The Senator's Wife (10 page)

O
N A RAINY
, cold Saturday morning, Nathan off to the office until late afternoon, she crossed the front porch around the lion, she went through her routine downstairs—the mail, the plants. Then she climbed the stairs and went directly to Delia's study. She sat again at Delia's desk. This time, for the first time, she opened one of its lower drawers.

There they were, more letters, in file folders labeled with the names of her children—Nancy, Brad, Evan. But this wasn't what Meri was looking for—though when she'd mounted the stairs, she hadn't allowed herself to know she was looking for anything. She shut that drawer and opened the one opposite it on the right-hand side of the desk and read the label there—
Tom.
She felt her breath quicken.

After only a moment's hesitation, she pulled a letter out and read it. And then another.

Later she would ask herself how she could have done this. She would feel such a sense of shame as she remembered these hours alone in Delia's house—as she remembered everything that happened after that between her and Delia—that she would think of this time in her life as cut off, separate from who she was before it and who she became afterward. An island of something. Desperation. Need. Occasionally through the years she would wonder about her own mental fragility at this period of her life, about hormones run amok, about depression. She wouldn't know. She won't know. She will never tell Nathan, or anyone else. She will never feel comfortable with this memory.

There were perhaps fifty or sixty letters, some unfolded and filed flat, others still in their envelopes. Over the remaining time Delia was away, Meri read through most of these letters more than once, and slowly, hungrily, she was able to piece together a story, a history of Tom and Delia.

She learned that they hadn't lived together in twenty years, that there was no plan for them ever to live together again. But also that they were still seeing each other at least occasionally, that they still made love. That they had always made love, even through the hardest times between them. That there was still, then, a marriage in some sense—or a love affair—one whose shape Delia seemed to be in charge of.

She learned that Tom had at first begged Delia to forgive him for his infidelities—or for the one infidelity in particular that seemed to have caused their separation. In the early letters, he blamed himself, he described himself as a sinner and beyond help in his weakness. He also never stopped expressing the hope that she would find a way to take him back.

But eventually he recognized that this wasn't going to happen. He conceded Delia's power, even her wisdom. “You were right,” he wrote, “to want to keep things as they are, because much as I love you, I couldn't have been faithful. I know that now, and if I were honest, I'd have to say I probably knew it then too.”

Only a few years earlier, he'd written, “Wherever you are is home to me, Delia. Lying with you is the deepest and most thrilling comfort I can know. Simply put, I'm myself with you as I am nowhere else in my life, and I'm happy that, clear-sighted as you are about me at other times, you can still love me in those moments.”

One note, undated, maybe a note that came with a gift, or flowers, said simply, “Delia. My wife.”

Sitting in Delia's house, in Delia's chair, reading Delia's letters from Tom, what Meri was most aware of at the time was a muddled kind of envy. Envy of Delia and Tom together. Envy of their sad, powerful story. Envy of something in it that she would have liked for herself.

Sometimes when she came home and was having a quick meal with Nathan before his evening in his study started, a meal in which they each talked about their work, in which each of them was a little preoccupied—maybe, she thought, even a little bored by the other—she would be aware of the yearning to have, to have had, even the pain that Delia clearly had, if that's what had made it possible for her also to have something as moving, as thrilling, as rich as the love that existed between her and Tom. In what seemed to her like the hollowness of those moments, she felt that the kind of emotion Tom wrote about to Delia wouldn't be like anything Nathan could ever feel for her, or she for him. That there was a way in which she held herself too distant from him—she was too cold a person—to allow such deep feeling, such deep knowledge to live and grow.

