The Senator's Children

by Nicholas Montemarano

  She went inside and took off her boots and her coat. She went up to bed, where within minutes she fell asleep.

  *

  When she woke, it was dark—outside and inside. She was thirsty, and the pain was working its way back through her body. She walked through the dark to the bathroom for a glass of water. She found candles, brought them downstairs, and lit them. After starting a fire in the fireplace, she tried to get comfortable on the couch under two blankets.

  And then, just as she was about to fall asleep again, the lights came back on and the phone was ringing.

  She wrapped one of the blankets around her and went to the phone in the kitchen. She let it ring until she heard her own voice on the answering machine. “We’re not here . . .”

  Following the beep, there was a pause. Then she heard David’s voice. “It’s me,” he said. “I just wanted to check on you.”

  Danielle picked up the phone. “David,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You sound like you’re crying.”

  After a moment he said, “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  She couldn’t get out any words. David said, “Honey, are you still there?”

  “I’m still here,” she said.

  OCTOBER 23, 1996

  Betsy’s roommate, her fourth in just over three years at Columbia, was hovering. Her previous roommates had been distant, as if afraid of her, but this one was the opposite: she liked to poke, prod, intrude; she asked too many questions; she was the nosiest person Betsy had ever met. Her name was Virginia, and some people called her Gin, but she was from Montana, and some people called her Montana. Betsy thought of her simply as the roommate. It was hard not to think about her; she was always there.

  Now, for example: hovering over Betsy as she packed a bag. The roommate was dressed as a Bond girl—specifically, Honey Ryder, played by Ursula Andress in 1962’s Dr. No. She planned to wear the costume every day for the next week. The temperature was around fifty, but still, the roommate was wearing a white bikini and a white belt above her bikini bottom and a brown leather holster for a plastic knife, all of which Andress had worn during a “famous” beach scene, the roommate had explained to Betsy. She had worn this outfit to her classes.

  “When people ask who I’m supposed to be,” she said now, “I never say Honey Ryder, which is like a porn star’s name. I say Ursula Andress, which I guess could be a porn star’s name too—you know, because Andress sounds like undress. But I just love her. I wish my last name were Andress.” The roommate had declared this, almost word for word, that morning when Betsy first saw her costume, and Betsy now said the same thing she’d said that morning: “You’re old enough to change your name, you know.”

  “Would you ever change your name?”

  This, Betsy knew, after two months as the roommate’s roommate, was a teaser question intended to elicit personal information.

  “I like my name,” Betsy said.

  “Are you an Elizabeth?”

  “You’ve asked me that before,” Betsy said.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “I’m just Betsy.”

  “Because usually when you meet a Betsy, she’s an Elizabeth.”

  Betsy wanted to say, “Usually you don’t meet a Virginia from Montana,” but she knew this could elicit a long monologue from the roommate about her family history, which would lead to the story of how her parents got divorced but then remarried each other, which would lead to various stories of her own romantic life, how she dated only older men, including one of her professors, stories she’d already told Betsy who knew how many times. Betsy didn’t know what to believe anyway. She had come to assume that everyone was lying, that people had ulterior motives, that no one could be trusted.

  “Listen, I was thinking, maybe you want some company.”

  “Thanks, but I may stay only one night.”

  “I don’t really know Philadelphia,” the roommate said.

  “Maybe next time.”

  Betsy grabbed a few books from her desk and a sweater from her drawer, put them into her bag, and zipped it closed.

  The roommate was standing in front of the door. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t mind going.”

  “Thanks, really, but I’d like to spend some quality time with my dad.”

  There—she’d said it. Brought him up. Which she knew would give the roommate an opening to say:

  “What’s he like—your father?”

  Betsy paused as if trying to find just the right words. “He’s lonely and has no friends, except Swish, which is the dog he recently got—because he’s lonely. He’s handsome, and he’s dated a few women since my mother died—I told you she died, right?—and I’ve met a few by accident, but he wasn’t really interested in them, I could tell, because he still loves my mother.”

