The Senator's Wife (32 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Delia, Late Afternoon, July 19, 1994

D
ELIA STOPPED IN
town to pick up a bottle of wine and a roast chicken. They'd have a salad too, a cucumber salad with yogurt and garlic and mint, but she had those ingredients at home. She hooked her bag over her shoulder and walked slowly up Main Street in the blistering heat. The secret of this weather was to go slowly, never to rush.

She stopped just before the turn onto Dumbarton to talk to Peggy Williams, her old neighbor, widowed now, who had just put her house on the market. They spoke of the revival of the real estate boom, how helpful it would be to them and how hard on the younger generation. Peggy would move away once the house sold. She was going to live in what was called an
active-adult community
near her son in northern California.

She asked about Tom, and Delia offered the quick version.

“Well, no matter what,” Peggy said, “he's alive. That's the important thing.”

“For all of us, I would think,” Delia said, and they smiled and walked off in their separate directions, Peggy toward town, Delia home.

She was grateful for the deep shade on Dumbarton. She walked slowly, lifting her head to greet the slightly cooler air under the trees. She passed the house that had belonged to the Bowers, the one the Donahues used to own. Little children were playing in a plastic pool in the driveway, shrieking and splashing.

She turned into her own driveway and went up it. She would pick some mint for the cucumber salad now, she thought. Then once she was in, she could stay in, with Tom, where it was cool.

She set her striped bag down on the back steps and broke off four or five stems of the mint. It had taken over the whole bed on this side of the back door. She should get Matt to pull some of it out. She bent her face to smell it, its fresh scent, before she put her sprigs in her bag and mounted the steps.

The house was cool and utterly still but for the noise of the air conditioner. Perhaps Tom was napping. Perhaps even Meri and the baby had dropped off in the living room. She wouldn't be surprised, in this heat.

She shut the door slowly behind her, hearing the latch click metallically in place with a wince. She set her bag and her keys down carefully on the kitchen table. Her hands still smelled of the mint. She raised them to her face for a moment and inhaled.
Mint,
she thought,
is the smell of happiness.

She would tell Tom this. She would put her hands to his face and tell him. She walked across the kitchen and into the hallway. How lovely and cool it was in here! She'd have to remember to thank Matt again for the air conditioner when she saw him next.

She moved as quietly as she could in its steady, reassuring hum down the hallway to the living room.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Meri, February 2007

M
ERI IS SITTING
in the bleacher seats that rise above the indoor pool at Williston High School, waiting for Asa's event to start. She and Henry have barely made it here in time—she was late leaving work, and he dawdled, as usual, leaving preschool. He had to say good-bye to two friends. One, David—his beloved David (“What does he see in the guy?” Meri had asked Nathan not long ago, and they had discussed the improbability of most childhood romances); and Jeff. Jeff, because he was too shy, Henry explained in the car.

“Wait, I didn't know this,” Meri said. “So
you're
in charge of the kids who are too shy?”

“No!” he shouted, grinning in delight. He's the only one who still believes in her great wit. Then he sobered. “But
I
am not shy.”

Henry is her angel, the last child she will have. She looks over at him. He's large for a three-year-old, sturdy and blond, unlike the older two boys. An enthusiast, unlike them too.

“Yes,” she said. “I know that.”

It was twenty-one degrees outside, and the heater in the car had only just started to blow tepid air over them when she parked and she and Henry made their dash from the sidewalk into the gym.

In here the air is heavy and warm, the bleachy, clean odor engulfs you, the tiled walls make every noise reverberate. They're calling out the times of the previous race, while those boys, their hair wet, their noses pinked, stand around with towels draped over their shoulders. But these races don't really count: Asa is a freshman, on the freshman team. The important competitions of the day are over—at this point in the meet, the bleachers are only about a third full. Meri feels that this makes it especially important that some members of the family be there to watch Asa. She and Henry are the only ones today—Nathan has an afternoon class, and Martin, her eleven-year-old, is at his clarinet lesson.

She spots Asa down among the other freshmen, wearing a tiny red Speedo. This is the closest to naked she gets to see him now—he was swamped by modesty at about age twelve. With his own money, he's actually bought a hook and eye for the inside of his door so the younger boys can't barge in on him.

She watches him. He's very tall for his age, like all of their children, and his body is just beginning to widen out a bit after his last spurt of growth, helped by the muscles he's developed swimming. He's fourteen. His voice has changed within the last year, without awkwardness—just slipping lower and lower—and his face is changing too. His jaw is suddenly strong, like Nathan's, and his eyebrows have come in full and dark.

He looks up at the stands and she catches his eye and waves, points to Henry next to her. Asa nods almost imperceptibly, and his eyes shift quickly elsewhere.

