A Garden of Earthly Delights (37 page)

“Give Blood,” those signs said. Clara sucked at her lip to think of what that meant, why it was nailed up everywhere. Men were dying, drained of their blood; did it sink into sandy soil, or into dust, or into mud, across the ocean where Revere would never have to go?—when you owned what he did you went nowhere, you stayed home and managed things, even Judd did not have to go, but that was for a different reason: nerves. But the husbands and sons and brothers of people in town, Caroline's husband and Ginny's husband (though Ginny's husband had already left her) and anyone you could name, many of them were not just gone now but dead or reported missing, which was the same thing. Clara could not keep this in her mind and there was the remote, haunting idea that she should keep it in mind and think of it all the time, that someone needed to be thinking of it—it was so strange, this sudden opening up of the world. But she put it all out of her life and thought instead of Swan, who was a child and therefore safe. When she went to town and someone cornered her, some woman, she listened with her eyes lowered as she heard about some young man or boy who
was “all right,” didn't she think so, because everyone knew they were treated well in the prison camps? She thought instead of Swan.

Out here, north of Tintern and south of the Eden River, in the slow gentle slope of the valley that encompassed so much land, history had no power for her. It was hardly real except if you listened once too often to one of those old women. Clara kept up her house and sewed for herself and the boy and worked outside and made supper for Revere and took care of him when he came to her, telling him what he wanted to hear and letting him love her and say to her what he always said, as if he were kept young by saying these things, pressing his face against her body and losing himself in it. Out here time might pass, but it was just weathertime or daytime, seasons blending into one another or days turning into night, nothing that got you anywhere: she was older than before, maybe, but she looked better than she had ever looked in her life. Time had nothing to do with her.

The dog was barking. It rushed around the corner at her eagerly as if it had something to tell her, a dog of no particular type Revere had bought her one day. Clara ran around the house and saw first a car parked out by the road and thought
That's strange
, and then she saw a man at the end of the drive, just where it branched off to go to the barns and back along one of the old pastures. Swan was standing by this man. He was facing him and the man was bending a little to talk to him, his hands on his thighs. Clara approached them and the dog came up behind her and overtook her, barking. Once or twice she had been bothered by strangers and one winter morning she had even discovered footprints out in the snow, under her windows.…

The man was Lowry.

As soon as she saw that, she stopped. She stopped, panting, her hand against her chest as if she were stricken with pain. They looked at each other across the patch of scrubby grass, and the boy turned to look at her too. When she got her senses back she walked to Lowry, slowly, and he came to meet her. Clara said in a voice that was too faint, “What the hell do you want?”

Lowry looked the same. Or maybe not: something was different.
He wore a blue shirt and dark trousers and shoes smudged with dust from the walk down the lane. His face was the same face, with its thick firm jaw and that expression that played for innocence, as if he'd been gone a week at the most and why did she look at him like that?

“Mommy—” Swan said.

She wondered, staring at the boy, if Lowry knew. But how could he not know? She let Swan push against her, he was frightened; in another minute he would hide behind her legs. “It's just a visitor,” she said, a little sharply. She wanted him to be brave in front of Lowry. “You go over and play with the dog.”

The air between her and Lowry must have been choked with heat. He kept looking at her, smiling. No one should be able to smile that way, Clara thought. But she could do nothing in return, not make her face ugly or hard against him. She felt rigid, as if a small ticking mechanism inside had suddenly failed.

“Well, what do you want? What do you want?” she said.

“I came to see you, that's all.” He held out his hands, not to suggest an embrace but just to show that he was carrying nothing, had no surprises.

“You—you dirty bastard,” Clara said. She looked over to where Swan was playing, pretending to play, then her eyes shot back to Lowry. “Why did you come here? You want to ruin everything for me? Didn't they tell you about me?”

“Sure.”

“You asked then in town?”

“I asked them in town.”

“Well?” Clara said shrilly, “what do you want, then? He isn't here now, it's lucky. You want to see him?”

