HUBERT HAD HOPED TO FIND RUSSELL KENDALL ALONE IN HIS office. But when he approached the corner room at the far end of the greeting desk, as it was called, the office door was open, and standing outside the door like a valet was the guide Sam LaCoy, looking at the floor as if lost in thought, wicker backpack at his feet, a pair of fishing rods in his hands. Hubert heard the manager’s barking laugh and noted the trouser cuffs and shoes of someone seated just inside — Ambassador Smith, he assumed, joshing with the clubhouse manager. The English girl who greeted the guests coming and going and guarded the dining room and bar and other clubhouse facilities from intrusion by nonmembers stood at the desk, leaning on her elbows with a book open before her. It was always an English girl, because of the accent. She looked up from her book, a novel called Caddie Woodlawn, marked her place with her index finger, and studied Hubert for a second. The guides rarely came this far, unless in the company of a member.
“May I direct you to someone?”
“I need to see Mr. Kendall.”
“Sorry. He’s with a member.”
“I can wait.”
“As you wish.”
Hubert nodded hello to the other guide.
“Hubert.” LaCoy rubbed his knuckle across his nose and thumped the cork handles of the fishing rods on the floor in greeting. He was a thick-bodied man, built like a stump with green suspenders.
“They biting out there today?”
“Naw. They was only waiting till we left, I guess. We pretty much come up empty. You?”
“Never wet a line. Just lugging supplies for the Coles.”
“Figured. So them two ladies staying out there alone awhile.”
“Awhile, yes.”
Ambassador Smith and Russell Kendall emerged from the office together, both smiling, their transaction satisfactorily completed. They ignored the guides and kept walking in the direction of the greeting desk, where Smith suddenly stopped, as if remembering something he’d left behind. “Don’t mention who was inquiring, Russell. Not unless she shows genuine interest.”
“Not to worry, Ambassador,” the manager said. They shook hands and Smith moved on, his faithful guide following behind. The manager hoped Ambassador Smith was right, that if Mrs. Cole received a generous, timely, and discreet offer from an old-time reservist like Ambassador Thomas Smith, she would be willing to sell their camp at the Second Lake. It had to be done before the widow got over Dr. Cole’s death, but not while she was still in deep mourning, or she might feel she was being taken advantage of. It was shrewd of the ambassador to make his move quickly, however, while the place was still associated in the minds of Mrs. Cole and her daughter with the death of Dr. Cole. A year from now their memory of the event will be dimmed somewhat, and by then they would have made new associations with the place, social and otherwise, and Mrs. Cole might not want to sell Rangeview.
The ambassador and his family would be easier for Kendall to deal with than the Cole women, especially the daughter, Vanessa. He liked the ambassador. Everyone did. And there would be a sizable commission in it for Kendall if he helped facilitate the sale. The ambassador was an extremely wealthy man from very old money who preferred to let others do his business for him, even in trivial matters. He often had his secretary make his clubhouse dining room reservations for him by telephone from New York City, even though he and his wife were right here in residence in one of the Club cottages, she out on the golf course, he out on the Second Lake fishing.
“Hubert’s waiting to speak with you, Mr. Kendall,” the English girl said, surprising Hubert. He hadn’t thought she’d known his name.
Kendall turned to Hubert, eyebrows raised. “Yes?”
“In private, if that’s okay.”
Kendall nodded and went back into his office. Hubert followed him and stood facing the wide desk like a schoolboy, hat in his hands. Kendall leaned back in his chair and peered out the window behind him at the tennis courts. The window was open, and the soft tympani of the ball and racket and the ball and fine clay played in counterpoint in the background.
After a few seconds, Hubert cleared his throat and said, “There’s something you ought to know that happened today.”
“Really? What?” Kendall continued watching the tennis. A pair of tall, blond, long-jawed men in white flannel trousers and white short-sleeved shirts trotted back and forth on the near court like agitated storks.
“You mind if I sit down?” Hubert suddenly felt that if he didn’t put himself into a chair and trap himself there, he’d turn around and walk out the door.
Kendall waved him toward the dark green club chair recently vacated by Ambassador Smith and resumed gazing at the tennis. “What happened today that I should know about?”
“You know Mrs. Cole, Evelyn Cole? Dr. Cole’s wife. His widow, I mean.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Well, this morning I was up to the Second Lake there, at their camp. And she got accidentally shot.”
Kendall wheeled around in his chair. “Shot! By a gun? Oh, my!”
