Bellefleur (42 page)

Though Bromwell was ill at ease in the presence of the other children, he chattered away companionably with Germaine, despite—or perhaps because of—the difference in their ages. He enjoyed bringing her up to the third floor, to the tower on the northwestern corner he had had one of the servants help him weatherproof with strips of old asbestos siding they had found in an untidy heap in one of the barns; he enjoyed watching her walk in her quick, halting,
thought-absorbed
manner, her pudgy arms extended like a sleepwalker’s, her eyes glittering with that peculiar ravenous yearning, as if she knew (as Bromwell surely did) that the visible universe was filled with wonders greatly nourishing to the soul—if only the soul opens itself, unresisting.

The mystery of the world, one of Bromwell’s early masters said, is its comprehensibility.

So Bromwell puttered about, sketching in pencil the trajectories of certain planets and comets and runaway stars; making notations in his neat, rigorous, spidery little hand; describing flagelliform orbits that crossed and recrossed the familiar solar system with a whimsicality of their own. (From which Bromwell learned, as the years slowly passed, audacity as well as humility.) Though Germaine was hardly more than a baby, and certainly too young to understand, he was buoyed along by her very presence, and by the greediness of her listening, and spoke aloud any number of things as they came to mind: How can the rest of
them
remain satisfied with what the eye can seize, unmagnified! How can they live so crudely! Never asking the most obvious questions,
Are the past and the future contained in the sky, is there a “single moment” throughout all the galaxies, will it be possible someday to measure God (when the proper instruments are available), why does God delight in motion, is God contained not only in the Universe as it exists at this moment, but in its past and future as well
. . .
?
Never asking,
Where does the Universe end, when did it begin, if it’s an island what surrounds it, if it began 20 billion years ago what preceded those 20 billion years, is it dead or is it alive, is it alive and pulsing, do its components mate with one another, can I contain them all in my mind
. . .
?

A dust grain turned infinitesimally in the sunshine and revealed to Bromwell’s astonished eye a miniature galaxy, diamond-faceted. It might have been the glittering eye of a fly, magnified innumerable times; or the great sun itself, diminished. At such times he began to breathe lightly and shallowly, and his frail body quaked. (Indeed, throughout childhood Bromwell was subject to shivering fits, even when the temperature was mild. Your son is too high-strung, he’s too easily excited, members of the family told Leah and Gideon, disapprovingly; he isn’t much of a
boy,
is he.) He was hardly three years old before it became evident that his eyes were weak and he needed glasses, rather to his parents’ shame. (For they, of course, had perfect vision.
Their
handsome eyes would never require corrective lenses.) One winter, he and his somewhat older cousin Raphael traded a cold back and forth, like pups or kittens in a single litter, greatly worrying their mothers (for what if, in those days before snowmobiles and helicopters, when the castle was snowbound a month or more every winter, one of the children came down suddenly with pneumonia?)—for both had the look of children fated to die young, without protest. Gideon said roughly of his son that he’d outlive all of them; there was no need for the women to fuss. “He just wants answers to his questions,” Gideon said. “Give him answers to his questions and he won’t need any medicine.” But there wasn’t a Bellefleur, unfortunately, not even cousin Vernon, who could give Bromwell the answers he required.

(In secret, in his tower, fastidiously polishing the lens of his telescope as he talked to Germaine, Bromwell pushed to the very periphery of his mind the subject of family. The subject of
Bellefleur.
His imagination simply went dead, his prim little mouth settled into an ironic twist. Family and blood and family feeling and pride. And responsibility, and obligations, and honor. And history, Bellefleur history. The New World Bellefleurs were founded, you know, back in the 1770’s, when your great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jean-Pierre, settled in the north country. . . . How impatient Bromwell was with such palaver, even as a small child! He wriggled with embarrassment, hearing grandfather Noel drunkenly reminisce, listening to great-grandmother Elvira recall Christmas celebrations, horse-drawn sleigh races on Lake Noir, weddings (at which memorable things invariably happened) between people long dead, of whom no one had heard for decades, about whom no one cared. Even more embarrassing were his own mother’s strident claims:
Bellefleur
this,
Bellefleur
that, where’s your ambition, where’s your sense of loyalty, where’s your pride? Bromwell once fidgeted so in her presence that she took hold of him by the shoulders of his jacket to give him a little shake, and
he
shook himself free, wily and graceful as one of the cats, by wriggling out of the jacket and bounding away, leaving Leah with the bodiless jacket in her hands. . . . Why, Bromwell, what are you doing, what are you thinking of! she had cried, astonished. Are you disobeying
me?

