“What is Revere going to say when I tell him what we're going to do?”
“He's got a wife.”
“But he loves me,” Clara whispered. “He wants to marry me.”
“The hell with him.”
“He loves me.”
“I don't give a damn about another man's love.”
“He loves Swan too.…”
“Well, I don't give a damn about that either.”
“What if you get tired and leave me again?”
“That won't happen.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
They fell back into silence. Clara listened to his breath, felt his breath against her. She said dreamily, “But you … Lowry, with you everything is just what comes into your head. It comes out of somewhere like in a dream and you want it and then you get it, then that's over.… People or places to go to or things to do. The world is just spread out as far as you can see or feel it. I could fall out of that world, get pushed over the edge or something. Then what?”
“Clara, don't talk crazy like that.”
“And the kid too. He might get forgotten. You're in such a rush.…”
“No.”
“I'm not just a kid now, Lowry. I'm afraid what you'll do to me this time.”
“I always took care of you, sweetheart.”
“Oh, Christ—”
“You just wanted more from me than I wanted to give.”
Clara sat up. She did not want to look at him. It was as if they were criminals together, weak and suspicious together, not happy with each other the way she'd been with that man from the gas station—who had made her feel Lowry inside her without having to really be Lowry. The air was warm and sultry. This bedroom, which Clara had always loved, now seemed to her someone else's room. It was not just Lowry who did not belong in it, but Clara herself.
She let him embrace her again. Her mind stumbled backward to other embraces of his, and back all the way to that night in Florida years ago, when he had taken a washcloth and cleaned her up to suit him, to make her good enough for him. Or was she wrong about that, was she judging him wrong … ? She remembered that Lowry and she remembered herself, as if she had been outside her body all along and watching. He was the same man and she wanted him just as violently; making love with him cost her everything, every agonized straining to give life to that kernel of love he would always keep inside her. She would never be free of him. But she knew what she was going to say just the same.
“No. I guess I'm not going with you,” she said.
“What?”
“I'm not going.”
He touched his forehead with his fingertips—a strange gesture. He was stunned. Clara closed her eyes to get rid of that sight. She felt sick.
“You're not coming with me?” he said.
Clara got out of bed and put her housecoat on. It was made of pink cotton, rather wrinkled and not too clean. She went to the window and stared out. Lowry had not moved. After a while she looked over her shoulder at him, narrowing her eyes against anything she might see that she would not want to see. Lowry was tapping at his teeth with his fingers, watching her.
“You changed your mind?” he said.
“I never really thought any other way.”
She let her head droop. Her hair moved about her face languidly, lazily. She knew she must have the look of a woman in a picture who had everything decided for her, who had never had to think, whose long complicated life had been simplified by some artist when he chose one instant out of it to paint: after that, the hell with her.
“You want to spend your life waiting here for another woman to die?”
“If I have to.”
“Does your kid know about that?”
“I don't know what he knows. He's just a baby.”
“Maybe he knows more than you think.”
“Maybe.”
“And what about Revere, what if somebody told him I was with you?”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Suppose I did?”
“If you want to, go ahead.”
“Suppose I told him about before, too. Four years ago.”
“Go on and tell him.”
“Don't you care if I do?”
Clara looked down. “You won't tell him, Lowry.”
“Why not?”
“Because you won't tell him. You won't do that.”
They were both silent. She raised her eyes to his, narrowed.
“Why won't I?” he said.
“Because you know I love you. Why would you want to hurt me?”
“If you love me, why the hell—”
“I'm not like I was!” she said. “I'm different now—I'm a mother, I'm grown up— I had all this time to think about things—”
“Clara—”
“There's all these things you think about that I can't understand,” she said. She spoke softly and quietly, trying to keep her voice still. “You always go past me. That was why you wanted another woman, and you'd want one again—”
“If that's it—”
“No, that's not it. I'd go with you anyway. I'd take that chance if it were a few years ago—what the hell would I care? But it's different now.”
“Clara, you could do so much for me if you would.” “I can't do anything for you.”
He was breathing hard. “It wasn't just being shot that hurt me, it was other things,” he said. The way his mouth twisted showed how he hated to say this. “I had some trouble for a while. I was in a hospital over here, in Washington. They had to keep me quiet—try to keep me quiet—”
“My God,” Clara whispered.
“I don't want to go back to it, I mean I don't want to think about it,” Lowry said harshly. “Up in Canada we could start over again, and the kid too, a kid is so young he doesn't know anything—and we could have other kids—”
“Lowry—”
“I can't understand things. Life,” he said. He shut his eyes tight, as if to get rid of something flying around him, at him. “I don't mean around here. Here, everything is quiet. Your garden here.… It stays in one place. But over there— Nothing stays still long enough for you to understand it. How do you know what you're doing, what's happening? I can't live that way.”
“Lowry, please.”
“I can't live that way. It would kill me.”
“Lowry, I just can't go with you.”
He waited a moment. “All right,” he said.
She went out in the kitchen to wait for him. Swan must have caught sight of her because he came up on the porch. A slender, shy boy, with his father's face and Clara's hair, standing out on the porch and looking in as if he were on the precipice of time, not really born yet. He waited shyly out there. Clara looked at him as if he were a stranger. There was only this child between herself and Lowry: without him she would throw some things together and the two of them would run out to his car and drive off, and that would be that. Whatever happened—Canada or no Canada, more babies or not—she would not have given a damn.
But the boy was out there, watching. She said, “Swan, come inside, I'm going to fix up supper.”
He hesitated.