CHAPTER SIX

Delia, Christmas, 1971

T
HE HOUSE WAS COLD
, as it always was when they came back after an absence in this season. While Evan unloaded their suitcases and took them upstairs, Delia turned up the thermostat. Then she went out again to the car and carried in the bags of Christmas gifts each of them had brought, four for her, one, half filled, for Evan. She set them in the living room. Still wearing her coat, she walked back into the kitchen and quickly sorted through the mail that had accumulated here and been piled on the table by Marta, the cleaning woman. It was bills, mostly, and dozens of Christmas cards. She looked at the return addresses. Only a few of them were from what Delia thought of as
real people
—the rest just politics.

She'd come up to Williston from Washington five days early to get everything ready for Christmas. Evan, who was on his semester break from business school, had met her at the train station and driven her home. It was five o'clock, the sky completely bled of light by the time they got to the house. The year was 1971, it was the twentieth of December. Snow was predicted for the next day. A white Christmas, then. Delia felt almost a child's delight in the thought.

Tom had stayed on in Washington, but he was pretty sure he'd get home within a day or two. He was a senator now—he had been for five years. Next year he would run again, and though he didn't yet know who his opponent would be, he didn't expect much of a contest. He was widely popular in the state. He'd managed to walk a line between the traditions of old-fashioned liberalism—which were like a religion to him—and the new and ever-shifting demands of the civil-rights movement, the antipoverty movement, the feminists, the advocates of participatory democracy, the antiwar groups. A fancy dancer, he called himself—sometimes despairingly, she thought. He spoke of doing “the new Democratic two-step.” It occasionally made his life a difficult balancing act in Washington, but it seemed to work at home with his mixed-up constituency.

When she came into the living room, Evan was crouched at the fireplace, wadding up newspaper to start a fire. “Oh, let's go out, honey,” she said.

He turned, still squatting, looking over at her. “Yeah? You don't want to have something here by a fire?”

“No. It'll be cold in here even with the fire, and there's not much in the pantry but canned soup and crackers.”

“Canned soup is good by me.”

“No. It'll be my treat. Let's go out.”

“Your call,” he said, and stood up. Unfolded himself, really. Evan, like Tom, was tall, four or five inches taller than her other son, Brad. Several years earlier he had remade himself physically, he'd become more or less a new person. It was after the Peace Corps, which he'd entered as a scruffy kid, his beard always half grown in, his hair hanging down his back—his
costume,
as she thought of it, unvarying and to her mind unflattering: jeans that sagged off his narrow hips, ribbon-like woven belts in solidarity with who knew what tribe of Indians, and T-shirts, half of them torn or stained. Over this, as a concession to the weather and perhaps to some notion of elegance, he sometimes wore a motorcycle jacket—never anything more, even on the coldest days. It hurt her to look at him in winter.

She knew that the Peace Corps had asked for neatness and had insisted on a haircut and general cleanliness, but on his return she was startled at how much further Evan had gone. Tonight, for example, he was wearing slacks, and they were pressed. His hair was short by the standards of the day. He was clean-shaven, though he did have the full sideburns everyone sported now. His long narrow face looked sculpted. He wore rimless glasses and a fitted V-neck sweater over his striped shirt. This was his uniform now, and she preferred it. She told herself that she preferred it because it made him more beautiful, but who knew? Maybe she liked it because it was conventional—the way men had once been expected to look.

He was in his first year of business school, where he'd gone because he was interested in development on a human scale, in small projects that might be of actual help to the people he'd met and loved in South America. For the moment, though, he was learning about plain old raw capitalism, and almost in spite of himself, he was doing well at this.

Evan was the child Delia felt most comfortable with, though she had the tenderest love for Brad, her younger son. But everyone in the family felt that way about Brad—he was their baby. What she felt for Evan—on account of his beauty, his self-containment—moved her with a maternal pride that sometimes felt almost sexual in its intensity.

These feelings had to do also with her sense of something she found touching in what he seemed to feel toward her. It was typical of him to have arranged his schedule to pick her up. Ignoring a few years in adolescence when life with him was as much like hell as she imagined it, he had always been in some way protective of her—even, she would have said,
adult
around her.

