A Garden Of Earthly Delights Part 17

Revere had said of them: "They were eighty or more, both of them-the man died first. Their children were scattered and n.o.body wanted the old farm."

Clara thought that she had never heard anything so sad.

Sometimes she went walking out in the fields, carrying herself as if she were a vessel entrusted with something sacred or dangerous, something that must not be jostled. As often as she thought of the baby-which was nearly always-she thought of Lowry, and even when Revere was with her she could gaze past his face and into Lowry's face, wondering what he was doing at that moment and if he ever thought of her, knowing that the energy she needed to keep hating him was more than he deserved. These long months were a kind of dream for her. Looking back, afterward, she was never able to remember how she had pa.s.sed all that time. If Revere had allowed her to ask Sonya out, or if Caroline and Ginny had been able to come (their people forbade them), she would not have needed to drift about so in this sleepy confusion, waiting for the baby to be born. She was waiting for pain too. She could remember enough of what her mother had gone through to expect the same thing. The long, groggy months of pregnancy kept her heavy and warm, slow, a little dizzy with the awareness of what her body was going to accomplish and of the extraordinary luck she had had: where had Revere come from? He stayed with her for hours and held her in his arms, soothing her, telling her how much he loved her and how he had known this at once, the first time he saw her, telling her of all the things he was going to do for her and the baby; and out of all this Clara stared back at the way she had come and tried to figure out what was happening, but it always eluded her. She was like a flower reaching up toward the sun: it was good luck that the sun happened to be there, that was all. Like a flower she basked in the warmth of Revere's attention, never quite certain in those first few months how long it was going to last. When Revere stayed with her in the old house or when they walked slowly about the fields, talking, she believed she could hear past them the vast silence that had always followed her about, a gentle roaring that was like the roaring of the ocean when she'd been lying with Lowry out in the hot sun or like the monotonous rattling noise of the engines that had carried her and her family around for years....

He bought her a car, a little yellow coupe, and gave her driving lessons. They practiced on the lonely dirt roads where no other cars ever appeared, once in a while a hay wagon or a tractor, that was all, or some kids on bicycles. Clara loved those lessons and sat very straight behind the wheel, throwing her hair back out of her eyes with an excitement that was nearly hysterical-she could have been thinking of the complex system of roads that led from there to Mexico, a system she might be able to figure out. A map told you one astonis.h.i.+ng thing: no matter where you were, there was a way to get somewhere else, lines led there, crossing and recrossing, you just had to figure it out.

But when Revere didn't come she only drove the car around in the driveway and in front of the house. She couldn't go into town, where people would stare angrily at her-she figured it would take them a while to get used to her and Revere, so she would give them that time-and Revere would not allow her to drive over to Sonya's, and it was too far to go to another town; anyway, she did not want to leave. If she couldn't go to Mexico she might as well stay home. She had a home now that was all hers and no one could kick her out. She had someone to take care of her and she wouldn't ever have to worry about being slapped around or him coming in drunk-as far as she knew he didn't even drink, which was strange. She explored the old house so thoroughly that she accepted it as hers and no one else's, as if she had been living there all her life. For weeks she seemed to be sleepwalking through an immense warm dream that had the dampness of October in this part of the country but none of the clarity of afternoons when the sun finally broke through, and the pa.s.sivity with which she had had to accept Lowry's baby inside her kept her pa.s.sive about other things as well. Revere brought her anything she wanted: sewing machine, cloth, odd pieces of furniture. It was her home.

The birth of Lowry's child was coming upon her the way death had come upon the house's first tenants, a warm sullen breeze blowing toward her from some vague point in the future. Whatever Revere brought her or decided to do to the house, she accepted as if it had always been planned, as if he were just filling in an outline. When they walked out in the fields or along the old lanes, Clara pulling at weed flowers or sucking gra.s.s, Revere sometimes lifted his shoulders in a strange forceful way he had, as if arguing with himself, and Clara had only to close her eyes to see not Revere but any man, a man, the idea of man itself come to take care of her as she had supposed someone must, somehow. She did not think enough about the peculiarity of her situation to come to the conclusion that she was the kind of girl someone else would always protect. This would have surprised her. But Revere might have been a promise someone had made-that someone was Lowry- when he had taken her away to save her from the old life back on the road, in another world now, and it would never have occurred to her to thank him for it.

