My Father's Wives (14 page)

“Amen to that,” I said.

Surrounded by powder-coated Aspen trees and towering oaks, I
pedaled out of town. My legs felt as though they could ride forever, but the altitude hit me square in the chest. I was gasping for air when I reached the base of Smuggler Mountain, where I left the bike unchained, leaning against a row of mailboxes. I unscrewed my first bottle of water and caught a second wind, then looked straight up the hiking path. It was jagged and rocky terrain, not the most scenic, but quite a workout in the bright sunshine. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and started up, choosing the steepest angle I could find, confident my chest would catch up with my legs.

The path was more crowded than I expected, with a wide cross-section of early risers getting their morning exercise: older women climbing slowly in baggy workout clothes, little dogs at their heels; younger women in athletic gear wearing earbuds and determined expressions; three muscular young men riding mountain bikes straight up, dripping sweat beneath helmets and sunglasses. One woman had twin girls on either side, the three of them holding hands, singing a distantly familiar song. I paused as I passed them, waiting for an ache that never came.

Then I began to run. It took me twenty minutes to reach the top, and to my delight, I found I was breathing steadily, with no hint of fatigue. A wooden sign indicated an observation platform, so I climbed through the bushes onto a dirt path. Just as I emerged into the sunlight, I felt my right sneaker sink into a slippery mass and slide; I caught myself just short of falling flat. I looked up to find a large dog and a small woman, with a face I recognized even though I had never seen it before.

“My goodness, Percy!”

I leaned back against a boulder and lifted my soiled sneaker into the air. “What did you call me?” I asked.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said, struggling to place a leash on a chocolate-brown Labrador more than half her size. “Percy,” she said to the dog, “you naughty boy!”

Leaving my foot in the air, I reached into my backpack for the
water bottle and took a long drink. I watched the woman and dog battle, with a familiarity on both sides that suggested this was a frequent occurrence. “Your dog is named Percy?” I asked.

“He is,” she said without looking up. “And he is a
naughty boy
.”

“I thought I passed a sign that said dogs must be on leash.”

“You did. I only let him off up here. But I turned my head for a moment and I can see what happened to your shoe. I’m awfully sorry.” There wasn’t any question it was Elizabeth; the flat, Midwestern accent clinched it. She was from Ohio, just outside Cincinnati, and you could hear it in the way she spoke. She looked just as I expected, not much above five feet tall, with auburn hair cut short and sparkling eyes. “I have paper towels in my pack,” she was saying to me, having secured the dog. “Let me try to clean that off for you.”

I took a good look at the shoe and thought it was a lost cause. “Good luck,” I said.

“Don’t give up so easily,” she said, on her knees. “If you tell yourself you can’t do something, you’ll always be right.”

A shudder went through me. “What did you say?” I asked.

She smiled and shook her head. “That’s just an expression someone I knew used to use all the time,” she said.

“Percy Sweetwater?”

She looked up at me, her eyes squinting in the bright sun. “How in the world did you guess that?”

“Your dog,” I said. “Named Percy.”

Now she had forgotten all about the shoe. She got up, dusted herself off and stretched to her fullest height, roughly to my chin. “You look familiar to me,” she said. “Can’t put my finger on it. Something in your face.”

“I’m Jonathan Sweetwater,” I said, and put my hand out to shake hers. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

A smile broke slowly in the corners of her eyes, spreading to her lips. “Well, my goodness, Percy’s son. I can’t believe it, look at you. You look a little like your father,” she said. “Not a lot, but a little.”

In his autobiography, my father wrote that if he had ever started a company, this was the person he would have hired to manage it. He called her the most capable, organized person he had ever met.

“I’m Elizabeth Sweetwater,” she said, smiling warmly, “and this has got to be the greatest coincidence of all time.”

I smiled back. “No, it doesn’t.”

THE RESTAURANT WAS CALLED
Ellina and the octopus was everything Elizabeth promised it would be. I savored each bite, tender and spicy. I thought of Claire at the very first taste; it was exactly the sort of dish she loves. I selected the bottle I knew Claire would have paired with it from the wine list, even though it wasn’t my first choice.

