The Reserve

2

“WON’T BE NO SIGN OR MAILBOX THERE,” THE OLD FELLOW said, pumping gas into the tan Packard sedan. He was a scrawny man in his late sixties in coveralls, with a plum-size lump of tobacco in his cheek and stumped brown teeth. “Every time he puts one up, somebody comes along and knocks it down.”

“Why is that?” Vanessa Cole asked him. A light rain had begun to fall. She stepped away from the car and stood under the gas station canopy and watched the old man pump gas.

The man shrugged and looked the Packard over bumper to bumper and pursed his lips as if about to whistle. Nice-looking vehicle. Nice-looking girl, too. “Can’t say. ’Course, there’s some folks that claims he’s a Red. You know, a Commie.”

“And is he?” She reached into her purse to pay for the gas.

“Could be. I keep out of it. Could be he’s only what you call abnormal, if you know what I mean. Friend of yours?” he asked and winked at her.

“Aren’t you the flirt,” she said. Funny old man, she thought. She paid him and lay a gloved hand on his shoulder in a friendly way and gazed deeply into his wide-open eyes, startling and pleasing him. She thanked him for the directions and walked slowly around the front of the car and got in, letting him watch her.

By the time she’d driven the four and a half miles north on Route 19 as instructed by the funny man at the filling station, the rain was falling steadily in cold, wind-driven waves. Through flapping windshield wipers she caught sight of the red farmhouse and horse barn he’d said to look for and pulled off the road. She bumped onto the dirt lane that passed by the farm and drove through the adjacent field where a blue sprawl of chicory spread from the lane into the field. A few hundred yards beyond the farm, she crossed the river on a narrow wooden bridge and entered the woods. After a few seconds the rain briefly let up, and from the car she could see fresh chanterelles glowing like nuggets among the sodden leaves.

Then the rain resumed, and she had a hard time seeing where she was going. The lane wound uphill a ways, first through oak and maple trees, then through spruce and old red pines. After a while it dipped back toward the river again, ending at a large, two-story, cedar-shingled house situated on a rise in a hemlock grove. It overlooked an oxbow loop where the river slowed and widened into an eddy the size of a large mill pond. She parked as close to the front door as she could, removed her gloves, and dashed from the car up the wide stone steps and onto the front porch. She shook the raindrops from her hair and knocked on the door.

Carefully tended flowers decorated the yard — perennials and rose-and lilac bushes and pale-faced hydrangeas and thriving herb gardens. There was a two-bay garage at the side of the house and down by the eddy in the river a building that looked like a boathouse and must be where he keeps his airplane, she thought. On the flood plain beyond the boathouse she noticed a large vegetable garden protected by a head-high deer fence. The house and outbuildings and grounds impressed her. It was clearly the center of a serious, hardworking country life. She assumed the large structure with the skylights at the back of the house was his studio. Smoke curled from a stovepipe chimney and light glowed from inside. She knew he was there — the famous artist ensconced in his skylit studio, working alone through the cold, gray afternoon making pictures — and was eager to see the man in his natural element.

But first Vanessa Cole wanted to present herself to the woman of the house. She had learned the woman’s name while in Manhattan these weeks since her father’s funeral, but little else, for the artist’s wife was rarely seen in New York. Vanessa was curious about her — she wondered what the woman looked like, her age, her personal style. She wondered what kind of woman held on to a man like Jordan Groves. Or if indeed it could be done at all.

The door came unlatched and opened in. A very tall woman, taller even than Vanessa and a few years older, stood behind the screened door. A country woman, she seemed, and strikingly attractive, with pale blue eyes and silken, straight blond hair cut shoulder length. Her plaid flannel shirt was open at the throat, with the sleeves rolled above her elbows, and her arms and face and neck had a gardener’s tan, not a sunbather’s. A pair of Irish setters paced restlessly in the shadows behind her.

Vanessa said, “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Vanessa Von Heidenstamm.”

“How do you do,” Alicia said simply.

Vanessa hesitated, expecting the woman to invite her inside. Finally she asked, “Are you Mrs. Groves?”

“Yes.”

“I was hoping to speak with your husband. We met…he came out to my parents’ camp a few weeks ago. On the Fourth—”

“Yes. I know that. He told me,” Alicia said. Then added, “I’m sorry about your father.”

Vanessa thanked her. She had caught the slight accent and wondered if it was German or Russian. Probably Russian, she thought. And probably why the locals think the artist is a Red.

After a few seconds of silence, Alicia said, “Jordan’s in his studio. He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s working.”

“I understand. I’ll come back another time, then. When would be a good time?” she asked.

Alicia looked at Vanessa Cole for a moment, as if taking her measure for the first time. Friend or foe? Neither, she decided. “The studio’s out back,” she said. “But it’s raining, so come inside. There’s a breezeway. You can get there from the kitchen without getting wet,” she said and pushed the screened door back, letting the woman into her house.

Vanessa followed Alicia Groves into a warm, brightly lit kitchen that smelled of wood smoke and baking bread, and the dogs clattered along behind. Two blond boys, looking more like apprentice horticulturists than artists in training, sat at the long table with colored pencils and sketch pads, making careful botanical drawings of the thatch of wildflowers scattered before them. Theirs was a household guided by firm and fixed principles. Maybe the accent is German, Vanessa thought.

Alicia opened the back door for her and pointed in the direction of the studio. “If he doesn’t wish to be disturbed, he will let you know,” she said.

