Bride & Groom

VICTORIA GRANDOLET--Henry Bellamann--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

The latest novel of Henry Bellamann (Kings Row, TIME, April 15, 1940) is a mystery. What wrecked the Grandolets' marriage? The reader cannot be sure, and perhaps the author himself was far from certain.

The old plantation of the Grandolets had never had a mistress so seemingly well fitted for it as Victoria. It had never had an owner so seemingly well equipped to run it as her pleased, practical, 26-year-old husband, Niles. The generations of Grandolets who had cleared its thousands of acres, raised sugar on it, gone broke with it, fought for it, ruined it, restored it, improved it, mortgaged it, worked its Negroes, battled its quicksands, floods, fevers, snakes and heat, had never had such seemingly promising successors.

When Victoria looked out of the buggy and saw the swampy bayou country for the first time, a sickening wave of emotion swept over her--at the cypresses growing from the still, dark water, the abandoned, sagging-roofed cabins, the wilderness perfumes of Louisiana that were first intoxicating and then dizzily cloying. When she first saw the gleaming white colonnades of White Cloud flashing through the grove beyond the hedges, the terraces, the live oaks trailing mournful banners of moss, her heart pounded at its ancient, mirage-like beauty.

When she came to her first meal with her husband's family, and found the lower floors of the great house lit with candles that they could not afford, and the huge chandelier in the center hall twinkling with a starry brilliance as it was lighted in her honor, she trembled at their pride in her. When she found the Negroes welcoming the bride and groom with incomprehensible outcries of good nature, and her husabcand's kinfolk, wistful and old, treasuring her as if she were some lovely, fragile, enameled doll, she moved into a world of enchantment. When she dreamed with Niles in the warm, sweet air, savoring the dense, multitudinous murmur of night, watching the mansion, she knew that like her husband she would never be able to live anywhere else.

Ocean of Faded Carpet.

He was a study. He was lean, tanned, lazy and alert, disconcerting without meaning to be, commanding without being arrogant, closemouthed, not because he wanted to conceal the truth from Victoria, but because it never occurred to him that she would want to know the plantation's hard life. He had married her two weeks after he met her. When he looked at her his amber-colored eyes warmed at the sight of her silvery beauty. When he saw her amazement at the museumlike rooms, where the antique chairs were like small islands on the ocean of faded carpet, his eyes danced with amusement. When he heard her give her first order to the maids--breakfast for him--he could not conceal his satisfaction with her progress. When, without knowing that she was doing it, she made simple, practical, New England suggestions for improving the plantation, he acted on her advice, and prospered.

But when she told him that she wanted a child he flushed darkly, swallowed hard, laughed, and began a matter-of-fact, apparently inconsequential story about all the tangled family feuds, murders, suicides, money troubles, duels, wickedness, misery. When Victoria asked him about all the Negroes with family resemblances to the Grandolets, he silenced her with a look so black and a voice so low and level that she was drenched with fear. When they decided to have a child, Victoria was conscious of an odd chilliness crawling slowly over her skin, suddenly realized: "She had never liked to be touched by anyone. . . . She did not love Niles Grandolet. . . ." After their son was born, Niles and Victoria lived apart.

Years of Faded Affection.

Victoria never knew why she began to torment her guests by emphasizing their stupidities. Niles did not know why he suddenly began a love affair with his cousin. Victoria did not know why she began a loveless affair with a doctor. Their neighbors, who watched the Grandolets growing richer, and Victoria becoming the cool, aloof mother of the Grandolet heir, did not know that the household was anything but successful. Victoria did not know, when the years of deception finally ended, why she looked at the columns of the mansion in the moonlight, turned her clearsighted ruthlessness against herself, began to cry with the back of her hand against her mouth, stepped blindly into the gallery well and crashed through the crystal chains of the chandelier to her death on the floor of the hall.

Victoria Grandolet is an uneven, atmosphere-saturated novel, expertly written, distinguished by some subtle shadings in its portraits, and weakened by an overemphasis on the romanticism of the Old South. It is noteworthy because there might seem to be no earthly reason why this story of married life should come to its unhappy end. The story proceeds from highly complicated causes to effects that are always more than a little ambiguous. But in its account of the silent, invisible, termite undermining of affection and trust, the ghastly cost of the withholding of truth between man and wife, Victoria Grandolet makes its contribution to human understanding. The picture that emerges, stripped of its romantic setting, is too close to too many examples to be either exotic or nightmarish.

Women's Questions, Sailors' Answers.

George Washington Cable, late great Southern novelist, said that Creole society was a ship in which ladies were passengers and men the crew. The women asked passengers' questions, got sailors' answers, replied wittily and "laughed often, feeling their constrained insignificance." Victoria Grandolet might serve as a lecture with that acute observation for a text.

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