Bellefleur (37 page)

He would never have had his curious initial experience in the Turquoise Room, and the tragedy that followed would never have taken place, had it not been for a set of circumstances nearly too complex (so Vernon said, though perhaps he didn’t exactly know all that had happened) to transcribe. But Samuel’s uncle Arthur was back from the Kansas Territory filled with incoherent but impassioned praise for a man who had, evidently, along with several of his own sons, hacked five proslavers to death at Pottawatomie Creek. The man’s name was John Brown, already one of the most famous of the free-soil agitators, and Arthur Bellefleur—until only a few years previously a shy, stammering, portly youth with an inclination toward the ministry, as some have an inclination toward respiratory ailments, until, one evening at a church hall in Rockland when he heard Brown, in person, speak of the evil of slavery and the necessity for man to wreak God’s vengeance on the slavers, he had become transformed—“converted”—Arthur, still stammering, though no longer shy, a deerskin outfit stretched tight across his penguin shape, his hands and saliva flying about, seemed to be reasoning with—was in fact reasoning with—his brother Raphael to give him not only the use of the coachman’s lodge and a number of the guest chambers of the manor for an unspecified amount of time (indeed, some of Brown’s soldiers—though not Brown himself—were already there, in the kitchen, eating and drinking ravenously all that Violet had directed should be offered them: ten or twelve bearded and disheveled men, three of them husky brutish runaway slaves with skins of an unimagined blackness), and not only a generous amount of money in support of the cause (for Brown, Old Osawatomie, though in hiding and rumored to be wounded, would soon return to initiate a series of guerrilla raids of slaveholding settlements, and he was calling for at least two hundred rifles), and not
only
some five or ten or fifty or two hundred acres of wilderness land so that Brown could, when he wished, establish a rival nation, a “second government” with a population center to rival that of Washington, D.C., as the struggle against the abomination, slavery, grew in ferocity—but also (and here Samuel had to marvel at his uncle’s audacity) Raphael Bellefleur’s personal blessing.

“John Brown has said, and you must know it to be true, that the slaveholders have forfeited their right to live,” Arthur said.
“You can’t deny the truth of that statement.”

“You’re asking me to condone murder,” Raphael said in a queer drawling voice. He seemed disoriented, as if he and not his brother had just rushed in out of the night.

From boyhood on Samuel and his brothers had been accustomed to hearing their father discuss politics with his friends and political associates, primarily upstate Whigs, and there were numerous occasions when the discussions became animated, and boisterous, and almost—though never quite—violent; and there had been a dismaying interlude of several weeks when their aunt Fredericka, Raphael’s sister, then thirty-six years old, had pleaded without success for the entire family’s conversion to her new religion—“True Inspiration,” it was called by its small number of followers, headed at that time by a maniac German named Christian Metz—or, at the very least, financial support for the sect’s community five hundred miles to the west at Eben-Ezer (“Hitherto the Lord has helped us”). (“You are blind to the truth that stares you in the face, that shouts at you to listen, poor sinner, and rejoice that the scales have at last fallen from your eyes!” Fredericka wept, daring to put her hands on her brother—who was so appalled by the disorder of her hair and dress, and by the fact that she would actually
touch
him, he had not the presence of mind to thrust her away.) So the boys were accustomed to lengthy debates, some more spirited than others, some more susceptible to absurd rhetorical displays than others. But the intensity of the quarrel between Arthur and Raphael was alarmingly different.

“You dare not deny the truth of what we say!” Arthur shouted.

“Brown is a murderer!” Raphael shouted.

“We are at war, in war there is no murder!”

“Brown is a maniac and a murderer!”

“I tell you, we are at war! You are the maniac—the murderer—to deny it!”

Samuel knew that his father believed, as he himself did, and most people did, that the Negroes were sons of Ham, and accursed; they didn’t feel pain or exhaustion or despair like the white race, not even like Raphael’s Irish laborers, and they certainly did not possess “souls”—though it was clear they were more highly developed than horses and dogs. Exactly what they were, what they represented, how responsible for their own damnation they were, was debatable; and under ordinary circumstances, with a rational opponent, Raphael would have enjoyed a debate. But Arthur had clearly been touched by madness himself. The Old Man had, he said, put a hand on his shoulder and declared him a lieutenant colonel in the army to overturn slavery, and tears had poured down his cheeks, and he had known at that moment
why he lived.

