Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  His linen was changed less often. His collars were unbuttoned. He declined to come downstairs when his friends called, and gave as an excuse for missing drill, and for missing the sessions with Herod that had once consumed so much of his time, a drawling mumble about feeling “sluggish.” After weeping in Raphael’s arms Violet suddenly grew angry, and spoke in a rapid low voice of the “slut” who was ruining her boy: it wasn’t anyone on the household staff, she was certain, she was certain, she didn’t think it could be one of the female laborers, for how could he smuggle the creature up to the third floor day after day?—but he did have a woman, of course he had a woman, a filthy wicked slattern who wanted only to destroy Raphael’s heir! (Violet’s frenzy, as well as the remarkable words she used, embarrassed her husband to the point of stupefaction: he had never imagined his wife knew such words, let alone of the reality they indicated.)

  There were times when, emerging from the Turquoise Room, Samuel actually staggered, and his handsome face—more handsome than ever, it seemed—was oily with sweat. His skin might be feverish to the touch, his lips parched and raw. His mustache, untrimmed, bristled in all directions, and must have tickled; Violet once picked a tiny kinky hair off his lip—and thereby incurred her son’s startled displeasure. “Don’t touch me, Mother,” he said, recoiling. But at least, at that moment, he looked her fully in the face.

  Of course they investigated the room in his absence, at least in the first weeks when he allowed them in, but they found nothing—only the scattered newspapers, a cushion out of place, finger smears on the mirror, the minute hand of the clock slightly bent, and the clock no longer ticking. The odor of unwashed flesh, the odor—hardly more subtle—of fleshly delirium was sometimes faint, sometimes overpoweringly strong, so that Violet, hardly able to breathe, commanded the servants to throw open all the windows. How hideous, that smell! How obscene! And yet there was nothing to attach it to: the Turquoise Room was as extraordinarily beautiful as ever, as magnificent as ever, a room fit for royalty.

  The only time Samuel showed much interest in his parents’ increasing alarm—and then the interest was rather mild—was when Raphael pointed out that he’d been hidden away in the room for eleven hours straight; and Samuel, opening his blood-threaded eyes wide, said that that couldn’t be the case—he’d been in there only an hour or so—wasn’t it still morning? Raphael explained, trembling, that it was by no means morning. Samuel had been in that room all day, and did he intend to sleep in there again tonight . . . ? What was he doing in that room! Samuel began to gnaw at his thumbnail. He frowned, looked through his father, seemed to be making rapid calculations. Finally he said with a wry shrug of his shoulders that “time was different there.”

  He was absent for longer periods of time, for days at a stretch, and when he did appear at the dinner table he yawned, ran his hand lazily through his hair, let his food grow cold on his plate. He ate so little, he should have been wasting away: but in fact he was as solid as ever, and there was even the beginning of a slight paunch high above his belt. When Violet demanded to know what he was doing in the Turquoise Room he blinked at her as if not knowing what she meant, and said in a hollow, husky voice, “Just reading, Mother, what do you . . . what do you think?” and his slack lips drooped into a negligent smile. He disappeared for three days, and then for four; when they forced open the lock to the Turquoise Room he was nowhere to be seen. But then he appeared downstairs that very evening, and showed surprise once again that he’d been away so long. According to his calculations he’d gone upstairs to read the newspapers and had been there about two hours, but according to their calculations he had been gone for four days.

  “I think I understand,” he said slowly, again with that dull loose smile. “Time is clocks, not a clock. Not your clock. You can’t do anything more with time than try to contain it, like carrying water in a sieve. . . .”

  And so, finally, he disappeared into the Turquoise Room. He entered it one evening after dinner, and never came out; he simply disappeared. The windows were not only closed but locked from the inside. There were secret passageways out of two or three other rooms in the castle (one of them Raphael’s study) but there was no secret passageway out of the Turquoise Room. The boy had simply disappeared. He no longer existed. There was no trace, no farewell note, there had been no significant final remark: Samuel Bellefleur had simply ceased to exist.

  One night some months later. Raphael, still grieving for his son, cut short his meeting with a group of Republicans in a city five hundred miles away, and returned to the castle, and ran upstairs to the Turquoise Room (which was now kept locked, since it was so clearly haunted), and, with his gold-knobbed cane, smashed the enormous mirror. Shards of glass flew everywhere, shards of all sizes, icicle-shaped, pebble-shaped, some small as needles, driving themselves into Raphael’s flesh. He continued to strike the mirror, however, again and again, gripping his cane with both hands, sobbing and shouting unintelligibly. They had taken his son! They had taken his beloved son from him!

