The Senator's Wife (30 page)

She waited, smiling, until Meri had stepped outside, had moved away on the front porch. She waved then, and shut the door.

She turned back down the hall, feeling an almost giddy sense of release, of escape. Eagerly, quickly, she crossed to the dining room door.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Meri, July 7, 1994

O
N THURSDAY
, Meri's fourth time at Delia's house, she was once more sitting in the living room while Tom napped. This time too she'd barely spoken to him. The driver, Len, had helped him up the steps as he always did, had walked him in, waited for him outside the lavatory, and then taken him in to lie down on his bed in the dining room.

Len liked Meri. He often stopped for a few minutes to chat with her. He liked Tom too. Today after he'd shut the dining room door, he'd come and stood leaning against the frame of the living room doorway in his black suit to talk about him. “He's a good guy,” he said. “A good guy. Sharp. It's a shame.” He shook his head. “If that a happeneda me . . .” His lips pressed tight together to end his sentence, leaving Meri to fill in the blank for herself.
I'd be sad? I'd kill myself?

He pushed away from the frame and tapped it with his palm. “See ya Tuesday, right?”

“Right,” Meri said, and mirrored his pointing index finger.

“Hah!” he said.

After Len left, she simply sat for a while in the pretty living room—prettiest at this time of day, she thought—looking down from time to time at Asa when he made the startled noises and movements that punctuated his sleeping life. She was thinking about nothing. Well, lots of things, actually—images: Nathan, getting out of bed this morning, his body gleaming white in the bright sunlight. Delia's face when she was talking to her the other day, suddenly so seemingly cold. The almost-empty refrigerator. What she needed to buy. But nothing like a thought.

She sighed. The
New York Times
was lying in front of her on Delia's coffee table. She leaned forward and started to read. She went through the beginnings of a couple of articles on the front page. She'd just gotten engrossed in one about the national health plan, about whether abortion services would be included in it, when she heard the door to the dining room open. She looked up. Tom Naughton was starting across the hall toward her, using his metal cane, swinging his leg with each step.

She stood and began to move to him, to help, but he held up a hand. “Hokay.” Okay. It's okay.

She sat back down then and waited, trying not to watch his hitching progress. As he came into the room, he stopped at the bassinet, looking down. “Ace,” he said softly, smiling a little, gesturing at the sleeping baby.

Meri was pleased to have him remember Asa's name, to have him speak it. Delia had told her that he'd been charmed by the baby, that the night the two of them had babysat, he'd held him for a while. It argued for Tom, in her mind.

He moved to the sofa opposite her. He stood above it for a moment, and then more or less collapsed into it, a noise like a groan emerging from him.

Meri felt awkward, suddenly, in his presence. He was supposed to sleep when she was here. But perhaps this was a good sign, a sign of recovery—that he was less exhausted by his rehabilitation sessions than he'd been earlier.

Still, was she in charge of him now? Was she supposed to figure out what he wanted, or needed? “Would you like something to eat?” she asked. “Or drink?”

He shook his head.

They sat for a minute more. “I was reading,” Meri said. “The
Times.
” She gestured at the paper lying on the table in front of her. She kept her voice low. “There's an interesting article on the Clintons’ health plan. On abortion and the Clintons’ health plan. Would you like me to read it to you?”

“Yeh,” he said, with a pronunciation that sounded only mildly interested. And then he nodded and said it again, more clearly, more decidedly. “Yhes.”

Meri picked up the paper, rattled it flat, and started to read aloud. When she had to search through to a back page for the continuation, he waited patiently. She could tell he was listening—every time she looked up at him, he was frowning in concentration.

She came to the end of the article and there was another long silence.

Asa smacked his lips, nursing in his sleep.

She said, “There's a piece here on Breyer too. On the Supreme Court hearings. Shall I read that one?”

“Mmmm,” he said, nodding. She flipped back to the first page and started again.

This time, partway through the article, Asa stirred and shook himself—she could see him in her peripheral vision. He began to whimper.

On schedule: it was about the time he'd been nursing for the last few days. She tried to ignore him. She read on. But when she folded the paper back to the end of the story, the noise seemed to wake him fully. He started to move his arms and legs, and then to squawk.

