Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But after the amazing birth of Bromwell and Christabel nothing happened.

  Two babies, a boy and a girl, and both handsome; and both in fine health. And for a year or so Leah was grateful not to be pregnant, since even with nursemaids and servants and Edna to oversee the house she certainly did not want another baby. But then the months passed, and the years, and she did want another baby, and nothing happened; nothing at all. One morning as she lay beside her sleeping husband she thought clearly that she would be thirty years old before long, and then she would be thirty-five, and forty, and—and forty-five: and it would be over. The womanly part of her life would be over.

  The family insisted upon children, of course. They adored children, or at least the idea, the sentiment, of children. Increase and multiply: go forth and populate the earth: for the earth is there to be populated, by Bellefleurs. The Bellefleur line was not to dwindle away as so many New World aristocratic lines had: Raphael, who managed to inflict ten pregnancies on his rather neurasthenic wife Violet, often spoke of the need to have as many children as possible because (and he was quite correct) they could not all be relied upon to survive. He had a dread, an almost superstitious dread, of the Bellefleurs going the way of the Brendels (who had owned as much land in the mountains as Jean-Pierre himself, in the early 1800’s, but had lost it all through speculation, and sheer bad judgment, brought on by what Raphael considered a weakening of the intellect as a consequence of too much money and too much luxury: and the men disappeared, or simply refused to marry, or, if married, failed to have sons) and the Bettensons (Raphael was a boy of twelve when Frederich ran mad out into the snow after his lumbering company went bankrupt, and afterward his children all scattered and were never heard of again) and the Wydens (whose “name” survived today only with a black family in Fort Hanna, headed by the light-skinned descendant of one of Wyden’s slaves). It was great-grandmother Elvira’s belief that her father-in-law did not enjoy his children, in fact did not take much notice of them at all; but he was obsessed with having children, particularly sons, and never quite recovered from the tragic disappointment of his oldest son Samuel (who would have been Germaine’s great-uncle had he survived: though in fact he was believed not to have died, in the usual sense of the word, and still to exist, or at any rate to be present, in the manor, when Bromwell and Christabel were children). The line had come so close to dying out, to being eradicated, back at the very start: when poor Louis and his two sons and daughter were murdered over at Bushkill’s Ferry, and the only surviving Bellefleur was a mountain hermit no one had seen for years. And yet, miraculously, it had not died out . . . though there was the constant fear that it would, and all the land and fortune, or whatever remained of it, would fall to strangers.

  So Leah, despite her brash girlish disdain for such things, fell under the enchantment of the Lake Noir branch of the family, and shrewdly saw that Noel Bellefleur was a fool about pregnant women—even women like herself, of a size and a disposition not conventionally “feminine.” And once she was pregnant she found herself subdued; she found herself expressing an interest in the women in the family, and in their activities (quilting, crocheting, embroidering, overseeing the yearly canning, manipulating engagements, arranging for social evenings—a ceaseless round of social evenings, over the winters especially!—and vociferously mourning the dead) that was not hypocritical, or even experimental; she grew softer, and sweeter, and burst into tears easily, and liked nothing better than to curl up in Gideon’s arms, and she spent an inordinate amount of time during that first pregnancy sound asleep: sometimes she staggered with exhaustion an hour after waking, and (this, the restless young woman who had raced her handsome sorrel mare at valley competitions, and who had swum halfway across Lake Noir one rainy day in late September as a girl of sixteen, merely on a dare) could barely hold her head up through a meal, and yawned repeatedly, and napped everywhere in the lived-in part of the house and once or twice in parts of the house that were kept unheated, and, most astonishing of all, found it too much trouble to disagree when Gideon or his family spouted nonsense. Pregnant with the twins Leah grew even more beautiful. Her skin was golden, her perfect lips shaped themselves in a perpetual unconscious mesmerizing half-smile, her eyes, though deep-set and somewhat shadowed, took on a queer childlike brightness as if they had just been washed with tears. Even before the triumphant birth of twins her father-in-law had fallen in love with her, and revised (and in public) his doubts about the wisdom of Gideon’s marriage to a cousin from across the lake.

  (It was not simply that Leah was a first cousin of Gideon’s, but that she was a “poor” relative; and not simply that her mother Della bitterly despised the rest of the family; but, decades ago, the entire family—headed at that time by Jeremiah and Elvira, her parents—united to oppose poor Della’s infatuation with Stanton Pym on the grounds that this upstart young bank clerk with his fashionable outfits and his imported automobile was a shameless, fantastic, ingenious fortune hunter, and any issue of their union was likely to be flawed—though strapping Leah did not appear to be flawed.)

