The Senator's Children Read online

  DECEMBER 6, 1984

  At Buchanan College, an hour west of Philadelphia, Danielle walked into the classroom prepared to give her final lecture of the semester. She was afraid to give it, and so she had practiced: how tragedy is a slippery word made more so by every new theory about it; how if you try to define tragedy, someone very smart will find an exception; how tragedy in reference to art and tragedy in reference to life are not the same; how too often the word is used as a replacement for sad; how tragedy must involve suffering but all suffering isn’t necessarily tragic; how the so-called tragedies they had read that semester, by the beauty of the words used to create them—the slightest form of redemption—might not be tragedies after all; how perhaps true tragedies are not turned into art but are suffered in private.

  She laid her notes on the desk and looked at her students staring at her. They were only a few years older than her son would ever be. One student, Cal Westfall, a freshman but the best student in the class, raised his hand.

  Before she could call on Cal, she had a panic attack.

  By the time she reached the ladies’ room, she was having trouble breathing. She locked herself in a stall, where she sat on the toilet seat. She finger-pressed one of her nostrils closed and tried to breathe slowly.

  A few minutes later, she heard the bathroom door open, then the voices of two students from her class. One of the girls went into the next stall. Danielle, afraid the other girl would recognize her shoes, lifted her feet. The girl, upon glancing beneath the door and believing the stall to be empty, tried to push open the door. She kept pushing, harder, and Danielle said, “There’s someone in here,” and the girl said, “Sorry.”

  Danielle felt that she might die, and that to die wouldn’t be so terrible, and with this thought some of her anxiety lifted—enough for her to walk back to class, ten minutes late.

  She stood outside the room, staring at her empty chair, her notes on the desk, before walking in. Everyone stopped talking and looked at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m not feeling well. I’m going to hold office hours instead of class—in case you have questions about the final.”

  She gathered her notes, but before she could leave, Cal said, “Professor, we got you something.” He walked to the front of the class and handed her a gift. Even though it was wrapped, she could tell by its shape and weight that it was a book. She hadn’t expected this at all. She knew that the gesture wasn’t just because this was the last class, but that it also had to do with the accident. The class had gone through it with her, in a way. They’d been mature. They’d known how to offer condolences like adults. They’d said, “I was so sorry to hear, Professor,” or some version of that, before moving on to the business of class.

  She stood there holding their gift and thought, I should have gotten them a gift. She was afraid she might cry. Had she tried to speak, even to say thank you, she wouldn’t have been able. She wanted to open the gift later, in her office, but they were all looking at her. It was obvious that they wanted her to open it.

  She peeled off the wrapping paper slowly, and this helped focus her and calm her nerves. She couldn’t believe what it was—it was too expensive, it couldn’t be, but it was, the pink dust jacket, the haunting Alvin Lustig drawing, A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947 first edition. They knew it was her favorite.

  “This is too much,” she said.

  “If it makes you feel better,” Cal said, “my aunt owns an antiquarian bookstore, so we got a family discount.”

  “That makes me feel a little better,” she said. “I’ll cherish this. Thank you all very much.”

  In her office she had a bottle of red wine left over from an evening department meeting a week earlier—the first meeting she had attended since the accident; it took all of her strength and composure to get through her classes. Now, she poured wine into a coffee mug; she stared down into the wine before taking a sip. Her office hours had begun, but she couldn’t bring herself to open the door.

  She opened Streetcar and lifted it to her face. The smell reminded her of other old books she had smelled and the places she had smelled them—used-book stores in New York and London—and the quiet, peaceful feeling she associated with such places. Sometimes, when she was daydreaming before class, the memory of a specific bookstore, maybe one in Boston or Los Angeles she’d been to only once, would pop into her head in great detail—the storefront, the lighting, the layout of the shelves, the register, the face of the person behind the counter, the books she’d bought.

  She heard voices outside her door—a young man and woman from her class. There was a knock, but she didn’t move.

  After they were gone, she drank the wine she’d poured. She poured some more and drank it quickly, then lay on the couch in her office and closed her eyes.

  SPRING 1985

  The first time Betsy heard her mother say into the phone to her father, “Remember, tomorrow is a good day to try,” she registered it as curious—try what?—but not curious enough that Betsy thought too much about it. But when her mother said the same thing a month later, leaning against the kitchen counter, the phone receiver cradled between her shoulder and face so that she could peel an apple for Betsy, she knew that whatever to try meant, she wasn’t supposed to know.

  One day after school, she went into Nick’s room. She went in there at least once every day, sometimes just to lie on his bed, which made her feel closer to him, and look across the room at his clothes still hanging in his closet. She didn’t expect to find her mother sitting on Nick’s bed, blouse unbuttoned, head down, deep in concentration, pushing a needle into the flesh of her stomach, pinched between her fingers.

  Betsy froze in the doorway, unable to continue into the room or back out. Her mother looked up, startled, and dropped the needle. Betsy thought she’d caused her mother to prick herself. Her mother said, “Betsy, how many times have I told you to knock on any closed door.”

