Bellefleur (95 page)

It had always been remarked, how
peculiar
Hiram’s transformation was: for while during the day he was alert, quick-witted, and characteristically abrasive (a mere game of checkers, for instance, inspired him, even in the presence of children, to a pitiless intensity, and he was not a good-natured loser)—while during the day he missed nothing, handicapped though he was by his clouded right eye—as soon as he fell asleep he was entirely at the mercy of whims and muscular twitches and wisps of fey, cruel dreams, and often attempted, in his noctambulism, to destroy by shredding or fire the numerous papers, ledgers, journals, and leatherbound books he kept in his room. (It was one of the shameful secrets of the poor man’s life, confided only to his brother Noel, and then after much agonizing, and a spirited vow by Noel that he would never,
never
tell anyone, that both his children—his son Esau who had lived only a few months, and his son Vernon—had been conceived, evidently,
while he was asleep.
Poor Eliza Perkins, his bride, the eldest daughter of a moderately wealthy spice importer in Manhattan, had had to endure not only her conscious husband’s fumbling, awkward, embarrassed intercourse, which so often ended in sweaty failure, but her unconscious husband’s intercourse as well—more successful from a physiological point of view, though no less dismaying in other respects. It was not known whether Eliza confided in anyone, or that she quite grasped the situation: she had been, at the time Hiram brought her to fabled Bellefleur Manor to live, an extremely innocent, even rather charmingly ignorant, girl of nineteen.)

During the day great-uncle Hiram was always impeccably dressed, and carried his high, round little stomach with a rigid propriety. He contemplated with a grudging approval his balding skull, and his still-dark curly sideburns; he had always been pleased with his long, soft, “sensitive” fingers (to which he applied, every morning, an odorless cream lotion manufactured in France). His drawing-room manners were, as everyone attested, superb. When angered he spoke with an icy, cutting delicacy, and though his sleek pink skin flushed even more darkly, he never lost his temper. It would be common, it would be vulgar, he said, to show one’s feelings in public; or even in certain rooms of the house.

He was one of the Bellefleurs who professed to “believe” in God, though the nature of Hiram’s God was highly nubilous. A comically limited God, in many ways less powerful than man, and certainly less powerful than history: a God who might have been omnipotent at one time, at the dawn of creation, but who was now sadly worn out, a kind of invalid, easing toward His eventual extinction. (It seemed to Vernon, who believed, for a while, most passionately in God, that his difficult father had hit upon a belief calculated to offend both the God-fearing Bellefleurs and the God-deniers.) Nothing was more amusing, or more provoking, than to hear great-uncle Hiram interrupting his relatives’ remarks with long, elegant monologues punctuated with Greek and Latin quotations, ranging over the entirety of religions and religious thought—now Augustine was ridiculed, now Moses, now the Gospels, now John Calvin, now Luther, now the entire Popish church, now the cow-worshipping Hindus, now the arrogant, confused, self-promoting Son of God Himself. At such times he spoke in fastidious sentences, even in paragraphs, with an air of detachment and irony, and even those who disagreed violently with him were forced to admire his wit.

But he worried, he brooded: for it sometimes seemed to him that his appearance, proper as it was, did not
entirely
suggest the distinguished, cerebral, highly contemplative person he knew he was. His wartime injury, resulting in the loss of much of the vision in his right eye, might have added to his air of distinction, he felt, if only he could find exactly the right pair of eyeglasses. . . .

Thus Hiram Bellefleur during the day.

But during the night: ah, how alarming the transformation!

Those who glimpsed him in his somnambulist’s trance were appalled at his appearance. Hiram at night resembled only scantily the Hiram of the day: the muscles of his face were either slack and sagging, or screwed up into extraordinary twitching grimaces. His eyes rolled. Sometimes they remained closed (for, after all, he
was
asleep); sometimes they showed pale trembling crescents; sometimes they were wide open, their gaze unfocused. He stumbled and staggered and groped about, often as if he were about to wake up, and were orienting himself to his surroundings; but he never did wake up until he injured himself, or someone prevented him, in time, and shook him awake. (Though it was dangerous to do so. For the childish, impish Hiram, asleep, threw his arms about and kicked and even butted with his head, exactly like a two-year-old in a tantrum. And there were times when the shock of being awakened on the edge of a roof, or on the abutment of a bridge, or in a freezing rain, or, more recently, while attempting to hug to his breast the furious yowling Mahalaleel, so affected him that he was in danger of a heart attack.)