Once when he was small, only about two and a half, she and Tom were having a terrible fight—yelling, enraged at each other; and in the midst of it, Evan had come out of his bedroom in his blue sleeper, the plastic bottoms of its feet kissing the floor. He'd walked straight over to her and climbed onto her lap. Of course they had stopped, the moment they heard his approach.

“Evvie,” she'd said. “It's way past your bedtime. You need to go back to your room.”

“No, Mumma,” he said pleasantly. “I'm staying
right
by you.” And he had. He was holding on to her arm, smiling across the room at Tom. She could feel the tendons like wires in his compact body.

Later, after he'd been reassured, after he'd been put to bed again and she'd lain down with him until he slept, she and Tom, shamed, took up whatever the issue was between them in reasoned, even hushed tones.

In the car, they decided to go to the Peking Palace—mediocre food, crummy decor, but they both liked the pan-fried ravioli and imported beer. As they settled into one of the booths, Delia looked around at the colored paper lanterns strung from the ceiling, the Formica tabletops, the framed panels on the walls with bucolic scenes of an imaginary Chinese past—scenes that actually looked suspiciously Japanese to her.

“Nothing ever changes at the Peking Palace,” she said.

He looked up. “So you say,” he answered, and went back to the menu.

For health's sake—vegetables—they split an eggplant dish in addition to the ravioli. This turned out to be so spicy it made Delia's nose run. She had to ask for extra paper napkins. They talked easily, as they always did. Evan told her about a couple of cases he'd studied this quarter, about his exams, which he was pretty sure he'd aced. They talked about movies, and what kind of coffee they liked best. They talked about skiing—Delia was supposed to come up to New Hampshire in January and try to learn how, something she'd attempted several times in the past with no success. But Evan assured her the skis were shorter now than in those days, that the whole way of teaching it was different. He guaranteed her she'd enjoy it.

“When's Nan getting here?” he asked.

Delia was waiting for tea, though she knew it would keep her awake. “Not until midevening Thursday—she has to work that day. Oh! And did I tell you that she's bringing the beauteous Carolee with her? Some family thing means she can't go home for the holiday.”

He grinned. “You didn't,” he said.

Carolee was Nancy's roommate. They'd met in Boston at a fancy old firm where they both felt incredibly lucky to have been hired directly out of law school. Carolee had gone to Harvard, so she knew the city. She was helpful and generous to Nancy. After only a few months, they'd decided to find an apartment to share. Delia had visited them several times at this apartment, in Cambridge, and she knew that Evan had come down from New Hampshire a couple of times to stay with them too.

“
I
remember.” She raised her hand, a finger pointing up. “It's that her parents are living in Turkey now with some engineering project he's doing, and she has so little time off from work she can't possibly get there and back. So we've got her.”

“All
right
!” Evan said.

Delia smiled at him. “She is kind of gorgeous, isn't she?” It was true. Carolee was a beautiful young woman, in a richly monochromatic way. She had luxuriant honey-colored hair that fell below her shoulders, and perfect skin that seemed touched with honey too. Her eyes, as though to go with everything else, were a light brown.

“Kind of?” Evan said. “She's preposterously good-looking.”

Their waitress came and set Delia's teapot down, and next to it, a little saucer with two fortune cookies on it, wrapped in cellophane. “Which one of these do you suppose is the very one meant for you?” Delia asked, pushing the saucer toward her son.

He chose. “I have a friend who wrote these things for a while,” he said.

“It's a job? Writing fortune cookies?” They were both tearing at the wrappers.

“Not a full-time job, but he was a musician, supporting the habit. Anyway, it's left me disinclined to take these things very seriously.”

“Which of course you did, before.”

He raised his eyebrows at her and unfurled his little paper roll. He snorted. “I hate this,” he said. “It's so low risk. It's a maxim, not a fortune. ‘The sun shines always in the strong man's path.’ Fuck that.” He tossed the paper onto the table. He bit into his cookie. “What's yours?”

