The Senator's Wife Read online

“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.”

  “But she was a writer,” Nathan said. “A person who wanted her work, anyway, to be made public. Isn't that the bargain such a person makes?”

  “Oh no. No.” Meri was noticing that Delia used her hands almost constantly. “She struck no such bargain. We've no record that she ever tried to publish anything. And the novel was never even finished. So it truly wasn't a public life, not in any way. It was a domestic life. It just happened to have some writing appended to it, more or less.”

  “Still, I think she's fair game,” Nathan said. “History is about private people too. About individuals. About the self—maybe you'd call it the soul—and the impress on it of what happens out there. Social change. Political change. Change in cultures, in the world.” He'd sat up straighter. He was on, his face alive. “We have to look at what you call private people. Like the people I was telling you about in my book. To see what history means. What politics means. How life in a moment, under certain conditions, is felt, is taken in.” His hands curved in, touched his own chest, his heart. “So we need, really have a need, to find out about people like your Anne Apthorp.” He frowned. “What I mean, really, is that someone who recorded her feelings, who can explain them to us across these years, even fictionally, is a resource for everyone else. Everyone else like me, anyway.” His hand rose to his hair. “Otherwise we'd just be talking in numbers—in the abstract—about governments and wars and economics, and not about how they affected people. Which is what makes it really interesting.” This was Nathan's whole argument with the political-science department in Coleman. They were numbers guys, trends guys. They hadn't much liked his work, and he hadn't liked theirs.

  Delia nodded slowly, four or five times. “Well,” she said. “I can see that. Of course you're right,” she said. “I hate to agree about my Anne, but I can see that.” She seemed to be thinking about it. Then she lifted her chin. “But I don't know. It's all Oedipal in the end, isn't it?” Her face suddenly came alive. She leaned forward now, elbows on the table. “Really, isn't that it? That the study of history is Oedipal at its roots? Connected directly to the Oedipus complex?”

  “I'm game.” Nathan had sat back in his chair, and he was smiling in delight at Delia. “I'll bite. But how, exactly, would that work?”

  “Oh,” her hand waved, “doesn't it all start—our interest in the past—with our wanting to know more about our own parents? Really, that's what I mean.” She smiled. “That drive we all have to get to the root of their attraction to each other. We always want their story, don't we? It's the first history we're really curious about. And the last one. It haunts us. Because it's a history with the most important consequence in the world—us.” She turned her hands, palms up. “Us and our story. Our history.” Her eyes were bright in the candlelight. “So,” she said. “How did they meet each other? How could they possibly have come to love each other? And then sex, the biggest mystery of all. How do they do it?” She grinned. “What we'd like is to get right into that bedroom and watch them. The primal scene. And if that's not Oedipal, what is?” Her hands rose, dramatically. A silver bracelet on her wrist slid down her arm.

  Nathan laughed, and Meri did too. Delia was pleased with herself. Her mouth made a smug little priss. She had finished her wine, and Nathan held the bottle up—an offering. She held her glass out.

  Meri looked at him while he reached across the candles with the wine. Did he agree with her? Meri wondered. Had he ever thought about his parents having sex? Meri pictured his mother—her tidy grayish hair, her round, pretty little girl's face. This dining room table had come from her, and these old Windsor chairs, which creaked and complained when you shifted your weight in them. Meri couldn't imagine her moaning in sexual pleasure.

  Delia was expanding on her idea. Our interest in history starts with the personal, then enlarges to the political, the global. Nathan made a case for the reverse process. They were enjoying the argument.

  But Meri had drifted away. She was thinking of her own parents, subjects of much speculation between Lou and her. Did they do it? Ever? Wouldn't it make some kind of noise?

  This was the sticking point for Lou, especially after she began sleeping with boys. It made a lot of noise, she said. You had to hold your hand over the guy's mouth if you didn't want anyone else—at a party, say, or in the front seat of the car—to know what you were doing. And even then, there were the groans. Those they could do even with their mouths clamped shut.

  Meri looked at Delia. It seemed possible for her, sex, unlike most old people Meri had known.

  Why?

  The way she dressed, Meri supposed. Tonight, for instance, in a blue sweater and a straight black skirt, a wide silver necklace at her throat, the bangle on her arm—an outfit a woman half her age might have worn.

  But no, it was more the way she was. Something about her energy, what seemed like her appetite for life.

