Bellefleur

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, Ewan whispered.

  PRETTY VIDA IN her white high-heeled pumps, her jaws moving surreptitiously as she chewed gum (her mother and grandmother thought such a habit, in a young lady, insufferably vulgar), sat in the tearoom of the Manitou clinic with its mirrors and ferns and fleur-de-lis wallpaper, asking Albert repeatedly if he could understand what was going on, if he really believed that strange, frightening man was their father. And Albert, baffled, resentful, restless, lit matches and dropped them burning into the ashtray and said with a shrug of his shoulders, It’s him all right, it’s him bullying us in a new way.

  But I can’t believe it, Vida whispered.

  It’s him, Albert said, wiping at his eyes. The old fucker.

  AND ONE MORNING in late summer, wearing a plain, inexpensive brown suit, tieless, with the collar of his white shirt worn on the outside of his lapels, and carrying a small canvas valise, Ewan Bellefleur checked out of the convalescent home unattended, and set out on his journey westward to Eben-Ezer (now called, in these fallen times, Ebenezer) some five hundred miles away. He was going on foot, like a pilgrim.

  Most of the staff saw him off. A number of the nurses wept, for Ewan had been the best-loved patient they had had in years; several staff members vowed that they would come visit him, and in the meantime they would pray for their own enlightenment. Though red-faced and still somewhat stocky, with a broad, muscular chest that strained proudly against his shirt front, and small bright eyes encased in a galaxy of wrinkles, Ewan nevertheless exuded a remarkably boyish enthusiasm. About his gray hair, they claimed, a frail, pale, almost invisible aura radiated; or so it seemed, in the confused excitement of his departure.

  The Brood of Night

  It was a fear commonly shared by the Bellefleurs that great-uncle Hiram, afflicted as he was by a sleepwalking malady that admitted of no cure (from the age of eleven he had been subjected to every sort of treatment: strapped in his bed, forced to swallow pills, powders, and foul-tasting medicines, led through exhausting and humiliating exercises, pleaded with, “talked to,” forced to undergo, at White Sulphur Springs, a vigorous regimen of hydropathy under the direction of the famous society physician Langdon Keene—his “bodily poisons” were flushed away by enemas, wet packs, long soaks in the odorous waters, submission to waterfalls and cascades and other forms of “exomosis,” and all, alas, to no avail)—it was a fear certainly shared by Hiram himself—that he would one day succumb to a disastrous accident while groping about in his uncanny somnambulist’s stupor: but in fact the unfortunate man was to die fully awake, in the daytime, of a curious but evidently quite serious infection that grew out of a minor, nearly imperceptible scratch on his upper lip. It seems to have been the case, so far as anyone could judge, that his death at the age of sixty-eight had nothing at all to do with his history of noctambulism.

  But how strange, how bewildering, his mother Elvira said (for she had, over the tumultuous decades, worried more than anyone else about Hiram’s affliction, which she saw to be a direct response to the child’s shame at his father’s financial blundering), how absurd, the elderly woman said, half-angrily, when they told her about his sudden death. “There’s no logic to it, no necessity, he simply died of anything at all—” she laughed—“when we had worried ourselves sick over him for almost sixty years. . . . No, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. Sixty years of carrying on like an idiot during the night and undoing the sense he made during the day and then to die of an infection that might have happened to anyone. There’s no necessity to it, there’s something vulgar about it, I forbid you to tell me anything more!”

  And though her elderly husband, known vaguely among the Bellefleurs as the “old-man-from-the-flood,” and great-aunt Matilde (with whom the couple now lived, on the remote north shore of Lake Noir), grieved for her son’s surprising death, great-grandmother Elvira remained tearless and resentful, and really would not allow anyone to bring up the subject of Hiram and the last week of his life.

  “There’s something hopelessly vulgar about accidental death,” the old woman said.

