The Senator's Wife Read online

  He grinned. “You didn't,” he said.

  Carolee was Nancy's roommate. They'd met in Boston at a fancy old firm where they both felt incredibly lucky to have been hired directly out of law school. Carolee had gone to Harvard, so she knew the city. She was helpful and generous to Nancy. After only a few months, they'd decided to find an apartment to share. Delia had visited them several times at this apartment, in Cambridge, and she knew that Evan had come down from New Hampshire a couple of times to stay with them too.

  “I remember.” She raised her hand, a finger pointing up. “It's that her parents are living in Turkey now with some engineering project he's doing, and she has so little time off from work she can't possibly get there and back. So we've got her.”

  “All right!” Evan said.

  Delia smiled at him. “She is kind of gorgeous, isn't she?” It was true. Carolee was a beautiful young woman, in a richly monochromatic way. She had luxuriant honey-colored hair that fell below her shoulders, and perfect skin that seemed touched with honey too. Her eyes, as though to go with everything else, were a light brown.

  “Kind of?” Evan said. “She's preposterously good-looking.”

  Their waitress came and set Delia's teapot down, and next to it, a little saucer with two fortune cookies on it, wrapped in cellophane. “Which one of these do you suppose is the very one meant for you?” Delia asked, pushing the saucer toward her son.

  He chose. “I have a friend who wrote these things for a while,” he said.

  “It's a job? Writing fortune cookies?” They were both tearing at the wrappers.

  “Not a full-time job, but he was a musician, supporting the habit. Anyway, it's left me disinclined to take these things very seriously.”

  “Which of course you did, before.”

  He raised his eyebrows at her and unfurled his little paper roll. He snorted. “I hate this,” he said. “It's so low risk. It's a maxim, not a fortune. ‘The sun shines always in the strong man's path.’ Fuck that.” He tossed the paper onto the table. He bit into his cookie. “What's yours?”

  “Similarly unforthcoming about the future.” She flattened the little scroll out and read aloud: “‘The dreamer will awake eventually.’”

  “Well, it's a little about the future,” he said. “Assuming you're the dreamer.”

  “No.” Delia poured some tea into her cup. “Assuming I'm the dreamer, it's about the past.”

  He looked over at her sharply. Then he raised his mug of beer and drank.

  TOM WOULD COME UP Wednesday afternoon, he said, by plane and then a taxi. Evan offered to pick him up at the airport, but he insisted on doing it his way.

  “He likes that solo, dramatic entrance,” Evan said.

  “Plus, of course, there's the cabdriver,” Delia answered. “One more vote to be gathered in.”

  When he arrived, Delia didn't hear him come in. She was in the kitchen with the dishwasher running and a pot of sugar water roiling on the stove. His light voice said, “Hello, darling,” and she looked up to see him in the doorway, wearing the usual suit, the tie loosened, his face amused and fond.

  “Hi,” she said. She could feel her smile rise in response. She gestured at the stove. “Hi. I can't come to you.” She was waiting for the sugar to caramelize.

  “Then I'll have to come to you.” He crossed the room and put his arm around her, bent to kiss her neck, then her cheek, then the side of her mouth. In the pot, the sugar was beginning to turn slightly rust-colored under its silvery bubbles. Tom's flesh was cold against her face, his mouth tasted sweet and familiar. He smelled wonderful to her. She leaned against him and was aware of the relief she felt to have him here. To have him home.

  At this point in their life together, Delia divided her time almost evenly between Washington and Williston. Tom, of course, was more in Washington, though he came home when he could, on congressional breaks and when something in the state beckoned him.

  Delia had liked Washington initially—they had lived there early in their marriage, during the war. There were many young couples flooding the city then. The war gave them all a sense of quick intimacy, of intensity in their friendships. She'd liked it again when they came back, years later, in Tom's first term as a congressman.

