A Garden of Earthly Delights (44 page)

They were at the front of the second parlor, which was like a hall, where chairs were set up. A wake. Swan had been told: We are going to a wake. He hadn't wanted to ask what it meant:
wake.
It was strange, because death was
sleep
and not
wake.
But he hadn't wanted to ask because he was always asking the wrong questions. And now he was the youngest child in this room, and he'd confused the gleaming mahogany piano with the gleaming black coffin, cylindrical-shaped, at the front of the room. Robert was whimpering to Clara, “Do we have to look, Clara? Do we?” Clara said, “Honey, no. I don't think so,” but Revere overheard and said sternly, “Quiet. Follow me. All of you.”

Swan's heart was beating hard. Yet he was not afraid. For he knew—he told himself—that the dead man inside the coffin could not hurt
him
, could not touch
him.
It was a fact that
deadness
could not hurt you the way
livingness
sometimes could. Clara was often saying she'd had brothers, goddamned brats they'd been always pulling her hair, pinching and poking her, hurting her, so she wanted Swan to tell her if his brothers hurt him; but of course Swan never did. Swan never would. That was
tattling
, you were a
tattletale
if you did such things though possibly it was
tattletail
, meaning you had a tail like a rat's. Swan was more fearful of Jonathan than of any dead man yet still his heart was beating so it almost hurt, and he hated how Clara kept touching her hair, her hat, her ridiculous black stippled veil so you could see that she was nervous, too. Swan was embarrassed that his mother was different from the other women in the room: even the younger women. Her hair was too pale, and too beautiful. Her face had a kind of glow and wasn't sallow and tired-looking like the others' faces. Seeing Clara, Curt Revere's young wife, you wanted to look nowhere else. She was trying to walk stiffly like the others, yet still her hips moved, her shoulders and arms moved in a way to draw the eye to her. Her shapely legs were encased in silky dark stockings, and she wore high-heeled black patent leather shoes.

“Yes, Clara. The boy should see. He's of age.”

“Of age? Goddamn he's
seven.
” “Seven is the age of reason. Calm yourself, Clara.”

This exchange was in an undertone. No one overheard except Swan.

There'd been indecision, and therefore hope, but now Swan's left hand was gripped, hard. By Clara. She was all but dragging him forward. She had the tight-jawed look of a woman hiking up a steep incline, damned if she would be daunted. A kind of sick excitement stirred in Swan, in his bowels, the way you felt sometimes when you were about to be sick but didn't yet realize what it meant, that sensation.

He would think, afterward: Because a stranger had died, and was in a gleaming black box at a
wake
, in a stone mansion on Lakeshore Boulevard, Hamilton, New York, and that stranger was related to Curt Revere who was Swan's father, Swan had had to be brought here, and had to look upon
deadness.
Not the many miles of countryside between Lakeshore Boulevard and REVERE FARM in the Eden Valley had been enough to protect Swan, once it was decided. And so he was in this high-ceilinged room banked with flowers that smelled of death.

Swan found himself staring at an elderly man, a stranger, with pale parchment skin, and tightly pursed lips, who was lying on his back inside the gleaming cylindrical box, his eyes closed. Yet how waxy his eyelids looked. How waxy his face, though his cheeks were dabbed with rouge like a woman's cheeks. If you were dead, Swan thought, you lay on your back and everyone else had to stand, and file past to stare at you.

Clara nudged Swan. Whispered for him to shut his eyes, to pray.

Pray?

At home, Clara laughed at “pray”—“prayer.” But Swan knew he could not laugh here. He was staring at the elderly man, who resembled Curt Revere. Soft white hairs on his head, a thin, sunken face, and though his mouth was meant to suggest a smile yet there was something ironic and bitter about it. Swan shut his eyes tight and hid his face with his hands in the “prayer” gesture he knew, and could mimic like a monkey.

“Son.” Revere's hand was gentle on his shoulders.

Swan glanced upward, and in that instant he had a glimpse of his other father: the man with the pale blond hair, the man with the blurred smile and easy laughter.

The vacant blue sky, beyond that man's head. The blue of his eyes. The smell of the outdoors. The wind. What had that man said to him? He'd called him “Swan.” He knew him: “Swan.” He'd said something about “death”—dying, and the dead—but Swan could not remember.

