Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

not want to be consoled. Open-eyed, sleepless, she found herself rather angry. It was not like her: but then no one in this household really knew her: they thought she was a sweet docile little girl. And so she was, when it suited her. “He won’t be back for any of them,” she said. “He is abandoning us.”
    Like several of her Dublin relatives—her female relatives—little Germaine prided herself on being, from time to time, but always unpredictably, clairvoyant—gifted with second sight. So she knew, she knew. Jedediah would not only not return for the birth of their other children but he would never see his nieces and nephews—never in this lifetime.
    “Oh, how do you know, Puss!” Louis laughed, rolling his burly weight upon her.
    “I know, ” she said.

“Powers”
    L eah with her immense swollen belly. At five months she looked as if she were already nine months pregnant, and the baby might force its way out at any moment. What odd feverish dreams she endured, half-lying on pillows, the muscles of her legs now packed with soft plump flesh, her slender ankles swollen, her eyes rolling back into her head with the violence—the queerness—of her ideas! Were they hers, or the unborn child’s? She felt the creature’s power, her head aswim with dreams that left her panting and feverish but utterly baffled. She could feel the unborn child’s spirit but she could not see in her mind’s eye what it wished of her, what it craved.
    I am going to accomplish something, she thought frequently, opening and closing her fists, feeling her nails press against the palms of her hands. The soft pliant eager flesh. . . . I am going to be the instrument, the means by which something is accomplished, Leah thought.
    And then again days passed and she thought nothing at all; she was too lazy, too dream-befuddled to think.
    Her hair lay loose on her shoulders because it was too much trouble for her to plait and roll it, or even to have one of the girls tend to her. She lay back against her pillows, yawning and sighing. Her puffy hand caressed her midriff, as if she feared nausea and must remain very, very still: for at the oddest, least expected times she was overcome by a spasm of retching that quite unnerved her. Until now she had never been sick to her stomach—she prided herself on being one of the healthy Bellefleur women, not one of the sickly self-pitying ones.
    Leah holding herself still, very still. As if listening to something no one else could hear.
    Leah wild-eyed and sly as if she had just arisen from love, a forbidden love, her mouth fleshier than anyone remembered, curved in a slow secretive smile.
    Leah in her drawing room, on the old chaise longue, in a dream-stupor, her lovely eyes heavy-lidded, a teacup about to slip out of her fingers. (One of the children would catch it before it fell; or Vernon would lean forward on his knees, on the carpet, to take it gently out of her hand.) Leah ordering the servants about in her new voice, which was petulant and shrill and rather like her mother’s—though when Gideon said so, perhaps unwisely, she angrily denied it. Why, Della did nothing but whine the livelong day, wasn’t Della famous in the family for her monotonous mournful self-pitying dirge—!
    Leah more beautiful than ever, with her healthy high-colored complexion that put the other women to shame (winter bleached their cheeks, gave them a listless dead-white skin), her deep-set eyes that seemed enlarged with pregnancy, a very dark blue, almost black, keen and thick-lashed and usually glittering, as if flooded with tears—tears not of sorrow or pain, but of sheer inchoate emotion. Leah’s laughter ringing out gaily, or her robust full-throated girl’s voice, or her suddenly warm, faintly disbelieving murmur when she was struck with gratitude (for people—neighbors, friends, family, servants—were always bringing her little gifts, fussing over her, inquiring about the state of her health, staring