Vanessa walked along the breezeway to the windowless door of the studio and stopped there. The smell of wild thyme perfumed the air. Above the sound of the pounding rain she heard music inside — Ethel Waters, a sexy Negro singer whose plaintive voice she recognized, having heard her perform many times in uptown clubs back during Prohibition. Her ex-husband, the count, whom she liked to call Count No-Count, had been a fan of Negro music and bootleg gin, and back then so had she. Her divorce three years ago she associated with the end of Prohibition and Harlem nights and the beginning of her passion for swing and a taste for champagne. She waited for the song to end, then knocked.

“Yeah?” Jordan called.

“It’s me. It’s Vanessa…Vanessa Von Heidenstamm.”

Silence. A few seconds passed, and the door swung open. A gust of dry heat from the big-bellied cast-iron stove in the corner hit her in the face. The artist wore an ink-smudged T-shirt and overalls and was smoking a cigar. He put the cigar between his lips and without a word turned away from her and went back to his bench, picked up his chisel and mallet, and continued working. He was carving into a large block of maple for a woodcut. Rain washed across the skylights overhead and drummed steadily against them. The large space of the studio was open to the roof and smelled of cigar smoke and burning wood and paint and turpentine. Vanessa inhaled deeply.

With his back to her, the artist said, “Well, Miss Von Heidenstamm, what brings you way out here on a day like this?”

Cabinets and counters and tool racks were neatly arranged up and down the length and width of the studio — everything orderly and squared and ready to hand. Drawings and sketches on paper were pinned to the four windowless walls and on easels and corkboards. Suspended above the workbench, paintings on canvas and board and boxes of prints had been carefully stored in a shallow loft. On a table next to the tin sink sat a hand-cranked wooden record player, one of the boxy new portable Victrolas, and racked stacks of glossy black records. An overstuffed red leather armchair and reading lamp and a tall shelf crowded with books and magazines took up a near corner of the studio. Vanessa walked to the armchair and sat down, crossed her long legs, and lighted a cigarette.

“My father’s ashes,” she said.

He turned and looked at her. “Say what?”

“In the backseat of my car there is a large ceramic jar. Chinese. Second-century BC. The Han era. The jar happens to have been one of my father’s most treasured and valuable possessions, and inside it are his cremated remains.”

“Very interesting,” the artist said. “A little weird, though, if you want my opinion. Carting your father’s ashes around like that.”

“Daddy was a little weird. Anyhow, that’s what brings me back up here. And brings me to you.”

“What does?”

“My father’s ashes,” she said. “By the way, is the town called Petersburg because you live here and you’re a Red, or do you live here because it’s called Petersburg and you’re a Red?”

“None of the above,” he said and smiled. “It’s only a happy coincidence. Once a year I urge the town fathers to change it to Leningrad. They always vote it down.”

“I wondered. Anyhow, I have a favor to ask.” She looked around the studio. “Do you have anything to drink? A little wine? I don’t suppose you have any champagne. I’d love a glass of champagne.”

“It gives me a headache. I’ve got rum. Want a taste of old Havana?”

She smiled brightly and like a child nodded yes, and he pulled a bottle and two shot glasses from a cabinet above the sink and poured.

“Salud,” he said and drank.

“Salud.” She drained her glass and set it on the floor, beside the chair. “I heard about your brawl at the Club. You must be a little crazy,” she said.

“I don’t take lightly to insults. Not from twits like Kendall. Not from beautiful women, either.”

“Neither do I, Mr. Groves. I assume you’re referring to me, but I don’t recall insulting you. Quite the opposite. In any case, I’m quick to forgive and quick to forget. What about you?”

He didn’t answer. He refilled their glasses, then walked to the Victrola, cranked the handle a half-dozen turns, and placed a record on the spindle. The music was fast and pleasant, a quartet of black men singing and a single guitar.

Vanessa listened for a moment, unsmiling. “That’s real cute,” she said sarcastically. “What is it?”

“The song? It’s called ‘My Old Man.’ By some guys named the Spirits of Rhythm. It’s a group I heard at a Harlem joint a couple of years ago. You don’t remember cutting me cold at the Club that day?” The Spirits of Rhythm sang in the background, “My old man, he’s livin’ in a garbage can. Put a bottle of gin there an’ he’ll get in there…My old man, he’s only doin’ the best he can….”

“So I gather you’re not quick to forgive and forget. What if I said I’m sorry?”

“Quick to forgive. Apology accepted. Very slow to forget, however.”

She said she was afraid of that, which was why she had been reluctant to come to him. But she felt she had no choice. He was the only person who could help her.

“You don’t strike me as a girl who needs help from anybody. Least of all from me.”

“My father wanted his ashes up here in the Adirondacks. In the Reserve. He wanted them scattered in the Second Lake. He was practically religious about it.”

“Fine. Do it. What’s the problem?”

“I can’t,” she said. “Not without help.” Russell Kendall, the manager of the Reserve, had informed her that it was against the rules to inter a body on Reserve land. By the same token it was equally against the rules to scatter the ashes of a deceased member in any of the lakes or streams in the Reserve.

Jordan asked her why she didn’t carry her old man’s ashes up to the Second Lake in that Chinese jar and not tell anyone and just row out to the middle of the lake and empty the jar.

“Impossible,” she said. Mr. Kendall had warned her against trying exactly that and had alerted the warden at the gate to check her belongings for Dr. Cole’s ashes if she tried to hike up to the lake and take out one of the guide boats. “The manager dislikes me only a little less than he dislikes you. But my grandfather was one of the founders, so all he can do is harass me. He can’t kick me off the place. We’re shareholders, members. When Mother and I went into the Reserve to go up to Rangeview yesterday afternoon, he and the warden stopped us at the gate and went through our pack baskets and even our purses. Like we were suspected smugglers and they were customs officers. It was a total humiliation for Mother. Luckily, we were only on sort of a reconnaissance mission, and we’d left the ashes in the car, or Kendall probably would have locked Daddy in the clubhouse safe.”

