The Reserve

9

OVERNIGHT THE WIND GREW STRONGER, A WIND OUT OF THE north that blew the smoke south in the Reserve, away from the village of Tunbridge and the Tamarack Club, driving smoke deeper into the forested valleys and slopes of the Reserve and up the steep sides of the southern tier of the Great Range, across the peaks there and on to the rolling farmlands and villages, where the smoke dissipated finally into a haze, then rose into the dark sky, undetected by humans anywhere, within the Reserve or without, making it the private knowledge only of the animals and birds residing in the Reserve, the deer and bears and coyotes, the bobcats and fisher cats, the foxes, martins, and mink, the hawks and eagles and ravens on the rock-topped peaks, and, on the lakes below and in the cold streams tumbling into the lakes, the beavers and the loons and the lingering Canada geese, and, standing in the muskegs and shallows of the headwaters of the Tamarack River, the herons and cranes, and the owls returning from their nocturnal hunts to roost in the high branches of the spruce and pine trees, where, still higher and in among the crags, the solitary cougar lifted its heavy head from sleep and smelled the smoke drifting downwind from the Second Lake, and the great cat moved off the rocky ledge and made its way down through the conifers to the open birch forest below and loped still farther down to the bands of oak, hickory, maple, and poplar that crossed the lower valleys that lay between the mountain ranges of the Reserve: all the animals and birds in steady, uniform migration from north to south, an instinctual response to the smell of smoke, a felt command registering in their collective brain to track the smoke, not to its source, as humans do, but to where it grew faint and they could no longer see or smell it, even though obedience to the command drove them from the safety of the wilderness toward villages and farms beyond the southern boundaries of the Reserve, to where humans lived, where the forests had been cut and roads laid down and life for the wild animals and birds of the Reserve was a dangerous enterprise and food was scant and often protected by loud, barking dogs and men and boys with guns.

Consequently, it was nearly dawn, an hour before daybreak, with the wind shifting from the north around to the south and building to ten knots and steady, that the first early rising residents of Tunbridge, the village nearest the Reserve, woke and stepped outside to let their dogs run or trundled to the barn to feed the livestock and milk the cow or went to the henhouse to fetch the breakfast eggs, and they smelled wood-burning smoke floating down the Tamarack Valley from somewhere inside the Reserve. At the Tamarack clubhouse, Tim Rooney, the lone night watchman, a tall, sharp-shouldered man who people said looked like a young Abe Lincoln, made his last round along the long, dimly lit hallways of all three floors of the building and passed through the dark, cavernous dining room, where the stuffed moose head hung from the wall above the six-foot-high brook-stone fireplace, and checked the several members’ lounges and cocktail bar, the library and game room, the kitchens, the nursery, strolled past the locked door of the manager’s office and the greeting desk, and stepped out the main entrance of the clubhouse onto the open porch carrying two folded flags, the red, white, and blue American flag with its forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes and the green Tamarack Wilderness Reserve flag with the interlocking white TWR.

The watchman stood on the porch for a few seconds and studied the slowly graying eastern sky and observed that it might rain later in the day. He wrinkled his nose and inhaled and smelled wood smoke and wondered why on a late July dawn one of the members residing in the cottages attached to the Club would want a fire in his fireplace. An evening fire was nice, regardless of the season, to take the chill off and cheer the company, but an early morning fire in July, the hottest July on record, was more trouble than it was worth, a waste of good wood. He looked down the line of bungalows facing the golf course to see which chimney was giving off smoke, but it was still not quite light enough for him to see clearly, so he took a stroll along the lane and studied each of the six cottages close up with his flashlight beam. All the chimneys were cold, and all the windows were dark; the members and their families and guests were still asleep.

Puzzled, he walked back to the flagpole and hooked the American flag to the line and hoisted it and followed with the TWR flag and stood back a ways and watched them flutter prettily in the steady south wind. It was a morning ritual, the watchman’s last act before signing out and walking to his house in Tunbridge three miles north of the clubhouse. It was a way for him to check the direction of the coming weather. Last night, under a full moon, when he took the flags down, the light wind had been out of the north, driving clouds down from Canada. Sometime during the night the clouds had erased the moon, and now this morning’s wind was coming from the south, promising change — lower temperatures, and rain, probably, which Tim Rooney hoped would not fall before he got home to eat his breakfast with his wife and children and sleep for an hour and return here by noon to commence his day job tending the greens at the golf course. He felt lucky to have two jobs, even though they were only seasonal. Most people he knew barely had one.

