A Garden of Earthly Delights

  “Your whole family lives there?”

  Clara hesitated. “I live alone,” she said, looking down. Then she said shyly, “I work at the five-and-ten there and got the whole day off today, so did Sonya, just for the wedding. And somebody's coming to visit me today, a friend of mine.… It's all so nice, the day is so nice. It smells nice when the sun comes out.…”

  She laughed in embarrassment at her own joy.

  When she ran upstairs she saw there on her door the note she'd left: “Dear Lowry, I am at a wedding and will be back soon please wait for me Love Clara.” Sonya had helped her write it. She had hoped Lowry might come and discover it and be pleased to think that she had written it all herself, that she had learned so much from his teaching.

  She waited in her room.

  Hours passed, the afternoon passed. She thought of her friends out at the reception. But she had things to do: sewing, mending. There were two stuffed dolls on her bed now, made of old scraps. Clara did not take off her dress and shoes but stayed the way she was, ceremonial and uncomfortable, waiting for him. She sang to herself, breaking off now and then as her heart tripped violently over some small obscure sound that was never explained and never led to anything else. Her bed had a pink bedspread on it now. On her dressing table were bottles and tubes and glittering, gleaming things she was proud of. Sonya's boyfriend had driven her and Sonya to a larger town about twenty miles away where they went to a store that had clothing just for women and children—nothing else—and Clara bought a sweater there; it was folded neatly in one of the bureau drawers and she had the drawer pulled out so that she could look at it.

  Her card table was now covered with a scalloped cloth. On it lay Clara's white gloves and her pale blue purse, waiting. They continued to lie there in that alert, expectant way even after Clara herself had given up.

  4

  It was as if Clara were living in two worlds and two times: the one bounded by her room and her job and the drugstore and the now-familiar limits of Tintern, and the other spread out aimlessly across the country, dragged back and forth with Lowry in an invisible, insatiable striving. She did not understand him, but she sensed something familiar about the hardness with which he lived. It was her father's hardness brought into sharper focus.

  “But what the hell do you care about him?” Sonya and Ginny complained. Her friends kept up long monotonous arguments against him, annoyed by the clammy infatuation Clara did not try to hide. Over at Ginny's house, playing with the baby, Clara would have the sudden catastrophic vision of this baby as her own and Lowry as its father, but a father who never stayed in one place and who wouldn't know his own baby—no father at all. She felt icy with apprehension, as if she were inching out too far on something precarious. It was not that she was afraid of losing control of herself or of her knowledge of how things were; like everyone she knew, there was no speculation in her about what was real and what wasn't. It was only the secondary, underlying conviction that she was being betrayed so coarsely by her wishes that frightened her. She hated this backlashing tendency in herself that cut away at the simplicity of her life. “My mother worked all her life and had kids,” she told people. “Anything better than that is all right with me.” But she did not quite believe this herself.

  She loved Ginny's children and her love spread out to include Ginny herself and her husband Bob, a man of about twenty-two who was temporarily out of work. He had pumped gas at a gas station but the station had burned down. Ginny was one of those women who expressed themselves in bursts of generosity, with food or affection or anger; she had a round high-colored face that put Clara in mind of country girls she'd seen walking on back roads all her life. Her husband was thin and gave the impression of lunging when he walked or reached for things. His silence and the passivity with which he watched his own children gave no indication of his impatience. “Gonna get a car from a guy,” he'd brag to Clara, and grabbed her by the back of the neck to make it more emphatic. When he kissed her she thought in a panic that Lowry would find out. She pushed him away. “What the hell are you doing?” she said, making a face as if she had tasted something bad. They all must have liked her because she could take nothing seriously—Ginny's husband and other men who bothered her, married or unmarried— as if, in having committed herself to a hopeless infatuation, she was therefore kinder and more forgiving with them.

