Bellefleur (43 page)

“Then you should have buried it, you shouldn’t have picked around in its poor little chest,” Christabel said. “Come on, Germaine, honey! It’s too noisy in the garden, they’re bulldozing in the garden, maybe we could go down to the lake. . . . Or do you want to stay with
him?
He isn’t tormenting you?”

Germaine stared up at her, wordless.

Christabel was now more than a head taller than Bromwell, and much more solidly built. Her face was tanned and strong-boned; her breasts had begun to develop; her legs were lengthening. She carried into the tower an airy flyaway slapdash good humor that exasperated her brother. “Oh, do you really want to stay with
him!
But what—what—” She gestured carelessly and overturned Bromwell’s cardboard map of the solar system, as poor Bromwell reached weakly forward. “—what
good
does it do?”

MIGHT THERE BE,
Bromwell wondered aloud, staring deeply into his baby sister’s eyes, fairly drowning in that tawny-green fathomless gaze, a universe simultaneous with this universe in which a world like ours is propelled about its orbit, now at the aphelion, now at the perihelion, and again at the aphelion, century after century, a shadow-world, a mirror-world, in which, even now, I stand with my hands pressed between my knees, bending over a child said to be my sister, gazing into her eyes, wondering aloud. . . . Might there be, there, exact replicas of everything we have here, and would never
see,
here, without the reality of that other universe, the lead backing of our mirror . . . ? And then of course why would there be merely one universe simultaneous with this? Why not a dozen, three hundred, several thousand, several billion? Begun in a terrible explosion and now flying away from one another, flying faster at every moment, each identical with the others; linked by the identity of material (dust, sand, crystals, organic compounds of all kinds) and “life” itself. . . . And might there not be, granted the identity of these innumerable worlds, a way of slipping from one to another. . . .

Germaine held his gaze. She gave him no affirmation, she did not rebuke him.

Bromwell woke from his mild trance to hear a horn sounding nearby. Bellefleur noise, Bellefleur “emergencies”—a day could not pass without the excitement of a laborer’s injuries, or good news from Leah (back from one of her trips), or a fight among the children, or a visit from friends or business associates or relatives; or perhaps it was simply someone tapping at the horn of the new Stutz-Bearcat, for the pleasure of making noise. “Ah, well,” Bromwell sighed. “Our universe began with an explosion of immeasurable violence . . . so it’s natural for the human species to
rest,
so to speak, in
violence
. . . that is to say,
in motion.
”

Haunted Things

T
he cherrywood-and-veneered-oak clavichord Raphael had ordered built for his wife, Violet, with its walnut keys and ivory, gold, and jet ornamentation: an instrument of astounding beauty which no one (not even Yolande, who had taken several years of piano) could play. It was not that the keys stuck, or failed to sound; or even that the clavichord was out of tune. But anyone who sat before it to play was disturbed by its quivering air of hostility: for it did not
want
to be played, it did not
want
to make music. Or perhaps it was simply the Bellefleurs it detested. “We should sell this thing, or give it away, or at least store it in another part of the house,” Leah once said, in the days when she tried to play the musical instruments she found in the manor. “It sounds so awful. It sounds so
spiteful.
” But her mother-in-law merely closed the keyboard, and said: “Leah, dear, this is Violet’s clavichord. It’s too beautiful to move out of this room.” And so it was, and so it remained.

DAMP MISCHIEVOUS KISSES
floating in the air, planted firmly against lips at unpredictable times: once as Lamentations of Jeremiah was drifting off to sleep in the rolled-up featherbed Elvira had allowed him (she had shoved him out of their bed, insisted he sleep on the floor, forbade him to seek out another room since the rest of the family would know they had quarreled), so that, startled, wildly elated, he erroneously believed his wife had forgiven him, and was inviting him back not only to her warm bed but to her warm embrace; another time as the thirty-year-old Cornelia, locked in Raphael’s gloomy library with her stepbrother from Oneida, who was a Presbyterian minister, spread out before her on a desk the scribbled notes she’d taken, usually late at night, accusing the Bellefleurs—these terrible people she had, in all innocence, married into—of unspeakable insults and lapses of taste and crudenesses not to be believed: not a single kiss but many, grinding and sucking playfully all about her face and shoulders and bosom, so that the poor distraught woman went into hysterics and fainted; still another time as Vernon, walking on the promontory above the lake, in a lovesick trance, his arms crossed behind his back, his head bowed, tried out impassioned singsong lines
O Lara my love, O Lara my soul, how can you wallow in another’s arms, how can you deny my spirit’s chaste love
. . . and would have fallen into the lake fifty feet below, had not the kisses, angry and hissing and stinging as bees (and at first poor Vernon believed they
were
bees) awakened him.

