The Reserve

4

TREMBLING AS IF SUDDENLY CHILLED, ALICIA GROVES DROVE rapidly downhill from Hubert St. Germain’s cabin and said to herself that she hated this, lying like a child and hiding like a common criminal. And most of all, she hated having been exposed this way. Though it was probably a good thing, she thought. The exposure would allow her to end the deception. But not the guilt. No matter what Jordan did when he found out, the punishment would not be severe enough to end the guilt. And he would find out. And he would punish her. That girl will make sure he knows. She wants him for herself, Alicia thought, although she’s probably already had him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was the kind of woman who takes a man away from his wife and children just because she can and then leaves him behind and moves on to steal another. Alicia hadn’t known women like that, not personally, but she had read about them in novels and magazines.

It wasn’t that way with Hubert. It was different with him, wasn’t it? It had to be. That difference, however, was the source of her guilt. For she believed that she loved Hubert and he loved her, and she believed that Hubert had made her happier to be who she truly was than her husband ever had. In fact, it was Hubert who had shown her who she truly was. But there was a price to pay. A high, ongoing price. Regardless of what happened now, Alicia’s happiness and freshened knowledge of who she truly was had corrupted her marriage, had tainted it forward and backward, from its beginning to the eventual end of it. It was as if she had been false to her husband all the years they were married and now was condemned to be false to him for the rest of her life. That’s what Alicia believed.

Twice she felt the car begin to shudder and bump off the corrugated, switchbacking lane and had to yank the wheel and pull the vehicle away from the steep ditch at the side. And twice, lost in her thoughts, overwhelmed with guilt — and now dread, too, for she had seen herself through the calculating eyes of the other woman — she let the car coast almost to a stop before suddenly realizing it and accelerating back to a normal speed. Alicia had not intended to become involved with Hubert. Or with anyone else, for that matter. She told herself that she had not been looking for love outside the marriage, and she believed it. She and Jordan had often quarreled, of course, as all couples do, coming sometimes closer to violence, however, than most husbands and wives; and they had endured long periods of sullen detachment from each other, for Jordan was a difficult, demanding man with a roving eye and a permanent wanderlust and a need for constant forgiveness. But she had accommodated herself to his sharp, selfish ways, accepting them as an even trade for all the other ways in which he was large and exciting. Alicia believed that Jordan Groves had given her a bigger life than she ever could have acquired on her own or with a lesser man. Consequently, until she met and fell in love with Hubert St. Germain, Alicia had thought that, given her unique personality and desires, she was a happily married woman.

Over the years she had on several occasions been tempted to sleep with a man other than her husband — many men, usually friends or colleagues of Jordan’s, had made themselves available, especially when Jordan was off on one of his extended painting treks. But she had always turned them away with a gentle, appreciative smile, glad for the attention, but unwilling to break her marriage vows. Alicia had been raised a strict Catholic, and though she had not been to confession or mass since arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, and had said of herself in the intervening years that she was, like her husband, an atheist, and also like him was a Marxist, yes, but not a Communist, a Trotskyite, maybe, but not a Leninist, she still took vows of any kind seriously. It did not matter that she had made her marital vows in a civil ceremony performed by a Scottish justice of the peace with witnesses pulled in from the street. A sworn vow was a promise that, regardless of changed circumstances, one kept.

Thus, even though throughout her marriage to Jordan Groves there had been the usual crushes and flirtations, brief infatuations with men who resembled her husband not at all — short-lived fantasies generated by mild sexual curiosity — they had never come to anything. A few mixed signals and Alicia had quickly backed off, relieved, her curiosity doused, her fantasies fading fast and no longer able to excite her. In that way she had learned, to her surprise, that she was attracted to quiet men, self-contained, intelligent men who were modest about their accomplishments, men whose small, compact bodies were not at all like her husband’s Viking body. She discovered that she was attracted to men who knew things she didn’t, who possessed skills she lacked, and whose background and social status were radically different from hers. Knowing this, she was able to stand slightly outside her attractions and observe them dispassionately, even with mild amusement, for she was married to and, as far as she knew then, was still deeply in love with and made adequately happy by an entirely different sort of man — a man physically large and energetic and known to all the world for his turbulence and his frank outspokenness and egoism and his unquestioning belief in the importance of his life and work. A belief she had no difficulty in sharing with him.

In many ways they were, after all, a natural pair, Alicia and her husband, Jordan Groves. Jordan was educated in the arts, as she was, and like her was an only child raised by religious, politically conservative parents against whom he had rebelled early on — although his parents, of course, were American working class, Midwesterners, very blue collar, while hers were from the European haute bourgeoisie. And though they had made their home in a small farm village at the edge of the northern wilderness, Jordan and Alicia Groves were both cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated people. And they were rich. Together, but independently, and almost without trying — he by virtue of the immense early popularity of his work, she by virtue of being the daughter of well-to-do parents and the wife of Jordan Groves — the couple had become wealthy, renowned members of the haute bourgeoisie themselves. Thus she found it surprising and amusing and faintly ironic that, while she loved her husband for all the ways he and she were alike and in spite of the few ways they were different, she was periodically attracted to men like Hubert St. Germain for all the ways they were different and in spite of the few ways they were alike.

How they were different from each other was glaringly obvious to her. But until she had come to know the man intimately Alicia Groves could not have said how she and Hubert St. Germain were alike. There in his narrow bed in the furtive darkness of his small hand-built house, she learned that he was a man abandoned and lonely. She learned that he was a stoical man with low animal spirits, but one nonetheless eager to please in a sexual way and easy to please. And though essentially passive and trusting of all forms of authority, he was at bottom a man stubbornly independent of influence by others, especially in matters of right and wrong — ethical matters. And in that way she discovered that she, too, was all these things.

For she was abandoned and lonely. She had not been widowed like Hubert and was not childless and therefore was not, of course, abandoned and lonely in the same ways as he. But she was married to a man who was driven by powerful needs and desires, a man who for years had moved through her life like a hurricane, as if she were a single, small island in a vast archipelago, unable to alter his direction or diminish his force. After his storm had passed over and on, she always found herself alone, awaiting its return. Abandoned and lonely, then.

Also, her slow, gentle lovemaking with Hubert had taught her that she wanted to be held, not taken. She wanted to be touched with delicate precision by tongue and fingertip, not penetrated and lifted, awkward and off balance, unable to control her body herself, forced to give its leverage over to another. And she saw that, easy as she was to please, she was just as eager to give her lover pleasure back. She gave it, not as repayment, but as a gift outright, pure and simple, and the giving aroused and satisfied her.

They met in the fall and did not become lovers until the following spring. And all that spring, into the summer months, whenever she could steal away for a few hours, they made love and afterward walked in the woods and mountain meadows up behind his cabin, and there she discovered that she enjoyed deferring to Hubert’s authority in matters where she was incompetent or ignorant, as in the names and natures of the trees of the forest that surrounded them and the Alpine flowers and the berries and bushes and the natural history of the land and the streams and the lakes. She admired his woodland skills, which to her were arcane, like hunting and fishing and building a house with little more than an ax, a splitting maul, and a buck saw. And she never lied to Hubert, never pretended to possess knowledge or experience that she lacked, the way she lied to her husband to keep him from instructing her. She did on occasion, however, give over to Hubert’s authority in matters where she herself happened to be expert, such as gardening and cooking — skills she had learned from her Viennese mother and refined over the years of her marriage — but she did not believe that this was the same as lying to him. In these ways she learned that she was not vain or a liar by nature, as she had thought; she saw that she merely disliked conflict.

