The Senator's Children Read online

  Not a whisper, not a door creaking, not footsteps.

  More like flapping, something flying.

  Slowly, not fully awake, in that sleepy state she likes best, she walks toward Nick’s room, what used to be his, empty now except for two yoga mats and a cushion Cal sits on when he meditates. For years the bed remained, the dresser, the rug, a small bookcase, a shelf of trophies. Jackets hung on hooks on the wall. Even after her mother was gone, her father kept Nick’s room as it had been. For a long time he didn’t touch her mother’s things either, not a sweater in her dresser, not a pair of shoes in the closet, not a book on her nightstand. Sentimental gestures change nothing, Betsy thinks, but what else can we do?

  She hesitates at the door, hand on the knob, listening.

  She hears it again—what she assumes is a bat. She opens the door and turns on the dim sconce lamp on the wall. She sees that the windows are open. This surprises her: it’s been a cold week, and Cal never forgets to close down the house at night, the way her father used to when she was a girl. She steps farther into the room. She isn’t sure if it would be better to leave the door open so she can leave easily or close it behind her so that the bat, if that’s what she heard, can’t go somewhere else in the house. She decides to close the door.

  Then she sees something fly across the room and land on her yoga mat. She can’t see what it is, but it flew more like a bird than a bat. She moves closer, careful not to frighten it, and then she sits on the mat, a few feet away from what she can now see, almost impossible to believe, is a cardinal. She doesn’t know much about cardinals but guesses that it’s highly unusual for one to be standing so close to a human on a cold night in a Philadelphia brownstone. She thinks of Nick because his high school football team was the Cardinals—he was always wearing something with a cardinal on it, a hat or jersey or sweatshirt—and as she sits on the mat, she feels both heavy and light, she closes her eyes, and a peace comes over her, the way it does whenever she feels Nick and imagines he’s watching her.

  *

  She hears her name. She opens her eyes, sees Cal in the doorway. She doesn’t remember having fallen asleep, but hours must have passed. It’s still dark, but morning. Cal is coming in to meditate. He’s happy. Betsy can tell that he thinks she’s been meditating, that she felt well enough, motivated enough, to get up early, before even he was up.

  When someone you love is happy about something not true—Betsy has not been meditating, she has not felt motivated or well—is it better to let him be happy and not know the truth or to tell him the truth and make him unhappy? Something tells her that it would ruin Cal’s morning were she to say, “I fell asleep in here hours ago,” true or not. By saying that, she would worry him more than he’s already worried about her. No one, especially not Cal, has used the word breakdown to describe what Betsy has been going through, what prompted her to take a leave of absence from the foundation and move back to Philadelphia. But that word comes to her now—oddly, after such a peaceful feeling and a sleep so deep she’s not sure time has actually passed. The cardinal is gone.

  Cal bends down to kiss her on the lips, just long enough to express love and attraction without soliciting sex. She stands and hugs him. She likes the way his eyes don’t quite open all the way in the morning. She likes that his hair, a buzz cut since he was fifteen, looks the same in the morning as any time of the day. Whenever she closes her eyes and touches his hair, as she does now, he seems very much the same man she met almost six years ago. She likes that he sleeps shirtless—the least Cal thing he does. That must sound like a backhanded compliment, she thinks, maybe even an insult, to say that she likes most the thing he does that’s most unlike him to do. But it’s more that she likes when he surprises her.

  “Did you open the windows?”

  “No,” she says.

  “I closed them last night.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  When Cal is sure about something, as he often seems to be, he says so. From Cal, pretty sure means not so sure, and it disappoints her that he probably left the window open; she wants to believe that something magical happened.

  He puts one hand on her face and the other on her belly. She knows it’s crazy, but she thinks he knows, or that by touching her belly he will come to know, so she moves his hand. They stand in Nick’s old room looking at each other. She almost tells him then—he has this way of staring at her that makes it difficult to hide—but she kisses him again and doesn’t stop until the urge to tell has passed.

