A Garden of Earthly Delights (41 page)

Swan said, “I'll like it,” but he meant that he would like it if she did. It was clear his mother liked the idea. She liked everything. If something in the house made her angry she would break it or throw it out, if the dog bothered her she'd chase it away, but nothing had the power to disturb her. Nothing could get that far into her. It was like the mosquitoes that bit Swan out in the fields—he would watch anxiously as the little white swellings formed, sometimes in strange shapes, but after a while they just flattened out and disappeared. Things touched his mother like that, just on the outside of her skin. That was why she could move so quickly from place to place and why she had time to comb out her long hair, slowly and fondly, while other women always worked. Swan knew a few boys from school and he knew that their mothers worked all the time. His mother had her own car and drove it anywhere she wanted, to town
or anywhere. She had nice clothes and she liked to stand in front of the mirror and look at herself. Her hair was pale, almost white, and sometimes it lay down on her shoulders and past, straight and fine; but sometimes she had it twisted up somehow on her head in a way Swan did not like. He liked her careless and easy, running barefoot through the house, swearing at him for doing something wrong or muttering to herself about work she had to do; he liked her hands gesturing and arguing in silence, and her face screwed up into an expression of bewilderment as she tried to decide something— with her tongue prodding her cheeks and circling around to the front of her teeth, hard, as if Swan were not there watching her. Swan felt that he could spend his life hurrying after his mother, picking up things she had dropped and setting right things that she almost knocked over, and catching from her little grunted remarks that he must remember because she might forget. Now, sitting on this strange couch in a dim, airless parlor, she stared past Swan to Revere with that look of vacuity—her blond hair thick about her head, pulled up in a great swelling mass and fastened with innumerable pins, her neat, arched eyebrows rigid with thought, her eyelashes thick and confused—and Swan had a moment of terror in which he thought that she would not remember this man's name and that she would lose everything she had almost won.

But of course she would not lose. She began to smile, slowly. “Yes. After today it will be different. I'm really going to be your wife, and when I think of that nothing else matters.”

Revere smiled nervously, laughed a short, breathless laugh. He was staring at Clara.

Swan looked down at Revere's shoes. He resented them not thinking of him, not even remembering he was there. He was getting big now. He noticed things more than ever. That strange straight look of Revere's, directed right toward Clara—he noticed that look and it made him want to close his own eyes.

“You hear that, Swan? Nothing else matters,” Clara said. She leaned forward to embrace him. “Your father will take care of you and will change your life—my little Swan will grow up just like his father and be big and strong and rich—”

“Why do you call him that, Clara?”

“I like that name, that's my name for him.”

“What's wrong with Steven?”

“Steven is his name on the paper, but I call him something else. So what?” Clara said. “I saw in this magazine a man named Robin, he was a movie star, so handsome, so much money—that was when I was pregnant—and I thought of what I would call the baby if it was a boy. I would call him Swan because I saw some swans once in a picture, those big white birds that swim around—they look real cold, they're not afraid of anything, their eyes are hard like glass. On a sign it said they were dangerous sometimes. So that's better than calling a kid Robin, I thought, because a swan is better than a robin. So I call him that.”

“They call him Steven at school.”

“Sure—what do I care what they call him?” Clara said. “I call him Swan. Nobody else can call him that.”

There was a moment of silence. “The kids call me Steve,” Swan said.

“Steve. Steven. I like that name,” Revere said. “That's the name I picked. God, it's been a long time, hasn't it? All those years—”

“He's seven years old. Yes, it was a long time.”

