Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Garnet, trembling, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and crept along the shadowy hallway, a candle in one hand, the silver tray heaped with food, and covered by a white linen napkin, in the other. Because she knew she would be struck dumb when he confronted her (if he confronted her, for he hadn’t unlocked the door even for Cornelia, these past few days) she whispered ahead of time: Oh, I love you. Gideon Bellefleur. I love you. I love you. I have loved you since the first day I set eyes on you. . . . And, yes, it was on your white stallion, you were riding your white stallion, through the main street of Bellefleur, and you never saw me staring, you never glanced my way. . . . You never glanced to the right or the left, riding through the village like a prince. It was on your white stallion I first saw you, and I loved you at once, and I will always love you, no matter that you never glance at me, or even know my name. . . .

  Drunk and grinning a lopsided grin, and smelling of a man’s sweat, Gideon had opened the door; and leaned against the doorway staring at her. I didn’t think I had really heard anyone knocking, he said. You didn’t rap very hard, did you. You aren’t very strong, are you.

  He snatched the tray from her and threw the napkin aside and began to eat. Ravenously, like an animal; like a wolf. Garnet stared at him, her face burning. He tore at the meat with his head inclined to the side, like a wolf. His strong stony-white teeth gleamed in the tremulous candlelight.

  She had thought she would faint—a terrible dizziness arose in her—but she had not fainted. She stood rooted to one spot, staring at Gideon Bellefleur. Oh, I love you, she whispered in secret.

  “IT CAN’T BE allowed to live—”

  “It—they—must be put out of their misery—”

  “Don’t let Leah see! Is she awake?”

  Voices ballooning around the bed. Great tall teetering figures.

  The taste of blood, of salt, of orange-burning fire, drawing all sensation to the tongue. . . .

  Leah had given birth and lay back in a delirium.

  They were gasping. Whispering. What a tragedy! What could they do! Aunt Veronica, bringing a water-filled basin to the bedside, saw what lay squirming there and with a soft faint Oh! sank forward, in a dead faint. And Floyd Jensen, sleepless for most of the seventy-two hours, stared at the creature for a long, long moment—not one baby (and a giant baby at that) but two babies: then again not two babies (which would have been quite within the normal order of things) but one and a half: a single melon-sized head, two scrawny shoulders, and at the torso something hideous that resembled, in Jensen’s feverish imagination just before he fainted, part of another embryo—

  The creature had only two arms, two tiny fists, which it flailed angrily. And of course it was bawling.

  “Don’t let it wake poor Leah! Oh, what should we do—”

  “It should be put out of its misery—suffocated at once—”

  “But it’s living, it’s alive—”

  “Is she waking up? No? Hold her still—”

  “It should be put out of its misery!”

  “Might we take it to the city? Where no one—no one would know? An orphanage, a hospital—the steps of the cathedral at Winterthur—”

  Grandmother Della in her soiled black dressing gown, her scalp showing in pink slats through her thinning yellow-white hair, her eyes unusually bright, all but shouldered Cornelia aside. Cornelia, her brother’s silly chit of a wife! She stepped forward masterfully, just as she had stepped forward, years before, at the astonishing birth of Bromwell and Christabel, and raised both squirming infants aloft, to clear their lungs, give them a shake, get them wailing—for wasn’t she, after all, no matter how she disapproved of the girl and of the girl’s bully of a husband, the grandmother?—the mother’s mother? This creature was far heavier than the twins. But she raised it aloft. And, staring frankly, with a curious half-repulsed half-satisfied little smile, she said: “Just look at it! Shameless! You can see it’s meant to be a girl but that other part sticking out—just look!—why, those things are hanging halfway to its ankles, I never saw anything like it—”

  Leah lay weakened and delirious on the blood- and sweat-soaked sheets. Murmuring: Mother, Gideon, dear God. Mother. Gideon. Oh, please God, dear God. Help. . . . Give me my baby.

  Through the window a curdled-milk moon. No night sounds at all: not even crickets: Leah’s screams had silenced everything.