  When he was finished only a few slivers of mirror remained on the wall. What faced him—held up, still, by the exquisite Italian columns—was nothing more than the mirror’s plain oak backing, mere wood, two-dimensional, reflecting nothing, containing no beauty, badly hacked by the spasmodic blows of his cane.

  Tirpitz

  On her many travels—to Nautauga Falls, to the state capital, to Port Oriskany, to faraway Vanderpoel—Leah always took Germaine, no matter that the little girl would have preferred to remain at home, playing in the walled garden with Vernon or Christabel or the others; no matter that Gideon objected. “I can’t travel without her,” Leah said. “She’s my heart—my soul. I can’t leave her behind.” “Then stay home yourself,” Gideon said. And Leah stared at him, stared him down. “You don’t need to make these trips,” Gideon said, faltering. “It’s just something you are deluding yourself with. . . . We don’t need you to make these appeals for us.”

  Leah, knowing how the falsity of his words must strike him, knowing that he couldn’t fail to hear, for all his hypocrisy, their tinniness, saw no reason to reply. She simply rang for one of the servants, to help her pack.

  There was the matter of Jean-Pierre II unjustly imprisoned in Powhatassie, and Leah’s initial petitions denied; there was the matter of locating a partner (one with, as Hiram expressed it, “unlimited resources”) for certain mining operations east of Contracoeur, now that the scheme for managed cutting privileges in the pine forests had fallen through (and though Leah never explicitly spoke of the brothers’ ignoble failure with Meldrom neither Gideon nor Ewan was allowed to forget it: Leah would say only “Now we must shift our plan of attack,” “Now we must begin again at zero”); there was the need to check up on Bellefleur property, much of it operating at a loss, or with very slender profits; there was the matter of keeping up social contacts (which Leah, like Cornelia, called “thinking of our friends”)—for the day wasn’t distant when the many Bellefleur girls (Yolande, Vida, Morna, even Christabel, and now even Little Goldie) would be of marriageable age; and for a while, though she couldn’t have been sincere about it, there was the matter of finding a suitable husband for poor Garnet Hecht (who had surprised everyone, or nearly everyone, by having a baby: a darling little girl with dark curly hair and dark button eyes who hadn’t at this point any name, since Garnet was too listless to name her, yet too weakly stubborn to acquiesce in one of the names Leah suggested). So Leah was busy, marvelously busy, no sooner back at Bellefleur Manor and soaking in a hot bath than she was planning another trip, another mode of attack. Attorneys were hired, and then dismissed, for being incapable of “understanding what I say, when I don’t say it,” as Leah explained; there were brokers, bank officials, bookkeepers, accountants, tax lawyers, men whose names turned up like mica in a spaded garden as Leah talked excitedly at the dinner table of her plans, and then were covered over again and forgotten; there were of course Bellefleurs in other cities, frequently with ot
her names (Zundert, Sandusky, Medick, Cinquefoil, Filaree), who should—or should not—be cultivated, depending on their usefulness; there were so many politicians—from Governor Grounsel and his Lieutenant-Governor Horehound down through unelected party hacks who might have impressed Leah with their claim of knowing what really went on—that no one in the family, not even Hiram, could keep them straight. What this promiscuous assortment of men had in common was Leah: she believed they might be useful, or might at least put her in contact with others who would be useful.

