The Reserve

7

THE SITE WAS A FLATTENED PATCH OF AN ANCIENT GLACIAL esker where tall red pines grew straight as masts and there wasn’t much ground cover, other than a warm, fragrant bed of pine needles. A spill of boulders from a shifted brook lay close by, and while the men dug the hole, Vanessa busied herself lugging rocks and piling them at what she felt was the foot of her mother’s grave. Then she sat down on the ground a few feet away to watch, her arms across her knees, her chin resting on her arms. Jordan, in shirtsleeves, his leather jacket on the ground nearby, swung the pick and loosened the gravelly soil, and Hubert shoveled the dirt into a neat, conical pile. Vanessa was silent and dreamy seeming. While they worked the men spoke to each other in low voices, as if to keep from waking her.

“You ever do this before?” Jordan asked.

“What? Bury somebody in the Reserve?”

“No. But, yeah, that, too. I meant, you ever dig a grave before?”

“Not in the Reserve. But yes, a couple times I’ve had to dig a grave.”

“Who for?”

“For the family,” Hubert said. “My family. In the old family plot off Hitchcock Road.”

“Who’d you bury?”

“My old man. Then my mother.”

“What about your wife?”

Hubert was silent for a moment. “She’s in the town cemetery.”

“You ever shoot anybody before?”

“I didn’t shoot her, Jordan. The answer is no.”

“What about in the war?”

“I was only seventeen, and I had to take care of my mother. So I stayed out. My brothers went over.”

“Oh. Too bad. You would’ve been a good soldier,” Jordan said.

“Why do you say that?”

“You’ve got all the necessary skills. You’d have made a good sniper. And you don’t rattle easily when someone gets shot.”

“Go to hell, Jordan. I didn’t shoot her.”

“She didn’t shoot herself.”

“What about you? You ever shoot anybody in the war?”

“I was a flyer. I shot at other airplanes, not people.”

“There must’ve been people in those planes, though.”

“True enough, Hubie. True enough.”

“Did you shoot any of those airplanes down?”

“Two. I made two kills, both on the same day. April 4, 1918.”

“So you shot people, then. You killed people.”

“Yes. Germans. But I didn’t have to bury them.”

The moldering, sunlit bed of fallen needles quilted the ground. The view of the lake and mountains was blocked by trees, Vanessa noted, but it wasn’t a bad place to be buried, she thought. Daddy might even have preferred having his ashes up here instead of in the lake. A light wind slipped delicately through the tall pines above, and sunlight fell in patches between the feathered branches of the trees and warmed the ground where she sat. She wondered if she could trust the two men equally. She decided that, under pressure, Hubert would crack before Jordan. Hubert St. Germain was a local, however, and a guide, a man more trusted by the authorities than Jordan Groves, the Red, the artist from away. They’d probably go easy on Hubert, take whatever he said at face value and search for Vanessa’s mother elsewhere. They’d check her bank records, interview the cook and housekeeper and gardener in Tuxedo Park and the doorman and housekeeper in Manhattan, they’d call all her known friends and ask them if they’d heard from Mrs. Cole in the weeks since she was last seen by Russell Kendall at the Tamarack Club going in to the Cole family camp at the Reserve with her daughter. Jordan Groves, the artist from Petersburg, they’d have no reason to question, so he’d not have to lie or cover up. Unless, of course, someone heard or saw him fly in this morning or sees or hears him flying out later today. But she wasn’t worried about Jordan. He was used to lying, despite the fact that he claimed to tell the unvarnished truth, regardless of the consequences, in those travel books of his. They were probably mostly lies, too.

Hubert was a different sort of man, however. It wasn’t that he so much loved telling the truth as that he hated lying. Keeping silent, saying no more than necessary, that was his way of avoiding both. The sheriff, or maybe a police inspector from missing persons in Manhattan, would ask him when he last saw Mrs. Cole, and he’d say the date. Where? they’d ask. Out at the Cole place. Did he see her leave the camp? No. Did he see the daughter there? Yes. Did he see the daughter leave the camp? No. Were they both still at the camp when he left? Yes. Thank you very much, Mr. St. Germain.

Vanessa doubted they’d even bother to go to the trouble of rowing out to inspect the place. Russell Kendall might send someone from his staff to Rangeview to check around for signs of anything suspicious; but he’d probably send Hubert St. Germain, since the guide knew the place so much better than anyone else and had keys to all the doors.

When the hole was nearly five feet deep and difficult to dig any deeper without needing a ladder to climb out of it, the three returned to the lake for the body. Again, Vanessa stood off a ways and watched as the men worked. They wrapped the body in the white, red, and black Hudson Bay blanket from the bedroom where Evelyn Cole had been imprisoned, making a shroud of it by tying the blanket at the ends and the middle with rope — the same pieces of clothesline Vanessa had used to bind her mother’s ankles and wrists when she was still alive. Then Hubert and Jordan grabbed on to the ropes and carried the body of Evelyn Cole, like a log, up the slope behind the compound to the grave, for it was that to them now, a grave, not a hole in the ground. They walked slowly and stayed silent, as if the two men were pallbearers and the woman coming along behind were a priest or minister.

With the body wrapped in the blanket, they could no longer see the dead woman’s face and the ugly wound in her chest and the blood, distancing them somewhat from the violence of her death and bringing them closer to the inescapable fact of her death, its finality.

That would be the hardest thing for Jordan and Hubert to lie about, Vanessa realized. The actual fact of her mother’s death. It would be far easier to lie about how she died.