At the same time, when it came to matters of right and wrong, she believed that she was as stubbornly independent of Hubert’s opinions as he was of hers. They did not, therefore, discuss politics or religion or money. Those subjects did not yet concern them and might never concern them, although she knew that he had voted for Herbert Hoover, that he was a practicing Methodist, and that he owned little more than his cabin and his old car and his rifles and dog and lived for the most part outside the cash economy. And Hubert believed what the other villagers believed — that Alicia and her husband were probably Communists, atheists, and rich, for they were “from away,” as the locals said. Thus, when Alicia and Hubert spoke of right and wrong, ethical matters, they talked, not about their politics, religion, or money, but about the one thing more than any other that they shared — adultery.

In his bed, their faces pressed together, their hands laced and bare thighs touching, she said, “I don’t believe in this, Hubert. Adultery. It’s wrong. I don’t mean the sex part, our secrets. I mean the lying. The deception. I’m scared of it.”

“Why are you scared of it?”

“Because we’ll pay dearly for this someday. Probably someday soon. It’s not the same as having secrets. Everyone has secrets. It’s like privacy. But whether Jordan finds out or not, lies and deception corrode your soul, Hubert. They turn you inside out and make you into a liar and deceiver. It’s not just what you do, Hubert, it’s who you become. Not to God, and not to other people, who don’t know you’re lying. To yourself. I don’t want to become that person, Hubert.”

He lifted his hand to her face and traced her lips with his fingertips and said, “You’re wrong. It’s not a terrible thing. Come on, now, it’s a damned beautiful thing we’re doing. A good thing, not a bad one. I loved only one other woman, Alicia, and she died. And now you. And to tell the truth, I didn’t love her the same way as you. I loved her because I knew her so long and so well. It was love, yes, but it was different. It was like love. So nothing you say will make me think it’s not a beautiful and good thing, Alicia. Nothing.”

“Nothing, my darling? But it will come to nothing. It can’t go on, and you know that as well as I.”

“No,” he said. “Don’t think like that.” And he kissed her again, and she closed her eyes and opened herself to him again.

AT THE BOTTOM OF BEEDE MOUNTAIN, ALICIA DROVE THE FORD past the Clarkson farm and made a wide, distracted turn onto the unpaved road and headed north toward the village of Tunbridge. The road wound through the valley of the Tamarack River, whose headwaters rose deep in the rugged mountains of the Reserve, among the brooks and muskegs that fed the Second Lake. Here below, surrounded by the peaks of the Great Range, the valley was broad and flat, with wide green meadows — a rich floodplain granted shortly after the Revolutionary War to New Hampshire and Vermont veterans of the war as payment for their services. For generations, in spite of the harsh climate, the inhabitants of the valley had managed until recent years to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families through careful use and management of the region’s few natural resources — soil good enough to support family farms and modest herds of livestock, a surplus of tall timber for export to Albany and Troy, and fast-running streams for powering small mills. For generations, the people of Tunbridge had been farmers, woodcutters, and mill workers.

Hubert St. Germain was one of the few local men who regarded themselves, not as simple working people, but as professionals. The guides were gruff, no-nonsense men whose skills and knowledge of the mountains, forests, lakes, and streams were essential to and much admired by people from the cities whose desire for a wilderness experience, starting in the mid-1800s, brought them north to the Adirondack region in increasing numbers. For many years, the visitors were paying guests at local farmhouses, eating homegrown produce and fresh game at the farmers’ tables, playing cards and checkers in their parlors after supper, and swapping stories on their front porches. During the long summer days the people “from away” followed the hired guides into the forest and shot at deer and bear and other wild animals, killing them by the hundreds, and fished where they were told along the streams and on the lakes, where they caught trout by the thousands, and scrambled behind the guides up the steep, rocky, root-tangled trails to the bare mountaintops, there to quicken and refresh their sooty, urban souls with transcendental views of nature unadorned spreading out below to every horizon, as far as the human eye could see. The visitors were for the most part an educated, genteel lot, and many of them painted pictures of these scenes; others wrote pastoral poetry; still others wrote long letters and kept copious journals in which they extolled the harsh beauty of this wild terrain and praised the warm generosity and independence of the people who lived in it year-round.

Late in the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, however, with the creation of the Reserve and the construction of the Tamarack Club and cottages and the large, elegantly outfitted wilderness camps like Dr. Cole’s Rangeview on the Second Lake, the visitors no longer boarded in the homes of the residents. Instead, they hired the local people as caretakers, cooks, and cleaners, used them as waiters and gardeners and golf caddies at the club, so that the near equality of summer visitor and year-round resident began to disappear. A mutual parasitism based on a rigid set of class distinctions very much to the advantage of the outsiders took its place.

Then, when the stock market collapsed and the Depression took hold, one by one the small textile, shoe, and paper mills owned and managed by corporations based elsewhere shut down; and the downstate market for timber shrank and soon disappeared altogether. With the flow of outside capital gone dry, local people could no longer pay their debts. The banks downstate started calling in outstanding loans, and farms and homes, many of them heavily mortgaged, were repossessed or sold for back taxes, and land that had been in families for generations was sold off for a few dollars an acre, some of it to summer people, the rest to the Reserve. Gradually, by the mid-1930s, most of the year-round residents of the region found themselves out of necessity surviving solely as the seasonal, part-time, underpaid employees of the summer people. In two generations a class of independent yeomen and yeowomen had been turned into a servant class, with all the accompanying dependencies, resentments, insecurity, and envy.

Not Hubert St. Germain, though. The son and grandson of Adirondack guides, Hubert had no such diminished sense of himself as had his neighbors, or he never would have become the secret lover of Alicia Groves. Neither servant nor boss, the Adirondack guides were throwbacks to men of an earlier era, when the region had not yet been settled by white people — solitary, self-sufficient hunters and trappers and woodsmen who thought of themselves as living off the land, regardless of who owned title to it. They were viewed by locals and outsiders alike as independent contractors — somewhat the way the artist Jordan Groves was viewed. Thus, late one Saturday afternoon in October, when all the summer people had left the region to shift for itself once again and Jordan Groves met Hubert St. Germain for the first time at the Moose Head Inn in Sam Dent, after drinking a half-dozen bottles of beer with him and losing at arm wrestling to him — a thing that rarely happened to Jordan Groves — the famous artist felt easy about inviting the local guide home to eat with him, and the guide felt no discomfort in accepting. It was late at night by then, and the family was asleep. The men cooked steaks in a cast-iron skillet and drank whiskey and continued arm wrestling at the kitchen table until finally, at midnight, the artist was able to put the guide’s arm flat to the table.