He smelled that smoke again and caught sight of two of the women from town who worked in the kitchen, Florence Pease and Katie Henson, walking up the long hill from the road to the clubhouse. He waited for them out behind the clubhouse at the service entrance to the kitchen, and when they arrived there he said good morning and asked them if they smelled smoke or was he imagining it? Both women assured him that he wasn’t imagining it, they had smelled it all the way from town. But it wasn’t coming from anywhere in town or from the clubhouse grounds, it seemed to be coming from someplace inside the Reserve, they said. He asked if anyone had rung the fire bell. Like most able-bodied men and older boys in Tunbridge, the watchman was a member of the volunteer fire department, and if the big cast-iron bell on top of the firehouse had been rung, he’d be obliged to get back to the firehouse in town as fast as he could, catch breakfast where and when he could, and forget about his morning nap.

But the women said no, no fire bell, not while they were in hearing range.

If the fire was inside the Reserve, the watchman told the women, and it evidently was, then someone would have to climb a mountain, Goliath or Sentinel, for a look-see. They agreed. But they had work to do, they had to prepare breakfast for over a hundred members and their families and guests staying in the cottages and clubhouse bedrooms and suites, so maybe he should be the one to scoot up Goliath or Sentinel, where a view of the whole forty thousand acres of the Reserve could be easily obtained.

Goliath, seven hundred feet higher than Sentinel, provided the better view — there was talk of the CCC building a fire tower on the summit next year — and Tim Rooney, who was strong and young and fit, managed to reach the top of the mountain in less than an hour. By then the sky was covered by a rippled white blanket of high clouds from Canada, and the Tamarack Valley and village of Tunbridge north of the mountain and the entire broad expanse of the Reserve south of it sprawled below in full daylight. The watchman peered from his perch on top of the bare gray peak and traced the Tamarack River back upstream from the village, over the meadows of the outlying farms and into the woods that surrounded the clubhouse grounds and golf course, and saw no smoke. He looked through the woods, past waterfalls and gorges along the narrow lane that led from the clubhouse to the First Lake, across the First Lake to the Carry, and over the Carry to the Second Lake, where the half-dozen much-prized, privately built lakeside camps were situated on lakeside land leased from the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve, and saw no smoke. Then, halfway down the eastern shore of the Second Lake, the watchman located the source of the smoke. One of the camps was burning, or it had already burned to the ground, he couldn’t tell from this distance; and the fire was no doubt going to spread to the nearby forest, or it had already spread into the forest and was burning its way up the wooded slopes behind the camp. It was too far for him to see with his naked eye, but there was the strong likelihood of a forest fire, if not the reality of one.

Descending as rapidly as he could, the watchman ran to the clubhouse and found the manager in the dining room eating breakfast alone at a corner table, anxious and puzzled by the faint burning smell that had greeted him when he’d left his cottage a half hour earlier. The manager received the watchman’s news from the mountaintop with sober equanimity, almost as if he’d expected it, although it was only the sort of thing he’d been expecting since his little talk the evening before with Hubert St. Germain. He folded his napkin and sighed audibly and told the man to drive to town in the Club’s one vehicle, a wood-sided International Harvester truck that had been fitted out with bench seats for up to ten members and their luggage. Raise the alarm, he instructed the watchman, if it hasn’t already been done, and call out the volunteer firemen. He himself would ring the clubhouse dinner bell and rouse as many of the members and guests as were willing to help fight the fire and he would outfit them with shovels and buckets and lead them into the Second Lake.

The manager had no doubt as to which camp up there was burning. Rushing from the dining room to ring the bell, he glanced at his watch — a quarter to eight — and nearly bumped into the guide Hubert St. Germain, coming in. The guide quietly told him what he already knew, that there was a fire at the Second Lake, and added that fire bells were ringing all over the county, calling out the volunteers. They needed permission from the manager to drive the fire trucks and other vehicles onto clubhouse grounds in order to get into the First Lake. They also needed permission to use the guide boats there for transporting the firefighters over the lake to the Carry and on. The manager nodded his approval and told Tim Rooney, the watchman, to ring the dinner bell out on the porch steadily until he had everyone who was willing and able to help fight the fire out of bed and gathered here on the porch. He said to give them as many shovels and buckets as he could find in the gardeners’ sheds and carry them in the truck up to the First Lake boathouse, where he would meet them and lead them the rest of the way in. There were guide boats in the boathouse for no more than fifty firefighters, the manager said, and the volunteers from town had first claim on them, so the members and guests would have to be prepared to hike the whole way in to the Second Lake by way of the East Shoreline Trail, which was seldom used and thus was much overgrown with brush and blowdown.

