Bellefleur (58 page)

I know your kind.

He glanced at her, his face stiffening. But then he decided to smile. For why
not
smile?—Nicholas had no right to accuse him, back in Stan’s Tropicana Lounge. And perhaps Leah had told the truth: they were not guilty of killing anyone.

His tone changed, became formal, mock-formal: What do you say to the Nautauga House for dinner . . . ?

Ah, but she isn’t dressed for a place like that! The very idea frightens her; sobers her. Then we’ll take you somewhere first, he said vaguely, so that you can buy something. A half-hour should be enough, don’t you think?

She laughed, still a little frightened. Wriggled her toes. (How quickly, how miraculously quickly, he was offering her things: clothes, expensive clothes, maybe perfume, jewelry. A summer fur? She’d seen, in a recent newspaper photograph, the “girl” of an alleged gangster, a skinny little pouty-faced thing with practically no breasts or hips, and
she
was wearing, for a
Chicago
courtroom appearance, a “summer fox boa.”) . . . But you don’t know if you’re going to like me yet, Rodman, she said, her voice dipping coarsely.

He murmured something she could not hear.

You’re sweet, she said, linking her arm through his, and bringing her hand beside his on the steering wheel.
His
hand was immense—such a broad palm, such long wide strong fingers—she was sure they must be extremely strong.

She sang under her breath again.
No no no, no no no. .
. . Then began to tell him about her husband. Her ex-husband. You know, Rodman, she said, I like a man with a sense of humor. Willing to laugh at things, you know, not crying in his beer, taking it out on everybody else. Al went around with his head in a goddamn sack or something. I swear he did. My little girl—that’s Audrey—maybe you’ll meet Audrey sometime—was afraid of him, he had such a nasty temper. Got wounded in the war but nothing special, they gave him a purple heart like everybody else got, what the hell, it was all
he
was good for, getting himself shot in the leg, though actually it was his rear-end but he didn’t like to say, he thought people’d laugh and they
did.
Audrey, y’know what she said, once, she was peeking out at him from a window, he was working on the car or something in the driveway, she came running to me and said, all excited, how funny it was, that Daddy’s holes in his face were cut out right where his eyes were—Tina began to laugh. She laughed extravagantly, wheezing, gasping for breath. You ever heard anything so crazy? So funny?
Daddy’s holes in his face are cut out right where his eyes are—

He joined her, laughing. Uproariously laughing. As the heavy car sped along the highway. To the left, the sun was nowhere near the horizon but the sky, threaded with somber quizzical clouds, had begun to darken. There was a bruised, faintly resentful look to the air. But the clouds were too thin to be storm clouds.

North, into the mountains. But Nautauga Falls was in the other direction. So perhaps he should turn the car around.

He braked. And turned into a narrow dirt road, an old logging road. Drove a little too fast so that the big car rattled. The flask slipped out of Tina’s hand and struck the dashboard, and bourbon splashed.

. . . driving too goddamn fast, she said, surprised.

Not for people in a hurry, he said.

At the mountainous rim, at the edge, of all he could see, there might be a place he could stand, to look back at what he was: but perhaps it was dangerous to go there. Men hacked their way to that place . . . and then did not return. They slipped over the edge, or stared down too long into the abyss; they couldn’t remember where they had come from, still less why they had gone where they had.
There,
you forgot it was the rim, most likely. You didn’t even think it might be the center of a circle because the idea of a circle wouldn’t be there, for you to step into, the way you usually step into thoughts prepared beforehand.

Oh, look— That tree— There must have been a storm—

The road was impassable: a giant poplar lay at an angle across it.

All right, said the driver, get out. This is as far as we go, I want to see if I like you.

Tina was wiping at her skirt, which the bourbon had splashed.

You’re in such a goddamn
hurry
all at once, she said sullenly.

But the color was up in her cheeks and her eyes were shining as she slid across the seat to get out his door. Grunting, giggling, trying to pull her skirt down. Embarrassed that her thighs, which showed for a moment, whitely, were so raddled and jellyish.

But he was staring off into the sky. Slowly he ran both hands through his stiff bushy hair. Broad-shouldered, tall, very tall, lean, handsome, but wearing that soiled white vest, and a pale blue shirt that looked as if he hadn’t changed it for several days; and his beard needed trimming. They would stay at the Nautauga House, probably. Where (Tina knew, for a friend worked in the smoke shop off the lobby) there was a gentleman’s barber. . . .