  The less she saw of Lowry, the more she thought of him. When he did come, his face and voice were less real than what she imagined. She felt as if she had loved and married him and endured an entire lifetime, while Lowry himself was still young and indifferent. “I already have a boyfriend,” she explained to men who did not believe her, but she did not think to extend this perfunctory defense to the man who had driven her back to town from the wedding—and it happened that he showed up again in a few days, in the five-and-ten. It would never have occurred to her to turn away from him, because she understood that this man was not like anyone else she knew. He did not want the same thing from her.

  “How long have you been here, living alone?” he said. She told him, toying with a shining pair of scissors on the counter. Before this kind of man—one who “owned” things—she was shy and a little stubborn; she sensed that what gave her power with simpler men would have no effect on him. “Do you really live alone?”

  “I'm of age,” Clara said. She flicked her hair back out of her eyes and met the man's steady, gray, impenetrable stare. “I take care of myself.”

  “Do you go to church?”

  She lifted one shoulder in a gesture of indifference and then stopped before the gesture was completed—it was better to say nothing bad about religion because it might do her harm one of these days. “Well, my folks never went to church.”

  “That's too bad.” His hands rested on the edge of the counter and were perfectly still. Clara noticed things like hands: her own were always doing something, Lowry's fingers were always tapping impatiently, Sonya was always fooling with her hair. “At your age you need guidance. You need a religious foundation for your life.”

  “Yes, sir,” Clara said.

  Two tiny lines appeared between her eyebrows. She said, feeling a little embarrassed, “But I can take care of myself.” This came out more aggressively than she had wanted, so she softened the effect of her words by brushing her heavy hair off one shoulder and letting it fall loose on her back. “Where I come from,” she said softly, “you learn to take care of yourself when you're a little kid.”

  He leaned forward as if he could not quite hear her. “Where do you come from?”

  She bit her lip. She almost smiled. “Oh, from anywhere. From all over.” It was not flirtation, though it had the style of flirtation; she stared at him seriously to make him understand this. “We didn't have no particular home, we traveled on the season.”

  His silence indicated that he knew what she meant. Then he said, in a harsh, paternal tone, “People should have done more for you than they have. Society has failed you.”

  “Society—”

  “There are probably hundreds of girls like you—” He reddened slightly. “Have you gone to school?”

  “Oh, there was some woman in asking about me, from the school board here or something, I don't know. She asked me did I go to the doctor this year or to the dentist, things like that. Somebody said they could take me out of here and put me in some home or reformatory or something—but they can't because I'm of age. Can they do that?”

  “I don't know.”

  She felt a little disappointed at this answer. “Well, look, I don't want no home with other girls, I want everything I have right now the way it is and I want to be free and the hell with charity. My folks never took no charity, nothing. My pa—”

  “I don't know the county board,” he said quickly.

  “Yes, well, that's all right. I was just saying.” Clara lowered her gaze. The man inhaled deeply. Clara was conscious of other people in the store either watching them or very carefully not wa
tching them, but they were not forced into any kind of unity because of this. They stood alone, awkward and a little resentful, as if each had somehow failed the other.

  Clara said, “Did you want to buy something?”

  “My wife wanted some thread,” he told her, and already his eye was running along the rows of thread. “Gold thread—”

  Clara looked through the spools of yellow thread. It was smooth, smooth, packed down to an incredibly satiny smoothness; it was delightful to touch. “What about this one?” she said dubiously. He nodded and she saw the dark yellow transformed to “gold.” “Is this all, mister?”

  “Yes.”

  He made no move to leave but leaned on the counter, rubbing his hands against the lower part of his face. She saw that he wore a wedding band. What kind of a man would wear a ring? she thought at once. His hands were like any man's except for the ring, and the edges of his white shirt by his wrists and the dark sleeves of his suit coat. He was wearing a suit and tie in Tintern on a Wednesday. Clara believed she had seen him somewhere before having come to Tintern, or perhaps a picture of him: why did she think that? He summoned up in her blood a vague trembling response, inarticulate. She did not resent the way he looked but she resented a little the way he made everything around him look cheap and inadequate. Lowry, beside this man, would not stand straight enough; Clara would want to be poking him to make him stand straight. This man's shoulders and back were straight and firm, and nothing could tease him into looking any other way. She had no idea how old he was.

