The Reserve

by Russell Banks

“Miss Von Heidenstamm, for a man like me, you are nothing but trouble. As you have already noted. No, the best thing I can do for both of us is see you out and say thanks for the visit and good-bye.”

  Gently, the artist took her hand off his shoulder and led her to the door. He opened the door and let go of her hand, and she stepped outside. He closed the door and went back to his work-table. For a moment he stood there staring down at the block of maple he’d been carving for three full days. Then he reached for the bottle of rum and poured himself a drink. Glass in hand, he walked to the Victrola. He placed the record back onto the spindle, and the Spirits of Rhythm resumed singing, “My old man, he’s only doin’ the best he can….”

  AROUND MIDNIGHT WHEN JORDAN CAME IN TO BED, ALICIA was still awake, reading Gone With the Wind. It was the novel that everyone in America seemed to be reading that summer, sent to Jordan by the publisher in typescript six months earlier with a request that he illustrate an hors commerce limited edition for special friends of the publisher and author, numbered and signed. It was a lucrative offer, tempting. But after skimming the first few chapters, he’d pronounced it a ladies’ antebellum fantasy novel and tossed the manuscript into the fireplace. Now the book had become a beloved best-seller and there was even talk of making a movie adaptation. He was a little sorry he’d turned the offer down—it would have been the first time he’d illustrated a popular book by a living author. It might have led to many rich commissions.

  He went into the dressing room and pulled his clothes off, washed his face and brushed his teeth in the bathroom, and came quickly to bed. Alicia had already closed her book and snapped off the bedside lamp, and though she appeared to have gone straight to sleep, he knew that she was awake. Awake and waiting.

  For a few moments he remained silent. Then he said, “That girl, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, she came by the studio today.”

  “Yes, I know. I wondered if you were going to mention it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Why wouldn’t you? Really, Jordan. She has her cap set for you. You know that.”

  “Well, that’s nothing to me.”

  “Oh.”

  “She wanted me to do something weird for her.”

  “Oh.”

  “She wanted me to fly her and her father’s ashes up to the Reserve, so she could scatter the ashes in the Second Lake. Pretty weird, eh?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Maybe the place was special to him,” she said. “Will you do it?”

  “Christ, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t particularly like the girl. Or her family, either.” He rolled over and put his back to her. “People like that don’t need help from me. They contaminate everything and everyone they touch. Besides, it’s against Reserve rules.”

  “When did you start caring about rules?” she said and was silent for a moment. “‘People like that.’ They collect art, Jordan. They have nice big houses and apartments. They think artists are interesting, superior people. And you like all that, you know. And there’s no reason you shouldn’t like it, is there?”

  “They don’t collect art, except as an investment, as capital. They collect artists. So I deal with them only as much as I have to,” he declared. “And there’s no way she’s going to collect me.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Are you pissed off at me for something?”

  “Have you done something lately that I should be angry about?”

  “No. Not that I’m aware of, anyhow.”

  “Then I’m not angry at you, am I?”

  “Jesus. Do we have to live like this? Aren’t you able to forgive and forget, Alicia?”

  “You have tested me on that. Many times. And I have passed the test of forgiving and forgetting. Many times.”

  “All right, then. So why are you still pissed off at me?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “Go to sleep, Jordan.”

  For a few moments they lay in silence, unmoving. Finally, he said, “Do you know how many nights we’ve let end like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve made love, Alicia?”

  “Do you want to make love to me?” she asked. “You can, if you want to.”

  “Jesus Christ, Alicia! I hate this. You act as if you’ve taken a lover. Have you? Do you have a lover?”

  “That’s a very strange question,” she said. “Coming from you.”

  “Well, I mean it.”

  “No. Go to sleep, Jordan. Unless you want to make love to me.”