  For the first time in two months, the roommate was speechless.

  “Any other questions about my father?” Betsy said.

  *

  She had lied, of course. Her father did have a few friends, including Tim Swisher—such a good friend he didn’t mind a dog being named after him. And the part about quality time with her father—it was what she wanted, but she didn’t know what that meant anymore. He was lonely, and she didn’t know how to be around him. Sometimes she believed that he should be lonely, not as some kind of punishment but because—she didn’t know why, it just seemed right, for now. He was practicing law again. Like Betsy, he spent too much time working. In the three years Betsy had been in college, she and her father had drifted from each other. They hadn’t become strangers, but their conversations were brief and remained safely on the surface of things—her classes, his work, the dog. Never politics, especially not now, during the homestretch of an election season. Not that there was much suspense: Dole had no chance, Clinton would be reelected in a landslide, anyone could see that. Sometimes, they talked about Nick. Sometimes, by accident, awkwardly, about her mother.

  *

  As the train approached Philadelphia, her stomach went cold—a nervous feeling she hated. She remembered that she had two chocolate chip cookies in her bag. She ate half of one and put the uneaten half back into her bag. She felt a little better. But then she felt worse again, and so she ate the other half of the first cookie, and then she ate the second cookie, and then the train pulled into Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, but she didn’t move. She sat there, chewing the last of the second cookie, as passengers walked down the aisle and off the train.

  An hour later she got off in Buchanan. She’d done this before, but not in a few years. The first year after her mother died, she would take the train to Buchanan and walk from the station to the college where her mother had taught, and then walk around campus. She could have been a student there, and sometimes pretended that she was. She would go to the library and do her homework there. She would look in the stacks for her mother’s book about tragedy. She didn’t go into the building where her mother’s office had been for fear that someone might recognize her.

  It was dusk now, and she should be at home; her father would wonder where she was. She didn’t want to walk around Buchanan College; she didn’t know what she wanted except not to be home.

  She walked through the streets of Buchanan with no plan, no destination. Her father used to do something like this—go for a run without a plan, just run wherever he felt like it, turn here, go straight for a while, turn there, and see where fate, if that was what it was, led him. She did that now—except she walked. It was scary not knowing exactly where she was or where she was going or for how long she’d do this or when she’d be able to get the next train home or how worried her father might be, but then she felt it—the Nick-feeling, as if he were with her or watching her. A good feeling.

  And then she saw a bright light and walked toward it.

  As she got closer, she saw the sign: Wheatland.

  Her mother had taught for over twenty years at a coll
ege named after James Buchanan, and yet Betsy knew very little about him, except that he had preceded Lincoln.

  Betsy could feel the ghosts inside Wheatland: hats and coats still hung on hooks; calling cards in the calling card dish by the front entrance; unfinished letters beside dry quills on the desk Buchanan used in the White House; an unopened bottle of wine dated 1827; two depressions in the padded prayer bench where Buchanan’s niece used to kneel; empty chamber pots; an empty cup on Buchanan’s shaving desk; empty beds perfectly made; the small tin tub where Buchanan stood to bathe; a large brass tub and above it the showerhead through which warmed rainwater fell; a portrait of two boys, Buchanan’s niece’s sons, already dead from rheumatic fever by the time the artist created their likeness, the sea and a rocky shoreline in the background. The docent, an old man dressed in nineteenth-century fashion, kept saying “you all” even though Betsy was the only one on the tour—the last of the day. As Betsy walked through the house, she imagined that time had not passed, that all time was happening at once, that every moment lasted forever: James Buchanan was still and would always be washing his gouty feet, and always listening to his niece play the piano, and always hanging his coat on the coatrack by the front door, and always writing his memoir, and always dying in his bed with a view of the lawn and the trees, his lungs and heart failing; he would always be sipping wine and warming his bed and taking his last breath.

  *

  When Betsy arrived home, her father was waiting at the door. “I thought you’d be home earlier.”

  “I missed my train.”

