A Garden of Earthly Delights (22 page)

All he'd given to her of himself was his name: Lowry. And she could not be certain of that.

Clara lay huddled in the backseat listening to the sound of nocturnal insects outside. So loud! She thought of her pa who was somewhere behind her. She would not have minded being hit by him, she'd known she had deserved it, but his words shouted at her had hurt.
Bitch just like your mother!

That was wrong, to speak so of Pearl. To speak so of the dead, who can't speak for themselves.

Clara smiled to think that Carleton would never catch up with Lowry. He was too old, Lowry was younger. Lowry slept in the front seat of his car with no fear of being discovered and attacked. Carleton had killed a man once, but he'd almost been killed himself. If it came to a fight, Lowry would beat Carleton down with his fists.

Clara drifted back into sleep thinking
He will never find me. I am nobody's daughter now.
Jamming fingers into her mouth as she'd done as a little girl, for consolation.

Next morning they were driving north into New York State.

Hill country, but as the sky lightened Clara saw that the hills close beside the country highway fell back in waves to mountains, and that the boundary between the mountains and the mountainous clouds in the sky was feathery and unclear. Like between waking and sleep, you couldn't know for certain. Clara drew her knees up to her chest and hugged herself like a little girl. The mountains were so beautiful!

“Lowry, I bet you're from around here.”

Lowry glanced at her, surprised. His jaws were glittering with blond stubble. “How'd you know that?”

Clara just smiled mysteriously.

Somehow, she'd known.

Lowry was taking pride in this landscape, you could see. Descending one of the long broad hills, the blacktop road and the land spread out so vast Clara thought you could get lost in it, so much for the eye to see, and sunlight in patches, and cloud-shapes of shadow swift-moving across the fields. There were cornfields, and wheat fields, and what was maybe rye fields, rippling-green like water, and there were small farms, houses, barns, outbuildings amid acreage neatly plotted as a map; and the rest was trees, some of them of a kind Clara had not seen before, white-barked, growing in clusters. Straight as she could Clara sat staring. Her new home: Lowry was bringing her to her new home.

“I love you.”

It was the merest whisper. Wind rushing through their rolled-down windows, Lowry couldn't be expected to hear.

In a loud voice she asked, were they going to stop somewhere around here?—and Lowry said, “Maybe.”

An hour later they were descending into a town: TINTERN POPULATION 1650, Lowry said it was an old river town, the name of the river was the Eden River and the time of Tintern as a “living” town had been a hundred years ago, when his folks had first arrived. Clara stared at brick streets between tall gaunt steep-gabled brick and stone houses that looked like elderly toothless men. Here was a town that looked like a city, what Clara would have believed to be a city, but the neighborhood was old and run-down and there were children playing in the streets—white-skinned, but noisy and frantic like kids in the farmworkers' camps. You didn't think that people could be poor in a city, only in the country. This was a surprise.

The funny old brick street narrowed as it began to ascend to a high, humpbacked bridge so narrow vehicles could pass over it but one at a time. Clara's heart began to thump.

“Jesus! I'm scared we're gonna fall in.…”

Lowry just laughed at her and continued across the bridge that made a nervous whirring noise beneath the tires of his car, not slackening and not increasing his speed. Clara tasted panic: you could see the water through the grid of the bridge's floor! If she'd
been driving, she would have maybe fainted, the damn car would crash through the railing—

Lowry pointed out buildings along the river, most of them shutdown and boarded-up. Railroad yards, granaries. A tomato-canning factory that was still in operation part of the year. “The Depression hit Tintern pretty hard. Lots of people I knew left, but not me.” Yet he spoke regretfully as if he'd wanted to leave, and somehow hadn't been able. Clara listened closely to these rare words of Lowry's, for he'd never answered questions she put to him about himself, in all those hours of intimacy in the car; as if now, seeing this town, that was run-down and jumbled but somehow beautiful he was shaken in some way, and moved to speak.

On the north side of the river, as Lowry spoke of it, there was a Main Street; there was a River Street, and there was a Bridge Street; there was a railroad depot where trains only stopped a few times a week now; along the downtown streets were threeand four-story buildings, made mostly of dark brick, with false fronts Clara was curious to see: from the front the building looked sort of impressive, but from the side and back it was some old run-down thing. Clara's eye lit onto taverns, a restaurant, a movie house, clothes stores and a shoe store and a Woolworth's Five & Dime. She hoped they would be living downtown: she hoped they would be living somewhere above a ground floor.

“This road continues all the way to Port Oriskany, on Lake Erie,” Lowry said. “North of town, the road leads to Lake Ontario.” As if Clara knew, or, staring so hard at what lay before her, gave a damn for these places. Erie? Ontario?

Lowry pulled his car to a stop. Clara was practically leaning out the window, staring so hard. They were at the edge of the downtown on the crest of a hill; here you could see some of Main Street, and you could look back to that scary bridge and buildings on the other side of the river. Lowry was saying in a voice that sounded different, somber and almost-scolding, “Clara, there's a place for you in Tintern, I made some calls. But you need to keep quiet about yourself and don't make any trouble. Like if somebody asks where are your folks, you say politely, ‘I don't live with my folks
right now. I've been on my own since sixteen.' Whatever hell age you are, sweetheart, say you're sixteen.”

Clara laughed, biting her lip. “Goddamn, I am sixteen.”

“Anyway, say it. If the wrong people catch on to you, you'll be charged with ‘runaway.' You'll be placed in some juvenile facility. They'll try to contact your family back in—wherever. Or put you in an orphanage. That's the law.”