“Yes. By a gun. Shotgun. Over-and-under Belgian twenty-eight gauge that belonged to the doctor. I…I got it in my truck. My car. Outside.”
“Oh, my!” the manager said again. “Is she…is she all right?”
“Well, no. She’s dead. But it was an accident.”
“Dead!” Kendall left his chair and hurried across the room and closed the door. “Oh, my. Oh, my, this is terrible.”
Hubert looked down at his hands, one holding his old fedora by the brim, the other upturned in his lap, as if waiting for a coin from a passerby. What he was doing now did not feel any longer like the right thing. But it was too late to stop it, too late to go back to what he had been doing before. That had felt wrong, too. In little more than twenty-four hours — starting at the moment Vanessa Cole showed up at his cabin door — he had arrived at a place in his life where he could no longer choose between right and wrong. His life no longer felt like it belonged to him. It belonged to Vanessa Cole and Jordan Groves, and to Alicia Groves, and now it belonged to Russell Kendall, too.
“It was an accident. She…well, she dropped the gun, and it went off, I guess. It was hair triggered, and she had the safety off. I guess you could call it a freak accident. She didn’t have much experience with guns and such.”
“Oh, dear God, this is terrible! Where were you when this happened? She shouldn’t have been handling the gun! That’s supposed to be your job, for heaven’s sake!”
“I was right there. Actually, when it happened, I was trying to take the gun away from her,” Hubert said and instantly regretted it. He didn’t have to volunteer that. He wouldn’t lie, he couldn’t now, but he decided to offer no more information than was absolutely required, no matter how dumb he sounded.
“You were there? You saw it? And you brought the gun in and put it in your car, for reasons I won’t ask into just yet. What about the body, Mrs. Cole’s body? Did you bring that in, too?”
“No.”
“No? Where is she? Her body, I mean. At Rangeview?”
“Well, it’s…it’s back up in the woods a ways.”
“And Vanessa Cole, where is she? Did she come in from the lake with you?”
“No.”
“This is terrible news. Just terrible. The timing couldn’t be worse. When it gets out, it’ll be in all the papers. A thing like this, it’s not the sort of thing the members want the Reserve associated with, you know.”
“Yes.”
“Who knows about this? Other than you, of course. And Vanessa Cole.”
Hubert hesitated a moment. “I seen Ambassador Smith and Sam LaCoy out fishing when I come in. But I didn’t tell them nothing about it. I just said Mrs. Cole and the daughter didn’t want no company just yet.” Hubert hated the way he was talking. He sounded like a country bumpkin, and he knew it, but couldn’t stop himself. He was glad that Alicia couldn’t see or hear him.
“So only you and I and Vanessa know about this accident. That’s good. How’s she taking it?”
“Okay, I guess.”
Kendall sat back down and clasped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling a moment. “I’m tempted to do something indiscreet,” he said. “Possibly illegal. But I’ll need your cooperation, Hubert.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s still possible to keep this whole thing just between us. You know, bring the body of Mrs. Cole out from the lake after dark tonight, and then you and Vanessa drive it someplace else. Someplace downstate, in the Catskills, maybe, and take the gun with you, and say the accident happened there.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Kendall. The body’s not—”
The manager interrupted him. “You would be handsomely paid for the service, believe me. I have a discretionary fund available for…discretion. Do you think Miss Cole would agree to that?”
“Well, to tell the truth—”
“There are favors I could grant in exchange. She wanted her father’s ashes placed in the Reserve. I could allow it. There might be other favors.”
Hubert shook his head. “She doesn’t want anybody to know what happened, all right. Just like you.”
Kendall brightened. “Really?”
“For different reasons she doesn’t want anybody to know what happened. But she doesn’t want her mother’s body brought out, neither.”
“Why not, for heaven’s sake? We can’t leave it there. She’s dead, Hubert. It’s a human body.” He started to say that Ambassador Thomas Smith was thinking of buying Rangeview and might change his mind if a scandal were associated with the place, but thought better of it. Kendall didn’t want anyone getting between him and the ambassador in this transaction, and who knows whom Hubert might tell? If word got out, one of the other members might cut into line without relying on the manager to act as broker. There was a premium on camps in the Reserve.
“Well, for one thing, she’s scared,” Hubert said.
“Scared! Why? She didn’t do it, did she? Shoot her mother. I thought it was an accident. Mrs. Cole dropped the gun, and it went off accidentally, you told me.”
“Well, that’s more or less how it happened.”
“More or less?”
“Yes.”
