Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  After the fifth month Leah was immobilized much of the time. It was too awkward for her to climb stairs so she began to spend nights in the drawing room that overlooked the garden, half-sitting and half-lying against goosefeather pillows on a handsome old chaise longue. This room, sometimes called Violet’s Room by older members of the household (though Violet Bellefleur, Raphael’s unhappy wife, had disappeared into Lake Noir many decades ago and would surely never return, and even Noel and Hiram, her oldest grandchildren, could barely remember her), was an exceptionally attractive room, beautifully decorated with crimson silk wallpaper and oak wainscotting and alabaster lamps with white globes, and in one corner was a clavichord built for Violet by a young Hungarian cabinetmaker, a small, delicate-appearing, but quite sturdy instrument made of numerous woods: the jewel of the room though it was cracked on top and no one played it any longer. (Leah had tried; flushed with the excited, audacious complacency of her condition she had actually tried, remembering only dimly, and in fragments, the rudimentary piano lessons she had had at La Tour many years ago, and had resisted sullenly at the time—but her weight was nearly too much for the bench with its slender legs of veneered oak, and in any case her oversized fingers were too clumsy for the delicate walnut keys. She tried to play “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and the scale of C-major and a nameless boisterous square dance tune but the sounds that came out—tinny, jerky, shrieklike—were embarrassing. In the end she brought her fist down on the keys, which protested faintly, and closed the instrument, and forbade the children to play it, though Yolande’s touch was reverent and sensitive and she could almost play a recognizable tune.) The carpet was still fairly thick, a mazelike design of crimson, green, creamy-white, and very dark blue; there were numerous old chairs, some of them generously overstuffed, and a horsehair sofa the children loved to bounce on; and an armoire with mother-of-pearl fixtures and a dramatic carving of the Bellefleur coat of arms (a falcon volant, a snake draped about its neck); and a seven-foot fireplace made of fieldstone. Violet’s portrait had hung above the mantel for some time, but in recent years had been replaced by a rather dark, badly cracked landscape painting of indeterminate origin, thought to be “Italian Renaissance.” About the room were curious things brought in from other parts of the house by the children—a ferocious tiger (thought to resemble Mahalaleel) carved from a whale’s tooth, brass prickets with aged candles that would not burn, a queer distorting mirror about three feet high with an ornate ivory-and-jade frame that had been in the drawing room for years, but no one had troubled to hang—so that it was merely propped up against the wall and, because of its odd, oblique angle, sometimes reflected things perversely, or did not reflect them at all. (Once, gorging herself on chocolate-covered cherries and walnuts, and allowing greedy Mahalaleel to lick her sticky fingers, Leah had glanced across to the mirror and was startled to see, framed by sallow ivory and lusterless jade, absolutely nothing at all—neither herself nor Mahalaleel. And when one of Lily’s boys, Raphael, leaned forward to accept a chocolate from her, he was reflected only in a vague muddy haze. Another time sweet-faced Vernon, entering the room, was reflected as a narrow, twisted column of light; and once, though Leah and Mahalaleel and the twins were quite normally reflected in the mirror, aunt Veronica, passing before them, was not only not reflected at all but blotted their images out as well, so that only the corner of the room remained.)

  There was a parquet-topped table where Leah and the children and Vernon played cards that winter and spring, and the chaise longue—once an extremely beautiful piece of furniture, with carved mahogany legs and a sumptuous gold brocade covering—upon which poor Leah lay with increasing frequency, as the months passed and the child she carried grew larger and distinctly heavier. At first Leah had tried discreetly to hide her swollen belly, especially when friends came to visit—Gideon’s closest friend Nicholas Fuhr, who was unmarried, and who had always been—or so Leah thought—halfway in love with her; and Leah’s friend from girlhood, Faye Renaud, now married and the mother of several young children herself; and older friends of the Bellefleurs, and neighbors—with shawls, comforters, quilts, and even drowsy Mahalaleel himself, or at any rate his enormous fluffy plume of a tail. She troubled to arrange folds in a decorous fashion, to drape herself in shapeless dark gowns, even to loop strands of pearls about her neck, and to snap on oversized earrings—for, as grandmother Cornelia said, such tricks drew the eye upward. And the sight of her belly was disconcerting. (Even Gideon’s cousin Vernon, a year or two older than she, and so clearly and painfully infatuated with her—the poor gangling young man liked nothing better than to read poetry to her on those dreary afternoons when the sun set at three o’clock, or failed to appear at all, Blake and Wordsworth and certain of Hamlet’s soliloquies, and lengthy, incoherent, passionate poems of his own that put Leah in a comfortable stupor, her great eyes half-closed, her slightly swollen fingers clasped together over her belly as if securing it, one of the twins—usually Christabel—frankly napping nearby: even Vernon with his eager shy smile and his hopeful gaze and the reverent, melodic dipping of his voice as he read, or recited, God appears and God is light / To those poor souls who dwell in night / But does a human form display / To those who dwell in realms of day, appeared to be intimidated by the very fact of her, and if she groaned with sudden discomfort, or pressed a hand in alarm to her belly, feeling an instant’s terrifying pain, or even made a good-natured allusion to her condition—which did make certain routines of life, like washing one’s hair, and indeed bathing at all, and going to the bathroom—extremely difficult, poor Vernon would blush at once, and stare at her face with somewhat widened eyes as if to emphasize his not looking elsewhere; and smile his childlike perplexed smile, hidden in his beard. Though he was a Bellefleur himself, he never knew when the Bellefleurs were joking, or when they were being deliberately coarse in order to unsettle him, or when they were—as, upon occasion, they certainly were—utterly without guile.)