  He asked what she wanted for dinner, and she said, “Sorry, I made plans,” and he said, “Maybe tomorrow night,” and she said, “Actually, I may need to head back tomorrow for a study group,” and he said, “Breakfast, then.”

  Betsy had no plans but went out anyway. She went to a bar, ordered a beer, and took her time drinking it. Later, in Rittenhouse Square, she sat on a bench under a lamp and read. She waited until ten o’clock before walking home.

  There was egg on the side of the house. She didn’t believe that it had been a random prank. Quietly she went inside and down to the basement, where she filled a bucket with warm soapy water. She found a rag, carried the rag and bucket outside, and wiped the bricks and windows, but this only seemed to make it worse, the egg spreading. She wiped so hard that she made a hole in the rag.

  The front door opened. Under the porch light she could see more gray in her father’s hair. “Come in,” he said.

  “Just let me clean this.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Stupid kids,” she said. “It’s not even Halloween yet.”

  She continued scrubbing until her father took the rag from her. “It’s late,” he said. “Please come in now.”

  DECEMBER 17, 1999

  It was parents’ day, but in her mind—and aloud—Avery kept calling it parent day. It was the last day of school before break, a week before Christmas Eve. Avery, who already knew there was no Santa Claus, had asked her mother for the new Harry Potter—her mother had read to her the first two, and in the fall, Avery, a great reader for seven years old, had read the third on her own—and she was disappointed when her mother told her that the fourth book did not exist yet, that it wouldn’t be published until next year. She asked instead for Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden and James and the Giant Peach. Her mother said, “You know you’re not an orphan, right?” and Avery said, “I know,” and her mother said, “Then why so many books about orphans?” and Avery said, “I didn’t know they were all about orphans.”

  Except she did; she was interested in orphans. She found the idea of being an orphan, at least in the cases of Harry Potter and Pippi Longstocking, to be more exciting than frightening. She never wanted her mother to die—Bambi and Dumbo and The Lion King had made her cry—but sometimes she imagined that for some reason she was alone, and therefore special, and had secret powers, and was worthy of being written about in books.

  She’d written a book for parent day—all second graders did—but it had to be a nonfiction book, meaning it had to be true, and it had to be about your family, and so she’d written five pages—three complete sentences and a drawing on each page—about how her favorite thing to do was fall asleep knowing her mother was still up, and some mornings she woke first and got into bed with her mother and watched her sleep and sometimes fell back asleep herself, and when Avery woke again her mother was right there watching her. She knew how to draw a really good bed with details like bedposts and even the pink flowers on the bedspread, and she gave her mother long dark hair—she liked her mother’s hair—even though her mother pulled her hair back before bed.

  The children sat on a large oval rug in the center of the classroom and read their books aloud to their parents. Some kids had a mom and a dad there, some had just a dad there, some had just a mom there, some had two moms, no one had two dads there, though Avery understood—her mother had explained all this to her—that some kids, maybe no one in her class, had two dads, and that was okay, there were many kinds of families.

  Like theirs, her mother had told her. Avery had both a mother and a father, but she was being raised by her mother. As soon as she was old enough, around when she was three, she had asked where her father was, and her mother had said, “Your father had some difficult things happen, and right now he’s sad and needs to try to feel better, but when he’s better, I’m sure he’ll come to see you.”

  A few days later Avery asked, “What difficult things?”

  Her mother thought about her answer for longer than usual, and Avery waited. Then her mother said, “He made some mistakes, and was very hard on himself.” Avery wanted to know what mistakes, and her mother said, “Sometimes people make complicated choices,” an answer Avery found too complicated to understand.

  When she was five, she finally thought she understood. She asked if her father had died.

  No, her mother told her—he was alive.

  Now, Avery read her nonfiction book to her mother, while her classmates did the same, and she could see that her mother was pleased. Avery knew that her mother’s tears were happy, not sad—her mother had explained the difference.

  When Avery finished reading, the boy sitting beside her looked at her book’s cover—a drawing of her and her mother beneath the title My Family—and said, “You forgot to draw your dad.”

