Bellefleur (33 page)

Because Leah did not want Germaine to move into the nursery yet (she wasn’t a year old despite her size, and the rapidity of her maturation, and Leah frequently worried over her—she had an unreasonable fear that the baby might die suddenly in her sleep), and it was discovered one day that Christabel and Bromwell were really too big for the nursery (and no longer got along: Bromwell claimed that he couldn’t tolerate his twin, she was so slow-witted, so ordinary, and it rather offended him that she was several inches taller than he and could now bully him whenever she wished), the nursery was free for Little Goldie when Gideon and Ewan brought her home; and she was settled in there at once. There she had her choice of several charming little beds, each with its good horsehair mattress and its canopy; she could choose among the exciting clutter of hundreds of toys—dolls, stuffed animals, games, puzzles, crayons, paints, child-sized drums and bugles and cymbals, several rocking horses, a five-foot high Viennese merry-go-round with three handsome steeds. But standing in the doorway of the nursery Little Goldie was heard to say, in her hoarse, guttural murmur, “This isn’t my place.”

They pretended not to hear, and fussed over her all the more. Both Leah and Lily claimed that she was a gorgeous little child: so undernourished, so mistreated! Grandmother Cornelia was slower to come around: it had been a considerable shock for her when Gideon and Ewan (who had been missing for nineteen days) simply tramped in her breakfast room and said bluntly: “We’ve brought home an orphan, Mother, we had no choice.” Her sons were bedraggled and mud-splattered and clearly exhausted, and Cornelia had to stare at Gideon for several long seconds before she was certain he
was
Gideon—his beard was so grizzled, his eyes so bloodshot. . . . An orphan! A little girl dressed in rags, her face filthy, her hair hanging in greasy strands! The resigned violence with which she scratched her head was a clear indication that she had lice, and there was something disturbing—sullen, or merely mischievous—about the set of her eyes and her thin arched eyebrows. Cornelia managed to say, “Why so you have,” though she felt as if she might faint. She had been lying majestically on her chaise longue, swathed in a billowing silk gown, feeding bits of a cherry croissant to one of the kittens, and Gideon and Ewan had strode ahead of the servants, pulling that strange little child between them, tracking mud everywhere. “Why . . . why, so you have,” Cornelia murmured, staring at the girl. For several weeks she was to say to Edna (not to any of her family, who would have hooted her down out of uneasiness as much as simple disbelief) that Little Goldie was an elf-child, not a real child at all. Or perhaps she
was
a half-breed.

But in the end grandmother Cornelia declared her a beautiful child—a little angel—and claimed that Gideon and Ewan had done the proper thing in bringing her home with them. “We’re Bellefleurs, after all,” she said. “We can take in any number of abandoned children.”

LITTLE GOLDIE STRUCK
the skeptical Garth as
strange
rather than
beautiful.
(And, anyway, what did
beautiful
mean . . . ?)

Demuth Hodge had been dismissed long ago, sent away by a taciturn Ewan with six months’ wages and no explanations (one theory was that Leah had been furious because Demuth allegedly “disciplined” Christabel and Morna by rapping their bottoms with a ruler, after they slipped some overripe and easily squashed boysenberries into the pocket of his old tweed coat; another theory was that Bromwell had contemptuously denounced the young man—his knowledge of higher mathematics, Bromwell declared, was sheer fraud). Though the family had advertised everywhere for a replacement, both in the United States and abroad, no applicant appeared whose
vita
and person pleased everyone; so the Bellefleurs were without a tutor. Since they were reluctant to send the children away to school, especially the younger children, they had no choice but to attempt to educate them at home. Hiram gave instructions every morning from 9:00 
A.M.
until noon in arithmetic, algebra, classical mythology, and world geography; Vernon instructed them, two or three unscheduled afternoons a week, in composition, literature, and “elocution” (which mainly involved the passionate reading of poets dear to him, aloud, to a small giggling audience always on the brink of mutiny). But Bromwell volunteered to tutor the new child, perhaps because, at first, she excited his curiosity: she seemed to have come from so distant a land, so remote a territory, that her very humanity was suspect. How odd, how coarse, her words . . . ! Was it some Indian dialect she tried to speak, or a language of her own, utterly private? It might be a challenge, a scientific challenge, Bromwell thought, to teach the child how to be human . . . how to become human, through the English language.