Sixteen-year-old Della’s sapphire ring, a birthday gift from her grandparents, disappeared from her finger one night only to reappear, days later, in a brown hen’s egg cracked open by the wife of one of the farm laborers, in their wood-frame bungalow at the edge of Noir Swamp. And there was the matter of Whitenose, young Noel’s bay gelding (whom Noel had acquired from a stud farm with all the cash he’d saved from birthdays and Christmases, and had broken—with great courage and stubbornness—himself), who so very clearly saw and shied away from and occasionally reared back from invisible creatures of a menacing nature, that Noel could not reasonably discipline him; the inexplicable soughing noises in certain rooms of the manor, as if winds were blowing through invisible cornfields; an odor of fish, rank and irremovable, on the fifteenth-century French embroidered altar frontal Raphael had acquired on one of his rare trips to Europe, and
considered
—for hadn’t it cost a great deal, at auction in London?—
exquisitely
beautiful; and of course there was the matter (which, outside the family, became the inspiration for many a cruel, spirited gibe in opposition newspapers throughout the state) of the “phantom” voters in certain areas of Nautauga, Eden, Clawson, Calla, and Juniper counties who had turned out in the hundreds to defeat (by a narrow margin) Raphael Bellefleur’s third and last bid for political office. . . .

Jedediah, long ago, was so beleaguered by mountain spirits (and mountain spirits are the most capricious) that he soon accommodated himself to their presence, and spoke to them with the half-impatient, half-
affectionate
concern one might give to troublesome children; but he was still susceptible to vivid, alarming, entirely
convincing
dreams that would have him sinfully bedded with his brother’s young wife, and these caused him unremitting distress. (Which he was to feel well into his 101st year.) And Louis’s wife Germaine, miles away, down in Bushkill’s Ferry, was susceptible to annoying ticklish dreams that had dimly to do with her brother-in-law (whom she hadn’t seen for many years, and whom she did not really remember), and which caused her, one night, to unwisely call out
Jedediah!
—thereby waking Louis, who shook the poor woman until her eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. Felix—that is, Lamentations of Jeremiah—was to complain throughout his life that he was tormented more by “real” things than by spirits, and that he alone among the Bellefleurs was singled out for
absolute
defeat: he had said, after the bloodbath of the fox cannibalism, that he’d half-known on the very eve of the event that something terrible was going to happen, that he and his partner would lose all they had invested in the vicious little creatures, but (for such was Jeremiah’s apathy) he had felt only
resignation
—for what could one do to thwart a fate that began so many years ago, when his own father had, if not disowned him, unbaptized him?
You talk of haunted things,
Jeremiah had said sadly,
but what of those of us who know themselves haunted things—haunted things in human form?

And there was Yolande who appeared, evidently, at the very same moment in the dreams of a number of the slumbering Bellefleurs—Garth and Raphael and Vida and Christabel and Vernon and Noel and Cornelia and Gideon and Leah and (so it was believed, since she woke babbling a name that resembled
Yolande
) Germaine, and of course Ewan and Lily: Yolande in a long dark dress with loose sleeves, a sort of robe, her arms at her sides, her head flung back so that her lovely wheat-colored hair tumbled down her back, her expression sorrowful but not contrite, not at all contrite, so that her father, the next morning, brought his enormous fist down hard on the breakfast table, cracking the glass, and said; “She
has
run off with a man, I know it! And just to spite me! And it’s obvious she is still alive!”

