A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates
“Tell him,” Clara said, nudging him with her foot. “What's your name going to be? Don't be so shy, kid.”
“I don't know,” he said.
That was bad, a mistake. He sensed their impatience. “Don't you know?” Revere said. He smiled. “It's Revere. You know that. Say it now—Steven Revere.”
There was Clark, and Jonathan, and Robert, and now Steven: all brothers.
“Steven Revere,” Swan said softly.
He wished he had another name to blot out this one, to take its place, but he had nothing. His mother always said with a laugh that she had no last name—it was a secret—or better yet, she had forgotten it—she had been kicked out by her father, she said.
“Steven Revere. Steve,” the man said slowly. He peered into the child's eyes as if trying to locate himself there. Swan stared up shyly—he had the feeling for a moment that he could love this man if only he wouldn't take him out hunting and make him handle guns and kill things. Why was there always so much confusion and danger with men?
He edged over toward Clara but she was talking to Revere about other things. They talked about people who were coming, about the house, about Revere's sister. Swan, who spoke so little when he was with anyone besides Clara, tried to force the dizzying flood of words and impressions into coherent thoughts—this was all he could do. The only power he had was the power to watch and to listen. His mother could pick things up and toss them out in the garbage; she could slap him, spank him, hug and kiss him; she could yell out the window at some kids crossing through their property; she could sit smoking in the darkened kitchen, smiling at nothing. She was an adult who had power, and because Swan was a child, he had no power. This man here, this kindly man with the strong hands and the urgent, perplexed look—he too had power, the power suggested by this large house and the barns and land behind it, the enormous sweep of cultivated land that belonged to him while so many people owned nothing at all. He could walk confidently across his land and know that he owned it because he was a man, an adult, he possessed the mysterious power of strength that no child possessed, even those boys at school who pushed Swan around. But even those children had no real strength; adults owned them. Everyone was frightened by someone else, Swan thought.
“Well, what do you think?” Revere said, smoothing down Swan's hair. “You're not worried about the boys, are you? They're good kids. You'll all get along.”
“They'd better be nice to him,” Clara said.
“They won't bother him,” Revere said. “They're good kids.”
“I know what kids are like.…”
“Don't worry him, Clara. You know better than that. Steven,” Revere said, leaning to him, “you know your mother will take care of you. There's nothing to be worried about. It's just that now we're going to live together in one house. We've been waiting a long time for this. And you'll have three brothers to play with—you won't be alone anymore.”
“He never was alone,” Clara said.
Swan knew these “brothers.” His terror of them was based on the fact that they had never spoken to him but only looked at him, un-smiling. They were big—ten, twelve, and fifteen—and had their father's heavy squarish shoulders, the dark hair, and the dark quiet blue eyes. They seemed to be waiting for him to speak, to do something. The times Revere had brought them to meet Swan, Revere had done all the talking and even Clara had been silent. Revere had talked about them hunting together, fishing, playing with the horses. He had talked about doing chores together. He had talked about school.… But the boys had said nothing except what was dragged out of them by Revere and those words had no meaning.
“Look, everything will be fine. You know that,” Revere said to Clara.
She shrugged her shoulders but she smiled. She had taken out a cigarette and now she leaned forward so that Revere could light it; Swan, forgotten for the moment, watched in fascination the burning match and the tiny flickering glow at the end of the cigarette, as if he had never seen these things before. He wanted to pay attention to every small thing in order to keep time going slowly, because something important was going to happen that day and he was afraid of it.
“It isn't good for boys to be … without a mother,” Revere was saying.
Swan had always watched people closely when they were around his mother. He saw how they caught from her a certain catlike easiness, no matter what anger they had brought with them. Even this big Revere, with his squarish jaw and his wide, lined, intelligent forehead, was squinting at her now as if something misty and dazzling had passed between him and Clara. Swan looked quickly at his mother as if to see what it was that Revere saw in her; but he did not see it, not exactly. His mother smiled at him, a special smile, for him. It told him, right in front of this man whose big hands could have hurt them both, that they were here at last, here they were, what good luck!
“I know what you need around here,” Clara said. “Some windows open and some airing-out. Some of this old stuff cleaned, right? What's that thing you're sitting on, honey? I can see the dust in it, eating right down. Doesn't your sister care about the place?”
