The Reserve

5

“YOU NEEDN’T CARRY IT TO THE HOUSE,” VANESSA COLE SAID to the guide and smiled winningly. “Just unload everything here by the shore.” She placed her hand lightly, like a fallen leaf, on his thick shoulder and continued to hold the smile. She was the same height as he, Hubert noticed for the first time, tall for a woman, but not as tall as Alicia. It had somehow pleased him from the start that Alicia was taller than he, as if there were a rightness to it, a legitimacy. It was an observation that he had never carried to its logical conclusion: that if she had been shorter than he it would have been somehow wrong, illegitimate. He did notice now, however, that it also seemed right to him that Vanessa Cole was tall, even if not as tall as Alicia, and for a second he wondered if people from away, especially the women, ran taller than local people.

“You sure? I don’t mind lugging it up to the house, Miss Cole. Most of it goes to the pantry anyhow,” he said.

She said she was grateful to him for coming out on such short notice and didn’t want to keep him at the camp any longer than necessary. Besides, her mother was napping on the living room sofa, and Vanessa didn’t want to disturb her. She glanced down at the four cardboard boxes of food and other supplies the guide had unloaded from the boat and saw that certain items were missing. “I guess you’ll be making a second trip out anyhow. Can you do that today?”

“Probably not. This here’s mostly the food. It’s getting a little on, so I figured to bring the rest tomorrow and maybe use what’s left of today to cut you some wood and tend to whatever else needs tending to.” Hubert grabbed a box and hefted it to his shoulder. “I’ll take it into the pantry the back way, real quiet. So’s not to disturb Mrs. Cole.”

“No! Here, let me have that.” She took the box from him and set it back on the ground. “I…I’m sorry. Is there any way you can make that second trip this afternoon? You could just bring it out and drop it here on the shore for me. Don’t worry about the wood or anything. I can do that myself. I…I just need you to bring the rest of the supplies and leave them here on the shore. Please?”

Hubert looked closely at the woman’s face. She was strangely agitated, he thought, more than usual, that’s for sure. She was almost always wound a little tight, but in a fluttery, flirtatious way that put him off, like she was playing him for a rube or something. This was different, as if she was scared of having him go up to the house. Or somehow scared of him on a more personal level, like she thought he might be going to hit her or try to seduce her against her will, both of which were the furthest things from his mind. He liked her better this way than the other, however. He stepped back and looked at her face directly, and she lifted her chin slightly and stared back. For the first time he saw how truly beautiful she was and understood what all the fuss was about. For years he’d heard the rumors and the gossip — the high-society marriages and divorces, the love affairs with rich, famous men and even with local men not so famous and not in the slightest rich and with married members of the Tamarack Reserve and Club, at least one every summer and sometimes more than one. No man, young or old, could resist her, that was the word locally. But up to now Hubert had not understood why. Up to now, however, her full gaze had never really fallen on him. He had never felt seen by her and thus had never experienced the intense, diamond-hard clarity of her need before. It was not sexual need strictly, but a little like that. This was something beyond desire. It was an urgent need to be seen by him, to be made real by his gaze. And along with it came a silent but clearly felt declaration that he, Hubert St. Germain, was the only person on the planet who could do the job, the only person who was capable of truly seeing her and thus the only person who could make her existence a reality.

He asked her if she was all right.

She shook her head like a horse tossing its mane from side to side and gave him that sorrowful, scared, needy look again. “I’m not…,” she began, and then said, “Yes, I’m okay. I think I’m okay. You’re kind to ask.”

“I imagine it’s been hard on you, losing your father like that. So suddenly and all. And being here. Where he died, I mean. I remember when my father died it was a long time before I could go back to where it happened, to where they found the body.” This was more than he had ever said to her at once, and it surprised him, and surprised him even more when he continued. “I guess it was because he died unexpectedly, sort of by accident. It was different with my mother, because she was sick for a long time first. And with Sally, my wife, it was different then, too, because I never had to go back to where she had died. Although I remember the first time I drove past where the car crashed, I got all weak in the knees and couldn’t look at the tree she’d hit. It wasn’t so bad the second time, because by then the road department had come out and cut the tree down, in case somebody else might go off the road and hit it the same as Sally’s sister did.”

