A Garden of Earthly Delights (29 page)

She got away from him and caught up with Ginny, and was holding Ginny's baby and wondering at its out-of-focus eyes when someone approached her. It was Revere. She smiled at him and made the baby's hand wave at him, as if it were natural he should just step up out of a noisy crowd at the Tintern firemen's picnic. Clara chattered about the baby: “His name is Jefferson and this is his mother here, Ginny, and that's his father down there—where they're all laughing and carrying on. Isn't it a nice picnic?” Revere stood with one hand in his pocket, awkwardly.

“Clara, give him back. You go have fun,” Ginny said. She sounded maternal and bossy, like her own mother, but it was really meant to
be critical so that Revere could catch it: after all, he was here alone and he was married and hadn't he just fired Caroline's husband for drinking too much? She took the baby from Clara's arms and left Clara just standing there, facing Revere.

“You seem to like children,” he said.

“I love babies especially,” she said. She thought of Lowry and of any baby that Lowry might father—it would be half hers and might look like him around the eyes, and she would let him name it—and a sensation of faintness rose suddenly in her. She and Revere began to walk together. She felt this dizziness, this uncertainty that was not at all unpleasant, and wondered if she should tell this man about it. He seemed to have nothing to say and so she went on, chattily, “I'd like to have seven or eight children, lots of kids, and a big house and everything. Nobody is happy in a house without a baby, right? —I was just over visiting by the ocean, all that ways. I went with some friends and was swimming and out on the beach.”

She turned to him with a dazed, dazzling smile, as if she were still a little blinded by the sun. But he did not smile with her. He looked uneasy. “A friend of mine is coming to visit me tonight,” Clara went on. In her excitement she wanted to tug at Revere's arm to make him understand how important this was. “I have lots of things to do and have to get back home—I just came to the picnic with a friend—”

“Would you like to talk about them?—your friends?”

She thought this was a strange question. She glanced at Revere and was a little slowed down by his eyes, which were fixed on her in a way she remembered Lowry's had been. The faintness swelled out inside her. She wanted to turn and get back to Ginny, where it was safe, even if Ginny was angry, and get rid of the time somehow until eight o'clock when Lowry would come. She said, “My girlfriend Ginny—” but was cut off by some boys running past.

They strolled through the picnic grounds and stopped at the edge of the parking lot. The “parking lot” was just a field where cars could park for the picnic. From here the music sounded thin and sleazy. Revere said, “I think I'd like to talk to you. I don't ask anything from you.” Clara smiled nervously. She kept listening to that
music and thought how far away it was, so quickly, and here she hadn't been with this man for five minutes.

“Yes,” Clara said, “but my girlfriend— I'm supposed to have supper with her folks.”

“I can get you something to eat.”

“Something to eat?” Clara said blankly. “But my friend is coming at eight.”

“Is it a boyfriend?”

She said cautiously, “Just a friend,” and turned to him as if to get them on their way back to the picnic. But her gaze swung around past his chest and did not dare reach up to his face. She was conscious of his standing there, of his watching her. She was conscious of his name. His name floated about him like perfume around a beautiful woman, touching people before he even came near, defining and fixing him in a way he himself could never know about. Lowry himself had known this man's name.…

They stepped through the weeds and went over to his car, which Clara recognized at once. She must have looked at it more closely than she knew. She said, “Someone told me your name is Revere,” and he laughed and said, “I told you that myself.” But she did not mean him.

“You look a little different than you did before,” he said.

“Yes, I know it.”

She got in his car. The seat was hot and burned the backs of her knees. “Maybe,” she said weakly, “we could not drive far but just a little ways? Just a short drive?”

He drove out to the road, over the bumpy field. Some kids were playing around the parked cars. A boy with a toy cane stood on the roof of a car and waved his cane at them, calling something. Clara closed her face against them.

“What did you want to talk about?” Clara said.