“She isn't well,” Revere said clumsily. Swan saw how the man's gaze faltered; Clara must have been frowning. “It's only been a month since the funeral, after all. She just hasn't gotten over it yet—they were like sisters.”
Swan looked at the man's shoes: black stiff-looking shoes without any mud on them, not even a faint rim of dried mud around the very bottom.
“They were a lot alike,” Clara said softly. “People said so. Your sister is older than—than your wife, though.” The child stood between them, listening. He took everything too seriously and had not learned to laugh; he knew that, didn't his mother tell him so every day? But he had the idea that he must watch and listen carefully. He must learn. Living was a game with rules he had to learn for himself by watching these adults as carefully as possible. There had been one other adult in his life—not the schoolteacher, who didn't count, but one other man, almost lost in his memory, a strange blond man who had touched him and who had vanished.… Once in a while he found himself thinking about that man, trying to remember what that man had said to him. But it was fuzzy and lost. He had been too young. Now the memory of that other man, awakened by Revere's attention, swept down upon him like one of the big chicken hawks everyone hated, with its dusty flapping wings and its scrawny legs, and Swan could almost smell the fetid odor of that breath. (“Never say a word about him,” Clara had told him, just once. She did not have to tell Swan things twice.)
“Look—Esther was like a sister to her too, not just to me,” Revere was saying. Swan knew that their attention had moved completely away from him; he was relieved. “Out in the country like this, and not ever getting married—she liked Marguerite better than she liked me, really. She never caused any trouble. She never came between us. But she has nowhere to go now, she's too proud to ask anyone. The house is just as much hers as mine—”
Clara made a disgusted sound.
“Our father left it to us both.”
“Who keeps it going? Who has the money?” Clara said breathlessly.
“She has money of her own, that's not it. I don't care about that. Anyway, she doesn't want to live in Hamilton, she doesn't like it there and I don't blame her. She doesn't like my uncle. My sister and I have never really been close, but …”
“How she must hate me!” Clara said.
“She doesn't hate you, Clara.”
“She never told you?”
“No one ever said anything, all these years.”
“They were afraid of you, that's the only reason. But they hated me anyway and they'll always hate me. Are they really coming today?”
“Yes.”
“Every one of them? Really? The women too—Judd's wife too?” Clara said greedily.
“They do what I ask them to.”
Swan sensed something brittle and dangerous in the air about them. A faint warning began in his stomach, as it did when
Revere shook his head. “That's finished.”
“If she'd done what you wanted,” Clara said, “you and I would be married now. Not like this, with the kid seven years old and us going to be married finally—what a laugh! But no, no, you can't budge a woman like her. From a good family with a good German name, is she going to give a divorce to a man to make him happy? Never! She's going to sit tight with her nails dug in you to keep you as long as possible.”
Clara made a vague spitting gesture; then, to soften the movement, she frowned and picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue. “So your kid here has to be taught his last name, and he's afraid of you. Your own boy afraid of you. Are you proud?”
“No, I'm not proud.”
“Men are always proud, they think more of that than anything. But not women,” Clara said. She crossed her legs. The blue silk dress was drawn tight about her thighs in tiny veinlike wrinkles. She had lean, smooth legs; because she was wearing stockings today the curve of her calves was not shiny as usual. “Women have no pride. They do what men want them to do, like me, and to hell with it. If some bastards turn their nose up at me, let them. I never asked for any of them to like me.”
“After today everything will be all right,” Revere said. “The past is over. Marguerite is dead. I can't think anything bad of her now.”
“I don't think bad of her either,” Clara said quickly. She had the look Swan sometimes saw on her face when she was about to throw something down in disgust. “I don't think bad of the dead. She was a good woman to give you three sons—I don't think bad of anybody dead. I never knew her. And when I'm dead myself I won't give a damn if they're still talking about me.”
“After today it will be different,” Revere said.
Clara smiled a smile that could mean anything: that he was right, that he was wrong.
Today was a holiday; his mother was going to be married. Swan knew all about it. She had told him the night before that nothing really would be changed and he shouldn't worry; she was doing this for him. “We're going to live in a nice big house, not like this, and there's even a woman to help in the kitchen—think of that! And Revere, he likes you so. He loves you. We're all going to live together starting tomorrow. How will you like that?”
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
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.