  EVEN AS A boy Hiram had been serious and hard-working, and he was, he suspected, often compared favorably with his shallow brothers Noel (who spent all his time with horses, as if mere animals could occupy the intelligent energies of an adult male) and Jean-Pierre (who, long before the fiasco at Innisfail, was a grave disappointment to the family); at the age of eleven he was already astute in business matters, and could not only discuss the various aspects of the Bellefleur holdings, including the troubling tenant farms, with the family’s accountants, attorneys, and managers, but challenge these gentlemen when it seemed to him they were mistaken. It was, in a sense, in defiance of his obvious talent that he chose to study classics at Princeton, where he was, surprisingly, an only mediocre student; and no one ever quite understood why he left law school so abruptly, in the spring of his first year, in order to return to Bellefleur. As a boy he had lightly mocked his family and their eccentricities, and spoke as if he wanted nothing more than to dwell hundreds—perhaps thousands—of miles away, in a “center of civilization” remote from the Chautauquas; but living away from the manor for even a few months greatly distressed him, and the bouts of sleepwalking grew so frequent (he was once discovered by a night watchman crawling on all fours on the ice-encrusted roof of Witherspoon Hall, at Princeton, and again stumbling into the waters of Lake Carnegie; he was quite seriously injured when, at about eleven o’clock in the evening, he walked, clad in pajamas and bathrobe, directly into the path of a horse-drawn carriage on muddy Nassau Street)—and the daytime anxiety so acute—that the family speculated he might simply be homesick, despite his angry disavowals. (For all his life, up until the very eve of his death, great-uncle Hiram was infuriated by anyone’s theories concerning him: his gray, intelligent, normally contemplative eyes narrowed, and his jowls quivered with rage, at the very suspicion that anyone, even a loved one, might be forming an opinion about him. “I am the only person qualified to know about myself,” he said.)

  It had always been remarked, how peculiar Hiram’s transformation was: for while during the day he was alert, quick-witted, and characteristically abrasive (a mere game of checkers, for instance, inspired him, even in the presence of children, to a pitiless intensity, and he was not a good-natured loser)—while during the day he missed nothing, handicapped though he was by his clouded right eye—as soon as he fell asleep he was entirely at the mercy of whims and muscular twitches and wisps of fey, cruel dreams, and often attempted, in his noctambulism, to destroy by shredding or fire the numerous papers, ledgers, journals, and leatherbound books he kept in his room. (It was one of the shameful secrets of the poor man’s life, confided only to his brother Noel, and then after much agonizing, and a spirited vow by Noel that he would never, never tell anyone, that both his children—his son Esau who had lived only a few months, and his son Vernon—had been conceived, evidently, while he was asleep. Poor Eliza Perkins, his bride, the eldest daughter of a moderately wealthy spice importer in Manhattan, had had to endure not only her conscious husband’s fumbling, awkward, embarrassed intercourse, which so often ended in sweaty failure, but her unconscious husband’s intercourse as well—more successful from a physiological point of view, though no less dismaying in other respects. It was not known whether Eliza confided in anyone, or that she quite grasped the situation: she had been, at the time Hiram brought her to fabled Bellefleur Manor to live, an extremely innocent, even rather charmingly ignorant, girl of nineteen.)

  During the day great-uncle Hiram was always impeccably dressed, and carried his high, round little stomach with a rigid propriety. He contemplated with a grudging approval his balding skull, and his still-dark curly sideburns; he had always been pleased with his long, soft, “sensitive” fingers (to which he applied, every morning, an odorless cream lotion manufactured in France). His drawing-room manners were, as everyone attested, superb. When angered he spoke with an icy,
cutting delicacy, and though his sleek pink skin flushed even more darkly, he never lost his temper. It would be common, it would be vulgar, he said, to show one’s feelings in public; or even in certain rooms of the house.

  He was one of the Bellefleurs who professed to “believe” in God, though the nature of Hiram’s God was highly nubilous. A comically limited God, in many ways less powerful than man, and certainly less powerful than history: a God who might have been omnipotent at one time, at the dawn of creation, but who was now sadly worn out, a kind of invalid, easing toward His eventual extinction. (It seemed to Vernon, who believed, for a while, most passionately in God, that his difficult father had hit upon a belief calculated to offend both the God-fearing Bellefleurs and the God-deniers.) Nothing was more amusing, or more provoking, than to hear great-uncle Hiram interrupting his relatives’ remarks with long, elegant monologues punctuated with Greek and Latin quotations, ranging over the entirety of religions and religious thought—now Augustine was ridiculed, now Moses, now the Gospels, now John Calvin, now Luther, now the entire Popish church, now the cow-worshipping Hindus, now the arrogant, confused, self-promoting Son of God Himself. At such times he spoke in fastidious sentences, even in paragraphs, with an air of detachment and irony, and even those who disagreed violently with him were forced to admire his wit.

