Bellefleur (99 page)

(And how ironic was the fact that Gideon’s brother Raoul had just arrived at the castle, summoned by a telegram of Leah’s—Raoul who had not visited Bellefleur for decades, and who had refused his parents’ invitations and summonses and even their frequent pleas. Raoul, about whom so much was whispered, living a decidedly peculiar life down in Kincardine. . . . But so appalled was the family by his behavior, so stricken were they, that they
never
spoke of him; and Germaine was never to learn the smallest detail about him.)

(Ironic too was the fact that Della was at Bellefleur Manor that week, partly to console her brother for the loss of Hiram—who assuredly was dead, and had been buried, though Noel complained of hearing him bumping and stumbling about the corridors late at night, afflicted still with his sleepwalking mania. Ironic also, that young Morna and her husband Armour Horehound were there, visiting aunt Aveline; and Dave Cinquefoil and his bride Stella Zundert; and a Bellefleur from Mason Falls, Ohio, whom no one had ever met before, but with whom Leah had evidently been corresponding, about the possibility of the Bellefleur corporation acquiring a steel mill there; and there were several others, relatives or acquaintances of relatives, visiting the castle on that unlucky day. Only great-grandmother Elvira and her husband, and great-aunt Matilde, and of course Germaine herself, of the Lake Noir Bellefleurs, survived. Most of the household cats and dogs, with the probable exception of Mahalaleel, who had been missing for some time, were, of course, also destroyed.)

So powerful was the blast, so great the assault upon the earth, that the ground of nearby Bellefleur Village heaved and cracked, and the windows of most of the houses were shattered, and dogs set up a mad forlorn clamor; and Lake Noir rose darkly and pitched itself against its shores, as if it were the end of the world; and the tranquillity of mountain villages as far away as Gerardia Pass and Mount Chattaroy and Shaheen was shaken. The inhabitants of Bushkill’s Ferry who rushed from their homes to watch the holocaust across the lake—seven miles wide at that point—were seized with a collective panic, and stared, rigid as paralytics, at the flaming castle, convinced that the end of the world
had
come. (There were those who claimed afterward to have heard, across that great distance, the unbearable screams of the dying, and even to have smelled the hideous blackly-sweet stench of burning flesh. . . . )

Though Bellefleur Manor had appeared to be centuries old, it was, in fact, only about 130 years old. And of course it was never rebuilt since there was no one to rebuild it, or at any rate no one who wished to rebuild it, or had the financial resources to do so: the ruins remain to this day, on the southeastern shore of remote Lake Noir, some thirty-five miles north of the Nautauga River. Weeds and saplings and scrub pine grow there freely, amid the rubble, and every year the earth reaches up a little higher to reclaim it. The place, children say, is
not
haunted.

SHORTLY AFTER HE
became the Rache woman’s lover Gideon arranged for instructions in the Hawker Tempest with his former teacher Tzara, despite Tzara’s superstitious dislike for the plane (he had had, he told Gideon passionately, his fill of bombers in the war: it seemed to him that former warplanes stank of death though they were always miles away from the ghastly deaths they unleashed); and after only seven or eight hours in the air he felt confident, or very nearly confident, that he could manage it alone. It rode the air differently, of course, than any of the lighter planes: one could feel something crude and monstrous about it. While the other planes inspired affection and even love the Hawker Tempest inspired only grim respect.

And there was the matter, too, of the Rache woman’s intangible presence, which acted keenly upon Gideon’s somewhat overwrought senses.

(For he was very much aware of her, once in the cockpit, with the Plexiglas roof closed and secured. Gideon now owned the plane but he could not help thinking, each time he climbed into it, that he was trespassing; he was violating the woman’s innermost being; and he was enjoying it immensely, with an exhilaration he had not felt since the early days of his love for Leah. Tzara never mentioned the Rache woman, though Gideon suspected that he knew she was now Gideon’s mistress. He was confident, however, that only he could discern her scent amid the rough odors of metal and gasoline and leather—a scent that lifted from her hair as she shook it impatiently loose; a scent that arose, salty and gritty, from between her small hard breasts with their puckered nipples that looked always as if they were outraged; the scent of her belly and thighs. . . .
How many women have you had before me!
she said with mock bitterness. And Gideon said:
But you will be the last.
)

