Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  HE TOOK TO prowling about the house at night, making his way through the servants’ wing into the Great Hall, and into the drawing room. There, he drew the heavy velvet drapes (as if fearing the night watchman or the gate-house keeper or one of the dogs would see the light, and expose him), and worked, undisturbed for hours, on the clavichord. One morning Violet herself, still in her dressing gown, discovered him, and was astonished to see how pale the poor young man had grown, and how strange: he must have weighed little more than a hundred pounds, and his hair was plastered to his damp forehead, and his thin lips were tightly pursed as if he were resisting the impulse to scream. His hooded, rather weary eyes flashed to her, and he attempted a wan smile: but clearly he was unwell.

  “Tamás,” Violet cried, “why are you doing this? Why are you destroying yourself!”

  He turned away, though not discourteously, and, with a tiny screwdriver, proceeded to adjust something on the inside of the clavichord.

  That morning, Violet insisted upon feeding him bouillon, toast, and bacon rind, which she brought to her drawing room herself, on a silver tray; she made certain the door was closed behind her so that no inquisitive servant could peer in. Tamás ate, though reluctantly. It was clear that he ate only to please her; he kept glancing at the clavichord (which looked, in the brilliant morning light, more beautiful than ever), and his fingers involuntarily twitched. Violet asked him what was wrong—why was he so often unhappy—melancholy—was it thoughts of his homeland?—his wife? (She spoke in a near-whisper, trembling with her own audacity. But Tamás seemed not to care, or even to hear. Homeland? Wife? Unhappy? He merely shrugged his shoulders, and his eyes drifted back to the clavichord.)

  “Ah, but it is beautiful!” Violet cried. She rose, unsteady, and went to the clavichord, and struck a bold chord, using all her fingers. And struck it again, her heartbeat crazy and light as a butterfly’s. “Isn’t it beautiful, haven’t you produced a wonder!” she whispered, in triumph.

  When she looked back at Tamás he was gazing at her, and at the clavichord, with an expression of simple, mute adoration. Droplets of perspiration, or tears, ran down his thin cheeks, and he was, she could see, perfectly at peace. He fairly glowed with a still, calm, inviolable ecstasy.

  IT WAS ON a fine, clear, sunny May morning that Violet entered her drawing room to see the clavichord finished. She knew Tamás had finished it because he had laid, on the bench, the green brocaded cushion Violet intended to use.

  “Ah, how lovely,” Violet said, approaching the instrument. She depressed a note and it sounded, remote, but bell-like, with an indescribably sweet tone.

  She sat, and played a scale or two, and part of a simplified rondo, really a children’s piece, which she knew by heart. It seemed to her that the clavichord’s tone was even more beautiful than she remembered. What had Tamás done with it, overnight . . . ? She leaned forward to inhale the odor of the fine polished wood, and could not resist touching her cheek against it. A master craftsman had fashioned this exquisite instrument for her. He had thought enough of her taste to allow her to choose the woods, and the ornamentation; he had made a keyboard scaled to her delicate hands. Not one of Raphael’s costly gifts (the sable opera cloak, the new phaeton, the diamonds, pearls, and rubies, even the manor house itself) meant as much to her as Tamás’s clavichord which wasn’t, strictly speaking (for of course Raphael was paying for it) a “gift” from the young Hungarian at all. . . .

  In her satin dressing gown with the kimonolike sash Violet sat at the little instrument, playing her pieces one by one. Tamás would enter the room at any moment. She could imagine him making his way along the servants’ hall . . . into the Great Hall . . . pausing at the door of the drawing room, his hand on the knob, listening to this delicate, simplified mazurka . . . a haunting dancelike tune written by Chopin at a very young age. It was not quite suitable for the clavichord, nor were Violet’s little fingers agile enough, but the tone, the tone! . . . it was so exquisitely beautiful that tears started into Violet’s eyes.

  When the young Hungarian entered the room Violet was going to rise from the bench, and hold her arms out to him. For a long worldless moment they would stare at each other. And then he would close the door gently behind him, and . . .

