Bellefleur

  So Gideon never spoke to anyone of his uneasiness with his wife, and certainly he could not speak to her; not of anything so deeply, so profoundly, intimate. That he, her husband, believed she had become obsessed with . . . with the desire for . . . with desire itself. . . . That he believed she became, at times, almost a little unbalanced. . . . This passion, this grim joyless striving, this contest between them: was it simply for the purpose of having another baby? He could not bring himself to speak to her about such matters, the two of them hadn’t a vocabulary to contain such thoughts, Leah would have been irrevocably wounded. They could send each other into roars of laughter with crude imitations of the family—Leah as her sister-in-law Lily, Gideon as Noel or his pompous uncle Hiram—they could even speak frankly of decisions Noel made without consulting Gideon, and they could chide each other when one of them slipped into a mood (it was usually Gideon, these days), but they could not speak of their intimate physical life, their sexual bond, their love. At the very thought of such a trespass Gideon rose hastily and left for the stables, where he might stay for an hour or more, not thinking, not even brooding, simply breathing in the dark odorous hay-and-manure-and-horse comfort that so calmed him. He would not speak to her about such things. And anyway he reasoned that once she conceived, once she was again pregnant, the obsession would die.

  But then, incredibly, she failed to conceive.

  Month followed month and she failed, she failed to conceive, and it was this word she insisted upon—fail, failed—this word Gideon had to endure. Sometimes it was a frightened whisper I keep failing, Gideon; sometimes it was a curt blunt statement, We keep failing, Gideon. Bromwell and Christabel were in superb health. Bromwell walked a few weeks before Christabel, but both learned to talk at about the same time, and everyone exclaimed at the babies’ good natures: Aren’t you fortunate, Leah! Don’t you just adore them? “Of course I adore them,” Leah might say, distracted. And a few minutes later tell Lettie to take them away. She loved them but they must have represented to her a past accomplishment, some uncanny miraculous coup she’d managed at the age of nineteen; but now she was twenty-six, now she was twenty-seven, soon she would be thirty. . . .

  And then the family began making certain remarks. Certain inquiries. Aunt Aveline, grandmother Cornelia, even aunt Matilde, even Della herself. Do you think . . . ? Wouldn’t you and Gideon like . . . ? The twins are now five years old, don’t you think it might be a good time for . . . ? Once Leah snapped at her mother-in-law, “It isn’t as if we haven’t tried, Mother; we do practically nothing else,” and the remark was repeated everywhere, it was thought to be so typical of Leah Pym’s “indelicate” nature. But she was so beautiful, with her deep-set blue eyes, which were slate-blue, very dark, and her strong chin, and her perfect wide lips, and her proud bold quivering posture, that of course she was forgiven: at least by the men of the family.

  At the same time Lily kept having babies. It must be a simple feat, it must require a simple-minded integrity, Leah thought, eying her sister-in-law with a weak smile that concealed a powerful contempt. Or are there tricks, secret rituals . . . ? Superstitious maneuvers? She woke one morning, a few weeks before Mahalaleel’s arrival at the manor, and thought quite clearly—I don’t believe in anything, I am a natural atheist, but suppose I experiment with . . . with certain beliefs. (Ah, but really she was incapable of “believing”! She laughed at omens, at warnings, at all silly chatter about spirits and the dead and Biblical injunctions that had sprung, she knew full well, out of some old crabbed desert hermit’s sexual frustration; she even dismissed, perhaps too impatiently, her mother’s self-pitying tale of a “prophetic” dream she’d had on the eve of her young husband’s accidental death.) She would experiment, however. She would hypothesize. Of course she could not believe because she was too intelligent, and too skeptical, and had too wild a sense of humor. . . . She half-believed, perhaps. She was a natural atheist but she might half-believe if she put her mind to it.

  I don’t believe in anything, she thought angrily.

  But if I do believe . . .

  But of course I don’t. I can’t. Hiding things under pillows, whispering little prayers, calculating when the twins were conceived, what sort of food Gideon and I had eaten that evening . . .

  But if I do . . .

  While making love with Gideon she gripped his buttocks tight and shut her eyes and thought Now, now, at this very moment, now, but the words struck her as absurd, and she sank back, helpless, half-sobbing, miserable. She wanted to die. But no: of course she didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. She wanted to have another baby, and live, and all would be well, and she would never want anything again in her life.

  Never anything again in your life?

  Never.

  Not anything? In your entire life?

  In my entire life.

