Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Bellefleur
In memory of Henry Robbins
(1927–1979)
Time is a child playing a game of draughts;
the kingship is in the hands of a child.
—
H
ERACLITUS
Contents
The Uncanny Premonition Out of the Womb
Book Three:
In the Mountains
. . .
Great-Grandmother Elvira’s Hundredth Birthday Celebration
In the Mountains, in Those Days . . .
Book Four:
Once Upon A Time
. . .
The Assassination of the Sheriff of Nautauga County
The Destruction of Bellefleur Manor
This is a work of the imagination, and must obey, with both humility and audacity, imagination’s laws. That time twists and coils and is, now, obliterated, and then again powerfully present; that “dialogue” is in some cases buried in the narrative and in others presented in a conventional manner; that the implausible is granted an authority and honored with a complexity usually reserved for realistic fiction: the author has intended.
Bellefleur
is a region, a state of the soul, and it does exist; and there, sacrosanct, its laws are utterly logical.
—Joyce Carol Oates
I
t was many years ago in that dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time before Germaine’s birth (nearly twelve months before her birth), on a night in late September stirred by innumerable frenzied winds, like spirits contending with one another—now plaintively, now angrily, now with a subtle cellolike delicacy capable of making the flesh rise on one’s arms and neck—a night so sulfurous, so restless, so swollen with inarticulate longing that Leah and Gideon Bellefleur in their enormous bed quarreled once again, brought to tears because their love was too ravenous to be contained by their mere mortal bodies; and their groping, careless, anguished words were like strips of raw silk rubbed violently together (for each was convinced that the other did not,
could
not, be equal to his love—Leah doubted that any man was capable of a love so profound it could lie silent, like a forest pond; Gideon doubted that any woman was capable of comprehending the nature of a man’s passion, which might tear through him, rendering him broken and exhausted, as vulnerable as a small child): it was on this tumultuous rainlashed night that Mahalaleel came to Bellefleur Manor on the western shore of the great Lake Noir, where he was to stay for nearly five years.
Bellefleur Manor was known locally as Bellefleur Castle, though the family disliked that name: even Raphael Bellefleur, who built the extraordinary house many decades ago, at an estimated cost of more than $1.5 million, partly for his wife Violet and partly as a strategic step in his campaign for political power, grew vexed and embarrassed when he heard the word “
castle
”—for castles called to mind the Old World, the past, that rotting graveyard Europe (so Raphael frequently said, in his clipped, formal, nasal voice, which sounded as if it might be addressed to a large audience), and when Raphael’s grandfather Jean-Pierre Bellefleur was banished from France and repudiated by his own father, the Duc de Bellefleur, the past simply ceased to exist. “We are all Americans now,” Raphael said. “We have no choice but to be Americans now.”
The manor was built atop a high, broad, grassy knoll surrounded by white pine and spruce and mountain maple, overlooking Lake Noir and, in the distance, the mist-shrouded Mount Chattaroy, the tallest peak in the Chautauquas. Its grandeur as well as its battlemented towers and walls proclaimed it a castle: English Gothic in general design, with some Moorish influence (for as Raphael studied the plans of innumerable European castles, and as he dismissed one architect after another, the mood of the building naturally altered), a raw rugged sprawling beauty of a kind never seen before in that part of the world. It took a small army of skilled workmen more than seven years to complete, and in that time the name
Bellefleur
became famous throughout the state, drawing much praise and flattery (which soon wearied Raphael, though he felt it his due), and ridicule in the public press (which left Raphael speechless, beyond even rage—for how could any sane, civilized person fail to be stirred by the grandeur of Bellefleur Manor?).
Bellefleur Manor, Bellefleur Castle, Bellefleur’s Monument, Bellefleur’s Monumental Folly:
so people chattered. But all agreed that the Nautauga Valley had never seen anything like it.
The sixty-four-room building was made of limestone and granite from Bellefleur quarries in Innisfail; from sand pits at Silver Lake, also owned by Raphael Bellefleur, tons of sand were hauled by horse-drawn wagons for the mixing of mortar. The house consisted of three sections, a central wing and two adjoining wings, each three storeys high, and guarded by battlemented towers that rose above them, with a curious massive grace. (These towers were designed to contrast with several smaller and more ornate Moorish turrets rising from the corners of various wall façades.) About the oriel windows and immense archways limestone of a fairly light hue was used, in a spiral ribbon pattern, pleasing to the eye. Most of the roof was covered with heavy imported slate, though there were sections covered with copper, which caught the sunshine brightly at times so that the manor appeared to be in flames: burning, but not consumed. From across Lake Noir, a distance of many miles, the manor took on various surprising colors, eerily beautiful at certain times of the day—dove-gray, pink-gray, mauve, a faint luminous green. The heavy, even funereal effect of the walls and columns and battlements and steep-sloping roofs dissolved across the distance so that Bellefleur Manor looked airy and insubstantial as a rainbow’s quivering colors. . . .
Raphael was displeased at the slowness of the construction, and then he was displeased when it was completed. He regretted not having planned for a larger entrance hall, and a somewhat different porte cochere, and a coachman’s lodge in darker stone; he would have preferred the walls even thicker than six feet (for he feared fire, which had already destroyed a number of wood-frame mansions in the area); and the loggia on the second floor, with its thick columns between the first and third floors, struck him as ugly. Sixty-four rooms, perhaps, would not be enough: suppose his party should wish to meet at Bellefleur Manor one day? He would need a guest chamber of extraordinary dimensions and beauty (later, the Turquoise Room was added) for visitors of uncommon worth; he would need three gate houses instead of two, and the central gate house should have been larger. So he fretted, and strode about his property, trying to assess what he saw, wondering if it was as beautiful as people said, or as outlandish as his eye suggested. But he could not retreat: he must go forward: and when the last team of horses dragged the last load of materials over the turnpike from Nautauga Falls, when the last pane of imported stained glass was in place, and every piece of antique or custom-made furniture delivered, and every painting and tapestry hung, and the Oriental and Turkish carpets laid, and the parks and gardens and graveled walks prepared; when the last of the rooms was wallpapered with fine imported paper, and large hasps and locks affixed to each of the heavy-gauge steel doors, and the last carpenter—there were Germans, Hungarians, Belgians, Spaniards hired over the years—set into place the last panel, or mahogany newel post, or teakwood floor; when the last white-marble mantelpiece, imported from Italy, was in place, and the last crystal and gold chandelier, and the carvings and mosaics and sculpture and drapery and paneling Raphael had desired were in his possession . . . then he looked about him, pushing his pince-nez sharply against his nose, and sighed in resignation. He had built it: and now he must live in it.