Bellefleur (86 page)

She wanted, she said, simply to say goodbye to him. For, as he must know, she would be married on Saturday, and would leave for England shortly afterward. Her life was taking a turn she could not have anticipated. “Between us . . . between you and me . . . so much has passed,” she said with difficulty, “that it is almost as if . . . almost as if we
had
been married, and had suffered together the loss of our child. And so . . . And so I wanted to say goodbye to you, in private.”

Deeply moved, Gideon took the young woman’s hand and brought it to his lips. He murmured something about her pretty engagement ring—the small pink pearl in the antique setting—which he had not seen before.

“Yes,” Garnet said vaguely, “yes, it’s very pretty—Lord Dunraven is so fine a man, I scarcely—I scarcely—” and, staring at her lover’s gaunt, melancholy face (for he too had suffered, perhaps more cruelly than she), she lost the thread of her words.

After a pause Gideon released her hand. He wished her happiness in her marriage, and in her new homeland. Was it likely she would ever return to America?

Garnet didn’t think so. Lord Dunraven frequently expressed a wish to “settle down,” after the draining turbulence of the past year; for he was, evidently, accustomed to a far quieter life. “He is by nature a gentle person,” Garnet said. “Unlike . . . unlike you. And your family.”

“A fine man,” Gideon said slowly. “Who deserves happiness.”

“Yes, a fine man. An exceptionally . . . fine man,” Garnet said in a hollow voice.

They stood for a while in silence. In another part of the house a piano’s treble notes were struck merrily, and children shouted with laughter; there was a comfortable odor of wood smoke from one of the fireplaces; the door to this room, not firmly closed, was nudged open by one of the cats—by Mahalaleel himself, resplendent in his thick ruffed winter coat. He mewed inquisitively and trotted forward, quite as if he and Gideon were on friendly terms. His tawny eyes, in the lamplight, glowed with a covert intelligence, and his enormous silver plume of a tail was carried high.

“Well—” Garnet said. She paused, blinking rapidly. “I had only meant to— I thought, since between now and Saturday—”

Gideon nodded gravely. “Yes, there is a great deal to be done, I should imagine. You’ll be very busy.”

“Mrs. Pym tells me—she tells me you’ve bought an airport, in Invemere, is it? And you’re learning to fly a plane—”

“Yes,” Gideon said.

“But isn’t—isn’t that sort of thing dangerous?”

“Dangerous?” Gideon said. He had stooped to rub the great cat’s head, and seemed distracted. “But—but a man must challenge himself, you know. Only in motion is there life.”

“And your wife doesn’t object?” Garnet said in a small, quavering, reckless voice.

“My wife?” Gideon said strangely.

“Yes. She doesn’t object? For of course it must be—it
must
be dangerous.”

Gideon laughed, straightening. Garnet could not interpret his tone.

“Only in motion is there life,”
Garnet said. “I will remember that.”

She turned upon her lover a bright, melancholy smile, which so dazzled him that he looked away.

“I suppose,” Garnet whispered, “we must leave each other now. I suppose—”

Mahalaleel rubbed against her legs, mewing in his throaty, guttural voice, but when Garnet stooped to pet him he eased away, and leapt onto the back of a chair, and then onto the mantel. A crystal vase wobbled and nearly fell, brushed by the cat’s tail.

“I suppose we must,” Gideon said.

His manner was subdued, almost somber. Did he want to weep, did he want to cry aloud, as she did? In recent months he had taken on the look of a mourner. But despite his thin, lined cheeks, and his shadowed eyes, and the almost cruel turn of his lips, he was still an extremely handsome man. With a pang of gratified alarm Garnet saw that she was doomed to carry this man’s image with her, in the secrecy of her heart, for the rest of her life.

“If, at the very last moment,” she said suddenly, her heart kicking in her chest, “if—even on the church steps— Or, after the ceremony, when we are about to drive away— If, you know, you made a sign to me— Only just raise your hand as if you were— As if it were accidental— Ah, even at the very last moment, Gideon, you know I would return to you!”

Now the restless cat leapt from the mantel to a table, and, in so doing,
did
knock the vase down; and caused it to break in a dozen large, wickedly curved pieces.