Vanessa herself would have no difficulty claiming that her mother had simply disappeared, that’s all. There is no explanation for it, she’d say. The woman has vanished. One can speculate about why or how for as long as one wants; but the fact, the only fact that counts, is that the woman is gone. Vanessa would have no trouble forgetting all other facts and concentrating on that one alone, until it became the only fact that mattered. Absent a sure sense of the necessary and essential nature of the truth in all things known and unknown, it’s actually difficult to lie. It may even be impossible. In that sense, Vanessa was not a liar. She knew the meanings of the words true and false and was adept at distinguishing between a person who was a liar and one who was honest — Jordan was the first, Hubert the second — but she herself was neither. Her understanding of the truth of a given event was less of a concrete thing existing in the world — whether revealed or concealed, known or not — than of an incidental attribute. For her, the truth was more a coloration of reality than the organizing principle of its underlying structure. For her, it was utterly, and merely, contingent. Thus the truth was somewhat transient and changeable, one minute here, the next gone. It was something one could assert and a moment later turn around and deny, with no sense of there being any contradiction. Merely a correction. For Vanessa, the truth was like a bird that flies from tree to tree, so that the statement, The tree has a bird perched in it, referred to this nearby tree, then that, as the bird flew to the next tree, then that, and on through the entire forest of trees, and from there to the next forest, until the bird had flown around the globe, tree to tree, forest to forest, and had come full circle and could perch all over again in this tree nearby. By then, however, people had lost interest in the bird and its location.

The men solemnly lowered the body into the grave with two pieces of rope and when it was down dropped the ropes onto it.

“Do you want to say anything over her?” Jordan asked Vanessa.

She stood at the edge of the open grave and looked down into the darkness. “Don’t make me talk, or I’ll start crying. I don’t want to cry over her. Or Daddy either. Not yet,” she said and stepped away.

“But you will?”

“What?”

“Cry over them.”

“Yes.”

“What about you, Hubert? You want to say a few words over her?”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” Hubert said.

“I’m serious enough. I’m not religious myself, but I thought maybe one or both of you might be.”

“I guess I’m not especially religious, either. Not in a churchy way, anyhow. But it seems a shame to just bury her like this. Like she was a dog that got put down or something.”

“That was my thought,” Jordan said, and it was. He hadn’t been joking.

Vanessa said, “Will you two stop! Just put the rocks into the hole, and shovel the dirt back in.”

“Hubert? You want to say the words?” Jordan asked.

I really ought to do it, the guide thought. Of the three, he was the one most responsible for her death. But he shook his head and said, “No. You say the words, Jordan. You’re better at talking.”

Jordan nodded and stood at the foot of the open grave and addressed the dead woman. “Mrs. Cole, Evelyn, Mother. This is not easy. I speak for all of us. We are truly sorry. We’re sorry that, for reasons no one could have anticipated, we were unable to prevent your accidental death this morning. No one of us wished you dead, especially by such violent means. We’re also sorry that we were unable to provide you with a proper funeral and that we cannot comfort your many friends and acquaintances from all—”

“Jordan! For God’s sake, stop it!” Vanessa shouted. “You’re making a mockery of her!”

Hubert said, “No, he isn’t. He’s just saying the truth. Except he’s not saying that I might have prevented her death, if I hadn’t tried to take the gun out of her hands. He should say that, too. Go ahead, Jordan, and finish.”

“We’re sorry, yes. We’re sorry that we can’t comfort your many friends and acquaintances, because we have promised to protect your daughter, Vanessa, from being charged with kidnapping and confining you against your will and possibly even charged with your murder. Although we all know that your death was an accident. It’s not her fault that a family quarrel got out of hand and ended tragically like this. It’s not my or Hubert’s fault, either, that we found ourselves witnesses to your unfortunate demise.”

“You see, Hubert? He is mocking her. And us, too. You and me. Are you through, Jordan?”

“Yes, I’m through. We can bury her now,” Jordan said.

When they finished filling the grave with large rocks and had shoveled back all the dirt they had taken out of it, they tamped down the low mound and scattered a thick layer of pine needles over it. They took dead branches from the trees nearby and raked over their tracks, and when they were done it was midafternoon and the forest had been restored to its former condition.

At the shore of the lake they tossed the bloodstained rocks and clumps of moss and sod into the water. Jordan wondered about the gun. He told Vanessa that Dr. Cole’s shotgun should disappear, too.

“Take it with you when you leave in your airplane. Drop it in the lake.”

“Sorry. I’ve committed all the crimes I’m going to commit today.”

“Do you want it?” Vanessa asked Hubert. “I know you admire it,” she said, thinking that possession of the gun would tie him even more closely to the shooting, making him a more trusted ally in this — trusted to lie about the whereabouts of Evelyn Cole and how she came to be there.

“It’s a good weapon. But I’d have to explain how I came by it.”

“You can say I gave it to you. As a remembrance of my father and in gratitude for all the years you worked for him as a guide and hunting companion. I would have given it to you yesterday, if I’d thought of it. If I’d known it was there.”

“Too bad you didn’t,” Jordan said. He stripped off his bloodstained shirt and squatted at the water’s edge to rinse it clean.

Vanessa glared at his bare back for a second, then smiled, because his back was pretty and because he was right and was bold enough to say it. She liked that about him — his willingness to say out loud whatever he thought was the case.

“This isn’t working,” he said and stood and shook out the shirt. “I’ll have to burn these clothes when I get back to my studio.”

Hubert scanned the lake and saw a guide boat putting out at the Carry, a pair of fishermen in it. “We got company,” he said.

Quickly, Jordan ducked behind a ledge a few yards from the shore, well out of sight of the fishermen. “This means I’m stuck here till they go in,” he said, more to himself than to the others. Jordan was not eager to go home and face Alicia again. For a few hours he had succeeded in not thinking about her, in spite of Hubert’s presence, which had briefly released him from the dark, painful grip of his busted marriage. At the same time, however, he wanted to leave this place and put this particular mess behind him. Also, he believed that as soon as Hubert was gone and he and Vanessa were alone, she would begin to weep over the death of her mother — he suspected she was saving her tears for the occasion — and he would have to comfort her. One of the things that had most attracted him to her from the beginning and especially today was her refusal to be comforted, and he didn’t want that to come to an end. Being swept up by a woman’s unfocused anger was new to him and had a fresh, erotic charge to it. Jordan Groves was used to responding to the sadness of women, not their anger, and in recent years that had grown old and tired.

