Bellefleur (39 page)

Early on, Leah had won over grandfather Noel and uncle Hiram: they were clearly besotted with her, and thought it quite reasonable—even “pragmatic,” in Hiram’s words—that the old Bellefleur estate of 1780 might be regained, by judicious maneuverings. It would take time, it would require ingenuity and cunning, and secrecy (for if Bellefleur enemies suspected the family’s plan they would leap in and buy up the land simply out of spite); it would certainly require diligence and tact (and unfortunately the Bellefleurs had a reputation, generations old, of tactlessness); and
charm.
So if anyone objected to Leah’s schemes Noel and Hiram defended them, and great-grandmother Elvira soon joined in (for, as she neared her hundredth birthday, she was visited with increasingly apocalyptic dreams: floods, fires, lightning storms that illuminated the heavens: premonitions that something extraordinary was to happen to the family); and even Cornelia, who customarily opposed her daughter-in-law as a matter of principle, appeared to see some merit in certain aspects of the plan . . . for the grandchildren
would
be of marriageable age soon, the boys as well as the girls, and she
hoped
. . . ah, how fervently she
hoped
. . . that the new generation would choose more discreetly than the old. Gideon quarreled with Leah in the privacy of their suite, and maintained a sullen courtesy elsewhere, and Ewan sometimes vigorously challenged her (he was especially antipathetic to the scheme of securing a retrial or an outright pardon for Jean-Pierre II: Why not let the old boy spend the rest of his days in peace at Powhatassie, by now he’s adjusted, he must have a circle of comrades, he receives a monthly allowance from Father for little treats and niceties, doesn’t he—why not let him remain there, and not stir up trouble again?); but when he helped see her off, climbing into the old Packard touring car that fairly sagged beneath the weight of her luggage, turning to wave a goodbye kiss at whoever was assembled on the marble steps, Leah in her smart magenta traveling cloak with the matching kid shoes, her white gloves buttoned at the wrist, the filmy white aigrette bobbing on her slope-brimmed cream-colored hat, her rich glowing exultant face turned to him (and now, nearly a year after Germaine’s birth, she had lost the extra weight she’d carried, and even the tiny pinch of flesh beneath her chin, so like Germaine’s baby fat, had disappeared)—why, he could not stop himself from grinning, she was so
handsome
a woman, of course she would succeed! If any Bellefleur succeeded in this century, it would be Leah.

Through a helpful acquaintance in the attorney-general’s office Leah met a charming middle-aged man named Vervain, a furrier, who showed some interest in the possibility of entering into a partnership with the Bellefleurs, though he knew nothing about mining; but it soon developed that Vervain hadn’t the sort of capital Leah required. (And he was too well protected by his female relatives, as a rich widower, to be a possibility for poor Garnet, who
might
have appealed to him . . . a husbandless spiritless frail little mutt of a girl, halfway attractive if glimpsed in the right light, who somehow—no one knew how—no one could
guess
how—had had a darling little baby a few weeks ago.) But it was in the company of Vervain, who escorted both Leah and Germaine to the World’s Exposition at Vanderpoel, that Leah met P. T. Tirpitz, the banker and philanthropist, renowned throughout the state for his charitable donations of parks, lakes, renovated mansions, and immense sums of cash to worthwhile institutions (among them the Church of Christ, Scientist, to which he may have belonged). Long ago, it was thought, Tirpitz’s father had lent an undisclosed sum of money to Raphael Bellefleur, but Leah didn’t know if the transaction had taken place before the worst period of Raphael’s career—in short, she didn’t know if it had been fully repaid. It was a measure of Tirpitz’s gallantry that he made no allusion to past dealings with the Bellefleurs, and affected only a dim but flattering notion of their grandeur, and their significance in what he called “the magnificent history of our nation.”

Though he must have been an elderly man at this time—smallish, bald, with odd planes and layers of bone in his skull that made Leah think of her mother, and a tooth chipped in an inverted
V,
which gave him a boyish puckish disingenuous look—he appeared as robust as a man in his mid-fifties, or even younger. On one of their strolls through the Exposition grounds he insisted upon carrying Germaine, who had gotten tired, and it quite impressed Leah—who was, all her life, to be impressed by such obvious demonstrations of strength even when she had long outgrown their usefulness, and could see them, clearly, as nothing more than sentimental vestiges of a too-lively girlhood—remember, for instance, the daring midnight climb of her cousin Gideon into her bedroom where he fought and murdered
Love!
—it impressed her just the same, that the man’s legendary wealth, and the rumors of his association with a church she thought nothing if not comical, had not weakened him. His muscles were small but hard, and he staggered only a little under the hefty child’s weight. “You really don’t need to carry Germaine, Mr. Tirpitz,” Leah said, her smile gracious behind the filmy gauze of her veil. “I
need
to do nothing,” Tirpitz replied. But he winked at Leah to soften the effect of his words.

