Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  His embarrassment shaded gradually into contempt, and his contempt into a profound, listless melancholy, for he could not escape Bellefleur without escaping history itself; he might belong, then, to a world, but he could never belong to a nation. And then again Bellefleur was passion: passions of all kinds. He had no need to spy on his parents to comprehend the nature of the bond between them. (For didn’t he observe, frequently enough, in nature, such “bonds”—male and female mating, and mating, and again mating, their striving bodies locked mechanically together, one usually mounted upon another’s rear?—didn’t he hear, all too often, smutty tales of stud horses, bulls, hogs, roosters?—and he had been oddly disturbed by the men’s overloud laughter when someone told of a Steadman ram that had broken into a penned-off flock of ewes and impregnated, within five or six hours, more than one hundred of them. . . . If sex was a fascinating subject to the other boys it was a rather chilling subject to Bromwell, who approached it as he would approach all things, clinically and fastidiously, with the aid of books acquired through the mail. What was sex? What were the sexes? What did “sexual attraction” mean? He read of certain creatures—quahogs, whatever they were—who begin life as males, and who turn into females in order to mate; he puzzled over other creatures who had the ability to change sex within a matter of minutes, male to female to male again, in order to mate; and then there were the hermaphrodites who, possessing both male and female organs, might mate at any time . . . and in some cases continuously, for the life of the organism. There was a microscopic creature, at home in the warmth of human blood, in which the female lived encased within the male, in perpetual copulation: if Nature held no resistance, the extraordinary thing—it was a fluke, aptly named—would populate the world. The sexual eccentricities of oysters and sea hares and fish in general were not really eccentric, nor was it a matter of alarm that so much sperm was “wasted”—over one hundred million sperms in the ejaculation of the human male, fifty times more in the stallion, eighty-five billion in a single ejaculation of a boar!—for each of these evidently wished to populate the world with its own kind. When Bromwell stumbled upon his uncle Ewan straining and heaving and grunting with one of the laundresses in a closed-off downstairs room, or when he happened to see, quite by accident, through his telescope, his own father cupping a young woman’s head in his hand, and bringing it roughly to his big-pored face (this on a hill above the lake, a mile away), or when his cousins showed him the pronged bone of a raccoon’s penis (they had trapped the creature down by the creek and castrated it), asking him if he had any books that would explain such a strange thing—or was it, in the raccoon, normal?—Bromwell told himself once again that the details of sex were of no significance, for wasn’t life on this planet clearly a matter of a metabolic current, unstoppable, a fluid, indefinable energy flowing violently through all things from the sea worm to the stallion to Gideon Bellefleur? Why, then, take Bellefleur as central in nature? He much preferred the stars.)

  I began by hiding in Nature, Bromwell was to write in his memoir, decades later, but Nature is a river that carries you swiftly along. . . . Soon your world is everywhere, and there’s no need to hide, and you can’t even remember what you were fleeing.

  ALONE AMONG THE Bellefleurs his baby sister intrigued him.

  Leah had forbidden him to experiment with Germaine, but in private he did exactly as he wished. He examined her thoroughly, taking note (though he had no theory to explain it) of the curious scar tissue on her upper abdomen, an irregular oval of about three inches in diameter; he tested her eyesight (and was sadly pleased to discover that it was far, far keener than his own); he tested her hearing, weighed her, made pencil diagrams of her hands and feet, kept a fastidious record of her growth (which he seemed to know beforehand would be prodigious—as his assuredly was not); spoke with her as he might have spoken to an intelligent adult, enunciating his words carefully, giving her time to repeat them after him, moon, sun, star, constellation, Cassiopeia, Canis Major, Andromeda, Sirius, Ursa Major, Milky Way, galaxy, universe, God. . . . “You learn fast, don’t you,” he said in satisfaction. “Not like the rest of them.”