Alicia lay in bed upstairs and listened to the two men laugh and talk. Something in the voice of the stranger attracted her. It was not his north country accent. Alicia was not especially fond of the way the local people spoke; she sometimes had difficulty understanding their flattened, brisk English. But she liked listening to this man — his tone was sweet and unbroken, pitched lower than her husband’s. She could not hear their words very well, even though the door to the hallway was open, but she knew that they were talking about cars, she could make out that much, comparing the virtues and limitations of Model T, A, and B Fords, agreeing that for this climate and these roads the Model A was the best vehicle. The stranger called them that, “vehicles,” not cars.

She heard the stranger say that he ought to be getting home, adding with an odd wistfulness that he hated going back to his house at night now. Alicia got out of bed and put on her robe and walked to the doorway of the bedroom.

“Why’s that, Hubert?” her husband asked.

The stranger said, “On account of the house being empty now. My wife got killed a year ago last November,” he added in a flattened, expressionless voice, as if he were too used to speaking these words, and people’s sympathy only made him feel worse and this was a way to deflect their sympathy. Even so, he felt obliged, despite his full knowledge of the inadequacy of his words, to let people know of his pain and loss, because they were real and inescapable, a part of who he was, and people who did not know of his wife’s death often unintentionally said things or asked questions that squeezed his heart in an iron fist, bringing back full-blown his memories of that cold late-autumn night when the state trooper came to his door and told him that his young bride, his wife of three months, a passenger in a car driven by her older sister, had been killed. The car had hit a patch of black ice on the old Military Highway in West Tunbridge and had slid sideways off the road, gaining speed as it slid, crashing into a maple tree as thick as a man, hurling his bride from the car onto the frozen bare ground, a blow that crushed her skull and broke many of the large bones in her body. Now he got to the subject early, volunteering the information in a rehearsed, efficient, unemotional way, as if his wife had been someone else’s wife.

Alicia made her way down the narrow back stairs to the kitchen and heard the stranger say to her husband, “Mostly I’m over it. But it comes back hard sometimes when I go home late like this.”

Alicia’s husband said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Hubert, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. And I apologize for bringing it up.”

“You didn’t bring it up. I did. You would’ve liked her, probably. Sally was good. A good person.”

Alicia stepped into the kitchen and saw Hubert St. Germain for the first time and was startled and felt her throat tighten. She felt herself go out to him and was astonished by the speed and force of it. This had never happened to her before. There seemed to be a light in his face, as if someone in the room were shining a flashlight onto it. She couldn’t tell if it emanated from her fixed gaze and was reflected back by his sun-burnished face or if his face somehow gathered light on its own. Though she had never seen him before, even at a distance or in a crowd, he seemed strangely familiar to her. She had the uncanny feeling that he could have been her long-lost brother, taken from the family before her birth and raised in the forest by peasants as their own and now suddenly, unexpectedly, placed here before her. He was a squarely built man of average height and wore a denim shirt buttoned to the throat and tan trousers and leather boots. His brown felt hat was pushed back on his head, and when Alicia Groves entered the room, he stood and removed his hat, and a shock of sandy hair fell across his forehead. His skin was smooth and fair, his eyes bright blue with pale, almost white eyebrows that gave him a look of innocent surprise. She guessed he was in his middle thirties, a few years older than she, a few younger than her husband.

“Please…please, sit down,” she said, and he complied.

His words slightly slurred, Jordan Groves said, “Sorry we woke you. This’s Hubert St. Germain. He’s a guide over at the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve. Hubert, this’s my wife, Alicia.”

“Yes, ma’am, really sorry about waking you up,” Hubert said. “And pleased to meet you, for sure. I was just leaving,” he added and stood again and squared his hat.

“I overheard the last part of your conversation. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. St. Germain. That’s a terrible thing.”

“Yes, ma’am, it is. Thank you.”

“You should stay the night here,” she said. “We have plenty of room. It’s late, and you shouldn’t be driving anyhow. I know you boys have been drinking. And I can understand how difficult it must be to go home to an empty house. Please,” she said. “Stay.”

“Yes, Hubert, spend the night here and go home in the morning,” Jordan said.

“Really,” Alicia said. “I want you to stay.”

The guide hesitated a moment, then accepted their invitation, grateful for it. Too many nights through the hard year and a half since his wife’s death he had ended up drinking late with strangers at the Moose Head until the place closed or drinking in a stranger’s kitchen like this and finally having to make his way back to his cabin, driving drunkenly over narrow country roads, his Model A coupe drifting from one side of the road to the other, the headlights of oncoming vehicles doubling in his blurred vision, until at last he pulled up in front of his cabin and staggered inside, where, still fully clothed, he dropped onto his bed and, before losing consciousness, let himself be crushed by the weight of his loneliness, and wept. And then he blacked out, and the next morning remembered only the sad fact of his weeping and the feeling of his chest being pressed by a stone the size of the room itself. And with each day’s waking his loneliness and sorrow were worsened by his fear that neither was due to the death of his wife, that both had been in him all along.

Alicia lay in the darkness with her husband sleeping next to her. He had come to bed only minutes earlier and was snoring already and smelled of alcohol and meat and sweat. She heard the bed in the guest room creak and imagined the guide turning in his sleep, dreaming of his lost bride. Or perhaps, she thought, lying in bed in the room next to hers, he, too, was awake and listening for some indication that she was thinking about his presence in her house, and perhaps he was as eager as she for them to talk to each other with no one else present. And though Alicia soon fell asleep, when she woke in the morning her mind was instantly filled with this thought. And when the guide woke in the Groveses’ guest room bed, his loneliness and sorrow seemed mysteriously to have fled. When the artist, Jordan Groves, woke, he was mildly irritated by how late he had slept and hurriedly washed, shaved, and pulled on his clothes, so that by the time Hubert St. Germain and Alicia Groves were sitting down opposite each other at the breakfast table, the artist was already at work in his studio.

NOW THAT THE AFFAIR HAD BEEN DISCOVERED BY THAT DAMNED socialite, Alicia decided that she could not go on seeing Hubert any longer. She knew that she could have stayed hidden from the woman’s sight; Hubert could have insisted on speaking to her outside, and she would have gone away; Alicia must have wanted to be seen by her, to be discovered, uncovered, revealed — not so much to the rest of the world, but to herself. She would break it off immediately and wait for the Cole girl to tell Jordan what she had seen, and Jordan would draw his own conclusions: simply, he would know at once that his wife had been lying to him all these months. She had not been playing visiting nurse at the medical center in Sam Dent at all, had she? She had been with Hubert St. Germain those afternoons. He would bring those conclusions to Alicia, and she would have no choice but to confess everything.

But at least she could tell him that she had ended the relationship. She would say that she had ended it so that their marriage, however broken and betrayed, could continue in some form. And she would tell him that she was ashamed and remorseful, even though she was not ashamed of what she had done and was not remorseful, regardless of the damage it had done to her marriage. She would humbly accept her husband’s righteous wrath and stoically endure the license he had now — license to conduct, without guilt and probably not even secrecy or discretion, an affair with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. Alicia would be almost relieved by that, however. If he were openly having an affair, Alicia would no longer have to deal with his secrets and the lies that went with it and the rumors and gossip, which for years had afflicted the marriage, making it sullen and suspicious and sexually tepid.

