The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  As the airplane passed the camp, Jordan glanced to his right and saw that Dr. Cole and his guests had come out onto the deck. They watched the airplane reach the far side of the lake where it had first touched down and thought they saw a passenger in the cockpit behind the pilot, but couldn’t make out who it was.

  Without breaking speed, the pilot brought the airplane around to starboard again, carving a tight turn into the northeast, heading it directly into the wind, then pushed the throttle ahead another notch, accelerating as it came out of the turn. At about forty knots, the airplane squarely hit the step, the gathering surge of water just ahead of the pontoons. As the nose of the airplane rose, the pilot pulled back on the control yoke and pushed the throttle all the way forward. For a few seconds the airplane fought the water, working its way up and over the step, until it leveled off, and then it was airborne and climbing.

  From the deck of the camp, Dr. Cole and his wife and their friends watched the airplane rise off the surface of the lake and soar overhead and disappear into the night sky behind them, and when they turned to go back inside and get dressed for dinner, they realized almost as one that the artist’s passenger was Dr. Cole’s daughter, Vanessa. No one said it aloud until the couples were in their respective bedrooms—Dr. Cole and his wife in the master suite, a large, high-ceilinged bedroom just off the living room, with its own fireplace, and the others in the guest quarters, a low structure called the Lodge that was attached to the main building by a roofed-over walkway—when husband and wife said to each other, “Well, that was fast,” and, “I don’t know where she gets the nerve…,” and, “I didn’t even see her leave the room.”

  Dr. Cole pulled on his dinner jacket, brushed his lapels, and shot his cuffs. Checking himself in the mirror, he straightened his bow tie and said to his wife, “What do you think? Is she all right?”

  “No, of course not! When has Vanessa ever been ‘all right,’ Carter?”

  The doctor sat down heavily on the bed and placed his right hand over the left side of his chest and winced. His face had gone pale, and he was sweating.

  “What’s wrong?” his wife said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t look right.”

  “I’m fine, damn it! Leave me alone! It’s just…” He grabbed his left arm, high up.

  “No, you’re not fine. Are you in pain?” She came over to him and put her hands on his shoulders and stared at him.

  “It’s…it’s just indigestion. Heartburn is all. Leave me alone,” he said and shook her off him. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered through gritted teeth, “I’m a doctor, I know when something’s wrong.”

  WITH THE ALTIMETER READING 2,250 FEET, JORDAN SLID THE wheel slowly, smoothly forward, pulled back the throttle, and stopped climbing. He put the airplane on a heading for the clubhouse grounds two miles away. Below them the black forest flashed past. Jordan turned in the cockpit and looked back at Vanessa. She was smiling broadly, her hair tossed wildly by the wind. She lifted her arms over her head and opened her hands wide.

  “Can you fly an airplane?” he shouted above the roar of the engine and the wind.

  “Of course not!”

  “Put your hands on the wheel!”

  “What?”

  “You fly it! Hold on to the wheel!”

  She grasped the control yoke with both hands, looked at him as if for approval, and he nodded. She’s done this before, he thought.

  “You’re sure you’ve never flown an airplane?”

  “Never!”

  He said, “Okay. Five things to remember! Five precepts.”

  She laughed. “Only five?”

  “Observe! Think! Plan! Execute! And abandon! You use abandon if execute doesn’t work, and then you go back to observe!”

  “Okay!” she shouted. “You’re crazy, you know!”

  He let go of the yoke, and suddenly Vanessa was flying the aircraft. She seemed too eager to take the controls, too fearless. He kept his hands loosely on the yoke, not giving the airplane over entirely to her. He was not convinced that she had never flown before. He turned back and asked her to repeat the five precepts.

  “Observe!” she began. “Think! Plan…and what?”

  “Execute!”

  “Right, execute! And abandon!”

  “Good! So what do you observe?”

  “Oh, Christ! Everything!”

  “Start with altitude, bearing, speed!”

  “Okay, okay, okay!” she yelled and looked down at the gauges. “Altitude! I’ve got the altitude! And the compass, so that’s bearing! And here’s speed!”

  “Good! What else can you observe?”

  She peered around his broad shoulders and over the cowling and saw in the distance the moonlit roof of the clubhouse and some other smaller buildings nearby and the broad expanse of the golf course and then more dark forest and beyond the forest the mountains, Sentinel and the big one, Goliath. “Oh, my God! Mountains coming up!”

  “Right! So think! Precept two!”

  “We’re not high enough.”

  “Right! So plan! Precept three!”

  She nodded soberly and said nothing. Jordan smiled and waited for her to try gaining altitude on her own. They passed over the rambling rooftops of the Tamarack clubhouse and cottages and outbuildings, the automobiles and trucks and horse-drawn buggies parked along the roadway and in the oval drive, and the large crowd of people waiting on the side of the eighth fairway for the fireworks to begin, their faces all upturned, gazing at the biplane as it soared over them and on into the Adirondack night.