  But then Kennedy was killed, and in the middle of that public sorrow, she learned that Tom had been having an affair, a serious affair with the wife of another congressman, someone Delia had thought of as a friend. And in the aftermath of that, he confessed that there had been other affairs too, more casual, more fleeting. Accidental, Tom had called them, which made her laugh bitterly.

  They got through it, but after that life in Washington was more difficult for Delia. She was aware of her discomfort when she moved around socially. She never knew who else might have known about the affair—the affairs—and she never knew what those people who did know about them might be thinking of her. She felt a sense of strain, though nothing changed on the surface, though she was just as publicly charming as ever, was seen as often at the required political-social events. But when they'd bought the house, this house, and Delia began to have a life and friends in Williston, she realized how much more at ease she felt here. She supposed most of it was just getting away with Tom from the sexually charged atmosphere of Washington, where a handsome man with power, a man who talked easily, a man who was charming and chivalric around women, could always find companionship. Or, more accurately, had to actively choose not to have companionship, if that's what he wanted. Now, leaning into Tom, she said, “It's so good to have you here.”

  “Mmm, me too. You can't imagine.”

  “Sit. This will be done in a second. Do you want a drink?”

  “I'll put my stuff away and say hi to Evan. Be back in a minute.”

  When he came back, in his shirtsleeves, he poured each of them a scotch, and they sat at the kitchen table and talked about the way things had ended in Washington (hectic, with last-minute negotiating about a couple of bills), about the plans for the weekend. About what needed to get done before Christmas Day.

  Evan came down too and sat with them, and Delia heard again his report on school, with women embellishing it this time. Inevitable, she thought. There was always this need of Evan's to assert to his father that he was a man too.

  After they had gone out to buy a tree and Delia was alone again, she thought about this, about the element of competition between the two of them. Brad was exempt from this. Or perhaps he'd exempted himself with his gentleness, his sweetness—a sweetness that worried her sometimes. Occasionally she had the impulse to grab him, to shake him, to tell him how handsome he was.

  She'd brought this up with Tom one night recently, lying in bed—Brad's passivity, his almost deliberate turning away from whatever masculinity was understood to mean. “Or is it deliberate?” she asked. “What do you think?”

  “Ppph!” Tom said. “Meet the new American male.”

  “Is that it, you think? It's a cultural phenomenon?”

  “Well, it's apparently what the new American female wants. Someone she can dominate.”

  They had both been reading, and now they set their books, opened, facedown, on the blanket that covered them. Delia took her glasses off. “You're just saying that because, a) you dislike the women's movement, and b) you don't want to take responsibility for scaring him.”

  “Scaring him!”

  “Yes. Being so . . . male yourself, it's hard for him to make any claims on that territory.”

  “Evan has no troubles that way,” he said. He took his glasses off now too.

  “Evan is Evan. And it makes it worse, maybe, that there are two of you floating around here, around Brad, fairly exuding testosterone.”

  The house was quiet around them. This was in Washington. He said, “I don't dislike the women's movement.”

  “Hah!” she said.

  “I don't. Just some aspects of it.”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “The ones that might apply to your behavior.
”

  But he was frowning now, and when he spoke after a moment, he spoke more slowly. “No, I'm talking about the parts of the movement that so shrilly insist on . . . being wronged as a source of identity. I hate what that does to the sense of ourselves as a people. As a polis.”

  “Oh, how grand!” She put her hand on her heart. “A ‘polis.’”

  “Well, damn it, Dee, it is grand. It was grand, anyway. And it existed for a while, you know it, when we were young—that sense of the state having a responsibility to its people and the people to the state, to each other.”

  Tom had grown up poor and Irish in Boston. His father was a driver for a small coal-and-ice company. He had a job straight through the Depression, which many people living around them didn't, but there were seven children, and what he earned barely paid for food and rent. Tom and his siblings had all worked too when they could, and Tom and one of his brothers had actually left home for a while in their teens, just to ease the burden. They'd hoboed around the country, working on farms when there was work to be had, fighting fires in Montana and Wyoming one summer.

