Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He, Noel, would have the courage. When the time came.

  But now he sipped whiskey, and brooded over the past, and found it too much trouble to bestir himself even to comfort Gideon, who badly needed comforting, like an overgrown child; he had told Gideon several times that the accident at Powhatassie wasn’t his fault, it certainly wasn’t his fault, he must forget it, or if he couldn’t forget it (Nicholas, after all, had been Gideon’s closest friend) he should try to extricate himself from it, in his memory—and above all he shouldn’t feel guilty for having won the race, which he and Jupiter deserved to win; or for winning all that money. (Not that Noel really knew how much money had been won. He half-suspected that Hiram had cleared a great deal, in secret; and he had a vague idea that Leah herself had done well. He had won a modest amount, only $6,000.) But he let Gideon go, and paid no attention to his wife’s querulous remarks, sipping whiskey, chewing on his cigars, rubbing the kittens’ heads roughly, and tickling their balloon-fat little bellies, thinking of the past, of all that had gone wrong: not only did things go wrong, Noel thought, bemused, they went into knots and snarls, tortuous as the eye-dismaying designs on one of his sister Matilde’s crazy quilts. (Which were crazy. All interwoven interlocked dizzying colors. Too much for his brain to absorb. Ah, his sisters Matilde and Della! It pained him to think of them. Perhaps he would not think of them. Della blamed him, unfairly, for her husband’s accidental death, and was not above whispering Murderer at him, nearly three decades later; she even blamed him—and this was a measure of the old woman’s bullheadedness—for the fact that Gideon and Leah had fallen in love, and insisted upon marrying though they were cousins. And Matilde. Perfectly lucid in conversation, good-natured and even good-humored whenever he visited her, but obviously insane—for why, otherwise, would the woman live up there north of the lake, in an old hunting lodge in what remained of a fifty-acre camp Raphael had built for wealthy guests (one of them was the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, who managed to hold his position, and his power, for more than three tumultuous decades; another was the industrialist Hayes Whittier, who exerted so much control over the Republican Party, and whose son—twenty-one years old, but with the physique of a ten-year-old—was dying of consumption: so it was Raphael’s idea that the north woods, his north woods, might save the boy)—why on earth would Matilde keep so stubbornly to herself, eccentric as any old mountain hermit, refusing his and Hiram’s money, growing her own vegetables and raising a few scrawny chickens, making a spectacle of herself in the village—in the village that bore her own family’s distinguished name!—by buying up rags and old clothes, and selling those crazy quilts, and occasionally eggs, home-baked bread, and vegetables? He would not think of her.)

  Ah, but should he allow himself to think of Jean-Pierre?—at whose trial (in fact trials, since the first resulted in a hung jury) he had not merely fingered but actually grasped the poison vial, wondering if he should use it himself if Jean-Pierre was found guilty, or whether he should slip it to his brother. . . . But Jean-Pierre was too cowardly to take cyanide, just as he was too cowardly to have murdered ten or eleven men; he would have burst into tears, and possibly told their mother. And shame, anger, rage, had fueled Noel after the conviction, so that he hadn’t wanted to die, not even to escape the ignominy bruited about everywhere in the newspapers, and chuckled over by the Bellefleurs’ many enemies, who did not care that justice was being mocked so long as the Bellefleurs were wounded. He had not wanted to die but the little vial—its very existence, the fact of its promise—comforted him a great deal.

  Then there was his oldest son Raoul, managing one of the family’s sawmills down in Kincardine, who, caught up in a peculiar marriage, or in a peculiar ménage (Noel really knew little about the situation, he shut the women up when they began to speak of it, detesting gossip not his own) never—never—came home to visit. Not even during Cornelia’s illness a few years ago. Not even when Noel himself was laid low with intestinal flu one winter, and sweated off eighteen pounds. “That boy doesn’t love us,” Noel said bitterly. “He has his own troubles,” Cornelia said. “He doesn’t love us or he’d come visit,” Noel said. “And that’s all.”