Politically Raphael Bellefleur opposed slavery because he opposed the Democrats; privately he knew the system to be an enviable one—it answered the only important moral requirement that might reasonably be asked of an economic strategy: it worked. (And wasn’t it the case, he asked Arthur, on the very night of Arthur’s arrival, that some stocks of men are clearly bred for labor in the fields, and others for
thinking;
wasn’t it the case—ah, so
obviously
!—that some creatures are born to be slaves, and others to rule?) God did not create all men equal, even in heaven there is a division of labor, a hierarchy, and if one didn’t believe in heaven, or in God (though Arthur evidently did) then one must acknowledge that nature herself insisted upon the dominion of men over beasts, and the dominion of some men over others—for how, otherwise, had slavery ever come about? “Free the black man and leave him to his own devices, and he’ll soon have his own slaves,” Raphael said angrily. And flailed about, groping and stammering, quoting Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War (“. . . it is a general necessary law of nature to rule wherever one can”). And Arthur, trembling, ignored his words as if they were too contemptible to be acknowledged, and said:
“What John Brown is doing is nothing less than the greatest service any man can render to God at the present time.”

From somewhere Samuel’s once-meek uncle, a comical little figure with his penguin’s body and his penguinlike manner of holding his short arms out from his body stiffly, as if he didn’t know quite what to do with them, had learned to speak in a low, level, forceful, dramatic way, and to fix his eyes fiercely upon his listener; he had learned, Samuel couldn’t help but see, a soldier’s courage. It was of course ridiculous that he should claim to believe—that any white man should claim with a straight face to believe—that the black race not only should be raised to the level of the white race, but
would
be raised, and within a generation. It was ridiculous too that God should so frequently be invoked in what was a political matter. Nevertheless Samuel admired Arthur’s strength of conviction, and even his fanatical energy. Why, he was willing to die for the insurrectionist cause . . . !

So when Raphael turned to his eldest son and asked, with a dry, sardonic dignity, his eyes half-shut behind the shining lenses of his pince-nez, what
his
opinion on the subject was, Samuel’s heart swelled with a not-
altogether
sincere rush of sympathy, and he said: “They may have justice on their side, Father.” Seeing Raphael’s queer pinched look he paused, and then went on, with an almost boyish pleasure at the gravity of the moment, “Or at least history.”

Consequently it came about . . . and how immediately it came about, with what passion, must be an indication (so Vernon believed) of Raphael Bellefleur’s derangement, or imbalance, as early as the mid-fifties . . . that with a furious mock-servility Raphael changed his mind about driving the scruffy little gang of “soldiers” away, and made a show of insisting to Arthur that they remain in the manor as his guests, his personal guests: two or three of them might even wish (unless Arthur wished?) to reside in the Turquoise Room.

The swiftness with which Arthur’s expression altered—his mist-gray dilated eyes at once narrowing, his grimace softening to a malicious smile—showed how keenly sensitive he was to his older brother’s game, and so at once
he
agreed: why, yes, certainly, it was only appropriate, no need to hesitate, the Negroes would be given that room, for who else—including Arthur himself?—had a better right to it?

Exactly, Raphael said. And, still turned to his son, and still not looking at him, he directed Samuel to make the arrangements: inform the housekeeper, inform Violet, go to the kitchen and introduce himself to the “soldiers,” perform all the tasks that a gracious host would perform since, unfortunately, the head of the family felt indisposed and would now be retiring for the night. . . .

“Father,” Samuel said, lurching to his feet, “you aren’t serious!”

“I am as serious as you have been,” Raphael said.

SO THE THREE
runaway slaves were chambered for the night in the Turquoise Room, whose splendors were so astonishing, so inestimable, that it was quite probable the poor men did not even register the honor bestowed upon them—or they might have thought that each room in the castle was as luxurious. Whether they slept well, or uneasily; whether they were gratified by Raphael’s generosity, or baffled by it, or suspicious; whether they sensed the crude joke behind their host’s action—no one knew—but they asked Arthur if they might be housed elsewhere, the following day. And so they were moved to the coachman’s lodge. (And within a week Arthur and the men were gone—“word had come,” Arthur said mysteriously, of a change in plans; even the establishment of a second capital would have to wait.)