  Roosevelt was his hero. Roosevelt and his own mother, who insisted they tithe despite their poverty, who expected them to give what they could to those in need, who wanted them to hold themselves above no one. All this was part of who he was, and part of why Delia loved him.

  “I know the feminists didn't start it,” he said, “and I suppose I can't blame them for using it, but what bothers me is that attitude.” He shook his head. “‘I am me, the victim, before I'm a citizen, before I'm one of a multitude, before I have work to do to make this god-dam world better for everyone else too.’” He stopped. She could hear from his breathing that he was wound up.

  After a moment, he turned to her, smiling the small smile that twisted his mouth. “And I dislike especially the aspects of the women's movement that don't acknowledge that there are major differences between men and women.”

  “I don't think anyone's saying that.” Delia flipped her book up again.

  “Well, maybe they're willing to say that women are better than men, but that's about it.”

  She let a little silence gather before she said, “Well? Ain't it the truth?”

  Tom had laughed, moving his head back on his pillow, and Delia had smiled at him, but when they put on their glasses and started reading again, she realized that she was feeling a nagging sense of discomfort, as she often did when the women's movement came up.

  She had a sense of solidarity, yes, and she knew there were many wrongs to be righted. But she felt that her own life was emblematic in the feminist world of everything that was wrong, that by the light of the women's movement, she'd made bad choices. And having an accomplished daughter had made it worse. She was glad Nancy was a lawyer and proud of her for her ambition, but she felt sometimes that her daughter was sorry for her, occasionally even a little contemptuous of her. That she wondered what her mother did all day.

  Sometimes Delia herself wondered about it, wondered how she could have filled her life with the kinds of chores and odd jobs that it seemed to consist of now. From time to time she was aware of a pang of something that felt like envy, or perhaps even anger, toward Nancy, toward all the young, striving women they knew, here and in Washington.

  While Tom and Evan were gone, Delia fixed dinner—a simple meal: chicken, mashed potatoes, carrots with ginger. They'd have ice cream for dessert, with the caramel sauce she'd just made. She set the table for three in the kitchen, but she used the good china, the crystal glasses.

  She heard them come in, talking loudly, laughing, stomping. They sound just like horses, she thought. After a minute, she felt the movement of cold air around her legs. She went out to the hallway.

  Of course, they'd left the front door open. They were in the living room with the tree, tilting it up into its stand, giving each other advice. She went down the hall, intending to close the door, but instead she stopped, she stood there for a moment, looking out at the night. The predicted snow was falling, dry and light, still just a sheer white transparency on the porch, on the stone rail; still just a filigree where the light fell on the lawn. She shivered. She shut the door and went to look at the tree, a pretty fir so tall it almost touched the ceiling. Its clean wood smell filled the room.

  They ate dinner, and afterward, Evan went out to meet friends. She and Tom picked up in the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. Then he went down to the basement to find the boxes of ornaments they'd accumulated over the years. While Delia prepared a marinade for the beef they were having the next night, he strung the lights on the tree. When she came out, they began to lift the old ornaments carefully out of their boxes and hang them, stepping back often to spot the places that needed filling in. Twice the telephone rang upstairs in Tom's study—he had a separate line for work—but he let the answering service pick it up.

  When they were finished, Delia turned off all the lights except those on the tree, and Tom poured them each another glass of scotch. They sat together on the couch in the muted light. Tom's hand was resting on Delia's thigh. He had put some music on earlier—Respighi. He'd turned it up a bit when they sat down, and they listened through to the end of it in silence. The needle whispered in the last grooves, and lifted.

  After a minute or two, she said, “Sometimes I wish we'd never have to go back to Washington.”

  “Ah, Dee. It can't be Christmas all the time.”