  Jean-Pierre, his good-looking dandyish brother; now in prison for life plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years plus ninety-nine years. . . . And his oldest son Raoul, whom he’d thought, in his vanity, had so closely resembled him. . . . And Della who hated him, and Matilde who had no need of him (stout, winesap-apple-checked, chasing a clucking chicken out of the kitchen so that Noel could have a seat, smiling politely and answering his questions: How was she getting along, did she need firewood, did she need provisions, did she need money?—did she need him?) And Cornelia who baited him, who did not respect him as a woman should respect her husband. (Their marriage had gone off course on their honeymoon. In fact on their wedding night. Though they had made their wedding journey plans in secret, and had told only a few family members, nevertheless Noel’s friends and drinking cronies caught up with them at the White Sulphur Springs Inn where they were spending the night, and treated them to a raucous “horning”—a serenade of bells, tin pans, firecrackers, and horns of various kinds, and many ribald shouts and shrieks; and Noel, following mountain custom, very cheerfully following mountain custom, had of course invited the drunken party in for more drinks, and cigars, and even a few games of poker. Next morning he’d been astonished to learn that his bride was miffed.) And there was his father, Lamentations of Jeremiah, who had worn himself out trying to recoup the family’s losses, never outliving his father’s disappointment in him, and that cruel jeering name, administered with such deliberation. Poor Jeremiah had been swept away in the Great Flood almost twenty years ago, and his body had never been recovered, never given a decent burial. . . .

  The living and the dead. Braided together. Woven together. An immense tapestry taking in centuries. Noel began drinking the day of Nicholas’s death, and continued drinking into the autumn, making a pig of himself by the fireplace, spilling whiskey and tobacco and ashes down his front. . . . The living and the dead. Centuries. A tapestry. Or was it one of Matilde’s ingenious quilts that looked crazy to the eye but (if you allowed her to explain, to point out the connections) made a kind of dizzying sense . . . ? He mourned his lost father, and his imprisoned brother, and even his unnamed son who had died at the age of three days, long ago; he mourned Hiram’s pretty young wife Eliza; and his oldest son Raoul; and the others. The others. Too many to enumerate. He’d had a disagreement with Claude Fuhr a while back and their friendship of decades had ended in a shouting match and neither had apologized and perhaps Noel should have made the first move because he, being a Bellefleur, possessed more charity. . . . But he had not apologized, and now they were blaming Gideon for Nicholas’s death, and everything went wrong, tied itself into ugly knots and snarls only a quick swig from the bejeweled vial could solve.

  After the excitement of the new baby, the women discovered Noel there by the fireplace and, for a brief while, fussed over him. Even Cornelia. (“Don’t you want to see your new granddaughter, old man? She’s quite a sight!”) Even Veronica, who usually paid no attention to him. (It was generally thought that Veronica was one of Noel’s sisters. But in fact she was an aunt. Years older than Noel though she looked remarkably young—with her full, plump face unmarked by character lines, her somewhat coarse, ruddy cheeks, her smallish, close-set, placid hazel eyes, and her hair—so honey-warm a brown, it must have been dyed, and very expertly dyed at that: Noel once tried to figure out the woman’s age but his brain resisted and he simply poured himself another drink.) Even Lily, who was ordinarily jealous of Leah, came round to cheer him up by saying he should see the new baby—he should see her at once, she was growing so fast—she wouldn’t be a baby much longer.

  He growled that they should leave him alone. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die. . . . A time to kill and a time to
heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. . . . A time to laugh, and a time to weep.

  NEVERTHELESS, ONE DAY, he peeked through the open door of Leah’s boudoir and saw . . . and saw Leah in a green silk dressing gown, one breast exposed, full and waxen-white, the nipple, elongated, an astonishing pink-brown; he saw one of the servant girls lifting a baby into her arms; he saw, transfixed, the baby (which was a healthy-sized baby, kicking and flailing its arms robustly) start to nurse, its blind, greedy little mouth grabbing at the nipple. He stood, staring, his hands in his pockets, and his knees turned to water, and his glasses misted over. Oh, dear God, he thought.

