The Senator's Wife (22 page)

All this politeness, this graciousness, contrasted to the abject, angry poverty of so much of the city. She had often wondered how this struck visiting foreign dignitaries—but of course they were used to this divide in other countries too. Maybe it was strangest to someone raised here, she thought, where equality was the supposed norm, or desideratum anyway. She and Tom had talked about it sometimes, about all the failed promises of the civil-rights movement, the poverty initiatives that he'd been so passionate about in the early days. About how ironic it was that Washington itself was emblematic of this, if only those in power cared to look around.

And now, getting into the elevator, she was thinking about how they used to talk—about everything, it seemed to her. And everywhere. In bed, at the kitchen table when the children were asleep, in the bathroom where he'd sometimes come and sit while she was in the tub. A confusion of images, images of Tom, alert, argumentative, of his mouth moving in that tight wry smile of private amusement after he'd made a point. She thought of his mouth as it had moved today, working to say her name. She thought of its kissing her, caressing her body. Her mind was full of all of this as she rode slowly up in the antique elevator, as she pushed its flexible cage door open, as she got out, as she rang Madeleine's bell.

Perhaps this was why for a long foolish moment she didn't recognize the person who opened the door—though later she would think maybe it was also in sympathy with Tom, with his inability to assimilate all that was incongruous and out of place in his life. But then things righted themselves, and she said, she hoped with more pleasure in her voice than she felt, “Why,
Nancy
!”

CHAPTER TEN

Delia, May 1994

I
T WAS
N
ANCY
who insisted that they go home to Williston for the weekend. She said Delia needed the rest, she said they could talk better at home. Delia hadn't resisted. The truth was, the thought of home was welcome to her; and she sensed that she could make it through Nancy's visit better there than at Madeleine's or in the hospital, around Tom.

They flew up Friday afternoon. Their plan was to go back to Washington together Monday morning. After her second quick visit with Tom, Nancy would fly back to Denver that evening—she'd already left work for longer than she should have, she told Delia.

At home, in Williston, Delia unpacked. She unhooked the hose from the kitchen faucet and carried the plants from the tarp in the kitchen to their permanent locations—the jade to the living room, the fern to its stand in the dining room. The hibiscus stayed where it was. She went through the mail that Meri had sorted and took some of it up to her study, where she wrote a few notes in response. She drove to the grocery store in the mall and bought food, ticking the items off her list.

She tried to stay as busy as she could, because whenever she stopped—or even slowed down—Nancy was there, wanting to talk, insisting that Delia should leave Tom in Washington in a rehab place Nancy had found, where he would have, as she said now, “the best of care, Mother. And where his various Washington
friends,
” she emphasized this word unpleasantly, “can visit him. Let's not forget, Washington is his home. It makes no sense, none, for you to bring him here. And we all know that that would involve you in his care in a way that's completely inappropriate.”

Who is this
we
? Delia thought. Who is this us?

“But what would be the point of keeping him in Washington if it just meant I worried more?” she said. “That I'd have to keep flying down there because of that? That would be far more inconvenient for me.”

“If that's what you did, yes. But you need to avoid doing that. You need to extricate yourself from this . . . web that's catching at you.”

This time they were talking in the Peking Palace in Williston, but they'd had earlier versions of this conversation on the plane up from Washington and at the house. Nancy had even stood in the door to Delia's bedroom last night and kept at it,
though surely she could see,
Delia thought,
how exhausted I was.
Even after Delia turned out the light, she'd gone on talking, her silhouette dark in the doorway. Delia had had to tell her, finally, that she desperately needed to sleep.

Desperate or not, after Nancy left, Delia had lain awake for a long time in her bed, feeling a kind of terror envelope her. What frightened her was that she wasn't sure she could resist her daughter's power. She thought this might be the moment, actually, the moment she'd heard about from a friend or two—recollected sadly, ruefully—when the grown children swept in and irresistibly took over your life. When you could no longer say no, because it was so clear that all the things you thought of as
belonging to you
were in the process of becoming theirs—their possessions, and, of course, their heavy burdens, too: your life, your spouse's life, your illness, his illness, your death. The moment when you
owed
them something, when you
had
to give way, out of a kind of fairness to them; and then also because you just didn't have the strength left anymore to fight.

“It's not a web, dear,” Delia said now. “It's life. It's life that catches you. Life changes. And we change in response to it.”

“Mother. This is your decision.”

How narrow her lips were, Delia thought. How tight her mouth. Like Tom's, but without the playfulness.