  “I know. And I know you love your work. And I'm glad you do.” She put her hand over his. “It's just that life was simpler when you were just plain old Tom. And I was just a frumpy housewife, instead of chair of the fund-raising committee for this and that.”

  He raised her hand and kissed it. “You were never a frumpy housewife.”

  She sighed.

  He put his arm around her. “And I was never just Citizen Naughton either. You knew me. You knew how ambitious I always was.” She didn't answer. “I'm a schemer. I'm a louse.” He kissed the top of her head. “It's why you love me.”

  Was it? she thought. Would she have been interested in Tom if he hadn't been as ambitious, as promising as he was? Hadn't she wanted, hadn't they all wanted—all the bright young college women then—men they thought would take care of them?

  “It's not, why I love you,” she said.

  “But you do love me.”

  “I do.” She turned and smiled at him. “Goddamit.”

  “You know,” he said, reaching up, putting his finger on her lower lip, slightly into her mouth. “When the kids are finally all gone, we'll be able to make love on the couch, right here, right now, if we want to.”

  “The kids will never be all gone, you know that.”

  “I do.” He laughed. Then his face changed. “Come upstairs with me.”

  After they'd gone upstairs, after they'd made love and Tom had fallen asleep, Delia lay awake. She was thinking of him as he was when she first knew him, the sense of restless energy in him that made him attractive to her.

  He'd been a newly minted lawyer in New York then, and she'd been in her senior year of college, worrying about what came next. She'd majored in English. Could she teach? Should she do something more directly useful? Nursing school? She'd had two intense romances, neither fully consummated, and she felt that they stood for everything in her life: that everything she'd ever done was incomplete, unfulfilled.

  Tom, with his certainty, with what she felt was the nearly electric charge he carried, with all that was unfamiliar and exotic to her about his background, made all of that irrelevant.

  They met when her older brother brought him to Delia's campus one evening in the early fall, along with another man from the law firm they all worked in. She'd rounded up several friends, and they jammed into her brother's old car and drove to a crowded roadhouse about fifteen miles away from the school.

  There was a band on a little stage, elevated just a bit above the dance floor—two horns, a bass, a drummer, and an out-of-tune piano. They danced a
nd drank and smoked. She supposed they talked some too, but she remembered very little of that—and whatever there was was truncated and interrupted in any case, the band was so loud.

  Delia had more or less been offered by her brother to the other lawyer, a man named Preston Eccles. But after she had danced with him once, Tom cut in.

  From the first steps they took together Delia felt that awkwardness with Tom was inconceivable. He was a wonderful dancer and a sure, graceful leader. All she had to do was let his body tell her what to do.

  The air was dense with smoke, alive with music, with shouted bits of talk, with the smell of booze. Delia and Tom barely spoke, but Delia thought of their bodies as conducting a kind of conversation. Between dances they stood close to each other, waiting for the music to start again, feeling overwhelmingly the wish to be moving against each other; and then when they were, aware of the charge between them, the surprise and thrill of it each time they touched. Once, standing next to him, waiting, she looked at him; their eyes met and they both laughed, knowing what was coming. Before she knew him, she loved him. Her body trusted him.

  Now, she supposed, you would be dismissive of those feelings as grounds for marriage, as sufficient reason for joining with someone with the idea that you could live together forever. You would understand them for what they were—desire, hunger. Then, though, the misunderstanding—and the ability to make a decision based on such a misunderstanding—was possible.

  Of course, she loved him as she came to know him too, but most of that was after they married, after he swept her up in his sense of who he was, his sense of where he was going. His sense of the adventure he was going to make of his life. His and hers.

  And she was swept up. She believed in him, first as a labor lawyer, then when he went to work for less money at the Labor Relations Board in the city, then when they began the jumping around everyone had to do as the war started—to Washington in their case, the War Department, then briefly apart when he went to basic training and she went to Maine to live with her parents, then back to Washington and the War Department again, and later the State Department. She followed him after the war too, when he decided to go back to New England, to try politics at the local level.