Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

“indelicate” nature. But she was so beautiful, with her deep-set blue eyes, which were slate-blue, very dark, and her strong chin, and her perfect wide lips, and her proud bold quivering posture, that of course she was forgiven: at least by the men of the family.
    At the same time Lily kept having babies. It must be a simple feat, it must require a simple-minded integrity, Leah thought, eying her sister-in-law with a weak smile that concealed a powerful contempt. Or are there tricks, secret rituals . . . ? Superstitious maneuvers? She woke one morning, a few weeks before Mahalaleel’s arrival at the manor, and thought quite clearly— I don’t believe in anything, I am a natural atheist, but suppose I experiment with . . . with certain beliefs. (Ah, but really she was incapable of “believing”! She laughed at omens, at warnings, at all silly chatter about spirits and the dead and Biblical injunctions that had sprung, she knew full well, out of some old crabbed desert hermit’s sexual frustration; she even dismissed, perhaps too impatiently, her mother’s self-pitying tale of a “prophetic” dream she’d had on the eve of her young husband’s accidental death.) She would experiment, however. She would hypothesize. Of course she could not believe because she was too intelligent, and too skeptical, and had too wild a sense of humor. . . . She half-believed, perhaps. She was a natural atheist but she might half-believe if she put her mind to it.
    I don’t believe in anything, she thought angrily.
    But if I do believe . . .
    But of course I don’t. I can’t. Hiding things under pillows, whispering little prayers, calculating when the twins were conceived, what sort of food Gideon and I had eaten that evening . . .
    But if I do . . .
    While making love with Gideon she gripped his buttocks tight and shut her eyes and thought Now, now, at this very moment, now, but the words struck her as absurd, and she sank back, helpless, half-sobbing, miserable. She wanted to die. But no: of course she didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. She wanted to have another baby, and live, and all would be well, and she would never want anything again in her life.
    Never anything again in your life?
    Never.
    Not anything? In your entire life?
    In my entire life.
    Another baby—and nothing else, in your entire life?
    Yes. In my entire life.
    So she tried little tricks too silly to mention, and murmured little prayers, but still nothing happened: she was willing to make a fool of herself but nothing happened. She fell into moods of languor and depression in which she halfway wished—and deeply wounded Gideon by saying so—that she hadn’t married at all. “I should have entered a convent. I shouldn’t have given in to you,” she would say at such times, pushing out her fleshy lower lip like a child of twelve. “But you loved me,” Gideon protested. “No, I never did, how could I, I knew nothing about love, I was just an ignorant girl,” Leah said carelessly. “ You insisted on marrying. You were such a bully, I gave in out of fear of you, that you’d treat me the way you did that poor tame spider!” “Leah, you’re misrepresenting the past,” Gideon said, his face darkening with blood. “You know that’s a sin. . . .” “A sin! A sin! Imagine calling the truth sinful!” And she laughed him away, then burst into tears. Her moods were so capricious, so stormy, it was almost as if she were pregnant.
    I don’t want to be a woman any longer, she thought.
    But then: Oh, God, I want to have another baby. Just one more! Just one! I would never ask for anything again in my entire life. It wouldn’t even have to be a boy. . . .
    She thought it must be a good omen, not only that the great cat Mahalaleel came to the manor, but that he so clearly favored her. He was partial as well to Vernon and great-grandmother Elvira, who knew how to rub the back of his head with her knuckles, and he would sometimes