  Nevertheless the marriage did take place, and Leah and Gideon obviously adored each other, and Leah quickly became pregnant—but not too quickly, for that would have disturbed the older Bellefleurs as much as it would have disturbed Della herself—and gave birth to twins after a lengthy but not inordinately fussy labor; and all was well. For a while. For several years. And then . . . Do you know what I wish, she whispered to Gideon, I wish we would have another baby, do you think I’m silly, do you think the twins are still too small . . . ? And she began to yearn for a baby, to daydream, to invent silly names; even to befriend her sister-in-law Lily, who had of course been living in the manor for years before Leah’s own arrival, and who was somewhat disdainful (ah, it’s mere jealousy! Gideon assured her) of Gideon’s bride. Competitive as a girl in her horseback riding and swimming and even in her schoolwork (though she had never been a really good student, her mind was too restless, her imagination too playful) she began to feel, to be, competitive as a woman. As a mother. As a would-be mother. She looked upon Lily with envy, though she did not envy Lily her husband, or her actual children (except for sloe-eyed Raphael with his shy good manners and his obvious admiration for her); she coveted her sister-in-law’s easy pregnancies. Naturally she did not really want to be a brood mare (as she unforgivably said one night, in Cornelia’s presence, uncaring how her words offended her mother-in-law) but she would not have minded, no, she would not at all have minded, just one more baby. Even a girl.

  A fever of desire grew in her, and she and Gideon made love passionately, and frequently; sometimes one would feel the other staring, and turn, and see with a pang of desire so strong it was nearly convulsive (and this quite frequently in public, even at large social gatherings in neighbors’ homes) the other gazing so rawly, so openly that—that there was nothing to be done except the two of them must stammer excuses, and leave, and hurry away together. They were hardly able to wait until they were safe in the privacy of their suite of rooms before they tore at each other’s clothes, and kissed hungrily, and groaned aloud with the violence of their desire. Once they did not make it to the manor, but hurried into the old icehouse at the edge of the lake; another time, returning from a wedding party in Nautauga Falls, Gideon drove his car boldly off the road and across a hilly field until it came to rest, not quite hidden, in a stand of burnt-out hemlock.

  Gideon fell ever more deeply in love with his wife over the years. It was indeed like falling—he felt himself sinking, plunging, disappearing—being sucked into a passion for her, for her voracious appetite for him as well as for her glorious body itself, which he had never anticipated as a bridegroom. He fell more and more deeply in love with Leah, and at the same time he rather feared her. During their turbulent courtship he had been halfway fearful of her, but halfway amused as well—she was so defiantly virginal, so clear to give her young cousin to know that she disdained love and marriage and se
x and above all men and their animal natures; but after their marriage, after the birth of the twins, it seemed to him that the frequent savagery with which she clutched at him spoke of a Leah deeper, more impersonal, more puzzling than any he had guessed at: than any he had married. She seemed to be a woman, any woman, and not the particular young woman he loved.

  In the delirium of passion her skin went dead-white, and it seemed to him that her lovely mouth, her lovely eyes, her somewhat flared nostrils were harsh tears in that skin, the mouth especially straining for release. He could not hold her tightly enough. He could not penetrate her deeply enough. Their lovemaking gave off an odor of heat, of merciless pummeling intensity, and though they whispered to each other Leah and Gideon, and uttered their secret love words, it was not always a certainty that Leah and Gideon were involved. His taste on her anxious dry lips, her taste on his, the finest hairs of their sweat-slick squirming bodies twined together, and whole patches of skin made suddenly abrasive, raw as sandpaper: what a struggle, what a contest! Simply to keep from drowning was an effort, Gideon sometimes thought ruefully, lying exhausted beside his sleeping wife, whose breath still heaved in sleep, harsh and uneven and troubled, though the subtle rosy flush now tinted her throat and part of her face. He had thought of Leah as a ferocious virgin, in the early days of their marriage, and it had pleased him, in a sense, to pretend alarm at the remarkable strength—the remarkable physical strength—of his young wife; now the very muscularity of her desire, her choked grasping need, the curious fact (which should not have occurred to him, since he loved her so very much and wanted to protect her from all insult, even his own) that she was willing to be . . . shameless: that in the desperate agony of those last minutes of love, when it was evident that she might, she very well might, fail to reach the climax her body so violently demanded, she was willing to beg: groaning his name, half-grunting, not knowing what she said, what crude words forced their way out of her. Leah Pym, his proud young cousin, tall and broad-shouldered and supremely self-confident, knowing the value of her beauty, the value of her magnificent head of thick auburn hair, the value quite simply of her soul (which stood somewhat apart from her, detached and arrogant and quick to pass judgment on her as well as on others)—how has it happened, Gideon wondered, with guilty pleasure, that she has been so transformed?

  He thought: Is it I, Gideon, who has transformed her?

