Bellefleur (2 page)

(For Raphael was afflicted from boyhood with the Bellefleur temperament, an unfortunate combination of passion and melancholy: there never was any help for it.)

By the time Mahalaleel came to the manor, however, it was much changed. All but a very few of the staff of thirty-five servants had been dismissed over the decades, and a number of the rooms were closed off, and the wine cellar was badly depleted, and the marble statues in the garden were crudely weather-stained. As the delicate Japanese trees sickened and died they were replaced by sturdier North American trees—oak, cypress, silver birch, ash: some of the most beautiful pieces of furniture had been seriously scarred and battered by children, though they were, of course, traditionally forbidden to play in most of the rooms. The slate roof leaked in a dozen places, the turrets were storm-damaged, weeds grew where an outdoor swimming pool had been planned, the parquetry floor of the entrance hall was badly injured when Noel Bellefleur, as a young man, rode one of his horses into the house, for reasons never explained. Sparrow hawks and pigeons and other birds nested in the open towers (and the stone floors of these crude structures were strewn with the skeletons of tiny creatures); there were termites, mice, even rats, even squirrels and skunks and raccoons and snakes in the house; there were, everywhere, warped doors that would not quite close, and warped windows that could not be forced open. Tulip trees badly damaged by porcupine and starving deer were not adequately treated, nor was a magnificent wych-elm whose topmost limbs had been struck by lightning. The roof of the east wing had been only superficially repaired after a bad spring storm, and on the very night Mahalaleel arrived at the manor the highest chimney of this roof would be damaged. But what was to be done? What could possibly be done? To sell Bellefleur Manor was unthinkable (and perhaps impossible), to acquire another mortgage was out of the question. . . .

Grandfather Noel rode about the property on his aged stallion Fremont, taking notes in a small black ledger, recording the repairs that must be done before another season passed, calculating (though not very accurately) the sums of money required. He was most disturbed about the condition of the cemetery, where the handsome old marble and alabaster and granite markers, and above all Raphael’s mausoleum with its fine Corinthian columns, were in shameful condition. To die, and to be buried
there
. . .
!
And how spiteful the waiting dead would be . . . !

But he did no more than complain perfunctorily to his wife and the others, and his remarks had become so familiar by now that his sons Gideon and Ewan hardly made a courteous pretense of listening, and his daughter Aveline said, “If you would let me run the household, instead of Gideon and Ewan, maybe something could be done. . . .” But the old man was hobbled by inertia, it dragged at his ankles, dragged even at his horse’s ankles, and he was apt to pause in the midst of an impassioned speech, and, with an abrupt, resigned gesture of his arm turn away. It cannot be helped, any of this, these evil days that have befallen us, he seemed to be saying, it’s the Bellefleur fate, it’s our curse, there is no escaping it in this life. . . .

The Bellefleurs had always been distinguished from their neighbors in the Valley, not only by their comparative wealth, and their controversial behavior, but by their remarkable history of misfortune. Fate doled out to them an ordinate amount of good luck but then countered with an inordinate amount of bad luck. Impossible to characterize our family’s experience, Vernon Bellefleur thought: are we beset by tragedy, or merely farce?—or
melodrama
?—or pranks of fate, sheer happenstance, that cannot be deciphered? Even the Bellefleurs’ innumerable enemies considered them exceptional people. It was generally thought that the Bellefleur “blood” brought with it a certain capricious melancholy, a propensity for energy and passion that might be countered at any time by a terrifying bleakness, a queer emptiness of vision: so great-uncle Hiram once tried to describe the phenomenon by speaking of the exuberance of water gushing from a pipe . . . and then draining away, swirling away, down a drain . . . sucked by gravity back into the earth. First you are one, he said; and then, suddenly, you are the other. You feel yourself being sucked away . . . your exuberance sucked away . . . and there is nothing, nothing, you can do about it.

