Part 13 (1/2)

”You can let me out anywhere,” Clara said. She saw that Lowry's car was not parked out front. But she could not control her excitement. In the future lay everything-everything. Lowry in the doorway of her room, Lowry in her arms, his face, his voice, his calm stubborn will that was a wall she kept hurtling herself against- ”Thanks very much,” she said, polite as any child. She was about to get out, but her excitement prompted her to talk. She chatted the way she'd chatted for other men: ”It was nice that you stopped because now my new shoes didn't get all muddy.... Wasn't it a nice day today? I'm glad Caroline and Davey are married and happy and everything.... Thanks very much for the ride.”

”Do you live in town here? Where?”

She glanced at him, still smiling. ”Upstairs there,” she said, pointing. It somehow pleased her that the man bent a little to look.

”Your whole family lives there?”

Clara hesitated. ”I live alone,” she said, looking down. Then she said shyly, ”I work at the five-and-ten there and got the whole day off today, so did Sonya, just for the wedding. And somebody's coming to visit me today, a friend of mine.... It's all so nice, the day is so nice. It smells nice when the sun comes out....”

She laughed in embarra.s.sment at her own joy.

When she ran upstairs she saw there on her door the note she'd left: ”Dear Lowry, I am at a wedding and will be back soon please wait for me Love Clara.” Sonya had helped her write it. She had hoped Lowry might come and discover it and be pleased to think that she had written it all herself, that she had learned so much from his teaching.

She waited in her room.

Hours pa.s.sed, the afternoon pa.s.sed. She thought of her friends out at the reception. But she had things to do: sewing, mending. There were two stuffed dolls on her bed now, made of old sc.r.a.ps. Clara did not take off her dress and shoes but stayed the way she was, ceremonial and uncomfortable, waiting for him. She sang to herself, breaking off now and then as her heart tripped violently over some small obscure sound that was never explained and never led to anything else. Her bed had a pink bedspread on it now. On her dressing table were bottles and tubes and glittering, gleaming things she was proud of. Sonya's boyfriend had driven her and Sonya to a larger town about twenty miles away where they went to a store that had clothing just for women and children-nothing else-and Clara bought a sweater there; it was folded neatly in one of the bureau drawers and she had the drawer pulled out so that she could look at it.

Her card table was now covered with a scalloped cloth. On it lay Clara's white gloves and her pale blue purse, waiting. They continued to lie there in that alert, expectant way even after Clara herself had given up.

4.

It was as if Clara were living in two worlds and two times: the one bounded by her room and her job and the drugstore and the now-familiar limits of Tintern, and the other spread out aimlessly across the country, dragged back and forth with Lowry in an invisible, insatiable striving. She did not understand him, but she sensed something familiar about the hardness with which he lived. It was her father's hardness brought into sharper focus.

”But what the h.e.l.l do you care about him?” Sonya and Ginny complained. Her friends kept up long monotonous arguments against him, annoyed by the clammy infatuation Clara did not try to hide. Over at Ginny's house, playing with the baby, Clara would have the sudden catastrophic vision of this baby as her own and Lowry as its father, but a father who never stayed in one place and who wouldn't know his own baby-no father at all. She felt icy with apprehension, as if she were inching out too far on something precarious. It was not that she was afraid of losing control of herself or of her knowledge of how things were; like everyone she knew, there was no speculation in her about what was real and what wasn't. It was only the secondary, underlying conviction that she was being betrayed so coa.r.s.ely by her wishes that frightened her. She hated this backlas.h.i.+ng tendency in herself that cut away at the simplicity of her life. ”My mother worked all her life and had kids,” she told people. ”Anything better than that is all right with me.” But she did not quite believe this herself.

She loved Ginny's children and her love spread out to include Ginny herself and her husband Bob, a man of about twenty-two who was temporarily out of work. He had pumped gas at a gas station but the station had burned down. Ginny was one of those women who expressed themselves in bursts of generosity, with food or affection or anger; she had a round high-colored face that put Clara in mind of country girls she'd seen walking on back roads all her life. Her husband was thin and gave the impression of lunging when he walked or reached for things. His silence and the pa.s.sivity with which he watched his own children gave no indication of his impatience. ”Gonna get a car from a guy,” he'd brag to Clara, and grabbed her by the back of the neck to make it more emphatic. When he kissed her she thought in a panic that Lowry would find out. She pushed him away. ”What the h.e.l.l are you doing?” she said, making a face as if she had tasted something bad. They all must have liked her because she could take nothing seriously-Ginny's husband and other men who bothered her, married or unmarried- as if, in having committed herself to a hopeless infatuation, she was therefore kinder and more forgiving with them.

The less she saw of Lowry, the more she thought of him. When he did come, his face and voice were less real than what she imagined. She felt as if she had loved and married him and endured an entire lifetime, while Lowry himself was still young and indifferent. ”I already have a boyfriend,” she explained to men who did not believe her, but she did not think to extend this perfunctory defense to the man who had driven her back to town from the wedding-and it happened that he showed up again in a few days, in the five-and-ten. It would never have occurred to her to turn away from him, because she understood that this man was not like anyone else she knew. He did not want the same thing from her.

”How long have you been here, living alone?” he said. She told him, toying with a s.h.i.+ning pair of scissors on the counter. Before this kind of man-one who ”owned” things-she was shy and a little stubborn; she sensed that what gave her power with simpler men would have no effect on him. ”Do you really live alone?”

