The House at Belle Fontaine

by Lily Tuck

  Back out on her deck, Helen is transplanting herbs into pots: basil, rosemary, thyme and nasturtiums, the latter for a little color, and she likes to add the edible orange flower to salad. She is vaguely aware of the barn swallows flying to and fro over her head to their nest. Inside the house, the phone starts to ring and, looking up, Helen listens while the machine picks up.

  “Helen, are you there?” She hears a woman’s voice saying. “It’s Daphne, Alec’s sister. I’m calling you from Pennsylvania. Alec has been in an accident. Can you call me back, please? My number here—”

  “Not again,” Helen says to herself. Twice, while she was married to him, Alec had been involved in car accidents. The first time he broke his nose and wrist; the second time he was driving Helen’s new car and totaled it, but he himself did not suffer a single scratch. The woman who was with him however—Alec claimed that he hardly knew her, he was just giving her a lift home from work—was killed. Killed instantly. At the trial later, Alec swore that he had fallen asleep at the wheel—he was tired, not drunk—and the woman’s death was judged an accident and Alec was lucky. He was acquitted of all charges, including driving under the influence. Shaking her head—Alec, she thinks, is the sort of person who always manages to land on his feet—Helen goes back to digging a hole in the soil for the basil plant she is holding in her hand. She cannot now remember what the woman’s name was, the woman killed in the accident, only that it was an unusual name.

  In the car, Helen tries to think about something else, something pleasant. She thinks about Tuscany and the good time she had there. Everyone, she recalls, was so cheerful, like the porter and the maid at the hotel where she stayed: Sta bene, signora? The maid kept asking her with a smile. Sì, grazie, Helen had mustered her few words of Italian to reply. Also, she had particularly liked another couple on the tour; they were from Vermont. They promised to stay in touch. Ah, and the food! She ate like a horse and did not gain a single pound! Helen turns down the street that leads to the hospital.

  When Helen had finally called back, Daphne said that Alec was in intensive care. “They don’t think he is going to make it. I could tell by the way the doctor spoke,” Daphne said.

  “You know Alec. He always makes it,” Helen told Daphne.

  “But I’ll go, of course,” she also said.

  After hanging up the phone, she had sat for a moment longer stroking the cat who was sitting on her lap. When she and Alec said good-bye to each other on the bus after they reached town, Alec said to her, “Let’s have lunch together some time” and Helen, defensive, answered, “Sure. When do you suggest? How about never?” Now, she regrets her attempt at sarcasm and wishes that they had met for lunch and for perhaps more, but Alec, always good-natured, laughed at her remark and waved before disappearing in the crowd on the street.

  “Are you a relative?” the nurse at the desk asks Helen.

  Helen starts to shake her head then changes her mind. “His wife,” she lies—after all, she once was and she has kept his name.

  “Please sit down,” the nurse tells Helen in a kinder tone. “A doctor will be with you shortly.”

  The badge on the doctor’s white coat says Dr. ­Harris- Mehta and she is blonde and petite and young enough to be Helen’s daughter.

  “Your husband, Mrs. ah . . .”

  “Mallory.”

  “Yes, sorry—Mrs. Mallory—Mr. Mallory did not suffer,” Dr. Harris-Mehta starts to tell Helen. “Mr. Mallory had a severed aorta, his thoracic artery . . . ,” she pauses, “as well as massive trauma to the head. He was not conscious.”

  Helen stares at Dr. Harris-Mehta’s mouth. The halting way Dr. Harris-Mehta speaks makes it difficult for her to pay attention. She briefly wonders if Mr. Mehta is also a doctor and whether he and Ms. Harris met at medical school. She shakes her head to focus. “Was he alive when he was brought in?”

  Dr. Harris-Mehta nods as she twists her wedding band nervously on her finger. “We did everything we could to save your husband. He was never conscious,” she repeats, before she says, “We are going to ask you to wait for a few minutes before you see him. Would you like some coffee?” Since she has been on call this morning there has been one emergency after the other. A ten-year-old child chopped his finger off with a hatchet—and what was he doing playing with a hatchet in the first place, she would like to know. A man gashed his leg with a chain saw and to make matters worse he was a diabetic, another kid was having seizures, a little girl got bitten by a dog, and now this. Dr. Harris-Mehta glances toward the reception desk for some help from the nurse, but she is absorbed by her computer screen.

  Dr. Harris-Meha’s white coat, Helen notices, is buttoned up the wrong way and, briefly, she is tempted to reach over and fix it; she also wonders if this is the first time Dr. Harris-Mehta has had to inform a family member of a death, and a part of her wants to reassure Dr. Harris-Mehta. Alec was no longer her husband; they were no longer close. But this seems too complicated and confusing and also Dr. Harris-Mehta may not yet understand about divorce.

  “Was he—had he been drinking?” Helen has to focus again to ask.

  “We are running some tests and I am sure the police are investigating.”