“I don’t think they saw you, Jordan,” Hubert said. “But if we can see them,” he said to Vanessa, “they must be seeing me and you standing here like dummies.”

“That’s all right. It’ll only corroborate that you were at the camp and Mother and I were here together. So go ahead,” she said. “Leave now. Don’t forget the gun.”

Hubert said, “All right, I’ll keep the doctor’s shotgun and say you gave it to me as a remembrance.”

“It’s the truth. Daddy would have wanted you to have it.”

He pushed the boat into the water and saw the pool of blood in the bottom. Without comment he rocked the boat and dipped the near gunnel into the lake, letting a few inches of water in. Then he drew the boat back onto land, turned it over and emptied it. Gently, he wrapped the shotgun in his jacket and lay it and the oars in the boat and pushed the boat into the lake again. He seated himself in the stern and took up the oars. “Against the rules, you know, for a guide to be carrying a shotgun or rifle in the Reserve. Only the clients. Handgun’s all right, though.”

“Don’t hurt yourself thinking about it too much, Hubie,” Jordan said. “Just remember, you don’t have to lie. All you’ve got to do is leave a few things out. Like the fact that you saw me out here.”

“There’s a few other facts I got to leave out.”

Vanessa said, “Can you see who that is?” She shaded her eyes with the palm of her hand and gazed at the fishermen, now in the middle of the lake.

“I think it’s Ambassador Smith and his guide, Sam LaCoy. They’ll probably fish till five or so and then head back to the clubhouse, so as to get there before dark. Ambassador Smith, he always stays at one of the clubhouse cottages.”

“Tommy’s a friend of my parents. When you pass near, tell him that Mother and I want to be alone, okay?”

Hubert nodded and without saying good-bye commenced to rowing across the lake, toward the Carry. He kept the boat on a line that would bring him close enough to the other boat to be heard, close enough to give Ambassador Smith and Sam LaCoy the message from Miss Cole, who was staying at Rangeview with her mother to mourn the death of Dr. Cole in the place he loved best. As he rowed, Hubert began gradually to feel that he was no longer a partner in crime with Jordan Groves and Vanessa Cole; he was a loyal Adirondack guide again, a man with a known role in life and fixed protocol, and was relieved by it. He thought about the hand-tooled Belgian shotgun wrapped in his wool jacket in the bottom of the boat. A beautiful weapon, he said to himself, almost calling it a beautiful animal. To him, guns were living creatures, and he was going to enjoy keeping company with this one, admiring it with his eyes, holding it in his hands, walking in the woods with it, using it to hunt down and kill other living creatures.

ALICIA KNEW JORDAN WASN’T IN THE HOUSE — HE HADN’T COME up to bed, and she’d heard his airplane take off at dawn — and did not know when he might return or what he would say or do then. She did not yet believe that their marriage had ended. Because of the boys, he would not ask for a divorce, she was sure of that much. Jordan would never leave their upbringing to her and was incapable of raising them alone. And he was not in love with anyone else. He wouldn’t leave Alicia for another woman. Not even that Von Heidenstamm woman. And because Jordan was a sexually confident man, sure of his power to attract all types of women, he was not likely to be threatened by the fact that his wife had slept with Hubert St. Germain, who was not a sexually confident man. She did not think Jordan would become violent, even though he was known for his occasional outbursts of violence. There were men whom she might have slept with, she thought, men who might have made him lash out physically against them and against her as well — famous artists, rich men, politically committed men of the left, like Dos, who actually had once suggested to her that they become lovers. But, no, now that she thought about it, not even the rich and famous author John Dos Passos had made Jordan Groves jealous. She had told Jordan that Dos had invited her to meet him secretly for the purpose of making love — waiting before she told him until after Dos and Katie had gone back to New York, explaining that Dos had been drunk and probably would have propositioned any halfway attractive woman in the room that evening. Jordan had found it funny and faintly ridiculous. “Dos? The little rascal,” he’d said. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

Jordan competed with every man he met, whether in arm wrestling, making art, politics, money, or gathering the attention of women, but he seemed jealous of no man. Jealousy was close to envy, however, and Alicia knew that there were certain men her husband envied. But as types rather than as individuals. That may be the difference between the two emotions, she thought: one felt jealous of individuals, but one envied types. And she knew, as only a wife can, that her husband secretly envied, not men like John Dos Passos, but the poor. Especially the poor working-class men and women of his town. Her husband wished that he could be the famous artist Jordan Groves and yet also be one of them, one of those he perceived as the oppressed, the downtrodden victims of the rich and powerful. And it wasn’t just the poor, out-of-work, white Americans of his town, but also the Eskimos he’d lived among for months in Greenland and the Inuits of Alaska, the Negro field hands he’d drawn and painted in Louisiana, the Cuban sugarcane cutters, the Indians in the Andes silver mines, and most recently the peasants and workers fighting against the Fascists in Spain. He wanted to be one of them. He envied their powerlessness. To him, their powerlessness signified an innocence that he had abandoned long ago, when, after he’d come home from the war, he’d refused to work alongside his father, the carpenter, and had left his war bride and gone east to New York to become an artist.

Though Hubert St. Germain was an Adirondack guide, a type of man much admired in the region by the locals as well as by the wealthy visitors who hired him, Alicia knew that nonetheless he was in fact little more than a servant to those wealthy visitors. He was a man whose only power in the world came from his intimate knowledge of his immediate environment and from his quiet, dignified acceptance of his powerlessness. In that sense, Hubert, as a type, was like those Inuits and cane cutters and the Spanish peasants. She could imagine Hubert joining one of the Communist or anarchist brigades of workers and farmers, marching off to wage war against Franco and the Fascists. Well, not Hubert himself, exactly, but as a type of man. The type of man her husband envied. The type of man she had fallen in love with, she suddenly realized, and to whom, for nearly five months, once and twice a week and more, she had given her body and all its secrets.