Kendall narrowed his eyes. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing important.”
“Whatever happens in the Reserve has to be reported to me. Especially when it’s something…untoward. As this certainly appears to be.”
“I know.”
“Hubert, I could make it so you’d never work in the Reserve again.”
“I know.”
“You’d starve without the Reserve. You and half the people in this town,” he added.
“I know,” Hubert said, and sighed. He leaned forward in the chair and looked at the floor and without raising his eyes proceeded to tell the manager the rest. Or most of the rest. He did not tell him about Jordan Groves’s being at the Second Lake, and he did not tell him that Vanessa Cole had kidnapped her mother and kept her a prisoner in the camp for days.
The manager heard him out in silence. When Hubert had finished, Kendall sat up straight in his chair and brushed invisible crumbs from his shirt and straightened papers and pencils on his desk for a few seconds. The thunk of the tennis ball and an occasional hearty male laugh drifted through the open window.
The manager inhaled sharply through his nose. “You are a fucking idiot,” he declared. “You’re a fucking idiot twice over! First, for going along with the Cole girl and burying the mother on the Reserve, when you should have simply come here immediately and told me about the accident. We could have handled the matter discreetly, with no one the wiser. So you’re an idiot for having gone along with her, and God only knows why you did that, and second, you’re an idiot for coming here now and telling me what you’ve done with the woman’s body. And God only knows why you did that!”
“What should I have done, then?” Hubert asked. He genuinely wanted to know. “I’m not an idiot, Mr. Kendall.” He sat back in the chair and gave the manager a hard look.
“Really?” The manager laughed without smiling and shook his head. “What you should have done is refuse to cooperate with that girl and instead come to me right away so I could do the thinking for both of us. Now I’ve got no choice but to play it by the book. The Reserve rule book. I’ll have to call in the sheriff and tomorrow send a crew out there to dig up Mrs. Cole’s body and bring it in. The county will probably want an autopsy before issuing a proper death certificate. It’ll be in all the papers. Oh, they’ll love it. And not just the local papers, either. Kaltenborn will have it on the radio. It’ll make the newsreels. And the Cole estate, that’ll be tied up for years. Or else in the hands of that crazy girl. And who knows what she’ll do with the property.”
“The property?”
“Yes. Rangeview. Certain parties have expressed an interest in purchasing Rangeview from Mrs. Cole. It could have been a quiet, private transaction, handled by me. These are socially prominent people, Hubert. They don’t like their names or activities or their financial affairs in the newspapers or associated with people like Vanessa Cole, who does want her name in the newspapers and her pretty face up on the ‘March of Time’ screen. I don’t expect you to understand that. But I do expect you to act rationally. Or at least I did. And to leave the business of being discreet to me. That’s supposed to be my business, Hubert. That’s my special skill. It’s why I have this job. Your business, your skill, is to guide and protect your clients here on the Reserve and take care of their property for them. Your employer, don’t forget, is the Reserve. Your clients pay the Reserve for your services, and the Reserve pays you. Your allegiance, therefore, is first and foremost to the Reserve and only indirectly to your clients. The rules we follow here, all of us, you as well as I, are the Reserve’s rules, written into law years ago, generations ago, by men like Dr. Cole’s father, when they first created the Reserve as a private sanctuary for themselves and their families and friends. Remember that. And when you obeyed Vanessa Cole and helped her bury her mother on the Reserve, which is practically sacred ground to these people, especially those members like Ambassador Smith whose parents and grandparents created it, when you did that, Hubert, you broke the Reserve’s rules. There shall be no grave sites anywhere in the Reserve. None. That’s the rule that applies here, Hubert. While I might have bent that rule a little for Vanessa Cole regarding Dr. Cole’s ashes, in exchange for her agreeing to move the site of her mother’s unfortunate accident to someplace else, now, thanks to you, it’s too late for that. We’ll have to go up there tomorrow with a crew and dig up the body in daylight. How deep did you bury her?”
“About five feet, I guess.”
“Oh, my. Five feet deep. Well, there you are. There’s really no way this can be done quickly, unofficially, off the record. Discreetly.” Kendall reached for the standing phone with one hand and dismissed the guide with a backhanded wave of the other. “It’s too late to do anything today, it’ll be dark in a few hours. Be here tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. I’ll have two or three men who’ll go in with you. And probably the sheriff.”
Hubert nodded and pulled away from the sticky embrace of the chair. When he stood, he felt strangely tall, as if he were outside his body and looking down on it from above. The man he saw below was a small man, shrunken and frail, prematurely aged — a man who used to be an Adirondack guide.