  Nathan got up now and cleared the salad plates. He was going to fetch their dessert, one he'd made. Desserts were his specialty. While he was gone Meri told Delia that when they were courting sometimes one of his desserts would be all they had for dinner. “I can remember sitting at the table in my apartment with him, eating a lemon tart directly from the pan. The whole thing.” She didn't mention that they were naked, having made lov
e until so late that there seemed no point to fixing the first part of the meal.

  Tonight Nathan brought out a flan and dished it up for them. It was cool and slippery, and Meri slid it around in her mouth, savoring it.

  Delia was impressed. She started to talk about French cooking, about Paris.

  Paris, where she owned an apartment.

  “I'm actually going there in just a few weeks.” She set her spoon down. “And this reminds me, I've been meaning to ask, would you mind doing a few house-sitting chores? Just plant watering, the mail, and that sort of thing.”

  Nathan said quickly, “We'd be glad to.” Meri looked over at him. She could see that he meant exactly this, that he was made happy by the intimacy implied.

  “Think about it before you say yes,” Delia commanded. “I'll be gone for two full months. It's more or less my routine at this point—two months in the fall, two months in the spring.”

  Meri felt a quick pinch of loss, of disappointment. No more Delia this fall, then. She realized she'd seen this dinner as marking the beginning of something. Of her getting to know Delia, of course, but more than that, though she wasn't sure what. That they'd be pals? She didn't know. “It's no trouble at all,” she told Delia. She had another spoonful of flan.

  “You go every year?” Nathan said.

  “Yes, twice a year, every year, with the changing of the seasons. I'm like a migratory bird,” Delia said. “I think of the apartment as waiting for me when I'm not there. My nest. Though I rent it out occasionally—but only to friends. And of course the children use it often, too.”

  Now, with her fingers, she drew an elaborate map in the air for Meri and Nathan of where it was in relation to the Seine, to the Luxembourg Gardens.

  Meri confessed she'd never been to Paris.

  “Ah,” Delia said, her eyes fully on Meri. “How wonderful that you have that great pleasure ahead of you!”

  “What's the French connection?” Nathan asked. “How did you end up there?”

  “Oh, just one of those moments in life when you say, Let me out. I needed a getaway. I had a friend in Washington with contacts in Paris, and I spoke a little French.” She held her forefinger and thumb about an inch apart. “So I thought, yes. Oui. Pourquoi pas? And the rest, as they say, is history. Though not your kind,” she said to Nathan.

  They talked about France, about its charms. About its economic problems, about unemployment and assimilation. Delia described going on an errand into the exurbs, “and it was like another universe out there—these tall grim projects. And the street life! It could have been a souk in Morocco.”

  “This is interesting,” Nathan said, nodding his head. “When you think of the great contempt all those formerly homogeneous European cultures have for us, for the way we've dealt with the issue of race in America.” He smiled. “Now we'll get to see how well they do at it, I guess.”

  They'd been sitting at the table for a long time. The candles were short and lumpish with wax. Delia's lipstick was gone. She looked tired.

  Meri offered coffee or decaf, though she expected to be turned down, and she was. And, as she also expected, this signaled the evening's end. Delia pushed her chair back and got up, unbending slowly into a straight line, as if her body were arguing with each vertebra. Meri was suddenly conscious of her age. It must hurt to be that old.

  They moved with her back into the living room. Meri inhaled deeply. The lilies had started to open and their smell was thick in the air. Nathan helped Delia into her coat.

  At the door, she gripped their hands in turn. “Thank you so much, my dears,” she said.

  “Oh no,” Meri said. “Thank you. Thanks for the flowers. And for making us feel so welcome.”

  “Not at all,” Delia said. “If I have, I'm glad. I wanted to.” She turned to go, and then stopped and stepped back. “Now, I'll bring the key over tomorrow, for when I leave,” she said. “You should have it anyway. And actually, I suppose I should have told you, I already have yours—from Ilona's day. I hope that's something you're comfortable with.”

  They both made assenting noises.

  “And I'll leave the Paris phone number on the pad on the telephone stand. Plus the children's numbers—there are three of them—ranked in order of who should be called first, second, and third in case something happens at the house and you can't reach me. But not to worry,” she said. She'd turned away again, and she was gripping the doorknob. “Nothing happens in October and November.”

  “When does something happen?” Meri asked, thinking mostly of their house, of what they should be expecting.

  “September. Rain,” Delia pronounced as she stepped outside. “Weep holes clogging up, leaks. And then winter. Ice dams making problems. Pipes freezing.”