  As the months passed, as the long winter months slowly passed into a cold, drizzly spring, Leah’s appetite, never modest, became voracious. Around Christmastime her favorite foods were rum puddings and goat’s cheese, and then she developed a near-insatiable craving for mashed apricots, and Valley Products stewed tomatoes, and pepper ham which she ate with her fingers to Cornelia’s amazed disgust; and then, as the dead-white skin of her belly tightened over the swelling mass, and her poor ankles and knees grew bloated, and her breasts that had always been fairly small for her frame, and young and hard, grew larger almost daily, and began to ache and leak milk, to Leah’s distress, and even her neck thickened so that, though still lovely, and columnar, it must have been the size of Ewan’s, she began to devour raw beefsteaks, chewing for long minutes at a time, and grew nauseous at the very sight and odor of the food poor Edna prepared for the rest of the family, even Edna’s famous boysenberry cream pie which Leah had always loved; and then, to her husband’s surprise—for Leah made much of her disdain for men who drank, or for anyone who showed such a contemptible weakness—she habituated herself to glasses of wine in the early afternoon, and two or three bottles of Gideon’s and Ewan’s favorite dark ale as the day progressed, and some Scotch, and perhaps in the evening, while she played checkers or Parcheesi or gin rummy, some more Scotch (she soon acquired a taste for grandfather Noel’s favorite liquor, and he rather liked drinking with her—Leah is the only woman with sense enough to understand a joke, and to laugh at it, he often said, flushed with his success with her: for she was a queenly young woman, beautiful despite her size, and bathed in a warm, lightly damp, erotic glow), and then, in the late evening, when even the most stubborn of the children was in bed, she ate chunks of Gorgonzola cheese and drank in large mouthfuls some very old heavy red Burgundy lately discovered in a recess of Raphael’s cavernous wine cellar, long since thought depleted, and sipped at Spanish liqueurs, and crème de menthe, and a labelless brandy in which specks of genuine gold floated, and at midnight she fell into a st
uporous doze from which no one could have awakened her, not even Gideon, so that she simply remained in Violet’s drawing room, and they covered her with quilts, and tended to the fire, and brought a fresh saucer of cream for Mahalaleel, who slept at the foot of the couch on those nights—which were less frequent as spring approached—he chose to remain in the house.