  Betsy said that she was sorry and went to her room.

  *

  She didn’t understand why they wanted another when they already had one. When they’d had two, there had been no desire for three, but now that they had one, they wanted two again. She was pretty sure it was her mother who wanted another and her father who wanted whatever her mother wanted, whatever might make her her again.

  Her father was in DC during the week, her mother was teaching at Buchanan College on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Betsy was in fifth grade, trying to be more like Nick. She was no athlete, like her brother had been, but she had joined cross-country. She couldn’t throw or catch or shoot or dribble or kick a ball, any kind of ball, not well, but she could run.

  She ran with her father on weekends. She tried to keep up but couldn’t, even though he ran more slowly than he would have alone or with Nick. Too soon she’d have to walk, a terrible cramp in her side, her lungs burning, and her father would stop and walk with her. He was kind that way; he encouraged her. But she was doing this more for her mother. If she wanted to impress her father, it was so that he would report back to her mother what a good runner she was, or at least how hard she’d tried, and maybe then her mother wouldn’t want another, maybe she’d be fine with just Betsy.

  And so one Saturday morning that first spring without Nick, Betsy pushed herself past the cramp in her side and the burning in her lungs and into the nausea that comes after. Her father had coached her to push through discomfort but to listen to her body, two pieces of advice that seemed at odds. She ran off the path and out of sight to the edge of the river they’d been running alongside and got sick, and she thought: Mom will hear about this and not want another. She will remember that she already has a child who gets sick and needs help and is here and alive but has been feeling invisible, a living, breathing ghost.

  They walked home along the river and then through the city, and her father put his arm around her and made sure they stopped for water and pressed the water fountain button for her. She was dizzy and felt warm
despite the cool spring morning, but the longer they walked, the cooler she became, and the sweat on her face and back grew cold.

  When they arrived home and her mother asked how she did, her father said, “We had a nice run. It’s beautiful out.” Even though he was being kind by not telling her mother that Betsy had gotten sick, Betsy wanted her to know. “It was harder than I thought,” she said, hoping her father would say the rest, that she’d tried hard but gotten sick, but he didn’t. “I feel a little woozy,” she said, again hoping her father would take her cue, but he brought Betsy a glass of water and kissed her forehead. Finally she said, “I got sick,” but her mother didn’t hear. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch with a book on her lap, some tragedy she must have been teaching that week. Betsy could see the dog-eared pages and the passages her mother had underlined and her notes in the margins, but she could tell that her mother wasn’t reading. Her hands held the book open on her lap, but she was staring across the room at nothing.

  PART TWO

  Kiss and Tell

  2010

  FEBRUARY 14, 2010

  She bikes the two miles conscious of her ass.

  Not whether it looks good, or whether biking will make it look good, but what her ass might be doing to the photo in the back pocket of her jeans: a handsome man holding a baby, both of them blurred.

  It’s just a color copy of a photo from a tabloid, almost as old as she is, but she doesn’t want it to be too creased. She stops at the side of the road, moves the photo to her coat pocket, then continues biking.

  She has a folder on her computer, deeply buried and password-protected: tabloid pieces, embarrassing photos, articles from legit papers too. Downloads of books. Reviews, customer comments. So many books, so many contradictions; with every new word written the truth becomes murkier.

  She’s read, as far as she knows, everything written about this family. Seventeen years old, a second-semester college student, and already she has a PhD in them. Had David written a memoir, she could read it to him, a note from him then to him now. She could remind him of who he was and what he did. She could show him the photo in her pocket. But memoirs aren’t true, she thinks. A memoirist always has an eye on history; a memoirist spins the truth the way a politician does; a memoirist confesses and confesses but never to the worst; a memoirist reveals all his secrets but the darkest. One biography claims that To Kill a Mockingbird was David’s favorite book and made him want to be a lawyer; another claims that his favorite was All the King’s Men, which seems such the obvious choice, Avery thinks as she bikes the final bitch of a hill, that it must be made up.

  *

  She tells the gray-haired woman at the front desk of the nursing care facility that she is here to see David Christie. “I’m a relative of his,” she says. She explains that this is the first time she’s been able to come see him and then asks the woman what room David is in. The woman tells Avery the room number and asks her to sign in. Avery writes her real name, then realizes, as she walks down the long hallway to his room, that it isn’t really her name. Not the name she was born with. She had to wait until she was sixteen to change it. She’d been a hyphen but didn’t want her mother’s or father’s name anymore. So she made up a new one: Avery Modern. She just liked the sound of it. Newness. Now. A break from the past.

  Her mother was hurt. Not because she wanted Avery to keep her name but because she wanted Avery to keep her father’s name.

  Even with a new name, finally away at Buchanan College—a choice that hurt her mother even more than Avery’s new name—she’s still afraid someone will know who she really is. Her childhood home was often dark, the blinds drawn. Some days, after months of nothing, the bell would ring, a camera would flash, and her mother would slam the door.

