Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yet it was not his father Jedediah was leaving; nor was it—he was certain—his brother’s young wife, about whom his thoughts circled obsessively. If he meant to run away from Germaine he might have gone anywhere, he need not have exposed himself to such hardship. (And in a sense Jedediah hardly saw his sister-in-law now. Hardly “saw” her after the wedding ceremony and the wedding party—held unwisely at the Fort Hanna Inn, a noisy brawling tavern on the river in which Jean-Pierre had invested some of his money, and which was ideally suited for all-night drunken parties from which, early in the evening, tiresomely respectable guests fled, and native Indians—Indian women, that is—might be welcomed in, immune from state and county laws governing their presence in establishments that served alcoholic refreshments; and, some days later, the housewarming party which the young couple bravely gave (for it was not only the groom’s father who had gotten so shamefully drunk at the wedding party, and offered to fight the Fort Hanna Inn proprietor who, he said, was cheating him of “thousands of dollars of revenue,” but the bride’s father as well—an Irishman named Brian O’Hagan who made do in the wilderness by trapping beaver, and speculating in land rumored to be rich in silver and gold along the Nautauga River—“rumored,” that is, by the very people who wanted to unload their land) in the handsome log house with its wide veranda and several fieldstone fireplaces the old man was giving them as a wedding gift—after these incidents Jedediah did not really “see” Germaine at all. He carried her image about with him, effortlessly, and helplessly, and at odd unanticipated times—while kneeling in prayer on the floorboards of his bedroom, while struggling to saddle the small-bodied but uncannily strong roan mare he intended to take with him on his pilgrimage, while washing his face at dawn, bringing pools of icy water against his sleep-seared eyes—he might sense her presence, as if she had come up quietly beside him, and was about to lay her hand on his arm.

  Germaine O’Hagan was sixteen years old. Louis was twenty-seven. She was no taller than a child, quick and dark and lithe and very pretty, with self-consciously “gracious” movements she had learned from observing ladies at church; when in the presence of the Bellefleurs she stood very straight, her small hands clasped together just below her breasts, her eyes wide and dark and intense. She was not intimidated, though she might have been surprised, by Jean-Pierre’s boisterous charm—his exaggerated compliments which always sounded mocking when addressed to women, and which were, indeed, viciously mocking when addressed to his wife; his airy theatrical mannerisms; his spinning out of farfetched “frontier” tales learned in private clubs in Manhattan, and around mahogany tables on Wall Street, in the feverish years of his “rise”; and his careless tactless familiarity with the country’s ruling families, and with Washington politicians, generally known as contemptible but possessing devilishly admirable traits not unlike those attributed to Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, a duke’s son after all, himself. She was not intimidated, not even alarmed, since her own father—! Ah, yes, her own father. Who was still trying to sell Jean-Pierre shares along the Nautauga. Who bathed twice a year—in May, and then again in September, before the first frost.

  She was pregnant, after less than two months of marriage.

  She was pregnant, a girl of sixteen who looked, even close up, like a child of twelve.

  Jedediah had been planning to leave for years, he had been dreaming of the mountains, the high lake country, the solitude of balsam and tamarack and yellow birch and spruce and hemlock and tall white pines, some of them as thick as seven feet at the base, of surpassing beauty, and ageless: even before the most public of his father’s disgraces (the others, those that had broken his mother, were certainly worse), even before his brother brought home the little O’Hagan girl he claimed from the first he intended to marry—no matter that Jean-Pierre had plans for him, as he had plans for all his sons involving heiresses of Dutch, German, even of French stock, before the newspapers hawked the secrets of “La Compagnie de New York,” and even after: and then too, if he wanted simply to flee Louis and Germaine and the heart-stopping fact of their union, the fact that they shared the same bed night after night, now routinely, now without even self-consciousness (though Jedediah could not quite comprehend such an enormity) he might have followed Harlan out west, or settled in to work farmland along the Nautauga, since his father owned thousands of acres of land in the Valley and would have leased or sold it (he would not have given it, at least not until Jedediah married) very reasonably. But it was the north country he turned to. It was the north country he required. To lose himself, to find God. To ascend as a pilgrim, confident that God awaited.