  *

  Maybe it’s the Nick-feeling—the sense that he’s close and watching—that prompts Betsy to pull a box of photos out from the attic later that morning. Probably not the greatest idea, she thinks. She noticed the box when she helped her father move into the facility in Buchanan. She hates that word, facility, it sounds so clinical, and it reminds her that her father no longer has the facilities he once had, and neither does she—to run her mother’s foundation, to visit her father, to know how to be around him. She hasn’t had that facility—knowing how to be around her father—in years; but at least she’d been able to fake it, sometimes.

  She’s thought about the box from time to time but hasn’t touched it until now. Cal is at work, so she brings the box down to the bedroom—she still can’t help but think of it as her parents’ room—and places it on the bed. It’s a vintage leather hatbox with a white rope handle, and inside, in no order—no labeled envelopes or rubber-banded stacks—are a hundred or so photos, some faceup, some facedown. Even before reaching in, she can see herself as a girl, Nick as a baby, her father—unbelievable, she thinks—with a handlebar mustache. Seeing Nick as a baby, and her father’s mustache—which actually looks not so bad on him—makes her smile, and she decides that this exercise in sentimentality—if that’s what it is—might make her feel better, or at least might not make her feel worse. She wonders, as she reaches into the box and touches the photos, if that’s what she had wanted: to feel worse. To bring whatever she’s been feeling, her paralyzing ambivalence (marriage, pregnancy, father), her low-level sadness living in this house again, to an emotional head, like putting a hot compress on a whitehead—she’s been breaking out lately for the first time since high school—in order to bring all the pus—what her mother used to call poison—to the surface, so that you can then squeeze it and, after pain that brings tears to your eyes, be done with it. Maybe that’s what she had in mind, but now she feels that this is going to be okay. Nick in his football uniform. Her father with a mustache. No problem.

  She moves her hand around in the photos as if this were a lottery or raffle drawing. Inside the box, she is a baby and a high school student; her parents are newlyweds; her brother is alive. In a linear timeline, as in life, there is cause and effect, this leads to that leads to that, and so on, there are ramifications for one’s choices, what would the world be without that; but inside the hatbox, where time is not a line, the past is never quite dead, you can go back, forward, back again. You can’t change anything—except the order. You can end wherever you want.

  She closes her eyes and takes out one of her favorite photos, her mother at sixteen, a few years before she met David. It isn’t only that her mother is pretty with her bob cut and bangs, her short-sleeved black-and-white plaid dress, her black clutch purse; it’s more that she looks so happy—happier than Betsy ever saw her. Maybe as you get older, Betsy thinks, you become less happy. It must have been sunny that day: her mother is squinting at whoever is taking the picture. Maybe some high school boyfriend, Betsy thinks. You smile that way only at someone you’re in love with.

  She’s smiling that way on her wedding day too—the next photo Betsy happens to take out of the box. So is her father, who is wearing a black jacket with tails, gray slacks, a gray five-button vest, and a dark gray silk tie (this was before he wore only blue ties). Her mother’s dress is elegant, with a short, modest veil, the kind of wedding dress Betsy chose for herself.


  The longer Betsy stares at the photo, her okay feeling, the nostalgia-induced fantasy that the moment captured in the photo is permanent, gives way to the reality of the timeline: it is 2010, not 1966, and in between, forty-four years have happened. This is a hatbox, this photo is made of paper, this is her bedroom now. She looks at the photo and thinks: They had no idea. If she could dive into that box and swim around in time, if she could be there on her parents’ wedding day, she might say to them: “Be careful, take care of each other, hold on tightly, remember this moment, don’t lose your way, don’t lose each other.” But even were she to give them this advice, even were she to tell them exactly what was to come, would they have changed their minds? Would they have not gone through with it? Would they have parted ways? Would they have said, “We don’t” rather than “We do”? Or would they have disbelieved it? Would they have said, “Not us—never in a million years”? Or would they have believed it was possible but looked at each other and said, “We’ll figure a way out—we’ll cheat fate”?

  Too much. No more.

