Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And there was the time, when Gideon was a boy of fifteen, and he and Nicholas and Ewan and Raoul were allowed to accompany their fathers to a horse race in Kincardine, and afterward, at an inn, the men gambled with the inn’s proprietor and certain of his customers that they could distinguish not only the make of liquor served them in unidentified glasses, but its proof; they challenged the Kincardine men to a contest in which the blends were broken down, and the years given, and even (Noel was especially adroit at this, having practiced so assiduously) the place of origin. As soon as Noel Bellefleur sniffed his first drink, and sipped it, and set it down calmly on the bar and announced: “Ninety proof. Sixty-five point five percent rye at five years old, twenty-five percent bourbon at six years old, the rest some good sour spirits . . . most likely from Hennicutt County, Kentucky; yes, Hennicutt County, on account of their kegs being all center-cut maple, and impossible to miss—” why, the Kincardine men naturally wanted to withdraw their bets, but it was too late.

  And there were times, many times, when a fair amount of money changed hands around poker tables, at all-night sessions. At Bellefleur Manor; at the White Sulphur Springs Inn which was, for a while, the most famous watering place in the mountains, and drew numerous Southern plantation owners and their families; at the rambling wood-frame Innisfail Lodge, before it caught fire and burned to the ground (“But it was, of course, heavily insured,” men said simply, meaning no criticism of the Bellefleur owners); in private camps and homes. Poker, billiards, iceboat racing. For a while, glider-racing. (But a disastrous accident, resulting in the deaths of two young men, one of them a cousin-twice-removed of Noel’s, put an end to these contests.) Money changed hands with great alacrity and excitement. Money, and occasionally horses, and even land. If the women knew (and all the women disapproved, some of them—like Cornelia and Della—most angrily) they said very little; for what was to be done . . . ? The Bellefleur men were rich, they had a passion for gambling, they were famous in the mountains for their reckless, inventive challenges, and for their courtesy and grace in defeat (which was infrequent enough: for they were amazingly lucky), what was to be done to prevent them from their play . . . ? After all, they controlled the fortune.

  Horse racing was far more public, of course. Most of the betting was public. Men rode their own horses, they were acquainted with nearly everyone involved, the races (at the Powhatassie fairgrounds, at the Derby track, across the state in Port Oriskany where competition was most severe) were events of great local significance; and so it would have been thought rather eccentric if an owner did not naturally bet on himself. The women still disapproved, but less vehemently. Upon occasion they even allowed themselves to be caught up in the fever of the races: for betting on horses wasn’t an idle pastime, like betting on the April morning when ice-locked Lake Noir would finally crack, or betting on who might wrestle whom to the dirty floor of a riverside tavern, or who could shoot a shot glass off the head of a retarded boy who worked for some tavern keeper—it had to do with an owner’s pride in his horse and in his own performance. It had to do with pride in one’s blood, in one’s name.

  GIDEON WAS ASTOUNDED by his wife’s suggestion.

  “But why now?” he said.

  Leah gazed at him thoughtfully, her eyes half-closed. She was sitting in an oblong of sunshine, near the old sundial at the very center of the garden. Though she was no longer quite as beautiful as she had been—it was mid-July, the baby was due at any time, her eyes were ringed with fatigue and her skin had lost its superb glowing health, and she wasn’t able to carry the extraordinary weight of the unborn child with nearly as much style as previously—she had had Garnet Hecht help her fashion her hair in the heavily ornate manner in which she’d worn it as a bride (copied from an inept but charming portrait of Raphael Bellefleur’s beautiful young English wife Violet: the back hair arranged in a glossy chignon, two distinct bands of hair tied tightly with a velvet ribbon, its ends hanging down loose; a narrow braid over the crown of the head; and, in addition to that, wavy bangs brushed low over her strong, intelligent, somewhat crinkled forehead) and she was wearing a white crocheted shawl over a gown of coarse, knobby material, ochre mixed with green, which Gideon had never seen before. As a consequence of a disagreement that had taken place between them several days ago—Gideon had not liked Leah’s retort to an innocent-seeming question of his mother’s about the condition of Bromwell’s health—Gideon faced his wife with his hands self-consciously on his hips, his knees slightly bent in horsey fashion, his eyes narrowed.