  He was silent again. Then after a few moments her breathing slowed, and he knew she was sleeping. He closed his eyes, and soon he was sleeping, too.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, WHEN HE’D PUT IN A FULL MORNING’S work in the studio, Jordan Groves decided around noon to drive into the village to pick up the mail and newspapers and maybe have lunch at the Moose Head over in Sam Dent. He wasn’t feeling especially sociable, merely in the mood for a little public solitude and a meat-loaf sandwich and a cold bottle of beer. He wasn’t free to linger: Alicia was working in the garden and had plans, if it cleared up later, to take the boys swimming at the falls and would need the car. He thought a moment about taking the truck instead, freeing him to set his own time for returning home, then decided against it. There was the unfinished wood-block, the set of lithographs he’d promised the publisher of his Greenland travel book, letters to write and accounts to update, a new studio assistant coming by later for instructions. He couldn’t linger. There was always more work to do than time in which to do it. Jordan Groves believed that was a good thing.

  It was a bright day, but still overcast. He strolled from the studio to the garage, drew the doors open, got the Ford started, and backed the sedan from the dark interior out to the driveway. In daylight he saw the jar. It sat on the passenger’s seat—a tall, jade-green container about eighteen inches high with an overlapping cover. He stared at the jar, stunned and disbelieving, as if the object were a person, a stranger sitting beside him, unexpected and uninvited. The jar was very beautiful, softly rounded in the middle and narrow at the base and top, and elegantly proportioned, the force and gentleness of its ancient maker’s hands and mind evident in the form of the jar and the cut surface and the brilliant green glaze.

  Ten minutes later, he pushed his airplane from the hangar and slid it down the ramp and into the water. To keep the green jar from being jostled or tipped, he had strapped it with masking tape to the seat in the aft cockpit. He let the engine warm for half a minute, then taxied upstream fifty yards and brought the airplane around and into the fluttery wind. He headed on a diagonal across the rippled open water into the wide smooth belly of the river, picked up speed, hit the step, and, pulling back on the stick, lifted the airplane free of the water. It rose quickly over the trees that lined the farther bank. He fought the torque and dipped the left wing slightly, cutting the airplane back around to the south. As he flew over the garden, he looked down and saw his wife and sons peering up at him. The sun had come out, and they shaded their eyes against it with their hands, and the shadow of the airplane passed across them.

  His heading was south-southwest, a route that followed the glittering ribbon of the Tamarack River upstream, then over Bream Pond and down into the village of Tunbridge, avoiding the Tamarack clubhouse grounds and golf course, where he banked to port. Holding steady at twenty-five hundred feet he followed the Tamarack River toward its headwaters, flying over rising unbroken forest into the Reserve.

  He knew that she would be waiting for him at her father’s camp—no more an actual camp than her father’s Park Avenue apartment. But calling it a camp helped people like the Coles coddle their dream of living in a world in which they did no harm. It let them believe that for a few weeks or a month or two, even though their so-called camps were as elaborately luxurious as their homes elsewhere, they were roughing it, living like the locals, whom they hired as housekee
pers, cooks, guides, and caretakers: the locals, who were thought by people like the Coles to be lucky—lucky to live year-round in such pristine isolation and beauty.

  Crossing over the First Lake, Jordan spotted a pair of fishermen in a guide boat casting flies along the eastern shore. This isn’t going to work, he thought and was relieved. And a moment later, at the headwaters, when he came over the rise and looked down the cowl and surveyed the length and breadth of the Second Lake and saw that there was no one out on the water or fishing from the banks, he was faintly disappointed. He put the airplane down in the middle of the lake and taxied toward the eastern shore, then brought it along the shore to the shallows just off the Coles’ camp.

  Vanessa, wearing a pale yellow head scarf and denim shirt and tan slacks, stood on the shore by an overturned guide boat. She was smoking a cigarette. Jordan shut the engine down and when the propeller had wheeled to a stop told her to come aboard and remove her precious cargo from his airplane.

  “We need to scatter Daddy’s ashes from the air,” she said.

  “From the air? No! Do it from the guide boat. I’m in a hurry.”