  I will be a guide if necessary, he informed his father, who was, at first, speechless with anger: for when the West Indies deal went through he would need men he could trust as overseers, who would not be timid about handling the slaves firmly. I will live absolutely alone for one full year, from one June to the next, he told his skeptical brother Louis, who was rather hurt—for he was extremely fond of Jedediah in his bullying negligent way, and it frightened him, initially, to contemplate life with the family so diminished. For family meant everything.

  (First their mother had fled, after her nervous collapse. After their father had disgraced himself in public—or so it would seem, if one judged the situation not by the old man’s casual remarks but by the highly vocal remarks of others: Jean-Pierre Bellefleur’s second term as a congressman had ended abruptly, attended by charges of scandal and corruption, but it was never clear exactly what he had done since so many other men were involved, businessmen and politicians alike, what with inadequate laws and governors famously “pliant,” as the expression went. After weeks of newspaper exposure of La Compagnie de New York, a shareholding organization for founding a New France in the mountains for titled French families dispossessed of their property by the Revolution, at three dollars an acre (Jean-Pierre and his partners had, of course, paid the state far less after this revolution, when great masses of wilderness land originally owned by the British or by British sympathizers reverted back to the government, and state land commissioners were authorized to sell as much of it as possible, in order to populate the north country, and to establish a buffer between the new states and British Canada)—after weeks of secret meetings—the presence of strangers in the Bellefleur household—Jean-Pierre’s alternating panic and crude blustering euphoria—somehow it came about that no formal indictments were made. None. Jean-Pierre and his partners and La Compagnie were not even fined. But by then Jean-Pierre’s marriage was over: though it could not be said that he missed his wife. And then, years later, Harlan had fled, taking with him a matched team of Andalusian horses, and wearing around his lean middle a money belt stuffed with cash and all that remained of their mother’s jewelry.)

  And now Jedediah. Young Jedediah, who had always seemed so fearful of life.

  “One year!” Louis laughed. “You really think you’ll stay up in the mountains one year! My friend, you’ll be back home by the end of November.”

  Jedediah did not defend himself. His manner was both humble and arrogant.

  “Suppose you stay too long, and the passes fill up with snow?” Louis said. “It will go to fifty-seven degrees below zero up there. You know that, don’t you?”

  Jedediah made an indeterminate gesture. “But I must withdraw from this world,” he said softly.

  “Must withdraw from this world!” Louis crowed. “Listen to him talk—sounds like a preacher! Be sure you don’t withdraw altogether,” he said.

  Jedediah tried to explain himself more systematically to Germaine. But the girl’s staring tear-filled eyes distracted him.

  “I must—I want—You see, my father and his friends—Their plans for cutting down timber—Their plans for building roads and bringing in tenants—”

  Germaine stared at him. “Oh, but, Jedediah,” she whispered, “what if something happens to you? Up there in the mountains all alone . . .”

  “Nothing will happen to me,” Je
dediah said.

  “When the first snowfall comes, what if you can’t get out? As Louis said—”

  Jedediah had begun to tremble. It alarmed him that he would remember—he would see—this young girl’s face even after he had fled her. “I want to—I want to withdraw from the world and see if I am worthy of—of—God’s love,” he said, blushing. His voice shook with a fanatic’s frightened audacity.

  The girl made a sudden helpless gesture, as if she wished to touch his arm. And Jedediah drew back.

  “Nothing will happen to me,” he said curtly.

  “But if you leave now—if you leave now—you won’t be here when the baby comes,” Germaine said. “And we thought—Louis and I thought—We want you to be the godfather—”

  But Jedediah withdrew, and escaped her.

