Ah! who can e’er forget so fair a being?
Who can forget her half retiring sweets?
God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats
For God’s protection. Surely the All-seeing,
Who joys to see us with his gifts agreeing,
Will never give him pinions, who intreats
Such innocence to ruin,—who vilely cheats
A dove-like bosom. In truth there is no freeing
One’s thoughts from such a beauty; when I hear
A lay that once I saw her hand awake,
Her form seems floating palpable, and near;
Had I e’er seen her from an arbour take
A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear
And o’er my eyes the trembling moisture shake. . . .
Because he took little heed of such things, Vernon scarcely knew his own age. He was, he supposed, in his early thirties at the time of the great shock—the sight, to be repeated continuously in his mind’s eye, whether he woke or slept, of an infant borne aloft in the talons of a gigantic vulturelike bird, and partly dismembered, and even devoured, in midair, before his helpless gaze; the last time anyone in the family (and that person had been Leah) thought to celebrate his birthday was a considerable number of years before, and he had been twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time, he couldn’t quite recall. Vernon will never grow up, Hiram once said, not caring that he spoke—with such unpaternal disdain!—within earshot of his son. But Vernon halfway thought that he had always been grownup. He hadn’t had a childhood, had he?—hadn’t it come to an abrupt, cruel end? But perhaps since his mother had abandoned him to the Bellefleurs, so many, many years ago, his childhood had been blighted from the start. He had been, he sometimes thought (though he didn’t write about such sentiments because he believed poetry must be rhapsodic and hymnal and “beautiful”), a kind of changeling. . . . For though he was, by heredity, a Bellefleur, in his soul he most emphatically was not a Bellefleur.
So he frequently quarreled, not only with his father but with his uncle Noel and his aunt Cornelia, and his cousins Ewan and Gideon whom he had always, since boyhood, feared; for he knew himself an aspect of God, a fragment of God’s consciousness, whose bodily form as well as his family identity was irrelevant. Once swaggering bullnecked Ewan asked him (in somewhat coarser language) if he had ever made love—“With a woman, that is”—and stared at him blandly, as if daring Vernon even to sense the insult of his words. Vernon’s skin flared and prickled hotly, but he managed to reply, in his usual gentle voice, No, no, he hadn’t, he supposed he had not, in the usual sense of the words.
“What other sense is there?” Ewan wanted to know.
He ignored such crudities, and forgave them, for he was, he supposed, something of a clownish figure; and anyway what choice had he? Sometimes in his wanderings back in the foothills, miles from home, when the towers of the castle were barely visible at the horizon, he allowed himself to think, warmly, that his poetry would someday be the means of his escape from those terrible soulless people—it would be the means of his power—his fame—his revenge. Ah, if he could only discover the characteristica universalis—the exact and universal language lodged deep in the human soul—what profound truths he would utter! Like Icarus he would construct wings to carry him free of this vast, beautiful, gloomy, overpowering corner of the world (which felt so often, in the mountains especially, or along the lakeshore, like an edge of the world); unlike Icarus he would escape, and live in triumph, for his wings would be the inviolable wings of poetry. At such times his heart beat painfully, and he yearned to seize hold of someone—anyone—even a stranger—and attempt to explain the rapture that swelled in his breast—which must be, he thought, like the rapture Christ experienced—Christ who yearned only to be the Saviour of pitiful fallen mankind, of the very people who failed to hear His words. Like a man trapped in a tomb, whose voice is not strong enough to penetrate the dense rock that has been rolled up against it, he yearned to explain himself, yet lacked the art.