  “I can’t hold the jar and row the boat at the same time. Those little wooden things are pretty to look at, maybe, but they’re tippy.”

  “What about your mother? Let her row and you hug your father’s jar. Or vice versa. I’m just making a delivery, Miss Von Heidenstamm.”

  Vanessa explained that, after the long walk from the clubhouse in to the First Lake and the trip across both lakes to camp, her mother wasn’t feeling well enough to go out in the boat again. Besides, this was not something her mother wanted to participate in. It was just too sad for her even to contemplate. Vanessa didn’t want to put her through it. She was doing this strictly for her father. His last wish.

  “All right, then, let’s get it done,” he said and this time did not offer to help her step from the water to the pontoon and climb from there to the wing. She carefully advanced along the wing to the fuselage and saw the jar.

  “Take off the tape and hold it in your lap,” he said to her.

  “Jordan, I can’t tell you what this means to me,” she said. “What it means to my mother. And to my father. Him, especially. I do hope you’re not angry with me.”

  “For sticking me with a Chinese jug filled with your father’s ashes? Trapping me into coming out here like this? Of course I’m angry with you.”

  “I don’t think so. I think this is something you’ll never forget, Jordan. Or regret.” She slid into the cockpit, stripped the tape off the jar, and placed the jar on her lap.

  “Miss Von Heidenstamm, I already regret it.”

  “You don’t have to call me that.”

  “What?”

  “It was my married name. And I’m no longer married to him. Call me Vanessa.”

  “I’m going to taxi out to the middle of the lake. When I get there, you dump the ashes over the side, and I’ll bring you back. And then, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, I’ll be on my merry way.”

  “That’s really very boring, you know.”

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  “Much more interesting to scatter Daddy’s ashes from the sky.”

  “True.” Without turning, he instructed her to take off her head scarf and remove the top of the jar and cover the jar with the scarf.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the wind. I’ll tell you when to empty it. Just be sure you hold the damn thing out to the side as far as you can, and don’t remove the scarf until you upend the jar to dump it, or the wind and the prop wash will blow your daddy’s ashes all over you and inside the plane. I damn sure don’t want to have to clean Dr. Cole’s remains out of my airplane.”

  She gave the back of his head a grim smile. He restarted the engine and took the airplane back out toward the middle of the lake, where he hit the throttle, gathered speed, and put it into the air. At about five hundred feet he leveled off and banked the airplane toward the headwaters of the lake. He cut the speed to seventy knots and dropped it down until it was barely a hundred feet above the water, following the axis of the long, narrow lake from south to north. When he spotted the Coles’ camp coming up on his right, he slowed again and dropped another fifty feet, and hollered back, “Go ahead, do it now!”

  Vanessa hefted the jar to her shoulder, steadied it there for a few seconds with both hands, and facing it away from the wash, quickly extended it out to the side as far as she could and removed the scarf and emptied it. A gray swash of ash and bits of bone exploded into the air behind the airplane and drifted slowly down to the water, when suddenly Vanessa cried, “Oh, no!”

  Jordan jerked his head around and saw the jar drop from the airplane like a green stone. He watched it splash into the lake, where it sank almost at once. Vanessa’s scarf fluttered slowly down to the lake behind it.

  “I dropped the damn thing!” Vanessa cried. “I dropped it!”

  Jordan brought the airplane around and flew across the spot where the jar had gone in, locating it on a bisected pair of lines running the width and length of the lake. He saw the yellow scarf floating southward on the dark water, like a pale hieroglyph. “Try to memorize the shore points on both sides of the lake and at the ends!” he shouted. “The scarf’ll drift and sink anyhow, so don’t look at it.”

  “It’s gone, Jordan!”

  “No, it’s not! You can row out and dive for it!”

  “You idiot, it’s hundreds of feet deep there!”