He liked to frame her face in his hands and stare at her. He talked about her eyes and her skin; Clara hated this but put up with it, then it came to be something she expected Revere to do. If they were outside, she would smile up at the sky and let her mind loose from this place, wandering everywhere, and at the end return suddenly to this man who was staring at her-and she would be startled by the love she saw in his face. How could this stranger love her? Were all strangers so weak, no matter how strong they looked? But then, Lowry had been a stranger too, and so had her father, and everyone else. The only person not a stranger to her was Lowry's baby, the only thing she really owned. But each time she looked at Revere she saw more of him, until her shyness began to fade and she wondered if maybe she wouldn't end up loving this man after all, not the way she had loved Lowry but in another way. She knew that his mind did not flit around everywhere when he was with her; she knew he was looking at her and not through her at someone else.

"You're smart, Clara. You catch on quickly," he said, teaching her to back up the car. She had had no compliments in her life, and her face burned with pleasure when Revere said this. She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. All this drew him to her, fascinated him, and it was only to be in later years that she would do it just for the effect. At this time in her life everything was new and spontaneous. She was hypnotized always by the wonder of her being here at all: how had it happened? Had she really done it herself, made the decision herself ?

Out of the lonely, dark winter days in the house she had this idea: to make of Lowry's child a person to whom everything would make sense, who would control not just isolated moments in his life but his entire life, and who would not just control his own life but other lives as well.

They acted out two roles, not quite consciously: Revere was the guilty one, because he believed he had made her pregnant, and Clara was the victimized one, made softer and gentler by being victimized. She told him of her fears about having the baby, about the pain her mother had had each time, about the last baby that had killed her-this memory mixed up with a card game some men were having while, in another cabin, Clara's mother was bleeding to death. When she cried she was amazed at the sorrow she felt. She must have loved her mother in spite of everything, in spite of really having no mother for many years-so she wept until her head pounded, wis.h.i.+ng she could call her mother back from the grave and give her all these gifts Revere had given her; why hadn't her mother had anything? Revere soothed her, rocked her in his arms. The fact of her pregnancy meant that she was his and, like any stubborn, lucky strong man used to getting his own way, he loved what was his own. He talked of "making up for everything" and Clara listened, her eyes still glistening with tears, accepting his apologetic caresses at the same time she might be thinking about Lowry, if he might write someday and what if someone at the post office, just to be mean, got hold of the letter and ripped it up? At some point Revere's sorrow for having "hurt" her made her feel guilty and she said, "But I love it already. I can't wait to have it. I love babies," and by saying this everything would be returned to her, even the joy of having been in love with Lowry, though it had lasted only those few days. "But I'm not going to no hospital or anything to have it," she said. "I want to have it right at home here."

"We'll see about it," Revere said.

"No, I want to stay here. I'm not going away."

"We'll see."

She was fierce with love for her home. From her old room she had brought things along for her bedroom, which was the first "bedroom" she had ever even seen, let alone lived in. She had a bed and a bureau of good polished wood, and a mirror rising from it that was like no mirror she'd seen before, and a closet just for her clothes, though she hadn't many, and a chair with a pillow on it, and a table alongside the bed on which Revere put his wrist.w.a.tch when he stayed with her. On the wall opposite the bed was a print of a sunset, all spreading oranges and reds like pain flicked carelessly into water, with trees starkly silhouetted in black-Revere never said anything about the picture, which Clara had picked out herself. If she sat and stared at it long enough, strange, sad thoughts came to her and she would begin to cry, for no reason. Never in her life had she bothered to look at a real sunset; she heard sometimes on the radio a tw.a.n.gy-voiced man singing about a world "beyond the sunset" that also inspired her to tears, but still she did not bother to look at real sunsets. Paintings and music were meant to turn things into other things, Clara thought, so that the sunsets in pictures could make you cry while the real thing had no meaning at all. How could it? Even the picture of a house in winter, banked by clumps of evergreens, on the cover of a box of candy Revere had given her, meant more to her than the frequent picture she had of her own home, seen from the lane or the road. She could be moved by such things but not by reality, which was something that just lay stretched about her, indifferent and without meaning.

And just outside her bedroom was a corridor that led first to the kitchen-a big old drafty room with a pump at the sink, which Revere was going to fix up and which had already been painted a bright yellow-and then the parlor with its high gloomy windows that could hardly be stirred to life by the sun s.h.i.+ning through them, then to another room that was left empty. There were heaters in three of the rooms. The house had an attic, but no one had bothered to fix it up; there were old boxes of junk-clothing dampened and mildewed, and Christmas ornaments of a wispy silvery type, many of them broken, and ugly furniture. Clara had been through everything many times. She felt closest to the old people when she looked through the Christmas ornaments, fingering the bulbs and the p.r.i.c.kly lengths of trim that left silver flakes on her hands, thinking how unfair it was to those people that the things they had loved so ended up with Clara, a stranger. Then she put everything back carefully, as if she expected the owners to return and make their claim. Left alone in the attic, in sunny air or air heavy with gloom, she tried to think whether Revere was coming that evening or not. Sometimes she could not remember what he had promised.

