Isn’t it strange, people said, that the Bellefleur stories are all about love going wrong?—when of course, most of the time, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, things go perfectly well!
Noel laughed behind clouds of foul pipe smoke. . . . Yes indeed, he said, most of the time things go perfectly well. I’ve noticed that.
It was Yolande herself, at the precocious age of nine, who said, after having heard a fascinating (and convoluted: for it was necessarily expurgated for the ears of children) story about her father’s oldest brother Raoul, her uncle Raoul whom she had never once seen, who clearly lived in one of the strangest imaginable households, and lived in it happily enough—it was pretty little Yolande who exclaimed; “The curse on us is that we can’t love right!”
She was immediately hushed up. And cautioned never to say such a bizarre thing again, or even to think it. The very idea! Bellefleurs, after all, prided themselves on the depth and passion and longevity of their love. But to her brother Raphael she whispered, half in fear, “Oh, but what if it’s the truth—what if it’s the truth—and none of us can love right!” Her distress was such, one could not have said whether it was spontaneous or acquired; for even as a young child Yolande had been fond of exaggeration.
The trouble was, the tragedy was, no one cared to hear about the wonderful marriages. Wife and husband bound together for life, and happily; or at any rate not unhappily; who cared? In the midst of the children’s very world, for instance, there was the example of Garth and Little Goldie: forgiven almost at once for their recklessness in eloping, given a handsome little stone-and-stucco cottage on several acres of wooded land in Bellefleur Village, and the promise of as much financial support as Garth wished—though Garth, newly self-confident, and freed for the first time in memory of his waspish ill-temper, declared that he would earn every penny of the salary the family paid him for his help in managing the farms. There they were, two young people in love, handsome Garth and lovely Little Goldie, and everything had turned out well; but what was there to say about them?
By contrast, there was a great deal to say about love gone wrong.
And disagreements too. The children were awed by their elders quarreling among themselves, about who had loved whom most, or first, or why a love affair had gone wrong, whether it had been poisoned from within or without, whether it was part of the curse or just a bad accident. . . . Whether a love had been “tragic” or just plain “shameful . . .”
Everyone knew of the Onondagan Indian woman with whom Jean-Pierre lived for several years, and with whom he died, in Bushkill’s Ferry (her name was Antoinette—she had been baptized Catholic, and named for Marie Antoinette whose son, the Dauphin—King Louis XVII—was commonly believed to have escaped to the Chautauqua mountains); the match was considered a wicked one, though not half so wicked as it would have been had the old man actually married the woman. But few people knew of the much more shameful liaison Jean-Pierre began at the time of his wedding to poor Hilda Osborne, many years previously. He may have just returned from his honeymoon at the time (a two-month trip through the South, culminating with a grand ball in the newlyweds’ honor at Chapel Hall in Charlottesville, Virginia), or he may in fact have begun the liaison while still an engaged man: but the shame of it was, he took as a mistress a coarse lumber-camp follower named Lucille who had lived with a succession of men in the Lake Noir area, and so alternated his attentions between this woman in the country and his lawful wife Hilda in Manhattan (where they lived, supported by the Osborne’s generosity, in the palatial brownstone originally built by George Washington’s aide “Baron de Steuben,” and lavishly remodeled by the Osbornes), that the two women—so different in quality, in temperament, in beauty, in worth!—were made pregnant by him within the same week. Lucille—“Brown Lucy”—remained a shadowy, enigmatic figure—perhaps “Lucille” was not even her name—and it wasn’t known at what point in Jean-Pierre’s ambitious career he jettisoned the woman. As late as 1795, when Hilda first attempted to file for divorce, he was said to have been involved with a north country woman, presumably Lucille; there were children now—three or four, at least, all sons—but how (so Jean-Pierre as well as his sympathetic friends asked, laughing), how could one be certain whose sons were whose, when a woman of such promiscuous morals as this “Brown Lucy” was involved—! By the time Jean-Pierre ran for Congress in 1797 the woman had been dropped from his life, for pragmatic reasons. (And then, as he explained, when drunk, to anyone who would listen, even to his son Louis and his daughter-in-law Germaine, he hadn’t loved her any more than he had loved the other one, his wife: both women were desperate stratagems to keep him from throwing himself in the river or slashing his throat because the only woman he’d ever loved was lost to him when he was still a young man. . . . )
Of Harlan Bellefleur’s women little was known—he was said to have been involved, for a brief while, with the widow of a saloonkeeper somewhere in Ohio, and was said to have had, in unclear succession, not only a full-blooded Chippewa “wife” but a Haitian “wife” as well; and in the crumpled papers found on his person, after his death, there was a scribbled message for his “sole heir” in New Orleans, about whom no one knew anything—except that, as an officer of sorts alongside Jean and Pierre Laffite, in Andrew Jackson’s militia (made up of sailors, backwoods riflemen, Creoles, Santo Domingan Negroes, and Baratarian pirates), he had had occasion to spend some time in New Orleans in late 1814 and the early weeks of 1815. But it was doubtful, as Louis’s grieving widow said, that Harlan had left a “legitimate” widow, still less a “legitimate” heir.