  “My name is Curt Revere,” he said.

  “My name is Clara.”

  “Clara what?”

  She rubbed the damp palm of her hand along the spools of thread, turning them slowly. “Oh, just Clara,” she said. One of the spools jerked out of place and rolled down to the edge of the counter. It would have fallen to the floor but the man caught it.

  “Did you run away from home?” he said.

  “There wasn't any home, how could I run away from it,” Clara said sullenly.

  He waited for her to continue. She stared at the spool of thread he was holding. “What the hell business is it of yours!” she said suddenly. Her face felt as if it had cracked. She began to cry. He fitted the spool back into place, taking some time. Clara wept bitterly without bothering to turn aside or hide her face. She was used to crying. “You leave off askin me those things,” she said in a child's voice, and as she looked up at him the memory flashed through her mind of where she'd heard his name before: Lowry had mentioned it and that man had mentioned it. Caroline's husband worked for him. The corners of her eyes ached as she tried to get him into focus. There was something wrong, something terrible about him, she was on the brink of a precipice, her whole life could be ruined: he had money, power, a name. The very air about him seemed to tremble. He had a name that people knew.

  “Well,” he said gently, “if you don't have any last name then you don't have any. Maybe you lost it somewhere.”

  He tried to smile but was not too good at it. After a moment he moved uncomfortably, a little abruptly. Clara felt paralyzed by her recollection of who he was, as if he were an enemy she had been hiding from all her life. She tried to remember where she had seen him before, or what she had seen that he reminded her of.…

  “I could suggest that they stop bothering you, the people from the county board,” he said. Clara, hearing this, drew her hands together in a meek, prayerful gesture. “You are obviously able to take care of yourself, no matter what your age—”

  “I'm over sixteen.”

  “Yes.” He paused. Clara waited stiffly for him to continue. “In my car the other day you said something about—about— You said you were happy. You seem to be happy. You're obviously able to take care of yourself—”

  “I'm happy,” Clara said rigidly. “I can take care of myself.”

  “You said you like the weather.… You were happy.” He smiled a little. His smile was the kind directed to dogs and babies; it did not anticipate any response. Now he noticed the thread in his fingers and said, “How much is this?”

  “Five cents.”

  He took out a coin and handed it to her. “You want a bag or something?” Clara said. He said no, he'd put it in his pocket. As soon as it dropped in something touched Clara, some near-recognition. She felt different at once. “Your wife is sewing something made out of gold,” she said, with one of these mysterious spurts of daring she was to have several times in her life. She smiled. “Somebody told me you lived on a big farm,” she said, talkative now that he was ready to leave, “they said how nice it was—lots of hills and trees and horses— Nobody has big farms around here, but if they do they're land-poor; you're different. I don't know why,” she said, moving along the counter in the direction of the door, urging him along by running her hand on the edge of the counter with a playful meticulous precision. “I don't know much about it because my folks never had a farm or any place that you could settle down on, but anyway the ones that did lost them—the banks took them or something. I don't understand any of that. But you, you didn't lose yours, I'm glad for that.” She reached the end of the counter and leaned a little forward; for the first time she was conscious of her bare arms and the pale gold hairs on them. In the sunlight she would be sleek and golden. She looked at her arms and then slowly up at Revere.

