as well, as it turned out. When he came home from rehab this afternoon it was clear that he wouldn't have been able to do it even if he'd wanted to. He was just too tired. He'd had a snack, and then he'd lain down. When she'd gone in to say good-bye, he was asleep.

She wondered who would be at the party this year. She saw as she turned up the walk that there were at least a few young couples she didn't know. She came up the steps onto the crowded front porch and introduced herself to the young woman standing at the top.

She was in an interesting conversation with her about Hillary Clinton and feminism when Gail Sterne saw her and came over, drifting up in one of the gauzy caftans she wore to hide her bulk. She wanted to know how Tom was—they'd heard about his stroke. She took Delia to the bar, set up at the end of the porch, and Delia ordered her gin and tonic. While she waited, she described Tom's progress. Then she told Gail that he was home, with her.

“Well!” Gail said. “My! Well, I won't say I'm surprised, but . . . Yes, I will! I am surprised.”

Delia had her first bitter sip of the gin and smiled at Gail. “You're not the only one. Nancy says I'm trying for sainthood.”

This was only one of the many things Nancy had said to Delia on the phone when Delia had finally told her what she'd done.

“You've definitely got my vote,” Gail said.

“Nonsense. It's mostly just a matter of arranging things. He has plenty of money. All I'll do is spend it on him.”

“But you're so used to your privacy, Delia, to your own life.” Her hand came up and rested on her bosom. She had large, glittery rings on almost every finger.

“Oh, I've had too much of that,” Delia said. “It will do me good to be caring for someone besides myself.” She'd made this argument to Nancy too, and Nancy had said, “So? Go work in an orphanage. Get a dog. You owe Daddy
nothing,
Mother.”

“I don't do it because I feel I owe it to him,” Delia had said.

“Then why? Why do you do it?” Nancy's voice was shrill, as it had been throughout this conversation.

“Because I want to. Because this is what I want to do.”

And though she had answered every argument Nancy mounted with equal assurance, equal conviction, Delia had been aware that this was only the beginning of the discussion. That Nancy would come back to it again and again, particularly if Tom stopped making progress. That everyone who learned of Tom's arrival at her house, of her decision, would wonder at it, and those who were close to her would ask her openly about it, would argue with her. The only ones who hadn't so far were Madeleine Dexter and Brad. Though Brad had assumed it was only temporary, his father's stay with her in Williston, and she didn't correct him. Because maybe it was. And a few times when she was feeling a little overwhelmed, she had comforted herself by saying that nothing was permanent. “We'll see how it goes,” she said to herself from time to time.

And now she said it to Gail, too. “Anyway, we'll see how it goes. How I stand up to it. Intestinal fortitude, as it were.” She had another swallow of gin and made a face. “What a revolting idiom that is when you think about it!”

But Gail was preoccupied, frowning. “Yes, it's all improvisation from here on in,” she said, her voice slowed. She started talking about Bob's open-heart surgery last fall. How they spoke together of each annual event now—this party, their summer on the Cape—as though it might be their last. “The point is to do everything you can as long as you can, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Delia said. “To use yourself up.” And suddenly she had the image of herself having her solitary dinners, in the living room here, in her apartment in Paris. How wasteful that seemed to her now. How selfish.

Now Delia looked up and saw her neighbors, Meri and Nathan, just turning into the Sternes’ walk. He had one of those kangaroo pouches slung around his belly—the baby. Asa. She felt bad that she'd seen so little of them, but she had a proposition for them, an exchange she wanted to work out. She excused herself to Gail, who was turning to talk to someone else anyway. She stepped to the railing and called over to them.

Meri's face, which always had that slightly sullen look, bore the stamp of her fatigue—Delia had heard the baby in the night from time to time. It lifted now when she spotted Delia on the porch.

Delia beckoned them. “The booze is this way, my dears,” she called, and several of the young couples turned and smiled at her.

Meri and Nathan threaded their way through the clusters of people on the porch. Delia hugged each of them, leaning carefully over the baby in Nathan's case. As she stepped back, she peered in at him in the pouch. He was ridiculously small, curled in almost a half circle, his little hands at his face, his head flopped over sideways onto one shoulder, eyes closed.