  On the way home in the car, after she was shown Alec in the hospital morgue—afraid of what she might see, Helen had barely looked at the face of the man lying under the white sheet, who now she worries could have been nearly anyone. The dead man had seemed very small and Alec was over six feet tall, but the hair on his head looked the same. Unruly and still mostly red. Helen tries to think about Tuscany again. In San Gimignano, she went to the duomo several times to look at Ghirlandaio’s frescoes of Santa Fina, the patron saint of the city who, since she was paralyzed from childhood, had to lie immobile for years on a wooden plank. According to legend, when she finally died and her body was removed, the plank was found to be covered with white violets. All of a sudden, Helen remembers the name of the woman who was killed with Alec in the car. Eugenie.

  “How was your day?” Harold Mehta asks his wife when she gets home from the hospital. He is not a doctor but an assistant professor of law at the local university; however he and his wife did meet in college. They have been married five years and, next year, when Barbara has finished her residency, they plan to start a family.

  “Awful, I’m beat,” Barbara answers, shaking her head. “What is today anyway? Is today Friday, the thirteenth?” Barbara tries to smile. “The worst was a car accident. You should have seen him, Harold—the man had severed his aorta. When we opened him up, all the blood that had accumulated in the chest cavity came pouring out, like a wave. A tidal wave. I’ve never seen anything like it. I had to tell his wife, and I blanked on her name.”

  “Oh, honey . . . ,” Harold starts to say.

  “The wife just sat there listening to me while I told her about her husband,” Barbara continues, “with no expression on her face, as if I was giving her the weather report or something.” Again Barbara tries to smile.

  “She was probably in shock,” Harold says.

  “I guess I should start dinner,” Barbara answers.

  “Let’s go out,” Harold tells her. “Someone at school told me about a good Italian restaurant. We could try going there.”

  The Italian restaurant is where Gina works and she is Harold and Barbara’s waitress.

  Again, today, she was late for her shift and the restaurant manager gave her a look. Gina knows what the look means: If you keep this up, sweetheart, you are going to be fired. But today, Gina does not care: Let the asshole fire me. See if I give a shit! She and Craig had a fight and have broken up. And the fight, like most fights, was over something stupid. The fault of seeing that accident, Gina also thinks, which had upset her. As they walked on the beach, Craig started talking again about taking time off to go sailing and Gina told him how she did not want to be stuck on a boat with
just one person for a whole year. Of course she did not mean for it to sound quite like that—the “just one person” part—but Craig took offense and he accused her of all sorts of stuff that was not true, or only half true. Anyway, to hell with him, Gina thinks as she starts to tell her customers the specials. She barely looks at them as she recommends the fish of the day, which is baked swordfish, the linguine with fresh clams and the veal piccata.

  “I’ll have the veal,” Harold tells Gina.

  “And I’ll have the linguine,” Barbara says.

  “Good choices,” Gina answers automatically and not smiling. In the mood she is in, she cannot bear to look at couples, especially couples who appear happy together.

  “I think I’ve seen her before,” Harold tells Barbara after Gina has left with their order. “On campus. She’s a student, maybe.”

  “Who?”

  “The waitress.”

  “I didn’t notice. Is she pretty?” Barbara asks.

  “I guess, in a surly sort of way. But not my type,” Harold adds. He knows that Barbara is tired and he has to be careful but all of a sudden he remembers why the waitress looks familiar. One morning last fall he was sitting in the school parking lot listening to the end of Morning Edition on the radio and to Garrison Keillor list the famous people whose birthdays fell on that day—it was the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi—when he heard someone yell “Bastard!” then a car door slam. Then the waitress—he was ready to bet anything that it was she—ran in front of Harold’s car and, as she did so, she must also have stumbled or twisted her ankle because she nearly fell and during the time it took her to recover Harold got a good look at her face. A face, he thought, like in one in those old Italian religious paintings. A moment or two later, a colleague of Harold who was married, only not married to the waitress, and the same person who recommended the restaurant got out of the car.

  “Before I went out to speak to the wife,” Barbara goes on, as if she were just now finishing her sentence, “I had to change my clothes—not just my coat but my shirt and the pants I was wearing underneath. Everything was soaked with blood.”

  “Do you want a glass of wine?” Harold asks. He wants to change the subject.

  “Even my shoes,” Barbara says.

  “Red or white?”

  Barbara looks up at him. She is frowning.

  “Red or white,” Harold repeats. He and Barbara rarely drink, only on special occasions like weddings or anniversaries.

  Barbara shakes her head. “The man was drunk,” she continues. “The police report showed that the blood alcohol content was three times the limit.”

  “Maybe the accident was intentional.”

  Again, Barbara shakes her head. “You always assume the worst, don’t you?”

  “Suicide is not necessarily the worst. If someone no longer has any options. Maybe he was sick with something. Like cancer.”

  “No. He did not have cancer. Nothing was wrong with him. And what about his wife?”

  Harold shrugs as their food arrives. A different waitress, an older waitress, brings them their plates.

  “The veal?” She asks smiling and holding the plate up in the air.

  “For me,” Harold tells her.

  “Enjoy your dinner, folks,” the waitress says, before she leaves.

  “Is she the one?” Barbara asks, although she knows that she is not.