  She puts the photo back into the box and covers the box with its lid.

  But then she thinks, One more, I can’t end with this feeling, and so she opens the box, reaches in, and pulls out—God, why this one?

  She has seen this image so often online that she’s surprised to see the actual photo. Her mother is thin, too thin, but still pretty. Her parents are in profile. Her father’s hands are on her mother’s face, hers on his. Her father’s wedding ring is clearly visible. Her mother is looking up at him, but his eyes are closed. Her expression seems loving but anguished, as if she’s asking why. They look as if they’re trying to hold on to each other, to hold each other up.

  But just as the photo of her parents’ wedding day triggered sadness rather than happiness, this photo, taken during one of the most difficult times of their lives, triggers in Betsy feelings she didn’t expect: she feels sorry for them. They do love each other, she can see it, and they are trying to hold on.

  No more.

  She puts the photo into the box, brings the box back to the attic, and returns to where she is on the timeline of her life: March 1, 2010. She has no idea what to do with the rest of this day, this life.

  *

  Avery bikes across campus and then through cold, gray Buchanan, Pennsylvania, a college town of old row homes and churches and too many bars. Just outside town, on either side of the road she bikes every Monday and Wednesday, are farms awaiting spring, land so flat she might as well be in Iowa. She forgot to wear gloves, and by the time she arrives, her hands are dry and nearly numb from wind. Her nose is running. It looks as if she’s been crying.

  As soon as David sees her, he whispers, “We have work to do today.”

  “What kind?”

  “The female vote,” he says. “Shaking hands, kissing babies.”

  Then he seems confused, more confused than Avery. “Where are all the babies?” he says.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “Babies can’t vote.”

  “But people who like photos of babies—they vote.”

  “What are you running for?”

  He laughs as if Avery has made a joke.

  “Do you know how to tie a tie?” he asks, as if he hasn’t asked her this every time she has come to see him, and as if every time she hasn’t said no, sorry, she doesn’t.

  A blue tie is on his lap, but he’s shaking too much to grasp it. His hand is like the mechanical claw in that impossible carnival game where you lower a crane and try to steady it enough and open the claw just at the right moment to snag a stuffed bear made in China.

  He keeps trying but can’t grab the tie, so Avery picks it up. But she has no idea what to do next.

  She pushes David’s wheelchair in front of the mirror on the inside of the door and stands behind him. She lifts his collar and tries her best, but David laughs.

  “Hold on, hold on,” he whispers. “Pull the wide part down.”

  Behind him, her arms resting on David’s shoulders, Avery pulls the wide part down. She watches her reflection. If she weren’t holding the tie, she thinks, if instead she crossed her arms on his chest and laid her head on one of his shoulders, or touched the front of her head to the back of his, they’d be in an embrace. Avery waits for further instruction, thinking about the word embrace, which is more than a hug, as far as she’s concerned. Two people about to part for a long time, or two people reunited after a long time apart, don’t hug; they embrace. She imagines two people enclosing one another, bracing against each other. Two people in desperate love or crushed by the same grief.

  “Who is Dave?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Am I Dave?”

  “You’re David.”

  “Then who’s Dave?”

  She reminds him about the tie—that she needs help.

  “Cross the wide end over the narrow end,” he says. “Now, loop it under and around. Good, good. Now around again at the top. No, at the top. Start to make the knot. Like that—good. Now up through the loop.”

  She does what David tells her to do. She pulls the narrow end down while pushing the knot up, then slips the narrow end through the small white loop stitched to the back of the wide end.

  Avery doesn’t need a father or brother to know how a belt works. She’s worn belts. She’s unbuckled the belts of a few boys and watched others unbuckle their own. She slides David’s belt through the loops on one side, then reaches around his back to feel for the loops she can’t see, then passes the belt from one hand to the other, her face pressed against the tie she just tied.

  This is almost a hug, she thinks.

  “Now if only we had some babies,” David says.

  “How about you just shake some hands.”

  “All my hands do is shake.”

  “Maybe you could go around and introduce yourself.”