  The baby shrieked. Kicking, fighting. For breath. For life. Two somewhat abbreviated legs, and part of an abdomen, and rubbery-red slippery male genitalia, possibly oversized—it was difficult, with all the commotion, for Della to estimate—growing out of the abdomen of what appeared to be a perfectly well-formed, though somewhat large, baby girl. Her legs were longer and appeared to be normal, and her tiny hairless vagina was a healthy purplish-pink, the size of Della’s smallest fingernail, between the thrashing legs.

  “I know what to do,” Della said loudly.

  GIDEON’S HANDS, ACTING of their own accord, tore the girl’s clothing away. And then his own. If he could have torn her skin away as well, he might have done so: how greedily, how desperately, his fingers plucked! He wanted nothing between them, not a breath, not a thought.

  She strained apart from him but he forced himself, his great weight, onto her; and then into her; half-angrily he ground his mouth against hers and felt her hard childish teeth, resisting. Somewhere, far away, a scream sounded—or was it a loon’s wail—but Gideon, plunged so far into this girl whose name he didn’t recall, heard nothing.

  . . . Gazing at him with lovesick moonstruck eyes. Her words trailing off into the air, in his presence. Long thin hands, bony fingers, the nail bitten back to the quick, a habit that excited his disgust. Leah mocked. Of course Leah mocked. The girl was silly . . . yet the surprise of her in the corridor, the sudden alignment of eyes and hair and pert little chin that made her beautiful to his sleep-dazed eyes . . . the shy soapish odor of her . . . that tiny hand grasped so tightly in his. . . . She wept, she sobbed of love. Love. He did not hear. He no longer knew where he was. In the pine forest above the lake, on the needle-strewn cold ground? Something that was not the girl drew him down violently, as if the earth had cracked open and it was into the very earth itself he plunged: weightless, bodiless, helpless. Falling. Deeper. The desire to crush, to annihilate. To smother those cries. Plunging. Tearing.

  A demon poked at him with its hot sharp tongue, breathing boldly into his face. The tongue in his ear. So moist, so agitated! He could not control himself. The girl in a daze murmured, Love, love, oh, I love you, murmured a name that must have been his, but he did not hear: and then gripped his back, which had gathered itself into bunches of muscles, rising, arched, furious, as Leah herself might have gripped it, once did grip it, long ago.

  “Oh, Gideon, I love you—”

  GRUNTING, DELLA CARRIED the squirming thing to the walnut cabinet at the far end of the room, ignoring her daughter’s cries, and pushed aside a silly Chinese porcelain boar’s-head tureen—the costly junk her family had accumulated, she would have liked to make a pyre and burn it all!—and flopped the baby down. And, keeping her back discreetly to the others, blocking Leah’s view if, risen on her elbows, she should actually be watching, with one, two, three skillful chops of the knife, solved the problem once and for all.

  She turned to face the room. Drawing her first full breath in many minutes she said, triumphantly: “Now it’s what it was meant to be, what God intended. Now it’s one, and not two; now it’s a she and not a he. I’ve had enough of he, I don’t want anything more to do with he, here’s what I think—” and with a sudden majestic swipe of her arm she knocked the bloody mutilated parts, what remained of the little legs, and the little penis and testicles and scrotum, onto the floor—“what I think of he!”

  BOOK TWO

  The Walled Garden

  The Vial of Poison

  Germaine’s grandfather Noel Bellefleur carried with him, in secret, for more than fifty years, a vial of about two inches in
length, encrusted with tiny cheap-cut rubies and diamonds (or perhaps they were colored glass and rhinestones), filled with cyanide. No one knew of the vial of poison: not even Noel’s wife, not even his mother. He carried it with him at all times, except when he slept, and even then it was never more than a few yeards away, hidden in a drawer. When, in later years, he and Cornelia no longer shared a bed, and occasionally—on account of his harsh snoring, Cornelia claimed—did not even share a room, he began to keep the vial beneath his pillow. For safekeeping, he thought. Waking in the night after a disturbing dream, or after no dream at all, he would reach under his pillow anxiously and there it was—the tiny object, stone-studded, its roughness pleasurable to his fingertips, warmed by his presence.