  Avery looked at her mother. Then she glanced at some of the other covers around her: each had two parents and sometimes brothers and sisters, and her cover seemed plain in comparison. “Why don’t we add him,” her mother said, and Avery shrugged, which was not a yes, but not a no. Her mother asked the teacher for a box of crayons, and she brought it to Avery and sat on the big circle rug and watched Avery draw. Because she didn’t know what her father looked like, Avery gave him red hair like Pippi Longstocking and round glasses like Harry Potter and made him very tall and gave him a tie. But before she had finished, her mother said, “He has brown hair, and he doesn’t wear glasses,” and now Avery started to get upset, it was impossible to erase crayon, and maybe her mother could see Avery’s eyes filling, because she said, “It’s okay, it’s good the way it is, keep going.” Avery didn’t want to, and so her mother finished the drawing, coloring the tie blue and trying her best to change the hair from red to brown.

  Avery had drawn her father all the way on the right side of the cover—she and her mother were in the middle—and her mother drew a jump rope in her father’s hands even though his hands were at his sides, and connected the jump rope to Avery’s hands, even though she’d never jumped rope in her life, and the cover looked weird, it was ruined, but she didn’t want her mother to see her upset, so she excused herself to the bathroom, and took her time, and when she came out her mother was still working on the cover, as if she were the child. She had drawn a house and a sun and a partly cloudy sky.

  *

  That night, her mother brought Avery a shoe box; inside were ph
otos of her father—not real photos but cutouts from newspapers and books. He did have brown hair, just as her mother had drawn it on Avery’s cover, and he didn’t have glasses, and he was wearing a tie, and he was handsome and looked like a nice man—he was smiling—and her mother said, “This is your father, and he will always be your father. I can tell you more about him as you get older. Would you like that?”

  Avery shrugged, which was not yes, not no. One part of her did want to know more, and another part of her—the part that preferred to imagine her father—did not.

  OCTOBER 18, 2000

  The things you hide; the things you tell no one; the things you take to the grave. Maybe the dead could see. David wondered about that. He imagined that Nick was watching. Especially during his early-morning runs along the river with Swish, watching the sun rise over the water. He didn’t pray, but sometimes he talked to Nick—which was, for David, a kind of prayer. Are you there? Are you somewhere? Can you see me? Even when I hide my hands in my pockets, can you see the tremors? So slight someone might not notice. Still, he hid his hands.

  When he used to run as a younger man, in his thirties and forties, he wouldn’t have guessed that he’d still be running in his sixties. He’d assumed he’d get tired of it, or his body would, and he’d retire into walking. He wasn’t even sure he liked it much anymore. He’d been having difficulty tying the laces of his sneakers. This morning he’d lost his balance when trying to put on his running shorts and had to sit on the bed. His leg muscles had been cramping lately no matter how much he hydrated and stretched. Maybe he still ran for the connection he felt with Nick, and for this: the moment he stopped. Two miles along the Schuylkill, two miles back, and then the runner’s high as he walked the final quarter mile, sweat drying on his face and back, forty-something degrees, Swish panting and happy beside him.

  He liked to run early enough that there were few other runners. He’d run four miles and it was still only 6:45. A good thing, because he started laughing. He opened his eyes and checked that no one was nearby; they’d think he was crazy. He was remembering the Bush-Gore debate the night before—or, as he liked to call it, the Bush-Bore debate. It was the first time he’d watched a presidential debate since he’d been in one nine years earlier. He was laughing about the nod. Bush was speaking when Gore stood up and wandered closer to him. Bush gave him this nod that translated as “Hey, tough guy, you’re crowding my space—you okay?” Spontaneous and brilliant from a man not at all brilliant. David knew right then that Gore would blow this. Much smarter than Bush, far more qualified, but he’d sighed like a petulant child during the first debate, and now this weak attempt to out-tough Bush by invading his space. Probably already too late. God, David was so glad to be out of that world—though of course his exit had been sudden and humiliating. There was that. He stopped laughing.