His father ordered drinks for himself and Clara. Back over Clara's shoulder was a wall mirror framed by a tacky red velvet drape, and Swan tried to avoid seeing himself in it. His mother's hair had been cut the other day, apparently, radically cut so that it hugged her head and crept in alarming bunches of curls up to the crown of her head, urged up there by some kind of trickery. Swan could not decide if she looked good or ludicrous. She could be both at the same time, maybe.
“Steven, you should have ordered a drink too. It's your birthday,” Revere said.
“I don't like to drink.”
Revere considered this as if he had never heard it before. There were wedges beneath his eyes—dark, tired pouches. He looked like a man who is thinking constantly, thinking painfully. Swan and his mother were light-skinned, light-haired, and curiously supple and casual beside this impressive old man; to a passerby the relationship among the three of them would be quite obscure. Swan thought: God knows I don't like to drink. If I got started drinking I might not ever stop. He wished that he could tell this to his father and throw all the blame for it onto that man's lap.
“Bessie looks sort of old,” Clara said.
“Does she!” Revere said. “Well.”
“I thought so. Ronald is in Europe, did you hear? Studying in Copenhagen—neurology.”
The way Clara enunciated “Copenhagen”—“neurology”—you would think she said them every day. Swan smiled. “Ah, Steven,” she said, a little sharply, seeing that smile, “you should have kept on with school. Why let them get ahead of you? He isn't much older than you are.”
Swan shrugged. A negligent and self-derisive movement of his shoulders perfected by Jonathan in those days of the drive to school, and back. “I had enough of studying. Books.”
“But why?” It was Clara's saddest disappointment: Swan's indifference about going to college. Valedictorian of his graduating class, and he hadn't gotten around to completing applications to any university until it was too late for the year. Vaguely Swan said he could go to college in a few years, maybe.
“Steven, you always loved to read so.…”
“Well, I don't any longer. My brain is burnt out.”
Swan laughed, and Clara stared at him. How strange her son was becoming to her! She was growing fearful of him, almost. He was reminding her of someone, Swan sensed. “If I had the chance to learn things, and wasn't so stupid,” Clara said, tapping at her teeth with her fingernails, “I would be so proud. I would! All my life there have been people around me—like in the newspapers, and on the radio—the Reveres in Hamilton—who are smarter than I am, and can talk better. I always wished I could see into the past like some people. Like at that museum, remember? ‘Ancient Egypt.' ‘Pharaohs.' History, things that have happened for a reason. And these people, they can understand life. But me, I … I never could.” Clara faltered and Swan felt a stab of something like pity, sorrow, wonder: What was his mother trying to say, whom was she thinking about?
“Well, I don't have time for books now. Like I said, my brain is like a lightbulb, burnt out.” Swan thought with satisfaction that he was safe from the massive crammed shelves of libraries and the high-ceilinged rooms of museums, so much demanding to be read, known, stared at, absorbed—that vast garden of men's minds that seemed to him to have been toiled into its complex existence by a sinister and inhuman spirit.
Revere said, “I never went to college. None of us did. Why? You need a ‘moneyman'—you buy him. Same thing with a lawyer.”
Swan smiled across the table and into his mother's occluded gaze. So? You see? That's wisdom. You didn't really want for me to get past him, did you? Wasn't it enough for me to be equal to him? And so much younger?
That night, lying in the strange hotel room, he cast his mind about for something that would let him sleep. He thought of his cousin Deborah, whom he had last seen at Christmas—a big Christmas party at Clara's. Not a successful party, not quite, but maybe the relatives had eaten more than in other years, stayed later, maybe they had been more friendly, and Clara was obviously willing to wait any number of Christmases to bring them around to the point at which they would embrace both her and Swan—she could wait forever, this Clara Walpole! Deborah had come but probably she had wanted to stay home. He watched her all during the meal, sitting next to her father but not even talking to him, a thin, shy, haughty girl with long brown hair and brown eyes. She looked as if she might be stupid until her eyes moved upon you, then you felt something strange.… After the long, loud dinner Swan sat by her and talked. They were alongside the Christmas tree, almost behind it by the window, and outside it had been snowing; he remembered all this. The snow was gentle and peaceful, but inside children were running, shouting—he hated them. Swan told her about going to the city with his father, trying to make her feel some of his confusion, his worry, without exactly telling her.