  Her fingers were so clumsy, she exclaimed aloud. Ah, how frustrating, to be unworthy of this exquisite thing! But she would practice. She would honor it as Tamás had honored it, knowing the clavichord was something from another world, only entrusted, in a manner of speaking, to her. One day she would play not only her simple girlhood pieces but ambitious, brilliant, heartstopping pieces by Scarlatti and Couperin and Bach and Mozart, perhaps she would even have a kind of salon, and invite intelligent, cultured men and women—not Raphael’s acquaintances, not his contemptible political associates!—and Tamás would be the guest of honor—he might live at the manor as long as he wished—he would become famous throughout the state—a builder of clavichords and harpsichords—a master craftsman whose instruments were extremely costly but, as everyone acclaimed, more than worth their price: he had built, everyone would say, Violet Bellefleur’s clavichord, and there was never a more lovely, a more indescribably beautiful thing. . . .

  Violet broke off her playing, having heard something odd. She turned but there was no one in the room. Her own portrait, painted some years earlier by a flattering society portraitist, was, in its position above the marble fireplace, the natural place for her glance to alight; but she looked away at once, vexed and obscurely ashamed of its sleek, pretty, falsely rosy tones—what had Tamás thought, working for so many months in this room, forced to see, whenever he glanced around, that conventionalized image!—Tamás who was himself so superb an artist? He must have been secretly contemptuous not just of that portrait, and of Raphael’s matching portrait (which hung in the Great Hall), but of most of the Bellefleur acquisitions.

  I realize now what I must do, Violet would say to the young man when he appeared, having grasped the principle of beauty embodied in your work: I will have to remake this room, to suit it. To make a kind of shrine for it. Beginning of course with the removal of that insipid portrait—!

  (But perhaps he would recoil in surprise. Not wanting the painting to be discarded. He would ask, shyly, if it might be given to him. To hang in his room. But where was his room? In the servants’ wing. What a fuss there might be. . . . Too much whispering and speculation. . . . And if Raphael learned . . . But of course he would learn, at once. . . . )

  Violet saw by the clock on the mantel that it was getting late, nearly midmorning. Where was Tamás? He was usually hard at work by now. In another minute or two a solicitous servant would rap gently on the door and ask Violet if she wanted her morning coffee, and if Tamás then appeared, why the moment would be quite botched. . . .

  Perhaps he was ill? He had looked so worn, so exhausted, the day before. In fact for a number of days. He had refused even to drink the hot bouillon she had brought him yesterday, though she had thought that might have developed into a routine, a small pleasant ritual.

  Tamás?

  Are you ill?

  Aren’t you coming?

  By and by a servant did knock, and Violet sent her away, irritably, to find Tamás. It was very late. What could he be thinking of! It was inconsiderate of him, it was rather cruel, to so deliberately keep her waiting, since he knew very well she would be seated at the clavichord, like a child with a new toy. Unlike Tamás, Violet thought, to be affectedly modest.

  But Tamás was not in his room. Nor could they find him anywhere.

  “What do you mean,” Violet said in dismay, rising from the bench, “have you looked? Of course you haven’t looked everywhere!”

  So they searched the house, each of the floors and the basement; they searched the grounds and the outbuildings; they inquired of all the servants, and the groundsmen and the farmhands and even the itinerant help housed down by the swamp; and they reported to Miss Violet that Tamás was nowhere to be found. Th
e bed in his little room was neatly made as always, and his clothing and toiletries appeared to be undisturbed.

  “But surely there is a note?” Violet said, stricken. “He— We— My husband— The clavichord has not even been paid for—”

  They searched for him in the woods, using hounds, for he had been distracted for so long (except when working at the clavichord) that it was altogether possible he had wandered away and was lost. But they could not find him; the dogs could not even locate his scent. Violet wired the Nautauga Falls cabinetmaker for whom Tamás had worked, but the man had no knowledge of him; he claimed not to have heard from Tamás for nearly a year.