“Yes, I heard about that. I’m sorry for that, Hubert. For your loss. It must have been awful.”

“For a spell it was. We weren’t married long, but we’d been together a long time. High school sweethearts, sort of.”

For a few seconds they were silent. Then she said, “What about you, Hubert? Are you all right? I mean now, today.”

“Well…no, not exactly.” He surprised himself by answering honestly.

“What do you mean?” She reached out and touched his sleeve lightly, holding it between thumb and forefinger, reinforcing her plea to go ahead, Hubert, tell the truth.

“I guess…yes, I am kind of upset. Actually, I’m kind of worried about you coming to my place. When Alicia, Mrs. Groves, was there. In case you got the wrong idea,” he added, preparing to lie, knowing he would not be believed anyhow, and hating it, the lying, regardless of whether she believed him. He was a man with secrets, perhaps, but he did not lie.

“There was no wrong idea to get, Hubert. I mean, your private life is your own. It’s no business of mine. I don’t know Mrs. Groves, anyhow. Not personally. But she seems like a good person. And I do know you’re a good person.”

“This is sort of a strange conversation for us to be having. Isn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess it is.” She was still holding his sleeve. “I wish…I wish you could be the one to help me. I need someone to help me.” Her eyes opened wide and turned dark.

He heard himself say that he would help her. She wasn’t going to make him lie about Alicia, she was changing the subject for his sake, so maybe he was in her debt for that. “What do you need me for?”

Vanessa said, “I’ve done something…something wrong. Wrong, and very rash. And I don’t know what to do about it, Hubert. I’m confused, and I’m in trouble. A lot of trouble.” She let go of his sleeve and pressed the flat of her hand against the side of his upper arm. It was a friendly, trusting, comforting gesture, as if he and not she were the one asking for help and were receiving it from her touch. “Oh, God, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“What have you done?” Their faces were drawn close together now, their eyes locked, and he could smell her hair. It was like fresh-cut grass. Or maybe tea leaves, he thought. A woody, clean smell.

“You must promise to tell no one. It has to be a secret. No one else must know.”

“You can trust me.”

“You can’t tell anyone. Promise me.”

“All right. I won’t tell anyone,” he said, and meant it.

“I’ve done…I’ve done something bad to my mother.”

“Your mother? Mrs. Cole? What do you mean, ‘something bad’? I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s just, I got trapped in…a situation, trapped by her, and to escape it I did something very…rash. And now I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t undo it. And I can’t keep doing it, either. Because…well, because she’s my mother. And it’s wrong.”

“Tell me what you’ve done. It can’t be but so bad. I’ll help you,” he said again. “Have you accidentally hurt her or something?” Maybe they had a quarrel that turned violent, he thought. It happens sometimes in families, even families like the Coles. It had happened in his.

“No, I haven’t hurt her, not physically.”

“Well, it can’t be so bad, then.”

“Oh, yes, it’s bad, Hubert.” She took her hand away from his arm and held his hand in hers and told him to come with her to the house. “I shouldn’t be doing this, involving you, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have anyone to turn to, Hubert.”

“It’s okay, Miss Cole. You can trust me.”

Vanessa turned and walked quickly toward the house, Hubert following a few feet behind. They crossed the wide deck, passed through the screened porch, and entered the living room. He checked the sofa — Mrs. Cole wasn’t there, asleep or awake. He looked around the room and said to himself, So she lied about that. He wondered what else she’d lied about. Maybe everything. Maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to help her. She was capable of tricking him into behaving in a way that he’d be sorry for later, sorry and humiliated. Something ugly was going on. Maybe a thing has been done here that only rich people do, he thought, and he wished that he were not here in this house alone with this woman, wished that he were by himself in the deep woods tracking a deer instead of following this nervous, frightened woman who lied all the time. If he could not be alone in the woods, he wished he were with Alicia in the mountain meadow up behind his cabin, showing her the new-blooming pasture roses, the black-eyed Susans, and the pink yarrow. Alone in the deep woods; and with Alicia: they were the only times he had been happy in years. Maybe since he was a small child. Maybe always. Even with Sally, his wife — whom he believed he had loved, at least until he met Alicia — even with Sally he had not been happy and had preferred being alone. Secretly, he knew that his grief over his wife’s death had been eased and tempered by the sudden solitude that had followed it.

