by Sue Miller
Asa rescues her after a verse or two, coming in the front door, dropping his backpack on the floor. “Hey,” he says. His face is red and chapped-looking. His eyes are teary and pink-rimmed from the cold. He takes his hat off, his mittens and coat.
Henry has sat up. “We seen you win, Ace,” he says. “We yelled and yelled.”
“Yeah, I heard you up there.” He grins at Henry.
Henry slides off Meri's lap and goes to Asa. He drapes himself around one of Asa's legs—that's how much smaller, how much younger he is than his brother. “Ace is the winner!” he yells.
“You were great, honey,” Meri says.
“Yeah, well, I'm starving,” Asa says. He starts back toward the kitchen, pulling Henry along.
“I'm starving too!” Henry cries.
Feeling numb, distracted, Meri follows them. In the kitchen, she gets out a tablecloth and sails it open over the kitchen table. She gathers utensils from the drawer and moves around the table, setting them in place.
The boys leave to wash their hands. Meri thinks of telling Nathan about Delia now, but she doesn't. She doesn't because she knows he'll be sympathetic, sympathetic to her—he'll remember what he understood of her sorrow at the time, of her guilt, and he'll think of it as being compounded, being redoubled now, by Delia's death.
And it isn't. It just isn't, she doesn't know why.
She looks at him, grating cheese now, his big hands in motion, his hair swaying with each push. Nathan.
The boys come back, wiping their wet hands on their jeans, and they all sit down. Nathan serves the spaghetti, and they pass the pasta dishes around the table. He starts to sing: “Oh, Muss-olini was so proud, was-so-proud. / He ate spaghetti long and loud, long-and-loud. / He used to wind it round and round . . .”
The boys’ braying drowns him out. They've heard it before—many times before. Almost every time they have spaghetti.
“Shh, shh, shh,” Meri says. “Let's be quiet. Let's be elegant.”
They start to eat. “But what is elegant?” Henry asks after a minute.
“Elegant is behaving terribly well. Is being polite. Is saying please and thank you.”
“All the time?” Henry asks.
“Whenever appropriate,” Nathan says.
Martin asks to have the Parmesan cheese passed to him.
“Please,” Meri says.
“Please, please, please, please,” Martin says, making his voice whiny.
“What is appropriate?” Henry asks.
Meri explains while Nathan asks Asa about the meet. They talk about that, about Asa's chances of getting on the varsity team next year. About Henry's burned throat from cheering him on.
Martin asks Meri if she'll go over his lines with him after dinner. He's in a play at the college—he has the only kid part in it—and he dreamed last night that he got onstage and couldn't remember anything. He couldn't even recognize his cues. “And in the dream everyone was trying to help me, whispering them so loud it was like screaming, but it didn't help. I still couldn't remember them.”
“Everybody has those dreams, honey,” Meri says. “It doesn't mean anything.”
Nathan talks about a dream he once had in which he was giving a lecture with notes that turned out to be in some unrecognizable hieroglyphic language.
“What's hydroglippic?” Henry asks.
Asa explains. He gets up for some paper, and draws various glyphs he invents for Henry, in the end making a sentence with an eye, a heart, and a soccer ball, a sentence that Henry reads out loud with delight several times over.
After supper they clean up. In the living room, Meri goes over Martin's lines with him. Nathan has gone up to his study, and Asa is doing his homework on the dining room table. Henry sits across the living room, earplugs in, listening to songs only he can hear on his portable CD player. By himself—a matter of pride—he's changed into his pajamas, an old pair, almost worn out, that have come down from Martin, and before him from Asa. Meri can remember Asa in those pajamas, remember the ways in which he was exactly himself, even at Henry's age, completely different from the way Henry is now, and from Martin at that age too—grave and always anxious about being good, about pleasing her. Henry, unworried about any of that, occasionally sings a phrase out loud while he waits for Meri to put him to bed.
