by Sue Miller
When she finished, she sat still a moment, looking around her. Then she got up and went down the hall to what had been their rooms—the children's—to see what had become of them. The doors were closed. She opened one, then the other, and stood there, taking them in.
In terms of furniture they were unchanged from the time she and Tom had separated—the four-poster with the frilly canopy in Nancy's room, the two matching beds in the boys’ room. Even the pictures on the walls were the same. Posters of the Andes, of Machu Picchu in Brad and Evan's room; in Nancy's, framed paintings and reproductions chosen by Delia—they'd used this as a guest room after Nancy went to law school.
But in both rooms there were also odd collections of objects, clearly deposited there over time—lamps, framed pictures leaned against the walls, rolled-up rugs and pads, an upright vacuum cleaner, some cardboard cartons. Clearly no one had stayed in them for years.
Delia knew that the children didn't visit Tom. They saw him when they came to Washington, but they saw him in neutral territory—at their hotels, or in restaurants. And on Tom's visits to them, his infrequent visits, he stayed in hotels too.
She and Tom had talked once about this—she had wanted him to know that she hadn't encouraged their distance, that she hadn't asked any of them to be her ally against him. And he in turn had told her that he didn't hold her responsible.
It had seemed to her as they talked about it that he was almost welcoming of the distance from the children. Perhaps he saw it as a kind of penance for what he'd done, for being who he was. What he said was that the children had made their choices clear early on, and that he understood the bases for those choices.
But the fact was that all of them, except for Nancy, had yielded and drawn closer to him over the years. Delia thought now of this past Christmas, of the dinner with Brad and his family in Williston. Of course, Brad was the easiest one, but still, everyone had seemed happy and relaxed.
She went back down the hall to Tom's room. She opened the closet. She chose clothes quickly and set them out on the bed—just shirts and slacks. None of the expensive suits, of which there were perhaps eight or ten hanging up. She sighed, looking at them. Even when they had no money, Tom had been profligate with clothes. It was a weakness—another weakness. And she was left there too to deal with the problems, the marshaling of their limited resources that resulted.
But the truth was that she too had loved the way he looked in his fancy suits, in his expensive shirts and suspenders and shoes. And she had been sympathetic to what they meant to him—the entrée he felt they offered him into a life he wanted. He had told her once that he'd practiced standing casually, his hands in his pockets, that he'd imitated the gestures, the expressions of people he met in college and law school and early in his practice. And finally, he'd been successful—he'd truly become what he played at being. The clothes were the least of it, actually.
From his bureau she got out underwear, socks. She went down the hall to the storage closet, and there, on a shelf above the linens, were the suitcases, as they had been in the past. There were even a few she recognized. She brought one back and opened it on the bed. She folded the clothes carefully—professionally, she thought, with a little prideful pleasure—and laid them in.
She went to the bathroom for Tom's toiletries—a hairbrush, a razor and shaving cream, aftershave, toothpaste and a toothbrush. Even if the hospital provided some of these, she thought, he would probably like his own better. She put them into his dopp kit and wedged it into a corner of the suitcase, on top of the clothes. She zipped the suitcase shut and set it at the top of the stairs.
Then she came back into the room and crossed to the bed. She lay down heavily on it. It was the warmth in here, the stuffiness, she thought. And of course, it was the jet lag hitting her too—she'd waked several times in the night in Madeleine's apartment, confused in that silent darkness about the hour, about where she was. The last time had been about four-thirty, and she'd been awake ever since, though she'd lain in bed until almost seven, when she heard Madeleine in the kitchen.
I'll just sleep for a few minutes, she thought now, as her eyes closed.
SHE WAS ALMOST late for the meeting with Tom's social worker. When she got back to Tom's room afterward, it was around four. He was in bed. There was a wheelchair pushed back into a corner of the room, though, a sign of some recent activity.
His eyes opened and followed her as she approached. His hand rose as if to greet her, his lips parted. He made a noise, a noise that might have had a B or a D at its beginning; producing this noise, his open mouth had to labor, his tongue had to work.
Delia willed herself not to look away. She greeted him in return, saying her own name, saying she was glad to see him looking better. She spoke slowly, telling him she'd brought some of his things.
He didn't seem to understand her, so she set the suitcase across the chair and opened it. She took out a shirt, one of his beautiful, expensive shirts of a cotton so fine it felt like silk, and held it up. He cried out, seeing it, as though he recognized some part of his lost self.
She spent the rest of the afternoon with him. First she asked for a basin, got some hot water, and shaved him. Then she found a nurse to help her dress him. In his own clothes, clean-shaven, his hair combed, he seemed suddenly almost whole again, a person instead of a patient. Delia thought she could actually feel a difference in the way the nurses and aides treated him when they came into the room. She helped to feed him too, spooning the mush he was allowed into his mouth.
Mostly, though, she just sat by him, sometimes saying a few words, more often humming or singing. The time seemed to pass with a glacial slowness. When Tom dozed and she could relax—she could walk in the hallway for a bit, or go into the bathroom and splash water on her face—Delia felt a gratitude so profound it was almost physical.
