Bellefleur Read Free

shielded his eyes as the sky was split by lightning. He cried aloud at the surprise of it. For a brutal instant Mount Blanc was illuminated: it had taken on a queer hard mistless flattened quality, like a paper cutout, glaring with light that pulsed from within. Raphael too heard disembodied cries, blown like mere leaves. The Spirits of the Dead. They sought refuge on nights like this but, being sightless, they could not really determine how close they were to the living.
    Later that night, before he undressed for bed, Gideon Bellefleur checked windows and doors, seeing with angry resignation how the roof leaked in one room after another, and how ill-fitting the window frames were—but what good did it do, to be angry? The Bellefleurs were rich, they were certainly rich, but they hadn’t any money; they hadn’t enough money; not enough to repair the manor with the thoroughness it required; and what point was there in small, short-range repairs? Gideon reached out to close a banging shutter, his head bowed, his face contorted, his lips pressed tightly together so that he would not mutter an obscenity. (Leah could not tolerate obscenities from him. Or from any man. You want to desecrate life, she cried, by desecrating the very origins of life: I forbid you to say such ugly things in my presence. But then she herself frequently swore. When vexed or frustrated she swore, schoolgirl oaths, childish exclamations, Oh, hell, damn, goddamn! —which upset Gideon’s mother but which struck Gideon himself as irresistibly charming: but then his young wife was so beautiful, so magnificent, how could she fail to be charming no matter what sprang from her lips?) It was at that moment Gideon saw, or believed he saw, something emerge from the darkness at the edge of the lawn two floors below. It moved against the wind with remarkable alacrity and grace, like a gigantic water spider, skittering across the surface of the grass. My God, Gideon murmured softly. The thing, thwarted by the high garden wall, hesitated a moment, then made its way along the wall, less gracefully now, groping as if blind.
    Gideon leaned out the window, staring. His face, his thick long hair, the upper part of his body were soaked with rain. He would have shouted—shouted something—but his throat was constricted, and anyway the wind was far too loud, and would have blown his words back into the room. Then there was another flash of lightning and Gideon saw that a large slovenly wisteria tree, grown sprawling against the wall, was buffeted about by the wind so that it gave the odd appearance of moving toward the house. But that was all: nothing else was there: his vision had tricked him.
    For a while the storm subsided, and everyone went to bed, and then the winds began with renewed force, and it was clear that no one would sleep much that night. Leah and Gideon embraced in their bed, and spoke nervously of things they had agreed not to speak of again—the condition of the house, Leah’s mother, Gideon’s mother, the fact that Leah wanted another baby and could not, could not, for some reason could not conceive though she was already the mother of twins (five years old at the time, Germaine’s sister Christabel and her brother Bromwell); and then they were quarreling; and somehow Leah, sobbing, struck Gideon with her rather large fist, on the left side of his face; and Gideon, stunned at first, and then furious, gripped her shoulders and shook her, What do you think you’re doing, who do you think you’re hitting, and threw her back hard against the headboard of their antique bed (Venetian, eighteenth-century, a canopied intricately carved gondola outfitted with enormous goose-feather and swansdown pillows, one of the silliest of Raphael Bellefleur’s acquisitions, Leah’s favorite piece of furniture, so wondrously vulgar, so lavish, so absurd—she had rejected the bed her parents-in-law gave them when she came as a bride to the manor, and insisted upon