By now fire trucks from Tunbridge and the nearby villages of Sam Dent, Mascoma, and Petersburg were arriving full speed at the clubhouse, along with cars and pickup trucks filled with volunteer firemen in their fire helmets and knee-length waxed coats. One by one, the long line of vehicles drove quickly past the clubhouse and into the Reserve.

No one knew yet what the firefighters would find when they finally got up to the Second Lake. It would be nearly midmorning by then. They might find a single camp or outbuilding partially or wholly destroyed by a fire that could be easily contained and extinguished by a bucket brigade hauling water from the lake; or they might find the beginnings of a forest fire, which they could capture and control with trenches and limited burns until it burned itself out; or they might come out of the Carry and look across the lake and see half the eastern forest in flames, in which case they could only pray for rain.

HUBERT ST. GERMAIN WAS AMONG THE FIRST GROUP OF FIREFIGHTERS the Tunbridge Volunteers, to cross the Carry. Coming along right behind the Tunbridge contingent were the Petersburg men and boys. Though he was a member of the Petersburg Volunteers, Jordan Groves was not among them. The distant tolling of the bell had penetrated his dream-tossed sleep and had accompanied his dream for a long while, and when at last he woke, it took him several minutes to clear his head of the dream and determine where he was and what he was actually hearing. He was in his studio, where late last night, after finishing off half a bottle of Cuban rum, he had fallen asleep in his chair. He telephoned the firehouse and learned that the fire was in the Reserve, at the Second Lake, and the Petersburg trucks had already left. If he wanted to join them, he could drive his own car to the clubhouse and go in from there, or he could fly his airplane in. The artist pointed out that there were rules against landing a seaplane in the Reserve lakes. The dispatcher at the firehouse told him to forget the rules, they might need the airplane up there today.

Like Russell Kendall, Jordan Groves had no doubt as to where exactly the fire was located, and he put his plane down on the lake a short ways out from the Cole camp at about the same time as the boats arrived carrying the rest of the Petersburg firefighters and Hubert St. Germain and the men and boys from Tunbridge. Among them were Ben Kernhold and Darby Shay and his son Kenny and a batch of Kenny’s teenage friends — they’d joined the Tunbridge Volunteers with the hope of getting to fight a forest fire while school was in session, but not like this, when school was out — and Buddy Eastman and Rob Whitney and Carl James. Sheriff Dan Peters and three of his deputies from Mascoma, the county seat, were there, along with thirty or thirty-five more men and boys, even including the reclusive artist James Heldon, who owned a house and studio in the village of Sam Dent. He, like Jordan Groves, spent a great deal of time in New York City and elsewhere, advancing his art, and thus was only a part-time member of the Sam Dent Volunteers. Finally, making their way slowly through the tangled brush and cumbersome rocks of the eastern shore — led by the intrepid manager of the Tamarack Club, Russell Kendall, and his lieutenant, the night watchman, Tim Rooney — came the members and guests of the Club who had volunteered to fight the fire, ten or twelve of them, including Dr. Cole’s old friends from Yale, Red Ralston and Harry Armstrong, and Ambassador Thomas Smith, all of them determined to save their ancient, beloved Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.

ACCORDING TO LATER REPORTS, PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED, but generally conceded to be accurate by those who were present, by the time the firefighters arrived at the site, the main building of the camp called Rangeview had burned nearly to the ground, with only the large brook-stone fireplace chimney left standing. The nationally known artist James Heldon managed to retrieve from the wreckage of the house one of what he claimed were twelve high-priced paintings that he had placed on loan to the late Dr. Cole. The artist was confident that the appraised value of the eleven destroyed paintings would be covered by the late doctor’s fire insurance. However, most of the rest of the furniture, household goods, and personal possessions were destroyed or so badly damaged by smoke and by water tossed onto the dying fire by the bucket brigade as to be unsalvageable. The firefighters with great effort managed to confine the fire to the nearby grounds and, with the exception of several large pine trees located next to the main building, saved the surrounding trees and outbuildings and kept the fire from spreading to the adjacent forest. They were aided in this by the heavy rain that began to fall within minutes of their arrival at the site.