  IN HER YOUNG husband’s arms she lay sleepless and dazed, and surprisingly bitter, for the first time since their marriage. “He doesn’t love us,” she whispered. He was running off and leaving them, he was going to risk his life in the mountains, maybe turn into one of those deranged hermits you sometimes hear about: men gone mad from too much solitude. “He doesn’t want to be our baby’s godfather,” Germaine whispered. “He doesn’t love us.”

  Only half-hearing, Louis nuzzled her neck and murmured Now, now, Puss.

  “Just when our first baby is coming,” Germaine said.

  Louis laughed, and tickled her, and buried his warm bearded mouth in her neck. “But he’ll be back for the second, and the third, and the fourth,” he said.

  Germaine did not want to be consoled. Open-eyed, sleepless, she found herself rather angry. It was not like her: but then no one in this household really knew her: they thought she was a sweet docile little girl. And so she was, when it suited her. “He won’t be back for any of them,” she said. “He is abandoning us.”

  Like several of her Dublin relatives—her female relatives—little Germaine prided herself on being, from time to time, but always unpredictably, clairvoyant—gifted with second sight. So she knew, she knew. Jedediah would not only not return for the birth of their other children but he would never see his nieces and nephews—never in this lifetime.

  “Oh, how do you know, Puss!” Louis laughed, rolling his burly weight upon her.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Powers”

  Leah with her immense swollen belly. At five months she looked as if she were already nine months pregnant, and the baby might force its way out at any moment. What odd feverish dreams she endured, half-lying on pillows, the muscles of her legs now packed with soft plump flesh, her slender ankles swollen, her eyes rolling back into her head with the violence—the queerness—of her ideas! Were they hers, or the unborn child’s? She felt the creature’s power, her head aswim with dreams that left her panting and feverish but utterly baffled. She could feel the unborn child’s spirit but she could not see in her mind’s eye what it wished of her, what it craved.

  I am going to accomplish something, she thought frequently, opening and closing her fists, feeling her nails press against the palms of her hands. The soft pliant eager flesh. . . . I am going to be the instrument, the means by which something is accomplished, Leah thought.

  And then again days passed and she thought nothing at all; she was too lazy, too dream-befuddled to think.

  Her hair lay loose on her shoulders because it was too much trouble for her to plait and roll it, or even to have one of the girls tend to her. She lay back against her pillows, yawning and sighing. Her puffy hand caressed her midriff, as if she feared nausea and must remain very, very still: for at the oddest, least expected times she was overcome by a spasm of retching that quite unnerved her. Until now she had never been sick to her stomach—she prided herself on being one of the healthy Bellefleur women, not one of the sickly self-pitying ones.

  Leah holding herself still, very still. As if listening to something no one else could hear.

  Leah wild-eyed and sly as if she had just arisen from love, a forbidden love, her mouth fleshier than anyone remembered, curved in a slow secretive smile.

  Leah in her drawing room, on the old chaise longue, in a dream-stupor, her lovely eyes heavy-lidded, a teacup about to slip out of her fingers. (One of the children would catch it before it fell; or Vernon would lean forward on his knees, on the carpet, to take it gently out of her hand.) Leah ordering the servants about in her new voice, which was petulant and shrill and rather like her mother’s—though when Gideon said so, perhaps unwisely, she angrily denied it. Why, Della did nothing but whine the livelong day, wasn’t Della famous in the family for her monotonous mournful self-pitying dirge—!