She was grateful too for the news she'd gotten earlier from the social worker, and the physical therapist who'd come in briefly to Delia's conference. Tom's ability to eat was a good sign, she'd learned—some people couldn't control their mouths after a stroke and had to relearn this. And he was trying to name things, the social worker said. Both of these were indications of the potential for a strong recovery. They'd already started working with him in his room, moving his weak side, trying to get him to stand, to walk by himself. They would start taking him over to the rehabilitation unit in a day or two; and pretty soon after that, she'd have to make some decisions about where to have him treated, and for how long.
When Delia called the taxi to go to Madeleine's, it was almost eight, and she was exhausted again. She must have looked it too, because the driver got out from behind the wheel and opened the door for her, helped her in, holding her elbow. Or perhaps it was just that southern courtesy. Watching the congestion on M Street, listening to the car horns, she started thinking about Washington, about the southern quality of the city, which always struck her when she came back after an absence—particularly as it connected to race. There was an omnipresent country graciousness on the part of the blacks who were in serving positions everywhere in the city. The hospital staff, the waiters in restaurants, the cabdrivers—all, all smiling and polite. And now, getting out of the cab, here was Madeleine's doorman in his fancy uniform, greeting her by name, smiling too, opening the door for her.
All this politeness, this graciousness, contrasted to the abject, angry poverty of so much of the city. She had often wondered how this struck visiting foreign dignitaries—but of course they were used to this divide in other countries too. Maybe it was strangest to someone raised here, she thought, where equality was the supposed norm, or desideratum anyway. She and Tom had talked about it sometimes, about all the failed promises of the civil-rights movement, the poverty initiatives that he'd been so passionate about in the early days. About how ironic it was that Washington itself was emblematic of this, if only those in power cared to look around.
And now, getting into the elevator, she was thinking abou
t how they used to talk—about everything, it seemed to her. And everywhere. In bed, at the kitchen table when the children were asleep, in the bathroom where he'd sometimes come and sit while she was in the tub. A confusion of images, images of Tom, alert, argumentative, of his mouth moving in that tight wry smile of private amusement after he'd made a point. She thought of his mouth as it had moved today, working to say her name. She thought of its kissing her, caressing her body. Her mind was full of all of this as she rode slowly up in the antique elevator, as she pushed its flexible cage door open, as she got out, as she rang Madeleine's bell.
Perhaps this was why for a long foolish moment she didn't recognize the person who opened the door—though later she would think maybe it was also in sympathy with Tom, with his inability to assimilate all that was incongruous and out of place in his life. But then things righted themselves, and she said, she hoped with more pleasure in her voice than she felt, “Why, Nancy!”
CHAPTER TEN
Delia, May 1994
IT WAS NANCY who insisted that they go home to Williston for the weekend. She said Delia needed the rest, she said they could talk better at home. Delia hadn't resisted. The truth was, the thought of home was welcome to her; and she sensed that she could make it through Nancy's visit better there than at Madeleine's or in the hospital, around Tom.
They flew up Friday afternoon. Their plan was to go back to Washington together Monday morning. After her second quick visit with Tom, Nancy would fly back to Denver that evening—she'd already left work for longer than she should have, she told Delia.
At home, in Williston, Delia unpacked. She unhooked the hose from the kitchen faucet and carried the plants from the tarp in the kitchen to their permanent locations—the jade to the living room, the fern to its stand in the dining room. The hibiscus stayed where it was. She went through the mail that Meri had sorted and took some of it up to her study, where she wrote a few notes in response. She drove to the grocery store in the mall and bought food, ticking the items off her list.
She tried to stay as busy as she could, because whenever she stopped—or even slowed down—Nancy was there, wanting to talk, insisting that Delia should leave Tom in Washington in a rehab place Nancy had found, where he would have, as she said now, “the best of care, Mother. And where his various Washington friends,” she emphasized this word unpleasantly, “can visit him. Let's not forget, Washington is his home. It makes no sense, none, for you to bring him here. And we all know that that would involve you in his care in a way that's completely inappropriate.”
Who is this we? Delia thought. Who is this us?
“But what would be the point of keeping him in Washington if it just meant I worried more?” she said. “That I'd have to keep flying down there because of that? That would be far more inconvenient for me.”
“If that's what you did, yes. But you need to avoid doing that. You need to extricate yourself from this . . . web that's catching at you.”
This time they were talking in the Peking Palace in Williston, but they'd had earlier versions of this conversation on the plane up from Washington and at the house. Nancy had even stood in the door to Delia's bedroom last night and kept at it, though surely she could see, Delia thought, how exhausted I was. Even after Delia turned out the light, she'd gone on talking, her silhouette dark in the doorway. Delia had had to tell her, finally, that she desperately needed to sleep.