She went through her day as she normally would, tending to the boys and her gardens and the house, to all appearances the calm, competent, organized wife and mother she had been for over a decade now — ever since her one most self-defining act of defiance, when she’d disobeyed her parents by dropping out of Pratt to elope with the artist, her professor, the suddenly celebrated Jordan Groves. She was filled today with the same fear and uncertainty she had felt those long years ago. Her parents had forgiven her — once she was pregnant — and had reluctantly come to accept their daughter and son-in-law’s bohemianism, as they saw it, and leftist politics and atheism. At least she hadn’t gone to America and run off with a Jew or a Negro. The artist could always change his way of life as he grew older and wiser, unlike a Jew and a Negro, who could never change who they were, and besides, he was financially successful and famous and interestingly eccentric in a very American way. Alicia’s Viennese parents liked and admired self-made Americans for their energy and confidence almost as much as they liked and admired their Prussian neighbors to the north.

All day Alicia’s stomach felt tight and light, like a helium-filled balloon, and her arms and legs were weak and watery. Her hands trembled, as if she’d drunk too much coffee. Standing on the threshold of a life whose shape and details she could not imagine terrified her. Whatever happened or did not happen over the next few days or weeks, she knew that her life would never again be the same as it had been. By nature, Alicia did not like surprises. It was one of the reasons she had so easily adapted to her husband’s willful and impulsive nature. He was free to go and come, to make all the big decisions regarding the overall shape of their life together, so long as from one day to the next, year after year, she was allowed to play the unwobbling pivot. She was free neither to act nor react, and while other people, especially women, felt sorry for her and wondered why she so placidly accepted her husband’s outrageous public behavior (he wrote about it in his books, for heaven’s sake, for all the world to read), she had not felt sorry for herself. Lonely, perhaps. But there had been a useful and satisfying trade-off: her stability and commonsensical maintenance of the everyday and her tolerance of her husband’s waywardness had endowed her with a capacity for making him feel guilty. And now she had lost that capacity, perhaps for the duration.

A little after three o’clock, Hubert St. Germain knocked at the kitchen door. Alicia hadn’t heard him arrive or knock. She was in the library playing Jordan’s Jimmie Rodgers records on the cabinet-size Victrola, teaching Wolf and Bear to memorize and sing the songs, a gift to Jordan when — or was it if? — he came home. All three were sitting on the floor together singing “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride” along with Jimmie Rodgers, when Alicia heard the dogs bark and looked out the window and saw Hubert’s Model A in the driveway.

“Stay here, boys. Someone’s here,” she said and told them to keep practicing the songs. “But be careful handling the records. You know what they mean to Papa. No scratches or fingerprints.” She went through the kitchen to the door, roiled by anxiety mingled with anger. What on earth was he thinking, coming here like this? Was this his response to her letter? Or had Jordan confronted him somehow, threatened him or even physically attacked him? Or maybe Jordan had simply told him, Go ahead, you want her, she’s yours.

It didn’t matter. It was too late for that now.

She hushed the dogs, opened the door, and was relieved that the guide had a downcast expression on his face, shoulders slumped. A defeated man, she thought, though his face showed no signs of having been attacked by her husband. Defeated by her letter, then.

“You read my letter, Hubert,” she said. “Oh, Hubert, why did you come here?”

“No, no. What letter? I…I haven’t been home. Not since yesterday, actually. Not since right after you left my place. I…I need to talk with you, Alicia.”

“Jordan could come home any minute, Hubert. You shouldn’t be here. He knows…about us. I told him last night. I didn’t mean to, but I thought he’d already found out about…about us, and it just came out.”

“Yes, he told me. I know where he is. He won’t be back till after dark.”

They were silent for a moment, as if registering the visible changes that had occurred in each other’s face in the past twenty-four hours. They weren’t the same man and woman they had been yesterday afternoon, and it showed. Their faces were drawn and tightly held. They looked years older.

Finally Alicia said, “Hubert, I wrote you a good-bye letter. I put it in your mailbox, and Jordan saw me. He flew over, and I thought he knew about us. Because of that girl, and—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he interrupted. “I just need to talk with you,” he said again. “About us, yes. But something else.”

“Not here. Not in the house. Come down by the garden,” she said and led the way, the big red dogs bounding ahead, and as they walked, Hubert began telling Alicia what had happened at the Coles’ camp at the Second Tamarack Lake. He told her everything.

She heard him out without stopping him and was first shocked and then dismayed, and then frightened — frightened for him and also for her husband. They sat in the shade of a large maple tree in the Westport-style Adirondack chairs Jordan had copied from one he’d first seen several years back on the porch of a Westport summer cottage on the shore of Lake Champlain. He had rented a barn and organized a crew of local unemployed carpenters to manufacture the chairs and sell them to tourists. But the tourists never materialized, and the project, like so many others, had fallen apart, leaving Jordan with a dozen of the wide-board chairs to distribute around the grounds and porches of his own house. Jordan had loved the clean, geometric simplicity of the design and their ease of construction and comfort, and couldn’t understand why so few other people, especially people with the money to buy them, had the same appreciation.

“Do you realize what you and Jordan have done?”

“Well, yes,” he answered. “It was illegal. But it wasn’t wrong. Was it? Like hunting off-season on the Reserve, that’s illegal, too. It’s against the rules. But I do it. Lots of folks do it. They have to, most of them.” Hubert was exhausted. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt this many strong, conflicted emotions. He wanted to disappear into the woods and stay there alone for as long as it took until he and everyone else had forgotten all about Dr. Cole’s widow, Evelyn Cole, who had mysteriously disappeared way back in the summer of ’36, and the secret love affair he’d had those many long years ago with the wife of the artist Jordan Groves.

