A Garden of Earthly Delights

  Clara was asking Robert would he like another piece of raisin toast? The piece he'd taken had a burnt crust. Robert seemed about to say yes then changed his mind and said no, what he had was all right.

  Swan dreaded Clara addressing Jonathan that way, but Clara knew better. After Swan, Robert was Clara's favorite son.

  Robert had clear skin and eyes that were flecked with hazel; he was the nicest-looking of the Revere boys, with a sweet, flushed face and a habit of smiling nervously; something about him made Swan think of a rabbit fattened in a cage. Jonathan was lean, snaky-quick and unpredictable; if it hadn't been for Jonathan, Robert would have been Swan's friend. The week before, Jonathan had pelted a squirrel to death with heavy stones just to make Swan cry, and Robert had begged for him to stop. “I hate you! You always want to kill things.”

  “Lucky you, you're not a goddamned squirrel,” Jonathan had sneered.

  If Revere had known, Jonathan would have been punished. But Robert would never have told. Swan would never have told.

  Clara, finally sitting down, lifted her fork to her mouth and tried to eat; she sipped at coffee eagerly, and burnt her mouth; seeing Revere's eyes on her, she said edgily, “Oh, honey. I wish we didn't have to go. A funeral makes me …” Her voice trailed off weakly.

  “If you don't want to accompany us, Clara, you really don't have to. My family would understand.”

  “No! They wouldn't. They would judge me, and not like me.”

  “Clara, no.”

  Swan stared at his plate. The mess of broken eggs and congealing grease. He and the Revere boys squirmed in embarrassment when Revere and Clara spoke like this, in a quick intimate exchange as if they were alone. Clara, calling that old man honey! You could hear the tremor in Revere's voice; you could see the sick helpless love in the man's face. And Clara, exasperated, laughing in her edgy brittle way, fluffing out her hair with her hands like a willful child.

  Revere said quietly, “Clara, nobody likes funerals.”

  Mandy had arrived, to clean up in the kitchen. A short heavy woman older than Revere; prim and prune-faced, Swan thought. Always her suety gray eyes were trailing onto Clara, disliking her. And when Clara spoke to Mandy, the older woman stiffened and never met her eye. Mandy behaved as if Revere was God, with exaggerated solicitude and deference; of the boys, she favored Robert because he was the youngest. Swan was invisible to her, she seemed scarcely aware of him. Now she busied herself at the sink, while casting a sidelong look at Clara who was wiping her eyes with a napkin. Swan would have liked to shout at the old woman You're ugly! You're old! You were never like my mother!

  The five-hour drive to Hamilton, near Lake Ontario.

  Swan would remember not wanting it to end. For there was Death waiting, amid strangers Revere called my family.

  Yet Revere drove well, steadily and with concentration. He was an excellent driver, Swan thought. Behind the wheel of his stately new Packard sedan, silvery-green with a chrome-edged hood and fend-ers like arched wings. White sidewalls. A low sonorous horn, Revere demonstrated for them as they drove along the highway. Clara spoke repeatedly of what a good driver Revere was. She seemed excited, anxious. Lighting cigarettes and exhaling smoke out the partly opened window. From time to time Revere passed hitchhikers along the road—most were adult men, shabbily dressed, but a few were boys no older than Jonathan. “I wouldn't give dirty old bums like that a ride,” Clark said righteously. “They'd smell up the car.”

  Revere said, “They're out of work, Clark. They're homeless. They don't have your advantages, son. ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.' ”

  Swan was seated in the front between Revere and Clara; Clark, Jonathan, and Robert were in the backseat. Yet Swan, Jonathan and Robert shivered with unconscious pleasure that Clark, the eldest, had been rebuked. Only Clara protested, “Oh, he's right! I wouldn't give them a ride, either.”

  Revere said, bemused, “Of course not, dear. I hope not.”

  They talked of bums—“vagabonds,” Revere called them—for a while. Swan felt his mother stiffen; she seemed twitchy, restless. In the backseat, Jonathan was saying to Clark, “Could be, you'll be a bum yourself someday. Then what?” and Clark muttered, “I'm not going to be any bum!” and Jonathan said, “None of them ever thought they'd be, either.”

  By the time they reached Hamilton they were groggy from the drive. Clara had several times nodded off, her head lolling against Swan's; at a signal from Revere, he'd removed her cigarette from her fingers, and gave it to Revere to toss out the window. “Your mother is tired,” Revere said to Swan, gently, “she didn't sleep very well last night.” This intimate fact, so bluntly stated, made Swan blush. Yet he felt singled out for a confidence that excluded his brothers in the backseat, out of earshot.