  Revere stared at her. He seemed not to have heard any of her words, but only the musing, singsong tone of her voice. Clara came around from inside the counter and walked with him to the door, as if she were seeing him out of a place that belonged to her. Outside, his car was parked by the walk. Two children were in it. One of the back doors was swinging idly open and a boy of about eight sat with his legs out; another boy was struggling with him, trying to slide his arm around his neck. They argued in low, hissing voices, as if they had been forbidden to make any noise. Clara said, “Do you have any other children besides them?” “Another boy, two,” Revere said. She shaded her eyes. She and Revere stood in the doorway. Clara had the door open, holding it there with her body. She was wearing a pale yellow dress whose skirt now fluttered about her knees in the wind. “That's real nice,” she said. But she said it sadly. Revere said nothing and she did not look at him. Silence fell upon them as it had in the store, but she felt somehow linked to him by it—they were both looking out of this silence at his children, who were fighting with each other and had not noticed them.

  When she went back inside, Mr. Mulch was waiting for her. He sat most of the day in the back room, drinking, and came out into the alley to watch the Negro boys unload things from trucks that stopped a few times a month. He wore a white shirt and a tie and showed by his dress that he was different from other Tintern people; he had a malleable reddened face. “How much did he spend?” he said. Clara smelled about him the odor of the store itself— something sour and unused. “Five cents,” Clara said, smirking. “Five cents,” he repeated. He almost smiled. “That goddamn cheap bastard. That dirty son of a bitch of a cheap bastard. Five cents.” “Maybe he never came in to buy anything,” Clara said. He seemed to catch her words as if they were a trifling little blow directed at him, and he jerked back his head in a gesture of mock surprise and mock humor. “Then what did he come in here for?” he said.

  5

  “I'm thinking of how quiet it is.”

  “That isn't anything to think about.”

  “I can hear it, all this quiet. I think about it a lot.”

  They were standing on a bridge, looking down at the river. It was July now and the river had begun to sink. Clara leaned against the rust-flecked railing and stretched out her arms as if appealing to something—the river disappointed her with its slow-moving water, its film of sleek opaque filth. Its banks were far apart but the river itself had dwindled to a low, flat channel in the center of rocks that looked made of some white, startling substance that would flake off at the touch, like chalk.

  “It's real quiet here,” Clara said. “It's like t
his all over but you don't hear it.”

  Lowry kicked some pebbles off the bridge. Not much of a splash: the pebbles just disappeared into the water. Clara waited for him to speak. But it was like waiting for that splash—the more you listened for it, the less you heard.

  On both sides of the river the banks lifted to a twisted jumble of trees and bushes. These banks eased in to obscure the river's path, twisting and writhing out of sight. “Rivers go like this,” Lowry explained, making a line in the dust with a stick. “First they go straight like this; they run fast. Then they get slow and go like a snake. They pick up dirt and junk on the corners then and slow down. So they meander more. They meander bigger and fatter until this happens.” And he surprised her by running a straight line through the very center of the curves, jabbing the stick in the dust hard to show the first river back again—the straight line.

  “Is that the truth, honest?” Clara said lazily.

  Lowry tossed the stick over the side of the bridge. It seemed to fall slowly and hit the surface of the water without a sound. They watched it float under the bridge and away.

  “This river is dirty,” Clara said. “By the other side, there, it's awful dirty. People let all kinds of junk drain into it, sewer junk, Sonya told me. That makes me sick.”

  The heat seemed to flatten out against them. Clara shook her hair out of her eyes. This silence of Lowry's was just like the silence she always listened to and so it did not surprise her. She pressed her fingers against her eyes and made the sunlight do tricks for her; she'd done that on the buses and trucks they had taken, years ago. If a person wanted something bad enough, Clara thought, he should get it. If he wished for something hard enough, he should get it. She took away her hands and the placid river returned, unchanged. She looked up at Lowry, who was leaning back against the railing; he smiled. His hair had bleached even lighter in the summer sun. His face was tanned and his eyes were a mild thoughtful blue; he looked as if he had two parts to him, the outside part and the inside part that wanted to get out. She supposed that when he was anywhere his eyes showed he was thinking of another place, and when he was with anyone he would be thinking of someone else. His trouble was never to be where he wanted to be.