A Garden of Earthly Delights (40 page)

Revere said nothing. Perhaps, staring at Swan, he wasn't listening.

Clara had never been in this house before but she looked boldly around, with her calm, narrowly interested gaze, at the furniture that was so heavy and polished and nothing at all like the things in their old house, and she was not afraid. In the very air of this great stone house there was an odor that could never have belonged to their own house—an odor of weight and darkness and time, of things oiled and cared for. At one end of the room there was a great fireplace, big enough for Swan to stand in if he wanted, and above it a mantel with silver candlestick holders on either side. He knew what silver was, more or less. His mother had some silver things. And she had a golden ring and a golden necklace too, gleaming,
delicately glittering things that lay so gently against her tanned skin that you might worry about their getting lost or being thrown aside when she was in a hurry. Once she had lost a little heart Revere had given her, and Swan had hunted for it and found it in the weeds by the back door.

But they were in this house now. Clara swallowed, and stared, her eyes slightly narrowed as if she were looking into a blinding light. When she spoke it was impulsively, nervously. “Those chair legs—why are they twisted like that?”

Revere said, bemused, “That's the way they are.”

“It's—like an antique? That's what it is?”

“Yes, it's French, I think.”

Swan waited expecting Clara to say it was strange, she didn't like it, but instead Clara looked elsewhere. “That man in the picture— he's somebody you know?”

“It's a painting of my father.”

“Your father!”

Clara approached the portrait, cautiously. She stood with her hands clasped before her, staring, frowning, while Swan and Revere watched. Out of a vague brown-hued background the man said to be Curt Revere's father gazed down at her, imperturbed. A chill white light illuminated his face, that put Swan in mind of a sharp, clever dog's face. Clara glanced back at Revere, comparing the faces. “He has your eyes. But not so nice as yours.” Half-teasing, she said, “Will you look like him when you get that age?”

“Clara, I'm older now than my father was when he died.”

Revere made a sound that might have been an embarrassed laugh, yet it might have been reproachful as well. Clara didn't catch this. She frowned as if trying to solve a riddle: what exactly had Revere said? Swan saw her give up, and turn back to them, smiling. She was conscious of her new, expensive dress and her long silky legs. When she sat down she drew her skirt carefully over her knees.

“Ah, well,” she said, “people live, and people die. It keeps on.”

She stretched out her legs. She would make herself lazy and comfortable as a cat, even here, even today, while Revere sat stiffly, as if listening for something from upstairs or outside that he was afraid he might hear. He wore a dark suit. He smelled of something
harsh—maybe tobacco—while Clara smelled of the perfume in the amber jar Swan had always loved. He would sneak into her room and hold the jar up to the light to look through it. Through that glass the backyard became mysterious and fluid with a grainy, fragrant light. The ugly old pear tree, dying on one side, became serene and frozen in the glare of that special light—even if there were those pouches of cloudy cocoons filled with worms high up on the tree, it did not matter. Swan could look at them without disgust through that bottle.

“Steven,” Revere said, “what is your last name going to be now?”

Swan looked up at him. This man's natural expression was muscularly pleasant; his smiles faded easily into one another. He had big squarish white teeth that seemed to smile too. He was a man who belonged outside, not in this parlor. He had already tried to take Swan hunting with him, out behind Clara's house, and his strides through the grass had drawn him away from Swan, who hurried along nervously and could not look away from the grass for fear he would trip over something and the gun he had would go off. It was out of the high grass the pheasants and quail flew, and their flight terrified Swan so that he had burst into tears. He remembered that.

“Tell him,” Clara said, nudging him with her foot. “What's your name going to be? Don't be so shy, kid.”

“I don't know,” he said.

That was bad, a mistake. He sensed their impatience. “Don't you know?” Revere said. He smiled. “It's Revere. You know that. Say it now—Steven Revere.”

There was Clark, and Jonathan, and Robert, and now Steven: all brothers.

“Steven Revere,” Swan said softly.

He wished he had another name to blot out this one, to take its place, but he had nothing. His mother always said with a laugh that she had no last name—it was a secret—or better yet, she had forgotten it—she had been kicked out by her father, she said.