Jordan laughed. “So what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to fly me and Daddy to the Second Lake in your airplane. When you fly low over the water, I’ll do what Daddy expected me to do. That’s all.”

“Nope,” Jordan said. “Can’t do it.”

“Why not?” she asked. Then, pointing at the record player, “Look, I get the joke. Do we have to hear that song?”

“What do you want to hear?” He lifted the record off the spindle and slipped it into its paper jacket and reracked it.

“I want to hear you say you’ll help me do right by my father. I’ll pay you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I know, money’s no object. Thanks, but no thanks.”

“I’ll give you one of those James Heldon paintings you seem to like so much.”

“I don’t like them, actually,” he said. “No, that’s not quite true. There were two or three there that I admired. And I can get a Heldon on my own, thanks. But it doesn’t matter, I can’t help you.”

“You mean ‘won’t.’ Why not?” She stood and laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. “I think you’re more afraid of me than angry. Besides, that morning at the Club all I did was tell you the truth. That’s not so bad, is it? You don’t have to be afraid of me, Jordan Groves. I won’t hurt you.”

“Miss Von Heidenstamm…or is it Countess?”

“Miss.”

“Miss Von Heidenstamm, for a man like me, you are nothing but trouble. As you have already noted. No, the best thing I can do for both of us is see you out and say thanks for the visit and good-bye.”

Gently, the artist took her hand off his shoulder and led her to the door. He opened the door and let go of her hand, and she stepped outside. He closed the door and went back to his work-table. For a moment he stood there staring down at the block of maple he’d been carving for three full days. Then he reached for the bottle of rum and poured himself a drink. Glass in hand, he walked to the Victrola. He placed the record back onto the spindle, and the Spirits of Rhythm resumed singing, “My old man, he’s only doin’ the best he can….”

AROUND MIDNIGHT WHEN JORDAN CAME IN TO BED, ALICIA was still awake, reading Gone With the Wind. It was the novel that everyone in America seemed to be reading that summer, sent to Jordan by the publisher in typescript six months earlier with a request that he illustrate an hors commerce limited edition for special friends of the publisher and author, numbered and signed. It was a lucrative offer, tempting. But after skimming the first few chapters, he’d pronounced it a ladies’ antebellum fantasy novel and tossed the manuscript into the fireplace. Now the book had become a beloved best-seller and there was even talk of making a movie adaptation. He was a little sorry he’d turned the offer down — it would have been the first time he’d illustrated a popular book by a living author. It might have led to many rich commissions.

He went into the dressing room and pulled his clothes off, washed his face and brushed his teeth in the bathroom, and came quickly to bed. Alicia had already closed her book and snapped off the bedside lamp, and though she appeared to have gone straight to sleep, he knew that she was awake. Awake and waiting.

For a few moments he remained silent. Then he said, “That girl, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, she came by the studio today.”

“Yes, I know. I wondered if you were going to mention it.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Why wouldn’t you? Really, Jordan. She has her cap set for you. You know that.”

“Well, that’s nothing to me.”

“Oh.”

“She wanted me to do something weird for her.”

“Oh.”

“She wanted me to fly her and her father’s ashes up to the Reserve, so she could scatter the ashes in the Second Lake. Pretty weird, eh?”

“No, I don’t think so. Maybe the place was special to him,” she said. “Will you do it?”

“Christ, no.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t particularly like the girl. Or her family, either.” He rolled over and put his back to her. “People like that don’t need help from me. They contaminate everything and everyone they touch. Besides, it’s against Reserve rules.”

“When did you start caring about rules?” she said and was silent for a moment. “‘People like that.’ They collect art, Jordan. They have nice big houses and apartments. They think artists are interesting, superior people. And you like all that, you know. And there’s no reason you shouldn’t like it, is there?”

“They don’t collect art, except as an investment, as capital. They collect artists. So I deal with them only as much as I have to,” he declared. “And there’s no way she’s going to collect me.”

“Oh.”

“What’s the matter with you, anyway? Are you pissed off at me for something?”

“Have you done something lately that I should be angry about?”

“No. Not that I’m aware of, anyhow.”

“Then I’m not angry at you, am I?”

“Jesus. Do we have to live like this? Aren’t you able to forgive and forget, Alicia?”

“You have tested me on that. Many times. And I have passed the test of forgiving and forgetting. Many times.”

“All right, then. So why are you still pissed off at me?”

“I’m not,” she said. “Go to sleep, Jordan.”

For a few moments they lay in silence, unmoving. Finally, he said, “Do you know how many nights we’ve let end like this?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve made love, Alicia?”

“Do you want to make love to me?” she asked. “You can, if you want to.”

“Jesus Christ, Alicia! I hate this. You act as if you’ve taken a lover. Have you? Do you have a lover?”

“That’s a very strange question,” she said. “Coming from you.”

“Well, I mean it.”

“No. Go to sleep, Jordan. Unless you want to make love to me.”