Desperate or not, after Nancy left, Delia had lain awake for a long time in her bed, feeling a kind of terror envelope her. What frightened her was that she wasn't sure she could resist her daughter's power. She thought this might be the moment, actually, the moment she'd heard about from a friend or two—recollected sadly, ruefully—when the grown children swept in and irresistibly took over your life. When you could no longer say no, because it was so clear that all the things you thought of as belonging to you were in the process of becoming theirs—their possessions, and, of course, their heavy burdens, too: your life, your spouse's life, your illness, his illness, your death. The moment when you owed them something, when you had to give way, out of a kind of fairness to them; and then also because you just didn't have the strength left anymore to fight.
“It's not a web, dear,” Delia said now. “It's life. It's life that catches you. Life changes. And we change in response to it.”
“Mother. This is your decision.”
How narrow her lips were, Delia thought. How tight her mouth. Like Tom's, but without the playfulness.
“You aren't caught,” she said. “You do not have to do anything about Dad. I will handle it. I've spoken to the best place for brain damage in Washington. I've made the arrangements. You won't have to do anything more about it. You're not obligated to him. It would be absurd to think that, after what he did to you.”
Suddenly, watching her daughter's face, Delia was taken back to the memory of those weeks just after Tom had launched himself into his affair with Carolee, when, even in the midst of her own grief, she'd had over and over to try to ease Nancy's, to comfort her. To apologize to her, it sometimes seemed.
This, now—this insistence that her father had no right to Delia's attention or love—this sprang from the same place in Nancy's psyche, Delia thought. It was the little girl in Nancy, pleading that he needed to pay for wounding her, for betraying her.
Delia could feel the truth of this instantly, and oddly, it helped her, seeing things this way. It let her dismiss the notion of Nancy's power, the notion that had made her heart pound in her ears as she lay awake in bed last night. It let her feel the same loving pity for Nancy she'd felt so long ago when her daughter couldn't let go of her rage and confusion, couldn't stop herself.
Delia sighed. “Nor are you, dear. Obligated.” And then because she thought it might help Nancy to hear it, she said, “After what he did to you. To you, and Evan, and Brad.”
Nancy looked startled, and Delia felt she'd gotten it right. She felt, for the first time, that she might have the better hand in this situation. “Look, Nan,” she said, leaning forward across the table toward her daughter. “Given that, given that he's an old man who long ago disobligated all of us—disobliged us, I guess you'd say—shouldn't it be the person who's least . . . offended by that, least disturbed by it, who steps forward now? I want to do this and you don't. I . . . I've forgiven your father for what he did, in a way, it seems to me, you haven't.”
Nancy made a face, but she lifted her hand too, in a gesture that seemed to be an acknowledgment of the truth in what Delia had said.
“I suppose . . .” Delia said, and stopped. She wanted to be careful. She wanted not to push too hard. She knew Nancy was capable of resisting her just out of stubbornness.
“What? You suppose what?”
“I suppose, come to think of it, that the kind of hurt he offered me was so much more . . . predictable. It was really banal, in a way. Whereas the way he hurt you was not banal at all.” This was true, wasn't it? He had done a terrible thing to Nancy at that vulnerable stage of her life. He and Carolee had, together. “It was worse.”
But Nancy wasn't biting. “Both hurts were awful, to me and to you,” she said. “Both of them were unforgivable.”
After a moment Delia shook her head. “You can't speak for me, Nan. About what I find forgivable or unforgivable. I'm different from you, and my understanding of your father is different from yours.”
She watched as her daughter played with her chopsticks, lining them up precisely next to each other.
Nancy looked up. “What is it you'd like to do, then?”
Delia felt a relief so deep it was as though the breath she drew now were the first full breath she'd drawn since she heard the news about Tom. “There's a good place near Williston, too. For the brain-injured. The discharge worker told me about it. I'd like him there. It would make my life easier to have him there. Why don't I see about that?” she said. And then quickly went on, “And if it doesn't work out, we'll have all the legwork you've done in W
ashington to fall back on.”
There was something reluctant in Nancy's face, something petulant, Delia thought, but she capitulated, she agreed, more or less. What she said was, “Well, I suppose I can't stop you, if this is something you're determined to do.”
“I think I am determined. That's a good word for it. And I want to. I'm not exaggerating in any way when I say that: I want to.”
They talked for a while of logistics, of how Delia would manage it. Nancy wanted Delia to check in with her about everything as she went along, as she made decisions. She would expect regular calls.
Delia agreed. She agreed to everything. Yes, that all made sense, everything made sense. She kept her voice conciliatory.
As they drove to the house, Nancy said, “You have to promise me, Mother, that if it gets to be too much, you'll let me know. We'll figure something else out.”
“Of course.”
“There may be good places near me too. Or one of the boys.”
Delia didn't answer. To leave him to Nancy's tender mercies . . . well, such a thing would not be possible.
“And I want you to go to Paris, too, in the fall. No giving up the things you enjoy because you're Dad's . . . case manager or something.”
Paris. Delia hadn't thought of it once through all this. It seemed another universe. She remembered her last morning there, her breakfast on the balcony, the light in the sky around her. She remembered the call from Alison Miller the afternoon before.
“Maybe we could take turns coming to stay in the house and visiting him while you're away—to make sure everything was going well.”
“Yes,” Delia said.
