A Garden of Earthly Delights (56 page)

“You won't hurt me,” she had said.

But it was nothing like what Clara had promised—how strange and simple, how cruel his mother was! You didn't make girls happy in that simple way; they wanted and needed more, and if you couldn't give them anything more?

So he had stayed free of her and he had forced her to become free of him. And Clara had said, hearing it was all over: “Well, I'm just as glad. She was sort of trash anyway, wasn't she?”

Now Clara was shedding the cold haughty look she always wore into stores and restaurants, and as she read the menu a childish, cunning look came onto her face. Swan watched her in fascination. “Oh, this looks good. It isn't too expensive, is it?” she said. She pointed to something and showed it to Revere; he shook his head no, it wasn't too expensive. Swan smiled. He did not know what his
smile meant: just the reaction of witnessing rituals, ceremonies that have been repeated many times. Clara always did this. He wondered if she did it with the other men she met here in the city—if she met other men; she was secretive now, in a vague sloppy way— and if they shook their heads, no, in the same way Revere did. When Clara moved her head, slivers of light darted off her diamond earrings. Yes, they were diamond. They weren't rhinestone. But how could most people tell the difference?

That was one of the things that bothered her these days.

“Have anything you want, Clara,” Revere said.

They could relax in the shadow of this man and what he had done for them. Swan tried to think of Revere as his father, his
father
, and though the idea of Clara being his mother should have been harder for him to accept, still he could not quite understand what it meant to have a father. What did it mean, exactly? How was he to behave toward this man? He imitated any models he came across— he had been imitating and improving upon Clark's style for years— but at the very heart of their relationship was a sense of dry and forlorn emptiness across which father and son might contemplate each other forever. As Swan was more and more able to understand Revere's problems, his role was becoming simpler in one direction and more complex in another. He was turning into a kind of clerk or secretary. Or a kind of lawyer. Already he had spent time with one of his father's new men—his tax accountant—trying to explain to the man why Revere refused to pay certain things and agreeing yes, yes, it was irrational, but how were they going to get it paid without Revere knowing? The older Revere got, the more crucial it was that the game he played not be violated. He demanded to be fooled, lied to, misled. Swan believed that the people who worked with and for him knew this, but if they didn't, he, Swan, knew it and they would have to listen to him. There were certain things one could tell the old man, certain reports one gave him and others one did not. This was getting simpler because all he had to do was transform himself into a kind of machine to master it. But being Revere's only remaining son was getting more difficult. Robert was never mentioned, Jonathan had vanished out of their lives, and Clark was discussed in the way Revere had always discussed obscure relatives
who had failed … so that left Swan—Steven—and it wasn't enough just to play chess with the old man and let him win; the old man was getting bored with winning chess. It was becoming necessary to nudge him a little to correct him, before he made a catastrophic blunder and lost everything. Swan thought of how simple everything might be if only his father would die, but the thought was a shameful one.

His father ordered drinks for himself and Clara. Back over Clara's shoulder was a wall mirror framed by a tacky red velvet drape, and Swan tried to avoid seeing himself in it. His mother's hair had been cut the other day, apparently, radically cut so that it hugged her head and crept in alarming bunches of curls up to the crown of her head, urged up there by some kind of trickery. Swan could not decide if she looked good or ludicrous. She could be both at the same time, maybe.

“Steven, you should have ordered a drink too. It's your birthday,” Revere said.

“I don't like to drink.”

Revere considered this as if he had never heard it before. There were wedges beneath his eyes—dark, tired pouches. He looked like a man who is thinking constantly, thinking painfully. Swan and his mother were light-skinned, light-haired, and curiously supple and casual beside this impressive old man; to a passerby the relationship among the three of them would be quite obscure. Swan thought: God knows I don't like to drink. If I got started drinking I might not ever stop. He wished that he could tell this to his father and throw all the blame for it onto that man's lap.

“Bessie looks sort of old,” Clara said.

“Does she!” Revere said. “Well.”

“I thought so. Ronald is in Europe, did you hear? Studying in Copenhagen—neurology.”

The way Clara enunciated “Copenhagen”—“neurology”—you would think she said them every day. Swan smiled. “Ah, Steven,” she said, a little sharply, seeing that smile, “you should have kept on with school. Why let them get ahead of you? He isn't much older than you are.”

Swan shrugged. A negligent and self-derisive movement of his shoulders perfected by Jonathan in those days of the drive to school, and back. “I had enough of studying. Books.”

“But why?” It was Clara's saddest disappointment: Swan's indifference about going to college. Valedictorian of his graduating class, and he hadn't gotten around to completing applications to any university until it was too late for the year. Vaguely Swan said he could go to college in a few years, maybe.

“Steven, you always loved to read so.…”

“Well, I don't any longer. My brain is burnt out.”

Swan laughed, and Clara stared at him. How strange her son was becoming to her! She was growing fearful of him, almost. He was reminding her of someone, Swan sensed. “If I had the chance to learn things, and wasn't so stupid,” Clara said, tapping at her teeth with her fingernails, “I would be so proud. I would! All my life there have been people around me—like in the newspapers, and on the radio—the Reveres in Hamilton—who are smarter than I am, and can talk better. I always wished I could see into the past like some people. Like at that museum, remember? ‘Ancient Egypt.' ‘Pharaohs.' History, things that have happened for a reason. And these people, they can understand life. But me, I … I never could.” Clara faltered and Swan felt a stab of something like pity, sorrow, wonder: What was his mother trying to say, whom was she thinking about?