Bellefleur women, though troubled by the swelling and ebbing of this mysterious energy themselves, tended to minimize the phenomenon by saying it was a mood, a phase, a humor someone was going through. “Ah, you’re in one of your moods, are you,” Leah might say lightly to Gideon, as he lay fully clothed on their bed, in his muddy riding boots, his head drooping over the side and his face gone dark with blood and his eyes quite unfocused; and though he would not reply—though he might lie like that, paralyzed, hardly breathing, for hours—it was still only a mood in Leah’s estimation. “Where’s Gideon?” Leah’s mother-in-law Cornelia would surely ask as the family assembled for dinner in the smaller dining room—for the large dining room in the manor’s central wing, with its somber, heavy German tables and chairs, its morose Dutch oils, its begrimed ornamental plasterwork and crystal chandeliers in which tiny spiders had spun a galaxy of webs, and its eight-foot-high fireplaces which had acquired over the decades the look and even the smell of open tombs, had not been used for years—and Leah would shrug her magnificent shoulders indifferently and say, “He’s given himself up to a mood, Mother.” And her mother-in-law would nod wisely and make no further inquiries. After all her eldest son Raoul had long ago given himself up to a mood, a sinister humor, and her brother-in-law Jean-Pierre, imprisoned in Powhatassie at this time, was said to have committed a crime, or crimes, of so ludicrous a magnitude that if he were guilty (and of course he was not: the judge and the jurors, openly prejudiced against the Bellefleur family, had refused to consider his case fairly) it was certainly as a consequence of a demonic black mood, and nothing else. And when great-great-great-
grandfather
Jedediah retreated to the side of Mount Blanc, there to seek God in His living essence, surely it was a surrender to a curious mood, a treacherous mood . . . one which might have obliterated the entire Bellefleur line at the start. A cousin of grandfather Noel’s, in a temper over the family’s plans for his life, threw himself into the revolving blades of a thirty-six-inch saw at one of the family’s Fort Hanna sawmills, and it was said of him, contemptuously, that he had given himself up to a mood. . . . And Leah herself, who was considered by her husband’s immediate family to be almost too self-possessed, had been violently beset by odd quirks of behavior as a girl. (She had had the
oddest
pets, it was said. The
oddest
infatuations.)

It must have been a mood, on that unnaturally warm September night, that provoked her into a quarrel with her husband: it must have been a mood that led her into running downstairs and giving refuge to Mahalaleel at all. She knew, everyone speculated, that Mahalaleel’s presence would madden poor Gideon. . . .

And so indeed it came about.

ALL THAT DAY
the sky above Lake Noir was lurid with pale orangish-green swaths of light, as if it were sunset, and the sun were setting less than fifty miles away at the very rim of Mount Chattaroy. The mountains to the north were invisible. The air was malevolent. Toward dusk a warm rain began, gently at first, and then rippling with increasing violence across the lake. Then the wind lifted. The unnaturally dark waters of Lake Noir were whipped darker still, waves rose and sprawled forward and rushed wildly to shore, sleek and leaden-gray, with an air of angry impatience. One could hear—one could
almost
hear—their voices.

Young Vernon Bellefleur, walking in the pine woods, wondered if he should take refuge in the old workers’ barracks below the cemetery, or run for home. Storms terrified him: he was a great coward. He could hear voices in the winds, crying piteously for help, or simply for attention—from time to time it seemed to him, horribly, that he could recognize a voice. Or did he imagine it, in his abject terror . . . ? His grandfather Jeremiah, swept away in a flash flood, nineteen years ago, in a storm like this—his baby brother Esau who had lived only a few months—his own mother Eliza who had disappeared after kissing him and tucking him in bed for the night—
Goodnight, my sweetheart, goodnight, my little one, my mouse, my sweet baby mouse. . . .
He listened, in terror, and did not dare move.

The child Raphael, watching the storm approach from a closed-off room on the third floor of the east wing, shielded his eyes as the sky was split by lightning. He cried aloud at the surprise of it. For a brutal instant Mount Blanc was illuminated: it had taken on a queer hard mistless flattened quality, like a paper cutout, glaring with light that pulsed from within. Raphael too heard disembodied cries, blown like mere leaves. The Spirits of the Dead. They sought refuge on nights like this but, being sightless, they could not really determine how close they were to the living.

