A Garden of Earthly Delights (34 page)

When she came out again she must have looked awful, because Revere got right up and came to her. He took her hands. Clara was certain everyone thought he was her father and of course they had noticed she had no wedding ring—every woman had seen that in the first instant—so her face flushed with the shame of this situation he had gotten her into, just as it had flushed with shame before the doctor. The doctor called Revere inside to talk to him and Clara put on her coat and sat sullenly in it, thinking of nothing. Her feet were out loose on the floor, ankles turned out the way Lowry had sat that day on the riverbank, as if he had abandoned walking forever and would have been content to sit there doing nothing the rest of his life.

Revere came back out in a few minutes, his boots flopping, and Clara stared at them as if they were objects she could not quite place. Out in the car she cried with that hopeless, inflectionless passivity that cost her the least effort, while Revere talked to her, saying everything that was sensible and reasonable and that Clara would agree with in time but not right now. She was struck and weakened by his love for her, which was crazy, out of focus. “And I'm not going to a hospital. I'm not,” she said. “Nobody I ever knew
went to a hospital and they were all right.…” After a minute or two she sensed that she should carry on no longer, that he might lose patience, so she wiped her eyes dry and was quiet.

“I wanted to get you something,” Revere said apologetically. This was downtown, where the traffic fascinated and frightened Clara and the buildings were taller than any she had seen. On the sidewalks women walked past quickly in high-heeled shoes, as if they were used to wearing them on an ordinary weekday. They passed a big dirty-gray building with a statue out front: a horse rearing up toward the sky, a military man on his back, both of them tarnished a hard dead gray-green. It looked like something fished up from the bottom of the ocean. Revere parked the car and put a coin in the meter; Clara tried not to look too hard at the little flag that jumped back inside it. She had never seen that before. The air was frosty and impure here but no one seemed to notice. “Along this way,” Revere said, not touching her. She walked along slowly, staring. Her lips were parted. Revere brought her to a small shop with only a few yards' coverage on the street; it was a jewelry store with a sign bearing a long foreign name Clara could not read.

There were no other customers in the store, which was narrow and deep, consisting of one long counter that led to the back. Clara stared about at the gleaming clockfaces and silver plates and tea sets, placed out in the open so that anyone could steal them, and down past the flawless clean glass to the jewels on dark velvet. She felt dazed by what she saw.

“Maybe you'd like something here,” Revere said.

An old man waited on them. He was servile and smiling; he wore glasses. Clara stared down at the man's fingers as he brought out rings for her to look at—this could not really be happening, she thought. He indicated she should try a ring on. She slid it on her finger and saw how her hand was changed by it. “What's that, an emerald?” Revere said. The man said yes. Revere took Clara's hand and stared critically at the ring. “Well,” he said, releasing her, “pick out any one you want. It's for you.”

“But I don't know—what kind they are,” Clara said. She stood flat-footed and awkward. She had a terror of picking something too expensive, or something Revere thought was ugly.

“Take your time. Pick out something pretty,” Revere said. He stood a little apart from her. He was not uneasy, not quite, but Clara saw that there was something guarded in the way he spoke. She picked up a ring with a purple stone and tried it on.

“I like this one,” she said at once.

“That's an amethyst,” said Revere. Clara wondered what this meant.

“I guess I like it,” Clara said shyly.

“Look at the others.”

The old man pulled out another tray. Clara's heart beat in confusion and alarm at everything she had to see, touch, think about. Her instinct was to take the first thing and have done with all this awkwardness, all this pain. But in Revere's world, evidently, you stared hard at everything before you made your choice. The stones sparkled at her and their settings were intricate and beautiful, gifts from another world she had no right to and that she was stealing from those who really deserved them—not girls like herself but women who were really married, who were not choked with shame in a doctor's office. She was stealing from them and from Revere's wife, who should be here in Clara's place. Her fingers went blindly to another purple ring with a gold setting, placed high and cut into a dazzling intricate shape with many facets, and she turned it over and saw the price tag—just the number 550 in dark ink—and this did not register at once. When it registered she put the ring back. There was an ugly roaring in her ears. She would be able to wear on one finger something worth more money than her father had ever had at once, something worth more than anything her mother had owned, ever, and it was all coming about with no one showing any surprise except herself—the old man behind the counter wasn't surprised, maybe he was even bored, and Revere looked as if he did this every day. This was how life was.

