The Reserve

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WHEN FINALLY NO ONE WAS WATCHING HER ANYMORE, THE beautiful young woman extracted herself from her parents and their friends and left the living room. She passed through the screened porch and crossed the deck and barefoot walked softly over the pine needles in front of the sprawling log building downhill toward the sheared ledges along the edge of the lake.

She knew that shortly the others would notice, not that Vanessa had left her father’s party, but that the light in the room had suddenly faded, and though it was still late afternoon and not yet dusk, they would see that the sun, because of the looming proximity of the Great Range, was about to slip behind the mountains. The Second Tamarack Lake was deep and long and narrow, like a Norwegian fiord, scraped by glaciers out of the north-and south-running Great Range of steep, granitic mountains, and the view from the eastern shore of the Second Lake at this hour in high summer was famous. Most of the group would take their freshened drinks in hand and, following Vanessa, would stroll from the living room down to the shore to watch the brassy edges of the clouds turn to molten gold, and then, turning their backs to the sky and lake, to compliment the way the pine and spruce woods on the slopes behind the camp shifted in the dwindling alpenglow from blue-green to rose and from rose to lavender, as if merely observing the phenomenon helped cause it.

After a few moments, when the alpenglow had faded, they would turn again and gaze at the lake and admire in silence the smooth surface of the water shimmering in metallic light reflected off the burnished clouds. And then at last they would notice Vanessa Cole standing alone on one of the tipped ledges that slipped into the water just beyond the gravelly beach. With her long, narrow back to her parents and their friends, her fingertips raised and barely touching the sides of her slender, pale, uplifted throat, Vanessa, gazing in dark and lonely Nordic thoughtfulness into the whole vast enclosed space between lake and forest and mountain and sky, would seem to be situated at the exact center of the wilderness, its very locus, the only meaningful point of it. For her parents and their friends, for an interesting moment, the drama of the disappearing sun would be Vanessa Cole’s.

There were nine people at the party, Dr. Cole’s 1936 annual Fourth of July celebration at the Second Lake — Vanessa and her parents, Carter and Evelyn Cole; Red Ralston and his wife, Adele; Harry and Jennifer Armstrong; and Bunny and Celia Tinsdale. The men had been classmates at Yale, Skull and Bones, class of 1908. Their wives, respectively, had gone to Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Mount Holyoke. All four couples had married young and had in their twenties borne their children, and their children, except for Vanessa, had in turn done the same. During the previous decades the men had made a great deal of money buying and selling stocks and bonds and real estate and from the practice of their professions — Dr. Cole was an internationally renowned, if somewhat controversial, brain surgeon; Red Ralston, Vanessa’s godfather, was a corporate lawyer who specialized in bankruptcies; Harry Armstrong owned a company that manufactured automobile tires; Bunny Tinsdale ran his father’s steel company — and husbands and wives both were old enough now to have found themselves in the process of inheriting homes and family fortunes from their dying parents. They and their parents and their children and grandchildren had not been much affected by the Great Depression.

Every year on the Fourth of July — other than during the war years, when Dr. Cole and Bunny Tinsdale were army officers stationed in France — the four families gathered together here at Rangeview, the Cole family’s Adirondack camp, to drink and fish and hike in rustic splendor and to celebrate their loyalties to one another, to their families, and to their nation. This year, except for Vanessa, all the children and grandchildren were spending the holiday elsewhere — on islands, as someone in the group had noticed, Mount Desert Isle, Long Island’s North Shore, Martha’s Vineyard — which had somewhat diminished the occasion in importance and intensity, although no one said as much. They acted as if the absence of their offspring were both desired by them and planned and were not, as it appeared, a changing of the guard. The Coles so far had no grandchildren. Their only child, Vanessa, was adopted and at thirty had been married and divorced twice, but had remained childless—“barren,” as she put it.

It was nearly silent there by the shore — low waves washing the rocks at Vanessa’s feet, a soft wind sifting the tall pines behind her — and she could hear her thoughts clearly, for they were cold and came to her in words and sentences, rather than feelings, as if she were silently reciting a list or a recipe she’d memorized years ago. She was not happy, Vanessa told herself, not one bit, and she wished that she had stayed in Manhattan. It was always the same here, year after year, her mother and father’s annual Fourth of July show, and though it was more her father’s show than her mother’s, that didn’t make it any better. Not for her. Everyone had a show, she believed, and this was not hers, not anymore, if it ever had been, when she heard in the distance a low humming sound, a light, intermittent drone that rose and fell, surged and lapsed back almost into silence and then returned and grew louder.

She realized that it was an airplane. She had never before heard or seen an airplane at the Second Lake. Rangeview was the largest of only a half-dozen rough-hewn log camps, a few of which were elaborately luxurious, located in the forty-thousand-acre privately owned wilderness, the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve. Vanessa’s grandfather Cole had been one of the original shareholders. When shareholders in the Reserve—members, they were called — or their invited guests flew up from Boston or New York City in a private airplane, which they sometimes did, as it was a long, arduous day trip on the Delaware & Hudson train to Westport and by automobile from there, they came up the Hudson Valley and flew in from Lake Champlain north of the mountain called Goliath. They landed their airplane in a broad, mowed pasture over in the village of Tunbridge, three miles west, where they were met by a car sent from the Reserve clubhouse, so that an internal-combustion engine was never heard nor an airplane seen inside or above the Reserve itself or even above the Tamarack clubhouse and golf course. The mountains and forests and the lakes and streams were held for the exclusive use and enjoyment of members and their guests, most of whom, at least those who did not have their own camp on the Second Lake, stayed at the grand, hotel-like clubhouse and the cottages that surrounded it. The mountains and forests and lakes and streams were off-limits to strangers, tourists, and the inhabitants of the several hamlets in the region — except of course for the local people lucky enough to be employed by the members at their camps or at the associated clubhouse, cottages, and golf course as servants, caretakers, cooks, caddies, and guides. They were allowed onto the Reserve and club grounds, but only to work, and not to fish or hunt or hike on their own.