The Turquoise Room was aired, and scrubbed, and polished, and a number of its furnishings removed (some to be vigorously cleaned with kerosene, and given to the servants; some to be burned outright), and Raphael inspected it and saw that it was as beautiful as ever; it
was
a splendid room, worth every penny it had cost. Then it was shut up again, and not reopened until Senator Wesley Tidd came to visit, in order to discuss the logistics of a partnership with Raphael Bellefleur in an iron-ore mining operation in Kittery. (Out of the Kittery mines was to come the iron that sheathed the
Monitor
in the war—as well as iron for any number of other military equipment. Two hundred thousand tons were to be extracted from the Bellefleur mines annually, during the peak years, before the mines wore out.)

Evidently Senator Tidd spent a restless night in the Turquoise Room, for in the morning he seemed drawn and tired, and apologized for “not being himself.” His head ached, his eyes watered, his stomach was upset, he had suffered unpleasant dreams. . . . Almost timidly (for though the Senator was a thoroughly unscrupulous man he had impeccable social manners) he asked Raphael if perhaps . . . if perhaps he could be moved to another room? He was not accustomed to making such requests, but he
had
endured a particularly difficult night, and though the room was beautiful—even more astonishing than legend would have it—he feared it had been ruined for him on this visit.

And then again, some months later, when Hayes Whittier was a houseguest, he was discovered strolling about the park’s graveled walks well before dawn. When Raphael questioned him he answered evasively, saying only that he hadn’t slept well; he supposed it was indigestion. Later in the day he too requested another room. . . . His manner was sober, even grave. “What was the nature of your dissatisfaction with the room?” Raphael asked. “I was not dissatisfied with the room,” Hayes said at once. “But you spent an unusual night?” Raphael asked. “Ah, yes,” Hayes said, his voice dropping, his gaze fleeing Raphael’s, “a somewhat unusual night.” “Was there . . . any sort of odor?” Raphael asked hesitantly. Hayes did not reply; but he did not appear to be casting his mind about for a proper reply; he was simply staring at the ground. “Was there,” Raphael asked, “any sort of . . . of presence? I mean, could you . . . Could one . . . Could one
sense
a presence that might be called foreign, or . . .” Hayes hunched his shoulders in a way he had, and ran his forefinger over the bump at the bridge of his nose. When rising to speak in support of Secretary of War Cameron, some years later, he was to make the same gesture, and to speak in the same slow, distracted, profoundly melancholy voice. “There were a number of presences,” he said, staring at the gravel underfoot, “and . . . and, yes, yes, I suppose you might characterize them as
foreign.
”

THOUGH THE FILIGREE
and
objets d’art
—and that enormous intimidating mirror—would constrain them to some extent, and there could be, naturally, no young women present (as there frequently were, near the end of the evening, when the men met at the officers’ club), Samuel and several of his friends from the Light Guard decided to spend their poker night in the Turquoise Room, in order to investigate it.

For two or three hours their boyish high spirits must have had a subduing, or soothing, effect upon the “presences”—for nothing much happened that might be considered uncommon, though cards slapped down were frequently overturned, or blown off the table by an imperceptible breeze, and the wine the men sipped—a very dry white Portuguese wine from Raphael’s cellar—seemed to go at once to their heads, as if it were pure alcohol. Then, despite Samuel’s hearty insistence that nothing was wrong, that they had to resist the seductive power of their own imaginations, it soon became evident that invisible creatures were in the room with them: the game was more and more interrupted, a glass lifted to someone’s lips by itself and wine spilled, gold coins spun and rolled about, a ghost breath rippled Samuel’s hair playfully. There were heavy indentations in chair cushions, the impress of someone’s generous buttocks. The mirror grew cloudy and indistinct.
Diamond
-shaped crystals on one of the chandeliers began to rattle. There was an odor of flesh—not altogether clean—and yet not altogether unpleasant: the odor of perspiration that has dried, mixed with the odor of soil, sunshine, vegetation, unlaundered clothes. Most distressing, however, was the undercurrent of voices, lifting now and then into laughter of a somewhat jeering type. And though Samuel insisted, now rather boisterously, that his friends were imagining everything—they were silly as young girls, routed by spooks and imps!—what fools!—what
cowards
—one by one the young men made their excuses, feebly and nervously, and went home. When the last of his friends rose to leave, swaying unsteadily, Samuel seized what remained of the deck of cards and threw it petulantly down, cursing him; he staggered to his feet, turning his back on his friend, his arms crossed and his shoulders hunched in an attitude of childish fury, and when he raised his eyes he found that he was facing the mirror, staring into the mirror, and that, beyond the filmy glass surface, his friend was not reflected—the room itself was only dimly reflected—and his own image was transparent as a jellyfish’s.