Bellefleur (59 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
REFLECTIONS DARTING THROUGH
reflections. Faces swimming out of the movie projector’s ghostly light, or taking shape out of the dark still water. (But there was not a single water, a single substance. Instead there were layers upon layers, currents entwined with currents, many waters, many spirits, unknowable.)
How is it possible, Raphael wondered, with a small stab of fear, that we recognize one another from day to day, even from hour to hour . . . ? Everything shifts, changes, grows fluid, transparent. He saw the photograph of a tall stocky frowning man in the newspaper, and did not realize until he read the caption that the man was his own father. Once, not long before dawn, when he crept down from his room without waking the others, and ran barefoot across the lawn, his heart lifting with an absurd hope (ah, to get there!—to get safely
there,
as quickly as possible!—to make certain the pond had not disappeared in the night, like one of his strange dreams), he happened to see, some distance away, in the swampy area adjacent to the pond, his great-aunt Veronica hurrying toward the house. Like a sleepwalker she made her way with her arms extended and her head upright. Coils of graying hair had fallen loose on her shoulders so that she resembled, in the mist-threaded light, a very young girl. It was no more than two or three minutes before dawn, and red-winged blackbirds were singing stridently; and back in the swamp an owl called. How odd, how very odd, that she should be hurrying back to the castle, from the undrained marshy area below the cemetery, that she should walk—glide—so gracefully along, making no sound whatsoever, and not noticing her nephew as he stood, one hand raised in a shy, tentative greeting, no more than thirty feet away. . . . Raphael noted that the fluffy-plumed reeds barely stirred with her passing.
Yet a minute later, gazing into the colorless waters of his pond, Raphael could ask himself whether he
had
seen her—whether he had seen anyone at all. The swamp was nearly hidden in mist. Coils of fog blew indolently along the ground, as if alive. And anyway weren’t other people, members of his family as well as strangers projected flatly on a movie screen, unknowable from day to day, unrecognizable . . . ? Perhaps they were all bodiless as shadows, all images, all reflections.
Rising out of the quivering, agitated water into which he stepped, barefoot, was a face: the face of a young boy: a child’s ancient water-dimmed face, nibbled by invisible currents. As if framing it tenderly between two hands the pond held it aloft. A stranger’s face, it seemed. With that curious hopeful expression . . .
But perhaps Raphael was mistaken and the expression was not hopeful. Perhaps it
was
nothing at all: simply water, simply light. For if the dark waters were not there, the face would not exist either. It would vanish at once. It would never have been.
E
ven at the height of his fame and his power, in the very prime of his extraordinary life—even when it was quite plain that within a few years he could not fail to become a billionaire (for the first hops harvest of some four hundred acres had brought him profits far beyond his characteristically conservative estimation, and the second harvest, of more than five hundred acres, in a blessed conjunction with severe rainstorms that damaged plantations in Germany and Austria, and drove the world market price wonderfully high, brought him even greater profits), and he might exert his will more forcefully in politics (had he not
almost
convinced mistrustful Stephen Field that he was, despite his reputation for secrecy and stubbornness, and his unfortunate public manner, the very man for the office of governor during these troubled times)—even when the final additions to his magnificent estate were completed, the Roman bath with its priceless Italian tiles and the conservatory with its glass dome and the marble pagoda fronting the stables, and his hundreds of guests praised the manor in exalted language that would have embarrassed, had it been less than appropriate—even then, after a passage of time that, crowded with events as it was, should have exorcised the worst of his bitterness, Raphael Bellefleur often gave himself up to spasmodic outbursts of sheer rage, at the thought of his wicked son Samuel who had escaped him.
Of course Samuel had not “escaped” him. He was still in the castle, in the Turquoise Room, beneath his father’s roof. And yet everyone behaved as if he had died, and Raphael went along with the fiction, for certainly the young man did not
exist
in the usual sense of the word.
Violet mourned the loss of her handsome young son but refused to discuss the matter with Raphael. We know what we know, she murmured, and of that we cannot speak.
Old Jedediah kept to himself as always, courteous, distant, his pale hazel eyes averted from Raphael’s whenever they happened to meet. Unless Raphael imagined it, his aged father was
ashamed
on his account. To have lost a son like Samuel! A dashing young officer! And to have lost him in such a way—!
