Bellefleur (55 page)

“Gideon,” Garnet said, in a lower voice, “please tell me: you
didn’t
ask her to bring the child back? You don’t, even now, especially want her? As Cassandra’s father you don’t especially want her—?”

It was at this point that, quite suddenly, in a voice that hardly resembled his, Gideon said something that was to be as inexplicable—indeed, as unfathomable—in his own imagination as in Garnet’s, and to cause him, in secret, great torment: he heard himself say sardonically, “
Am
I the father?”

For a long moment Garnet simply stared at him. She could not comprehend his words. Slowly, as if dazed, she brushed her damp hair out of her eyes—tried to speak—stood swaying—staring at him. It was only when his face contorted with shame, and guilt, and immediate sorrow, that she realized the terrible thing he had said. He exclaimed, “Oh, Garnet of course I didn’t mean—” but already she had turned, and was running out of the room, her long hair streaming behind her.

He would have pursued her at once, and might have caught her, but in Garnet’s shock she dropped the candle; and once again he had to scramble after it as it rolled, not yet entirely quenched, beneath the bed. “Dear fucking
God,
why is this happening,” Gideon half-sobbed, his shoulder striking the bedframe (for he was a large man, and could not comfortably maneuver in that cramped space), “why am I plagued as I am, who is playing this vile trick, whom should I murder. . . . Jesus fucking God!” he exclaimed, at last catching hold of the candle, and retrieving it. And with great passion he spat on the wick, though the meager flame had at last died. “. . . should have let it go,” he murmured, “should have let everything go up in flames. . . .”

So Garnet fled, in a paroxysm of shame, hardly knowing what she did, which turn in the corridor to take, which stairway to descend. She fled, too stupefied even to weep, and somehow found herself in an unheated back hallway, and then at a door, throwing herself against a door, as dogs began to yip in a startled chorus. Gathering her cloak about her she ran across the lawn. Moonlight illuminated the long hill that dipped to the lake—
illuminated
the hill and not the surrounding woods—so that she had only one way to run. Now barefoot, her hair streaming, the skirt of her pretty silken gown beginning to rip, she ran, her eyes open and fixed. Somehow the cloak was torn off her shoulders—torn off and flung away. Still she ran, oblivious of her surroundings, knowing only that she
must
run, to flee the horror behind her, and to eradicate herself in the dark murmurous lake before her. Senseless words careened about her head: O Gideon I love you, I cannot live without you, I have always loved you and I will always love you— Please forgive me—

(An angel, transfixed by suffering! A crucifixion, Lord Dunraven was to think, afterward, in her lovely face! But how
terrifying
a sight she was, on that night, running like a madwoman, only partly clad, to drown herself in the frigid March waters of that ugliest of lakes!)

So Garnet fled; and would surely have drowned herself. Except, through the unlikeliest of coincidences (though not, upon reflection, any less likely, Lord Dunraven reasoned, than many another coincidence he had experienced in his lifetime, or had heard of in others’ lives) there turned up the Bellefleur drive at that moment a carriage drawn by two superbly-matched teams of horses, carrying Eustace Beckett, Lord Dunraven, a distant relative of grandmother Cornelia’s who had been invited, originally, for great-grandmother Elvira’s birthday, but who had had regretfully to decline, though saying (with a graciousness that struck Cornelia as kindly rather than sincere) that he would like to visit his American cousin another time. A telegram announcing his arrival had been sent from New York, but had not, evidently, been delivered, for no one awaited him at the manor. As the carriage turned up the drive, and passed by the gate house, Lord Dunraven saw, to his astonishment, a ghostly figure running down the long, long hill—running barefoot, despite the cold—her hair flying behind her—her arms outstretched—and though the vision was a most alarming one (for Garnet
did
resemble a madwoman) Lord Dunraven had the presence of mind, and the courage, to shout for the driver to stop at once; and he leapt down; and pursued the girl to the very edge of the lake where, since his cries had made no impression upon her, he was forced to seize her bare arm, to prevent her from plunging in the water.

