Bellefleur (63 page)

Nor did the cats like him. Not Ginger and Tom, or Misty, or Tristram, or Minerva; least of all Mahalaleel, whom Nightshade tried to court, offering him fresh catnip (he carried various herbs wrapped in waxed paper carefully tied with string, in his several pouches and wooden boxes), but Mahalaleel kept his magisterial distance, and would not be tempted. Once Germaine came upon Nightshade in the dim, teakwood-lined reception room, stooped over more emphatically than usual, holding something in his gloved hand and calling
Kitty-kitty-kitty, here kitty-kitty-kitty!
in his high-pitched squeaking voice—and a moment later Mahalaleel, his back and tail bristling, bounded past the little man and ran out of the room. Nightshade paused, sniffed the herb in his hand, and followed along after the cat, calling
Here kitty, here kitty, kitty-kitty-kitty
in a tireless unoffended voice.

Automobiles

I
t was in a handsome two-seater Buick, canary-yellow, with rakish wire-spoked wheels, that Garth and Little Goldie eloped, and in a smart little fire-engine-red Fiat with a cream-colored convertible top and polished hubcaps (a gift from Schaff for her recent birthday) that Christabel and Demuth Hodge eloped one fine autumn morning, driving, for brief periods during their gay, reckless, euphoric flight, at speeds of a hundred miles per hour despite the winding mountain roads. It was a supercharged Auburn, chalk-white, with gray upholstery and exposed exhaust pipes, of gleaming chromium, another sporty two-seater, that carried away, into the labyrinthian shadows of an unnamed foreign city, possibly Rome, the beautiful young actress “Yvette Bonner” in a film called
Lost Love
which was seen, in secret, by a number of the younger Bellefleurs (who speculated not only upon the identity of the actress—for
was
she Yolande, or did she merely
seem
to be Yolande?—but upon the probability of her having, in real life as well as on film, the tantalizingly cerebral and
yet
erotic relationship with the young mustached Frenchman who, in
Lost Love,
drove her so boldly and noisily away).

Many years ago (and there were sepia-tinted photographs to prove it) great-grandfather Jeremiah, for all his ill-luck and despondency, nevertheless owned one of the first motorcars in the area, a gaily decorated Peugeot in which passengers (including great-grandmother Elvira in a richly flowered and wide-brimmed hat that tied firmly beneath the chin) sat facing one another. In styling the Peugeot closely resembled a horse-drawn carriage, open to the wind, with bicycle-sized wire wheels and a single headlight. (Its painted arabesques, which looked, even as reproduced in a poor photograph, extremely delicate and beautiful, put Germaine in mind of certain of great-aunt Matilde’s quilts.) Noel and Hiram and Jean-Pierre shared, for a while, before their father’s creditors claimed it, a wonderful little Peugeot Bébé: it seated only one person comfortably, was noisy and dangerous and almost comically gaudy (with a turquoise leather seat and turquoise trim about the wheels, contrasting with the rich russet wood of the wheels; and a black-and-gold-striped body; and four oversized brass lamps; and a brass horn that gave a loud ribald sound designed to terrify horses on the road), and had the distinction of being the only car of its kind in the entire state at that time. If Hiram, as an older man, never cared for motorcars and refused to learn to drive (and disliked even the family limousine though it was driven by a highly competent chauffeur) it was possibly because he still remembered the Peugeot Bébé with great affection, and was susceptible, from time to time, to black moods, pitch-black airless moods, reminiscent of the one he suffered after the car was sold at auction. (
Why love anything if you’re going to lose it, why love anyone,
he frequently mused,
if there’s a possibility you will lose her. .
. . And so he hadn’t, it must be said, very
seriously
loved his young wife, nor had he much love for the unfortunate Vernon, whose death was as much an embarrassment to him (for he had
known
the boy would make a fool of himself!) as a source of paternal grief.)