THE SUN PASSED BEYOND THE RANGE, AND THE BROAD SHADOW of the mountains spread across the lake from west to east, and the light in Cinderella’s Suite quickly faded. Jordan Groves and Vanessa Von Heidenstamm did not notice the approaching darkness. They were still immersed in their lovemaking. It had begun slowly, tenderly, face-to-face, with long, lingering looks at each other, like devoted siblings at the start of a long absence taking their last leave of each other, gathering in all the details they had neglected to notice up to now. They removed their clothes, their own and each other’s, delicately, precisely, as if preparing to model for an artist, and once naked, seated side by side on the bed, they turned to face each other, and with their hands on each other’s bare shoulders, they kissed — sweetly, as if in relief and gratitude for having come to the peaceful end of a painfully protracted argument. And then they embraced and with their hands caressed each other’s breasts and backs and arms — her skin smooth and creamy and soft as fine silk, his alabaster white and tautly drawn over muscle and bone — and their separate bodies gradually lost their boundaries and merged into a third body, one that contained all their female and male differences and erased all their anatomical contrasts and inversions.
Their passion rose slowly. His because he had never made love like this before, delicately, teasingly, fully aware of each slow turning, and though it frightened him a little, it excited him in a fresh way. Hers rising slowly also, but with her it was because she had made love in this fashion many times before and knew very well its effect on a man who was used to having his way with a woman quickly and efficiently without being conscious of having lost awareness of his body. Men like Jordan Groves, egocentric sensualists, men whose lovemaking left them with a sense of accomplishment, were rarely truly satisfied by a woman, unless she managed to slow him in his headlong rush. He had to be brought, bit by bit, cell by cell, to complete awareness of his body, moving, as if he were a woman, from the outside in, rather than from the inside out, so that when he did lose his body, he lost everything. Men like Jordan Groves had to be braked and slowed. They were the only men capable of exciting Vanessa’s passion. Slowing them almost to a stopping point gave her a power over them that she otherwise lacked. It brought her out of herself and forward toward another human being and through that other into the shuddering void beyond, and when that happened she cried out in joy. Afterward, with no memory of having cried out, she had to be told of it by her lover, as if she had been elsewhere at the time. For she had been elsewhere — she had left the locked and guarded, dark room of her body for the blinding light of self-forgetfulness, where there was no one to be courted or seduced, where there was no one to affirm her reality by means of his or her gaze, and no one to fail at it over and over again. Making love with men like Jordan Groves let Vanessa Cole believe for a few seconds in the sustained reality of her essential being, even though afterward she could not remember ever having experienced it as such. Even though afterward it was as if self-awareness had been surgically removed and all she had to go on, all she was capable of experiencing, was its phantom. But her belief in its existence, like a Christian’s belief in a god she’s never met, gave Vanessa strength and a small, transient portion of equanimity, and for many years that belief had kept her from annihilating herself.
IT WAS NEARLY DARK WHEN THEY HEARD FOOTSTEPS ON THE DECK at the front of the house and then the squeak of the screened door of the porch opening and closing, and someone crossed the porch and knocked lightly on the living room door. Jordan reached for his clothes and rapidly began pulling them on, while Vanessa calmly rose from the bed, strolled naked to the dressing room, and emerged wrapped in a white cotton sheet. She told him to stay where he was and walked from the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind her. Jordan peered cautiously from the window along the front of the house to the porch. In the heavy shadow of the overhanging pines, even with a full moon rising in the east, it was too dark for him to see who was there, except that it was a man.
At the living room door Vanessa called, “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Hubert. Hubert St. Germain, Miss Cole.”
“What do you want? I’m not dressed.”
“I got to talk to you, Miss Cole.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
She opened the door, but did not invite him inside. “What do you want? You shouldn’t be here now, you know.” The cold air rushed into the room, and she shivered and pulled the sheet tightly around her. She was not fooled: the guide was bringing news that she did not want to hear.
“I know I shouldn’t have come out. But I got to warn you.”
“What, the British are coming?”
“No. I did something that I thought…that I thought was the right thing to do. The only thing I could do, under the circumstances. Only it didn’t work out right.”
“For heaven’s sake, Hubert, you sound like you’ve been a bad boy. Stop beating around the bush and tell me,” she said, although she already knew what he’d done and what would follow. She turned away and told him to come inside, then walked to her bedroom door and called to Jordan, “Come on out. It’s Paul Revere. The British are coming.” He’s told someone, she said to herself. The bloody fool. She never should have trusted him. He was weaker than she had thought.