”I'm of age,” Clara said. She flicked her hair back out of her eyes and met the man's steady, gray, impenetrable stare. ”I take care of myself.”

”Do you go to church?”

She lifted one shoulder in a gesture of indifference and then stopped before the gesture was completed-it was better to say nothing bad about religion because it might do her harm one of these days. ”Well, my folks never went to church.”

”That's too bad.” His hands rested on the edge of the counter and were perfectly still. Clara noticed things like hands: her own were always doing something, Lowry's fingers were always tapping impatiently, Sonya was always fooling with her hair. ”At your age you need guidance. You need a religious foundation for your life.”

”Yes, sir,” Clara said.

Two tiny lines appeared between her eyebrows. She said, feeling a little embarra.s.sed, ”But I can take care of myself.” This came out more aggressively than she had wanted, so she softened the effect of her words by brus.h.i.+ng her heavy hair off one shoulder and letting it fall loose on her back. ”Where I come from,” she said softly, ”you learn to take care of yourself when you're a little kid.”

He leaned forward as if he could not quite hear her. ”Where do you come from?”

She bit her lip. She almost smiled. ”Oh, from anywhere. From all over.” It was not flirtation, though it had the style of flirtation; she stared at him seriously to make him understand this. ”We didn't have no particular home, we traveled on the season.”

His silence indicated that he knew what she meant. Then he said, in a harsh, paternal tone, ”People should have done more for you than they have. Society has failed you.”

”Society-”

”There are probably hundreds of girls like you-” He reddened slightly. ”Have you gone to school?”

”Oh, there was some woman in asking about me, from the school board here or something, I don't know. She asked me did I go to the doctor this year or to the dentist, things like that. Somebody said they could take me out of here and put me in some home or reformatory or something-but they can't because I'm of age. Can they do that?”

”I don't know.”

She felt a little disappointed at this answer. ”Well, look, I don't want no home with other girls, I want everything I have right now the way it is and I want to be free and the h.e.l.l with charity. My folks never took no charity, nothing. My pa-”

”I don't know the county board,” he said quickly.

”Yes, well, that's all right. I was just saying.” Clara lowered her gaze. The man inhaled deeply. Clara was conscious of other people in the store either watching them or very carefully not watching them, but they were not forced into any kind of unity because of this. They stood alone, awkward and a little resentful, as if each had somehow failed the other.

Clara said, ”Did you want to buy something?”

”My wife wanted some thread,” he told her, and already his eye was running along the rows of thread. ”Gold thread-”

Clara looked through the spools of yellow thread. It was smooth, smooth, packed down to an incredibly satiny smoothness; it was delightful to touch. ”What about this one?” she said dubiously. He nodded and she saw the dark yellow transformed to ”gold.” ”Is this all, mister?”

”Yes.”

He made no move to leave but leaned on the counter, rubbing his hands against the lower part of his face. She saw that he wore a wedding band. What kind of a man would wear a ring? she thought at once. His hands were like any man's except for the ring, and the edges of his white s.h.i.+rt by his wrists and the dark sleeves of his suit coat. He was wearing a suit and tie in Tintern on a Wednesday. Clara believed she had seen him somewhere before having come to Tintern, or perhaps a picture of him: why did she think that? He summoned up in her blood a vague trembling response, inarticulate. She did not resent the way he looked but she resented a little the way he made everything around him look cheap and inadequate. Lowry, beside this man, would not stand straight enough; Clara would want to be poking him to make him stand straight. This man's shoulders and back were straight and firm, and nothing could tease him into looking any other way. She had no idea how old he was.

”My name is Curt Revere,” he said.

”My name is Clara.”

”Clara what?”

She rubbed the damp palm of her hand along the spools of thread, turning them slowly. ”Oh, just Clara,” she said. One of the spools jerked out of place and rolled down to the edge of the counter. It would have fallen to the floor but the man caught it.

”Did you run away from home?” he said.

”There wasn't any home, how could I run away from it,” Clara said sullenly.

He waited for her to continue. She stared at the spool of thread he was holding. ”What the h.e.l.l business is it of yours!” she said suddenly. Her face felt as if it had cracked. She began to cry. He fitted the spool back into place, taking some time. Clara wept bitterly without bothering to turn aside or hide her face. She was used to crying. ”You leave off askin me those things,” she said in a child's voice, and as she looked up at him the memory flashed through her mind of where she'd heard his name before: Lowry had mentioned it and that man had mentioned it. Caroline's husband worked for him. The corners of her eyes ached as she tried to get him into focus. There was something wrong, something terrible about him, she was on the brink of a precipice, her whole life could be ruined: he had money, power, a name. The very air about him seemed to tremble. He had a name that people knew.

”Well,” he said gently, ”if you don't have any last name then you don't have any. Maybe you lost it somewhere.”

He tried to smile but was not too good at it. After a moment he moved uncomfortably, a little abruptly. Clara felt paralyzed by her recollection of who he was, as if he were an enemy she had been hiding from all her life. She tried to remember where she had seen him before, or what she had seen that he reminded her of....

”I could suggest that they stop bothering you, the people from the county board,” he said. Clara, hearing this, drew her hands together in a meek, prayerful gesture. ”You are obviously able to take care of yourself, no matter what your age-”

”I'm over sixteen.”