“Why should I want to see him?” He leaned toward her and laughed. She heard the familiar laugh but saw something flash from inside his hair, something flat against his skull; this frightened her. It might have been a scar around which hair wouldn't grow. “I just came to see you. I thought you might want to see me.”

“I don't know why in hell you thought that,” Clara said, trying to make her words hard enough to keep down her trembling. She turned away from him suddenly to stare out at the fields that ran to
the road—thick with dandelion fuzz that was white and fragile as she felt. Out there his car was parked. “Why did you leave your car out there?”

“I don't know.”

But she thought it was strange. He had come back to the house on foot. “How did you find me?” she said.

“They told me. But they didn't think I should come.”

“Well—what do you think? What do you want?” she said. She stared at him and felt in this instant that she was too young to go through such things, that this moment was terrible for her because she knew what he wanted and what she would say to him, as if everything had been rehearsed in her dreams for years without her knowing about it.

“Honey, I came back for you,” he said. He took her hand. He slid his hand up to her wrist and jerked her a little as if waking her. “He's a real cute little kid,” he said, nodding over toward Swan. “I knew he was your kid right away—he looks like you. I knew I was at the right place then.”

“But—what do you want?” Clara said.

“Do you love him, this Revere?”

Clara wanted to say something but could not. Her lips parted but Lowry's eyes had too much power over her, they wanted too much. She felt that she would fall helplessly from him if he released her wrist.

“I said, do you love him?”

“I don't need to love anybody.”

Lowry laughed. His face was not as tan as one might think, this late in August. “Aren't you going to invite me in? Have supper or something—what time is it?”

“Suppertime almost, but I don't have anything fixed—I—”

“Don't you want me to stay?”

She looked around to where Swan was kneeling with one arm around the dog's neck. They might have been whispering together or crying together. The impulse to tell Lowry that this child was his was so strong in Clara that for a moment she could not speak at all. Then she said, “You can come in. I'll feed you. He isn't coming over tonight.”

“That would be real kind of you.”

“You're probably hungry.”

“I'm hungry.”

“You look tired—you've been driving a long time.”

“That's right.”

At the door her foot slipped and Lowry had to catch her. “Swan, come on in,” she called. The boy was waiting on the path, his clever, silent face turned toward them. Then Clara said, confused, “No, never mind. You don't need to—it's hot inside.” She started to cry. It had something to do with her foot slipping on her own doorstep—mixing her up, frightening her. Lowry laughed and put his hands on her waist and pushed her up into the house.

“This is nice,” he said, “but Revere could do better for you.”

“I know that.”

“Don't you mind, then?”

“I don't want anything else. I told him to stop buying me things a long time ago.”

He walked through the kitchen and looked into the parlor. There Clara's plants were everywhere, on the windowsills and on tables— broad, flat leaves, ferns, tiny budlike leaves, violets you might almost miss if you didn't look closely enough. She saw Lowry looking at them. “You have a house all your own now,” he said.

Clara followed him into the parlor where it was cool. She was still crying, angrily. Lowry turned and said, “I see you got grown up.”

“Yes.”

“When did that happen?”

“After you left.”

“Not before?”

“No.”

“They said you've been with him a long time. Four years, maybe? That's a right long time, it's like being married.”

“Yes,” Clara said.

“You like him all right?”

“Yes.”

“What's this here?” And he reached up to take hold of the small gold heart she wore on a chain around her neck. “So he gives you nice things. This is expensive, right?”

“I don't know.”

“What about his other wife?”

“He's only got one wife.”

“What about his other sons?”

“I don't know.”

“They don't mind you?”

“I suppose they hate me—so what?”

“Doesn't it bother you?”

“Why should it?”

“Being out here like this—for him to come visit when he wants.”

“You used to do that too,” Clara said, pulling away. He let go of the heart. “I suppose you forgot all that.”