  Leah, boldly, called him in. Why stand there gaping? Hadn’t he ever seen a baby before?—a baby nursing before?

  “Isn’t she hungry this morning!” Leah said. She shuddered, she laughed. There was a curious elated, gloating sound to her voice which excited Noel. “Ah, just look at that! Isn’t she a beauty!”

  The small hands made clenching, grabbing motions. The eyes were half-shut with pleasure; and then opened wide with agitation—a deep, clear green—as if there were some danger the breast might be taken away.

  “Such a little pig, isn’t she!” Leah laughed.

  “A very . . . a very healthy baby . . .” Noel said faintly.

  “Well, she’s big enough. And getting bigger every day.”

  Noel wiped and polished his glasses. And sat, timid as a suitor, on Leah’s couch. His daughter-in-law had never looked more beautiful—her complexion was whitely-hot, as if with concentration; her blue eyes shone in triumph; her lips were full and moist. A considerable quantity of milk had dribbled down the front of her silk gown, and its odor was so warm, so stale, so sweet, that Noel grew dizzy. Ah, if only he could nurse at Leah’s breasts!

  Why had he hidden away all these weeks, brooding over things he couldn’t change, spitting into the fireplace like an old man?

  That afternoon, he stayed until Leah chased him out. And returned the next morning, and stayed and stayed. He did not know whether he should envy Gideon or not—there was something courteous, something almost too formal, about Gideon and Leah now: they no longer quarreled in front of the family, or slapped at each other; they no longer squeezed each other’s hands, or whispered in each other’s ears, or kissed noisily. Gideon had trimmed his beard and mustache, and made a show of behaving, after those terrible black weeks following Nicholas’s death, like a gentleman; and Leah addressed him with a small cool discreet smile. In the early days of their marriage Cornelia had been scandalized, the way the two of them “pawed” each other in public. . . . But those days appeared to be past.

  Still, Noel did envy his son. Because Gideon was this woman’s husband, after all. Her husband, and the father of that beautiful baby.

  Leah had always turned aside when stories of the family were told, and she had always professed boredom when the subject of the Bellefleur “fortune” was brought up, as it so frequently was. But now, suddenly, she wanted to hear everything, everything Noel could tell her, going back to the original Jean-Pierre . . . the youngest son of the Duc de Bellefleur . . . banished from his homeland by Louis XV for his “radical ideas” about individual rights . . . arriving penniless in New York and yet, within years, evidently rich enough to acquire, in the 1770’s, some 2,889,500 acres of wilderness land for seven and a half pence an acre. . . . It delighted Leah to learn that this extraordinary man had wanted at one time to control the northeastern border of what had newly become known as the United States of America (which meant the control of waterways as well, and commerce with Montreal and Quebec); and that he had even drawn up plans—how seriously, Leah wondered!—for breaking his wilderness kingdom away from the rest of the state, and even from the new nation, in order to establish a sovereignty of his own. It was to have been called Nautauga, and it would have had close diplomatic and commercial ties with French Canada.

  “Ah—Nautauga,” Leah whispered. “Of course. Nautauga. How simple. . . . Almost three million acres, all his. Nautauga.”

  The only likeness of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur the family had was a poor engraving that had been the frontispiece of The Almanack of Riches, a paperbound book published in 1813 by Jean-Pierre and a printer friend, in shameless imitation of Ben Franklin’s Almanack: in the shadowy reproduction a bright pair of eyes gleamed, and the brows hulked dark and ponderous and shrewd. A handsome man, bewigged, with a very black dandyish beard. That long thin noble Bellefleur nose. Middle-aged, perhaps. Not old. Leah studied the picture, holding it up to the light. A handsome man, yes; and there was something noble about him.

  “Tell me everything you know about him,” Leah commanded her elders. Then, after a pause, bravely: “Even the circumstances of his death.”

  SO THE DAYS passed. Autumn plunged, as it must, into winter; the sun described a laconic parenthesis in the sky, and disappeared as early as 3:00 P.M.; and sometimes there was no sun at all. Yet Noel Bellefleur was never happier.