One day someone drove down the lane in a rusty station wagon and Clara ran out onto the porch. It was November now and cold, but she stood waiting for the man to come up to her, her face set for a surprise, for something pleasant. But the man was about sixty, cranky and nervous. He said, "If somebody lives here now there's got to be a mailbox out front. Why ain't there a mailbox?"

Clara looked out toward the road as if checking to see if one might be there. Then she said, "There's n.o.body going to write me a letter."

"You need a mailbox regardless. Are you gonna get one?"

"I don't need none."

"What's your name?"

"Clara."

"Clara what?"

"Just Clara. I don't have any last name," she said sullenly. She stared down at the man's feet. Of course he knew who she was and that Revere owned all of this, but he kept at her with his eyes and his angry voice until she said, turning away as if she were a married woman with other things to do: "Oh, go to h.e.l.l!"

Through the parlor window she watched him turn the station wagon around and drive back out, fierce and in a hurry. She thought with a kind of slow nervous power that maybe Revere could take that man's job away from him if she bothered to complain. But when Revere came out that day she said nothing. It was too shameful-she remembered the way that old man had looked at her, as if she were dirt, and how it was like everyone would look at her if they got the chance.

After a while she began to think about Revere's wife, who fed him meals on those days when he didn't eat with Clara, and the same sensation of power she had felt about the mailman rose up in her. What if ... ?

She sometimes said, "What does your wife say when you're not home for supper? Does she get mad?"

Revere could signal her to be quiet without ever saying a word himself, but at times she chose not to understand his gestures. She would lean against him and let her head droop against his shoulder as if overcome with thought or worry, and he would always answer her. "This has nothing to do with her," he would say finally. Clara did not like this answer but she did not believe it, either. She would smile into Revere's face as if she knew better. He sometimes said, a little coldly, "You shouldn't worry about her. She's a very strong person."

"What do you mean, strong?"

"Strong. Like her family."

He never wanted to say much about his wife but Clara drew it out of him gradually, over the months. She did this with an actual picking gesture, touching his arm or shoulder and drawing something away from him, bits of lint or minute hairs she would hold between her fingers for a second and then discard with a deliberation that had nothing to do with thought. He must have been fascinated by her, by her words or her face, something, because she noticed how he would always answer her questions in the end. He seemed always to see another Clara, not Clara herself. "She isn't like you, Clara," Revere said once. "She isn't a happy woman." And Clara had stared at him, wondering if he thought she she was happy-then she decided that of course he did, what did he know about her hours of being alone and thinking of Lowry, always Lowry, and her fear of what might happen in childbirth? He couldn't guess any of this. She was a girl who had been walking one day in the middle of a muddy road, dressed up, proud, excited, waiting for a man but not the man who had driven up behind her and stopped to give her a ride. Or she was the girl at the firemen's picnic, dressed up again but too excited and too reckless to know anything about how she should look, or about how people should look at her. Or she was the girl who ran out to meet Revere on the porch of this house, or out onto the hard frozen gra.s.s, s.h.i.+vering so that he would scold her as he embraced her, and so far as he knew her life had begun that day on the muddy road after someone else's wedding and had its reality only when he was able to get free and drive over to see her. So it was no wonder he thought she was happy; and she knew she would have to stay happy if she wanted a last name for Lowry's baby. was happy-then she decided that of course he did, what did he know about her hours of being alone and thinking of Lowry, always Lowry, and her fear of what might happen in childbirth? He couldn't guess any of this. She was a girl who had been walking one day in the middle of a muddy road, dressed up, proud, excited, waiting for a man but not the man who had driven up behind her and stopped to give her a ride. Or she was the girl at the firemen's picnic, dressed up again but too excited and too reckless to know anything about how she should look, or about how people should look at her. Or she was the girl who ran out to meet Revere on the porch of this house, or out onto the hard frozen gra.s.s, s.h.i.+vering so that he would scold her as he embraced her, and so far as he knew her life had begun that day on the muddy road after someone else's wedding and had its reality only when he was able to get free and drive over to see her. So it was no wonder he thought she was happy; and she knew she would have to stay happy if she wanted a last name for Lowry's baby.

"But why isn't your wife happy?" Clara said, pretending surprise.

"I don't know. She isn't well."

"How bad is she sick?"

"She isn't sick. But she isn't well."

Clara would pretend to be baffled at this, as if such complexity lay beyond her. She was learning to play games with him to take the place of the pa.s.sion she had felt for Lowry-you had to do something and say something to a man, and what was there to talk about that made any sense? Everything that was serious about life had to be kept back because Revere could not know about it. He could never know. Even if someone in Tintern hinted to him about Lowry, about another man involved with Clara, he wouldn't believe it. He did certainly think he had discovered her and that he had almost seen her born, that he was almost her father in a way. "She isn't like you," he would tell her. "You're very beautiful, you don't worry about anything.... You're just a child."

