Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  IT WAS GENERALLY known that old Raphael’s physician, the renowned Wystan Sheeler, had tried to dissuade him from the “drum fancy” (for so Dr. Sheeler called it, in an effort, perhaps, to undermine its power over the sick man’s mind)—he had pointed out that such a whimsical, indeed capricious, action would have the inevitable effect of eclipsing the many significant things Raphael had done in his lifetime. He had, after all, built Bellefleur Manor. There was nothing quite like it in the Chautauquas—poor Hans Dietrich’s castle had come nowhere near it in grandeur or ambition, and the medieval-Gothic monstrosity erected downriver by the brother of the “grain baron” Donoghue was, at best, a hunting and fishing lodge. Raphael had been, hadn’t he, one of the founders of the Republican Party, at least in this part of the North, and he had built his hops empire up from nothing, meeting, in his prime, weekly payrolls involving more than three hundred workers. . . . Everyone knew that he had entertained royally: Supreme Court justices, among them the formidable Stephen Field, had been houseguests at the castle, and the brewery king Keeley, and the senators Kloepmaister and Fox, and the visiting Prince of Wales, and Secretary of State Seward, and Secretary of War Schofield, and the Attorneys General Speed, Stanbery, Hoar, and Taft, and Nathan Goff after he stepped down from his position as Secretary of the Navy, and of course there were briefer visits from Schuyler Colfax when he was Vice President, and Hamilton Fish just after the notorious Virginius episode, and even, for an afternoon, James Garfield when he was campaigning for the Presidency. Chester Arthur had been scheduled to spend a weekend at Bellefleur, but his wife’s illness, at the last moment, detained him in Washington; Ulysses Grant had accepted an invitation but failed to appear; and of course there was the mysterious “Abraham Lincoln” who had sought refuge at Bellefleur, where he was to spend the rest of his days.

  (Dr. Sheeler had never spoken with this individual, for Raphael kept him sequestered, for the most part, but he had caught several fairly direct glimpses of him—and it was true that the aged man resembled the late President. Gaunt, hollow-cheeked, with a melancholy visage, and an obviously intelligent face, and a beard not unlike Lincoln’s: but he was much shorter than Lincoln had been, probably not more than five feet six, and so of course he wasn’t Lincoln; could not possibly have been Lincoln; and why Raphael persisted with the folly, or truly believed that it was not folly, Dr. Sheeler could not determine. Perhaps, in his premature dotage, poor Bellefleur had so wanted to have been a significant political figure, or, failing that, an intimate acquaintance of a significant political figure, that he had invented an Abraham Lincoln of his own . . . ? On what was to be his deathbed Raphael “confided” in Dr. Sheeler: while President of the United States Lincoln had been near to collapse, near, even, to suicide, overcome with attacks of panic and guilt and horror arising from the thousands upon thousands of deaths the Union had suffered, and he had been quite sickened by the behavior and arrogance of Secretary of War Cameron, and of course by the meanness of Congress, and the turbulence of the country at large, even in those areas in which there was no active fighting, and (though he admitted it to no one at the time) he knew he had done wrong by imprisoning so many civilians in Indiana and elsewhere, simply because they had been suspected of proslavery sentiment, he knew he had behaved wickedly, and must be punished. So, aided by Raphael Bellefleur, whom he had recognized as a soulmate, the aggrieved man devised a scheme whereby an actor would be hired to “kill” him in a public place, and after his “death” an expertly constructed wax corpse would lie in state for thousands of mourners to view, and Lincoln himself, freed of his mortality, would retire to the paradise of the Chautauquas, as Raphael’s permanent guest. All this came about flawlessly, Raphael insisted, and Lincoln spent his final years in near-seclusion on the estate, wandering in the woods, contemplating the lake and mountains, reading Plato, Plutarch, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Fielding, and Sterne, and playing, on long ice-locked winter evenings, chess and backgammon with his host, who was himself becoming a recluse. It wasn’t long after Lincoln’s “assassination,” Raphael told Dr. Sheeler, that he halfway wished he might arrange for his own death in so bloodless and yet irrevocable a fashion.)

  But why did Raphael want to mock his own dignity, and desecrate his body, by insisting that his heirs have him skinned and made into a drum? Dr. Sheeler simply did not understand.