“Yes, it is wrong,” Alicia said, her accent growing more noticeable as she spoke. Even she could hear it, but when her feelings ran high she couldn’t do anything about it. “You didn’t have to do it, you know. Bury that woman out there and make it so that now you have to lie about it, lie about how she died and what you did afterward, just to protect the daughter. How did she convince you to do it?” she asked, incredulous. “Especially Jordan. How did she talk him into going along with this scheme?”

“What do you mean, ‘especially Jordan’?”

“Nothing. It’s just that he’s more skeptical of people than you are, I guess. Less trusting. Particularly of women. Rich women.”

“You think I trust rich women?”

“You trusted me.”

Hubert was silent for a moment. “What do you think I should do?”

“Oh, Lord, Hubert, I don’t know.”

“What will you tell Jordan?”

“Jordan? Nothing. Unless he first tells me what you and he did today. And he won’t do that.”

“No, I guess not. He wouldn’t have any need to do that,” he said. “I’m the one who needed to tell you. Is he going to leave you, Alicia? Because of us?”

“I don’t think so. Not as long as we stop seeing each other, you and I. And we will stop, Hubert. This has to be the last time we can be together.”

“I know.” He shook his head slowly from side to side, as if saying no with great reluctance. “Everything’s a damned mess, isn’t it? Everything.”

“Yes.”

“What should I do?”

“Is that why you came here today, to ask me what you should do?”

“No, I came…I came because I love you. And I trust you to tell me the truth. I need to know the truth, Alicia, because it’s the only way for me to tell right from wrong. For maybe the first time in my life since I was a kid, I don’t know if what I’ve done is right or wrong.”

“You know what I think, don’t you?”

He was silent for a moment. “Yes, I suppose I do,” he said. “I guess I knew all along what I should do. I just needed to hear it from you. You think I should go and tell Russell Kendall what happened, and show him where we buried the body.”

She didn’t answer him.

He stood slowly, like a tired old man. With his back to her, he said, “I should leave now.”

“Oh, Hubert, I’m so sorry that it all came down to this. I wish I had known back…back when it first started.”

“Would you have turned me away, if you’d known it was going to end like this?”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“Me neither.”

“Good-bye, Hubert. I loved you very much.”

“I love…I loved you, too. Very much.”

He walked alone up the stone steps to the back of the house, and when he passed by the kitchen door on his way to his car, he saw the two little boys standing there, somber and worried looking. He was a stranger to them. Alicia’s sons. They were Jordan Groves’s sons, too. And this was the house that Alicia and Jordan Groves had built together, the life they had made together, man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother and children, and the evidence of all their years of work together was here in front of him. It came home to him then — the foolish, deluded thing that he had done these months with Alicia, the strangely passive state of mind it had gradually induced in him, transforming him without his knowledge into a man made foolish and deluded by no one but himself. The love affair with Alicia Groves was why he had agreed to help Vanessa Cole keep her mother a prisoner. It was why he had ended up this morning struggling over the gun with the woman. It was what had caused her death. It was why he helped bury her on the Reserve.

The boys were very serious, as if they could read the guide’s thoughts. The older one said, “Hi,” and the younger boy tried a small smile.

“Hello,” Hubert said and moved on. When he got into his car, he saw the gun lying on the passenger seat, Dr. Cole’s Belgian shotgun, still wrapped in his jacket. That, too, he thought. I’ll have to tell the truth about the gun, too. And how I came by it.

VANESSA’S BEDROOM, HERS SINCE CHILDHOOD, WAS IN A SEPARATE wing of the main building, with a wide view of the lake and the Great Range, and when Jordan asked to see the rest of the house she led him there in a roundabout way.

“You won’t find any James Heldon paintings anywhere but in the living room. Daddy liked prominent display.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I’m interested in how people lay out their houses. Tells you a lot about them. It’s a form of behavior, like a painting. You can learn from it. What to emulate, what to avoid.”

They passed from the living room into a windowless hallway, and off the hallway to a small room with a corner fireplace and rough-cut floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with books — complete sets of Kipling, Cooper, and Trollope, the entire Harvard Classics and the Yale Shakespeare in twenty-eight volumes — and on tables slabs of large, illustrated books on hunting and fishing. One long shelf held the entire set of Little Blue Books. Jordan pulled down two at random and leafed through them: number 562, Sophocles’s Antigone, and number 200, Voltaire’s The Ignorant Philosophers.

“Your father’s?”

“Yes.”

“Not exactly light reading.”

“No. This was the nursery,” she told him. “Until I was four. Then it became Daddy’s library.”

She spoke slowly and deliberately now, somewhat out of character, Jordan thought. He was waiting for her to crack and come apart. Any minute now what has happened will hit her, and she’ll become a different person, he thought. A sad and sorrowful woman filled with guilt will replace the incandescent, tough-talking woman filled with smooth, fast-running anger. He didn’t want that transformation to occur, but knew that it was inevitable and that once it did occur he would be transformed, too. He would return to his senses. Or, more accurately, he would return to being the man he had been when he’d first arrived here this morning. When she became sad, he in turn would be obliged to acknowledge that what he had helped her do today was not just illegal, it was wrong, inhuman, and probably stupid as well. And then he would be obliged to face once again the fact of his wife’s adultery, weighing it against the fact of his own adulterous indulgences and infatuations, trying to balance his anger and fear against his regret and guilt. And Hubert would no longer be merely his partner in crime, but also his rival.