On the basis of pale green pieces of shattered glass found in the fireplace and certain other evidence, Essex County sheriff Dan Peters stated that the fire appeared to have been started by a kerosene lantern either thrown or, much less likely, accidentally dropped into an already lit fire in the fireplace. It was assumed by all that the person who threw — or dropped — the lamp was Vanessa Cole. Vanessa’s mother, Evelyn Cole, was at first thought to have been in residence at Rangeview at the time of the fire. But the region’s other well-known artist, Jordan Groves, said that he had flown Mrs. Cole from the Second Lake over to Westport on Lake Champlain the previous evening. Presumably, she had made her way to the Westport rail station and later returned by train to her home in Tuxedo Park, New York. It therefore appeared that at the time of the fire Vanessa Cole was alone at Rangeview. Russell Kendall, the manager at the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve Club, and the guide Hubert St. Germain confirmed this.

When the firefighters first arrived at the camp, Vanessa Cole was nowhere to be found, and it was feared that she had perished in the fire. The firefighters, once they had succeeded in keeping the fire from spreading to nearby trees and the outbuildings, searched in vain through the still smouldering rubble for the remains of the woman. Meanwhile, the artist Jordan Groves, guided by intuition and a more thorough and intimate knowledge of Vanessa Cole’s mind than that available to the others present, left the group and bushwhacked his way uphill through the dense woods behind the camp and discovered the poor woman in a clearing about a quarter mile away. As he did not bring Vanessa in until sometime later, many of those present did not learn firsthand what had happened to her or even that she had been found by Jordan Groves. It was raining very heavily by then, and many of the firefighters and most of the volunteers from the clubhouse had started making their way back, either along the shoreline trail or across the lake by guide boat to the Carry and from there on to the First Tamarack Lake, where a second flotilla of guide boats awaited the brave, exhausted men and boys of the Adirondacks and the loyal members and guests of the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.

JORDAN GROVES STRODE QUICKLY UPHILL FROM THE CHARRED remains of the house and after a few moments of climbing through the stand of red pines saw Vanessa Cole in the clearing a short ways beyond. She was seated on the ground at the grave of her mother. She was still wrapped in the sheet, sopping wet from the rain, and was visibly trembling from the cold, and as he entered the clearing and drew near her, he saw that beside her on the ground lay a shovel — the same shovel that he and Hubert had used to bury Vanessa’s mother. Next to the shovel was a thick, brown, cardboard file folder tied with a black ribbon.

Vanessa was speaking, at least her lips were moving, but all Jordan heard was a low murmur cut with static and broken hisses, the same sound she had breathed into his ear that morning at Rangeview, the day they’d dropped Dr. Cole’s ashes into the lake. It had seemed intimate and erotic then, a teasing invitation. But it sounded like madness now. She stared straight at the grave of her mother and seemed to be addressing her — addressing the woman’s ghost, perhaps, or Vanessa’s memory of her mother from long ago, because there was a childlike tone to her voice, making sentences that ended with an upturn, a question mark. For a moment Jordan thought that she was mocking her mother in a little girl’s voice — he heard her say a great fall, or perhaps it was grateful, and together again, or maybe it was never again, and on a wall—words that emerged from a running stream of words in a grammar other than English. Or maybe it was a childhood nonsense song he was hearing, or a nursery rhyme.

He knelt beside her and realized that she was still naked under the cold wet sheet. He shucked his heavy waxed fireman’s coat and draped it over her shoulders. She stopped speaking then — it was more a noise that had stopped than speech, but a noise filled with feelings he’d never before heard articulated by her, nor by anyone else he’d known. Feelings he had no name for.

“Can you stand?” He held her by the elbows, ready to lift her to her feet.

“Yes, of course,” she said, and without his help moved gracefully to a standing position.

He backed away, surprised, once again unable to distinguish between authenticity and performance, unable to know for certain if she was mad in actual fact or was acting mad, was lost to herself in pain or merely imitating it — and if imitating pain, then what was she really feeling? For she had to be feeling something, didn’t she? No one could be alive and conscious and not feel something.

“Did you set the fire, Vanessa?”