“I didn't think it would ever happen—you coming here finally—”

“You mean her dying. It took her so long to die,” Clara said. She rubbed her cheek against Swan's and it was so strange: that she could feel and smell so soft but be so blunt. Swan closed his eyes and smelled her perfume, wishing they were both back in their house, safe, alone, just the two of them. Only she and Swan really lived there, not Revere. That house wasn't much, and sometimes animals crawled under it to die—but Swan liked it better than this big dark house with the rock on the outside. What if lightning struck it and all those rocks fell in on them while they slept … ? “It was a hell of a thing. After we're married we won't say anything about it, huh?” Clara whispered. “Because then I'll be in her place and it would be bad luck. In her bed. But right now I can say that it was a hell of a thing. I wanted her to die, but—but I wouldn't really want anybody to die, you know? I just wanted to be with you. I couldn't stop thinking about it even if it was bad, in my dreams I thought of her gone off somewhere and me with you in this
house—and Swan with us, like now—with his own father like a boy should be. I couldn't help that. Is that my fault, that I dreamt those things? Is that bad of me?”

He took her hands as if to comfort her. “We both wanted the same thing,” he said.

“But look, I don't like anybody to die!” Clara said. “I don't want to be married with that behind me, I'm not like that. It was love that got me into this. I fell in love with you. I didn't ask for that, did I? Did I want somebody else's husband? And your poor wife, what could she do? None of us asked for this, it just happened. She had to die thinking of me all the time, and when you came home to her from me, what did she think? Christ, that's awful! I'd kill any man that did that to me.… What could I do to make it any easier for her? I fell in love and that was that.…”

She was staring up into Revere's face. She was both passionate and submissive and there was something urgent, something straining in her voice. They sat in silence for a while. Then Revere muttered, “I know, I know.…” He looked at Swan and seemed just now to remember him. A slight coloring came to his cheeks. He said nervously, “It's getting time. Esther must be ready by now, and …”

“Where are your kids?” Clara said.

“Outside.”

“Outside all this time? Why don't they come in and wait?”

“They'll be all right, Clara. Don't worry about it.”

They took Swan upstairs, the two of them walking on ahead and talking about something in their new rapid, hushed voices. Clara, in this house, had already taken on the characteristic of walking with her back very straight and her head bowed, nodding in agreement with whatever Revere said, whether she really agreed with it or not. “I spent my nights in here when I was home,” Swan heard Revere say to Clara. “She was sick then.… Steven,” he said, turning, “this is going to be your room. Come here.” He came. He looked into the room and his mouth went dry at the thought of it, a room of his own in this house, with its smooth empty walls and the window at the end with a curtain on it. After today he would be alone. He would sleep here alone and the door would be closed on him. If he
had a bad dream he could not run in to Clara; she already belonged to someone else.

“What's this, one of the kids' rooms?” Clara said, opening a door. She looked inside briefly, as if all rooms now were hers to look into. Revere walked along the hall just ahead of her. He tapped at another door and said that that was Clark's room. At the end of the hall he opened a door and Swan's legs worked fast to get him to the door before Revere forgot about him and closed it again, leaving Swan alone out in the hall. “Is that—where we're going to stay?” Clara said, pleased. She looked in and seemed to hesitate, her back very stiff. Revere was saying that all “her” things had been taken out and the room had been painted; it was all new, all clean. Clara nodded. Swan stood a few feet behind them, unable to see past them. He did not care. This was to be the room they would live in and the door would close on it, and he would not be able to run in if he was frightened. He did not care about it. As Revere talked, Swan saw behind this tall dark-haired man another man, vague and remote but somehow more vivid than Revere, whose presence seemed to be descending over this house like a bird circling slowly to the earth, its wings outstretched in a lazy threat. Revere talked, Clara talked. They spoke in quick, low voices, as if someone might still be in that room listening to them. Swan half shut his eyes and could almost hear the voice of that other man, that man who was a secret from Revere and who had gone away and had never come back.…

A woman was waiting for them at the stairs. Swan had never seen her before. His eyes shied away from adults, as the eyes of animals sometimes refuse to focus upon human eyes, out of a strange uneasy fear; he felt that this woman's eyes also shied away from him and Clara both. She was introduced to Clara and the two women touched hands. She was an old woman, much older than Clara, so old that just looking at Clara must be awful for her. They talked fast. Both women nodded, and Revere nodded.

“—your aunt Esther,” Revere was saying to him.