  Raphael considered the question politely. In his final years he moved slowly, with a patrician studiedness; his every action, even so small and ostensibly casual an action as the lifting of a teacup, was measured and ironic, and imparted an air of tension to anyone who watched. If the tone of the first three-quarters of his life was zeal, the tone of the last quarter was irony. “Are you asking,” he said finally, “why I have chosen a drum above other instruments . . . ? If so, I can only say that it was the first idea that flew into my mind. Because we have, you see, a cavalry drum on hand.”

  Dr. Sheeler chose to ignore his patient’s exquisitely modulated sarcasm. He said, softly, “I meant, Mr. Bellefleur, why do you wish to mock yourself by mutilating your body in that fashion? I can think of no precedent for such an extraordinary act.”

  “Is it mockery?” the old man asked, knitting his brows. “I had thought, rather, it was a kind of immortality.”

  “Ah, immortality! Being stretched across a crude musical instrument, which your heirs will be instructed to play several times a day!—it’s at the very least,” Dr. Sheeler said, “a most unusual notion.”

  “I have provided for the conventional resting place, I’ve designed a handsome mausoleum, to be fashioned of white Italian marble, with graceful Corinthian columns, and charming androgynous angels with tinted marble eyes, and Anubis himself to stand guard,” Raphael said, drawling out his words. “Unfortunately there is no one to share it with me. Mrs. Bellefleur, as you know, did away with herself in a most mysterious fashion; and my sons Rodman and Samuel have quite, quite vanished. And it isn’t likely, I suspect, that they will be found—even after my death I doubt that they will step forward. Lamentations is my only heir, and you see what he has become.”

  “He’s a steadfast, generous young man.”

  “He’s a fool. And his wife Elvira: you’re aware, of course, that she has returned to her parents’ home, temporarily, as she insists, in order to have her baby there, claiming that the atmosphere of the manor is disturbing . . . ? I doubt that that headstrong young woman will return here while I am still living.”

  “She loves you, but it’s quite possible that she does find the atmosphere disturbing. This new notion of yours—”

  “Loves me!” Raphael said contemptuously. “Of course she doesn’t love me. Nor does my son. Nor do I especially want them to. It’s on account of that, you see, that my wishes must be carried out to the letter.”

  “That—?” Dr. Sheeler asked, baffled.

  “That,” Raphael said with finality.

  AFTER YEARS OF estrangement Dr. Sheeler was summoned back to Bellefleur, to treat Raphael (who had aged considerably since his third defeat at the polls) for “sluggish circulation,” sleeplessness, and chronic depression. It was clear to Dr. Sheeler that his patient had given up on life, even as he made languid, drawling requests for the proper medicines to treat his condition. He often wandered about the walled garden in the rain, or tramped slowly along the lake shore, leaning heavily on his cane, his pince-nez, secured by an elastic band, swinging free of his face. He no longer troubled to change his linen often, or even to shave; his eyebrows had become grizzled; he muttered aloud to himself, gnashing his teeth, reliving old battles.

  Three times he had run for the office of governor, and three times he had lost! And the third defeat had been the most humiliating. So many thousands of dollars wasted . . . so much of his spirit, his strength, his idealism. . . . There had been, of course, savage editorials against him. There had been clownish cartoons, vile caricatures. Libelous “exposés” by journalist hacks: HOGS TREATED BETTER THAN BELLEFLEUR HOPS PICKERS. And:
BELLEFLEUR LABORERS DYING LIKE FLIES. Midway in his campaign he had rushed home to initiate a clean-up of the barracks, which were somewhat unclean, but it was too late, the influenza was already raging; and then the summer was so unusually wet; and the following summer as well, when he couldn’t get enough pickers to work in the fields, and the hops ripened prematurely and began to rot. . . . Thousands upon thousands of dollars, rotting. The green jungles, acres of green, vines snaking from left to right around the supporting poles, a sea of leafy green, lush and overlush, rotting in the moist sunlight. And how everyone had rejoiced, knowing he was broken.