“Yes.”

“Was it an accident?”

“Not really.”

“‘Not really.’ Why did you come up here, Vanessa?”

She pointed at the file folder. “To bury that. I could have let it burn in the fire. Maybe I should have let it burn. Turn it into ashes, like Daddy. I was going to. But then I wanted to bury it with my mother. Put it in the ground with her,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”

“Why? What is it? What’s inside the folder?”

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let them burn up in the fire, and I couldn’t bury them, either. Isn’t that ridiculous, Jordan? Can’t live with ’em, and can’t live without ’em,” she said and abruptly smiled, then was serious again. “Will you do it for me?”

“What’s inside the folder, Vanessa?” he demanded. He reached for the folder, but she shoved his hand away.

“Something that should never have existed! Something that, once it did exist, should have been burned or buried long ago.” Vanessa spoke rapidly now, with more anger than agony. “Something that, if it wasn’t burned long ago, should be buried with my mother. I can’t bury them with him, it’s too late for that now. Besides, she’s the one who allowed them to come into existence in the first place.”

Vanessa was smiling, and Jordan took a step back and tried to see her more clearly, more objectively, as he thought of it, so that he could somehow gain purchase on what she was feeling. He couldn’t know what she was talking about, what she was referring to, unless he had some idea of what she was feeling. Otherwise, she was simply raving. Otherwise, her words had no connection to reality, not even a tangled, mad connection. Unless, of course, she was acting. And if indeed she was only acting, then it was something other than madness, something maybe worse than madness.

“Daddy kept them up here at the Reserve,” she went on. “Hidden in the library, of all places. Can you imagine? Hidden right there in plain sight in the old Beinecke, in the one place he knew she would never look. And neither would I. Until yesterday, when I took you into the library, which had been the nursery when I was little, and I thought, of course, ‘Everything is in the library.’ That’s what Daddy used to say whenever I asked a question he didn’t have the answer for. ‘Everything is in the library.’”

“What the hell are you talking about? Am I supposed to think you’re crazy, Vanessa?”

“I’m not crazy.”

“What’s in the folder, then.”

“What’s in the folder? Why, photographs.”

“Photographs. Of what? Of whom?”

“Photographs of me, Jordan! Me with no clothes on, me when I was a teeny-weeny girl, taken by my daddy, with my mommy acting as his studio assistant. Drunk or doped at the time, no doubt, but my daddy’s faithful assistant all the same. Then and now. Even dead. Do you want to see them?” she said and picked up the folder.

“Yes.”

“Well, you can’t.” She hugged the folder to her chest. “They’re mine. They’re me.”

“Okay, fine. You want me to bury them?”

“Yes. I…I can’t do it myself. I don’t know why. I want to, but I don’t want to let them go. It’s too…hard, somehow. I feel like it’s destroying evidence.”

“I’ll do it,” Jordan said.

“But don’t look at them!”

“I won’t.” He picked up the shovel and proceeded to dig a hole in the soft wet ground that was the width and length of the folder. “Okay, let me have it.”

She handed him the folder very carefully, as if it contained sacred scripture, a gnostic revelation. “You can’t look.”

“I won’t,” he said, and he didn’t. He was absolutely sure that there were no photographs inside the folder. Papers — he could tell that much from the weight and shape of it — but probably nothing more than receipts for materials and work done at the camp, or letters, newspaper clippings, possibly a half-dozen old magazines or a pack of Dr. Cole’s personal Rangeview letterhead stationery. But photographs? No. Jordan lay the folder flat in the hole and filled it in and tamped down the dirt and kicked a layer of pine needles over it. “There, it’s done. Do you want me to place a rock on top, some kind of ceremonial marker?”

“Don’t condescend to me.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “In case you ever change your mind and want to come back and dig them up.”

“‘Them.’ The photographs.”

“Yes. The photographs.”

“No. No need to mark it.” She stood with shoulders slumped, hands lost in the sleeves of the heavy fireman’s coat, strands of soaked hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks — a bedraggled, lost child, Jordan thought.

“Come on, Vanessa. I’ll take you over to my place, get you some dry clothes, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

“You can do that? Fly me away from here?”

He was silent for a few seconds, then exhaled slowly, as if a quandary had at last been resolved. “Yes. I can do pretty much whatever I want now.”

“What’s going to happen to me, Jordan?”

