by Sue Miller
She watches him. He's very tall for his age, like all of their children, and his body is just beginning to widen out a bit after his last spurt of growth, helped by the muscles he's developed swimming. He's fourteen. His voice has changed within the last year, without awkwardness—just slipping lower and lower—and his face is changing too. His jaw is suddenly strong, like Nathan's, and his eyebrows have come in full and dark.
He looks up at the stands and she catches his eye and waves, points to Henry next to her. Asa nods almost imperceptibly, and his eyes shift quickly elsewhere.
Henry has been describing a game to her, describing it at length and in great detail. It's a game he and David invented at preschool. First they were robbers in the game, and then they became super-heroes trapping the robbers—but not like the superheroes he has dolls for, he says, and he lists them and all their superpowers. He and David were a different, a better kind of superhero.
“Hold that thought and pay attention,” she says. “They're going to start. See?” She turns Henry's head in Asa's direction and points. The gangly boys are lining up, getting ready, shifting their weight from foot to foot and shaking out their hands. Now they hunch over on their starting blocks, and then there's a pop! and the noise of their hitting the water, all at once. Yelling fills the room.
She and Henry yell too. It's one of his favorite things to do.
Asa does the breaststroke, that wastefully extravagant way of moving through water. His head and shoulders come heaving up out of the pool with an astonishing circular lift of both his arms, and then the arms disappear underwater, pulling down and back, his body rushing forward. With all this dramatic upper-body motion, the action of the boys’ lower bodies is regular, just a steady rocking of their buttocks in and out of the water, a motion that startled Meri when she first saw it, it was so like fucking. Even now she's unable not to take note of it. She wonders whether the boys even think about it, whether they sometimes joke about it with one another.
Asa turns underwater at the end of the pool and comes up again. He's ahead of everyone else, way ahead, which isn't surprising. He's the largest boy in the pool, and a fine swimmer. Nathan taught him. He's taught all the boys. Even Henry can do the crawl better than Meri, who didn't learn to swim until she was an adult.
“Ace! Ace! Beat all of the others, Ace!” Henry yells.
“Come on, baby,” Meri calls out. “Go, go, go, go!”
Everyone is yelling, whistling, clapping. A girl on the bench directly below them is standing, stomping her feet frenziedly and squealing in what sounds like either pain or ecstasy. The din in the tiled space is overwhelming. Henry laughs in joy.
At the second-to-last lap, someone else on the Williston team starts to catch up to Asa. He actually makes the final turn only a second or two after him, but Asa pulls ahead easily at the close, and then suddenly he's hanging at the end of the pool, panting, grinning up at his coach and waiting to hear his time amid the screams of the crowd.
When the meet is over, Asa disappears with the other boys into the showers. Henry and Meri bundle up before they go out to the car and start home. Asa will come home on his bike.
In the car Henry says, “My throat is burned from my yelling.”
“Mine too.”
He's quiet a minute. Then he says, “Why do you call Asa your baby? He's not a baby.”
She looks at him. He's frowning under his thatch of blond hair, hair she still trims herself, at home. “Who is a baby?” she asks. “Are you my baby?”
“No. You don't even have a baby.”
“Ah, but you used to be my baby. Even Asa was my baby once upon a time.”
“But that was too long ago.”
“Well, you're right. I should just cut it out, shouldn't I?”
“Yes, you should,” he says, sternly.
They drive along. Meri is thinking, as she does at least several times a week, of Asa as a baby, thinking of him with the usual pang of sorrow for how little she was able to give to him then, to do for him. Her love for the other two boys as newborns was instant and complete—she was ready to adore them even as they emerged, bloody and gummy, from her body. But she had to learn those feelings slowly and reluctantly with Asa, and she's never stopped feeling guilty for what he missed out on. When Nathan wanted to have a second child, Meri had at first resisted, out of that guilt, out of the sense that Asa should have all of her love forevermore because she was so incapable of loving him at the start, so frightened and closed in.