  Long ago as children they had played certain games that left Gideon dry-mouthed and terribly upset. He saw Leah rarely, he was warned against seeking her out, she was Della Pym’s daughter—Della who hated them all—and so the opportunities of meeting her, joining in games with her, were few. But he remembered one occasion. At the old brick community center in the village. When he was already too mature for such games, and likely to make trouble. (Ewan had been banished from certain activities years before: he was brash, bullying, the size of a grown man, and the other children feared him.) A game called “The Needle’s Eye.” Singing in children’s quavering excited voices, marching in a ring, girls and boys alternating, grasping hands, a game that had been played for generations, children circling, hot-faced, their eyes snatching at one another, Leah twelve years of age and a head taller than the other girls, her lovely face flushed as if with windburn, her dark eyes avoiding his. Gideon took his place on the inside of the circle and clasped hands with a Wilde girl from downriver, over the heads of the marching children, and his pulses rang with the familiar witless words he paid no attention to, for he was staring—staring—at his young cousin with the waist-long auburn hair and the small, high breasts that had begun to push against her hand-crocheted blue sweater.

  The needle’s eye that does supply / The thread that runs so truly / It has caught many a smiling lass / And now it has caught you. / Oh, it has caught one and it has caught two. / It has caught many a smiling lass / And now it has caught you. Gideon’s partner did not want to bring their arched arms down over Leah’s balky head, out of jealousy or out of simple fear that Leah might jab her in the ribs, but Gideon forced their arms down, trapping his cousin, and the boys who grasped her hands released them, and there Leah stood, blushing angrily, staring at the floor, as the children sang “The Needle’s Eye” through once again, now lustily, with an air of barely restrained violence. Leah was to be kissed. In public. Before everyone’s eyes. Leah Pym, her face gone a furious pink, her lower lip protruding, her gaze lowered in shame. The needle’s eye that does supply / The thread that runs so true. . . .

  Gideon was not accustomed to brooding over the past; he was not accustomed to thinking in this way, perhaps to thinking at all—it wasn’t in his nature. But the memory of that asinine game made his eyes fill with tears, and his pulses leapt, for he was, still, that sixteen-year-old boy, staring with dry, parted lips at his beautiful cousin, who had not spoken more than a dozen words to him in her life. How he loved her, even then! And how humiliating, how agonizing it was. . . . When he’d moved forward to grasp her shoulders and kiss her (for it was not only his privilege, it was his obligation according to the rules of the game: and though there were adults looking on they would not rush between the children, they would not shout, Stop! You nasty low-minded creatures!), she had murmured a low breathy panicked protest and ducked to escape, lowering her head as if involuntarily, and butting poor Gideon’s mouth. While the children laughed uproariously Gideon had had to staunch the blood with some fussing old woman’s handkerchief. Leah had run out of the hall.

  Now he pulled at his wiry black beard, and ran his hands hard over his face, and sighed. Is it I, Gideon, who has transformed her?

  If he might take his brother Ewan aside, to speak frankly with him. To inquire. About women: about women who are anxious to have babies. (But it was possible that Ewan, married to that pallid spiritless woman, might not even know what Gideon was talking about. Or might turn it into a crude hilarious joke.) If he might take his father aside. Or his uncle Hiram. Or one of his cousins in the Contracoeur area, which he rarely visited now because of a disagreement that grew out of last year’s leasing of some land along the river. . . . And there was his cousin Harry whom he’d always liked, but he too was estranged, it had to do with finances, his father and Hiram, maneuverings Gideon knew very little about.

  But the family never spoke openly about serious things. So how might be begin . . . ? Embarrassing enough to speak of illnesses, accidents, debts, financial problems of any kind; risking old Noel’s anger and feigned ignorance. The official Bellefleur attitude was one of robust jocularity. Men drinking together, men at the hunting camp. Nothing so important it can’t be laughed away. Shouted away. (Across the lake old Jonathan Hecht, a cabinetmaker who had done work for grandmother Elvira decades ago, lay stricken with a “wasting” disorder that was a consequence of old war injuries, and spent most of his time in bed now, set up downstairs in the parlor or, in warm weather, out on the veranda: the old man was obviously dying, at times he was too feeble even to lift a hand in greeting, but when Gideon’s father rode over to visit him he spoke cheerfully, even harshly, with an air of subtle accusation, striding to the bed and whipping off his hat, all outdoors bustle, smelling of horse and leather and tobacco, Well, Jonathan, how the hell are you on this fine morning! Looking better, in my opinion! Feeling better too, eh? Oh, you’ll be up and at ’em in no time! Have to hide the little girlies from you, yes? . . . You know, Jonathan, two things would fix you up just fine: a little snort from this-here that I smuggled past your wife, and an hour or two out on the lake with me, just trolling for the hell of it, to see what turns up. A few lungs-full of fresh air’d set you up right, ’s no wonder you lay around looking so groggy and slow, what with the smell in this place. . . .

  (The old man’s step-granddaughter, Garnet, a shy anemic-looking girl with long straggly blond hair that was all snags and snarls, tried to warn Gideon’s father, tried to silence him, but of course he paid no attention. He had come to Bushkill’s Ferry on his old stallion Fremont to cheer that miserable ba
stard up, as he’d said, and he wouldn’t allow any of the silly Hecht women to dissuade him.)

  Nor did Gideon feel that he could talk to Nicholas Fuhr, his friend since childhood, or his other friends in the area—that would have been a violation of his marriage, an act equivalent to infidelity.