Bellefleur (20 page)

Nocturne

W
hen, after more than ten months in the womb, and after a seventy-two-hour labor of such violent pain and remorseless, convulsive heaving, that Leah, stoic throughout the pregnancy, and unwilling to speak aloud of her dread, was reduced to a thrashing screaming animal whose cries rang out, through the opened windows, to permeate the darkness, and were said to be heard across the lake (so that there was, for Gideon, nowhere to hide, and not even a drunken stupor could save him)—when, after the ordeal of a labor so colossal that there would never be, for Leah, words to contain it (and it was her private theory that the labor itself hadn’t begun that oppressively hot August evening after dinner when most of the family were down at the lake, and only the grim-faced silent Della, in her tiresome mourning, attended her; it had really begun that Sunday at Powhatassie, after the finish of the race, after Nicholas was carried on a stretcher off the track—not known yet to be so irreparably injured, but unconscious nevertheless, and bleeding—and she was stricken by a lightning-bolt of pain intense enough to darken her vision, as if not only her eyes but her entire body, her entire vision, had gone blind), and in her incoherent bawling she cried out not only for her mother to help her, and for poor Gideon (whom she had banished days earlier from her bedside—she couldn’t bear, she claimed, to witness
his
hapless suffering, since her own was terrible enough: “Get away! Get out of here! I can’t stand it! I won’t have you here! You’re really a coward, you’re really a baby yourself, go on out of here, go play poker with your friends, go get drunk, you love to get drunk, you’ve been drunk for the past month! Go away from my bedside, go on
out
of here!” she cried, her broad face streaked with perspiration that seemed already to have worn little rivulets into her flesh, no matter how often Della or Cornelia wiped it away), but God Himself, in Whom she had never believed: God Whom she had, even as a small girl, cheerfully mocked (at times even to her mother’s face, for it was
always
a delight to upset Della); when after the stench of blood in the room, and the first sight of the infant’s head between Leah’s smeared thighs, caused not only aunt Veronica to fall down in a dead faint but Dr. Jensen himself (and Jensen had been so marvelous when the twins were born, talking to Leah constantly, even, at the crucial moment, pressing on her abdomen and breathing with her, sharply and deeply and rhythmically, with her, as if his lungs had the power to inform hers—as in fact they did: the birth, after a ten-hours’ labor, had gone miraculously well)—when all this had transpired, and Leah’s poor wracked body was free of whatever had inhabited it, Cornelia spoke first, saying, “It should be suffocated at once,” and great-grandmother Elvira said, “It could be taken away—taken to Nautauga Falls—left on the doorstep of an orphanage—” and Della, having elbowed the other women aside, ignoring her daughter’s wailing (for Leah, in her delirium,
wanted
the creature), said simply: “I’ll take care of it. I know what to do.”

IF LEAH WAS
a lush, plump, darkly red multifoliate rose, spoiled by years of careful nurturing in fertile, manure-rich soil, then Garnet Hecht was a straggly wild rose, one of those stunted, anemic, but still pretty blossoms whose petals are, almost at once, blown; such wild roses are usually white, or pale pink, and their pistils are frail and powdery as a moth’s wings; even their thorns are meekly dull beneath one’s exploratory thumb.

Still, Gideon thought, running, Garnet’s tiny hand grasped hard in his (how light it was!—her bones were as thin as a sparrow’s), still, such roses
are
pretty once you actually examine them.

“Gideon, oh, stop—Gideon, please—Gideon—”

But she could not catch her breath, he pulled her along so quickly, through the woods beside the lake, late at night, only the three-quarter moon (which was the color of curdled milk, angrily glaring) and a scattering of stars as witnesses. They were running together through the pine woods just to the north of the manor; underfoot were needles upon which their feet slipped, and Garnet cried out in breathless alarm. “Oh, Gideon, please—I didn’t mean—I’m so afraid—Gideon—”

The pine trees were perfectly straight. Perfectly black, in silhouette. Ahead was the uncanny dark of Lake Noir, in which the moon—even this bright, pulsating moon—was reflected only dimly; and no stars were reflected at all.

Behind them, far behind them, a woman’s wail arose; and Gideon ran faster. He was panting hard. He was wordless. Poor Garnet staggered after him, her thin arm outstretched, her childlike hand grasped tightly in his, sobbing, not daring to slacken her pace.