But Nathan had prevailed, and they'd had Martin, and then much later Henry—like Asa an accident: she was forty-eight at the time, careless about contraception because she thought those days were over for her. And each of the younger boys had made Meri more generous, more profligate with her love, just as Nathan had predicted. Each of them had made her love Asa more, and then more again.
But not just Asa. She had also felt, in the universe she and Nathan made with the boys, that she was somehow revising her own childhood too, giving herself retroactively a sense of safety, of encirclement she'd never had then.
She pulls into the driveway. Nathan's bike, and Martin's too, are leaned against the side of the house. The windows on the first floor blaze with light. When she and Henry come into the living room, she can hear Nathan's voice in the kitchen. They leave their coats on the hooks Nathan installed by the front door. She helps Henry off with his boots, and they head down the hall.
Nathan has already started supper. He greets them both, a kiss for Meri, a high five for Henry. “Did Asa win?” he asks, turning back to her.
“He did.”
“Asa won?” Martin says, looking up from a book he's reading at the kitchen table. He wears glasses and looks geekier than either of the other boys. He is kind of a geek—but oddly, given this, he's enormously popular. When the phone rings, none of the rest of them bothers to answer it if Martin's around, it's always so likely to be for him.
“Easily,” she says.
“What was his time?” Nathan asks.
“That I couldn't tell you. You'll have to wait and ask him when he gets home. What are we having for dinner?” She smells garlic and onions, and he has the big kettle on.
“Spaghetti,” he says.
“Spaghetti!” Henry yells. “Spaghetti! Spaghetti!” He dances around the cooking area of the kitchen. “I. Love. Spaghetti!”
“Henry!” Nathan calls. “Hen! Henry, hold it down.” He points to the party wall, the wall their neighbors, the Switalskis, live behind. Live behind quietly, as Meri and Nathan often point out. They have two little girls, six-year-old twins who seem to be completely orderly children, acoustically barely there.
Meri leans over Nathan's shoulder as he stirs some sausage meat into the sizzling onions, breaking it up with the wooden spoon. She asks him about his day. She tells him about hers.
Nathan says, “I bought a Times, and the Register”—the local paper. “This'll take me at least a half an hour, if you want to sit down and read for a while.”
“I will, I think. I haven't stopped since this morning.” She goes into their living room. She sits down and looks quickly at the front page of the Times. More horror stories from Iraq. She can't bear to read them.
In the kitchen she can hear Henry's voice going up and down, dramatic endings on every sentence. Nathan only has to murmur something occasionally to keep him going.
She skims through the Arts section, finds a pen, and does the crossword puzzle. It's easy today, a Tuesday. By Friday it's hard for her, and she hardly ever even tries Saturday. Then she opens the Register and flips quickly through it, skimming a few articles. When she comes to the obituaries, her hands stop and she makes a little noise.
It's Delia, her face smiling back at Meri.
It's a photograph taken perhaps in her early middle age, but it's unmistakably Delia. The headline is “Senator's Wife Dies at 89.”
Meri feels the deep pounding of her heart. She reads through the obituary once, almost bre
athless, barely taking in the facts presented. Then she forces herself to read it again, more slowly. But even this second time, trying to understand the details, what she's mostly thinking of is the last time she saw Delia, the awful scene that ended everything.
TOM'S FACE, which had been heavy-lidded and rapt watching her, had suddenly changed, his eyes shifting past her, widening. Meri turned, her hands still on her breasts, and saw Delia. Delia, frozen, her mouth dropped open, her eyes wild.
Meri isn't sure what she did first—maybe she tried to pull her blouse closed, maybe she started to get up. She remembers that across the room, Tom was struggling to stand too. When she looked around at Delia again, the old woman had backed up a few steps, her face terrible to see—and then she turned and vanished down the hall.
Meri got back to the kitchen within seconds. Delia already had her purse, her keys, and she was at the opened door. Meri started to speak, to say something, but she was aware at the same moment of Tom's voice in the house behind her, his strange noise, his cry: “Dheee!”