Hubert said, “Your mother’s not here, I guess.”

“No. She’s…she’s in her bedroom.”

“Maybe I should take a look at her,” he said. “Make sure she’s okay.”

“No! She’s all right. She’s fine. It’s just…she’s indisposed.”

“I believe I need to see her, Miss Cole. You said some things outside that make me think I need to see her. Just to make sure she’s okay.”

“Yes, I guess I did,” she said and sighed. “All right. You can see her. But you mustn’t talk to her. You mustn’t. And you can’t tell anyone that she’s here. You said I could trust you. And you said you’d help me, remember?”

“I did,” he said, but he did not promise her anything more. He was a man who tried not to make promises that he might not be able to keep; yes, he had told Vanessa that she could trust him and he’d help her; those were promises he could keep. But he was not sure that he would not talk to Vanessa Cole’s mother or tell someone she was here at Rangeview. Not until he had seen the woman first with his own eyes and had determined what Vanessa had done to her. For that was what she’d said, wasn’t it? That she had done something bad to her mother.

Vanessa unlocked and opened the door to her parents’ bedroom. She stepped aside, and motioned for him to enter. He walked to the doorway. Looking past Vanessa into the bedroom, he saw the woman. It was Mrs. Cole. Her name was Evelyn, he remembered, but he had always called her Mrs. Cole. Dr. Cole had long ago told Hubert to call him Carter. The guide had liked that. The woman’s hands and ankles were bound, and there was some kind of cloth over her mouth, and Hubert did not know what to think. Whatever he had expected to see, it was not this.

Mrs. Cole looked over at Hubert St. Germain, the family’s longtime guide and caretaker, standing by the door, his hands hanging empty at his sides, Vanessa beside him, and the woman seemed to recoil from him, as if he had come to do something to her that Vanessa couldn’t bring herself to do alone. Mrs. Cole’s eyes widened in fear, and she shook her head wildly no, as if pleading with him not to do it.

Barely two seconds passed, and Vanessa grabbed Hubert by the hand and pulled him away from the room and slammed the door shut on her mother and locked it.

“Let me back in there, Miss Cole!”

“No. I can’t,” she said and stood with her back to the door.

“I got to help her!”

“No!” She cried, “Help me, Hubert! Please, I’m the one who needs you.”

“How? What’s going on here? Why is she like that, all tied up and gagged like that?”

“I can’t explain. But you have to trust me, Hubert.”

“Then you got to tell me the reason she’s like that.”

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll have to untie her and let her tell me.”

Vanessa looked steadily at him for a moment, her lips pursed, as if she were taking the measure of the man. Finally, she said, “It’s not my mother who’s trapped. Believe me. It’s not my mother who’s a prisoner, Hubert. It’s me.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mother…my mother wants to lock me away in a mental hospital. Where they’ll drug me. Or worse. Where they’ll give me a lobotomy or something. She’s taken my inheritance away from me. My mother wants me dead, or as good as dead!”

“She can’t want you dead. She’s your mother.”

“And that only makes it worse, Hubert. Don’t you see? When your own flesh and blood wants you locked away so she can take your money or wants you mindless or even dead, it’s so terrible that you don’t know what to do! I panicked, Hubert. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking, I was simply reacting. I just wanted to make it so she couldn’t put me into a looney bin for the rest of my life, or worse. I felt like a caged animal. I still do! She planned to ship me off to a hospital in Europe, where I was before. So I forced her to come here, to the Reserve. But I’ve only made it worse. If I let her go now, she’ll make me go into the hospital like she planned, the papers are all drawn up and signed, but now, to punish me for doing this, for forcing her to come to the Reserve and keeping her here against her will like this, she’ll let them give me a lobotomy. I know it. I just know it. Do you know what that is, Hubert? A lobotomy?”