"I'm not a child," Clara said.

"You enjoy everything in life. You don't worry," he said.

That winter he began to bring a cousin of his over to visit her, a thin, lanky man who had not yet married, who was in his thirties. His name was Judd. While Revere sat with his feet out before him on the heater, firm and confident, Judd was restless and made Clara want to run to him and calm him down. He had a bony, earnest face that might have been handsome if something hadn't gone wrong, some angle pushed out of shape by his prominent cheekbones.

She listened to the two men talk about horses and the weather and their families and business contracts; evidently Revere had forced one of his compet.i.tors out of business. Clara sat listening, not quite knowing what they were talking about but sensing that Revere wanted her to stay on the periphery of his life, except when he crossed over to her of his own accord. She did not mind. Life out in the country had infected her with its silence; she imitated the cat Revere had brought her from home, a long-haired gray cat with a shabby, gentle, lazy face. The men talked, Revere more than Judd, about people Clara would never know, some of them living far away, others already dead. "Yes, sir, he is asking for trouble. He is asking for someone to sit on him," Revere would say, but smiling. Judd would make a flicking motion with his fingers, as if dismissing this person. A minute later Clara found out they were talking about the governor of the state. It made her smile in alarm, to think she could listen to a conversation that tossed that man's name about so casually; she felt a strange surge of power, as if Revere's quiet, be-mused strength might someday turn into her own. But all she did was pet her cat, who lay sleeping at her feet and paid no attention to them at all.

They taught her to play card games. Revere always won; he was an apologetic winner. Clara made mistakes because she could never remember the rules. She thought card games were silly but they belonged to the world of men, so there must be some point to them. Staring at a hand of cards newly dealt to her, trying to make sense of the numbers and suits, Clara understood that her brain could go so far and no further. She was limited, like a dog tugging at a chain. Somehow the two men could work these cards, toss down combinations right in the middle of talking, but Clara had to work hard every second. Perspiration came out on her forehead, tiny beads of sweat because she was ashamed of being stupid. She did not want to lay down her hand for them to see because it would be like opening her brain to the daylight and revealing how limited she was.

From Revere and Judd she got a picture, gradually, of a vague web of people, the generations mixed together and men present in their talks simultaneously with their grandfathers, and Revere and Judd as children; it was like a great river of people moving slowly along, bound together by faces that looked alike and by a single name. How wonderful to be born into this name and to belong to such a world.... Clara thought of Lowry's child among them, even if she herself could never quite make it. She thought of this child pus.h.i.+ng its way through, appearing before the legs of aged people and pus.h.i.+ng them aside, impatiently, with somewhere to go. Her child would be strong, Clara thought, like Lowry. It would be like Lowry. It would push its way through like Lowry did and yet it would be happy, while Lowry had never been happy, because it would be born with everything Lowry had been seeking. It would have a last name and a world and want nothing....

They alluded now and then to relatives, in an oblique, glancing way that was difficult for Clara to follow. She gathered that the most wealthy of the Reveres lived in the city, in Hamilton. She gathered that there was some kind of quarrel between the city and the country Reveres, but that it would be straightened out. Revere's father had been a great fat man who'd died at the age of forty, knocked off a horse that ran under a low-hanging branch; he had been drunk at the time. Clara could not reconcile this with Revere himself. That story about his father was almost a joke, but nothing about Revere himself was a joke. And they mentioned a cousin of theirs, an older woman who traveled everywhere and never came home. She lived in Europe. Revere screwed up his face to show disgust for her. Judd defended her, saying, "People can't help what they believe. She says she just can't believe in G.o.d." "She'll believe in h.e.l.l, though, fast enough," Revere said coldly. Clara sat leaning a little forward, her eyes lowered. She was learning. In those love magazines she used to read there were many stories of girls screaming at married men who had promised to marry them but never did marry them, and the point of the stories was that you got nothing by screaming but might get something by shutting up. Clara was learning that that was so.

During the long days when he was traveling or could not leave home, she talked to the cat and carried it around in her arms until it struggled free, or she worked at the sewing machine or tried to cook. She wandered through the rooms and looked out the windows at the snowy fields where white lay upon white out to the very horizon of the mountains. She cried out in silence for Lowry to come back to her, but nothing happened, no one came except Revere and once in a while his cousin Judd. She learned how to be still. Her hands would fall innocently upon her stomach and rest there, and she could not remember what she had done with her hands before. Kneeling on the sofa and staring out into the heavy winter sky, she thought: "I will not think about him. I will think about nothing all day long. Nothing. Nothing." The cat was so lazy it made Clara sleepy, so she slept during the day and felt that it was good for her. Then she and the cat sat in the kitchen together, she gave the cat warm milk, and talked to it off and on.

