The Senator's Wife (21 page)

When it opened and Delia stepped in, she felt the familiarity of it like a wash, a smell. There
was
a smell, in fact—the scent of Tom and how he'd lived here: cooking odors, the faint tang of cigar smoke, his aftershave, and others, unnamable. Just
Tom
.

She shut the door behind her and walked slowly through the rooms on the first floor—the living room on one side of the hall, the back room Tom had used as a study, the dining room, the small kitchen. They were unchanged, except that one chair in the living room had been reupholstered, and the framed family pictures that had once crowded the round table next to the couch were gone. And he never used the dining room for entertaining, that was clear: the enormous table was stacked with papers, the chairs pushed back against the walls.

They had lived together in this house at least part-time for almost ten years, renting it from the owner, who had a small apartment on the third floor. It was in what was then a dangerous part of town, but it was what they could afford. Sometime after they separated, Tom had bought it, and now he was the landlord, with a tenant above him. She hadn't been in these rooms for nearly twenty years.

She had exiled herself, in effect. Tom had been only welcoming, only eager when she came here the first couple of times after Carolee, during the campaign for the Senate in 1972, the campaign she'd agreed to help him with in spite of the affair. He'd been hopeful that the house itself—which she'd loved, she thought now, moving through the spacious rooms—would call her back. It was what they'd planned, after all—that after Brad, the youngest, left to go to college, they would sell the house in Williston and Delia would come to Washington full-time.

But Delia had known, even as she lived through those days, that the campaign and the way they were together through it were a reprieve from reality. A reality that gripped her once he'd won, once she'd stood beside him at the podium for the last time, smiling and waving and fighting back tears. Once the party in Williston to celebrate was over, once he'd made love to her in their bed there, once he'd left the house in the morning to go back to Washington.

That was when what Delia thought of as
the crazy time
began for her, a time when she didn't know what she wanted; or when she wanted conflicting things in rapid succession.

Or not so rapid. Sometimes she was sure she'd chosen the right thing. She would stay in Williston, alone, for four or five months, feeling certain that she was getting over him. Once she didn't see him for an entire year. But then something would happen and she'd want him. Or perhaps what she wanted was evidence that he wanted her, that she still had some power over him. She didn't know. She didn't ask herself to know. She'd beckon him to Williston or New York, and they'd fall into each other's arms, they'd make love over and over, and when they parted, Delia would leave feeling sore and well used, her face chafed, her sex swollen.

Throughout these years, Tom, sensing her anguish, was kind. He was also steady in his sense of what he wanted—to live together again. Not to divorce, ever. He said that he loved her, that he would always love her, that she was the love of his life, in spite of his unfaithfulness. He described that as his own weakness, having nothing to do with failures on her part.

But he had other women. He was discreet, much more discreet than he'd been with Carolee. But he had lovers. She knew this. She knew it because he told her that unless she came back to him, he would. She knew it because she could occasionally sense, when she called him in the evening, or at night, that he was with someone.

They argued about this. He said that if she were coming back, of course he would stop, he would be faithful to her. But that she couldn't have it both ways. If she was never coming back, as she insisted she wasn't, then he needed to have a life.

Their arguments during this time were sometimes ugly, sometimes fierce. Delia was worse than Tom—she felt freed by what he'd done to be so. She called him names. She called his lovers names: his cunts, his sluts. She accused him of trying to hold on to her because of his career—she said he had
used
her in the campaign.

Even years later—when Delia had come to believe that Tom really had loved her in some way through everything, that he had wanted to stay married on account of those very real feelings—even then she thought in her most cynical moments that she'd probably been useful to him more than once in warding off one or another of his lovers. She could imagine the scene: his oh!-so-regretful calling up of the older, now solitary wife who wouldn't, couldn't, give him up.
Religion,
you know
. Though of course it was
his
religion—and then too the religion of politics at that time—which prohibited divorce. But his lovers wouldn't have known that. She could imagine the younger women pressing, threatening, and Tom coming back with his impeccable excuse, about Delia's sad absolutism, about their resulting arrangement and her prior claim.

