Bellefleur (66 page)

So it came about that the young couple was invited to the castle, and a number of belated wedding presents were given them. Months before the baby was scheduled to be born Della was allowed to choose among the nursery’s several antique cradles; Pym was invited to join the men for cards. (He always lost at cards with the Bellefleurs—but not
too
badly, so that while Della was vexed she had no reason to be seriously upset.) They were invited to spend several days at the castle during the Christmas holiday, when a number of other relatives and guests were to be there, and it certainly looked—it
looked
—as if the marriage were being tacitly accepted. (At no point did anyone take Pym aside, of course, and welcome him into the family; or even shake his hand with an expression of pleasure. But then the Bellefleurs were always reticent about their feelings. They would not have wanted to be called
sentimental.
)

It was on Christmas Eve that Pym was killed in a toboggan accident on Sugarloaf Hill. All that day there had been a fair amount of drinking and feasting (and Christmas Day promised a roast suckling pig, and champagne for breakfast), and perhaps Pym was simply unaccustomed to so much celebrating. It was believed that he and Della quarreled sometime during the afternoon, hidden away in their room on the third floor, but it wasn’t known what they quarreled about. (Did Della object, suddenly, to her brothers’ and cousins’ interest in Pym? Was she jealous? For her young husband’s head was being turned, flattered by Noel and Lawrence in particular, and he seemed quite cheerfully willing to make a fool of himself on ice skates, on the lake, and roughing about in the snow as if he had been doing this sort of thing with the Bellefleurs all his life.)

The Bellefleurs were betting on toboggan races with the Fuhrs and the Renauds, and there was much good-natured horseplay out on the hill, and more drinking. Beer, ale, Scotch, bourbon, straight gin, straight vodka, and various brandies were being consumed. Della was to learn afterward only that her husband had insisted upon taking part in the race—had insisted that he knew how to handle a toboggan—though to her knowledge he had never done anything of the sort before. That the men would attempt Sugarloaf Hill on its steepest side, at night, with the moon nearly obscured by clouds—that they would risk their necks in an absurd bet (the winning toboggan was to collect only $200, to be divided up between five or six men)—that they would plunge downward in the face of a bitter northeast wind, with the temperature already minus five degrees: all this suggested drunkenness, swinish drunkenness.

There were so many versions of what happened on the hill, some overlapping and some flatly contradicting one another, that Della, in her grief and fury, soon gave up attempting to sort out the truth from the lies. She knew only that three toboggans raced—that poor Stanton, in a red stocking-cap and muffler, doubtless quite drunk, had been in the fourth position on the Bellefleur sled—that while in the lead the Bellefleur sled struck an exposed rock and hurtled off to one side, toward a grove of pines—the order was given to jump—and amid much shouting and laughter the men did jump, happy to abandon the expensive toboggan to its fate: but of course Stanton, who knew nothing of tobogganing, was abandoned along with the sled, and killed outright when it smashed against a pine. As quickly as that it happened—as quickly as it takes to recount the incident—one moment the poor befuddled young man was alive, and the next moment he was dead, thrown against a tree trunk like a rag doll, his face so badly mutilated that several of the men, so drunk they could barely stagger to where he lay, quarreled at first about who it was.

“But you know,” one of them said finally, with inspired drunken logic, “it must be what’s-his-name—you know—the one with the mustache—
him
—Della’s husband—because he’s nowhere around here now, and this one
here,
on the ground
here,
isn’t any one of
us
—”

They found the red stocking-cap some thirty feet from the body, twisted about a tree limb.

AND SO, GRANDMOTHER
Della said, stroking Germaine’s cheek with her cool dry hand that smelled of the harshest soap, you have only one grandfather: a Bellefleur grandfather.

The little girl sat motionless, not drawing away from the old woman’s hand. For even to move, at such a moment, would be wrong.

. . . They wanted, of course, to kill the baby as well. They wanted me to miscarry. I was four months pregnant with your mother at the time and if they’d had the courage, grandmother Della said, shaking with laughter, sniffing, they would have invited
me
to ride the toboggan too. . . . But I didn’t miscarry, despite the shock of losing Stanton. I was terribly ill for a long time, and I went to live with my sister Matilde, and then the baby was born, your mother Leah, and I wept that it wasn’t a boy because I was somewhat out of my head at that time and I imagined that only a boy, a man, could take revenge on his father’s murderers.