When Alicia arrived home, Jordan was not there, and his new assistant, Frances, was taking care of the boys, amusing them in the studio. They were teaching her the names of the artist’s tools and equipment, the girl explained brightly, so that she could make an inventory.

“Frances is very smart, Mama,” Wolf said.

“And she’s nice, too,” Bear added, and the girl reddened.

“I’m sure she is. Where did Mr. Groves go?”

“I don’t know. He said he had some business to attend to. He took his airplane. That’s a swell thing to have, your own airplane that you can land on water.”

“He’ll take you for a ride, if you want,” Wolf said. “Papa likes taking people for rides in his airplane.”

“There are brownies on the kitchen counter by the stove, and milk in the icebox. Help yourself when you’re ready. I’ll be upstairs, so just holler if you need me,” Alicia said and went into the house. She would write to Hubert now and tell him of her decision. Alicia was glad that Jordan was not at home, so that she could write the letter before she had a chance to change her mind; and she was glad that he had taken his airplane, because she could hear its engine a half mile upriver and could hide the letter before he came into the house.

Upstairs in the bedroom, sitting at the writing desk, Alicia took out a vanilla-colored envelope and a sheet of stationery, and she wrote,

Dear Hubert, this is the first and last letter I will write to you. What happened today has brought me to my senses. I will always treasure the love that we shared with each other, but we cannot continue this any longer. You are the only man other than my husband whom I have ever loved or ever will love. I am grateful to have had that. Before I knew you I was content and, though I did not know it, unhappy. You made me very happy, but with it came a terrible discontent. It cannot go on. The costs to my children and to my marriage are too great. When that woman came to your house today, I was forced to look at myself through her eyes, and I realized that I have been swept up in a kind of madness. Please forgive me for allowing it to happen. Forgive me for loving you.

And signed it, Always, A.

She folded the letter, sealed it in the envelope, and wrote Hubert’s full name on the envelope and put it into her purse. Tomorrow she would drive to town and stop at the turnoff by the Clarkson farm where Hubert’s mailbox was located, and she would leave the letter in the box.

No, she would do it now, she decided, before Jordan returned. Before she understood fully what she was giving up. Before she could change her mind.

JORDAN GROVES FLEW HIS AIRPLANE FROM THE SECOND LAKE south over the headwaters of the Tamarack River into the wilderness and then around to the west and across the Great Range, the same way he had come in, so as not to be seen by anyone fishing the First Lake or hiking in from the clubhouse. Shortly, he was on the other side of the Great Range, beyond the Reserve and flying high above the broad valley. He was on his usual route now, following the river home, headed downstream from the outskirts of the village, flying over the scattered roadside farms and the green meadows and cornfields and the clusters of maple and oak and elm trees. There were crosswinds in the valley at this altitude, churning the air slightly, and rather than climb out of the turbulence, he dropped down until, at about twelve hundred feet, cupped by the surrounding mountains, the air smoothed, and he was able to see the freshly oiled road that ran like a scorched ribbon alongside the widening river, and he could even make out individual cows in the fields and people working in their gardens and yards. Only a few vehicles were visible — a dump truck trundling into town, then Darby Shay’s delivery van carting the week’s groceries over to the poor farm in Sam Dent, and then, headed in the opposite direction, he saw the tan Packard sedan that he recognized as Vanessa Von Heidenstamm’s and, following close behind, the modified Model A Ford coupe that he knew belonged to the guide Hubert St. Germain.

Seeing the two of them in the same frame made Jordan Groves freshly ashamed of his mad pursuit of Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. Though he had not seen much of the guide since that autumn night when he’d first met him, he liked the man. The artist admired the guide for his honesty and stoicism and independence. He had been impressed by the straightforward, tough-minded way the man handled the death of his wife. Hubert St. Germain, the longtime caretaker for the Coles, would do without complaint whatever Vanessa asked him to do, but no more or less than that. Hubert St. Germain had the calm good sense and moral clarity not to indulge in elaborate fantasies about the woman, no matter how seductive a game she played. Hubert St. Germain would never find himself out there at the Second Lake, uninvited, unexpected, hoping to step into the living room and take the woman into his arms and make love to her. The guide was a man another man could admire, a man another man could try to emulate.

The situation was new, but his emotions were familiar to him. He saw that this was fast becoming one of those times when, to clear his mind of weakness and confusion and to regain the meaning of his life, Jordan Groves periodically left home and family and journeyed alone to a far place. It had been nearly two years since his August ’34 trip to Greenland, four years since the winter in the Andes when he climbed Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, and Aconcagua and hacked his way through the jungle to Machu Picchu and lived for a month in a hut by the shores of Titicaca. On each of these journeys he had made a daily written record of his thoughts and observations and his sometimes reckless and dangerous experiences, exact and truthful and unsparing, and he had made drawings of the people he met and the places he visited. Each time, on his return, he had published a revised, lightly edited version of his journal as a book, along with many of the drawings. He hadn’t been able to finish the Greenland book yet because he’d been so taken by the natives and their hardy yet delicate ways and their persistent good cheer that he’d filled his sketchbooks and journals with drawings of human beings and had neglected to make pictures of the glaciers that surrounded them. It was the huge white glaciers, those vast mountains of ancient ice, he realized later, that had made the people seem simultaneously strong and vulnerable. To make sense, to be faithful to his perceptions of the Greenlanders, his book needed the glaciers. For that he would have to return to Greenland.

Though not best-sellers, his books had been very well received, partially because of the drawings, but also because the artist was a clever writer with a knack for storytelling. Mostly, however, his readers enjoyed the explicit nature and apparent honesty of his descriptions of his sexual encounters with the women native to those places. To his wife and friends and even to journalists interviewing him, he claimed that those episodes were mostly “tall tales,” fictionalized autobiography, and no one pressed him on the point. But the drawings, made from life, confirmed the claims made by the words, for Jordan Groves, like the American expatriate writer Henry Miller, seemed to hold nothing back, recording in both pictures and words his misadventures alongside his adventures, his happy ease in succumbing to temptation and his occasional principled resistance to it, his delight in the life of his body as much as his compulsion to muse philosophically on subjects great and small. He himself made no claims for the books as literature — he referred to them as his “travel books”—but critics and reviewers admired them, albeit with a certain condescension, invariably noting that, for an artist, Jordan Groves was a remarkably good writer.

Flying along the river, he glanced ahead and saw the Clarkson farm coming up on his right, and then he saw what appeared to be his own car stopped at the lane that led up Beede Mountain to where Hubert St. Germain had built his cabin. He banked hard to the right and circled back over the mountain and the guide’s log cabin and down, and, yes, it was his own black ’34 Ford sedan all right, and there was Alicia standing beside the mailbox posted at the side of the road, and she turned and gazed up at him as he flew low and passed overhead. He banked left, crossing over the river, and circled back a second time, dropping the airplane down to just under a thousand feet, and when he flew over Alicia, who stood by the car now with the driver’s door open, he leaned from the cockpit and waved to her, and Alicia, looking sad and lonely even from this distance, slowly, almost hesitantly, as if she wasn’t sure who he was, waved back.

