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

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.
    So Leah, despite her brash girlish disdain for such things, fell under the enchantment of the Lake Noir branch of the family, and shrewdly saw that Noel Bellefleur was a fool about pregnant women—even women like herself, of a size and a disposition not conventionally “feminine.” And once she was pregnant she found herself subdued; she found herself expressing an interest in the women in the family, and in their activities (quilting, crocheting, embroidering, overseeing the yearly canning, manipulating engagements, arranging for social evenings—a ceaseless round of social evenings, over the winters especially!—and vociferously mourning the dead) that was not hypocritical, or even experimental; she grew softer, and sweeter, and burst into tears easily, and liked nothing better than to curl up in Gideon’s arms, and she spent an inordinate amount of time during that first pregnancy sound asleep: sometimes she staggered with exhaustion an hour after waking, and (this, the restless young woman who had raced her handsome sorrel mare at valley competitions, and who had swum halfway across Lake Noir one rainy day in late September as a girl of sixteen, merely on a dare) could barely hold her head up through a meal, and yawned repeatedly, and napped everywhere in the lived-in part of the house and once or twice in parts of the house that were kept unheated, and, most astonishing of all, found it too much trouble to disagree when Gideon or his family spouted nonsense. Pregnant with the twins Leah grew even more beautiful. Her skin was golden, her perfect lips shaped themselves in a perpetual unconscious mesmerizing half-smile, her eyes, though deep-set and somewhat shadowed, took on a queer childlike brightness as if they had just been washed with tears. Even before the triumphant birth of twins her father-in-law had fallen in love with her, and revised (and in public)