  The door to his room is ajar. She knocks, but when no one says “come in,” she pushes the door open anyway. It’s a large room divided into three areas. On the far side, by the window, are a bed and dresser. The side of the room closest to the door is a living area with a love seat, two chairs, and a TV mounted on the wall. Between the living area and the bed are a desk and a small bookcase.

  Avery walks in to get a closer look at the framed photo on the dresser: a younger David, his wife, their two children. She looks at their faces, into their eyes, the photo taken years before she, Avery, was born, and then she hears faintly a man’s voice, “I’m sorry,” and a woman’s voice, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” She was so fixated on the photo that she didn’t notice until now the open bathroom door: he is sitting on the toilet, a nurse cleaning him, a wheelchair beside the toilet. She goes back into the hallway to wait.

  *

  She has thought about this moment for months, ever since she discovered online that David had moved into this facility. She has prepared for it as much as one can prepare for something like this. She has the photo and plans to show it to him. Maybe that’s the first thing she should do. But what she didn’t consider, she realizes as the nurse opens the door and sees her, is what to say if asked in front of him who she is. She could say exactly what she wrote when she signed in: her name. Maybe just her first name, leave it at that. She could say “just a friend.” She could lie, not a great idea, and say she’s a volunteer who visits people who don’t get many visitors.

  But before the nurse can say anything, David recognizes her. Or seems to.

  “Hello,” he whispers. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  Avery can barely hear him. The nurse explains that he speaks only in whispers now. “Sometimes you have to lean in close,” she says.

  “She knows,” he says.

  Then to Avery: “It’s been a while.”

  She walks over to him and stands beside his chair. She tries not to betray her shock. She already knew from photos of him online that his hair is gray, but his body shaking this much, especially his hands—no photo could ever show that.

  He was every bit as good as Clinton at making people believe him. Clinton bit his lip and squinted to seem sincere, whereas David did this thing with his jaw, he would flex it, the bones would kind of pop. It seemed involuntary, and maybe that was its power. It gave the impression of simultaneous stillness and motion, vulnerability and strength. He never used any of those cliché politician hand gestures like the Clinton thumb, which was really the Kennedy thumb, fist closed, thumb resting against the thumbside of the index finger and slightly extended, a way of pointing without pointing; or the hand steeple, where the fingers come together to form a little rooftop. Not David Christie; he kept his fingers interlocked as if in prayer, or palms down on a dais, arms slightly tensed, torso leaning forward. Early in his career he used to keep his hands in his pockets. Someone smart must have told him not to; looks like you’re hiding something. Maybe the jaw flex is something not everyone can do, like rolling your tongue. No doubt someone on his campaign noticed it and said, “Keep doing that thing with your jaw, it plays well,” and maybe David said, “What thing with my jaw?”

  Avery has looked in a mirror and tried, but all that happens is she grinds her teeth or moves her lips into a pout or twitches her nose or furrows her brows. She ends up looking menacing or ridiculous or both. David must not be aware of it, because he still does it—right now, in fact. Even as the Parkinson’s causes him to shake in his wheelchair, a quick flex of his jaw makes him look dignified. He’s trim and still dresses sharp: gray slacks, white oxford, brown leather loafers.

  “In the closet,” he whispers, and at first Avery thinks he’s telling her to get into the closet.

  She comes to understand that he’s asking her to open the closet. She slides open the door: three suits, a dozen or more button-down shirts, and what must be fifty ties—all of them blue.

  “You pick,” he says.

  As she’s looking through the ties, more dark blue than light, he whispers in his chair behind her, “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “You certainly like the color blue,” she says, even though she already knew thi
s about him.

  She chooses navy with a pattern of alternating thin and thicker white stripes. She’s not sure what to do with it.

  “I know you know how to tie a tie,” he whispers.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  “I taught you myself.”

  “I must have forgotten.”

  She lays the tie on his lap. He manages to pick it up, but his shaking causes him to drop it. She picks it up, brushes it clean with her hand.

  “My doctor told me this would happen,” he says, “but I was sure I’d figure out a way to cheat it.”

  “Did I choose the right one?” she says.

  “You look good, honey,” he says.

  That word, honey, what a father might say to his daughter.

  “Let me get the nurse,” she says.

  “Betsy, wait,” he says, but she leaves.

  She walks down the long hallway to the lobby, where old people—older than David—sleep away the day like cats. She stops at the nurses’ station and tells the first one she sees that David Christie needs help getting dressed. The nurse smiles and says, “Okay, we’ll have someone check on him.”

  Only when she’s outside, about to unlock her bike, does Avery realize that she’s still clutching the tie. She takes a few steps back toward the entrance, but stops. She folds the tie and puts it into her coat pocket with the photo. She unlocks her bike and begins the ride back to campus, her face and hands cold against the wind.