  Another baby—and nothing else, in your entire life?

  Yes. In my entire life.

  So she tried little tricks too silly to mention, and murmured little prayers, but still nothing happened: she was willing to make a fool of herself but nothing happened. She fell into moods of languor and depression in which she halfway wished—and deeply wounded Gideon by saying so—that she hadn’t married at all. “I should have entered a convent. I shouldn’t have given in to you,” she would say at such times, pushing out her fleshy lower lip like a child of twelve. “But you loved me,” Gideon protested. “No, I never did, how could I, I knew nothing about love, I was just an ignorant girl,” Leah said carelessly. “You insisted on marrying. You were such a bully, I gave in out of fear of you, that you’d treat me the way you did that poor tame spider!” “Leah, you’re misrepresenting the past,” Gideon said, his face darkening with blood. “You know that’s a sin. . . .” “A sin! A sin! Imagine calling the truth sinful!” And she laughed him away, then burst into tears. Her moods were so capricious, so stormy, it was almost as if she were pregnant.

  I don’t want to be a woman any longer, she thought.

  But then: Oh, God, I want to have another baby. Just one more! Just one! I would never ask for anything again in my entire life. It wouldn’t even have to be a boy. . . .

  She thought it must be a good omen, not only that the great cat Mahalaleel came to the manor, but that he so clearly favored her. He was partial as well to Vernon and great-grandmother Elvira, who knew how to rub the back of his head with her knuckles, and he would sometimes tolerate pretty Yolande petting him and fussing over him; but he ignored the rest of the household, even the servants who fed him, and once in Leah’s earshot he hissed angrily as Gideon stooped to pet his head. “All right, then,” Gideon muttered, rising to his full height and resisting the impulse to kick the creature, “go back to hell where you belong.”

  Because Mahalaleel was so discriminating, it soon became a mark of good fortune if he curled up at someone’s feet, or rubbed around someone’s legs, making his throaty crackling noise. He had a habit of coming up behind both Leah and Vernon and thrusting his big head beneath their hands importunately, demanding to be petted; it was an extraordinary gesture, and never failed to astonish and delight Leah. “Aren’t you bold!” she laughed. “You know exactly what you want and how to get it.”

  She and her niece Yolande brushed his thick cloudy coat with Leah’s own gold-backed hairbrush, and tried to lift him in their arms, laughing at his weight. In the right mood he could tolerate a surprising amount of attention, but he always stiffened when the youngest children approached: Christabel was not welcome, nor were Aveline’s noisy children, nor Lily’s (except for Yolande and Raphael), and even cautious Bromwell, frowning behind his glasses, wanting only to “observe” and take notes on Mahalaleel. (He had already begun his journal, which was filled with minute observations, and measurements, and even the results of several dissections performed on small rodents.) Immediately after settling in the house Mahalaleel drove away the other tomcats, and made coquettish subordinates of the females; the household’s six or seve
n dogs kept their distance from him. He was allowed to roam nearly anywhere he wished. At first he slept in the kitchen, on the wide warm stone hearth; then he chose a comfortable old leather chair in the room known as Raphael’s library; then he spent one night in the first-floor linen closet, sprawled luxuriously on grandmother Cornelia’s fine Spanish tablecloth; then he was discovered beneath the red velvet Victorian settee in a little-used drawing room, snoring faintly amid the dust balls. Sometimes he disappeared for an entire day, sometimes for a night; once he was gone three days in a row and Leah was heartbroken, convinced that he had abandoned her. And what a bad-luck sign that would be . . . ! But he reappeared suddenly, in fact at her very heels, making his hoarse guttural sound and butting with his head against her hand.

  He made grandfather Noel nervous by coming up silently behind him, and staring with his wide-spaced tawny green eyes as if he were about to speak. He teased the kitchen help for food, and was rather shameless about his tricks: fed by one servant he nevertheless cajoled another into giving him food, and then another: and yet he never exactly mewed like a hungry cat, he never condescended to beg. He quickly became something of a household puzzle. How was it possible, the children asked, that Mahalaleel could be sleeping soundly by the fireplace in the parlor, but when you left the room or only turned your head he was gone—simply gone? Albert and Jasper swore they had seen Mahalaleel up a tall pine back of one of the logging roads, a mile and a half away. It was one of those pines with no branches or limbs for a considerable distance—seventy-five feet or more—and there was Mahalaleel perched on the lowest limb, absolutely motionless, his hair gray and indistinct, his enormous tail curved about to cover his paws, his wide staring intelligent face terrible as that of a great horned owl about to swoop down upon its prey. They wondered—how could a cat so large manage to climb that tree?—and was he trapped there, would he need help getting down? They called him but he did no more than glance down at them, as if he’d never seen them before. They tried to shake the tree, without success. “Mahalaleel, you’ll starve up there!” they shouted. “Mahalaleel, you’d better come home with us!”