“Oh, excuse me, I'm so sorry,” she said to Tom. She set the paper down, and bent to pick up the baby. She lifted him to her shoulder. She patted him gently for a few minutes, but his noises only became more frantic. And then he was really crying, fighting with her, pushing his body against her to get to her breast.

“Hong,” Tom said.

“
You're
hungry?!” Meri asked, jiggling Asa harder. What next?

He shook his head. “
Ace,
hong.”

“Oh, yes. Yes,” she said, and smiled helplessly. “I'm afraid he is.”

“Feeuhmm.”

“Feed him?”

He nodded. “Feeuhmm. Sokay.”

“You don't mind?” she said, realizing, even as she spoke the words, that she
did
mind. She did, of course she did, or she would have done it on her own, fed Asa without being given permission. She hadn't fed him in front of a stranger since the time the old woman in the lunch place had turned from her in revulsion. She'd even tried to avoid nursing him in front of Nathan, though that wasn't always possible.

He shook his head.

What she wanted was for him to go away, go back into his room—but she didn't feel she could say this to him. It would be too rude. It would be unkind. She lowered Asa and rested him along her arm. As he stopped crying and began his noisy snuffling toward her, she lifted her T-shirt on that side.

But she did it awkwardly because she was trying not to expose her breast to Tom, and Asa was left rooting and snuffling at the fabric of her shirt. By the time she tilted her body back to pull him away from her and put her hand under her breast to lift the nipple to him, milk was spurting out. It landed all over Asa's face. His body started, and he swung his head quickly back and forth in recoil. He made a funny spitting noise with his mouth and tongue, a kind of infant Bronx cheer. And when he came forward again, she saw that there was milk on the lids of his eyes and in his ears.

As Asa attached himself, she heard Tom make a noise and looked over at him. He was laughing, his head thrown back. She remembered that laugh from the evening at Delia's house at Christmas, his light hoarse laugh and the way he gave himself over to it. It had made her smile then, and she smiled now too.

She watched him as he subsided. Their eyes met. There must have been something quizzical in her smile now, because he shut his eyes, turning his head as Asa had, making Asa's noise. He was
explaining
himself in pantomime, she realized—explaining the joke. His hand waved in front of his own face imitating the milk, her spurting milk as it landed on Asa.

Meri laughed. It
was
funny.
Asa
had been funny, in his piggy, grunting gluttony, with the little raspberry noise he had made, his tongue sticking out. She looked down at him now. She lifted her hand to wipe the whitish liquid from the intricate whorls of his tiny ears.

By the time Delia's car pulled into the driveway, Asa had finished on the first side and Meri had him on her shoulder, burping him.

“Dhelia,” said Tom. His voice was warm—excited, Meri would have said.

“Yup,” Meri said. “She's home.” She smiled at him and he smiled back, the small, self-mocking smile that he'd had when he was whole. His hand rose to his face, to his mouth, and he lifted his finger to his lips.
Shh.

But then the hand kept moving, up to his eyes. He rubbed them briefly, as though he was fatigued. Meri wasn't sure, she couldn't have sworn that he intended the gesture she thought she'd seen him make along the way.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Delia, July 9, 1994

E
VAN WAS COMING TO VISIT
, arriving any moment. He was coming because Nancy had asked him to. She couldn't take the time off from work to come east again herself, she told Delia, so she wanted him to “check on things.”

Delia was waiting at the train station. It was hot. She was standing in the shadow of the building on the platform.

She and Evan were to have lunch together on the way home, and then he'd stay overnight, casting a critical eye on her arrangements, his assigned task. She'd asked Matt to come over to be with Tom today until they got home. She'd promised him time and a half—it was, after all, a Saturday.

Evan dropped down off the train in a single graceful motion. He was carrying only a small case. His face opened to see her, and she was startled by the strength, the power of his embrace.

“You are almost unbearably handsome,” she said, stepping back from him, looking up into his pale, amused eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses. “You must be utterly impossible to live with.”

“I am,” he assured her, grinning.

And perhaps this was true. He'd had a messy divorce from his first wife, the mother of his kids, in part because he'd begun a relationship with his second wife before the marriage ended. Delia thought she'd gotten the sense of a tremor or two now in the second marriage, but she wasn't sure.

