Bellefleur

  And one day he saw a doe beset by dogs, farmers’ dogs running loose in a pack, snarling and yipping in a frenzy as they tore her apart—tore at her immense swollen belly, where she carried a fetus that would have been dropped in a week or two: he saw, and he fled, covering his ears, his ceaseless prayer to God rising to an involuntary shout. My Lord and my God, my Lord and my God, have mercy. . . .

  And strangest of all he saw, suspended in a dark swamp pond, fringed with rushes and cattails and water willow, a queer white floating face: a stranger’s face in which the eyes were so colorless as to be nearly indistinct; and the chin, beardless, melted away into nothing. A human face, yet with less substance than the skulls of the cannibal Indian. It was strange, too, that the pond should be so lightless, so brackish, since it was probably only a few feet deep, and fed by a fresh-running brook. But Jedediah could not see its bottom. He saw only the ghostly floating face with its weak melting-away chin and its helpless smudged eyes, and he drew back in revulsion as well as in alarm.

  And then one day, without intending it, he came upon Mack Henofer’s campsite, and saw at once, in the first moment of the old man’s shouted greeting and the dog’s yipping, that Henofer had been plundered, his soul laid waste, his physical being taken over by a demon. How terrifying it was, to lift his eyes to Henofer’s and to see, not Henofer’s eyes at all, but those of a demon. . . .

  “Jedediah! Jedediah Bellefleur! Is that you?”

  He had known Henofer was a spy of his father’s, a paid spy, but he had found it in his heart to forgive him; for vengeance is God’s, after all. But now Henofer himself had been eradicated and what stared out at him from the old man’s rheumy eyes was not even human.

  “Jedediah Bellefleur,” the demon crowed in triumph, before he understood that Jedediah had found him out, “aren’t you a surprise on this side of the mountain!—aren’t you a sight! Or is that even you, my boy? You look so different! My eyes, these days, they been giving me trouble—especially in the sun like this—Jedediah? Why don’t you answer? You’re thirsty, aren’t you? Hungry? Is that you, looking so strange?”

  He extended a broad dirty hand for Jedediah to shake, but Jedediah stood his ground. I know who you are, he whispered.

  The Death of Stanton Pym

  In his smart little imported car, a two-seater Morris Bullnose with brass fixtures and aqua finish and aqua-and-orange spoked wheels, and its black convertible top rarely up, even in troubled weather (for he liked, the Bellefleurs saw, to be observed driving through Bellefleur Village on his way to the lakeshore road and the manor—Stanton Pym in a candy-striped sports coat and a pert straw hat with a red band, a bookkeeper’s son and a canal digger’s grandson courting in public the daughter of a man who, had he wished, might claim blood ties with one of France’s oldest noble families), maneuvering the sporty car with a boyish self-consciousness along the graveled curves, as if confident he were being watched by envious eyes. Della’s suitor appeared on Saturdays and Sundays and occasionally on Wednesday evenings to take her for long dusty drives around the lake, or to the Falls for dinner, or rowing on Silver Lake, or (on Wednesday evenings) to church services at the little white squat-steepled Methodist church on the Falls Road, or to the county fairgrounds where they might stroll hand in hand (so it was reported to the Bellefleurs) from one farm exhibit to another, and from one amusement to another, eating cotton candy and candied apples and hot buttered popcorn and drinking lemonade like any other young couple—except of course the match was doomed, and it was generally known that the suitor himself was doomed should he persist (but how could he, since he wasn’t a stupid young man?) in the courtship.

  The man who was to be Germaine’s grandfather—her other grandfather—was, at the age of twenty-seven, already a bank officer in the First National Bank of Nautauga Falls. Apart from his natty dress (which of course was reserved for weekends) and his habit of repeating jokes judged to be only mildly amusing, he was a serious, even rather grave young man—wonderfully ambitious—bright and hard-working and wonderfully ambitious, as the bank’s president told Noel Bellefleur one day. He had a talent for bank work and had specialized in mortgage loans. He knew a great deal. “. . . Is my financial situation part of what the young bastard knows?” Noel asked.