AS THE NEWLYWEDS
were about to climb into the Bellefleur limousine, as they waved goodbye to the assembled well-wishers on the steps of Della’s house, Gideon, standing at the rear, in his long heavy muskrat coat (for the March winds were ferociously cold), a matching fur hat atop his head, felt a sudden itching in his ear—and, without thinking, raised his hand to scratch it—
began
to raise his hand, to scratch it—and then froze. For he saw how the bride stared at him.

She was waving farewell giddily. Her pretty little white-gloved hands flew about, and her lovely hair was being blown by the wind, when, suddenly, seeing him about to make a gesture, she paused—paused and stared—stared at him with an expression in which hope, terror, and incredulity were mingled.

But Gideon had
not
scratched his ear. Wisely, prudently, he lowered his hand. He could tolerate the itching in his ear, he reasoned, despite its violence, until the limousine was well out of sight on the Falls road.

The Skin-Drum

H
ow strange! Whyever did he do it? Whyever did he sink into such cynicism, such despair? Imagine, the great Raphael Bellefleur willing himself to be, immediately following his death (which of course he had brought about by fairly starving himself, and taking not a one of the drugs prescribed for him by Wystan Sheeler),
skinned,
and his hide treated, and stretched across a Civil War cavalry drum that was to be, according to the terms of his will, kept “forever and at all times” on the first floor landing of the circular stairs leading up from the Great Hall of Bellefleur Manor! The man who had built the castle was to be preserved within it, in a matter of speaking, made into a drum, and the drum was to be (again, according to the will, though this clause was never obeyed) sounded each day to announce meals, the arrival of guests, and other special events. . . . What perversity, people said, laughing and shuddering. But then, you know, he wasn’t even
insane:
he didn’t have that excuse.

Properly played, the Skin-Drum of great-great-grandfather Raphael gave out a smart, brisk, magisterial tattoo which had the power to penetrate every corner of the castle. Hearing it (for sometimes the children played with it, risking severe punishment) the family shivered and stared off into space.
That,
they could not help but think, even those Bellefleurs who scorned superstitions, is old Raphael, living still.

THE SKIN-DRUM WAS
often disappointing, at first. For when the children showed it to their cousins or friends they frequently withheld the most significant information about it: that it was made of the hide of a human being. So it presented itself as a Civil War drum, in quite good condition, with brass fittings, and faded red velvet ribbons, not strikingly different from drums the children might have seen elsewhere. Here, why don’t you play it, one of the Bellefleur children might say, handing over the sticks—see what it sounds like.

One of the visitors (in fact it was Dave Cinquefoil, a few days before the mysterious death of the Doan boy) seized the drumsticks and, holding the drum awkwardly between his knees, as if he were riding a horse, hammered wildly away, giggling, and became so intoxicated with the sound (for it almost seemed, judging from the rat-tat-tat he was producing, that the boy had a natural talent for the drum) that he found it difficult to stop. Grinning, giggling, gasping for breath, he sat on the landing and drummed away with the sticks, his hands and arms moving so quickly they were hardly more than blurs, his face wet with perspiration and his eyes glittering, while the Bellefleur boys tried to stop him, appalled at the racket, for they hadn’t, certainly, thought their cousin would have such an enthusiasm for the thing! From everywhere in the castle people appeared, holding their ears—even the shyest of the servants—even the youngest of the children—and still, and still, Dave hadn’t wanted to stop—until finally Albert wrenched the sticks away from him, shouting, frightened,
For Christ’s sake that’s enough!

Afterward, they told Dave that the drum was actually made out of the skin of their great-great-grandfather Raphael—who was of course Dave’s great-great-grandfather as well. He had stared at them, his mouth slack, and smiled a queer loose smile, and said, finally, wiping his face, that he had guessed it: maybe he’d heard the story from his own parents, maybe he’d heard about it at the castle, but he didn’t think so, he really thought he’d guessed it, while playing the thing. Not Raphael Bellefleur’s exact identity, of course. But that the drum was fashioned out of a human being’s hide, and that the person had been a Bellefleur. Yes, Dave said, laughing uneasily, I guessed it right away.
He
was the one who made me keep going.