He was silent again. Then after a few moments her breathing slowed, and he knew she was sleeping. He closed his eyes, and soon he was sleeping, too.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, WHEN HE’D PUT IN A FULL MORNING’S work in the studio, Jordan Groves decided around noon to drive into the village to pick up the mail and newspapers and maybe have lunch at the Moose Head over in Sam Dent. He wasn’t feeling especially sociable, merely in the mood for a little public solitude and a meat-loaf sandwich and a cold bottle of beer. He wasn’t free to linger: Alicia was working in the garden and had plans, if it cleared up later, to take the boys swimming at the falls and would need the car. He thought a moment about taking the truck instead, freeing him to set his own time for returning home, then decided against it. There was the unfinished wood-block, the set of lithographs he’d promised the publisher of his Greenland travel book, letters to write and accounts to update, a new studio assistant coming by later for instructions. He couldn’t linger. There was always more work to do than time in which to do it. Jordan Groves believed that was a good thing.

It was a bright day, but still overcast. He strolled from the studio to the garage, drew the doors open, got the Ford started, and backed the sedan from the dark interior out to the driveway. In daylight he saw the jar. It sat on the passenger’s seat — a tall, jade-green container about eighteen inches high with an overlapping cover. He stared at the jar, stunned and disbelieving, as if the object were a person, a stranger sitting beside him, unexpected and uninvited. The jar was very beautiful, softly rounded in the middle and narrow at the base and top, and elegantly proportioned, the force and gentleness of its ancient maker’s hands and mind evident in the form of the jar and the cut surface and the brilliant green glaze.

Ten minutes later, he pushed his airplane from the hangar and slid it down the ramp and into the water. To keep the green jar from being jostled or tipped, he had strapped it with masking tape to the seat in the aft cockpit. He let the engine warm for half a minute, then taxied upstream fifty yards and brought the airplane around and into the fluttery wind. He headed on a diagonal across the rippled open water into the wide smooth belly of the river, picked up speed, hit the step, and, pulling back on the stick, lifted the airplane free of the water. It rose quickly over the trees that lined the farther bank. He fought the torque and dipped the left wing slightly, cutting the airplane back around to the south. As he flew over the garden, he looked down and saw his wife and sons peering up at him. The sun had come out, and they shaded their eyes against it with their hands, and the shadow of the airplane passed across them.

His heading was south-southwest, a route that followed the glittering ribbon of the Tamarack River upstream, then over Bream Pond and down into the village of Tunbridge, avoiding the Tamarack clubhouse grounds and golf course, where he banked to port. Holding steady at twenty-five hundred feet he followed the Tamarack River toward its headwaters, flying over rising unbroken forest into the Reserve.

He knew that she would be waiting for him at her father’s camp — no more an actual camp than her father’s Park Avenue apartment. But calling it a camp helped people like the Coles coddle their dream of living in a world in which they did no harm. It let them believe that for a few weeks or a month or two, even though their so-called camps were as elaborately luxurious as their homes elsewhere, they were roughing it, living like the locals, whom they hired as housekeepers, cooks, guides, and caretakers: the locals, who were thought by people like the Coles to be lucky — lucky to live year-round in such pristine isolation and beauty.

Crossing over the First Lake, Jordan spotted a pair of fishermen in a guide boat casting flies along the eastern shore. This isn’t going to work, he thought and was relieved. And a moment later, at the headwaters, when he came over the rise and looked down the cowl and surveyed the length and breadth of the Second Lake and saw that there was no one out on the water or fishing from the banks, he was faintly disappointed. He put the airplane down in the middle of the lake and taxied toward the eastern shore, then brought it along the shore to the shallows just off the Coles’ camp.

Vanessa, wearing a pale yellow head scarf and denim shirt and tan slacks, stood on the shore by an overturned guide boat. She was smoking a cigarette. Jordan shut the engine down and when the propeller had wheeled to a stop told her to come aboard and remove her precious cargo from his airplane.

“We need to scatter Daddy’s ashes from the air,” she said.

“From the air? No! Do it from the guide boat. I’m in a hurry.”

“I can’t hold the jar and row the boat at the same time. Those little wooden things are pretty to look at, maybe, but they’re tippy.”

“What about your mother? Let her row and you hug your father’s jar. Or vice versa. I’m just making a delivery, Miss Von Heidenstamm.”

Vanessa explained that, after the long walk from the clubhouse in to the First Lake and the trip across both lakes to camp, her mother wasn’t feeling well enough to go out in the boat again. Besides, this was not something her mother wanted to participate in. It was just too sad for her even to contemplate. Vanessa didn’t want to put her through it. She was doing this strictly for her father. His last wish.

“All right, then, let’s get it done,” he said and this time did not offer to help her step from the water to the pontoon and climb from there to the wing. She carefully advanced along the wing to the fuselage and saw the jar.

“Take off the tape and hold it in your lap,” he said to her.

“Jordan, I can’t tell you what this means to me,” she said. “What it means to my mother. And to my father. Him, especially. I do hope you’re not angry with me.”

“For sticking me with a Chinese jug filled with your father’s ashes? Trapping me into coming out here like this? Of course I’m angry with you.”

“I don’t think so. I think this is something you’ll never forget, Jordan. Or regret.” She slid into the cockpit, stripped the tape off the jar, and placed the jar on her lap.

“Miss Von Heidenstamm, I already regret it.”

“You don’t have to call me that.”

“What?”

“It was my married name. And I’m no longer married to him. Call me Vanessa.”

“I’m going to taxi out to the middle of the lake. When I get there, you dump the ashes over the side, and I’ll bring you back. And then, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, I’ll be on my merry way.”

“That’s really very boring, you know.”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“Much more interesting to scatter Daddy’s ashes from the sky.”

“True.” Without turning, he instructed her to take off her head scarf and remove the top of the jar and cover the jar with the scarf.

“Why?”