Now Vanessa could hear the airplane clearly and steadily. Though she could not see it, she knew it was coming in from the north, flying low, tracing the Tamarack River to the First Lake and on to its headwaters here at the Second. Suddenly the airplane appeared in the northern sky just above a line of black silhouetted spruce trees. It was rising in the distance over the water quickly, its gleaming belly exposed to the waning sun, as if the pilot had decided to take in the view of the entire lake and surrounding mountains and the darkening sky, when she heard the engine cut back. The airplane — a pale gray biplane with scarlet trim and two open cockpits, a goggled, hatless pilot in the forward cockpit, the other empty — slowed there, seeming almost to pause in flight and hover, when it banked to the west, heading toward the mountain wall that plunged straight into the glittering water.

It was a seaplane with two large pontoons, and she thought she was watching a man about to crash his airplane deliberately against the thousand-foot vertical slab of gray granite, and she forgot her cold thoughts and grew almost excited, for she had never seen anyone kill himself and realized that in some small way she’d always wanted to and was surprised by it. The pilot seemed about to smash the airplane against the rock face of the mountain, when, less than a hundred yards from it, he banked hard to the left, dipped the wings back to horizontal, cut the engine speed nearly to stopping, and swiftly descended toward the water. The airplane touched down at the far side of the lake, broke the surface, and slid into the water, unfolding high fans of silver spray behind the pontoons. Vanessa was relieved, of course, but felt a flicker of disappointment, too.

Her parents and their friends stood smiling on the near shore in front of the camp. They clapped their hands appreciatively and gazed across in a welcoming way at the pilot of the airplane. Near them four Adirondack guide boats had been drawn up onto the bank and turned over to dry. Vanessa’s mother sat gracefully on one hull, her barefoot legs crossed at the ankles, and sipped champagne from a crystal flute. From her distance, Vanessa admired her mother’s gentle, slightly dreamy poise, and decided that it was the dress, a cream-colored, low-necked, beltless frock by Muriel King that hung straight from the shoulders. Her mother was in her early fifties, too old to look that good, Vanessa thought. It was the stylish designer dress and the simple gold bracelet, she decided. And the bare feet. The other women and the men, though they would no doubt dress more or less formally for dinner tonight, wore what they thought were north-woods hunting and fishing apparel — wool slacks, checked flannel shirts, rubber-soled boots: rugged Abercrombie & Fitch camp wear. Vanessa herself had on a pale blue sleeveless cotton blouse and a white pleated skirt that pointed nicely to her long, tanned legs and narrow feet. She wasn’t so much competitive with her mother’s appearance as wanting to distinguish it from hers, just as her mother, even if she had to wear dresses from Greta Garbo’s personal designer here at camp and go barefoot, seemed to want to distinguish her appearance from that of the other women, who were her oldest, dearest friends. More than either of them thought, however, or wanted to think, Vanessa Cole and her mother were alike.

At the far side of the lake in the cool shadow of the overhanging rock wall, the pilot pushed his goggles to his forehead, squinted, and peered across at the cluster of people standing by the overturned guide boats and, half hidden in the ancient pines behind them, the wide deck and screened porch and outbuildings of the camp. The airplane rocked gently in the water. The camp was a low structure made of barked, hand-sawn logs, a nice-looking place, larger and more lavish than he’d expected, and a lot less rustic. But he should have known: Dr. Cole was old New York and Connecticut money, piles of it. The pilot counted eight people — then, when he noticed the tall, slender figure of a woman standing a couple of hundred yards from the others, nine — and was surprised and a little downcast. When he’d accepted Dr. Cole’s invitation to come to the Second Lake and see his collection of Heldons, he had hoped for something a little more private. He hated having people watch him when he looked at pictures and wait expectantly for his remarks, which, despite his reluctance to say anything at all, he always felt compelled to make. Actually, what he hated was his inability to say nothing, simply to look at the pictures in thoughtful silence.

He saw Dr. Cole lift his cocktail glass in the air and extend it toward the airplane, and the pilot waved back. He inched the throttle forward, punched the pedal under his right foot and turned the pontoon rudders, bringing the airplane around to starboard. Gradually he increased engine speed and drove the aircraft out of the shade of the mountain into the twilight, thumping it through the low, dappled ripples and across the lake as if the aircraft were a motorboat. He knew it was forbidden to run a motorboat on the Tamarack Lakes — nothing allowed on the water but genuine, silent, handmade Adirondack guide boats — and wondered if there were rules against seaplanes. Not yet, but now that he’d flown his four-year-old Waco biplane in, give them a week and there would be.

