The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to become Mother’s caretaker, now that Daddy’s gone. She depended on Daddy for everything,” Vanessa said, watching his deft movements, fingertips, lips, tongue. “Can you show me how to do that?” she asked.

  “She didn’t seem particularly frail to me,” he said.

  “Mentally.”

  “Oh.” He passed her a cigarette paper and sprinkled tobacco into it and, softly guiding her fingers with his, got it rolled into a lumpy tube. “Now wet the leading edge of the paper lightly,” he said and sat back to watch. She ran the tip of her tongue across the paper, looked up at him and smiled, then skillfully—expertly, he noticed—finished making the cigarette.

  “I feel you’ve done this before,” he said.

  “Not with tobacco.”

  She tucked her long legs under her and lighted the cigarette and smoked, and though Jordan knew she was showing off, he could not stop himself from admiring what appeared to be her nonchalant, natural grace. The room was flooded with tawny sunlight. Wood smoke from the fireplace, the brown sugar aroma of the rum in the glass, and the smell of burning tobacco—private, deeply familiar odors to Jordan—mingled and perfumed the room and somehow let him feel that he had known this woman for many years. She made him feel glad to be alive. It was a rare, simple-hearted pleasure just to sit back and look at her full, precisely formed mouth and listen to her low, husky voice.

  She wanted to talk about her father, she told him, but not with anyone who knew her father well or was related to him or one of his friends, and definitely not with her mother. They wouldn’t understand. When her father was alive Vanessa had spent a year talking about him to a world-famous Swiss psychiatrist, she said, and it hadn’t helped in the slightest, because she had come away both adoring her father and despising him fully as much as she had at the start. And now that he was dead, she adored and despised him to an even greater degree than before. And she was troubled by this, she said, for it made it difficult for her to grieve over his death in a useful or even an honest way. She had hoped that bringing his ashes up here would help, but she could already tell that it hadn’t made any difference at all. “It’s painful, his death, naturally. But all the same, I feel false. I feel ungrateful.”

  “I can understand why you might adore your father. What the hell, he was your father. But why did you despise him? Why do you, I mean.”

  “You’d be better off asking why I adored him. Actually, either way, the answer would be the same. After a year on the good doctor’s couch, I learned that much,” she said. “One hates a person for the same reason one loves him. Especially if that person is one’s parent.” Her father and mother had adopted her when she was little more than an infant, she told him. An only child, she had been doted on, swaddled by their love and care—even spoiled, she admitted it. All her life she had been given everything she wanted. With one exception. Right up to the day her father died, he had refused to tell her who her real mother and father had been or how she had come to Dr. and Mrs. Cole for adoption. All he would say was that she had not been wanted by her real parents. “Our foundling,” was how Dr. Cole had described her, even to strangers. “He so dominated Mother in this that, even now, with his ashes at the bottom of the lake, she still won’t tell me where they ‘found’ me or who left me there. Daddy’s wishes were and are and always will be her commands,” she said. “For all I know, they could have kidnapped me.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Jordan said. “You can’t despise your father just because he wouldn’t tell you how you came to be adopted. There’s got to be another reason. He may have had good motives for it. Rightly or wrongly, he may have felt he needed to protect you somehow. I mean, what if your real mother was a whore and your real father a drunken sailor on a weekend pass? He might reasonably want to keep that from you.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “The truth is, the great, beloved Dr. Carter Cole was not the man everyone thought he was,” she said. “Not in private, not in secret. Not when he was alone with Mother and me. And alone with me…” She trailed off. “Well, let’s just say he was different. A different man. He was not a nice man, Jordan.”

  “No one’s the same when he’s alone with his wife or his children. It’s where you let your guard down, especially if, like your father, you’re more or less a public figure.”

