The Senator's Wife Read online

  She believed in him, and she believed that they were meant, somehow, to be together. That was what was destroyed more than anything else when she learned about his affairs—that sense of destiny.

  Thinking about it later, what was most astonishing to her was that she had held on to that idea as long as she did. That was part of the humiliation, she thought now—confronting her own childish notions about love, about what their marriage had meant.

  At the time, though, losing that had made her desperate, it had made her wild with grief. She almost literally couldn't believe he had done what he'd done. She wanted more than anything for him to make the affairs go away, make them not have happened. She wept, she hit him, she listened to his promises, to his anguish, she wept again.

  But they made it through, and she was older now. She loved him more wisely. She couldn't be hurt that way again.

  At 2:10 Evan came in, the front door closed behind him. He went to the kitchen for a while, and then she heard his footsteps on the stairs. Tom stirred and turned over, but didn't wake. Something in her relaxed after that, and in a while she felt it begin—the slow deep dizziness that meant sleep.

  DELIA SPENT THURSDAY in preparation. She made the beds in the room where Nancy and Carolee would be sleeping. She sat down and wrote out menus for the long weekend and made a shopping list. She drove to the supermarket at the new mall just outside of town, and went up and down the aisles, filling the shopping cart and even the low basket under it with what she thought of as largesse—feeling generous, expansive, as she did so. When she came home, she made two batches of Christmas cookies, and a lamb and barley soup.

  She was in the kitchen when Nancy and Carolee arrived with Evan—he'd driven to the train station again to get them. She went into the hallway to greet them just as Tom came down the stairs.

  The girls were taking their coats off, talking with Evan. They'd left together straight from work for the train station, and they were both wearing their business outfits—heels and suits, the skirts carefully longer than was the fashion. The jacket of Nancy's suit was boxy, but Carolee's cut in sharply at the waist and then flared out. It made you notice her hips, her shapeliness.

  Delia was there first and she hugged them both, first Nancy and then Carolee. She stood back to watch Tom embrace Nancy (“Sweetie!” he said, throwing his arms around her), to watch Nancy in turn introduce him to Carolee, with so much pride that you would have thought she'd invented the other young woman.

  When the girls went upstairs to change and unpack, Tom followed Delia into the kitchen. “Va va voom,” he said in a low voice to her, grinning. He wiggled his eyebrows up and down.

  “I know, I know,” Delia said. She made a face at him. “But maybe you can calm down for just a minute and open some wine for me.”

  The girls came back down in blue jeans and sweaters, transformed into kids again, and they all went into the living room and had drinks—beer for Evan; scotch, neat, for Tom; and wine for all three women. Tom, as always when there was a fresh audience for his charm, laid it on, though Delia would have said he was equally flirtatious with everyone.

  But Carolee's presence made them all livelier than usual. It seemed to Delia that Evan, especially, was almost jockeying with Tom for position, plying Carolee steadily with questions. And she was expansive under the attention of the two men, explaining her life to them, an explanation Delia had heard piecemeal earlier—the exotic locales she'd lived in as her parents settled in different places with her father's engineering projects. The shock of American culture when she came back for college. “I had an accent,” she said, “and everyone thought I was putting it on. A kind of nameless, quasi-British, I don't know, maybe part British-Indian, postcolonial thing.” She shook her head, remembering it, and her lovely hair swayed. “Everyone hated me, they thought I was such a fraud. I had to consciously teach myself Americanisms, to say things like real nice.” She seemed to take their attention for granted, she seemed certain of the fascinating quality of her own life.

  Well, it was fascinating, but mostly because she was a lively recounter of it. But she was generous too. She turned to Delia at one point and said, “All this is just so gorgeous.” She gestured around her. “I wish I could do what you do—make this home so beautiful, so gracious. It even smells good.” She laughed. “All these wonderful, female accomplishments I'm just so in terror of.”

  “One succumbs inch by inch,” Delia said. She reached over and poured herself another glass of wine.

  “Oh, don't say succumb. I'd give anything to be able to—I don't know—just have all these things in my life.”

  Delia smiled across the room at Tom, and was grateful when Nancy took over, talking about the law firm, the kind of fine line the women had to walk between being tough-minded and competent, but also female, nonthreatening to the men.

  Delia got up and passed around the crackers and cheese again, the bowl of spiced almonds.

  They talked about Carnal Knowledge, about what its tone toward women really was. They argued about Portnoy's Complaint. They all agreed that part of the reason they liked The French Connection was that there was no such problem to consider—women barely existed in it.

  At some point later they came inevitably around to politics—Carolee asked Tom about the Pentagon Papers. He was expansive, he had a lot of theories about what he guessed were the complicated motives of Daniel Ellsberg, whom he knew personally; but he said he was glad the papers had come out, that everyone in Washington had known all along that the government had been lying. He said this had been and would be the making of Katharine Graham at the Washington Post. He called her Kay.

  Carolee seemed happier, more animated than Delia had seen her before. Her cheeks were flushed, though maybe that was from the wine. Delia noticed for the first time that one of her light brown eyes was slightly lazy. When she looked at you, you felt compelled by this, by the intensity of her focus, the sense of something willed in it as the slower eye pulled toward you.