And then he was gone, homeward bound, thinking, No, not this time. No more journeys. No more months away from Alicia and the boys, traveling to exotic, far-flung lands, living like the natives among the natives in order to reinvent himself and coming back to tell the world how he had done it and whom he had done it with and what it was like there. The Greenland book would have to remain unfinished, and any future books would be about his life in the Adirondacks in the bosom of his family. From now on he would find his inspiration at home. And any solitary reinventing he did would be done in daylight, inside his studio.

A few moments of following the Tamarack River, and then he was above the fork where it joined the Bouquet River and doubled its width and depth, and he had entered the township of Petersburg and could see among the distant trees the chimneys and the black-shingled roof of his house. He began his descent, and for the first time in nearly a week he thought again about the war in Spain and the fight to save the republic from the Fascists, for that week the republic had begun issuing arms to civilians in Madrid, and when the airplane touched down and the pontoons sprayed high fantails of water behind it, Jordan Groves brought back to his mind the American men who were signing up for the Lincoln Brigade, many of them his friends and longtime political allies, and for a few seconds, as he taxied along the riverbank and brought the airplane up to the hangar ramp, he envied those men. But when he looked over to the side yard where the girl, Frances Jacques, was pushing Bear on the tire swing that hung from a high branch of the big oak, while Wolf at her side patiently waited his turn, the artist all at once ceased to envy the men who were enlisting to fight Fascism in Spain, and he concentrated instead on the promises he would make to his wife tonight. This time he would change his life right here at home. The war in Spain would have to be fought without him.

IN TOWN, HUBERT ST. GERMAIN SLOWED AND PARKED IN FRONT of Shay’s General Store and watched Vanessa Cole’s Packard continue on, speeding past the roadside lines of towering elms, headed for the clubhouse, where she would leave her car and walk the mile-long trail into the First Lake. It was a simple but somewhat arduous way to get from what passed for civilization to what passed for wilderness. You needed to be fit enough to make the hike into the boathouse at the First Lake, row a mile and a half across it to the Carry, where you took a different guide boat and rowed two more miles to the camp. In his shirt pocket Hubert had the list of supplies that Vanessa had written out for him at his cabin. It will take two trips, he thought, studying the list. Maybe three. He’d try to lug half the supplies in this afternoon, mostly the food, and bring in the rest tomorrow.

It looked from the list that she was planning to stay awhile, at least two weeks. Or even longer, she had implied, telling him to check at the clubhouse on the first of August, where, if she decided to stay on, she would leave a new list with Mr. Kendall. Hubert was not to come out to the camp unless she arranged for it beforehand. She wanted to be alone with her mother to share their grief over the tragic loss of her father at Rangeview, the one spot on earth that was sacred to him. Although Hubert did not think that the death of Dr. Cole was particularly tragic — Dr. Cole had enjoyed a good long life, after all, and his heart attack had killed him quickly — he was just as happy to stay away from the two women, so long as they didn’t need him for anything specific, because otherwise they tended to turn him into a generalized servant, a rustic houseboy, expecting him to stay out there at the camp and do for them all sorts of things that they could easily do themselves, without adding anything to the monthly retainer they paid him.

Dr. Cole had always been more respectful of the guide than his wife and daughter were, more aware that the guides and caretakers were specialists whose wilderness skills and knowledge, handed down over generations, had taken many years to acquire. In some ways, Dr. Cole was like Alicia, Hubert thought. They both enjoyed having him teach them as much as he could of what he knew and they did not — the names of the native flowers and plants and insects and the habits of the animals and the fish and the birds. They both wanted him to tell them who in town was related to whom and how. They even wanted to learn the histories of the houses and farms of Tunbridge and who had once owned the land. Dr. Cole had treated Hubert St. Germain as an equal, when, of course, in the eyes of the world he was not the doctor’s equal. No, the death of Dr. Cole by heart attack was not tragic. But Hubert would miss him nonetheless. Especially since from now on he would have to deal directly with the wife and the daughter.

It was not clear to him what Vanessa Cole had concluded back there at the cabin, but it was enough that she suspected he and Alicia were lovers. They would have to keep from seeing each other for at least as long as Vanessa Cole stayed at the camp. When she left the Reserve and returned to the city, he and Alicia could take the measure of any damage done and decide what to do then. But he knew they could not be together again the way they had been before.

In any event, he decided, until Vanessa Cole was gone from the Reserve, they would not be able to meet as they had. He was unsure of how to communicate this decision to Alicia. He did not want to write her a letter. He and Alicia had communicated only in person, never in writing. From the beginning, he had simply counted on her appearing at the door of his cabin three afternoons a week, except for when he was up at the lakes. All spring and into the summer, over and over again, she had knocked softly on his door and entered his life, making it seem suddenly large to him and precious and exciting. Before then it had felt small, nearly worthless, dull. And sorrowful. And lonely. Which was how it would have to be now, for a month, perhaps longer, possibly forever — depending on what Vanessa Cole did with her suspicions.

That’s all they were, though — suspicions. What could Vanessa Cole care if her hired guide and caretaker was having a love affair with a woman who happened to be the wife of a man she barely knew? The artist Jordan Groves wasn’t part of the Coles’ circle; he wasn’t even allowed on the Reserve or at the clubhouse, not since he’d landed his airplane at the lake and had that fight with Kendall. Also, Hubert had heard that Vanessa Cole was angry with the artist for flying her up to Bream Pond on the Fourth of July, the same night her father died, and leaving her there to walk back alone. If she was still angry with him, then she’d probably enjoy suspecting that the artist’s wife was sleeping with her family’s hired guide and caretaker. She’d like that. She wouldn’t want to do anything that helped end the affair. She’d want to keep her suspicions to herself.

Hubert walked up and down the aisles of the store, followed by Kenny Shay, the owner’s son, who carried the items the guide selected back to the counter and stacked them there — tinned beef, bacon, eggs, cheese, oatmeal, spaghetti, bread, butter, canned vegetables and fruit, sugar, and condensed milk, and hard goods, too, like candles and kerosene and soap — a long list of supplies that Hubert would lug into the lakes on his back and take across to the camp in his guide boat, where he knew Vanessa and her mother would need him to cut enough firewood to last them two weeks or longer. No doubt he would have to make some small repairs on the place as well, and, depending on their mood, he might have to go back to the clubhouse and bring in fifty pounds of ice from the icehouse and before dark catch them a pack basket full of trout and clean the fish for them, cooking a half dozen tonight and putting the rest on ice. He would not get home until late. But it was work for which he would be fairly paid, according to his old agreement with Dr. Cole, and there was no other paying work anywhere in the region for him right now, not without taking away the job of one of the other guides. Still, he was not looking forward to doing it.

AS VANESSA NEARED THE CAMP, THE PACE OF HER ROWING picked up. She glanced over her shoulder at the shore, looking to avoid the rocky outcrop that extended into the water on either side of the landing, then scanned the deck and grounds, hoping for a few seconds that somehow she had hallucinated this or dreamed it, all of it, and she would see her mother and maybe even her father standing on the deck, dressed for dinner, cocktails in hand, anxiously awaiting her return. Ever since the meeting in New York at the lawyer’s office, Vanessa had felt that she was having one of those frightening dreams with no beginning or end, where you know you’re dreaming — you must be, because everything is out of control and unpredictable, and you feel guilty of some dark, unnamed crime — but you’re unable to wake from it.

