A Garden of Earthly Delights (31 page)

This was the very end of August. The air was motionless. Clara was used to perspiration on her forehead, her neck, her body, but she did not like it because it made her feel dirty. Lowry disliked dirt. So she wiped her forehead with the backs of her hands and stood at the side of the road and waited. If she stared straight ahead, she could see the tall ungainly buildings of Tintern, one of them the building she'd lived in now for over two years. Seen from the back, they looked hollowed-out and strange; women had clothes hanging up to dry, drooping from line to line, on the back porches. Two girls came from the turnoff of Main Street, riding bicycles, heading down toward her. They were about twelve or thirteen and lived somewhere on the other side of the town, in those neat identical white frame houses bought by men who had managed to save money for twenty years or so in the sawmill or at the gypsum plant, doing steady work, therefore different from Clara and her people. She felt this difference now more and more often. When she had been with Lowry—no matter where his imagination had been— she had never noticed such things. She must have lived in a daze. But now she did notice, now her eyes had taken on the characteristic of narrowing shrewdly when she met someone, as if sizing up an enemy. The girls were laughing shrilly together and as they approached Clara they fell silent. Clara stared at their sweaty, smeared faces, their little mouths and eyes shaped for secret wonder and laughter about this strange blond girl Clara, whom everyone knew and talked about, who didn't have any family, who lived by herself in that dump—!

The first girl pedaled faster and shot by Clara, saying nothing, then the other was by too. Once they were past, they giggled again. Clara watched them ride away—the second one had a boy's bike, old and battered—and wondered what they had been saying about her. She did not feel any bitterness. She did not feel anything toward them at all. She watched them ride down the lane and wondered why she had never had a bicycle, why she hadn't trained her legs to go up and down like that in tight controlled circles, so that the muscles of the calf showed, even on those skinny girls. They
wore blue jeans that were baggy and faded, they stood up on the pedals in a breathless rigidity that waited to see where it would be taken to, the girls calm and unalarmed by bumps and rocks in the lane. They zigzagged back and forth, calling out to each other, their words flattened now by the distance. The soft pale dust of the lane was marked by their tire prints, a vague blurred confusion of lines that no one but Clara could understand. Clara looked after them and felt how old she was, how far she had come while never having ridden down back lanes like this with a friend, on bicycles, before supper.… Then she heard some men talking and looked over to the office, where Revere and two other men stood. Revere was backing off from them.

He must have seen her because he backed away, still talking, and then turned and headed to her. She was serious when he approached her. She watched him come and saw how his eyes emerged out of the distance, fixed upon her. She had not quite remembered them. He said hello, but she hesitated, unwilling to say anything across that space of dirt, when here she had been standing and waiting for him so obviously—anyone could tell that.

“Is anything wrong?” Revere said. He brought a sweet, fresh smell of new lumber with him on his clothes. But it began to fade at once in the afternoon heat. “Did you want to—see me?”

Clara almost shivered, but she had felt it coming and controlled it. She must have been looking at him with a small, fixed, strange smile. Revere wore no suit coat today and no tie, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up. But he still did not look like a man from this country. Just as Clara, dressed up, looked like every other girl for miles, so Revere looked like no one else even when dressed like them.

“I was out walking and saw your car,” Clara said flatly. She kept staring at him as if to force him into saying something, doing something. Revere was slowly folding up a slip of yellow paper, then he seemed to forget about it and held it between his fingers absently. “It's hot, it's awful hot. I feel all heavy and sick with this summer,” Clara said. Her voice had gone breathless, amorous in a tired way, and her eyelids drooped as she spoke, not knowing at all what she was going to say. But she did not think she had to say much of anything.
She was so aware of him standing there that her throat kept wanting to close up, to swallow in terror; his movements too were stiff. They might have gone through this before, many times. Clara did indeed feel that she had said something of this nature to him before, and that he had looked at her as he was looking now. Clara glanced down at herself, as if to guide Revere's eyes, at her bare tanned arms and bare tanned legs, at her black ballerina slippers that had cost $2.98 new and were already run over and smudged and looked like hell. Everything she had, Clara thought, looked like hell sooner or later. She said, tossing her hair back out of her eyes, “Do you own this place here—this lumberyard?”

“Not all of it,” he said. He tried to smile.

She still had not smiled and so she felt ahead of him. “You own lots of things in town, though,” she said flatly.