Because she was alone so much, she looked in the mirror often, as if to seek out her reflection as company. She liked to look at herself. She wondered if this was the face Revere saw, or did he see someone else? Her face was fine-boned, her eyes were slanting, like pale blue gla.s.s, eyelashes thick and innocently pale, almost white; she had a sleepy, lazy smile that could come out of nowhere even if she never felt like smiling again in her life. She held the cat up to the mirror and tried to interest it in its reflection; it did not respond. "Mighty strange, not to see yourself in a mirror," Clara said aloud, feeling sorry for the cat. What if people couldn't see themselves? It would be like living in a vast desert. The cat's name was Rosalie. When Revere and Judd sat in the parlor talking, she held the cat on her lap, her own expression shaped and suspended like the cat's, sleek and sleepy at once, so that Revere could stare at her with that look she was beginning now to control; she thought, "He fell in love with me the way another man falls into a swamp," and was able to think of herself as this swamp, something Revere could sink into and lose himself in. And if Lowry ever saw her again, she thought, he too would sink and drown; she would get him.

That b.a.s.t.a.r.d Lowry, she thought, clear-eyed and awake when Revere dozed off beside her, his heavy arm around her to keep her still and close to him. Sometimes she lay sleepless until dawn, when the night turned into day abruptly and awkwardly as light shot over the ridge of mountains-and where all that time went she could not say. She could watch Revere's face define itself into the face she now knew and was beginning to love: the lined, stern forehead, the eyes that did not seem to relax even when closed. Clara's long hair would be twisted with sleeplessness.

She thought of Rosalie, the first Rosalie, and how that girl had had a mistake happen to her and had not known where to run with it, on whose lap to dump it. Clara had known what to do before she had even known she would have to do it.

She thought of her mother-all those babies gouging themselves out of her, covered with blood, slippery and damp as fish, with no more sense than fish and no value to anyone. And how her mother had died!-she knew more about that night than she had ever let herself think about.

And she thought of her sisters, and of her brothers-lost somewhere-and of her father, who would probably be on the road right now, as always, drinking and fighting and going on, getting recruited on one crew after another, and that was going to be all. Had she betrayed them by running out? What did she owe them or anybody?

Her hands fell onto her stomach and she thought fiercely that she would betray anybody for this baby; she would even kill if she had to. She would do anything. She would kill Lowry himself if she had to.

In the morning she drank a cold gla.s.s of water to help keep her nausea down and felt the bright new coldness fall inside her as if there were nothing to stop it. And she would stand in her bare feet, s.h.i.+vering on the rough kitchen floor, and look out the window past the rustand snow-flecked screen that was still left on it from last summer, to the barns that were stark black against the snow and past them to the decrepit orchard and as far as she could see to the horizon, to the sky, and hear silence easing down to her.

One day Revere drove her down through the valley and across the river and into the city of Hamilton, which she had heard about but had never seen. It was a port at the branch of two great rivers. Clara saw its smoke rising fatly up into the winter air for miles as they approached the city, driving on smart paved highways and pa.s.sing cars that were often as good as Revere's. Back from the highway were the occasional shanties with their tar-paper or tin roofs, abandoned or filled with some hint of forlorn life, and along the highway were pieces of thrown-away junk, iron sc.r.a.ps, rusted m.u.f.flers that just fell off cars, sometimes even automobiles, and the frequent unsurprising signs for Royal Crown Cola or hotels in Hamilton with rates for the family or Lucky Strike cigarettes, everything sad and misty in the gray air. That soot on the edge of the signs, Revere told her, was blown out from the city they were coming to.

They crossed the Eden River on a high gleaming bridge. It was the same river Clara had waded in while Lowry watched, so long ago, and she thought grimly that it was really a different river this far out of Tintern and at this time of the year. It wasn't the same river at all. The bridge was high and new and Clara's stomach cringed to think of how high they were. She stared down at the water far below, winding tightly between two bright banks of ice covered with soft powdery snow; she was afraid she might be sick. She wondered if this trip might be a trick and if Revere might be going to abandon her somewhere, six months pregnant as she was.