  He was pious and methodical in his experiments, and there was always an air of reverence about him—a child who appeared to be, at least at a distance, a somewhat undersized ten, in a knee-length white laboratory coat, his hair cropped short and shaved up the back, his thick-lensed glasses fitting snugly on his nose as if he’d been born with them—even when what he did was illicit, and would have enraged his mother. Forbidden to dissect animals he nevertheless continued to dissect them, though his interest in biology was quickly ebbing, as his interest in the stars blossomed; forbidden to experiment with what he called his sister’s “powers” he nevertheless experimented with them, sometimes allowing into his tower, as a control, sweet Little Goldie (who represented, to Bromwell, the “average” intelligence) and even the hoydenish, rapidly growing Christabel (subdued for weeks after the curious and unexplained incident of the barn fire out by Mink Creek, but naturally somewhat restless, and impatient, and likely to taunt her twin if he surrendered, even for a moment, the natural power his superior intelligence allowed him: but Bromwell needed her since she represented the “slightly above average” intelligence) since she had been born of the same parents as Germaine, and presumably shared genetic inclinations. He oversaw three-hand casino among the girls, though Christabel and Little Goldie thought it ridiculous, to be playing cards with a baby!—and noted how frequently Germaine won, or would have won had she known how best to play the cards she received. He had Little Goldie sit across the room and stare without blinking at full-color illustrations in his Elements of Biology, and he queried Germaine, patiently, about what she “saw” Little Goldie seeing; or he instructed Little Goldie to run somewhere and stare for five full minutes at a distinctive, sizable object (a water tower, a tree, one of the new cars) while Germaine, in the tower, twitched and whimpered (and frequently soiled her diapers) and tried to say what Little Goldie saw. Her fists paddled, her chin was wet with baby spit, she stammered, and squirmed, and caused the very floor of the room to vibrate with the intensity of her emotion—and much of the time (according to Bromwell’s calculations 87 percent of the time) she really did “see” what the other child saw. And after Germaine pointed excitedly, one morning, at an empty beaker on a windowsill, not more than five seconds before the beaker was blown off and shattered on the floor, Bromwell instructed her to push off the sill, by her own “powers,” a similar beaker—and would have kept the poor child there for hours (for he had the reptilian patience of an adult to whom time possesses no value except in proportion to what it might reveal, what meager nugget of truth it might suddenly cast up) had not she reverted, after the first hour, to infanthood, and began screaming and thrashing about so violently that he feared the entire household would rush up his private stairs and break open the locks to his private tower. And then Germaine, whom he needed, upon whom he was so curiously dependent, would be taken from him forever. . . . And of course he would be soundly whipped by one or the other or both of his parents.

  “Don’t cry! It’s all right. It’s all right,” he mumbled, embarrassed.

  It was one of his schemes that, by leading Germaine through a labyrinth of possibilities, reading off the names of villages and towns and cities and rivers and mountains, perhaps even moving her hand about on a large map spread across the floor, perhaps even blindfolding her, he might discover the whereabouts of his missing cousin Yolande (missing now for several weeks) . . . and what a coup that would be, how seriously, then, the family must take him, after the failure of numerous search parties and the family’s private detectives! But at the very sound of the word Yolande Germaine became agitated and would not cooperate.

  “Maybe you should limit yourself to experimenting with your mice and birds,” Christabel said, looking about the messy tower with her hands on her hips. “Cutting up that poor puppy . . . I remember that poor puppy. . . . Maybe
you should let me take Germaine downstairs. She’d rather play with me, wouldn’t you, Germaine?”

  “That puppy was born dead,” Bromwell said quietly. “It was the runt of the litter, it was born dead, it would only have been buried, I did not inflict pain upon it, I did not cause its death. . . .”

  “Then you should have buried it, you shouldn’t have picked around in its poor little chest,” Christabel said. “Come on, Germaine, honey! It’s too noisy in the garden, they’re bulldozing in the garden, maybe we could go down to the lake. . . . Or do you want to stay with him? He isn’t tormenting you?”

  Germaine stared up at her, wordless.

  Christabel was now more than a head taller than Bromwell, and much more solidly built. Her face was tanned and strong-boned; her breasts had begun to develop; her legs were lengthening. She carried into the tower an airy flyaway slapdash good humor that exasperated her brother. “Oh, do you really want to stay with him! But what—what—” She gestured carelessly and overturned Bromwell’s cardboard map of the solar system, as poor Bromwell reached weakly forward. “—what good does it do?”

