Bellefleur (98 page)

Her voice was a hoarse frightened whisper. She clutched at her daughter, who struggled at first to free herself, and then quieted, suddenly, when she saw how agitated her mother was. And anyway her father had left. And anyway (so she told herself fiercely) he hadn’t retracted his promise.

But he doesn’t love you, Leah said, squatting so that she could look Germaine in the face. You must know that. You
must
know. He doesn’t love any of us, he only loves—he only loves, now, his planes and—and the sky—and whatever he finds there—

IF GERMAINE SLEPT
poorly on the night before the catastrophe it was not, as one might surmise, that she anticipated the destruction of the castle, and the deaths of her parents: it was simply because she both dreaded and yearned for the morning, when her father would take her into the sky as he had promised—but then again perhaps he wouldn’t, perhaps he
would
retract his promise—ah, what might happen! She was only four years old, she was small and helpless and frightened and so exhilarated she woke every half-hour, her bedclothes tangled in her legs and her pillow crushed in the oddest ways. The spittle-stained panda who slept with her found himself unaccountably on the nursery floor where his young mistress impetuously tossed him, waking from a nasty little dream in which her father
did
retract his promise and fly away without her.

In the morning, very early, she ran in her summer nightgown out into the hall, and called out
Daddy, Daddy
—and at once he appeared, as if he had been waiting for her (thought she knew of course he hadn’t—probably he had been planning to slip away in secret); and he wished her a happy birthday, and kissed her, and told her yes, yes, of course, he hadn’t forgotten, he certainly planned on taking her for a ride, but she had to get dressed first, and she would have to have a little breakfast, wouldn’t she, and then they would see about the ride.

He hadn’t changed his mind? He hadn’t forgotten?

He wore a white suit with a dark shirt, open at the neck, and Germaine thought she had never seen anything so dazzling white, and so beautiful. The coat hung loose on him—the shoulders drooped slightly—but it was a very handsome coat and she wanted to hide her face against it, and say Why don’t we take Mamma too, why don’t we ask Mamma, then she wouldn’t be so angry, maybe, she wouldn’t hate us both so much—

But he sent her off to breakfast.

And appeared downstairs in a half-hour, to take her to Invemere. Wearing the white suit with the dark blue shirt, and a white hat with a deep crest in its crown and a band of braided leather that looked so smart, so handsome, she laughed aloud at the sight of it and clapped her hands and said that
she
wanted a hat just like that. Leah lit one of her long cigarettes and brusquely waved the smoke away and coughed that tight quick cough of hers, but said nothing. How strange it was, but how wonderful, that this morning Leah didn’t seem to care! The airplane ride, and Germaine’s birthday: and she didn’t seem to care. But then so many people were coming later that day. The attorneys, the advisers, the managers, the tax men . . .

Gideon took Germaine’s hand, and at the doorway he paused, and lifted his white hat in a little farewell gesture. Which Leah didn’t notice. He asked if she
would
like to join them.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Go on, go away, take her away, do what you want.”

She stubbed her cigarette out in a saucer, and the saucer rattled noisily against the table. And when she looked up again her husband and her daughter were gone.

She seized the little silver bell, and rang impatiently for Nightshade.

DRIVING ALONG THE
lake Gideon spoke gaily of his Dragonfly and how Germaine would like it. We’ll have to wear parachutes, he said. In case of trouble. I’ll have to strap yours on you and give you some instructions though of course nothing will happen. . . . Your Daddy knows how to fly as if he has been flying all his life.

He gave her his wristwatch to examine. It was a new watch with a wide leather band which she had never seen before. The face was so
complex
—there were so many numerals and moving hands, black, red, and even white lines—she could not tell the time, though she had learned to tell time perfectly well on the castle’s numerous clocks.

Can you see the red hand moving? Gideon asked. That’s the second hand.

She studied it, and did see it moving. But the black hand moved too slowly. And there was a small white hand that moved too slowly also.

So they drove along on a hot August morning and the dust billowed up behind them and Germaine was studying the watch so intently, she did not notice that her father had stopped his idle cheerful talk, and had turned off the lakeshore road. The car bumped and bounced along the narrow lane that led to aunt Matilde’s house.

