Dedication
In memory of Henry Robbins
(1927–1979)
Epigraph
Time is a child playing a game of draughts;
the kingship is in the hands of a child.
—HERACLITUS
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Bellefleur Family Tree
Book One: Mahalaleel
The Arrival of Mahalaleel
The Pond
The Bellefleur Curse
The Pregnancy
Jedediah
“Powers”
The River
Great Horned Owl
The Uncanny Premonition Out of the Womb
Horses
The Whirlwind
Nocturne
Book Two: The Walled Garden
The Vial of Poison
The Vision
The Spider, Love
The Nameless Child
The Walled Garden
Bloody Run
The Poet
Paie-des-Sables
The Holy Mountain
In the Nursery
The Hound
The Room of Contamination
Tirpitz
The Birthday Celebration
Book Three: In the Mountains . . .
In Motion
Haunted Things
Cassandra
“The Innisfail Butcher”
The Elopement
Great-Grandmother Elvira’s Hundredth Birthday Celebration
In the Mountains, in Those Days . . .
Fateful Mismatches
The Tutor
Passion
Another Carriage . . .
The Noir Vulture
Kincardine Christ
Reflections
The Wicked Son
The Mud-Devourers
Book Four: Once Upon A Time . . .
Celestial Timepiece
Nightshade
Automobiles
The Demon
The Death of Stanton Pym
Solitaire
The Bloodstone
The Proposal
The Mirror
Once Upon a Time . . .
Mount Ellesmere
The Jaws Devour . . .
The Strike
The Harvest
Book Five: Revenge
The Clavichord
God’s Face
The Autumn Pond
The Rats
The Spirit of Lake Noir
Query
Air
The Joyful Wedding
The Skin-Drum
The Traitorous Child
The Vanished Pond
The Purple Orchid
Revenge
Unknown to Gideon . . .
The Jaws . . .
The Assassination of the Sheriff of Nautauga County
The Brood of Night
Brown Lucy
The Broken Promise
A Still Water
The Destruction of Bellefleur Manor
The Angel
Afterword
About the Author
Novels by Joyce Carol Oates
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
This is a work of the imagination, and must obey, with both humility and audacity, imagination’s laws. That time twists and coils and is, now, obliterated, and then again powerfully present; that “dialogue” is in some cases buried in the narrative and in others presented in a conventional manner; that the implausible is granted an authority and honored with a complexity usually reserved for realistic fiction: the author has intended. Bellefleur is a region, a state of the soul, and it does exist; and there, sacrosanct, its laws are utterly logical.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Bellefleur Family Tree
BOOK ONE
Mahalaleel
The Arrival of Mahalaleel
It was many years ago in that dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time before Germaine’s birth (nearly twelve months before her birth), on a night in late September stirred by innumerable frenzied winds, like spirits contending with one another—now plaintively, now angrily, now with a subtle cellolike delicacy capable of making the flesh rise on one’s arms and neck—a night so sulfurous, so restless, so swollen with inarticulate longing that Leah and Gideon Bellefleur in their enormous bed quarreled once again, brought to tears because their love was too ravenous to be contained by their mere mortal bodies; and their groping, careless, anguished words were like strips of raw silk rubbed violently together (for each was convinced that the other did not, could not, be equal to his love—Leah doubted that any man was capable of a love so profound it could lie silent, like a forest pond; Gideon doubted that any woman was capable of comprehending the nature of a man’s passion, which might tear through him, rendering him broken and exhausted, as vulnerable as a small child): it was on this tumultuous rainlashed night that Mahalaleel came to Bellefleur Manor on the western shore of the great Lake Noir, where he was to stay for nearly five years.