“I heard of it, yes.” He’d read about the new form of brain surgery that doctors were performing on mentally ill people nowadays. It was in all the news, and because Dr. Carter Cole, a distinguished summer resident of the Reserve, was one of the men who had invented the procedure, even the local papers had covered it. It was being called a miracle cure. Hubert didn’t think it was the sort of thing that should be done to Vanessa Cole, though. She was strange, yes, and eccentric, and by his lights maybe even a little weird, but Vanessa Cole wasn’t what you’d call mentally ill. Mostly, she was rich and spoiled was all. Which weren’t crimes, he knew, and didn’t necessarily make you crazy. Certainly not crazy enough to warrant a lobotomy.

“So now that I’ve got control of her, I’m stuck with her. I can’t let her leave.” She laughed suddenly, a cold, mocking laugh. “If it weren’t so damned awful and she weren’t suffering, it’d be ridiculous. If the consequences for me weren’t so final, it’d be almost funny.”

Hubert was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t see how I can help you, neither. Maybe the consequences aren’t so final,” he said, more a question than a statement.

“Oh, Hubert, please! Don’t be naive! I know what’s waiting for me over there. If I let her go now, my life will be over. It’s as simple as that. I’ll never see the light of day again. I’ll be locked up and brain damaged for the rest of my life.”

The guide tried to grasp the situation, get it clear in his mind. He was a problem solver, especially of other people’s problems. He knew he had to take a step back and take the thing apart as if it were a broken machine, lay all the parts out on the table, find the faulty gear or broken belt, replace it with a new one, and put the machine back together again.

The two said nothing while Hubert pondered the situation. He asked if she minded if he smoked, and she said no, and he pulled out his pack of Luckies and lighted one and smoked. Vanessa took his pack from him and lighted one for herself. Finally he said, “Maybe the first thing is to make it so she isn’t suffering like that, all tied up and gagged and all.”

“No! You’ll help her escape, and she’ll come back with the sheriff, and they’ll haul me off in a straitjacket!”

Hubert promised Vanessa that he would not help her mother escape. He just didn’t want the woman to suffer unnecessarily. Also, he pointed out, if Vanessa released her mother temporarily, so to speak, and in exchange got her to cooperate in her own confinement here at the camp, they might have a chance to make her understand why Vanessa had done this, and her mother might change her mind then about the mental hospital and the inheritance and so forth. At worst, it would buy Vanessa a little time to come up with some idea of what to do with her. “If you keep her hog-tied like that, she’s going to believe you actually are crazy. And you’re right, she’s going to want revenge.” He wasn’t urging her to free Mrs. Cole completely, he said. Just enough so the three of them could sit down and talk to one another about the situation and why Vanessa had reacted the way she had. Maybe that way a solution would come to them, he told her. “But in the process we shouldn’t hurt her in any way,” he said. “No need to keep her tied up and all. We can just keep her locked in the bedroom and bring her food there. I’ll shutter the windows so she can’t climb out.” He told her that if Vanessa wanted, since he wasn’t at the moment working for anyone else, he would bring the second load of supplies back before dark and stay here at Rangeview tonight, so they could take turns guarding her mother, while all three of them tried to come up with a resolution to this. “There’s got to be a way out of this that works for both of you.”

“You promise?” Vanessa asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t lie, Miss Cole. And I don’t make promises I can’t keep. I think that together we can work this thing out.”

She sank down on the sofa and with her head resting in her hands stared straight ahead at the dead fireplace. “All right, then. Go ahead and untie her,” she said without looking at him. “And, please, call me Vanessa.”

Returning to the bedroom, Hubert knelt beside Mrs. Cole and undid the scarf covering her mouth. In as soothing a voice as he could manage, he said to her, “Now don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you, Mrs. Cole. I’m just trying to find a way to fix this mess. You understand, Mrs. Cole?”

She nodded and, lips trembling, asked him for water. The glass Vanessa had filled earlier was on the dresser, and Hubert retrieved it and gave it to her. She drank quickly. “Vanessa…my daughter wants to kill me, Hubert! My own daughter! She wants to kill me.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“What does she want, then?” Her voice was dry as sandpaper.