  She looked at Tom a lot. It was the kind of thing Delia might have been bothered by in another context, but here, now, she wasn't.

  Later she asked herself why. It seemed to her it must have been because of Carolee's youth, and because she was Nancy's friend. Or maybe it was because Tom had made her beauty a kind of joke between Delia and himself.

  But there were other reasons. Tom had been unusually loving in bed the night before, and she had carried the aftermath of that with her through the day—the image of his long body bent over her in the half dark, the feeling of his hands, his mouth, on her.

  And then too, at one point later in the evening when they were all sitting around with empty glasses and he was describing a disastrous camping trip they'd taken years before, he ticked off the afflictions that had struck them, pointing at each of them as he went around the room. “This one had poison oak, this one got food poisoning, and this one”—coming to Delia, smiling that private smile of his across at her—“was so sunburned she couldn't be touched for days afterward.” Something in this casual public hint of their married intimacy, and maybe too in the possessive listing of his family members, warmed Delia. Perhaps it reassured her. Perhaps it was intended to do exactly that. In any case, she didn't pick up on the currents that were passing between him and Carolee.

  The next day, getting up from the kitchen table, Tom noticed her grocery list, things she'd forgotten or had already run out of—she'd lost the habit of cooking for a crowd. He picked it up and looked at it. “I'd be happy to run out and get this stuff for you,” he said.

  “Oh, would you?” she said, feeling only grateful. While he went outside to get the car warmed up, she sat down at the table and copied the list over so he could read it.

  After he'd left, after she'd straightened up in the living room, after she'd unloaded the clean dishes from the dishwasher and put the dirty ones in, she got out the big cream-colored bowl and the electric mixer and started to assemble what she would need for the cake s
he planned for dessert tomorrow. As she was sifting the dry ingredients, Nancy came thundering down the uncarpeted back stairs to the kitchen. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and white woolen socks on her feet. She had no makeup on. Her hair was skinned back into a ponytail. She looked like a pretty twelve-year-old. Delia smiled at her.

  She asked Delia what there was for lunch. Delia suggested soup, and maybe a sandwich. Nancy went into the pantry. Delia heard the refrigerator door open. “What about Carolee?” she called.

  “What about Carolee?”

  “Doesn't she want some lunch too?”

  “Mmmph,” said Nancy. She came around the corner eating something. A carrot, stuck into her mouth. She had a pile of plastic bags heaped awkwardly against her stomach. She set them on the counter, removed the carrot as though it were a cigarette, and holding it between the first and second fingers of her hand, she said, “She went with Daddy. She had a few errands she wanted to do in town.”

  Delia looked up at her. “Why didn't you go along?” she asked.

  “Because I didn't have any errands.”

  “You could have kept her company.”

  “Mother,” she said, rolling her eyes, making fun of the way she'd talked to Delia a few years earlier in her life. “She has company. She's with Dad. And it's not like she's ten years old or . . . incapacitated or something, anyway.”

  “You're right. You're right,” Delia said. She poured milk into the flour and sugar mixture and set the mixer going so she wouldn't have to talk anymore.

  They were gone for several hours. Delia told herself this meant nothing. He was taking her on a tour of the town. They'd probably had lunch at the funny restaurant he liked at the inn on the campus. He was hosting her. Why not? He was, after all, her host.

  After the cake was done and had cooled, after she'd frosted it, she decided to go out. She put on her boots, her coat, a hat, and gloves. She called up to Evan and Nancy that she'd be back in a while.

  It was bitterly cold. The sidewalks on Dumbarton Street were covered with ice. Old footprints were frozen in their crusty surface. Half of them hadn't been shoveled of the most recent snow, or even of earlier ones—everyone drove in winter.

  Delia stepped over the plowed heap at the edge of the road and walked in the street. It was silent. One car passed her. Her boots crunched on the pellets of salt and gravel in the brown snow. Her breath fogged damply in front of her and bit at her face. She turned onto Main Street and walked the long blocks into town. She passed a young couple going the other way, both of them carrying bags full of gifts. He was wearing a Santa hat. “Merry Christmas!” he said, and the girl echoed him.

  Delia made herself smile. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  The closer she got to the business district, the busier it was with last-minute shoppers. She had to weave her way down the sidewalk to avoid bumping into people. One of the stores was pumping Christmas music out into the frigid air.

  She went into the Five&Ten. Here too Christmas music played, a perky choir doing the more secular songs—about Santa, about Rudolph. The vast store was overheated, and it smelled, as always, of burning coffee. Hardly anyone was there.

  She began going through the aisles, pulling things into her basket, things that she hadn't thought about needing. A cardboard placard dotted with small white buttons, for a shirt of Tom's that was missing one. Thread. A new hairbrush. Bobby pins. Notepads to set by the phones. Shoelaces. Manila envelopes, business envelopes. Extra pens. Shoe polish. She took her time. When she was done, when she'd paid for everything, she went with her bag to the lunch counter at the front of the store and had some of their terrible coffee.