The pilot scouted along the shore below the camp for a shallow beach and found it close by the young woman standing away from the others. She seemed lost in thought, in a blue mood, and did not look at him, but did not seem to be avoiding him, either. She was like an exhibit, a piece of sculpture set at the edge of the lake — part of the view. She was very pretty, he noticed when he drew near shore. Beautiful, even. She had high, almost Andean cheekbones and sharp, precise features, bright blue eyes, and full lips. She wore no makeup, or none that he could discern, and her long, gingery hair hung loosely over her shoulders. Broad shoulders for a slender woman, he noticed. She must be an athlete, a swimmer or a serious canoeist. Maybe she’s an actress, he thought. She looks like an actress. Her face was vaguely familiar to him, and then he remembered who she was.

He pulled the throttle back, shoved the rudders full left, and brought the airplane around and into the wind to keep it from slithering while anchored and getting itself all weather cocked. It would be nice if the Coles had a dock to tie up to, but there were rules, of course, against lakeside structures, other than the camps themselves, which had to be built a certain distance from the water and be as invisible from the lake as possible, and strictly on the Second Lake. The illusion of wilderness was as important to maintain as the reality. The pilot’s wife sometimes called the Reserve a zoo for trees, but that was extreme, he thought, a particularly European point of view.

Cutting the engine, the pilot stood in the cockpit, took off his goggles altogether, and scanned the slate blue lake from one end to the other in the near dark, quickly memorizing its dimensions and the ins and outs of its shoreline. He had meant to get over here earlier in the day but had made the mistake of ducking into his studio after breakfast and by the time he checked his watch it was nearly four thirty. Alicia had been right, it was a national holiday, and he should have allowed himself to forget his politics for once and enjoy the holiday like everyone else in America today, go down to the river with her and the boys for a Fourth of July picnic and then, while they were napping, fly over to the Reserve, see the doctor’s collection of Heldons, and be home before nightfall, in time to drive Alicia and the boys to watch the fireworks with the rest of the locals. But instead he’d worked late.

He eased himself from the cockpit and stepped onto the left pontoon, tossed his mud-hook anchors into the water, tugged at the lines until he knew they were snagged in the lake bottom, and kneeled and tied the lines tightly to cleats. The woman had turned and was watching him, still with the same distant, broody expression on her exquisite face. She had very smooth, white skin that shone. He glanced up at her. A world-class beauty who knows it, he thought. Nothing but trouble. He had recognized her face from photographs he’d been shown by Alicia. He knew she was Dr. Cole’s daughter, Vanessa, the one-time Countess de Moussegorsky or something like that. For years, ever since she’d been presented to society, both in New York and in Washington, she had been the subject of much gossip, local, national, and international, although the pilot was more familiar with the local than the rest, except for when Alicia from time to time called his attention to a piece in one of the glossy women’s magazines or Vanity Fair or the New Yorker or the society pages of one of the New York papers. Her celebrity was of a type that mattered more to Alicia than it did to him. The woman was nothing more than a socialite, for God’s sake. A parasite. Come the revolution, no more socialites.

He eased himself down from the pontoon into the shallow water and strode ashore, wetting his boots and his trousers to the knees and seeming not to care. Vanessa smiled and brought her hand to her mouth to cover it. The pilot’s easy, unselfconscious directness was a sudden relief to her, and all her gloom lifted. He wore a collarless leather jacket with ribbed cuffs and waistband and under it a white dress shirt open at the throat. The pilot was a large man, in his early forties, tall and broad, with big, square hands, and moved with the grace of a man who liked the feel and appearance of his own body, although he did not seem to be vain. His black straight hair fell loosely forward over his brow and gave him a harried, slightly worried look. Because of the goggles he wore when flying and his permanently tousled hair, his fair skin was unevenly tanned. He had very dark, almost black, deep-set eyes, and a prominent, long arc of a nose, and his face was wide, with a jutting chin, slightly underslung. He was not a remarkably handsome man, but to Vanessa — because of his size, his physical grace, intense coloring, and prominent, symmetrical features — an extremely attractive one nonetheless.

He stamped his boots on the ground and said hello to the woman, turned to the others in the distance and waved in a loosely friendly way and started walking toward them.

“Who are you?” the woman asked. Her voice was low and husky, a smoker’s voice.

He turned back to her and smiled. “Jordan Groves. From over in Petersburg. Who are you?”

“I’m not sure you’re allowed to bring an airplane in here,” she said.

“Me neither. Your father invited me over. He and I met on the train the other day coming up from the city.”

“So you know who I am.”

“Yeah, sorry.” He hesitated. “You’re Vanessa…”

“Von Heidenstamm.”

“Von Heidenstamm. Née…Cole.”

“Right. And you’re…”

“Jordan Groves.”

“The famous artist.”

“So they tell me.”

“Né…?”

“Groves.”

“Well, aren’t we something, then?” she said and came forward and, smiling up at him, hooked his arm with hers and walked him toward the others, who had waited for him by the shore until Vanessa seemed to have taken possession of the visitor and then they had moved away from the nearly darkened lake and were now making their leisurely way back up the piney embankment, returning to the camp.

As they walked, Jordan Groves glanced at her bare arms and said, “Aren’t you a little cold?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am. Let me have your jacket until we get inside.”