“Well, that’s what we’re going to find out,” Hubert said, helping the woman to her feet. She staggered when he let go of her. He steadied her for a few seconds, then helped her from the chaise to the bed. He sounded and looked like a calm, rational man, but he was confused and turbulent and scared. I’m in way over my head here, he thought. I wish I could talk this thing out with Alicia. Alicia would know what I should do. She would know if what I am doing is wrong or just plain dumb. Or both. I need to think about what Alicia would do in my place, he said to himself, and then concluded that she would do exactly as he was doing, and immediately he felt better about it and plunged ahead.

WHEN ALICIA GROVES RETURNED HOME, SHE WENT STRAIGHT inside the house. Passing through the dining room on her way to the kitchen, she glanced out the French doors to the terrace with the big cleft rock in the center and beyond to the grassy bluff above the wide bend in the river. In the shade of the tall oak tree her husband was pushing Bear on the tire swing in long, swooping arcs while talking to Wolf, who stood at his side, smiling. A few feet away the two red dogs lay asleep in splotches of sunlight.

Alicia stopped by the window and lay both hands on the sill, as if to steady herself. She was sure that Vanessa Cole had already told Jordan that she had seen his wife at Hubert St. Germain’s cabin, when she was supposed to have been at the medical center in Sam Dent, probably adding a few lurid details in the telling. Had she buttoned her blouse correctly when she came out of the cabin to the deck? Had she smoothed her skirt? Alicia couldn’t remember. When you lie you forget the truth. Alicia knew that she had been seen by Jordan from the air. He had been out looking for her, obviously, flying over Hubert St. Germain’s cabin in search of his straying, lying wife, and he had found her exactly where Vanessa told him he would. And now, while he seemed to be playing contentedly with his sons, he was merely awaiting the return of his wayward wife and more lies and denials. She couldn’t put herself through that, not anymore. Regardless of the consequences, she decided, she would no longer lie to her husband.

Throughout the remainder of the afternoon, and later, while she prepared supper for the four of them and Jordan in his studio studied his new assistant’s inventory, and all through the evening meal and afterward, as she washed the dishes and got the boys through their baths and into bed, Alicia anxiously watched her husband and waited for him to confront her.

But he said and did nothing out of the ordinary. If anything, he was more affable and relaxed than usual. He seemed downright affectionate toward her, and at one point, passing behind where she stood at the kitchen sink washing the supper dishes, he placed one big hand on her left shoulder and the other on her right buttock and slid it down along her thigh like a promise. It was a thing he had not done in months. Involuntarily, she stepped away from his hand, and he moved on.

Finally, when the boys were in their beds and slipping into sleep, Alicia went looking for her husband. She found him in the room they called the library, but which over time had become the artist’s office, for no one other than he ever used the room. It was where he wrote letters, paid bills, kept all his files and archives, and where late at night he read and listened to his beloved jazz records and smoked cigars and sometimes drank old whiskeys neat.

He was typing out a letter to the writer John Dos Passos, whom he had befriended during the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti way back in 1922. Dos had been writing about the trial, and Jordan had made a limited-edition wood engraving to help raise money for the defense fund. Later, after the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, Dos and his wife, Katie, on several occasions had visited the artist and his family in Petersburg. They had worked together in ’31 and ’32 to help free the Scottsboro boys, and recently the two men had become collaborators in the effort to raise money for medical supplies for the republicans in Spain. Dos had been urging Jordan to join him in Spain and make a series of pictures based on Goya’s famous engravings of the Napoleonic War. Until now, Jordan had not turned him down. But tonight he wrote, Too much work to do here, too many commitments, too many family obligations keeping me here….

Alicia sat on the leather sofa and smoked a cigarette while her husband typed at the desk. When he finished, he folded the letter and put it into an envelope, addressed and stamped the envelope, and swiveled around in his chair to face her.

“I’ve just told Dos to forget about the Spanish thing,” he said and smiled. “I’m not going over.”

Alicia nodded somberly. “That’s good, if it’s what you want. To stay here instead, I mean.”