They kept on driving for some time. The sun tried to s.h.i.+ne through the gray, misty air, and finally they were driving in traffic and Clara looked out narrow-eyed at girls her age waiting to cross streets, their arms loaded with books. They wore bright wool socks that went up to their knees, and plaid wool skirts, and coats that hung carelessly open as they stood about with a vague purposeful air of having somewhere to go but feeling no hurry about it. It was about noon. There were many trucks on the road. Everything brightened and Revere turned off onto a winding street that led down toward the river. He said, "This is upriver from Hamilton." Clara tried to think what that meant; was it something special? Up-river, they maybe didn't get polluted water.

The homes here were set far back from the street, on hills that faced the river. Great immense homes with rows of windows that caught the sun and flashed it out indifferently, bounded by spiked iron fences and gates or high brick walls. The houses gave no sign of life. Clara stared out at them. Revere slowed his car in front of one of the hills. "Look at that," he said. It was nearly hidden from the street, high behind clumps of evergreens, a dark gray stone house with columns. "Does someone you know live here?" Clara said. "One of my uncles," said Revere. Clara's jaw muscles involuntarily tightened as if she were biting down hard on something, unable to stop, and she could feel the baby hard and tight inside her, demanding this already-the house and the columns and its heavy brutal look. She said, teasing, "Are you going to take me up to visit?" but he was already driving past. He didn't like to joke about things like that. "I thought you were going to take me in," she said. She did not call this man by any name. She certainly did not call him Curt nor did she even think of him by that name; she did not think of him by any name at all. If she had needed to call out for him to come to her she would have said, "Mr. Revere!" like everyone else.

"Someday, who can tell?" he said, trying to match her own tone.

He drove on for a while until they pa.s.sed over into an area where the homes were closer together, all on a level, and Revere's surprise was a visit to a doctor-Clara had been against doctors all along. She had thought his silence meant he agreed with her. So she sat in the car for a while, trembling with anger while he talked to her. Then she gave up, close to tears. "All right, G.o.dd.a.m.n it," she said, and allowed him to get her inside the waiting room so that she could sit with him, without a wedding ring, in this room filled with women and their husbands who stared at her as if she were on display. "I hope it's born dead, just to get back at him," she thought, imagining Revere's sorrow and her own righteous hatred of him for what he had caused. She clasped her hands together, turned away from Revere to refuse his murmured conversation, and stared fixedly at the feet around the room-boots and rubbers and women's boots tipped with fur and unhooked farmers' boots (these were Revere's) that were leaving a small puddle on the floor. Good. It showed they were from the country, making a mess, and her without a wedding ring (and she would not hide her hands), while a skinny scarecrow woman with hair like straw looked up from her magazine at Clara, and a man with a round pumpkin face watched her too. There was a gla.s.sed-off part.i.tion behind which a nurse sat, answering a telephone, and in this gla.s.s Clara could see a vague reflection of herself. When they had come in, Revere stooped to talk through the hole in the gla.s.s; he had said, "Clara Revere," as if this were really her name, as natural as anything, and he didn't expect anyone to be surprised, not even Clara. She had wanted to interrupt and say, "Clara Walpole," but had no nerve. So she sat now and waited, and when that strange name was called-Clara Revere- she got up and refused to look at Revere as the nurse led her out.

When she came out again she must have looked awful, because Revere got right up and came to her. He took her hands. Clara was certain everyone thought he was her father and of course they had noticed she had no wedding ring-every woman had seen that in the first instant-so her face flushed with the shame of this situation he had gotten her into, just as it had flushed with shame before the doctor. The doctor called Revere inside to talk to him and Clara put on her coat and sat sullenly in it, thinking of nothing. Her feet were out loose on the floor, ankles turned out the way Lowry had sat that day on the riverbank, as if he had abandoned walking forever and would have been content to sit there doing nothing the rest of his life.

Revere came back out in a few minutes, his boots flopping, and Clara stared at them as if they were objects she could not quite place. Out in the car she cried with that hopeless, inflectionless pa.s.sivity that cost her the least effort, while Revere talked to her, saying everything that was sensible and reasonable and that Clara would agree with in time but not right now. She was struck and weakened by his love for her, which was crazy, out of focus. "And I'm not going to a hospital. I'm not," she said. "n.o.body I ever knew went to a hospital and they were all right...." After a minute or two she sensed that she should carry on no longer, that he might lose patience, so she wiped her eyes dry and was quiet.

"I wanted to get you something," Revere said apologetically. This was downtown, where the traffic fascinated and frightened Clara and the buildings were taller than any she had seen. On the sidewalks women walked past quickly in high-heeled shoes, as if they were used to wearing them on an ordinary weekday. They pa.s.sed a big dirty-gray building with a statue out front: a horse rearing up toward the sky, a military man on his back, both of them tarnished a hard dead gray-green. It looked like something fished up from the bottom of the ocean. Revere parked the car and put a coin in the meter; Clara tried not to look too hard at the little flag that jumped back inside it. She had never seen that before. The air was frosty and impure here but no one seemed to notice. "Along this way," Revere said, not touching her. She walked along slowly, staring. Her lips were parted. Revere brought her to a small shop with only a few yards' coverage on the street; it was a jewelry store with a sign bearing a long foreign name Clara could not read.

