Bellefleur (40 page)

(Gideon. But she would not think of Gideon. She rarely thought of Gideon, and never when she hoped to enjoy herself.)

She sat, and drank the bourbon, and waited, and after some fifteen minutes of waiting she began to get restless, and happened to see—but had the Oriental boy mentioned it, in his shy cold murmur?—an envelope on the silver tray.
Mrs. Bellefleur
was scrawled in red ink on its front. She snatched it up at once and tore it open. And read these words, which had been scrawled in the same dark red ink, in the same loose hand:

Leah dearest, we are one of a Kind arent we, I know you
inside-out
 & know you know me, if you step into the next room I will make you very happy I believe, & ser sear certianly you will make
me
very happy & will return I promise to the barbarian Bellefleurs in great TRIUMPH!!!!!

Leah let the card slip through her fingers, whimpering with the
surprise
—the shock—the distress of it. She got to her feet, and fumbled to set down the glass; and then brought it up to her lips again and swallowed a large mouthful of bourbon. Her face flamed. She finished the drink. Let the glass fall. Started for the door, almost tripping in her long skirt. Paused. You filthy old son of a bitch, she whispered, you buzzard, I could pick you clean, I could suck the marrow from your bones. . . . She set her hat straight on her head. Stood there, gazing into a mirror, wondering at the red-faced angry woman she saw there. The bastard, she whispered. I will tell Gideon.

She thought of Jean-Pierre imprisoned, for a crime—for crimes—he did not commit, and the townspeople gloating over it; she saw the magnificent wilderness kingdom taken from her family, piece by piece, tract by tract, over the centuries. If Germaine were here . . . If Germaine were here it would be so simple to hug the child to her, to weep into the child’s neck. Where have you come from, who are you, why were you sent, what must I do. . . . There were times when, embracing Germaine, and gazing into her eyes, Leah saw, somehow
saw
—as if it were a dream of the previous night she was able, only now, to summon to
consciousness
—what must be done.

The hotel room was empty except for the overstuffed furniture and the orchids. Everything was silent; street noises did not rise so high. There was Jean-Pierre, now an elderly man, pining away in a prison cell . . . there was the hideous massacre at Bushkill’s Ferry . . . the humiliation of the public auction when Noel and Hiram were boys . . . the loss of the land, piece by piece, like jigsaw puzzle parts, over the years. How
real
that was, all of that! And how unreal Leah Pym suddenly felt.

She paused, halfway to the door. Looked back to the glass lying on the carpet, and the card, that rectangular piece of white cardboard, lying beside it. Swallowed, pressed both hands against her burning cheeks, stared. If I could see into the future, she thought in dismay, I would know exactly what I must do. . . .

The Birthday Celebration

T
he day Yolande ran away from home, never to return—
never
to return to Bellefleur Manor—was also the day of Germaine’s first birthday.

But was there any connection between the two events . . . ?

On that dry, warm, relentlessly sunny August day, when no breeze blew across Lake Noir, or down from the mountains, there was to be a large birthday party in the late afternoon, to which Leah had impulsively invited all the young children in the area, and their mothers—all the children from reasonably good families, that is. (And she invited the Renauds, whom she rarely saw now, and the Steadmans and the Burnsides, and even wrote out an invitation to the Fuhrs which, when she reread it, struck her as humiliatingly meek: so she discarded it.) In her enthusiasm over seeking out financial and political support for the family Leah had quite neglected people close to home; she had not even thought of them for months.
Please come to help us celebrate the first birthday of our darling Germaine,
she wrote gaily.

At teatime there would be a huge square chocolate cake with pink frosting and
GERMAINE 1 YEAR OLD
in creamy vanilla letters, and an entire table and a stone bench heaped with presents, out back on the terrace; there would be paper hats and noisemakers and surprise treats for the younger children, and champagne for everyone else, and even musical entertainment (Vernon planned to play his flute, while Yolande and Vida danced, costumed in long dresses and veils and feather boas dragged out of one of the trunks in the attic); and Jasper was to lead his young Irish setter through the complicated tricks he had taught the dog over the summer. . . .
We hope to have a marvelous time and we hope you can join us!