Now he turned to her, and was looking at her. For the first time,
at
her. She smoothed down her skirt, and staggered, her heels sinking in the sandy soil, and tried to smile.

All right, he said, as if not catching that smile, strip.

What?

Your clothes. Strip. Now. Before we go back. I want to see, he said softly, with an air of melancholy resignation, if I like you.

Reflections

N
ow the pond, Mink Pond,
his
pond, was at its prime: lush and glittering with reflections, trembling with ungovernable incalculable life:
his.

How beautiful!—Is it possible to get closer?—Is there a path? So visitors cried, from the graveled walk. (But the banks were now overgrown with alder and water willow, cattails, pickerelweed, bulrushes, reeds, nameless tall grasses. So much water willow, and so suddenly—how, Raphael wondered, did it grow so fast this summer—sinewy stems with dozens of eager red roots, arching over the water and then sinking beneath the surface, to take hold of the muddy bottom. And growing, so ferociously, from everywhere on the pond’s fertile circumference. From one day to the next Raphael’s narrow, secret pathway had to be opened.)

Hello, Raphael—is that Raphael—? Raphael? Is he there?

Raphael—?

Strangers’ voices. Guests of the castle. (For there were visitors now all the time. But they rarely found their way to Raphael’s pond.)

Reflections, at dusk, of a doe with her six-weeks’ fawn. Stooping to drink. Cautious, yet rather noisy; splashing about; stepping on tussock sedges that sank slowly beneath their weight. The fawn’s eyes were enormous but not greatly concerned with seeing. The doe’s coat was a queer silvery-russet. As they drank spasmodic ripples radiated out, toward the pond’s distant center.

Reflections, at midday, of dragonflies. The banks, the pond, the overhanging willow branches, alive with dragonflies: a frenzy of iridescent glitter, turquoise, onyx, reddish-yellow: their outsized monstrous heads: their pulsing wingbeats.

The pond in its maturity, in its prime. But in midsummer creatures lay about as if exhausted—frogs on tussocks, a snake on a sun-bleached rock—a snapping turtle, new to the pond and new to Raphael’s eye, on a partly submerged log. Bright green algae, smelling of rot and sun. Far overhead but looking, in the pond’s quivering brackish surface, as if it were only a few inches away, the pale gauzy-gray insubstantial sky was disturbed by whirligig beetles and fisher spiders and mud minnows.

Life, reflected in the pond, or sucked down into the pond and swallowed, given no reflection. Water snakes graceful and undulating, like bulrushes come to life; and silent. Silent too the innumerable yellow perch with their rows of minute dark stripes and their insatiable appetites.

Raphael—?

You don’t love us, was Vida’s sudden cry as, for no reason he could determine, she gave her brother a shove. Hurt and bewilderment in her voice, as well as anger. It was someone’s birthday. Raphael was certain it had not been
his
birthday. . . . He slipped away, restless and bored with their foolish games. Musical chairs and “The Needle’s Eye” and charades and tag and hide-and-go-seek and . . . It wasn’t true, that he didn’t love them. It was simply the case that he never thought of them.

The pond quivered and glittered and trembled with its secret spirits. He wanted to know them. He would know them. Sleeping things, scurrying things, spiders, crayfish, milfoil, pennywort, tadpoles, ugly black bullheads in the muddy shadows at the very bottom. Tiny, near-microscopic lice clinging to underwater grasses; bubbles, popping to the surface, stinking of decay like the body’s gases; bubbles that revealed themselves not as air, as nothing, but as living globules, the size of fleas.

Reflections of swamp sparrows, red-winged blackbirds uneasily perched on cattails, wings thrashing about in the willow leaves. Once, through a maze of insect-riddled pickerelweed, the great white-winged bird with its skinned head and pointed beak, flying far overhead, so distant that the sound of its flapping wings could not be heard.

(The Noir Vulture, they called it. In their furious befuddled mourning. What a commotion they made, with their noisy tears, their grief, their anger! Gunshots sounded from the swamp, from the lakeshore, day after day; but they returned empty-handed. Raphael hid, and observed, and slipped away from the house as quietly as possible, and of course he was not asked to accompany the men into the swamp.)

