The Senator's Wife

by Sue Miller

  “Don't you sir me,” he said, smiling. “It's Tom. Tom to both of you.”

  He led them down the hall and took their coats, headed back to the closet with them; unlike Delia, who just let you drop them on the little striped couch.

  And here she came, out from the kitchen, carrying her tray. “Come in! Come into my parlor,” she cried, and they obediently followed her into the living room. She was wearing a red dress with a fitted top and a loose skirt that swirled around her as she moved. She set the tray down on the low, square coffee table, and stood up to kiss Meri's cheek. Meri felt enveloped by the rush of perfume. Delia stepped up to Nathan and kissed him too.

  Then Tom was back. Nathan began talking to him about some paper or editorial of his that he'd read recently.

  “Sit, sit,” Delia commanded, and when Meri obeyed but not the talking men, she touched Tom's elbow. “Darling, make your admirer sit down and have a drink.”

  Nathan turned to her, grinning his wolfish grin. “More than an admirer.” He turned back to Tom. “I'm a fan, I'm afraid.”

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” Delia said. “In the old days, Tom loved anyone as long as he was registered to vote. But now he's going to be your servant. You'll do the drinks, dear?”

  She turned to Meri. “What will you have? We have to work fast. I've wedged you in, I'm afraid. It's why I asked you to come a little early. My younger son arrives, with his entire family,” she exaggerated this, waving her hand dramatically in the air, “at about seven. A Christmas visit. A week's Christmas visit.” She raised her eyebrows. “So I'm so glad you were able to make it.”

  While Tom went back to the kitchen to get their drinks—scotch for Nathan, sparkling water for Meri—Delia passed around the little dishes of nuts and olives she'd brought out. She was talking about the son who was about to visit—where he lived, how long it had been since she'd seen him, the ages of his children.

  Nathan asked what he did.

  She smiled. “Oh, he's kind of a dropout, I think you'd say. He builds sailboats—beautiful, old-fashioned, handmade, wooden boats. One at a time. Much in demand, and very costly, but it's so labor intensive that there's no money in it at all for him.” She was flushed, Meri noted, and she seemed wound up. But she looked prettier—less severe, less grand—than Meri had seen her look before. “His wife teaches high school, and I suspect makes twice what he does. But he is, I would say, our sweetest child. Don't you agree, Tom?” she said to her husband as he came back with the drinks. “Is Brad not the sweetest of our children?”

  Tom turned to his wife. Meri watched his expression shift, his face open, warmly. His eyes, which had seemed cool and keenly observant earlier, did something when they looked at Delia that she'd read of but never seen: they lit up. “Whatever you say. I defer to you,” he said.

  “Oh, who on earth wants to be deferred to?” Delia said, looking over at Meri and Nathan, inviting them in. “I want you at least to seem to consider this question. And then, of course, I want you to defer to me.” She smiled up at him, the dazzling smile that lifted Delia's face into agelessness from time to time.

  They were flirting with each other, Meri thought.

  “Well, he is. You know he is,” Tom said. He turned to Meri and Nathan. “Have you met any of the children? Which is what we still call them, though they are all older than you by some years.”

  Meri shook her head.

  “No. Well.” He sat down. “In a nutshell, then, Nancy is formidable and fearsomely well organized. Fearsomely.” He pretended to shudder. “Evan is easy, I would say. And funny. And Brad is, always has been, the gentle one. The good one. Which is sometimes a burden, I'm sure. The sweetest, yes.”

  Delia thanked him.

  Meri watched them as the conversation began, and meandered. They talked about Clinton, and Tom said that once he got this Whitewater thing off his back he was going to do interesting things.

  “Now that's worrisome,” Delia said. She made a face. “A president who does interesting things.”

  Nathan and Meri laughed, and Tom's face lifted in a wry smile. But he went on. He said, “If there's anyone who can pull the Democrats back to a path less . . . driven by political correctness, I think it might be him. And that's what we're going to need to get anything done around here.” He shook his head. He smiled again, that small, charming smile. “And he's a political animal. He really lights up a room. That helps.”