  MIGHT THERE BE, Bromwell wondered aloud, staring deeply into his baby sister’s eyes, fairly drowning in that tawny-green fathomless gaze, a universe simultaneous with this universe in which a world like ours is propelled about its orbit, now at the aphelion, now at the perihelion, and again at the aphelion, century after century, a shadow-world, a mirror-world, in which, even now, I stand with my hands pressed between my knees, bending over a child said to be my sister, gazing into her eyes, wondering aloud. . . . Might there be, there, exact replicas of everything we have here, and would never see, here, without the reality of that other universe, the lead backing of our mirror . . . ? And then of course why would there be merely one universe simultaneous with this? Why not a dozen, three hundred, several thousand, several billion? Begun in a terrible explosion and now flying away from one another, flying faster at every moment, each identical with the others; linked by the identity of material (dust, sand, crystals, organic compounds of all kinds) and “life” itself. . . . And might there not be, granted the identity of these innumerable worlds, a way of slipping from one to another. . . .

  Germaine held his gaze. She gave him no affirmation, she did not rebuke him.

  Bromwell woke from his mild trance to hear a horn sounding nearby. Bellefleur noise, Bellefleur “emergencies”—a day could not pass without the excitement of a laborer’s injuries, or good news from Leah (back from one of her trips), or a fight among the children, or a visit from friends or business associates or relatives; or perhaps it was simply someone tapping at the horn of the new Stutz-Bearcat, for the pleasure of making noise. “Ah, well,” Bromwell sighed. “Our universe began with an explosion of immeasurable violence . . . so it’s natural for the human species to rest, so to speak, in violence . . . that is to say, in motion.”

  Haunted Things

  The cherrywood-and-veneered-oak clavichord Raphael had ordered built for his wife, Violet, with its walnut keys and ivory, gold, and jet ornamentation: an instrument of astounding beauty which no one (not even Yolande, who had taken several years of piano) could play. It was not that the keys stuck, or failed to sound; or even that the clavichord was out of tune. But anyone who sat before it to play was disturbed by its quivering air of hostility: for it did not want to be played, it did not want to make music. Or perhaps it was simply the Bellefleurs it detested. “We should sell this thing, or give it away, or at least store it in another part of the house,” Leah once said, in the days when she tried to play the musical instruments she found in the manor. “It sounds so awful. It sounds so spiteful.” But her mother-in-law merely closed the keyboard, and said: “Leah, dear, this is Violet’s clavichord. It’s too beautiful to move out of this room.” And so it was, and so it remained.

  DAMP MISCHIEVOUS KISSES floating in the air, planted firmly against lips at unpredictable times: once as Lamentations of Jeremiah was drifting off to sleep in the rolled-up featherbed Elvira had allowed him (she had shoved him out of their bed, insisted he sleep on the floor, forbade him to seek out another room since the rest of the family would know they had quarreled), so that, startled, wildly elated, he erroneously believed his wife had forgiven him, and was inviting him back not only to her warm bed but to her warm embrace; another time as the thirty-year-old Cornelia, locked in Raphael’s gloomy library with her stepbrother from Oneida, who was a Presbyterian minister, spread out before her on a desk the scribbled notes she’d taken, usually late at night, accusing the Bellefleurs—these terrible people she had, in all innocence, married into—of unspeakable insults and lapses of taste and crudenesses not to be believed: not a single kiss but many, grinding and sucking playfully all about her face and shoulders and bosom, so that the poor distraught woman went into hysterics and fainted; still another time as Vernon, walking on the promontory above the lake, in a lovesick trance, his arms crossed behind his back, his head bowed, tried out impassioned singsong lines O Lara my love, O Lara my soul, how can you wallow in another’s arms, how can you deny my spirit’s chaste love . . . and would have fallen into the lake fifty feet below, had not the kisses, angry and hissing and stinging as bees (and at first poor Vernon believed they were bees) awakened him.

