Bellefleur (29 page)

The needle’s eye, the needle’s eye, tiny voices sing, mixed in with the sound of the tumbling little brook, and Garnet, hearing them, instinctively draws in her breath, and tightens her grip—her slender arms across his back, her surprisingly strong legs against his. The needle’s eye has caught many a smiling lass and now . . . and now it has caught you. . . . At the wedding, at the very altar, she had nudged against him and given him a look that made him feel faint, whispering, You don’t love me: you’ve had so many women! You don’t love me! In the dazzling white gown of moiré silk, hundreds of pearls sewn to it, her veil more delicate than the crystalline stars of Lake Noir’s deep ice, so quivering with life that the rich powerful beats of her heart were visible in her eyes, she simply stared at him: and her wide beautiful mouth relaxed, but almost imperceptibly, so that he knew he was saved. She ran recklessly to the edge of the cliff and dove off, her body plunging downward so gracefully, so perfectly, that it seemed she must be willing it: and he wanted to run after and throw himself into the water beside her, but he could not move. The needle’s eye, the needle’s eye . . . Her head, a colt’s head, came up to bump his jaw. And there was laughter. You don’t love me, you are such a bully, the voice rang out, teasing him almost to a pitch of madness, I will never forgive you for what you did to Love, I will never forget, laughing shrilly as he tried to undress her and she wriggled away to run heavy-footed about the bedroom of the hotel suite, and he gave chase, his laughter frightened, an unfamiliar laughter, his arms clumsily outstretched, and then she was slapping at him, harder than she should have slapped, and her skin was hot to the touch, and her eyes glared feverishly, and she kissed him full on the lips, sucking and biting, and then reared back, and pushed him with the heel of her palm, and looked at him for the first time, her face distended with exaggerated revulsion—Oh, just look at you, just look, grizzly! Baboon! Look at the hair, the frizz, on you, oh, my God
look,
her voice rose gaily, wildly, and a coarse bark of startled laughter escaped from her, How can you!—how is it possible!—I didn’t marry a baboon, did I! Gideon, stricken, ashamed, did not at first run after her but tried to say—what was it he tried to say—stammering, mumbling, his overheated face going hotter still with the impact of his bride’s disgust—tried to say that she must have seen him swimming, hadn’t she—he couldn’t help himself—the hair on his chest, and on his belly—he couldn’t help it—he was sorry—but she must have seen him swimming, hadn’t she, and other men as well— Rain like demons’ merry insubstantial faces pressed against the bedroom window, Gideon halfway thought in his confusion that people in the hotel knew about them and had somehow climbed up to stare, or were they his friends, his brothers and cousins, come to mock him, while Leah in a distant corner of the room crouched, her body rosy with candlelight, gleaming as if it were, like his, covered with a fine oily film of perspiration, and then she burst into tears, and he hurried to her and embraced her, surprised at how small she was, in his arms, and how passionately she pressed her face against his chest Oh I love you, Gideon, I love you I love you—

Don’t move,
Gideon says faintly.

Don’t don’t don’t move.

The girl, exhausted, sobbing, lies motionless beneath him, but cannot relax her grip on him, in terror of the voices so close to her head in the wild grass, and the presence that sprawls beside them, Don’t stop, go on, what the hell are you doing, you two, do you think I don’t know about this, do you think I haven’t been spying all these months, go ahead, go right ahead, what a pair of idiots, what a pair of contemptible idiots, Leah laughing angrily, jubilantly, a straw or a blade of grass between her teeth so that she can tickle poor Gideon, drawing the invisible blade from his ear to his lips and back again, tickling, tickling, poking the blade into his ear, drawing it down along his vein-taut neck, along his shoulder, slick with sweat, Do you think I don’t know everything that goes on in my house, do you think I haven’t seen you two looking at each other or whispering together, what a pair of idiots, drawing the teasing blade across his back, along his backbone, and then suddenly, without warning, her warm moist bold hand falls upon his back, rubs his backbone, rubs at the very base of his spine, at that small knob at the base of his spine, rubbing with such robust lewd energy that Gideon is at once plunged—catapulted—into a delirium from which, out of which, he can never hope to return, though even in his final paroxysm he begs
No please don’t stop wait no no
—

