A Garden of Earthly Delights (30 page)

“Is your mother alive, Clara?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Where is she, dear?”

“This place in Florida, I guess. Where they had a little farm.” Clara paused, confused. “I mean, orange grove. Outside Savannah.”

“Savannah?” Revere frowned, considering. “And what about your father, Clara?”

“My father? I don't know,” Clara said, laughing edgily, “what about him? I ran away to leave him.”

“Why?”

“Why'd anybody run away? He was hitting me.”

“Did he hurt you, Clara?”

“Naw.” For suddenly an idea opened at the back of her mind: she hadn't run away from her family because Pa was hitting her but because it had been time. Like stealing the flag, it had been time for that. Like falling onto her knees in that church and praying her heart out for Rosalie, the first and last time. That was why she was
sitting here in Revere's car this afternoon on an August Sunday years later. Defensively she said, “My pa had some bad luck. He got cheated lots of times. He used to get drunk and hit us kids and I had a chance to leave and …”

“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 the 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.

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.