  Hayes Whittier too had betrayed him. Hayes’s tubercular son had died, finally—the camp on Lake Noir had not saved him—but it wasn’t on account of the son’s death that Hayes had turned against him, and may even (stories differed, of course) have spoken publicly against him, during the last days of his doomed campaign. Hayes had been in love with Violet. Or had behaved as if he were. Struck, as he called it, by something “haunted” in her face. (Her morbid attachment to that halfwitted Hungarian carpenter whose name Raphael had forgotten, perhaps!) It had seemed to Raphael that Hayes’s sentimental passion for Violet had increased as his son’s strength ebbed. He gazed upon her with moony vacant eyes. He was eager to accompany her to receptions and dinners and even, upon occasion, to a lavish society funeral in Vanderpoel—his lovesick manner rather comically at odds with his portly bulk and his mussed muttonchop whiskers and his formidable wife (the granite-bosomed Hortense Frier, the bishop’s daughter), and his reputation as one of the shrewdest and most audacious leaders of the Republican Party. That he had betrayed other men, out of necessity, as he claimed, and driven at least one of them (Hugh Boutwell, after his bid for senator) to a premature grave, had seemed to Raphael proof of the man’s authority: he had never dreamt Hayes might turn against him.

  Take me with you to Washington, Violet had begged, on that crucial April morning (the day before, as Raphael rather irrelevantly recalled, Palm Sunday), I can’t bear to stay at Bellefleur while you’re gone, and Raphael, vexed at his wife’s sudden foolishness, said irritably, My dear, I am only going to be absent for two days! The ride in the carriage would exhaust you, and then we would be returning immediately—it isn’t, you must know, a pleasure jaunt. Then tell our houseguests to postpone their visit, Violet said. Certainly not, Raphael said, staring at her through his pince-nez, can I have heard you correctly? Tell our houseguests—! But, said Violet, the Whittiers are so—so— Both Whittiers, said Raphael enigmatically, you are speaking of—? She had paced about the room like an actress signaling distraction, she had even managed to pull strands of her hair loose, and seemed to her husband willful and not at all charming: for she would misunderstand his very faith, his husband’s inviolable faith, in her. That she might even think that he might even think her capable of succumbing to Hayes Whittier’s importunate attentions—! It was foul, it was unspeakable. Raphael seized her lavender parasol, that silly beribboned French thing, and kicked it across the room. Madame, he cried in a high wounded voice, you defile the very air of our home, with the sort of sentiments I cannot help but intuit, and reject with all that is in me!

  Much later, the Washington trip not only completed but its meager fruits forgotten, when Raphael had occasion to dine with Hayes and several other gentlemen in Manhattan, he noted Hayes’s palpable coolness, his forced “good manners,” and deduced—with relief, with gratification—that his husbandly faith in Violet’s virtue had not been misplaced: certainly she had never been that big-bellied bewhiskered creature’s mistress, even for a night: the very idea was obscene. And how is Mrs. Bellefleur, Hayes asked over brandy and cigars, rather belatedly, not quite meeting Raphael’s eye, and Raphael said curtly, Violet is well.

  “PERHAPS YOU WANT to defile yourself,” Wystan Sheeler said cautiously, “because you feel, without quite articulating it, guilt over your wife’s—”

  “Not at all,” Raphael said. “Rather, it is she who must feel guilt, and shame as well. For didn’t she betray me?—didn’t she betray her wedding vows, by taking her own life so wantonly?”

  “The guilt of which I speak,” Dr. Sheeler said, “is not a conscious guilt. It is not an examined guilt. It is, instead—”

  “She is ashamed, like the others,” Raphael said in a flat weary voice.

  “Such guilt is, instead—”

  Raphael began to laugh suddenly. Propped up against pillows, sweating out a severe attack of the flu that had come upon him, as nearly as his physician could deduce, as a consequence of an unwise midnight walk along the lakeshore, in a driving rain, the aging man looked both abstracted and painfully knowing. He screwed up one side of his face and all but winked at the alarmed Dr. Sheeler. “Forgive me,” he said, gasping for breath, “but I was forced to think of—of—my grandfather Jean-Pierre—of whom, as you know, I rarely think—for I never knew him, he was dead before my birth—long dead—and if he had not died, he and the others, those unhappy others, I would not have been born, and so—! And so—there are inevitably things of which one does not think if one wishes to remain sane—until such time as—as they are thrust into the open—But I was saying—I seem to have lost the thread of what I was saying—”

  Dr. Sheeler lay his hand against the fevered man’s forehead, and attempted to calm him. “We were speaking only of a theoretical matter,” Dr. Sheeler said gently, “and perhaps this is not the time. . . .”