She prayed that she would wake from this dream. And then she did. Her mother sat gracefully on the hull of an overturned guide boat, her barefoot legs crossed at the ankles. She sipped champagne from a crystal flute. She wore a simple gold bracelet on her wrist. From her distance, Vanessa admired her mother’s gentle, slightly dreamy poise, the way she looked down at the rocky shoreline as if she were remembering something privately amusing, and Vanessa decided that it was the dress that made her look so lovely, a cream-colored, low-necked, beltless frock by Muriel King that hung straight from the shoulders. It was the dress, but even more it was the unselfconscious privacy of her thoughts. What a beautiful woman, Vanessa said to herself. I will look that beautiful someday. I will know how to dress like that someday. I will know how to have thoughts like that someday. Then she saw her father. He was standing on the deck. He was dressed for dinner. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he was rocking ever so slightly on his heels, looking with pride and good-natured satisfaction at his wife down at the shore, as if he had created her, a painting or a photograph he had made. There was nothing impatient about him, nothing distracted — he had taken a moment to stop and look fondly and with profound appreciation at his wife without her knowing or posing or worrying about pleasing him.

But the deck was deserted, there was no one at the shore, there was not even a guide boat, and there was no one walking among the tall pines that surrounded the camp. She had not been dreaming. Her father was dead. And she had indeed committed a dark, unnameable crime. For the first time since forcing her mother to Rangeview and imprisoning her there, Vanessa was truly terrified of what she had done.

Up to this moment, whenever she saw what she had done, she had justified it to herself, rationalizing her rash acts, telling herself that she had no choice, none, they had trapped her, Mother and the lawyers and the doctors, and now they wanted to put her in a cage and keep her there for the rest of her life. Or worse. Those were facts. Everything else was speculation or memory, febrile and unreliable. Since childhood, Vanessa had felt trapped by her parents, as if they were predators and she their intended prey — trapped and then put in a cage for later, when they would have the time and occasion to devour her properly. As a small child, Vanessa could not listen to those old fairy tales being read to her without crying and begging whoever was reading to stop, stop. Those old stories of children put into ovens by stepmothers and wicked witches. Children climbing sky-high bean stalks to the giant’s lair. Children being led by a piper into a mountain cave, never to be seen again. They terrified Vanessa. She could not bear to say or even hear nursery rhymes without feeling her chest tighten and her legs go all watery, making her cry to her nanny Hilda or to the child reciting the rhyme, “Stop! Stop saying that! I hate that! It’s nasty and scary. You’re only doing it to scare me!”

People — her nanny Hilda and the babysitters, other children and their parents, and her own parents and their friends — were impressed by Vanessa’s exquisite sensitivity and smiled down at her and praised it, as if she were the most delicate flower of all and therefore the most precious. But she knew, even as a very young girl of five and six, that her inability to listen to the fairy tales and nursery rhymes that other children loved had its origin someplace else, because the tales and verses made her feel the way she felt when she almost remembered being naked and lifted high in the air by a big man and placed up on the fireplace mantel with a scary hot fire burning below, the big man turning into her father, who disappeared suddenly behind his camera box, covering himself with a black hood, when something made a whooshing sound and a flash of light so bright that for a few seconds she couldn’t see anything and only knew that she was being lifted again by a big man and carried to a sofa that was hard and scratchy on her bare bottom and back, where she was placed just so, her naked legs and arms arranged just so, her head turned just so. She remembered the diamond shapes in the carpet on the floor, dark red against a field of green. And then another whooshing sound and flash of light that made her close her eyes tight, and she kept them closed tight, clenching them like fists, wrinkling up her nose and crinkling her forehead, making herself ugly, until her father carried her to her crib, where he put her nightie back on her and kissed her on the cheek. And then her mother, led to the crib by her father, leaned down and stroked Vanessa’s hair slowly, dreamily, with eyes half closed, smiling, as if she’d never felt anything so soft and lovely before.

At her father’s funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, when it was Vanessa’s turn to speak, she started to talk about what her father was like as a young man, before he went off to war, when she was the very little girl that Dr. and Mrs. Cole had recently adopted, but somehow she got away from what she’d planned to say. She had meant to describe him as heroic and wise and all-knowing, the way little girls are supposed to remember their fathers, but instead she found herself describing him the way she actually remembered him. She said that he was cold and detached and that he saw people, including his own daughter, as objects to be examined and cut open and repaired, as a thing to be photographed and privately exhibited for his exclusive, secret pleasure. What began as a loving daughter’s eulogy ended as a turgid, blurred accusation that so upset everyone that afterward no one would speak to her. Until the morning two weeks later when her mother announced that she had scheduled a meeting for that afternoon with Whitney Brodhead to discuss her father’s will. When they entered the lawyer’s conference room and Vanessa saw Mr. Brodhead seated at the head of the long table with a sheaf of papers spread before him and Dr. Reichold standing at the rain-sopped window looking down at the street, Vanessa knew that she was just as trapped now as she had been all those years ago, lifted into the air by a big man and placed naked up on the mantel with the fire burning somewhere below, and her father, behind the camera box and hidden under his black cloak, saying, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again….”

Vanessa dragged the guide boat from the waterline at the rocky shore up to the knoll beyond, rolled it over onto the gunnels to dry, and walked quickly to the house. She had been gone longer than she expected and knew that her mother would be thirsty and hungry and would need to use the toilet. The water system for the camp was primitive, but effective — a pipe that ran downhill from a spring behind the cookshack fed a wood-fired water heater in the kitchen of the main building and the several bathrooms. There was an outhouse for the help, of course, but no bathing facilities for them except the lake.

She unlocked and opened the door to her parents’ bedroom and entered. Her mother was seated on a straight-backed chair by the dressing table, just as Vanessa had left her hours earlier, her hands and ankles bound and tied to the chair. The silk scarf had slipped from her mother’s mouth to her chin, and her mouth gaped open. Her head lolled to one side, eyes closed, and her breathing sounded labored and raspy, as if she had climbed a steep hill.

Vanessa hurried to her side and untied her hands and ankles and removed the scarf. “Mother? I’m sorry I took so long, Mother. Are you all right?”

Evelyn Cole’s head wobbled, and she turned, opened her eyes, and looked at Vanessa with a puzzled expression, as if not quite recognizing her daughter. Half lifting the woman from the chair, Vanessa guided her mother with one arm around her waist from the chair across the room to the bed and gently lay her down and covered her with a Hudson’s Bay blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed. “Oh, Mother, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Please, please, please, be all right.”

Evelyn said, “Water. Give. Me. Water. Vanessa.”

Vanessa ran into the bathroom and filled a glass, thinking, Please don’t die. This isn’t what I wanted. All I wanted was not to be trapped by you and Daddy. Then she heard the bedroom door open and close behind her. Rushing from the bathroom, she heard the click of the lock in the door. The blanket lay in a white, black, and red heap on the floor beside the bed.

