by Sue Miller
But she didn't say any of it, of course. She couldn't. Nathan would never understand how she could have done what she did or why she felt so compelled by Delia, by her life. Why she let herself open the drawer, take the letters out, read them. She could never explain it, because she wasn't sure herself. And if she said something like, “I was lonely, Nathan. I am lonely. I'm lonely and scared,” he would think that she was only trying to excuse herself for what he would see as a reprehensible act. For what she saw as a reprehensible act too.
And was it that she was lonely? Was it that she was scared? She wasn't really sure that either was the reason, that either was true. For how could she be lonely or scared? She was married, married to someone she loved. She was going to have his child. She lived with him in a beautiful house, they were making a delicious supper together. They would sit down and eat it and talk, and perhaps, later on tonight, make love. She looked over at him. He was bent over the table again now, his long, delicate fingers working carefully with the olives, his face sober at his task.
“Maybe there's no point,” she said. “Maybe some people just like to keep things private. Secret, I guess you'd say.”
CHAPTER NINE
Delia, Early May 1994
IS THIS MRS. NAUGHTON?” The voice at the other end of the line was female, distinctly American, older.
Delia had just come in. She was standing at the desk in the entryway to her apartment in Paris. It was raining out, and she was damp—she hadn't had time to change her clothes. “It is,” she said.
“Ah. This is . . . well, you don't know me, but I'm a friend of Tom's, of your husband. I'm Alison Miller.”
Delia didn't know the name. Her throat seemed to have dried up. She heard her voice as a croak. “Yes?”
“It's about Tom. I'm afraid . . .” And then she said in a rush, “Oh, he's alive. I'm sorry. I should have started with that. He is alive.”
Delia sat down, hard, so hard that she nearly dropped the phone.
“But he's had a stroke,” the woman was saying, this Alison person. “He's here, in Washington, in the hospital.”
Delia was supposed to talk, she was supposed to say something. “But he's . . . he is, all right?”
“Well, no. He's in intensive care. They don't know, I guess, no one seems to know, if he's all right. I guess . . . it seems that it's not easy to tell right away how bad these things are.”
“He's had a stroke?” It was as though Delia's brain was catching up, a half minute behind what this woman was saying.
“Yes. They're doing all they can, but they can't say, yet, how he'll be.”
“But, is he conscious?” She was seeing Tom, or she was trying to see him, and this seemed important to her, to know this, as a way of imagining what had happened to him.
“Sort of. He seems, almost not conscious. Perhaps, I don't know, he's in a kind of shock.” Her voice rose at the end of the sentence. When Delia didn't say anything, she said again, “I don't know.”
Delia was too confused for the moment to respond. She could hear the drumming of the rain on the balcony, the hum of the refrigerator from her kitchen. Her umbrella was dripping slowly onto the floor next to her in the foyer. She'd need to wipe that up.
After a few seconds, Alison Miller's voice continued. “I think—well, they think too—that someone needs to be here who can . . . someone from the family. With the power to make decisions.”
“Well, yes. One of the children would . . . do the children know?”
“No. I . . . No, I didn't. That would be . . . I just thought to call you.”
Delia cleared her throat. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Would you tell me your name once more?”
“I'm Alison Miller. I'm a friend of Tom's.”
“And you took him to the hospital?”
“I called the ambulance, yes, and came in with him.”
Delia was beginning to make sense, a kind of sense, of all this, though she wasn't certain what was being asked of her. “Do you know . . . I mean, had Tom made any arrangement? In case of such an event?”
“Arrangement?” Now Alison Miller sounded confused.
“Yes. What . . . ?”
Alison Miller's voice was dry, suddenly: “I think the arrangement, as you put it, was immortality.”
Delia was silent.
And now the woman said, more gently, “There was no arrangement, as far as I can tell.” There was a silence. “Mrs. Naughton,” she said, “you need to come home.”
“Home?”
“You need to come to Washington. Tom needs you.”