The Poet

G
ermaine’s great-uncle Vernon, the poet, prematurely grizzly, sweet-faced, with the mismatched eyes that so delighted her (Vernon loved to squat before her, closing one eye and then the other, the blue eye, the brown eye, the blue eye, as the child gasped and muttered and waved her fists, sometimes shutting both
her
eyes in the excitement of the game, squealing with laughter that grew wilder as the game accelerated and the brown eye, the blue eye, the brown eye, the blue eye opened and shut more and more rapidly, until tears streamed down Vernon’s cheeks and were lost in his beard) was said, openly, with that Bellefleur “frankness” that caused so much grief, to be a disappointment to the family and especially to his father: not simply because he was evidently incapable of adding up a column of figures (something Bromwell had mastered at the age of two), or intelligently following family discussions on the perpetual subject of interest rates, debts, loans, mortgages, tenant farmers, investments, and the market prices of various Bellefleur commodities, and not even because as a slope-shouldered, absentminded, apologetic bachelor whose face resembled (as his niece Yolande affectionately said) a hunk of aged cheese, and whose shapeless clothes, so rarely changed, gave off an unfortunate odor of onions, stale sweat, solitude, befuddlement, rotting fruit (he thrust apple and pear cores into his pockets, orange rinds, banana skins, even half-eaten tomatoes, for he usually ate while on one of his walks, composing poetry in his head and then scribbling it down on slips of paper which he also thrust into his pockets, often not quite conscious of what he did), and—but how might it be expressed?—simple
oddness,
he was unlikely to marry into a prominent or prosperous family, and in fact unlikely to marry at all; but because of his essence, his soul, his very
being.

Of course the family did not use these words. They used other words, and frequently.

“Remember that you’re a Bellefleur,” Hiram told Vernon irritably, when he set out on one of his rambles (sometimes he went no farther than the cemetery, or the village; sometimes he hiked all around Lake Noir and turned up in Bushkill’s Ferry where, despite his extreme shyness (in public, even at times in the presence of his own family, he suffered a perpetual blush as if his somewhat roughened skin were windblown) he offered to recite his most recent poems in the general store or at the feed mill or even at one of the taverns (where men who worked for the Bellefleurs were likely to gather); sometimes his poetic inspiration (which he explained as “God dictating”) was so complete that he lost track of his surroundings and wound up along a wild stretch of the Nautauga, or up in the foothills in bad weather; once he disappeared for seventeen days and had to be hunted down by hounds, lying weak with malnutrition and a “storm” of poetry in the ruins of a trapper’s hut some forty miles northeast of Lake Noir in the shadow of Mount Chattaroy). “Remember that you’re a Bellefleur, please don’t bring embarrassment on us, don’t give our enemies reason to ridicule us,” Hiram said. “As if they don’t have reason enough already.”

“We don’t have enemies, Father,” Vernon said softly.

“I will have Henry follow you, if you like. On foot or on horseback. And then if you get lost, or injure yourself . . .”

“Who are our enemies, Father?” Vernon said. Though he faced his father boldly he could not prevent his eyes from squinting; and this was a mannerism that particularly annoyed Hiram. “It doesn’t seem to me . . .”

“Our enemies,” Hiram said, “are perfectly visible.”

“Yes—?”

“They’re everywhere, don’t be an idiot. That
pretense
of yours of being halfwitted, a poetic genius touched by God—!”

“I’m not a poetic genius,” Vernon said, his face going brick-red. “You know perfectly well that I have only begun, I am in my apprenticeship, I have many, many years to go. . . . Father, please don’t distort everything! It’s true that I am a poet and that God has touched me . . . God dwells
in
me . . . and I, I . . . I have dedicated myself to poetry . . . which is the language God uses in speaking to man . . . one soul addressing another. . . . You must know how I am groping and blundering, how I despair of creating anything worthy of God, or even of being heard by my fellow man, what a perpetual mystery poetry is to me: is it a way of coming home, a way of coming back to one’s lost home? Sometimes I understand so clearly, in a dream, or when I’m half-awake, or, this morning, feeding Germaine in the garden, when she stuck all her fingers in her mouth and spat out her mashed apricots in my face and shook all over with laughter at the
look
of me, and I found myself staring right into her eyes, and laughing too, because . . . because . . . some barrier had been crossed, some wall between our souls had been . . . It’s as if there is an envelope between us, a membrane, nearly transparent, do you see, Father, between your soul and mine, as we stand here talking, and mere words will not penetrate it . . . though we try, God knows we try . . . but . . . but sometimes a gesture, an action, a certain
way
of speaking . . . a way of speaking which is music or poetry . . . which can’t be willed, or learned . . . though it can
halfway
be learned. . . . Sometimes, Father, do you see,” he said, his words tumbling over one another slapdash and desperate, and his eyes narrowed nearly to slits in the face of Hiram’s stony silence, “do you see. . . . It . . . it can. . . . Poetry. . . . I mean our souls. . . . Or was I talking about God, God speaking in us . . . in some of us. . . . There is a place, Father, there is a home, but it isn’t here, but it isn’t lost either and we shouldn’t despair, poetry is a way of getting back, of coming home. . . .”