“Because of the wind. I’ll tell you when to empty it. Just be sure you hold the damn thing out to the side as far as you can, and don’t remove the scarf until you upend the jar to dump it, or the wind and the prop wash will blow your daddy’s ashes all over you and inside the plane. I damn sure don’t want to have to clean Dr. Cole’s remains out of my airplane.”

She gave the back of his head a grim smile. He restarted the engine and took the airplane back out toward the middle of the lake, where he hit the throttle, gathered speed, and put it into the air. At about five hundred feet he leveled off and banked the airplane toward the headwaters of the lake. He cut the speed to seventy knots and dropped it down until it was barely a hundred feet above the water, following the axis of the long, narrow lake from south to north. When he spotted the Coles’ camp coming up on his right, he slowed again and dropped another fifty feet, and hollered back, “Go ahead, do it now!”

Vanessa hefted the jar to her shoulder, steadied it there for a few seconds with both hands, and facing it away from the wash, quickly extended it out to the side as far as she could and removed the scarf and emptied it. A gray swash of ash and bits of bone exploded into the air behind the airplane and drifted slowly down to the water, when suddenly Vanessa cried, “Oh, no!”

Jordan jerked his head around and saw the jar drop from the airplane like a green stone. He watched it splash into the lake, where it sank almost at once. Vanessa’s scarf fluttered slowly down to the lake behind it.

“I dropped the damn thing!” Vanessa cried. “I dropped it!”

Jordan brought the airplane around and flew across the spot where the jar had gone in, locating it on a bisected pair of lines running the width and length of the lake. He saw the yellow scarf floating southward on the dark water, like a pale hieroglyph. “Try to memorize the shore points on both sides of the lake and at the ends!” he shouted. “The scarf’ll drift and sink anyhow, so don’t look at it.”

“It’s gone, Jordan!”

“No, it’s not! You can row out and dive for it!”

“You idiot, it’s hundreds of feet deep there!”

He didn’t respond. He brought the airplane in close to shore and splashed down a short ways below the camp, taxied back to where he’d picked her up, and cut the engine. For a moment they sat motionless in the silence, the airplane rocking gently on its pontoons. Finally Jordan said, “Hey, look, Vanessa, I’m sorry about the jar. Seriously. It was very beautiful.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“And I never said it to you right. I’m sorry about your father, too.”

“No, it’s probably the best thing. The jar, I mean. Daddy loved that old jar more than any other thing he owned. Except this camp.”

“It’s probably worth a fortune, though. The jar.”

“Mother would never have sold it. No, it’s only right that it’s still with him…and that they’re both at the bottom of the lake.” Her eyes filled with tears.

“Yeah, well, I guess that’s the best way to think about it,” he said gently.

“You’re being so kind. That’s nice.”

“No, that’s normal.”

“Would you come up to the camp with me? I need to talk with somebody.”

“What about your mother?”

She shook her head. “No, no, I can’t talk to her. Mother and I, we’re like…we’re on different planets. Especially about Daddy.” She paused, and noted that he seemed to be waiting for her to continue. “C’mon, I think I owe you a drink, anyhow,” she said. “I owe you a lot more than that, actually,” she said and smiled sadly.

He nodded and got out of the cockpit and extended his hand to her, and she took it and stepped onto the wing beside him. He quickly anchored the airplane, and when it was secured, they came ashore and, still holding hands, walked up the long slope, through the grove of tall pines to the deck of the camp. She liked the feel of his large callused hand around hers. It was a workman’s hand — which was natural, wasn’t it, for he had spent years carving wood-and linoleum blocks and making copper etchings and cutting lithographs. Even drawing and painting required the use of his big hands; and he was probably a builder, too, judging from his house and the outbuildings, which had seemed handmade to her — skillfully done, but not by a firm of architects, engineers, and contractors. And all that firewood stacked so neatly in the open sheds alongside the garage and studio and in the breezeway — he cuts his own firewood to heat his house and studio. His arduous travels to distant, difficult lands — Greenland, Alaska, the Andes — were legendary. He was strong and lean and hardhanded. Many of the men whom she had successfully seduced in the past were cut from the same social cloth as he — rich men; cosmopolitan men; even a few famous writers and artists; and sportsmen like her first husband, the Russian Boris Seversky, men who flew their own airplanes and traveled to exotic parts of the globe on three-month-long treks and safaris. She was rumored to have had affairs with Ernest Hemingway and Max Ernst and Baron von Blixen. But none of them had hands like his. Their bodies had been hardened by sport and exercise, not by physical work.

She knew she had managed to slip through his resistance to her, but wasn’t sure what had done it or how long it would last. He was changeable and unpredictable, a man who could burst into flame one minute and just as quickly turn to ice. She asked him to make himself comfortable on the sofa by the fireplace, then knelt with her back to him and lit the fire she had laid earlier. When it began to crackle and burn, she stood and crossed the room to the bar, aware all the while that he was looking at her.

“What’ll you have?” she asked. “I have rum, but it’s not Cuban, I’m afraid. Jamaican. It’s what I’m having.”

He studied her carefully, more watchful than curious, as if she were more a danger to him than a puzzle. “I don’t know, it’s a little early. Yeah, rum’s fine.”

She poured them each three fingers and returned to the sofa by the fire and sat next to him.

“Where’s your mother?” Jordan asked, looking around the large room. There seemed to be no one else at the camp, no guide or cook, no friends or family members. Which made sense, he decided, given the two women’s private and slightly illicit reasons for being here. “I’m thinking I ought to make your mother some kind of apology, too,” he said. “I should offer her my condolences.”