Why did
dead
mean more in a man, than in a squirrel, a dog, a chicken? At the farm, chickens were killed by hand: their heads torn off in a sharp twisting motion, no more fuss than if you were shucking corn. Why was a man different? Was a man different?
A rich man is different
Swan thought.

“Steven, come away now.” Revere spoke gently.

“Oh, Swan! Come away.”

Clara was pulling him beside her. Almost, Clara was hugging him against her side, clumsily. He wanted to shove away from her, for he was no baby, he was seven years old which is
the age of reason
and he didn't need his damn mother. Sidelong he watched her, and the others. They were all going to die like the elderly man in the gleaming black box: but they didn't know it. Or didn't believe it. The way a chicken, in the instant before human hands reached out to grab it, and twisted its head from its neck, would not believe it was going to die.

Swan eased free of Clara's clutching hands, and walked away. As if he knew where he was going, in this strange place. But no one stopped him. There was something sweet and rotted on his tongue, he could not spit it out with everyone watching.

He found a bathroom, that smelled strongly of toilet cleanser. Then he found a room with shelves of books. He pulled out several tall heavy books with
Encyclopaedia Britannica
stamped in gilt letters on their spines. He was turning pages, looking at pictures, trying to read in the dim lighting, of a faraway place called Egypt, that was in Africa. Someday, he thought, he would go there: he would never return here.

At dawn of that day when Clara had her miscarriage—she had been about three months pregnant—she woke to see her husband dressing in the dark. He stood off to one side, dressing stealthily, and she lay very still, as if he were an intruder who had not yet noticed her. Her eyes were vague and gritty with sleep, her hair lay tangled over the pillow, and her heavy inert peace contrasted with Revere's quick movements. She saw as he turned to pick something up that his chest had grown heavy; his waist was thick. She could hear his breathing. The air was a little chilly—it was September and beginning to get cold at night—and the window behind him glared silently with light, everything slowed down as in a dream and having that strange elasticity of a dream, so that it could belong to any time.

She remembered him without those lard-pale ridges of fat: a younger man undressing before her, trembling with excitement for her.

She thought of Lowry, his face passing in and out of her mind as it always did, not upsetting her and not even blotting out Revere's kindly, hardened face, the look of precise concentration he was giving now to buttoning his shirt. The pregnancy with Lowry's baby had been uncertain, she hadn't known exactly what was going to happen; but this time everything was certain. There was nothing for her to worry about or even think about, except that she wanted a girl. So she looked at Revere in the half-dark and thought that he was a good man and that she did love him, she loved him somehow.

“Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?” Clara said.

He glanced around, startled like a thief. “Did I wake you up?” he said.

“I don't know, it's all right.” Clara stretched her arms and yawned. “When are you coming back, I can't remember.…”

“Tuesday.”

She remembered then that he'd told her this.

“Are you going to miss me, darling?” Clara asked.

He'd been buttoning his shirt. She saw how his fingers hesitated— he had thick, strong fingers. He was not a man who worked very
much with his hands for he hired “farmhands” for this purpose; and yet, he was strong, he bore a taciturn authority Clara associated with maleness. It occurred to her that Revere's fingers and everything that was his belonged to her, who had nothing of her own; and had belonged to her for ten years now. Never did she see the tall black letters on the barn REVERE FARM without feeling a stab of elation, pride.

Bitches don't love nobody
Carleton had accused her. Drunk, and his face contorted.
Run off. Dirty filthy bitch like all of them.

She'd proven him wrong. Her drunk-father. Whitetrash Carleton Walpole left behind in, where was it. Migrant workers' camp in godforsaken Florida.

Revere was looking at her tenderly. In that way, Clara recalled, he'd looked at the instant photo of Clara as a girl, preening seductively for the camera. “Clara, dear, I wish you'd come with me.” He sat on the edge of the bed, careful to retain most of his weight on his feet. “I thought you liked train rides.…”

He stroked her hair. Clara liked to be touched; lazily she closed her eyes. One of the farm dogs was barking in the near distance. “Your relatives don't like me, Curt. I try, but I can't talk to them.…” It wasn't true, exactly: Clara knew better than to try. She saw their eyes on her, judging.
They hate my guts
she dared not tell Revere who would defend them, hurt. “They're so different from you. And that time I went to buy that pretty dress, with the lace collar …”

“Clara, haven't you forgotten that yet?”