Hiram had turned partway aside, so that
his
injured eye, his clouded eye, faced Vernon. After a long moment he said, in an uncharacteristically patient voice, “But there is a home, Vernon. Our home. Here. Right here. Exactly—precisely—
here.
You are a Bellefleur despite the misfortune of your mother’s blood, and you live here, you feed upon us, this is your home, your birthright, your responsibility—and no amount of that high-toned babble can alter what I say. You are a Bellefleur—”

“I am not a Bellefleur,” Vernon whispered.

“—and I ask you only not to bring more ridicule on our name.”

“I am not a Bellefleur except by accident,” Vernon said.

Hiram stood quietly. If he was upset he gave no indication: he did no more than tug at his cuffs. (Every day, even in the depths of winter when the castle was snowbound, Hiram dressed impeccably: in custom-made suits, in dazzling white shirts which he sometimes changed by midafternoon, and again by dinner; he wore a variety of vests, some of them colorful; and always his watch and chain; and gold or jeweled cuff links. Though he had suffered all of his life from a curious sort of malady—sleepwalking—he gave every impression of being not only in excellent health, but of being in supreme control of himself.)

“I fail to understand what it is you’re saying, Vernon,” Hiram said softly.

“I don’t want to antagonize you, Father, but I must—I must make it clear—I am not a
Bellefleur,
I am only myself, Vernon, my essence is Vernon and not Bellefleur, I belong to God, I
am
God, God dwells in me, I mean to say—I mean that God speaks through me—not always—of course—but in my poetry—when my poetry is successful— Do you see, Father,” he said, so nervous, so excited, that flecks of saliva appeared on his pale lips, “the poet knows that he is water poured into water, he
knows
that he is finite and mortal and may drown at any time, in God, and that it’s a risk to summon forth God’s voice—but the poet must accept that risk—he must take the chance of drowning in God—or whatever it is—I mean the poetry, the voice—the, the rhythm— And then he isn’t whoever people say he is, he doesn’t have a name, he doesn’t
belong
to anyone except that voice—and they cannot claim him—they dare not claim him—”

Hiram turned suddenly, and struck Vernon across the mouth.

It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that neither quite comprehended what had happened for several seconds.

“I—I—I say only,” Vernon gasped, backing away, his hand pressed against his bleeding lip, “I say only that—that—that—man’s true home is elsewhere, I don’t dwell in this castle of pride and vanity, amid all these—these hideous possessions—I am not your son to order about—I am not your possession—I am Vernon and not Bellefleur—I am Vernon and not—”

Like his son Hiram had a pink flushed face, and now it grew even pinker. With a gesture of familiar, resigned disgust, he simply waved his son out of the room.

“You’re mad,” he said. “Go drown yourself.”

“I am Vernon only and not Bellefleur and you dare not claim me as Bellefleur,” Vernon said, weeping, crouched in the doorway like a little old man; “you drove my mother from me with your
Bellefleur
cruelty, and you buried me alive with your
Bellefleur
insanity, and now you—and now— But you will not triumph— None of you will triumph— I know that you and the others are plotting something—you and Leah—even Leah—Leah whom you’ve corrupted with your talk of money, land, money, power, money, money— Even Leah! Even Leah!”

Hiram waved him away with a magician’s calm disdain. His hands, like Vernon’s, were long and soft; but his nails were meticulously filed. “What do you know, my boy, of
Leah,
” he murmured.