There were no other customers in the store, which was narrow and deep, consisting of one long counter that led to the back. Clara stared about at the gleaming clockfaces and silver plates and tea sets, placed out in the open so that anyone could steal them, and down past the flawless clean gla.s.s to the jewels on dark velvet. She felt dazed by what she saw.

"Maybe you'd like something here," Revere said.

An old man waited on them. He was servile and smiling; he wore gla.s.ses. Clara stared down at the man's fingers as he brought out rings for her to look at-this could not really be happening, she thought. He indicated she should try a ring on. She slid it on her finger and saw how her hand was changed by it. "What's that, an emerald?" Revere said. The man said yes. Revere took Clara's hand and stared critically at the ring. "Well," he said, releasing her, "pick out any one you want. It's for you."

"But I don't know-what kind they are," Clara said. She stood flat-footed and awkward. She had a terror of picking something too expensive, or something Revere thought was ugly.

"Take your time. Pick out something pretty," Revere said. He stood a little apart from her. He was not uneasy, not quite, but Clara saw that there was something guarded in the way he spoke. She picked up a ring with a purple stone and tried it on.

"I like this one," she said at once.

"That's an amethyst," said Revere. Clara wondered what this meant.

"I guess I like it," Clara said shyly.

"Look at the others."

The old man pulled out another tray. Clara's heart beat in confusion and alarm at everything she had to see, touch, think about. Her instinct was to take the first thing and have done with all this awkwardness, all this pain. But in Revere's world, evidently, you stared hard at everything before you made your choice. The stones sparkled at her and their settings were intricate and beautiful, gifts from another world she had no right to and that she was stealing from those who really deserved them-not girls like herself but women who were really married, who were not choked with shame in a doctor's office. She was stealing from them and from Revere's wife, who should be here in Clara's place. Her fingers went blindly to another purple ring with a gold setting, placed high and cut into a dazzling intricate shape with many facets, and she turned it over and saw the price tag-just the number 550 in dark ink-and this did not register at once. When it registered she put the ring back. There was an ugly roaring in her ears. She would be able to wear on one finger something worth more money than her father had ever had at once, something worth more than anything her mother had owned, ever, and it was all coming about with no one showing any surprise except herself-the old man behind the counter wasn't surprised, maybe he was even bored, and Revere looked as if he did this every day. This was how life was.

In the end Revere wanted her to take that one. It was a little large for her finger but she said it was all right, she didn't want to bother anyone. All the way back home she stared at her hand, looking off at the colorless countryside and back at her finger, at the rich deep purple stone, her mind so overcome by it that she did not think of it as something she had stolen-from Revere's wife or her own peo- ple or anyone. It was hers. Clara brought the ring up and touched her face with it, then raised it to her eye so that she could see the sharp tiny reflection of the moving countryside in it, shadows and blurred forms that were like the pa.s.sing of time in a world you could never get hold of.

"I thank you for this," she said to Revere.

The baby was born in May, a few weeks overdue by her reckoning, but that was lucky: it was just on time, according to Revere. And what she went through turned out to be no great surprise-it was not as bad as the times she had suffered along with her mother, having to watch helplessly. Revere drove her in to Hamilton, to a hospital, because this was what he had wanted and in all things that did not really go against her wishes she would give in to him; and the son she had, hers and Lowry's, was delivered over to Revere forever.

9.

As soon as she became a mother with a baby to care for, time went quickly for Clara. She learned to live by the baby's rhythms, sleeping when he slept and wakening when he woke, fascinated by his face and the tiny eyes she imagined were like Lowry's eyes, coming so slowly into focus and one day looking right at her. Revere named the baby Steven, and Clara said that was a fine-sounding name, but her own name for him was Swan; she liked to whisper "Swan, Swan" to him, and sometimes when she fed him her hand would come slowly to a stop and she would sit leaning forward, frozen, staring at this creature who had come out of her body and had now taken on life of his own, putting on weight as if he knew what he was doing-and there he was, looking at her. "You smart little baby, darling little Swan," Clara would sing to him, hurrying around barefoot when it was warm enough at last, taking in the air of spring with a joy she had not felt since Lowry had left her. She made up tuneless tireless songs about him: He's going by train and by airplane All around the world....