“Steven Revere. Steve,” the man said slowly. He peered into the child's eyes as if trying to locate himself there. Swan stared up shyly—he had the feeling for a moment that he could love this man
if only he wouldn't take him out hunting and make him handle guns and kill things. Why was there always so much confusion and danger with men?

He edged over toward Clara but she was talking to Revere about other things. They talked about people who were coming, about the house, about Revere's sister. Swan, who spoke so little when he was with anyone besides Clara, tried to force the dizzying flood of words and impressions into coherent thoughts—this was all he could do. The only power he had was the power to watch and to listen. His mother could pick things up and toss them out in the garbage; she could slap him, spank him, hug and kiss him; she could yell out the window at some kids crossing through their property; she could sit smoking in the darkened kitchen, smiling at nothing. She was an adult who had power, and because Swan was a child, he had no power. This man here, this kindly man with the strong hands and the urgent, perplexed look—he too had power, the power suggested by this large house and the barns and land behind it, the enormous sweep of cultivated land that belonged to him while so many people owned nothing at all. He could walk confidently across his land and know that he owned it because he was a man, an adult, he possessed the mysterious power of strength that no child possessed, even those boys at school who pushed Swan around. But even those children had no real strength; adults owned them. Everyone was frightened by someone else, Swan thought.

“Well, what do you think?” Revere said, smoothing down Swan's hair. “You're not worried about the boys, are you? They're good kids. You'll all get along.”

“They'd better be nice to him,” Clara said.

“They won't bother him,” Revere said. “They're good kids.”

“I know what kids are like.…”

“Don't worry him, Clara. You know better than that. Steven,” Revere said, leaning to him, “you know your mother will take care of you. There's nothing to be worried about. It's just that now we're going to live together in one house. We've been waiting a long time for this. And you'll have three brothers to play with—you won't be alone anymore.”

“He never was alone,” Clara said.

Swan knew these “brothers.” His terror of them was based on the fact that they had never spoken to him but only looked at him, un-smiling. They were big—ten, twelve, and fifteen—and had their father's heavy squarish shoulders, the dark hair, and the dark quiet blue eyes. They seemed to be waiting for him to speak, to do something. The times Revere had brought them to meet Swan, Revere had done all the talking and even Clara had been silent. Revere had talked about them hunting together, fishing, playing with the horses. He had talked about doing chores together. He had talked about school.… But the boys had said nothing except what was dragged out of them by Revere and those words had no meaning.

“Look, everything will be fine. You know that,” Revere said to Clara.

She shrugged her shoulders but she smiled. She had taken out a cigarette and now she leaned forward so that Revere could light it; Swan, forgotten for the moment, watched in fascination the burning match and the tiny flickering glow at the end of the cigarette, as if he had never seen these things before. He wanted to pay attention to every small thing in order to keep time going slowly, because something important was going to happen that day and he was afraid of it.

“It isn't good for boys to be … without a mother,” Revere was saying.

Swan had always watched people closely when they were around his mother. He saw how they caught from her a certain catlike easiness, no matter what anger they had brought with them. Even this big Revere, with his squarish jaw and his wide, lined, intelligent forehead, was squinting at her now as if something misty and dazzling had passed between him and Clara. Swan looked quickly at his mother as if to see what it was that Revere saw in her; but he did not see it, not exactly. His mother smiled at him, a special smile, for him. It told him, right in front of this man whose big hands could have hurt them both, that they were here at last, here they were, what good luck!

“I know what you need around here,” Clara said. “Some windows open and some airing-out. Some of this old stuff cleaned,
right? What's that thing you're sitting on, honey? I can see the dust in it, eating right down. Doesn't your sister care about the place?”

“She isn't well,” Revere said clumsily. Swan saw how the man's gaze faltered; Clara must have been frowning. “It's only been a month since the funeral, after all. She just hasn't gotten over it yet—they were like sisters.”

Swan looked at the man's shoes: black stiff-looking shoes without any mud on them, not even a faint rim of dried mud around the very bottom.