  “How could you do this to me!” Violet whispered. Her heart pounded so strangely, she thought she would faint. She was so angry, and so frightened, and so vexed, like a child who has lost her closest playmate: and there stood the clavichord in the window, the lovely matchless clavichord, meant to be shared, meant to be exclaimed over in his presence, and played for him: and he was gone.

  Gone, as it turned out, forever.

  FROM THIS TIME afterward Violet lived sunk within herself, and only appeared to come to life, albeit fitfully, while seated at the clavichord. Years and years and years were to pass, and Tamás was not to be found, nor did anyone receive word of him. Raphael thought the entire incident was extremely suspicious. He had never heard of a workingman or tradesman or carpenter or whatever the young fool called himself who had declined to present his bill, and it upset him, for years, that services done for him should remain unpaid: that wasn’t the Bellefleur way of doing business.

  Violet played the clavichord, at first for brief periods of an hour or less, then for two, three, four, and even five hours at a stretch. She refused to accompany her husband on his most ambitious campaign journey about the state, and Raphael afterward blamed her, quite unreasonably, for his poor showing. It was not uncommon for the mistress of Bellefleur Manor to descend to her drawing room immediately upon rising, and, in her dressing gown, with her hair all atumble down her back, quite indifferent to the demands of the household, and even, frequently, to the presence of household guests, seat herself at the clavichord and play for hours, the door locked behind her. Once, discovering the door unlocked, her son Jeremiah, then an ostensibly grown man; entered the room shyly, and stood listening for some twenty or thirty minutes to his mother’s frantic, feverish playing, in which he could discern from time to time (but with difficulty, for Jeremiah had never been musically inclined, and had received no training) sudden queer sounds—airy, light, muted, faint—of unutterable beauty. The clavichord was not an easy instrument to play, Jeremiah judged by his mother’s exertions, and the frequently flat, tinny notes she struck, it seemed at times hardly more than a glorified lyre or guitar, but from somewhere there arose, unpredictably, with eerie force, a voice—an almost human voice—or perhaps it was the echo of a voice—frail and all but inaudible—thin with pain, and distance, and loss. It is lovely, Jeremiah thought. And understood, or almost understood, his mother’s devotion.

  Once, in Jeremiah’s presence, Violet stopped playing suddenly. Her arms fell loose, and her head sank forward onto her bosom. Jeremiah wondered if he dared approach her; she appeared to be sobbing soundlessly. But when he whispered, “Mother?” she turned to him with a look of chagrin and anger, and denounced him for spying on her. “You wouldn’t understand, any of you,” she said, closing the keyboard roughly, “he was an artist, he completed his task and scorned to ask for payment, how could any of you understand! His art is defiled by your mere presence.”

  Raphael, of course, was less patient with his wife. He engaged Dr. Wystan Sheeler to treat her, for it seemed to him altogether obvious that Violet was suffering from a nervous disorder of some kind (was it brain fever? anemia? a female complaint to which no medical name might be given?). When Dr. Sheeler failed to cure her, or even to satisfactorily diagnose her malady, Raphael ordered him from the house—and it was to be some years before the celebrated physician forgave him, and returned, at Raphael’s plea, to treat Raphael himself.

  Why did she hide herself away on the loveliest of summer days, to play that wretched instrument? Why did she ignore her houseguests, her husband, even her lonely, aimless son? Raphael charged her with—with—he knew not what—he knew not how to express it. That she was unfaithful to him, and gloated in her behavior, seemed to him obvious, and yet—and yet—he had no proof—and in more rational moments wondered precisely what he meant. He dared not accuse her, for of course she would deny it, she might even (since in recent years his demure young bride had hardened somewhat) laugh contemptuously at him. Unfaithful! Unfaithful to him! In the privacy of her own drawing room! Alone! With her clavichord—with her clavichord! Yes, she might very well laugh, and he would be defenseless against her scorn.

  In the end, shortly before Violet walked into Lake Noir and drowned herself, “taking her own life” in the least obtrusive of ways (for the body was never found though the lake was dredged), the clavichord was irreparably damaged.