  It was getting dark, so the boys ran home, intending to bring a flashlight back and some food with which to tempt him—but as soon as they burst noisily into the kitchen they saw that Mahalaleel was already there, washing his oversized paws daintily on the hearth. When did he come back, they wanted to know. Oh, a few minutes ago, Edna said. But he was trapped up a tree in the woods! He was trapped up a big pine and couldn’t get down! they said, astonished.

  Mahalaleel was an excellent hunter—the women of the house didn’t want to know the number of wood rats he brought in his strong jaws to the kitchen door, nor the size of the rats; Leah was the only one to dare enter the dining room where, one freezing morning, Mahalaleel had produced out of nowhere a massive snowshoe hare which he was greedily devouring—in fact, most of the neck and the back of the head were gone, and raw strings of muscle glittered bloodily in Mahalaleel’s teeth as he glanced up with an almost human leer—lying sprawled on the gleaming mahogany table Raphael had had imported from Valencia. “Oh, my God, Mahalaleel!” Leah cried. The sight of the half-eaten rabbit, and her beautiful pet’s bloody muzzle, and the greenish frost-tinged eyes in which the black iris was greatly dilated made her feel faint. It was a terrifying sensation, as if she were losing her balance at the edge of a cliff. Yet even at that moment—reeling, half-blind—she wondered if perhaps she might be pregnant. Faintness was, after all, a symptom of pregnancy.

  IT SOON BECAME Mahalaleel’s custom to follow Leah upstairs in the evening, and to make his bed at the foot of Leah’s and Gideon’s enormous bed. Gideon was annoyed: what if the creature had fleas? “You have fleas,” Leah said curtly. “Mahalaleel is absolutely clean.” To humor his wife Gideon pretended to admire the cat; he even stroked its arrogant head, and tolerated its disdain. He could not block a sensation of absurd disappointment when it refused to purr for him.

  Mahalaleel not only purred luxuriously for Leah, but flopped over onto his back, and allowed his pinkish-gray stomach to be tickled, and made playful kittenlike lunges at Leah with his paws and teeth. If he should forget he was playing, if he should unsheath his claws, and sink his teeth in her flesh—! Gideon lay listlessly against his pillows, watching Leah pretend to attack Mahalaleel, watching the giant cat squirm and gurgle and lash out and flick its plume of a tail, and it crossed his mind more than once that if the cat should wound his wife—why then he would batter it to death at once, with his fists if necessary. He hadn’t a gun in this room. Or a knife: Leah pretended to abhor such things. But Gideon Bellefleur with his muscular arms and shoulders, his long supple fingers, could very easily kill a creature like Mahalaleel with his hands.

  “Be careful, Leah,” he said. “You’re playing too rough with him.”

  Leah jerked an arm away. The cat had snagged a claw in the sleeve of her silk nightgown, and there was a faint red line, hardly more than a hairsbreadth, on her forearm. “Gideon, your voice upsets him,” she said irritably. “Must you speak so loudly when there are just the three of us in this room . . . ?”

  After a short while Mahalaleel was not content with sleeping at the foot of the bed, curled up on the turquoise and cream-colored brocade cover (which he had already soiled somewhat, with his hairs, and dirty feet); during the night he made his way on tiptoe, walking with extreme delicacy for so large a creature, to lie between Leah and Gideon. Gideon was never certain when Mahalaleel made his move, but it was during a period of Gideon’s deepest, most intense sleep, so that he was never awakened, and at dawn he would discover himself pushed far to the right side of the bed, crowded out by that damned Mahalaleel.

  “Tonight he sleeps in the kitchen,” Gideon said.

  “He sleeps here,” Leah said.

  “He belongs in the barn with the other animals!”

  “He belongs here,” Leah said.

  And so they disagreed, and quarreled frequently, but Mahalaleel continued to sleep with them, leaving his multicolored hairs everywhere—even, Gideon might discover to his fury, in his eyelashes, or in his beard. He had to excuse himself from a conference with his father, his uncle Hiram, Ewan, and a bank officer from Nautauga Falls, because something had worked its way in his eye and his eye was watering and tears were streaming down his cheek: of course it turned out to be a cat hair.