“Nothing,” he said. Then added, “But only if you agree to do what your mother originally wanted you to do.”

“Oh! Go into that hospital? That’s what she originally wanted. So they could perform the operation on my brain. The operation they learned from Daddy. The operation that will make me nice.”

Jordan put his arm around her shoulders and gently moved her away from the grave and toward the woods below. “Vanessa, no one’s going to operate on you. Trust me. There’ll be no brain surgery. All that business about your father and lobotomies, it’s not true, Vanessa. You know that. No more than your belief that he took obscene pictures of you when you were a child. You’ll be fine, I promise. If you go into the hospital, nothing bad will happen to you.”

“You don’t know as much as you think you do.”

“I do know that if you don’t go into the hospital, there’s going to be a thorough investigation into the fire, and you’ll likely go to jail for setting it. They already know you set it. That you set it ‘not really’ by accident. And who knows what else will come out in an investigation and trial? Your mother’s death, for example. Which might also be seen as ‘not really’ an accident. And that you kidnapped her. And buried her body here on the Reserve. You’ve still got plenty to hide, you know.”

“Is it like I’m pleading insanity?”

“Yes.”

“Am I insane, Jordan?”

“I don’t know.” Then added, “No, not to me.”

They walked a few more feet, and she stopped and stuck out her lower lip and pouted. “I don’t want to go.”

“You’ll be fine,” he said again. “Trust me.”

“What if they find out about what happened to Mother?”

“They won’t. Not if you go quietly into the hospital. I told the sheriff and Russell Kendall that I flew her out last night and she went back to New York by train from Westport. Your original plan. They believed me. Or at least the sheriff did. Kendall went along for his own reasons, I guess. And Hubert will, too. No one will ever know what happened here. It will be just as you planned. Your mother will have simply disappeared. But now, because of the fire, you have to disappear, too. Only for a while, though. A hospital in Europe is perfect. A nervous breakdown is perfect. In a year, you’ll be able to come back to New York and start your life over again.”

“Start my life over. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? What about you, Jordan?”

“Yeah, well, like I said, I can do pretty much whatever I want to now.”

“So you’re free?”

“Yes. I’m free. In a sense, you are, too. We’re both free as birds.”

AT THE TAMARACK CLUBHOUSE, THE OVERHEATED KITCHEN WAS crowded with local women and girls cleaning the pots and dishes and utensils. The firefighters and the Reservists who had gone out to the Second Lake with them had been rewarded with a large dinner prepared by the staff of the Club and the wives and daughters of the volunteers from the surrounding villages. Local women and girls had cooked the meal, and the wives and female guests of members had served it and cleared the dining room tables afterward. Then, a little before nine o’clock, Alicia Groves left the kitchen and walked slowly, wearily from the building, past the tennis courts and toward the staff parking lot where she had parked her car. Her mind was on her sons, Bear and Wolf, whom she had left at the house in the care of the girl Frances. Alicia needed to get back to them. They were trying not to show it, but she knew they were frightened and confused and did not believe her steady assurances that everything was going to be fine, Papa will come home soon, but then he might have to go away on a long trip to Spain.

The rain had stopped falling. As she neared the car she glanced up at the rising meadow beyond and saw flickering chartreuse lights dotting the darkness — fireflies. She stopped for a moment to watch. They were beautiful, the first thing of beauty that she had noticed in days, it seemed. The first thing that had given her pause and taken her thoughts away from the sudden dismemberment of her life. Fireflies. Their tiny lights flared against the darkness, then went out, like sparks from an invisible fire.

For a long time Alicia stood beside the car watching the fireflies dance through the darkness, until it came to her that she would survive this day and the next and the next, for in the midst of a life of loneliness and unacknowledged abandonment she had finally come to know true love, and because she had known love she had for the first time been able to see the darkness that for so many years had surrounded her. She had deceived her husband, yes, but in the end she had not lied to him about her love for Hubert, and now she was glad that she had not lied to him, glad that she had not told her husband what he wanted to hear, which would have partially healed the breach in their marriage and allowed it to continue more or less as before, in darkness, with no brilliant lights illuminating for a few brief seconds the wildflowers strewn across the alpine meadow before her. She did not realize it, so caught up was she in the glow of her thoughts, but as she got into the car and drove it from the parking lot down the road toward her home and her children and her unknown future, Alicia Groves was smiling.