“Oh, but Gideon—I didn’t mean—please—”

It was Della Pym who had sent Garnet to Gideon, with something to eat—cold sliced turkey, and ham, and half a loaf of that thick whole-wheat bread he loved, and some date-nut bread as well—for after Leah’s labor began he had gone upstairs to the third floor, over into the east wing, where he had been sleeping, off and on, since the Powhatassie race, with only a bottle of bourbon to keep him company, and his Springfield rifle (with which, from the window, he shot hawks and crows out of the sky—or had been shooting them before the wise birds learned to avoid that wing of the house). He had been sleeping on the floor, on a filthy old carpet, in his clothes, and his mother claimed—not quite truthfully—that he hadn’t washed or shaved or rinsed his mouth since Nicholas’s funeral. If Leah would not comfort him (and she would
not,
his weakness disgusted and frightened her), why then he would allow no one to comfort him, let them rap on the door, or pound, let them murmur his name or pronounce it, as Noel did, sharply and briskly—
Gideon, what the hell are you doing to yourself! Gideon, open this door at once!

Garnet, trembling, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and crept along the shadowy hallway, a candle in one hand, the silver tray heaped with food, and covered by a white linen napkin, in the other. Because she knew she would be struck dumb when he confronted her (
if
he confronted her, for he hadn’t unlocked the door even for Cornelia, these past few days) she whispered ahead of time: Oh, I love you. Gideon Bellefleur. I love you. I love you. I have loved you since the first day I set eyes on you. . . . And, yes, it was on your white stallion, you were riding your white stallion, through the main street of Bellefleur, and you never saw me staring, you never glanced my way. . . . You never glanced to the right or the left, riding through the village like a prince. It was on your white stallion I first saw you, and I loved you at once, and I will always love you, no matter that you never glance at me, or even know my name. . . .

Drunk and grinning a lopsided grin, and smelling of a man’s sweat, Gideon
had
opened the door; and leaned against the doorway staring at her. I didn’t think I had really heard anyone knocking, he said. You didn’t rap very hard, did you. You aren’t very strong, are you.

He snatched the tray from her and threw the napkin aside and began to eat. Ravenously, like an animal; like a wolf. Garnet stared at him, her face burning. He tore at the meat with his head inclined to the side, like a wolf. His strong stony-white teeth gleamed in the tremulous candlelight.

She had thought she would faint—a terrible dizziness arose in her—but she had not fainted. She stood rooted to one spot, staring at Gideon Bellefleur. Oh, I love you, she whispered in secret.

“IT CAN’T BE
allowed to live—”

“It—they—must be put out of their misery—”

“Don’t let Leah see! Is she awake?”

Voices ballooning around the bed. Great tall teetering figures.

The taste of blood, of salt, of orange-burning fire, drawing all sensation to the tongue. . . .

Leah had given birth and lay back in a delirium.

They were gasping. Whispering. What a tragedy! What could they do! Aunt Veronica, bringing a water-filled basin to the bedside, saw what lay squirming there and with a soft faint Oh! sank forward, in a dead faint. And Floyd Jensen, sleepless for most of the seventy-two hours, stared at the creature for a long, long moment—not one baby (and a giant baby at that) but two babies: then again not
two
babies (which would have been quite within the normal order of things) but one and a half: a single melon-sized head, two scrawny shoulders, and at the torso something hideous that resembled, in Jensen’s feverish imagination just before he fainted, part of another embryo—

The creature had only two arms, two tiny fists, which it flailed angrily. And of course it was bawling.

“Don’t let it wake poor Leah! Oh, what should we do—”

“It should be put out of its misery—suffocated at once—”

“But it’s living, it’s
alive
—”

“Is she waking up? No? Hold her still—”

“It should be put out of its misery!”