  Leah more beautiful than ever, with her healthy high-colored complexion that put the other women to shame (winter bleached their cheeks, gave them a listless dead-white skin), her deep-set eyes that seemed enlarged with pregnancy, a very dark blue, almost black, keen and thick-lashed and usually glittering, as if flooded with tears—tears not of sorrow or pain, but of sheer inchoate emotion. Leah’s laughter ringing out gaily, or her robust full-throated girl’s voice, or her suddenly warm, faintly disbelieving murmur when she was struck with gratitude (for people—neighbors, friends, family, servants—were always bringing her little gifts, fussing over her, inquiring about the state of her health, staring with an unfeigned and most gratifying reverence at the mere size of her). Only her husband was a witness to her body’s amazing elasticity, which rather frightened him as the months passed: her lovely pale skin stretched tight across her belly and abdomen, tight, and tighter still with each week, each day, an alabaster-white, astonishing. Whatever was growing inside her was already alarmingly large and would grow even larger, stretching her beautiful skin tight as a drum, tighter than a drum, so that Gideon could do no more than murmur words of love and comfort to her, while staring, or consciously not staring, at that remarkable mound where her lap had once been. Had he fathered twins again, or triplets . . . ? Or a creature of unprecedented size, even in a family in which hefty infants were quite common?

  “Do you love me,” Leah murmured.

  “Of course I love you.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  “I’m faint with love for you. But intimidated.”

  “What?”

  “Intimidated.”

  “What does that mean? Intimidated? Now? Why? Really?”

  “Not intimidated,” Gideon said, stroking her belly, leaning down to kiss it, to press his cheek gently against it, “not intimidated but in awe, somewhat in awe. Surely you can sympathize. . . .”

  He pressed his ear gingerly against the tight-stretched skin, and began to hear—but what did he hear, that so immobilized him, that drew the irises of his eyes to mere pinpricks?

  “Oh, what are you chattering about, I can’t hear you, speak up, for God’s sake,” Leah would cry, seizing him by the hair or his beard, and tugging him up so that he would be forced to look at her face. At such times she might burst unaccountably into tears. “You don’t love me,” she said. “You’re terrified of me.”

  Indeed, she was to grow colossal with her pregnancy so that, in the final month or two, her very features appeared gross: the mouth and the flared nostrils and the eyes visibly enlarged, as if a somewhat ill-fitting mask had been forced upon her. Her lips were often moist, there was spittle in the corners, a certain feverish breathlessness that enhanced her beauty—or was it the curious power of her beauty—and made Gideon look away, stricken. She was his height now. Or taller: standing barefoot she could gaze quite levelly into his eyes, smiling her perverse, secretive little smile. And Gideon was of course an exceptionally tall man—even as a boy he had had to stoop somewhat to get through doorways in ordinary houses. She was his height now or a little taller, a young giantess, beautiful and monstrous at the same time, and he did love her. And he was terrified of her.

  THAT WINTER LEAH was the uncontested queen of the household. There was no disputing her authority: Lily kept prudently to her part of the manor,
though it was ill-heated and shabby, and cautioned her children (who, smitten with Leah, disobeyed her) not to cross her tyrannical sister-in-law’s path; Aveline was uncharacteristically silent in her presence, and deferred even to her brother Gideon; aunt Veronica, appearing for a few minutes in the evening, if Leah was still awake, or briefly in Leah’s cozy drawing room just before dinner, when the warm flames of the fireplace were reflected in the darkened windows, and the lovely great cat Mahalaleel might be dozing at Leah’s feet, would stand silently gazing upon her nephew’s young wife, her placid sheep’s face showing only a curious impersonal interest—though she gave Leah a number of small, charming gifts that winter, and was to give the infant Germaine an antique rattle that had once belonged to her own mother, and which had considerable sentimental value. Even grandmother Cornelia began to defer to her, and did not answer back when Leah spoke insolently; and great-grandmother Elvira, often too weak to come downstairs for days at a time, was continually asking how Leah was, and sending servants and children back and forth with little messages and admonitions. Della Pym moved back into the manor to be with Leah in the final weeks of the pregnancy, despite her son-in-law’s quite explicit lack of enthusiasm, and brought with her Garnet Hecht, who was not exactly a servant but a “girl who helped out”—and even Della, closemouthed and stubborn, was observed backing down before her daughter’s demands. And of course all the men of the household were entranced by her. And nearly all the children.