Tiny drops of blood, in the children’s milk and in the cream bowl, for days after the cedar of Lebanon was felled by chain saws one shrieking afternoon (for though the tree was more than one hundred years old, and of course very attractive, and
of course
it had a sentimental value to the older Bellefleurs, the landscape architect Leah had hired from Vanderpoel insisted it must come down since it took up too much space in the garden and would have to be propped up anyway with unsightly boards), and a sense of agitation throughout the house, as if the giant tree’s spirit, pain-maddened, were running loose: a most unpleasant episode that did not really end until, some weeks later, the November storm evidently swept the spirit away. But that was hardly a blessing, since the storm was to bring with it a worse problem.

And there were, of course, innumerable other vexing things, more and less mysterious, haunted closets and baths and mirrors and drawers, and even a corner of Aveline’s boudoir, and the dust-coated drum made of Raphael’s skin that sometimes made light tapping sounds as if invisible fingers were drumming on it restlessly, and the lavender silk parasol, badly faded and frayed, said to have belonged to Violet, that rolled of its own accord across the floor, as if angrily kicked—but how seriously were they to be taken? For, after all, as Hiram frequently said, with his bemused skeptical smile,
These absurd spirits batten on
our
credulity. If we stopped believing in them, if, together, unified for once, the entire family stopped believing .
. .
why, then, they would be powerless!

Cassandra

O
ne chilly sunny day in early November Leah acquired another baby—another girl of questionable parentage—for the Bellefleurs.

It was a long, ambitious day, which began with a visit to the Gromwell property on the far side of Silver Lake. Though Leah had of course seen the property before, and claimed to have made a thorough study of its financial situation (which was quite poor—the quarry had been losing money steadily for the past six years), she insisted on being driven over in the new Rolls-Royce limousine, accompanied by Germaine and Hiram, and a young woman just hired to help with Germaine (her name was Lissa: she had been hired to replace Irene, as Irene had been hired to replace Lettie). It was a gusty day, and despite Hiram’s disapproval (he was
always
fussing and clucking and disapproving of Leah’s whims, like an aging husband) Leah had bundled her little girl up for winter and taken her along. The child loved rides, she loved to perch atop her mother’s lap and point and chatter and ask questions, which Leah answered patiently. It was very important, Leah believed, for a child to learn as much as possible—to see as much as possible—even at a very early age.

“And the important thing is, Germaine,” Leah said, as they were driven through the gate, “that we own this. All this. This is a sandstone quarry—I’ll have to ask Bromwell to explain to us, exactly what sandstone is—and it takes in sixty-five acres, all the way to the Sulphur Springs Road, and we own it now. The papers were signed just last Friday and now it’s
ours.
”

They were driven about the property, along rutted lanes, for nearly half an hour; at one point Leah insisted upon getting out and climbing halfway down into a pit, poor Hiram, stumbling beneath Germaine’s weight, in tow. “. . . not much to look at,” Hiram said irritably. “You’ll have a hard time explaining this purchase to Mr. T.”

“Nothing I do calls for an explanation,” Leah said sharply, turning her fur collar up. “I’m not a child.”

She unlocked the manager’s office and went inside, bringing Germaine with her. The place was not so dirty as she had feared. An old pulltop desk, its pigeonholes crammed with yellowed papers, a tacked-down strip of linoleum tile, an army cot, pillowless, with a soiled blanket tossed over it. . . .

“Well, Germaine,” she said heartily, “here we are!
You
wanted this.”

Germaine did no more than glance at her.

“The Gromwell Quarry. We have acquired the Gromwell Quarry,” Leah said. “And now—? Well, Germaine, are you pleased? Did I do well?”

Germaine began to chatter, as if she were a small child, and Leah, not knowing whether to be vexed or amused, waved her away. She ran and leapt and stumbled about the room, greatly excited, while Leah contemplated the situation. It had cost far more than she had anticipated, but the Gromwell Quarry was now theirs; and soon they would acquire another tract of land, adjacent to this; and then another; and another; until the original holdings were united once again. perhaps it would take most of her lifetime, Leah thought, and Germaine herself would have to complete the task. Then again, perhaps it would only take a few years, with her luck. There was no doubt about it, Leah had “luck”; she was possessed by it; she could make no mistakes.