He seemed a little embarrassed. She wondered if there wasn't something resentful about him, about the way the corners of his mouth drooped in profile as if he were puzzled himself over what he was doing. “I should be back to have supper with them,” Clara said, relaxing a little so that she could enjoy the drive, “they're real
good friends to me. I don't have any family or anyone and they invite me over a lot.… I'm friends with a girl named Sonya too. But you probably don't know her.…”

He might have been waiting for her to get through with this kind of talk. Clara shrugged her shoulders in miniature at his silence, not for him to see. She thought of Lowry probably on his way driving to her, and of how they would make love that evening. She thought of the ways she might use to explain to Lowry what was wrong with her—unless it was just a mistake. She would have liked to talk to Revere about Lowry but did not know how to begin. Anyway, you should not confide in adults, especially men; it was better never to say anything secret to anyone.

They drove up the highway and kept going, not fast. Clara looked out the window and enjoyed it, though she'd had quite a bit of driving with Lowry the week before. Moving around and getting somewhere so long as you were more or less already on your way back always struck her as nice; it was nothing like riding on the crop seasons. She said, “I loved the ocean. I loved driving there and seeing everything. You can see more of the mountains on your way out.… Do you travel around much?”

“Mostly to Chicago.”

“Chicago?” Clara said. “In this car?”

“By train.”

“Oh,” she said, pleased. She liked that expression, “by train.” Anyone else would have said “on the train.” She imagined him speeding through the countryside in those straight, relentless lines railroad tracks made, cutting through backcountry and eating up distance like nothing. She looked over at him as if he had performed a magic feat. “Mr. Revere, what was it you wanted to say?”

He brought the car to a stop as if he were far enough now from what had bothered him back there. They were at the top of a hill and could look down to some scrubby land where there was a narrow angular lake—“Mirror Lake”—dotted with trees and the stumps of trees on its north side. Young people swam here and had picnics, but today there were only a few couples; everyone was at the charity picnic. Clara could hear someone's car radio blaring, all the way up the hill. The memory of those days with Lowry came
back to her like a stab in her breast. Clara felt how far she was from them already, just the way Mr. Revere must feel far from those young people who were swimming and carrying on around Mirror Lake.

Revere rubbed his face. He might have been, like Clara, trying to wake up out of a dream. “There are some things I can't understand,” he said slowly. His words were a little harsh. Clara noticed that they cut at the air more than the words of other people did; there was something impatient about them. “I don't think I can explain them. But—when I was your age I stayed with an uncle of mine who lived on a ranch in Dakota. I spent the summer there. He drove my cousins and me into town and it was hardly a town at all—much smaller than Tintern—just a muddy street with some stores. Back from the road there was a shack and a big family lived there. Nine children. There was a girl my age. She had long hair that was almost white and dressed just in rags and she was—like you.… She was Swedish.”

“I ain't Swedish,” Clara said suspiciously. “I'm American.”

“She was happy,” Revere said.

Clara wondered at that. She did not understand what this man was talking about. What he was saying had something to do with another girl, someone who was grown up now and old, lost, forgotten, someone Clara had never even seen. “That was nice,” Clara said uncertainly. “I mean—her being happy.”

“My first wife was from a family in the valley here,” Revere said. “She was my own age. Then she died and I married Marguerite—”

“Yes,” Clara said, “somebody said that was your wife's name.” He took no notice that someone had been talking about him. He said, “We have three boys but she's never really been well since before the first one was born. She's a fine person … her father was a fine man. It's all in her, behind her … her family.… But her heart is heavy.”

“Why?”

He looked off to one side, as if Clara had asked a foolish question. “Most people are that way, Clara,” he said.

Clara did not know what to say. Should she make a joke, or smile, or what? What made her uneasy was the knowledge that she would
not be able to tell anyone about this conversation, especially not Lowry. She said, gropingly, “Your boys are real nice, anyway the two I saw— There ain't something wrong with the youngest one, is there?”

“No.”

“But—then—”

“There's nothing wrong.”

“Is your wife sick bad?”

“I don't know.”

“Does the doctor come out a lot?”

“Yes.”

