A Garden of Earthly Delights (51 page)

Ransom laughed at this remark. He might have thought that Clara was being witty.

Clara said, seriously, her hand on Ransom's wrist for emphasis, “It's damn hard to believe people like us lived then. But I guess they'd have to be, the Egyptians, wouldn't they?”

Ransom smiled. “Wouldn't they what?”

“Have to be like us? I mean, human beings.”

“Like
you
? I doubt it.”

The adults laughed. Swan, staring gloomily into a display case at daggers and “grave artifacts,” tried not to overhear.

Ransom treated them to “tea” in the museum's dining room. Wine for Clara and him, and a Coke for Swan. All three ate pastries called hot-buttered scones. Clara licked her fingers, and laughed for very happiness, and Swan supposed he should be happy, too.

Next day, Clara told her Revere hosts she was “going shopping.”

Two hours in the morning in shops along Lakeshore Boulevard, including an antique store where Clara insisted upon buying a small iron animal for Swan—“For your room, at home. For the windowsill. Like one of the statues in the museum, isn't it?” Swan stared at the hand-sized little creature, an antelope with horns. Its legs were slender, and its tail was upright. A beautiful thing, but Swan felt sad stroking it, he didn't know why. He wasn't thinking that it was not “real”—that some man had made it, with the purpose of selling it—but that somehow there was an actual animal trapped inside it, in the heavy iron. A real animal, that something had happened to. “Well, d'you want it or not? C'mon, sweetie.”

Clara touched his hair. After so many months of not seeming to love him, she was beginning to love him again.

In a cab, hailed for Clara by the admiring proprietor of the antique store, Swan held the heavy little antelope on his lap, wrapped in paper. He had the idea that he and Clara were returning to the house on Lakeshore Boulevard, but Clara instructed the driver to take them somewhere else—another large, imposing building that was the Hamilton Public Library.

Clara said quickly, “I have more shopping to do, honey. It would just be boring for you. Here's five dollars, you can buy yourself
lunch like a big boy. I'll meet you at around four o'clock, out here on the steps.”

Swan was stunned. All by himself, he was expected to be in that building? And buy lunch for himself ? He had never done such a thing in his life. Clara said, nudging him gently, “Steven, it's just books in there. Out in the country where we live, there's nothing like this, is there? Go on. My little bookworm.” And she nudged him again, less gently.

Blindly, Swan climbed out of the taxi.

He ascended the snowy stone steps without glancing back. He'd left the little iron antelope in the taxi, half-hoping that Clara would forget it.

Inside the library, Swan wandered into a large room with a fire-place in which no fire was burning. There were shelves of books to the ceiling, and an elderly man dozing in a leather chair. Swan pulled out the first volume of the
World Book of Wonders
and began to read before removing his coat. His eyes were glazed with moisture.

A middle-aged woman librarian approached to tell him that the children's library was downstairs.

“I'm not a child. I'm in seventh grade.”

This remark surprised Swan, in the tone of Clara's new friend Ransom. Matter-of-fact and unhurried. In fact, Swan was not in seventh grade but sixth.

The librarian relented. Swan remained in the fireplace room, for several hours. Leafing through the
Book of Wonders
, and later
A History of American Aviation
and a handsome book of photographs of Indians by someone named Edward S. Curtis. The Indians in the photographs were very different from those in Jonathan's
Scalp-hunter
and
Lone Ranger
comics, and Swan wished he could show them to Jonathan.

By one o'clock Swan's stomach began to growl but he told himself sternly he wasn't hungry. He drank from a water fountain in the hallway, and used the men's rest room, and returned to his seat in the reference room. Library patrons came and went, and at last even the elderly man roused himself and departed. At ten minutes to four, Swan left the library to sit outside on the steps, shivering in
the wind from the lake. By four-thirty, when Clara had not come, he went inside again to get warm, peering anxiously from a leaded window beside the door. At five o'clock the library was closed, so he had no choice but to leave, this time sitting at the top of the steps with his back against the wall, in a corner. It was December; the sun set early. Harsh little snow-pellets were blown into his face. He thought of the cemetery behind the Lutheran church, and of Robert. He was shivering convulsively. He made himself think of his cousin Deborah, how impressed she would be when he told her about the big-city library.

At last, after about twenty minutes, Clara arrived in a taxi. She opened the door to signal for him impatiently. “Swan! Come
on.
”

Annoyed at him, she seemed. For rising from the steps stiffly, like an old man.

“God! Look at you. I hope you don't get pneumonia.”

Clara fussed over him, kissing his cold cheek, chattering as they were driven back to the house on Lakeshore Drive. Swan sat silent, sullen. He would say nothing about the little antelope: of course, it was gone. Clara had given it no more thought than she'd given him. But she remembered to ask if he'd had lunch, and if there was change from the five-dollar bill.

Swan told her no. No change.

At the Reveres' house, Swan fell asleep on the bed in his room without undressing. Sometime later Clara came in. “Swan! Are you sick?” He woke confused, not knowing if it was very late; or not so late, and another protracted dinner awaited him downstairs. Clara was wearing a velvety purple dress with a skirt that fell to mid-calf; her windblown hair had been brushed, and fixed into what she called a
chig
-
non.
“So, sweetheart, you're mad at me? Your mamma?” Swan lay very still smelling her perfume and something else—the wine or liquor the adults drank here, or the scent of her secret life, whatever it was that made Clara so happy. She kicked off her shoes, she sat heavily on the bed beside him. “Don't be mad at me, honey, I'm so happy … so happy. I'm happy in this place and I'm happy at home.” Shockingly, Clara began to cry. Swan could not recall his mother crying in years. “I can't help it, honey, I'm just so happy—I feel so good. I deserve it, don't I? Don't I?”

