The Senator's Wife (4 page)

D
ELIA GETS OUT
of her car and goes around to the side entrance of the house. She unlocks the door and turns off the alarm system. She walks through the house and opens the front door from within.

Despite the warmth of the late-summer day outside, the Apthorp house is cool. It's almost always cool. It's also dark—the walls have been repapered in historically accurate patterns that favor deep green or red or brown. Everything smells of old fires and damp. Delia likes this, that the air itself seems to be of another time.

Adele DiRosa comes in, the woman who sells tour tickets and runs the gift shop. Delia calls a greeting to her on her way to the storage closet for more booklets and the little clip-on badges visitors are required to wear.

This is a slow week, the last week of August. Only one couple stops by in the morning, and they turn down Delia's offer to walk them through. They want to explore at their own pace, they say—though they stop and ask her a few questions before they leave.

After they're gone, Delia goes into the gift shop and talks for a while with Adele. The shop is a light space, airy, with large modern windows—completely different from the rest of the house. It was built much later as an addition, a new kitchen, in the years before the college bought the house and reclaimed it for history. Now the cupboards are full of spare copies of the books they sell, and they use the stove and sink to make coffee and tea.

Adele is at least thirty years younger than Delia, but they've known each other for a long time and they're companionable. They talk today about local politics—the closing of a nearby military base, the possibility of establishing a minimum-security prison on its grounds. It's been discussed and debated repeatedly in the local paper. Adele is more in favor of this than Delia, but they both worry about incarceration as a growing American industry.

In the afternoon, there's a little flurry of business. At the one-thirty tour, there are two older couples and a young woman writing a thesis on nineteenth-century New England women. When Delia is done with them, there are several people going through on their own who have questions for her. She barely has time for a cup of tea and a bathroom break before the four o'clock tour.

At just after five, Delia locks the doors again, and she and Adele leave, calling their good-byes to each other at their cars. Delia opens her windows to cool the car off—the day has turned hot, as she thought it would. She drives to the center of town. She parks at a meter there, one of a row installed on Main Street only three years before. In Kitchen Arts she buys two inexpensive champagne flutes and some blue-checked dishcloths. She walks the four doors down to the specialty food shop. There she buys a small circle of goat cheese, several pâtés, a baguette, a box of crackers, a jar of expensive mustard, and some cornichons. From behind the glass doors of the double-wide refrigerator, she takes out a bottle of chilled champagne.

These shops and others like them—a fancy produce store, a wineshop—have arrived in Williston slowly over the last ten years or so, changing the town and the people. Now everyone knows what
confit
means, what
first cold pressing
is, what the difference is between a niçoise and a calamata olive.

It is pleasant to have these amenities, Delia thinks, but they strike her, too, as making this kind of sophistication somehow obligatory. As though to keep up with the times, you have to be more careful about all this, you have to choose just the right cheese, and the right wine to go with it. Delia can remember fondly the parties in their first small apartment, when the children were tiny and she served Wheat Thins and Ritz crackers with a vivid orange cheese streaked with pink—its name lost to time, its dye probably carcinogenic. The booze was all anyone cared about anyway.

The truck is gone when she gets home. She parks in her own driveway by the kitchen door and carries her bags in. She refrigerates the cheese and pâtés, the champagne. Then she pours a glass of wine for herself and goes to the front hall to pick up the mail that has dropped through the slot in the door and scattered on the floor. She carries it to the living room and sits down to go through it.

At about six-thirty, she goes back to the kitchen and arranges the flutes she bought for her neighbors in a wicker basket, nested into the new dishcloths. She puts in the baguette, the pâtés, the cheese, the mustard and cornichons, and the cold bottle of champagne, and carries it outside and across the porch.

The husband answers the door. A tall boy, handsome, with a long face and a strong jaw. Much better-looking in a conventional way than the wife, a disparity Delia always finds interesting. He's wearing work clothes: jeans and a dark T-shirt. Those huge
healthy
sneakers they all have now. When she introduces herself, a wide grin changes his face, and his hand rises as if to straighten his hair, but he more or less yanks it instead. Nathan, he says his name is.