(She was to learn later that Tirpitz,
for the past fifty years,
had exercised every morning: sit-ups, push-ups, barbells, leg weights. “The body is an instrument by which we can approach God,” Tirpitz said. “It is the
only
instrument.”)

He took her to dinner, and arranged for one of his most trusted servants to stay at Leah’s hotel with Germaine (even so, Leah worried: she had become, since the birth of this extraordinary child, an almost fussy mother who felt vaguely that something was missing from her own body, an arm or a leg or at least a finger, when her child was out of the room: and then Germaine seemed to
aid
her so, simply by gazing at her and smiling); he took her to the sailboat races on the Eden River, and to the opera, and to the private reception that followed the presentation of a medal to the visiting Emperor of Trapopogonia by Governor Grounsel on the third night of the Exposition (the emperor, whose kingdom was east of Afghanistan, disappointed Leah by resembling Hiram, and by speaking an almost accentless English—though she was naturally flattered by his warmly appreciative remarks to her); he arranged for the three of them to explore the Exposition early Sunday morning, before it was open to the public, pointing out exhibits that were of more than ordinary interest (engines; rockets; calculating machines; the City of the Future with its moving sidewalks and robot-servants and controlled temperatures and handsome manikin-people; the Hospital of the Future where blood, sperm, tissues, bones, and every organ—including the brain—would be stored, and would be available for patients), and ending the tour with the Tirpitz Pavilion, which was of course his own, and which both Leah and Germaine loved best: a five-acre jumble of marvels that included painted and bejeweled baby elephants; a white marble fountain with hundreds of tiers that sent out spray in a dizzying variety of forms; a killer whale named Beppo in a green-tinted transparent tank; a small mountain of orchids of the most extraordinary subtlety and beauty; Egyptian and Mesopotamian statuary; the Zodiac, in diamonds, fixed to a black velvet covering; a life-sized and amazingly lifelike Abraham Lincoln who intoned, in a grave, gentle, but forceful voice, “The Emancipation Proclamation” innumerable times a day; carnivorous plants from the Amazon region that, with their yard-wide petals and the steel-spring trap of their jaws, ate and digested not only insects but mice and birds fed to them by attendants. . . . And there was more, much more, so much more that Leah’s head swam, and she felt the drunkenness of euphoria without having tasted (for it wasn’t yet noon) a single drop of alcohol.

“Mr. Tirpitz,” Leah said, laying her white-gloved hand on his arm, “what is the theme of your pavilion?—what is the connection between all these wonderful things?”

“Can’t you guess, Mrs. Bellefleur?”

“Guess! Can’t I guess! Oh, I’m no good at guessing, Mr. Tirpitz, my children are far sharper, if only Bromwell were here—you’d
adore
Bromwell, I think—
I’m
no good at guessing. What is the connection?”

“But, Mrs. Bellefleur,” Tirpitz said, smiling so that the inverted
V
on his chipped tooth showed, “
surely
you can guess.”

Yet she could not. So Tirpitz turned to Germaine, and squatted before her, and asked if
she
could guess; and the child—hardly more than a baby, with the baby fat still plumping out her cheeks—stared at the old man with her tawny green-bronze eyes, as if gazing into his very soul, and said in a small, shy, but unfaltering voice: “Yes. I can.”

Tirpitz laughed. He straightened, with some awkwardness (for the small of his back ached), and at once changed the subject, grasping both Leah and Germaine by the hand, leading them on, for now it was nearly time for the Exposition to open to the public, and they must escape before the hordes descended.

“I find it very hard to breathe in the air of crowds, don’t you,” he said.