“Well, I'm not goin back. I'll kill myself first.”

“That kind of talk, you keep to yourself. That's the first thing that'd get you taken into custody, talk like that.”

Clara tried to make her face serious. “ ‘I don't live with my folks right now. Been on my own since sixteen.' ” Goddamn, she kept wanting to laugh she was so nervous, or excited.

Lowry said, “I've made some calls like I said. There's maybe a job for you if you can make change. Learn to use a cash register.”

“ ‘Make change'—?”

“Like, changing a dollar bill. Five-dollar bill.”

“Sure! Sure I can do that.”

Clara had done this for Pearl lots of times. Even before Pearl got dreamy and dopey. Nancy, too. Buying things in a store, they hadn't wanted to figure out the coins, themselves. And knowing what kind of change you were going to get back, so you wouldn't be cheated.

Eagerly Clara said, “It's easy: you think of a dollar as being one hundred pennies. Then you—” but Lowry cut her off.

He turned the key in the ignition, to start the car motor again. Going to take her somewhere now, she guessed. He had never spoken to her like this before and Clara was fearful of him now and fearful he was saying goodbye to her. “Lowry, I could—do things for you. Like women do. I could—”

“No. I told you, Clara. I don't stay in one place long. And nobody comes with me. I don't marry any of them, either. Erase me from your head because you're just not the one, kid. Not just you're too young which you are, but what I want is a—voice. A way a woman talks to me, says things to me I don't know and am astonished to hear and I'll know her as soon as I hear her. Or maybe I never will hear her, and that's all right, too. Because my father was poison to
women, and damned if I will be, too. And some things, the worst things, run in your blood.”

Clara nodded numbly. Not wanting to think this could be so.

Saying desperately, like a pleading dog if such could speak, “Lowry, why'd you ever bother with me?”

Lowry, driving his car, pulled to a traffic light and didn't answer at once. Didn't look at her, either.

“It wasn't ‘bother,' Clara. Don't think that.”

“You helped me. Saved me. You—”

“Maybe I always wanted a little sister. Maybe that's it.”

“I have a job. I'm on my own now.”

Astonishing to Clara who had expected to be working out in the fields, or scrubbing some rich ladies' toilets, she had a job in the Woolworth's Five & Dime right on Main Street. Somehow, Lowry had arranged for her to be interviewed by the fattish middle-aged manager Mr. Mulch, and she'd been hired right off. A store! In town! Clara couldn't believe her good luck. She smiled to think how Rosalie would envy her. Clara Walpole, a salesclerk in a
store.

It was like the world had been broken into pieces and tossed into the air and come down again in a nicer arrangement. Yet an arrangement Clara could not believe had anything to do with her— what she deserved, what she'd earned. Sharing a long counter with another girl, who'd quit school in ninth grade a few years back and was passing time till her fiancé could afford to marry her; selling sewing supplies—scissors, threads of all colors, ready-made ruffled curtains, cloth of all colors and prints. On a slow day, if the manager wasn't around, you could drift over to visit Joanie at the candy counter who'd give away broken-off bits of peanut brittle, ribbon candy, stale old bonbons and marshmallows about to be removed from the display case and tossed into the garbage. And there was the magazine and pocket book rack, where you could leaf through
Silver Screen, True Romance, Collier's
and
Life.
There were paperback novels Clara stole away for overnight reading—
Lamb in His Bosom, So Big, Honey in the Horn.
Lowry was impressed, Clara spoke of such
books. She meant to demonstrate to him how mature she was, and independent.

Goddamn, though: she wished she'd learned to read better. It took her an hour sometimes to read a dozen pages, pushing her finger beneath the words and mouthing them like a first grader.

Being a salesgirl at the five-and-dime was glamorous-seeming, and Clara was proud of her position, but it was harder work than you'd have guessed. Waiting on customers was the easy part. Also you had to unpack merchandise at the back of the store and carry it to the front; you had to repack old merchandise, back into grimy old cartons. You had to help sweep up. You had to help wash the big fly-specked windows. The five-and-dime was in a block-long row of brick buildings infested with roaches and rodents, and under Mr. Mulch's disgusted direction you had to deal with these: nasty-smelling poisons set out for the roaches, and traps with wicked steel springs for the mice and rats. The tricky thing was, the rats could devour the mice's cheese bait and if the trap sprung it didn't hurt them one damn bit.

Clara had to laugh, she'd used to think a store in town was so special. Now she knew better, but it was a kind of secret you kept so people outside the store didn't know. So funny! Joanie made them all laugh complaining of rodents breaking into her candy display case in the night, that was supposed to be rodent-proof, eating just parts of some candies and leaving the rest, and tracking goddamn turds she had to brush off by hand. Mr. Mulch's byword was
What the customer don't know don't hurt 'em.

Lowry asked Clara how she liked her job at Woolworth's, and Clara said she'd never had a job she loved so much. And Lowry seemed pleased, and maybe proud of her.

“Mulch says you're learning fast. ‘Sharpest-eyed girl in the store.' ”

So happy! Lowry had found a furnished room for Clara, with its own tiny bathroom, and had paid her first three months' rent. This he'd done without telling her, exactly—that was Lowry's way. The room was on Mohigan Street around the corner from Main, above a hardware store. Through her rear window Clara could see, slant-
wise, that high old nightmare bridge and a slice of the Eden River. For a long time she sat dreamy-eyed in her windows gazing out. She imagined herself telling Rosalie
I live by myself now. On a second floor.