  Early on, Leah had won over grandfather Noel and uncle Hiram: they were clearly besotted with her, and thought it quite reasonable—even “pragmatic,” in Hiram’s words—that the old Bellefleur estate of 1780 might be regained, by judicious maneuverings. It would take time, it would require ingenuity and cunning, and secrecy (for if Bellefleur enemies suspected the family’s plan they would leap in and buy up the land simply out of spite); it would certainly require diligence and tact (and unfortunately the Bellefleurs had a reputation, generations old, of tactlessness); and charm. So if anyone objected to Leah’s schemes Noel and Hiram defended them, and great-grandmother Elvira soon joined in (for, as she neared her hundredth birthday, she was visited with increasingly apocalyptic dreams: floods, fires, lightning storms that illuminated the heavens: premonitions that something extraordinary was to happen to the family); and even Cornelia, who customarily opposed her daughter-in-law as a matter of principle, appeared to see some merit in certain aspects of the plan . . . for the grandchildren would be of marriageable age soon, the boys as well as the girls, and she hoped . . . ah, how fervently she hoped . . . that the new generation would choose more discreetly than the old. Gideon quarreled with Leah in the privacy of their suite, and maintained a sullen courtesy elsewhere, and Ewan sometimes vigorously challenged her (he was especially antipathetic to the scheme of securing a retrial or an outright pardon for Jean-Pierre II: Why not let the old boy spend the rest of his days in peace at Powhatassie, by now he’s adjusted, he must have a circle of comrades, he receives a monthly allowance from Father for little treats and niceties, doesn’t he—why not let him remain there, and not stir up trouble again?); but when he helped see her off, climbing into the old Packard touring car that fairly sagged beneath the weight of her luggage, turning to wave a goodbye kiss at whoever was assembled on the marble steps, Leah in her smart magenta traveling cloak with the matching kid shoes, her white gloves buttoned at the wrist, the filmy white aigrette bobbing on her slope-brimmed cream-colored hat, her rich glowing exultant face turned to him (and now, nearly a year after Germaine’s birth, she had lost the extra weight she’d carried, and even the tiny pinch of flesh beneath her chin, so like Germaine’s baby fat, had disappeared)—why, he could not stop himself from grinning, she was so handsome a woman, of course she would succeed! If any Bellefleur succeeded in this century, it would be Leah.

  Through a helpful acquaintance in the attorney-general’s office Leah met a charming middle-aged man named Vervain, a furrier, who showed some interest in the possibility of entering into a partnership with the Bellefleurs, though he knew nothing about mining; but it soon developed that Vervain hadn’t the sort of capital Leah required. (And he was too well protected by his female relatives, as a rich widower, to be a possibility for poor Garnet, who might have appealed to him . . . a husbandless spiritless frail little mutt of a girl, halfway attractive if glimpsed in the right light, who somehow—no one knew how—no one could guess how—had had a darling little baby a few weeks ago.) But it was in the company of Vervain, who escorted both Leah and Germaine to the World’s Exposition at Vanderpoel, that Leah met P. T. Tirpitz, the banker and philanthropist, renowned throughout the state for his charitable donations of parks, lakes, renovated mansions, and immense sums of cash to worthwhile institutions (among them the Church of Christ, Scientist, to which he may have belonged). Long ago, it was thought, Tirpitz’s father had lent an undisclosed sum of money to Raphael Bellefleur, but Leah didn’t know if the transaction had taken place before the worst period of Raphael’s career—in short, she didn’t know if it had been fully repaid. It was a measure of Tirpitz’s gallantry that he made no allusion to past dealings with the Bellefleurs, and affected only a dim but flattering notion of their grandeur, and their significance in what he called “the magnificent history of our nation.”

  Though he must have been an elderly man at this time—smallish, bald, with odd planes and layers of bone in his skull that made Leah think of her mother, and a tooth chipped in an inverted V, which gave him a boyish puckish disingenuous look—he appeared as robust as a man in his mid-fifties, or even younger. On one of their strolls through the Exposition grounds he insisted upon carrying Germaine, who had gotten tired, and it quite impressed Leah—who was, all her life, to be impressed by such obvious demonstrations of strength even when she had long outgrown their usefulness, and could see them, clearly, as nothing more than sentimental vestiges of a too-lively girlhood—remember, for instance, the daring midnight climb of her cousin Gideon into her bedroom where he fought and murdered Love!—it impressed her just the same, that the man’s legendary wealth, and the rumors of his association with a church she thought nothing if not comical, had not weakened him. His muscles were small but hard, and he staggered only a little under the hefty child’s weight. “You really don’t need to carry Germaine, Mr. Tirpitz,” Leah said, her smile gracious behind the filmy gauze of her veil. “I need to do nothing,” Tirpitz replied. But he winked at Leah to soften the effect of his words.

  (She was to learn later that Tirpitz, for the past fifty years, had exercised every morning: sit-ups, push-ups, barbells, leg weights. “The body is an instrument by which we can approach God,” Tirpitz said. “It is the only instrument.”)