  Hamilton was a real city, as Clark had predicted, not a mill town like Tintern. There was so much to see, entering it, that Swan didn't know where to look. Revere pointed out to him something he'd never seen before—a “railroad bridge.” Here, the Eden River had widened and appeared to be faster-moving, a steely grayish hue approaching Lake Ontario—“One of the ‘Great Lakes,' Steven. Look at the map.” But when Swan studied the map, he became confused and lost a sense of where they were. For the map was paper-flat, and nothing like the world. Swan was staring through the rain-washed railings of a bridge and down into a sudden valley at railroad tracks—so many! Then they were above the river that was moss-gray, a lusterless no-color, swiftly flowing through channels that seemed to have been formed from raised outcroppings of rock. Revere pointed out a dam—“It holds the water back, for electrical power.” Swan wondered if he was meant to understand this. He stared at the ragged-looking frothy rapids. Everything here was rushing, impatient. There was more traffic, streams of traffic, cars and trucks pressing forward, impatient. Yet Revere continued to drive with his usual composure, pointing out landmarks to Swan— a tall spire that was the Cathedral of St. Peter, another bridge in the distance, factory smokestacks rimmed with flame. There was an eagerness in his voice that suggested pride, as if in some way he owned these things.

  “Is that your factory, darling? That one?” Clara spoke naively, as a girl might speak. Revere smiled, saying, “There's no factory that's ‘mine,' Clara. I've told you that my family has invested in Hamilton Steel. But we are only investors.” Swan was sitting forward in his seat, staring. It was a confused, jumbled scene made up of patches of open space and enormous tin-colored “oil drums” as Revere called them and ugly buildings behind wire fences with smokestacks silhouetted against the gloomy sky. Halos of light glowed about the tops of these smokestacks. “Are they are on fire?” Swan asked.

  Clara laughed lightly. “You can see them burning, silly! Sure they are.”

  But Revere said, reprovingly, “The smokestacks are not on fire. They appear to be burning, but it's a combustion caused by fuels. It's self-consuming—the smokestacks won't burn.”

  Swan felt the importance of being told this fact by the man who was his father; he knew that Clara was the silly one, Clara had been rebuked, and that his brothers in the backseat would be smiling, in secret. He did not look at her.

  After a while they came to a large intersection, and turned onto a strange wide road with a divider in its center in which grass and shrubs grew. Immediately it seemed to Swan that the air was clearer, the sky less mottled with cloud. Revere said, “This is Lake-shore Boulevard, Steven. Lake Ontario is just ahead.” Swan was staring hard, not wanting to miss the lake. In the backseat the boys were talking excitedly. Clark said, “ ‘Ontario'—it's the biggest lake in the U.S.” Jon said, sneering, “Is not.” Clark said, “What is, then?” Jon said, “Lake Superior, stupid.” Clark said, annoyed, “There's Hudson Bay, in Canada. That's big.” Jon said, “That's a ‘bay,' not a ‘lake.' ” Robert intervened, “What's the difference?”

  They were passing blocks of stores. Small shops with glittering glass. A jewelry store—a “furrier's”—women's clothing stores. Clara said, “Oh! Look at
that dress. So pretty.” There was a faint furtive pleading in her voice, that embarrassed Swan. For Revere was sure to say, a little later, that Clara could buy that dress if she wanted it—and it would come as a surprise to her, because she would have forgotten. So much came to Clara like that, as surprises.

  Now they were in a residential neighborhood where the houses were as large as Revere's farmhouse. And some were larger. No driveways were quite so long as Revere's driveway in the Eden Valley, but the lush beautiful lawns went far back from the boulevard, and there were shrubs of a kind, ornamental and elaborately pruned, Swan had never seen before even in photographs. He thought how strange it was, they were traveling through all these sights to get to a funeral, to a dead man.

  There at last was the lake: so big you couldn't see any horizon. Nor could you see, to the left or to the right, any edge. Revere said approvingly, “Big as an inland sea, Steven. Imagine how it looked to the first explorers.” Swan saw that the boulevard here was made of brick, washed clean the way nothing could be clean out in the country; and all the houses had been built to face the water, on little hills. The facades of the houses were blank and impassive as the faces of strangers. Clara nudged Swan, saying, with a kind of gloating triumph, “See, Swan! How d'you like ‘Lakeshore Boulevard'?”

  “Please call him by his proper name,” Revere said.

  “ ‘Steven.' ” Clara spoke quickly, with childlike obedience; but nudged Swan to indicate that this was a joke. In a formal voice she said, “Steven, how d'you like where your father's people live?”

  Swan murmured a vague embarrassed reply.

  They turned onto one of the bricked drives leading up from the roadway. Swan was staring at a large foursquare house made of nickel-colored stone. There was a tall flagpole in the front lawn and at its top an American flag—rippling red and white stripes—blew in the wind like a living thing. A flag, for just a private house. There was a steep roof on the stone house made of some heavy-looking material—slate. There were more windows than Swan could count, somewhere beyond twelve. And tall wide chimneys. And columns at the front of the house that made it look like a public building, not somebody's home. Clara seemed frightened suddenly. She took out her compact and dabbed powder on her face, muttering to herself. “Oh, God. I look like hell.” She clamped her hat—a small black cloche with a dusky veil with black dots, that Clara complained made everything look like it had pimples—on her head, groping with nervous fingers. Her nails were carefully polished a deep peach-pink, and filed; Swan had seen her that morning, bent over her task with a small bottle and brush.