  “Because . . .” Leah said slowly. “Because . . .”

  Her darkened, hollowed eyes gave to her tired face something of the glimmer of a death’s-head: but she had looked, in the last weeks of her pregnancy with the twins, very much like this, and Gideon steadfastly refused to become alarmed. His manner was guarded, his jaw rigid. He had not broken down during their quarrel, he had not burst into helpless, enraged tears, wanting both to pummel the woman and to embrace her, and so the crisis seemed to him past, and he would not succumb. He preferred today’s slow, dreamy, drawling voice to her usual nervous, strident voice, though it seemed to him extraordinarily arrogant of her to have sent poor frightened Garnet Hecht (all elbows and skinny legs and flyaway hair, her pretty face distorted when she merely gazed upon Gideon, with whom, as Leah so mockingly said, even in Garnet’s presence, she was piteously in love) to summon him into the garden to speak with her—as if she were royalty, and he one of her subjects. She sat on a cushion on one of Raphael’s thronelike granite chairs, beside the rusted, useless sundial (which, shadowless, gave no time), both arms resting lightly on the mound in her lap, which always seemed about to move, to shift its position, her pale swollen legs clumsily outstretched, her swollen feet in brocade slippers Cornelia herself had made for her; she sat there, immobile, imperious, monumental in her very weight, gazing at her husband with her head tilted back, so that her eyes were hooded and she seemed to be peering at him from a distance. A month-old kitten, gray-and-white-striped, hardly more than a potbellied ball of fluff with big ears and a pert erect tail, played with the hem of her skirt and had even begun to tear the material; but Leah did not notice.

  Gideon waited. His knees were really trembling, slightly; imperceptibly; he had come close to breaking down several days ago, he had wanted very badly to bury himself in her, sobbing, demanding—demanding that she return to him, as she’d been: his fierce virginal bride whose very soul, like her lean, hard, skittish body, had been tightly closed against him so that he had had to conquer it, and conquer it, and again conquer it; and she had dissolved into tears of love for him; for him. But now . . . Now the woman was so wonderfully, so arrogantly, pregnant, what need had she for him?—what need had she for a husband? Other people only distracted her from her ceaseless brooding, her obsessive concern with her body and its urges and sensations. Months ago Leah had confessed to Gideon, in a puzzled voice, groping for the correct words, that nothing was so real to her now as certain flashes of sensation—tastes, colors, even odors, vague impulses and premonitions—which she interpreted as the baby’s continuous dreaming, deep in her body. (Our son, Leah said, our son’s dreaming that pulls me down into it, the way an undertow might pull you down into the lake even when the surface of the water appears to be calm. . . . )

  “Because,” Leah said, the skin about her eyes crinkling, “it seems to me necessary.”

  She had summoned him to her, when she knew—she must have known—that he and Hiram were leaving that morning for New York; she had summoned him to her to suggest that he place a number of bets, with different parties, on himself and his stallion, for next Sunday’s race at Powhatassie.

  “Necessary?”

  “I can’t explain.”

  They had not made love for many months. Only dimly, sadly, could Gideon remember: but then it was wisest not to remember. She had expelled him from her bed out of a nervous, and certainly premature caution. (Dr. Jensen himself had assured Gideon
that lovemaking, at least of a gentle sort, would not be at all injurious to the unborn child, up until the very last month or two. But that had been before the child had grown to so prodigious a size.) Even as an adult, as the father of children, Gideon could not quite determine how a man might deal with a woman whom he could not make love to, and consequently disarm; for it seemed to him that a woman, even a relatively plain, unassertive woman, had all the advantage . . . all the power. He could not have said what this power was, where it presides, how precisely it might touch a man, but he knew its sinister strength.

