The Senator's Wife

by Sue Miller

  “Well, that's part of it. You're seventy-five years old, you haven't been Dad's wife in decades except legally, and you should not be doing this.”

  “Well, I am.” Delia's voice sounded childishly defiant to her own ears.

  Nancy didn't answer for a moment. Then she said, “Have you talked to Evan about this?”

  “I have.”

  “And what does he say?”

  “He says, he'll wait for me to call him when I know more.”

  Nancy must have heard in Delia's voice the suggestion that Evan was behaving better than she was, that he was being the good child, and she the difficult one. She didn't say anything for a few seconds. Then: “And this will be tomorrow, you think?”

  “Yes. In the morning, they said. They do rounds or something.”

  “And you'll call me then also?”

  “Of course, dear. As soon as I know what the prognosis is. Or the general picture anyway.”

  “Then I'll wait too.” This sounded reluctant, a concession.

  They said their good-byes. Delia said at least once more that she'd call as soon as she knew anything, and then Nancy said, “You know, Mother, I'm only thinking of you.”

  Her voice had changed, and Delia felt guilty about her own anger, her resistance to her daughter.

  “I know,” she said.

  Madeleine had set the table in the kitchen. She had lit two candles, and when Delia came in, she turned out the overhead light.

  They talked as they always did, easily, intimately. After Delia had explained what she could of how Tom was, after they'd speculated and commiserated, Madeleine spoke for a while of Dan's death, spoke at greater length than she had before about how hard the adjustment to widowhood had been for her.

  They sat silent for a moment, and Delia reached over to touch Madeleine's hand. Two old hands, she thought. Hers looked gnarled on top of Madeleine's. Even Maddy's fingers were plump.

  Madeleine looked up at her. “At least you won't have that adjustment if Tom dies—you've lived apart from each other for so long.”

  Delia moved her hand. “Don't say that, Maddy. He's not going to die.”

  “Well, but it's the beginning, isn't it? Even if he recovers completely, there's a process that's begun. It's like the dreaded hip fracture for women.”

  Delia shifted in her chair. Her back hurt—the long plane ride, and then of course lugging her suitcase all over creation. “I suppose you're right,” she said, making a face. “The famous slippery slope.”

  Madeleine smiled. “Which we're all sliding down, aren't we? from birth on.” She lifted the bottle. “A splash?” she asked.

  “Oh, why not?” Delia said. Madeleine poured, and Delia drank. It was a good French pinot noir. Maddy must have gone out and gotten it especially for her. She set the glass down and sighed. “Who knows?” she said. “Maybe, if he should die, maybe I'd miss him more deeply for not having had him all this time.”

  “Now that would be foolish, dear, which is something I don't think you are.”

  “Well, but when I am foolish—when I have been—it's always been in connection with Tom, hasn't it?”

  Their old faces mirrored each other across the table, in rue, in affection. A little while later, they got up and Madeleine turned the light on. They cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. As she was standing with her back to Madeleine, wiping the table, Delia asked, “Do you know someone here in Washington named Alison Miller?”

  “I don't think so,” Madeleine said. “Why?”

  “She's the person who called to tell me about Tom. She was with him when he had the stroke.”

  “Ah!” Madeleine said.

  Delia turned around. Madeleine had turned too, and was facing her. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves so big they reached nearly to her elbows. She still had her apron on. She looked like a charwoman, Delia thought. Not that Delia had ever seen one.

  “Yes, ‘ah,’” Delia said.

  “She could be anyone, Dee. A friend, someone he knows from work or politics. Tom has a thousand friends, and at least half of them are women.”

  “I know. I just thought you might . . . know.”

  Madeleine shook her head. “I can't help you with that one, sweetie.”

  Later they said good night and went to their bedrooms at opposite ends of the apartment. When Delia shut the guest room door, there was only silence. She could have been alone in the world.

  She lay in bed, looking at the unfamiliar greenish shapes in the room, dimly lighted by the glow from the electric clock. She was remembering what she'd said about Tom, feeling ashamed of herself for having been glib about the possibility of his dying while he was lying so confused and lost in the hospital.

  But the problem, she thought now, was that she'd been as blinkered about the possibility of Tom's falling ill or dying as he had. She'd thought he was immortal, that he'd always be there. Or at least as long as she was. She'd always thought that there was time, ample time ahead, to work things out, to find a way to be together again at some point.

  She would have said she'd made her peace with their situation years earlier. She would have said—indeed, she had said—that their solution worked for them, that they both liked it just as it was. But it seemed she'd been waiting all along. Waiting for something to change, to bring them together. Because, after all this, it must still be that she thought of them as belonging together. That he was her destiny.

  Foolishness. Her head swung back and forth on the pillow, she made a little noise.

  EVERYTHING ABOUT Dr. Ballantyne was large, most of all his head, which was completely bald, though he couldn't have been more than fifty or so. His teeth were large too, with wide gaps between them—the kind of teeth, Delia thought, which, if he were a child now, would be fixed, at great expense to his parents.