  He didn’t respond. He brought the airplane in close to shore and splashed down a short ways below the camp, taxied back to where he’d picked her up, and cut the engine. For a moment they sat motionless in the silence, the airplane rocking gently on its pontoons. Finally Jordan said, “Hey, look, Vanessa, I’m sorry about the jar. Seriously. It was very beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “And I never said it to you right. I’m sorry about your father, too.”

  “No, it’s probably the best thing. The jar, I mean. Daddy loved that old jar more than any other thing he owned. Except this camp.”

  “It’s probably worth a fortune, though. The jar.”

  “Mother would never have sold it. No, it’s only right that it’s still with him…and that they’re both at the bottom of the lake.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Yeah, well, I guess that’s the best way to think about it,” he said gently.

  “You’re being so kind. That’s nice.”

  “No, that’s normal.”

  “Would you come up to the camp with me? I need to talk with somebody.”

  “What about your mother?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, I can’t talk to her. Mother and I, we’re like…we’re on different planets. Especially about Daddy.” She paused, and noted that he seemed to be waiting for her to continue. “C’mon, I think I owe you a drink, anyhow,” she said. “I owe you a lot more than that, actually,” she said and smiled sadly.

  He nodded and got out of the cockpit and extended his hand to her, and she took it and stepped onto the wing beside him. He quickly anchored the airplane, and when it was secured, they came ashore and, still holding hands, walked up the long slope, through the grove of tall pines to the deck of the camp. She liked the feel of his large callused hand around hers. It was a workman’s hand—which was natural, wasn’t it, for he had spent years carving wood-and linoleum blocks and making copper etchings and cutting lithographs. Even drawing and painting required the use of his big hands; and he was probably a builder, too, judging from his house and the outbuildings, which had seemed handmade to her—skillfully done, but not by a firm of architects, engineers, and contractors. And all that firewood stacked so neatly in the open sheds alongside the garage and studio and in the breezeway—he cuts his own firewood to heat his house and studio. His arduous travels to distant, difficult lands—Greenland, Alaska, the Andes—were legendary. He was strong and lean and hardhanded. Many of the men whom she had successfully s
educed in the past were cut from the same social cloth as he—rich men; cosmopolitan men; even a few famous writers and artists; and sportsmen like her first husband, the Russian Boris Seversky, men who flew their own airplanes and traveled to exotic parts of the globe on three-month-long treks and safaris. She was rumored to have had affairs with Ernest Hemingway and Max Ernst and Baron von Blixen. But none of them had hands like his. Their bodies had been hardened by sport and exercise, not by physical work.

  She knew she had managed to slip through his resistance to her, but wasn’t sure what had done it or how long it would last. He was changeable and unpredictable, a man who could burst into flame one minute and just as quickly turn to ice. She asked him to make himself comfortable on the sofa by the fireplace, then knelt with her back to him and lit the fire she had laid earlier. When it began to crackle and burn, she stood and crossed the room to the bar, aware all the while that he was looking at her.

  “What’ll you have?” she asked. “I have rum, but it’s not Cuban, I’m afraid. Jamaican. It’s what I’m having.”

  He studied her carefully, more watchful than curious, as if she were more a danger to him than a puzzle. “I don’t know, it’s a little early. Yeah, rum’s fine.”

  She poured them each three fingers and returned to the sofa by the fire and sat next to him.

  “Where’s your mother?” Jordan asked, looking around the large room. There seemed to be no one else at the camp, no guide or cook, no friends or family members. Which made sense, he decided, given the two women’s private and slightly illicit reasons for being here. “I’m thinking I ought to make your mother some kind of apology, too,” he said. “I should offer her my condolences.”

  Vanessa explained that her mother was still overcome by Dr. Cole’s death. Her mother was somewhat frail anyhow, and the long drive up from Manhattan yesterday and then the hike and boat trip in to camp had left her weakened. But he needn’t worry, she would convey his apology and condolences to her mother later.

  Jordan pulled out his tobacco and papers and rolled a cigarette.