For the first time in his life Swan did not share Clara's mood. She'd switched on the overhead light in his room not caring if it hurt his eyes, he shielded his face with his arm.
I hate you. You are a bitch.
He would have liked to punish her, and that name was a punishment, even if she couldn't hear it. Even if she would never know.

Two months into seventh grade at the junior high in Tintern, Swan was skipped into eighth grade. This only meant crossing the hall and being assigned to another homeroom. The kids here were older of course, and most of the boys were taller than Swan; there was a long-legged boy related to the Reveres though lacking the Revere name, and this boy observed Swan with unusual interest, though he kept his distance and was not friendly.

Acting like he's afraid of me
Swan thought.

In eighth grade, his teachers were polite with him, and often praised him. The teachers seemed to know exactly who he was: Curt Revere's son, Jonathan Revere's younger brother. They gave him A's and called upon him in class when he raised his hand, but not otherwise. As always Swan did extracredit assignments in math, English, history, he read books on an extracredit reading list, and spoke to his teachers respectfully. In each class there was but one adult among thirty or more children and Swan knew that this adult, whether intelligent or not, attractive or not, was the only individual of value in the room, whose opinion of him mattered.

Jonathan was seventeen now, a junior, and had his driver's license and his own, secondhand Chevrolet. Clara insisted that Jonathan drive Swan to school and when he balked, she spoke with Revere. “It makes no sense, son. For you to drive to school and your brother, attending the same school, to take the bus.” Revere spoke quietly, and Jonathan mumbled, “Yes, sir.”

Swan, riding in Jonathan's car, so close in the passenger's seat to his brother, tried to think of things to say to him. Things to make him laugh, or to impress him. Things to make Jonathan like him. For Jonathan was silent in Swan's presence, withdrawn and ironic in
manner; he chain-smoked, tossing Old Gold packages onto the floor, that Swan cleared away. There were dark bruises beneath Jonathan's eyes, his skin was pimpled and sallow. It was difficult to believe that Jonathan had ever done well in school, his grades were never more than C's now, and sometimes D's. Half the time he cut afternoon classes to hang out with his beer-drinking buddies at the Sunoco station where one of them worked, but he had to return to the school to pick up Swan, his brother whom he loathed.

Swan knew: Jonathan loathed him. It was no secret. Jonathan never spoke to him if he could avoid it, and when Swan chattered in the car, Jonathan grunted in derision and switched on the radio, high.

Why do you hate me?
was not a question Swan had ever put to Jonathan, only to Robert. There had not been any answer to the question, that he could recall.

One January afternoon when the boys were driving home, Swan took out of his pocket something he meant to impress Jonathan with: a fishing knife.

He'd found it in some trash behind the school. A battered old double-edged knife with a serrated blade, and a plastic handle that had been mended with adhesive tape. The blade was rusted and dull, but it was about eight inches long, and looked wicked. It looked like an Indian dagger in one of Jon's comic books.

“See what I found? Out behind the school.”

Jonathan glanced at him, indifferent. But when he saw the knife in Swan's hand he clutched at the steering wheel, and made a whimpering noise. The car skidded briefly on the asphalt pavement.

Swan said quickly, “I found it out back of the school. Somebody didn't want it, I guess.” Swan was aware of his brother's surprise, and his brother's moment of fear. It had been only a moment, and Jonathan had recovered, but both he and Swan were aware of it. Forcing himself to laugh Swan said, “Can a knife be sharpened, if it's rusty? Would you like it?”

Jonathan mumbled he didn't want anybody's shitty old knife.

Swan wound down the window and threw the knife out, just to
show Jonathan how little it meant to him. How the hell could Jonathan think that he, Swan, meant harm? He was only twelve and Jonathan was seventeen.…

Next morning, Swan told Clara that he'd rather take the school bus after all. Clara, who'd cared so much about this issue only recently, now seemed hardly to care. She seemed to know about Jonathan cutting classes, and drinking with his school dropout friends; but she never spoke of it. “All right, honey. It's probably better, you can make friends on the bus, and get to know some girls,” she said vaguely. Her kitchen was being done over and everywhere canvas lay harsh and gritty underfoot.

Once he was freed from Swan, Jonathan drove off and spent the day any way he liked: the hell with school. He was still a junior, he hadn't been passed on. So he drove a few miles down the valley and picked up two other kids and they went fishing or inspected motorcycles and used cars in a big slummy lot out on the highway, or, after a while, they got to certain corners before the school bus arrived and drove certain girls to school, though the girls didn't always have time for school.

If Revere was out of town, Jonathan wouldn't bother coming home for supper. They ate in a diner out on the highway, fifteen miles away. He knew that Clara would not tell on him. When the notices started arriving from school asking about why he was absent so much, Clara talked seriously with him and he said that he hated school, he hated the teachers and kids. He was defiant and on the verge of tears. But Clara touched him and said, after a moment, “I know how it is.” So she did not tell Revere. He could trust her.