Jordan Groves had no philosophy for this task, no ethical system with sufficient rigor and discipline to give him a coherent, self-sustaining style. As long as Vanessa kept her cool, however, he could keep his. He tried to help her hold on to the glittering mixture of warmth and brittleness, of humor and anger, that resisted dissolving in sarcasm or superficial irony. It was sexy to him, and he liked it — two can play at that game — and now he needed it. The last thing he wanted from her was sad sincerity. He thought of those Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy and My Man Godfrey with Powell and Carole Lombard and The Petrified Forest with Bogart and Bette Davis. He thought of Ernest Hemingway’s stories and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. That was the style he needed, and he felt that if he could keep on affecting it, he could become it, and she would become it, too.

“I assume he bought these books by the foot and had them shipped from New York. Carried in by backpack.”

“More or less. But he read them. They’re from the house in Tuxedo Park. After the nursery became the library. He was the one who taught me to read. Every summer until I was sixteen and had graduated from college he made a list of books in the library that I had to read and report on.”

“Sweet sixteen and already a college graduate? Come on. Am I supposed to believe that?”

“Check the social register.”

“Can’t say I own one.”

“Look in the library,” she said. “Everything you need to know is in the library. Everything.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” He ambled from the room out to the hallway, where two rows of framed photographs hung on the walls — lakes, rivers, mountains. No people or other animals. “Daddy’s?”

“But of course.”

“He had good equipment.”

“The best. He had Alfred Stieglitz as his adviser.”

“Stieglitz takes pictures of people, though.”

“He only advised Daddy on technical matters,” she said quickly and changed the subject. “Coming up is my bedroom, dressing room, and bath. Cinderella’s Suite.”

“Cinderella had sisters, as I recall. Stepsisters.”

“I always thought of her as adopted. It was a screwy family, anyhow. No father, just a stepmother and a fairy godmother. And, of course, Prince Charming,” she said and placed her hand on his forearm and curtsied.

“Your feet are not exactly tiny.”

“I beg your pardon!” She kicked off her moccasins and extended one foot for him to observe and admire. “Long and narrow and perfectly arched. A dancer’s feet,” she declared and walked on ahead of him, stepping lightly, like a ballerina.

“Why’d you call it ‘Cinderella’s Suite’? I don’t picture you sweeping the hearth.”

“I didn’t call it that. Daddy did. His and Mother’s quarters he called Olympus. The dining room is Mead Hall. The guest quarters is the Lodge, the library is the Beinecke, the kitchen is the Scullery, and so on. The living room is Valhalla. All very mythic. All quite hilarious. In a Yale-ish way. He even had wooden signs made and hung them over the doors. Until Mother made him take them down.”

“Why?”

“Actually, the only sign she objected to was ‘Cinderella’s Suite.’ But she couldn’t complain about it without having to say why. So she made him take them all down. On the grounds of hilarity.”

“Hilarity?”

“She was against it. It gave her headaches.”

“So why’d she object to calling your quarters Cinderella’s Suite?” Jordan asked. They had stopped in front of the closed door at the end of the hallway.

“You ask too many questions, my prince,” Vanessa said and opened the door and entered.

The room was large and like the rest of the house paneled with wide, carefully roughened boards sawn from first-growth spruce trees, made to look as if they’d been split off the tree trunk with a maul and a wedge. Light off the surface of the lake flooded the bedroom. A Navajo rug hung on the wall above the bed. Otherwise the room was bare of decoration and gave the impression of being an extra room, a guest room suited to anyone and everyone. It was neat and orderly, with no evidence of Vanessa’s having slept there — no clothing out, no cosmetics or perfumes, no keepsakes. Just a single bed, a reading chair and table and kerosene lamp, a narrow, waist-high, pine dresser, and a wood-stove. Off the room Jordan glimpsed a small dressing room with open shelves that held neatly folded towels and blankets and extra sheets, and beyond that a bathroom. All very plain and spartan. It surprised him. He felt that she was as much a visitor here as he.

Vanessa sat on the edge of the bed and gazed out the wide window at the lake, its surface glittering like polished silver plate. The sky had turned milk white under high cirrus clouds, and the mountains were dark gray, almost black, in the distance. The two men fishing were still out there in their guide boat. Vanessa patted the bed beside her and said, “Come here and look. The fish must be biting.”

Jordan sat a few inches from her and saw the fishermen on the lake and checked his watch. Three thirty-five. Another hour and a half, at least, before those two retreat to the clubhouse and I can fly out of here, he thought. He was as reluctant to go home, however, as he was anxious to leave this newly haunted house, haunted as much by the woman beside him as by the woman they had buried in the forest behind it. Vanessa was starting to spook him — her calm, slow-moving, slow-talking tour of the house, her placid deflection of his questions and barbs. He was no longer afraid that she would start to weep in grief and guilt and oblige him to comfort her. Quite the opposite now. He was afraid that she would not break into sobs and tears of anguished remorse, that she would simply continue this cold, playful repartee. It occurred to him that in fact she felt no grief, no remorse. No fear, even.

She turned to him and pushed his jacket open. “You’re not wearing a shirt. Where is it?”

“I put it to dry on the deck railing,” he said and remembered the bloodstains again and that he would have to burn the shirt or Alicia would ask him how he’d gotten it bloodied. He knew that Vanessa was not thinking of his shirt splashed by her mother’s blood, but of his naked torso. The idea that, despite everything, Vanessa was thinking about his body excited him. She pushed his jacket open further and looked at his chest and partially exposed shoulders, and he felt heat travel to his face and groin.

“You will have to stay inside until nearly dark, probably,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t let anyone know that you’ve been here.”

“No.”

“Do you think they can see your airplane from out there?”

“No. It’s anchored in a cove well out of sight. It’s behind a tree-covered spit of land. They’d have to come right up on it in the boat to know it was there.”

“That’s good,” she said and slipped his jacket off his shoulders altogether and pulled first one cuff, then the other, and drew the jacket away from his arms and dropped it onto the floor. “You’re very beautiful,” she said.

“You said something strange back there.”

“What?”

He reached down and retrieved his jacket and slipped it on. “About the sign, ‘Cinderella’s Suite.’ You said your mother objected to it, but didn’t want to say why, so she had all the signs taken down.”