“It’s exactly what I want. From here on out, I’m a homebody,” he said and paused. “And I’m not going to Greenland, either.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that’s good, too. If it’s what you want.”

“Alicia, listen. There’s something I need to talk about with you. Something serious. About us.”

“Yes. I know.”

“You know?”

“Before you say anything more, Jordan, I have to tell you that it’s over.”

“What is?”

“I ended it,” she blurted.

“Ended what?” He leaned forward in his chair, as if he hadn’t heard her correctly.

“What happened…between Hubert and me.”

“Between you and Hubert? Hubert St. Germain?”

“It’s in the past now. I wrote him today and told him that it’s over. When you saw me out there this afternoon I was putting the letter in his mailbox. By now he’s read it, so he, too, knows that it’s finished.”

“Hubert? Hubert St. Germain? What the Christ are you talking about, Alicia?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Don’t make me say it. Please, Jordan. I’m so sorry it happened, and so ashamed. I don’t know what I was thinking, I must have been crazy. But I promise you, it’s in the past now. And I swear, I’m profoundly sorry.”

“You’re sorry.”

“Yes. Please, forgive me, Jordan.”

They remained silent for a moment, Jordan staring at his wife, who looked down and away, shamefaced. He took out his tobacco and papers and slowly rolled a cigarette and lighted it. Finally, he said, “Are you telling me that you’re having an affair with Hubert St. Germain?”

“Yes. No! I’m telling you that it’s over. I’ve ended the affair. I won’t see him again, ever. And I’m asking you to forgive me. I know it won’t be easy, and I don’t deserve it. Please, Jordan.”

Jordan’s face had clouded over and darkened. This had never happened to him before. In every married couple, he believed, one was a liar and the other a truth teller. Alicia had always been the truth teller. Now, suddenly, the poles were reversed, a circumstance that shocked and confused him even more than what Alicia was actually confessing. As long as he knew that he was the one who lied, the one who kept secrets and generated elaborate deceptions, then he knew who he was and how that man behaved. And as long as he believed that Alicia never lied or kept secrets or deceived him, he knew who she was and how she behaved.

But forgive her? He was the one who had always needed forgiveness. He had never been asked to forgive her for anything before. He wasn’t sure he knew how. What did it feel like, anyhow, to forgive someone? Jordan Groves bore grudges; he had enemies and knew who they were and enjoyed keeping them identified as such: Jordan Groves was a son of a bitch who didn’t mind the reputation, because it kept at bay people who were capable of hurting him. But he had never found it necessary to forgive anyone. Not even his parents. Forgive and forget might be how it went for most people, but not for Jordan Groves. Thanks to his optimistic egoism and self-confidence, Jordan had little trouble forgetting; it was easy for him; but once a lie or a deception was forgotten, what was the need for forgiveness? If you truly forgot the offense, how was forgiveness even possible? Had he been raised Catholic like Alicia, he might have been able to conflate the two, but his parents had been strict Presbyterians, and Jordan Groves’s atheism was founded on that immovable Protestant rock. Thus, while he knew that deep down, like all human beings, he was an irredeemable sinner, he was hard-hearted.

“Well now. So you’ve been fucking my friend Hubert St. Germain.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Since mid-March. But not—”

“No ‘buts,’” he said, cutting her off. “And no greasy details. Right now all I want is to know the facts.”

“All right.”

“Where?”

“At…at his cabin. Nowhere else.”

“How often?”

“Only sometimes. Not often. Oh, Jordan, don’t do this, please!”

“How often? Twice? Twenty times? Since mid-March, it must be hundreds of times.”

“We met a few times a week, sometimes once. Sometimes not at all.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“No one, Jordan. I swear it. Except for that woman…Vanessa Von…whatever. Vanessa Cole.”

“Vanessa? How the hell does she know?”

Suddenly Alicia understood her mistake. She felt herself blush with shame. She realized that she could have lied. She should have lied. But it was too late now. She had no choice but to go on telling the truth. “Oh, God. I…I’m so stupid. She came to Hubert’s cabin today, and she saw me there. I thought…I assumed that she knew, and that she told you. And when you flew over the cabin and saw me stopped at Hubert’s mailbox, I guess I assumed that you had seen her. Or she had telephoned you. Or something. Oh, God!” she cried.