How fierce the Hawker Tempest was, even when it floated, comparatively noiselessly, at the highest of altitudes! Fierce and urgent and combative and never playful, like the other planes. With its more powerful engine and its greater weight it did not simply ride, it thrust itself forward, like a swimmer, always forward, penetrating the harsh northerly winds as effortlessly as it penetrated the shimmering hot currents of a thermal day. It quivered with strength, it began to look, to Gideon’s eye, absurdly crippled on the ground, with its canvas top pulled snug over it like a blindfold on a horse. The red and black of its fuselage seemed to him a muted shout. Such an airplane
must
be freed from the spell of gravity, it
must
be taken into the air as often as possible: so Gideon came to think, exactly, perhaps, as the Rache woman had come to think. When Tzara told him in an offhanded manner that he really should stay away from the Tempest for a few weeks, since the feel of such a plane could become addictive, and could spoil the other planes for him, it was already too late.
There it is,
Gideon thought, when he arrived at the airport each day,
that’s the one, it will be only a matter of time now.

AFTER LEAVING GERMAINE
at aunt Matilde’s Gideon drove directly to the airport, and arrived at midmorning. He was observed in a loose-fitting white suit, wearing a sporty Western-looking white hat no one had seen before, with what appeared to be a band of braided leather. (The hat was later discovered in Gideon’s office, left behind, for of course he had worn a helmet and goggles in the plane.) He spoke to Tzara and one or two of the mechanics; he avoided talking with his friend Pete, who arrived at the airport at 10:30, and took up a Wittfield 500; he opened mail, dictated a few letters to the office’s only secretary, spoke briefly on the telephone; strolled out along the edge of the runway, in the oil-flecked weeds, his hands in his pockets, his head flung back. (Like all pilots Gideon now studied the air. He knew that the vast ocean of air that stretched invisibly above him, from horizon to horizon, was far more significant than the land. He knew that his human life was conducted on the floor of that invisible sea and that he might redeem himself only by rising free of the land, from time to time, however briefly, however vainly. So nothing mattered quite so much as the texture of the day: were there clouds, and what kinds of cloud; was it warm; was it cold; was there humidity, and haze; was it clear; above all what was the
wind
—that feeble word intended to explain and to predict so much, in fact everything, that was not the earth! He could see and hear and taste the wind, he could feel it on every exposed part of his body; his fingertips twitched with a secret and ineffable knowledge of its mystery.

So his employees observed him, strolling along the runway. Old Skin and Bones, he was. With his limp, and his maimed right hand. With his hot glaring half-crazy eye for women, which was, as the women discovered to their chagrin, really a sign of his vast indifference, his contempt. Old Skin and Bones. Shrunken inside his clothes. His cheekbones prominent, his nose jutting. Elbows and knees jerky. Restless. He could not sit still, could not bear to remain behind his desk, was always pacing, so the secretary complained, imagining he was staring at her when he passed behind her desk, though in fact he had no awareness of her—no interest, of late, in any woman except Mrs. Rache. Gideon Bellefleur.
The
Gideon Bellefleur about whom so much was whispered. His automobiles, and before that, long ago, when he was a young man, his Thoroughbred horses: hadn’t he once owned a magnificent albino stallion, hadn’t he once ridden it to victory in a race that had brought his family hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal bets? Or was that, perhaps, another Bellefleur?—his father, or grandfather? There were so many Bellefleurs, people said, but perhaps most of them had never existed. They were just stories, tales, anecdotes set in the mountains, which no one quite believed and yet could not quite disregard. . . .

Though Gideon, of course, certainly existed. At least until the day he committed suicide by diving his airplane into Bellefleur Manor.

HE LEFT HIS
rakish white hat in his office, and strapped on a pilot’s helmet with amber goggles. His figure was quick and spare, and he walked, observers noted, with an unusually pronounced limp. He had told Tzara he might take the Tempest up for an hour or so but he didn’t check with Tzara beforehand, and the perfunctory flight notes he had made—pencil scrawls, nearly unintelligible—were left behind on his desk. Quickly he checked the airplane: the oil, the sparkplugs, the fuel line connections, the propeller, the wings (which he caressed somewhat more hastily than usual, as if not caring what dents or cracks or other imperfections he might discover), the tires, the brakes, the generator belt, the gasoline. And all was well. Not in perfect condition, for the Hawker Tempest was an old plane, rather battered from the War; it was said to have survived more than one crash-landing, and more than one pilot. But it would do, Gideon thought. It was just the thing for him.