“Might we take it to the city? Where no one—no one would
know?
An orphanage, a hospital—the steps of the cathedral at Winterthur—”

Grandmother Della in her soiled black dressing gown, her scalp showing in pink slats through her thinning yellow-white hair, her eyes unusually bright, all but shouldered Cornelia aside.
Cornelia,
her brother’s silly chit of a wife! She stepped forward masterfully, just as she had stepped forward, years before, at the astonishing birth of Bromwell and Christabel, and raised both squirming infants aloft, to clear their lungs, give them a shake, get them wailing—for wasn’t she, after all, no matter how she disapproved of the girl and of the girl’s bully of a husband, the grandmother?—the mother’s mother? This creature was far heavier than the twins. But she raised it aloft. And, staring frankly, with a curious half-repulsed half-satisfied little smile, she said: “Just look at it! Shameless! You can see it’s meant to be a girl but that other part sticking out—just look!—why, those things are hanging halfway to its ankles, I never saw anything like it—”

Leah lay weakened and delirious on the blood- and sweat-soaked sheets. Murmuring: Mother, Gideon, dear God. Mother. Gideon. Oh, please God, dear God. Help. . . . Give me my baby.

Through the window a curdled-milk moon. No night sounds at all: not even crickets: Leah’s screams had silenced everything.

The baby shrieked. Kicking, fighting. For breath. For life. Two somewhat abbreviated legs, and part of an abdomen, and rubbery-red slippery male genitalia, possibly oversized—it was difficult, with all the commotion, for Della to estimate—growing out of the abdomen of what appeared to be a perfectly well-formed, though somewhat large, baby girl.
Her
legs were longer and appeared to be normal, and her tiny hairless vagina was a healthy
purplish
-pink, the size of Della’s smallest fingernail, between the thrashing legs.

“
I
know what to do,” Della said loudly.

GIDEON’S HANDS, ACTING
of their own accord, tore the girl’s clothing away. And then his own. If he could have torn her skin away as well, he might have done so: how greedily, how desperately, his fingers plucked! He wanted nothing between them, not a breath, not a thought.

She strained apart from him but he forced himself, his great weight, onto her; and then into her; half-angrily he ground his mouth against hers and felt her hard childish teeth, resisting. Somewhere, far away, a scream sounded—or was it a loon’s wail—but Gideon, plunged so far into this girl whose name he didn’t recall, heard nothing.

. . . Gazing at him with lovesick moonstruck eyes. Her words trailing off into the air, in his presence. Long thin hands, bony fingers, the nail bitten back to the quick, a habit that excited his disgust. Leah mocked. Of course Leah mocked. The girl was silly . . . yet the surprise of her in the corridor, the sudden alignment of eyes and hair and pert little chin that made her beautiful to his sleep-dazed eyes . . . the shy soapish odor of her . . . that tiny hand grasped so tightly in his. . . . She wept, she sobbed of love. Love. He did not hear. He no longer knew where he was. In the pine forest above the lake, on the needle-strewn cold ground? Something that was not the girl drew him down violently, as if the earth had cracked open and it was into the very earth itself he plunged: weightless, bodiless, helpless. Falling. Deeper. The desire to crush, to annihilate. To smother those cries. Plunging. Tearing.

A demon poked at him with its hot sharp tongue, breathing boldly into his face. The tongue in his ear. So moist, so agitated! He could not control himself. The girl in a daze murmured, Love, love, oh, I love you, murmured a name that must have been his, but he did not hear: and then gripped his back, which had gathered itself into bunches of muscles, rising, arched, furious, as Leah herself might have gripped it, once
did
grip it, long ago.

“Oh, Gideon, I love you—”

GRUNTING, DELLA CARRIED
the squirming thing to the walnut cabinet at the far end of the room, ignoring her daughter’s cries, and pushed aside a silly Chinese porcelain boar’s-head tureen—the costly junk her family had accumulated, she would have liked to make a pyre and burn it all!—and flopped the baby down. And, keeping her back discreetly to the others, blocking Leah’s view if, risen on her elbows, she should actually be watching, with one, two,
three
skillful chops of the knife, solved the problem once and for all.

She turned to face the room. Drawing her first full breath in many minutes she said, triumphantly: “Now it’s what it was meant to be, what God intended. Now it’s one, and not two; now it’s a she and not a he. I’ve had enough of
he,
I don’t want anything more to do with
he,
here’s what I think—” and with a sudden majestic swipe of her arm she knocked the bloody mutilated parts, what remained of the little legs, and the little penis and testicles and scrotum, onto the floor—“what I think of
he!
”

BOOK TWO
The Walled Garden