In the beginning, Samuel’s young friends came frequently to visit. Raphael gave them food and drink but always excused himself from the drawing room; he could not bear to see the young men in their uniforms, none of them so tall and handsome and quick as Samuel had been. He overheard their murmurous conversation: Samuel would return, Samuel would reappear any day: and what stories he would tell! It was inconceivable that Samuel Bellefleur was dead. . . .
Of course he isn’t dead, one of the lieutenants said. He simply chooses not to be with us.
Poor Lamentations of Jeremiah mourned the loss of his brother, going about in a melancholy daze, his inkwell eyes piteous to behold. Go away, go out of my sight, Raphael moaned, you must know you won’t
do.
And the unhappy boy crept off to his room and locked the door.
RAPHAEL WOULD HAVE
liked to withdraw from the world for a spell, in order to properly mourn the loss of his son. And yet—he found himself unable to keep from thinking about the world.
The world. The world of time, and flesh, and power.
For wasn’t the world always there, always in turmoil, no matter that one closed one’s eyes to it? The sanctity of the Chautauqua mountains, the eerie mist-shrouded solitude of Bellefleur Manor, which seemed, to many a visitor from downstate, and to Mr. Lincoln himself (who had first visited it in the late fifties, when the nation’s movement toward war began to violently accelerate), to place the castle out of time, and to give it an otherworldly, an almost legendary aura, was soon lost to Raphael: for, after all,
he
owned the estate,
he
knew all the blunders and heartbreaking miscalculations that had gone into its creation,
he
alone was responsible for its upkeep. Like the God of creation he could not reasonably take solace in his creation, for wasn’t it—after all—
his?
So he could not withdraw. He could not turn his restless darting insatiable intelligence away from the world, though of course this was precisely what Samuel had chosen to do. Only to Jedediah did Raphael dare say a few words, not of grief but of befuddled anger: Do you comprehend, Father, what the boy has done!—he has—he has—he has wantonly and with full deliberation
gone over to the other side, to the blacks.
But white-haired Jedediah, distant as always, as if his soul abided still in the mountains, merely nodded vaguely and turned away. It was his
affliction
—or perhaps his pretense of an affliction—to be nearly deaf. Father, Raphael cried, his heart knotted in his chest, my son has gone over to the
blacks
. . .
!
I
t was on the airless sultry eve of Germaine’s second birthday, in the midst of a prolonged heat wave (of some twelve days’ duration, with midday temperatures as high as 105 degrees, a record in the Chautauqua region) that Vernon Bellefleur, angular and impatient and bullying, in his “new” poetic voice, with his beard trimmed cruelly short so that it hardly resembled a beard and his long hair tied at the nape of his neck with a soiled red scarf, so antagonized a group of men at a Fort Hanna tavern that they turned upon him in drunken fury, and threw him into the Nautauga River to his death. Or so it must have been: for how could Vernon, his wrists and ankles bound with clothesline, Vernon who had, alone among the Bellefleur children, never learned to swim, prevent himself from drowning in those swift deep waters—?
The summer, the terrible heat, the busyness of the castle, comings and goings, the death of Cassandra, the surprise of Lord Dunraven’s visit (and he had promised Cornelia that he would return, after his journey to the West Coast, to spend a few more days at the castle before leaving for England),
Leah’s
and Hiram’s and young Jasper’s frequent trips to distant cities: too much, the older Bellefleurs murmured, simply too much was happening. There was the distressing change in Vernon, after the baby’s funeral; there was Ewan’s campaign for sheriff of the county, which he had begun lazily enough, with a cynical good humor, for certainly he didn’t care—how could a Bellefleur
care
about such an office?—but which, as the weeks passed, came to seem more important. There was the problem of Gideon. (But, in Leah’s presence, of course there was no “problem”—simply that he was frequently away, absent for days at a time.) There was the sharp disappointment of the rejection, from the governor’s office, of Jean-Pierre’s formal request for a pardon (and attached to the rejection was a hand-written, and entirely gratuitous, note to the effect that the “original sentence” was “lenient enough”—a remark that infuriated Leah, who vowed she would get her revenge on Grounsel someday.) There was the surprise of a peculiar (and not very literate) letter of many pages from the elderly Mrs. Schaff, addressed to Cornelia, complaining bitterly about her “headstrong” daughter-in-law who was “already exhibiting, at her tender age, the vices of her ancestors”: Cornelia read certain selected passages to the family, who reacted with uproarious laughter, and then again with resentment, and still again with baffled rage. (Christabel, questioned by both her mother and Cornelia, claimed she hadn’t any idea what old Mrs. Schaff meant. “Maybe because my knees hurt when we kneel for prayer, and sometimes I wriggle around, and once I snuck a rolled-up scarf to kneel on,” Christable said, tears in her eyes.) There was the surprise, which should have been a pleasant one though in fact it greatly disturbed the family, of young Bromwell’s good fortune—but perhaps “good fortune” was the wrong term: he had published a thirty-page essay in a magazine no one had ever heard of,
The Journal for the Study of Time,
an essay whose meticulous graphs, charts, formulae, data, and vocabulary attested to an extraordinary intellect (a biographical note on Bromwell spoke of him as the youngest contributor in the publishing history of the magazine). The only member of the family who even attempted to read the essay was Hiram. “The boy certainly shows promise,” he said evasively. “There’s probably little reason for me to continue tutoring him in mathematics. . . .”
