The Senator's Wife (33 page)

The cause of death isn't given, but the obituary says that Delia died in an assisted-living home in Denver.

Near Nancy then. This saddens Meri. She'd met Nancy. She remembers Tom's word for her—
formidable
—and the little shudder of mock fear he'd given after he said it. She knows enough to surmise that it must have been hard for Delia to end her life in Nancy's care.

But the obituary says she'd been living in Paris until two years before her death; it tells of her love for all things French. It mentions the Apthorp house, and speaks of her part in making it a museum.

It says also that she grew up in the small town of Watkins, Maine, where her father was headmaster at a boys’ school. That she went to Smith College. That she was married to Thomas Naughton in 1940. That he later was a member of the House of Representatives for two terms, and then a senator for two terms also. That in Washington Delia was known for her beauty and charm, her wit. That parties at the Naughtons’ house were coveted invitations.

That she is survived by three children, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

That she and the senator had lived separately after his second campaign for the Senate, though they never divorced. That he predeceased her, in 1998.

But Meri knew that. She and Nathan had been in bed, reading the paper, when Nathan came across that obituary. Wordlessly, he'd held it up in front of her. The photo of Tom's young, eager face had made Meri remember his expression in Delia's living room, watching her.

And then, as now, the other memories flooded her. His mostly silent dinner with them the night that Delia left, a meal during which they kept reassuring him that she would come back, that surely she'd call. He had seemed to seize on this, repeating it, as a child would. Meri had seized on it too, silently. Of course Delia would call. She'd forgiven Tom so much already. She loved him. This couldn't be the end of all that. It wasn't possible that Meri could have set such a thing in motion.

Nathan went over to help Tom get to bed, to spend the night. He slept on the living room couch—he told Meri he wouldn't have felt comfortable going upstairs, poking around up there to find a place to sleep. He'd gotten Tom up the next morning and brought him over for breakfast before Len came to pick him up. They were sure she'd call today, they told him.

But she didn't. And she wasn't there by that evening either, when Matt came over to say he had to get going.

Once again Tom stayed with them for dinner. Once again Nathan went over to help get him to bed. After he'd fallen asleep though, Nathan came home for a while to talk with Meri about what course of action they ought to take. They were sitting in the kitchen still trying to decide this when Nancy called. Meri answered the phone.

Nancy said her mother was with a friend in Washington. That she had decided—“
finally,
” Nancy said, with heavy emphasis—that it was too much for her, that she couldn't manage Tom's needs by herself.

She said that for now she had arranged for Tom to go back to Putnam as a resident. The driver would take him there tomorrow. She was calling to ask if they would be willing to pack a few days’ worth of clothes and toiletries to go with him. She'd be very grateful. She was already very grateful to them for stepping in with Tom over these last few days. She herself would come east over the weekend and do the rest of what needed to get done.

Yes, Meri said. No, no, it wasn't an imposition. No, they'd be happy to.

Nathan had done it, the packing. He'd gone back over that night to stay with Tom again, and in the morning, while he put the old man's things in a suitcase, he explained to Tom what was happening. Tom came over and had breakfast with them for the last time, and then Len arrived and led him out to the car.

Meri had already said good-bye, and she stayed in the house, watching their slow progress down the stairs and over to the driveway. At the last minute, though, she ran after them. “Tom,” she called. They were at the car, Len had opened the door.

Tom turned to face her. He seemed more hunched over; he looked abruptly years older, years weaker.

She could feel her eyes fill with tears. Len was speaking to her cheerfully, but she paid no attention to him. “I wanted to say goodbye,” she said to Tom.

He nodded. “Unh,” he said.

She put her hand on his arm. It felt bony, the flesh felt loose. She couldn't remember ever having touched him before. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm just
so
. . . so sorry.”

He shook his head, and then he smiled—his amused, wry smile, that small pursed twist of his mouth. “Noo,” he said. His hand rose to rest flat on his chest, and then he struck himself there. “
Mhe
a culpa!” he said, clearly, still smiling at her.