  Of course it was clear that Stanton Pym was pursuing Della Bellefleur for her money and property—or for the promise of it, when she inherited; why otherwise would he have switched so readily, and, it seemed, so adroitly, from his courtship of the daughter of a Falls glove manufacturer to Della, when the glove manufacturer’s business was sold at a loss?—though of course Stanton Pym withdrew from his pursuit of the girl long before the factory was actually sold, and before, even, rumors surfaced. It was simply the case, people said admiringly, that the bright young man knew a great deal.

  At the First National Bank of Nautauga Falls Pym dressed in well-tailored and somber three-piece suits, and walked about with an almost military briskness and formality. If his grandfather had slaved in the pitiless midsummer sun to help build the Great Canal, and had died, of an undiagnosed internal hemorrhage, while lifting a shovel heavy with wet clay, at the age of forty-three; if his father had ruined his eyes and developed a hump between his shoulder blades, working a fourteen-hour day as an assistant bookkeeper for the largest textile mill in the region, and if he was dismissed after thirty years’ service with no more than a token “pension”—exactly why, no one knew, though the dismissal might have had something to do with the man’s failing eyesight and his perpetual melancholia—young Stanton seemed to know nothing of these indignities, and sometimes seemed, if questioned by people from his old neighborhood, to know nothing, with an almost charmingly innocent arrogance, of his family at all, living or dead. He gave his mother part of his salary, of course, and visited her as often as possible, but his new responsibilities—his new life—took up most of his time.

  If, in the First National Bank with its sepulchral pretensions (though it was not the largest bank in Nautauga Falls it boasted a truly impressive neo-Georgian façade, and its floors, of simulated marble, were agreeably cold; it had cut- and frosted glass windows and, guarding the stairs to the vault, a pewter grille weighty as a medieval portcullis) young Stanton Pym dressed with admirable sobriety, and if he was careful to appear not only modest but self-effacing at the Methodist ceremonies he attended, at other times—Saturdays and Sundays in particular—he dressed in the latest men’s styles and, had he been somewhat taller, and his eyes less close-set, he would have been one of the most striking of the “new” young men. (They sometimes appeared to be everywhere in those days—ambitious sons of farmers or even farmers’ laborers—back from serving in the army, or back from a two-year course at business school, considerably taller than their parents, with firm frank handshakes and expectant smiles, and no intention whatsoever of living as their families had lived.)

  Pym had no more than two or three outfits for each season, but by switching vests, wearing different shoes (sometimes white, sometimes white-and-brown, sometimes brown, sometimes black, depending upon the season and the time of day) and different neckties and hats, he was able to give the impression of being fashionable as any of the wealthier young men. (Far more “fashionable,” after all, than the Bellefleurs—for young Noel and his many cousins cared more for horses, hunting, fishing, boating and other masculine preoccupations than they did for society.) In summer months he wore white as often as possible—white trousers, smartly creased; white shoes; the red-and-white-striped blazer; even white gloves—despite its impracticality (for he had, after all, an automobile to contend with—first a Model-T, which demanded a fair amount of tinkering and adjusting, and then the little English car, acquired secondhand from one of the bank’s customers). It was in this jaunty summer costume that Della Bellefleur first saw him, on the boardwalk at White Sulphur Springs.

  He was escorting the glove manufacturer’s daughter, whom Della of course knew, but knew slightly, and without any grea
t warmth. A slender young man, no more than Della’s height, a year or two younger than she, perhaps, with pomaded dark hair parted precisely in the center of his head, and a small dark mustache, like a fuzzy caterpillar, riding his short upper lip. That Sunday, he even carried a cane with an ebony knob. Della and Stanton Pym exchanged no more than a half-dozen words upon that occasion, for there were so many other people close about, in his party and in her own, but Della sensed immediately—and was never to be shaken from her conviction, not thirty years after Pym’s death—that Pym, before being introduced to her, before knowing she was one of the two Bellefleur heiresses, had stared at her with a curious startled intensity as if . . . as if he recognized her . . . or saw something in her face. . . . As if, in that first moment, on the crowded White Sulphur Springs boardwalk, he knew.

  (Perhaps it was not love at first sight, Della was one day to tell Germaine, as she turned the pages of her old photograph album, because I don’t believe such a phenomenon exists . . . and if it does, it’s immoral. But there is such a thing as immediate regard. Immediate sympathy. And intelligent and fully conscious awareness of another’s worth.)

