A Garden of Earthly Delights
“You sound regretful, Clara. Did you love your parents?”
“Sure.”
“Even your father, who hit you?”
“Sure.”
“But why?”
Clara shrugged. This close questioning was getting to her.
“Why did you love your father if he hit you?” Revere persisted.
“He was my father. I said.”
“But—is that enough?”
“He was my father.” Clara spoke sullenly now. She was beginning to understand this man's power: he pretended to be gentle with you, even humble; it was his way of making you think he was no different from you. But of course he was different. There was some picking, precise look in his eyes, a tension in his face, that reminded her of Lowry when Lowry wasn't his teasing self but somebody older and more serious who scared her.
“You don't stop loving somebody just 'cause they hit you,” Clara said contemptuously, as if the thought was childish, silly. As if you'd have to be goddamned weak to give in to such.
Revere thought this over. Clara half-closed her eyes and tried to think of her father but her mind shrank from the memory; it was a memory that came unbidden at night, and not in daylight. Instead she smiled thinking of her and Rosalie tramping along the street, two pickers' kids in town, and there was that house, that flag. Oh, that flag! Clara smiled remembering running up boldly to snatch it and could see herself, as if all the action had been done by another person. Then in the next instant everything fell away, years vanished, and she was sitting here with this strange man. What had her father to do with it, then? But she could not explain this to Revere.
“Are you going to be married soon?” he said.
She looked at him. “How come you say that?”
“Are you?”
“I don't know. I guess not.”
“But you might?”
She laughed shyly. “I don't think so.”
“Is there somebody in mind?”
“Mister, can we go back now? Please?”
He looked at her the way he had looked at the photograph. “All right,” he said. “We can go back.”
She sat up straight, with the docile alertness of a child who may have done something wrong. The land back into Tintern moved unhurriedly to them, and Clara measured with her eyes the distance they had yet to go. And Lowry was on the way to her and would be with her in a few hours. She felt slow and peaceful, as if warmed by the sun. Revere was even more of a stranger to this town than she was herself, she thought. She stood between him and the ugly little clump of buildings and the clearings that were only halfway cleared and the dusty lanes with weeds growing in their centers; he might have owned some of it or all of it but he was more a stranger than she was.
When he let her out he looked tired. She thought he must be almost forty; it was the first clear thought she had had about him. “Take care of yourself,” he said, echoing Lowry's words. Clara was a little shocked at that echo. She shook her head yes, smiled yes, with her hand on the doorknob just waiting for its freedom, waiting for his sad, heavy gaze to release her. Why his resentment, why that bullying set of his mouth? Clara wanted to tell him that she was free and belonged to no one at all. And if she ever did, it would be to another man. But she did not know what he wanted. She had never met anyone like him, she did not know how to talk to him. All she felt when she left was a sense of relief at being away from the pressure of his gaze.
When she climbed the stairs to her room she felt that relief ebb out of her. Revere's look stayed with her, the look her father should have given years ago if he'd known how—but of course he hadn't— and that would have kept her home, kept her from running. From Lowry too. And from this new, stunning knowledge—she let her hand fall against her stomach. Yes, it was true. Was it true? How could she know for certain? She stood at the top of the stairs breathing heavily.
She opened the door, half-expecting Lowry to be inside, but the room was empty. The air was very hot. A few flies buzzed about when she entered, annoyed at being disturbed, then they quieted down. Clara sat on her bed and stared at the opposite wall for a few minutes, thinking of nothing. Then Revere's face returned to her, and then the knowledge about her life she'd had in the car: what had brought her all this way to Lowry and to what she believed she might be carrying inside her had just been an accident. Was that it? Life was a sequence of accidents and nothing more?
She lay on her bed and lit a cigarette and waited. Trying to think what she was going to tell him, which words to use. “I'm afraid I got some trouble, Lowry,” or “There's something wrong you need to know,” or “I feel bad about …” It might have been the ease with which she mouthed this that made her know she would never get to say it, that things did not go that easily.
When Lowry finally came it was late. Clara had taken off her dress but still lay on top of her bed, waiting. In the darkness she could see objects without bothering to figure them out; she knew where everything was. She lay with her feet curled up under her, half-sitting, propped up by a pillow, with an ashtray tilted on the bed. She was just lighting her sixth cigarette when she heard the unmistakable sound of Lowry's car outside; she hadn't known that she had known what his car sounded like.
He knocked and came inside. Clara had stood. “No, don't turn on the light,” he said. He closed the door and she could hear him breathing hard.
“What's wrong?”
He seized her and pulled her over against him. “I can't stay, I'm in a hurry. I did something,” he said. Though his voice was rushed, he was not frightened. “I'm on my way through. I can't stay. Are you all right, Clara?”
“What's wrong?”
“For Christ's sake don't cry—stop that,” he said. He embraced her and lifted her off the floor. There was something reckless and joyful about him that terrified her. “Little Clara, it's all right, I'm not hurt or anything—just in a hurry— How the hell are you, kid? How's everything here? I missed you—”
He pushed her back toward the bed and sat her down. “Look, I can't stay. Maybe I could write you a letter or something—O.K.? O.K., sweetheart?”