  Meri thought this must have been true of Tom too, when he was in politics.

  “A bit of an animal generally, maybe,” Nathan said. When Tom looked up, a question on his face, Nathan said, “The Gennifer Flowers thing.”

  “Which, by the way, he handled well,” Tom said. “Though he could have pushed that public-private distinction harder. It'd be a gift to the political life of this country if that line got more clearly drawn.” He swirled his drink, and sipped. “Still, it's clear he enjoys women. But I don't think it'll hurt him. It's pretty much a Washington disease, I'm afraid I must say. People are used to it.”

  Meri had been looking at Delia, and now she noted a shift in her expression.

  “Do you remember when everyone thought Bush had a mistress too?” Tom asked. “But she was rumored to be someone wealthy and WASPy, of course.” He set his glass down. “The problem here is the goddam Democrats, who sleep down, you see. They love that white trash.” He barked, a short laugh. “And white trash loves publicity, so the Democrats are the ones who get into all the trouble. As opposed to the Republicans. They sleep up.” He gestured. “Up, where all is Episcopalian and quiet as death itself, and no one ever has to hear a thing about it.”

  “Surely that's not the only problem,” Delia said. Her smile seemed tight to Meri.

  Tom looked at his wife, his jokiness abruptly vanished. “No,” he said. “No, of course it's not. But it's the political part of the problem anyway, Dee.”

  A little later, Meri mentioned the photograph she'd found of Tom at work, the Watergate photo. They talked about the Senate hearings, about that period of time generally. About where they were, what they were doing then.

  Tom shook his head. “My God, what a terrific cast of characters they were,” he said.

  “My favorite of the entire group was Martha Mitchell,” Delia announced. “Old Martha, who critiqued the whole thing from home by the telephone. Do you remember? She'd call someone up and announce one loony event after another with her big wide mouth. Remember, Tom, when she said she'd been kidnapped by the FBI? And it was true?”

  Tom was watching her, smiling.

  Delia turned to Nathan and Meri, her face open in delight. “They were all true, all these things that people assumed were dipsomaniacal.”

  “Yes,” Meri said. “And they named a psychiatric liability after her. The Mitchell effect.”

  “Meri,” Nathan said, shaking his head. “A ‘psychiatric liability’? ‘The Mitchell effect’? Please.”

  “I will explain the Mitchell effect, and why it's called a psychiatric liability.” Meri curtsied her upper body to him, to the room. “It's more or less when a shrink makes the assumption that a statement which is true, but strange and unverifiable—when he assumes that it emerges from mental illness. Like, ta da! the FBI drugging you and kidnapping you: Oh, you must be a paranoid schizophrenic!”

  “Poor Martha,” Tom said. He stood up, holding his empty glass, and offered to get another round of drinks. Only Nathan said yes, and they went together to the kitchen this time. As she and Delia started to talk about what her other children were doing for Christmas this year, Meri could hear their voices, back and forth.

  When they came out, Nathan was talking about his students, their romantic passion for the sixties, or for what they imagined the sixties to have been.

  Tom said he'd encountered that in young people too, especially when he visited college campuses. “It's all they want to hear all about, as though it were some golden age. The sixties, the sixties, the sixties.”

  �
��I was glad when they were over,” Delia said. “It was just so complicated, threading through all that in Washington. And then I moved back here more or less full-time, and that was that, for me. A private life.”

  “Do you miss it?” Meri asked. “Washington?”

  Tom's gaze was steady on his wife as she answered. “There are things I miss about it,” Delia said. “I had dear friends there. I miss them.” The animation that had lit her face earlier was gone now. “But we see each other now and then, and call. And write.” She lifted her wineglass. “It's true my life is narrower now. But so is everyone's at my age.” And then something livened in her again. “Except, of course, for Tom.”

  Tom gave a little snort. After a moment, he turned to Meri. “You haven't said what you're up to in Williston, and I want to know.”