With a sudden burst of energy Gideon hauled himself up onto the wing, and into the second cockpit; and there, crouched down in the first cockpit, hugging the two-by-four box on her lap, was Mrs. Rache, awaiting him. She was twisted about, gazing at him over her shoulder. A slow smile, a wordless greeting, passed between them.

So she had come, as she’d promised! She had been waiting for him all along. But discreetly out of sight.

Gideon did not lean into the cockpit to kiss her; he smiled upon her with a lover’s lordly yet somewhat dazed smile. She had come, she was his, and the box was on her lap: so it would take place, as they had planned. . . . He did not kiss her, knowing she would draw away in displeasure (for she detested any public show of affection or intimacy, or even friendship), but he could not resist reaching down to squeeze her gloved hand. Her fingers were hard and strong, returning the pressure. It excited him to see that she wore khaki trousers and a long-sleeved man’s shirt and a badly scruffed leather vest, and the helmet with the amber goggles that resembled his own. Every tuft, every tendril of hair had been tucked severely into the helmet; her darkly tanned face looked, in the glare of the August sun on the fuselage and wings, almost featureless.
My love,
he whispered.

She had come, she was his! And the box she had promised was on her lap.

Trembling with excitement he climbed inside and settled into place and fastened his seat belt. No parachute—no time for a parachute!—and of course
she
had not troubled with one either. He smiled at the control panel. He primed the engine and started it and listened carefully to hear how it sounded, and he watched the controls as the oil pressure came up, and all was well, all was as it should be. He released the brake. He began to move—it began to move—taxiing somewhat jerkily out along the runway. The engine grew ever louder and more powerful. Daddy, screamed the heartbroken little girl, why did you lie—! But the sound of the engine drowned her out as the air-speed needle leapt off its peg and started around the dial. The control wheel vibrated in his hands.

Farewell to Tzara, who had, perhaps unwisely (for he had sensed from the first the melancholy drift of Gideon’s mind), taught Gideon to fly so well; farewell to the mortgaged airport which would soon be bankrupt and abandoned, its runway overgrown with weeds. Farewell to the twelve or fifteen brave little planes spaced about in the grass, awaiting their turns in the air; farewell to the frayed weathercock, and to those who witnessed the fighter’s takeoff into a glowering hazy-humid sky in which, at an altitude of less than 1,000 feet, the contours of the land would probably be lost. Farewell to the earth itself: Gideon’s pride was such that he hoped never to set foot upon it again.

The runway flew beneath. The propeller’s blades disappeared in a blur of speed. The wind, the wind, suddenly the wind came alive, and beat against the plane, but Gideon held it steady and all was well. Sixty miles an hour, sixty-five. The wind wanted now to seize the plane beneath its wings and lift it into the air, perhaps to overturn it, but Gideon held it steady, and near the end of the runway he eased the wheel back and the nosewheel left the ground and they were in the air—they had left the ground, and were in the air—three inches, eight inches, a foot, two feet in the air—in the air and rising—rising—to clear that line of poplar trees—

Now they were safe in the air, and rising steadily: climbing eight feet a second, ten feet a second: and Gideon’s hands instinctively maneuvered them through the bumps and pockets of air. The great ocean was invisible, but it was quite solid. One must be extremely skillful to manage it. Three hundred feet, three hundred seventy-five, and climbing, climbing steadily, at six hundred feet he banked to the right, at eight hundred he began a long sweeping climb out and away from the airport, turning toward the south.

All was well: within a half-hour the ordeal would be completed.

He climbed to 2,500 feet, then to 3,000 feet. The ground was invisible. The heat-haze lay everywhere, thinning out only as the plane rose. And then over Lake Noir, over the cooler air of Lake Noir. The noisy plane plunged through shreds of cloud and opened suddenly into patches of clear blazing sunshine and then reentered the clouds again, at 3,500 feet. Gideon felt in the engine’s throb and in the fine vibration of the wheel that all was well.