  At that time Della was twenty-nine years old. She was not a pretty woman, nor even—with her long nose and her prim censorious stare—a very attractive woman, but she carried herself proudly, and was known for her common sense and her reliability; her smile, when she smiled, could be appealing. It had been the family’s intention for some years to marry her to a cousin-twice-removed who lived in the Falls with his widowed mother and spent his time speculating, fairly modestly, in real estate, but the match was stalemated by Della’s and the cousin’s silence on the subject. Do you actively dislike Elias, Della’s mother and aunts interrogated her, is there anything about him that strikes you as unacceptable . . . ? Or are you simply being stubborn? Why don’t you say something?

  But Della said nothing, and though she and her cousin were brought together frequently, and encouraged to stroll about alone together, their “match” rested in a kind of apathetic equilibrium. They would be married someday—perhaps—but in the meantime there was no engagement. Della was spoken for, and no other suitors stepped forward, and the years passed, and though Della’s mother and aunts discussed the situation tirelessly Della herself refused to discuss it at all. She quite liked her virginal status. She was not stubborn, as she frequently declared.

  And then, suddenly, there was Stanton Pym.

  How Pym knew about Della’s conversion to Methodism, how he knew that she attended Wednesday evening services at the little country church (but not Sunday services: the family forbade that), how he managed to insinuate himself into her company there (for Della, being a Bellefleur, tended to hold herself somewhat apart from the others, even in her enthusiasm for their religion), how he managed to overcome her suspicions; no one knew. But suddenly they were “courting.” They were said to be “sweet on each other.” Noel learned that Pym went to the Methodist church only on Wednesdays, and that he had never been a serious churchgoer in the past; he learned that Pym had begun seeing Della only a week after withdrawing as a candidate for the hand of the glove manufacturer’s daughter. He’s after her, the Bellefleurs said, with an air of genuine surprise, he’s actually after her. . . . Pym himself so misjudged Della’s family attitude toward him that he was always extending his hand to the men when they happened to meet, smiling his perky little smile, commenting on the weather, telling jokes. (He very much enjoyed his own jokes and laughed richly at them, though never in the funereal recesses of the First National Bank.)

  The family disapproved, quite vocally, but of course Della paid them no mind: she went out with Pym in the Morris Bullnose, delighted as a young girl, her flower-bedecked hat tied firmly beneath her chin. The two of them were seen on the amusement rides at the state fair, they were seen rowing at Silver Lake, at sunset, and dining together by candlelight in the Nautauga House; Della even admitted, after close questioning, to having been introduced to Stanton’s mother. (Of course the mother is impossible, Della said stiffly, she kept touching my arm and fawning on me and asking the most ridiculous questions—how many servants we had, how many rooms in the house, if it was true that my father had once been kidnapped—but, after all, Stanton is as critical of the poor woman as I am, and knows her faults thoroughly: and Stanton isn’t anything like her. They are two quite separate and distinct persons.)

  When it was pointed out to Della—now by Elvira, now by her brothers Noel and Hiram, even by her sister Matilde—that the young man was pursuing her only because she was an heiress, she simply waved the notion away as if it were completely absurd.

  You don’t know Stanton as I do, she said.

  STANTON WAS OF course to die an accidental death, as the witnesses and the coroner were to attest, yet long before the accident, long before the marriage, when he was warned of the possible dangers of marrying Della Bellefleur against her family’s wishes, he waved the notion away as if it too were completely absurd. Della and I are in love, he said simply.

  But the Bellefleurs—! Wasn’t he afraid of them?

  You don’t understand, he would say, smiling. Della and I are in love. We know exactly what we are doing.

  Though she was nearly thirty years old, and a fully mature woman, Della was sent away over the summer to visit with some of Elvira’s relatives in another part of the state; and she and Pym were forbidden to see each other. They wrote letters faithfully but of course the letters were intercepted and opened, and their laconic, pious, possibly codified messages were read contemptuously aloud. It was noted that the words engagement and marriage were frequently used. And that they professed their love for each other: but always in a judicious, fairly formal manner. (The letters, at least, Della’s family said, are not obscene.) While Della was away Pym suffered two unrelated accidents, both of them minor: the brakes of his automobile failed and he ran off the road, into a thicket of scrub pine; when he went to open his bedroom window one evening the window came loose, toppling over on him, and broken glass flew everywhere—cutting him, fortunately, only superficially. In telling Stanton Pym’s story afterward, over the years, members of the Bellefleur family, with the exception, of course, of Della, usually emphasized the paradoxical fact that while Pym might very well have expected to be killed by Della’s relatives, or at least badly beaten, he did die, in the end, an entirely accidental death—as if his fate were predetermined, and had nothing to do with Della at all.

