He joined her, laughing. Uproariously laughing. As the heavy car sped along the highway. To the left, the sun was nowhere near the horizon but the sky, threaded with somber quizzical clouds, had begun to darken. There was a bruised, faintly resentful look to the air. But the clouds were too thin to be storm clouds.
North, into the mountains. But Nautauga Falls was in the other direction. So perhaps he should turn the car around.
He braked. And turned into a narrow dirt road, an old logging road. Drove a little too fast so that the big car rattled. The flask slipped out of Tina’s hand and struck the dashboard, and bourbon splashed.
. . . driving too goddamn fast, she said, surprised.
Not for people in a hurry, he said.
At the mountainous rim, at the edge, of all he could see, there might be a place he could stand, to look back at what he was: but perhaps it was dangerous to go there. Men hacked their way to that place . . . and then did not return. They slipped over the edge, or stared down too long into the abyss; they couldn’t remember where they had come from, still less why they had gone where they had. There, you forgot it was the rim, most likely. You didn’t even think it might be the center of a circle because the idea of a circle wouldn’t be there, for you to step into, the way you usually step into thoughts prepared beforehand.
Oh, look— That tree— There must have been a storm—
The road was impassable: a giant poplar lay at an angle across it.
All right, said the driver, get out. This is as far as we go, I want to see if I like you.
Tina was wiping at her skirt, which the bourbon had splashed.
You’re in such a goddamn hurry all at once, she said sullenly.
But the color was up in her cheeks and her eyes were shining as she slid across the seat to get out his door. Grunting, giggling, trying to pull her skirt down. Embarrassed that her thighs, which showed for a moment, whitely, were so raddled and jellyish.
But he was staring off into the sky. Slowly he ran both hands through his stiff bushy hair. Broad-shouldered, tall, very tall, lean, handsome, but wearing that soiled white vest, and a pale blue shirt that looked as if he hadn’t changed it for several days; and his beard needed trimming. They would stay at the Nautauga House, probably. Where (Tina knew, for a friend worked in the smoke shop off the lobby) there was a gentleman’s barber. . . .
Now he turned to her, and was looking at her. For the first time, at her. She smoothed down her skirt, and staggered, her heels sinking in the sandy soil, and tried to smile.
All right, he said, as if not catching that smile, strip.
What?
Your clothes. Strip. Now. Before we go back. I want to see, he said softly, with an air of melancholy resignation, if I like you.
Reflections
Now the pond, Mink Pond, his pond, was at its prime: lush and glittering with reflections, trembling with ungovernable incalculable life: his.
How beautiful!—Is it possible to get closer?—Is there a path? So visitors cried, from the graveled walk. (But the banks were now overgrown with alder and water willow, cattails, pickerelweed, bulrushes, reeds, nameless tall grasses. So much water willow, and so suddenly—how, Raphael wondered, did it grow so fast this summer—sinewy stems with dozens of eager red roots, arching over the water and then sinking beneath the surface, to take hold of the muddy bottom. And growing, so ferociously, from everywhere on the pond’s fertile circumference. From one day to the next Raphael’s narrow, secret pathway had to be opened.)
Hello, Raphael—is that Raphael—? Raphael? Is he there?
Raphael—?
Strangers’ voices. Guests of the castle. (For there were visitors now all the time. But they rarely found their way to Raphael’s pond.)
Reflections, at dusk, of a doe with her six-weeks’ fawn. Stooping to drink. Cautious, yet rather noisy; splashing about; stepping on tussock sedges that sank slowly beneath their weight. The fawn’s eyes were enormous but not greatly concerned with seeing. The doe’s coat was a queer silvery-russet. As they drank spasmodic ripples radiated out, toward the pond’s distant center.
Reflections, at midday, of dragonflies. The banks, the pond, the overhanging willow branches, alive with dragonflies: a frenzy of iridescent glitter, turquoise, onyx, reddish-yellow: their outsized monstrous heads: their pulsing wingbeats.