Then there was Raphael, who sailed to England in order to acquire the right sort of wife: and returned with the frail young woman (eighteen at the time, to Raphael’s thirty-one) Violet Odlin, whose neurasthenia deepened with each pregnancy (there were ten in all—though only three live births). Perhaps the marriage was a good one. No one knew, since Raphael and Violet rarely exchanged a word in public; in fact, after some eight or nine years of marriage they were rarely seen together except at the most public, the most social, of events—at which they were extremely courteous to each other, with the graciousness normally reserved for strangers who suspect they will not get along, and who are accordingly all the more congenial. (Judging from the portrait that remained, Violet Odlin possessed a frail, faded, nervously intense kind of beauty, and her wedding dress with its hundreds of pearls and its eight-foot-long veil of Belgian lace had a waist so tiny—seventeen inches—that the young woman who had worn it must have been hardly larger than a child. Indeed, it was the only dress in the family that Christabel could wear for her wedding, and even then they had to squeeze her rather brutally into it.)
The tragedy of Samuel Bellefleur’s “love match” was well known despite the Bellefleurs’ attempts to keep it secret, and to this day a worried adult might wonder aloud whether, when a child was behaving badly, he or she might also go over to the other side. (The crude expression take up with Negroes was sometimes used as well.) Hiram’s marriage to unhappy Eliza Perkins lasted hardly more than a year, but could not be said, even initially, to have been a love match; and though Della’s ill-fated marriage to Stanton Pym was a love match, on her testimony at least, it came to an abrupt and tragic conclusion, albeit an accidental conclusion, after only a few months. And then there was Raoul, about whom no one dared speak above a whisper.
Most extraordinary of all, however, was the “love match” of poor Hepatica Bellefleur.
Hepatica lived a very long time ago, but her example was often raised when Bellefleur girls behaved in a headstrong manner. You know what happened to Hepatica—! their mothers said. And even the boldest of the girls grew sober.
Hepatica was a very pretty, and very spoiled, young girl of sixteen when she fell in love with the man who called himself Duane Doty Fox. (When, in subsequent years, Jeremiah became acquainted with relatives of the legitimate Duane Doty—the Wisconsin land speculator and circuit judge of some renown—they c
laimed to have never heard of “Duane Doty Fox.” Which was unsurprising.)
Sunny, even-tempered, sometimes a little childish, Hepatica had long wavy hair in coloring rather like Yolande’s, and a fondness for concocting, as often as the cook would allow, elaborate fanciful dishes of her own invention—a shellfish-and-whipped-cream mousse, an extremely sweet syllabub, a peanut-butter-and-pineapple tart that was a favorite of the children’s to this very day; and of course, being a wealthy young Bellefleur heiress, and a strikingly pretty one as well, she had innumerable suitors, among them several very desirable young men (and some no longer young, precisely, but desirable just the same for various practical reasons): but without so much as asking her parents permission, she turned them all rudely down. I don’t ever want to get married, she said, making a fastidious little moue; I don’t want all that fuss.