Vanessa explained that her mother was still overcome by Dr. Cole’s death. Her mother was somewhat frail anyhow, and the long drive up from Manhattan yesterday and then the hike and boat trip in to camp had left her weakened. But he needn’t worry, she would convey his apology and condolences to her mother later.

Jordan pulled out his tobacco and papers and rolled a cigarette.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to become Mother’s caretaker, now that Daddy’s gone. She depended on Daddy for everything,” Vanessa said, watching his deft movements, fingertips, lips, tongue. “Can you show me how to do that?” she asked.

“She didn’t seem particularly frail to me,” he said.

“Mentally.”

“Oh.” He passed her a cigarette paper and sprinkled tobacco into it and, softly guiding her fingers with his, got it rolled into a lumpy tube. “Now wet the leading edge of the paper lightly,” he said and sat back to watch. She ran the tip of her tongue across the paper, looked up at him and smiled, then skillfully — expertly, he noticed — finished making the cigarette.

“I feel you’ve done this before,” he said.

“Not with tobacco.”

She tucked her long legs under her and lighted the cigarette and smoked, and though Jordan knew she was showing off, he could not stop himself from admiring what appeared to be her nonchalant, natural grace. The room was flooded with tawny sunlight. Wood smoke from the fireplace, the brown sugar aroma of the rum in the glass, and the smell of burning tobacco — private, deeply familiar odors to Jordan — mingled and perfumed the room and somehow let him feel that he had known this woman for many years. She made him feel glad to be alive. It was a rare, simple-hearted pleasure just to sit back and look at her full, precisely formed mouth and listen to her low, husky voice.

She wanted to talk about her father, she told him, but not with anyone who knew her father well or was related to him or one of his friends, and definitely not with her mother. They wouldn’t understand. When her father was alive Vanessa had spent a year talking about him to a world-famous Swiss psychiatrist, she said, and it hadn’t helped in the slightest, because she had come away both adoring her father and despising him fully as much as she had at the start. And now that he was dead, she adored and despised him to an even greater degree than before. And she was troubled by this, she said, for it made it difficult for her to grieve over his death in a useful or even an honest way. She had hoped that bringing his ashes up here would help, but she could already tell that it hadn’t made any difference at all. “It’s painful, his death, naturally. But all the same, I feel false. I feel ungrateful.”

“I can understand why you might adore your father. What the hell, he was your father. But why did you despise him? Why do you, I mean.”

“You’d be better off asking why I adored him. Actually, either way, the answer would be the same. After a year on the good doctor’s couch, I learned that much,” she said. “One hates a person for the same reason one loves him. Especially if that person is one’s parent.” Her father and mother had adopted her when she was little more than an infant, she told him. An only child, she had been doted on, swaddled by their love and care — even spoiled, she admitted it. All her life she had been given everything she wanted. With one exception. Right up to the day her father died, he had refused to tell her who her real mother and father had been or how she had come to Dr. and Mrs. Cole for adoption. All he would say was that she had not been wanted by her real parents. “Our foundling,” was how Dr. Cole had described her, even to strangers. “He so dominated Mother in this that, even now, with his ashes at the bottom of the lake, she still won’t tell me where they ‘found’ me or who left me there. Daddy’s wishes were and are and always will be her commands,” she said. “For all I know, they could have kidnapped me.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jordan said. “You can’t despise your father just because he wouldn’t tell you how you came to be adopted. There’s got to be another reason. He may have had good motives for it. Rightly or wrongly, he may have felt he needed to protect you somehow. I mean, what if your real mother was a whore and your real father a drunken sailor on a weekend pass? He might reasonably want to keep that from you.”

“You’re right,” she said. “The truth is, the great, beloved Dr. Carter Cole was not the man everyone thought he was,” she said. “Not in private, not in secret. Not when he was alone with Mother and me. And alone with me…” She trailed off. “Well, let’s just say he was different. A different man. He was not a nice man, Jordan.”

“No one’s the same when he’s alone with his wife or his children. It’s where you let your guard down, especially if, like your father, you’re more or less a public figure.”

She moved closer to him on the sofa. “You’re a public figure, Jordan, and I know you’re different when you’re with your family alone. In private. I can tell from a single visit to your home that Jordan Groves in private is a nice man.” She laughed lightly. “Actually, it’s in public, with the whole world watching, that you’re not a nice man. A brawler. You’ve punched critics in the jaw and given reviewers black eyes. You’re an opinionated, drunken Red. And a famous womanizer. Oh, you have such a dangerous reputation, Jordan Groves! While you’re up here in the mountains holed up in your studio and your sweet wife bakes bread and your sons study the local flora, people in New York City are talking. Or when you’re off on one of your famous adventures in the Arctic or wherever it is you go alone for months at a time to paint and where it’s clear from your pictures and writings that you sleep with the native women and probably participate in horrid native rituals, all the while, back here and in the cafés of Manhattan, tongues are wagging. No,” she said, suddenly serious, “you’re the opposite of my father.” She reached out and brushed his cheek with her fingertips. “You didn’t shave this morning, did you?”

He swiped at her hand and shoved it away and scowled. “Yes, I shaved.”

“Why are you so violent with me?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“What makes you think you know me?”

“You’re answering a question with a question, Jordan,” she said softly and touched his cheek a second time.

“Once I would have eaten you whole,” he said and took her hand gently away from his face. “Right down to your beautiful white fingertips,” he said, and he put her fingers into his mouth and held them there and touched them with his tongue.

