Bellefleur (7 page)

Or was the curse, as Vernon thought, something very simple . . . ?

What is gained will be lost. Land, money, children, God. (But—skinny and agitated and chronically unhappy, with his beard so scant and prematurely grizzled, and his love for Leah never declared, and his black ledgerbooks (taken from old Raphael’s desk) filled with sloping smudged scrawls that he claimed was poetry, and would transform the world one day, and expose his family for the tyrants they were—what did cousin Vernon know? So no one listened, or half-listened and waved him away with an impatient wave of the hand. His father Hiram was most impatient of all, for Vernon had turned out
not quite right:
his blood was all his mother’s, and she had failed disastrously as a Bellefleur wife, and was best forgotten. After she ran away from the manor, many years ago, Hiram, uncharacteristically silent, and extremely ill-tempered, had fashioned for her a two-foot marker of cheap granite,
Eliza Perkins Bellefleur, May She Rest In Peace,
set down in the corner of the cemetery, on a downward slope, given over to
Queenie, Sebastian, Whitenose, Chinaberry, Sweetheart, Bitsy, Love, Pegs, Mustard, Buttercup, Horace, Baby, Daisy, Bat, Pinktail,
and others: the children’s various pets: dogs, cats, a turtle, an unusually large and attractive spider, a raccoon with gentle manners, a gray fox cub that did not live to maturity, and a bobcat cub that experienced the same fate, and even a redback vole, and a near-odorless skunk, and several rabbits, and one snowshoe hare, and at least one handsome ring-necked snake. Of his mother’s position in the Bellefleur Cemetery—but of course it was only a
symbolic
position, the woman wasn’t actually buried there, she wasn’t actually dead—Vernon prudently declined to speak.)

But then perhaps the curse had something to do with silence. For the Bellefleurs, Leah’s mother Della often said, would
not
speak of things that demanded utterance. They spent time at foolish activities like fishing and hunting and games (how the Bellefleurs loved games!—games of any kind—cards, jigsaw puzzles, checkers, chess, their own flamboyant variants of checkers and chess, and other games invented by them during the long iron-hard mountain winters; and every variant of hide-and-seek, played with manic enthusiasm in the labyrinthine recesses of the castle—a reckless activity, as it happened upon one occasion that a Bellefleur child, decades back, ran to hide somewhere in the cavernous cellar, and was never found despite days of frantic searching; nor did his poor bones ever turn up) with the abandon of very small children grasping and clutching at things only to throw them immediately aside, as if time were an unfathomable, inexhaustible pool instead of something like old Raphael’s once-famous wine cellar, which was quickly depleted in the years following his death and the decline of the Bellefleur fortune. They chatter about inconsequential things, Della said bitterly, and frequently; she lived most of the time across the lake, in a red-brick Georgian house at the very center of the village of Bushkill’s Ferry, and though her family could not discern her house across the miles she could discern theirs very easily: indeed, the eye always leapt to Bellefleur Manor on its hill, there was no escaping the castle, even at twilight when the sun’s slow slanting orange-red rays illuminated it, and the lake itself began to sink into its uncanny darkness. They chatter about pork roasts and candy apples and antler spreads, Della said, while everything falls in pieces around them. They go tobogganing on Christmas Eve and one of their people is killed and the next day they open their presents as if nothing had happened, and they never speak of it, they
refuse
to speak of it. (But her husband, Stanton Pym, who did indeed die in a tobogganing accident, hardly six months after the marriage, and when poor Della was four months pregnant with Leah, had never been considered
one of their people:
so perhaps Della’s charge was unwarranted.)

Then again the curse might have been that the Bellefleurs were so hopelessly, and at times so passionately, divided on all subjects. Germaine’s uncle Emmanuel, whom she saw only once in her life, and who appeared in the Valley only rarely, and never predictably, since he professed a violent dislike for what he called “city life” and “overheated rooms” and “women’s talk,” included on all his maps of the region the original Indian name for the area—Nautauganaggonautaugaunnagaungawauggataunagauta—which meant, in essence, for it could not be literally translated, a space-in-which-you-paddle-to-your-side-and-I-paddle-to-mine-and-Death-paddles-between-us. Those silly Indian names, the Bellefleur women said, why couldn’t they say directly what they
mean,
like us? Emmanuel’s reverence for the Indians and the local Indian culture (which could hardly be said to exist any longer since the treaties of 1787 had banished all Indians from the mountains and the fertile farmland along the river, and a few thousand of them lived in a single reservation north of Paie-des-Sables) was mocked by most of the family, who did not know quite how to interpret it. Emmanuel was, of course, “strange”—but that did not entirely explain his affection for Indians, and his even greater affection for the mountains. He was a throwback to Jedediah, evidently—and perhaps to Jean-Pierre himself, who had degenerated to the point of taking on a full-blooded Iroquois squaw as his mistress, shortly before his death. (But had Emmanuel ever “known” a woman? His brothers Gideon and Ewan loved to discuss this subject, indeed it was one of their few safe subjects, and while Gideon believed firmly that of course Emmanuel
must
have had sexual experience, Ewan liked to add that it mightn’t necessarily have been with a woman: whereupon both brothers laughed loudly. Of their oldest brother Raoul, who lived one hundred miles to the south in Kincardine, and whose sexual life was so bizarre, they rarely spoke.) So the Bellefleurs, Emmanuel once said, were always at war: they had the disposition of minks: and he wanted no part of their curse. (But then it was said of Emmanuel that he himself was under a curse or an enchantment, so how could he presume to judge others?)