“That man's leaving,” Clara said.
The boy came inside. He remembered to shut the screen door without letting it slam. His eyes moved carefully, almost shrewdly around the kitchen, as if looking for things out of place. Clara touched his head and let her hand fall a little heavily onto his shoulder. He flinched a little but said nothing. They waited for Lowry to come out. “Did you dig some nice holes?” Clara said. “Did Butch help you?”
He shook his head, no.
Lowry came out. “I'm going to fix up some supper, you stay for it,” she said.
“I'm not hungry.”
“Everybody's hungry,” Clara said. She did not mean her voice to be so harsh and hopeless. Lowry and Swan looked at each other, both of them strangely shy. In Lowry there was something stunned and withheld, i
n Swan there was the kind of timidity Clara hated in all children, especially boys. “For Christ's sake, people have to eat,” she said. “You want something or not?”
“I said no.”
She and Swan followed him out onto the back porch. “You got a few more hours before it gets dark,” Clara said. “Do you expect to drive far, or …” They kept up this kind of talk in front of the boy, Clara feeling herself pushed forward further and further toward that precipice, so that she wanted to scream at Lowry to get out of here before it was too late and everything was ruined. If he said just the right thing, if he looked at her in just the right way—
But he did not know this. If he had known, he might have changed her life; but he was exhausted, he had given up, something had drained out of him and left his face ashen. Instead, he took hold of Swan's chin and bent down to look into his face.
“You ever killed any snakes or things, kid?”
Swan tried to jerk away.
“Let go of him!” Clara cried.
“I just want to ask him: you ever killed anything?”
Swan shook his head no desperately.
“You're lying. I can see in your face you killed something already and you're going to kill lots of things.” Lowry's own face twisted into something ugly that might have been there all along, through the years, without him or Clara knowing of it. Clara saw how his mouth changed, how his grayish teeth were bared. “I can see it right there—all the things you're going to kill and step on and walk over.”
And he released Swan. He straightened up, stepped back. The boy ran to Clara, too terrified to cry, and she stood without bending to embrace him and watched Lowry walk away. He walked out along the side path to the lane and out along that, taking his time. The last she saw of him wasn't even him, but the dust that rose behind his car as it moved out of sight.
“You forget about him, you hear?” Clara cried. “Don't you think about him again—he's going and he won't be back! You're going to get things that he could never give you, you're going to get a last name, a real name, and a whole world to live in—not just a patch of a world— You hear me? You hear me?”
She had to be careful or she would go crazy, Clara thought. She had to be careful. The boy's face, drawn and strangely old, seemed to her suddenly the one thing she had to hate, the only thing that had lost her Lowry.
III.
SWAN
1
The man said to be Swan's father had shoulders that stooped a little, as if to minimize their obvious strength. His hair was gray, a mixture of many shades. All his life Swan had been seeing this man, but today, when he looked at him, his vision seemed to blotch, as if trying to protect him from some mysterious injury. He was a child, seven. His vision would pound and tiny nervelike veins around his eyes pulsed a warning to him, but a warning of what? He was seven now and getting big and had no patience with babyish fears; he himself could measure how fast he had grown this year by the limb of the apple tree he had never been able to reach before.
That morning they had been driven to the man's house many miles from their own, in the man's car that was heavy and solid as a piece of farm machinery. Though the man's house was said to be a farmhouse it looked like no farmhouse Swan had ever seen before. It was made of dark weatherworn stone with long narrow windows, more windows than Swan could count, and shutters painted green. There were three brick chimneys. Behind the farmhouse was a barn, painted dark red, larger than any barn Swan had ever seen; what was even more startling, the barn was positioned at the top of a small hill, and it had sides that enclosed the barnyard. There was a copper weathercock on the highest peak of the barn and on its front was painted in big black letters REVERE FARM. There were two tall silos in good repair beside this barn, and there were several other outbuildings: Revere pointed out the stable, the cow barn, the chicken coop. He had a pleased, embarrassed way about him, and glanced often at Swan who was staring through the windshield of the car, squeezed in beside Clara.
Clara leaned down to Swan, gripping his thin shoulders and bringing her head level with his. She was excited, gleeful as a child. “Oh Swan, look! Did you ever see anything so—” But Clara's voice faltered. So big she might have meant. But she had no adequate words. Swan felt the poverty of his mother's language, and knew it to be his own.
The driveway from the road was long, perhaps a quarter-mile. It was lined with tall evergreens so evenly spaced you understood that they had been planted deliberately. At REVERE FARM, little was left to chance.
Swan wanted to shut his eyes. He knew this was meant for him, that was why Clara was gripping his shoulders so tightly.
As they were walking into the house, Clara murmured in Swan's ear, “Don't be afraid of him, Swan. He loves you. What the hell is wrong with you?” She poked him, pinched him. Swan bit his lip to keep from crying. Inside, he was taken into the parlor as Revere called it, a room that smelled of furniture polish and something dark and moldy. Revere was breathing hard, and his face had a warm copperish glow; he sat heavily in a chair with a high back and a thick cushion, and drew Swan to him. Loves you. Loves you. Swan held his breath against the man's smell. “Steven. This will be your home.” Revere's voice was husky, as if he were on the verge of crying. A grown man, an old man! Swan balked, and would have wrenched away if Clara's deft fingers hadn't caught him.
Clara said to Revere, as if Swan were not present, or were some sort of animal to whom language had no meaning, “See what it is for him—your son!—to be afraid? Of his own father, afraid? And in his father's house for the first time at age seven.”
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 u
p, 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.