But then, one warm April afternoon, while being driven home from the village (where she frequently visited with the rector’s daughter—the only girl in the vicinity who was not too embarrassingly a social inferior) she happened to see, working with a small gang of laborers alongside the road, a most unusual young man. He was tall—he was shirtless—he wore a straw hat pulled low over his forehead—and as the Bellefleur two-seater passed he raised his head slowly, with the unhurried calm of a creature so wild, so totally undomesticated, that he had yet to discover pain at the hands of human beings: and stared openly at Hepatica in her yellow polka-dot frock and bonnet. No other man in the area would have dared look at her in quite that way; even small children, living in the vicinity of the castle, were cautioned not to stare.
But how silly he was, Hepatica thought, shirtless, gleaming with perspiration, his chest hair furry and frizzy—how wonderfully hilarious! (For it was extraordinary, the sight of a bare-chested man, particularly along the lakefront road—which was very nearly a private road of the Bellefleurs, though in theory it was open to anyone. Most unusual, Hepatica thought. Most strange.)
She saw too that he was handsome, though swarthy-skinned; and bearded (and she was not at all certain that she liked beards). For days afterward she kept seeing him at the side of the road, lowering his pickax to gaze at her, his face strong and broad and deeply tanned, his eyes very dark; dark but gleaming; intensely gleaming—or so she imagined. It did no good to chatter about him and ridicule him, to whoever would listen, for she kept thinking about him, thinking and thinking about him, and at the mere suggestion of a walk to the village, or even down to the lake, her heart fluttered so that she felt almost faint.
Where a more modest (or at least a more prudent) girl would have waited to encounter the young man again by accident, Hepatica, acting with a single-minded impetuosity more suitable, perhaps, in one of her brothers, made inquiries among the servants and the villagers, and soon learned that the young man, new to the area (he had just come down from Canada, it was believed, and had lived for a while previously in Wisconsin), was a blacksmith’s assistant and a laborer-for-hire in the village; and his name was Duane Doty Fox.
Did he have any family? shameless Hepatica asked. Did he have a wife?
Evidently he had no one—no one at all. It wasn’t even known where, exactly, he lived.
Ah, but didn’t he live in the village? Hepatica asked.
He worked in the village but he lived, so far as anyone knew, up in the woods. A strange, quiet, unfriendly man . . . though he was said to be an excellent worker.
And so one fine spring day Hepatica walked to the village, accompanied by a servant girl whom she sent off on an errand of embarrassing flimsiness, and, quite alone, quite fearless, she strode directly to the blacksmith’s shop (where her family never did business, since at that time the Bellefleurs employed their own blacksmith), and met with Duane Doty Fox. It isn’t known what they talked of, at that first meeting—the conversation must have been awkward and strained—Hepatica must have been somewhat embarrassed—though perhaps (she was a marvelously inventive and imaginative child, and told lies with such a pretty flair that they never seemed serious) she simply prattled on about her favorite pony and his need for new horseshoes. She might have asked him about Canada, what sort of Indians and wild beasts lived there; or about Wisconsin; or what he thought of the new President; or any flibbertigibbet thing that flew into her head.
And so they met, and fell in love. Hepatica Bellefleur and the swarthy stranger known only as Duane Doty Fox: and it was a measure of Hepatica’s precocious ingenuity that they contrived to meet some five or six times (always in the woods, or along a little-frequented stretch of Lake Noir; once on the banks of Bloody Run, high above the water) without arousing the family’s suspicions. Just when the first of the gossip made its way to the manor, Hepatica, her eyes shining, brought Fox into the castle itself and introduced him—introduced him as her husband-to-be. There was her tiny white hand in his enormous grimy fist—there was her curly wheat-colored hair beside his shoulder. It was not even a question of love, Hepatica said bluntly. It was a question of need. Neither could live without the other and that was that. . . .
The family objected, as one might expect. But Hepatica, perhaps telling the truth and perhaps not, simply whispered something in her mother’s ear; something feverish and secret and unsurprising. And so the engagement took place. And then the wedding—a private wedding attended by only a few Bellefleurs, in the old manor chapel.
Are you happy? Hepatica’s girl cousins asked enviously.