What Delia said to Meri was “No words. Not one word.” Her face was ravaged, but fierce. Her hand was up, her fingers spread: stop. And then she was gone.
Meri stood stupidly, not moving for a moment. Then she followed, out into the bright, hot sunlight. She caught up to Delia, saying . . . what? She can't remember. Delia, this isn't what you think. Delia, please come back. It didn't matter what. It was just words, as Delia said.
They reached the end of the driveway. Delia had said nothing to her, hadn't even looked at her, but her mouth was open and moving. She was breathing noisily and irregularly, a kind of hysterical breathing, Meri would have said, if she'd ever spoken of this moment to anyone. Meri touched Delia's arm and the old woman jerked herself away, spinning to face her.
“Get back there,” she said. She pointed, and Meri looked back and saw Tom just starting toward them down the sunstruck driveway—no walker, no cane, just his slow, perilously uneven lurch. “It's your mess now,” Delia said. Her voice was shrill. “Get back there and see if you can fix it, fix what you've done.”
She turned and walked quickly down Dumbarton toward Main Street.
Meri had stopped, she couldn't go any farther. Asa was back there, alone in Delia's house, asleep. And behind her Tom cried out again, a long, deep wail—as Delia moved rapidly away far down the street, her figure seeming to bob under the dappled shade of the trees. Meri watched her for a moment.
Then she turned and went slowly back up the driveway to Tom.
SHE LIED TO NATHAN. She never thought for a moment of not lying, of telling the truth. She was lying to save herself, to save herself and Nathan together, to save Asa. She was lying for all of them. Tom, listening, said nothing to contradict her. What she told Nathan was that she had just finished nursing Asa, that Delia had arrived and misunderstood what was happening.
Nathan had believed her. He had sided with her, he had been sympathetic and supportive. Weeks later, when they were going over all of it again—as they did repeatedly during that time—he said, “So maybe to her way of thinking he wasn't maimed enough.”
It was the first time either of them had spoken of it with anything approaching distance, much less levity, and Meri felt a simultaneous sense of gratitude to Nathan, and loss. Loss, because he'd moved that far away from it already, far enough away to make a joke—and she knew that she couldn't. That she wouldn't, ever.
She reads the obituary yet again, this time finally forcing herself to imagine it, the way the rest of Delia's life has played out.
The cause of death isn't given, but the obituary says that Delia died in an assisted-living home in Denver.
Near Nancy then. This saddens Meri. She'd met Nancy. She remembers Tom's word for her—formidable—and the little shudder of mock fear he'd given after he said it. She knows enough to surmise that it must have been hard for Delia to end her life in Nancy's care.
But the obituary says she'd been living in Paris until two years before her death; it tells of her love for all things French. It mentions the Apthorp house, and speaks of her part in making it a museum.
It says also that she grew up in the small town of Watkins, Maine, where her father was headmaster at a boys’ school. That she went to Smith College. That she was married to Thomas Naughton in 1940. That he later was a member of the House of Representatives for two terms, and then a senator for two terms also. That in Washington Delia was known for her beauty and charm, her wit. That parties at the Naughtons’ house were coveted invitations.
That she is survived by three children, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
That she and the senator had lived separately after his second campaign for the Senate, though they never divorced. That he predeceased her, in 1998.
But Meri knew that. She and Nathan had been in bed, reading the paper, when Nathan came across that obituary. Wordlessly, he'd held it up in front of her. The photo of Tom's young, eager face had made Meri remember his expression in Delia's living room, watching her.
And then, as now, the other memories flooded her. His mostly silent dinner with them the night that Delia left, a meal during which they kept reassuring him that she would come back, that surely she'd call. He had seemed to seize on this, repeating it, as a child would. Meri had seized on it too, silently. Of course Delia would call. She'd forgiven Tom so much already. She loved him. This couldn't be the end of all that. It wasn't possible that Meri could have set such a thing in motion.