The caprices of noctambulism! Dr. Langdon Keene himself, physician to the notorious Jay Gould (who suffered from a somewhat milder form of the disorder than poor Hiram), made a study of Hiram’s body fluids, and forced the young man—he was seventeen at the time, and extremely prone to depression—to drink several quarts of water a day, even when he wasn’t a patient at the White Sulphur Springs spa. But the sleepwalking did not cease: on the contrary, the demands of Hiram’s bloated kidneys gave to his shrewd nighttime manuevering an especial grace (born perhaps out of desperation), so that he was able to slip by the servant who attended him, like a wraith, and descend the great circular stairs of the manor, his arms extended, one foot unerringly placed below the other, in absolute silence, and make his way out to the well some two hundred yards to the east of the house, where only the hysterical barking of the dogs prevented him from urinating over the fieldstone side of the well, and into the family’s drinking water. Upon another occasion the young man—who professed a loathing of horses—made his way asleep into the stable, and attempted to climb on the back of an unbroken colt of Noel’s, awaking only when the frantic young horse leapt about in the stall and struck at Hiram with his hooves. He might, one would think, have been grievously injured: but apart from a few bruises and a bloodied nose, and of course the trauma to his system caused by the abrupt awakening, he was unhurt. Dr. Keene thought that aspect of his young patient’s noctambulism particularly interesting—for whether Hiram slipped and tumbled down a flight of stairs into the cellar, or waded out into the swamp in brackish snake-infested water that came to his knees, or walked unheeding through an octagonal stained-glass window, or fell some forty feet from the balcony of one of the Moorish minarets, or, as a young officer in the army, wandered toward the enemy’s trenches in total obliviousness of the gunshots and fiery explosions on all sides of him, he was, relatively, time after time,
unhurt.
“He should have died many times by now,” the physician said, rather tactlessly, while discussing Hiram’s case with his parents. “In a sense, you might consider the remainder of his life a gift.”

“Yes,” said Elvira impatiently. “But he still must
live
it, you know—!”

(ONE OF THE
most unsettling of Hiram’s nocturnal adventures, which he was to tell no one about, not even Noel, took place three weeks after his young wife Eliza had disgraced herself by running away. Though as a precaution against sleepwalking he had not only strapped himself into bed, and rigged a system of bells attached to wires which would sound an alarm if he blundered into them, but had posted a reliable servant boy in the corridor outside his room as well, he nevertheless found himself—woke suddenly to find himself, confused and terrified—some twenty or more feet out onto the ice of Lake Noir. It was only mid-November; the ice was extremely thin; indeed, he could hear it cracking and sighing on all sides. Petrified with horror he dared not move, but looked about him like a madman, seeing only the cold glittering ice and the moon reflected haphazardly in it and, at a seemingly great distance, the dark shoreline. The castle itself was hidden in shadows. It took the distraught man a minute or two to absorb the circumstances of his situation, and its danger; he was so panicked that he did not even feel, clad in his woollen nightshirt, the idle ferocity of winds that blew from the mountains, sending the fairly mild temperature (it was about 32 degrees Fahrenheit) down some fifteen or twenty degrees. Sweat broke out through every pore of his body. As the ice cracked beneath his paralyzed feet he looked down, and saw, quite suddenly, a figure standing below the ice, exactly where he stood—a figure who was upside down, and whose feet were evidently pressed against his. Though at other times the waters of Lake Noir were disturbingly dark, and its ice near-opaque, as if heavy with minerals, on this occasion the ice appeared to be translucent, and Hiram could stare down to the very bottom of the lake some forty or more feet below. The presence of the shadowy figure—it was a man, he saw, a stranger—quite unnerved him, for what was he doing there?—how on earth had he come to be there, beneath the crust of ice, upside down, in the bleak silence of a November night? Sweating, trembling, Hiram dared not move, but stood with his bare feet pressed against the stranger’s feet (and were they too bare?—he could not quite see), hearing the irritated cracking of the ice on all sides. The figure was motionless, as if paralyzed or frozen in place. And a few feet away another figure stood, upside down, shadowy as the first, unmoving. And there was another . . . somewhat smaller of stature, a child or a woman . . . and still another . . . and as Hiram’s eyes adjusted to the gloom [here, even his clouded eye possessed a penetrating vision] he saw to his astonishment that there was a considerable crowd of reversed figures, some of them moving but most fixed in place, their feet against the thin crust of ice, their heads nearly lost in shadow. He wanted to cry aloud in terror: for who were they, these upside-down silent people, these doomed people, these strangers!
Who on earth were they and why did they dwell in the Bellefleurs’ private lake?
)