“Did you do something?”
“Christ, yes, it's about time,” he said. “I was fed up with this twobit business, this two-bit goddamn junk I've been doing. Next time you see me I'll be different. I'm sick to death of myself the way I am—what the hell am I?” He sat down heavily beside her. His released joy made his body heavy. “I'm going to Mexico, sweetheart.”
“I'll go with you—”
“What? You stay here. You grow up. Do you need some money?”
“Why are you going away?” Clara said wildly. “What's wrong? Did you kill somebody?”
“I've never been down to Mexico, that's why I'm going there. I'm going to do lots of things— Look, do you need some money? How the hell are you?” He took her jaw in his hand and looked at her, this new, loud, strange Lowry. She could feel his anxious breath on her face and was paralyzed. No words came to her. “You're a sweet little girl but look, look, I never fooled you, did I? I never lied to you. I told you all along how it was. O.K.? Are you O.K.?”
He lay back with her on the bed and held her in his arms. But she had already retreated from him, grown small. She felt small, and her body was numb and dead in his arms, something foreign to both of them. Lowry kissed her and kept on talking in that low, explosive way, his energy threatening to damage her with the very innocence of its joy, and she could not understand it. She had shrunken far inside her body and could not control its trembling and could not understand what was happening. Lowry said, getting up, “Clara, I've got to get going. I'm in a big rush. If somebody comes looking for me, tell them to go to hell—right? I'm only taking what's my own. If he follows me I'll smash his head in. Tell him that. Here, Clara, I'll try to see you sometime again—remember me, all right? Here's something for you. Remember me—I took good care of you, didn't I?”
Then he was gone. Clara lay still. When she finally turned on t
he light she saw money on the table, bills scattered carelessly as if the wind of Lowry's passing had blown them there by accident. It was some time before she could make herself get up to put them away. She moved slowly, woodenly. She wondered how she would live out the rest of her life.
7
The day Clara took her life into control was an ordinary day. She did not know up until the last moment exactly how she would bring all those accidents into control, like a driver swerving aside to let a rabbit live or tearing into it and not even bothering to glance back: he might do one or the other and not know a moment before what it would be.
She was sixteen now, and by the time the baby was born she would be seventeen. Every morning after Lowry had left she woke up to the clear, unmistakable knowledge of what had happened to her and what it meant. The dreaminess of the past two weeks had vanished. She stared long and hard at things. It might have been that she didn't trust them—that she wanted to make sure they stayed still, kept their shapes, identities. She thought about the baby obsessively and of Lowry who would be kept alive in this way even when—in Mexico, or anywhere—he really did die. Lowry would remain alive through his baby and its eyes might resemble his, its mouth or way of speaking—and it would answer her when she called it, a baby boy maybe who would come running breathless and laughing when she called him, to her.
To people in Tintern she must have looked very like their own girls, the kind who'd grown up too quickly and were anxious to grow up even more. She knew people were talking about her. When Lowry came to Tintern they talked and now that he failed to come to Tintern they talked even more. She felt their eyes, following her.
She cried, and cursed herself for her weakness! It was those dry, exhausted hours when she had no more tears or curses left that hurt her most. Lowry had been cruel to her, a selfish bastard—she knew. Yet, so long as Lowry himself did not know, she supposed he was innocent of harming her. And he did love her, in his way. She would always believe this.
One afternoon when Clara was out walking by herself along a back lane a mile or so from her room, thinking these thoughts, murmuring and laughing softly to herself, she saw: Revere's automobile, parked. And in that instant she understood what she was going to do and what she'd been planning to do for nearly four weeks.
It had been that long: four weeks. She thought it could have been four years. Clara had never paid much attention to the workings of her body, but after that trip with Lowry her attention had turned inward so violently and resentfully that she would never be able to think of her body any other way. Lowry had changed her. But she was healthy despite this. The trouble was that her body's health had nothing to do with her personally, with Clara; its workings and demands were not hers. She sometimes dreamed that Lowry was making love to her and her mind did not want this at all—it was disgusted and angry. She would press both hands against her stomach when she was alone, or even sometimes in the store, and think of how her body had continued in its way while her mind had tried hard to go in another; but in the end there was no choice. Time kept on passing, she kept on growing into it, drifting into it. There was no choice.
When she had nothing else to do she went out walking by herself. In Tintern there were always people walking, kids or old people or anyone at all, maybe attended by dogs that ran barking and sniffing everywhere. Some of the old men carried heavy branches to use as canes, some of the kids carried branches that were supposed to be weapons. Clara walked back on the dusty lanes that led past closed-up storage barns and frame houses and fields that had never been cleared. She avoided walking by the creek because so many people hung around there, and she never went past the Tintern “hotel,” where mill hands rented rooms or just hung out. One day she saw Revere's car parked up on the shoulder of the road; back a distance was a new building, a small office that had something to do with the lumberyard. It looked as if it had been built out of new raw lumber just the other day. The lumberyard itself was large and not very busy. The sawmill, some distance away and facing another road, was noisy and crowded with men; Clara was afraid of it.