  Meri answered quickly, dismissively, describing the program and the kinds of topics it covered. “I'm in charge of the culture beat, mostly,” she said. “The arts, somebody's latest book, but also ‘the culture,’” her hands made quotation marks. “Sort of whatever the latest new thing is.”

  She stopped. She'd had the sudden thought that Tom might be useful to her, a good connection, a resource. She said, “But sometimes they let me do something political. So maybe I'll end up calling you, eventually. If you'd consent to be called.”

  “Of course, I'd be delighted. Remind me to give you my card.”

  Meri could hear the perfunctory note in his response. Using a tough moll's voice, she said immediately, “Gimme your card.”

  He looked at her sharply, and then he laughed. He had a wonderful laugh, Meri thought. It was like his voice, light and dry, and his head tilted back a little, giving over to it. Meri felt she'd accomplished something, provoking his laughter.

  He stood up, and reached into his back pocket for his wallet. She had the sense that he was really looking at her for the first time tonight, that she'd moved from invisibility to . . . what? Personhood, anyway. She wondered fleetingly what it would be like to be attractive, sexually, to Tom Naughton, something she clearly wasn't in her present state.

  He had come over in front of her now, and he was almost bowing as he handed her the card. She took it, looking up at him. There was a smile playing over his small mouth. He was conceding the point, she thought: he wouldn't have “remembered” to give her the card if she hadn't insisted.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling back. “I'll use it sparingly, if at all.”

  “Anytime,” he answered.

  She took it in only as Tom moved back to his chair, that Nathan was talking, had been talking, and now she heard him: he was talking about her. He was revising her description of her job, talking about the prison writing program. “. . . you know, some of these guys were in for murder. And she went out there to Goffstown and sat with them and taped these extraordinary interviews. . . .” Meri watched him, his face so earnest as he went on, about the response the radio station had had, the people wanting to donate funds to the writing program.

  She saw what he was doing. He didn't want to be seen as having a wife who wasn't smart, who wasn't important in some way. She was his, after all. She was part of who he was. She couldn't be frivolous, which is how she'd presented herself—because that was how she'd been flirting with Tom.

  This, now, was how Nathan did it.

  So they were all flirting with Tom, she thought. How strange. How funny. She wondered how it would feel to be a person whose attention everyone wanted to have.

  Nathan caught her eye, saw something in her gaze, and stopped abruptly.

  Delia broke the short silence. She was worried about Brad, about his being a little late.

  “It's fine, Dee,” Tom said. His tone was reassuring. “There's no weather. It's just traffic.” He got up and put another log on the fire.

  “Are you folks traveling for Christmas?” Delia asked.

  Meri gestured at Nathan. “We're going to his mother's house. New Jersey. It's our first joint Christmas with her.” She made a little face. “Nervous-making.”

  Nathan looked at her. “Come on, you're not nervous.”

  She waited a beat. “Oh, that's right.” She turned to Delia and Tom. “Apparently not nervous-making,” she said.

  Tom said to Delia, “Remember our first Christmas at your parents’ house?”

  Delia smiled at him. “I'd rather not.”

  “Were you nervous?” Meri asked.

  “I wasn't smart enough to be nervous,” he said. “I had no idea.”

  “My parents disapproved,” Delia said. “We had just told them we were engaged, and they couldn't have been less pleased.”

  “On what grounds?” Nathan asked.

  “Mother of God, what wasn't there?” Tom said. “Every prejudice of the day. I was poor, I was Irish, I was Catholic, I was déclassé.” He had a swallow of scotch. “Now, I'd known all that, you couldn't be those things in that day and age without knowing how others thought of you, but I hadn't fully taken in what an unattractive package I was until I arrived to stay at Delia's for two long, long days.”

  “I should say that they were not unkind people,” Delia said. “They were just frightened for me.”

  “The papist, the lowlife, was taking their lovely girl away,” Tom said.

  Delia rolled her eyes.

  “Would ruin her.” He smiled. “Conversion, God help us, was a possibility.” And he went on, talking about Delia's parents, the impossible stiffness of the visit, the long silent meals, his early departure.