He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled gratefully and walked ahead of him, while he lagged a few steps behind and admired her long, confident strides and straight back and head held high as if she’d just done something to be proud of. A damned beautiful animal, he said to himself. But a woman to watch is all. Not to touch. Maybe to paint is all. Definitely a woman to be careful of. The way she walked reminded him of a woman he had met in Budapest many years ago, and her figure was like that of another he’d met in Toronto just last year. He hadn’t painted either woman and was glad of it, but he’d touched both, and both had left him feeling badly used — more by himself than by them.

When they reached the camp, Vanessa hooked the artist’s arm firmly with hers, and once inside proceeded to introduce him to the people there one by one, even to her father, as if Jordan Groves were her guest and not her father’s.

“Jordan Groves and I are practically old friends,” Dr. Cole said. “Am I right, Jordan?”

“Yes. Practically.”

There was a fire crackling in the huge stone fireplace. Mrs. Cole had lit the kerosene lamps and a few candles, and the room glowed in soft, rust-colored light. It was a large, handsome room, and the interior of the house smelled like the forest that surrounded it. Except for Dr. Cole and his wife, Evelyn, Jordan Groves forgot the names and faces of the houseguests as quickly as they were given to him. They each shook his hand and stepped away. Plutocrats, he decided at once. Leisure-class Republicans. People with inherited wealth and no real education and, except for the doctor, no useful skills. Not Groves’s sort, he knew, and they knew it, too, and were no more curious about him than he about them.

A seaplane landing in the lake, however — that was fairly intriguing. Quite a sight, way out here. The fellow probably thinks the rules are made for other people, though, not him. Another of Carter’s left-wing artist types. Among his friends and colleagues, Dr. Cole was himself a left-wing artist type — although he was certainly no supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and his so-called New Deal and was not an artist, merely a man who, since college, appreciated art and enjoyed a little amateur sketching and watercolor painting and photography. They thought of their old friend as harmlessly creative.

Mrs. Cole went to the bar to fix Jordan a whiskey. Dr. Cole said, “So glad you could make it, Jordan. Quite an entrance, I must say,” he said and laughed appreciatively. The doctor was nearly a foot shorter than Jordan, with the beginnings of a humped back that made him seem even shorter than he was. His pale face and round body were soft, jellied, but he had beautiful white hands with long, slender fingers. Of course, a surgeon’s hands, Jordan thought. The doctor’s grip was quick and careful, in and out, with no friendly squeeze or masculine shake. In another man, Jordan would have thought the handshake effeminate. With this man, merely careful. Protecting his tools.

“Yes, well, sorry about that,” Jordan said and looked around the large, high-ceilinged living room for the Heldons. After Jordan Groves himself, the most famous artist residing in the region was James Heldon. In fact, the two were among the best-known living artists in the country, at least among Americans. In those years the truly famous artists, the painters and sculptors prized by museums and serious collectors, were European. Though often linked by critics and reviewers, mainly because they both were figurative artists and American and resided at least part-time in the Adirondack mountains of northern New York, Groves and Heldon, as artists, were very different. Heldon’s oils and pastels were mostly transcendental, expressionistic landscapes of the north country — the mountains, lakes, and skies that the artist had lived among part-time for decades — and blurred, etherealized nudes of his wife. He was very popular in New York City and Philadelphia art circles. His paintings, in spite of being rather small, for he painted in the forest and on the mountains en plein air, sold for many thousands of dollars. The tonier and more academic critics loved him. Jordan Groves, on the other hand, was valued and known mainly for his graphic work — woodcuts, etchings, prints — although he also, but only occasionally, painted in oils and pastels and had done a number of celebrated murals for the WPA. He had become known increasingly, both in the United States and the Soviet Union, notoriously here, lovingly there, for his politics. Thus he was often compared to the great Mexican muralists Orozco, Sequeiros, and Diego Rivera. In recent years, however, he had become famous for his commissioned illustrations of limited-edition books — classics like The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn and Aesop’s Fables—for which he was paid large sums of money. While Jordan Groves admired James Heldon’s work, he had a nagging suspicion that Heldon, who was nearly the same age as he and whom he had so far avoided meeting, did not consider him a serious artist and thought of him as merely an illustrator and left-wing propagandist. As Jordan saw it, the problem, the crucial difference between the two north country artists, was political, not aesthetic.

Even so, James Heldon was himself viewed as a man of the left — at least by the critics and general public. He had spoken out often in support of the workers and any number of Roosevelt’s domestic programs, but he had always been careful to avoid being connected with causes and positions taken up by the Communist Party, the Comintern. Which was not Jordan’s way. Though Jordan had refused to join the party — he was not a joiner, he often said, but as long as the battle was just, didn’t care who fought alongside him — he had donated a group of his most valuable pictures to the Soviet people and had painted several murals in Moscow honoring the workers’ heroic role in the revolution. He wondered where Heldon would come down on this Spanish thing. The Italians were in the war now, and in spite of getting thrashed in March by the Spanish Republicans at Guadalajara, they were spoiling for a second go-round. Bombing Ethiopia in May had bolstered their confidence and had probably improved their flying skills.