  “Guilt,” Raphael said, thrusting his physician’s hand away, “my wife’s or mine, or whatever you are proposing. Guilt and shame and—and all the rest. And suddenly I found myself thinking of one of the old crook’s schemes: the selling of ‘elk’ manure over in the Eden Valley. Special Arctic manure, the highest quality of manure, twenty-five wagons of it, I seem to recall, sold at $75 a wagonload to some idiot farmers . . . ! And they bought it, they bought it,” Raphael said, beginning to laugh again, wheezing with laughter. Tears spilled from his narrow stone-colored eyes. “Elk manure. The old crazy crook. No wonder he died as he did, as he had to. . . . And Louis and . . . and the others. . . . For if they hadn’t died I would not have seen the light of day: I and Fredericka and Arthur. And so. And so, Dr. Sheeler, you see,” he said, laughing so that his caved-in chest began to heave, “there is, at the bottom, elk manure. Your theories—my guilt—hers—theirs—anyone’s: elk manure. The very finest high-grade Arctic nitrogen-rich elk manure.”

  Dr. Sheeler drew back from the sick man’s bed, and stared rather coldly at him. After a long pause, during which Raphael continued to laugh with an abandon ill-fitting his condition, and his stature, the good physician said, “Mr. Bellefleur, I fail to understand the basis of your mirth.”

  But Raphael, dying, laughed all the harder.

  AND SO THE famous Raphael Bellefleur did die, for it was, evidently, one of the grimmest aspects of the Bellefleur Curse that one had to die . . . whether in old age or in youth, whether willingly and eagerly, or with revulsion: no escaping it, one simply had to die.

  In sickbeds or in the beds of strangers. In the lake, that eerie dark-hued lake; or on horseback; or in flaming blazing “accidents”; or as a consequence of a simple household misstep—slipping down the stairs of the Great Hall, for instance, or being infected by a cat’s scratch. Bellefleurs tend to die interesting deaths, Gideon once observed, many years before his death; but his observation was not necessarily accurate.

  Raphael’s, for instance, was not a particularly interesting death. Heart failure as a consequence of severe influenza: and then of course he was simply an old man: prematurely aged. He died, not in his comfortable canopied bed, but on the floor of Violet’s drawing room, which had been preserved exactly as she had left it on the night of her suicide. (How the sickly old man had dragged himself there no one could guess. He had seemed, the day before, totally without strength.) He died in Violet’s room very late one June night and was found by a servant the next morning, face down on the carpet, beside the clavichord. The gr
een brocaded cover had been pulled off the bench, but the keyboard remained closed.

  Of course he was mourned throughout the state, and even his old enemies, and the numerous men who had mocked and ridiculed him behind his back, were appalled at his passing. Raphael Bellefleur, who had built that monstrous castle, dead—! Dead like anyone else!

  The aged Hayes Whittier, confined to a wheelchair in his Georgetown mansion, was said to have burst into tears when the news was told him.

  “It’s the end of our great era,” he said. “America will never see anything quite like it again.” (Though Whittier’s Memoirs, published posthumously, were disappointingly circumspect about his private life, even as they were boldly frank about his public life, it is possible to deduce from the tone of melancholy resignation with which he spoke of “the beautiful Englishwoman” with her “haunted” face who was mistress of Bellefleur Manor that he had never been Violet’s lover.)

  So the great man died, he who had been, in his prime, many times a millionaire: and his single heir Lamentations of Jeremiah had not the audacity to disobey the terms of his will. The body was skinned, and the skin treated, and stretched across the frame of a cavalry drum, to be kept for many decades in its appointed place on the first-floor landing of the Great Hall. The drum was judged a fairly handsome instrument, as such things go. It had not, for instance, the graceful beauty of Violet’s clavichord—but it was attractive in its own way.

  ONLY A VERY few times was the Skin-Drum used as Raphael had wished, played, upon significant occasions (the birth of Jean-Pierre II, the stroke of midnight of New Year’s Eve of 1900, the anniversary of Raphael’s death), by a uniformed servant, a sort of butler-handyman, who had been, in the Civil War, a drummer boy. After this servant’s departure from the castle Jeremiah himself attempted the task, his teeth chattering, the sticks slipping repeatedly from his numbed fingers; and that was it. No one wanted to play the Skin-Drum, still less did anyone want to hear it. For it gave out an astonishingly penetrating sound not easily forgotten.