  “You’ve never taken much interest in my horses before,” Gideon said stiffly. “You’ve always disapproved, like your insufferable mother, of such things as gambling. And now you seem to be giving me permission . . .”

  Leah glanced down at the kitten, which had begun to attack her ankle; with an effort, fairly grunting, she stooped over to seize it by the scruff of its neck. In midair the tiny creature kicked and bleated. Gideon, staring at the kitten, at his wife, struck by her magnificent russet hair, which gleamed in the intense sunshine, was rocked with an emotion he could not comprehend. He loved her, he was helpless in the face of his love for her, yet this emotion seemed to encompass and swallow up even love. Like other Bellefleur men before him, like Jean-Pierre himself many decades before, Gideon looked upon a face so incontestably not his own, so distant from anything he might have dreamt, that he experienced it simply as fate.

  “You don’t love me,” he whispered.

  Leah did not hear. She dropped the kitten from a height of twelve inches or so and it immediately lay down and rolled over, showing its rounded, palely fuzzy stomach. It kicked frantically, pawing the air, though Leah’s hand was safely out of reach. “. . . before I was even born,” Leah said. “Your side of the family. Your father most of all. Don’t deny it.”

  She was alluding to her own father’s death, one Christmas Eve many years ago. He had been killed in a tobogganing accident—it had been an accident—on one of the treacherous hills north of Mink Creek. Gideon made a gesture of impatience. They had discussed this incident many times and had come to the conclusion, which Gideon hadn’t at all forced, that Leah’s mother had imagined it all—a conspiracy against her young husband, a deliberate capsizing of the toboggan, Stanton Pym thrown against a tree and killed outright.

  “. . . that night, don’t deny it. And the bets were collected,” Leah said. “At the very funeral they were collected.”

  “I really doubt that,” Gideon said, his face burning.

  “Ask my mother. Ask your own mother.”

  “None of this has anything to do with me,” Gideon said. “I was a child of three or four at the time.”

  “There was a great deal of betting on the toboggan race and perhaps on other matters too, that night,” Leah said. “And the bets were collected, at my father’s funeral.”

  “You speak with such authority, but you really don’t know,” Gideon said uneasily. “You have only your mother’s word. . . .”

  “Your side of the family has always gambled. It’s in your blood, it’s part of your fate. And so . . . And so it occurred to me, the other night, that the Powhatassie race might be an important event in our lives.”

  “Did it!” Gideon said. But his mockery was so light, so diffident, that Leah did not detect it. “It occurred to you the other night . . . ?”

  “What time is it?” Leah said, frowning. She turned stoutly to look at the sundial but it showed only a sliver of a shadow, a very pale gray. “I don’t have my watch. . . . You and Hiram are leaving now, aren’t you?”

  “Why did this suddenly occur to you, after so many years?” Gideon said. He was still standing some yards from her; he had not come closer; quite deliberately he was keeping his distance. He could well imagine the fragrance of her gleaming red hair, and her body’s close secret sweetness. “You’ve always disapproved,” he murmured. “In fact you begged me not to race, when we were first married. . . . You were afraid I might be injured.”

  “I’ve talked with Hiram,” Leah said. “You should be leaving now.”

  Gideon did not hear. He said, in the same low voice, “You were afraid I might be injured . . . ?”

  Leah’s gaze shifted. For a brief moment she said nothing.

  “Ah, but you weren’t hurt, were you! All those years. . . . And before we were married. . . . The ice-racing, the diving, the swimming, canoeing at night, wrestling, boxing, all the dangerous things . . . the ridiculous things. . . . Things young men do. . . . You weren’t hurt,” she said faintly. “And you won’t be.”

  “And I thought you and Della disapproved of the betting too. The principle of betting. Isn’t it dishonest, isn’t it sinful . . .”

  “I don’t believe in sin,” Leah said curtly.

  “I thought you were so fiercely moral, about dishonesty.”

  “About telling lies. About being mean, and narrow-minded, and selfish. As for gambling—it isn’t very different from ordinary business investing, as Uncle Hiram has explained. I don’t think I quite understood before.”

