A Garden of Earthly Delights (45 page)

“When I'm away I miss you very much. I'm afraid you might not be here when I get back,” Revere said. Anything lured out of him by her softness or by their intimacy was something he would regret later; he was not that kind of man. Judd was a talker, but not Revere. So she felt uncomfortable when he confessed these things, not because they meant anything in particular to her but because she had no real interest in the private side of this public man's life. She touched his arm, the clean stiff material of the shirt Mandy had fussed over, and felt his warmth inside, a warmth that was alive and pleading but nothing she could respond to as a woman. She loved him about as much as she loved Clark and Robert—she did really like them—and a little further behind was Jonathan, who seemed to resist her but who had such fine eyes, who was almost as smart as her own son. What she felt for Revere was confused on one side with his boys and this house, and on the other side with the man whose name was so well known and who could never be a private, intimate human being, but only a person committed eternally to fulfilling his name.

When she opened her eyes he was still leaning over her, staring hard, and something in his face discomforted her. “You're too serious, don't worry about me,” she said. She lifted herself up on one elbow and seemed by this to be getting free of him. He moved aside. “We're going to have a little girl and she'll be as healthy as I am. Don't worry, all right? Now, you don't want to be late.”

“I have enough time.”

She did not like his talk but she didn't like his silence either. “Well, what do you want?” she said. The weight of his love was sometimes burdensome. She did not like having to walk about inside the circle of his infatuation for her, which was nothing she could understand or admire. To Clara, a man's love was no sign of his strength but rather of his weakness, something you wanted from him but then had to feel a little sorry about taking. “I'm not mad about the other night, that hunting business,” she said. “If that's what you mean.”

“I hope you aren't still angry.…”

“You're right, it's good for Swan to go hunting. Fine. That's fine. I agree.” She brushed her hair back and in that instant wanted almost to cry out for something—for escape, for someone to help her. But the impulse subsided at once. She was at home here, warm beneath the covers, safe and protected by Revere and his world. He might seem to be a stranger at times but he was at least a stranger she could handle. “I asked him why he didn't want that gun—that's a real nice gun you bought him—and he told me something, but it didn't make sense. He likes dogs and cats and things, you know, and he doesn't want to shoot rabbits either. He doesn't like the loud noise, he said.”

“He has never tried to go hunting,” Revere said quietly.

They were tugging over something. Clara felt this, understood it perfectly, and knew enough to give in. “Well, I told him what you said and he said he'd go with Robert, he likes Robert. Robert's nice to him sometimes,” she said, wondering a moment later why she had said that “sometimes,” which didn't sound good. “He said he'd go today if it was nice. Him and Robert—he and Robert, they get along real well together if they're alone.” She paused. All these jagged edges had been covered many times in the last few years, many times. She could run over them smoothly without really drawing his attention to them. “He'd tell you, but he's afraid.”

“Afraid of his father?”

“He loves you but he's afraid. A boy should be afraid of his father a little,” Clara said cunningly. She tried to remember her own father. Had she been afraid of him? What had he been like? He stood there, at one end of her life, as if at the opening of a tunnel, silhouetted against the light, barring her way back to her childhood: a tall lean man with a narrow face, blond hair, squinting suspicious eyes, a mean mouth. Thank God, she thought, that Revere did not swear in front of women—not much, anyway; that he did not paw and grunt like an animal, the way Carleton had with her mother and then Nancy and who knows how many other women; that he did not drink too much. She awoke from this to hear Revere speaking quietly and she touched his smooth-shaven cheek, feeling a surge of tenderness for him, wishing there was something more of herself
that she could give. “He's younger than the other boys, remember,” she said. “He's afraid of them, you know how kids are. They don't bother him or anything,” she said carefully, knowing of course that Jonathan hated Swan and bothered him all the time, “but you know how kids are. Give him time to grow up.”

“Yes,” he said.

Clara kissed him. “He'll use the gun. I promise he'll shoot something.”

“And, Clara, you should let him alone more. You shouldn't fuss over him.”

“O.K., fine. I agree with that.”