AND YET, IN
the end, so far as anyone could discern, Hiram’s death at the age of sixty-eight appeared to have nothing at all to do with his somnambulism.

He had returned from the factory town of Belleview, a two-mile stretch along the Alder River which the Bellefleurs owned, and had built up within the past several years, and, exhausted, his eyes and nostrils still smarting from the chemical stench (the paper mill was by far the most virulent-
smelling
of the factories, it really left him quite sick), his head reeling from the offensive sights he’d seen (for the mill workers’ living quarters, whether in the barrackslike apartment buildings the Bellefleurs had erected, or in their own ramshackle wood-frame dwellings which marred nearly every hill and knoll, were
really
unfit for human habitation, and threw Hiram into a frenzy of doubt about the worth of human nature itself en masse), he lay down fully clothed except for his shoes atop his massive brass bed, and slipped into an uneasy vexing sleep that had to do with Leah’s unreasonableness and the ferret-faced impudence of one of the mill managers and his sister Matilde who was so eccentric, up there on the north shore sewing her outlandish incomprehensible savage quilts, and his son Vernon who appeared, in this waking-dream, not
altogether
dead (which seemed to Hiram’s way of thinking something of a betrayal of the family name) . . . and suddenly, suddenly, it must have been because of family concern, over the weeks, about Gideon’s behavior, his monomania for flying (the willful young man—for to Hiram he would always be “young”—had bought still another airplane, at considerable expense, merely for his own private pleasure) . . . suddenly Hiram was seeing again, and hearing, the insolent engine of that sporty little seaplane, painted in camouflage spots, pontooned, with a single whirring propeller, as it taxied bouncing along the choppy surface of the lake, and rose into the air, shakily at first, and then with a rakish confidence, bearing Eliza Bellefleur away from the embrace of her lawful husband. . . .

No, no,
no,
Hiram muttered, grinding his teeth, trying to force himself awake, no, you don’t, not again, not for a second time, leaving me to the humiliation . . . the shame . . . the loneliness night after night. . . . But he could not manage to wake up. It was about five-thirty in the afternoon, the sun shone vigorously through his latticed windows, down on the lawn the children were noisy and a dog was barking foolishly, yet he could not quite force himself awake; and suddenly his tearful bride was back in his bed, in his arms, and he was trying desperately to think of something—anything—to say to her, to explain himself, or to apologize, but her panicked odor disturbed him, her wet dark warm intimate odor, he could not think of a single word to say, not even in his own defense, it exasperated and maddened him that the woman wept so frequently, and turned herself from him in shame—in modesty—though of course he
did
somewhat despise her, for certain bodily weaknesses she could not control, and were, indeed, part of being female—as he surely understood—and did not truly blame her—
except
—if only they were downstairs in the drawing room or the Great Hall or at the dinner table, fully and formally clothed, with witnesses to hear and appreciate his remarks!—but, alas, they were, as it seemed they
forever
were, trapped in that bed that stank of panting futile exertion, and he could not think of a word, not a single saving word, to utter.

Then, abruptly, he woke.

He did awake. And lay there, in his vested suit, with his pocket watch ticking confidently away, his toes in calf-high black silk stockings twitching with exasperation. But the odor was still in the room with him. That wet dark warm furry intimate odor, with its slight scent of blood. Yes, blood. It
was
blood. How odd, how very odd, how disgustingly odd, the dream-stench was still in the room with him; it was, in fact, in his very bed.