“I said that?”

“Yes. Why did she object to it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.” Jordan left the bed and sat in the chair facing her, his back to the window. Her equanimity scared him a little. He knew she wanted him to make love to her, but the calm ease with which she made that evident signified something other than physical desire, something more mental than of the body, as if her body were merely following orders.

“I don’t want to talk about my mother or my father. Not now,” she said. “Maybe not ever,” she added. Then she suddenly said, “Jordan, did you know that my father was…that he performed lobotomies? Do you know what a lobotomy is?”

“Sure. It’s brain surgery for psychos. It was in all the papers a year or so ago.”

“Daddy invented the procedure, you know.”

“I thought some Portugese quack developed it. Sounds medieval to me, like a pseudoscientific surgical exorcism. I can’t believe your father fell for that.”

“Oh, he more than fell for it. He was working with some people at Yale doing experiments on chimpanzees and monkeys, and then he was in Portugal, where he assisted in a dozen lobotomies, and last year he got permission to do it on human beings at the clinic in Zurich, where Mother was so set on sending me.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, it’s the truth. He taught the doctors there how to do it, because it’s not been approved here in the States. It’s brain surgery, but you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to do it. You just drill a couple of little holes in the front of the skull, insert this cutting instrument that Daddy invented himself. He actually showed it to me, a long, thin steel shaft with an L-shaped blade at the end. You twiddle it back and forth a few times, remove, and presto! No more demons. No more troublesome behavior. No more bad daughter.”

Jordan just smiled. He didn’t believe a word she was saying. But why on earth would she tell such a story? Was it to cover her disappointment that he had rejected her overtures? He hadn’t really rejected her, anyhow; he had merely backed away from her first touch and changed the subject, changing it only temporarily, perhaps. In matters of seduction, Jordan Groves was passive. Never the initiator, he let the woman come to him, giving her the responsibility for the invitation to the dance, and only then, when the dance had begun, would he take the lead. That’s all he was doing here, he thought — foisting on to Vanessa the obligation to declare her intent to have him make love to her, so that afterward he could tell himself that he had merely been complying with her wishes, fulfilling her needs, not his, slaking her lust, not his. Though, naturally, he well knew that he had met his wishes, too, had fulfilled his needs and slaked his lust as much as the woman’s.

That it was a pattern he knew, but he had never examined the causes. In every other action in his life, he was the initiator, the prime mover, but when it came to sex, he let the woman come to him. Or rather, he made the woman come to him. Even his wife, Alicia — except for that first time, way back when they left the gallery party drunk on champagne and new fame and went to his studio downtown, and he asked her to marry him and she said yes, and to celebrate they took off their clothes and made stormy love the entire rest of the night, until dawn broke and gray New York winter light drifted through the high windows and skylight of the studio and fell onto the two of them lying asleep in each other’s arms. From then on, though, he had waited for Alicia to come to him. For Jordan Groves, a man’s sexual favors were precisely that, favors. A woman’s were something else — a request, perhaps, a statement of need or of desire strong enough to require explicit expression by the woman. In a small way, it comforted his vanity and assuaged any residual guilt afterward that, in order to have sex with a woman, he had not been obliged to overcome her objections by any means fair or foul. And he never risked being rejected.

He surprised himself, therefore, when he stood up and took off his leather jacket again and crossed to the bed and sat next to Vanessa and put his bare arms around her. He kissed her on the mouth, softly, and then, as he felt his passion rise, with force this time.

Vanessa pulled away and pushed him back and said, “Wait. You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m lying.”

“Lying? You mean about your father? No, not exactly.”

“That means you think I’m lying.”

“It means you sometimes say things that are not exactly false and not exactly true, and it’s hard for me to know where they fall between the two.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was your father interested in lobotomies? Yeah, sure. Why not? He was a brain surgeon, after all. Did he perform them himself? Maybe he did, maybe he only wanted to, or intended to. But did he go to Europe and do it at that private clinic in Zurich and teach the doctors there how to do it? It’s possible, I guess, but unlikely. I’m sure you believe he did. But based on what? And was your mother setting you up for a lobotomy by sending you to Zurich? Again, I’m sure you believe she was, but based on what evidence? She never said that to you, did she?”

“She didn’t have to. But think about it, Jordan! What a publicity coup for the famous psychiatrist, Dr. Theobold, if he were able to say he miraculously cured the daughter of the equally famous American brain surgeon, Dr. Carter Cole, of an incurable mental illness by using the surgical techniques and tools invented by the late Dr. Cole himself. Rich parents and husbands from all over the world would be shipping their troubled and troublesome children and wives to Zurich. For a half-hour’s surgery and with only a few days needed for recovery, he could charge whatever he wanted, ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars a head! Remember, Jordan, I know these people, Theobold and Reichold and the others. They’re Nazis, Jordan. Very ambitious and greedy Nazis. And I know my father.”

“You’re not suffering from an incurable mental illness.”

“Of course not! I’m not even mentally ill. I’m suffering from something, though.”

“What? Other than the sudden, unexpected loss of your parents.”

For a long moment they both remained silent, gazing out the window. Finally, in a voice barely above a whisper, Vanessa said, “Secrets. Secrets kept from me, and secrets I’ve kept from everyone else. Secrets aren’t like lies. They’re more like brain surgery. They kill your soul. Lying is only a technique for keeping secrets. One of the techniques. Lies and silence and…and storytelling, which is nothing more than changing the subject in an interesting way. All those clever diversionary tactics. Like bad behavior in public. Reckless behavior in public. Or like this,” she said, and she put her arms around him and drew him to her and kissed him and softly moaned. She whispered into his ear, “I want you to take me, now, here,” and ran her hand down his chest and began loosening his belt. He kissed her on the mouth and throat and began unbuttoning her shirt — her father’s flannel shirt, although he did not note that.