She closed the old photograph album. For a long moment she said nothing, and though Germaine ached to scramble off the sofa and run away, she remained sitting, her feet in their shining patent-leather shoes brought pertly together, her handknit red kneesocks exactly even. Finally grandmother Della sighed, and wiped at her nose with a rumpled handkerchief, and said in a half-amused tone meant to release her granddaughter: But the one thing I did miscarry, thank God, was
God.
I never again believed in any of that barnyard manure from that Christmas Eve to this very day. For
that
I suppose I should thank the Bellefleurs!

Solitaire

I
n one of the manor’s smallest and dampest rooms, on the second floor of the east wing, looking out upon a section of wall and part of a minaretlike tower with mock-battlemented turrets, the old man sat, backed into a corner, playing cards: slapping cards down on the table before him, one after another after another: studying, without expression, the message that finally lay flattened out before him, exposed and bereft of mystery. And then he snorted with contempt or impatience, and gathered the cards up, and shuffled them again.

Gradually, the children were told, their great-uncle Jean-Pierre would become adjusted to the “outside world,” and to them; perhaps, in time, he would allow them into his room (but what a dreary room it was, with a low ceiling and dark-paneled walls and only one window!—and he had chosen it himself), and he would invite them to play cards with him; but at the present time they must respect his privacy and the dignity of his old age, and not spy on him through the keyhole, or jostle about in the corridor giggling like little fools.

Great-uncle Jean-Pierre was an old man, and he wasn’t, after all, in perfect health. Sudden noises startled him. He could not bear the cats scurrying in the corridors—the sight of Nightshade, poor Nightshade, quite repulsed him—he hadn’t any appetite for even the tastiest of the dishes his mother Elvira ordered for him (he preferred watery oatmeal, and the coarse white bread the servants ate, and he had a curious habit of sprinkling nearly
everything
—roast beef, potatoes, fresh lettuce and tomatoes—with sugar)—he hadn’t (and this struck Leah as strangest of all) any
interest
in the family’s affairs.

But then of course he wasn’t well. He coughed, and sniffed, and spat angrily into his handkerchiefs, and complained of chest and stomach pains, and insomnia (for his bed was too soft, and the linen too scratchy-clean), and a sense of vertigo whenever he left his room, or even dared to look out the window. Bellefleur Manor was a horrific place—it was so inhumanly
large
—he hadn’t remembered how large it was: ah, what a terror to contemplate! What sort of mind, driven by an unspeakable lust, had imagined it into being? The castle . . . the castle’s grounds . . . the lightless choppy immensity of Lake Noir . . . the thousands upon thousands of acres of wilderness land . . . the mountains in the distance: a terror to contemplate: and beyond them, sprawling out on all sides, a greater horror, that entity glibly referred to as
the world.
What maddened mind, deranged by an unspeakable lust, had imagined all this into being . . . ?

Jean-Pierre II snorted with derision, and shuffled and cut and shuffled and dealt out his cards, one after another after another. He much preferred
his
game.

The Bloodstone

B
ecause of a vow she had made as a young woman in her twenties, many years ago, after the second, or possibly the third, of her fiancés died (and one of the fiancés was a handsome thirty-year-old naval officer whose father owned a string of textile mills in the Mohawk Valley) great-aunt Veronica never emerged from her suite of rooms before sunset, and never wore anything but black. “Anyone as unhappy as I should hide away from the sun,” she said. It was thought that she had imagined herself a beauty at one time—and perhaps she
had
been a beauty—and now she was in mourning not only for the two or three men who might have saved her from a perpetual virginity, but for her own youthful self: for the girlhood that must have seemed at one time inviolable, but which gradually eroded until nothing remained of it but the stubborn chaste irrelevant vow she had made, evidently before witnesses: “Anyone as unhappy as I should remain hidden away from people, so as not to upset them,” she said boldly. “Ah, I
am
accursed!”

