Bellefleur (24 page)

Which Leah knew wasn’t altogether true. For Love did bite if irritated, and Leah’s fingers were covered with angry little stings about the size of mosquito bites, which grew red with her impatient scratching; and if she didn’t feed it immediately in the morning—dead flies and other insects, even dead spiders; bread crumbs; cookie crumbs; milk and sugar and tiny bits of meat, offered with a tweezers—it would sometimes leap down from its web and sting her sharply on the back of the hand. If anyone was present (and there were girls at La Tour, her age or younger, who, fascinated and disgusted by Love, crept into Leah’s room very early, before chapel, to watch the handsome spider at his breakfast) Leah did no more than draw in her breath sharply, and cry “Oh!—aren’t you naughty!—can’t you wait a
moment?
” and suck at the tiny wound, giggling, her eyes shining as they darted over her silent, staring audience of girls in floor-length nightgowns and woollen robes, their hair, long as Leah’s, unbraided for the night and falling loose past their thin shoulders. “He gets ravenously hungry during the night, because it’s so long for him,” Leah explained.

Quite frequently one of the girls, lingering behind after the others had left, would ask Leah shyly if she might feed Love sometime. Or have him perch on her finger, or her shoulder, as he did so jauntily with Leah when the mood struck him. “I wouldn’t hurt him, I wouldn’t crush him or anything,” the girls promised, when Love was still fairly small—penny-sized, with a modest little belly; and then as the weeks passed, and Love greedily devoured the dozen little meals Leah offered him daily, and grew—grew to the size of a roach, then to the size of a hummingbird—the girls said, shivering, hugging themselves, “I wouldn’t be afraid of him—I wouldn’t drop him, or knock him away—I wouldn’t
scream,
Leah, please!”

Though Leah always accepted food the girls brought, and was particularly pleased to receive walnut fudge (since it was not only one of Love’s favorite foods but one of Leah’s, and Della never—
never
—sent fudge to La Tour), she always refused to allow the girls to participate in the ritual of feeding Love. He was
her
discovery,
her
pet. There had never been anything like him in the history of La Tour Academy for Girls, and there never would be, and Leah was so unhappy there, so lonely and restless and angry, and yet spitefully proud of herself (for she
was
a Bellefleur: she belonged to the Bellefleur family and as far as anyone knew she belonged to the
wealthy
Bellefleurs), that she refused not only most of the girls’ timid requests for Love, but their timid, inarticulate, groping overtures for friendship as well. And then too there was the possibility, the very real possibility, that Love would sting a girl so hard that she would betray Leah and run to Madame Mullein. Or might Love even (and this thought rarely crossed Leah’s mind, it was so hideous) quickly grow to prefer another girl, another girl’s trembling finger, her soft freckled arm, the warm fragrant scent of her hair . . . ?

Leah’s roommate Faye Renaud was a child of about average size, and consequently much shorter than Leah, with unruly frizzy hair, and nondescript features, and a slight stammer that sometimes exasperated Leah (who, even when intimidated by a teacher or one of the older girls, spoke out quickly and boldly, for no one was going to get the better of
her
), and sometimes charmed her: Faye was Leah’s closest friend at the school, her only friend really, and the girls sometimes liked to pretend that they were sisters. But even when Faye begged for a chance to pet Love’s fine satiny-black hair (“I won’t tell the other girls, Leah, please!” she whispered) Leah thought it wisest to refuse.

“Love is a wild creature, after all,” Leah said, with dignity.

VERY LATE ONE
night, when all the lights were out, shut off by a master switch operated by the headmistress, Leah, sleepless, homesick for the mountains, for the very
feel
of the Chautauqua air, and the odor of brackish Lake Noir, homesick even (though she would certainly not admit it) for her mother, imagined she heard something beneath her bed. Heard it, or felt it. Sensed it somehow. . . . As a small child she had frightened herself with the thought of nasty ugly creatures hiding beneath her bed. They were vaguely aquatic, yet dark, darkly sluggish, like eels writhing in mud; they were possessed of a queer half-human slyness, though they were also, and this is what terrified her, hardly more than black shapes. They were keenly aware of
her,
of every move she made in bed, and so it was necessary for her to lie perfectly still, her arms rigid at her sides and her breath as shallow as possible.

But she had outgrown these silly creatures. The only thing beneath
her
bed, Leah thought, was dust balls.