  From time to time he unscrewed the minuscule cap, and sniffed at the contents, his eyes hooded. The poison smelled wonderfully astringent. As quick, as surprising, as mothballs or ammonia or skunk: odors he halfway liked, in their mild forms. He might even shake the white crystals out on a surface and examine them. Did poison, even so marvelously effective a poison, lose its miraculous power to kill, after a period of time . . . ? Though there were innumerable reference books in his grandfather’s library which he might have consulted, though he might even have inquired, casually, of his grandson Bromwell (who, at this time, when Germaine was only an infant, had acquired a remarkable library himself, and never exactly with anyone’s permission: the child simply ordered whatever he liked—a complete set of the World Book, volumes on biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, even a telescope kit that came in a large packing case to the depot in Bellefleur, where Gideon went, mystified, to pay $400 for whatever it was his headstrong little boy had ordered now), and though he might certainly have asked Dr. Jensen, who dropped by frequently at the house, to check on Leah and her new baby girl, he said nothing to anyone—the poison was his secret, sacred to him, unutterable. From time to time he simply changed the vial’s contents, filling it with “fresh” cyanide.

  Noel Bellefleur in his old age had the shrewd, rather raffish appearance of an osprey surfacing from brackish water, a squirming fish in its beak. There was something blurred and soiled about him. His nose had a slight knob in it, his cheeks were relatively unwrinkled but very shiny, the scar from an old war wound gleamed boldly on his forehead like a third eye: an eye more clearly defined than his own eyes, which, behind the lenses of his glasses, were gauzy, unfocused, as if set in water. He limped badly, and with what appeared to be a deliberate awkwardness. He wore shapeless outfits at home—trousers that drooped on his somewhat shriveled haunches, and white shirts that, not tucked into his belt, were allowed to billow out, roomy as nightshirts or a servant’s smock. Even when he appeared in public his linen was never very clean. Germaine was to think of him as birdlike, indeed—a hook-beaked bird in an untidy nest. One would not have been surprised to see feathers and down clinging to him. When he troubled to shave, which was infrequently, he did a poor job of it, and sometimes appeared in the breakfast room bleeding from a half-dozen tiny nicks, indifferent to, sometimes angered by, his family’s protestations. Once every several months a barber was driven to the manor from Nautauga Falls, to tend to both Noel and his elderly mother Elvira (who received the man in the privacy of her room). If Noel was a thin, watchful, rakish old bird, his wife Cornelia was a plumped-out guinea hen, still an uncommonly attractive woman with small, pretty hands and feet, and snow-white hair that was perfectly and stiffly groomed at all times.

  Like birds the two pecked at each other, from time to time, impatiently, irritably, but without violence. If Cornelia had known of the secret vial she would have exclaimed: “That crazy old fool is doing it to spite me—he wants to humiliate me. He’ll swallow cyanide and leave me behind and everyone will point me out: that’s the woman whose husband committed suicide to escape her!”

  But in fact Noel had acquired the precious little object when, as a boy of seventeen, he had suffered, perhaps even more painfully than Hiram and Jean-Pierre, his father’s protracted humiliation: the decline of the family’s fortune, the selling-off of land, the dismantling of old Raphael’s railroad (the wonderful little cars, even the ties, were sold for scrap metal!—and the furnishings, which no one wanted, were stored in one of the unused hop barns, where rain soon destroyed them), the desperate attempt to make quick money by raising foxes. . . . “What now, what next,” Hiram muttered, with a sigh like a thud, and Noel, unable to spend all his time with his horses, began to lie about the house, a skinny, loose-jointed boy, listless, overtaken by a Bellefleur malaise as severe as any, feeling too weak, too miserable, to raise a finger. In those days Jean-Pierre, named appropriately for old Jean-Pierre, was his mother’s darling, spoiled and capricious and very good-looking, with dark curls and dark, cunning, puppyish eyes, and he was somehow able, despite the Bellefleurs’ financial problems, to spend a great deal of time playing cards in the Falls, and in certain notorious riverfront taverns: twenty years old to Noel’s seventeen, he would nevertheless (being guileless, and infinitely good-natured) have brought his younger brother along on his expeditions, in order to snap him out of his “mood”; but Noel always refused. He did acquire from Jean-Pierre, however, who had won it at poker, the bejeweled little vial. “It’s for smelling salts or something,” Jean-Pierre said, tossing it to Noel. “Maybe opium. I don’t have any use for it.”