  He felt the yoke under his hands move slowly, steadily back, felt the nose lift slightly as the airplane lost speed and gained altitude, and knew that she was executing. Not enough speed, though, and not enough lift. “Give it some more power!” he shouted. A few seconds later the engine noise grew louder, and they began climbing faster. The airplane rose up and over the treeless cliffs of the summit of Sentinel, topping it by less than five hundred feet. Now they were passing over Bream Pond, toward Goliath, but the airplane needed to gain another fifteen hundred feet quickly to avoid slamming into the broad, granite shoulder of the mountain, and there was not enough time to do it at this speed, unless she abandoned her plan and cut hard to starboard, bringing the airplane back toward Bream Pond, Sentinel, and the Tamarack clubhouse and grounds. He waited five seconds, ten, and figured he had five more before he’d take over the airplane, when he felt the yoke turn in his hands a few degrees to the right, from twelve o’clock to two. The airplane dipped to the right, but was losing altitude. Then gaining speed, fighting torque, and pulling out of the turn. But it was too low now and headed for a stand of tall pines on a bluff east of the mountain, unless she saw the notch ahead and slightly to the right and aimed for it.

  “Observe!” he yelled and pointed at the notch, a cleft between the pine-topped bluff and the cliffs on the south side of Bream Pond.

  She righted the airplane and brought it slowly around, flashing through the notch and missing the trees below by barely a hundred feet. Suddenly they were flying over the still, moon-silvered waters of Bream Pond. Jordan tightened his grip on the controls and took over the aircraft.

  “Hey!” she shouted. She tried to turn the wheel left and right, pushed it forward and back. Nothing happened. The airplane was his again. “I’m not through yet!” she yelled.

  “Yes, you are,” he said, and he slowed the plane to ninety knots, then seventy, and looped around at the far end of the pond, and came back up its length, where he dropped it into the water a few hundred yards from shore. He taxied back to a short, sandy beach and let the airplane drift to a halt in shallow water, and shut down the engine. The world was suddenly silent, except for the dying waves from the airplane’s wake lightly slapping the pontoons.

  “This is a good place to watch the fireworks,” he said to her and pointed back the way they had come. “You can sit here and see them through the notch.”

  “Brilliant!”
she exclaimed. “But better from the shore,” she said, and hitching her skirt to her long white thighs, she climbed out of the cockpit and splashed to the beach. “Come on! Follow me!” She made her way quickly up the slope, to where an overgrown lumber road passed the pond, and waved to him from there. “C’mon! There’s a grassy clearing I know just down the road where the view is truly splendid. I walk up here lots to swim in the pond and picnic and get away from the family. We can lie on our backs and see the whole valley and sky from there!”

  Jordan watched her as she disappeared behind a stand of white birches gleaming in the moonlight. She reappeared seconds later on the far side of the trees, striding down the narrow dirt road toward the opening to the valley and the clear view of the Tamarack clubhouse and golf course below. He watched her walk out of moonlight into darkness, and he knew what would happen if he followed. He started the engine, and the airplane drifted down shore a ways, where he brought it around to face the wind and open water.

  “Hey! Where the hell are you going?” she hollered.

  “Home! It’s late!”

  “What? You’re leaving me here?”

  “You left me, remember? Once you abandon ship, there’s no getting back aboard!”

  “You bastard!”

  He didn’t answer. He shoved the stick forward and quickly moved across the smooth water, hit the step, and accelerated across the skin of the pond as if on skids on ice. Then the airplane lifted free of the water and rose with a roar into the darkness. He was flying through the notch at about twenty-five hundred feet, still climbing, and prepared to make the long, rising turn to the northeast, to pass over Goliath and on to Petersburg and the Tamarack River and his home, where he was late and his wife and sons awaited him, when he looked off to his left and saw the sky light up. A battery of hissing rockets sent long, fiery arcs of red, yellow, green, and blue into the blackness, like thunderbolts cast against the gods. High in the sky above the Reserve, the rockets finished their ascent, lost their force and floated for a second, and one after the other exploded with a luminous flash—gigantic flowers of light that instantly faded, crumpled, and dissolved in the night. Trails of sparks floated back to earth like brightly colored petals. A thunderous boom echoed across the valley, and the sky filled with darkness again.

  Shortly after midnight on Monday, May 3, 1937, the night train from Zurich left Switzerland, passed through Liechtenstein, stopped at Bregenz in Austria, and traveled on to the eastern shore of Lake Constance, where Switzerland, Austria, and Germany converge. At 3:30 A.M. eastern European time, as the train rounded the lake, the sky brightened, and the passengers, those who were awake, turned in their seats and admired the glistening white peaks and the blue water. The train was not crowded. Most of the passengers were Swiss businessmen traveling to initiate or complete transactions with German manufacturers and government procurement agencies. Among the passengers were a Swiss doctor in his midthirties wearing a gray wool suit and white shirt and knotted silk necktie, indistinguishable from the businessmen, and a young American woman who slumped sleeping in her seat beside him. They were alone in their first-class compartment. The man had been reading a book and now gazed intently out the window. The woman wore a tailored, brown tweed jacket and skirt and a black, wide-brimmed, Lilly Dache hat with a veil that covered her forehead and half covered her pale face. She wore no jewelry or makeup, and her long auburn hair was disheveled and needed brushing. The man nudged the young woman and pointed out the window at the lake and the mountains. Very beautiful, he said in English. The woman opened her eyes and sat up straight in the seat. She squinted and peered out the window as instructed. Where are we? she asked. We are in Germany, he answered. The town of Friedrichshafen. He indicated the three most prominent mountains south of the lake and said, Hoher, Churfirsten, and Santis. After a few seconds she said, Oh, and slumped back in her seat again and closed her eyes under the veil. In seconds the woman appeared to be sleeping. The train followed the glittering waters of the Rhine north and west into the German heartland. At exactly 7:14 A.M. central European time, as scheduled, the night train from Zurich arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt.