  Sixteen-year-old Della’s sapphire ring, a birthday gift from her grandparents, disappeared from her finger one night only to reappear, days later, in a brown hen’s egg cracked open by the wife of one of the farm laborers, in their wood-frame bungalow at the edge of Noir Swamp. And there was the matter of Whitenose, young Noel’s bay gelding (whom Noel had acquired from a stud farm with all the cash he’d saved from birthdays and Christmases, and had broken—with great courage and stubbornness—himself), who so very clearly saw and shied away from and occasionally reared back from invisible creatures of a menacing nature, that Noel could not reasonably discipline him; the inexplicable soughing noises in certain rooms of the manor, as if winds were blowing through invisible cornfields; an odor of fish, rank and irremovable, on the fifteenth-century French embroidered altar frontal Raphael had acquired on one of his rare trips to Europe, and considered—for hadn’t it cost a great deal, at auction in London?—exquisitely beautiful; and of course there was the matter (which, outside the family, became the inspiration for many a cruel, spirited gibe in opposition newspapers throughout the state) of the “phantom” voters in certain areas of Nautauga, Eden, Clawson, Calla, and Juniper counties who had turned out in the hundreds to defeat (by a narrow margin) Raphael Bellefleur’s third and last bid for political office. . . .

  Jedediah, long ago, was so beleaguered by mountain spirits (and mountain spirits are the most capricious) that he soon accommodated himself to their presence, and spoke to them with the half-impatient, half-affectionate concern one might give to troublesome children; but he was still susceptible to vivid, alarming, entirely convincing dreams that would have him sinfully bedded with his brother’s young wife, and these caused him unremitting distress. (Which he was to feel well into his 101st year.) And Louis’s wife Germaine, miles away, down in Bushkill’s Ferry, was susceptible to annoying ticklish dreams that had dimly to do with her brother-in-law (whom she hadn’t seen for many years, and whom she did not really remember), and which caused her, one night, to unwisely call out Jedediah!—thereby waking Louis, who shook the poor woman until her eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. Felix—that is, Lamentations of Jeremiah—was to complain throughout his life that he was tormented more by “real” things than by spirits, and that he alone among the Bellefleurs was singled out for absolute defeat: he had said, after the bloodbath of the fox cannibalism, that he’d half-known on the very eve of the event that something terrible was going to happen, that he and his partner would lose all they had invested in the vicious little creatures, but (for such was Jeremiah’s apathy) he had felt only resignation—for what could one do to thwart a fate that began so many years ago, when his own father had, if not disowned him, unbaptized
him? You talk of haunted things, Jeremiah had said sadly, but what of those of us who know themselves haunted things—haunted things in human form?

  And there was Yolande who appeared, evidently, at the very same moment in the dreams of a number of the slumbering Bellefleurs—Garth and Raphael and Vida and Christabel and Vernon and Noel and Cornelia and Gideon and Leah and (so it was believed, since she woke babbling a name that resembled Yolande) Germaine, and of course Ewan and Lily: Yolande in a long dark dress with loose sleeves, a sort of robe, her arms at her sides, her head flung back so that her lovely wheat-colored hair tumbled down her back, her expression sorrowful but not contrite, not at all contrite, so that her father, the next morning, brought his enormous fist down hard on the breakfast table, cracking the glass, and said; “She has run off with a man, I know it! And just to spite me! And it’s obvious she is still alive!”

  Tiny drops of blood, in the children’s milk and in the cream bowl, for days after the cedar of Lebanon was felled by chain saws one shrieking afternoon (for though the tree was more than one hundred years old, and of course very attractive, and of course it had a sentimental value to the older Bellefleurs, the landscape architect Leah had hired from Vanderpoel insisted it must come down since it took up too much space in the garden and would have to be propped up anyway with unsightly boards), and a sense of agitation throughout the house, as if the giant tree’s spirit, pain-maddened, were running loose: a most unpleasant episode that did not really end until, some weeks later, the November storm evidently swept the spirit away. But that was hardly a blessing, since the storm was to bring with it a worse problem.