She had only to smile at them, showing her lovely white teeth, and they knew the answer. But there was something alarming (or so they liked to say, afterward) about the intensity of feeling in her. . . . It was overwrought and exaggerated and unhealthy. Why, just to see that big dark brute squeeze his bride’s hand in his, and smile his hesitant but unmistakably sensual smile . . . ! Just to be near the couple, and sense the unrestrained passion of their “love” . . .
The Bellefleurs were generous, however, and gave the couple a small farm up in the foothills, on Mink Creek, with the promise of assistance whenever Fox should request it, and the promise—unstated, but quite tangible—to Hepatica that she might return at any time. (For she wasn’t the first Bellefleur to have married impetuously. And she might very well, like some of the others, wake one morning to a realization of her mistake.)
Now time passed: weeks and months and part of a year. And the young couple kept to themselves. Though frequently invited to the manor they never came. Hepatica’s parents were heartbroken; and then angry; and bewildered; and again heartbroken; but what was to be done? They drove out to the farm as often as they dared (not being invited), and spent an empty hour or so with Hepatica, who looked and behaved much the same as usual, and insisted that she adored being an old-fashioned wife who did her own cooking and baking and housecleaning. (Though the house hardly looked clean. And the coffee cake she offered her parents, along with tea served in Sèvres cups already cracked, tasted lardy—not at all the sort of thing she had made at home.) Duane Doty Fox stayed out in the field, working. Or in the barn. Working. Shirtless, with his dirty straw hat set rakishly on his head, in manure-splattered boots. He did no more than wave a pawlike hand at his in-laws, ducking into a doorway, turning away out of shyness or indifference. How crude he was, their new son-in-law! How clumsy, how barely human!
And then one of Hepatica’s uncles encountered Fox at a supply store beside the lake, and was astonished at the sight of him: for he hadn’t remembered his niece’s fiancé as quite so dark and hairy. And he was gruff as well: mumbled in so guttural a voice the storekeeper could hardly understand him. His muscular shoulders were somewhat stooped, and his neck was thick, and his beard was tangled and snarled. Worst of all, he barely responded to Hepatica’s uncle’s courteous greeting. A nasal sound that was part a grunt and part a snarl . . . and that was all.
Imagine, so primitive a man married into the Bellefleur family . . . !
During the long winter they kept to themselves, but soon after the first thaw Hepatica arrived a
t the manor, unaccompanied—she’d just ridden over for an afternoon’s visit, she said, and didn’t want anyone to make a fuss. Though she kept up a steady stream of chatter—charming and girlish and entertaining as always—she was obviously unhappy, and there were sad dark dents beneath her eyes. But to every question she replied in the same bright insouciant way, saying only that it was a pity Duane couldn’t be talked into coming along—but he was so shy, he was so very shy—he hoped they would understand.
(Was Hepatica pregnant? The question couldn’t be asked, and she gave no hints. But she was distressed about something, despite her frivolous conversation.)
From time to time Bellefleur men encountered Fox in the area, and it was something of a joke, at first, how coarse and bearish he had become. Hepatica’s cooking, perhaps? Or had he always inclined toward stoutness? His beard was no bushier than ever, perhaps, but now hair grew on his throat, and no doubt on his shoulders. There were tufts of thick hair on the backs of his hands. His eyes, which had been of ordinary size in the past, so far as anyone remembered, now looked small and close-set; even rather stupidly cruel. (Was he drinking? Was he drunk when they met him? He always brushed past or turned away, often without even a grunted hello.) They joked of “Fox,” saying that he hadn’t the comeliness of a red or even a gray fox; he hadn’t a fox’s intelligent grace. His hair resembled thick dark quills, heavy with oil. And his nose . . . his nose had become somewhat flattened, hadn’t it . . . ?
Or were they imagining everything? (For the Bellefleurs, despite their affection for Hepatica, could not resist jests of a coarse nature; and such jests—as the men readily admitted—required a certain distortion of human reality.)
Hepatica came to visit her mother more and more frequently, and sometimes she began weeping as soon as she arrived; but she never explained what was wrong. Asked why she was crying she would say lightly, Oh, I just feel sad! or, I’m such a silly girl, wasn’t I always a silly girl, don’t take any notice of me!
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