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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The
Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Forgiving Why
do we do what we do? Sue Miller riffs on that question in her new novel, The
Senator’s Wife. There are two marriages that are central to the story.
The title refers to Delia Naughton, wife of Senator Tom Naughton. Meri Fowler
and her husband, Nathan, have moved into the double house adjacent to Delia’s.
Different generations, different marriages and different relationships. Tom
no longer lives with Delia, but they have remained married. He has been
unfaithful to Delia throughout their marriage. Why do they all do what they
do? Especially, why does Delia tolerate Tom’s behavior? Does she go so far as
to forgive him? Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 2, “Delia,
August 1993,” pp. 23-26: It
rains steadily, through the night and Delia wakes from time to time to its
heavy racket in the trees outside her open bedroom window. At one
point she gets up and she puts
another blanket on the bed. When
she wakes for good, though, at about five, light is flooding the room.
There's a cool breeze moving the branches of the tree outside, but she
imagines she can feel the heat of the day entering the house, rising. She
begins assessing her body—what hurts today, what doesn't—and then flings back
the covers in irritation with herself How tedious can you be? She's up, she
goes down the hall to the bathroom, to urinate, to brush her teeth, to lay
out her medications and take the morning batch. The
kitchen, at the back of the house, seems cold and dark when she comes down
the back stairs, and she's glad for the sweater she pulled on over her
bathrobe. She makes her breakfast and sits listening to the news on the
local public-radio station. There's much talk, a year later, about the
recovery from Hurricane Andrew in Florida. And locally, they've arrested
someone who'd been dropping rocks on cars from an overpass on the state
highway. At
seven, she goes upstairs and writes a long letter to her older son, Evan.
Then she showers and gets dressed in what she thinks of as her work clothes—today a cotton
dress and low-heeled sandals. She puts on the makeup she usually
wears—mascara, lipstick, a little color on her cheeks—and looks at herself
critically in the mirror. Well, she's done what she can, she can do no more. It's around eight-thirty when
she goes back downstairs to make her second cup of coffee at the espresso
machine—black this time. She's just sitting down at the table to drink it
when she hears a truck pull up outside, and then, in a minute, men's voices
yelling at one another. Carrying her coffee, she goes to the living room, to
the front windows. The moving van in the driveway on the other side of the
double house is huge, red and white, and the men are busy around it, opening
doors, pulling out clanking metal ramps. They are young, they are wearing
matching T-shirts, though she can't make out what they say. Delia can hear
someone next door, inside what she still thinks of as Ilona's house, thudding
up the stairs. As she sits looking out with
her coffee, the thudding becomes steady. They have begun to carry furniture
in. They shout to one another, they call back and forth from the driveway,
from the foot of the stairs up to the top. The new owners, too, have arrived
and added their voices to the din. Delia hears the young woman—Mary, her name
is. No, Mai. She .spelled it for Delia, she
remembers that now There was something nervy and tomboyish about her,
qualities Delia likes in a girl. In a woman. So this will be the end of the
deep silence on the other side of the wall, then. Delia won't be sorry,
though by now she's used to it—the house next door has been empty since Ilona
Carter's death eight months or so ago. But even before then, her elderly
neighbor's routines weren't the kind that generated much noise. Certainly
not noise at a level that could easily penetrate the multiple layers between
Delia's house and hers—the solid brick fire wall, the studs and slatted lath
on both sides, the two coats of old horsehair plaster, and then all that had
been added and attached on top of that over the years—paint and wallpaper and
wallpaper and paint again. The one regular exception to
the quiet had been in the late afternoons, when Ilona listened to classical
music at a high volume while she had one very strong double martini, consumed
with habitual slowness over several hours of listening, of
getting up over and over to change the records: Ilona never made the
transition to tapes or CDs. And though on Delia's side of the house the music
sometimes caused a bothersome light buzzing of the window glass, for the most
part she liked it, liked the way it seeped murmurously through the walls. She
counted on it, actually. It was like listening to flowing water, she thought.
Something as elemental as that. It
was harder occasionally when Ilona invited Delia over for a drink too, and
put on a particular piece of music by a particular performer she
admired. Then they'd sit together in the overwhelming racket, Ilona smiling, her old head thrown
back, her eyes behind the Coke-bottle lenses of her glasses closed in a kind
of ecstasy, her large, horsey teeth exposed; Delia waiting with all the
impatience of someone under a dentist's drill for the noise and the pain to
stop. Ilona
was more than slightly deaf Thus the volume. She was also arthritic and had macular degeneration. "But
I don't complain," she would say, when she'd finished complaining. And
it was true that she was by nature a buoyant person. She confirmed Delia's
opinion that musicians were usually the happiest people— Ilona had played
second violin with a small symphony orchestra in the Midwest earlier in her
life. Delia had known her for thirty years and felt an uncritical devotion to
her for most of that time. Ilona's
death had been sudden. It was Delia who found her, and it was the silence
late one winter afternoon that made her think to telephone over
there. That made her go through the hall drawer for Ilona's keys when there
was no answer to the ringing and ringing, that made her step across
the ice-crusted front porch
and let herself in,
that propelled her
upstairs when
Ilona didn't
respond to her calls
and wasn’t anywhere on the first floor. She'd
died in her sleep, apparently. At any rate, she was in bed with the covers
pulled up nearly to her chin. Her skin had turned a startling
yellow-gray. Her
death shocked Delia, though
shouldn't have.
The old woman was ninety-two. Delia
herself was seventy-four when Ilona died. Old too, yes. But Ilona's presence,
her very existence, had always made Delia feel young and vital—sometimes
even girlish. Oh, she knew, of course that to the mostly truly young
families who were her neighbors now, she and Ilona were more like than not.
They inhabited a category: old woman. These neighbors might have understood
that one was quite a bit older than the other, but what difference really did
that make? What they would be focused on was the waste of their both still
living alone in those two huge houses. And now Ilona is gone, and her side of
the house will be reclaimed, transformed. But
the truth is,
Delia is perfectly happy to have young people moving in. More liveliness,
more children. There'd been a kind of pause on the street after the last of
the previous batch of children had left, vanished into high school or college
or life. For a few of those years there'd been hardly anyone playing on the
street, there were few trick-or-treaters at Halloween, there were no cries
echoing through the early dusk as the children ran through one another's
yards. Delia had missed it. It's good
that the silence is over. The childless older couples have moved on. The
houses have sold. Some were so large they've been turned into condominiums,
so two or three families live where one did in the old days. Once again you
saw children, you heard them—their high, light voices, their games, their
occasional extravagant public weeping. She's glad for it. She's glad for
this young couple moving in next to her. Perhaps they have children, or will
have them. She hadn't asked when she met the woman. When Delia leaves to go to
work, there's no one outside. Ilona's front door is propped open though, and
she can hear voices in the house. She takes her car. Usually she
walks, but she's decided she'll do some shopping today when her workday is
over—she'll buy some little gifts for her new neighbors, something to make
them feel welcome. One
reason we read novels is to examine and understand human behavior. The
questions we have about behavior as we read The
Senator’s Wife are never answered. Perhaps it’s enough to understand the “what”
of forgiveness, and accept that we can never fully understand the “why.” Steve
Hopkins, February 21, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Senator's Wife.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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