Everyone smiled. Swan smiled too. He wanted to like this woman, this Esther, because she had the look of a woman nobody else liked. She was tall and gaunt with a face like Revere's, but older,
narrowed, and her hair was white and thin so that Swan could see the stark white line of her scalp where her hair had been parted. This white line and the way her gaze dropped, nervously, made Swan understand that she had no power. She was an adult but she did not have any power.

“—Judd should be here, and the boys—the boys are outside,” she said breathlessly.

“Don't tire yourself out, Esther,” Revere said.

The old woman's hands were like leaves stirred restlessly by the wind. You would think they were at last going to lie still, they were so limp, but then they would begin to move again in jerks and surges they could not control.

“Let me go in the room for a minute,” Clara said. “Are they outside already? Are they here? I have to fix my hair—”

“Clara, you look fine—”

“No, I have to fix it,” she said nervously. She turned, and Swan was afraid for a second that she would forget and leave him here with these strangers. But she glanced back and said, “Come with me, kid. We'll both be downstairs in a minute.” She took his hand and they hurried down the hall together. They left Revere and the old woman behind, and outside a dog was barking, which meant someone was driving up, but when Clara pulled him away he was all alone with her and they were like conspirators together. “You got something on your face—what the hell is that?” she whispered. “Christ, what a dirty kid!”

She opened the door to that room and went right inside. She went right in, pulling Swan with her, and closed the door behind her as if she had been doing this all her life. A big, sunny room. The walls had been covered with light green paper and there were silver streaks in it that dazzled Swan's eyes. “Silk wallpaper, what do you think of that,” Clara said. There were four great windows with filmy white curtains that distorted the land outside and made it dreamy and vague; the curtains moved gently in the wind. Clara stood for a moment in the middle of the room, breathing quickly.

Then she said, “Where's that hairbrush? Goddamn it—” She picked up a little suitcase that had been set inside the door and let it fall onto the bed and opened it. Swan wandered around the room,
staring. He went to the windows first. His own window, back home, looked out on the backyard and that was all—everything ran back to a scrawny field and ended. He could not see the horizon. Here, so high in the air, he could see the fields and a big woods far away. He was not high enough to see the borderline of mountains, but, in this house, he knew they were there and for the first time he felt pleasure in this knowledge. He leaned against the window and looked down. An automobile had driven up. People were getting out. Two dogs ran at them, barking with joy.

“Oh, here it is,” Clara said angrily.

Swan did not turn to look at her. He touched the windowsill; it had warped a little from rain. When you looked closely at the room you saw things like that. There were a few brown water stains in the ceiling, like clouds—nothing anyone else would bother to look at, only Swan. And the big bureau that looked fine and polished, that had some scratches on it; he saw them too.

“Come over here, will you? You want to fall out that window?” Clara said. That showed she hadn't been watching him—he could not fall out the window, Swan thought with disgust. “I got to fix you up. You want to look better than his kids, don't you?”

She wet her finger and rubbed his forehead. Swan submitted without struggle. This room was fresh and sunny, not like the corridor outside and the parlor downstairs; and he had caught a glimpse of the big kitchen with its iron stove and wooden table— that had looked gloomy too. But up here, in this room that would belong to his mother and Revere, everything was fresh. There were even yellow flowers in a vase on the bureau.

“Did somebody die in here?” Swan said.

“His wife died in here a month ago,” Clara said. “So here we are.” She smiled a half-angry ironic smile at him. “Now, don't worry about anything. Do what I tell you. If they make trouble for you, tell me about it first, don't tell
him
—men don't like that. Tell me if your ‘brothers' bother you. I know what kids are like, I had brothers of my own.” Clara paused, her eyelids tremulous. For a moment Swan thought she might say more: but she did not. It was like an opaque window was opened at such times, and you could see through—almost!—and in that instant the window slammed shut
again, and you saw only your own reflection. “I know, they'll make it hard on you. That's only natural. But someday—well, it will be different. Someday you will have everything—you will be the son he loves best.”

“I don't want to be,” Swan said sullenly.