  AT SIX, WELL BEFORE THE REST OF THE FAMILY WOKE, JORDAN Groves left his bed. He shaved and dressed for work in loose, paint-spattered dungarees and sweatshirt and came down the wide front stairs to the living room and went into the kitchen and let the dogs out and the cats in. Most days he carried a chunk of cheese and some bread directly to his studio and made a pot of coffee there and sat contemplatively for an hour in front of yesterday’s picture before setting to work on it. It was the best time of the day for him, best for thinking, best for work. Today, however, he lingered at the house. He built a fire in the kitchen stove, let the two dogs back inside and fed them and the four cats, and reloaded the wood box—normally Alicia and the boys’ morning chores—and waited for the others to come down.

  Around seven thirty Wolf, still in pajamas, padded down the back stairs from the children’s wing and headed straight to the icebox for milk, when he realized that his father sat in the rocker by the bay window, looking out. Characteristically somber, the boy said good morning, and Jordan Groves smiled, said, “Hello, son,” and, continuing to look out the window, resumed his thoughts. He was replaying the events of the previous evening, trying to recall exactly what was said and done and by whom and why. He was pretty sure he understood Dr. Cole and knew what his intentions and needs were. And the others he didn’t linger over: they were all who and what they seemed to be. The girl, though, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, was pretty much a mystery to him. She was not who and what she seemed. But the one who was most mysterious to him, the one whose intentions and needs and behavior he understood not at all, was the man himself, Jordan Groves. Why had he taken her up in his airplane and let her fly it so dangerously close to the mountains at night? And why had he left her there at the pond, left her to walk alone back to her family’s camp at the Second Lake?

  The view from the window gave on to the Tamarack River where it swerved away from the house and grounds into a broad oxbow and widened and ran north for three hundred yards of smooth, slow-running, deep water—more a pond here than a river. Directly in the artist’s line of sight was the wooden riverside hangar he had built the summer he bought his airplane. Four years later, he still liked the sturdy, wide, four-square look of the structure. He had come in last night by moonlight reflected off the river. He had winched the airplane out of the water and onto the ramp and into the boathouse, and by the time he got up to the house, Alicia and the boys were already in bed asleep. Jordan stayed downstairs in his study for a while and read the new Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle, and, as was his habit, didn’t go up to bed himself until midnight, and when he slid in next to her, Alicia did not appear to waken, which relieved him.

  Wolf was the younger of the boys, just turned six. His brother, whose name was Bear, was eight. When his sons were born, Jordan had insisted on naming them for animals he admired—despite considerable resistance from their mother and her Austrian family, who said it might be all right for red Indians to name their children after animals, but not for white people. If Bear had been a girl, Jordan would have named her Puma. Wolf he would have named Peregrine. He said he wanted his children to be inspired all their lives to live up to what they were called, and since he was a devout atheist he wasn’t going to name them after saints. “No Christian names,” he declared, and no family names. Aside from Jordan himself and Alicia, there was no one in either family worth emulating. If when they became adults his sons wished to go by their middle names, which as a compromise had been drawn from Alicia’s and his genealogies, that would be all right with him. But he was sure it wouldn’t happen. By then they will have become their names, he said. Just as, for better or worse, he had become Jordan, and their mother had become Alicia.

  Wolf drank from the chilled jug of milk, put it back in the icebox, and crossed the large, open kitchen and climbed onto his father’s lap. He nuz
zled against Jordan’s chest and inhaled deeply the familiar smell of turpentine and paint and chemicals from the studio, his father’s own smell, as comforting to the boy as his father’s face and voice. Jordan wrapped his arms around his son and held him there.

  “Did you see the fireworks, Papa?” Wolf asked in a faraway voice.

  “I saw them from the air. On my way home.”

  “That must have been great, to see them from the airplane.”

  “Yes. It was. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back in time for you to see the fireworks,” Jordan said. “I got talked into giving someone a flying lesson.”

  “Oh. That’s okay. We had fun anyhow.”

  Jordan eased the boy off his lap and set about making breakfast for him. A few minutes later Bear made his way down the steep, narrow back stairway to the kitchen. He gave his father a friendly wave and made for the icebox and like his brother slurped milk straight from the jug. Kittens, Jordan thought. Cubs. They know exactly what they want, and it’s the same as what they need.

  “Hey, how come you’re making breakfast, Papa?” Bear asked.

  “How come you’re not?” Jordan answered and smiled.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go get washed up and dressed, boys. Then come back and eat. We’ll do something special together today,” he said, and the boys quickly disappeared up the stairs.