“But Tom and I, we are not—”
“I know that. I know. But there is no one else.”
“But are you . . . ?” The rulelessness of her life with Tom had left her unable to be certain of anything in this moment.
“No,” she said. “No. Not me.” And then she said again, “There is no one else.”
Delia had to buy a first-class ticket, the only space available on the next morning's flight out. She was seated next to someone famous, someone whose face she knew, she knew very well, but couldn't place. He drank three glasses of champagne quickly, and once the plane was in the air, put a mask over his eyes, tilted his seat back, and went to sleep. After a while he began to snore, to snore in what Delia thought of as a feminine way—little fluttery spurts, as though each breath were a great surprise to him, something to exclaim over. Gasps of snoring, nothing like the steady, deep rasps Tom produced.
Sleep wasn't possible for Delia, although to her surprise, she'd slept well last night. And now, sitting on the plane, she remembered that she'd had a dream. She'd dreamed of Tom. She began retrieving it bit by bit. An odd dream. Well, weren't they all? She was with him in a clearing in a wood—a kind of glade. She saw it suddenly. It had been like a scene from Bergman, struck with a kind of holy celluloid light, the way his dream sequences often were—full of yearning and nostalgia. She couldn't have said what she and Tom were doing there, but when she'd waked, it was with a feeling of joy. Within seconds, though, lying in her dark bedroom, listening to the rain outside, she'd remembered the reality: that he was ruined, he was dying.
Or not. She didn't know. That was the problem, wasn't it?
Immediately after she got off the phone with Alison Miller, she'd called the doctor—a man named Ballantyne, whose number Alison Miller had given her. She'd had to wait a long time while he was paged. Twice someone clicked onto the phone to ask if he could call her back, but Delia said no, she'd hold.
When he finally came on the line he was noncommittal. For now it was better not to speculate. “The next few days,” he said, “will tell the tale.” This phrase struck Delia, it seemed so old-fashioned and familiar. It was something her mother had said to her, something she herself had said occasionally to one of the children when she didn't know how to answer a question.
After Delia had hung up, she sat for a long time in the hallway in her wet shoes. It was too much, too much to take in. The woman—a friend? a lover? Tom, in some kind of limbo, where no one could tell how he would be, who he would be, when he emerged.
She'd called the hospital again this morning before she'd left for the airport, but it was still night in Washington and there was no further news. The nurse or receptionist answering the phone had sounded irritated with her, as though she should have known better than to call asking for information at such an hour. She spoke to Delia as you would speak to a child, and in response Delia had felt like a child—shamed, but angry too.
She'd calmed herself by carefully setting the table on the balcony for her usual breakfast. She'd had to wipe the table and chair dry with a towel. Then she brought out a tray with the croissant, the seedless raspberry jam, the rich dark coffee with steamed milk. She sat down and laid her napkin across her lap. The consolation of the daily, she thought.
There were children playing in the courtyard below, their shrill voices rising. The sky was a pale blue above her, with smears of thin high clouds
moving fast across it. She was aware of actually enjoying the musical ticking of the spoon stirring the little lump of brown sugar into her coffee, the sound of the china cup clinking lightly against its saucer as she set it down.
That world, so fresh, so perfect, washed so clean by the rain, seemed unconnected to this one—this plane with its stale air, with this unkind person sleeping next to her.
And this world in turn seemed not possibly to be leading to the one she would arrive in later today. To Tom, lying damaged in a bed in a hospital. To the hospital itself and its terrible life—the routines, the boredom, the anxiety. To the questions she would be in charge of finding the answers to.
Tom. Tom, whose face stayed blank when she tried to think of him as he might be now. She could only remember him in motion—talking, laughing.
Oh! In the dream—Delia's lips parted, thinking of it—they'd been practicing cartwheels. How silly! But she remembered the sensation of it, the wild physical abandon of throwing yourself forward in space, of flipping upside down—as wild as sex, really. She remembered too that it was understood between them that they had come to the woods to do this in private so that they wouldn't embarrass the children, who didn't know they had this skill, who wouldn't have liked seeing them do it in any case.