  “Hello, my name is David—David what?”

  “Christie.”

  “Hey, that’s a good name.”

  In the community room, women in wheelchairs play basketball. They take turns trying to shoot a pink plastic ball through a kiddie hoop a few feet away.

  “The female vote,” Avery says.

  They watch the game. There seem to be no rules and at the end there’s no winner. The ladies who can applaud, applaud. A staff member, a heavy man not much older than Avery, takes away the hoop and ball.

  Avery pushes David’s chair to the center of the room. “I’m here today to listen to you,” he says, but no one looks up.

  “They can’t hear,” Avery says.

  “Are they deaf?”

  “Possibly,” she says, “but what I mean is, you whisper.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You just did it again.”

  David looks confused, as if he doesn’t believe her.

  “I can speak for you, if you want.”

  “How will you know what to say?”

  “You be Cyrano, I’ll be Christian.”

  “My wife used to read that to my daughter,” he says.

  “Tell me what to say.”

  “Hello, my name is David Christie, and I would like to earn your vote.”

  “Hello,” Avery says, and waits for the ladies to look. “This is David Christie, and he would like to earn your vote.”

  PART THREE

  Mistakes Were Made

  1991–1992

  AUGUST 1991

  Iowa. It was all about Iowa.

  David’s campaign headquarters was in Old City, Philadelphia. Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Ben Franklin, Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence—perfect associations for someone running for president, his campaign manager told him. But he pretty much lived in Iowa. He spent time in New Hampshire too, and Maine, and South Dakota, and Maryland. And DC, of course. There was still the Senate—committees, votes, that glacial pace he hated. Posturing, ass-kissing, backstabbing, bullshit. And there was home—Center City, Del
ancey Place, Danielle and Betsy. But he was rarely there, not nearly as often as he’d promised he’d be.

  No—it was about Iowa. Small, bouncy planes, shitty motels, six or seven events a day, churches and schools and corn boils and ice cream socials, sixteen-hour days, only to do it again the next day, and the next. It was all about Iowa.

  Everyone else had left—Tsongas and Clinton and Kerrey and Brown. No chance to win after Governor Kirkwood announced, but David stayed. People said he was nuts, what a waste of time and money, but he didn’t care—he was staying. He had a plan: he was going to show that he didn’t give up, and that would become the story. He’d wait for Kirkwood to make a mistake, he’d sneak up on him, and by then it would be too late for the others, they’d be long gone, their Iowa campaigns reduced to lawn signs. Not David—for him it was Iowa or bust. And the good thing was he didn’t even have to win. Close would be as good as a win. But if he won—shit. That was why it was all about Iowa. There would be no New Hampshire or Maine or South Dakota or anywhere without Iowa. Iowa had become a mantra, a word David spoke and wrote and thought so often it had become a sound, a feeling: Iowa. The feeling was he was going to win. He was still a speck in the polls—Kirkwood was Iowa born and raised, his father a coal miner, lost his mother young, grew up in a house without running water, high school in West Des Moines, Iowa State University, navy jet pilot—but never mind all that, David was determined to win. He wasn’t sure how, but he could feel it. He had recurring dreams of standing alone in bright, almost blinding sunlight in vast fields of brown cornstalks. Just him—no one else. The last one standing.

  But he woke one August morning in the Hotel Fort Des Moines, his home away from home, gripped with doubt—not about winning, but about why he wanted to win, why he was there so far from his family. He looked in the bathroom mirror and didn’t recognize himself. Was there more gray in his hair? Had his eyebrows become bushier? Was that a stray hair growing from his ear? He looked older, shorter, softer, he thought. He dropped for fifty-two push-ups to match his age. He did this every day, but this morning, panicked, he did them too quickly and had to break them into two sets. Even so, not too shabby. He stood, took off his T-shirt, and looked in the mirror again. He hardened his stomach, flexed his biceps. That was better. He looked forty-two, not fifty-two. There wasn’t more gray in his hair, after all. His eyebrows looked fine.