“In Tintern? Yes, something. It isn't important.”

“How do you get to own things?”

“What?”

“How do you get that way?—How would a baby end up like that? A baby that was just born and had nothing?”

“You look a little tired, Clara,” he said. He came to her. Clara watched his hand approaching and thought, This can't be happening. He touched her arm. It was the first time he had touched her but it too seemed familiar. “Is something wrong? Have you been ill?”

“I must be ugly in all this heat,” she said, turning away. She felt real revulsion. She brought one hand up to hide her face from him and he stepped around to look at her, the way a child or dog will press after someone who has retreated. He looked so strange, so uneasy and nervous, that she was afraid she would do something crazy just to end what they were going through.

“No, you're not ugly,” he said.

“I'm tired—”

“You're not ugly.”

He said it sadly. She did not want to meet his eyes. Her heart had begun to pound heavily. Revere pressed his hand against her forehead, just for an instant, a light, casual gesture that was meant to calm her but instead made them both nervous. Clara thought,
Somebody is watching from the lumberyard. She thought, The whole town is watching. But when she swung her eyes around, as if trying for freedom, she saw no one at all. Nothing.

“I can drive you back,” he said.

He waited for her to acquiesce. It took a moment or two. Then he pushed her gently toward the car. This was the way Lowry had pushed her—not a real push, but just a nudge, something to get her started and guide her a little, but really just an excuse for touching her. “You work too hard in that store. You shouldn't have to work at all,” Revere said.

“Yes,” Clara said, thinking of how she had worked all her life and had never known any better, while other people owned the farms she and her family had worked on, and still other people owned the trucks that drove up to buy the vegetables and fruit, and others owned banks and sawmills and lumberyards and factories and grocery stores in town that sold the things she and her family had picked, and the children of all these people were free to ride bicycles up and down quiet dusty lanes throughout their whole childhoods, never growing old.

She got into the car and let her head droop down toward her chest, just for an instant. It was all she allowed herself. In the next moment she would know, she thought: it depended on which way he turned the car. If he drove back into town (the car was headed in that direction) she would have to start thinking about getting out of this place, but if he turned around and went the other way, she had a chance. Revere started the car and drove it a little jerkily up onto the lane, then backed up into the lumberyard driveway so he could turn the car around.

She knew they were talking to each other, even though they had nothing to say out loud. All she had were questions, questions. She was fearful of being injured, broken, dirtied beyond anything Lowry could ever fix up. But she had trained herself to think, “That bastard,” whenever Lowry's name came to mind, and the blood pulsing from her anger for him gave her courage. In a few minutes they had overtaken and passed the girls on the bicycles. The girls were standing and resting, their legs on either side of the old bikes,
and Clara let her eyes brush past them with something like a forlorn, wistful affection—but they were just brats anyway, girls with fathers and mothers and families who dawdled around the dime store handling things and who stared a little too often at Clara and Sonya. In the instant Revere drove by them Clara wanted to catch their eyes and toss out to them a look of contempt, but when she turned, her look changed into one of confusion, of clumsy affection, as if she would have liked somehow to be nothing more than a third girl with them, on another bike, and not in this car heading out toward the country and whatever was going to happen to her out there.

He was saying, “I didn't know if you'd want to see me again. I don't want to get you in any trouble.”

“Yes,” Clara said.

“I mean with people in town.”

“Yes.”

“I stopped by the picnic to see you. But you belonged with those young people you were with.”

Clara said nothing.

“It's strange,” Revere said. His voice was not warm. “I didn't think I would see you again.”

Clara looked out the window. The hot sun, facing them, gave her a vague reflection in the side window so that she could see herself. She rolled down the window and the wind poured in, whipping her hair back. She closed her eyes. After a moment Revere said, “There's a house I own out here. I bought some land and a house came with it.…” Clara opened her eyes and waited for the house to come into sight. She expected it to materialize out of nowhere. “I own this land here,” Revere said. “There are two hundred acres to this. But the land's no good.”

“No good,” Clara echoed, not quite questioning him. She wondered why anyone would buy farmland he couldn't farm on, but she was too nervous, too oddly tired, to ask.