Vanessa yanked on the door latch and shrieked, “Mother! Open this door! I’ll kill you for this!” She ran to the window, shoved it open, and unhooked the screen. In seconds, she was out the window and racing around to the front of the building, where she saw her mother already at the shore struggling to turn the guide boat off its back, unable to do it.

Vanessa approached her mother methodically, calmly. “It’s too heavy for you.”

Evelyn Cole let go of the boat and looked out at the lake as if seeking help. There was no one there. The sun was halfway between the meridian and the far side of the lake, and the water glittered like hammered brass. Her daughter was insane. Her daughter was going to kill her, Evelyn knew it now. She said, “Vanessa, please. Let me go. I promise, I’ll do anything you want.”

“It’s too late, Mother. I don’t believe you.”

“Please, Vanessa. Please don’t kill me. I’m your mother, Vanessa.”

“No, you’re not.” They stood facing each other across the upturned boat. “I don’t want to kill you, for heaven’s sake. I just want…,” she began and left the sentence hanging.

A few seconds of silence passed. “What do you want from me, Vanessa?”

Vanessa took a deep breath. “I want…I want you to be a good girl. That’s all. While I figure out what to do with you.”

Vanessa took her mother firmly by the elbow and guided her slowly back up to the house. When they reached the deck, Evelyn said, “I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“Hubert St. Germain is coming soon with supplies. I’m going to have to keep you locked up and quiet while he’s here.” Vanessa glanced back and checked the glimmering horizon for Hubert’s boat. No sign of him yet.

“Please don’t tie me up again. I swear, I’ll stay out of sight and will be quiet as a mouse. Please, Vanessa.” The ropes had burned Evelyn Cole’s wrists and bare ankles, and the scarf over her mouth had made her feel as if she was suffocating. She meant it, she would do exactly as Vanessa wished. She would stay in the bedroom with the door closed while Hubert was at the camp, and she would not call for help. Vanessa would have to come to her senses eventually. She couldn’t be mad. She couldn’t be capable of killing her own mother. “Vanessa,” she said, and waited until Vanessa’s gaze came back to her. “I am your mother.”

“Stop saying that!” They stood at the closed door of the bedroom side by side. “Come,” she said and held out her hand. “Let’s go in now.” With her free hand Vanessa turned the key and pushed the door open.

“You don’t understand. You’re my child, Vanessa. I’m your mother.”

“Stop saying that! I’ve got to think. I’ve got to think about what’s next.”

“I’m afraid, Vanessa. I’m afraid of what you’re going to do next. Please, remember, you’re my child.”

“Don’t say that again.”

“Vanessa, you are.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to tell you the truth.”

“Right. If you want to tell me the truth,” Vanessa said, drawing her mother into the room and leading her to the chair, “you can tell me who my real mother was. And my real father. Not that it matters much now.”

“I’m your real mother,” Evelyn said simply.

Vanessa turned and looked closely at her. She looked away again. “No. No, you’re not. My real mother never…a real mother wouldn’t treat her daughter the way you’ve treated me,” she said. She put her hands on Evelyn’s shoulders and pushed her down into the chair and gathered the strands of rope from the floor. “A real mother wouldn’t steal her daughter’s inheritance and try to have her locked up in a mental hospital. A real mother would fight tooth and nail against anyone who’d try to do that. A real mother would protect her daughter.”

“It’s true, Vanessa. You are my child.”

“Oh, no, I’m not. Because a real mother wouldn’t lie about it for thirty years. She wouldn’t tell her daughter she was adopted if she wasn’t.”

“Daddy didn’t want you to know. Because he was ashamed of me, and angry. For a long time he was very angry. And I was scared. Scared that, if you did know the truth, other people would find out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What…what is the truth?”

Evelyn looked up at her daughter’s anxious face and sighed. This was a conversation that she had longed for and had imagined having a thousand times, but now that it was actually taking place she was very frightened, and for a few seconds she wanted to end it, wanted to say, No, you are not the child I bore before your father and I were married. You’re some other woman’s child. You are not the baby all grown up that I conceived one drunken spring night at a Williams College mixer. She wanted to say, You’re not the child whose father I could not name, a college boy whose face I could not remember the next morning, when I stumbled still drunk down the stairs of the fraternity house and out the door into bright sunlight, my party dress stained and half buttoned. You are not the baby I bore in North Carolina that fall at the home for girls like me, girls whose parents could afford to send them into hiding for six months and claim they’d gone abroad for a semester to study French or Italian or music appreciation, returning to college and proper society in the spring, slim and fresh faced and all but virginal again. Evelyn Cole did not want to tell her daughter that her parents had paid to keep the baby, their grandchild, in the home, which was in fact a posh private orphanage in Asheville, North Carolina, while Evelyn finished her junior and senior years at Smith, where she was courted by the very promising Carter Cole, a Yale man from a distinguished old New England family, a well-born man bound for medical school and inherited wealth, a man who, to the delight and relief of her parents, did indeed marry her. And one night a year later, when he was interrogating his bride about her past sexual experiences, as he often did that first year of their marriage, demanding to hear every last detail, wanting to peer into her sexual past as if it were a set of pornographic photographs, she broke down and finally told him everything she could remember about that terrible party at the fraternity house at Williams College. He had known that his bride had not come to him a virgin — she couldn’t lie about that, he was training to be a doctor, after all — but now he learned that her past, and thus his own, was further tainted by the birth of a child, a little girl who was three years old, a child never put up for adoption and old enough now to be aware of a little of her own mysterious and illegitimate origins, thanks to the sentimental indiscretions of Evelyn’s parents, who had made semiannual visits to the home to visit the child and make sure that she was receiving adequate care, who had indulged themselves by staying with the child alone for hours each time they visited.

“I have no memory of that,” Vanessa declared. “None.”

“Daddy was always afraid that you did. You were so precocious a child, so intelligent, that he kept waiting for it to come out. He was afraid that somehow you knew I was your real mother, and it would become known to other people. And he didn’t want that.”

“But I didn’t know! I have no memories of any visits from Grandma and Grandpa way back then. All I remember of the orphanage are the big lawns and my room there. I remember the bars of my crib and the lawns outside. Nothing else. No people. Not even other children. Except for my crib and the endless lawns, all my earliest memories are of you and Daddy and the house in Tuxedo Park and the apartment in the city and the Reserve. Were there other children?”

“At the home? There were only a few, maybe two or three. Little babies waiting to be adopted. It was very exclusive,” Evelyn said. “Vanessa, I really am thirsty. May I please have a glass of water?”

“As long as you stay in the chair where I can see you,” Vanessa said and went into the bathroom where, watching her mother in the mirror, she filled a glass at the sink and returned with it. She handed the glass to her mother, who drank it down and asked for another. When she came back with the second glass, Vanessa said, “But I don’t understand. Why didn’t Grandma and Grandpa let me be adopted when I was a little baby? Was there something wrong with me? Something that made it so nobody wanted me?”

“Lots of people wanted you. You were beautiful and intelligent and charming. They wouldn’t sign the papers.”

“Who? The people who ran the home?”