At once she knew. She knew, and let the watch fall, and said in an aggrieved voice: But this isn’t the way to the airport! This isn’t the way!

Hush, said Gideon.

Daddy, this isn’t the way!

He drove faster, without glancing at her. She kicked at the seat, and knocked the watch onto the floor, not caring if it broke; she began to sob that she hated him, she loved Mamma and hated him, Mamma was right about him, he didn’t love any of them, Mamma was right, Mamma knew everything! But though she thrashed about and cried until her face was wet and overheated, and even the front of her polka-dot jumper was damp, he did not stop the car, nor did he even try to comfort her. And of course he didn’t say he was sorry for lying.

Why did you promise, Daddy! she screamed. Oh, I hate you—I hate you and wish you were dead—

And she did not even care that aunt Matilde and great-grandmother Elvira and the smiling old man were so pleased to see her. She didn’t
care,
she was still sobbing and hiccuping, there was the tame red cardinal in his wicker cage, in the sun, making his high questioning chip-chip-chip sound, there were the white leghorns and the white long-tailed rooster with the bright red comb, but she didn’t care, she drew away from aunt Matilde’s hug, even Foxy the red cat, hiding around the corner of the house and finally venturing forth, seeing who it was, even Foxy couldn’t distract her, for she knew she had been betrayed: her father had broken his promise to her, and on her birthday of all days.

The old people wanted him to stay but he had no time for them.

Let me make you some breakfast, aunt Matilde said. I know you haven’t eaten. Eggs, buckwheat pancakes, sausages, muffins—blueberry muffins, Gideon—don’t you have time for us, really?

But of course he hadn’t time.

Ah, Gideon, look at you—! Aunt Matilde sighed. So thin—!

He stooped to kiss Germaine goodbye but she turned half-aside in disgust.

She was such an outraged, poker-faced little lady, he couldn’t help laughing at her. It’s because of the wind, he said, the wind isn’t right, it’s coming from the mountains too hard, it would knock our little plane out of the sky. Germaine? Do you understand? Another day, when it’s calmer, I’ll take you up. We can fly right over Lake Noir and see the castle and the farm and you’ll be able to see Buttercup out in the pasture, and wave to him, all right? Another day. But not today.

Why not today! Germaine screamed at him.

He waved his hat at them as he backed away, smiling. But it was nothing more than the shadow of a smile, just as his eyes weren’t anything more than the shadows of eyes, and of course she knew.

She knew, she knew. And would not even glance at the watch he left behind for her—the big ugly watch with all the confusing numerals and lines.

He got in the car and backed it around and drove away, and even waved at them out the window, but he was already gone, she wouldn’t wave back, she stood there staring at him, panting, no tears left, the salty tears already drying on her cheeks, and when the car was out of sight down the narrow lane she wouldn’t let the old people comfort her because she knew she would never see him again, and it would do no good to cry, to scream, to throw the watch down into the dust and stamp on it: she knew.

Another time, another time, great-grandmother Elvira whispered, touching Germaine’s hair with her stiff chill fingers.

A Still Water

I
n a strange land where the sky has disappeared and the sun has gone dark and the rocky inhospitable soil beneath our feet has vanished, on the borders of Chymerie . . . on the borders of the deathly-dark lake . . . beneath the waters of the deathly-dark lake . . . the god of sleep, they say, has made his house.

For there are, according to the immense monograph
A Hypothesis Concerning Anti-Matter,
by Professor Bromwell G. Bellefleur, slits in the fabric of time, “portals” linking this dimension with a mirror-image universe composed of identical (and yet unrelated, opposed, totally distinct) beings.

How may they be identical, and at the same time “unrelated, opposed, and totally distinct”?

The god of sleep, a corpulent god, a most greedy god, has made his house where the sun has no dominion, eclipsed by the brute matter of the earth. There, no man may know aright the point between the day and the night. In that place a still water abides . . . a still, lightless, bitter-cold water which runs upon the small stones and gives great appetite for sleep.

A HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING
Anti-Matter.
Eight hundred dense pages long, filled with Bellefleur’s small, chaste, rigorous handwriting, and hundreds of equations, and graphs, and sketches, and impatient desperate doodles, which mimic the work’s somber thesis. Prefaced with an enigmatic and loosely translated remark of Heraclitus, on the nature of time: or, rather, on the nature of our conception of time.

Those who read
A Hypothesis Concerning Anti-Matter
and were not acquainted with the brilliant young man who wrote it feared for his sanity; those who knew Bromwell were disturbed but not at all surprised. And of course they did not fear for his sanity, for who among them was half so sane as that boy-genius who had never grown up . . . ?

(For Bromwell had changed only superficially from the boy who walked so briskly away from New Hazleton Academy for Boys long ago. A “child” of no more than four feet nine inches, with a wise, lined face, and thick wire-rimmed glasses, and thinned-out hair that looks blond in some lights and silver-gray in others. There is a rumor among his associates at Mount Ellesmere, and among his disciples, and even among his many rivals and enemies (for of course he has enemies, though he knows none of them by name), that he has a twin: but who, or what, might this “twin” be—! Of course no one has ever seen Bromwell’s twin, nor does anyone know whether the twin is a male or a female.)

Over the long years, as he labored on the
Hypothesis,
Bromwell chose to live on the most meager of part-time salaries, supplemented at times by grants and fellowships, not so much confident in the ultimate worth of his research as indifferent to his circumstances and surroundings. If he never grew past the height of four feet nine, observers claimed, it was primarily because he didn’t
try.
And of course he ate poorly, and slept little, and worked himself to the brink of collapse—and may even, on one or two occasions, have crossed over into that murky indefinable terrain known to the impoverished of imagination as madness. But he soon righted himself, and returned. For
there
was not his kingdom,
there
his splendid mind had no dominion.

He was condemned, as he saw from the start, to sanity. His rejection of the remorseless claims of blood was but one aspect of his sanity. Even when word came to him of the destruction by fire of Bellefleur Manor and the deaths of both his parents, and, indeed, of most of his family, he showed nothing more than the startled concern a sensitive person might feel for any catastrophe—he might mourn, but he could not truthfully weep.

He had proven, in his massive study, that the future as well as the past is contained in the sky—and so of course there is no death. But there is no pathway to that other dimension, whether it is called “future” or “past.” Only by way of miraculous, unwilled slits in the fabric of time that link this dimension with a mirror-image universe of anti-matter can one pass freely into that other world. But of course they are unwilled.

The author of
A Hypothesis Concerning Anti-Matter
maintained a most unusual equilibrium of mood: neither blissful nor melancholy as his fame spread. For since he had proven that the future as well as the past exists, and exists at all times, he had of course proven that he himself existed, and that everything about him existed, and had from the beginning of “time,” quite without justification.

Nevertheless he sometimes dreamt of the god of sleep who swallowed them up one by one by one. In that dark place where the sun has no dominion, and a still water abides . . . a still, lightless, bitter-cold water which runs upon the small stones and gives great appetite for sleep. And sometimes he even dreamt, oddly, that the water (but the water was only a metaphor!) had frozen, and those who clung to its surface, upside down, were trapped beneath the ice, their heads lost in the chill shadow, the soles of their feet pressed against the ice. After news came of the destruction of Bellefleur Manor he had this hideous dream, several times. And then, gradually, it faded.

The Destruction of Bellefleur Manor

A
nd so it came to pass, on the fourth birthday of the youngest Bellefleur child, that the renowned castle and all who dwelled within it both as masters and as servants (and all—a considerable number of persons—who were attending the family council that afternoon, summoned by Leah: attorneys and brokers and financial advisers and accountants and managers of a dozen businesses and factories and mills) were destroyed in a horrific explosion when Gideon Bellefleur crashed his plane into the very center of the castle: a quite deliberate, premeditated act, of unspeakable malice, and certainly not accidental, as Gideon’s flying associates were to claim. For how could the destruction of Bellefleur Manor and the deaths of so many innocent people have been an accident, when the plane that dived into the house was evidently carrying explosives, and when it was directed so unerringly, so unfalteringly, into its target . . . ?