In the end Revere wanted her to take that one. It was a little large for her finger but she said it was all right, she didn't want to bother anyone. All the way back home she stared at her hand, looking off at the colorless countryside and back at her finger, at the rich deep purple stone, her mind so overcome by it that she did not think of it as something she had stolen—from Revere's wife or her own peo-
ple or anyone. It was hers. Clara brought the ring up and touched her face with it, then raised it to her eye so that she could see the sharp tiny reflection of the moving countryside in it, shadows and blurred forms that were like the passing of time in a world you could never get hold of.

“I thank you for this,” she said to Revere.

The baby was born in May, a few weeks overdue by her reckoning, but that was lucky: it was just on time, according to Revere. And what she went through turned out to be no great surprise—it was not as bad as the times she had suffered along with her mother, having to watch helplessly. Revere drove her in to Hamilton, to a hospital, because this was what he had wanted and in all things that did not really go against her wishes she would give in to him; and the son she had, hers and Lowry's, was delivered over to Revere forever.

As soon as she became a mother with a baby to care for, time went quickly for Clara. She learned to live by the baby's rhythms, sleeping when he slept and wakening when he woke, fascinated by his face and the tiny eyes she imagined were like Lowry's eyes, coming so slowly into focus and one day looking right at her. Revere named the baby Steven, and Clara said that was a fine-sounding name, but her own name for him was Swan; she liked to whisper “Swan, Swan” to him, and sometimes when she fed him her hand would come slowly to a stop and she would sit leaning forward, frozen, staring at this creature who had come out of her body and had now taken on life of his own, putting on weight as if he knew what he was doing—and there he was, looking at her. “You smart little baby, darling little Swan,” Clara would sing to him, hurrying around barefoot when it was warm enough at last, taking in the air of spring with a joy she had not felt since Lowry had left her. She made up tuneless tireless songs about him:

Revere was a little shy with the baby. “Why do you call him Swan?” he said. Clara shrugged her shoulders. With the baby born, she had work to do now—she did not bother fixing herself up for Revere but sat wearily or with a pretense of weariness, her long bare legs outspread and her hair tied back from her face carelessly, interested only in the baby. When Revere held him, Clara could hardly tear her eyes from the baby's face to look at Revere and to listen to his words. “I like the name, I picked it out myself. It's my baby,” Clara said stubbornly. But she knew enough to soften anything she said, so she leaned forward to touch Revere's hand. She said, “I love him and I want lots of babies all like him.”

She could tell that Revere didn't know how to hold a baby or how to feed him, it was just a nuisance to have him around, but she kept quiet about how she felt. She could outwait anyone, outlast anyone.

She would never have known what people thought of her from just the things Judd said if she kept asking him, except one day in July, when she thought Swan was sick, she drove into Tintern by herself. She had the baby bundled in a blanket, lying on the front seat beside her, and as she drove she kept leaning over to touch his face; she was sure he had a fever. “Don't fall asleep, that scares me,” she said. “Swan, you wake up.” She heard her voice climbing to hysteria. So she stopped the car and picked up the baby and pressed her face against his; then it struck her that this was crazy and that she should have called Revere on the telephone, hunting him up wherever he was, instead of taking the baby out into the heat. “You're not going to die. What's wrong, why don't you wake up like you used to?” The baby looked drugged. Clara began to cry, then she stopped crying and put the baby down and drove on, and when she got to Tintern the dusty little town opened up before her eyes like a nightmare picture someone had made up just for a joke. She thought how dirty it was, how ugly and common.