Returning to the living room, she strode to the bar and poured herself a half glass of rum and the same for Jordan. “You want a drink?” she asked Hubert. “Sit down and have a drink,” she said. Then, “No, make a fire first, will you? It’s cold in here.”
“I could use a drink, I guess. H’lo, Jordan,” he said as the artist entered the room, dressed, but shirtless, with his leather jacket on and zipped.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Jordan said.
“I’m afraid he’s the harbinger of bad tidings. What do you want, Hubert? To drink, I mean.”
“Same as you, I guess.”
“You guess. Is that all you do, guess?”
“No. I know a few things. I’ll have the same as you and Jordan,” he said and knelt by the fireplace and crumpled newspaper into it and laid some sticks down and while the others watched in silence got the fire lit.
Jordan slumped in a large chair and looked at him. Finally he asked, “What’s the bad news, Hubert? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. You got back to your cabin and sat there looking at your dog and had a crisis of conscience. Right?”
Hubert stood and looked at Jordan, then at Vanessa, who handed him the drink. The burning pine sticks snapped loudly behind him. He saw that they had spent the afternoon making love, and was glad of it. So many things were fracturing and getting reconfigured that it felt somehow reassuring to see still more of it. What the hell, let it all come down, he thought. Everything that’s broke is beyond repair. He was even glad that Alicia and he would not be able to see each other again, and that he might never be able to hire out his services to the Reserve again. Better that nothing will ever be the same again, rather than only some things. “Yes, you’re right,” he said to Jordan. “As far as it goes.”
“Jesus Christ,” Vanessa said. “‘As far as it goes.’” She moved from table to table, lighting the kerosene lanterns, filling the large, high-ceilinged room with pale orange light. “My father’s dead only a few weeks, and my mother’s killed this morning by a shotgun blast, a regrettable, sad accident, as we know, and Daddy’s ashes are in the lake, and Mother’s body is buried in the woods, both deeds illegally done, and you’re having a little crise de conscience? Get some perspective, Hubert. I haven’t even started to properly mourn yet, because of all this goddamned mess, and meanwhile you’re feeling a little guilty? Why should we care about that?”
“If that’s all it was, that I talked to Alicia about…about what happened this morning and all, I wouldn’t have come out here tonight. I would’ve just left it like it was.”
“You did what?” Jordan said. “You told Alicia? Jesus!”
“Why on earth did you do that, Hubert? What were you thinking?”
Jordan said, “I’ll tell you what he was thinking. He carried his little bag of guilt straight to his lover, my wife, because he couldn’t handle it himself, and she’s the only one he knows who would keep his secret, since I’m a part of it and she’s married to me, the father of her children, and is therefore obliged to protect me. Besides, she’s good at keeping secrets, isn’t she, Hubie? So now Alicia knows about it, and you’re feeling guilty about that, too. You’re having a second crisis of conscience, and you’ve rowed all the way out here in the dark to get it off your chest. You can screw another man’s wife, but you can’t stand thinking badly of yourself. Better get used to it, Hubie.”
“Jordan, don’t call me Hubie.”
“I’ll call you any damn thing I want.”
Hubert looked at Jordan, then at Vanessa. His partners in crime. Fellow liars. Adulterers. Everyone in it together, but only for him-or herself. He didn’t know who any of them was any more, not even Alicia. Not even himself. All he knew was what they had done. He had no idea of why, however.
“Stop it, you two,” Vanessa said. “Just tell us the rest, Hubert.”
“Tomorrow morning Kendall’s sending me and a couple of the boys from the Club out here with Dan Peters to dig up your mother’s body and take it in for an autopsy and suchlike.” He paused for a moment to let them absorb the information. “Peters is the Essex County sheriff,” he added.
Vanessa and Jordan glanced at each other, then turned away and stared expressionless at the fire.
Hubert said, “Kendall knows what happened out here today.”
“So I gather. Who told him?” Jordan asked. “Alicia? You told her what happened, and she took it to Kendall?” It was not like her to betray him that way. But it was not like her, he had once believed, to betray him by sleeping with another man and continuing to do it and lie about it for months. Falling in love with him, even. There wasn’t much left in his life now that was predictable, except lies and betrayal.
“You told him yourself, didn’t you, Hubert?” Vanessa said. “Because of Alicia. Because that’s what she wanted you to do.”