Henry has been describing a game to her, describing it at length and in great detail. It's a game he and David invented at preschool. First they were robbers in the game, and then they became super-heroes trapping the robbers—but not like the superheroes he has dolls for, he says, and he lists them and all their superpowers. He and David were a different, a
better
kind of superhero.

“Hold that thought and pay attention,” she says. “They're going to start. See?” She turns Henry's head in Asa's direction and points. The gangly boys are lining up, getting ready, shifting their weight from foot to foot and shaking out their hands. Now they hunch over on their starting blocks, and then there's a
pop!
and the noise of their hitting the water, all at once. Yelling fills the room.

She and Henry yell too. It's one of his favorite things to do.

Asa does the breaststroke, that wastefully extravagant way of moving through water. His head and shoulders come heaving up out of the pool with an astonishing circular lift of both his arms, and then the arms disappear underwater, pulling down and back, his body rushing forward. With all this dramatic upper-body motion, the action of the boys’ lower bodies is regular, just a steady rocking of their buttocks in and out of the water, a motion that startled Meri when she first saw it, it was so like fucking. Even now she's unable not to take note of it. She wonders whether the boys even think about it, whether they sometimes joke about it with one another.

Asa turns underwater at the end of the pool and comes up again. He's ahead of everyone else, way ahead, which isn't surprising. He's the largest boy in the pool, and a fine swimmer. Nathan taught him. He's taught all the boys. Even Henry can do the crawl better than Meri, who didn't learn to swim until she was an adult.

“Ace! Ace! Beat
all
of the others, Ace!” Henry yells.

“Come on, baby,” Meri calls out. “Go, go, go, go!”

Everyone is yelling, whistling, clapping. A girl on the bench directly below them is standing, stomping her feet frenziedly and squealing in what sounds like either pain or ecstasy. The din in the tiled space is overwhelming. Henry laughs in joy.

At the second-to-last lap, someone else on the Williston team starts to catch up to Asa. He actually makes the final turn only a second or two after him, but Asa pulls ahead easily at the close, and then suddenly he's hanging at the end of the pool, panting, grinning up at his coach and waiting to hear his time amid the screams of the crowd.

When the meet is over, Asa disappears with the other boys into the showers. Henry and Meri bundle up before they go out to the car and start home. Asa will come home on his bike.

In the car Henry says, “My throat is
burned
from my yelling.”

“Mine too.”

He's quiet a minute. Then he says, “Why do you call Asa your baby? He's not a baby.”

She looks at him. He's frowning under his thatch of blond hair, hair she still trims herself, at home. “Who
is
a baby?” she asks. “Are you my baby?”

“No. You don't even
have
a baby.”

“Ah, but you used to be my baby. Even Asa was my baby once upon a time.”

“But that was too long ago.”

“Well, you're right. I should just cut it out, shouldn't I?”

“Yes, you should,” he says, sternly.

They drive along. Meri is thinking, as she does at least several times a week, of Asa as a baby, thinking of him with the usual pang of sorrow for how little she was able to give to him then, to do for him. Her love for the other two boys as newborns was instant and complete—she was ready to adore them even as they emerged, bloody and gummy, from her body. But she had to learn those feelings slowly and reluctantly with Asa, and she's never stopped feeling guilty for what he missed out on. When Nathan wanted to have a second child, Meri had at first resisted, out of that guilt, out of the sense that Asa should have all of her love forevermore because she was so incapable of loving him at the start, so frightened and closed in.

But Nathan had prevailed, and they'd had Martin, and then much later Henry—like Asa an accident: she was forty-eight at the time, careless about contraception because she thought those days were over for her. And each of the younger boys had made Meri more generous, more profligate with her love, just as Nathan had predicted. Each of them had made her love Asa more, and then more again.

But not just Asa. She had also felt, in the universe she and Nathan made with the boys, that she was somehow revising her own childhood too, giving herself retroactively a sense of safety, of encirclement she'd never had then.

She pulls into the driveway. Nathan's bike, and Martin's too, are leaned against the side of the house. The windows on the first floor blaze with light. When she and Henry come into the living room, she can hear Nathan's voice in the kitchen. They leave their coats on the hooks Nathan installed by the front door. She helps Henry off with his boots, and they head down the hall.

Nathan has already started supper. He greets them both, a kiss for Meri, a high five for Henry. “Did Asa win?” he asks, turning back to her.

“He did.”

“Asa won?” Martin says, looking up from a book he's reading at the kitchen table. He wears glasses and looks geekier than either of the other boys. He
is
kind of a geek—but oddly, given this, he's enormously popular. When the phone rings, none of the rest of them bothers to answer it if Martin's around, it's always so likely to be for him.

“Easily,” she says.

“What was his time?” Nathan asks.

“That I couldn't tell you. You'll have to wait and ask him when he gets home. What are we having for dinner?” She smells garlic and onions, and he has the big kettle on.

“Spaghetti,” he says.