Clara thought about that. “It's nice he can come out a lot,” she said. “A doctor looked at me once. He gave me some shots in the arm that stung a little.… My pa, though, was real scared. Grownup men get scared sometimes too. But he wasn't scared of anything else,” she said quickly. Revere was still looking out the window. Outside, some blackbirds were fighting over something on the ground. “Tell me,” Clara said suddenly, “are there books in your house?”

“Some.”

“Are they—up on the walls?”

“On shelves? Yes.”

“Oh,” Clara said, pleased, “that's nice.”

Revere smiled at her. “Do you like to read, Clara?”

“Yes! But I have trouble, sometimes.” She paused, twining her hair around her finger. “I'm kind of slow, I guess. I have to say the word to myself when I read, and it takes so long, it makes me tired. If I have kids, I want for them to read. I would give them lots of books so they could read all the time.” Clara thought of Lowry skimming his paperback books and magazines at the shore, and giving her the dictionary; of course, Lowry would want his children to be educated.
If you want a life. Different from your parents.
“If I'd gone to school and learned things right, I'd be—I'd be different than I am now.”

“But Clara, why do you want to be different?”

She felt her cheeks coloring. She laughed. This man was saying he liked her the way she was. “I guess I don't want to be different.”

Revere gazed at her solemnly. If Curt Revere was a playing card, Clara thought, he was one of the kings. Heavy-jawed, inclined to brooding. Not fast and sexy-treacherous like the jacks. You were supposed to think that the king of spades was stronger than the jack of spades, but that wasn't so. Having so much, knowing so much wore out your soul, for you knew that you could lose it.

“Ginny and her folks are gonna be … wondering. Where I am.”

But Revere didn't seem to hear. With his first and second fingers he was squeezing his lips, thinking. She could feel the resentment in the air about him, and something else, too—that steady brooding weight of his stare that meant that Clara had been selected out of the visible landscape—and maybe the invisible landscape, too— just for him. He saw in her face a face that Clara herself could not see, and she felt a moment's confused power, brief as a flash of heat lightning. And Lowry was on the road returning to her, and in a few hours they would be together again: it wouldn't even be dark yet.

In Clara's purse were loose snapshots. Two were of her and Lowry taken at the shore, another was of Clara alone, taken more recently in an automatic photo booth in the drugstore. She was tempted to show Revere all three, but she took out only the one of herself. “This is me, I had it taken last week. My girlfriend and me …” She faltered, not knowing what she meant to say. Revere took the snapshot and examined it. The way he frowned made Clara uneasy, she hadn't meant anything special by offering the picture. In it, Clara had wetted her lips and was posed
all eyes
and her hair sliding into her face like a
Screen Romance
starlet and her shoulders raised to accentuate her breasts in a snug cotton-knit sweater—Clara and her girlfriend had laughed themselves silly with their poses, almost wetting their pants. And now: Here was Curt Revere taking it seriously. He said, “This doesn't look like you exactly, Clara. But I would know you anywhere. Clara.” She put out her hand for the picture, but he was still looking at it. “It's very strange,” he said. “I don't ask anything of you.…” Clara held her breath for some reason thinking he would mutilate the snapshot. Instead, he placed it in his shirt pocket.

“I didn't mean.…” Clara began weakly.

“Can't I have it, Clara?”

He wasn't begging exactly. A wounded sound in his voice, you don't expect to hear in a man like Curt Revere.

“Oh, sure! Sure.”

Revere said slowly, not looking at her, “My first, young wife died. In childbirth. It wasn't supposed to happen, she had the ‘very best prenatal care.'… The baby died, too. So long ago, she was young enough to be—she could have been—my daughter now. It's very strange for me to think that.”

Clara nodded, embarrassed. When older people talked of their age, how could you respond? It was so shameful, somehow.

She wanted to put out her hand. Wanted to touch this man's face that was so heavy with thinking. It frightened her to think that somewhere—when she shut her eyes, she imagined the place precisely: the pickers' camp in Florida where she'd last seen him—her father Carleton Walpole might be brooding over her. Swigging his cider jug in that way he'd perfected where he spilled only a few drops …

“You have a lovely smile, Clara.”

Smile? Had she been smiling?

Inanely Clara said, “I guess … I don't see myself.”