The pond in its maturity, in its prime. But in midsummer creatures lay about as if exhausted—frogs on tussocks, a snake on a sun-bleached rock—a snapping turtle, new to the pond and new to Raphael’s eye, on a partly submerged log. Bright green algae, smelling of rot and sun. Far overhead but looking, in the pond’s quivering brackish surface, as if it were only a few inches away, the pale gauzy-gray insubstantial sky was disturbed by whirligig beetles and fisher spiders and mud minnows.
Life, reflected in the pond, or sucked down into the pond and swallowed, given no reflection. Water snakes graceful and undulating, like bulrushes come to life; and silent. Silent too the innumerable yellow perch with their rows of minute dark stripes and their insatiable appetites.
Raphael—?
You don’t love us, was Vida’s sudden cry as, for no reason he could determine, she gave her brother a shove. Hurt and bewilderment in her voice, as well as anger. It was someone’s birthday. Raphael was certain it had not been his birthday. . . . He slipped away, restless and bored with their foolish games. Musical chairs and “The Needle’s Eye” and charades and tag and hide-and-go-seek and . . . It wasn’t true, that he didn’t love them. It was simply the case that he never thought of them.
The pond quivered and glittered and trembled with its secret spirits. He wanted to know them. He would know them. Sleeping things, scurrying things, spiders, crayfish, milfoil, pennywort, tadpoles, ugly black bullheads in the muddy shadows at the very bottom. Tiny, near-microscopic lice clinging to underwater grasses; bubbles, popping to the surface, stinking of decay like the body’s gases; bubbles that revealed themselves not as air, as nothing, but as living globules, the size of fleas.
Reflections of swamp sparrows, red-winged blackbirds uneasily perched on cattails, wings thrashing about in the willow leaves. Once, through a maze of insect-riddled pickerelweed, the great white-winged bird with its skinned head and pointed beak, flying far overhead, so distant that the sound of its flapping wings could not be heard.
(The Noir Vulture, they called it. In their furious befuddled mourning. What a commotion they made, with their noisy tears, their grief, their anger! Gunshots sounded from the swamp, from the lakeshore, day after day; but they returned empty-handed. Raphael hid, and observed, and slipped away from the house as quietly as possible, and of course he was not asked to accompany the men into the swamp.)
REFLECTIONS OF AN eye, multiplied thousands—thousands upon thousands!—of times, in a single drop of water. Eyes reflecting eyes. The pond was, of course, more dizzyingly complex than a dragonfly’s wings; more subtle than a bullfrog’s papery shed skin; more slyly alive than the red midges. It was aware of him at all times, it lapped about his groping fingers, caressing, calculating, giving comfort. Eyes gazing into eyes gazing into eyes. Those long summer afternoons in which the very heat-haze seemed asleep, yet everything was alive, intensely alive, with thought. . . .
Reflections of flies, gnats, hummingbirds. Reflections of hungry pickerel, cast upward against the scummy pads of water lilies.
Reflections, too sudden and too bright (red, olive-red) of a cardinal and his mate, disturbing the tranquillity of Raphael’s brooding.
If I could go down, if I could sink, if I could burrow my head into the dark warm mud, if my lungs were strong enough to endure pain . . .
Patience.
Stillness.
In the dim undersea of colored, dancing shadows, in the Rialto Theater, they had sat, a full row of them, delighted as small children with their new purchase. (Several downtown blocks of Rockland, to the west, in Eden County. Among the properties was an old movie theater with a sagging marquee
and a vast, vaulted, cavernous foyer whose robin’s-egg-blue ceiling was brushed with sequins that resembled fish scales.) They ate stale buttered popcorn—their popcorn—and devoured boxes of mints—and found it difficult to settle down, even when “The March of Time” showed such unspeakable sights. This was their property, Bellefleur property, the sandstone façade, the cheap plaster pillars, the worn, filthy “Oriental” rugs, the rows and rows of seats descending gradually to the stage; the faded scarlet curtains, fold upon fold of velvet; the ornate grimy molding at the ceiling; the screen with its criss-crossings of hair-thin cracks. What they did not own was the play of colored shadows on the screen, and so they settled back to watch: soon drawn, like the rest of the sparse audience, into the mysterious story set now in the cornfields of the Midwest, now in a tropical city, now in “Paris.” There was a beautiful though hard-faced woman with platinum blond hair curled tightly under, too tightly under, so that she looked, to Raphael’s skeptical eye, like a manikin. She wore gowns that clung to her breasts, even to her sloping pelvis. There was a girl, her younger sister, who appeared in only a few scenes, at the beginning of the movie and again at the end, when the woman returned to her hometown (though only briefly, because her mustached lover, her millionaire-pilot lover, pursued her across the continent), and this girl—with her frank pretty face and her shining wheat-colored hair and her soft melodious voice and her small smile—was so much more interesting than the woman, so much more attractive, that whenever she appeared on screen the audience’s interest quickened; one could feel it, unmistakably. So small a role, and yet—wasn’t that girl remarkable!