She leaned forward to look out the window at the cottony fields of sunstruck clouds below her.
TOM WAS LYING propped up in bed, his eyes open, conscious.
Conscious, but absent, Delia thought: he seemed not to notice her as she approached, he seemed not to hear her voice when she spoke. Or perhaps to hear it from some great distance he'd traveled. He turned now to its sound, turned slowly, his eyes not homing in on her, but moving around. It made her think of the way children follow sound in their infancy, vague as to its purpose or its source. Tom had just that blank, swimming gaze.
She spoke again. “Tom. Dear. It's me. It's Delia.”
He frowned. That was all.
He was wearing a patterned hospital johnny. His arms appeared skinny and flaccid, emerging from its wide sleeves. His hands lay curved and useless-looking on the sheet pulled up to his belly. His hair was in disarray, spiky, and Delia, unable to stand this, smoothed it. She stroked his face. His eyes closed. He leaned his face to her hand. “Unnnnh,” he said.
“Sweetheart,” she answered.
But when his eyes opened, they still didn't quite fix on her. He looked only puzzled. The blankness of his stare, the way his face drooped, his apparent inability to understand anything going on around him—all these made him seem animal to Delia. Like a large, sad, frightened animal.
It was better not to speak at all, she thought. She knew something about strokes. Several friends had had them, and her father had died of one, lying speechless and motionless in a hospital bed for more than a week. Delia knew that it was conceivable that nothing made sense to Tom right now. Her appearance here, her words. The very here of it, in fact—the hospital itself. Did he have any understanding of where he was? of how he got here? Possibly not. That must be more frightening than anything.
She decided that she wouldn't speak again. She'd just be here, a presence. A reassuring presence, she hoped. But silent. She'd save her speaking for the doctors.
She pulled a chair close to the bed and leaned over Tom, holding his hand, stroking his head, as that had seemed to comfort him. And it did again. He turned into her hand, his mouth resting on her palm like a kiss. She thought of his kissing her hand like this at various times. Seizing it, opening it, pressing his lips to her palm in passion, in sorrow—and over and over through the years, in apology.
But his face was dead now—no emotion—and there was nothing at all to read in his lips’ touch. His eyes closed again. After a few minutes, saliva started to pool in her palm. She pulled her hand away, wiped it on the sheet.
DELIA HAD CALLED Madeleine Dexter from Paris. She knew she didn't want to stay in a hotel, or in Tom's house. Madeleine lived in Georgetown, near the hospital. She was an old friend, one of the earliest friends Delia had made in Washington, way back when Tom was first a congressman. For the last few decades, Delia had seen her only once a year or so, usually in New York, where they met to see a play they were both interested in, or a show at the Metropolitan Museum. They always stayed at the same hotel and had dinner together. Between them as they talked they usually drank at least a bottle of wine, and then a smaller bottle of dessert wine. They caught each other up on the children, on their marriages, on the shape of their lives and their feelings about that.
Madeleine had known Tom and had loved him too, though more than once she had said to Delia—and reported that she'd said to him—that she could “skin him alive” for what he'd done to his marriage. She was one of the few people Delia could talk to about the complexities of what Madeleine called “your arrangement.”
She was alone now. Her husband, who had worked in the State Department, had died a few years earlier. Dan.
She opened the door and held her arms wide for Delia to step into. She was a short, plump woman with one of those enormous bosoms that occupy the entire space between the shoulders and the waist. Delia felt it like a large soft pillow pushing against her own more meager front.
“Ah, Delia,” she said as they stepped back from each other. Her face was round and full, prettier now than it had been in her youth, when it had been her figure that had attracted men. “Let's face it,” she had said more than once. “I was stacked.”
Now she held her head tilted up to see Delia through the lower lenses of her bifocals. “Here you are, darling. Here you are, and with a chicken—actually, a rooster, I guess I should say—come home at last to roost.” She smiled. “Yes, of all things.”