But she interrupted to say, “I hate your mother, do you know that?”
Swan was stunned. “You what?”
“I hate my own mother too. So it's all right.”
She looked up at him and smiled. There was something unreal about her gaze: she was too young to be staring at him like that.
“Tell the truth, Steven! You hate both of them yourself.”
“No.”
Slyly she poked him. “Come on.”
“I hardly know your mother. And why should I hate my own mother?”
Deborah's face shifted into an expression of contempt. “You know the truth but you don't speak it, so why should I talk to you? If you loved me and respected me …” Swan was embarrassed, and said nothing; they lapsed into silence. After a moment Deborah said meanly, “You're what is called a ‘bastard.' ‘Illegitimate.' Your mother and father weren't married when you were born. So why should you tell lies like everybody else, all these hypocrites? You're from the outside, everyone knows it. You can speak the truth.”
“No. I'm not from the outside,” Swan said. “I'm Curt Revere's son.”
He had an impulse to take hold of Deborah, to hurt her. But the impulse passed quickly. He could not hurt her, he loved her; and if he didn't love her, he could not love anyone else. She was his sister-self. Yet with her, he had to pretend. “What you say isn't true, Deborah. So shut up.”
Thinking now of that girl, on the verge of sleep, and wondering why, like him, she was so unhappy, and undefined; so like himself, but a Revere. Even her clothes looked old, of a bygone era, and they never seemed quite to fit her slender body, as if they'd belonged to someone else. We could leave here. Live somewhere else. Europe. Alaska. Mexico. Deborah! In his half-sleep he imagined making love to Deborah but before he could kiss her mouth, before he could enter her body, she faded and was gone.
On his twentieth birthday Swan was also away from home: in Chicago with Revere to meet with “moneymen.” And that summer he spent weeks in Hamilton, staying in a hotel; meeting with his father's people, and quarreling; threatening them with actions Revere himself had not thought of, yet were belligerent enough to be an old man's ideas. Selling property. Selling investments. “Pulling out.” Reinvesting. The Eden County Reveres were making a good deal of money on wheat, corn, soybeans because of government tariffs on imports, and what did Revere care if other interests weren't yielding nearly so much? Swan wanted to think it wasn't just the federal government, laws passed by Congress as a result of lobbying, bribery. The future was automated farming, like factories; except the products were to be eaten. Except, if you were smart, your workers weren't unionized, and could be fired with a few days' pay. The biggest U.S. companies could be broken by strikes, but not Revere-owned farms. Not yet.
When Swan was twenty-two he took his father up on the threat of buying out the partners.
“What are you waiting for, Pa? They're just laughing at you.”
“Like hell they are. They'll change their minds when …”
Swan closed his eyes. “You've been talking about this for ten years.”
His bra
in swerved and plunged past his father's. He was a young horse cruelly yoked to an aging horse. Forced to hobble his pace to match the other's. He had his own ideas, he knew what he wanted to do. In his mind was a land surveyor's map of the countryside from the Eden Valley north into Hamilton. Clearly he could see it intersected by a new highway; an interstate highway larger than any road that had yet been built in upstate New York. This was the future, he knew. He would purchase more land, always more land, and he would rebuild and expand the barns; tear down the old-style silos and build new ones, weatherproof. He would buy into a frozen foods company for that too was the future. He was feverish thinking of all he might do; the thought of so much power lying latent in the mute, brute land, waiting for someone to seize it. Clara was right: you needed to know what the past was. But you needed to know only to plunge into the future.
Swan had overseen the sale of the gypsum plant. He'd have liked to bail out on the Tintern lumberyard but Clark, damn dumb slow-witted Clark who hadn't had an idea in his head in his life, ran it.
