Read Online Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

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