  Standing one morning outside the drawing room door Raphael had been convinced he heard a stranger’s voice inside the room—beneath, or behind, or arising within the music. He threw open the door and rushed inside and though he found no one—no one beside a terrified Violet—he was so infuriated, so frustrated, he brought his fist down hard on the top of the clavichord, and cracked the fine wood. Several strings broke—a high, faint, incredulous shriek sounded from inside the instrument—and though it was repaired afterward (indeed, Raphael was thoroughly ashamed, and baffled that he should so wantonly damage his own goods) the clavichord was never quite the same again. Its tone was flat and tinny and dead though of course it remained, and was, still, in Germaine’s time, an exquisitely beautiful piece of furniture.

  God’s Face

  High in the mountains the seasons sped swiftly. Now the planet tipped north, now south. Now aurora borealis flooded the night sky and pitched into drunkenness all who gazed upon it; now all light was sucked back into nothing and the world was black—black—utterly and wordlessly black, as if eclipsed by the deep mire of man’s sin.

  How many seasons?—how many years?

  Jedediah tried to count them on his fingers, which ached with cold. But as he passed from five to six his mind fluttered and died.

  Clouds drifted idly downward out of the night sky, below the icy peaks of the mountains, down, downward, below the timberline. As mists rose from secret steaming rivers. The bowels of the earth, hidden from sight. In all this, Jedediah noted, there was a willful absence, for God refused to show His face. Though his servant Jedediah had been kneeling in expectation for many seasons.

  God, you would not force me to beg. . . . You would not force me to grovel. . . .

  Aurora borealis, seen always for the first time. A stilled frenzy of light. What had its beauty, its unfathomable incalculable beauties, Jedediah wondered spitefully, to do with God? Did God, indeed, dwell in that beauty? In that “sky”?

  The northern lights faded. Eventually the pitch-dark night returned, and obliterated all memory. Spirits, hidden by the mists, roamed freely. Did as they chose. Mocking, jeering, fondling one another’s bodies. The most intimate caresses. The most obscene whispers.

  Was God there, Jedediah wondered. In that? In those creatures?

  He had climbed back into the sky, after months of wandering as a penitent. All that he had seen—the men and women he had encountered, and had tried to convince of God’s love—the actions God had forced him to take, often against his own wishes: all closed over now, and was obliterated, for the Holy Mountain had nothing to do with the flatland. Memory sank. The past closed over. Only Jedediah remained. And God.

  Sin, Jedediah saw, tugged more powerfully at God than love. Sin demanded that God show His face while love, mere love, begged.

  Sin. Love. God.

  But as he was God’s servant he could not commit sin. God gave him no freedom. He wondered, kneeling, in his nig
ht-long vigil, if he was then incapable of love.

  Even his fury for the demon who had ousted Henofer’s soul from his body swiftly died. For Henofer, no doubt, had complied in that obscenity. He was not to be pitied. The demon, cast out of his body, had probably slipped away under cover of the ravine’s shadows, and the turbulence of the stream. It would push its way into another body and soon be at home. The smugness of evil, Jedediah thought. While I kneel on this ledge. Begging. My joints are stiff and my bones ache and there are such sharp stinging pains in my belly that I want only to double up, to grovel in Your sight. . . . Which would please You, wouldn’t it!

  . . . Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face. I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my father’s children. . . . O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of thy salvation. Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me. . . . And hide not thy face; for I am in trouble; hear me speedily. Draw night unto my soul, and redeem it. . . .

  Hide not thy face.

  Hide not thy face.

  IT WAS SHORTLY after Jedediah’s return to his cabin on Mount Blanc (which he saw, without emotion, had been left untouched—his enemies were too clever to step unwittingly into the traps he had fashioned for them), in a weatherless calm that belonged as easily to late winter as to late fall, that he took upon himself the task, the great task, the fearful task, the task for which he had come to the mountains so very long ago, despite the ridicule of his family: to look upon God’s face.