  He took her to dinner, and arranged for one of his most trusted servants to stay at Leah’s hotel with Germaine (even so, Leah worried: she had become, since the birth of this extraordinary child, an almost fussy mother who felt vaguely that something was missing from her own body, an arm or a leg or at least a finger, when her child was out of the room: and then Germaine seemed to aid her so, simply by gazing at her and smiling); he took her to the sailboat races on the Eden River, and to the opera, and to the private reception that followed the presentation of a medal to the visiting Emperor of Trapopogonia by Governor Grounsel on the third night of the Exposition (the emperor, whose kingdom was east of Afghanistan, disappointed Leah by resembling Hiram, and by speaking an almost accentless English—though she was naturally flattered by his warmly appreciative remarks to her); he arranged for the three of them to explore the Exposition early Sunday morning, before it was open to the public, pointing out exhibits that were of more than ordinary interest (engines; rockets; calculating machines; the City of the Future with its moving sidewalks and robot-servants and controlled temperatures and handsome manikin-people; the Hospital of the Future where blood, sperm, tissues, bones, and every organ—including the brain—would be stored, and would be available for patients), and ending the tour with the Tirpitz Pavilion, which was of course his own, and which both Leah and Germaine loved best: a five-acre jumble of marvels that included painted and bejeweled baby elephants; a white marble fountain with hundreds of tiers that sent out spray in a dizzying variety of forms; a killer whale named Beppo in a green-tinted transparent tank; a small mountain of orchids of the most extraordinary subtlety and beauty; Egyptian and Mesopotamian statuary; the Zodiac, in diamonds, fixed to a black velvet covering; a life-sized and amazingly lifelike Abraham Lincoln who intoned, in a grave, gentle, but forceful voice, “The Emancipation Proclamation” innumerable times a day; carnivorous plants from the Amazon region that, with their yard-wide petals and the steel-spring trap of their jaws, ate and digested not only insects but mice and birds fed to them by attendants. . . . And there was more, much more, so much more that Leah’s head swam, and she felt the drunkenness of euphoria without having tasted (for it wasn’t yet noon) a single drop of alcohol. />
  “Mr. Tirpitz,” Leah said, laying her white-gloved hand on his arm, “what is the theme of your pavilion?—what is the connection between all these wonderful things?”

  “Can’t you guess, Mrs. Bellefleur?”

  “Guess! Can’t I guess! Oh, I’m no good at guessing, Mr. Tirpitz, my children are far sharper, if only Bromwell were here—you’d adore Bromwell, I think—I’m no good at guessing. What is the connection?”

  “But, Mrs. Bellefleur,” Tirpitz said, smiling so that the inverted V on his chipped tooth showed, “surely you can guess.”

  Yet she could not. So Tirpitz turned to Germaine, and squatted before her, and asked if she could guess; and the child—hardly more than a baby, with the baby fat still plumping out her cheeks—stared at the old man with her tawny green-bronze eyes, as if gazing into his very soul, and said in a small, shy, but unfaltering voice: “Yes. I can.”

  Tirpitz laughed. He straightened, with some awkwardness (for the small of his back ached), and at once changed the subject, grasping both Leah and Germaine by the hand, leading them on, for now it was nearly time for the Exposition to open to the public, and they must escape before the hordes descended.

  “I find it very hard to breathe in the air of crowds, don’t you,” he said.

  THE EVENING BEFORE Leah was scheduled to return to Bellefleur Manor she was invited to Tirpitz’s private suite on the nineteenth floor of the Vanderpoel Hotel, where, Tirpitz promised, they would discuss the Bellefleurs’ financial situation. Quite by accident—it really was an accident, he insisted—he knew a little about the geology of the Chautauqua region, and the iron ore and titanium deposits east of Contracoeur (titanium!—Leah had never heard the word before), and would like very much to discuss the plans for several mining operations Leah had mentioned. Leah had been almost girlishly pleased by his tone, and did not mind his flirtatiousness (“Ah, but I dread to ask how much money you and this charming daughter of yours want!” he said, and Leah said quickly, “Not what we want but what we need, Mr. Tirpitz,” and he said, “For the maintenance of that enormous estate in the mountains, and to finance your husband’s expensive tastes in horses?” and Leah said, “He’s sold all his horses, and the estate maintains itself—it almost maintains itself,” and he said, “But do I dare believe that, dear Mrs. Bellefleur!”) and his paternal habit of seizing her hand and rubbing it briskly between his own. (As if Leah’s strong, blunt-fingered, overheated hand needed warming!) She did not mind, even, the old man’s smell—an indefinable odor, crisply acerbic as the air of an attic which pigeons have befouled for decades, and then again dry and tough as old parchment; and then again (when he first greeted her, when he had just left his rooms) oily-sweet from the French cologne he dabbed liberally on himself.