  “Cyanide,” Noel said at once.

  “What?” asked Jean-Pierre, smiling. “What did you say?”

  He hid the little vial away and showed it to no one. Once it was filled with poison it acquired a peculiar life or spirit of its own—quite as if it were another Bellefleur, another member of the family—but at the same time it was indisputably his. Suicide, Noel thought dreamily, as a boy in his late teens and then in his early twenties, ravaged by lurid violent fantasies of sex which of course he could not control, suicide, just the thought of it, the thought of escape, why is it so luxurious . . . ?

  Often he fingered the vial, safely hidden in his trouser pocket. While enduring conversations in the drawing room with his female cousins and aunts, or sitting through interminable dinners. Suicide, the thought of it, the luxurious thought of it, why did he smile so suddenly, his delight raying across his face? For of course he never intended to use the cyanide. Never. But the thought of it, the feel of the vial, were most satisfying.

  (In the family there were legends of odd “suicides.” Noel’s grandmother, for instance, who drowned in Lake Noir . . . and his own father, perhaps, Lamentations of Jeremiah, who insisted upon going out in a murderous storm though everyone in the family tried to stop him: wasn’t that a kind of suicide, really? Strangest of all was the contrived death, the “assassination” of President Lincoln, an intimate friend of grandfather Raphael’s—or so family legend would have it, and Noel, being skeptical, did have his doubts. But it was generally believed in the family that Lincoln had arranged for his own “assassination,” so that he could retire from the world of politics and strife and domestic pain, and live out the remainder of his days as a special guest at Bellefleur Manor. The poor man had come to abhor his life with its public and private burdens, and its very real crimes (so many thousands of men killed in the war, which no notion of political justice could ever absolve, and hundreds of civilians imprisoned in Indiana and elsewhere, without due process of law—simply at his imperial command). Lincoln had, it was said, so despaired of life that he wanted only to tear a hole in the earth’s side and plunge through and lose himself forever. . . . And so, by means of a plot Noel had never quite understood, which was completely financed by Raphael Bellefleur and perhaps even imagined by him, the public Lincoln had been “assassinated” so that the private Lincoln might live. Of all the forms of suicide, Noel thought, that had the most style.)

  AT THE FUNERAL for the poor Fuhr boy, killed in that freak accident, Noel, possibly the most intoxicated mourner present (though his own son Gideon was well fortified by whiskey—it was just that, Noel thought
resentfully, Gideon was young, and could hold his alcohol with as much control as Noel had once had), fingered in secret the precious vial, and gave himself up to thoughts of death.

  Death. How suddenly it might come when you didn’t want it. How reluctantly it came when you did. Nicholas Fuhr was dead: he’d survived any number of riding accidents, and fistfights, and God knew what else: but suddenly he was dead, his poor body broken. There were a number of men Noel had wished dead in his time—the Varrells, of course, before they were murdered (and the blame placed wrongly on Jean-Pierre); one or two rivals for Cornelia’s hand; his nation’s wicked enemies in the war. But he had never killed anyone. Not even as a soldier. He would not have wished to actually kill anyone, to actually bring about a death, and it troubled him that perhaps, when the time came (and when might it come?—he was an old man now, his eyesight was failing, the lake salmon were fished out, Fremont was getting wobbly) he would be incapable of taking the cyanide he had hugged to himself for so many decades. . . . Odd, how his grandfather Raphael had continued living. An embittered old man. Still wealthy, but a failure: a failure at politics, a failure as a husband, and (so he thought, and said) a failure as a father. He certainly wanted to die, living in near-seclusion all those years, only his Honored Guest (some comradely political failure he’d picked up on his campaigning, some party hack he had, for reasons no one knew, become indebted to: the rumor, absurd of course, was that the bearded old man was Abraham Lincoln!) to keep him company, along with his books and journals. He must have wanted to die, Noel thought, yet he hadn’t had the courage, or the bitterness, to kill himself.