The Senator's Wife (7 page)

“So, you moved here in the sixties, was it?” Meri asked.

“That's right. The mid-sixties. Before the sixties
were
the sixties.”

“And did you love the house right away?” Meri asked, thinking of her own complicated feelings about her side.

“Well, I don't know, really,” Delia said. “I suppose a new house often represents something, doesn't it?” Her hand gestured. Her eyes were steady on the road. “Some change in your life, or perhaps, if you're married, a change in your life together. So you feel a kind of hopefulness, usually, with a move, but perhaps you feel a little anxiety too.”

“Yes,” Meri said. And after a moment, “Was your husband already a senator then? When you bought the house?”

“No, not yet. A congressman. We commuted to Washington. Or he did, mostly. I stayed more in Williston the first few years. Brad, my youngest, was still in high school.” She looked at Meri and smiled. “I had the bit part here, the congressman's wife, while he paraded around down there, the hero: the congressman himself.”

“But the separation must have been hard,” Meri said. She was thinking that she might be able to bring this around to Tom's absence, to unearthing the reasons for it.

“Oh, I got used to it,” Delia said. “You can get used to anything.” After a moment she said, “It's surprising to discover that, but it's one of the most necessary things life teaches us. Don't you think?”

And Meri, once again, was startled into what felt like confusion by a chance remark of Delia's. She wasn't sure how to answer. “Well, I suppose,” she said. “But I . . . haven't discovered that yet, I guess.”

“Ah,” Delia said, smiling. “
Yet.
”

“Yes,” Meri said. “No.”

Delia looked quickly at Meri, mischief on her face. “I so love it when people answer a question with, ‘Yes, no.’” She turned, in noble profile again, and after a moment she said, “Or ‘No, yes,’ for that matter.”

T
HAT EVENING
when Meri told Nathan about her excursion with Delia, she tried to describe to him the way Delia had affected her several times, in those moments that had startled her. “It's those aperçus, you know.”

“I don't know. Tell me.”

Meri looked up at him over the table—he was waiting, his eyes, opened wide, on her. She had never met a man before Nathan who said this—“Tell me.” Who said it and then sat back to listen.

But just as she was about to explain, she stopped and frowned. “Come to think of it though, maybe they're
my
aperçus, after she says something.” She pondered it. “No, that's not the way it works. They're hers.
She
understands what she's saying, what the frame of reference is, but I don't, quite. I don't get the implications, fully, I think, and it stops me in my tracks.”

Their knives and forks clinked. They were having a meal cooked by Meri tonight, one of about six dishes she knew how to make. Pork chops with a mustard sauce.

“Give me a
for instance,
” he said.

“For instance,” she said. “I was about to ask a direct question about Tom—for
you,
Natey, on your behalf, trying to solve the great mystery of where he is. My angle was sympathy—how hard it must have been when he was in Washington in Congress and she had to stay in Williston for the kids, et cetera. This is what she'd just been talking about. And I was proceeding rapidly down the track, toward the station, really getting close, I thought, when she derailed me. Stopped me dead. With an aperçu.”

“Which was?”

“Something about—oh, I can't even remember it, exactly. It had to do with life, as they mostly do. Life with a capital
L.
How you learn to endure things, or something.”

He finished what he was chewing. “Not very remarkable, as aperçus go.”

“Maybe not. But it felt remarkable in the moment. It felt like
news.
”

T
HEY HAD TO
invite Delia three times before they found an evening she could come over for dinner. The first time she was headed to Maine for the weekend to see her son and his family, and the second time she had a concert she was attending with some friends.

“Why don't we have things to do?” Meri asked Nathan. “Why don't we go to a concert with some friends?”

“Because we're new in town, and we're both out of our minds with work,” Nathan said.

This was true, though truer for Nathan than for Meri. On most days, she got to leave her work behind when she came home. Nathan's went on and on, with class preparation in the evenings, with his book on the weekends. And when they did have free time together, the house claimed them. They'd painted two rooms so far, the kitchen and their bedroom. In the bedroom they'd had to strip off the old wallpaper first, with a steamer they rented for one long, muggy day. The air in the room was still damp when they went to bed that night, and it smelled of old wallpaper paste. Meri liked it—the wheaty humidity—but Nathan said it waked him on and off all night.