“Well, I don't have time for books now. Like I said, my brain is like a lightbulb, burnt out.” Swan thought with satisfaction that he was safe from the massive crammed shelves of libraries and the high-ceilinged rooms of museums, so much demanding to be read, known, stared at, absorbed—that vast garden of men's minds that seemed to him to have been toiled into its complex existence by a sinister and inhuman spirit.

Revere said, “I never went to college. None of us did. Why? You need a ‘moneyman'—you buy him. Same thing with a lawyer.”

Swan smiled across the table and into his mother's occluded gaze. So? You see? That's wisdom. You didn't really want for me to get past him, did you? Wasn't it enough for me to be equal to him? And so much younger?

That night, lying in the strange hotel room, he cast his mind about for something that would let him sleep. He thought of his cousin Deborah, whom he had last seen at Christmas—a big Christmas party at Clara's. Not a successful party, not quite, but maybe the relatives had eaten more than in other years, stayed later, maybe they had been more friendly, and Clara was obviously willing to wait any number of Christmases to bring them around to the point at which they would embrace both her and Swan—she could wait forever, this Clara Walpole! Deborah had come but probably she had wanted to stay home. He watched her all during the meal, sitting next to her father but not even talking to him, a thin, shy, haughty girl with long brown hair and brown eyes. She looked as if she might be stupid until her eyes moved upon you, then you felt something strange.… After the long, loud dinner Swan sat by her and talked. They were alongside the Christmas tree, almost behind it by the window, and outside it had been snowing; he remembered all this. The snow was gentle and peaceful, but inside children were running, shouting—he hated them. Swan told her about going to the city with his father, trying to make her feel some of his confusion, his worry, without exactly telling her.

But she interrupted to say, “I hate your mother, do you know that?”

Swan was stunned. “You what?”

“I hate my own mother too. So it's all right.”

She looked up at him and smiled. There was something unreal about her gaze: she was too young to be staring at him like that.

“Tell the truth, Steven! You hate both of them yourself.”

“No.”

Slyly she poked him. “Come on.”

“I hardly know your mother. And why should I hate my own mother?”

Deborah's face shifted into an expression of contempt. “You know the truth but you don't speak it, so why should I talk to you? If you loved me and respected me …” Swan was embarrassed, and said nothing; they lapsed into silence. After a moment Deborah said meanly, “You're what is called a ‘bastard.' ‘Illegitimate.' Your
mother and father weren't married when you were born. So why should you tell lies like everybody else, all these hypocrites? You're from the outside, everyone knows it.
You
can speak the truth.”

“No. I'm not from the outside,” Swan said. “I'm Curt Revere's son.”

He had an impulse to take hold of Deborah, to hurt her. But the impulse passed quickly. He could not hurt her, he loved her; and if he didn't love her, he could not love anyone else. She was his sister-self. Yet with her, he had to pretend. “What you say isn't true, Deborah. So shut up.”

Thinking now of that girl, on the verge of sleep, and wondering why, like him, she was so unhappy, and undefined; so like himself, but a Revere. Even her clothes looked old, of a bygone era, and they never seemed quite to fit her slender body, as if they'd belonged to someone else.
We could leave here. Live somewhere else. Europe. Alaska. Mexico. Deborah!
In his half-sleep he imagined making love to Deborah but before he could kiss her mouth, before he could enter her body, she faded and was gone.

On his twentieth birthday Swan was also away from home: in Chicago with Revere to meet with “moneymen.” And that summer he spent weeks in Hamilton, staying in a hotel; meeting with his father's people, and quarreling; threatening them with actions Revere himself had not thought of, yet were belligerent enough to be an old man's ideas. Selling property. Selling investments. “Pulling out.” Reinvesting. The Eden County Reveres were making a good deal of money on wheat, corn, soybeans because of government tariffs on imports, and what did Revere care if other interests weren't yielding nearly so much? Swan wanted to think it wasn't just the federal government, laws passed by Congress as a result of lobbying, bribery. The future was automated farming, like factories; except the products were to be eaten. Except, if you were smart, your workers weren't unionized, and could be fired with a few days' pay. The biggest U.S. companies could be broken by strikes, but not Revere-owned farms. Not yet.

When Swan was twenty-two he took his father up on the threat of buying out the partners.

“What are you waiting for, Pa? They're just laughing at you.”

“Like hell they are. They'll change their minds when …”

Swan closed his eyes. “You've been talking about this for ten years.”

His brain swerved and plunged past his father's. He was a young horse cruelly yoked to an aging horse. Forced to hobble his pace to match the other's. He had his own ideas, he knew what he wanted to do. In his mind was a land surveyor's map of the countryside from the Eden Valley north into Hamilton. Clearly he could see it intersected by a new highway; an interstate highway larger than any road that had yet been built in upstate New York. This was the future, he knew. He would purchase more land, always more land, and he would rebuild and expand the barns; tear down the old-style silos and build new ones, weatherproof. He would buy into a frozen foods company for that too was the future. He was feverish thinking of all he might do; the thought of so much power lying latent in the mute, brute land, waiting for someone to seize it. Clara was right: you needed to know what the past was. But you needed to know only to plunge into the future.

Swan had overseen the sale of the gypsum plant. He'd have liked to bail out on the Tintern lumberyard but Clark, damn dumb slow-witted Clark who hadn't had an idea in his head in his life, ran it.

Swan told Revere that the only one of the relatives he trusted was Judd. He spoke slowly and clearly so that Revere, frowning, turning his bifocal glasses in his hands, would not misunderstand. “It's taken me five years to realize that you distrust them but you continue to work with them—why? Uncle Judd can maneuver them out. We'll buy them out, and the hell with them. And if Uncle Judd doesn't want to do it, I'll convince him. I think I know how.”

Revere's stern little line of a mouth smiled slightly.