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. After a moment, he withdrew her hand and placed it on her lap. “But not now,” he said. “Not anymore.” He put his glass on the table beside him and stood. “I know what people say about me. I know my reputation, and mostly I don’t give a good goddamn. Listen, Vanessa, somebody once asked me in one of those dumb magazine interviews what I wanted out of life, and I told him the truth, I said, ‘I want all of it.’ And until recently that’s pretty much how I’ve lived my life.”

“‘Until recently.’”

“Yes. But now…now I’m starting to realize that I can’t have all of it.” He paused and looked above her and out the window at the lake and the mountains and the sky. “Some of the things we want cancel out other things we want. I’m not going into details,” he said, “but I want my wife and my boys to be happy. I want them to be proud of me. And I want that more than I want certain other things,” he said and turned back to her. “Even you.”

“And you believe that? If you can have me, you can’t have them? And vice versa, that if you can’t have me, then you can have them? Are you sure?” she said. “Because I’m not.”

“Look, you’re not some pretty little Chilean dance hall girl showing me her tits, or a smiling round-faced Inuit girl lying naked under a bearskin blanket, or some doe-eyed model from the Art Students League dying to sleep with the famous artist. You’re not one of those Fifth Avenue society hostesses looking for a discreet tumble in the maid’s room after the party’s over and the other guests have gone home. No, you’re like me, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. And people like you and me, we leave a lot of wreckage behind us. I don’t want my family to be part of that wreckage. That’s all I’m saying.”

She stood next to him and put her hands on his shoulders and drew him to her. Leaning forward, she nestled her mouth next to his ear, and whispered something he barely heard, a slight hissing sound whose frequency rose and fell. Wordless, it sounded to him like a distress signal beamed through turbulence from a distant transmitter. He shoved her hands off his shoulders and pushed her away and raising his large right hand placed it hard against her chin and cheek, his fingers running all the way up her face to her brow, and he pressed it there for a moment, while she closed her eyes and pushed back and waited.

“I’m leaving now,” he said and abruptly withdrew his hand. He backed several steps away, turned, and walked from the room.

She stood by the fire with her eyes closed. She did not open them until she heard the roar of his airplane engine. A few minutes later, when she could no longer hear the engine and knew that he was airborne and gone from the lake, she walked to the door of her parents’ bedroom. Taking a key from her pocket, she unlocked the door, opened it, and peered in at her mother. The woman was sitting on the chaise, her hands and feet still tightly bound with rope, her mouth gagged with a white silk scarf, her blue eyes wild with fear.

Vanessa said, “If you promise to be quiet and not scream or shout at me anymore, I’ll remove the scarf.”

Her mother nodded her head rapidly up and down.

Vanessa reached around her and loosened the scarf. Pulling it free, she wound it carefully around her own throat, arranging the ends over the front of her shirt in a fetching way. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror and rearranged the scarf slightly. “And if you promise to stay here in the bedroom and not come out until I say it’s time, I’ll untie you.” Again her mother nodded, and Vanessa released the woman’s hands and feet and left the room, carrying the pieces of rope in her hands.

MILES AWAY, FLYING ON A NORTHEASTERLY HEADING, JORDAN Groves put the Reserve behind him and crossed above country villages and farms tucked into the valleys and clustered alongside the curling north-flowing streams. Shining in the distance, with the Green Mountains of Vermont humped up at the far horizon, was Lake Champlain, a glacial lake fourteen miles wide and one hundred twenty-five miles long — open water all the way to Quebec. Jordan was not ready to return home yet; to place himself in the bosom of his family again; to become the husband and father he had been this morning, before he backed his car from the garage and turned and discovered in the passenger’s seat the green Chinese jar with the ashes of the late Dr. Cole inside. He was not ready to let go of Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He wanted to get away from her and everything associated with her — the Reserve, the Tamarack Club, the Second Lake, her father’s camp, the people she came from and the people she ran with. But he did not want to let her go.

Yesterday’s Canadian front with its blowzy raw wind and rain had passed off to the southeast. The cloudless sky was deep blue, the temperature in the low sixties, even at altitude, and the forest a rich green blanket running all the way from the Reserve down to the pale, newly mown fields of the lakeside farms. A steady five-knot wind blew back from the direction the front had taken. No gusts. Perfect flying weather. He saw a hawk carving spirals in the air several hundred feet below him. A black Model T Ford like the one he owned the year he and Alicia first moved up from New York City crawled along the dirt road between the iron-mining village of Moriah and the lakeside shipping town of Port Henry.

At the southern end of the lake, he banked left, and cruised in a northerly direction over the bare bluffs of Crown Point and made his way along the scalloped western shoreline. Tiny white triangular sails dotted the dark blue waters and clustered in the coves and marinas of Port Henry and, a few miles farther north, the towns of Westport and Essex. Halfway across the lake a ferryboat the shape and, from this distance, the size of a shoe box made its slow way from New York state to Vermont. Off to his right a rocky islet no larger than a barn rose, as if from the deep, covered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds — swarms of gulls and petrels and loons. Jordan circled the rookery, wonder struck by its abundance, and when his gaze returned to the open water ahead, he looked up and was startled by what he saw. It was at least two miles away and a thousand feet above the surface of the lake — an enormous, round, silver object that appeared to be coming steadily toward him from the direction of Canada.