“No, no—you must not— My poor girl, you must not—” Lord Dunraven cried, out of breath. The girl tried to struggle free. She clawed at him, even slashed at him—quite harmlessly, as it turned out—with her teeth, and writhed with such demonic violence that her gown was torn nearly off her back, exposing the bare flesh. “I say you
must
not,” Lord Dunraven grunted, holding her, at last, still, in the moment before she sank into blessed unconsciousness.

Another Carriage . . .

A
nother carriage, piled high with trunks, unceremoniously jammed with people, carried
her
away: so Jean-Pierre theorized, though in fact he could not see her: though he saw, quite clearly, her bewigged and vacant-eyed father.

The next day, outside a tavern, he joined a regiment bound for Fort Ticonderoga; and the night before leaving he dreamt, not of the girl, but of the ugly prison-castle his family inhabited for centuries, in the north of France: its monstrous walls eighty-five feet high and seven feet thick, the shallow green-scummed water of the moat giving off a most unpleasant stink.

Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, Crown Point. . . . He left for the north without seeing a map. Henceforth he would not meet his fate passively: he would
forge
it.

The Noir Vulture

I
t was on a windless June day of heart-stopping beauty (only a very few clouds, diaphanous, subtle as milkweed fluff, were brushed against the china-blue sky) that Vernon Bellefleur, who had despaired for more than twenty years of being a poet (a genuine poet, in his own terms: everyone else referred to him, glibly, if not contemptuously, as The Poet), became, at last, quite suddenly, through an experience of obscene horror, a
poet.
And so he was to remain, for the rest of his exceptionally long life.

“A man’s life of any worth,” Vernon often intoned, “is a continual allegory. . . .”

But what is the nature, precisely, of this allegory? Are all men’s lives allegorical, or only the few, the extraordinary few?

He liked to read to The People. To his family’s field hands, or mill hands, good simple unquestioning sturdy folk, about whom the phrase
the salt of the earth
was not inappropriate: he liked to stand before them in his jacket that was too tight in the armpits, and buttoned crookedly, part of his beard caught up in the gay red scarf he knotted about his neck for such occasions, his voice rising with a dramatic intensity that stirred his listeners to a sympathy so profound it expressed itself in spasms of mirth. (But were
their
lives allegorical, their simple laborers’ lives . . . ? Or might they require the transcendental services of the poet, of poesy, to transform them . . . ?) At any rate he read, though his knees trembled with the audacity of his undertaking (for he read out in the fields, standing atop a wagon; or on a window ledge in the Fort Hanna mill; even in crowded taverns on Friday evenings, where the tavern keeper, knowing he was a Bellefleur, commanded a modicum of attention for him), and tears jerked in the corners of his eyes, he read until his throat was hoarse, until his head reeled with exhaustion, until, glancing up, he saw that most of his audience had drifted away—for perhaps his thirty-eight-line sonnets on “Lara” were too painfully candid for them, or they found too difficult, too demanding, the words of certain other poets, lifelong heroes of Vernon’s, whom he also read:

Ah! who can e’er forget so fair a being?

Who can forget her half retiring sweets?

God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats

For God’s protection. Surely the All-seeing,

Who joys to see us with his gifts agreeing,

Will never give him pinions, who intreats

Such innocence to ruin,—who vilely cheats

A dove-like bosom. In truth there is no freeing

One’s thoughts from such a beauty; when I hear

A lay that once I saw her hand awake,

Her form seems floating palpable, and near;

Had I e’er seen her from an arbour take

A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear

And o’er my eyes the trembling moisture shake.
. . .

Because he took little heed of such things, Vernon scarcely knew his own age. He was, he supposed, in his early thirties at the time of the great shock—the sight, to be repeated continuously in his mind’s eye, whether he woke or slept, of an infant borne aloft in the talons of a gigantic vulturelike bird, and partly dismembered, and even
devoured,
in midair, before his helpless gaze; the last time anyone in the family (and that person had been Leah) thought to celebrate his birthday was a considerable number of years before, and he had been twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time, he couldn’t quite recall. Vernon will never grow up, Hiram once said, not caring that he spoke—with such unpaternal disdain!—within earshot of his son. But Vernon halfway thought that he had
always
been grownup. He hadn’t had a childhood, had he?—hadn’t it come to an abrupt, cruel end? But perhaps since his mother had abandoned him to the Bellefleurs, so many, many years ago, his childhood had been blighted from the start. He had been, he sometimes thought (though he didn’t write about such sentiments because he believed poetry must be rhapsodic and hymnal and “beautiful”), a kind of
changeling
. . . . For though he was, by heredity, a Bellefleur, in his soul he most emphatically was
not
a Bellefleur.

So he frequently quarreled, not only with his father but with his uncle Noel and his aunt Cornelia, and his cousins Ewan and Gideon whom he had always, since boyhood, feared; for he knew himself an aspect of God, a fragment of God’s consciousness, whose
bodily form
as well as his
family identity
was irrelevant. Once swaggering bullnecked Ewan asked him (in somewhat coarser language) if he had ever made love—“With a woman, that is”—and stared at him blandly, as if daring Vernon even to
sense
the insult of his words. Vernon’s skin flared and prickled hotly, but he managed to reply, in his usual gentle voice, No, no, he hadn’t, he supposed he had
not,
in the usual sense of the words.

“What other sense is there?” Ewan wanted to know.

He ignored such crudities, and forgave them, for he was, he supposed, something of a clownish figure; and anyway what choice had he? Sometimes in his wanderings back in the foothills, miles from home, when the towers of the castle were barely visible at the horizon, he allowed himself to think, warmly, that his poetry would someday be the means of his escape from those terrible soulless people—it would be the means of his power—his fame—his
revenge.
Ah, if he could only discover the
characteristica universalis
—the exact and universal language lodged deep in the human soul—what profound truths he would utter! Like Icarus he would construct wings to carry him free of this vast, beautiful, gloomy, overpowering corner of the world (which felt so often, in the mountains especially, or along the lakeshore, like an edge of the world); unlike Icarus he
would
escape, and live in triumph, for his wings would be the inviolable wings of poetry. At such times his heart beat painfully, and he yearned to seize hold of someone—anyone—even a stranger—and attempt to explain the rapture that swelled in his breast—which must be, he thought, like the rapture Christ experienced—Christ who yearned
only
to be the Saviour of pitiful fallen mankind, of the very people who failed to hear His words. Like a man trapped in a tomb, whose voice is not strong enough to penetrate the dense rock that has been rolled up against it, he yearned to explain himself, yet lacked the art.

Instead he stumbled, he stuttered, he groped, he annoyed and exasperated and embarrassed and bored other people, and made (ah, how frequently!) a contemptible fool of himself. One by one the children outgrew him. For a while each loved him—loved him very much—sought him out to tell little secrets to, to complain of the other adults’ indifference or cruelty; gave him presents; climbed on his lap, kissed his prickly cheek, teased, even taunted him, played little tricks on him; but loved him. One by one, Yolande (sweet, pretty, strong-willed Yolande, who had broken his heart by running away without leaving, as he had truly thought she would, a message for
him
), Vida, Morna, Jasper, Albert, Bromwell, Christabel. . . . Garth had never liked him. Garth had always been faintly contemptuous of him, making rude razzing noises during lessons or during Vernon’s readings. There was dreamy gentle dark-eyed Raphael, with his long pale slender hands, his white, almost clammish skin, Raphael who was so shy he had taken to avoiding, in recent years, not only his rowdy brothers and cousins and their friends, but Vernon himself. For a while Vernon and Raphael had been quite close. Vernon had liked to think of the boy as
his
son, a changeling of sorts, for wasn’t it
improbable
—ludicrous—that beefy beery
Ewan
should be the boy’s father? He had taken Raphael on hikes with him, he had shared with him certain beautiful moments—

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,
. . .