  She grew negligent—or was it contemptuous—and thought, Why be ashamed of the way I look? Why not take pride in myself? And so she stopped bothering with pearls and earrings, which only made her nervous anyway, and if she could have pulled her wedding ring off her thickened finger she would have done so, and instead of dark, drab, discreet clothing of the kind her mother always wore (insisted upon wearing, for Della was perpetually “in mourning” for her young husband whom the Bellefleurs had killed), she began to wear, not only for special occasions when the Steadmans or Nicholas Fuhr or Faye Renaud stopped by, but on quite ordinary eventless mornings, brightly colored gowns, some of them floor-length, with wide rakish sleeves, or decorative beads or feathers, or handmade Spanish lace: and sometimes the dresses had open necklines, so that Leah’s full ripe astonishing breasts were partway revealed, and Vernon, entering the drawing room hesitantly, carrying his ledger filled with scribblings (he was quite vain, and yet embarrassed about his “scribblings,” his poetry, and would read it only to Leah and certain of the children, making sure that Gideon and Ewan and his father Hiram were nowhere near: a rhapsodic singsong invocation of his masters Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Heraclitus, mixed in with interminable reflections (which poor Leah, whose head swam these days when she did so much as leaf through one of Bromwell’s science encyclopedias, or even one of Christabel’s simple readers, could make no sense of—it was difficult enough for her to restrain great torso-shuddering yawns as Vernon read in his tremulous, reedy, rather oracular voice, which was his special “poetry voice”) on family legend of dubious authenticity: the meaning of the Bellefleur curse; how Samuel Bellefleur was seduced by spirits that dwelled in the very stone walls and foundations of the manor; how Raphael really died; why he had insisted—not only perversely, but uncharacteristically, for throughout his lifetime he had scorned unconventional behavior—that his cadaver be skinned, and the skin tanned, and stretched across a drum; why the house was haunted (and Leah had to admit that it probably was haunted, but like the rest of the family she simply stayed out of the most troublesome rooms, and saw to it that the most dangerous room of all was kept locked, even padlocked, against the inquisitive children who would nose out any secret, however terrifying) and in what odd ways, throughout the generations, it had been haunted; what Gideon’s brother Raoul’s fate would be (though in Gideon’s presence Vernon would certainly not dare to approach that painful subject); why Abraham Lincoln had chosen to spend his last years in seclusion, on the Bellefleur estate; what had really happened to great-grandfather “Lamentations of Jeremiah”; why his own mother Eliza had disappeared without warning; why the family was doomed unless—but on this point the poetry drifted into an even more puzzling obscurity, and Vernon tended to mumble, and Leah had only the imprecise idea that salvation lay with Vernon or what he represented, and not with the other Bellefleur men or what they represented—Vernon, alas, touchingly eager for an hour or two with Leah, during the afternoon when all of the men, Leah’s husband in particular, could be relied upon to be absent, and only the gentlest, the most civilized of the children—Bromwell, Christabel, Yolande, Raphael—might be present, and fairly engrossed in their books or games, or trying (with minimal success) to interest Mahalaleel in the most comely and spirited of his new brood of kittens, would stare at her bosom, at the smooth, glaring-white tops of her enormous breasts, and freeze where he stood, and stammer a greeting, too stricken even to blush for a minute or two. . . .

  But why be ashamed of the way I look, Leah thought angrily, though in fact she was somewhat ashamed, or at the very least painfully self-conscious (for she remembered how, as a girl, she had pitilessly scorned the very idea of having a baby, and had vowed that she would never find herself in so disgusting a condition); why not take pride in myself as I am.

  “Vernon, for Christ’s sake,” she would say impatiently, reaching out to him, to squeeze his cold, timid, boneless hand, “sit down, I’ve been waiting for you, I’ve been bored all morning, Gideon’s all the way to Port Oriskany and won’t even be back tonight, he’s negotiating for something so complicated, and so tedious, I didn’t even make a show of asking about it—some granaries?—something about the railroad? Oh, your father would know but don’t ask him, let’s not give a damn about such trivia! Read me what you’ve written since yesterday. Pour me some ale first, and have some for yourself, and could you pass those nuts—unless the children have gobbled them all up—and sit down, please, right here, right by the fire. Sit down.”

  And so, bedazzled by her, his knees somewhat weak, Vernon Bellefleur would sit only a few feet from Leah Bellefleur, his breath scanty, his nervous skinny fingers tugging at his beard. And he might begin by reading, in a self-conscious, heightened voice, some lines of Shelley, or Shakespeare, or Heraclitus (This cosmos none of gods or men made; but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures), whom he clearly thought to be brothers of his, and while at times it was all Leah could do (for she was a well-mannered young woman, in principle) to resist snorting with laughter at his vanity, at other times she found herself so deeply moved that a tear might trickle fatly down her cheek and her little boy might say, with that disconcertingly clinical edge to his voice, “Mamma, why are you crying?”

  “I have no idea,” she would say stiffly, wiping her face on her sleeve like one of the children.

  Gideon was away, Gideon was so frequently away, on business, on his father’s and Hiram’s business, and so Vernon came to visit (for handsome Nicholas Fuhr, whom Leah might very well have married—might have married, once marriage struck her as inevitable—certainly could not drive over, nor could Ethan Burnside, or Meldram Steadman, out of fear of Gideon’s jealousy), Vernon who was not much different from the women, and whom Leah was very fond of, though she sometimes nodded off not only when he was reading to her but when he was speaking to her; and Gideon, if he knew, was not at all jealous. Contemptuous, perhaps. But not jealous.