“I didn't forget anything,” Lowry said. “That's why I'm here.”

Then the trembling started in her, a rigid violent trembling that began far down on her spine and passed up her back to her shoulders and arms, a feeling she had never known she could have. All those years with Revere were being swept out into sight and considered and were maybe going to be swept out the back door, as if with a broom Clara herself was whisking about impatiently.

“Let me get you a beer,” Clara said.

“Are you cold?”

“For Christ's sake, no,” she said, looking away. “It's summer out.” She felt the shivering start again and made herself rigid. Lowry sat down and she went to the refrigerator and got two bottles out. At the window she saw Swan by one of the barns, alone and lonely, a child without other children, with a mother who was now about to desert him and betray him, just as she must have always known she would. And the worst betrayal of all would be her giving him this father who had come down the lane without even driving up, apologizing for nothing and already bossing them around. She saw Lowry through the doorway, his legs outspread and his hands fallen idly across his flat stomach.

She sat on the arm of his chair. Drinking together like this made them quiet, quieted something in her. Lowry said, “I went to Mexico and got married.”

“You what?”

“Got married.”

Clara tried to keep her voice steady. “Where is your wife, then?”

“I don't know.”

“Well—that's nice.”

“We got rid of each other before the war. She was trying to teach down there, just for something to do. She was from Dallas. I guess,” he said, closing his eyes and pressing the bottle against them, “I guess we were in love, then something happened. She kept at me, she kept worrying. She was afraid I went after other women.”

“What was she like?”

“I don't know. What are people like? I don't know what anyone is like,” he said. “She had dark hair.”

“Oh.”

“This was all a while ago. She divorced me.”

“Divorced?”

The word was so strange, so legal, it made her think of police and courthouses and judges. She stared at Lowry as if she might be able to see the change this divorce had made in him.

“Are you all right now—are you happy?” she said.

Lowry laughed. She saw the lines at the corners of his mouth and wondered for a dazed instant who this strange man was.

“That depends on you, honey.”

“But what do you want from me? You son of a bitch,” she said, bitterly. “I'm a mother now, I have a kid. I'm going to be married too.”

“That's nice.”

“I am, he's going to marry me.”

“When is this going to take place?”

“Well, in a few years. Sometime.”

“When?”

“When his wife dies.”

Lowry grinned without there being anything funny. “So you're waiting around here while she dies, huh? They said in town she was sick but she'd been sick for ten years. You want to wait another ten years?”

“I like it here.”

“Stuck out here by yourself ?”

“I'm not by myself, goddamn it. I've got Swan. I've got Revere
too,” she added. “There was nothing else I ever wanted in my life but a place to live, a nice place I could fix up. I have a dog too and some cats. And all my plants—and my curtains there that I sewed—”

“It's nice, Clara.”

“Sure it's nice,” she said. She drank from the bottle. “You're not going to take this away from me.”

“You could just leave it, yourself.”

“What about Swan?”

“He comes too.”

“Where do you think you're going, then? You're so goddamn smart. You always had plans, you always knew where you were going,” Clara said. She bit at the neck of the bottle, hard. Lowry was watching her as if he felt sorry for her, suddenly, after all these years, and as if the emotion were a little surprising to him. “You came and went, you drove up and you drove away, I couldn't think of anything but you and so you went away and that was that— The hell with me. You never thought about anybody but yourself.”

“Don't be mad, honey.”

“You're a selfish bastard, isn't that true? You go off and leave me and come back, what is it, four years later? And I'm supposed to love you, I'm supposed to go with you—to the beach again maybe for three days. Then you'll give me and the kid a ride back and kick us out—”

Lowry sat back in the chair. He looked tired.

“I didn't think about you like that, honey,” he said. “I mean—the way I thought about the woman I married.”

“You don't need to tell me.”

“I wanted something else, honey. I couldn't talk to you.”

“But you could to that woman down there, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you left her? If you like her so much go on back and find her,” Clara said furiously.