Dr. Cole led Jordan Groves from painting to painting. Hanging on the varnished plank walls of Rangeview were more than a dozen small Heldon landscapes that he had purchased over the years from the artist himself, with a dozen more hanging in his Park Avenue apartment and their home in Tuxedo Park. Vanessa followed the two men, but kept a few feet behind them, silent and watching and listening, like a reluctantly roused predator, operating more on instinct than need. She liked the artist’s hard concentration, how he stood before each painting and literally stared at it for long minutes, as if it were alive and moving and changing shape and color before his eyes; and she liked that he offered no comment, no praise, compliment, or critique; just looked and looked and said nothing and moved on to the next, until he had seen them all, then returned to three or four of the landscapes for a second long look.

Her father, to his credit, did not ask Jordan’s opinion or evaluation of the pictures, although he was justly proud of having purchased them and proud of his personal friendship with James Heldon — who was, after all, practically an Adirondack neighbor and a fellow second-generation member of the Reserve — and confident of the long-term value of the pictures in the art market. Dr. Cole collected paintings that he loved to look at, but he also made sure that they were sound investments. He owned three John Marin watercolors that had been painted when Marin visited the region in 1912 and ’13, a large Jonas Lie, two very fine Winslow Homers, and a landscape by William Merritt Chase that he had inherited from his mother. They were the nucleus of a small, but tasteful and increasingly valuable collection. He insisted that his focus was solely on paintings of his beloved Adirondacks, but in Vanessa’s view her father collected art in order to collect artists, because he himself was not one and wished he were. And now, apparently, he was collecting Jordan Groves.

She reached out and touched Jordan on the shoulder. “Do you want your jacket back?”

“Thanks, yes,” he said and watched her slip it off her shoulders and allowed her to drape it over his. “Wouldn’t mind another whiskey, either,” he said and handed her his glass.

She went to the bar, and he drifted along behind, enjoying that particular perspective, and Dr. Cole followed him. Without looking at him, Jordan said to the doctor, “Those are fine pictures. Heldon is a lousy painter, you know, but a wonderful artist. It’s probably lucky for him that he can’t paint,” he said, and instantly regretted it. He knew that he was showing off for the girl. He should have said nothing, but once begun, it was hard to stop. “If he could paint, he’d be a lousy artist and merely a wonderful painter. Lucky for him he can’t. Lucky for you, too. Since you’ve bought so many of them,”

“What do you mean, ‘If he could paint, he’d be a lousy artist’?” Dr. Cole asked.

“He’s religious. Heldon is a forest Christian.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“If he could paint, he’d lose his religion, and he wouldn’t have anything to replace it with, except technique. And technique alone won’t hold value.”

“Daddy,” Vanessa said, “you shouldn’t expect one artist to praise another. Especially when he’s afraid the other artist is better than he is. You are, aren’t you, Mr. Groves? A little?”

“What?”

“Afraid.”

“Afraid of you, maybe. But not James Heldon.”

“Come, come, Vanessa,” Dr. Cole said. “Don’t get started. Here, while you’re doing that for Mr. Groves, refill my drink, too, will you?” He handed her his empty glass and stepped between his daughter and his guest.

Vanessa obeyed, but glanced back at Jordan like a cat who’d been interrupted at her meal and would soon return.

Timidly, a little reluctantly, the others in the group, once the artist had taken a seat by the fire and appeared to open himself to them, gathered near him and one by one made a polite effort to draw him into light conversation. Red Ralston’s suggestion that he ought to paint the early sunset, catch the alpenglow here at the Second Lake, went nowhere, and Ralston slipped off to the porch to smoke a cigar in the gloaming. Jennifer Armstrong asked Jordan if he’d ever been to the Second Lake before, and he said no, and she offered him a canapé, which he accepted. “But isn’t it lovely?” she asked him.

“What?”

“The Second Lake.”

He agreed, the Second Lake was lovely.

“What about the Reserve?” she asked.

“What about it?”

“Isn’t it lovely?”

He said yes, the Reserve was lovely.

“We’re damned fortunate Carter’s held on to the old family homestead,” said Harry Armstrong.

Dr. Cole laughed at that. “Yes, the ‘homestead’! Not quite, Harry. That’s still the family farm in Greenwich, and as soon as my mother goes, it goes, too.”

“Carter, really,” Mrs. Cole exclaimed.

Harry Armstrong said to Jordan, “I mean, we’re lucky because, even though we’re members, we can’t build our own camps out here on the lake. Not anymore. Got to preserve the Reserve, I guess. But at least we get to use Carter’s Rangeview. The Reserve’s put a freeze on any new construction up here, you know.”

Jordan said that he didn’t know.

Bunny Tinsdale was curious about Jordan’s airplane, was it his own?

“It’s a 1932 Waco,” Jordan told him. He’d bought it new at the factory in Troy, Ohio, four years ago and had flown it to Lake Placid, where he’d had it fitted out with pontoons. Then he had flown to his home on the Tamarack River, where he’d landed on water for the first time. “Nearly dumped the damned thing.”

“Interesting,” Tinsdale said. And how long had he been flying?

“Since I was a kid,” Jordan said. He took a sip from his drink. He didn’t want to talk about flying with this crowd.

“And where did you learn to fly?”

“Well, I took the army flying course at Ashburn Airport on Chicago’s South Side.”

“So you were in the war?”

“Yes. Late. In 1918. I was in the Ninety-fourth Aero Squadron.”

“You flew under Eddie Rickenbacker?” Dr. Cole said.

“Briefly.”