When Martin feels safe with his lines, Meri takes Henry upstairs and reads him two picture books. He leans more and more heavily against her. She turns off the light and lies beside him as his breathing slows and deepens. She's thinking, as she has on and off throughout the evening, of Delia, of Delia and Tom, and of herself, then. That Meri, the Meri who had known them, who had cared so much about what their story was, about their history, about what they thought about her—the Meri who had so carelessly wrecked their lives—that version of herself seems impossibly far away, her life is so absolutely here, so bound up with the boys and Nathan.
She can remember feeling then that she and Nathan would have no story in the sense that Delia and Tom did, no parallel deep currents of love between them. She had thought she knew already what their marriage was, what its limits were. She had thought they were in it. She didn't know they'd barely begun. She couldn't have imagined the long, slow processes that would change them, change what they felt for each other. She would never have guessed, either, the way the children would remake them and their love.
Once, recently, as she and Nathan collapsed into bed at the end of the day and then lay there next to each other, neutered by fatigue, waiting only for sleep, that summum bonum, she jokingly said to him, “Think we're a match made in heaven, Natey?”
He didn't answer for a moment, and she thought he'd dropped off. But then he turned and touched her face. “I think we're a match made right here on earth, in this very house.”
That feels right, and true to Meri—that it is the things she and Nathan have lived through here, with each other and the children, that have made them who they are, and who they are together.
BUT TOM AND DELIA were a part of that for her, she's thinking now. They changed her also, they had a role in fitting her for the life she has now.
She had, she knows, wanted Delia to change her. She had sought Delia out, she had thought she could learn from her. She had even thought she could learn from the private story of Delia's life, from the letters from Tom that she went through. Meri remembers Delia's face when she said that life teaches you you can endure anything, when she said you needed to forgive yourself. It always seemed to Meri that she was about to understand something large and important about how to be in the world from Delia.
But in the end she has come to think it was Tom who changed her more, who gave her something, something that she didn't know she needed. It's the memories of him that have stayed with her, that have come back to her most clearly, most often. Over and over in those few odd afternoons she shared with him, he seemed to be inviting her to smile, to laugh with him. She remembers it all—the humor in his eyes, the gentle comedy in the gestures he made to her. The day he thanked her with his hand on his chest, the day he raised his finger to his lips. She remembers. She remembers his acting out Asa's greed, his funny protest of the milk that had spurted from her all over him. She remembers laughing with Tom then, laughing at him. Laughing at Asa for the first time. Even—yes—laughing at herself. She remembers that Tom made her feel whole, happy. That he made her feel beautiful.
“Mea culpa,” he had said after Delia left, and that was a great, generous gift to her. But he was smiling when he said it, and that was perhaps the greater gift.
Henry stirs beside her in the bed. “Blue,” he says, or something like it. She looks down at his sleeping face, restored to near-infancy in its utter relaxation. Carefully she slides her body off the bed, slowly she gets up. She crosses the room, steps into the hall and closes Henry's door behind her. She stands in the hallway, listening. Martin is going over one of his lines again in his room, repeating it, trying different emphases. Asa has music o
n low downstairs. She can hear the dining room chair creak as he shifts his weight in it. Henry is in his bed, Nathan is in his study. She has the sense of her life surrounding her, of being held in it. Of belonging here.
She thinks of the photo of Delia again, and she remembers her desperation trying to talk to her, trying to explain herself. And of course, there was probably nothing she could have said that would have changed anything then. She had done what she had done.
But what she would have told Delia if she had had the words then for what she has come to feel over the years, what she would have said—and she would swear that this is true—is that she did what she did with Tom that day for love. Out of love.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbotts; and the memoir The Story of My Father. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Sue Miller
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Sue [date]
The senator's wife / by Sue Miller.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction.
3. Female friendship—Fiction. 4. Middle class—Fiction.
5. New England—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.I421444S46 2008
813'.54–dc22 2007014659
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26872-3
v3.0