Long before Germaine’s brother Bromwell fled Bellefleur and made his name—
his
name—in the vast shadowy world south of the mountains he liked to pronounce, with his child’s unself-conscious authoritative lisp, that a “curse” was unlikely; but if indeed one could chart the undulating pattern of something that resembled a “curse” through generations of the same family, no doubt it could claim some scientific validity: as genetic inheritance, not as superstitious crap. For Bromwell, clerkish and prematurely balding, even as a small child, with his delicate wire-rimmed glasses and his austere pale forehead with its armor of hard, flat bones knit worriedly together, and his small slender fingers that were always twisting about a finely sharpened pencil, had the theatrical flair of selecting the absolutely right wrong word: of awakening his listeners (whose eyes sometimes glazed over, for who can tolerate fifty-minute lectures on the improbable nature of “infinity,” or the rather monotonous mating habits of algae, or the earth’s subtle gravitational pull on the
sun
—as an analogue, the waspishly brilliant child would quickly make clear, to the theological notion of God’s dependence upon his only free-thinking creature Man—who, even among the hard-of-hearing, sweet-faced, pious old widows and grandmothers and aunts of the manor, could tolerate such observations from a child not yet ten years of age?) with a sudden razor-like thrust of vulgarity, which always confirmed his listeners’ uneasy judgment that he was not only brilliant (as they halfway suspected Hiram’s gangling son Vernon was, despite his eccentricity) but also correct.

So the curse was inherited in the blood; or it was breathed in with the chill, fresh, somewhat acrid piney air; or it was just a way of denying the strident rationalist claim that nothing, absolutely nothing—no God, no design, no destiny—sought to push its facial bones up hard against generations of perishable Bellefleur skin. Moving with a manicured fingernail a carved ebony draught, puckering and pursing his lips over the checkerboard, uncle Hiram liked to murmur that he, fallible as he was, blundering and groping (though in fact he was a shrewd, rather malicious checker player: he would not lose, not even to an ailing child) and half-blind in his right eye from an incident in the War which he refused to discuss (evidently he had left his tent, was sleepwalking his way toward the enemy trenches, when a great explosion of flame destroyed not only that tent and the young soldiers who slept within but some fifty-odd soldiers altogether—and Hiram Bellefleur was untouched save for a bit of fire which darted to his eye), fallible as he was and no more than a competent gamesman, he was nevertheless more astute than the God of creation, whom he contemptuously dismissed as senile: that God “existed” he had no doubt, for he was, surprisingly, one of the “religious” Bellefleurs, but this God was comically limited, and near worn-out, and hadn’t the spirit in recent centuries to meddle in the affairs of men. So the “curse” was just chance: and “chance” is just what happens.

At such times Hiram might be playing draughts with Cornelia, or Leah, or one of the children—young Raphael, perhaps, who was so quiet, so unnaturally quiet, since his near-drowning in the pond (the circumstances of which he chose
not
to explain completely to the family). If Hiram was playing with one of the women she was likely to wave aside his fanciful remarks, to which she had probably not listened in any case; if he was playing with Raphael the child hunched his thin shoulders over the board, shivering, as if his great-uncle’s words chilled him but could not be refuted.

Yes, Hiram said with sardonic pleasure, the famous Bellefleur curse is nothing more than
chance
—and chance is nothing more than what happens! So those of us who aspire to some degree of control, let alone moral intelligence, cannot be victims of absurd grotesqueries like the rest of you.

PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE
family, however, even those who lived hundreds of miles away, in the flatland, and heard only the most oblique, most exaggerated rumors of the Bellefleur clan, never hesitated to speak of the Bellefleur curse, as if they knew exactly what they were talking about, and there was no mystery surrounding it at all. The curse on the Bellefleurs, it was said, was very simple: they were fated to be Bellefleurs, from womb to grave and beyond.