(But when Raphael leaned over to his mother, to say, Isn’t that Yolande?—Lily pretended not to comprehend. Not even to hear. “Isn’t that Yolande?” Raphael asked, raising his voice, and his family told him to be still—there were other people in the theater, after all. Afterward when the lights came on and the others left and the Bellefleurs remained sitting in their row, as if greatly moved, subdued by the screen’s effortless miracles and its almost supernatural beauty, Raphael asked again about the girl—about Yolande—for certainly it was Yolande—and Lily said in a vague stunned voice, “No, it wasn’t, I had that thought for a moment too but then I looked more closely, I suppose I’d know my own daughter if I saw her,” and Vida snorted contemptuously, saying, “That actress is beautiful, and Yolande wasn’t—she had an ugly nose,” and Albert did no more than grunt in baffled amusement, and Leah said, squeezing Lily’s hand, “Your daughter would be no more than fifteen, you know, and that girl—that young woman—was in her early twenties at least. She’s probably been married and divorced a half-dozen times.” Garth and Little Goldie, who had been sitting just across the aisle, holding hands and sharing a bag of peanuts and giggling, claimed not to have noticed the girl at all: a girl in the movie said to resemble poor Yolande . . . ? No, they hadn’t noticed her at all.)
And of course there was no “Yolande Bellefleur” among the actors’ names.
“What a silly idea, Raphael,” Vida whispered, staring at him. “You’re getting strange. I don’t know if I like you.”
REFLECTIONS DARTING THROUGH reflections. Faces swimming out of the movie projector’s ghostly light, or taking shape out of the dark still water. (But there was not a single water, a single substance. Instead there were layers upon layers, currents entwined with currents, many waters, many spirits, unknowable.)
How is it possible, Raphael wondered, with a small stab of fear, that we recognize one another from day to day, even from hour to hour . . . ? Everything shifts, changes, grows fluid, transparent. He saw the photograph of a tall stocky frowning man in the newspaper, and did not realize until he read the caption that the man was his own father. Once, not long before dawn, when he crept down from his room without waking the others, and ran barefoot across the lawn, his heart lifting with an absurd hope (ah, to get there!—to get safely there, as quickly as possible!—to make certain the pond had not disappeared in the night, like one of his strange dreams), he happened to see, some distance away, in the swampy area adjacent to the pond, his great-aunt Veronica hurrying toward the house. Like a sleepwalker she made her way with her arms extended and her head upright. Coils of graying hair had fallen loose on her shoulders so that she resembled, in the mist-threaded light, a very young girl. It was no more than two or three minutes before dawn, and red-winged blackbirds were singing stridently; and back in the swamp an owl called. How odd, how very odd, that she should be hurrying back to the castle, from the undrained marshy area below the cemetery, that she should walk—glide—so gracefully along, making no sound whatsoever, and not noticing her nephew as he stood, one hand raised in a shy, tentative greeting, no more than thirty feet away. . . . Raphael noted that the fluffy-plumed reeds barely stirred with her passing.
Yet a minute later, gazing into the colorless waters of his pond, Raphael could ask himself whether he had seen her—whether he had seen anyone at all. The swamp was nearly hidden in mist. Coils of fog blew indolently along the ground, as if alive. And anyway weren’t other people, members of his family as well as strangers projected flatly on a movie screen, unknowable from day to day, unrecognizable . . . ? Perhaps they were all bodiless as shadows, all images, all reflections.