“Please, come in,” he says, and steps back, gesturing expansively into Ilona's living room, filled now with enormous boxes.

“No, no,” Delia says, though she does, actually, enter the house—just for a minute, she tells herself. “I
won't
stay. My aim here is not to complicate your life, but to make it easier.” She holds the basket out. “This is for you. At whatever stage of the evening you're ready for it.”

And now the wife, Meri, comes bounding down the stairs, her puggy, somehow sexy round face smutched with dirt. She's in jeans too, but barefoot. Her hair has been pinned up, and long thin strands have escaped around her face.

“Look what Mrs. Naughton has brought us,” Nathan says, holding the basket up to her.

“Oh, it's beautiful,” she says. “Thank you so much, Delia. It's Delia, right?” She comes through the boxes to the front door, her hand extended, and they shake.

“It is Delia. And you're Meri, Meri with an
e,
I think.” The girl nods, and Delia gestures at the basket. “And this is your reward, for such a hard day's work. There is
nothing
as horrible as moving.”

Nathan is standing next to her, and he turns to her now. “Won't you join us for just one glass? It looks like great champagne.”

“No, no. I'm not staying, not if you tie me down. I know what it is to unpack a house, and the last thing you need tonight is a guest.”

Meri looks relieved. “We
are
dead,” she says, and then lets her head loll, her tongue hanging out.

Delia watches the little spasm of irritation pass on Nathan's face. He disapproves of his wife, of her silliness anyway. It makes Delia turn to Meri and smile. “I would think so,” she says.

As Delia steps back to Ilona's storm door, reaching for the handle, Nathan moves along with her. He doesn't want to let her go, clearly. He's speaking of his delight in meeting her, in being neighbors, of his admiration for her husband. They look forward to seeing her. “You and the senator, of course.”

“Oh, the senator,” she says, smiling. “Yes, on one of his ceremonial visits.” And waving her hand vaguely, she opens the door. “We will certainly try to arrange that, once you're settled.”

They come and stand in the doorway, thanking her again as she goes around the lion to her own front door.

Her side of the house suddenly seems very orderly, in spite of the books piled everywhere and the mail scattered on the coffee table. In the kitchen, she pours herself another glass of wine, the expensive red wine from France she treats herself to. She makes a light dinner. Salad, a few toasted slices of day-old bread, and the smaller pâté she bought for herself when she got the larger ones for Meri and Nathan. She sits at the kitchen table. She has the little brown radio on low, a jazz station she likes at this hour, as much for the soothing deep voice of the host as for the music itself.

Suddenly she hears voices through the kitchen wall, a low, faint alternation of tones. This startles her for a moment; but then she remembers from the earlier days of Ilona's tenure, when the older woman still sometimes entertained, that the sound carries best in here because of the openings made behind the wall for the pipes to pass through. Here, and unfortunately also in the bathrooms. She will have to get used to
that
again. She turns the music up slightly.

But now their voices rise too for a moment—sharp, perhaps angry. She hopes they're not arguing about her. About her or
the senator.

Probably not, she tells herself. There are many things to argue about when you're tired, when you've labored side by side all day, each of you bossing the other around. She carries what's left of her dinner to the living room.

Later, as she lies in bed reading, there are a few more thumps and thuds. She sets her book down. She's remembering moving in on this side of the wall with Tom, so many years ago. It was 1965, the children all still in college—no, all but Nancy. She'd started law school.

Delia and Tom were still youthful then, youthful and hopeful, in spite of the hard times they'd just come through. Or maybe because of them. This was to have been their new start, this house, though they had pretended, moving in, that they were an ordinary middle-aged couple, excited about an ordinary move. She remembers that after the kids went out for the evening to explore the new neighborhood, they sat in the kitchen together, exhausted by their long day, and drank almost half a bottle of scotch between them. There was a moment when he made her laugh about something or other. About nothing, really. It was a thing he could do effortlessly, unless she was steeled against it.