When they reached the house her face and body were damp with sweat that had turned cold. She did not bother wiping her forehead. Revere, helping her out of the car, touched her with a
hand that was cold with perspiration too. She wondered what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all. They were some distance from the road, parked in the overgrown driveway. The farmhouse was probably a hundred years old. Clara saw feverishly that its roof was rotted in one part and that some of its windows were broken. Tall thistled grass grew everywhere. There were sharp weeds that brushed against her legs but she was too nervous to avoid them. Revere was indicating something, very seriously, and she turned and saw a few old barns, washed by the rain to no color at all. They went on toward the house. Clara was watching her feet. She did not want to stumble on the back steps, which looked wobbly. She thought that if she stumbled she would fall apart, everything would crack into pieces. Revere helped her up. Since he had first touched her back on that lane she had grown weak, as if she did indeed need help getting in and out of cars and walking up three or four steps. Revere pushed the door open and it moved away from his hand, opening by itself. Clara swallowed hard. In her body everything was pounding with heat and fear and heaviness.

Just inside the house she turned to him miserably, sobbing. He took her hands and tried to comfort her. She felt his pity, his own uneasiness, and that hard strength behind him that she had to count on now. She was giving herself over to him and it would be done the way Lowry would do something, thinking it through, calculating on it, and then going ahead. All her life she would be able to say: Today she changed the way her life was going and it was no accident. No accident.

“I'm afraid—I don't want—” she began. But Revere pressed her face against him, hiding her face. He was trembling. Clara shut her eyes tight and thought that she would never go through this again, not anything like this. She would never be this terrified again.

“No, don't be afraid. Clara. Don't be afraid,” he said.

Her teeth had begun to chatter. She thought of Lowry, that bastard Lowry, and of how he was making her do this, making her heart swell and pound furiously in her chest like something about to go wild. It was of Lowry she thought when Revere made love to her. They were in what must have been a parlor, surrounded by drifting bunches of dust and the corpses of insects and odd pieces
of furniture hunched beneath soiled sheets. The ceiling was covered with cobwebs that swayed a little though there was no breeze at all.

By the time the first cooling thunderstorms came in late September, that house had been fixed up—the roof mended, the steps and porch strengthened, the inside painted and even papered with a special wallpaper Clara herself had picked out of a big book, pale pink with tiny rosebuds. When she was alone in the morning she would sit out on the porch as if waiting for someone to come, or she would stare off across the land that had come with this house, un-tended and belonging to no one really, since Curt Revere did not bother to put anything into it. She would try to think what she was doing and how this had come about: she tried to imagine the old people who had lived out their lives here, a couple who had built everything and worked the land and who had died and lost it so that Clara could sit on their porch and stare out with a stillness that she must have sucked in with the air of the old house, the intimate breaths of that old couple.

Revere had said of them: “They were eighty or more, both of them—the man died first. Their children were scattered and nobody wanted the old farm.”

Clara thought that she had never heard anything so sad.

Sometimes she went walking out in the fields, carrying herself as if she were a vessel entrusted with something sacred or dangerous, something that must not be jostled. As often as she thought of the baby—which was nearly always—she thought of Lowry, and even when Revere was with her she could gaze past his face and into Lowry's face, wondering what he was doing at that moment and if he ever thought of her, knowing that the energy she needed to keep hating him was more than he deserved. These long months were a kind of dream for her. Looking back, afterward, she was never able to remember how she had passed all that time. If Revere had allowed her to ask Sonya out, or if Caroline and Ginny had been able to come (their people forbade them), she would not have needed to
drift about so in this sleepy confusion, waiting for the baby to be born. She was waiting for pain too. She could remember enough of what her mother had gone through to expect the same thing. The long, groggy months of pregnancy kept her heavy and warm, slow, a little dizzy with the awareness of what her body was going to accomplish and of the extraordinary luck she had had: where had Revere come from? He stayed with her for hours and held her in his arms, soothing her, telling her how much he loved her and how he had known this at once, the first time he saw her, telling her of all the things he was going to do for her and the baby; and out of all this Clara stared back at the way she had come and tried to figure out what was happening, but it always eluded her. She was like a flower reaching up toward the sun: it was good luck that the sun happened to be there, that was all. Like a flower she basked in the warmth of Revere's attention, never quite certain in those first few months how long it was going to last. When Revere stayed with her in the old house or when they walked slowly about the fields, talking, she believed she could hear past them the vast silence that had always followed her about, a gentle roaring that was like the roaring of the ocean when she'd been lying with Lowry out in the hot sun or like the monotonous rattling noise of the engines that had carried her and her family around for years.…