Bellefleur (48 page)

Somehow they struggled to their feet. Gideon’s nose was bleeding freely, there was blood—his, or Garth’s—smeared on Garth’s face and shirt; their chests rose and fell convulsively. Though people were yelling for them to stop they did not hear. They were staring at each other, circling each other. Garth’s mother hurried into the room, with grandmother Cornelia close behind. “Oh, what are you doing!” the women screamed. “Oh, stop!
Garth!
Stop!”

Garth rushed his uncle, who caught him in his arms, and, grunting like animals, the two of them staggered backward, crashing through the French doors (so that glass flew and there were more terrified screams). Then both fell backward against a low balcony railing; and over the railing, and into the rose garden six feet below. The fall did not appear to hurt either of them—perhaps they did not notice it—for their struggle increased in intensity.

Noel came limping over, in his work clothes, shouting for them to stop. He carried a hoe and was accompanied by the farm overseer, and several hired hands, who gaped stupidly at Garth and Gideon. But the fighting men (for Garth
was
a man, nearly as heavy as his uncle) paid no attention.

Now Gideon was on top, slamming his fist into Garth’s face; now Garth was on top, shrieking, trying again to close his fingers (which were bleeding) around his uncle’s throat. They rolled over and over in the desiccated rosebushes, unheedful of the thorns and the innumerable scratches on their faces and hands that had begun to bleed. From an upstairs window aunt Aveline shrieked: “Turn the fire extinguishers on them! Quickly! Quickly before one of them is murdered!” Vernon appeared, his straggly beard blowing, and made the mistake of approaching them—and suddenly he was propelled violently backward, the book he was carrying thrown out of his hand. (He fell in one of the open trenches, where a new pipe was in the process of being laid, and badly sprained his ankle. But in the excitement no one noticed.) Several Bellefleur dogs ran over, barking hysterically.

“Oh, where is Ewan,” Lily cried, leaning over the railing, “where is Ewan—Ewan is the only one who can stop them—”

But Ewan was nowhere to be found. (He had taken one of the pick-up trucks into the village.) Nor was Leah home: she and Germaine were in Vanderpoel for the weekend. Hiram appeared, shaking his cane, shouting for order; order, or he would call the sheriff; but naturally the men paid no attention, and would even have knocked him to the ground as they rolled in his direction, had he not danced quickly aside.

“Help me, you idiots,” Noel cried to his workers, and though he boldly seized Gideon by the hair they did not dare come near: and he soon lost his grip on his son.
He
was panting convulsively: he stumbled backward, his hand pressed against his chest. (So Cornelia cried, “You, down there, take care of that foolish old man! Don’t let him
near
those two!”) The dogs barked and yipped and whined, circling the men, their ears laid back.

On the balcony, stepping on the shattered glass, Little Goldie stared at the struggling men, her small fist pressed against her mouth. Her pale arched eyebrows were brought sharply together, in a look of horror; her skin had gone white, so that her innumerable pale freckles appeared to darken; her blond hair was all atangle. It might have been noted, from the rose garden especially, that she was, in that stance, particularly beautiful—a prematurely adult young girl, with small, hard breasts, a tiny waist, slender hips and legs. “Oh no oh no oh
no,
” she whimpered; but the men took no heed of her either.

Garth lay back, panting, and Gideon stumbled to his feet, dripping blood from his nose. For five or six seconds they rested: and then Gideon ran at his nephew, and the two of them again scuffled, and the women screamed. Albert appeared. And young Jasper. Hiram was trying to break up the fight by prodding the men with his cane, but to no avail; both were oblivious of his timid blows. Jasper and Albert tried to grab hold of Garth, futilely; Noel tried again to seize his son by the hair, but one of Garth’s wild fists caught him in the mouth. (And cracked the poor man’s dentures.) A shoe flew loose—it was Gideon’s—and shreds of Garth’s shirt—and skeins of blood.

“Stop! You must stop! I command you to stop!” Grandmother Cornelia shouted, her wig askew.

In the end, however, they stopped only because—instinctively,
unconsciously
—they felt it was time to stop. Garth crawled away, sobbing; Gideon remained on his side, propped up by one elbow. It might have been the case, since Garth was the one to crawl away, that he had been defeated (and so most of the witnesses argued), but Gideon’s blood-streaked face showed no triumph.