Swan told Revere that the only one of the relatives he trusted was Judd. He spoke slowly and clearly so that Revere, frowning, turning his bifocal glasses in his hands, would not misunderstand. “It's taken me five years to realize that you distrust them but you continue to work with them—why? Uncle Judd can maneuver them out. We'll buy them out, and the hell with them. And if Uncle Judd doesn't want to do it, I'll convince him. I think I know how.”
Revere's stern little line of a mouth smiled slightly.
“How strange you are now. Sometimes I don't know you.”
Yet Clara spoke half-admiringly. She knew to keep her distance. Swan laughed, his mother was so fanciful. Yet it was true, maybe. Even when shaving, he avoided seeing his face. Without knowing it he'd perfected a means of shaving that involved gazing only at his jaws, through part-shut eyes. Seeing no more of himself than he needed.
It became a time then when Swan was intoxicated with all he'd inherited—he could sit at the window of the third-floor room he'd commandeered as his office, and stare at nothing; not even out the window at the land that had once so enthralled him, foothills, mountains, much of it Revere property. Figures, speculations danced in his head. They lived at the center of activity, and production: REVERE FARM had become a model farm of the New Era: barns rebuilt and humming with efficiency, like factories; dairy cows milked by machines and not fumbling human fingers; hundreds of acres of wheat ripening toward harvest. Swan could feel his heart the beating heart of the farm, and the range of his desire, scanning the horizon as far as he could see, was the measure of what they would someday attain. “They.” He liked to think that he was lifting them all with him, all the Reveres; those long-deceased men and women who'd loved and hated one another so fiercely, bound together by a single name and committed to living out the drama of that name. The lush, fertile countryside through which the Eden River coursed north to Lake Ontario had first been settled in the early 1700s, and by the time of the Revolution, the first Reveres had arrived. And now—
Then Swan would wake from his trance and think, What am I doing?
He was not one of them. He cared nothing for them.
He could leave it all, even now. Walk away.
But his mind flooded with figures, speculations, rumors, theories. Steven Revere was not the only young Revere with ambition and plans. There were others in his generation, and one of them the fat-faced cousin with the Harvard degree: Swan's rival, you could say.
They spoke by telephone, solely. They never met.
The telephone was Swan's instrument, sparing him face-to-face meetings with people he disliked. There was still a residue of shyness in him: Clara's towheaded son. Now he rarely read anything except newspapers and financial news; if he listened to the radio, it was to financial news. Rarely did he walk out onto the farm as Revere still did, and yet more rarely did he enter the barns, the stables. He scarcely knew the horses' names, and which foals belonged to which mares. There was a farm manager, and the manager had assistants. Swan was spared, and would be spared. He'd long ago realized in himself an unnerving weakness—a mystical sort of love—for this inherited land, that was almost a terror in his blood. “The land”—a fine gauzelike scrim occluded his vision, the way the information packed into print, into books, had once threatened to invade his brain and leave him powerless. All knowledge is a drug, Swan believed. And all drugs can be addictive.
He would fight it. He knew how. He'd isolated it—this sensation, as of imminent helplessness—as the way in which a fetus grows in its mother's belly: tiny head taking form, tiny arms, legs, torso, fish-body becoming human; sucking its energy from the encasing flesh and growing, always growing. Mysteriously growing. If he knew where this demonic energy came from, he would know the secret to all things.
It was about this time that he bought a pistol and carried it with him when he drove into the city. When he walked about the city streets alone he liked to let his hand rest on it, in his pocket, knowing that it possessed a power that he did not. Thinking I am armed now, I am ready. Swan smiled at the strangeness of such comfort: his heart beat with less strain.
The only time Swan left the handgun in his car, locked in the glove compartment, was when he picked up a woman somewhere and took her back to his hotel: one of those young women sitting conspicuously alone in bars, positioned so that winking neon lights, reflected from the street outside, softened and made their faces alluring. They might have been salesclerks, office workers, nurse's aides and not prostitutes, or anyway not exclusively prostitutes, available without the intervention of a pimp. If Swan sensed a male presence, Swan retreated. He was filled with a moral repugnance for such a transaction, he could not bear it. The women he encountered were friendly-seeming, hopeful that he would “like” them. He knew, and he paid them money in excess of anything they might have asked, because money was the means by which he kept them from him.