His embarrassment shaded gradually into contempt, and his contempt into a profound, listless melancholy, for he could not escape
Bellefleur
without escaping history itself; he might belong, then, to a world, but he could never belong to a nation. And then again
Bellefleur
was passion: passions of all kinds. He had no need to spy on his parents to comprehend the nature of the bond between them. (For didn’t he observe, frequently enough, in nature, such “bonds”—male and female mating, and mating, and again mating, their striving bodies locked mechanically together, one usually mounted upon another’s rear?—didn’t he hear, all too often, smutty tales of stud horses, bulls, hogs, roosters?—and he had been oddly disturbed by the men’s overloud laughter when someone told of a Steadman ram that had broken into a penned-off flock of ewes and impregnated, within five or six hours, more than one hundred of them. . . . If sex was a fascinating subject to the other boys it was a rather chilling subject to Bromwell, who approached it as he would approach all things, clinically and fastidiously, with the aid of books acquired through the mail. What was sex? What were the sexes? What did “sexual attraction” mean? He read of certain creatures—quahogs, whatever they were—who begin life as males, and who turn into females in order to mate; he puzzled over other creatures who had the ability to change sex within a matter of minutes, male to female to male again, in order to mate; and then there were the hermaphrodites who, possessing both male and female organs, might mate at any time . . . and in some cases continuously, for the life of the organism. There was a microscopic creature, at home in the warmth of human blood, in which the female lived encased within the male, in perpetual copulation: if Nature held no resistance, the extraordinary thing—it was a fluke, aptly named—would populate the world. The sexual eccentricities of oysters and sea hares and fish in general were not really eccentric, nor was it a matter of alarm that so much sperm was “wasted”—over one hundred million sperms in the ejaculation of the human male, fifty times more in the stallion, eighty-five billion in a single ejaculation of a boar!—for each of these evidently wished to populate the world with its own kind. When Bromwell stumbled upon his uncle Ewan straining and heaving and grunting with one of the laundresses in a closed-off downstairs room, or when he happened to see, quite by accident, through his telescope, his own father cupping a young woman’s head in his hand, and bringing it roughly to his big-pored face (this on a hill above the lake, a mile away), or when his cousins showed him the pronged bone of a raccoon’s penis (they had trapped the creature down by the creek and castrated it), asking him if he had any books that would explain such a strange thing—or was it, in the raccoon, normal?—Bromwell told himself once again that the details of sex were of no significance, for wasn’t life on this planet clearly a matter of a metabolic current, unstoppable, a fluid, indefinable energy flowing violently through all things from the sea worm to the stallion to Gideon Bellefleur? Why, then, take
Bellefleur
as central in nature? He much preferred the stars.)

I began by hiding in Nature,
Bromwell was to write in his memoir, decades later,
but Nature is a river that carries you swiftly along. .
. .
Soon your world is everywhere, and there’s no need to hide, and you can’t even remember what you were fleeing.

ALONE AMONG THE
Bellefleurs his baby sister intrigued him.

Leah had forbidden him to experiment with Germaine, but in private he did exactly as he wished. He examined her thoroughly, taking note (though he had no theory to explain it) of the curious scar tissue on her upper abdomen, an irregular oval of about three inches in diameter; he tested her eyesight (and was sadly pleased to discover that it was far, far keener than his own); he tested her hearing, weighed her, made pencil diagrams of her hands and feet, kept a fastidious record of her growth (which he seemed to know beforehand would be prodigious—as his assuredly was not); spoke with her as he might have spoken to an intelligent adult, enunciating his words carefully, giving her time to repeat them after him,
moon, sun, star, constellation, Cassiopeia, Canis Major, Andromeda, Sirius, Ursa Major, Milky Way, galaxy, universe, God. .
. . “You learn fast, don’t you,” he said in satisfaction. “Not like the rest of them.”