  “But now you understand.”

  “I . . . I . . . I understand many things,” she said slowly.

  The oblong patch of sunshine had grown wider, and more intense. Gideon stared, squinting at Leah. There was something she had said that disturbed him, but he could not grasp what it was; the very sight of her, the groping and yet magisterial tone of her voice, had begun to mesmerize him. “. . . many things?” he said.

  “His dreams. His plans for us,” she whispered.

  “His . . . ?”

  She crossed her fleshy arms over her belly, protectively, rocking slightly forward.

  “You must leave. You’ll be late for the train,” she said. “Come here, kiss me goodbye, you haven’t kissed me for so long. . . .”

  In that moment her mood changed. And Gideon was unlocked. And came to her, dropping on one knee, his arms encircling her, rather roughly, his lips pressed against hers, at first timidly, then greedily, as he felt her strong arms close about him. Ah, how lovely it was to kiss her! Simply to kiss her! Her wide fleshy lips seemed to sting, her darting tongue made him dizzy, the weight of her body, the impulsive tightening of her arms, nearly caused him to lose his balance and topple into her lap. She was so large, so magnificent. She could draw him into her, and swallow him up, and he would shut his eyes forever, in bliss, in surrender.

  After all, Gideon thought brokenly, I am the father. I am the father.

  Horses

  It was on a nameless chestnut gelding of no great beauty or grace, but with a normally tractable disposition, short-headed, blunt-nosed, with a single white stocking on his left forefoot—won at cards with British officers not three weeks before the Golden Hill riot in January—that Jean-Pierre Bellefleur, looking, with his smart three-cornered hat of black velvet, and his costly new leather boots, somewhat older than his twenty-six years, first saw Sarah Ann Chatham: at that time a girl of no more than eleven or twelve, small-featured, snub-nosed, with a lightly freckled oval face of disquieting beauty, and pale golden silky hair, and a bearing that was at once childlike and imperious; and . . . and even before the girl laughed and pointed at him (his mount, alarmed by an approaching stagecoach, was rising on his hind legs and whinnying piteously, and Jean-Pierre began to shout in French), showing her babyish teeth, pulling free of the hefty red-faced Englishwoman beside her (a nursemaid, a governess?—she was too ugly to be a relative)—even before Jean-Pierre, sitting in the cold brownish-yellow muck, had the opportunity to stare fully at her, he had fallen in love. . . . For the rest of his life he would recall not only the incredible shock of the cold, the muck, the graceless fall itself, and not only the beautiful, elated child’s cry in the instant before the servant hurried her along (for she had responded to Jean-Pierre’s accident as if it were an antic meant only to amuse, and only to amuse her), but the queer indecipherable joy of the moment—a joy that arose out of an absolute certainty—a
sense that his fate was now complete, his life itself complete, laid out invisibly before him but laid out nevertheless, and awaiting his acknowledgment. He was in love. Pitched to the street, the object of amused derision (for others, too, were laughing openly: that he was so clearly French was naturally part of the joke), his dandyish clothes ruined; he was in love. All that, as a boy, he had been told and read of the New World—that native Indians of astonishing classical proportions lived here, and went nude even in winter, in forests of prodigious beauty and beside streams visibly crowded with salmon and trout (one had only to dip a hand-net in the water to capture them); that there were undefined, unimaginable monsters, some as tall as fifteen feet, that lived freely in the mountains, and made sporadic raids on the settlements, carrying off even adult men as prey; that there were, in certain areas, diamonds and rubies and sapphires and great blocks of jade in the soil, and silver and gold deposits of a lushness never seen before on earth; that there were fortunes to be made in a six-months’ space of time, and never any regrets—all these marvels paled beside the snub-nosed impetuousness of a girl he did not even know, at this time, was the youngest daughter of an ailing customs commissioner in New York, an officer of the Crown who, within the year, would evacuate his family home to England, and leave Jean-Pierre bereft forever.