  She moved closer to him on the sofa. “You’re a public figure, Jordan, and I know you’re different when you’re with your family alone. In private. I can tell from a single visit to your home that Jordan Groves in private is a nice man.” She laughed lightly. “Actually, it’s in public, with the whole world watching, that you’re not a nice man. A brawler. You’ve punched critics in the jaw and given reviewers black eyes. You’re an opinionated, drunken Red. And a famous womanizer. Oh, you have such a dangerous reputation, Jordan Groves! While you’re up here in the mountains holed up in your studio and your sweet wife bakes bread and your sons study the local flora, people in New York City are talking. Or when you’re off on one of your famous adventures in the Arctic or wherever it is you go alone for months at a time to paint and where it’s clear from your pictures and writings that you sleep with the native women and probably participate in horrid native rituals, all the while, back here and in the cafés of Manhattan, tongues are wagging. No,” she said, suddenly serious, “you’re the opposite of my father.” She reached out and brushed his cheek with her fingertips. “You didn’t shave this morning, did you?”

  He swiped at her hand and shoved it away and scowled. “Yes, I shaved.”

  “Why are you so violent with me?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

  “What makes you think you know me?”

  “You’re answering a question with a question, Jordan,” she said softly and touched his cheek a second time.

  “Once I would have eaten you whole,” he said and took her hand gently away from his face. “Right down to your beautiful white fingertips,” he said, and he put her fingers into his mouth and held them there and touched them with his tongue.

  She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. After a moment, he withdrew her hand and placed it on her lap. “But not now,” he said. “Not anymore.” He put his glass on the table beside him and stood. “I know what people say about me. I know my reputation, and mostly I don’t give a good goddamn. Listen, Vanessa, somebody once asked me in one of those dumb magazine interviews what I wanted out of life, and I told him the truth, I said, ‘I want all of it.’ And until recently that’s pretty much how I’ve lived my life.”

  “‘Until recently.’”

  “Yes. But now…now I’m starting to realize that I can’t have all of it.” He paused and looked above her and out the window at the lake and the mountains and the sky. “Some of the things we want cancel out other things we want. I’m not going into details,” he said, “but I want my wife and my boys to be happy. I want them to be proud of me. And I want that more than I want certain other things,” he said and turned back to her. “Even you.”

  “And you believe that? If you can have me, you can’t have them? And vice versa, that if you can’t have me, then you can have them? Are you sure?” she said. “Because I’m not.”

  “Look, you’re not some pretty little Chilean dance hall girl showing me her tits, or a smiling round-faced Inuit girl lying naked under a bearskin blanket, or some doe-eyed model from the Art Students League dying to sleep with the famous artist. You’re not one of those Fifth Avenue society hostesses looking for a discreet tumble in the maid’s room after the party’s over and the other guests have gone home. No, you’re like me, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. And people like you and me, we leave a lot of wreckage behind us. I don’t want my family to be part of that wreckage. That’s all I’m saying.”

  She stood next to him and put her hands on his shoulders and drew him to her. Leaning forward, she nestled her mouth next to his ear, and whispered something he barely heard, a slight hissing sound whose frequency r
ose and fell. Wordless, it sounded to him like a distress signal beamed through turbulence from a distant transmitter. He shoved her hands off his shoulders and pushed her away and raising his large right hand placed it hard against her chin and cheek, his fingers running all the way up her face to her brow, and he pressed it there for a moment, while she closed her eyes and pushed back and waited.

  “I’m leaving now,” he said and abruptly withdrew his hand. He backed several steps away, turned, and walked from the room.

  She stood by the fire with her eyes closed. She did not open them until she heard the roar of his airplane engine. A few minutes later, when she could no longer hear the engine and knew that he was airborne and gone from the lake, she walked to the door of her parents’ bedroom. Taking a key from her pocket, she unlocked the door, opened it, and peered in at her mother. The woman was sitting on the chaise, her hands and feet still tightly bound with rope, her mouth gagged with a white silk scarf, her blue eyes wild with fear.

  Vanessa said, “If you promise to be quiet and not scream or shout at me anymore, I’ll remove the scarf.”

  Her mother nodded her head rapidly up and down.

  Vanessa reached around her and loosened the scarf. Pulling it free, she wound it carefully around her own throat, arranging the ends over the front of her shirt in a fetching way. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror and rearranged the scarf slightly. “And if you promise to stay here in the bedroom and not come out until I say it’s time, I’ll untie you.” Again her mother nodded, and Vanessa released the woman’s hands and feet and left the room, carrying the pieces of rope in her hands.