“Did you shoot down any Germans?” Vanessa asked and smiled.

“Yes. Two. Both on the same day.”

“And what day was that?” she asked.

“April 4, 1918.”

“Must have been quite a day,” she said.

He didn’t answer, and she smiled.

Bunny Tinsdale wanted to know about flying a plane with pontoons. “Is it harder than flying a regular plane? You know, with wheels?”

In the air the pontoons were deadweight and slowed the airplane down, Jordan explained, but in the water it wasn’t much different from running a motorboat. Once you got the hang of it.

“Where the heck do you actually fly?” Jennifer Armstrong wondered. “I mean, with those things on it, pontoons. What do you actually use it for?”

“Transportation,” Jordan said. He flew it mainly here and there in the north country.

“Interesting.”

But he was thinking of taking a trip to Greenland soon, Jordan told them, and would fly it there. He wanted to make some pictures of the glaciers to illustrate a book. An account of his previous travels there.

“Your own book? One you wrote yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting,” Jennifer Armstrong said and got up to make herself another drink.

“You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you, Mr. Groves?” Evelyn Cole said. “We have a dozen lake trout from this morning’s expedition. Our boys are very good providers.”

The pilot felt suddenly physically fatigued, as if he’d been running. He took a few seconds to answer, then said, “I don’t think so. It’s getting dark, and I’m expected at home. But thanks.” He wondered if her “boys” were the doctor and his friends, or the local men working in the kitchen shack out back. His friend, Hubert St. Germain, was the regular guide and caretaker for the Coles. He wondered if Hubert was the good provider.

Maybe he ought to stay for dinner, Jordan thought. He was as aware as Vanessa that the good doctor collected artists, but the man also collected art, and Jordan had a few small, unsold Adirondack landscapes and a dozen woodcuts that he wouldn’t mind placing in Dr. Cole’s collection. They might make the doctor reconsider his passion for James Heldon. Jordan was conscious of Vanessa standing behind him, and he waited for her to say something that he would have to defend himself against without at the same time alienating her father. It was not easy for him to be polite to these people.

But Vanessa said nothing. It amused her to see the degree to which her parents and their friends bored and slightly irritated the artist and the ways he did the same back to them. She left the room for a moment and returned wearing a pale linen jacket over her blouse. She made herself a martini and again took up her position behind Jordan, who was slumped in a wide, cushioned chair made of wrist-thick branches of a birch tree with the bark left on for rustic effect. It was an uncomfortable chair, and she could tell from his glum expression that to Jordan it was also ugly and pretentious, and so it was to her now, too. Most of the furniture was of that type — it was the desired style, meant to look handmade, cumbersome, rough, as if built by a local woodsman with ax and adze, which was in fact the case — but up until this moment she had seen it only through her parents’ and their friends’ admiring eyes.

She leaned down and placed her face next to Jordan’s and whispered, “I won’t be happy until you take me for a ride in your airplane.” Her cheek nearly brushed his, then pulled away. The others seemed not to notice. They were discussing the annual fireworks display at the Tamarack clubhouse tonight, which they could not see from the camp unless they rowed out to the far side of the lake in the guide boats around nine o’clock and faced the northeast sky above the distant clubhouse and golf course. They wondered whether it would be worth the effort.

“When?” Jordan asked her.

“Now,” Vanessa said.

Jennifer Armstrong said, “I hate to complain, but every year I’m rather disappointed. The fireworks are really mostly for the locals, I think.”

“Good public relations,” Bunny Tinsdale said. “Bread and circuses for the hoi polloi.”

Jordan stood and declared that he had to leave. He thanked the doctor for his hospitality and for showing him the Heldons, nodded to the group, and quickly departed from the room. The sun had disappeared entirely behind the Great Range, and the lake was black, and the temperature was dropping fast. Outside on the deck he stopped to roll and light a cigarette and checked the wind. In the west, above the sooty mountains, the sky had faded from lemon to silken gray. The air was still smooth, he noted. The blue-black eastern sky was clear, with swatches of stars already visible, and over the treetops behind the camp a half-moon was rising. The pilot smoked his cigarette and made his way in the gathering darkness down the path to the lake and walked along the shore to his anchored airplane.

She was waiting for him when he got there. She stood barefoot on the rocky beach in her white skirt and linen jacket, looking eager and elegant and brave. Jordan said nothing to the woman, and she said nothing to him. He stepped into the water and she followed. Grabbing a wing strut with one hand, he swung himself onto the nearer pontoon, turned, and extended his other hand to her. Refusing his help, she stepped gracefully onto the pontoon and made her way along the lower wing to the aft cockpit and situated herself there.

Jordan untied and retrieved first one anchor, then the other, and quickly seated himself in the forward cockpit. He switched on the ignition, double-checked fuel and oil-pressure gauges, and started the large radial engine. The propeller rotated feebly for a few seconds, then the engine coughed, grumbled, and came to life. Jordan cut the float rudders to starboard, bringing the airplane around, facing it into the light northeast wind. He nudged the throttle forward, and the aircraft began to accelerate, bumping across the low ripples of the lake on a bearing that took it gradually away from shore, toward the farther side of the narrow lake.

As the airplane passed the camp, Jordan glanced to his right and saw that Dr. Cole and his guests had come out onto the deck. They watched the airplane reach the far side of the lake where it had first touched down and thought they saw a passenger in the cockpit behind the pilot, but couldn’t make out who it was.