  After they said good night, after the door had closed behind Delia, Meri turned to Nathan. “Okay, what are ice dams? What are weep holes?”

  Nathan knew, of course, even though he'd never owned a house before. He explained them to her.

  “How do you always know that stuff?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding? Everyone knows that stuff.” He went back to the kitchen to start cleaning up.

  Meri crossed to the lilies. Bending over them, she breathed in their sweet, almost sexual odor. When she went to the kitchen, Nathan reached to her face—for a moment she thought in love. But no, he was wiping at her nose and cheek with his thumbs. “Lily dust,” he explained.

  They worked together silently. Meri went back and forth to the dining room, clearing the table. On one of her trips into the kitchen, she said to Nathan, “I used to steal from the motel.”

  “What motel?”

  “My first job. At the motel. I was an embezzler.”

  He looked over at her, weighing it. She met his gaze. She was interested to see if he'd believe her.

  “Come on, Meri. You did not.”

  “Nah,” she said, smiling at him. “Just joking,” she said, and left the room again.

  She had told Nathan many lies at various stages in their relationship, most of which she had owned up to. She told him when she first met him that her parents had died in an auto accident when she was fourteen. Why? She didn't know. She told him that she'd danced topless in a bar. She was trying to turn him on that time.

  But this was not a lie. The manager at the motel had liked the way she looked. He used to hang around after she'd arrived. He'd corner her in the back office. He'd press against her and kiss her, sloppily. This was the worst part of the job, and she thought she ought to get paid for it. She knew that he knew what she was doing, but she knew too that if she kept the amounts small enough, he wouldn't report her.

  Nathan had never made such a bargain, it went without saying.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Meri, October and November 1993

  BY EARLY OCTOBER, Meri was fairly certain that she was pregnant. Though she never kept very close track of her periods, she was feeling funny, and she realized she couldn't remember when she'd had her last one. She stopped in the drugstore on Main Street on her way home from work one afternoon and bought a self-testing kit. She was amused to see that it was shelved next to the condoms. Was there some joker on the pharmacy staff? Had he intended the irony?

  At home, perched on the edge of the bathtub, she had to read the instructions several times over, but finally she sat on the toilet and held the stick under her while she urinated, as it seemed she was supposed to—though her hand got liberally wet too. And then she waited and watched as a faint blue cross emerged, the vertical line stronger than the horizontal, in the little result window on the stick. She read the instructions once more to be sure this meant what she thought it meant. Then, because she wanted to be certain, she unwrapped another of the little wands and did it all over again, more skillfully this time. Practice makes perfect, she thought, though this seemed a skill she wouldn't need often after this—not for another nine months in any case. She sat on the toilet, her pants down around her ankles, the wand resting o
n the apron of the rust-stained old sink, and watched as the cross appeared again in the result window.

  “Fuck!” she said aloud.

  She pulled her pants up and padded barefoot down the hall to their bedroom. She lay down for a while, watching the shadows in the room deepening, going back and forth over it. It was bad timing, yes, but they had talked about wanting a child. It was hard to think of a time in the next few years that would be any better—and the next few years might be the last ones possible for her.

  She got up and went downstairs. She was aware of the house around her in a way she hadn't been before—the number of rooms off the hall, the large open spaces below. They'd imagined a family, buying it. Or Nathan had, and she'd agreed. She'd agreed to what he imagined for her. But now that it was upon her she was . . . what? Frightened?

  She was. How could they possibly manage this? How could she? since Nathan was too busy to manage anything beyond what he had to do right now.

  But maybe, she thought, maybe once he was done with his book, his life would be a little more his own. Maybe he could be more involved than it seemed he might be now. She sat in the twilit living room and ran through multiple versions of how it might go. What frightened her the most was how little time they'd had together, alone, to get to know each other, to get used to each other. She'd felt that was just beginning to happen, here, as they started to make a life together in this house. Now they would have to turn out together, away from each other, to a child. To their child.

  It was almost completely dark outside when Nathan got home. She watched him come slowly up the stairs outside, the weary warrior from academe. She was glad to see him. She was glad not to be alone with this anymore. She listened to his key in the lock.

  He stepped in and stopped halfway across the room, seeing her. “What's up?” he said. “Why are you sitting there in the dark?”

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said. “Come sit in the dark with me.”

  He obeyed, still wearing his coat, still holding his briefcase, which he rested on his lap. He was really just a large shape, a bulk in the chair across the room. “What's going on?” he asked.