Bellefleur (38 page)

He turned, and his friend was still there, chattering, his hand extended for Samuel to shake. If the young man caught in that instant Samuel’s own astonishment he gave no indication: quite simply he was escaping, and there was nothing Samuel could do to restrain him.

So he left, and Samuel remained in the room, at first angered by—by whatever it was—by the queer bodiless agitation of air—by the murmurous voices—and the laughter that rose in jagged little peaks—and the
odor.
He drank from a wine bottle, staggering about the room. Why didn’t they show themselves, were they afraid of
him,
who were they to intrude on a private card game, to interfere—who were they to trespass in Bellefleur Manor? He saw, reflected in the mirror, a dark figure pass close behind him; but when he turned no one was there. Coward, he whispered.

The gold minute hand on the alabaster clock above the mantel began to move backward. Samuel stared at it, the bottle lifted to his lips. He was angry, he wasn’t frightened, quite deliberately he swallowed a few large mouthfuls as he watched the clock hand, though the wine had begun to dribble down his chin. Then he threw the bottle from him and rushed to the clock and stopped the hand, and moved it forward again. There was a slight resistance but he overcame it; and in his zeal moved the hand round and round and round, so that he lost track of the time. . . . Two in the morning, perhaps. Two-thirty. No more than three.

Now when he turned he saw in the mirror a mist-shrouded group of people, all of them black: and detaching itself from the group, with a peculiar airy grace—peculiar because it was so
solid
—was the figure of a woman. Samuel stared, standing motionless. In his distraction he began to dig at the tartar on his front teeth, a habit he believed he had cured himself of years before.

A black woman—a Negress—but not a slave—evidently not a slave—with wide thick grape-colored lips—tobacco-colored skin—a broad, somewhat flat nose, with prominent nostrils—hair that frizzed with static electricity—strong shoulders—muscular shoulders—a thick but long neck—long-lashed eyes—very dark eyes—eyes that fixed him in a mocking stare. He stood immobile, waiting for her to speak—what if she called him by name, what if she claimed him!—his thumbnail now jammed between two of his lower teeth.

A Negress, an African—with what defiantly, hideously African features! Samuel stared and stared, for he had never seen a black woman before, never at such close range, and though the mirror was cloudy, and the outlines of the woman’s body bled away into the shadows, she was somehow enlarged, magnified, and subtly distorted, as if she were an image detaching itself from its surface and covering Samuel’s eye—a dream-image adhering to the surface of his amazed unresisting eye. But she was so ugly! She
was
ugly, despite her beauty. A mature woman, ten or more years older than Samuel, with heavy breasts that appeared to be hanging loose inside a shapeless sweat-stained garment, and tense cords in her neck, and stained teeth. One of her lower teeth was even missing. . . . Ugly, obscene. Still she held him with that bold stare, as if his expression of alarm and disgust amused her. She
was
ugly, she
was
obscene, he wanted only to turn and run from her, and slam the door behind him, and lock it. . . . But instead he remained immobile, a strand of wavy hair fallen over his forehead, his shirt collar askew, the front of his vest wine-stained, his legs slightly bent at the knee as if their strength were draining from them; and the thumb pressed against his teeth.

But you have no
right
to be here, he whispered.

FROM THAT NIGHT
onward Samuel Bellefleur was not himself—it was said of him, repeatedly, even by persons who had not previously known him well, that he “wasn’t himself.” Seated at dinner he smiled vacantly, and pushed food about his plate, and replied when spoken to so languidly, so indifferently, that Violet burst into tears more than once, and had to be escorted from the room. He was not discourteous: he made a show of being courteous: but his every word, his every gesture, even the most subtle movement of his brow, communicated a perverse and possibly even malicious contempt.

They could smell the woman on him—they could sense his erotic gravity—a sensuousness so powerful, so heavy, that it held down his soul like an enormous rock, and would not allow it to float to the surface of ordinary discourse.

Raphael was embarrassed, and then angry; and then baffled (for
how
could his son be indulging in a wicked liaison, when he no longer left the manor?); and, in the end, frightened. He had not expected his son to be celibate, he certainly knew of slightly scandalous doings among the officers of the Light Guard, and so long as Violet did not know—or did not acknowledge that she knew—it hardly mattered. But he had not expected anything so rankly obvious as this: and there was, at all times, even in the breakfast room, that incontestable rich ripe overripe fairly reeking
odor
that emanated from Samuel, stirred by his every movement, wafted about in the most innocent of atmospheres. And yet the boy bathed—certainly he bathed—he bathed at least once a day.