“Spaghetti!” Henry yells. “Spaghetti! Spaghetti!” He dances around the cooking area of the kitchen. “I. Love. Spaghetti!”

“Henry!” Nathan calls. “Hen! Henry, hold it down.” He points to the party wall, the wall their neighbors, the Switalskis, live behind. Live behind
quietly,
as Meri and Nathan often point out. They have two little girls, six-year-old twins who seem to be completely orderly children, acoustically barely there.

Meri leans over Nathan's shoulder as he stirs some sausage meat into the sizzling onions, breaking it up with the wooden spoon. She asks him about his day. She tells him about hers.

Nathan says, “I bought a
Times,
and the
Register
”—the local paper. “This'll take me at least a half an hour, if you want to sit down and read for a while.”

“I will, I think. I haven't stopped since this morning.” She goes into their living room. She sits down and looks quickly at the front page of the
Times.
More horror stories from Iraq. She can't bear to read them.

In the kitchen she can hear Henry's voice going up and down, dramatic endings on every sentence. Nathan only has to murmur something occasionally to keep him going.

She skims through the Arts section, finds a pen, and does the crossword puzzle. It's easy today, a Tuesday. By Friday it's hard for her, and she hardly ever even tries Saturday. Then she opens the
Register
and flips quickly through it, skimming a few articles. When she comes to the obituaries, her hands stop and she makes a little noise.

It's Delia, her face smiling back at Meri.

It's a photograph taken perhaps in her early middle age, but it's unmistakably Delia. The headline is “Senator's Wife Dies at 89.”

Meri feels the deep pounding of her heart. She reads through the obituary once, almost breathless, barely taking in the facts presented. Then she forces herself to read it again, more slowly. But even this second time, trying to understand the details, what she's mostly thinking of is the last time she saw Delia, the awful scene that ended everything.

T
OM'S FACE
, which had been heavy-lidded and rapt watching her, had suddenly changed, his eyes shifting past her, widening. Meri turned, her hands still on her breasts, and saw Delia. Delia, frozen, her mouth dropped open, her eyes wild.

Meri isn't sure what she did first—maybe she tried to pull her blouse closed, maybe she started to get up. She remembers that across the room, Tom was struggling to stand too. When she looked around at Delia again, the old woman had backed up a few steps, her face terrible to see—and then she turned and vanished down the hall.

Meri got back to the kitchen within seconds. Delia already had her purse, her keys, and she was at the opened door. Meri started to speak, to say something, but she was aware at the same moment of Tom's voice in the house behind her, his strange noise, his cry: “Dheee!”

What Delia said to Meri was “No words. Not one word.” Her face was ravaged, but fierce. Her hand was up, her fingers spread:
stop.
And then she was gone.

Meri stood stupidly, not moving for a moment. Then she followed, out into the bright, hot sunlight. She caught up to Delia, saying . . . what? She can't remember.
Delia, this isn't what you think. Delia, please come back.
It didn't matter what. It was just
words,
as Delia said.

They reached the end of the driveway. Delia had said nothing to her, hadn't even looked at her, but her mouth was open and moving. She was breathing noisily and irregularly, a kind of
hysterical breathing,
Meri would have said, if she'd ever spoken of this moment to anyone. Meri touched Delia's arm and the old woman jerked herself away, spinning to face her.

“
Get back there,
” she said. She pointed, and Meri looked back and saw Tom just starting toward them down the sunstruck driveway—no walker, no cane, just his slow, perilously uneven lurch. “It's your mess now,” Delia said. Her voice was shrill. “Get back there and see if you can fix it, fix what you've done.”

She turned and walked quickly down Dumbarton toward Main Street.

Meri had stopped, she couldn't go any farther. Asa was back there, alone in Delia's house, asleep. And behind her Tom cried out again, a long, deep wail—as Delia moved rapidly away far down the street, her figure seeming to bob under the dappled shade of the trees. Meri watched her for a moment.

Then she turned and went slowly back up the driveway to Tom.

S
HE LIED TO
N
ATHAN
. She never thought for a moment of not lying, of telling the truth. She was lying to save herself, to save herself and Nathan together, to save Asa. She was lying for all of them. Tom, listening, said nothing to contradict her. What she told Nathan was that she had just finished nursing Asa, that Delia had arrived and misunderstood what was happening.

Nathan had believed her. He had sided with her, he had been sympathetic and supportive. Weeks later, when they were going over all of it again—as they did repeatedly during that time—he said, “So maybe to her way of thinking he wasn't maimed
enough.
”

It was the first time either of them had spoken of it with anything approaching distance, much less levity, and Meri felt a simultaneous sense of gratitude to Nathan, and loss. Loss, because he'd moved that far away from it already, far enough away to make a joke—and she knew that she couldn't. That she wouldn't, ever.

She reads the obituary yet again, this time finally forcing herself to imagine it, the way the rest of Delia's life has played out.