“You aren't
caught,
” she said. “You do not
have
to do anything about Dad. I will handle it. I've spoken to the best place for brain damage in Washington. I've made the arrangements. You won't have to do anything more about it. You're not obligated to him. It would be absurd to think that, after what he did to you.”

Suddenly, watching her daughter's face, Delia was taken back to the memory of those weeks just after Tom had launched himself into his affair with Carolee, when, even in the midst of her own grief, she'd had over and over to try to ease Nancy's, to comfort her. To
apologize
to her, it sometimes seemed.

This, now—this insistence that her father had no right to Delia's attention or love—this sprang from the same place in Nancy's psyche, Delia thought. It was the little girl in Nancy, pleading that he needed to pay for wounding her, for betraying her.

Delia could feel the truth of this instantly, and oddly, it helped her, seeing things this way. It let her dismiss the notion of Nancy's power, the notion that had made her heart pound in her ears as she lay awake in bed last night. It let her feel the same loving pity for Nancy she'd felt so long ago when her daughter couldn't let go of her rage and confusion, couldn't stop herself.

Delia sighed. “Nor are you, dear. Obligated.” And then because she thought it might help Nancy to hear it, she said, “After what he did to
you
. To you, and Evan, and Brad.”

Nancy looked startled, and Delia felt she'd gotten it right. She felt, for the first time, that she might have the better hand in this situation. “Look, Nan,” she said, leaning forward across the table toward her daughter. “Given that, given that he's an old man who long ago disobligated all of us—
disobliged
us, I guess you'd say—shouldn't it be the person who's least . . . offended by that, least disturbed by it, who steps forward now? I
want
to do this and you don't. I . . . I've forgiven your father for what he did, in a way, it seems to me, you haven't.”

Nancy made a face, but she lifted her hand too, in a gesture that seemed to be an acknowledgment of the truth in what Delia had said.

“I suppose . . .” Delia said, and stopped. She wanted to be careful. She wanted not to push too hard. She knew Nancy was capable of resisting her just out of stubbornness.

“What? You suppose what?”

“I suppose, come to think of it, that the kind of hurt he offered me was so much more . . . predictable. It was really banal, in a way. Whereas the way he hurt you was
not
banal at all.” This was true, wasn't it? He had done a terrible thing to Nancy at that vulnerable stage of her life. He and Carolee had, together. “It was worse.”

But Nancy wasn't biting. “Both hurts were awful, to me and to you,” she said. “Both of them were unforgivable.”

After a moment Delia shook her head. “You can't speak for me, Nan. About what I find forgivable or unforgivable. I'm different from you, and my understanding of your father is different from yours.”

She watched as her daughter played with her chopsticks, lining them up precisely next to each other.

Nancy looked up. “What is it you'd like to do, then?”

Delia felt a relief so deep it was as though the breath she drew now were the first full breath she'd drawn since she heard the news about Tom. “There's a good place near Williston, too. For the brain-injured. The discharge worker told me about it. I'd like him there. It would make my life easier to have him there. Why don't I see about that?” she said. And then quickly went on, “And if it doesn't work out, we'll have all the legwork you've done in Washington to fall back on.”

There was something reluctant in Nancy's face, something petulant, Delia thought, but she capitulated, she agreed, more or less. What she said was, “Well, I suppose I can't stop you, if this is something you're determined to do.”

“I think I am determined. That's a good word for it. And I want to. I'm not exaggerating in any way when I say that: I
want
to.”

They talked for a while of logistics, of how Delia would manage it. Nancy wanted Delia to check in with her about everything as she went along, as she made decisions. She would expect regular calls.

Delia agreed. She agreed to everything. Yes, that all made sense, everything made sense. She kept her voice conciliatory.

As they drove to the house, Nancy said, “You have to promise me, Mother, that if it gets to be too much, you'll let me know. We'll figure something else out.”

“Of course.”

“There may be good places near me too. Or one of the boys.”

Delia didn't answer. To leave him to Nancy's tender mercies . . . well, such a thing would not be possible.

“And I want you to go to Paris, too, in the fall. No giving up the things you enjoy because you're Dad's . . . case manager or something.”

Paris. Delia hadn't thought of it once through all this. It seemed another universe. She remembered her last morning there, her breakfast on the balcony, the light in the sky around her. She remembered the call from Alison Miller the afternoon before.

“Maybe we could take turns coming to stay in the house and visiting him while you're away—to make sure everything was going well.”

“Yes,” Delia said.