When Evan saw the damaged car, he asked what had happened to it. She didn't want to tell him the truth. She said the other driver had run the light. They commiserated.

As they drove, he told her he'd mostly come to see her, but also because, as he put it, “I want to get Nancy off everyone's back.” They talked about Nancy, about how angry she was over all this.

“Well, she has a right to be, I suppose,” Delia said. “I did pretty much lie to her about it.”

“I bet Nan's the kind of person a lot of people pretty much lie to, just to make their lives easier,” he said.

“Poor Nan,” Delia said. “I'm sure you're right.” They were quiet a moment. She said, “Well, at least I don't lie to myself.”

“No?” he said.

She looked over at him. He was smiling at her, fondly, she thought.

They talked about the heat. It was much worse in New York, he told her. “The whole city has that overriding stench of things rotting that it gets when it's this hot.”

They stopped for lunch at the restaurant in the old mill just outside of town. It was dark as you entered it, but the back was full of light. It had been opened up and glassed in. It looked out across the dam and the water rushing over it—this was why people came.

There was no air-conditioning, but all the windows were open back here, and there was a breeze off the spilling water, a breeze with a fresh, slightly algal smell to it. As they sat down, Delia noticed that there were kids far below them, boys in wet blue jeans, barefoot and bare-chested, climbing on the rocks at the bottom of the falls where the water crashed with a smoky foam. She pointed them out to Evan.

A young waiter came over and Evan ordered a martini. “Do you want a drink, Mother?”

“I'll have wine,” Delia said. She looked up at the waiter. “A sauvignon blanc if you have it.”

They sat back. The sound of the water was a steady noise around them. Delia asked about Evan's work. The drinks came. They talked about his kids, about his wife, about how busy she was at the moment. She did set design, and she had two shows opening in the fall.

Over lunch, their conversation became more desultory, both of them falling silent every now and then to look at the water, at the young men diving in the pool at the bottom of the falls. Delia thought of the boys Mrs. Davidson had told her about at the rehab place in Putnam, the daring young men who'd fallen, or crashed, or leapt from something they shouldn't have into something they shouldn't have. She thought about Evan when he was younger—Evan, who so much more than Brad had beckoned danger. She'd actually been relieved when he entered the Peace Corps, where it would be the government's job—no longer hers—to keep him from harm.

They'd almost finished when Evan asked more specifically about Tom, about how much improvement there'd been since he saw him in Washington.

Delia described him, and then the arrangements she'd made. She talked about the way their days went. “It's very companionable, really. It makes me realize how solitary I'd become.”

“So this is what you want. For the foreseeable future.”

“Yes. It is.”

“And Paris?”

“Ah.” She shrugged. “Well. Maybe
you
'll use it more.” She smiled at him. “It's true. It means I'll go less. But that was bound to happen eventually.”

“And you won't miss it.”

“Of course I'll miss it! But I will go from time to time. Just not for as long a time. I will not feel deprived, dear.”

“No. You do sound happy, in fact.”

“I am.”

“Do you think you're . . . falling in love again? As it were.” And now he sang the song, in Marlene Dietrich's German accent. “Fawleen in luff a gayn, whaat am I too doo . . .”

Delia laughed. Then, looking down, fussing with her napkin, she said, “Oh, I've always been in love. As you no doubt know.”

“Well, but it was on hold for a long time.” He said this carelessly, his hand made a quick airy gesture. “Or on the back burner, or something.”

Delia felt a prick of irritation at him, at his easy assumptions about her life, and Tom's. “It was never on hold,” she said.

“I just meant, you know, you didn't act on it,” he said, apology in his voice.

“It was never on hold,” she said. “It was never on the back burner, as you put it. We acted on it.”

“You acted on it.”

“Yes.” Delia sat back and looked levelly across the table at him.

“What are you saying, Mom? That you and Dad were lovers all these years?”

She let a few seconds pass. “Yes.”

His mouth opened, his eyebrows lifted. He looked away from her, over the water, down to the boys below. Then he looked back at her, smiling broadly. “Well!” he said.

She smiled back. “Yes. Well.” She pushed back her chair. “Shall we go now, and see your father?”