Instead he stumbled, he stuttered, he groped, he annoyed and exasperated and embarrassed and bored other people, and made (ah, how frequently!) a contemptible fool of himself. One by one the children outgrew him. For a while each loved him—loved him very much—sought him out to tell little secrets to, to complain of the other adults’ indifference or cruelty; gave him presents; climbed on his lap, kissed his prickly cheek, teased, even taunted him, played little tricks on him; but loved him. One by one, Yolande (sweet, pretty, strong-willed Yolande, who had broken his heart by running away without leaving, as he had truly thought she would, a message for him), Vida, Morna, Jasper, Albert, Bromwell, Christabel. . . . Garth had never liked him. Garth had always been faintly contemptuous of him, making rude razzing noises during lessons or during Vernon’s readings. There was dreamy gentle dark-eyed Raphael, with his long pale slender hands, his white, almost clammish skin, Raphael who was so shy he had taken to avoiding, in recent years, not only his rowdy brothers and cousins and their friends, but Vernon himself. For a while Vernon and Raphael had been quite close. Vernon had liked to think of the boy as his son, a changeling of sorts, for wasn’t it improbable—ludicrous—that beefy beery Ewan should be the boy’s father? He had taken Raphael on hikes with him, he had shared with him certain beautiful moments—
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity, . . .
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things . . .
—yet for some reason, when Raphael was about eleven years old, they became estranged. Of course it was all on the boy’s side: Vernon had never ceased loving him. But the boy rose early and slipped away before breakfast, and spent all his time at the pond north of the cemetery (Mink Pond, it was called, though another pond, now dried up, had once been called Mink Pond), and when Vernon hiked out there to be with him he could feel how unwelcome he was: how, as he approached the pond’s marshy reedy willow-choked bank, and caught sight of the boy lying stomach-down on his raft, staring into the water, he was clumsily violating the child’s privacy, the child’s very soul. It was, he thought, sadly, like tramping heedlessly on a bird’s wing . . . Raphael lingered about the pond until after sunset, and then only reluctantly came home; even in the rain he played there; even on uncomfortably cold days. (What does he do for so many hours, Lily asked in exasperation, wondering if the boy needed a doctor’s care, or simply a good spanking, and Vernon said, somewhat arrogantly, What do any of us do—?) But he had lost Raphael and would never reclaim him. Now there was only Germaine: Germaine, that sturdy red-cheeked beauty with the amazing, uncanny eyes, and Garnet’s baby Cassandra, who was of course far too young, still, to appreciate Vernon’s devotion. And someday, he supposed, he would lose Germaine and Cassandra too.
And then there was Leah.
Leah—“Lara”—his Muse—his inspiration—his folly.
Ewan had asked rudely if Vernon had ever performed the act of love with a woman; he had not asked if Vernon had ever loved a woman. Surely there was an important distinction. He had fallen in love with Gideon’s young wife on the very day of the wedding, at the wedding party, as he gazed with longing at the dancers—at his cousin Gideon and Gideon’s bride—magnificent Leah Pym—Leah from across the lake—Della Pym’s daughter—one of the “poor” Bellefleurs. (Poor out of pride, it was said. For Della could certainly have lived in the castle had she wished.) He had loved her then and had been, over the years, content to love her at arm�
��s length, like a courtier of old, reading in her presence (though not, alas, always with her attentive ear) poems of longing, his own and others’, With how sad steps O moon, and “Greensleeves,” and the tender, clumsy, assonance-heavy “Lara” sonnets; eager to do errands for her, to mind the children, to listen sympathetically as she complained of Cornelia’s tyranny. But Leah was, in recent months, not always an inspiration. The gross but marvelous physicality of her pregnancy had somewhat unnerved him—he had discovered, then, that Leah in his imagination was sometimes lovelier than Leah in the flesh—but the Leah of the present was more extreme. Her glittering eyes disturbed him, and her fingers smudged with newsprint (for she read, each morning at breakfast, several papers), and her quick wit, her manner of addressing Hiram, even in Vernon’s presence, in a language so studded with private allusions and financial terms and abbreviations of one kind or another that it constituted, nearly, a code—a code poor Vernon could not hope to decipher, and which caused him pain. And she was frequently imperious. Hoarse-voiced, and then shrill. Sending back the tea things because a single cup was cracked, or the tea wasn’t hot enough, or there was an indentation—“Suspiciously like a thumbnail!”—in the icing on a piece of coffee cake. (Isn’t she terrible, the servants whispered, sometimes in tears. Isn’t she full of herself! And such was their distress that they frequently spoke in voices loud enough for Vernon to hear.)
