A Garden of Earthly Delights

by Joyce Carol Oates

I. Carleton

Carleton Walpole is a migrant worker, traveling with his family from camp to camp looking for work during the Great Depression. One day the truck breaks down, and as they wait for repairs his wife, Pearl, gives birth to a daughter whom they name Clara. Carleton is an arrogant, vain man who later kills a man by accident in a bar. The family moves to avoid the police. Pearl dies in childbirth a few years later, and Carleton takes up with a woman named Nancy. Clara goes to school, though she does not excel, and Carleton favors her out of all his children. One day when Clara is a teenager, she receives a visit from two women from the First Methodist Church in Florence. They invite her to a prayer meeting at their church that evening, which Clara accepts. The meeting at the church disturbs Clara, and she leaves early with a young man named LeRoy and they go to a restaurant. At the restaurant she meets another man named Lowry, and she goes home with Lowry, though he declines to sleep with her. When she comes back home that evening, Carleton begins to beat her. The next morning, Clara finds Lowry again and leaves town with him. Carleton sets out to look for her, but never finds her and succumbs to an unidentified illness.

II. Lowry

Lowry does not seem to live anywhere, but travels from town to town. He explains that his parents lost everything in the Depression, so he is afraid to possess anything. They eventually settle in a town called Tintern, and he gets her a small room and a job at a Five and Dime. She repeatedly professes her love for Lowry, but he insists on treating her like a sister, and she jealously observes him going off with other women. Clara has a friend named Caroline who marries a man named Davey. Davey works a farm owned by a wealthy man named Curt Revere. As Clara walks back from their wedding, a man offers her a ride, and he turns out to be Revere himself. One summer Lowry begins sleeping with her. He tells her to use birth control but she does not. She meets Revere again and he oddly compares her to a Swedish girl he once met near a farm. Lowry suddenly shows up at her room one night, saying he is in trouble and he must flee for Mexico.

III. Revere

Revere comes across her again and takes her to an abandoned farmhouse he owns, where they make love. Revere provides for her in the farmhouse, coming every few days when he isn't with his wife Marguerite. At age seventeen Clara gives birth to a boy. Revere assumes the boy is his, but Clara knows it is Lowry's. They name the boy Steven, but Clara calls him Swan. When Swan is an infant, Lowry comes to the farmhouse and asks Clara to take Swan and go with him to Canada. Clara refuses, saying she is waiting for Marguerite to die so that she can marry Revere and be prosperous. Lowry leaves, but Swan later realizes that this man is his father.

Clara eventually marries Revere and they move into his house, when Swan is seven years old.

IV. Swan

He adopts Swan, whose name is changed to “Steven Revere,” and he meets Revere's three sons: Clark, Jonathan, and Robert. Clara vainly buys many expensive items and decorations for their home, knowing that Revere has no end of money. Robert and Jonathan pick on Swan, although Clark, the oldest, is mature and kind. On a hunting trip that Swan despises, Swan pushes Robert and accidentally makes Robert's gun go off, killing the youth. Everyone accepts his death as an accident. Jonathan gradually becomes less responsible and more delinquent, while Swan excels in school and skips a grade.

Swan refuses to go to college in spite of his excellent grades, and he breaks off a relationship he has with a girl named Loretta because he is afraid of the carnal sins that his mother warned him against. Eventually Swan becomes Revere's assistant in the business, since Clark has married a lower-class girl and has fallen out of Revere's favor. Swan becomes depressed and finds his attention drifting from everything he does. Swan is in love with a niece of Revere's, Deb, who is married to another man. One night Swan goes to Revere's and Clara's house, yelling that he cannot stand the couple any more. Swan pulls out a gun and tries to kill Clara, only to find he cannot do it. Swan accidentally shoots Revere and then kills himself. Clara has a nervous breakdown and spends the rest of her life in a nursing home. She is visited on occasion only by Clark.