at things only to throw them immediately aside, as if time were an unfathomable, inexhaustible pool instead of something like old Raphael’s once-famous wine cellar, which was quickly depleted in the years following his death and the decline of the Bellefleur fortune. They chatter about inconsequential things, Della said bitterly, and frequently; she lived most of the time across the lake, in a red-brick Georgian house at the very center of the village of Bushkill’s Ferry, and though her family could not discern her house across the miles she could discern theirs very easily: indeed, the eye always leapt to Bellefleur Manor on its hill, there was no escaping the castle, even at twilight when the sun’s slow slanting orange-red rays illuminated it, and the lake itself began to sink into its uncanny darkness. They chatter about pork roasts and candy apples and antler spreads, Della said, while everything falls in pieces around them. They go tobogganing on Christmas Eve and one of their people is killed and the next day they open their presents as if nothing had happened, and they never speak of it, they refuse to speak of it. (But her husband, Stanton Pym, who did indeed die in a tobogganing accident, hardly six months after the marriage, and when poor Della was four months pregnant with Leah, had never been considered one of their people: so perhaps Della’s charge was unwarranted.)
Then again the curse might have been that the Bellefleurs were so hopelessly, and at times so passionately, divided on all subjects. Germaine’s uncle Emmanuel, whom she saw only once in her life, and who appeared in the Valley only rarely, and never predictably, since he professed a violent dislike for what he called “city life” and “overheated rooms” and “women’s talk,” included on all his maps of the region the original Indian name for the area—Nautauganaggonautaugaunnagaungawauggataunagauta—which meant, in essence, for it could not be literally translated, a space-in-which-you-paddle-to-your-side-and-I-paddle-to-mine-and-Death-paddles-between-us. Those silly Indian names, the Bellefleur women said, why couldn’t they say directly what they mean, like us? Emmanuel’s reverence for the Indians and the local Indian culture (which could hardly be said to exist any longer since the treaties of 1787 had banished all Indians from the mountains and the fertile farmland along the river, and a few thousand of them lived in a single reservation north of Paie-des-Sables) was mocked by most of the family, who did not know quite how to interpret it. Emmanuel was, of course, “strange”—but that did not entirely explain his affection for Indians, and his even greater affection for the mountains. He was a throwback to Jedediah, evidently—and perhaps to Jean-Pierre himself, who had degenerated to the point of taking on a full-blooded Iroquois squaw as his mistress, shortly before his death. (But had Emmanuel ever “known” a woman? His brothers Gideon and Ewan loved to discuss this subject, indeed it was one of their few safe subjects, and while Gideon believed firmly that of course Emmanuel must have had sexual experience, Ewan liked to add that it mightn’t necessarily have been with a woman: whereupon both brothers laughed loudly. Of their oldest brother Raoul, who lived one hundred miles to the south in Kincardine, and whose sexual life was so bizarre, they rarely spoke.) So the Bellefleurs, Emmanuel once said, were always at war: they had the disposition of minks: and he wanted no part of their curse. (But then it was said of Emmanuel that he himself was under a curse or an enchantment, so how could he presume to judge others?)
Long before Germaine’s brother Bromwell fled Bellefleur and made his name— his name—in the vast shadowy world south of the mountains he liked to pronounce, with his child’s unself-conscious authoritative lisp, that a “curse” was unlikely; but if indeed one could chart the undulating
Then again the curse might have been that the Bellefleurs were so hopelessly, and at times so passionately, divided on all subjects. Germaine’s uncle Emmanuel, whom she saw only once in her life, and who appeared in the Valley only rarely, and never predictably, since he professed a violent dislike for what he called “city life” and “overheated rooms” and “women’s talk,” included on all his maps of the region the original Indian name for the area—Nautauganaggonautaugaunnagaungawauggataunagauta—which meant, in essence, for it could not be literally translated, a space-in-which-you-paddle-to-your-side-and-I-paddle-to-mine-and-Death-paddles-between-us. Those silly Indian names, the Bellefleur women said, why couldn’t they say directly what they mean, like us? Emmanuel’s reverence for the Indians and the local Indian culture (which could hardly be said to exist any longer since the treaties of 1787 had banished all Indians from the mountains and the fertile farmland along the river, and a few thousand of them lived in a single reservation north of Paie-des-Sables) was mocked by most of the family, who did not know quite how to interpret it. Emmanuel was, of course, “strange”—but that did not entirely explain his affection for Indians, and his even greater affection for the mountains. He was a throwback to Jedediah, evidently—and perhaps to Jean-Pierre himself, who had degenerated to the point of taking on a full-blooded Iroquois squaw as his mistress, shortly before his death. (But had Emmanuel ever “known” a woman? His brothers Gideon and Ewan loved to discuss this subject, indeed it was one of their few safe subjects, and while Gideon believed firmly that of course Emmanuel must have had sexual experience, Ewan liked to add that it mightn’t necessarily have been with a woman: whereupon both brothers laughed loudly. Of their oldest brother Raoul, who lived one hundred miles to the south in Kincardine, and whose sexual life was so bizarre, they rarely spoke.) So the Bellefleurs, Emmanuel once said, were always at war: they had the disposition of minks: and he wanted no part of their curse. (But then it was said of Emmanuel that he himself was under a curse or an enchantment, so how could he presume to judge others?)
Long before Germaine’s brother Bromwell fled Bellefleur and made his name— his name—in the vast shadowy world south of the mountains he liked to pronounce, with his child’s unself-conscious authoritative lisp, that a “curse” was unlikely; but if indeed one could chart the undulating
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