A more pleasant surprise was Lord Dunraven’s extended visit. He was, he claimed, absolutely enchanted by the mountains and the wilderness land and the innumerable lakes: it struck him as astonishing that the Bellefleurs lived in so paradisaical a world, and lived in it so . . . so . . .
unself-consciously
, so
naturally.
Noel took him fishing along the north shore of Lake Noir (ah, that lake, that sinister lovely lake!—there was nothing like it in all of England, or even in the Scottish highlands), and there were frequently little fishing and hunting expeditions on higher ground, though it was observed that Cornelia’s cousin, while in every respect in excellent health, and certainly, at the age of forty-two, in the prime of life, and certainly
enthusiastic,
tired more easily than the other men; once he fell asleep, or slipped into a stupefied unconsciousness, on the walking horse Noel had selected for him, and they had to secure him to the saddle and the horse’s neck with rope. But he loved, he said repeatedly, the mountains—how high
were
the Chautauquas?—and the air was so fresh, the mountain lakes so
beautiful
—at least in the wilderness land the Bellefleurs showed him (for of course, elsewhere, there were ugly razed acres, and streams fouled by mills and factories, some of them owned by the Bellefleurs themselves). Noel answered vaguely, not quite knowing what he meant, that of course the mountains were beautiful but they had been, he thought, somewhat higher in the past, during his boyhood: he didn’t know, maybe ten thousand feet or so, the highest peak . . . ? “Ah, there is nothing like that in my country,” Lord Dunraven said, smiling sadly.
Lord Dunraven was of somewhat less than average height, at least by Bellefleur standards, but he carried himself well. His good-natured face was frequently illuminated by crinkling smiles that quite changed his appearance: he was capable of looking, even with the bushy graying hair that receded so sharply at his temples, like a much younger man. His cheeks seemed permanently windburned, with an attractive ruddy blush; his eyes were clear and kind; his manner, though highly studied and self-conscious, was graceful. If the Bellefleur children mocked him behind his back (Dunraven’s accent, they thought, was hilarious) they nevertheless came to like him a great deal, and Germaine was especially fond of him. (Poor Germaine!—not only had she lost her baby sister Cassandra, but her father was rarely home, and now even cousin Vernon, who had always spent so much time with her, was never around.)
Lord Dunraven, Eustace Beckett, owned a large country estate in Sussex, and a town house in Belgravia; his fortune was modest by Bellefleur standards, but he had been his father’s only heir, and lived comfortably. On the single occasion he managed to speak with Garnet, after the terrifying scene on the beach (about which no one knew, for of course Lord Dunraven respected the young woman’s privacy, and her obvious sorrow) he explained to the unhappy girl that he was an “amateur” at life and sometimes felt, despite his age, and the frequency of deaths in his family, that he hadn’t yet begun to live. And he smiled his tentative hopeful smile, and gazed upon her with such frank childlike tenderness, that Garnet turned away in confusion, and murmured an excuse—for she had to escape his presence—she could not
bear
his kindness, and the memory of that shameful scene on the beach. (After Garnet fled to Bushkill’s Ferry Lord Dunraven made polite, casual inquiries about her, but of course no one told him about Cassandra; though they did allow him to know, obliquely, that the young woman’s family background was somewhat common. Nevertheless Lord Dunraven wrote to Garnet, and even sent her flowers upon at least one occasion (so Della reported), and spoke of her with an unembarrassed warmth that indicated his ignorance of his own feelings. She had, he supposed, many admirers? . . . a girl of such quiet charm and beauty . . . a girl of such
delicacy.
Perhaps she was even spoken for? Well, said Cornelia flatly,
perhaps.
)