THE EVENING BEFORE
Leah was scheduled to return to Bellefleur Manor she was invited to Tirpitz’s private suite on the nineteenth floor of the Vanderpoel Hotel, where, Tirpitz promised, they would discuss the Bellefleurs’ financial situation. Quite by accident—it really was an accident, he insisted—he knew a little about the geology of the Chautauqua region, and the iron ore and titanium deposits east of Contracoeur (titanium!—Leah had never heard the word before), and would like very much to discuss the plans for several mining operations Leah had mentioned. Leah had been almost girlishly pleased by his tone, and did not mind his flirtatiousness (“Ah, but I dread to ask
how
much money you and this charming daughter of yours want!” he said, and Leah said quickly, “Not what we want but what we
need,
Mr. Tirpitz,” and he said, “For the maintenance of that enormous estate in the mountains, and to finance your husband’s expensive tastes in horses?” and Leah said, “He’s sold all his horses, and the estate maintains itself—it almost maintains itself,” and he said, “But do I dare believe that, dear Mrs. Bellefleur!”) and his paternal habit of seizing her hand and rubbing it briskly between his own. (As if Leah’s strong, blunt-fingered, overheated hand needed warming!) She did not mind, even, the old man’s smell—an indefinable odor, crisply acerbic as the air of an attic which pigeons have befouled for decades, and then again dry and tough as old parchment; and then again (when he first greeted her, when he had just left his rooms) oily-sweet from the French cologne he dabbed liberally on himself.

So she prepared to meet him in his suite on the nineteenth floor of the Vanderpoel, dressing herself in her most charming outfit (which Tirpitz had already seen once, but Leah couldn’t help that)—an oatmeal-colored silk dress with a many-layered skirt, a black velvet hat upon whose fashionably sloped brim three blood-red multifoliate roses bobbed, long black gloves with simulated black pearl buttons, high-heeled leather shoes she had ordered made a half-size too small (for she was vain about her large hands and feet, and took no comfort from Gideon’s insistence, in the early days of their marriage, that a woman of her statuesque proportions would look
peculiar
with smaller hands and feet); and she carried her silk parasol, which matched the dress. It upset her, even so, to leave the baby behind—though Mr. Tirpitz had sent over the same servant, a middle-aged Scots woman with a happy disposition and a special love, as she said, for baby girls; she halfway wondered if Mr. Tirpitz would mind if she brought Germaine with her. . . . Odd, it was odd, Leah thought, kissing Germaine goodnight, how much she depended upon this child: how little she concerned herself with the others (she had to make an effort to recall, precisely, the twins—though Christabel and Bromwell were hardly twins now), as if, when gazing at Germaine, she forgot the others entirely . . . and her husband as well . . . and all the Bellefleurs. She seemed to draw energy from the baby, much as the baby had drawn energy from
her,
sucking the warm rich sweet milk from her breasts with a sensual rapacity that had been rather wonderful while it lasted. . . .

“Goodnight! Be good, dear, and go to sleep at once! Oh, I
love
you,” Leah whispered, hugging the baby, and not minding that in her excitement the baby grabbed at the cloth roses, and nearly tore one off the hat. “I’ll be back by midnight.”

Germaine kicked, and fussed, and threatened to cry; but Leah was firm.
“Go to sleep at once.”

On her way out Leah heard Germaine starting to cry, but she paid no attention, and took the stairs down to the street floor, being too impatient for an elevator, and walked the several blocks to the Vanderpoel. There, a silent black man in uniform took her up in a cagelike elevator to Mr. Tirpitz’s suite (this particular elevator had only one stop, the nineteenth floor), and another servant, also in livery, but Oriental rather than black, let Leah into the parlor. She exclaimed aloud—there were orchids everywhere—vases and vases of orchids—white orchids, lavender orchids, orchids of a subtle creamy-blue shade—she had never seen anything so beautiful.

She was seated in a comfortably overstuffed chair, and the young Oriental man brought her a drink on a silver tray, which he put down on a table before her. Leah snatched up the drink at once and took a sip. Bourbon, so far as she could tell it was good bourbon, though she wasn’t a connoisseur like most of the Bellefleurs; but it was precisely what her nerves required.

The servant disappeared. She was left to herself. She waited, gazing at the orchids, wondering if Mr. Tirpitz owned an orchid plantation—but surely he did—surely he owned a great many things. Not long ago uncle Hiram had spoken of Tirpitz, had mentioned the name in some connection or other, with reverence, Leah believed, but she could not recall exactly. How amazed Hiram and the others would be when she returned with Tirpitz’s support for the Contracoeur mines!—how amazed and envious and jealous Gideon would be—