And so, while Faye slept a few yards away, Leah lay at the very edge of her bed and reached under. She groped about quite boldly. Of course there was nothing! What could there be! Her fingers closed about a slipper and tossed it aside. And encountered a ball of dust. (Leah was often scolded for her “failure to observe the rules of cleanliness”—for even her clothes, and even her hands and feet and neck, were not always as clean as they might be.) And encountered, then, something else . . . at the very first like a dust ball, it was so soft, so fine, so filmy . . . and then it was firmer . . . and it tickled . . . ah, it was moving! moving! . . . and then it stung her.

She was so surprised, she did not even yank her arm out; she simply moved it a few inches away. And lay there, frozen, her eyes opened wide in the dark.

And then, after a few seconds, she felt the softness again . . . she felt the tickling again . . . as the thing crawled over her hand. She lay motionless, waiting. It was going to sting. She knew it was going to sting. That piercing needlelike thrust. . . . But it simply remained there, on the back of her hand. A mouse? A baby mouse? Leah had, of course, seen innumerable baby mice, and it always distressed her when the cats tormented them, when they ran about blindly, squealing, squeaking for life; even baby rats were darling creatures. But a mouse beneath her bed? Mice in the room? Rats?

She drew her hand cautiously away. Where was that slipper. . . . If she acted quickly enough perhaps she could crush the thing before it escaped. . . .

But with remarkable alacrity, and a kind of grace that seemed almost human, the thing leapt back onto her hand and began to make its way, slowly, as if aware of her apprehension, up her arm . . . very slowly up her arm . . . its delicate legs brushing against the delicate hairs of her arm. . . . Staring at the faintly moonlit ceiling Leah lay paralyzed, and thought, as the creature fumbled a little by the crook of her arm, that it would now fall off: it couldn’t get a toehold: it would fall off and she would scramble out of bed, on the other side of the bed, and scream for help. But the creature did not fall off. It simply turned, and made its way up to her shoulder, at the same slow, deliberate pace, as if it were fully conscious of her, and able to read her thoughts.

Leah did not dare move. Odd, that her heart continued to beat calmly, that she did not fly into a panic. She was an unusually strong-willed, even stoic child, and felt contempt for the “ladylike” girls at the academy, but there had been times—once, when Angel reared back from a copperhead, and again when a boy, younger than Leah, started inexplicably to sink, to drown, while swimming in Lake Noir—when she had lapsed into a state of sheer brainless panic. And she had a bad temper: she was a
most
moody, mercurial child: sometimes, Della shouted, she was possessed of a demon, and only a good exhaustive beating would cure her. But that night as Love crept delicately along the smooth skin of her upper arm, to pause at her shoulder, its thin legs poised like a dancer’s, its keen sharp eyes fixed intelligently upon her, Leah did not panic, did not babble out for help, though she wanted, ah, how very much she
wanted,
to cry “Faye, help me! Faye, do something! Get a shoe, get a boot, hit it, please, crush it,
please!
”—she did not succumb to the terror she felt, but lay motionless, hardly breathing.

And in the morning, at dawn, when the room finally grew light enough for her to see (for the feathery weight on her shoulder, so close to her ear, though unmoving, apparently unthreatening, did not allow her to sleep: she even began to imagine she could hear it breathing), she turned her head slowly, her eyes narrowed, her lower lip caught hard in her teeth—and there it was: there, the handsome spider: hardly more than spider-sized at the time, but remarkably sleek, with tiny beadlike eyes, and hair of burnished black, so fine, so thick, as to resemble fur.

“Why, you’re a
spider,
” Leah whispered in amazement.

LOVE, A SECRET
from Faye for a brief while, and from the other girls for several weeks, grew rapidly. His favorite foods were bits of other insects mashed around in sugar-milk, and very tiny bits of meat. (A silver-dollar-sized piece of fatty beef, smuggled upstairs in a napkin from the dining hall, would keep Love engrossed for days.) From the very first Love was keenly sensitive to his mistress’s moods, and if she was tearful he would rub against her ankle, like a cat, and scuttle up her to nuzzle against her neck and cheek; if she was nervous he would crawl rapidly about the walls, spinning out abortive webs, the strands of which fell loose, swaying, responsive to the slightest movement of the air. When Leah was in high spirits Love kept his distance, with an almost resentful dignity: he spun his fascinating web in a high corner of the room and perched in its center, watching her, censorious, immobile, offended. At such times Leah would clap her hands and call him, her cheeks flushed, her eyes gleaming with the
wildness
of it—that she, Leah Pym, had a spider for a pet!—a sleek handsome black hairy-legged yellow-beady-eyed
spider
for a pet.

“Come here! Now you come
here!
” she cried, bringing her palms smartly together. “Don’t you want to be fed all day? Don’t you give a damn? You, Love! You pay
attention
to me!”