REFLECTIONS OF AN
eye, multiplied thousands—thousands upon thousands!—of times, in a single drop of water. Eyes reflecting eyes. The pond was, of course, more dizzyingly complex than a dragonfly’s wings; more subtle than a bullfrog’s papery shed skin; more slyly alive than the red midges. It was aware of him at all times, it lapped about his groping fingers, caressing, calculating, giving comfort. Eyes gazing into eyes gazing into eyes. Those long summer afternoons in which the very heat-haze seemed asleep, yet everything was alive, intensely alive, with thought. . . .

Reflections of flies, gnats, hummingbirds. Reflections of hungry pickerel, cast
upward
against the scummy pads of water lilies.

Reflections, too sudden and too bright (red, olive-red) of a cardinal and his mate, disturbing the tranquillity of Raphael’s brooding.

If I could go down, if I could sink, if I could burrow my head into the dark warm mud, if my lungs were strong enough to endure pain . . .

Patience.

Stillness.

In the dim undersea of colored, dancing shadows, in the Rialto Theater, they had sat, a full row of them, delighted as small children with their new purchase. (Several downtown blocks of Rockland, to the west, in Eden County. Among the properties was an old movie theater with a sagging marquee and a vast, vaulted, cavernous foyer whose robin’s-egg-blue ceiling was brushed with sequins that resembled fish scales.) They ate stale buttered popcorn—
their
popcorn—and devoured boxes of mints—and found it difficult to settle down, even when “The March of Time” showed such unspeakable sights. This was their property, Bellefleur property, the sandstone façade, the cheap plaster pillars, the worn, filthy “Oriental” rugs, the rows and rows of seats descending gradually to the stage; the faded scarlet curtains, fold upon fold of velvet; the ornate grimy molding at the ceiling; the screen with its criss-crossings of hair-thin cracks. What they did
not
own was the play of colored shadows on the screen, and so they settled back to watch: soon drawn, like the rest of the sparse audience, into the mysterious story set now in the cornfields of the Midwest, now in a tropical city, now in “Paris.” There was a beautiful though hard-faced woman with platinum blond hair curled tightly under, too tightly under, so that she looked, to Raphael’s skeptical eye, like a manikin. She wore gowns that clung to her breasts, even to her sloping pelvis. There was a girl, her younger sister, who appeared in only a few scenes, at the beginning of the movie and again at the end, when the woman returned to her hometown (though only briefly, because her mustached lover, her millionaire-pilot lover, pursued her across the continent), and this girl—with her frank pretty face and her shining wheat-colored hair and her soft melodious voice and her small smile—was so much more interesting than the woman, so much more attractive, that whenever she appeared on screen the audience’s interest quickened; one could feel it, unmistakably. So small a role, and yet—wasn’t that girl remarkable!

(But when Raphael leaned over to his mother, to say, Isn’t that Yolande?—Lily pretended not to comprehend. Not even to hear. “Isn’t that Yolande?” Raphael asked, raising his voice, and his family told him to be still—there were other people in the theater, after all. Afterward when the lights came on and the others left and the Bellefleurs remained sitting in their row, as if greatly moved, subdued by the screen’s effortless miracles and its almost supernatural beauty, Raphael asked again about the girl—about Yolande—for certainly it
was
Yolande—and Lily said in a vague stunned voice, “No, it wasn’t, I had that thought for a moment too but then I looked more closely, I suppose I’d know my own daughter if I saw her,” and Vida snorted contemptuously, saying, “
That
actress is beautiful, and Yolande wasn’t—she had an ugly nose,” and Albert did no more than grunt in baffled amusement, and Leah said, squeezing Lily’s hand, “Your daughter would be no more than fifteen, you know, and
that
girl—that young woman—was in her early twenties at least. She’s probably been married and divorced a half-dozen times.” Garth and Little Goldie, who had been sitting just across the aisle, holding hands and sharing a bag of peanuts and giggling, claimed not to have noticed the girl at all: a girl in the movie said to resemble poor Yolande . . . ? No, they hadn’t noticed her at all.)

And of course there was no “Yolande Bellefleur” among the actors’ names.

“What a silly idea, Raphael,” Vida whispered, staring at him. “You’re getting strange. I don’t know if I
like
you.”