This was the very end of August. The air was motionless. Clara was used to perspiration on her forehead, her neck, her body, but she did not like it because it made her feel dirty. Lowry disliked dirt. So she wiped her forehead with the backs of her hands and stood at the side of the road and waited. If she stared straight ahead, she could see the tall ungainly buildings of Tintern, one of them the building she'd lived in now for over two years. Seen from the back, they looked hollowed-out and strange; women had clothes hanging up to dry, drooping from line to line, on the back porches. Two girls came from the turnoff of Main Street, riding bicycles, heading down toward her. They were about twelve or thirteen and lived somewhere on the other side of the town, in those neat identical white frame houses bought by men who had managed to save money for twenty years or so in the sawmill or at the gypsum plant, doing steady work, therefore different from Clara and her people. She felt this difference now more and more often. When she had been with Lowry—no matter where his imagination had been— she had never noticed such things. She must have lived in a daze. But now she did notice, now her eyes had taken on the characteristic of narrowing shrewdly when she met someone, as if sizing up an enemy. The girls were laughing shrilly together and as they approached Clara they fell silent. Clara stared at their sweaty, smeared faces, their little mouths and eyes shaped for secret wonder and laughter about this strange blond girl Clara, whom everyone knew and talked about, who didn't have any family, who lived by herself in that dump—!
The first girl pedaled faster and shot by Clara, saying nothing, then the other was by too. Once they were past, they giggled again. Clara watched them ride away—the second one had a boy's bike, old and battered—and wondered what they had been saying about her. She did not feel any bitterness. She did not feel anything toward them at all. She watched them ride down the lane and wondered why she had never had a bicycle, why she hadn't trained her legs to go up and down like that in tight controlled circles, so that the muscles of the calf showed, even on those skinny girls. They wore blue jeans that were baggy and faded, they stood up on the pedals in a breathless rigidity that waited to see where it would be taken to, the girls calm and unalarmed by bumps and rocks in the lane. They zigzagged back and forth, calling out to each other, their words flattened now by the distance. The soft pale dust of the lane was marked by their tire prints, a vague blurred confusion of lines that no one but Clara could understand. Clara looked after them and felt how old she was, how far she had come while never having ridden down back lanes like this with a friend, on bicycles, before supper.… Then she heard some men talking and looked over to the office, where Revere and two other men stood. Revere was backing off from them.
He must have seen her because he backed away, still talking, and then turned and headed to her. She was serious when he approached her. She watched him come and saw how his eyes emerged out of the distance, fixed upon her. She had not quite remembered them. He said hello, but she hesitated, unwilling to say anything across that space of dirt, when here she had been standing and waiting for him so obviously—anyone could tell that.
“Is anything wrong?” Revere said. He brought a sweet, fresh smell of new lumber with him on his clothes. But it began to fade at once in the afternoon heat. “Did you want to—see me?”
Clara almost shivered, but she had felt it coming and controlled it. She must have been looking at him with a small, fixed, strange smile. Revere wore no suit coat today and no tie, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up. But he still did not look like a man from this country. Just as Clara, dressed up, looked like every other girl for miles, so Revere looked like no one else even when dressed like them.
“I was out walking and saw your car,” Clara said flatly. She kept staring at him as if to force him into saying something, doing something. Revere was slowly folding up a slip of yellow paper, then he seemed to forget about it and held it between his fingers
absently. “It's hot, it's awful hot. I feel all heavy and sick with this summer,” Clara said. Her voice had gone breathless, amorous in a tired way, and her eyelids drooped as she spoke, not knowing at all what she was going to say. But she did not think she had to say much of anything. She was so aware of him standing there that her throat kept wanting to close up, to swallow in terror; his movements too were stiff. They might have gone through this before, many times. Clara did indeed feel that she had said something of this nature to him before, and that he had looked at her as he was looking now. Clara glanced down at herself, as if to guide Revere's eyes, at her bare tanned arms and bare tanned legs, at her black ballerina slippers that had cost $2.98 new and were already run over and smudged and looked like hell. Everything she had, Clara thought, looked like hell sooner or later. She said, tossing her hair back out of her eyes, “Do you own this place here—this lumberyard?”
“Not all of it,” he said. He tried to smile.
She still had not smiled and so she felt ahead of him. “You own lots of things in town, though,” she said flatly.
“In Tintern? Yes, something. It isn't important.”
“How do you get to own things?”
“What?”
“How do you get that way?—How would a baby end up like that? A baby that was just born and had nothing?”
“You look a little tired, Clara,” he said. He came to her. Clara watched his hand approaching and thought, This can't be happening. He touched her arm. It was the first time he had touched her but it too seemed familiar. “Is something wrong? Have you been ill?”
“I must be ugly in all this heat,” she said, turning away. She felt real revulsion. She brought one hand up to hide her face from him and he stepped around to look at her, the way a child or dog will press after someone who has retreated. He looked so strange, so uneasy and nervous, that she was afraid she would do something crazy just to end what they were going through.