Jordan shook his head sadly. “You certainly have been a fool. But not as much a fool as I’ve been. Are you in love with him?”

She hesitated before answering. “I…I thought I was. I was unhappy, Jordan. For a long time I was very unhappy.”

“I don’t care about causes! There are a thousand reasons why a woman commits adultery. And a thousand and one why a man does it. Right now all I care about is getting the material facts. I don’t even care if it was good sex or bad sex or anything in between. That’s your private business and will only disgust me anyway. I want the facts. So I can…so I can know what to do next.” He studied his hands and saw they were shaking, and he was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you in love with Hubert St. Germain? Are you still in love with the son of a bitch?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “But I have closed my heart to him.”

“Oh. You’re in love with him, but you’ve closed your heart to him. Whatever that means. Does it mean you’re no longer in love with me?”

“No, it does not, Jordan. I will always be in love with you.”

“You will, eh? Well, that’s a little hard for me to grasp. Here’s a fact. Except for you, I have never been in love with anyone. Only you. Period. So I don’t know what the hell you mean when you say you’re in love with Hubert, despite having ‘closed your heart to him,’ and that you will also always be in love with me.” He rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I don’t know how you can be in love with both of us.”

“It’s not like that. Being in love, I mean. It’s more complicated and confusing than that.”

“Not to me. For me, with every woman the love switch is either off or it’s on. And it’s always been on with you, Alicia. With everyone else, off.”

“I’ve never doubted your love for me,” she said quietly. “But all those women, the women you’ve slept with, you never loved any of them?”

“No. Absolutely not. You know that, you’ve always known that. Cold comfort, maybe, but we’re not talking about me here, are we? Oh, I know I might be partly to blame for driving you into the eager arms of the noble Adirondack woodsman Hubert St. Germain. It’s obvious even to me that I’m hard to live with and have not been a faithful husband and have left you alone here with the boys for weeks and months at a time. And I know in some people’s eyes ol’ Hubert’s a charmer, even if a somewhat mournful and inarticulate one. And I know that after nearly ten years of marriage any woman gets restless and maybe a little curious about what it might be like to fuck someone other than her husband. So there are all kinds of causes ready to hand. So many that there’s no point in discussing them. What I have to know is, what exactly has happened, Alicia? What has happened? So that I can decide what I am to do now. My next move.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do I divorce you? Or do I fall down on my knees and promise to be a better husband? Do I fly into a rage and knock you down and bust all the furniture? Or do I weep in sorrow and self-pity for having lost the love of my life? What the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t know the answer to that. Do I drive over to Hubert’s cabin and drag him out of his filthy adulterous bed and beat the shit out of him? Or do I sit down with him over a bottle of whiskey and talk about the perfidy of unhappily married women? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Alicia,” he cried, and his voice broke. “What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to feel?” He spread his arms wide and opened his body and face to her.

She came forward and got down on her knees in front of him and put her head against his chest and wrapped her arms around his waist. Weeping now, she said, “All of it, Jordan. Do all of it. If you ask for a divorce, I’ll give it to you. If you promise to be a better husband, I’ll believe you. If you beat up Hubert, I’ll understand. Though Lord knows it’s not his fault. None of it is. It’s all my fault. If you sit down and get drunk with him and talk about what an awful woman I’ve been, I’ll understand. Do all of it, Jordan. Do anything. Do everything. Just please, in the end, please forgive me, Jordan.”

Tears streamed down his broad cheeks. “Not possible, Alicia. It’s not possible. I can’t forgive you because I can’t forget what you’ve done. Not as long as I can picture the two of you crawling all over each other naked in bed. And what you’ve said. That you still love the man. It’s not fair, I know, I don’t have any right to feel the way I do. I know that. Because I’ve had my share, more than my share, of dalliances or liaisons or whatever you want to call them. But there’s a difference, Alicia. I never loved any of those women! They were just flashes of light in the dark. Fireflies. I never shared my secrets with them. Only with you, Alicia. I never let them know me. Only you.”