This period, the crazy time, lasted for six or seven years. Then slowly things got easier for her. She had several affairs of her own, and that helped. It made her feel less desperate, less as though Tom were the only man she could ever love—not that she loved either man she became involved with, just that they made love seem a possibility.

She had grown very close to one of them, a widower, a composer she met through Ilona. She felt that she might have loved him, but she could never adjust to the way he made love. It was always impassioned, always
hard,
she would have said. Quick. There was none of that lazy playfulness that she and Tom had learned together, none of the loving attentiveness to her body that meant release for her. Finally they stopped being lovers and became friends, for a while anyway.

But even more important for Delia in coming to some kind of peace about Tom was her sense of enjoying her solitude. Her new life in France was part of that, but in Williston too she found she felt a new ease moving around socially by herself. That need of Tom's to occupy center stage, which had always kept her in a supporting role—or maybe even relegated to the audience—that wasn't there to limit her anymore, to hem her in. She formed friendships differently, she took greater pleasure in them. She could feel that people liked her, something she'd never been sure of in the past, so focused had everyone always been on Tom.

More and more Delia let go of Tom, of his life away from her, his life in Washington. At one point she made a list of things she wanted from the house in Washington, and he had movers come and truck everything up to her.

She climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. She went first to what had been their room. It had been painted and redecorated—it was dark and modern now. Where before the walls had been a soft gray and the bedding and furniture white, now things were brown, brown, brown. The curtains and bedspread were a rich, dark paisley.

She sat on Tom's bed and called each of her children again—at home, so she wouldn't interrupt their work; but also so that she wouldn't have to talk to them, Nancy in particular—she'd be dealing with answering machines. In the messages she left, she repeated as accurately and carefully as she could what Dr. Ballantyne had said to her in the hospital.

When she finished, she sat still a moment, looking around her. Then she got up and went down the hall to what had been their rooms—the children's—to see what had become of them. The doors were closed. She opened one, then the other, and stood there, taking them in.

In terms of furniture they were unchanged from the time she and Tom had separated—the four-poster with the frilly canopy in Nancy's room, the two matching beds in the boys’ room. Even the pictures on the walls were the same. Posters of the Andes, of Machu Picchu in Brad and Evan's room; in Nancy's, framed paintings and reproductions chosen by Delia—they'd used this as a guest room after Nancy went to law school.

But in both rooms there were also odd collections of objects, clearly deposited there over time—lamps, framed pictures leaned against the walls, rolled-up rugs and pads, an upright vacuum cleaner, some cardboard cartons. Clearly no one had stayed in them for years.

Delia knew that the children didn't visit Tom. They saw him when they came to Washington, but they saw him in neutral territory—at their hotels, or in restaurants. And on Tom's visits to them, his infrequent visits, he stayed in hotels too.

She and Tom had talked once about this—she had wanted him to know that she hadn't encouraged their distance, that she hadn't asked any of them to be her ally against him. And he in turn had told her that he didn't hold her responsible.

It had seemed to her as they talked about it that he was almost welcoming of the distance from the children. Perhaps he saw it as a kind of penance for what he'd done, for being who he was. What he said was that the children had made their choices clear early on, and that he understood the bases for those choices.

But the fact was that all of them, except for Nancy, had yielded and drawn closer to him over the years. Delia thought now of this past Christmas, of the dinner with Brad and his family in Williston. Of course, Brad was the easiest one, but still, everyone had seemed happy and relaxed.

She went back down the hall to Tom's room. She opened the closet. She chose clothes quickly and set them out on the bed—just shirts and slacks. None of the expensive suits, of which there were perhaps eight or ten hanging up. She sighed, looking at them. Even when they had no money, Tom had been profligate with clothes. It was a weakness—another weakness. And she was left there too to deal with the problems, the marshaling of their limited resources that resulted.

But the truth was that she too had loved the way he looked in his fancy suits, in his expensive shirts and suspenders and shoes. And she had been sympathetic to what they meant to him—the entrée he felt they offered him into a life he wanted. He had told her once that he'd practiced standing casually, his hands in his pockets, that he'd imitated the gestures, the expressions of people he met in college and law school and early in his practice. And finally, he'd been successful—he'd truly become what he played at being. The clothes were the least of it, actually.