Revere was a little shy with the baby. "Why do you call him Swan?" he said. Clara shrugged her shoulders. With the baby born, she had work to do now-she did not bother fixing herself up for Revere but sat wearily or with a pretense of weariness, her long bare legs outspread and her hair tied back from her face carelessly, interested only in the baby. When Revere held him, Clara could hardly tear her eyes from the baby's face to look at Revere and to listen to his words. "I like the name, I picked it out myself. It's my baby," Clara said stubbornly. But she knew enough to soften anything she said, so she leaned forward to touch Revere's hand. She said, "I love him and I want lots of babies all like him."

She could tell that Revere didn't know how to hold a baby or how to feed him, it was just a nuisance to have him around, but she kept quiet about how she felt. She could outwait anyone, outlast anyone.

She would never have known what people thought of her from just the things Judd said if she kept asking him, except one day in July, when she thought Swan was sick, she drove into Tintern by herself. She had the baby bundled in a blanket, lying on the front seat beside her, and as she drove she kept leaning over to touch his face; she was sure he had a fever. "Don't fall asleep, that scares me," she said. "Swan, you wake up." She heard her voice climbing to hysteria. So she stopped the car and picked up the baby and pressed her face against his; then it struck her that this was crazy and that she should have called Revere on the telephone, hunting him up wherever he was, instead of taking the baby out into the heat. "You're not going to die. What's wrong, why don't you wake up like you used to?" The baby looked drugged. Clara began to cry, then she stopped crying and put the baby down and drove on, and when she got to Tintern the dusty little town opened up before her eyes like a nightmare picture someone had made up just for a joke. She thought how dirty it was, how ugly and common.

When she ran into the drugstore, barefoot, a few people at the counter looked at her. They were sipping c.o.kes. "Mr. Mack?" Clara said. A fan was turning slowly above the counter, making noise. "Where is Mr. Mack?" Clara said. "My baby's out in the car sick. I need help for him." Her voice accused those people who stared at her as if they were complete strangers and hadn't lived in the same town with her for two years. The woman behind the counter, Mr. Mack's niece, looked at Clara for maybe ten seconds and said, "He's takin a nap an' don't want n.o.body botherin him."

"My baby's sick," Clara said. She went past them and kept going. "Mr. Mack?" she called. At the doorway to the back she hesitated, her toes curling. There was a beige curtain pulled shut across the doorway. She did not push it aside, but said, "Mr. Mack? This is Clara here- Can you come out?"

He was not an old man but he had always looked old, and in the while she had been away from Tintern he had grown to look even older. No more than forty-five, but with a reddened face that was pale underneath its flush, and hair thinning meekly back from his forehead: he brushed the curtain aside and looked at her. She saw how his eyes narrowed, remembering her.

Clara's words came out too fast, tumbling over one another. "My baby's sick, out in the car. He's got a fever or something-he don't wake up right."

"Take him to a doctor."

"What doctor?"

He looked behind her, as if making out the face of a doctor somewhere in the distance. "In the city. Don't your man take you to a doctor in the city?"

"I need some pills or something," Clara said. She was trying not to cry. "He's real hot. You want to come out and see him? He's in the car-"

"How much money do you have?"

"I don't know-I-I forgot it," Clara said. They faced each other silently and Clara thought in panic that she should have brought the baby inside, not left it out there, or was she afraid to pick it up? At the counter people were watching. And there was some noise outside that meant her little yellow car had attracted attention already; but she did not turn around. Finally Mr. Mack said, in a voice that let her know what he thought of her: "All right. Just a minute."

Clara hurried back out, past a big mannish woman with great shoulders she had seen once or twice before-a farm woman-and those two girls of maybe thirteen who had ridden past her that day on their bicycles. She did not look at them. After she had pa.s.sed and was out the screen door, she heard someone laugh. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," she thought. "Sons of b.i.t.c.hes, I'll get them." But this took only a second and already she was lifting the baby out. His eyes were closed, milky-pale, and she bent her face against his to see if he was breathing-but she could not tell-and her heart stopped beating for a moment as she wondered if she was standing here with a dead baby, out in the sun with people drifting over to look. There were some little kids across the way; they called something out to her.

Mr. Mack took his time coming out. His face was furrowed like an old man's. "Remember, I ain't no doctor," he said. "Let's see him."

"He's hot, ain't he?"

"Take him out of the sun," the druggist said. His face showed disgust. Clara wished he would look at her, acknowledge her. They stepped back against the building. Mr. Mack touched the baby's forehead with the back of his hand, as if he were afraid of catching something from him.

"Look, I'll get money," Clara said wildly. "You know I can pay for it; just take care of him. It ain't none of that baby's fault-"

"He's got a fever."

"Is that bad? How bad is that?"

Mr. Mack shrugged his shoulders.

"What if he dies?" Clara said.

"He won't die."