“Ha! See?” Len said to Meri. “You can take the boy outta the church, but you can't take the church outta the boy.” He helped Tom into the car.

Meri stood in the driveway and watched the sleek black car back down the driveway and make its turn. She watched until it moved out of sight.

Tom's obituary had said that he died in a hospice in Washington, of a long illness. It focused mostly on his career in government, his then-unpopular resistance to the forms the antipoverty movement took under Sargent Shriver. Delia was mentioned as surviving him, she was called the wife from whom he'd been separated for a long time.

Meri is sitting, looking at nothing, having set the paper down. She thinks again of Delia's face in the terrible moment of her discovery, and then of all that happened after she left. She remembers Nancy's arrival that weekend, grim, satisfied, packing her father's possessions up, and some of her mother's too. She remembers the slow emptying out of the house in the months that followed before it was put up for sale, the various visits by Brad and Evan, the rental van Brad drove, the moving trucks that came to take things to Evan, to Nancy.

She remembers going over there alone once that fall on a night when Nathan was off at a meeting. She remembers standing, weeping, in the emptied-out rooms. She remembers the way her cries echoed in the dark.

Henry comes out from the kitchen. “Sing to me, Momma,” he says, as he climbs onto her lap.

“Shall I?” she says. She feels that he's calling her back, that she's still far, far away.

“Yeah.”

“What shall I sing?”

“Sing ‘Pay My Money.’”

This is a song from a Bruce Springsteen CD that Nathan brought home recently. Henry has fallen in love with it.

Meri starts, her voice soft and croaky at first. “Well I thought I heard the captain say, / ‘Pay me my money down. / Pay me or go to jail . . .’”

Asa rescues her after a verse or two, coming in the front door, dropping his backpack on the floor. “Hey,” he says. His face is red and chapped-looking. His eyes are teary and pink-rimmed from the cold. He takes his hat off, his mittens and coat.

Henry has sat up. “We seen you win, Ace,” he says. “We yelled and yelled.”

“Yeah, I heard you up there.” He grins at Henry.

Henry slides off Meri's lap and goes to Asa. He drapes himself around one of Asa's legs—that's how much smaller, how much younger he is than his brother. “Ace is the winner!” he yells.

“You were great, honey,” Meri says.

“Yeah, well, I'm
starving,
” Asa says. He starts back toward the kitchen, pulling Henry along.

“I'm starving too!” Henry cries.

Feeling numb, distracted, Meri follows them. In the kitchen, she gets out a tablecloth and sails it open over the kitchen table. She gathers utensils from the drawer and moves around the table, setting them in place.

The boys leave to wash their hands. Meri thinks of telling Nathan about Delia now, but she doesn't. She doesn't because she knows he'll be sympathetic, sympathetic to
her
—he'll remember what he understood of her sorrow at the time, of her guilt, and he'll think of it as being compounded, being redoubled now, by Delia's death.

And it isn't. It just isn't, she doesn't know why.

She looks at him, grating cheese now, his big hands in motion, his hair swaying with each push. Nathan.

The boys come back, wiping their wet hands on their jeans, and they all sit down. Nathan serves the spaghetti, and they pass the pasta dishes around the table. He starts to sing: “Oh,
Muss
-olini was so proud, was-so-proud. / He
ate
spaghetti long and loud, long-and-loud. / He used to
wind
it round and
round
. . .”

The boys’ braying drowns him out. They've heard it before—many times before. Almost every time they have spaghetti.

“Shh, shh, shh,” Meri says. “Let's be quiet. Let's be elegant.”

They start to eat. “But what
is
elegant?” Henry asks after a minute.

“Elegant is behaving terribly well. Is being polite. Is saying please and thank you.”

“All the
time
?” Henry asks.

“Whenever appropriate,” Nathan says.

Martin asks to have the Parmesan cheese passed to him.

“Please,” Meri says.

“Please, please, please, please,” Martin says, making his voice whiny.

“What is
appropriate
?” Henry asks.

Meri explains while Nathan asks Asa about the meet. They talk about that, about Asa's chances of getting on the varsity team next year. About Henry's burned throat from cheering him on.