  They talked in the hallway, with nurses and patients passing around them. He towered over her. His voice was big too, loud, and Delia kept having the impulse to shush him. It felt wrong to her to broadcast Tom's fate this way to anyone who'd care to listen. She had to force herself to attend to what he was saying, rather than how he was saying it.

  He told Delia that Tom's stroke was treated quickly enough that there was a good chance of substantial recovery. It had occurred on the left side of the brain, though, which meant that language skills and speech were likely to be affected to a greater or lesser degree. And for now, he was having trouble moving the right side of his body. Improvement was likely, and radical improvement was possible, he said—though it was harder for older people. The important thing was that therapy begin quickly and continue as long as it was helping. He said the hospital did rehab for only two weeks. They would plan on keeping him here for that long. After that there were excellent facilities nearby, right here in Washington. She should talk about this with Tom's physical therapist and his discharge planner, and, of course, with Tom when he could take it in. In the meantime they were doing a sort of baby-step rehab in his room, and he'd been put on medication to reduce the chances of another stroke.

  “So nothing is really clear,” she said.

  “That's not true.” His voice, though loud, was kind. And he had an unhurried air, which Delia was grateful for. “A great deal is clear. He's doing well, at this point. And he'll do better. We just don't know how much better.”

  After a moment, Delia said, “And is that just luck—how much better he'll do?”

  “It's luck, some, and then willpower, the desire to get well. But yes, luck probably controls more than half of it.”

  Delia was standing with her back against the wall for support. She shifted her weight a little.

  “I'll tell you what else was luck for him: his friend,” the doctor said.

  She made a quizzical face.

  “I guess whoever was with him got him here more or less instantly.”

  “Alison. Miller.”

  “Is that her name? I met her so briefly. A nice woman. She was terribly concerned. Anyway,
they were only a couple of blocks away, at some restaurant, having lunch. That was luck too.”

  Lunch then, Delia thought. It could have been just friendly, or even business. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, well, thanks.” She pushed off from the wall.

  He told her anytime, that she was to call with any questions—call him, or the physical therapist. “She may be more in charge of how things go with him from now on than I am, actually.” He showed her his wide array of teeth one last time, and then he lumbered down the hall, around the corner.

  Delia went to Tom's room. He was gone, his bed freshly made up. The flowers had begun to arrive, she saw. There were five or six arrangements of funereal size set around the room, and the heady, slightly rotted aroma of hyacinths was in the air. She would be the one writing the thank-you's for these, she supposed. For now she didn't want to think about it. She left without looking at the cards and went down the hall to the nurses’ station.

  The woman on duty there told her Tom was having some tests done. Delia asked her where she could find Tom's discharge manager, and the nurse told her that social work was downstairs, on the third floor. As Delia turned to go, the nurse called her back. She'd remembered Tom's things, which they'd kept for him in a locker. “You should take them,” she said. “There's his clothes, and then a bunch of stuff from his pockets—his keys and his wallet, things like that that he can't be in charge of right now. I'll get them.” She disappeared into a room behind the open station.

  When she came back, she handed Delia Tom's keys and his wallet. His clothes were in a clear plastic bag.

  She was talking again. She said they were going to move Tom to rehab in a day or two. “And it'll be better for him to have some of his own clothes to wear over there. You know, it helps them, psychologically, to be dressed each day.”

  Delia said she'd get some things to bring in for him.

  She took the elevator downstairs to the department of social work, riding with a group of nurses who were laughing about how good-looking one of the interns was. The receptionist in that area said that the social worker who managed patient after-care was busy just then, but she scheduled Delia for an appointment with her in the afternoon.

  After she'd taken the little card, Delia rode the elevator down all the way to the lobby, crossed it, and stepped out into the humid Washington air. Almost instantly she started to perspire. There were no cabs around and no cabstand visible in the flow of people, so she went back inside. The young man at the information desk pointed out to her the taxi telephone on the wall by the glass doors. When the dispatcher asked her “Where to?” she gave him Tom's address—her old address, the apartment they had lived in together in a town house on Capitol Hill.

  When she drove up in the cab it looked the same, except that the white paint on the brick had eroded here and there and a faint sandy pink was bleeding through. But the front yard, which had been mostly crabgrass and packed dirt in their day, was different. It was flourishing, full of crowded perennials coming in green and lush, with pastel tulips thrusting up through their foliage. Tom must have hired a gardener.

  Delia opened the low iron gate and went up the walk. She had a sense of being conspicuous, as though she could be seen—the ex-wife, arriving where she didn't belong. She had to try three keys on Tom's ring before one fit in the lock on the shiny black door.

  When it opened and Delia stepped in, she felt the familiarity of it like a wash, a smell. There was a smell, in fact—the scent of Tom and how he'd lived here: cooking odors, the faint tang of cigar smoke, his aftershave, and others, unnamable. Just Tom.

  She shut the door behind her and walked slowly through the rooms on the first floor—the living room on one side of the hall, the back room Tom had used as a study, the dining room, the small kitchen. They were unchanged, except that one chair in the living room had been reupholstered, and the framed family pictures that had once crowded the round table next to the couch were gone. And he never used the dining room for entertaining, that was clear: the enormous table was stacked with papers, the chairs pushed back against the walls.