Of course she was still beautiful. She would always be, Vernon knew, beautiful. Despite the fact that the soft plump placidity of her face had thinned slightly so that near-invisible lines showed about her eyes, ghostlines, really, not seriously imprinted in the flesh, and visible only in harsh bright sunlight. . . . (She had lost a considerable amount of weight after her pregnancy, and continued to lose it. For she was always rushing from place to place—the state capitol, Vanderpoel, the Falls, Port Oriskany, Derby, Yewville, Powhatassie, even New York City—and even at home she rarely relaxed, as she had in the old days, in the walled garden or Violet’s boudoir. Even sprawled exhausted in a chair she was thinking, thinking, planning, plotting, her mind turning and turning about like a windmill blade, giving off a nearly palpable heat. Vernon had actually glimpsed her, once, through the partly open door of Raphael’s study, talking over two telephones, a receiver tightly couched against each of her hunched shoulders!) But Leah would always be a beautiful woman, Vernon told himself, sighing a lover’s sigh of resignation, and he would always love her; and she would always belong to another man.
HE WANDERED IN the Lake Noir area, and in the foothills, gone sometimes for a week or ten days, tramping the fields and lanes and riverbanks in his muddy, leaking shoes, wearing on his head a cast-off rubber rainhat of Noel’s, or a cast-off Irish hat of Ewan’s he had found on the floor of a closet. With his straggly graying beard he looked decades older than he was, like a figure out of mythology, or out of the mountain mists, an incongruous red scarf tied about his neck, his trousers stained at the knee, his jackets sometimes baggy, sometimes tight, sometimes not even his. Aunt Matilde had knitted him a wonderful bulky sweater heavy as a coat, with generous-sized pockets for his books and papers and pens, and she had sewn on wooden buttons she’d carved herself, out of hickory wood; but one day he returned to the manor without it, shivering like a fool in the rain, and claimed that he could not—could not—remember what had happened to it. (A man who loses an article of clothing he is wearing, Hiram intoned, will eventually lose everything.)
So he wandered, always on foot. Eccentric, probably not “crazy” (for there were far crazier people in the hills), probably not dangerous. He was never to encounter, in his years of wandering, his cousin Emmanuel—by now an almost legendary, improbable figure, about whom the other Bellefleurs rarely spoke, as if they had forgotten he was a brother of Gideon’s and Ewan’s, and had come to think of him as remote in time, like Raphael’s son Rodman, about whom so little was known: though presumably Emmanuel was still mapping the region, covering every acre on foot, and would one day return home in triumph. With his mismatched eyes (which always surprised and amused children, but sometimes made adults uneasy) and his untidy appearance and his “poesy” Vernon came to be famous in the region; of course he was also known as a Bellefleur, and given a wide berth. Farmers driving pick-up trucks along the country roads he traveled slowed courteously as they passed him, never offering him a ride (for to offer a Bellefleur anything might be interpreted as impertinence, coming from a social inferior, and everyone lived in dread of offending or insulting the Bellefleurs: Ewan had injured a number of men in fights, as had Gideon; and Raoul’s temper had been legendary; Noel had been a hellion in his day; Hiram, in some ways the most sinister of the Bellefleurs, had exercised his kind of power decades ago by buying up, at dismayingly cheap prices, land belonging to farmers who had been forced into bankruptcy; and of course there had been Jean-Pierre II who had murdered eleven men one night, quite calmly and methodically, because of an “insult” he had overheard), though they were quick to stop if Vernon indicated he wanted a ride. And quick to allow him to sleep in their haylofts, or to help with farm chores (though he was almost comically clumsy) in exchange for meals. They liked Vernon—they liked him—however they may have felt about his family—and could forgive him his doggerel-poetry which he imagined, poor fool, would someday save the world. And if he spoke of a farmer’s kindness, back at the castle, perhaps one of the harder-hearted Bellefleurs would overhear. . . .