Delia smiled back. “It's true, I'm afraid. And I'm Henny Penny. Or maybe Chicken Little. And it seems the sky is falling.”
“Was it awful?”
“It seemed so to me. He just seemed . . . ruined.”
“Oh, Dee.”
“But the nurses say you can't tell yet. That there are good signs, that he has good responsiveness. He's moving everything, though not perfectly. And I haven't talked to the doctor yet. So I don't know. I truly, truly don't know a thing.”
“That must be harder than anything.”
“Well, not than anything, but it's hard.”
“But is he . . . alert?” Madeleine asked.
Delia laughed dryly. “Not so's you'd notice, I guess. Anyway, I need to change. I need to shower. I'm exhausted.”
“Of course, of course,” Madeleine said. “You know the way. I'll be in the kitchen, fixing us supper for whenever you're ready. Just take your time, my darling.”
Delia carried her suitcase down the long hallway. The apartment, deeply carpeted everywhere, curtained in multiple layers at all the windows, swallowed every noise. As she unpacked in the chintzy, plush guest bedroom, Delia could smell garlic, herbs—maybe tarragon. She was hungry, she realized. And so tired. Several times she had to stop and sit at the edge of the bed for a moment, feeling a yearning as strong as her hunger just to lie down. But as soon as she stopped, the image that rose in her mind was Tom—the new Tom—and she didn't like thinking of him.
The shower wakened her. Wearing her robe, she went to the kitchen doorway. Madeleine's face opened again when she saw her, and she offered Delia wine. There was a bottle, uncorked, on the kitchen counter next to the sink, a glass set next to it. Madeleine's glass, half empty, was on the island by the salad bowl where she was tearing lettuce.
“I'll take a glass, and then retire for a minute,” Delia said. “I'm going to call the kids. They haven't heard yet.”
“Ah!” Madeleine was pouring. “Well, you'll need the wine then.” She lifted the glass to Delia.
“I'll be quick,” Delia said. “Since there's not much to report to them. Just the event itself, I guess.”
Madeleine sighed. “It's so hard to imagine the dashing Tom, brought so low.” She shook her head. “I would have thought he was
exempt from the universal fate, somehow.”
“I think he thought so, too.” She remembered what the woman's voice had said on the phone—that the arrangement was immortality. It occurred to her that Madeleine might know Alison Miller, or know who she was. “I'll be right back,” she said.
Brad was out. She left a message with Ellie, his oldest child, just saying Tom had had a stroke, but was going to live, that she was with him, staying at the Dexters’.
Evan was solicitous, quick with questions, questions she couldn't answer. She told him she'd call him back as soon as she really knew anything. Yes, she said, maybe he could come, but for the moment she didn't think there was much point.
Nancy was still at work. Maybe because of that, her tone was businesslike and efficient. Once she had the basic information about her father's condition, there was a pause. Then she said, “You're not managing this.” It wasn't quite a question.
This is why I called her last, Delia thought. She had a sip of wine. “I'm afraid I am.”
“That's completely inappropriate, Mother,” she said flatly.
This was so Nancy-like, so predictable, that Delia laughed. “That's the least of my concerns at the moment, dear.”
“It is not possible that you should become his . . . caregiver. Whatever.”
“Nan.” Delia set her glass down on the bedside table. “I don't know what's possible or impossible right now. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.”
“It's not ‘getting ahead of ourselves’ to start thinking of ways to manage this without your direct involvement.”
“I am involved, I'm afraid. I'm the one empowered to make decisions.”
“But surely you can pass that power to one of us.”
Delia didn't answer her. Even though she'd thought of this herself, thought of it instantly on the phone with Alison Miller, now, with Nancy, she was aware of the notion as encroachment, as threat. A no rose in her.
“Have you explained your situation with Dad to anyone?”
“I haven't had time to do anything, Nan. I just got here. I'm exhausted.”