  But he worried, he brooded: for it sometimes seemed to him that his appearance, proper as it was, did not entirely suggest the distinguished, cerebral, highly contemplative person he knew he was. His wartime injury, resulting in the loss of much of the vision in his right eye, might have added to his air of distinction, he felt, if only he could find exactly the right pair of eyeglasses. . . .

  Thus Hiram Bellefleur during the day.

  But during the night: ah, how alarming the transformation!

  Those who glimpsed him in his somnambulist’s trance were appalled at his appearance. Hiram at night resembled only scantily the Hiram of the day: the muscles of his face were either slack and sagging, or screwed up into extraordinary twitching grimaces. His eyes rolled. Sometimes they remained closed (for, after all, he was asleep); sometimes they showed pale trembling crescents; sometimes they were wide open, their gaze unfocused. He stumbled and staggered and groped about, often as if he were about to wake up, and were orienting himself to his surroundings; but he never did wake up until he injured himself, or someone prevented him, in time, and shook him awake. (Though it was dangerous to do so. For the childish, impish Hiram, asleep, threw his arms about and kicked and even butted with his head, exactly like a two-year-old in a tantrum. And there were times when the shock of being awakened on the edge of a roof, or on the abutment of a bridge, or in a freezing rain, or, more recently, while attempting to hug to his breast the furious yowling Mahalaleel, so affected him that he was in danger of a heart attack.)

  The caprices of noctambulism! Dr. Langdon Keene himself, physician to the notorious Jay Gould (who suffered from a somewhat milder form of the disorder than poor Hiram), made a study of Hiram’s body fluids, and forced the young man—he was seventeen at the time, and extremely prone to depression—to drink several quarts of water a day, even when he wasn’t a patient at the White Sulphur Springs spa. But the sleepwalking did not cease: on the contrary, the demands of Hiram’s bloated kidneys gave to his shrewd nighttime manuevering an especial grace (born perhaps out of desperation), so that he was able to slip by the servant who attended him, like a wraith, and descend the great circular stairs of the manor, his arms extended, one foot unerringly placed below the other, in absolute silence, and make his way out to the well some two hundred yards to the east of the house, where only the hysterical barking of the dogs prevented him from urinating over the fieldstone side of the well, and into the family’s drinking water. Upon another occasion the young man—who professed a loathing of horses—made his way asleep into the stable, and attempted to climb on the back of an unbroken colt of Noel’s, awaking only when the frantic young horse leapt about in the stall and struck at Hiram with his hooves. He might, one would think, have been grievously injured: but apart from a few bruises and a bloodied nose, and of course the trauma to his system caused by the abrupt awakening, he was unhurt. Dr. Keene thought that aspect of his young patient’s noctambulism particularly interesting—for whether Hiram slipped and tumbled down a flight of stairs into the cellar, or waded out into the swamp in brackish snake-infested water that came to his knees, or walked unheeding through an octagonal stained-glass window, or fell some forty feet from the balcony of one of the Moorish minarets, or, as a young officer in the army, wandered toward the enemy’s trenches in total obliviousness of the gunshots and fiery explosions on all sides of him, he was, relatively, time after time, unhurt. “He should have died many times by now,” the physician said, rather tactlessly, while discussing Hiram’s case with his parents. “In a sense, you might consider the remainder of his life a gift.”

  “Yes,” said Elvira impatiently. “But he still must live it, you know—!”