Later that night, before he undressed for bed, Gideon Bellefleur checked windows and doors, seeing with angry resignation how the roof leaked in one room after another, and how ill-fitting the window frames were—but what good did it do, to be angry? The Bellefleurs were rich, they were certainly rich, but they hadn’t any money; they hadn’t enough money; not enough to repair the manor with the thoroughness it required; and what point was there in small, short-range repairs? Gideon reached out to close a banging shutter, his head bowed, his face contorted, his lips pressed tightly together so that he would not mutter an obscenity. (Leah could not tolerate obscenities from him. Or from any man.
You want to desecrate life,
she cried,
by desecrating the very origins of life: I forbid you to say such ugly things in my presence.
But then she herself frequently swore. When vexed or frustrated she swore, schoolgirl oaths, childish exclamations,
Oh, hell, damn, goddamn!
—which upset Gideon’s mother but which struck Gideon himself as irresistibly charming: but then his young wife was so beautiful, so magnificent, how could she fail to be charming no matter what sprang from her lips?) It was at that moment Gideon saw, or believed he saw, something emerge from the darkness at the edge of the lawn two floors below. It moved against the wind with remarkable alacrity and grace, like a gigantic water spider, skittering across the surface of the grass.
My God,
Gideon murmured softly. The thing, thwarted by the high garden wall, hesitated a moment, then made its way along the wall, less gracefully now, groping as if blind.

Gideon leaned out the window, staring. His face, his thick long hair, the upper part of his body were soaked with rain. He would have shouted—shouted something—but his throat was constricted, and anyway the wind was far too loud, and would have blown his words back into the room. Then there was another flash of lightning and Gideon saw that a large slovenly wisteria tree, grown sprawling against the wall, was buffeted about by the wind so that it gave the odd appearance of moving toward the house. But that was all: nothing else was there: his vision had tricked him.

For a while the storm subsided, and everyone went to bed, and then the winds began with renewed force, and it was clear that no one would sleep much that night. Leah and Gideon embraced in their bed, and spoke nervously of things they had agreed not to speak of again—the condition of the house, Leah’s mother, Gideon’s mother, the fact that Leah wanted another baby and could not, could not, for some reason could not conceive though she was already the mother of twins (five years old at the time, Germaine’s sister Christabel and her brother Bromwell); and then they were quarreling; and somehow Leah, sobbing, struck Gideon with her rather large fist, on the left side of his face; and Gideon, stunned at first, and then furious, gripped her shoulders and shook her,
What do you think you’re doing, who do you think you’re hitting,
and threw her back hard against the headboard of their antique bed (Venetian, eighteenth-century, a canopied intricately carved gondola outfitted with enormous goose-feather and swansdown pillows, one of the silliest of Raphael Bellefleur’s acquisitions, Leah’s favorite piece of furniture, so wondrously vulgar, so lavish, so absurd—she had rejected the bed her parents-in-law gave them when she came as a bride to the manor, and insisted upon this one after having wandered through the closed-off rooms, knowing precisely what she wanted: for she had played in the manor as a very young girl, one of Gideon’s cousins, one of the “poor” Bellefleurs from the other side of the lake). And then she kicked at him, and he threw himself on her, and they grappled, and cursed each other, and grunted, and panted, and as the storm raged outside they made love, not for the first time that night, and ground their damp tearful faces against one another, and murmured
I love you, oh, God how I love you,
and not even the Spirits of the Dead, their forlorn tumultuous heartrending cries, could penetrate their passionate heaving ecstatic labor. . . .

And then it was over, and both were asleep. Gideon swam effortlessly, through what must have been a flood; but he was untouched by uprooted trees, debris, even corpses flung along by the current; his heart swelled with triumph. It seemed that he was hunting the Noir Vulture once again. That enormous white-winged creature with its hunched shoulders and mottled, naked, monkeyish face. . . . Leah sank to the very bottom of sleep, where she was pregnant at once: not only pregnant but nine months’ pregnant: her belly swelled and pulsed and fairly pounded with life.

AND THEN, SUDDENLY,
she was awake.

Downstairs, at the very front of the house, far away, something was crying to be let in.

She could hear it plainly: it was crying, begging, clawing to be let in.

Leah shook off her warm, heavy, mesmerizing sleep, and was at once drawn up to the surface where the storm still howled, and something begged piteously for entry. Without hesitating she rose naked from bed and slipped on her silk robe—one of the few items of clothing that still remained from her trousseau of six years ago, now badly frayed and a little soiled at the cuffs. Her husband flung an arm toward her and murmured her name in his sleep, querulously, possessively, but she pretended not to hear.