The Reserve by Russell Banks
But at least she could tell him that she had ended the relationship. She would say that she had ended it so that their marriage, however broken and betrayed, could continue in some form. And she would tell him that she was ashamed and remorseful, even though she was not ashamed of what she had done and was not remorseful, regardless of the damage it had done to her marriage. She would humbly accept her husband’s righteous wrath and stoically endure the license he had now—license to conduct, without guilt and probably not even secrecy or discretion, an affair with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. Alicia would be almost relieved by that, however. If he were openly having an affair, Alicia would no longer have to deal with his secrets and the lies that went with it and the rumors and gossip, which for years had afflicted the marriage, making it sullen and suspicious and sexually tepid.
When Alicia arrived home, Jordan was not there, and his new assistant, Frances, was taking care of the boys, amusing them in the studio. They were teaching her the names of the artist’s tools and equipment, the girl explained brightly, so that she could make an inventory.
“Frances is very smart, Mama,” Wolf said.
“And she’s nice, too,” Bear added, and the girl reddened.
“I’m sure she is. Where did Mr. Groves go?”
“I don’t know. He said he had some business to attend to. He took his airplane. That’s a swell thing to have, your own airplane that you can land on water.”
“He’ll take you for a ride, if you want,” Wolf said. “Papa likes taking people for rides in his airplane.”
“There are brownies on the kitchen counter by the stove, and milk in the icebox. Help yourself when you’re ready. I’ll be upstairs, so just holler if you need me,” Alicia said and went into the house. She would write to Hubert now and tell him of her decision. Alicia was glad that Jordan was not at home, so that she could write the letter before she had a chance to change her mind; and she was glad that he had taken his airplane, because she could hear its engine a half mile upriver and could hide the letter before he came into the house.
Upstairs in the bedroom, sitting at the writing desk, Alicia took out a vanilla-colored envelope and a sheet of stationery, and she wrote,
Dear Hubert, this is the first and last letter I will write to you. What happened today has brought me to my senses. I will always treasure the love that we shared with each other, but we cannot continue this any longer. You are the only man other than my husband whom I have ever loved or ever will love. I am grateful to have had that. Before I knew you I was content and, though I did not know it, unhappy. You made me very happy, but with it came a terrible discontent. It cannot go on. The costs to my children and to my marriage are too great. When that woman came to your house today, I was forced to look at myself through her eyes, and I realized that I have been swept up in a kind of madness. Please forgive me for allowing it to happen. Forgive me for loving you.
And signed it, Always, A.
She folded the letter, sealed it in the envelope, and wrote Hubert’s full name on the envelope and put it into her purse. Tomorrow she would drive to town and stop at the turnoff by the Clarkson farm where Hubert’s mailbox was located, and she would leave the letter in the box.
No, she would do it now, she decided, before Jordan returned. Before she understood fully what she was giving up. Before she could change her mind.
JORDAN GROVES FLEW HIS AIRPLANE FROM THE SECOND LAKE south over the headwaters of the Tamarack River into the wilderness and then around to the west and across the Great Range, the same way he had come in, so as not to be seen by anyone fishing the First Lake or hiking in from the clubhouse. Shortly, he was on the other side of the Great Range, beyond the Reserve and flying high above the broad valley. He was on his usual route now, following the river home, headed downstream from the outskirts of the village, flying over the scattered roadside farms and the green meadows and cornfields and the clusters of maple and oak and elm trees. There were crosswinds in the valley at this altitude, churning the air slightly, and rather than climb out of the turbulence, he dropped down until, at about twelve hundred feet, cupped by the surrounding mountains, the air smoothed, and he was able to see the freshly oiled road that ran like a scorched ribbon alongside the widening river, and he could even make out individual cows in the fields and people working in their gardens and yards. Only a few vehicles were visible—a dump truck trundling into town, then Darby Shay’s delivery van carting the week’s groceries over to the poor farm in Sam Dent, and then, headed in the opposite direction, he saw the tan Packard sedan that he recognized as Vanessa Von Heidenstamm’s and, following close behind, the modified Model A Ford coupe that he knew belonged to the guide Hubert St. Germain.
Seeing the two of them in the same frame made Jordan Groves freshly ashamed of his mad pursuit of Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. Though he had not seen much of the guide since that autumn night when he’d first met him, he liked the man. The artist admired the guide for his honesty and stoicism and independence. He had been impressed by the straightforward, tough-minded way the man handled the death of his wife. Hubert St. Germain, the longtime caretaker for the Coles, would do without complaint whatever Vanessa asked him to do, but no more or less than that. Hubert St. Germain had the calm good sense and moral clarity not to indulge in elaborate fantasies about the woman, no matter how seductive a game she played. Hubert St. Germain would never find himself out there at the Second Lake, uninvited, unexpected, hoping to step into the living room and take the woman into his arms and make love to her. The guide was a man another man could admire, a man another man could try to emulate.