“Now if you or I did that,” Delia said, pointing, “we'd have a stiff neck for a week.”

Meri said, “I wouldn't mind the stiff neck if Nathan would just
carry
me everywhere I went.”

Nathan grinned his toothy, boyish grin. “I would if I could, it goes without saying.” His big hands cupped the little shape at his front, just the way you did when you were pregnant, Delia thought. Maybe that's why they had these little pouches, so men could have the tiniest sense of the experience.

Now he announced that he was going to get a beer for himself—did Meri want anything? She asked him to bring her some sparkling water.

When he was gone, Delia turned to the younger woman. “How are you getting on? Do you need anything? Does the baby need anything?”

Meri shook her head. “Nothing. We don't use half of the stuff we've got. All he wears are little T-shirts and diapers. Or just diapers, it's been so warm.” She sounded hoarse and exhausted.

“And you? How are you? Any better?” Delia asked.

Meri shrugged.

“It's a trying time,” Delia said. “When they're so little and feeding and being changed all the time.”

“I sometimes feel I'm living in a big cotton ball. In a fog.” She tipped her head from side to side, almost shaking it.

“I wish I could be of more help. Once I get Tom settled in, I will. I'm actually quite fond of infants. Some people aren't.”

“Do tell,” Meri said. “And how is that coming, Tom's being here?”

“Early days,” Delia said. “We haven't sunk into a routine yet, though I suppose we will. We really have to. I want to keep on at the Apthorp house. It's a busy year—the sesquicentennial of Anne Apthorp's death. The college is publishing a new edition of the letters. Many celebrations.”

“A sesquicentennial? What, pray tell, is that?”

“The one-hundred-fiftieth year. But there's always something. Two hundred years from her birthday. Two hundred years from the building of the house, and on and on. And all of it's just about raising money, of course.”

Nathan came back with the drinks—Meri's silvery water and his beer, which was almost black.

Delia gestured at it. “A murky brew,” she said.

“Murky, but fantastic.” Nathan lifted it and drank.

“Our host is peculiar about beer,” Delia said. “Or so it has always seemed to me. He specializes in the opaque.”

“I like opaque,” Nathan said. “In a beer anyway.” Nathan offered Meri a taste.

She tried it and made a little face. “I'm not even jealous of you. Though Delia's lovely drink with lime,” she lifted her chin toward Delia's glass, “is another story.”

“I'd hate to tell you how good it is,” Delia said. “It's very good.” She had another sip.

“Delia's still doing her volunteer work,” Meri told Nathan. “Even with Tom living with her.”

“Impressive,” Nathan said. He had a little mustache of brown foam.

“Yes, I am,” Delia said. “And this brings up something I wanted to propose.” She set her glass on the wide porch railing. “You know I've hired this wonderful young man, Matthew, to take care of Tom for about an hour or so each day when he gets home from rehab and I'm still at work.” Meri nodded. “Well, it turns out he can't be there two days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays. A class he needs to take this summer, which turned out to be held later in the day than he'd originally thought.” They were both waiting, attentive. “If one of you could possibly come over for about an hour and a half on those two afternoons for the duration of summer school, I would be
eternally
grateful. And I will insist on taking the babe for at least one evening a week in exchange. I'd been meaning to offer this anyway.” She turned to Meri. “Don't you remember I told you I would sit for you?”

“I do,” Meri said. “It's a lovely offer.”

“It wouldn't be any real work,” Delia said. “Tom, I mean. He'll likely just sleep, he comes home so thoroughly worn out from his day. There will almost certainly be nothing for either of you to do except perhaps get him something to eat or drink if he wants it. It's just that I'm not comfortable yet leaving him by himself. I suppose in six months I'll look back at all this elaborate hoo-hah I've arranged and think I was silly, but for now I seem to require it.”

Meri said she understood, absolutely. “I'd be nervous about leaving Asa, too,” she said.

“Not
would be
nervous, because I'm absolutely going to take him.” She smiled, she picked up her glass again. “You
will
be nervous, I'm afraid. Those are the terms. I will take him.”

They agreed on it. Meri and the baby would come over and stay with Tom, starting the following Tuesday.