  MILES AWAY, FLYING ON A NORTHEASTERLY HEADING, JORDAN Groves put the Reserve behind him and crossed above country villages and farms tucked into the valleys and clustered alongside the curling north-flowing streams. Shining in the distance, with the Green Mountains of Vermont humped up at the far horizon, was Lake Champlain, a glacial lake fourteen miles wide and one hundred twenty-five miles long—open water all the way to Quebec. Jordan was not ready to return home yet; to place himself in the bosom of his family again; to become the husband and father he had been this morning, before he backed his car from the garage and turned and discovered in the passenger’s seat the green Chinese jar with the ashes of the late Dr. Cole inside. He was not ready to let go of Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He wanted to get away from her and everything associated with her—the Reserve, the Tamarack Club, the Second Lake, her father’s camp, the people she came from and the people she ran with. But he did not want to let her go.

  Yesterday’s Canadian front with its blowzy raw wind and rain had passed off to the southeast. The cloudless sky was deep blue, the temperature in the low sixties, even at altitude, and the forest a rich green blanket running all the way from the Reserve down to the pale, newly mown fields of the lakeside farms. A steady five-knot wind blew back from the direction the front had taken. No gusts. Perfect flying weather. He saw a hawk carving spirals in the air several hundred feet below him. A black Model T Ford like the one he owned the year he and Alicia first moved up from New York City crawled along the dirt road between the iron-mining village of Moriah and the lakeside shipping town of Port Henry.

  At the southern end of the lake, he banked left, and cruised in a northerly direction over the bare bluffs of Crown Point and made his way along the scalloped western shoreline. Tiny white triangular sails dotted the dark blue waters and clustered in the coves and marinas of Port Henry and, a few miles farther north, the towns of Westport and Essex. Halfway across the lake a ferryboat the shape and, from this distance, the size of a shoe box made its slow way from New York state to Vermont. Off to his right a rocky islet no larger than a barn rose, as if from the deep, covered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds—swarms of gulls and petrels and loons. Jordan circled the rookery, wonder struck by its abundance, and when his gaze returned to the open water ahead, he looked up and was startled by what he saw. It was at least two miles away and a thousand feet above the surface of the lake—an enormous, round, silver object that appeared to be coming steadily toward him from the direction of Canada.

  It was an aircraft—a dirigible, he quickly realized. One of those huge new zeppelins from Germany he’d been reading about. They fascinated him, and he’d been trying to figure a way to make a picture of one, a painting or even an etching that captured the enormity of the thing, without having to portray it tethered to the ground with tiny human beings standing nearby to show scale. He wanted to picture it in flight, nothing surrounding it but clouds and sky, the largest machine in the world. He swung off to the port side, out of the path of the oncoming monster, and cut his speed and dropped altitude for a better view as it approached. There were only two of these gargantuan aircraft in existence, the Graf Zeppelin, which kept to the European and South American routes, and the Hindenburg, which crossed the North Atlantic from Frankfurt to Lakehurst, New Jersey, by way of Montreal. For months, he had been hoping to catch sight of it, but, up to now, whenever the Hindenburg passed through the region, he had learned of it too late, days afterward, from the local newspapers or from a neighbor who was lucky enough to have been at Lake Champlain when the great shining airship plowed through the blue Adirondack sky. It was exciting to have caught sight of it, and what a break, he thought, to see the damned thing from the air!

  It was enormous, over eight hundred feet long and shaped like a gigantic bomb. It was one hundred thirty-five feet in diameter, he remembered reading. Despite its incredible size and its speed, which Jordan estimated at eighty miles per hour, it seemed more animal than mechanical as it moved implacably through the air, more a living creature from another age than a twentieth-century man-made flying machine. He remembered a few more of its specifications—that it was powered by four huge 1,200 horsepower Mercedes-Benz engines, and that it was filled with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen. The airship was fitted out with formal dining rooms, lounges, luxurious staterooms, promenades, and even a smoking room, all located inside its shining hull instead of in an external gondola, as with conventional dirigibles. And he knew a little of its history—that the Zeppelin Company, threatened with bankruptcy, had accepted financial backing from the Nazi party. The United States was the only reliable source in the world for nonflammable helium, but Congress, mildly anxious over the rise of the Nazis, had forbade the sale of the gas to the Germans, forcing the Zeppelin Company to fill its airships instead with hydrogen. The Hindenburg had been fireproofed, he’d read, but even so, hydrogen was flammable, and this somehow made the dirigible all the more dangerously attractive to Jordan, all the more a living thing.