Samuel stayed away from the family for longer and longer periods of time, and though Raphael was grateful that he wasn’t, at least, leading a dissolute life on one of the gambling boats, or piling up debts in the Falls like other young men in his circle—the boy
was,
after all, sequestered away in the Turquoise Room with the two or three newspapers Raphael subscribed to, and the almanac for the year, and even the Holy Bible!—still he could not refuse to acknowledge his son’s increasing estrangement, and the fact that what stared coldly at him out of Samuel’s eyes was no longer exactly his son. “Are you not feeling well, Samuel,” Raphael murmured, touching the boy’s arm, and after a space of several seconds the boy would draw away, slowly, and smile that haughty indifferent smile, and say in a husky voice, “I am feeling
exceptionally
well, Father.”

His linen was changed less often. His collars were unbuttoned. He declined to come downstairs when his friends called, and gave as an excuse for missing drill, and for missing the sessions with Herod that had once consumed so much of his time, a drawling mumble about feeling “sluggish.” After weeping in Raphael’s arms Violet suddenly grew angry, and spoke in a rapid low voice of the “slut” who was ruining her boy: it wasn’t anyone on the household staff, she was certain, she was
certain,
she didn’t think it could be one of the female laborers, for how could he smuggle the creature up to the third floor day after day?—but he did have a woman, of course he had a woman, a filthy wicked slattern who wanted only to destroy Raphael’s heir! (Violet’s frenzy, as well as the remarkable words she used, embarrassed her husband to the point of stupefaction: he had never imagined his wife knew such words, let alone of the reality they indicated.)

There were times when, emerging from the Turquoise Room, Samuel actually staggered, and his handsome face—more handsome than ever, it seemed—was oily with sweat. His skin might be feverish to the touch, his lips parched and raw. His mustache, untrimmed, bristled in all directions, and must have tickled; Violet once picked a tiny kinky hair off his lip—and thereby incurred her son’s startled displeasure. “Don’t touch me, Mother,” he said, recoiling. But at least, at that moment, he looked her fully in the face.

Of course they investigated the room in his absence, at least in the first weeks when he allowed them in, but they found nothing—only the scattered newspapers, a cushion out of place, finger smears on the mirror, the minute hand of the clock slightly bent, and the clock no longer ticking. The odor of unwashed flesh, the odor—hardly more subtle—of fleshly delirium was sometimes faint, sometimes overpoweringly strong, so that Violet, hardly able to breathe, commanded the servants to throw open all the windows. How hideous, that smell! How obscene! And yet there was nothing to attach it to: the Turquoise Room was as extraordinarily beautiful as ever, as magnificent as ever, a room fit for royalty.

The only time Samuel showed much interest in his parents’ increasing alarm—and then the interest was rather mild—was when Raphael pointed out that he’d been hidden away in the room for eleven hours straight; and Samuel, opening his blood-threaded eyes wide, said that that couldn’t be the case—he’d been in there only an hour or so—wasn’t it still morning? Raphael explained, trembling, that it was by no means morning. Samuel had been in that room all day, and did he intend to sleep in there again
tonight
. . . ? What was he
doing
in that room! Samuel began to gnaw at his thumbnail. He frowned, looked through his father, seemed to be making rapid calculations. Finally he said with a wry shrug of his shoulders that “time was different there.”

He was absent for longer periods of time, for days at a stretch, and when he did appear at the dinner table he yawned, ran his hand lazily through his hair, let his food grow cold on his plate. He ate so little, he should have been wasting away: but in fact he was as solid as ever, and there was even the beginning of a slight paunch high above his belt. When Violet demanded to know what he was doing in the Turquoise Room he blinked at her as if not knowing what she meant, and said in a hollow, husky voice, “Just reading, Mother, what do you . . . what do you think?” and his slack lips drooped into a negligent smile. He disappeared for three days, and then for four; when they forced open the lock to the Turquoise Room he was nowhere to be seen. But then he appeared downstairs that very evening, and showed surprise once again that he’d been away so long. According to his calculations he’d gone upstairs to read the newspapers and had been there about two hours, but according to
their
calculations he had been gone for four days.

“I think I understand,” he said slowly, again with that dull loose smile. “Time is clocks, not a clock. Not your clock. You can’t do anything more with time than try to contain it, like carrying water in a sieve. . . .”