They stayed silent for several moments, Alicia with her head against his chest and Jordan with his arms around her, holding her close. She heard his heart pound, and he felt her back shudder as she wept. In all their years together, they had never both wept at the same time. She had wept, because of his sins against her, or he had wept out of guilt, but separately.

Finally, he let go of her and told her to go upstairs to bed and leave him alone. “I need to be alone. I need to think. I need to know what’s really happened here, and I don’t believe you can help me with that.” He pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face dry and gave it to her to do the same, which she did.

Then, awkwardly, she stood up, and when she turned to leave she saw that the dogs had come into the room and were sitting alertly by the door, watching Alicia and Jordan with worried expressions on their long faces.

Alicia said, “They know.”

“What do they know? They’re dogs.”

“They know that something terrible has happened to us.”

“Has it? I don’t know yet what has happened to us. I need time to think. Go to bed, Alicia. I’ll be up later. Or maybe I won’t.”

She left the room, and the dogs followed, still worried. When Jordan heard Alicia’s footsteps overhead, he turned back to his desk and picked up his letter to Dos Passos. He held it to the light and studied it for a moment as if trying to read it through the envelope. Then he tore the letter in half and half again and dropped the pieces into the wastebasket.

The three newcomers learned at breakfast that they were listed for two missions today, a morning flight and an afternoon, their first flights over enemy territory. It was not great weather for flying. The early morning rain had stopped, but a blanket of low clouds remained. They had been waiting for a week for their airplanes to arrive from Bilbao and had been given Breguets, not the Russian Polikarpov monoplanes they had requested. The Breguets had been fitted out with two machine guns and bomb racks that held four twenty-five-pound bombs. Their mission was to bomb a pair of gunpowder factories deep in enemy territory, just beyond the Jarama River, fifteen miles from Madrid. To get the job done with the Breguets they would have to do it twice. All nine of the foreign pilots in the squadron stood by their planes until they saw the starting signal, a white flare shot from the field house. As soon as they were in the air, the planes moved into a V of V formation, in which each of the three-man patrols was in a V and the three patrols themselves were in a V. The American named Groves flew on the right wing of the first patrol, which was led by the Englishman Fairhead. Chang flew on Fairhead’s left wing. The ceiling had settled at three thousand feet, making it easy to cross into enemy territory unseen in the clouds. When they had passed over the target factories and flown a few miles beyond, Fairhead swung the formation back toward home territory. The right-wing patrol crossed over the top of Fairhead’s lead patrol, and the left slid under, the three together making as quick and tight a 180-degree turn as a single patrol alone could make. When they were almost on top of the factories Fairhead gave the signal to attack, and all nine planes dove, still in a V of V formation. Fairhead’s lead patrol was to take out the antiaircraft battery located between the two factories. The two wing patrols were led by the veterans, Papps, the Englishman, and Brenner, the American, who had Whitey on his wing. They went for the factories. The pilots lined up their bomb sights and released the bombs, continuing the dive, machine-gunning people, mostly civilians madly racing away from the factory yards. At three hundred feet they flattened out their dive and sped across the Jarama River and until they got into friendly territory kept their aircraft as close to the ground as possible, following the narrow valleys and draws to keep the enemy from seeing where they’d gotten to. Later that same afternoon they made the return trip, all nine of them, to bomb the same factories. There was much more antiaircraft fire this time, little puffs of white smoke here and there, like small detached cumulus clouds, growing more numerous as the airplanes approached the factories. They dropped their bombs, finishing off the factories and, as they had before, machine-gunned anyone foolish enough to be caught in the open. This time, on their return to base Fairhead led them down along miles of enemy trenches, and following his example the pilots fired their Vickers.303 machine guns at infantrymen helplessly firing back with small-bore rifles and revolvers. After their first pass, the American named Groves, the one called Rembrandt, ceased firing. It was April 4, 1937. The American had suddenly remembered that it was an anniversary. Twenty years ago on this day he had shot down two German Fokker Dr. Is over France. He held formation, but his guns went silent, while the others kept firing their machine guns until they finally ran out of ammunition and headed back to the base.