A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates
He would think, afterward: Because a stranger had died, and was in a gleaming black box at a wake, in a stone mansion on Lakeshore Boulevard, Hamilton, New York, and that stranger was related to Curt Revere who was Swan's father, Swan had had to be brought here, and had to look upon deadness. Not the many miles of countryside between Lakeshore Boulevard and REVERE FARM in the Eden Valley had been enough to protect Swan, once it was decided. And so he was in this high-ceilinged room banked with flowers that smelled of death.
Swan found himself staring at an elderly man, a stranger, with pale parchment skin, and tightly pursed lips, who was lying on his back inside the gleaming cylindrical box, his eyes closed. Yet how waxy his eyelids looked. How waxy his face, though his cheeks were dabbed with rouge like a woman's cheeks. If you were dead, Swan thought, you lay on your back and everyone else had to stand, and file past to stare at you.
Clara nudged Swan. Whispered for him to shut his eyes, to pray.
Pray?
At home, Clara laughed at “pray”—“prayer.” But Swan knew he could not laugh here. He was staring at the elderly man, who resembled Curt Revere. Soft white hairs on his head, a thin, sunken face, and though his mouth was meant to suggest a smile yet there was something ironic and bitter about it. Swan shut his eyes tight and hid his face with his hands in the “prayer” gesture he knew, and could mimic like a monkey.
“Son.” Revere's hand was gentle on his shoulders.
Swan glanced upward, and in that instant he had a glimpse of his other father: the man with the pale blond hair, the man with the blurred smile and easy laughter.
The vacant blue sky, beyond that man's head. The blue of his eyes. The smell of the outdoors. The wind. What had that man said to him? He'd called him “Swan.” He knew him: “Swan.” He'd said something about “death”—dying, and the dead—but Swan could not remember.
Why did dead mean more in a man, than in a squirrel, a dog, a chicken? At the farm, chickens were killed by hand: their heads torn off in a sharp twisting motion, no more fuss than if you were shucking corn. Why was a man different? Was a man different? A rich man is different Swan thought.
“Steven, come away now.” Revere spoke gently.
“Oh, Swan! Come away.”
Clara was pulling him beside her. Almost, Clara was hugging him against her side, clumsily. He wanted to shove away from her, for he was no baby, he was seven years old which is the age of reason and he didn't need his damn mother. Sidelong he watched her, and the others. They were all going to die like the elderly man in the gleaming black box: but they didn't know it. Or didn't believe it. The way a chicken, in the instant before human hands reached out to grab it, and twisted its head from its neck, would not believe it was going to die.
Swan eased free of Clara's clutching hands, and walked away. As if he knew where he was going, in this strange place. But no one stopped him. There was something sweet and rotted on his tongue, he could not spit it out with everyone watching.
He found a bathroom, that smelled strongly of toilet cleanser. Then he found a room with shelves of books. He pulled out several tall heavy books with Encyclopaedia Britannica stamped in gilt letters on their spines. He was turning pages, looking at pictures, trying to read in the dim lighting, of a faraway place called Egypt, that was in Africa. Someday, he thought, he would go there: he would never return here.
3
At dawn of that day when Clara had her miscarriage—she had been about three months pregnant—she woke to see her husband dressing in the dark. He stood off to one side, dressing stealthily, and she lay very still, as if he were an intruder who had not yet noticed her. Her eyes were vague and gritty with sleep, her hair lay tangled over the pillow, and her heavy inert peace contrasted with Revere's quick movements. She saw as he turned to pick something up that his chest had grown heavy; his waist was thick. She could hear his breathing. The air was a little chilly—it was September and beginning to get cold at night—and the window behind him glared silently with light, everything slowed down as in a dream and having that strange elasticity of a dream, so that it could belong to any time.
She remembered him without those lard-pale ridges of fat: a younger man undressing before her, trembling with excitement for her.
She thought of Lowry, his face passing in and out of her mind as it always did, not upsetting her and not even blotting out Revere's kindly, hardened face, the look of precise concentration he was giving now to buttoning his shirt. The pregnancy with Lowry's baby had been uncertain, she hadn't known exactly what was going to happen; but this time everything was certain. There was nothing for her to worry about or even think about, except that she wanted a girl. So she looked at Revere in the half-dark and thought that he was a good man and that she did love him, she loved him somehow.
“Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?” Clara said.
He glanced around, startled like a thief. “Did I wake you up?” he said.
“I don't know, it's all right.” Clara stretched her arms and yawned. “When are you coming back, I can't remember.…”
“Tuesday.”
She remembered then that he'd told her this.
“Are you going to miss me, darling?” Clara asked.
He'd been buttoning his shirt. She saw how his fingers hesitated— he had thick, strong fingers. He was not a man who worked very much with his hands for he hired “farmhands” for this purpose; and yet, he was strong, he bore a taciturn authority Clara associated with maleness. It occurred to her that Revere's fingers and everything that was his belonged to her, who had nothing of her own; and had belonged to her for ten years now. Never did she see the tall black letters on the barn REVERE FARM without feeling a stab of elation, pride.
Bitches don't love nobody Carleton had accused her. Drunk, and his face contorted. Run off. Dirty filthy bitch like all of them.