But he soon grew impatient. “Repeat after me,” he said, and again, “Repeat after me,
please,
” and “
Are
you listening?
Do
you comprehend?” Garth and Albert and Jasper hung about in the doorway of the nursery, snickering. They rather resented Little Goldie.
Another
child . . . ! Another comely child, drawing the adults’ attention. . . . Garth called out suggestions of his own, which were ignored. He thought it especially comic that Little Goldie could barely hold a pen—she was always splashing ink on herself and Bromwell. How clumsy, for a girl . . . ! It was only when Bromwell pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes in a weary, adult gesture, and said in his sharp curt voice, “Maybe you
are
a half-breed, or anyway a halfwit: in either case we may as well abandon lessons,” that Garth felt a rush of sudden, irresistible emotion—not the hilarity that reduced Albert and Jasper to shrieking hyenas, but rage—rage so violent that he had to be restrained from throwing the terrified Bromwell out the window to which he had carried him, snarling: “You little bastard! You wise-ass little bastard! Now you see how you like it! Now you see how hard you land!
Now
—”

Garth would have defined it as resentment he continued to feel as the weeks passed, had he been given—as he was not—to brooding over his own emotions: resentment and a dull baffled aching anger and a sense of something obscurely
not right.
Garth had always been a fairly closemouthed boy, though inordinately noisy and lively; he had walked home one winter afternoon from bobsledding, after a spill in which no one was evidently hurt, holding his hand close against his side, saying nothing to the other children, though the smallest finger of his right hand had been nearly severed (and was to be sewn back on by a remarkably quick-witted Leah, even as the doctor was sought) and there was of course an alarming loss of blood. He would never
say
what was wrong, if he was growing angry, or why he was growing angry—it was his habit merely to erupt into passion. Even when Yolande (with whom he shared certain secrets against their parents and the other adults) asked him what was wrong, was he slipping into a black mood, he muttered only, “Go to hell with you, you nosy damn bitch.”

In the nursery were things Garth had played with as a child, and outgrown—the rocking horses, the merry-go-round, the stuffed animals—though he could only dimly remember them, and their very sight filled him with an inexplicable inchoate anger. He watched the strange child move among them, as silent as he, lifting and setting down toys as if she too were recognizing them, but did not quite know what to do with them. Several of the girls—Christabel and Vida and of course Yolande, who could not resist anything stray and mysterious—played with Little Goldie, making friends by degrees, helping her with her lessons now that Bromwell was banished from the nursery (and it was the case, rather oddly, that Gideon took Garth’s side in the outburst, and would have walloped Bromwell’s behind if the child hadn’t burst into tears), and with her ABC sampler, which she was doing in rich purples, golds, and greens, exactly like the old, tattered sampler on the wall, framed and behind glass, that had once been done by someone named Arlette Bellefleur—ABC’s, numerals up to ten, and the statement
I AM ARLETTE BELLEFLEUR BORN 1811
—though of course the sampler on the wall was badly faded. No one thought it puzzling that Garth, who was always out of doors, even in bad weather, lingered about the nursery with the girls, quick to offer to repair their dollhouse (which must have been, Yolande said, one hundred years old, and termite-ridden) when the swinging wall fell off its hinges, and to help them move furniture about (they aped the restless Leah who liked nothing so much as to spend a rainy afternoon ordering the servants to rearrange the furniture, and struggling impatiently with pieces
herself
)—the teetering whatnot shelf made of empty spools of thread, painted Chinese red, and filled with dolls’ china and tiny glass birds and animals and eggs, which Garth carried without effort, and in a wonderfully graceful way, so that nothing toppled off and broke; the child-sized horsehair sofa that was a replica of one of the parlor sofas; the heavy music box, which must have been three feet deep and five feet long, the size of a child’s casket, said to have been made in Switzerland though it was equipped with American rolls. When Yolande thanked him spiritedly, as if she were proud—especially before Little Goldie—of how considerate her older brother could be, Garth blushed and could not think of anything to say. He knew only that the strange little girl with the solemn freckled face and the waist-long white-blond hair was staring at him intently.

So he fled the nursery, and spent a week or so outdoors—working on the farm, accompanying Ewan and Hiram on a business trip to the Falls. And then he reappeared one stormy afternoon when the temperature dropped thirty degrees in an hour, and asked if they wouldn’t like him to build a fire in the little fireplace—? By this time Goldie was clearly more at home, and seemed happy to see him. She laughed often, though she would not always explain her merriment; she hugged Yolande when Yolande guided her clumsy hands so that she could thread an especially fine needle; she offered Garth a doll’s cup of the rank catnip tea the girls had brewed. One of the women had taken the time to set her hair in ringlets, and she looked as sweet, as demure, as improbably pious as the pencil drawings on the nursery walls of numerous Bellefleurs as children (these insipid drawings, done by more than one artist, portrayed Raoul, Emmanuel, Ewan, Gideon, and even Noel, Matilde, Jean-Pierre II, Della, and Hiram, and one or two unidentified children, in identical poses: their hands clasped in prayer, their eyes cast beseechingly heavenward); but even then Garth did not comprehend how he loved her.