  (ONE OF THE most unsettling of Hiram’s nocturnal adventures, which he was to tell no one about, not even Noel, took place three weeks after his young wife Eliza had disgraced herself by running away. Though as a precaution against sleepwalking he had not only strapped himself into bed, and rigged a system of bells attached to wires which would sound an alarm if he blundered into them, but had posted a reliable servant boy in the corridor outside his room as well, he nevertheless found himself—woke suddenly to find himself, confused and terrified—some twenty or more feet out onto the ice of Lake Noir. It was only mid-November; the ice was extremely thin; indeed, he could hear it cracking and sighing on all sides. Petrified with horror he dared not move, but looked about him like a madman, seeing only the cold glittering ice and the moon reflected haphazardly in it and, at a seemingly great distance, the dark shoreline. The castle itself was hidden in shadows. It took the distraught man a minute or two to absorb the circumstances of his situation, and its danger; he was so panicked that he did not even feel, clad in his woollen nightshirt, the idle ferocity of winds that blew from the mountains, sending the fairly mild temperature (it was about 32 degrees Fahrenheit) down some fifteen or twenty degrees. Sweat broke out through every pore of his body. As the ice cracked beneath his paralyzed feet he looked down, and saw, quite suddenly, a figure standing below the ice, exactly where he stood—a figure who was upside down, and whose feet were evidently pressed against his. Though at other times the waters of Lake Noir were disturbingly dark, and its ice near-opaque, as if heavy with minerals, on this occasion the ice appeared to be translucent, and Hiram could stare down to the very bottom of the lake some forty or more feet below. The presence of the shadowy figure—it was a man, he saw, a stranger—quite unnerved him, for what was he doing there?—how on earth had he come to be there, beneath the crust of ice, upside down, in the bleak silence of a November night? Sweating, trembling, Hiram dared not move, but stood with his bare feet pressed against the stranger’s feet (and were they too bare?—he could not quite see), hearing the irritated cracking of the ice on all sides. The figure was motionless, as if paralyzed or frozen in place. And a few feet away another figure stood, upside down, shadowy as the first, unmoving. And there was another . . . somewhat smaller of stature, a child or a woman . . . and still another . . . and as Hiram’s eyes adjusted to the gloom [here, even his clouded eye possessed a penetrating vision] he saw to his astonishment that there was a considerable crowd of reversed figures, some of them moving but most fixed in place, their feet against the thin crust of ice, their heads nearly lost in shadow. He wanted to cry aloud in terror: for who were they, these upside-down silent people, these doomed people, these strangers! Who on earth were they and why did they dwell in the Bellefleurs’ private lake?)

  AND YET, IN the end, so far as anyone could discern, Hiram’s death at the age of sixty-eight appeared to have nothing at all to do with his somnambulism.

  He had returned from the factory town of Belleview, a two-
mile stretch along the Alder River which the Bellefleurs owned, and had built up within the past several years, and, exhausted, his eyes and nostrils still smarting from the chemical stench (the paper mill was by far the most virulent-smelling of the factories, it really left him quite sick), his head reeling from the offensive sights he’d seen (for the mill workers’ living quarters, whether in the barrackslike apartment buildings the Bellefleurs had erected, or in their own ramshackle wood-frame dwellings which marred nearly every hill and knoll, were really unfit for human habitation, and threw Hiram into a frenzy of doubt about the worth of human nature itself en masse), he lay down fully clothed except for his shoes atop his massive brass bed, and slipped into an uneasy vexing sleep that had to do with Leah’s unreasonableness and the ferret-faced impudence of one of the mill managers and his sister Matilde who was so eccentric, up there on the north shore sewing her outlandish incomprehensible savage quilts, and his son Vernon who appeared, in this waking-dream, not altogether dead (which seemed to Hiram’s way of thinking something of a betrayal of the family name) . . . and suddenly, suddenly, it must have been because of family concern, over the weeks, about Gideon’s behavior, his monomania for flying (the willful young man—for to Hiram he would always be “young”—had bought still another airplane, at considerable expense, merely for his own private pleasure) . . . suddenly Hiram was seeing again, and hearing, the insolent engine of that sporty little seaplane, painted in camouflage spots, pontooned, with a single whirring propeller, as it taxied bouncing along the choppy surface of the lake, and rose into the air, shakily at first, and then with a rakish confidence, bearing Eliza Bellefleur away from the embrace of her lawful husband. . . .