Rising out of the quivering, agitated water into which he stepped, barefoot, was a face: the face of a young boy: a child’s ancient water-dimmed face, nibbled by invisible currents. As if framing it tenderly between two hands the pond held it aloft. A stranger’s face, it seemed. With that curious hopeful expression . . .
But perhaps Raphael was mistaken and the expression was not hopeful. Perhaps it was nothing at all: simply water, simply light. For if the dark waters were not there, the face would not exist either. It would vanish at once. It would never have been.
The Wicked Son
Even at the height of his fame and his power, in the very prime of his extraordinary life—even when it was quite plain that within a few years he could not fail to become a billionaire (for the first hops harvest of some four hundred acres had brought him profits far beyond his characteristically conservative estimation, and the second harvest, of more than five hundred acres, in a blessed conjunction with severe rainstorms that damaged plantations in Germany and Austria, and drove the world market price wonderfully high, brought him even greater profits), and he might exert his will more forcefully in politics (had he not almost convinced mistrustful Stephen Field that he was, despite his reputation for secrecy and stubbornness, and his unfortunate public manner, the very man for the office of governor during these troubled times)—even when the final additions to his magnificent estate were completed, the Roman bath with its priceless Italian tiles and the conservatory with its glass dome and the marble pagoda fronting the stables, and his hundreds of guests praised the manor in exalted language that would have embarrassed, had it been less than appropriate—even then, after a passage of time that, crowded with events as it was, should have exorcised the worst of his bitterness, Raphael Bellefleur often gave himself up to spasmodic outbursts of sheer rage, at the thought of his wicked son Samuel who had escaped him.
Of course Samuel had not “escaped” him. He was still in the castle, in the Turquoise Room, beneath his father’s roof. And yet everyone behaved as if he had died, and Raphael went along with the fiction, for certainly the young man did not exist in the usual sense of the word.
Violet mourned the loss of her handsome young son but refused to discuss the matter with Raphael. We know what we know, she murmured, and of that we cannot speak.
Old Jedediah kept to himself as always, courteous, distant, his pale hazel eyes averted from Raphael’s whenever they happened to meet. Unless Raphael imagined it, his aged father was ashamed on his account. To have lost a son like Samuel! A dashing young officer! And to have lost him in such a way—!
In the beginning, Samuel’s young friends came frequently to visit. Raphael gave them food and drink but always excused himself from the dr
awing room; he could not bear to see the young men in their uniforms, none of them so tall and handsome and quick as Samuel had been. He overheard their murmurous conversation: Samuel would return, Samuel would reappear any day: and what stories he would tell! It was inconceivable that Samuel Bellefleur was dead. . . .
Of course he isn’t dead, one of the lieutenants said. He simply chooses not to be with us.
Poor Lamentations of Jeremiah mourned the loss of his brother, going about in a melancholy daze, his inkwell eyes piteous to behold. Go away, go out of my sight, Raphael moaned, you must know you won’t do. And the unhappy boy crept off to his room and locked the door.
RAPHAEL WOULD HAVE liked to withdraw from the world for a spell, in order to properly mourn the loss of his son. And yet—he found himself unable to keep from thinking about the world. The world. The world of time, and flesh, and power. For wasn’t the world always there, always in turmoil, no matter that one closed one’s eyes to it? The sanctity of the Chautauqua mountains, the eerie mist-shrouded solitude of Bellefleur Manor, which seemed, to many a visitor from downstate, and to Mr. Lincoln himself (who had first visited it in the late fifties, when the nation’s movement toward war began to violently accelerate), to place the castle out of time, and to give it an otherworldly, an almost legendary aura, was soon lost to Raphael: for, after all, he owned the estate, he knew all the blunders and heartbreaking miscalculations that had gone into its creation, he alone was responsible for its upkeep. Like the God of creation he could not reasonably take solace in his creation, for wasn’t it—after all—his?
So he could not withdraw. He could not turn his restless darting insatiable intelligence away from the world, though of course this was precisely what Samuel had chosen to do. Only to Jedediah did Raphael dare say a few words, not of grief but of befuddled anger: Do you comprehend, Father, what the boy has done!—he has—he has—he has wantonly and with full deliberation gone over to the other side, to the blacks.
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