  What’s that silly little melody you are always humming, Cornelia asked him suspiciously, why are you smiling to yourself?

  Aveline said, Is Pappa sneaking whiskey in the mornings now?

  Leah, the cause of his chattery good spirits, pretended to notice nothing unusual at all. (Her husband’s strong-willed father had always been one of the liveliest of the Bellefleurs.) He talked to her for hours, tireless. And if he said, “But, Leah, I must be boring you—I must be wearing you out with this old dead history,” she always protested vehemently. How could he think of such a thing, boring her with facts about the Bellefleur family . . . !

  Old Jean-Pierre, that outrageous man. Nautauga in its earliest years. The old house across the lake at Bushkill’s Ferry. (In which the tragedy had taken place: but Noel did not wish to dwell upon that.) Jean-Pierre’s empire, his tumultuous years as a congressman, his partnerships in resort hotels, steamboats, coach lines, taverns; The Almanack of Riches (which, despite its derivative nature, went through three hundred printings!); the scheme to bring Napoleon to the Chautauquas; the old Cockagne Club; the timber-razing projects; the Arctic elk manure scandal; the innumerable women or tales of women. . . . Noel chattered away happily. His own children had never cared to hear these tales, except for the story—necessarily abbreviated—of the Bushkill’s Ferry massacre; and so it was something of a miracle that young Leah Pym, the most beautiful bride ever brought to live in Bellefleur Manor, should show such an intense, such an insatiable interest. Noel fairly glowed with pleasure. One of Leah’s questions could start him off for an hour or more. It frequently seemed, on those long lazy lamp-lit winter afternoons, that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, the old man himself, was in the room with them, standing with his back to the fire, leaning against the mantel, puffing on a foul-smelling pipe and shaking with merriment. . . .

  ONE NOON NOEL gathered together a party of children for a drive across Lake Noir in his horse-drawn sleigh. The ice was solid—wonderfully solid—frozen now to a depth of twenty or more inches. (The ice of Lake Noir!—a phenomenon taken for granted by local residents, but well worth the attention given it by curious visitors: How is it possible, strangers wondered, that ice, which is after all merely water, should possess the shading and even the texture of onyx, and that it should refuse to melt in the warm breezes of April, retaining its solid state well past the time when ice-locked ponds and lakes on far higher ground had cracked . . . ? Examined in chips or drops Lake Noir did not have a dark or even a shadowy cast; it appeared to be “normal”; and when young Bromwell studied it carefully beneath his microscope he could find nothing exceptional about it. But in bulk it was peculiarly lightless, and seemed to reflect or radiate a blackish sheen, like that of ravens’ feathers. It was one of the family legends that the Bellefleur dead, though officially buried in the cemetery, really went to live in Lake Noir, in its murky depths, and could sometimes be sighted beneath the ice, standing upside down with their feet against the ice, by one who was himself fated soon to die. But the children bel
ieved this tale only when they wanted to frighten themselves.)

  Racing across the ice, several of the grandchildren—Christabel, Louis, Vida—bundled up beside him, beneath a wool-and-feather-lined quilt, Noel had a sudden idea: he reached in his pocket for the vial of poison: and there it was, there as always it was. But it no longer gave comfort. It no longer seemed important. Poison? A quick death? Suicide? But why? (So Noel imagined his daughter-in-law interrogating him, the color high in her cheeks, her magnificent eyes glowing.)

  You—a Bellefleur? Taking comfort from the cowardly thought of suicide?

  His first impulse was to throw it away; but of course the ice was solid, the vial might be discovered. So he put it back in his pocket. Since they were going to visit poor Jonathan Hecht this afternoon (Jonathan’s condition had worsened, he wasn’t expected to live beyond the New Year) it occurred to Noel that he should leave the vial with his old friend. Ah yes!—with Jonathan.

  “That poor old man,” Noel thought, his heart swelling charitably.

  The Vision

  High above the mist-shrouded river. In the many-faceted light, quivering with moisture, that breaks off the mountain. (The name of the mountain? Jedediah has forgotten. Only with an effort can he grasp that things—even so vast, so uncharted—have been given names.)