It was an aircraft — a dirigible, he quickly realized. One of those huge new zeppelins from Germany he’d been reading about. They fascinated him, and he’d been trying to figure a way to make a picture of one, a painting or even an etching that captured the enormity of the thing, without having to portray it tethered to the ground with tiny human beings standing nearby to show scale. He wanted to picture it in flight, nothing surrounding it but clouds and sky, the largest machine in the world. He swung off to the port side, out of the path of the oncoming monster, and cut his speed and dropped altitude for a better view as it approached. There were only two of these gargantuan aircraft in existence, the Graf Zeppelin, which kept to the European and South American routes, and the Hindenburg, which crossed the North Atlantic from Frankfurt to Lakehurst, New Jersey, by way of Montreal. For months, he had been hoping to catch sight of it, but, up to now, whenever the Hindenburg passed through the region, he had learned of it too late, days afterward, from the local newspapers or from a neighbor who was lucky enough to have been at Lake Champlain when the great shining airship plowed through the blue Adirondack sky. It was exciting to have caught sight of it, and what a break, he thought, to see the damned thing from the air!

It was enormous, over eight hundred feet long and shaped like a gigantic bomb. It was one hundred thirty-five feet in diameter, he remembered reading. Despite its incredible size and its speed, which Jordan estimated at eighty miles per hour, it seemed more animal than mechanical as it moved implacably through the air, more a living creature from another age than a twentieth-century man-made flying machine. He remembered a few more of its specifications — that it was powered by four huge 1,200 horsepower Mercedes-Benz engines, and that it was filled with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen. The airship was fitted out with formal dining rooms, lounges, luxurious staterooms, promenades, and even a smoking room, all located inside its shining hull instead of in an external gondola, as with conventional dirigibles. And he knew a little of its history — that the Zeppelin Company, threatened with bankruptcy, had accepted financial backing from the Nazi party. The United States was the only reliable source in the world for nonflammable helium, but Congress, mildly anxious over the rise of the Nazis, had forbade the sale of the gas to the Germans, forcing the Zeppelin Company to fill its airships instead with hydrogen. The Hindenburg had been fireproofed, he’d read, but even so, hydrogen was flammable, and this somehow made the dirigible all the more dangerously attractive to Jordan, all the more a living thing.

He drew close to the airship. Keeping several hundred yards off its starboard side, so as to avoid its powerful wash and wake, he flew his airplane along its length, a sixth of a mile. He was stunned by the sheer size of the machine. Stunned and moved. Its very scale was beautiful to Jordan, like a Greenland glacier seen for the first time — a thing too big for human beings to imagine, but, for all that, a natural and perfected part of the world that humans inhabit. Passengers peered from the windows and waved as he passed, and from the open cockpit of his tiny Waco biplane he waved back.

Toward the aft of the airship, where the hull narrowed slightly, four gigantic fins emerged, a dorsal fin and a fin on either side and a keel-like fin from the belly, and as Jordan flew past them he saw the enormous red-and-black swastikas emblazoned on the fins. He had not expected that. At once the zeppelin lost all its beauty. It became an ugly thing. He peeled sharply away from the airship, cut speed, and dropped down toward the surface of the lake, heading slowly, as if with shoulders hunched, for the shoreline, where he flew up and over the low wooded hills and put his airplane on a heading toward home.

The man ordered breakfast at the Hauptbahnhof restaurant for the young woman, and when she had been served, he left her alone at the railroad station and arranged to have her trunk and her two Mark Cross suitcases sent by taxi to the Frankfurter Hof hotel. She was to present her passport and her ticket at the hotel later in the afternoon and retrieve her luggage after it had been thoroughly inspected by the officials of the Zeppelin Company. They are very much afraid of sabotage, the man explained. For the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon, the two behaved as tourists, visiting the Museumsufer along the embankment of the river Main and the Palmengarten and St. Bartholomew’s Gothic cathedral. The man seemed to enjoy explaining the history and importance of the sites to the woman, in spite of her apparent lack of interest or curiosity. At 4:00 P.M. they arrived by taxi at the Frankfurter Hof and were directed to the main dining room, which had been commandeered by the Zeppelin Company. The room was crowded with the thirty-eight other passengers and numerous family members and friends, all carefully watched by Waffen SS men. The SS men stood in pairs at parade rest along the four sides of the dining room, while Zeppelin security officers in dark blue uniforms weighed luggage and purses and briefcases, then opened and examined the contents of each piece. A line was forming before a long table at the farther end of the room, where an inspector collected the passengers’ matches, cigarette lighters, batteries, flashlights, even photographic equipment and flashbulbs. A second inspector placed the items into small cloth bags tagged with the owner’s name. The passengers were assured that when the trip was over their property would be returned. They could keep the bag as a souvenir. One of the passengers, a very short, compact American man with black dyed hair that came to a point at his forehead, was arguing with the inspector. He clutched a package the size of a shoe box and did not wish to submit it for examination. I had it specially wrapped! the man protested. Two of the SS officers came forward and stood behind the inspector, and the American gave in with no further argument. The inspector removed the bright wrapping paper, taking care not to rip it, and opened the box. Inside was a Dresden china doll. It’s for my daughter, the American said. One of the SS officers stepped forward and removed the doll from the box and put it through the X-ray machine and returned with it. The inspector took the doll from the officer, lifted the dress, and smiled. It’s a girl, dummkopf, the American said. So I see, the inspector said and handed the doll back. The young woman in the plain brown suit and black hat and veil had watched the argument and the examination of the doll, and the man accompanying the woman had watched her. He took her purse from her and placed it on the table. We must hurry, he said. Soon the buses will come to take everyone to the hangar for the departure. She asked him if he had seen the doll. He nodded yes. She was pretty, wasn’t she? the woman said. Yes, very pretty, he said, and, taking her by the arm, he moved her down the table, away from the man with the doll.