They
had
gone to a few social events. There'd been an opening tea at the dean's house, and twice different colleagues of Nathan's had had them over for dinner with others. But generally, unless they were asked or required to do something, they tended to stay home. To stay home by themselves. Delia would be their first guest, and Meri was slightly nervous about the meal—which she was in charge of: Nathan had to work late—and about how things would go.

When Meri answered the door, Delia
sailed
in—for the first time Meri thought she understood that word as it would apply to a human being. She was carrying a huge spray of white lilies. While Nathan opened a bottle of wine in the living room, Meri got out the folding stepladder and looked through the high shelves in the pantry for a vase big enough for the flowers. Nothing. She finally had to put them in a galvanized bucket, they were so tall and full. Even in this homely container, though, they made the living room suddenly more finished-looking when she carried them in to where Delia and Nathan were sitting.

She set them on the curved bench in front of the darkening windows. “They're gorgeous, Delia,” she said, stepping back. “Thank you.”

“Well, the thing is, lilies
last,
” Delia said. Meri looked over at her. Her wineglass was in her hand, her legs were crossed. For a woman in her seventies, she looked absurdly glamorous, Meri thought.

“
And
they're gorgeous,” Nathan said.

Meri sat down on the slightly sagging couch, which had come from her apartment in Coleman. Delia was in the wing chair from Nathan's mother, Nathan was in an old armchair of his. None of these things matched, or even began to complement each other.

They talked for a while about how they were settling in, and then Meri had to get up and go to the kitchen. She had to baste the pork roast, being careful not to let the one wobbly rack in the oven tip it onto the floor. Then she had to sauté the shallots for the green beans. She was in and out of the kitchen a good deal, actually, before the meal. It was too fancy, she realized—what she'd planned. It took her away too much.

But she could tell that it was going well between Delia and Nathan. She could hear their voices quickly alternating, and Nathan's big laugh rang out often. Delia was charming him, just as she'd charmed Meri whenever their paths crossed. This was what being a senator's wife would do for you, Meri supposed—turn you into an almost professionally charming person.

When Meri made her last appearance, Nathan was talking about his book. He was expansive under Delia's questioning, and Meri could hear pleasure in his voice. He'd messed his hair up too.
Nate.

At dinner, Meri had her turn receiving Delia's energetic attention.

She found herself explaining her work in almost as full detail as Nathan had his. Delia was a person who could say, “Fascinating!” and make you feel suddenly that your life
was.

“Why didn't they have jobs like this when I was a young woman?” she asked at one point. Then she smiled. “Not that it would have mattered, since I was not a young woman who ever even had a job. Unless you count summer jobs in college. If that counts, I was a waitress, for a combined total of perhaps six or eight months of my life.”

They talked about their first jobs. Nathan had been a caddy in high school, Meri had worked as a receptionist at a seedy motel at the edge of her hometown.

“And where was this?” Delia asked.

“Rock Hill, Illinois,” Meri said dismissively. “No one's ever heard of it.”

“No, you're right. I haven't either,” Delia said. “But I don't know the Midwest well. Like so many easterners, I suppose. All of us are really more or less snobs about the Midwest, I think.”

“But it works both ways,” Nathan said. “Midwesterners don't know the East either,” Nathan said. “Meri'd never been east before she met me.”

“Not so,” Meri said. “I was in New York once for about a week.”

“New York is not the East,” Nathan said.

“A world unto itself,” Delia agreed, nodding. “As Washington is.”

“Well, and it was a class trip too,” Meri said, remembering. “I was in a
herd
in New York, is what I should have said. A herd of teenagers. And we did things I'd never do again. The Statue of Liberty. City Hall. Though I did like the boat cruise.” She had made out through most of it with her boyfriend at the time—she could remember his kisses, which tasted of chewing gum.