But what was the fight about?—what on earth had happened?

Garth hid away in his room, and wouldn’t answer; Gideon, though looking a bloody wreck, and so exhausted he could hardly walk, staggered to his Aston-Martin and drove away, ignoring the shouts of incredulity that were raised behind him.

How did it begin?—weren’t Garth and his uncle usually on good terms?—didn’t they
like
each other?—what had gone wrong?—why did they suddenly want to kill each other?

So the family asked; but no answers were forthcoming.

Great-Grandmother Elvira’s Hundredth Birthday Celebration

O
n the day before great-grandmother Elvira’s hundredth birthday, in honor of which a large celebration had been planned by the family, it was observed by Leah and others that Germaine was uncommonly nervous, and even rather cranky—the usually happy little girl refused to be drawn into the others’ excitement (most of the children, and many of the adults, were in a near-frenzy of excitement over the party—for not since Raphael Bellefleur’s time had so ambitious a social event been planned at Bellefleur Manor); she kept to herself in the nursery, or in her mother’s boudoir, or in Violet’s drawing room, staring anxiously out the window, with a concentration that seemed adult, at the November sky (which was perfectly cloudless); she was so distracted that a footstep behind her or a gentle “Germaine . . . ?” or one of her favorite kittens, flying across the floor, was enough to frighten her into a little scream. Leah sought her out and knelt before her, framing her face, gazing into her evasive eyes. “What is wrong, dear? Don’t you feel well?” she asked. But the little girl answered disjointedly, squirming out of her mother’s embrace. The sky tasted muddy, she said. Muddy-black. There were eels in it. The cellar smelled: rubber and skunk and something burnt on the stove. Tiny spiders were crawling up her legs and stinging. . . .

“She must be coming down with something,” grandmother Cornelia said, approaching the child but not touching her. “Just look at her eyes. . . .”

“Germaine,” Leah said, trying to hug her, “there certainly aren’t spiders crawling up your legs! You know better! Those are just goose-bumps, you’re cold, you can’t seem to stop shivering, can you . . . ? Are you getting sick? Is it your stomach? Please tell me, dear.”

But she pushed Leah away and ran to the window, pressing her cheek against the pane so that she could peer up, anxiously. Her forehead was furrowed and her lips, which were unusually pale, were drawn back from her baby teeth in an ugly grimace.

“She’s such a strange child,” Cornelia whispered, shuddering.

“. . . Are you coming down with a cold, Germaine? Please tell me. At least
look
at me. There’s nothing up
there
to look at!” Leah cried. She caught hold of Germaine again, and again framed her face, this time holding it rather roughly between her hands. “I don’t want you to babble such nonsense. Do you hear? Not in front of me and certainly not in front of anyone else. And
certainly
not tomorrow when our guests arrive. Eels in the sky, skunks in the cellar, spiders, what
nonsense!
”

“You’ll be frightening her, Leah,” Cornelia said.

But Leah paid no attention to her mother-in-law. She was staring into her daughter’s face, holding her squirming head still. The eyes were dilated, the skin was pale and clammy, there was an aura of—of what?—something dank, wet, sour, brackish about the child. After a long moment Leah said, “Something is going to go wrong, isn’t it. Something is going to go wrong after all my work. . . .” But then, with a little cry of disgust, “But you don’t always know. You don’t
always
know.”

She pushed Germaine away and straightened, and said to her mother-in-law in a vexed, tearful voice, “She doesn’t
always
know, does she!”