“Yes. I’m not sure that’s what she wanted me to do, though. I did it on my own account.”
“Oh, Hubert St. Germain, you’re like a moth to flame.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t resist what can destroy you. You think you’re being honest, but you’re acting on some dumb blind instinct.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I thought I was doing what was right. Finally.”
Jordan said, “Did you tell Kendall about me, that I’m involved?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s something, I suppose. But Alicia, she knows everything?”
“Yes.”
Jordan pulled his tobacco and papers from his jacket pocket and rolled a cigarette. Vanessa sat opposite him, turning her glass and staring at it. Hubert looked at the fire and drank off his rum and placed the heavy glass on the end table next to him. Three full minutes passed in silence, except for the snap of the fire in the fireplace. Then Hubert walked to the door. He waited there for a second, as if expecting one of them to stop him, to ask where he was going, why he was leaving, why he had done what he had done. But no one asked him anything, and he was glad. He wouldn’t have known how to answer. He didn’t know where he was going, or why he was leaving, or why he had done what he had done. He opened the door and departed from them. Let it all come down.
Jordan left his chair and crossed to Vanessa and stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, naked beneath the sheet, and pushed the sheet away and felt her cool skin. Firelight flickered across her breasts, and the artist thought it would make a beautiful picture — a seated, nearly naked woman seen from above and behind like this, her light auburn hair loose and long and streaked with red and orange bands of firelight, her buttery shoulders and her full, firm breasts with the pink nipples barely visible, the white sheet collapsed across her lap; and emerging from the darkness that surrounded her, obscure shapes of furniture, ominous, impersonal forms slowly encroaching on the lit space filled by the naked woman, thoughtful and grave. The fire in the fireplace and the kerosene lanterns were outside the frame. All the light on the woman was reflected light. He removed his hands from her shoulders — he didn’t want his hands in the picture, just the woman alone in the nearly dark room, naked and sad and in danger and aware of everything in the picture and beautiful to behold.
“You’re looking at me, aren’t you?” she said in a low monotone. She felt the heat and light from the fireplace and lamps on her face and upper body and the heat and light from the gaze of the man standing behind her, and she was filled with inexpressible joy. The warm illumination from both fire and man solidified her, gave her body and her mind three full dimensions and let her shape-shifting self, aswirl in a fixed world, stop and hold and, when she had become its still center, made the world begin to swirl instead. This must be how other people feel all the time, she thought.
Jordan could not resist touching her and placed his hands on her shoulders again. She shrugged them off. “Just look at me. Keep looking at me.”
“I want to touch you.”
“No touching,” she said. It was a child’s voice, high and thin, almost a plea.
Jordan took a step back and to the side and tried looking at her from a different angle, a three-quarter view, but it did not have the same mystery and sadness of looking at her from behind and above. It was merely a portrait now of a posed woman, a model instructed by the artist to sit naked in a large chair with a sheet draped across her lap. The woman he had seen before was gone.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Especially now.”
“No.”
“What will you do when they come tomorrow?”
“Whatever I have to.”
“What will you tell them?”
“Whatever I have to.”
“Will you tell them about me?” he asked. “That I was here?”
“No.”
“Will you be all right? Tonight, I mean. Alone.”
“I’ve never been anything but alone. I’ll be all right.”
He leaned down to kiss her, and she jerked away. “I said no touching.”
VANESSA HEARD HIM CLOSE THE OUTER DOOR AND CROSS THE porch and deck. Then silence — except for the dry, whispering rattle of the fire. She turned in the chair and cupped in both hands the pale green glass bowl of the kerosene lantern on the table beside her and lifted it into the air. She stood, and the sheet fell away, and she was naked. She carried the lantern to the fireplace. The crackling fire warmed her belly and breasts and thighs, its yellow light flickering across her pale skin like fingertips. She gently set the glass bowl onto the cut-stone mantelpiece, like an offering on an altar. Turning, she picked up a second lamp from a table and crossed the living room. Planes of orange light slid and skidded over the walls and high ceiling as she walked into the darkened hallway and turned from the hallway and entered the library.
“Everything you need to know is in the library.”