  He drew close to the airship. Keeping several hundred yards off its starboard side, so as to avoid its powerful wash and wake, he flew his airplane along its length, a sixth of a mile. He was stunned by the sheer size of the machine. Stunned and moved. Its very scale was beautiful to Jordan, like a Greenland glacier seen for the first time—a thing too big for human beings to imagine, but, for all that, a natural and perfected part of the world that humans inhabit. Passengers peered from the windows and waved as he passed, and from the open cockpit of his tiny Waco biplane he waved back.

  Toward the aft of the airship, where the hull narrowed slightly, four gigantic fins emerged, a dorsal fin and a fin on either side and a keel-like fin from the belly, and as Jordan flew past them he saw the enormous red-and-black swastikas emblazoned on the fins. He had not expected that. At once the zeppelin lost all its beauty. It became an ugly thing. He peeled sharply away from the airship, cut speed, and dropped down toward the surface of the lake, heading slowly, as if with shoulders hunched, for the shoreline, where he flew up and over the low wooded hills and put his airplane on a heading toward home.

  The man ordered breakfast at the Hauptbahnhof restaurant for the young woman, and when she had been served, he left her alone at the railroad station and arranged to have her trunk and her two Mark Cross suitcases sent by taxi to the Frankfurter Hof hotel. She was to prese
nt her passport and her ticket at the hotel later in the afternoon and retrieve her luggage after it had been thoroughly inspected by the officials of the Zeppelin Company. They are very much afraid of sabotage, the man explained. For the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon, the two behaved as tourists, visiting the Museumsufer along the embankment of the river Main and the Palmengarten and St. Bartholomew’s Gothic cathedral. The man seemed to enjoy explaining the history and importance of the sites to the woman, in spite of her apparent lack of interest or curiosity. At 4:00 P.M. they arrived by taxi at the Frankfurter Hof and were directed to the main dining room, which had been commandeered by the Zeppelin Company. The room was crowded with the thirty-eight other passengers and numerous family members and friends, all carefully watched by Waffen SS men. The SS men stood in pairs at parade rest along the four sides of the dining room, while Zeppelin security officers in dark blue uniforms weighed luggage and purses and briefcases, then opened and examined the contents of each piece. A line was forming before a long table at the farther end of the room, where an inspector collected the passengers’ matches, cigarette lighters, batteries, flashlights, even photographic equipment and flashbulbs. A second inspector placed the items into small cloth bags tagged with the owner’s name. The passengers were assured that when the trip was over their property would be returned. They could keep the bag as a souvenir. One of the passengers, a very short, compact American man with black dyed hair that came to a point at his forehead, was arguing with the inspector. He clutched a package the size of a shoe box and did not wish to submit it for examination. I had it specially wrapped! the man protested. Two of the SS officers came forward and stood behind the inspector, and the American gave in with no further argument. The inspector removed the bright wrapping paper, taking care not to rip it, and opened the box. Inside was a Dresden china doll. It’s for my daughter, the American said. One of the SS officers stepped forward and removed the doll from the box and put it through the X-ray machine and returned with it. The inspector took the doll from the officer, lifted the dress, and smiled. It’s a girl, dummkopf, the American said. So I see, the inspector said and handed the doll back. The young woman in the plain brown suit and black hat and veil had watched the argument and the examination of the doll, and the man accompanying the woman had watched her. He took her purse from her and placed it on the table. We must hurry, he said. Soon the buses will come to take everyone to the hangar for the departure. She asked him if he had seen the doll. He nodded yes. She was pretty, wasn’t she? the woman said. Yes, very pretty, he said, and, taking her by the arm, he moved her down the table, away from the man with the doll.