The Senator's Wife Read online

  “This is something I hadn't realized.”

  Delia looked over at Meri quickly and smiled. After a moment she said, “Well, I think it's true. Their work connects them so directly to other people, and that makes them happier. Or it seems to.”

  “Ah,” Meri said. She wondered if this was true.

  As they drove along, Meri rolled her window down and let the air push her hair back. They were on a closed-in, winding road now. The air smelled of the pinewoods around them. Delia was telling Meri about the history of the town, how it had been centered around a mill on the river built by Gideon Willis; how the center had moved to where it was now years later, after the college was established; how, much later than that, the mill itself was abandoned.

  “But it's restored now,” she said. “There's a restaurant there. It's quite pretty. Romantic, really. You and Nathan ought to go there sometime.”

  After a moment, Meri asked, “Have you gone? With your husband?”

  “Not for years,” Delia said, equably.

  They were moving past open fields. Some, here and there, were under cultivation. Some were overgrown. Hay fields, Delia said, waiting to be mown for the last time this year. After about ten more minutes, Delia signaled again and pulled over into a dirt parking lot around a long, low, shedlike building, painted white with dark green trim. Six or seven cars were already parked under the spreading linden next to it, and there were at least that many people at the open front of the building, where bins—wooden boxes, really—were set on two long trestle tables, tilted forward to show their brightly colored contents. Meri got out and followed Delia, walking past the array.

  There were tomatoes and peaches and lettuces and apples. There were green grapes, and red ones, and bluish purple ones. There were potatoes in several shapes and colors, and small, fresh-looking carrots with their feathery green tops still attached. There were onions and scallions and heads of garlic and bushels of corn. There were boxes overflowing with basil and mint, tied bunches of thyme. “God, the abundance!” Meri said. “It's overwhelming.”

  Delia picked up a basket from where two towers of them were stacked at the end of the tables and began to move back along the boxes. “I only do fruit and lettuces,” she said. “It makes things simpler. I hardly ever cook anymore.”

  “I never used to cook,” Meri said. “But I'm afraid we do now, every single night. I guess that's what's supposed to happen when you get married.”

  “They do seem to go hand in hand,” Delia said.

  “We share it. Nathan's terrific and I'm so-so. But I'm learning.”

  Delia's old fingers moved quickly over the fruits, gently squeezing. “You'll have to rearrange a few things in that old kitchen if you're going to get very tricky about it.”

  “Oh, I know,” Meri said. She was filling her basket more slowly than Delia, who seemed to know ahead of time exactly what she wanted. Meri chose apples, lettuce. “But Nathan is making plans,” she said. “Plans for renovation. He loves to roll the word around in his mouth.”

  “Renovation,” Delia pronounced loftily, “is almost as much fun as moving.”

  Meri laughed, and looked over at her. She was smiling slyly to herself, pleased, it seemed, to have been found amusing.

  Meri hesitated by the basket of corn. Should she get some? She and Nathan hadn't discussed what to have for dinner, but it looked so fresh, the tassels still silky and white, the husks tight, that she couldn't resist. Two. No, four. She chose a hard, fat garlic, a sampling of herbs.

  They went inside to pay. The shed had a dirt floor and two bare lightbulbs hanging from a wire strung across the ceiling. The plump woman running the cash register knew Delia. She greeted her warmly. She asked about her grandchildren, and Delia inquired about the woman's husband, who wasn't well, apparently.

  There was a plate stacked with individually wrapped pieces of fudge on the counter by the cash register. Delia bought two squares as she settled with the woman. “To fortify us on the trip home,” she said.

  In the car, she unwrapped a corner of her piece. She nibbled on it as she began to drive. Meri imitated her, holding the fudge in the plastic wrap just as Delia did, to avoid getting her hands sticky.

  “So. You're pretty much settled in?” Delia asked after a few minutes.

  “After a fashion.” Meri shrugged. “We don't have curtains, we need a new couch, we need new rugs, we want to paint just about everything, but aside from that, yes, sure, pretty much.”

  “Agony,” Delia said.

  “Actually, I think the worst of it is over,” Meri said. She let the fudge dissolve in her mouth and watched the fields flash by.

  “I hope never to move again,” Delia said. “I want to be carried out feetfirst, as Ilona was.”

  Meri turned back to Delia. “Ilona was?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean she died in the house?”

  “Yes.” Delia looked at her. “Didn't you know that?”

  “No.” Meri was startled. It seemed strange to think of. They had been sleeping in the room where someone died. They had been making love in that room.

  “Well,” Delia said, “she did.”

  Meri shook her head. “It's just that I didn't know.”

  After a minute, Delia said, “You'd probably be hard-pressed to find one of the older houses in town that someone hadn't died in. That's where people used to be when they died. Home.”

  “I just hadn't thought of it,” Meri said, almost apologetically.

  Delia drove on, speeding up, slowing down. “It was, I think, a happy death.”

  “I didn't know there was such a thing as that, either.”

  “Well, we can't really know, can we?” Delia laughed a little. “But if you're old enough, I think, you're ready. And Ilona was. She was tired. Her world had shrunk. Her pleasures were fewer.” Delia shrugged. “I can certainly imagine it.”

  She seemed to be doing just that, Meri thought. Her expression was faraway.

  Then her face lifted. “She once said to me, ‘When you get to be my age, you've had to watch most of your friends die.’ Seemingly sad. But then she said—after one of her wonderful judicious pauses—‘But of course you get to watch your enemies die too.’”

  Meri laughed. She had the last bite of fudge and crumpled up her plastic wrap. She saw that Delia was almost finished too. “Can I take that?” she asked, pointing to the plastic.

  “Oh. Yes. Thank you.” Delia popped the last bit of fudge into her mouth and handed over the wrap. Meri crumpled that up too, and put both into her purse.

  They drove in silence for a while. Meri was looking out the window. She looked back at Delia, who seemed drawn in somehow. Or maybe just concentrated on driving.

  “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.”

  THAT 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.”

  THEY 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 ab
out 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.