Nancy parked in the driveway, and they walked to the side steps, the ones that led into the kitchen. It was dark, they'd forgotten to leave the outside light on, and Delia stumbled over something. Nancy caught her elbow and continued to hold it as they came up the back stairs to the door. When they went in, Delia reached over in the black kitchen and switched on the lamp over the table. Blinking in the light, Nancy looked exhausted.

Why, she's
old,
Delia thought, looking at the deep, bitter grooves around her daughter's mouth, the lines in her forehead. She spoke gently to her. “Well, we seem to have made a plan then.”

T
HE REHAB CENTER
was about forty minutes from Williston. Delia drove slowly along the two-lane highway, watching anxiously for the signposts and turns she'd written down when she called for directions. She'd just come past the rotary and the yellow farmhouse when she saw it, as described, on a hill to the right.

“Rather imposing,” the woman on the phone had said, and it was—a grand old mansion, Georgian. On either side of it, low two-story brick buildings stretched out, back into the woods that pushed up toward the top of the hill.

She drove under a bright blue canopy by the front door and parked in the asphalt lot marked for visitors. Inside, there was a wide entrance hallway. Just visible behind a blond wood counter, a receptionist smiled up at her. She had flyaway gray hair. Delia told her the name she'd been given, and then sat down to wait, looking around her.

Everything was of a fine quality for what it was, and what it was was deliberately bland, painstakingly inoffensive. The color scheme was gray and a deep green—restful to the eye, she supposed. The pictures on the walls were anonymous pastoral scenes or framed posters from shows at art museums. Haystacks by Monet. Out in the hallway, flowers by O’Keeffe.

Walking with Mrs. Davidson minutes later, Delia was both impressed and oppressed by the place. The doors stood open to many of the little apartments off the long corridors, and Mrs. Davidson called out hello to various residents who seemed to be just sitting there idly, waiting for an invitation to talk. She was a pretty woman, perhaps in her fifties, slightly overdressed for her job—a purple suit, a big scarf knotted at her shoulder. She looked like a high-school principal, Delia thought.

She pointed out to Delia that the residents had their own furniture, their own pictures on the walls and mementoes set out. And Delia could see these as they passed slowly by—the figurines arranged on a table, the Victorian chair, the family photos cluttering a wall, the Persian rug spread over the institutional floor covering. The remnants of a full life led elsewhere.

This was where they would hope Tom could be moved in due time, Mrs. Davidson said.

Delia took all this in, commenting politely. As they moved around, she looked at the residents, old, like Tom, but ambulatory for the most part. Once they saw a young man walking the corridor ahead of them with an aide who was holding his hand. Delia asked Mrs. Davidson about him.

“He's one of our
boys,
” she said. “They're the other part of our population. When you're talking about neurological damage, there are two main culprits, and those are a stroke, and trauma. A few other illnesses, a few other possibilities. But mostly stroke and some violent event. And the population most likely to invite a violent event—to have a motorcycle accident with no helmet, to dive into a quarry without knowing where the rocks are, to drive too fast, to pass on a hill—those are, of course, young men. We try to offer them more discipline, more physical activity. And we actually house them in a different wing—they can be disruptive to the older population. I can show you if you wish.”

“No, no. It's not necessary,” Delia said.

They went next to the rehab and nursing-care wing, where Tom would be, at least at first. Delia saw the elaborate equipment he would work out on to build his strength, the rooms where his speech therapy would take place.

In the open main room here, a birthday party was in full swing. There was a speechless old woman slouched off center in a wheelchair at the head of the table, her mouth open as if in permanent shock at what had become of her, a little pointed hat held to the top of her head by an elastic band running under her chin. Ten or twelve other residents sat around the table with nurses or helpers next to most of them, a few being fed, more helping themselves—some competently, some as awkwardly as little children. Many of them too wore hats. A young woman wearing a flowered smock was chattering as she cut the cake, explaining, as you do with small children: “We're having ice cream. It's vanilla, vanilla ice cream. And look! Here's some cake! Two cakes. This cake has chocolate, and that one doesn't. So if you don't like chocolate . . .”

There was a kind of din under this, the noise of the patients’ conversation in response, taking place in a different rhythm, a different style.

Delia's main thought as they left the ward, as she walked back with Mrs. Davidson down the enclosed corridors with their slightly floral smell, as she sat listening to her talk about finances in her office, was that Tom would be appalled. And then, sitting there, nodding at Mrs. Davidson as she spoke, she realized that she was thinking of another Tom, one who would have walked with her through this place in one of his suits, a beautiful tie at his neck, his hand at her back, at her elbow, looking at her from time to time, commenting privately on things to her with the slightest wry twist to his mouth, an almost invisible lift of his eyebrows.