Nathan went over to help Tom get to bed, to spend the night. He slept on the living room couch—he told Meri he wouldn't have felt comfortable going upstairs, poking around up there to find a place to sleep. He'd gotten Tom up the next morning and brought him over for breakfast before Len came to pick him up. They were sure she'd call today, they told him.
But she didn't. And she wasn't there by that evening either, when Matt came over to say he had to get going.
Once again Tom stayed with them for dinner. Once again Nathan went over to help get him to bed. After he'd fallen asleep though, Nathan came home for a while to talk with Meri about what course of action they ought to take. They were sitting in the kitchen still trying to decide this when Nancy called. Meri answered the phone.
Nancy said her mother was with a friend in Washington. That she had decided—“finally,” Nancy said, with heavy emphasis—that it was too much for her, that she couldn't manage Tom's needs by herself.
She said that for now she had arranged for Tom to go back to Putnam as a resident. The driver would take him there tomorrow. She was calling to ask if they would be willing to pack a few days’ worth of clothes and toiletries to go with him. She'd be very grateful. She was already very grateful to them for stepping in with Tom over these last few days. She herself would come east over the weekend and do the rest of what needed to get done.
Yes, Meri said. No, no, it wasn't an imposition. No, they'd be happy to.
Nathan had done it, the packing. He'd gone back over that night to stay with Tom again, and in the morning, while he put the old man's things in a suitcase, he explained to Tom what was happening. Tom came over and had breakfast with them for the last time, and then Len arrived and led him out to the car.
Meri had already said good-bye, and she stayed in the house, watching their slow progress down the stairs and over to the driveway. At the last minute, though, she ran after them. “Tom,” she called. They were at the car, Len had opened the door.
Tom turned to face her. He seemed more hunched over; he looked abruptly years older, years weaker.
She could feel her eyes fill with tears. Len was speaking to her cheerfully, but she paid no attention to him. “I wanted to say goodbye,” she said to Tom.
He nodded. “Unh,” he said.
She put her hand on his arm. It felt bony, the flesh felt loose. She couldn't remember ever having touched him before. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm just so . . . so sorry.”
He shook his hea
d, and then he smiled—his amused, wry smile, that small pursed twist of his mouth. “Noo,” he said. His hand rose to rest flat on his chest, and then he struck himself there. “Mhea culpa!” he said, clearly, still smiling at her.
“Ha! See?” Len said to Meri. “You can take the boy outta the church, but you can't take the church outta the boy.” He helped Tom into the car.
Meri stood in the driveway and watched the sleek black car back down the driveway and make its turn. She watched until it moved out of sight.
Tom's obituary had said that he died in a hospice in Washington, of a long illness. It focused mostly on his career in government, his then-unpopular resistance to the forms the antipoverty movement took under Sargent Shriver. Delia was mentioned as surviving him, she was called the wife from whom he'd been separated for a long time.
Meri is sitting, looking at nothing, having set the paper down. She thinks again of Delia's face in the terrible moment of her discovery, and then of all that happened after she left. She remembers Nancy's arrival that weekend, grim, satisfied, packing her father's possessions up, and some of her mother's too. She remembers the slow emptying out of the house in the months that followed before it was put up for sale, the various visits by Brad and Evan, the rental van Brad drove, the moving trucks that came to take things to Evan, to Nancy.
She remembers going over there alone once that fall on a night when Nathan was off at a meeting. She remembers standing, weeping, in the emptied-out rooms. She remembers the way her cries echoed in the dark.
Henry comes out from the kitchen. “Sing to me, Momma,” he says, as he climbs onto her lap.
“Shall I?” she says. She feels that he's calling her back, that she's still far, far away.
“Yeah.”
“What shall I sing?”
“Sing ‘Pay My Money.’”
This is a song from a Bruce Springsteen CD that Nathan brought home recently. Henry has fallen in love with it.
Meri starts, her voice soft and croaky at first. “Well I thought I heard the captain say, / ‘Pay me my money down. / Pay me or go to jail . . .’”