JUST AS THE Bellefleurs were sharply divided on the subject of religion—more specifically, on the subject of God—so were they divided on the related subject of the existence of Evil. Whether Evil “existed” or whether it only appeared to exist, from a necessarily limited point of view; whether it certainly did exist, and existed for a purpose (inevitably divine in scope if not in sentiment); whether there was no Evil, but a small galaxy of evils, each contending for its share of human flesh; whether Evil was simply the palpable absence of Good (thought to be the laziest of the arguments); whether, given a universe dominated by spirit, the only significant Evil could be spiritual; or, conversely, whether the only significant Evil could be material, given the fundamental material nature of the universe . . . so the Bellefleurs argued, sometimes quite passionately, sometimes with a lamentable lack of civility, and not only failed to convince one another but, by way of their very passion, closed their minds against those subtleties, however infrequent, which might have aided their intellectual growth. (Indeed, the spirit of contention was sometimes thought to be the essential curse of the Bellefleurs—for isn’t it out of contention that all evils spring?)
Pious and good-natured, and stubborn, Vernon considered himself a henotheist, or perhaps a pantheist; what mattered, he reasoned, was not the content of one’s belief but its depth. Since his God encompassed and swallowed up everything, every particle of matter—the filigree of synapses in that masterwork of cunning, the human brain; the speckled boxlike armor of the trunkfish; the screech of planing mills, Germaine’s happy smile, his mother’s tearful farewell, the splendor of Mount Blanc and the rank gloomy silence of Noir Swamp—since his God was identical with His creation, there could be nothing left over, no room for laborious theorizing. The pulses sang as pulses have always sung Here I am, I am here by right, I exist, and the spirit of all creation through me, and the wise man, and certainly the poet, echoes this song. (But there is a God of Destruction, too, Gideon said one day to Vernon, years ago, when members of the family still took Vernon seriously enough to quarrel with him, come and I will show you. . . . And dragged him away to the witchhobble-choked foot of Sugarloaf Hill where in angry boyish triumph he showed Vernon a partly eaten doe. The poor thing had been pregnant, evidently—her belly had been torn open by dogs—her throat so crudely slashed that she had bled to death—forced to watch (and her affrighted eyes, not yet picked clean by birds, were open and fixed) the horror of the dogs’ greedy devouring jaws. She had died while witnessing the death of her fetus. And the dogs hadn’t been espec
ially hungry, Gideon said, look at all they’ve left. . . . Vernon gagged, and backed away; could not stop himself from vomiting, though he felt his cousin’s excited contempt. But when he recovered he said, Gideon, the dogs must be nourished . . . we eat, and are eaten . . . don’t despair. Gideon had stared at him. What do you mean, what do you mean, don’t despair! Don’t judge, Vernon whispered. Don’t despair. But Gideon had looked at him uncomprehendingly, as, years later, the child Raphael was to look at him after having asked him a question about leeches. Don’t despair, don’t judge, don’t set yourself apart from God so that you are forced to judge, Vernon implored Gideon, trying to take his angry cousin’s arm. Don’t touch me, Gideon said.)
The family was also divided, though not as decisively, on the subject of certain more immediate beliefs. Uncle Hiram did not believe in spirits, but his brother Noel did; most of the children believed in the giant snowman in the mountains, and in the Swamp Vulture, or Noir Vulture, as it was sometimes called (indeed, it was sometimes called the Bellefleur Vulture, by people in the area), and most of the adults—though certainly not all of the adults—did not. That there were Bellefleurs who claimed to have seen the enormous bird, up in the mountains, or circling the swamp, seemed to inspire, in the others, only amused contempt: All the more reason for knowing the thing is a hoax, Della once declared, if that pathological liar Noel claims to have seen it.
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