From his bureau she got out underwear, socks. She went down the hall to the storage closet, and there, on a shelf above the linens, were the suitcases, as they had been in the past. There were even a few she recognized. She brought one back and opened it on the bed. She folded the clothes carefully—professionally, she thought, with a little prideful pleasure—and laid them in.

She went to the bathroom for Tom's toiletries—a hairbrush, a razor and shaving cream, aftershave, toothpaste and a toothbrush. Even if the hospital provided some of these, she thought, he would probably like his own better. She put them into his dopp kit and wedged it into a corner of the suitcase, on top of the clothes. She zipped the suitcase shut and set it at the top of the stairs.

Then she came back into the room and crossed to the bed. She lay down heavily on it. It was the warmth in here, the stuffiness, she thought. And of course, it was the jet lag hitting her too—she'd waked several times in the night in Madeleine's apartment, confused in that silent darkness about the hour, about where she was. The last time had been about four-thirty, and she'd been awake ever since, though she'd lain in bed until almost seven, when she heard Madeleine in the kitchen.

I'll just sleep for a few minutes, she thought now, as her eyes closed.

S
HE WAS ALMOST
late for the meeting with Tom's social worker. When she got back to Tom's room afterward, it was around four. He was in bed. There was a wheelchair pushed back into a corner of the room, though, a sign of some recent activity.

His eyes opened and followed her as she approached. His hand rose as if to greet her, his lips parted. He made a noise, a noise that might have had a
B
or a
D
at its beginning; producing this noise, his open mouth had to labor, his tongue had to work.

Delia willed herself not to look away. She greeted him in return, saying her own name, saying she was glad to see him looking better. She spoke slowly, telling him she'd brought some of his things.

He didn't seem to understand her, so she set the suitcase across the chair and opened it. She took out a shirt, one of his beautiful, expensive shirts of a cotton so fine it felt like silk, and held it up. He cried out, seeing it, as though he recognized some part of his lost self.

She spent the rest of the afternoon with him. First she asked for a basin, got some hot water, and shaved him. Then she found a nurse to help her dress him. In his own clothes, clean-shaven, his hair combed, he seemed suddenly almost whole again, a
person
instead of a patient. Delia thought she could actually feel a difference in the way the nurses and aides treated him when they came into the room. She helped to feed him too, spooning the mush he was allowed into his mouth.

Mostly, though, she just sat by him, sometimes saying a few words, more often humming or singing. The time seemed to pass with a glacial slowness. When Tom dozed and she could relax—she could walk in the hallway for a bit, or go into the bathroom and splash water on her face—Delia felt a gratitude so profound it was almost physical.

She was grateful too for the news she'd gotten earlier from the social worker, and the physical therapist who'd come in briefly to Delia's conference. Tom's ability to eat was a good sign, she'd learned—some people couldn't control their mouths after a stroke and had to relearn this. And he was trying to name things, the social worker said. Both of these were indications of the potential for a strong recovery. They'd already started working with him in his room, moving his weak side, trying to get him to stand, to walk by himself. They would start taking him over to the rehabilitation unit in a day or two; and pretty soon after that, she'd have to make some decisions about where to have him treated, and for how long.

When Delia called the taxi to go to Madeleine's, it was almost eight, and she was exhausted again. She must have looked it too, because the driver got out from behind the wheel and opened the door for her, helped her in, holding her elbow. Or perhaps it was just that southern courtesy. Watching the congestion on M Street, listening to the car horns, she started thinking about Washington, about the southern quality of the city, which always struck her when she came back after an absence—particularly as it connected to race. There was an omnipresent country graciousness on the part of the blacks who were in serving positions everywhere in the city. The hospital staff, the waiters in restaurants, the cabdrivers—all, all smiling and polite. And now, getting out of the cab, here was Madeleine's doorman in his fancy uniform, greeting her by name, smiling too, opening the door for her.