“My boys never got much attention from their mother because she wasn't well. They aren't used to it—I don't mean they don't like it but they don't know what to do with it. You confuse them. And Steven needs to be let loose more. He needs more freedom.”

“You don't know what it's like for a kid to run loose,” Clara said. “I do.”

“He has to learn to take care of himself.”

“But that's what I don't want,” she said. She rubbed her cheek against his, wondering how much longer he would stay. She listened to him always and agreed with him in words, and then went on to do whatever she wanted to anyway. She had learned this technique from Nancy, years back. “I want him to be different from other kids. I want him different, I don't want him like—the way I was.”

After he left she tried to sleep again, thinking mainly of Swan and of Lowry behind him, another figure silhouetted at the end of another tunnel, Swan's tunnel; but he could not really remember Lowry. He had been too small to remember anything. And it seemed to her that the relationships between people and their fathers were like thin, nearly invisible wires … you might forget they were there but you never got rid of them. She was sure that her own father was still alive somewhere: maybe he had finally gotten a real job, settled down somewhere with Nancy and the beginning of a new family, and there he was right now if she wanted to look him up. With her money, she would look him up someday. She could
help him out, maybe, if he'd let her; but he might not let her. For Esther, who had grown old and helpless so fast, she felt almost nothing—she was just a stranger who hadn't liked Clara and had gone to pieces when Clara had moved in. It was good she was out of the way. But for her own father, who would be getting old by now, she felt a confused, generous sympathy, blocked up because she had no way of freeing it. In a few years, maybe. There was no need to hurry.

When she woke again it was lighter. The sun was out, the air smelled good. She went downstairs and Swan and Robert were about to go outside. Swan was standing in the doorway to the side shed. “He's fixing up the guns,” he said. Clara saw tiny flakes in the corners of his eyes but did not rub them out for him. He didn't like her to do that when anyone else was around.

“Did you both eat?” she said.

“Yeah, we ate.” Behind Swan, Robert was cleaning his rifle. He looked up at Clara, frowning. The gun in his hands made him look older. He was thirteen on his last birthday and a handsome, solid boy, with slow eyes and hands. Swan waited in the doorway, pretending to be at ease. He was still a little slight, though she thought he would be growing fast one of these days. He had Lowry's pale, clear blue eyes and something remote and unfathomable in his face, like Lowry, but his silence he had gotten from neither Lowry nor Clara. He had the air of a child perpetually listening to voices around him and voices inside him. Clara wanted to slide her arms around his neck but she knew this would just embarrass him.

“You kids be careful, huh?” she said.

“I'm used to it. I go out all the time,” Robert said.

“What about Swan here?”

“I might not shoot anything,” Swan said nervously. He did not look at her. “I might just go with him.”

“He don't need to shoot anything the first time,” Robert said.

Clara had the idea that there was some tension between the boys, that maybe Robert had been talked into this—but from Robert's polite, slow face you could tell nothing. He was really polite, this thirteen-year-old, and Clara was always surprised by it. He handed
Swan his heavy gun and the boy took it, his shoulders drooping just a little in surprise—he didn't remember how heavy the gun was— then he turned away, ready to go out into the shed.

Clara said uncertainly, not knowing if she should say it or not, “Your father never meant to holler at you, Swan.” She was speaking past Robert as if he didn't exist, to Swan's back. Swan did not turn. “If you don't want to shoot the goddamn thing you don't have to.”

The words were so clearly Clara's—they could never have been condoned by Revere—that Robert lifted his eyes to her. He did not quite smile. “He's gonna be all right,” Robert said.

“Mornin, Clara.”

It was a jovial greeting, a mock-country drawl. Judd Revere was not one to naturally call out “Mornin!” with a lopsided grin so you knew you were meant to laugh at him, and with him.

Judd dropped by in the late morning, when Clara was in her garden. She knew the sound of his car: she straightened, and smiled. Judd came around back whistling, hands in his pockets. They were always happy to see each other, a kind of light flashed between them, like a mirror catching sunshine. A quick flash, others might not note.