Her book is lying on the counterpane, her hand resting on top of it. Under the light falling from the bedside lamp, the bluish veins are sharply delineated, the bones and tendons raised. The hand of an old woman. She isn't looking at it though. She's remembering Tom on that night. He was in his forties then, at the height of his attractiveness, his charm—tall and lanky and still somehow boyish, with his long mocking Irish face, his sandy hair. It was after that first flagrant affair. She found out later that there had been others before it, less important, less disruptive, but this was the first big one, the first one she had to know about.

He sat at the table with her, laughing. And then his face sobered and he leaned over suddenly to say, out of the blue, “Thank you.”

She knew that he meant
Thank you for taking me back, thank you for forgiving me, thank you for moving with me into this beautiful house, thank you for making things look all right to the world.

She had raised her hand. She didn't want to talk about it again, to be reminded of what she felt as her humiliation. She didn't want to be thanked for being a person who would consent to such humiliation. She raised her hand to ward all that off, and he let it go. He sat back and began to talk of other things again.

As she lies there, her hand rises now too, involuntarily this time, against the other memories, the later ones—the memories of the second big affair, the other one she had to know about, the one that ended things. Because when Delia gave him an ultimatum that time, he couldn't let go of the woman. He wasn't able not to see her, not to keep meeting her—in other people's empty apartments, in hotels in New York, in their own house in Washington when Delia was out of town. The circle of friends and colleagues who knew about it grew larger. People expressed their concern to her, about her. About him and what he was doing to his career, his future. But in that other world, the world where politicians were still allowed private lives and some protection from the press, it never broke; there was no public scandal.

And then the affair was suddenly over. Or he told her it was over.

They had tried to put that one behind them too. Oh, Delia was good at trying!—a bitter smile changes her face in the light from her bedside lamp. But his sad attentiveness, his kindness to her, his palpable grief, all these defeated her. The memory floods her now, she's helpless against it. She recalls flying to Washington, to Tom and their house there, where he had slept with his lover; from Washington, from Tom, back to this empty house; looking for a place, any place, where she felt whole.

And then, just after a visit he'd made to her here, weeks after he'd promised the affair was over, a friend in Washington—her closest, dearest friend—called to say that she'd seen them together again. She hadn't been sure she should tell Delia, but then thought that someone else might, more cruelly. “I'd rather it was me,” she said.

Delia had said thank you, and hung up. She was in the hallway, by the telephone stand. It was an unusually warm day for early April, one of those gifts of a New England spring. The shifting sun through the bare trees made the light move around her. She'd stood there a long time feeling a number of things, which finally coalesced into a sense of relief.

She was relieved. She didn't need anymore to try, to pretend.

She allows herself this memory fully, without resistance: that moment—the front door open, the dirt smell of early spring.

And the relief. It was all over. The lover, Tom, her shame in front of the two younger children, in front of her friends. It was over. It no longer had anything to do with her, it wasn't anymore her job to make things right.

Within a week she'd flown to France, and four days after that, through some friends of friends, she'd found an apartment to rent at the southern edge of the seventh arrondissement in Paris.

Over that long spring and summer apart, she and Tom began slowly to write each other, to try to work out the terms of their life. She would wait until after the elections to divorce him. She agreed, in fact, to campaign with him—it would have been too damaging to him not to. But they wouldn't live with each other again. He would stay in Washington, and she'd keep the Williston house.

And some of these things did, indeed, happen as they had planned. She appeared publicly with him perhaps twenty or thirty times in that campaign—as a favor, and, she told herself, because she truly didn't care anymore.

She surprised herself, though, by enjoying it, tentatively at first, and then fully, truly. But as she told herself, she'd always liked that part of political life with Tom—the long days moving around among people charmed by him, interested in him. The speeches, full of an idealism and passion that were Tom at his best. The late-night sessions with aides, the loose, easy humor, the relaxed public touching—his hand at her elbow, around her shoulders. His claiming her over and over: “My wife . . . ,” “My wife . . . ,” “My better half . . .” And after all, of course, she believed in him, politically, and believed he was good at what he did. And a part of all this—her pleasure, her sense of
belonging
with him during this time—was that they were lovers again through the months of campaigning. Without really talking about it, without asking each other much about what it meant, they turned to each other this way too, again and again.