“They were a lot alike,” Clara said softly. “People said so. Your sister is older than—than your wife, though.” The child stood between them, listening. He took everything too seriously and had not learned to laugh; he knew that, didn't his mother tell him so every day? But he had the idea that he must watch and listen carefully. He must learn. Living was a game with rules he had to learn for himself by watching these adults as carefully as possible. There had been one other adult in his life—not the schoolteacher, who didn't count, but one other man, almost lost in his memory, a strange blond man who had touched him and who had vanished.… Once in a while he found himself thinking about that man, trying to remember what that man had said to him. But it was fuzzy and lost. He had been too young. Now the memory of that other man, awakened by Revere's attention, swept down upon him like one of the big chicken hawks everyone hated, with its dusty flapping wings and its scrawny legs, and Swan could almost smell the fetid odor of that breath. (“Never say a word about him,” Clara had told him, just once. She did not have to tell Swan things twice.)

“Look—Esther was like a sister to her too, not just to me,” Revere was saying. Swan knew that their attention had moved completely away from him; he was relieved. “Out in the country like this, and not ever getting married—she liked Marguerite better than she liked me, really. She never caused any trouble. She never came between us. But she has nowhere to go now, she's too proud to ask anyone. The house is just as much hers as mine—”

Clara made a disgusted sound.

“Our father left it to us both.”

“Who keeps it going? Who has the money?” Clara said breathlessly.

“She has money of her own, that's not it. I don't care about that. Anyway, she doesn't want to live in Hamilton, she doesn't like it there and I don't blame her. She doesn't like my uncle. My sister and I have never really been close, but …”

“How she must hate me!” Clara said.

“She doesn't hate you, Clara.”

“She never told you?”

“No one ever said anything, all these years.”

“They were afraid of you, that's the only reason. But they hated me anyway and they'll always hate me. Are they really coming today?”

“Yes.”

“Every one of them? Really? The women too—Judd's wife too?” Clara said greedily.

“They do what I ask them to.”

Swan sensed something brittle and dangerous in the air about them. A faint warning began in his stomach, as it did when he was inching out on ice, but his mother must have felt nothing, for she went on teasingly, “Your wife didn't do what you asked.”

Revere shook his head. “That's finished.”

“If she'd done what you wanted,” Clara said, “you and I would be married now. Not like this, with the kid seven years old and us going to be married finally—what a laugh! But no, no, you can't budge a woman like her. From a good family with a good German name, is she going to give a divorce to a man to make him happy? Never! She's going to sit tight with her nails dug in you to keep you as long as possible.”

Clara made a vague spitting gesture; then, to soften the movement, she frowned and picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue. “So your kid here has to be taught his last name, and he's afraid of you. Your own boy afraid of you. Are you proud?”

“No, I'm not proud.”

“Men are always proud, they think more of that than anything. But not women,” Clara said. She crossed her legs. The blue silk dress was drawn tight about her thighs in tiny veinlike wrinkles.
She had lean, smooth legs; because she was wearing stockings today the curve of her calves was not shiny as usual. “Women have no pride. They do what men want them to do, like me, and to hell with it. If some bastards turn their nose up at me, let them. I never asked for any of them to like me.”

“After today everything will be all right,” Revere said. “The past is over. Marguerite is dead. I can't think anything bad of her now.”

“I don't think bad of her either,” Clara said quickly. She had the look Swan sometimes saw on her face when she was about to throw something down in disgust. “I don't think bad of the dead. She was a good woman to give you three sons—I don't think bad of anybody dead. I never knew her. And when I'm dead myself I won't give a damn if they're still talking about me.”

“After today it will be different,” Revere said.

Clara smiled a smile that could mean anything: that he was right, that he was wrong.

Today was a holiday; his mother was going to be married. Swan knew all about it. She had told him the night before that nothing really would be changed and he shouldn't worry; she was doing this for him. “We're going to live in a nice big house, not like this, and there's even a woman to help in the kitchen—think of that! And Revere, he likes you so. He loves you. We're all going to live together starting tomorrow. How will you like that?”