Bellefleur Manor was known locally as Bellefleur Castle, though the family disliked that name: even Raphael Bellefleur, who built the extraordinary house many decades ago, at an estimated cost of more than $1.5 million, partly for his wife Violet and partly as a strategic step in his campaign for political power, grew vexed and embarrassed when he heard the word “castle”—for castles called to mind the Old World, the past, that rotting graveyard Europe (so Raphael frequently said, in his clipped, formal, nasal voice, which sounded as if it might be addressed to a large audience), and when Raphael’s grandfather Jean-Pierre Bellefleur was banished from France and repudiated by his own father, the Duc de Bellefleur, the past simply ceased to exist. “We are all Americans now,” Raphael said. “We have no choice but to be Americans now.”
The manor was built atop a high, broad, grassy knoll surrounded by white pine and spruce and mountain maple, overlooking Lake Noir and, in the distance, the mist-shrouded Mount Chattaroy, the tallest peak in the Chautauquas. Its grandeur as well as its battlemented towers and walls proclaimed it a castle: English Gothic in general design, with some Moorish influence (for as Raphael studied the plans of innumerable European castles, and as he dismissed one architect after another, the mood of the building naturally altered), a raw rugged sprawling beauty of a kind never seen before in that part of the world. It took a small army of skilled workmen more than seven years to complete, and in that time the name Bellefleur became famous throughout the state, drawing much praise and flattery (which soon wearied Raphael, though he felt it his due), and ridicule in the public press (which left Raphael speechless, beyond even rage—for how could any sane, civilized person fail to be stirred by the grandeur of Bellefleur Manor?). Bellefleur Manor, Bellefleur Castle, Bellefleur’s Monument, Bellefleur’s Monumental Folly: so people chattered. But all agreed that the Nautauga Valley had never seen anything like it.
The sixty-four-room building was made of limestone and granite from Bellefleur quarries in Innisfail; from sand pits at Silver Lake, also owned by Raphael Bellefleur, tons of sand were hauled by horse-drawn wagons for the mixing of mortar. The house consisted of three sections, a central wing and two adjoining wings, each three storeys high, and guarded by battlemented towers that rose above them, with a curious massive grace. (These towers were designed to contrast with several smaller and more ornate Moorish turrets rising from the corners of various wall façades.) About the oriel windows and immense archways limestone of a fairly light hue was used, in a spiral ribbon pattern, pleasing to the eye. Most of the roof was covered with heavy imported slate, though there were sections covered with copper, which caught the sunshine brightly at
times so that the manor appeared to be in flames: burning, but not consumed. From across Lake Noir, a distance of many miles, the manor took on various surprising colors, eerily beautiful at certain times of the day—dove-gray, pink-gray, mauve, a faint luminous green. The heavy, even funereal effect of the walls and columns and battlements and steep-sloping roofs dissolved across the distance so that Bellefleur Manor looked airy and insubstantial as a rainbow’s quivering colors. . . .
Raphael was displeased at the slowness of the construction, and then he was displeased when it was completed. He regretted not having planned for a larger entrance hall, and a somewhat different porte cochere, and a coachman’s lodge in darker stone; he would have preferred the walls even thicker than six feet (for he feared fire, which had already destroyed a number of wood-frame mansions in the area); and the loggia on the second floor, with its thick columns between the first and third floors, struck him as ugly. Sixty-four rooms, perhaps, would not be enough: suppose his party should wish to meet at Bellefleur Manor one day? He would need a guest chamber of extraordinary dimensions and beauty (later, the Turquoise Room was added) for visitors of uncommon worth; he would need three gate houses instead of two, and the central gate house should have been larger. So he fretted, and strode about his property, trying to assess what he saw, wondering if it was as beautiful as people said, or as outlandish as his eye suggested. But he could not retreat: he must go forward: and when the last team of horses dragged the last load of materials over the turnpike from Nautauga Falls, when the last pane of imported stained glass was in place, and every piece of antique or custom-made furniture delivered, and every painting and tapestry hung, and the Oriental and Turkish carpets laid, and the parks and gardens and graveled walks prepared; when the last of the rooms was wallpapered with fine imported paper, and large hasps and locks affixed to each of the heavy-gauge steel doors, and the last carpenter—there were Germans, Hungarians, Belgians, Spaniards hired over the years—set into place the last panel, or mahogany newel post, or teakwood floor; when the last white-marble mantelpiece, imported from Italy, was in place, and the last crystal and gold chandelier, and the carvings and mosaics and sculpture and drapery and paneling Raphael had desired were in his possession . . . then he looked about him, pushing his pince-nez sharply against his nose, and sighed in resignation. He had built it: and now he must live in it.