  On the way home, just as she'd turned onto Dumbarton Street again, she fell on the ice. Nearly until she hit the ground, she made herself believe that it wouldn't happen, that she could right herself. She landed on her side, almost lying down, her purchases scattered on the frozen lawn next to her. She didn't get up for a minute or so, just lay there waiting for the pain and the sense of insult to subside, looking across the crusted snow at the cheap, ugly things she'd bought. As she carefully picked everything up, she felt so sorry for herself that she had to fight back tears.

  “Stop it!” she whispered violently.

  From halfway down the block, she could see that the car was in the driveway. They were home.

  As she came up the front walk, Delia wasn't sure what she felt—maybe relief, pathetically enough. When she opened the door, the house was quiet, and then she heard Tom's voice on the phone in his study upstairs. She dropped her coat and her purchases on the couch in the front hall. In the kitchen, the groceries that didn't need refrigeration were all set out neatly on the table—by Carolee? by Tom? Delia put them away: oatmeal for breakfast, more fruit, English muffins, sugar, jam, bread, baking powder. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, even her hands lifting each of these items, carrying it to its rightful place.

  When she went upstairs, she could hear Nancy's and Carolee's voices, barely audible over the music playing in Nancy's room. Tom's study door was open and he was still on the phone. He waved at her from behind his desk, he grinned cheerfully, innocently, and then he turned away in his swivel chair to keep talking. Delia went to their bedroom. She shut the door and lay down.

  Tom stayed in his study most of the rest of the day, on the phone—Delia could hear his voice when she walked past. When he emerged for a drink before dinner, he was animated and charming, but then he'd been full of charm and blarney all along.

  Carolee, though, seemed pitched higher in every way. She talked more, she laughed more, she laughed louder. Her makeup and hair were done carefully. Delia had to will her own voice to sound normal and friendly when she spoke to her.

  After dinner, she and Tom left the young people cleaning up and went to the ten o'clock service at the Episcopal church, which had been their compromise between Catholicism and Congregationalism when they married. They were silent in the car on the way over, but she was familiar with this. This was just Tom's sudden collapse after being on for a while.

  They parked in the lot behind the church and came around to the front. She could feel the stir Tom's arrival caused as they came in, even though they took seats in a pew near the back. Several people close to them greeted him in whispers, and others turned to look, their faces lifted into that embarrassed half smile of recognition of the senator Delia knew so well. It happened all the time to Tom, with Tom, and Delia didn't mind it then. He expanded under it, he absorbed it all. She only had to smile back, to make vague and friendly comments. But when occasionally by herself she would look up and see that someone knew who she was, she always turned away from the eager glance of recognition, she busied herself with whatever she was doing. She felt almost offended to be approached when she wasn't with him. She hated having her solitary privacy invaded.

  The service began. They stood for a welcoming prayer, a prayer of thanks, and then, still standing, they sang the first carol of the service—“O Come, All Ye Faithful.” For Delia, the carols and scriptures at this time of year were an evocation of her youth, when she had thought of herself as a believer. She didn't anymore, but this service in particular brought those feelings back to her, made her nostalgic for them. She remembered sitting in the church on the Green in the small town in Maine where she'd grown up—sitting with her parents and older brother—growing tearful through certain prayers, certain responsive readings.

  It was different for Tom. For him this service—any public gathering actually—was mostly a performance, like so much else in his life. Even as they bowed their heads in prayer, she could feel the energy radiating from him. He was more alive under all these eyes, among all these people.

  She felt a sudden wave of tenderness for him. Of pity. How much more he needed than she did! How much harder it was for him to be made happy. That was probably part of the draw of Carolee, part of the reason he'd wanted to linger in her company today. A new audience. A new lovely audi
ence. That's all it was, she thought.

  She reminded herself that this was part of his everyday life in Washington—the pretty young secretaries, the female aides, the interns. And just as there was nothing remarkable or threatening to her in any of that, there wasn't in his being charmed by Carolee, in his flirting with her. She reached over and held his hand for a moment, and he looked at her quickly and smiled.

  When the service was over, he turned immediately to those around him and began talking and shaking hands. He always kept one hand on Delia too—around her shoulders, at her elbow, her back. She was part of him for now—the senator's wife—and she moved with him the short distance back up the aisle, nodding, greeting people, listening to Tom talk. He told someone how good it was to be out of Washington, and Delia met his eye and made a face at him: liar. His mouth tightened in a half smile back at her. He talked about the weather with someone else, about ice hockey. “Merry Christmas!” he said over and over. “Merry Christmas!”

  A fortyish man asked him about Vietnam, about the draft. He had sons in their midteens, he said, and naturally . . .

  “I'm with you. I'm with you,” Tom said. “We're working on it. God willing, it'll be over before they have to go.”

  They were quiet again in the car on the way home, but as they turned onto Dumbarton Street, as they pulled into the driveway, she could feel him come to a kind of attention. It might have been for Carolee, but it might just as easily have been for his own children. She went with him up the steps, through the door.

  The house was silent. On the stand in the front hall, there was a note from Nancy in her round, schoolgirlish script. “We're at the movies. Then maybe a drink. Back late.”