  “No. It was someone else,” Harold answers, humoring Barbara. Then, as if he had only now come to this decision, he leans across the table and takes Barbara’s hand. Squeezing it, he says, “You know something, honey, we’re lucky.”

  Although late in the day when Helen gets home from the hospital, she sets up her easel and paints again on the deck. Determined to distract herself and not to brood on events, she studies the picture she has begun. Helen does not presume to copy Ghirlandaio’s painting—she plans to use it as inspiration. For instance, instead of having Santa Fina dressed in red, she is going to paint her naked; instead of having her lie on a wooden plank, she will have her lying in a field of white flowers; she has not yet decided how she will depict Saint Gregory, who has come to Santa Fina as a vision to predict her imminent death. Absorbed as she is, Helen nevertheless is reminded of the life class she took with Alec and how rigorous and old-fashioned Alec’s teaching had been. She remembers how adamant he was about proportions—he used the height of the model’s head to show them how the rest of the model’s body lined up and eight heads was what he said was the norm.

  “Measure, measure, measure!” he had shouted at them.

  “Does Pablo Picasso measure?” Helen, all stiffness and resentment, asked Alec that first lesson.

  “Of course, he measures,” Alec replied, looking past Helen at her easel and shaking his head.

  In the end, she had surprised herself and learned a lot from Alec. If only, she thinks, she had not married him, but Alec, sober, was hard to resist. Helen sighs as she calculates the length of Santa Fina’s body, her elbows at her waist, her arms bent in a position of prayer before she puts her brush to the canvas.

  “If only you two had stayed married,” on the phone, Daphne kept repeating to Helen, “this would never have happened!” while Helen said nothing. “Despite all his faults,” Daphne wailed, “he was a good man. A talented man!” Still Helen had said nothing. In back of her, she can hear the barn swallow chicks in their nest, twittering, anxiously waiting to be fed. Another thing that had attracted Helen to him was that Alec did not have a self-conscious bone in his body. She remembers the time when the model was late and Alec, without saying a word to anyone, took off his clothes and assumed the poses. That day, after class, she also remembers, was when they went back to her house and, for the first time, made love.

  And Alec had a nice common touch (later Helen was irritated by it): he always treated everyone exactly the same no matter who they were or how rich they were. Often, he would stop to talk to a waitress or the cashier in a store—invariably, a woman, Helen recalls—for several minutes and when Helen became impatient and accused him of making needless chatter, Alec defended himself by saying that he was just being friendly.

  At the trial, she discovered that Eugenie had been employed as a pastry chef at one of the better restaurants on the island and that she was Canadian. Except for a half brother who made threatening faces and gestures at Alec and who, after being warned repeatedly by the judge not to, had to be removed from the courtroom, Eugenie had, it seemed, no other relatives. Even after Helen confronted Alec with receipts—two for a motel on the North Fork and one for a hundred-dollar gift certificate at Neiman Marcus—she found crumpled up in his sports coat pocket, he still continued to deny his affair with Eugenie. The gift certificate, he claimed, was for her, only he misplaced it. Eventually, however, he admitted that on the fatal night, he did have a drink with Eugenie. One drink, he swore to Helen, but, by then, she had stopped believing him.

  When the sun begins to set and the mosquitoes start coming out, Helen can no longer concentrate on her painting and she starts to pack up her paints and fold her easel. As she carries her things around to the front door, she runs into Craig, who is coming home.

  “Hi, Mrs. Mallory—can I help carry your stuff?”

  Helen had not heard Craig’s truck and he has startled her. In the fading evening light, he looks a little like the way Helen imagines Alec might have looked when he was young and Craig’s age, although of course she had not known Alec then. Tall, thin, with the same sort of hair.

  “Thanks,” Helen stammers, “that’s nice of you—it’s getting dark and too buggy out. Oh—” An unexpected sharp pain in her chest makes her cry out. The pain is like a stab from a knife and Helen has never experienced anything like it. For a moment, she is afraid she is going to fall as, at the same time, unbidden, the image of Alec lying in the hospital morgue comes into her head.


  “Are you okay?” Craig asks, putting out his hand to take her arm.

  Doubled up outside her house in the near dark, Helen does not answer. She could at least have told him good-bye.

  “Are you all right?” Craig repeats. He does not know what to do.

  She could have stayed in the room with him and kept him company for a little longer, she thinks, as, slowly, she straightens herself up. Craig’s arm, she sees, is outstretched toward her and she is tempted to take it. Instead, she hands him her canvas. “Careful—the paint is still wet,” she manages to say.

  “Your painting?” Craig holds out Helen’s painting without looking at it. After dropping Gina off at work, he had driven around aimlessly all afternoon in his truck. Twice he had gone to Montauk and back. He finds it hard to believe that during the course of a single day his feelings can change so rapidly from love to hate. Like the man in the car, he thinks, one minute you are okay and alive, the next you are dead.

  “Of Santa Fina,” Helen is saying. The pain has disappeared as quickly as it appeared and she is recovered.

  “Santa who?” Craig has understood Helen to say Gina and he looks down at the painting in his hand—a painting of a naked woman lying on a bed of flowers and a man, also naked except for a blue cape thrown over his shoulders, floating over her.