The situation was new, but his emotions were familiar to him. He saw that this was fast becoming one of those times when, to clear his mind of weakness and confusion and to regain the meaning of his life, Jordan Groves periodically left home and family and journeyed alone to a far place. It had been nearly two years since his August ’34 trip to Greenland, four years since the winter in the Andes when he climbed Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, and Aconcagua and hacked his way through the jungle to Machu Picchu and lived for a month in a hut by the shores of Titicaca. On each of these journeys he had made a daily written record of his thoughts and observations and his sometimes reckless and dangerous experiences, exact and truthful and unsparing, and he had made drawings of the people he met and the places he visited. Each time, on his return, he had published a revised, lightly edited version of his journal as a book, along with many of the drawings. He hadn’t been able to finish the Greenland book yet because he’d been so taken by the natives and their hardy yet delicate ways and their persistent good cheer that he’d filled his sketchbooks and journals with drawings of human beings and had neglected to make pictures of the glaciers that surrounded them. It was the huge white glaciers, those vast mountains of ancient ice, he realized later, that had made the people seem simultaneously strong and vulnerable. To make sense, to be faithful to his perceptions of the Greenlanders, his book needed the glaciers. For that he would have to return to Greenland.
Though not best-sellers, his books had been very well received, partially because of the drawings, but also because the artist was a clever writer with a knack for storytelling. Mostly, however, his readers enjoyed the explicit nature and apparent honesty of his descriptions of his sexual encounters with the women native to those places. To his wife and friends and even to journalists interviewing him, he claimed that those episodes were mostly “tall tales,” fictionalized autobiography, and no one pressed him on the point. But the drawings, made from life, confirmed the claims made by the words, for Jordan Groves, like the American expatriate writer Henry Miller, seemed to hold nothing back, recording in both pictures and words his misadventures alongside his adventures, his happy ease in succumbing to temptation and his occasional principled resistance to it, his delight in the life of his body as much as his compulsion to muse philosophically on subjects great and small. He himself made no claims for the books as literature—he referred to them as his ??
Flying along the river, he glanced ahead and saw the Clarkson farm coming up on his right, and then he saw what appeared to be his own car stopped at the lane that led up Beede Mountain to where Hubert St. Germain had built his cabin. He banked hard to the right and circled back over the mountain and the guide’s log cabin and down, and, yes, it was his own black ’34 Ford sedan all right, and there was Alicia standing beside the mailbox posted at the side of the road, and she turned and gazed up at him as he flew low and passed overhead. He banked left, crossing over the river, and circled back a second time, dropping the airplane down to just under a thousand feet, and when he flew over Alicia, who stood by the car now with the driver’s door open, he leaned from the cockpit and waved to her, and Alicia, looking sad and lonely even from this distance, slowly, almost hesitantly, as if she wasn’t sure who he was, waved back.
And then he was gone, homeward bound, thinking, No, not this time. No more journeys. No more months away from Alicia and the boys, traveling to exotic, far-flung lands, living like the natives among the natives in order to reinvent himself and coming back to tell the world how he had done it and whom he had done it with and what it was like there. The Greenland book would have to remain unfinished, and any future books would be about his life in the Adirondacks in the bosom of his family. From now on he would find his inspiration at home. And any solitary reinventing he did would be done in daylight, inside his studio.
A few moments of following the Tamarack River, and then he was above the fork where it joined the Bouquet River and doubled its width and depth, and he had entered the township of Petersburg and could see among the distant trees the chimneys and the black-shingled roof of his house. He began his descent, and for the first time in nearly a week he thought again about the war in Spain and the fight to save the republic from the Fascists, for that week the republic had begun issuing arms to civilians in Madrid, and when the airplane touched down and the pontoons sprayed high fantails of water behind it, Jordan Groves brought back to his mind the American men who were signing up for the Lincoln Brigade, many of them his friends and longtime political allies, and for a few seconds, as he taxied along the riverbank and brought the airplane up to the hangar ramp, he envied those men. But when he looked over to the side yard where the girl, Frances Jacques, was pushing Bear on the tire swing that hung from a high branch of the big oak, while Wolf at her side patiently waited his turn, the artist all at once ceased to envy the men who were enlisting to fight Fascism in Spain, and he concentrated instead on the promises he would make to his wife tonight. This time he would change his life right here at home. The war in Spain would have to be fought without him.
IN TOWN, HUBERT ST. GERMAIN SLOWED AND PARKED IN FRONT of Shay’s General Store and watched Vanessa Cole’s Packard continue on, speeding past the roadside lines of towering elms, headed for the clubhouse, where she would leave her car and walk the mile-long trail into the First Lake. It was a simple but somewhat arduous way to get from what passed for civilization to what passed for wilderness. You needed to be fit enough to make the hike into the boathouse at the First Lake, row a mile and a half across it to the Carry, where you took a different guide boat and rowed two more miles to the camp. In his shirt pocket Hubert had the list of supplies that Vanessa had written out for him at his cabin. It will take two trips, he thought, studying the list. Maybe three. He’d try to lug half the supplies in this afternoon, mostly the food, and bring in the rest tomorrow.