  “Sit down,” Leah would say, stifling a yawn, “and read what you’ve written since yesterday. I’ve been so dull and heavy-headed and lonely all morning. . . .”

  Though Vernon was not yet thirty his brown hair was graying, especially at the temples; and his skimpy beard was nearly all gray. What a pity, Leah thought, that he hasn’t a wife—hasn’t a wife and never will have one—since she might take him in hand, and trim that beard, and the stiff little hairs in his ears, and see to it that he doesn’t wear the same baggy trousers five days running, and that greasy little vest. He needs kisses to liven up his complexion. . . .

  Vernon, leafing through the ledger, fumbling with the oversized pages, glanced up at Leah as if—but of course it could not be possible—her stray, whimsical thoughts had the power to communicate themselves to him. He stared at her for a long uneasy moment. She blushed, gazing at the young man’s thin, sallow face, and his slightly mismatched eyes (one was pale blue, the other pale brown: it was the blue eye that seemed to have the correct vision, and confronted things directly; the brown eye peered off a fraction of an inch to the left), and the tangle of his eyebrows, which were as thick as Gideon’s. Vernon had the Bellefleur nose—long, straight, Roman, waxen-pale at the very tip—but in other respects, about the mouth, and about the eyes especially, he must have resembled his mother. His forehead was narrow and high, creased with years of brooding; there were premature lines, like parentheses, framing his mouth; the shape of his face was queerly triangular, since, though his forehead was narrow, his chin was quite small, and looked, from the side, as if it were melting away to nothing. Yet there was something attractive about him, something appealing. T
hough he was not manly, he was certainly nothing like Gideon or Ewan or Nicholas Fuhr, still, Leah thought with sudden conviction, he was warmly attractive, as a child or a beast might be attractive, in its very vulnerability. And then there was the young man’s shy eagerness, his gentle manners, and the way—once he began to read—he forgot his surroundings and became increasingly passionate, so that his thin, rather reedy voice began to take strength, vibrating with intensity. Leah knew nothing at all about poetry—she had memorized poems at La Tour, for her English and French classes, but even at the time she grasped very little of what she memorized, and forgot it all as soon as the school year was over—but she admired Vernon’s obstinate devotion to his craft, especially in the face of ridicule. (Ah, ridicule! What he hadn’t had to bear, since he first became infatuated with words—not their meanings, not even their sounds, but their very weight and texture—as a child of nine or ten, poring over the leather-bound “classics” in old Raphael’s library.) She could not really resist feeling something of the contempt for Vernon that most of the family felt, since the poor man had failed so miserably, and so frequently, at one after another of the tasks Hiram had set him (the last in the series of failures took place in the Fort Hanna sawmill, where Vernon had had a “managerial” position, but rumor had it that he mingled with his men, even ate lunch with them, and sought them out in taverns after work, where in his quavering hopeful voice he read them incantatory poems in long heavily stressed iambic lines on such subjects as—the very men themselves, sawmill workers with little or no formal education, the sons of impoverished farmers or day laborers or men who had joined the army to fight in the last war and had never returned, men who, in Vernon’s feverish imagination, celebrated the “dignity and mystery” of honest physical labor unclouded by thought, uncontaminated by the obsession with personal gain that characterized the property-owning class: all this, this apotheosis of unfurrowed brows, swelling gleaming muscles, the very nobility of the Animal-in-Man, declaimed in lengthy and heavily stressed poems the men could not follow, and had no wish to follow—when they wanted only more money from the Bellefleurs, and preferred to deal with Ewan or even the old man himself, who cared nothing for them as men but would not, at least, embarrass and anger them by composing sentimental poems in their honor. And so in the end the Fort Hanna workers jeered poor Vernon out, and might even have roughed him up one night in a riverside tavern if they had not been apprehensive of Ewan’s or Gideon’s revenge: for the Bellefleurs were famous in exacting vengeance). Since coming to live at the castle as Gideon’s wife, Leah had been only peripherally aware of Vernon, and then primarily as Hiram’s son. She knew of the comical Fort Hanna episode, though not its humiliating details, and it crossed her mind more than once that perhaps the episode wasn’t laughable as everybody (especially Hiram) thought—perhaps it was most unfortunate—even tragic. She wondered: Had Vernon run off somewhere alone and cried? Was he the sort of man who might allow himself to cry?