When she ran into the drugstore, barefoot, a few people at the counter looked at her. They were sipping Cokes. “Mr. Mack?” Clara said. A fan was turning slowly above the counter, making noise. “Where is Mr. Mack?” Clara said. “My baby's out in the car
sick. I need help for him.” Her voice accused those people who stared at her as if they were complete strangers and hadn't lived in the same town with her for two years. The woman behind the counter, Mr. Mack's niece, looked at Clara for maybe ten seconds and said, “He's takin a nap an' don't want nobody botherin him.”

“My baby's sick,” Clara said. She went past them and kept going. “Mr. Mack?” she called. At the doorway to the back she hesitated, her toes curling. There was a beige curtain pulled shut across the doorway. She did not push it aside, but said, “Mr. Mack? This is Clara here— Can you come out?”

He was not an old man but he had always looked old, and in the while she had been away from Tintern he had grown to look even older. No more than forty-five, but with a reddened face that was pale underneath its flush, and hair thinning meekly back from his forehead: he brushed the curtain aside and looked at her. She saw how his eyes narrowed, remembering her.

Clara's words came out too fast, tumbling over one another. “My baby's sick, out in the car. He's got a fever or something—he don't wake up right.”

“Take him to a doctor.”

“What doctor?”

He looked behind her, as if making out the face of a doctor somewhere in the distance. “In the city. Don't your man take you to a doctor in the city?”

“I need some pills or something,” Clara said. She was trying not to cry. “He's real hot. You want to come out and see him? He's in the car—”

“How much money do you have?”

“I don't know—I—I forgot it,” Clara said. They faced each other silently and Clara thought in panic that she should have brought the baby inside, not left it out there, or was she afraid to pick it up? At the counter people were watching. And there was some noise outside that meant her little yellow car had attracted attention already; but she did not turn around. Finally Mr. Mack said, in a voice that let her know what he thought of her:
“All right. Just a minute.”

Clara hurried back out, past a big mannish woman with great
shoulders she had seen once or twice before—a farm woman—and those two girls of maybe thirteen who had ridden past her that day on their bicycles. She did not look at them. After she had passed and was out the screen door, she heard someone laugh. “Bastards,” she thought. “Sons of bitches, I'll get them.” But this took only a second and already she was lifting the baby out. His eyes were closed, milky-pale, and she bent her face against his to see if he was breathing—but she could not tell—and her heart stopped beating for a moment as she wondered if she was standing here with a dead baby, out in the sun with people drifting over to look. There were some little kids across the way; they called something out to her.

Mr. Mack took his time coming out. His face was furrowed like an old man's. “Remember, I ain't no doctor,” he said. “Let's see him.”

“He's hot, ain't he?”

“Take him out of the sun,” the druggist said. His face showed disgust. Clara wished he would look at her, acknowledge her. They stepped back against the building. Mr. Mack touched the baby's forehead with the back of his hand, as if he were afraid of catching something from him.

“Look, I'll get money,” Clara said wildly. “You know I can pay for it; just take care of him. It ain't none of that baby's fault—”

“He's got a fever.”

“Is that bad? How bad is that?”

Mr. Mack shrugged his shoulders.

“What if he dies?” Clara said.

“He won't die.”

“But what if—”

“Then he dies.”

Clara stared at him. “Look, you give me some pills or something. You better give them to me.”

“I'm not a doctor, I don't prescribe.”

“Please, mister. Give me some pills or something—”

“All right, just a minute.”

He went back inside. Everything was silent. Clara did not look around to check out this silence. The baby's eyelids fluttered as if he were struggling to get awake. He choked a little. “What's
wrong?” she said. “You wake up, now. Why don't you cry or something?”

Mr. Mack returned and handed her a bottle. “You can rub this on him,” he said. He wiped his hand on his thighs, uneasily, indifferently. Clara stared at the bottle's label: Rubbing Alcohol. “Give him some of these, too. Can you read?” he said. He handed her a little bottle of children's aspirin.

“I can read,” Clara said.

“All right. There you are,” he said, glad to get rid of her. He was about to turn away but Clara stopped him.