“Your grandparents. My mother and father. They would come back from North Carolina and tell me how beautiful you were, as if to punish me. Over and over. And how they were just waiting for the right people to come along and adopt and raise you. I think they meant that. Your grandparents were proud. Proud of their bloodlines. As you know. And even though no one knew for sure who your real father was, they knew he was at least a Williams boy. Which was something, I suppose. They wanted to be able to choose who would adopt you. So they just paid to keep you there and never signed the papers. I don’t know what they were thinking, what they were hoping would happen, because nothing could happen. Except that you would grow older and eventually grow up there.”

“What about you? You could have signed the adoption papers.”

“No. I was only twenty when you were born, and I didn’t dare go against my parents. And then later, by the time I was of legal age, I was engaged to marry Daddy. By then I was so used to keeping it a secret that I didn’t want to think about it.”

“‘It.’ You mean me. So why did you and Daddy finally decide to adopt me? I mean, I was safely out of sight way down there in North Carolina, out of sight and, at least in your case, out of mind. You could’ve left me there to rot, if you’d wanted to.”

“It was your father’s idea. Well, no, it was my idea. Under his conditions. Once we realized that we weren’t going to have any children together, I begged him to let me take you from that place and raise you as our child. He agreed, but only if I promised to say that you were adopted and never revealed to anyone, not even to you, that I was your real mother. My parents were happy to go along with it. And so were the people who ran the home. In the end, everyone got what they wanted. Which was to save face. Everyone got to save face. Even me.”

“Even you. Why weren’t you going to have children together, you and Daddy? Was there something wrong with you?”

“No, not with me.”

“With Daddy, then. I never heard anything about that.”

“It wasn’t a physical thing with him. Not really. Your father was…a difficult man. Sexually, I mean. He didn’t…he didn’t like to make love. Also, he was very old-fashioned, and when he found out that I wasn’t a virgin…” She trailed off.

Vanessa said, “Keep talking, Mother.”

“Oh, I hate telling you all this!”

“It’s too late to stop now. Tell me the rest.”

“In the very beginning, when we first tried to make love, it went…badly, let’s say. The fact is, on our honeymoon he found out that I wasn’t a virgin, and he rejected me for a time. Later on, months later, when we tried to make love, he couldn’t. And then…well, then he wouldn’t. We were both pretty shy about it, about sex, and it was just simpler not to do it at all, and he never complained about it, and neither did I. Although it made me very lonely for a long, long time.”

“My Christ!” Vanessa said. “This is mad. I don’t know if I can take it all in. Or even believe it! It’s all so fruity and weak and pathetic. You disgust me, Mother. Truly. You amaze and disgust me. Both you and Daddy. And Grandma and Grandpa, too. But especially you!”

“Vanessa, please don’t be angry with us. We did the best we could.”

“Well, they’re all dead, Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa. So I can’t get back at them for what they did. But you’re not dead. And look at you, you’re trying to put me out of the way again, like you did when I was born. Like Grandma and Grandpa did when I was a baby.” Vanessa took the glass from her mother, set it on the dressing table, and pulled her arms behind the chair and tied her wrists. “Where are all those photographs Daddy took of me when I was a little girl?” she suddenly demanded. “You know the ones.”

“I don’t…I don’t know.” Her mother looked up, wide-eyed and frightened, at Vanessa. “Those photographs? What photographs? They’re in Daddy’s albums, I suppose,” she said. “In the library here, where he kept them stored. And on the walls, framed. And at home.”

“No. You know what I’m talking about, so don’t play dumb. Photographs of me. Naked. I want them.”

“Naked! What do you mean? He took hundreds of photographs of you back then. He loved photographing you. He had his own darkroom and everything, where he developed and printed them. But I never saw any pictures of you naked. What are you talking about? Please don’t put the scarf over my mouth, Vanessa. It makes me feel like I’m suffocating.”

“From before the war. From when I was four or five. Or maybe I was only three and recently ‘adopted.’ You were there, Mother. You knew! You knew he was taking those pictures.”

“No. Daddy was very shy about that. He didn’t like to see you naked, ever.”

“If you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going to tie the scarf over your mouth. I don’t want to listen to your lies anymore.”

“Vanessa, it is the truth! Daddy always made me or Hilda make sure you were properly covered before he went into your room, and he never bathed you or even saw you being bathed. Some things I don’t remember from those years before the war, you know, because of my bad nerves back then. And the medicines. But I do remember that.”

Vanessa sighed heavily. “Oh, God, Mother, you’re still lying to me. Or else you’re lying to yourself and believing it. Either way, it’s a lie. Because you were there, and you know where those pictures are. Daddy was very orderly and never threw anything away. I’m sure you’ve gone through all his files since he died and know exactly where those pictures are. You said you remember being present when he took them.”

“No, no! He wasn’t like that, Vanessa. He wasn’t.”

“I’ll bet I’m not the only naked little girl he took photographs of. Wasn’t the only naked little girl, I mean.”

“Your father wasn’t the kind of man who—”

Vanessa cut her off with the silk scarf, tying it tightly this time so it wouldn’t slip down. “No more lies, Mother. No more lies,” she said, walking to the open window, which she shut and locked. Then she pulled down the shade, dropping the room into darkness. “I’ll come back for you after Hubert’s been here and gone. Maybe then you and I will go through those albums in the library together. Won’t that be nice? Just the two of us. What fun. Mother and daughter leafing through the family albums. Maybe then you’ll tell me everything.”

She locked the bedroom door behind her and walked from the living room to the porch. From the deck she saw a guide boat a half mile out on the lake. It was Hubert St. Germain — smoothly, expertly, his oar blades barely making a ripple in the water — rowing toward the camp.

The doctor shook the young woman’s hand and said, Good-bye, Vanessa, and bon voyage. Your luggage will be in your stateroom, he added, and she nodded as if agreeing. He turned her toward the other passengers, and she followed them onto the bus. When the bus had departed, the doctor walked into the hotel bar and ordered a schnapps and filled his pipe with tobacco and lighted it. A half hour later, in a soft, drizzling rain, the passengers arrived at the airfield and were taken inside a cavernous hangar, where they were inspected a second time for matches, lighters, and batteries. Beyond the hangar, tethered by its nose to a mooring mast, the enormous zeppelin floated in the air, ten feet from the ground. The silver ship was nearly a sixth of a mile long, shaped like a gigantic whale. An open staircase extended from its gleaming belly to the ground. One by one, the passengers climbed the stairs and entered the leviathan. A steward escorted the American woman to her room on Level B and left her alone there. She removed her hat and veil, exposing a single red spot above each eyebrow, tiny circular wounds recently healed. After a few moments, she stepped to the large rectangular window and looked down at the crowd of well-wishers and officers on the ground. A uniformed brass band played “Muss I Denn?” and a choir of Nazi youth sang the “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland Über Alles.” Gradually, the crowd below — the brass band, the Nazi youth contingent, the Zeppelin officials and groundsmen, and the government officials and SS officers — began to diminish in size. Without a ripple of felt movement, the airship was silently rising. At about three hundred feet the muffled sound of the diesel engines penetrated the silence of the stateroom, and the great zeppelin slowly turned northwest and in the gathering dusk headed toward the lights of Koblenz, following the Rhine to the sea.