Without breaking speed, the pilot brought the airplane around to starboard again, carving a tight turn into the northeast, heading it directly into the wind, then pushed the throttle ahead another notch, accelerating as it came out of the turn. At about forty knots, the airplane squarely hit the step, the gathering surge of water just ahead of the pontoons. As the nose of the airplane rose, the pilot pulled back on the control yoke and pushed the throttle all the way forward. For a few seconds the airplane fought the water, working its way up and over the step, until it leveled off, and then it was airborne and climbing.

From the deck of the camp, Dr. Cole and his wife and their friends watched the airplane rise off the surface of the lake and soar overhead and disappear into the night sky behind them, and when they turned to go back inside and get dressed for dinner, they realized almost as one that the artist’s passenger was Dr. Cole’s daughter, Vanessa. No one said it aloud until the couples were in their respective bedrooms — Dr. Cole and his wife in the master suite, a large, high-ceilinged bedroom just off the living room, with its own fireplace, and the others in the guest quarters, a low structure called the Lodge that was attached to the main building by a roofed-over walkway — when husband and wife said to each other, “Well, that was fast,” and, “I don’t know where she gets the nerve…,” and, “I didn’t even see her leave the room.”

Dr. Cole pulled on his dinner jacket, brushed his lapels, and shot his cuffs. Checking himself in the mirror, he straightened his bow tie and said to his wife, “What do you think? Is she all right?”

“No, of course not! When has Vanessa ever been ‘all right,’ Carter?”

The doctor sat down heavily on the bed and placed his right hand over the left side of his chest and winced. His face had gone pale, and he was sweating.

“What’s wrong?” his wife said.

“Nothing.”

“You don’t look right.”

“I’m fine, damn it! Leave me alone! It’s just…” He grabbed his left arm, high up.

“No, you’re not fine. Are you in pain?” She came over to him and put her hands on his shoulders and stared at him.

“It’s…it’s just indigestion. Heartburn is all. Leave me alone,” he said and shook her off him. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered through gritted teeth, “I’m a doctor, I know when something’s wrong.”

WITH THE ALTIMETER READING 2,250 FEET, JORDAN SLID THE wheel slowly, smoothly forward, pulled back the throttle, and stopped climbing. He put the airplane on a heading for the clubhouse grounds two miles away. Below them the black forest flashed past. Jordan turned in the cockpit and looked back at Vanessa. She was smiling broadly, her hair tossed wildly by the wind. She lifted her arms over her head and opened her hands wide.

“Can you fly an airplane?” he shouted above the roar of the engine and the wind.

“Of course not!”

“Put your hands on the wheel!”

“What?”

“You fly it! Hold on to the wheel!”

She grasped the control yoke with both hands, looked at him as if for approval, and he nodded. She’s done this before, he thought.

“You’re sure you’ve never flown an airplane?”

“Never!”

He said, “Okay. Five things to remember! Five precepts.”

She laughed. “Only five?”

“Observe! Think! Plan! Execute! And abandon! You use abandon if execute doesn’t work, and then you go back to observe!”

“Okay!” she shouted. “You’re crazy, you know!”

He let go of the yoke, and suddenly Vanessa was flying the aircraft. She seemed too eager to take the controls, too fearless. He kept his hands loosely on the yoke, not giving the airplane over entirely to her. He was not convinced that she had never flown before. He turned back and asked her to repeat the five precepts.

“Observe!” she began. “Think! Plan…and what?”

“Execute!”

“Right, execute! And abandon!”

“Good! So what do you observe?”

“Oh, Christ! Everything!”

“Start with altitude, bearing, speed!”

“Okay, okay, okay!” she yelled and looked down at the gauges. “Altitude! I’ve got the altitude! And the compass, so that’s bearing! And here’s speed!”

“Good! What else can you observe?”

She peered around his broad shoulders and over the cowling and saw in the distance the moonlit roof of the clubhouse and some other smaller buildings nearby and the broad expanse of the golf course and then more dark forest and beyond the forest the mountains, Sentinel and the big one, Goliath. “Oh, my God! Mountains coming up!”

“Right! So think! Precept two!”

“We’re not high enough.”

“Right! So plan! Precept three!”

She nodded soberly and said nothing. Jordan smiled and waited for her to try gaining altitude on her own. They passed over the rambling rooftops of the Tamarack clubhouse and cottages and outbuildings, the automobiles and trucks and horse-drawn buggies parked along the roadway and in the oval drive, and the large crowd of people waiting on the side of the eighth fairway for the fireworks to begin, their faces all upturned, gazing at the biplane as it soared over them and on into the Adirondack night.

He felt the yoke under his hands move slowly, steadily back, felt the nose lift slightly as the airplane lost speed and gained altitude, and knew that she was executing. Not enough speed, though, and not enough lift. “Give it some more power!” he shouted. A few seconds later the engine noise grew louder, and they began climbing faster. The airplane rose up and over the treeless cliffs of the summit of Sentinel, topping it by less than five hundred feet. Now they were passing over Bream Pond, toward Goliath, but the airplane needed to gain another fifteen hundred feet quickly to avoid slamming into the broad, granite shoulder of the mountain, and there was not enough time to do it at this speed, unless she abandoned her plan and cut hard to starboard, bringing the airplane back toward Bream Pond, Sentinel, and the Tamarack clubhouse and grounds. He waited five seconds, ten, and figured he had five more before he’d take over the airplane, when he felt the yoke turn in his hands a few degrees to the right, from twelve o’clock to two. The airplane dipped to the right, but was losing altitude. Then gaining speed, fighting torque, and pulling out of the turn. But it was too low now and headed for a stand of tall pines on a bluff east of the mountain, unless she saw the notch ahead and slightly to the right and aimed for it.