(For Raphael was afflicted from boyhood with the Bellefleur temperament, an unfortunate combination of passion and melancholy: there never was any help for it.)
By the time Mahalaleel came to the manor, however, it was much changed. All but a very few of the staff of thirty-five servants had been dismissed over the decades, and a number of the rooms were closed off, and the wine cellar was badly depleted, and the marble statues in the garden were crudely weather-stained. As the delicate Japanese trees sickened and died they were replaced by sturdier North American trees—oak, cypress, silver birch, ash: some of the most beautiful pieces of furniture had been seriously scarred and battered by children, though they were, of course, traditionally forbidden to play in most of the rooms. The slate roof leaked in a dozen places, the turrets were storm-damaged, weeds grew where an outdoor swimming pool had been planned, the parquetry floor of the entrance hall was badly injured when Noel Bellefleur, as a young man, rode one of his horses into the house, for reasons never explained. Sparrow hawks and pigeons and other birds nested in the open towers (and the stone floors of these crude structures were strewn with the skeletons of tiny creatures); there were termites, mice, even rats, even squirrels and skunks and raccoons and snakes in the house; there were, everywhere, warped doors that would not quite close, and warped windows that could not be forced open. Tulip trees badly damaged by porcupine and starving deer were not adequately treated, nor was a magnificent wych-elm whose topmost limbs had been struck by lightning. The roof of the east wing had been only superficially repaired after a bad spring storm, and on the very night Mahalaleel arrived at the manor the highest chimney of this roof would be damaged. But what was to be done? What could possibly be done? To sell Bellefleur Manor was unthinkable (and perhaps impossible), to acquire another mortgage was out of the question. . . .
Grandfather Noel rode about the property on his aged stallion Fremont, taking notes in a small black ledger, recording the repairs that must be done before another season passed, calculating (though not very accurately) the sums of money required. He was most disturbed about the condition of the cemetery, where the handsome old marble and alabaster and granite markers, and above all Raphael’s mausoleum with its fine Corinthian columns, were in shameful condition. To die, and to be buried there . . . ! And how spiteful the waiting dead would be . . . !
But he did no more than complain perfunctorily to his wife and the others, and his remarks had become so familiar by now that his sons Gideon and Ewan hardly made a courteous pretense of listening, and his daughter Aveline said, “If you would let me run the household, instead of Gideon and Ewan, maybe something could be done. . . .” But the old man was hobbled by inertia, it dragged at his ankles, dragged even at his horse’s ankles, and he was apt to pause in the midst of an impassioned speech, and, with an abrupt, resigned gesture of his arm turn away. It cannot be helped, any of this, these evil days that have befallen us, he seemed to be saying, it’s the Bellefleur fate, it’s our curse, there is no escaping it in this life. . . .
The Bellefleurs had always been distinguished from their neighbors in the Valley, not only by their comparative wealth, and their controversial behavior, but by their remarkable history of misfortune. Fate doled out to them an ordinate amount of good luck but then countered with an inordinate amount of bad luck. Impossible to characterize our family’s experience, Vernon Bellefleur thought: are we beset by tragedy, or merely farce?—or melodrama?—or pranks of fate, sheer happenstance, that cannot be deciphered? Even the Bellefleurs’ innumerable enemies considered them exceptional people. It was generally thought that the Bellefleur “blood” brought with it a certain capricious melancholy, a propensity for energy and passion that might be countered at any time by a terrifying bleakness, a queer emptiness of vision: so great-uncle Hiram once tried to describe the phenomenon by speaking of the exuberance of water gushing from a pipe . . . and then draining away, swirling away, down a drain . . . sucked by gravity back into the earth. First you are one, he said; and then, suddenly, you are the other. You feel yourself being sucked away . . . your exuberance sucked away . . . and there is nothing, nothing, you can do about it.
Bellefleur women, though troubled by the swelling and ebbing of this mysterious energy themselves, tended to minimize the phenomenon by saying it was a mood, a phase, a humor someone was going through. “Ah, you’re in one of your moods, are you,” Leah might say lightly to Gideon, as he lay fully clothed on their bed, in his muddy riding boots, his head drooping over the side and his face gone dark with blood and his eyes quite unfocused; and though he would not reply—though he might lie like that, paralyzed, hardly breathing, for hours—it was still only a mood in Leah’s estimation. “Where’s Gideon?” Leah’s mother-in-law Cornelia would surely ask as the family assembled for dinner in the smaller dining room—for the large dining room in the manor’s central wing, with its somber, heavy German tables and chairs, its morose Dutch oils, its begrimed ornamental plasterwork and crystal chandeliers in which tiny spiders had spun a galaxy of webs, and its eight-foot-high fireplaces which had acquired over the decades the look and even the smell of open tombs, had not been used for years—and Leah would shrug her magnificent shoulders indifferently and say, “He’s given himself up to a mood, Mother.” And her mother-in-law would nod wisely and make no further inquiries. After all her eldest son Raoul had long ago given himself up to a mood, a sinister humor, and her brother-in-law Jean-Pierre, imprisoned in Powhatassie at this time, was said to have committed a crime, or crimes, of so ludicrous a magnitude that if he were guilty (and of course he was not: the judge and the jurors, openly prejudiced
against the Bellefleur family, had refused to consider his case fairly) it was certainly as a consequence of a demonic black mood, and nothing else. And when great-great-great-grandfather Jedediah retreated to the side of Mount Blanc, there to seek God in His living essence, surely it was a surrender to a curious mood, a treacherous mood . . . one which might have obliterated the entire Bellefleur line at the start. A cousin of grandfather Noel’s, in a temper over the family’s plans for his life, threw himself into the revolving blades of a thirty-six-inch saw at one of the family’s Fort Hanna sawmills, and it was said of him, contemptuously, that he had given himself up to a mood. . . . And Leah herself, who was considered by her husband’s immediate family to be almost too self-possessed, had been violently beset by odd quirks of behavior as a girl. (She had had the oddest pets, it was said. The oddest infatuations.)
It must have been a mood, on that unnaturally warm September night, that provoked her into a quarrel with her husband: it must have been a mood that led her into running downstairs and giving refuge to Mahalaleel at all. She knew, everyone speculated, that Mahalaleel’s presence would madden poor Gideon. . . .
And so indeed it came about.
ALL THAT DAY the sky above Lake Noir was lurid with pale orangish-green swaths of light, as if it were sunset, and the sun were setting less than fifty miles away at the very rim of Mount Chattaroy. The mountains to the north were invisible. The air was malevolent. Toward dusk a warm rain began, gently at first, and then rippling with increasing violence across the lake. Then the wind lifted. The unnaturally dark waters of Lake Noir were whipped darker still, waves rose and sprawled forward and rushed wildly to shore, sleek and leaden-gray, with an air of angry impatience. One could hear—one could almost hear—their voices.
Young Vernon Bellefleur, walking in the pine woods, wondered if he should take refuge in the old workers’ barracks below the cemetery, or run for home. Storms terrified him: he was a great coward. He could hear voices in the winds, crying piteously for help, or simply for attention—from time to time it seemed to him, horribly, that he could recognize a voice. Or did he imagine it, in his abject terror . . . ? His grandfather Jeremiah, swept away in a flash flood, nineteen years ago, in a storm like this—his baby brother Esau who had lived only a few months—his own mother Eliza who had disappeared after kissing him and tucking him in bed for the night—Goodnight, my sweetheart, goodnight, my little one, my mouse, my sweet baby mouse. . . . He listened, in terror, and did not dare move.
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