Because of the vow Germaine rarely saw her great-aunt, and then only in the winter months when the sun set early and Germaine’s bedtime wasn’t until well after dark. The surprise of great-aunt Veronica was her
ordinariness:
if the children hadn’t known of her unhappy loves and her curious penitential vows they would have thought her far less interesting than their grandparents, and certainly far less interesting than their temperamental great-grandmother Elvira (shortly to become, at the age of 101, a bride again). Great-aunt Veronica was a plump, full-hipped and full-breasted woman of moderate height, with a placid sheep’s face, smallish hazel eyes with innumerable blue tucks and pleats about them, a mouth that might have been charming except for its complacent set, and a fairly smooth, unlined skin that varied extremely in tone: sometimes it was quite pale, at other times mottled and flushed, especially about the cheeks, and at other times, still, it was ruddy, coarse, and heated, almost brick-red, as if she had been exercising violently in the sun. (Though of course she never exercised. It seemed to tire the poor woman even to walk
downstairs,
which she did with an air of listlessness that not even the promise of excellent claret and excellent food could dispel.)

Absolutely unexceptional were her pastimes: she did needlepoint, like the other old women, but would never have had the stamina or the imagination to create works of art like aunt Matilde; she played gin rummy from time to time, for modest stakes; she gossiped about relatives and neighbors, usually with an air of languid incredulity. She admired good china but had never built up a collection of her own. She could not tolerate anything but the finest linen against her skin (or so she liked to say), and of course she abhorred machine-made things, most of all machine-made lace. (All the Bellefleur women, even Leah, abhorred machine-made lace, no matter that the family had recently acquired a lace-manufacturing factory on the Alder River.) Her manners were mincing: she was
really
too much: sitting primly at the dining room table, night after night, sipping daintily at her wine, drinking a spoonful or two of soup, making a show of playing with her food as if the very notion of an appetite were abhorrent. (Indeed, it was a family joke of long standing that great-aunt Veronica gorged herself in her room, before coming downstairs for dinner, in order to preserve the myth of her girlish fastidiousness, decades after the myth had ceased to have any meaning—or anyone who might care to believe in it.) That Veronica had a dainty appetite was bluntly belied by her full, comfortable figure, and the suggestion of a second chin, and her obvious air of superb health. For a woman of her age—! people were always remarking, in wonderment. Though no one knew exactly how old she was. Bromwell had once calculated that she must be much older than grandmother Cornelia, which would have made her more than seventy, but everyone laughed him out of the room—one of the few instances in which the child was demonstrably mistaken. For great-aunt Veronica looked, even at her most torpid, no more than fifty; at her freshest she might have been as young as forty. Her small undistinguished eyes sometimes shone with an inexplicable emotion that might have been a pleasure in her own enigmatic being.

Upon occasion she wore open-necked gowns, which exposed her pale, rather lardish skin, and the beautiful dark-heart-shaped stone she wore about her neck on a thin gold chain. Asked about the stone she always gazed down upon it sorrowfully, and touched it, and said after a long painful moment that it was a bloodstone—a gift from the first man she had ever loved—the only man (she saw this now, so many decades after) she had ever loved. A deep green stone, flecked with red jasper, glowing and fading with variations in light, pulling heavily on the thin chain: a stone heart the size of a child’s heart.
Is
it beautiful,
do
you think it’s beautiful? she would ask, frowning, peering down at it so that her small pudgy chin creased against her chest. She couldn’t, she declared, judge any longer, herself. For it had been so many, many years since Count Ragnar Norst had given her the bloodstone.

But of course it was beautiful, people said. If one liked bloodstones.

NORST INTRODUCED HIMSELF
to Veronica Bellefleur at a charity ball in Manhattan, attended, it was said, by many persons of questionable background. Though Veronica, then a comely young woman of twenty-four who wore her red-blond hair braided and wound about her head like a crown, and who distinguished herself by her high tinkling spontaneous laughter, had, of course, a chaperone, and would not ordinarily have countenanced a stranger’s approach—let alone a stranger’s daring in actually taking her hand and raising it to his lips!—there was from the very first something so peremptory and at the same time so artless about his manner that she could not assert herself against it. In handsome though rather dated formal attire, with a very dark goatee and gleaming dark curls on either side of his forehead, Count Ragnar Norst identified himself ambiguously as the youngest son in a family of merchants who owned a shipping line that spanned the globe, doing trade in New Guinea and Patagonia and the Ivory Coast, and as a diplomatic attaché whose embassy was, of course, in Washington, and as a “poet-adventurer” whose only desire was to live each day to the fullest. Veronica’s confused impression of Norst upon that occasion was a positive but troubled one—he
was
attractive, but how intensely, how
queerly,
he had smiled at her! And with what unwelcome intimacy he had kissed her hand, as if they were old, intimate friends. . . .