As they stepped into the kitchen, Delia could feel it—the cool air. “Ah, the air conditioner!” she said. “Isn't it lovely?”

He nodded.

“It's been sitting in the basement for lo! these many years. I wasn't even sure it worked anymore. So you see, having Tom here has helped me too, in fact. Matt put it in, just today. I didn't know if he'd have time or not.”

“And Matt is . . . ?”

“He's the student, the one I told you about. He's my Tom-sitter, and jack-of-all-trades. Come, meet him.”

Evan followed Delia to the living room. Matt was sitting on the couch, a book on his lap, pen in his hand, his bare feet propped against the coffee table. He hadn't heard them because of the noise of the air conditioner. It
was
noisy, the result, no doubt, of its age and its sitting unused for so long downstairs in the damp.

Matt scrambled up. He danced around, blushing, sliding his feet into his sandals and greeting them. He shook Evan's hand. They were almost the same height, but Evan looked slender and graceful next to Matt's childish bulk.

Matt told Delia that Tom was napping after a long walk outside. “We made it almost to the corner,” he said as he gathered his work together. “He's awesomely tough.”

“You know, those are the very words I would have chosen for Dad,” Evan said, smiling at Delia.

B
UT WHEN
T
OM
limped into the kitchen late in the afternoon and offered Evan his version of a greeting, Delia could see that Evan was appalled by his state, maybe even repulsed.

Over the course of the evening, though, as she cooked dinner, as they ate, as they sat around the kitchen table talking, she could watch Evan
getting it,
figuring out the rules for how Tom talked now. She could tell that he felt, just as she did, the presence of the person Tom had always been.

She watched Evan, his beautiful face lifting in response to Tom, smiling, talking. How much he had changed over the years!—that idealistic, romantic young man become a
money guy,
as he called himself, wearing his expensive clothes, living in his expensive loft in the city, having his children over once every few weeks. And yet the love she felt for him was unchanged, was based on who he'd been and who he still was to her. This is how it is with your children, she thought. You hold all the versions of them there ever were simultaneously in your heart.

O
N THE WAY
back to the train station the next day, he asked questions about the prognosis, and Delia answered honestly. More progress was always possible, and Tom wanted it, so he worked hard. “I think happiness counts too,” she said. “I'm sure it does, in fact. And he is happy here. With me.” She heard the pride in her own voice and was embarrassed, suddenly. “But there are limits,” she said. “I don't deceive myself. He won't work again. That's clear.”

Evan made a noise of agreement. After a moment he said, “We should think about closing down the Washington house, too, I suppose. Selling it.”

“Oh!” she said. She looked over at him. “Do you think so, at this point?”

“What do you mean, ‘at this point’?”

“Well, in case he recovers enough to want to go back.”

“And live alone?”

She could hear the incredulity in his voice. She didn't say anything.

“Mom.”

She looked at him again. Evan—so self-contained, so handsome.

His eyes were steady on her behind his glasses. His voice was gentle. “He won't live alone again. Don't you know that?”

She looked back to the road.

“And if he does, it'll have to be in some kind of assisted living place.” When she didn't answer in a minute, he said again, “Mom?”

“I suppose you're right. It's just . . .” She was silent for a long moment, driving, and then she said, “But I'd rather not do anything like that until he and I have talked. Until we know that's something he wants. Or that it's all right with him, in any case.”

“That's fine. We'll wait then.” After a minute he said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to rush you. To make you go any faster than you want with this.”

She nodded.

He wouldn't allow her to come into the station to wait for the train with him. He leaned in the open passenger window after he'd gotten out. “I've gotta say, Mom, you're full of surprises.” He was grinning. “Secrets and surprises.”

She rolled her eyes.

He laughed and touched the door in farewell before he turned away.

Delia drove home slowly, the fender rattling. She had known it, hadn't she? That Tom wouldn't be able to go home, that he would have to stay with her. She had held out the hope—for his sake, of course—that he would get better, but she'd known almost right away, she realized now, that he wasn't likely to get better
enough.
That she would keep him. He would be hers.

Hadn't she even wanted that, some part of her? Wanted him to have to stay with her?

She tried to think that through. She didn't think so. She really didn't. Even in her joy at having him, those early days, she had always been working for what was best for him, she had always wanted that. She was sure of it.