It might have been Stanton Pym’s Morris Bullnose, as much as his audacious attempt to marry, and to survive marrying, a Bellefleur heiress, that infuriated Della’s family; for though the Bullnose was a small car, and cost considerably less than the family’s cars at that time (a six-cylinder Napier and a Pierce-Arrow saloon car), its pert sporty air, and its brass fixtures, struck Della’s brothers and cousins as impertinent and inappropriate for a junior officer of a Nautauga Falls bank. (After Stanton’s death Della sold the car at once. Both Noel and a cousin named Lawrence offered to buy it from her—and to pay a respectable sum—but Della refused.
I would rather drive it into Lake Noir and sink along with it,
she said,
than sell it to either of you.
)

Great-aunt Veronica’s fiancé Ragner Norst, who called himself a count and may in fact have been one, despite the Bellefleurs’ doubts (for he had been, after all, or claimed to have been, an intimate friend of the famous Count Zborowski—the very Zborowski who owned so much property in New York, and entertained lavishly in Paris, and was killed in a freak accident while driving his splendid Mercedes in a ferocious race in the South of France) drove a most impressive Lancia Lambda, black as a hearse, stately, regal, with a
monocoque
body and independent front suspension—which the Bellefleurs envied, though they
suspected
Norst had acquired it secondhand: it had curious scratches on its doors, as well as its front fenders, and its thick gunmetal-gray cushions gave off an odor not unlike that of a stagnant pond, or a tomb.

For many years the Bellefleurs drove only one “good” car—a maroon Cadillac with steel-spoked wheels, one of the first of the Fleetwood Broughams (it had carpeted foot rests and adjustable swivel-type reading lamps and mahogany fixtures, among other things) and it was this car, rather badly in need of repainting, that Gideon was given as a wedding present, so that he might drive his young bride to their secret honeymoon hotel in style: but at that time Gideon, so enamored of horses, and in any case so enamored of Leah, hardly appreciated the automobile’s 7030 c.c. V8 engine, which carried them along noiselessly though they drove, often without quite knowing it, at high speeds. After the ignominious loss of the plum-colored Pierce-Arrow at Paie-des-Sables, Gideon acquired, through his Port Oriskany friend Benjamin Stone (the son of the philanthropist Waltham Stone who had made his fortune in the production of washing machines), a number of remarkable cars—the magnificent Hispano-Suiza; rebuilt Aston-Martin; a bottle-green Bentley (which Lord Dunraven very much admired); and, somewhat later, at about the time of the migrant workers’ strike, a white Rolls-Royce coupe with a virtually soundless engine—by far Gideon’s favorite car, at least up until the time of his accident.

Rolls, of course, was the family’s near-unanimous choice for their largest car; and so, as the Bellefleur fortune swelled, they acquired, at Leah’s particular insistence, a six-seater Silver Ghost with every imaginable
feature
—leather upholstery, hand-painted panels, silver ashtrays, silver-framed mirrors, gold fittings, and thick fur (it was a novelty fur—Alaskan wolf) carpeting: a most impressive sight, and a fittingly impressive sight, to appear at the ugly portals of the Powhatassie State Correctional Facility to bear away poor meek ashen-faced Jean-Pierre II, who was at last deemed worthy of a pardon by the governor of the state. But it was not the Rolls, of course, Leah wished to take, as, accompanied by her manservant, Nightshade, and Germaine, and young Jasper (who was developing so rapidly, who seemed to know, now, as much about the estate’s finances as Hiram himself, and nearly as much as Leah), she drove south in a fruitless and really quite ill-advised attempt to locate, and bring back, her erring daughter Christabel: for that purpose Leah drove her own car, an austere, practical Nash sedan which, she calculated, would never draw attention to itself or its occupants. But of course she never found Christabel and her lover Demuth, nor did the authorities ever find the Fiat, though Edgar had reported it missing at once. (What a generous gift it had been, that bright red coupe with its cream-colored top and its dazzlingly shiny hubcaps!—and all, as the elder Mrs. Schaff said bitterly, to provide a common whore with the means of flight from her husband and family; and who knows but that the Fiat hadn’t
inspired
the little whore’s love affair, as well as her escape from Schaff Hall?)

Over the years there had been, not in strict chronological order (for the Bellefleurs, reminiscing, quite shamelessly jumbled “chronological” order—indeed, to Germaine’s way of thinking, they had a lofty
contempt
for it), a Packard limousine, and a Pierce-Arrow saloon car, and a green Stutz-Bearcat, and something called a Scripps-Booth (which no one seemed to remember); insurance records showed a Prosper-Lambert, evidently a French car, with acetylene gas lamps and seat covers of dyed kid. There was a Dodge, and a La Salle; there were several Fords including two Model-A’s, which were among the hardiest of the Bellefleur cars. Interest in automobiles varied wildly among the Bellefleurs, and was not consistent, in any single individual, throughout a lifetime: though Ewan professed to have little genuine concern for what he drove, so long as it got him from place to place quickly and economically. He viewed with something like alarm his brother Gideon’s sudden infatuation with cars, which seemed to him less plausible than Gideon’s earlier infatuation with horses, if only because Gideon was now a fully mature man, and no longer an impulsive boy.