But then she stopped smiling. No, she thought, nothing good or useful could come of what she had done. The undeniable truth was that her husband, her marriage, had used her badly, and she had rebelled against that abuse by convincing herself that she had fallen in love with Hubert St. Germain so that she could commit adultery with him. She had used Hubert as badly as her husband had used her. But that was not the problem she faced now. That was merely the truth. The problem she faced now was that except for her children she was alone in the world. Her marriage was ruined, and the man for whom she had ruined it was not a man she could love and live with. Hubert St. Germain, the guide, the man of the woods, a taciturn, stoical, mildly sensual man, a man who had let her be his envelope, his perfect companion and lover: Hubert St. Germain was dull and unimaginative and provincial. She saw clearly for the first time that he was not capable of knowing who she was. And he was not ignorant enough to pass for innocent. She might have learned to love him if he had been innocent. She had brought down on herself an unexpected darkness, and she could not blame him, and she could not blame her husband. She could only blame herself, and that did not matter, because it did not change anything.

What will she do now with the rest of her days? She knows the answer. She will raise her sons, and when they become men she will cling to them and want to ask constantly of them if they love her, but she will hold her tongue. Instead, over and over she will ask herself, and now and again will dare to ask her sons, if she did badly by them, and they will sigh and reassure her one more time that she did not do badly by them and they are grateful. She will not ask them if she had been wrong to betray their father after he had so many times betrayed her, because they will never know of that. Their father will have died in Spain in April 1937. Shot down by the Fascists. In their eyes and in the eyes of most of the western world who cared about that war or cared about art or both, he will have died a hero. Only Alicia, his widow, will know what took him to Spain in the first place, and even she won’t know the whole story.

From the long veranda of the clubhouse, Hubert watched her drive away. She had not seen him, he knew. Then he heard the distant rattle of an airplane engine, Jordan Groves’s airplane flying from the Second Lake over the Carry and the First Lake, tracing the lane to the clubhouse, and there it was in the night sky, bringing Vanessa Cole in from the Reserve. The plane flew low across the clubhouse grounds, as if it bore a load that was too heavy for it and was struggling to gain altitude. And then, as it passed beyond the clubhouse grounds, it rose up and over the tall trees and soared into the dark sky, aiming for the notch between the two mountains in the east, Goliath and Sentinel. The airplane was quickly gone from sight, and a few seconds later Hubert could no longer hear it.

Slowly, he stepped down from the porch and walked around the clubhouse to the back of the building and headed for the parking lot where he had left his truck. As he neared the truck, he saw the same fireflies dancing over the dark meadow that Alicia had seen, and at first for a moment his heart, like hers, filled with freshened gladness. I will see her again, he thought. He was sure of it. And it will be very soon, he thought, and in time we will marry, and someday we will have a child of our own.

But when he got into his truck and closed the door and sat there for a moment in the silent dark, suddenly, without reasoning his way to it, he realized that he was a fool. A goddamned fool! What had he been thinking! He felt his face heat up from embarrassment. It was ridiculous even to hope that he and Alicia would marry and have a child together. Ridiculous and arrogant. He did not know what was in Alicia’s mind or heart; he couldn’t. Any more than she knew what was in his. All she knew of his mind and heart was what he had been able to show her of himself. And very little of what he had shown her corresponded to who he really was. He knew it was the same for her. For months it had been as if they were both asleep and dreaming each other into existence, and now they were awake. Or at least he was. He did not know if she was awake yet or still dreaming. He couldn’t. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. It didn’t really matter. He would not see her again, except at a distance, and when he did catch sight of her he would immediately retreat or change direction so that they could not meet. Hubert St. Germain will live alone in his cabin until a very old age, and he will become legendary. A guide of the old school, people will say, a gruff throwback to an earlier era when the Adirondack guides were viewed as true woodsmen. Those who knew Hubert St. Germain when he was young will say that he was one of those twentieth-century men who resembled in every way the first Europeans to enter this vast, unsettled forest, men who learned from the Indians how to hunt and trap the beasts that lived here, men who marked the steep, switchbacking trails to the mountaintops and crossed the lakes in their guide boats and descended the rivers and streams that tumbled from the icy headwaters to the mighty Hudson River in the south and the broad St. Lawrence in the north. Those men were the true Adirondack guides. They were not the mere caretakers of the grand old summer camps and the servants of the members of the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.