The Pregnancy

F
or a number of years Leah halfway thought there was a curse of some kind on
her:
she couldn’t seem to have another baby.

Of course she had the twins. And had them within the first year of her marriage, when she was still nineteen. A nineteen-year-old mother of
twins.
(It just isn’t like you, Della in her mourning said primly; to do something so—well,
extravagant:
as if you were trying to please
his
side of the family.) She hadn’t wanted to marry, she hadn’t wanted to have a baby, but if it
had
to be, why, she was rather pleased with the fact of twins. In all the history of the New World Bellefleurs—some seventy-eight births (not all of them, of course, live births; and in the old days many infants died over the long
winters
)—there had never been a single instance of twins before.

(Aunt Veronica remarked mildly, one night at dinner, playing with her food as she usually did by pushing it about her plate with a ladylike fastidious show of indifference—for she had been brought up in the days when ladies did not exactly
eat
in public, they reserved their grosser appetites for the privacy of their rooms—no matter that their generous figures belied their ascetic pretensions—Aunt Veronica lowered her eyes but sent her remark out in Leah’s direction, There were some sort of, I don’t know, twins or triplets or maybe more, born to my poor cousin Diana—she married some sweet boy in the Nautauga Light Guard but there must have been bad blood on his side of the family—the Bishops, they were—out of Powhatassie—they were something to do with banking—or had a big resort hotel on the lake, I don’t remember—anyway it’s long before your time and nobody remembers and nobody probably even remembers poor Diana: but
she
had twins, or triplets, or quadruplets, or whatever you call them, and they were all wizened and joined together in funny ways, a head to a stomach or two stomachs, and they didn’t have all their necessary parts or limbs, it was disgusting to see, but very sad too, of course, very tragic, I remember trying to console Diana and she just screamed and screamed and wouldn’t let anyone near and wanted to nurse the pathetic little things but of course they were dead, they never even drew breath, and everyone said, Oh, Lord wasn’t it a mercy!—and they presented some sort of theological problem too, I can’t remember exactly why—how did you baptize them, and how did you bury them—but in the end it must have been solved and I don’t know why I even bring the subject up, Leah, it doesn’t have a glimmer of a thing to do with
you,
does it?—the twins are so beautiful, and they’re absolutely separate, they weren’t joined together one bit, they don’t even
count
as the other kind of thing at all.)

But after the amazing birth of Bromwell and Christabel nothing happened.

Two babies, a boy and a girl, and both handsome; and both in fine health. And for a year or so Leah was grateful not to be pregnant, since even with nursemaids and servants and Edna to oversee the house she certainly did not want another baby. But then the months passed, and the years, and she
did
want another baby, and nothing happened; nothing at all. One morning as she lay beside her sleeping husband she thought clearly that she would be thirty years old before long, and then she would be thirty-five, and forty, and—and forty-five: and it would be over. The womanly part of her life would be over.

The family insisted upon children, of course. They adored children, or at least the idea, the sentiment, of children. Increase and multiply: go forth and populate the earth: for the earth is there to
be
populated, by Bellefleurs. The Bellefleur line was not to dwindle away as so many New World aristocratic lines had: Raphael, who managed to inflict ten pregnancies on his rather neurasthenic wife Violet, often spoke of the need to have as many children as possible because (and he was quite correct) they could not all be relied upon to survive. He had a dread, an almost superstitious dread, of the Bellefleurs going the way of the Brendels (who had owned as much land in the mountains as Jean-Pierre himself, in the early 1800’s, but had lost it all through speculation, and sheer bad judgment, brought on by what Raphael considered a weakening of the intellect as a consequence of too much money and too much luxury: and the men disappeared, or simply refused to marry, or, if married, failed to have sons) and the Bettensons (Raphael was a boy of twelve when Frederich ran mad out into the snow after his lumbering company went bankrupt, and afterward his children all scattered and were never heard of again) and the Wydens (whose “name” survived today only with a black family in Fort Hanna, headed by the light-skinned descendant of one of Wyden’s slaves). It was great-grandmother Elvira’s belief that her father-in-law did not enjoy his children, in fact did not take much notice of them at all; but he was obsessed with having children, particularly sons, and never quite recovered from the tragic disappointment of his oldest son Samuel (who would have been Germaine’s great-uncle had he survived: though in fact he was believed not to have died, in the usual sense of the word, and still to exist, or at any rate to be present, in the manor, when Bromwell and Christabel were children). The line had come so close to dying out, to being eradicated, back at the very start: when poor Louis and his two sons and daughter were murdered over at Bushkill’s Ferry, and the only surviving Bellefleur was a mountain hermit no one had seen for years. And yet, miraculously, it had
not
died out . . . though there was the constant fear that it would, and all the land and fortune, or whatever remained of it, would fall to strangers.