He was pious and methodical in his experiments, and there was always an air of reverence about him—a child who appeared to be, at least at a distance, a somewhat undersized ten, in a knee-length white laboratory coat, his hair cropped short and shaved up the back, his thick-lensed glasses fitting snugly on his nose as if he’d been born with them—even when what he did was illicit, and would have enraged his mother. Forbidden to dissect animals he nevertheless continued to dissect them, though his interest in biology was quickly ebbing, as his interest in the stars blossomed; forbidden to experiment with what he called his sister’s “powers” he nevertheless experimented with them, sometimes allowing into his tower, as a control, sweet Little Goldie (who represented, to Bromwell, the “average” intelligence) and even the hoydenish, rapidly growing Christabel (subdued for weeks after the curious and unexplained incident of the barn fire out by Mink Creek, but naturally somewhat restless, and impatient, and likely to taunt her twin if he surrendered, even for a moment, the natural power his superior intelligence allowed him: but Bromwell needed her since she represented the “slightly above average” intelligence) since she had been born of the same parents as Germaine, and presumably shared genetic inclinations. He oversaw three-hand casino among the girls, though Christabel and Little Goldie thought it ridiculous, to be playing cards with a baby!—and noted how frequently Germaine won, or would have won had she known how best to play the cards she received. He had Little Goldie sit across the room and stare without blinking at full-color illustrations in his
Elements of Biology,
and he queried Germaine, patiently, about what she “saw” Little Goldie seeing; or he instructed Little Goldie to run somewhere and stare for five full minutes at a distinctive, sizable object (a water tower, a tree, one of the new cars) while Germaine, in the tower, twitched and whimpered (and frequently soiled her diapers) and tried to say what Little Goldie saw. Her fists paddled, her chin was wet with baby spit, she stammered, and squirmed, and caused the very floor of the room to vibrate with the intensity of her emotion—and much of the time (according to Bromwell’s calculations 87 percent of the time) she really did “see” what the other child saw. And after Germaine pointed excitedly, one morning, at an empty beaker on a windowsill, not more than five seconds before the beaker was blown off and shattered on the floor, Bromwell instructed her to push off the sill, by her own “powers,” a similar beaker—and would have kept the poor child there for hours (for
he
had the reptilian patience of an adult to whom time possesses no value except in proportion to what it might reveal, what meager nugget of truth it might suddenly cast up) had not she reverted, after the first hour, to infanthood, and began screaming and thrashing about so violently that he feared the entire household would rush up his private stairs and break open the locks to his private tower. And then Germaine, whom he needed, upon whom he was so curiously dependent, would be taken from him forever. . . . And of course he would be soundly whipped by one or the other or both of his parents.

“Don’t cry! It’s all right. It’s all right,” he mumbled, embarrassed.

It was one of his schemes that, by leading Germaine through a labyrinth of possibilities, reading off the names of villages and towns and cities and rivers and mountains, perhaps even moving her hand about on a large map spread across the floor, perhaps even blindfolding her, he might discover the whereabouts of his missing cousin Yolande (missing now for several weeks) . . . and what a coup that would be, how seriously, then, the family must take him, after the failure of numerous search parties and the family’s private detectives! But at the very sound of the word
Yolande
Germaine became agitated and would not cooperate.

“Maybe you should limit yourself to experimenting with your mice and birds,” Christabel said, looking about the messy tower with her hands on her hips. “Cutting up that poor puppy . . . I remember that poor puppy. . . . Maybe you should let me take Germaine downstairs. She’d rather play with
me,
wouldn’t you, Germaine?”

“That puppy was born dead,” Bromwell said quietly. “It was the runt of the litter, it was born dead, it would only have been buried, I did not inflict pain upon it, I did not cause its death. . . .”