On his way into town Judd often dropped by the Revere house. He was a landowner, as he called himself, not a worker, the result being that he had no visible work yet worked continually, in his head. From grudging remarks made by Revere, Clara understood that Judd was very smart.
Eyes in back of his head.

Clara dabbed at perspiration on her forehead, and brushed at her hair. She was wearing a stiff green straw hat—in fact, a hat Judd had bought for her, on a whim—to shade her eyes. “Well. Looks like he got off to an early start this morning,” Judd said, giving
he
a faint intonation you could interpret as admiring, or bemused. Judd was a smiler, Clara thought: so much smiling, and his eyes cautious and watchful, tricky. It was said that you would not want to play poker with Judd Revere but if you needed advice, needed help, Judd Revere was the man to come to, for he would not judge you as other men might. He was a tall, loose-jointed man, not at all like Revere. You could tease him and laugh at him and it wouldn't lodge deeply
in him as it would with Curt, where any stray word, any unintended and inadvertent insult, would be lodged forever. Clara thought what a shame it was, Judd wasn't good-looking; for he had the ease of a man meant to be good-looking, like Lowry. And it was a worse shame, it filled her with hurt, rage, resentment, that his snobbish bitch of a wife hadn't once called Clara to invite her to visit, though the women lived hardly five miles apart.

When Judd dropped by like this he would always protest he couldn't stay long, he had errands in town, but eventually he would sit with Clara in her new mail-order “lounge” lawn chairs under the willows and Clara fetched him orange juice. “Fresh-squeezed, I did it myself.” Judd would take a big swallow, roll his eyes in a comical yet serious way, and say, “Clara! Delicious.” Then he talked. Judd always had news, whether the news meant much to Clara or not. He could talk about politics and things in the newspaper Clara knew nothing of and he could make them interesting, almost. Beyond his voice she was listening for rifle shots, trying not to be distracted. Trying not to worry. Goddamn she was not going to worry, not one of those mothers who wear themselves out worrying.
Needs to be let loose more. Needs more freedom.
Clara hoped those tiny little lines she'd been seeing in her forehead had faded, she'd been rubbing at with cold cream. Judd's forehead was crisscrossed with thin lines like cobwebs but that was all right in a man, even Lowry's face had had lines.

“Judd, I like your hair a little long like that. A man looks nice with kind of long hair.” Clara spoke half-teasing and half-serious. He brushed his hair back from his forehead as she said this. She talked at Judd in this fashion, enjoying his company but not worried about it, because he so obviously admired her but would never do anything about it. “How's your little girl?” she said, thinking at once of her little boy who was not so little anymore. “When are you going to bring her over? I like little girls … this next one is going to be a girl.” And she touched her stomach. Judd looked away, strangely fastidious. He said something about his daughter, whose name was Deborah. She was five years old. Clara took little interest in children who were not immediate to her. She could not quite believe in them. So she listened vaguely, inclining her head toward
Judd. Her gaze moved on to her legs, which were stretched out in the sunshine, and she saw that Judd looked at them now and then too, as if accidentally, bemusedly. They fell silent. Clara sighed. Then Judd began to talk again, about a problem of his. Revere accused him of being slow and lazy and too kind, but what could he do? It had something to do with business and Clara did not respond. Then he asked her about the porch and she brightened. “Clark is going to do it for me. I made all the plans. Now that my husband owns the lumberyard, all of it, I can get anything I want.…”

“That's very convenient.”

“Clark likes to help me. He's a good boy. Then, next, we might have a swimming pool.”

Judd nodded affably.

“They swim in that lake,” Clara said, making a face. “There are snakes and bloodsuckers there. Garbage fish—carp. What if they cut their feet and get lockjaw?” Though she was thinking of Swan, her Swan; yet she made herself think of the others, too—her stepsons. “So, don't you think—a swimming pool is best?”

“I suppose so, Clara. Sure.”

Like Revere, he seemed scarcely to be listening to her words.

Looking at her. Listening to her voice, and smiling.

Clara said, with an air of pride, “Swan is out hunting now. With his brother Robert.”

“Hunting?”

“I think it's good for a boy to go hunting.”

Judd shrugged. “I never cared for hunting.”