Nathan had begun to reminisce about his culture shock on moving to the Midwest—about the food, the flat terrain, about his misery. “In all fairness, though, I was unhappy at the college, and that colored everything. From the day I arrived, I was trying to leave. But it is also true that I didn't find anything physically appealing. Except Meri.” His head made a kind of bow to her across the table, and then turned to Delia again. “But my heart never leapt to the countryside. Or to the town either.”

“Well, of course, New England is prettier,” Meri said. “Greener.
Curvier,
somehow. Perfect, really.” She looked from one of them to the other. “I've never lived in as perfect a place,” she said. “I can't get used to it. I feel, in a way,
unsuited
to it. It's almost not real to me.” She was struck by her own words—she hadn't clearly framed the thought before, but now she did: she didn't feel at home here.

“What do you mean, not real?” Delia asked.

“Oh, I don't know.” She couldn't tell them what she felt, could she? That she didn't feel at home?

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, for instance, what you call downtown here is so
arranged.
Too prettily arranged. To a midwesterner, it seems . . . not real. Like a stage set.” She looked from one of their attentive, polite faces to the other. “Whenever I walk down Main Street, I half expect a chorus of locals to step forward and start singing some happy, civic song.” She opened her arms wide, a Broadway gesture.

This made Delia laugh, and Meri felt such a sense of pleasure that she was almost embarrassed for herself. She got up and began to carry plates into the kitchen.

When she came back with the salad, Delia was talking. “. . . the kind of thing a woman of my generation would do, isn't it?” she was saying. “Still, I love it. We have her letters on display in the house, and I love looking at them, the very letters she sat down and wrote to him more than a hundred and fifty years ago.”

She looked up at Meri. “I'm telling Nathan about the Apthorp house—have you heard of it?”

Meri was standing by her, holding the salad bowl so Delia could serve herself. She shook her head. “I haven't, no,” she said.

“I was explaining that I work there. Volunteer there, actually.” And Delia went on explaining it, about Anne Apthorp's fiction and how it was discovered, about the house and her involvement in its development as a museum.

Meri had sat down opposite Delia now, and was watching her. You lost all sense of her age when she was animated, Meri thought. Of course, the candlelight helped too. Delia's eyes, usually so piercing, seemed softer, gentler in the yellow light. Her wild white hair was an aureole around her face.

“I suppose I'm drawn to her because her life was like mine, in some ways, though of course she did something so different with it. But basically she's someone who stayed at home. She had to stay at home, given the times she lived in and her marital status.” She had a sip of wine and set her glass down. Turned it, slowly. “Still, she found a way out, didn't she?”

Delia was looking into the flames of the candle in front of her place. Then she looked up at Meri and Nathan and smiled. “Well, isn't that what marriage is all about?” she said. She lifted her hand. “Staying in it while getting out in some way too?”

Oh! Meri thought. Another aperçu. Another window opening inside her.

Delia was frowning. After a pause she said, “But there's a part of me, I suppose, that more or less regrets the whole Apthorp house thing too.”

Nathan asked her what she meant.

“Well, it's perverse, after all, don't you think, to take a life that was so private, so turned inward, and make it a public life, after the fact?” She appealed to each of them, turning from one to the other.

“No.” Nathan's voice was absolute. He shook his head. “Nope, I can't
afford
to agree with that. That's precisely how the study of history happens, and I'm an historian.”

“Oh yes, I know that. But some lives are
meant
to be public—my husband's, for instance. He can expect no mercy.” She pushed her hair back off her face. “Though of course, he's not been in office for so long, people ignore him more than they used to.” She smiled. “This is still painful for him, after all these years,” she said.

Tom again.
Meri and Nathan were assiduously not looking at each other.

“When was it that he left office?” Nathan asked.

“He decided not to run again in ’78.”

“And that was because . . . ?”

“Oh, all kinds of things.” Her hand fluttered in the air. “The point I'm making, I think, is that I spend my days passing on information about the life of someone who had every right to expect that her letters might have been of interest only to the person to whom they were addressed. And yet here I am, here is the whole Apthorp house enterprise, arranging for people to just
poke
through everything, to find out all they can.”