FAR OUT ON THE LAKE, THE TWO FISHERMEN SLOWLY REELED in their lines and lay their fishing rods in the boat. The man who was the guide, Sam LaCoy, dipped the oar blades into the still water and began to row the boat slowly back toward the Carry. The other man, whose name was Thomas Smith, a retired diplomat, once ambassador to the Court of St. James, turned in the bow and looked back across the lake at the Cole place, Rangeview. The log buildings glowed in the late afternoon sunlight.

“Do you know the Coles?” Smith asked the guide.

“Can’t say I do. Not personally.”

“Damned good people, Dr. Cole and his wife. He’ll be missed around here.”

“Expect so.”

“I wonder what she’ll do with the camp, now that he’s gone. The widow. It’s hard to imagine she or the daughter will want to hold on to it. Carter Cole was a lifelong Adirondacker, a real true Reservist, you know. His father was one of the original shareholders. Not the wife, though. And certainly not the daughter.”

“You plan on making ’em an offer on the place?”

“It’s a thought.”

“Be good to have a camp of your own up here on the Second Lake. Instead of boarding all the time down to the clubhouse cottages.”

“Yes. The Coles got in the Reserve early. My father was a little slow to realize the value of a camp at the Second Lake.”

“The daughter, she must be third generation, then.”

“Right. She’s got quite a reputation, the daughter, Vanessa. You ever meet her?”

“I’ve seen her. From a distance,” the guide said and pulled once on the oars, hard, driving the boat alongside the dock to where Ambassador Smith could step directly from the boat without wetting his boots or trouser cuffs. “Sorry about the fish not biting,” the guide said.

“My fault, Sam, not yours. We’d have caught a string of trout, I’m sure, if I’d been ready early and didn’t have to get back to the clubhouse before dark. Oh, look!” he said and pointed out a ways where ring-size ripples in the flat black surface of the water spread in widening circles, as if someone were dropping pebbles into the lake. “Now they’re feeding.”

The guide said, “If you owned that Cole place, you’d have yourself a couple more hours to catch your supper before going in.”

“You’re right about that,” Ambassador Smith said. “I’ll have to give the matter some thought.”

The guide took up their gear and pack basket, and the two men headed into the woods of the Carry on to the First Lake, where another boat awaited them.

At breakfast on the morning of April 5, 1937, the big American, the one they called Rembrandt, announced to the others that today’s mission would be his last. He told them he’d had enough. Tomorrow he was going to Madrid. He intended to stay at the Hotel Florida with the American journalist Matthews and the novelists Hemingway and Dos Passos and the photographer Capa. He claimed they were friends of his. He said that he wanted to make pictures of the war to help raise money back in the States. He was an artist, he said to them, not a soldier, and could do more for the anti-Fascist cause with his pictures than by machine-gunning men in trenches from the air, which he said was like shooting ducks in a barrel. Anyone could do that. They didn’t need him for it. The other pilots said nothing. He told them he didn’t care if he was breaking his contract with the Republic of Spain, the government could keep his back pay and whatever signing bonus they still owed him, he’d had enough and wanted to be able to sleep at night without seeing bodies exploding in the air. The others seemed not to mind. They went on eating breakfast. The big American was the least popular man in the unit and had been from the start. Finally Fairhead spoke. He said if this was to be Groves’s last mission he might as well lead it himself. An hour later they were in the air in a V of V formation, with the departing American leading the point patrol. They had their Russian monoplanes now, the Polikarpov I–16s that the Spanish called Moscas. There were heavy rain squalls and a low ceiling of about fifteen hundred feet. They crossed the line at Brihuega where the Italians had attempted to cut their way to Torija and began their bombing run against the lines of tanks parked alongside the valley road. The big American dropped his bombs on the tanks, and the rest of the pilots did the same, and they destroyed many of them. Then Fairhead, who led the right patrol, waggled the wings of his aircraft and pointed up and to their left, where there was a squadron of Fiat single-seat CR 32s, no match for the speed and armaments of the Russian monoplanes. The pilots put their Moscas into a sharp right echelon and began climbing, closing fast on the Fiats. There were seven of the Italians and then, still higher, another five. When the airplanes engaged, formation flying was no longer possible. They broke into one-on-one dogfights, making passing side shots mainly as they tried to position themselves behind their targets. The Moscas began to take advantage of their superior maneuverability and climbing speed. The big American got himself in on the tail of the lead Fiat and fired his 20-millimeter cannons for fifteen seconds straight, sending the Italian spinning downward, spilling a trail of water, gasoline, and black smoke. The American quickly dove after a second target a thousand feet below, but the Italian saw him coming and turned away and dove in the opposite direction. The American curled back in pursuit, but after a few moments the Fiat managed to elude him in the low clouds. When the American broke through the clouds at about five thousand feet, he looked up and saw five Fiats diving toward him. He plunged back down into the clouds again and with the Fiats close behind carved a sharp left vertical bank and completed a 360-degree turn, bringing him in behind his pursuers, firing both machine guns steadily and scattering all five of the Fiats in different directions. A few moments later when he emerged below the clouds again, he found himself in unfamiliar territory, mountainous, with the tops of the mountains in clouds. He was alone in the sky. He dropped down into a valley, hoping for some sign, a river or a road or a village that would help him read his map. As he moved along a rough valley cut with arroyos and narrow dry stream-beds, he spotted too late an antiaircraft gun emplacement in among the trees. At that instant, before he heard the sound of the gun or saw the white puff of smoke in front of his airplane or the second off to his right, a third shell struck his airplane. It hit the left side of the fuselage behind the cockpit, and he could no longer fly the airplane. He was bleeding badly from his shattered left thigh and ankle, and then another shell hit the airplane, this time in the cowling, smashing the engine, igniting the fuel, and instantly the airplane flipped onto its back and began its spiraling plummet to the ground.