Ewan himself was content to drive a good, solid, handsome American car, a Packard, though he bought for his favorite mistress (the divorcée Rosalind Manx, who called herself a “singer-actress’), through Gideon’s and Benjamin Stone’s assistance, a showy blue Jaguar E-type with dyed rabbit-fur upholstery and silver fixtures, which was often seen tearing along even the narrowest of Nautauga Falls streets, evidently oblivious to (and immune from) traffic police. (Ewan would not have minded if Lily had learned to drive, though he didn’t encourage it, and of course hadn’t time to teach her himself: but he evidently expressed amused gratification when Albert, who had tried to teach his mother to drive Leah’s Nash, pronounced her hopeless.) Albert himself owned a Chevrolet Caprice which was one day to sideswipe a tenant farmer’s pick-up truck, injuring Albert and killing the farmer outright; Jasper drove a smart, practical Ford, with few frills, and Morna was to one day acquire, as
her
birthday present from a new husband, a handsome chocolate-brown Porsche. Bromwell was never to acquire a car, nor was he even to learn how to drive.

The oldest automobile the Bellefleurs owned, at about the time of Germaine’s birth, was grandmother Della’s black two-door Ford, a gift from a sympathetic uncle-in-law (one of Elvira’s brothers) so that she might, if she wished, drive herself about: but of course Della never learned to drive, and the car remained, decade after decade, unused, its battery dead, swallows nesting in its cushions, in the old carriage house behind the red-brick house in Bushkill’s Ferry. Leah, as a girl, had tried unsuccessfully to start it; she had nagged Della about getting it serviced, and in working order—for, if it worked, her boy friend Nicholas Fuhr had offered to give her lessons—and it might be fun, didn’t Della think, if the two of them went for Sunday drives along the river, or southward out of the mountains on an overnight trip, for a change of scene?

“Whyever would you want a change of scene,” Della asked irritably (for her tomboyish daughter had such a strident, aggressive voice), “aren’t things troublesome enough
here?
”

So the old black Ford remained in the carriage house, graceless, unwanted, rusting in leprous patches, covered over with a film of dust and
pigeon
- and swallow-droppings—and so it remains, in fact, until this very day.

The Demon

I
n the mountains, in those days long ago, Jedediah Bellefleur wandered, a penitent. And when he saw that a demon had come to dwell in Henofer’s cabin, that the demon had pushed himself inside the old man’s grizzled chest and now stared boldly out of the old man’s eyes—boldly and
mockingly,
as if daring Jedediah to recognize him!—he knew that he must not suffer the creature to live.

I know you, he whispered, advancing upon him.

The demon blinked and stared. Henofer’s face had undergone many changes, perhaps it was already the face of a dead man, astonishingly aged. Though Jedediah had lived on the other side of the mountain for only a year or two or three, in that period of time Henofer had become an old man, and it was possible that his infirmity allowed the demon to slip into his body.

Of course you know me, the demon said.

That isn’t
his
voice, Jedediah said, smiling. You can’t quite imitate
his
voice.

His—? Whose? What do you mean?

The old man. Henofer. You didn’t know him, Jedediah said. So you can’t imitate his voice. You can’t deceive me.

What do you mean? the demon said. In a pretense of fear he began to stammer. I’m Mack—you know me—it’s Mack, Mack Henofer—for God’s sake, Jedediah, are you joking? But you never joke—

Jedediah looked around the clearing. There was Henofer’s sway-backed horse, and his mule; his cowardly hound lay with his belly pressed flat against the ground and his ragged tail limply wagging, as if, having made peace with his master’s murderer, he now wished to make peace with his master’s avenger.

On a crude wooden rack by the doorway of Henofer’s cabin there were several hides—bloodstained and ragged and unrecognizable—raccoons, foxes, beavers, squirrels, bobcats? The sight of them was a surprise.

I didn’t know
you
could work the trap lines, Jedediah said, eying the creature with a sly smile.