  He recalled Mahalaleel’s appearance, that rainy night. A rat, really. An opossum. With that skinny ugly tail. He might have stomped it to death right there in the foyer, and Leah could not have stopped him, and no one would really have blamed him. Now it was too late: now, if Mahalaleel disappeared, Leah would grieve over him. (She wasn’t herself these days—hadn’t been herself for months—too easily brought to tears, to rage, to a black dispirited mood.) Leah would know of course that Gideon had done it and she would never forgive him.

  So Mahalaleel continued to sleep in their bedroom, and at dawn Gideon would wake with a start to see the cat gazing unperturbed at him, no more than six inches away. The creature’s eyes were golden-green and flawless, like jewels; there was something fascinating about them. Gideon knew better, he knew that animals hadn’t any grasp of their own being, they did not, after all, create themselves, yet he could not tear his eyes away from the cat’s. The silky fur, soft and rising cloudily, revealing in a single ray of sunshine all sorts of amazing improbable colors—not only an eerie crystalline dove-gray, and an ivory-white, but saffron, and russet, and gold, and even a sort of lavender-green; the subtle misty design hidden in the layers of fur and fluff—vaguely tigerish, rainbow stripes of every variety of width and depth of coloring; the pert, rather snubbed grape-colored nose with its sharply defined nostrils (so sharp they looked, even at close range, as if someone had outlined them in black ink with a fine-tipped pen); the silvery-white whiskers which measured, according to Gideon’s son Bromwell, nine inches from tip to tip, and were always straight and bristling with cleanliness; the tip of th
e tongue, so damp and pink, which often protruded slightly, just a fraction of an inch, between his front teeth in the morning—a sign of lazy contentment, of absolute satisfaction. Gideon’s public attitude toward his wife’s pet continued to be one of indifference or disdain: he was a horseman, after all, like his father, and had never fussed much over dogs, not even the finest hunting dogs on the estate. So he ignored Mahalaleel downstairs. But sometimes in private he almost admired the creature. . . . He stared at its calm unblinking uncanny eyes, and it stared back at him, showing the tip of its tongue, its big knobby oversized feet sometimes beginning a little dance: kneading at the very pillow on which Gideon’s head lay: sheathing and unsheathing those great curved claws.

  ONE MORNING GIDEON awoke very early to see Leah sitting up in bed, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, in untidy strands across her breasts. The cat lay slumbering between them, an enormous patch of warm shadow. Before Gideon could speak Leah reached out to grasp his shoulder, and then his forearm; her grip was surprisingly hard. He dreaded what she might tell him. And yet it turned out to be the best possible news: she was certain, she claimed, that she was pregnant.

  “I feel something there. I’m not imagining it, I feel something, it isn’t even like the other time, it’s something quite different—quite distinct. I can feel that I’m pregnant. I know.”

  And so she was pregnant, indeed. And so Germaine came to be born.

  Jedediah

  Jedediah: 1806. A pilgrimage into the mountains. In his twenty-fourth year. I will be a guide if necessary, he told his angry father, I will live absolutely alone for one full year, he told his skeptical brother, please don’t worry about me, don’t think about me at all.

  Jedediah Bellefleur, the youngest of the three sons of Jean-Pierre and Hilda (who had fled her husband in 1790, and lived now in seclusion with her wealthy elderly parents in Manhattan), relatively slight-bodied for a Bellefleur, particularly for one who wanted to explore the western range by himself. No more than five feet six inches tall in his thick-heeled leather boots. No more than 130 pounds in weight, at the time of his departure. (When he returned—ah, when he returned!—he barely weighed one hundred pounds. But that was much later.) Unlike his brothers Louis and Harlan, and certainly unlike his notorious father, Jedediah was soft-spoken and reserved; his silence was sometimes mistaken for aloofness, even for contempt. He had a narrow triangular face surrounded by sprigs of dark electric hair which was always unruly, as if stirred by inordinately restless thought. Jean-Pierre had forced him to ride as a very small child and in a freakish accident (the normally tractable gelding had been panicked by the smell of blood on someone’s clothes: it was November, it was pig-butchering time) he was thrown, and badly hurt, and as a consequence would walk with a slight limp his entire life. If he was bitter—but of course Jedediah was not bitter—if he even contemplated bitterness toward his father, he did not show it: he had learned shrewdly not to show anything of his secret life to his father.