It looked from the list that she was planning to stay awhile, at least two weeks. Or even longer, she had implied, telling him to check at the clubhouse on the first of August, where, if she decided to stay on, she would leave a new list with Mr. Kendall. Hubert was not to come out to the camp unless she arranged for it beforehand. She wanted to be alone with her mother to share their grief over the tragic loss of her father at Rangeview, the one spot on earth that was sacred to him. Although Hubert did not think that the death of Dr. Cole was particularly tragic—Dr. Cole had enjoyed a good long life, after all, and his heart attack had killed him quickly—he was just as happy to stay away from the two women, so long as they didn’t need him for anything specific, because otherwise they tended to turn him into a generalized servant, a rustic houseboy, expecting him to stay out there at the camp and do for them all sorts of things that they could easily do themselves, without adding anything to the monthly retainer they paid him.
Dr. Cole had always been more respectful of the guide than his wife and daughter were, more aware that the guides and caretakers were specialists whose wilderness skills and knowledge, handed down over generations, had taken many years to acquire. In some ways, Dr. Cole was like Alicia, Hubert thought. They both enjoyed having him teach them as much as he could of what he knew and they did not—the names of the native flowers and plants and insects and the habits of the animals and the fish and the birds. They both wanted him to tell them who in town was related to whom and how. They even wanted to learn the histories of the houses and farms of Tunbridge and who had once owned the land. Dr. Cole had treated Hubert St. Germain as an equal, when, of course, in the eyes of the world he was not the doctor’s equal. No, the death of Dr. Cole by heart attack was not tragic. But Hubert would miss him nonetheless. Especially since from now on he would have to deal directly with the wife and the daughter.
It was not clear to him what Vanessa Cole had concluded back there at the cabin, but it was enough that she suspected he and Alicia were lovers. They would have to keep from seeing each other for at least as long as Vanessa Cole stayed at the camp. When she left the Reserve and returned to the city, he and Alicia could take the measure of any damage done and decide what to do then. But he knew they could not be together again the way they had been before.
In any event, he decided, until Vanessa Cole was gone from the Reserve, they would not be able to meet as they had. He was unsure of how to communicate this decision to Alicia. He did not want to write her a letter. He and Alicia had communicated only in person, never in writing. From the beginning, he had simply counted on her appearing at the door of his cabin three afternoons a week, except for when he was up at the lakes. All spring and into the summer, over and over again, she had knocked softly on his door and entered his life, making it seem suddenly large to him and precious and exciting. Before then it had felt small, nearly worthless, dull. And sorrowful. And lonely. Which was how it would have to be now, for a month, perhaps longer, possibly forever—depending on what Vanessa Cole did with her suspicions.
That’s all they were, though—suspicions. What could Vanessa Cole care if her hired guide and caretaker was having a love affair with a woman who happened to be the wife of a man she barely knew? The artist Jordan Groves wasn’t part of the Coles’ circle; he wasn’t even allowed on the Reserve or at the clubhouse, not since he’d landed his airplane at the lake and had that fight with Kendall. Also, Hubert had heard that Vanessa Cole was angry with the artist for flying her up to Bream Pond on the Fourth of July, the same night her father died, and leaving her there to walk back alone. If she was still angry with him, then she’d probably enjoy suspecting that the artist’s wife was sleeping with her family’s hired guide and caretaker. She’d like that. She wouldn’t want to do anything that helped end the affair. She’d want to keep her suspicions to herself.
Hubert walked up and down the aisles of the store, followed by Kenny Shay, the owner’s son, who carried the items the guide selected back to the counter and stacked them there—tinned beef, bacon, eggs, cheese, oatmeal, spaghetti, bread, butter, canned vegetables and fruit, sugar, and condensed milk, and hard goods, too, like candles and kerosene and soap—a long list of supplies that Hubert would lug into the lakes on his back and take across to the camp in his guide boat, where he knew Vanessa and her mother would need him to cut enough firewood to last
AS VANESSA NEARED THE CAMP, THE PACE OF HER ROWING picked up. She glanced over her shoulder at the shore, looking to avoid the rocky outcrop that extended into the water on either side of the landing, then scanned the deck and grounds, hoping for a few seconds that somehow she had hallucinated this or dreamed it, all of it, and she would see her mother and maybe even her father standing on the deck, dressed for dinner, cocktails in hand, anxiously awaiting her return. Ever since the meeting in New York at the lawyer’s office, Vanessa had felt that she was having one of those frightening dreams with no beginning or end, where you know you’re dreaming—you must be, because everything is out of control and unpredictable, and you feel guilty of some dark, unnamed crime—but you’re unable to wake from it.