“Similarly unforthcoming about the future.” She flattened the little scroll out and read aloud: “‘The dreamer will awake eventually.’”

“Well, it's a
little
about the future,” he said. “Assuming you're the dreamer.”

“No.” Delia poured some tea into her cup. “Assuming I'm the dreamer, it's about the past.”

He looked over at her sharply. Then he raised his mug of beer and drank.

T
OM WOULD COME UP
Wednesday afternoon, he said, by plane and then a taxi. Evan offered to pick him up at the airport, but he insisted on doing it his way.

“He likes that solo, dramatic entrance,” Evan said.

“Plus, of course, there's the cabdriver,” Delia answered. “One more vote to be gathered in.”

When he arrived, Delia didn't hear him come in. She was in the kitchen with the dishwasher running and a pot of sugar water roiling on the stove. His light voice said, “Hello, darling,” and she looked up to see him in the doorway, wearing the usual suit, the tie loosened, his face amused and fond.

“Hi,” she said. She could feel her smile rise in response. She gestured at the stove. “Hi. I can't come to you.” She was waiting for the sugar to caramelize.

“Then I'll have to come to you.” He crossed the room and put his arm around her, bent to kiss her neck, then her cheek, then the side of her mouth. In the pot, the sugar was beginning to turn slightly rust-colored under its silvery bubbles. Tom's flesh was cold against her face, his mouth tasted sweet and familiar. He smelled wonderful to her. She leaned against him and was aware of the relief she felt to have him here. To have him home.

At this point in their life together, Delia divided her time almost evenly between Washington and Williston. Tom, of course, was more in Washington, though he came home when he could, on congressional breaks and when something in the state beckoned him.

Delia had liked Washington initially—they had lived there early in their marriage, during the war. There were many young couples flooding the city then. The war gave them all a sense of quick intimacy, of intensity in their friendships. She'd liked it again when they came back, years later, in Tom's first term as a congressman.

But then Kennedy was killed, and in the middle of that public sorrow, she learned that Tom had been having an affair, a serious affair with the wife of another congressman, someone Delia had thought of as a friend. And in the aftermath of that, he confessed that there had been other affairs too, more casual, more fleeting.
Accidental,
Tom had called them, which made her laugh bitterly.

They got through it, but after that life in Washington was more difficult for Delia. She was aware of her discomfort when she moved around socially. She never knew who else might have known about the affair—the affairs—and she never knew what those people who did know about them might be thinking of her. She felt a sense of strain, though nothing changed on the surface, though she was just as publicly charming as ever, was seen as often at the required political-social events. But when they'd bought the house, this house, and Delia began to have a life and friends in Williston, she realized how much more at ease she felt here. She supposed most of it was just getting away with Tom from the sexually charged atmosphere of Washington, where a handsome man with power, a man who talked easily, a man who was charming and chivalric around women, could always find companionship. Or, more accurately, had to actively choose
not
to have companionship, if that's what he wanted. Now, leaning into Tom, she said, “It's so good to have you here.”

“Mmm, me too. You can't imagine.”

“Sit. This will be done in a second. Do you want a drink?”

“I'll put my stuff away and say hi to Evan. Be back in a minute.”

When he came back, in his shirtsleeves, he poured each of them a scotch, and they sat at the kitchen table and talked about the way things had ended in Washington (hectic, with last-minute negotiating about a couple of bills), about the plans for the weekend. About what needed to get done before Christmas Day.

Evan came down too and sat with them, and Delia heard again his report on school, with women embellishing it this time. Inevitable, she thought. There was always this need of Evan's to assert to his father that he was a man too.

After they had gone out to buy a tree and Delia was alone again, she thought about this, about the element of competition between the two of them. Brad was exempt from this. Or perhaps he'd exempted himself with his gentleness, his sweetness—a sweetness that worried her sometimes. Occasionally she had the impulse to grab him, to shake him, to tell him how handsome he was.