“Look in the library,” she had said to Jordan. He had questioned her claim to have graduated from college at sixteen, and she had told him to check the social register, even though she knew that the social register would neither confirm nor deny her claim. She was performing for him, mixing lies with truths, and he, naturally, was believing nothing. “Everything you need to know is in the library. Everything,” she had said to him, and a dreaded certainty, which until that moment had eluded her, came over her. Vanessa suddenly knew what to look for and where to look for it. There was no speculation or supposition about it; she knew that a thick, cardboard file folder tied with a black ribbon was located in a locked wooden cabinet built into the shelves behind her father’s reading chair. It had always been there, and she had always avoided looking at it, and it had become invisible to her. She set the lantern on the floor and pulled the heavy, leather-upholstered chair away from the wall. She yanked hard on the wooden knob of the cabinet, and it broke off in her hand. Grabbing a poker from the stand next to the corner fireplace, she proceeded with a half-dozen blows to smash the thin panels of the cabinet door to pieces. Inside the cabinet, she saw what she had known would be there. She removed the brown cardboard file folder from the cabinet and sat on the floor and held it flat on her lap and was about to untie the black ribbon and open it, when it seemed suddenly to burn her bare skin with a dark heat. She pushed the folder off her lap, to the floor. Then she stood and picked up the folder again. It was cool to the touch, now that she no longer wanted to open it.
Vanessa left the library and carried the folder to the living room. There she held it against her breasts and stared at the fire for several seconds. The flames had begun to die, and she was shivering from the cold now. Kneeling, she placed the folder flat on the hearth. She reached behind her for the fallen sheet and draped it over her shoulders like a robe. On her knees, she stared at the file folder and reached one hand forward and nudged the folder a few inches toward the open fire, all the while murmuring and shaking her head from side to side as if arguing with herself. She pushed the folder another inch closer to the flames. She looked up at the mantelpiece. She could feel the heat of the flames against her face and throat. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again….
She stood then and slowly approached the mantelpiece, reached out and lifted the kerosene lantern off it. Holding the bowl in her two hands, she backed a few steps away from the fire. She hurled the lantern through the flaming mouth of the fireplace into the darkness beyond, and the entire room filled with a flash of hot light.
JORDAN GROVES MADE HIS WAY WITH RELATIVE EASE ALONG the rocky shore. The full moon above the lake was like a gigantic eye looking in on the earth. He pushed through brushy undergrowth and splashed across the mouths of small, rock-strewn brooks to the hidden cove a mile south of the camp, where his airplane was anchored. Stepping onto the near pontoon, he pulled the anchors free of the lake bottom and climbed into the cockpit and started the engine. He hit the rudders, and brought the airplane around to the south, facing the soft wind. A broad streak of moonlight crossed the water in front of him like a brightly lit, rippled runway, and his takeoff along it was quick and smooth and straight, a gracefully rising arc drawn from the surface of the lake into the cloudless, star-filled sky above. As he passed over the camp buildings, he kept his gaze fixed on the stars above and ahead of him and did not see the living room windows of the camp suddenly change color — dark orange flaring to bright yellow.
ALICIA MOVED SLOWLY THROUGH THE HOUSE, SHUTTING OFF the lights one by one. The boys had finally fallen asleep — all day and into the evening they had been anxious and somber, as if they knew that something was about to change their lives irrevocably, even though Alicia had made every effort to demonstrate to them that today was just another ordinary summer day in the life of the Groves family. Papa was gone someplace in his airplane but would be back in a day or two, she told them, maybe even tonight. Where has Papa gone? they wanted to know. She wasn’t sure, it was business, it had come up suddenly, and he had left early before any of them was awake and didn’t give her the details. They’d memorized and rehearsed singing the Jimmie Rodgers songs, and in the afternoon, after Hubert came and left, she asked the boys to keep helping Papa’s new assistant learn everything she could about the studio, told them to go on teaching the girl the names and places of the different tools and materials the same way Papa had taught them, by making an inventory of all the inks and paints and pastels and pencils, all the blocks and plates and even the sheets of paper organized by weight and size, and the rolls of canvas and stretchers and the brushes, knives, chisels, gouges — reminding Wolf and Bear that Frances had never been inside a real artist’s studio before yesterday and that by helping her they were helping Papa, because when he got back he would have lots of new work to do and would not have the time to train her himself.
With Frances and the boys safely ensconced in the studio, Alicia had continued to behave as if it was just another normal late July afternoon — weeding the garden, gathering the first summer squashes and cucumbers, restaking the branches of the tomato plants that were about to break under the weight of the clusters of new green tomatoes. And later she’d taken Wolf and Bear to swim in the river, and the dogs, as anxious and somber as the boys, for the first time refused to go into the water. They stood on the sandy shore and watched, as if protecting the boys, who dutifully practiced their strokes a short ways beyond, and when the boys came out of the water and Alicia toweled them down, the dogs lay on the warm sand of the short beach and continued their watching, as if something strange was happening, when, in fact, everything was normal, life as usual, just another afternoon and evening at the Groveses’.