“So,” I said as we clinked our glasses together, “may I begin with the simplest of questions?”

“Of course.”

“Why did you name your dog after him?”

Elizabeth smiled. She wasn’t especially pretty, but there was something attractive about her nonetheless. It came from inside: she radiated energy and intellect. “In the big picture, your father was good to me,” she said. “But when he left I was angry. I said things I later wished I had not. Percy, in retrospect, was not a man you spent your life with. He was more like a comet that flashed and left a bit of illumination behind. My life was better for having known him, but I didn’t figure that out until after he died. I regretted never making peace with him, so I named Percy in his honor, meant with respect and love.” She paused and put her hand to her mouth. “My goodness, what you must think. I named a
dog
after your father.”

I smiled. “Freud would say you wanted to finally be able to tell him what to do.”

“Freud would probably be right,” she said, raising her glass to her lips, “but that isn’t the only reason. I truly do remember him fondly.
He was what he was. If I expected him to be otherwise, that was more my mistake than his.”

The waiter was clearing the dishes from our first course, and as he refilled our wineglasses I noticed she had finished a good deal more of hers than I had of mine. She took another long sip as soon as her glass was filled, closing her eyes as she drank with a satisfied sigh.

“Did my father drink a lot?” I asked.

“How are you defining ‘a lot’?”

“As much as you?”

She batted her eyes. “Are you suggesting I drink a lot?”

“Do you?”

“Why yes, I do,” she said, and raised her glass toward me for emphasis. “Your father did not. He drank a great deal of coffee. Not too much wine.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Elizabeth ordered roasted chicken with Brussels sprouts; I had grilled salmon with broccoli. We finished a bottle of Claire’s favorite Pinot Grigio and ordered another. I watched her as she drank: she seemed to savor each taste as though it was her first, and while she must have polished off an entire bottle you would not have known it from her behavior.

“How did you meet my father?” I asked.

“I knocked on his door and called him an asshole.”

“Seriously?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “But that’s the way I like to tell the story. I assume you know I was a doctor. A damn good one, in fact. In retrospect I would have done more good for the world if I had remained one, but then I would never have met your father.”

“And your dog would have a different name.”

“Precisely.” She took another sip of wine. “I was working in the emergency room of a hospital in the worst section of Washington. Two o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, a woman in the final stage of labor was wheeled into the ER. She was a mess. Poorly nourished,
filthy, bruising on various parts of her body including the face, crack cocaine in her system. Little surprise, her child was born with all sorts of problems, a predictable result of the mother’s health and lack of prenatal care. We did everything we could for that child. To my dismay, the mother was allowed to take her home when she was discharged. A month later, we received word that the mother had found a lawyer to file suit against the hospital, and every one of us on duty, when the baby was delivered. I was saddened but not concerned. Surely, anyone would be able to see what had happened. That’s why I was so appalled when I was told our insurance company was going to settle the case rather than fight it. I demanded an explanation and was told a lawyer would have the mother cleaned up, there would be testimony as to the condition of the baby, and ultimately the jury would feel sympathy and give her a whole bunch of money, regardless of the real liability. I said I refused to be a part of that; I wanted to fight. They said I was welcome to fight but I would be on my own. They were going to settle and that was that. The mother ultimately got a million dollars and all of us on duty received informal reprimands. That galled me more than the money. I walked out the door and never went back.”

All the time Elizabeth spoke she never raised her voice.

“So you knocked on my father’s door?” I asked.

“Sort of,” she said. “Percy was not only the most powerful man in Washington, he was also the most accessible. He set aside a day every month to meet with ordinary citizens to hear their ideas and their problems. Six months after that baby was born, he met with me. I was volunteering as a lobbyist for tort reform. I was scheduled for fifteen minutes of his time. I wound up spending two hours in his office and he hired me a few weeks later, told me I was the brightest person he had ever encountered. Two years later, I managed his campaign for reelection.”

“When did you become romantically involved with him?”

