Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates

up and at ’em in no time! Have to hide the little girlies from you, yes? . . . You know, Jonathan, two things would fix you up just fine: a little snort from this-here that I smuggled past your wife, and an hour or two out on the lake with me, just trolling for the hell of it, to see what turns up. A few lungs-full of fresh air’d set you up right, ’s no wonder you lay around looking so groggy and slow, what with the smell in this place. . . .
    (The old man’s step-granddaughter, Garnet, a shy anemic-looking girl with long straggly blond hair that was all snags and snarls, tried to warn Gideon’s father, tried to silence him, but of course he paid no attention. He had come to Bushkill’s Ferry on his old stallion Fremont to cheer that miserable bastard up, as he’d said, and he wouldn’t allow any of the silly Hecht women to dissuade him.)
    Nor did Gideon feel that he could talk to Nicholas Fuhr, his friend since childhood, or his other friends in the area—that would have been a violation of his marriage, an act equivalent to infidelity.
    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