But Yolande and Christabel planned a smaller birthday celebration, in one of the children’s secret places on the bank of Mink Creek (the Bellefleur children, in every generation, had “secret” places—in passageways, in nooks and crannies and cupboards and cubbyholes, in haylofts, beneath the floorboards of abandoned barns, behind evergreens, behind boulders, up trees, on roofs, in ice-tunnels (in winter), in manor towers whose floors were strewn with the skeletons of birds and bats and mice, in the old “Roman bath” their elders presumed was safely boarded up); they had nagged Edna into allowing them to bake and frost some cupcakes, and they had stolen from the kitchen larder a half-dozen ripe peaches and some sweet black cherries and a pound of rum-flavored chocolates from Holland. Yolande slipped into her pocket some pink candles for the cupcakes, and a box of kitchen matches from Edna’s stove. What a lark it would be, with no adults—with no Leah—hovering near!

So at midmorning they took Germaine out to play in the garden as usual, but they soon crept away through the gate at the rear, each of them holding her by the hand. They would hurry to Mink Creek, to a pretty little cove a short distance from the lake, where the creek emptied into the lake, and there—seated on pine logs, protected from the sun by low-hanging willow branches—they would have their own private birthday celebration, and no one would know. (A noisy gang of boys—Garth and Albert and Jasper and Louis, and a visiting cousin from Derby, Dave Cinquefoil—were swimming off the Bellefleur dock, but they couldn’t see the girls; and Leah and Lily and Aveline and grandmother Cornelia were being fitted for their fall clothes, by a dressmaker and her assistant from the Falls, so they would be occupied all morning.)

“This is a special day, Germaine,” Yolande said, stooping to kiss the child. “It’s your first birthday and it will never come again. . . . Do you know, a year ago you weren’t born yet! And when you were born you were just a baby, a helpless little baby, nothing like you are now!”

Germaine had grown into a sturdy toddler, large for her age—very pretty—with red-brown curls and a small snubbed nose and those amazing green-bronze eyes, whose fabled luminosity varied: in the candlelit shadows of Leah’s bedchamber they frequently glowed with a discomforting intensity, but in the ordinary glare of midmorning sun they appeared no more striking than Yolande’s and Christabel’s eyes (for Yolande and Christabel were also extremely attractive). Germaine was a baby, still, and yet more than a baby. She was intermittently and unpredictably precocious: she knew many words, but would not always say them. Then again she could be a terrible infant in a matter of seconds, mewling and bawling and kicking and thrashing about. It was observed widely that she behaved well when Leah was not present, but no one dared tell Leah that. Yolande was of the opinion that
she
could be Germaine’s mother, and that Germaine would be far better off. (“Your mother is always fussing over Germaine, she’s always kissing and hugging and talking to her, talking some kind of private baby talk, she’s always
looking
at her—that would drive me wild!” Yolande told Christabel. “She doesn’t look at
me,
” Christabel said weakly.)