IT WAS GENERALLY
known that old Raphael’s physician, the renowned Wystan Sheeler, had tried to dissuade him from the “drum fancy” (for so Dr. Sheeler called it, in an effort, perhaps, to undermine its power over the sick man’s mind)—he had pointed out that such a whimsical, indeed capricious, action would have the inevitable effect of eclipsing the many significant things Raphael had done in his lifetime. He
had,
after all, built Bellefleur Manor. There was nothing quite like it in the Chautauquas—poor Hans Dietrich’s castle had come nowhere near it in grandeur or ambition, and the medieval-Gothic monstrosity erected downriver by the brother of the “grain baron” Donoghue was, at best, a hunting and fishing lodge. Raphael had been, hadn’t he, one of the founders of the Republican Party, at least in this part of the North, and he had built his hops empire up from nothing, meeting, in his prime, weekly payrolls involving more than three hundred workers. . . . Everyone knew that he had entertained royally: Supreme Court justices, among them the formidable Stephen Field, had been houseguests at the castle, and the brewery king Keeley, and the senators Kloepmaister and Fox, and the visiting Prince of Wales, and Secretary of State Seward, and Secretary of War Schofield, and the Attorneys General Speed, Stanbery, Hoar, and Taft, and Nathan Goff after he stepped down from his position as Secretary of the Navy, and of course there were briefer visits from Schuyler Colfax when he was Vice President, and Hamilton Fish just after the notorious
Virginius
episode, and even, for an afternoon, James Garfield when he was campaigning for the Presidency. Chester Arthur had been scheduled to spend a weekend at Bellefleur, but his wife’s illness, at the last moment, detained him in Washington; Ulysses Grant had accepted an invitation but failed to appear; and of course there was the mysterious “Abraham Lincoln” who had sought refuge at Bellefleur, where he was to spend the rest of his days.

(Dr. Sheeler had never spoken with this individual, for Raphael kept him sequestered, for the most part, but he
had
caught several fairly direct glimpses of him—and it was true that the aged man resembled the late President. Gaunt, hollow-cheeked, with a melancholy visage, and an obviously intelligent face, and a beard not unlike Lincoln’s: but he was much shorter than Lincoln had been, probably not more than five feet six, and so of course he wasn’t Lincoln; could not possibly have been Lincoln; and why Raphael persisted with the folly, or truly believed that it was not folly, Dr. Sheeler could not determine. Perhaps, in his premature dotage, poor Bellefleur had so
wanted
to have been a significant political figure, or, failing that, an intimate acquaintance of a significant political figure, that he had invented an Abraham Lincoln of his own . . . ? On what was to be his deathbed Raphael “confided” in Dr. Sheeler: while President of the United States Lincoln had been near to collapse, near, even, to suicide, overcome with attacks of panic and guilt and horror arising from the thousands upon thousands of deaths the Union had suffered, and he had been quite sickened by the behavior and arrogance of Secretary of War Cameron, and of course by the meanness of Congress, and the turbulence of the country at large, even in those areas in which there was no active fighting, and (though he admitted it to no one at the time) he knew he had done wrong by imprisoning so many civilians in Indiana and elsewhere, simply because they had been suspected of proslavery sentiment, he
knew
he had behaved wickedly, and must be punished. So, aided by Raphael Bellefleur, whom he had recognized as a soulmate, the aggrieved man devised a scheme whereby an actor would be hired to “kill” him in a public place, and after his “death” an expertly constructed wax corpse would lie in state for thousands of mourners to view, and Lincoln himself, freed of his mortality, would retire to the paradise of the Chautauquas, as Raphael’s permanent guest. All this came about flawlessly, Raphael insisted, and Lincoln spent his final years in near-seclusion on the estate, wandering in the woods, contemplating the lake and mountains, reading Plato, Plutarch, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Fielding, and Sterne, and playing, on long ice-locked winter evenings, chess and backgammon with his host, who was himself becoming a recluse. It wasn’t long after Lincoln’s “assassination,” Raphael told Dr. Sheeler, that he halfway wished he might arrange for his own death in so bloodless and yet irrevocable a fashion.)

But why did Raphael want to mock his own dignity, and desecrate his body, by insisting that his heirs have him skinned and made into a
drum?
Dr. Sheeler simply did not understand.

Raphael considered the question politely. In his final years he moved slowly, with a patrician studiedness; his every action, even so small and ostensibly casual an action as the lifting of a teacup, was measured and ironic, and imparted an air of tension to anyone who watched. If the tone of the first three-quarters of his life was zeal, the tone of the last quarter was irony. “Are you asking,” he said finally, “why I have chosen a
drum
above other
instruments
. . . ? If so, I can only say that it was the first idea that flew into my mind. Because we have, you see, a cavalry drum on hand.”