But it was not life as usual, and they all knew it, even Frances, Jordan’s new assistant, who at the end of the day came to Alicia and asked if maybe she should stay home tomorrow and wait for Mr. Groves to telephone before she came back to work. Alicia said yes, that was a good idea, since she wasn’t sure exactly when he would be back, and there was no point in her hanging around in the studio when he wasn’t here to tell her what to do. Unless, of course, she needed more time to familiarize herself with the artist’s tools and materials. The girl said no, the boys had taught her real good, she said. She said they were amazing, the boys. So smart and helpful and well behaved. Alicia thanked her and gave her some money for her two days’ work and sent her on her way, believing that she would not see this girl again, at least not here. She’d bump into her in town, maybe, see her by accident at the grocery store, and the girl would ask after the boys, politely avoiding any mention of Mr. Groves or her brief employment as his studio assistant. For he would no longer be there, working in his studio, managing his household, raising his sons, sharing his life with his wife. Alicia did not yet know where in fact he would be or what he’d be doing there or whom he would be sharing his life with, but from the moment she woke at dawn to the sound down by the river of his airplane engine starting up and heard the plane take off and fly over the house and up the valley, gone, she had known that he would return only to organize his permanent absence from this house and from her, and from now on his sons would at best be mere visitors in his life, his unhappy guests on holidays and school vacations.
So she was not surprised, as she walked through the house shutting off the lights, dropping the house room by room into darkness, that she did not, as usual, leave a light burning at the kitchen door for him. She passed through the library, where barely twenty-four hours ago, she and Jordan had last held each other and wept over the damage they had done alone and together to their marriage, and she stood a moment beside his desk as if he were still seated there and she were waiting for him to turn to her and say All is forgiven, and All our lies and betrayals belong to the past now. Her glance fell on the wicker basket beside the desk, and she saw in it a sealed and stamped letter torn in half and half again, Jordan’s cream-colored personal stationery with his familiar logo for the return address and letterhead — a river, the River Jordan, he had once explained to her, represented by three parallel, waved lines rippling below a grove of three pines. It was his mark, his stamp, his signature. She reached into the basket and picked up the four pieces of the torn letter and envelope and saw that it was addressed to John Dos Passos. She knew then where her husband would go when he left her. She did not read what he had written to Dos. She didn’t have to — he had written it before learning of her betrayal and the months of deception. He had written it when he thought he knew who she was. Everything was different now. And then she heard the high, nasal hum of the airplane in the distance, its tone dropping and volume steadily increasing as it followed the river north toward home.
The young American woman stood alone at the wide window on the promenade of Level A, ignored now by the other passengers, for they had given up trying to engage her in conversation. Shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, the steward announced that it would soon be possible to see the coast of Newfoundland. Below, the warm waters of the Gulf Stream merged with the cold North Atlantic Drift. For the first time since leaving Frankfurt, the sky had cleared, and the passengers on the promenade peered down from the Hindenburg and watched its long shadow cross the turquoise water. In the distance, looking like tiny sailboats, icebergs cast off by the glaciers of Greenland floated southeast on the Labrador Current. Soon the airship passed close enough to one of the icebergs for the passengers to take its measure. It was a mountain of ice gleaming in the sunlight, its enormous pale green base visible below the surface of the sea. A double rainbow circled the white peak. There was a sudden noise, a rumble and then a loud crack that could be heard inside the airship, and the mountain of ice seemed to break apart. A third of it split away and slid slowly into the sea. Calving, they call it, said a man standing beside the young woman. She turned quickly. It was the short man whose Dresden doll, his gift for his daughter, had been inspected at the hotel in Frankfurt. The man smiled. It’s the mother iceberg giving birth to the baby iceberg, he added. Cute, eh? She said, Yes. Will your daughter be meeting you when we arrive tomorrow? she asked. He said that he hoped so, and the woman closed her eyes for a second and smiled warmly, as if picturing in her mind the happy reunion of father and daughter. She said, Your daughter will love the doll that you’re bringing to her. He said again that he hoped so, and she said, Oh, I’m certain of it. She turned back to the window, and the shadow of the gigantic airship crossed over the iceberg below — now two icebergs, a mother and a daughter — dissolving the double rainbow and dimming the white glare of the ice to gray.