Martin asks Meri if she'll go over his lines with him after dinner. He's in a play at the college—he has the only
kid
part in it—and he dreamed last night that he got onstage and couldn't remember anything. He couldn't even recognize his cues. “And in the dream everyone was trying to help me, whispering them so loud it was like screaming, but it didn't help. I still couldn't remember them.”

“Everybody has those dreams, honey,” Meri says. “It doesn't mean anything.”

Nathan talks about a dream he once had in which he was giving a lecture with notes that turned out to be in some unrecognizable hieroglyphic language.

“What's hydroglippic?” Henry asks.

Asa explains. He gets up for some paper, and draws various glyphs he invents for Henry, in the end making a sentence with an eye, a heart, and a soccer ball, a sentence that Henry reads out loud with delight several times over.

After supper they clean up. In the living room, Meri goes over Martin's lines with him. Nathan has gone up to his study, and Asa is doing his homework on the dining room table. Henry sits across the living room, earplugs in, listening to songs only he can hear on his portable CD player. By himself—a matter of pride—he's changed into his pajamas, an old pair, almost worn out, that have come down from Martin, and before him from Asa. Meri can remember Asa in those pajamas, remember the ways in which he was exactly himself, even at Henry's age, completely different from the way Henry is now, and from Martin at that age too—grave and always anxious about being good, about pleasing her. Henry, unworried about any of that, occasionally sings a phrase out loud while he waits for Meri to put him to bed.

When Martin feels safe with his lines, Meri takes Henry upstairs and reads him two picture books. He leans more and more heavily against her. She turns off the light and lies beside him as his breathing slows and deepens. She's thinking, as she has on and off throughout the evening, of Delia, of Delia and Tom, and of herself, then. That Meri, the Meri who had known them, who had cared so much about what their story was, about their history, about what they thought about her—the Meri who had so carelessly wrecked their lives—that version of herself seems impossibly far away, her life is so absolutely
here,
so bound up with the boys and Nathan.

She can remember feeling then that she and Nathan would have no story in the sense that Delia and Tom did, no parallel deep currents of love between them. She had thought she knew already what their marriage was, what its limits were. She had thought they were
in
it. She didn't know they'd barely begun. She couldn't have imagined the long, slow processes that would change them, change what they felt for each other. She would never have guessed, either, the way the children would remake them and their love.

Once, recently, as she and Nathan collapsed into bed at the end of the day and then lay there next to each other, neutered by fatigue, waiting only for sleep, that
summum bonum,
she jokingly said to him, “Think we're a match made in heaven, Natey?”

He didn't answer for a moment, and she thought he'd dropped off. But then he turned and touched her face. “I think we're a match made right here on earth, in this very house.”

That feels right, and true to Meri—that it is the things she and Nathan have lived through here, with each other and the children, that have made them who they are, and who they are together.

B
UT
T
OM AND
D
ELIA
were a part of that for her, she's thinking now. They changed her also, they had a role in fitting her for the life she has now.

She had, she knows,
wanted
Delia to change her. She had sought Delia out, she had thought she could learn from her. She had even thought she could learn from the private story of Delia's life, from the letters from Tom that she went through. Meri remembers Delia's face when she said that life teaches you you can endure anything, when she said you needed to forgive yourself. It always seemed to Meri that she was about to understand something large and important about how to
be
in the world from Delia.

But in the end she has come to think it was Tom who changed her more, who gave her something, something that she didn't know she needed. It's the memories of him that have stayed with her, that have come back to her most clearly, most often. Over and over in those few odd afternoons she shared with him, he seemed to be inviting her to smile, to laugh with him. She remembers it all—the humor in his eyes, the gentle comedy in the gestures he made to her. The day he thanked her with his hand on his chest, the day he raised his finger to his lips. She remembers. She remembers his acting out Asa's greed, his funny protest of the milk that had spurted from her all over him. She remembers laughing with Tom then, laughing at him. Laughing at Asa for the first time. Even—yes—laughing at herself. She remembers that Tom made her feel whole, happy. That he made her feel beautiful.