  They had lived together in this house at least part-time for almost ten years, renting it from the owner, who had a small apartment on the third floor. It was in what was then a dangerous part of town, but it was what they could afford. Sometime after they separated, Tom had bought it, and now he was the landlord, with a tenant above him. She hadn't been in these rooms for nearly twenty years.

  She had exiled herself, in effect. Tom had been only welcoming, only eager when she came here the first couple of times after Carolee, during the campaign for the Senate in 1972, the campaign she'd agreed to help him with in spite of the affair. He'd been hopeful that the house itself—which she'd loved, she thought now, moving through the spacious rooms—would call her back. It was what they'd planned, after all—that after Brad, the youngest, left to go to college, they would sell the house in Williston and Delia would come to Washington full-time.

  But Delia had known, even as she lived through those days, that the campaign and the way they were together through it were a reprieve from reality. A reality that gripped her once he'd won, once she'd stood beside him at the podium for the last time, smiling and waving and fighting back tears. Once the party in Williston to celebrate was over, once he'd made love to her in their bed there, once he'd left the house in the morning to go back to Washington.

  That was when what Delia thought of as the crazy time began for her, a time when she didn't know what she wanted; or when she wanted conflicting things in rapid succession.

  Or not so rapid. Sometimes she was sure she'd chosen the right thing. She would stay in Williston, alone, for four or five months, feeling certain that she was getting over him. Once she didn't see him for an entire year. But then something would happen and she'd want him. Or perhaps what she wanted was evidence that he wanted her, that she still had some power over him. She didn't know. She didn't ask herself to know. She'd beckon him to Williston or New York, and they'd fall into each other's arms, they'd make love over and over, and when they parted, Delia would leave feeling sore and well used, her face chafed, her sex swollen.

  Throughout these years, Tom, sensing her anguish, was kind. He was also steady in his sense of what he wanted—to live together again. Not to divorce, ever. He said that he loved her, that he would always love her, that she was the love of his life, in spite of his unfaithfulness. He described that as his own weakness, having nothing to do with failures on her part.

  But he had other women. He was discreet, much more discreet than he'd been with Carolee. But he had lovers. She knew this. She knew it because he told her that unless she came back to him, he would. She knew it because she could occasionally sense, when she called him in the evening, or at night, that he was with someone.

  They argued about this. He said that if she were coming back, of course he would stop, he would be faithful to her. But that she couldn't have it both ways. If she was never coming back, as she insisted she wasn't, then he needed to have a life.

  Their arguments during this time were sometimes ugly, sometimes fierce. Delia was worse than Tom—she felt freed by what he'd done to be so. She called him names. She called his lovers names: his cunts, his sluts. She accused him of trying to hold on to her because of his career—she said he had used her in the campaign.

  Even years later—when Delia had come to believe that Tom really had loved her in some way through everything, that he had wanted to stay married on account of those very real feelings—even then she thought in her most cynical moments that she'd probably been useful to him more than once in warding off one or another of his lovers. She could imagine the scene: his oh!-so-regretful calling up of the older, now solitary wife who wouldn't, couldn't, give him up. Religion, you know. Though of course it was his religion—and then too the religion of politics at that time—which prohibited divorce. But his lovers wouldn't have known that. She could imagine the younger women pressing, threatening, and Tom
coming back with his impeccable excuse, about Delia's sad absolutism, about their resulting arrangement and her prior claim.

  This period, the crazy time, lasted for six or seven years. Then slowly things got easier for her. She had several affairs of her own, and that helped. It made her feel less desperate, less as though Tom were the only man she could ever love—not that she loved either man she became involved with, just that they made love seem a possibility.

  She had grown very close to one of them, a widower, a composer she met through Ilona. She felt that she might have loved him, but she could never adjust to the way he made love. It was always impassioned, always hard, she would have said. Quick. There was none of that lazy playfulness that she and Tom had learned together, none of the loving attentiveness to her body that meant release for her. Finally they stopped being lovers and became friends, for a while anyway.

  But even more important for Delia in coming to some kind of peace about Tom was her sense of enjoying her solitude. Her new life in France was part of that, but in Williston too she found she felt a new ease moving around socially by herself. That need of Tom's to occupy center stage, which had always kept her in a supporting role—or maybe even relegated to the audience—that wasn't there to limit her anymore, to hem her in. She formed friendships differently, she took greater pleasure in them. She could feel that people liked her, something she'd never been sure of in the past, so focused had everyone always been on Tom.

  More and more Delia let go of Tom, of his life away from her, his life in Washington. At one point she made a list of things she wanted from the house in Washington, and he had movers come and truck everything up to her.

  She climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. She went first to what had been their room. It had been painted and redecorated—it was dark and modern now. Where before the walls had been a soft gray and the bedding and furniture white, now things were brown, brown, brown. The curtains and bedspread were a rich, dark paisley.

  She sat on Tom's bed and called each of her children again—at home, so she wouldn't interrupt their work; but also so that she wouldn't have to talk to them, Nancy in particular—she'd be dealing with answering machines. In the messages she left, she repeated as accurately and carefully as she could what Dr. Ballantyne had said to her in the hospital.