  Meri watched them both, their pleasure in passing the subject back and forth, their ease with what must have been this hard part of their history. She was wondering whether she and Nathan would ever be able to be as playful about the differences between them. The parallel differences, actually—she, the Tom character, the lowlife, the outsider. Nathan was as patrician as Delia really, as completely comfortable with himself.

  Suddenly there were voices outside, and before they could get up, they heard the door open and a young voice calling, “Grandma?”

  Delia was up instantly. Moving quickly as a girl, she disappeared around the corner to the hall. Tom stood too, and went more slowly around the corner. Then Meri saw the kids in the wide doorway to the hall—three kids, the oldest in her early teens, Meri thought, the youngest maybe eight or so. They were shimmying out of their coats and talking rapidly, mostly to Delia, who was still out of sight behind them. One of them, the youngest, sat on the little couch and began to heel off his boots. Now a man's voice, a woman's, could be heard in the mix.

  Nathan and Meri were standing up in the living room. Nathan said, “We should go, no?”

  “Absolutely.” But they stood awkwardly a minute longer, listening to the family assembling in the hall, not wanting to interrupt the moment of reunion.

  Delia came back, leading the others in to introduce them all. Nathan and Meri said hello to everyone and almost simultaneously began to make their excuses. Tom went to get their coats. The kids in their stocking feet had come into the living room and were unloading the bags of presents they'd carried in with them, arranging the bright-colored packages under the tree.

  While Meri talked to Brad's wife—Susan—asking her about the drive down, Tom reappeared, holding her coat. Meri turned and let him help her into it. Awkwardly, bumpily, they moved into the hall. The kids made no show of sociability, but the four adults trailed out with Meri and Nathan, Delia in the lead.

  “I'm so glad you could get over while Tom was here,” she said. “He's leaving after dinner tonight, so it really was right now or never. It's wonderful you were free at exactly the time that would work.”

  “We wouldn't have missed it,” Nathan said.

  “Same for us,” Brad said. “It's a miracle when we get to see him at all, so this is really great, short as it is.” He was smiling, almost shyly, at his father.

  “Where are you headed now?” Nathan asked Tom.

  “Oh, I've got to get to New York for some bu
siness first thing in the morning. I've got a car coming, after dinner. Poor guy's probably sitting in some bar watching sports till it's time.” He turned to Brad. “He brought me down from Boston this afternoon.”

  “Hey, he's getting paid to watch those sports,” Brad said. “Not a bad gig at all.”

  As they left, stepping out into the cold night air, Meri looked back for a moment through the glass pane of the closed door. Brad and his mother had turned back into the house behind Tom, and Brad had his arm around Delia. Their heads were bent down, almost touching each other.

  “I need food!” Nathan said as soon as they opened their own door. They both headed back for the kitchen, Nathan dropping his coat on a dining room chair on the way. “Too much booze on an empty stomach.”

  Meri stopped in the pantry. “We've got pasta,” she called out. “Fusilli and penne.”

  “Let's do penne.” He was already clattering pots and pans. “Fast and easy. We can have oil and olives and herbs.”

  “We've got lemons too,” Meri said. “I'll zest one, if you like.”

  When she came into the kitchen with the box of pasta, the lemon, the herbs, he was already carrying a pot full of water from the sink to the tiny stovetop. He turned the flame on under it, and they worked in silence for a few minutes at the door-table.

  Nathan said, “Big lie there, did you notice?” He had started to pit the olives.

  “What? That he came down this afternoon?”

  “Yep.” He looked up, frowning. “When we know for a fact he was there last night.” His hands stopped moving. “What would be the point of that, you think?”

  Meri knew that this was the moment when she could confess what she knew. When she could tell the sad story of how Delia and Tom had separated so painfully years ago, how they'd painfully come back together and created a new way of being married, which was private, just for themselves. When she could say, “They're supposed to be just friends. That's what the kids think.”

  This was the moment when she could speak also of what she'd done, of how she'd come to know all this. When she could tell him how sorry she was, how ashamed.