Revere's flashes of anger came vertically upon Clara, out of nowhere, never addressed to her exactly (for he loved his young blond wife, he adored his Clara) but to attitudes of hers he considered unworthy of a Revere wife. She understood that she had power over this man's anger as long ago she'd had power over Carleton Walpole's anger but that it was not a power she could control: it was like lightning, that could be swift and lethal.

“In the city I could go to a—a museum, maybe?—but not alone. I'd be so lonely by myself. And you're busy. And anyway … there are the boys here.” Clara didn't want to say
There is Swan
for of course Swan was not her only son now. “And I want to work in my garden, it makes me happy.…” One of Revere's farmhands helped
Clara with the garden, a kitchen garden it was called, where she'd planted tomatoes, pole beans, fast-growing cucumbers, zucchini, acorn squash; but also zinnias, marigolds, petunias, and hollyhocks, her favorite flower. At Revere's great-aunt's house in Hamilton Clara had seen what a formal garden was, such precision, symmetry, the way colors were repeated and related, but her garden was nothing like that. Clara's garden was one that Pearl would have liked, Clara thought. Just to walk around in it, maybe to sit in it, in a chair. Sit, and dream. Where it wasn't just kneeling and stooping and picking desperate to fill baskets for a few pennies each. And you the owner of the garden, with a farmhand to help
you.

“My garden,” Clara said. “You like the flowers I bring in, don't you? The zinnias …”

Revere seemed scarcely to be listening to Clara. He leaned over her and pressed his face against the side of her face, and her hair that wasn't yet combed out. She felt his warm breath; it was a little stale yet from sleep and she wanted to move away, but did not. His hand had dropped onto her stomach, familiar and heavy. Warm, comforting. Clara put her own hand over his and smiled at him thinking he would be leaving in a minute, in just another minute.

She loved him. He was her husband, he adored her. He was a good father to her son. He was a good man, she knew. Decent, fair-minded, if sometimes impatient with others who didn't live up to his standards. He was a well-to-do man: “rich.” Yet he wasn't arrogant, bossy. Not to her, anyway.

Yet it was easier to love Curt Revere when other people were around, and seeing him. Through others' eyes, Clara could admire him. A large man, not tall, but wiry, solid, walking with little grace or a sense of what grace might be; he got most of what he wanted, without exactly demanding it. His torso, even part of his back, was covered with matted graying-dark hair, and on his thick arms and the backs of his hands were softer, finer hairs. Aging, these hairs were turning lighter, like a kind of metal. Clara recalled from the migrant camps those older men, whose muscled bodies were softening, turning to fat; how their bodies must have astonished them, betraying them; and Revere was of that
maleness.
His face was already
creased and leathery, his eyesight weakening; often he was short of breath. When at last his muscles did turn to fat he would look sad, puffy, discarded. Clara could think of this with a remote, impersonal regret, the way one mourns over the death of former presidents and generals, men of public life who reveal their private degeneration all at once and die at that moment—up until then they require no sympathy. She could hold him in her arms and look past him, as if looking from the present time into a vortex of no time at all—the Clara who had always been at the center of herself, whether she was nine or eighteen or twenty-eight, as she was now. Whatever else happened, that Clara never changed.

“Are you warm enough? How do you feel?” he said. He kissed her throat. She turned her face so that he could kiss her mouth, not because she wanted him to but because it had to be done. His other wife must have been dog-sick with pregnancies, she thought, the way he fussed over her; he did not seem to believe in her strength, which she took for granted. Nothing bothered her. If she had cramps occasionally it was nothing to keep her in bed, she liked to be up and doing something, anxious not to miss whatever was going on. She hated to be sick and idle, mooning around a sickroom—she had never been sick a day in her life, she told people. She would be healthy until the day she died. But most of all she liked to know what was going on, even if she could not always understand it. Now that Revere had these new interests there was much happening, but it was a man's business—complexities of partnerships she liked to be told about even if she could not grasp their meaning. She could understand money, however, and Revere had enough of that. She believed vaguely that he had much more money than he had had in the old days when he had pursued her, but it was difficult to tell, and certainly it would be difficult to make it clear to people in the neighborhood: what could you buy, past a certain point? She had magazines that showed enormous startling houses and her own house would imitate these (she was having a back porch added) but it took time, time; she had good clothes but nowhere to wear them, and what did people in the country know about these things? All they could understand was something flashy, like her car; Clark's
little foreign car, which had cost more money than Clara's, probably was lost on them and looked like a toy. They knew nothing, what could you do with such people?