What he feared, if he'd been drinking: that, overcome with passion or anguish, exhausted as if he'd run a great distance to their anonymous and malleable bodies, he might confess to them that he did not know what his life was, what he was doing, where he'd come from, or why his brain pounded with desires he could not comprehend. Always he was running-toward, yet at the same time running-away as in a dream gone bad. “I hurt my brother once. One of my brothers. It was an accident. Yet I did it on purpose.” He was fearful of uttering such words in the lulling intimacy of sex; in the false intimacy of sex; in the brainless aftermath of sex. He was fearful of uttering words he could not retract. And of plunging onward saying he was a killer who had not completed his work and was waiting for his final deed to rise up within him.
He was frightened of these women yet returned repeatedly to them whenever he was in the city. Away from the valley, Steven Revere was not Curt Revere's son. Nor Clara Walpole's son: how furious Clara would be, to know of Swan's secret, sexual life! He smiled to think of the revenge he was taking, even if it was revenge upon himself, too. Saying, one night, to a girl he'd met in a Hamilton cocktail lounge and with whom he spent several hours: “How do you keep going with your life? I mean, how do you keep living?” It was a serious question and the girl considered it seriously yet finally she laughed and said, “It's how I am.”
He was astonished at this reply. At the simplicity and sincerity of this reply. He thought of the long afternoon in the Hamilton library, and of waiting for his mother outside on the stone steps in the wind. A bitch she was. A whore. Even a child knows. And recalling Clara later that evening as Swan lay listless on his bed, how his mother had spoken to him in her rapid soft dazed voice of how happy she was, and how she deserved happiness; and he had believed that this was so, Clara deserved happiness, yet at the same time he knew she must be punished, and he alone was the instrument of punishment.
“Is something wrong? Did I say something wrong?” the girl asked, seeing Swan's face.
Female pleading. You were meant to respond protectively,
yet you wanted to lash out, to hit and to hurt.
He left her abruptly, shaking with an anger he did not understand. In his car unlocking the glove compartment and seeing, yes to his relief the pistol was there, that mute and not-heavy object that fitted with such ease and logic in the grip of a man's hand.
Explain to that girl what he'd done, and had not yet completed. What he and Clara had done. Explain, and she would not have cared. It's how you are. We are. How close he'd come to hurting her, she could not have known.
11
In Hamilton, in a hotel into which he'd checked under the name Walpole, he ran his finger idly along the listings of Physicians & Surgeons in the local directory. The name Piggott struck him. He called to make an appointment.
The Hamilton Reveres had their physicians and surgeons, you could be sure. Their favored hospital. When one of them was stricken by illness, they purchased the very best medical attention.
If Piggott, E. H., practice limited to internal medicine, had an opening late that afternoon, Swan guessed that Piggott, E. H., was not likely to be one of the Reveres' physicians. He was grateful that, as the breathy receptionist informed him, she could “fit him into” the doctor's schedule.
An office on the eleventh floor of one of the older downtown buildings, a few blocks from the lake that was choppy and no-color beneath a glazed-looking sky. Swan had had one of his blanked-out nights, the previous day. Was it the weekend? He guessed not, since Piggott had office hours. And others in this building had office hours.
In Piggott's waiting room were several other patients. Swan was disconcerted: somehow, he hadn't imagined other people. He hadn't imagined waiting.
He gave his Walpole name to the receptionist. He was ten minutes early for his five-fifteen appointment. He sat, restless and edgy. Picked up an old Time to leaf through, without interest. The financial news would be not new, and so without value. Other features— politics, films, books—were of no interest to him. “Mister?”—the child was perhaps four years old. His mother was a woman of about Swan's age, maybe older, with a sad, hardened face; she wore a dress of slovenly glamour, and oddly dressy high-heeled shoes. Swan had only glanced at her when he'd entered the waiting room, and he had not noticed her child at all. “Mister? Hiya.”