  “These people, these ‘Reveres.' They hate my guts.”

  Several times Clara had told Swan these enigmatic words. Hate my guts. But why? And why guts?

  A middle-aged man, old as Revere, hurried down the front steps of the nickel-colored mansion. He came to Revere, who'd rolled down the car window; the men gripped hands, for a moment wordless. Then the man told Revere he should park in back, so many cars would soon be arriving. Swan noted how well dressed this man was: a dark suit, tightly buttoned; a white shirt with a curiously stiff collar; a necktie that looked as if it were made of gunmetal. Revere drove the Packard to the rear of the house, slowly. He seemed distracted. Swan saw that the house had three full floors, unlike the farmhouse. He saw a garden with people standing in it, in odd postures, that turned out to be statues, gray and startling. Autumn flowers, zinnias and asters and marigolds, were blooming, but there was a left-behind look to the garden, as if something had happened to make it irrelevant. Swan whispered to Clara, so no one could hear, he wished he could stay outside—he could wait in the garden.

  Clara ignored him. He saw that her face was bright, taut, tense, and that she was smiling her special smile, stretching her lipsticked lips across her teeth without revealing her teeth. Swan knew that Clara hated her teeth that were discolored and slightly uneven, whitetrash teeth she called them, shamed.

  They entered the house through a side door. Into a vestibule, and into a hallway that smelled not unlike Revere's house in the Eden Valley: furniture polish, and something dank and musty like mold. It was a rich person's smell, Swan supposed. They were taken into a “parlor” with furniture even heavier and more old-fashioned than Revere's; there was a table so massive, so intricately and senselessly carved, you would think it deserved to be stared at, yet no one took the slightest notice. On this table were tall vases of flowers, mostly white lilies that gave off a sweet-sickish odor.

  “Oh, calla lilies. That's what those are?”

  Clara spoke tentatively, adjusting her hat. The black-dotted veil gave her a moribund look, as if she were a very old woman peering out at the world with half-blind eyes.

  Clara tried to grasp his hand but he shoved her hand away.

  “Steven. Come.”

  It was Revere speaking, quietly. No one would shove away Curt Revere's hand.

  Swan was being led forward blindly. Behind him he heard, or believed he heard, Jonathan mimicking his father's voice. Steven, come! Little bastard. The other boys giggled.

  Now they were in a larger room, that might have been another parlor. Here there was a great shining piano, its keyboard shut. More flowers, and that sweet-sickly odor mingled with the more pungent odor of tobacco smoke. At the windows were curtains flimsy as ghosts. A woman in a dark shimmering dress hurried to embrace Revere; the two were nearly of a height, and might have been brother and sister, except they were so old, Swan thought, confused. Could you be brother and sister, and so old? The woman had gray hair caught back in a tight coil, and her skin looked tight, too. Elaborately, she came to embrace Clara. “Claire. My dear. I mean—Clara. So very good to see you, dear. On this sorrowful occasion.” Swan had a sudden terrible impulse to laugh; if he laughed, his brothers would admire him. But he stood unresisting as the woman with the tight-coiled hair frowned over him. “Oh. Is this— Steven?” With jerky movements, she bent to embrace him; Swan neither resisted nor allowed himself to be embraced. Clara poked him meaning he should say hello, should say something, but Swan stood mute. This woman was—who? Someone's great-aunt? Revere's aunt? And not his sister after all? Swan made an effort to listen, initially. But there were too many people arriving, and all of them strangers. Some resembled Curt Revere, and others did not. Many were his age, and even older. Though there were younger people, too—a surprise to Swan. He had come to believe that all Reveres were old, except for his brothers.

  “My wife, Clara—”

  “My son, Steven—”

  Once introduced, Swan was then ignored. His brothers, too, though older, and known to these people, were mostly ignored. Swan overheard a white-haired man say to Revere, gripping his arm at the elbow with startling intimacy, “Curt. He spoke of you often. At the end.” Swan was shocked to see Revere's face crease suddenly, as if he were holding back tears.

  He glanced around, hoping to catch Jonathan's eye.

  If they exchanged a glance, it would be a wink. A man Revere's age, almost crying!

  But Jonathan, frowning, was staring at the floor. Shuffling slowly along beside Clark who was licking his lips nervously. Like a steer on its hind legs, Clara said of her eldest stepson, but fondly. And there was Robert, dazed-looking, glancing about as if for help. Looking for his mother Swan thought.

  Swan felt a stab of satisfaction: he had Clara, and his stepbrothers had no mother.

  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.