And so, finally, he disappeared into the Turquoise Room. He entered it one evening after dinner, and never came out; he simply disappeared. The windows were not only closed but locked from the inside. There were secret passageways out of two or three other rooms in the castle (one of them Raphael’s study) but there was no secret passageway out of the Turquoise Room. The boy had simply disappeared. He no longer existed. There was no trace, no farewell note, there had been no significant final remark: Samuel Bellefleur had simply ceased to exist.

One night some months later. Raphael, still grieving for his son, cut short his meeting with a group of Republicans in a city five hundred miles away, and returned to the castle, and ran upstairs to the Turquoise Room (which was now kept locked, since it was so clearly haunted), and, with his gold-knobbed cane, smashed the enormous mirror. Shards of glass flew everywhere, shards of all sizes, icicle-shaped, pebble-shaped, some small as needles, driving themselves into Raphael’s flesh. He continued to strike the mirror, however, again and again, gripping his cane with both hands, sobbing and shouting unintelligibly. They had taken his son! They had taken his beloved son from him!

When he was finished only a few slivers of mirror remained on the wall. What faced him—held up, still, by the exquisite Italian columns—was nothing more than the mirror’s plain oak backing, mere wood, two-
dimensional
, reflecting nothing, containing no beauty, badly hacked by the spasmodic blows of his cane.

Tirpitz

O
n her many travels—to Nautauga Falls, to the state capital, to Port Oriskany, to faraway Vanderpoel—Leah always took Germaine, no matter that the little girl would have preferred to remain at home, playing in the walled garden with Vernon or Christabel or the others; no matter that Gideon objected. “I can’t travel without her,” Leah said. “She’s my heart—my soul. I
can’t
leave her behind.” “Then stay home yourself,” Gideon said. And Leah stared at him, stared him down. “You don’t need to make these trips,” Gideon said, faltering. “It’s just something you are deluding yourself with. . . . We don’t
need
you to make these appeals for us.”

Leah, knowing how the falsity of his words must strike him, knowing that he couldn’t fail to hear, for all his hypocrisy, their tinniness, saw no reason to reply. She simply rang for one of the servants, to help her pack.

There was the matter of Jean-Pierre II unjustly imprisoned in Powhatassie, and Leah’s initial petitions denied; there was the matter of locating a partner (one with, as Hiram expressed it, “unlimited resources”) for certain mining operations east of Contracoeur, now that the scheme for managed cutting privileges in the pine forests had fallen through (and though Leah never explicitly spoke of the brothers’ ignoble failure with Meldrom neither Gideon nor Ewan was allowed to forget it: Leah would say only “
Now
we must shift our plan of attack,” “
Now
we must begin again at zero”); there was the need to check up on Bellefleur property, much of it operating at a loss, or with very slender profits; there was the matter of keeping up social contacts (which Leah, like Cornelia, called “thinking of our friends”)—for the day wasn’t distant when the many Bellefleur girls (Yolande, Vida, Morna, even Christabel, and now even Little Goldie) would be of marriageable age; and for a while, though she couldn’t have been sincere about it, there was the matter of finding a suitable husband for poor Garnet Hecht (who had surprised everyone, or nearly everyone, by having a baby: a darling little girl with dark curly hair and dark button eyes who hadn’t at this point any name, since Garnet was too listless to name her, yet too weakly stubborn to acquiesce in one of the names Leah suggested). So Leah was busy, marvelously busy, no sooner back at Bellefleur Manor and soaking in a hot bath than she was planning another trip, another mode of attack. Attorneys were hired, and then dismissed, for being incapable of “understanding what I say, when I don’t say it,” as Leah explained; there were brokers, bank officials, bookkeepers, accountants, tax lawyers, men whose names turned up like mica in a spaded garden as Leah talked excitedly at the dinner table of her plans, and then were covered over again and forgotten; there were of course Bellefleurs in other cities, frequently with other names (Zundert, Sandusky, Medick, Cinquefoil, Filaree), who should—or should not—be cultivated, depending on their usefulness; there were so many politicians—from Governor Grounsel and his Lieutenant-Governor Horehound down through unelected party hacks who might have impressed Leah with their claim of knowing what
really
went on—that no one in the family, not even Hiram, could keep them straight. What this promiscuous assortment of men had in common was Leah: she believed they might be useful, or might at least put her in contact with others who
would
be useful.