THE PARTY TO
celebrate great-grandmother Elvira’s hundredth birthday was to have been, at first, a family party: and then Leah hit upon the idea of inviting Bellefleurs from other regions, and even other states (Cornelia and Aveline were drawn into her enthusiasm, each supplying lists of names, in some cases of Bellefleurs no one had seen for decades, in such distant places as New Mexico, British Columbia, and Alaska, and even Brazil): and then Hiram hit upon the idea of inviting people from outside the family, since it had been so long since the manor had been open to a number of important, influential guests: and naturally Leah responded to his suggestion with zeal.
Meldroms . . . Zunderts
. . . Schaffs
. . . Medicks
. .
. Sanduskys . . . Faines . . . Scroons . . . Dodders
. . . Pyes . .
. Fiddlenecks
. . . Bonesets . . . Walpoles . . . Cinquefoils . . . Filarees
. .
. Crockets
. . . Mobbs . . . Pikes . . . Braggs . . . Hallecks
. .
. Whipples
. . . Pepperells
. . . Cokers . . . Yarrows . . . Milfoils . . .
Fuhrs
(though of course they probably would not even acknowledge the
invitation
) . . .
Vervains
. . . Rudbecks
. . . Governor Grounsel and his family
. . . Lieutenant-Governor Horehound and his family .
. . Attorney General Sloan and his family . . . Senator Tucke . . . Congressman Sledge . . . the Caswells and the Abbots and the Ritchies and . . . and perhaps even Mr. Tirpitz
(though it was unlikely that he would come). . . .

Leah hired a male calligrapher to write out the invitations, which were sent out on oyster-white cards with the Bellefleur coat of arms embossed in silver on them; if the celebration is to be held, she declared, everything should be done perfectly. A Vanderpoel caterer was retained. More domestic help was hired. Since guests were coming from so far away they would have to spend the night, or even several nights: so the castle’s innumerable guest chambers would have to be aired and cleaned and polished and perhaps even repainted and in some cases fumigated. Furniture would have to be reupholstered. Rugs would have to be cleaned. Old stained varnish would have to be scraped off, and new varnish applied. More china must be bought; and more crystal; and silverware. Paintings, statues, frescoes, tapestries, and other ornamental objects would have to be cleaned and switched around from room to room. (How odd, how very odd, Leah thought, studying for the first time certain of the things Raphael Bellefleur had acquired, presumably by way of dealers and buyers in Europe. She wondered if he had actually looked at them before he had them hung: for what could one possibly make of these copies of Tintoretto, Veronese, Caravaggio, Bosch, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Rosso . . . ? There were enormous cracked oils and ten-by-fifteen faded tapestries and frescoes and altarpieces of
The Rape of Europa, The Triumph of Bacchus, The Triumph of Silenus, Venus and Adonis, Venus and Mars, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Danae, The Marriage of the Virgin, The Annunciation, Cupid Carving His Bow, Diana and Acteon, Jupiter and Io, Susannah and the Elders,
there were Olympian feasts and battles and orgies, in which lecherous satyrs leered, and thick-buttocked “graces” clutched wisps of diaphanous clothing comically inadequate to cover their nakedness, and gods with ludicrously tiny phalluses were being stripped by
putti
who were really dwarves with comically foreshortened legs and bulging foreheads. . . . On one wall of Leah’s and Gideon’s own bedchamber was an immense time-darkened oil depicting Leda and the Swan, in which Leda was an obscenely plump maiden with a dazed expression, reclining upon a much-rumpled couch, and starving off, with a feeble arm, a stunted but ferocious swan with a phallic neck so meticulously rendered it must have been a joke. . . . Leah stared at these things, shining a flashlight on them, feeling lightheaded, and occasionally even nauseous, wondering if she was imagining their satirical
bizarrerie;
wondering if Raphael had intended to purchase such grotesque art, or whether the poor man, for all his money, had been hoodwinked. They would have to come down someday. But there was no time, now, to replace them with other works of art; nor would there be enough money.) She even wanted to open the Turquoise Room, about which she had heard so much, but was dissuaded, not by the other Bellefleurs’ pleas, but by the extraordinary sensation that coursed through her when she laid her hand upon the doorknob. . . . (But someone had nailed the door shut, in addition to locking it. Nailed it shut with six-inch spikes. “A pretty sight, in the corridor for any guest to see!” she said.)

A week before Elvira’s birthday Leah realized that the estate must
smell.
It was a farm, there were farm animals, how could it not smell? So, over Noel’s weak protests, she arranged for an entire herd of Holsteins, what remained of the horses, and a number of hogs and sheep to be shifted by truck to other parts of the estate. (The family had just acquired, at rather a bargain, some seven hundred acres of fairly good land along the Nautauga River, adjacent to the land once farmed, and poorly farmed at that, by the tenant farmer Doan and his idle family.) “I don’t see any reason to advertise the fact that we are
farmers,
” Leah said. “And anyway we aren’t, really—most of our income comes from other sources.”