But Love would not be commanded, nor could he be wooed. He came to his mistress only when the spirit moved him: sometimes surprising her by leaping from the wall onto her head and burrowing into her hair (on Sundays and on Wednesday evenings when dining was “formal,” Leah and Faye prepared each other’s hair, sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes impatiently: Leah’s dress-up hairdo was quite elaborate, involving not only a heavy chignon but several brands and braids of hair wound about her head, and full, fluffy, wavy bangs that nearly obscured her eyebrows: and it was invariably into
that
charmingly pretentious hair arrangement that the mischievous Love insinuated himself, a minute or two before the bell rang to summon the girls downstairs), and, more frequently, scuttling up her stockinged leg to her underpants of cotton wool and burrowing inside
them
and crawling, flattened, sly, across the swell of her stomach, while she squealed and slapped at him and jumped about the room trying to dislodge him—knocking over her desk chair, the tea things, the water basin, poor Faye’s potted fern, the stack of kindling wood beside the little fireplace. And there were times—especially after she had returned to Bushkill’s Ferry, and home, and Love was much larger, having grown to the size of a sparrow—when Love sensed that her mind was elsewhere as she fed or stroked him, and, in a sudden ill-natured frenzy, stung her most cruelly on the back of the hand, or the breast, or even her cheek. Leah’s scream, her shock, her sudden childish tears,
somewhat
placated him at such moments. “Oh, that hurt, that hurt, why did you do that, oh, you did that deliberately, you
calculated
that, don’t you love me?—haven’t I been good to you? Do you want me to take you out to the woods and turn you loose? Don’t you
love
me?” Leah whispered.

THE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG
Leah Pym and her gigantic black spider, incorrectly said to be a black widow spider, became quite notorious in the Valley. Very few people had actually seen the spider, and fewer yet had seen it perched upon her shoulder like a tamed bird, or nestled in her hair; but everyone had an opinion about it.

When the girl first returned from the academy at La Tour—appearing, unannounced, at her mother’s door, tearful and weakened and alarmingly thin (for she had lost a considerable amount of weight, having succumbed to a terrible melancholia that not even contempt for her classmates and her teachers and the headmistress could dissipate) it was said that she had contracted some deathly illness, down in the flatland. (La Tour was one hundred or more miles to the south, a fairly prosperous commercial city of moderate size, on the Hennicutt River; mountain people claimed that the air in such low-lying places was foul, and that they had actual difficulty breathing it, through their nostrils especially, because it was so unpleasantly thick-textured.) It was whispered that she had had a disastrous love affair—with one of her teachers?—but were there men teachers at the Academy?—ah, but then perhaps poor Leah had been victimized by a
woman!
—and it was no wonder that Della, imperious closemouthed Della Pym, refused to discuss the situation. Word spread that the girl had behaved very oddly during her last weeks at the school: she had stopped eating; tore pages out of her diary and textbooks, and burned them; gave away clothing because it no longer fit her, being too loose; gave away jewelry; even a lovely mink hat that had been a present from her uncle Noel, about which she had always been rather vain. She had refused to go to chapel. Or to her classes. She had “pined away” for Bushkill’s Ferry, for Lake Noir, for the mountains. She had lost all interest in her sorrel mare, and was to leave Angel behind at the academy stable, when she left so abruptly. Strangest of all, the girl had a most unusual pet. . . .

This daughter of Della Pym’s, Della’s only child, born some five months after her father’s death, was known generally to be willful and vain and bad-tempered, though Della certainly had not spoiled her. One of Gideon Bellefleur’s earliest, fondest memories of his beautiful cousin had to do with a violent temper tantrum she threw at the age of three: something so maddened her that she stamped and kicked and threw herself about, and savagely ripped the front of her white satin dress with its Flemish lace collar and cuffs, and had to be carried out sobbing by one of the adults. Upon another occasion she sulked at the wedding of a cousin in Innisfail, and drank glass after glass of champagne, and challenged certain of her boy cousins to a wrestling match (which they wisely declined), and, gaily intoxicated, her long billowing skirts hoisted to midthigh, she waded in a brook and splashed about and refused to come back when her mother called her. She was then no more than eleven years old, but her hips had already begun to fill out, and her small breasts had a distinctly womanly fullness and softness to them, that made Gideon and his brothers quite uneasy. The incident ended abruptly when Leah stumbled back to shore, wet and breathless and white-faced, weeping, for reasons no one could comprehend, “I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” What it was the child did not want, no one knew, nor could she explain.
“I don’t want to!”
she sobbed, tears streaking her rounded cheeks; and Gideon, then a boy of fifteen, could do no more than stare.