Her face changed then, the way women’s faces do when they think of a man they once loved. “Jonathan,” she said, her voice more girlish,
“I assume you know that every woman that ever encountered Percy fell in love with him immediately.”

“I’ve figured that out,” I said. “I want to know why. I want to know who he was so I can understand why he did the things he did.”

Elizabeth was still in girlish mode. “Your father was charming, brilliant, and powerful, which are wonderful qualities. But the real key to his appeal was none of those. Do you want to know what it was?”

I leaned closer. “Of course I do.”

“He was more vulnerable than any man I’ve ever encountered,” she said. “Women are accustomed to men who want us, but there is nothing quite as irresistible as a man who
needs
us.”

Claire’s face jumped into my mind. Did she
need
me? Or did I need her? “I’m not getting that part,” I said. “In what way did he need you?”

“Your father could never be alone. You know that term ‘serial monogamist’? That was Percy. He went from woman to woman, faithful to us until he was done with us, and then he was on to the next.”

“He wasn’t faithful to my mother,” I said.

“I know. He told me that was a great regret. He considered himself a man of principle, and he was terribly sorry he hurt your mother that way. I never met her but he spoke glowingly of her. She must have been a special person.”

“Still is.”

She smiled. “How nice.”

The waiter approached with eyebrows raised and dessert menus in his hands. Elizabeth ordered a decaffeinated espresso; I asked for an order of tiramisu and two forks.

“Listen,” Elizabeth said, “I’m going to tell you the truth about your father because you deserve to know it. When we met I fell for him immediately and he for me; I could sense it during our very first conversation. He was married to his former secretary at the time, and he was bored to tears with their relationship. He married her because she idolized him, and because she had a great ass. Christine is a lovely person but she’s very limited intellectually.”

“I met her,” I said.

Elizabeth nodded. “Then you know. When I met your father he was starving for more than she could give him. He desperately wanted to discuss books, art, business, anything. He was a diverse, interesting man who required stimulation in more than the one way she was able to provide it.”

“So he was bored?”

“He was beyond bored. He was desperate.”

“Why did he marry her in the first place?”

“Because she was the opposite of your mother. Alice, from all I’ve heard, challenged him. She was attracted to him largely because they shared the same political views, and half the time she understood the issues better than he did. She wasn’t especially impressed by his power. Christine was enormously impressed. She thought the sun rose and set around him. I’ve never met your mother, but I’m guessing she’s not like that.”

I smiled. “You couldn’t be less like that than my mother.”

“That’s what I figured,” Elizabeth said. “He married Christine because she wasn’t your mother. And he married me because I wasn’t Christine.”

The desserts arrived, and Elizabeth stirred a cube of sugar into her coffee. I had one question remaining. “What did you mean when you said he was vulnerable?”

Elizabeth breathed a heavy sigh, remembering something that filled her with regret. “Your father could not be alone. He wouldn’t do anything alone. It’s the reason he didn’t leave Christine before he met me, or leave me until he had found his next partner. He couldn’t stand to be alone, even for an evening. He would joke about it. He’d say, ‘I find my own company tedious,’ and everyone would laugh. But it wasn’t funny. Your father was scared to death of being alone. There’s nothing at all funny about that.”

I WALKED HER TO
her car after we finished, and when she offered her hand for a shake I pulled her close and kissed her firmly on the cheek. When all was said and done there was a hollow quality about her; for all her vibrancy and intelligence it was clear she was a lonely person. And her emptiness was contagious. The weight of my lies and the distance I had traveled collapsed upon me like a heavy coat as I watched her drive away. Suddenly, I missed Claire terribly. I could picture her sleeping soundly in our room, buried beneath a comforter. Claire has the amazing capacity to be cold no matter the temperature and sleeps in a sweatshirt every night, bundled beneath a blanket so thick I perspire at the sight of it. But she sleeps sweetly, with a smile on her lips, and perfectly still, in keeping with her personality. She sleeps soundly, too, never budging at the shrill of my alarm or a honking car horn or fireworks on New Year’s Eve. The only sounds that rouse her are ones made by the children; remarkably, a sniffle from a bedroom separated from ours by a long hallway never escapes her attention.