He cranked the music box for the girls, and willingly changed the heavy copper rolls, though it embarrassed him to be forced to admit—as Bromwell would not have been forced—that he hadn’t any idea of how the mechanism worked. “It just goes like this, this thing in here,” he said, growing warm as Little Goldie along with Christabel and Yolande pressed near. The music box hadn’t been one of the pastimes Garth had cared for, when
he
had slept in the nursery, and even now he found its smooth gleaming oak sides and its fussy etched-glass lid discomforting. It might so easily break down and how on earth would he repair it?

One of the rolls gave out, at various speeds, English minuets and rondos and dainty tinkling tunes, another bellowed hymns accompanied by a wheezing organ, still another—Garth’s favorite—sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “General Harrison’s Grand March” and the “St. Louis Light Guard Polka and Schottisch.” Garth grew to like the music, or at any rate to like Little Goldie’s solemn, awed interest in it, and though the other girls rapidly lost interest and drifted away, and Yolande began to be absent from the nursery for days at a time, Garth never grew tired of turning the brass crank. On their honeymoon, in fact on their wedding night, the “St. Louis Light Guard Polka and Schottisch” was to attain a wildly ecstatic beauty.

Because he had never been in love before Garth had no idea, nor might anyone have thought to explain to him (for he
was
naturally moody, and often turned away with a snarl when approached) why he was stricken with insomnia, why he lost his appetite, why he wanted only to be by himself—in the cemetery, up at Bloody Run, riding his horse along Mink Creek—or why, perversely, he wanted never to be alone, but with Little Goldie. He bloodied his cousin Louis’s lip when Louis inadvertently bumped into him, and then again he ran out barefoot in the rain, late one night, to waylay his uncle Hiram who, sleepwalking, had managed to open the two or three doors locked for his protection, and who was stumbling open-eyed, his arms feebly extended, in the direction of the Bellefleurs’ dock on Lake Noir: and Garth did this with a peculiar abashed courtesy. (He had, in the past, been sent after Hiram, and had never been able to resist grabbing the pompous old fool’s arm roughly, and shaking him awake, though he was instructed not to do so.) He turned on Mahalaleel when Mahalaleel leapt up from nowhere onto the wrought-iron table in the garden where some of the family was lunching, and nearly made off with a turkey drumstick, though the rash action resulted in a badly lacerated forearm, and everyone chided him: he shouldn’t have tried to
hurt
Mahalaleel, he should only have tried to retrieve the drumstick. And then again he was patient with Vida, and told the boys not to follow Raphael out to his pond but to leave him alone, what did it matter, what the hell did it matter, if Raphael wanted to be by himself every day? His blood pounded with a sudden impulsive fury, and then subsided; and he felt sometimes like weeping; and he
did
suffer from insomnia for the first time in his life. (Previously Garth had been certain that people who claimed to lie awake all night were lying. They must be lying, for how on earth did they keep their eyelids from closing as his did, within seconds after he lay his head on the pillow?)

One night, sleepless, he wandered the second-floor corridor in the direction of the nursery, and happened to see great-aunt Veronica gliding along, noiselessly, ahead of him, her feet evidently bare, and very pale, her long thick gunmetal-gray hair loose on her shoulders, her dark robe (for she wore mourning, like Della, even at night) billowing about her—and he thought it odd that Veronica should pause at the nursery door, and stand with her head inclined to it for several long seconds, and then open the door and step inside. Odd, and disturbing, though he couldn’t have said precisely why—for wasn’t it the prerogative, even the duty, of the women in the house to check on the younger children from time to time? But he followed Veronica into the darkened nursery and saw, by moonlight, how she bent over the sleeping Little Goldie, and how stiff her back went when she heard or sensed his presence. She turned to him readily, however, as if not very surprised, and, her forefinger to her lips, pushed him back out into the candlelit corridor, and said, her eyes nearly shut as if she were winking: “What a charming little sister Ewan and Gideon brought home for you. . . . She’s
very
attractive, isn’t she?”