She'd proven him wrong. Her drunk-father. Whitetrash Carleton Walpole left behind in, where was it. Migrant workers' camp in godforsaken Florida.
Revere was looking at her tenderly. In that way, Clara recalled, he'd looked at the instant photo of Clara as a girl, preening seductively for the camera. “Clara, dear, I wish you'd come with me.” He sat on the edge of the bed, careful to retain most of his weight on his feet. “I thought you liked train rides.…”
He stroked her hair. Clara liked to be touched; lazily she closed her eyes. One of the farm dogs was barking in the near distance. “Your relatives don't like me, Curt. I try, but I can't talk to them.…” It wasn't true, exactly: Clara knew better than to try. She saw their eyes on her, judging. They hate my guts she dared not tell Revere who would defend them, hurt. “They're so different from you. And that time I went to buy that pretty dress, with the lace collar …”
“Clara, haven't you forgotten that yet?”
Revere's flashes of anger came vertically upon Clara, out of nowhere, never addressed to her exactly (for he loved his young blond wife, he adored his Clara) but to attitudes of hers he considered unworthy of a Revere wife. She understood that she had power over this man's anger as long ago she'd had power over Carleton Walpole's anger but that it was not a power she could control: it was like lightning, that could be swift and lethal.
“In the city I could go to a—a museum, maybe?—but not alone. I'd be so lonely by myself. And you're busy. And anyway … there are the boys here.” Clara didn't want to say There is Swan for of course Swan was not her only son now. “And I want to work in my garden, it makes me happy.…” One of Revere's farmhands helped Clara with the garden, a kitchen garden it was called, where she'd planted tomatoes, pole beans, fast-growing cucumbers, zucchini, acorn squash; but also zinnias, marigolds, petunias, and hollyhocks, her favorite flower. At Revere's great-aunt's house in Hamilton Clara had seen what a formal garden was, such precision, symmetry, the way colors were repeated and related, but her garden was nothing like that. Clara's garden was one that Pearl would have liked, Clara thought. Just to walk around in it, may
“My garden,” Clara said. “You like the flowers I bring in, don't you? The zinnias …”
Revere seemed scarcely to be listening to Clara. He leaned over her and pressed his face against the side of her face, and her hair that wasn't yet combed out. She felt his warm breath; it was a little stale yet from sleep and she wanted to move away, but did not. His hand had dropped onto her stomach, familiar and heavy. Warm, comforting. Clara put her own hand over his and smiled at him thinking he would be leaving in a minute, in just another minute.
She loved him. He was her husband, he adored her. He was a good father to her son. He was a good man, she knew. Decent, fair-minded, if sometimes impatient with others who didn't live up to his standards. He was a well-to-do man: “rich.” Yet he wasn't arrogant, bossy. Not to her, anyway.
Yet it was easier to love Curt Revere when other people were around, and seeing him. Through others' eyes, Clara could admire him. A large man, not tall, but wiry, solid, walking with little grace or a sense of what grace might be; he got most of what he wanted, without exactly demanding it. His torso, even part of his back, was covered with matted graying-dark hair, and on his thick arms and the backs of his hands were softer, finer hairs. Aging, these hairs were turning lighter, like a kind of metal. Clara recalled from the migrant camps those older men, whose muscled bodies were softening, turning to fat; how their bodies must have astonished them, betraying them; and Revere was of that maleness. His face was already creased and leathery, his eyesight weakening; often he was short of breath. When at last his muscles did turn to fat he would look sad, puffy, discarded. Clara could think of this with a remote, impersonal regret, the way one mourns over the death of former presidents and generals, men of public life who reveal their private degeneration all at once and die at that moment—up until then they require no sympathy. She could hold him in her arms and look past him, as if looking from the present time into a vortex of no time at all—the Clara who had always been at the center of herself, whether she was nine or eighteen or twenty-eight, as she was now. Whatever else happened, that Clara never changed.
“Are you warm enough? How do you feel?” he said. He kissed her throat. She turned her face so that he could kiss her mouth, not because she wanted him to but because it had to be done. His other wife must have been dog-sick with pregnancies, she thought, the way he fussed over her; he did not seem to believe in her strength, which she took for granted. Nothing bothered her. If she had cramps occasionally it was nothing to keep her in bed, she liked to be up and doing something, anxious not to miss whatever was going on. She hated to be sick and idle, mooning around a sickroom—she had never been sick a day in her life, she told people. She would be healthy until the day she died. But most of all she liked to know what was going on, even if she could not always understand it. Now that Revere had these new interests there was much happening, but it was a man's business—complexities of partnerships she liked to be told about even if she could not grasp their meaning. She could understand money, however, and Revere had enough of that. She believed vaguely that he had much more money than he had had in the old days when he had pursued her, but it was difficult to tell, and certainly it would be difficult to make it clear to people in the neighborhood: what could you buy, past a certain point? She had magazines that showed enormous startling houses and her own house would imitate these (she was having a back porch added) but it took time, time; she had good clothes but nowhere to wear them, and what did people in the country know about these things? All they could understand was something flashy, like her car; Clark's little foreign car, which had cost more money than Clara's, probably was lost on them and looked like a toy. They knew nothing, what could you do with such people?
“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
“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.