Germaine was also given to queer prolonged spells of “
knowingness
”—when her gaze deepened but seemed unfocused, and her baby’s face shifted into impassivity. At such times there was a stubborn Bellefleur set to her pursed lips; she would not respond to kisses, queries, love pinches, or even little slaps. She disturbed the servants by coming up silently behind them. She discomforted one of the dogs by staring into his eyes. Sometimes she left off playing, and was to be seen perched up on the white wrought-iron chair that was usually Leah’s, in the garden, with her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand, her expression still and sad and prematurely melancholy. In the nursery one morning she astonished Irene by babbling excitedly, “Bird—bird—Bird—” and pointing to the window, not five seconds before a small bird—it must have been a warbler—slammed into it and fell, its neck broken, down into the shrubbery. Once Garth hitched up the old pony cart to the last pony on the estate, a gentle, rather lazy Shetland with faded brown markings, and watched over Germaine and Little Goldie as they rode squealing with delight around the weedy track; and he claimed that the baby put her hands to her ears and shut her eyes tight a few seconds
before
the pony trotted over a rock that flew up into the cart’s axle and nearly overturned it. . . . (On the eve of her birthday Germaine was reluctant to be put to bed, and behaved quite disgracefully in her bath. Leah, her face flaming, was forced to shake the child and cry, No, you don’t, no, you’re bad, you’re deliberately and shamelessly bad and you know better and I won’t tolerate it!—and bundle her off, still kicking, to bed. She thrashed about, she threw her pillow out of the crib, she wailed, and held her breath, and choked and sputtered and spat, and threw a tantrum lying down, as Leah watched, biting her lip, but making no move to interfere—for she
wouldn’t
be manipulated—and then finally, after an interminable period, Germaine grew tired, and the wails were sobs, and the sobs faint petulant gasps, and suddenly her eyes were closed, and she slept. But within an hour she was awake again, screaming more violently than ever, and when Leah rushed to her she was sitting up in bed, her skin clammy, her pajamas soaked with sweat, babbling about fire—she clutched at Leah and fixed her with those great staring eyes, and babbled about fire—in a voice so terror-stricken that Leah’s heart nearly failed. She comforted the baby, and changed her, and brought her to bed in the big bed (for Gideon was away on business that night, he hoped to return by teatime the following day), and after Germaine fell asleep Leah put on a dressing gown and wandered about the manor, too frightened to sleep, convinced that there
might
be a fire—there had been fires enough in the old days—and that Germaine had smelled the smoke or in some way seen the fire—or had foreseen it— But of course there was nothing. And when Leah returned to her bed at 4:00 
A.M.
she found her daughter sleeping deeply and placidly as any one-year-old.

THE GIRLS WERE
in their secret cove only a half-hour when they were joined by twin ginger kittens, about seven weeks old, but unusually long-bodied, who came mewing through the grass, and were greeted with cries of delight: the kittens were petted, hugged, kissed, fed cupcake crumbs, and allowed to go through the frenzied motions of nursing against Yolande’s neck (“Oh, how they tickle! Aren’t they silly! Just look—the way they knead their paws and shut their eyes and purr, sucking at nothing at all!” she cried), and finally to drop off to sleep in Yolande’s and Christabel’s laps.

And then the boy appeared.

No, first he threw a rock—a large rock that splashed in the creek only a few feet from where Christabel sat.

The girls screamed, and then Yolande shouted, “Damn you, go to hell!” thinking it was one of the Bellefleur boys. But it was a stranger: the boy in overalls with the cloth cap on his head: and he had the same jeering moronic grin as he came splashing along the creek, bringing his feet down with exaggerated force.

He jumped up on the bank, and seized one of the kittens. Holding it against his chest he petted it roughly, and puckered his lips, and said
Kitty, nice kitty, kitty-kitty-kitty,
in a high-pitched voice meant to mimic Yolande’s.

“You put that kitten down! That’s our kitten!” Yolande said.

The boy ignored her. His expression was flaccid and self-contained, as if he were alone. “Don’t you scare that kitten,” Yolande said faintly.

Christabel had scrambled farther up the bank, hugging herself; Germaine was sitting in the grass, a messy half-eaten peach in her hand. Yolande got slowly to her feet, staring at the boy. She was very frightened. But angry too. “You don’t have any
right
to be here,” she whispered.

The boy looked at her for the first time. His eyes were small, mud-brown, moist. On his forehead were premature lines, which deepened with mock concern.

“
You
got no right to be here,” he said.

He reached up to tug the cap down more tightly on his forehead, still holding the kitten against his chest. It had begun to struggle wildly.

Then Christabel asked nervously if he’d like something to eat—a cupcake, or a peach—would he like some candies—and the boy turned from Yolande to Christabel, his expression still impassive. “Candies,” he said, approaching Christabel, his mouth opening, his ugly tongue protruding like a dog’s, so that she understood he wanted the chocolates put in his mouth. Which she did, with a thin little giggle. The boy chewed two candies, frowning, then spat them out—spat them into the creek without bothering to lean over, so that the mess dribbled on his trouser legs.

“. . . kinda shit is that . . . trying to poison me . . .” he muttered.

“Those are good candies! Those are from Holland!” Yolande cried.

He took hold of Christabel by the hair and pulled her to the creek bank and pushed her off, and she fell splashing in two or three feet of water. “You want to come swimming too?” he asked Yolande. “You and the baby? Eh? Take off your clothes and come swimming too?”