  Della returned at the end of the summer, and the couple became engaged at once. Pym was transferred to the new bank branch at Bushkill’s Ferry, where he would be assistant manager, and he arranged to buy, with the aid of a considerable mortgage, an old but fairly attractive red-brick house with a clear view of the lake and, in the distance, Bellefleur Manor. If he encountered Bellefleur men on the street he always called out a hearty hello, and insisted upon shaking hands, no matter how coldly they eyed him; one day Lawrence, driving the handsome old gold-ornamented phaeton that had been his father’s, on his way to see his fiancée, nearly had a serious accident when his team of matched horses reared up in a panic at the noisy approach of the Morris Bullnose—and rather than apologize for the horses’ distress, Stanton Pym climbed out of his car and shook hands with Lawrence, amiably, as if it were all a lark; in fact he used the opportunity to tell Lawrence one of his jokes, which was especially inappropriate under the circumstances. (A man and a woman, on their honeymoon. The bridegroom’s horse misbehaves. The bridegroom counts three, slowly, before whipping it. Next, the bridegroom’s hound misbehaves. Again the bridegroom counts three, slowly, before whipping it. And then there is a disagreement between the bridegroom and his new bride: and slowly he begins to count, One, two . . . ) Stanton exploded in childish laughter, throwing his head back so hard that his straw hat flew off. He was clearly in excellent spirits. He was clearly not in the least afraid of Lawrence. Before taking his leave he invited Lawrence to come visit him and Della after the wedding—for by th
en, as he said, with a parting smile, “Everything will be settled.”

  The wedding took place in late September, at the Methodist church, attended by only a few relatives. Della had a trust fund which paid a small but by no means contemptible dividend, and Stanton’s new position at the bank was a highly promising one, and they seemed, according to visitors, happy enough: at any rate Elvira soon received word that Della was pregnant. Of course she could not stay away from her daughter, no matter how she disliked her son-in-law; and then, as time passed, she did not really dislike him all that much . . . though of course she disapproved of him . . . disapproved, at any rate, of the idea of him. For the young man himself, even with his foolish little mustache, was well mannered and cheerful and devoted to Della. Or so it seemed. So, indeed, it seemed—as Elvira declared to the others. But what else have we to go on? Shouldn’t we perhaps begin to relent, since in the end we’ll forgive them anyway?

  So it came about that the young couple was invited to the castle, and a number of belated wedding presents were given them. Months before the baby was scheduled to be born Della was allowed to choose among the nursery’s several antique cradles; Pym was invited to join the men for cards. (He always lost at cards with the Bellefleurs—but not too badly, so that while Della was vexed she had no reason to be seriously upset.) They were invited to spend several days at the castle during the Christmas holiday, when a number of other relatives and guests were to be there, and it certainly looked—it looked—as if the marriage were being tacitly accepted. (At no point did anyone take Pym aside, of course, and welcome him into the family; or even shake his hand with an expression of pleasure. But then the Bellefleurs were always reticent about their feelings. They would not have wanted to be called sentimental.)

  It was on Christmas Eve that Pym was killed in a toboggan accident on Sugarloaf Hill. All that day there had been a fair amount of drinking and feasting (and Christmas Day promised a roast suckling pig, and champagne for breakfast), and perhaps Pym was simply unaccustomed to so much celebrating. It was believed that he and Della quarreled sometime during the afternoon, hidden away in their room on the third floor, but it wasn’t known what they quarreled about. (Did Della object, suddenly, to her brothers’ and cousins’ interest in Pym? Was she jealous? For her young husband’s head was being turned, flattered by Noel and Lawrence in particular, and he seemed quite cheerfully willing to make a fool of himself on ice skates, on the lake, and roughing about in the snow as if he had been doing this sort of thing with the Bellefleurs all his life.)