“Observe!” he yelled and pointed at the notch, a cleft between the pine-topped bluff and the cliffs on the south side of Bream Pond.

She righted the airplane and brought it slowly around, flashing through the notch and missing the trees below by barely a hundred feet. Suddenly they were flying over the still, moon-silvered waters of Bream Pond. Jordan tightened his grip on the controls and took over the aircraft.

“Hey!” she shouted. She tried to turn the wheel left and right, pushed it forward and back. Nothing happened. The airplane was his again. “I’m not through yet!” she yelled.

“Yes, you are,” he said, and he slowed the plane to ninety knots, then seventy, and looped around at the far end of the pond, and came back up its length, where he dropped it into the water a few hundred yards from shore. He taxied back to a short, sandy beach and let the airplane drift to a halt in shallow water, and shut down the engine. The world was suddenly silent, except for the dying waves from the airplane’s wake lightly slapping the pontoons.

“This is a good place to watch the fireworks,” he said to her and pointed back the way they had come. “You can sit here and see them through the notch.”

“Brilliant!” she exclaimed. “But better from the shore,” she said, and hitching her skirt to her long white thighs, she climbed out of the cockpit and splashed to the beach. “Come on! Follow me!” She made her way quickly up the slope, to where an overgrown lumber road passed the pond, and waved to him from there. “C’mon! There’s a grassy clearing I know just down the road where the view is truly splendid. I walk up here lots to swim in the pond and picnic and get away from the family. We can lie on our backs and see the whole valley and sky from there!”

Jordan watched her as she disappeared behind a stand of white birches gleaming in the moonlight. She reappeared seconds later on the far side of the trees, striding down the narrow dirt road toward the opening to the valley and the clear view of the Tamarack clubhouse and golf course below. He watched her walk out of moonlight into darkness, and he knew what would happen if he followed. He started the engine, and the airplane drifted down shore a ways, where he brought it around to face the wind and open water.

“Hey! Where the hell are you going?” she hollered.

“Home! It’s late!”

“What? You’re leaving me here?”

“You left me, remember? Once you abandon ship, there’s no getting back aboard!”

“You bastard!”

He didn’t answer. He shoved the stick forward and quickly moved across the smooth water, hit the step, and accelerated across the skin of the pond as if on skids on ice. Then the airplane lifted free of the water and rose with a roar into the darkness. He was flying through the notch at about twenty-five hundred feet, still climbing, and prepared to make the long, rising turn to the northeast, to pass over Goliath and on to Petersburg and the Tamarack River and his home, where he was late and his wife and sons awaited him, when he looked off to his left and saw the sky light up. A battery of hissing rockets sent long, fiery arcs of red, yellow, green, and blue into the blackness, like thunderbolts cast against the gods. High in the sky above the Reserve, the rockets finished their ascent, lost their force and floated for a second, and one after the other exploded with a luminous flash — gigantic flowers of light that instantly faded, crumpled, and dissolved in the night. Trails of sparks floated back to earth like brightly colored petals. A thunderous boom echoed across the valley, and the sky filled with darkness again.

Shortly after midnight on Monday, May 3, 1937, the night train from Zurich left Switzerland, passed through Liechtenstein, stopped at Bregenz in Austria, and traveled on to the eastern shore of Lake Constance, where Switzerland, Austria, and Germany converge. At 3:30 A.M. eastern European time, as the train rounded the lake, the sky brightened, and the passengers, those who were awake, turned in their seats and admired the glistening white peaks and the blue water. The train was not crowded. Most of the passengers were Swiss businessmen traveling to initiate or complete transactions with German manufacturers and government procurement agencies. Among the passengers were a Swiss doctor in his midthirties wearing a gray wool suit and white shirt and knotted silk necktie, indistinguishable from the businessmen, and a young American woman who slumped sleeping in her seat beside him. They were alone in their first-class compartment. The man had been reading a book and now gazed intently out the window. The woman wore a tailored, brown tweed jacket and skirt and a black, wide-brimmed, Lilly Dache hat with a veil that covered her forehead and half covered her pale face. She wore no jewelry or makeup, and her long auburn hair was disheveled and needed brushing. The man nudged the young woman and pointed out the window at the lake and the mountains. Very beautiful, he said in English. The woman opened her eyes and sat up straight in the seat. She squinted and peered out the window as instructed. Where are we? she asked. We are in Germany, he answered. The town of Friedrichshafen. He indicated the three most prominent mountains south of the lake and said, Hoher, Churfirsten, and Santis. After a few seconds she said, Oh, and slumped back in her seat again and closed her eyes under the veil. In seconds the woman appeared to be sleeping. The train followed the glittering waters of the Rhine north and west into the German heartland. At exactly 7:14 A.M. central European time, as scheduled, the night train from Zurich arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt.