The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  VANESSA’S MOTHER, EVELYN COLE, HAD LONG FEARED THAT her daughter was insane, but Dr. Cole would not hear of it. For years they had fought over whether to have Vanessa committed: Mrs. Cole arguing that it would save not only their daughter’s life but their marriage as well; Dr. Cole insisting that Vanessa’s periodic threats and occasional attempts to kill herself and her wildly reckless behavior—the flagrant sexual involvements with married men, the arrests for public lewdness, the spending binges on clothes and jewelry and the shoplifting that often accompanied them, the drug and alcohol abuse, even the two sudden elopements and the divorces that quickly followed—were high drama designed mainly to gain attention.

  “Attention from whom?” Evelyn would angrily demand.

  “From us,” he would say. And sigh, “Mainly from me, I suppose,” confessing once again that he had failed Vanessa when she was a child, that he had been consumed in those years by his work and consequently had neglected his daughter. “Though she’s brilliant and talented, a trained musician and actress, and a gifted writer, too, if she wanted to apply herself to it, mentally she’s still a child,” he explained to practically anyone who would listen, but especially, when they were alone, to his wife, who seemed determined to blame Vanessa’s behavior on Vanessa herself.

  As if invoking a higher authority, he would say to her, “People who are deprived of certain emotional necessities in childhood often remain stuck there.” And then confessing yet again, as if it gave him hope, “When she was very young, I was mostly absent, physically and emotionally. Even you know that. Then, during the war, when she was only eleven and twelve, I was off in France and left her in your care. And you, my dear, were often ill yourself. You were drinking heavily then, as you’ll recall. No, the servants raised our daughter. We were both off in our separate worlds. And you know it, and I know it. Nannies and housekeepers and babysitters raised Vanessa. First servants and then boarding school headmistresses and then college deans. And now there’s no one left to raise her but us. And because she’s an adult, it’s too late. The difference between you and me is that you won’t admit it. We reap what we sow, Evelyn.”

  But he insisted that he did not blame his wife; he blamed himself. Dr. Cole was not one to shrug off responsibility. Evelyn, as he liked to say, had her own problems, of which alcohol was only one. As a young woman in her twenties and thirties, Evelyn Cole had suffered from what was called nervous exhaustion and was subject to fainting spells and long periods of lassitude and depression, hypochondria and extreme mood swings, which her husband, the doctor, treated with small doses of paregoric and other drugs, and she treated with gin. It wasn’t until four years ago when she was approaching fifty and on an extended European family vacation and could not stop weeping and could not leave her Zurich hotel room that she put herself in the care of Dr. Gunther Theobold, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst, who took her off all forms of medication, including alcohol. It was he who finally convinced Dr. Cole that Mrs. Cole was correct. For their sake and hers, he told them, their daughter should be institutionalized. “Not confined like a prisoner, but psychoanalyzed. She will of course be required to reside at the institute for at least a year,” he explained.

  Dr. Cole warned Dr. Theobold that Vanessa’s accounts of her childhood would doubtless sound bizarre and were likely to be wholly invented, but the psychoanalyst smiled and said that he had been told all kinds of fairy tales and listened not for the facts but for the truth. “When the patient learns the truth, the emotional truth, she will be freed of her delusions and will cease the behavior that has been based on those delusions.” They followed his advice and committed her then and there to the Theobold Institute, where Vanessa was indeed confined, kept behind high brick walls until, after meeting with her daily for thirteen months, Dr. Theobold pronounced her cured, no longer a danger to herself or others, and sent her home to New York, bearing what she said were the manuscripts of a surrealist novel and a Shakespearean sonnet sequence that she had written at the institute.

  But she was not cured. Dr. Theobold confided to his assistant, Dr. Reichold, that the girl was probably incurable, at least by conventional means. He would not be surprised if before long she was back. Within weeks of taking up residence in her parents’ apartment, she was arrested at the Carlyle Hotel for refusing to leave the hallway outside the penthouse suite where her ex-husband, Count Von Heidenstamm, lived when in New York. The count, who had recently remarried, was in Monte Carlo on his honeymoon. Though there was no reason to think the newlyweds would return for months and the nickel-plated revolver found in her purse suggested otherwise, Vanessa insisted to the police that she only wanted to be there to congratulate the couple when they returned to New York.

  Days later, she wrecked her father’s Packard in Westport, Connecticut, driving home drunk at 3:00 A.M. from a party, given by the members of a secret society at Yale, where she had been the only female guest. She was arrested and spent the rest of the night in jail. The following morning Dr. Cole rushed by train to Westport. He posted bail for his daughter, purchased a replacement Packard, and drove her back to New York, relieved to learn that the party had been given by Wolf’s Head, not Skull and Bones.

  She told her friends and her parents and their friends and a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune that she had been asked by the American Olympic Committee to solo all forty-four national anthems in their native tongues at the upcoming winter Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, after which she would be doing a series of programs for the BBC on the “New American Opera.” Later, she attributed her absence at the winter games to the Nazi party’s insistence on having a German operatic soprano sing the national anthems. The BBC series, she claimed, was canceled when it was learned that Vanessa had once been a friend of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée whose attachment to the new king Edward VIII was scandalizing all Britain. “Attractive American women need not apply,” she explained.

  At the Stork Club one night she told Walter Winchell that she was sleeping with Ernest Hemingway and had been invited to join him on safari in Kenya, and Winchell reported it in his column the following day, although he did not reveal her name or Hemingway’s, merely referring to her as a “Gorgeous Gotham Gadabout” and the author as a “Titan of the Typewriter.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, there’s nothing to it,” Vanessa said when her parents challenged her on these and other outlandish stories. “It’s only a goddamn joke. I’m tweaking their noses, that’s all. Giving bored people something interesting to talk about.”

  But her dangerous, erratic behavior and wild exaggerations and outright lies kept Dr. and Mrs. Cole in a state of constant anxiety and dread—which did not altogether displease Vanessa. She enjoyed keeping them in that state. Consequently, when after a few months her parents began to ignore her reckless and threatening ways, as if they’d grown accustomed to them, she would suddenly turn into the good daughter again—a calm, lucid, sociable, and controlled young woman of the world. Soon the three Coles, father, mother, and daughter, were seen going out to dinner together again, spending weekends at the house in Tuxedo Park, entertaining friends and colleagues and distinguished New Yorkers from the worlds of art, medicine, and commerce at their apartment, and in early July heading north to the Adirondack wilderness for the annual Independence Day gathering of ’08 Bonesmen and their families at Rangeview, the Cole camp on the Second Tamarack Lake.

  But as soon as her parents appeared content, Vanessa found a new way to alarm or, better yet, embarrass them. Flying off in a seaplane that Fourth of July night with the artist Jordan Groves was hardly alarming to them and certainly was not embarrassing, but it may have raised Dr. Cole’s blood pressure sufficiently to have contributed to his fatal heart attack. And when, five days later, at his funeral in Greenwich, Connecticut, Vanessa delivered an oration over his ashes that scandalized her mother and everyone else who had ever loved and admired Dr. Cole—a strange, tangled account of her relationship with her father
, suggesting, but not stating explicitly, that when she was a little girl he had sexually abused her—her mother was both sufficiently alarmed and embarrassed that, after consulting Whitney Brodhead, the family attorney, and exchanging a series of cables with Dr. Theobold, she decided that she had no choice but to have Vanessa institutionalized a second time.

  It took Evelyn Cole most of two weeks to make the arrangements. Finally, under the pretense of meeting at the Wall Street offices of Brodhead, Stevens, and Wyse to discuss Dr. Cole’s will, and in the presence of Whitney Brodhead and Dr. Otto Reichold, Dr. Theobold’s nice young assistant, Evelyn Cole informed her daughter, Vanessa, that she had become a danger to herself and others. The necessary papers had already been drawn up, she said. She hoped that Vanessa would see the wisdom and necessity of this decision and would cooperate.

  Vanessa sat back in the leather chair and sighed heavily and closed her eyes. Her mother reached across from the chair beside her and patted her hand. No one said a word. The large, dim conference room was decorated with portraits of the firm’s founders and furnished with oak tables, glass-fronted bookcases filled with law books, heavy leather-upholstered chairs, standing ashtrays, and a tufted leather sofa with gleaming brass trim. The only sound was the loud ticktock of the antique, burled-maple clock posted by the door.

  Dr. Reichold, flaxen haired, handsome, sturdy, stood by the window on the other side of the room. He slowly filled his pipe with tobacco from a small round leather pouch and looked down from the tall window at the bowlers and umbrellas of the lunch-time throng of pedestrians ten floors below. He was eager to get home to Zurich, but if the girl did not go along willingly and sign the commitment papers, if she resisted, then the mother might want to take the case to court, which Dr. Theobold had instructed him to avoid at all costs. The institute was not recognized in the United States as a legally licensed mental institution; no American court would approve of sending Vanessa to Zurich against her will. And Dr. Theobold did not want the girl committed to one of those terrible American lunatic asylums where, he wrote to Mrs. Cole, she would be driven to suicide. If anyone was going to cure the daughter of Dr. Carter Cole, it would be he, Dr. Gunther Theobold.

  “Don’t you think it would be nice and okay for enjoying the autumn in Zurich, Vanessa?” Dr. Reichold said.

  Seated at the end of the long conference table with a sheaf of papers in front of him, Mr. Brodhead, round as a medicine ball and hairless except for a curling shoal above his ears and a thick white mustache, scrutinized his navy blue pin-striped lapel and plucked a tiny white hair from it and set it carefully to the side, as if saving it for later. “It’s really for the best, Vanessa,” the attorney said without looking at her. An unpleasant piece of business, this. He hoped it would end quickly, without a scene. He hated scenes, especially when significant family estates were involved.

  Vanessa opened her large blue eyes, and they were filled with tears. She said to her mother, “I suppose you have everything ready for me to sign. Like last time.”

  “Yes, dear. It’s really only a formality.”

  “‘Only a formality.’”

  “Essentially, all we’re doing here is giving your mother power of attorney while you’re in the care of Dr. Theobold,” Mr. Brodhead said. “And naming your mother, myself, and U. S. Trust as executors of the several trust funds established for you by your grandparents and your late father. And, of course, a statement certifying that you’re putting yourself in Dr. Theobold’s care of your own free will, et cetera.”

  “‘Et cetera.’”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do I have to give Mother power of attorney, and give her and you and the nice old men at U. S. Trust control of what’s rightfully mine? I’m not a minor. I’m not certifiably crazy. Am I?”

  “No, dear. It’s only a temporary safeguard,” her mother said and lightly nudged her on the arm, her writing arm, Vanessa noted.

  “Against what?”

  “It’s merely a means of safeguarding and managing your holdings while you’re incapacitated,” the lawyer said.

  “‘Incapacitated’? I’m not incapacitated.”

  “While you’re abroad, I mean.”

  “I suppose, Mother, you’ve already booked passage for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course. On the Isle de France, I hope?”

  “Actually, I…,” her mother began. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Oh, dear. Ernest has booked passage on the Isle de France for later this month, and it would be nice if we could travel together. At least until we must part in Paris.”

  “Ernest?”

  “Hemingway, Mother. The writer. He’s going to Spain, you know. To fight the Fascists and write about it for Collier’s, I think he said. He invited me to join him in Madrid. But I guess now I can’t do that, can I?” She sighed again. “He’ll probably end up with that awful Gellhorn woman. He’s left his wife, you know. Or is about to.”

  “Actually, I thought you’d like it better if I got you a stateroom on the wonderful new German dirigible, the Hindenburg! You seemed so excited talking about it the other day! It’s quite luxurious. And expensive, I might add. Four hundred dollars, one way. But less than three days between New York and Frankfurt!” she said brightly. “Isn’t that amazing? And Dr. Theobold has agreed to meet you in Frankfurt and personally accompany you by train to Zurich.”

  Dr. Reichold got his pipe ignited and sucked hard on it for a few seconds. “I will travel from America with you, Vanessa,” he said between sucks. “For me it is the first time on the zeppelin, too. There is even a room for smoking. We can sit in it and talk together, and you can tell me all about this writer, Ernest, if you like.”

  “If I like.”

  “Yes, yes, if you like.”

  Her mother continued to pat Vanessa’s hand. “It’s for the best, dear. Don’t you agree?”

  Vanessa pulled her hand away, leaving her mother to pat the arm of the chair. She felt like an animal with its leg in a steel trap and no way to free itself without amputating the limb. The mother, the lawyer, and the doctor had feigned calm solicitude and reason, and now, with barely disguised vigilance, they watched Vanessa examine her trap and test its strength. She knew what they wanted and expected from her. They were waiting for Vanessa to erupt in furious opposition, to snap and howl at them and keep them at bay, while she yanked at the caught limb, tore at it, clawed and then chewed on it, so that finally, to save Vanessa from herself, they would be obliged to wrestle her to the floor and stick her with a needle and medicate her. It would make her pliant and predictable. And it would make their case. They could say they had no choice. She was clearly a danger to herself and others. “Yes, Mother, I agree,” she said. “Whatever you want, whatever Daddy would have wanted, it’s for the best. Whatever Dr. Theobold and Dr. Teutonic Pipe here and Whitney Mr. Brodbent Esquire, and all those trustworthy old men at U. S. Trust, whatever they want is for the best. Best for whom, though?”

  “Why, for you, darling.”

  “All right, Mother.” She stood up and walked to the conference table. “All right. As. You. Wish. Where do I sign?”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AT THEIR HOUSE IN TUXEDO PARK, Vanessa and her mother were packing Vanessa’s trunk, when suddenly Vanessa left her mother alone in the bedroom. She went downstairs and into the basement laundry room, where she untied the laundress’s clothesline and cut it into four pieces. When she returned to the bedroom, her mother was bent over the bed carefully folding sweaters. Her back was to Vanessa, and she was humming “A Fine Romance.” Vanessa came up behind her and grabbed her by the wrists and wrenched her arms back and quickly tied them at the wrists and elbows. Too shocked and confused to cry out or even protest, her mother merely stared at her. She opened her mouth and inhaled deeply.

  “Don’t say a word. Just listen.”

  Her mother said, “Vanessa! What are you doing?”

  Vanessa wrapped a nylon stocking around the older woman’s m
outh and knotted it. “I told you not to say a word,” she said. Evelyn Cole shook her head from side to side, like a horse trying to spit the bit. “We’re going for a drive together, Mother. The Hindenburg will have to leave without me. Instead, we’re driving up to the Second Lake and scattering Daddy’s ashes there. It’s what he would have wanted,” she said and slammed the half-filled trunk shut. “Not this.”

  Later in the week, when Vanessa did not show up in Parkhurst, New Jersey, for the departure of the Hindenburg, Dr. Reichold was not particularly disappointed. He was not fond of Vanessa personally and had not looked forward to spending thirty hours in close company with her, even on the Hindenburg. Nor, unlike most men, was he sexually attracted to her, as he preferred young blond male athletes and regretted having to miss the Berlin Olympic Games for this. But thanks to Mrs. Cole he had his return ticket to Frankfurt already paid for and in hand. He would simply report that Mrs. Cole had decided at the last minute not to commit her daughter, and Dr. Theobold would, as usual, stroke his beard and shrug and say, “In order to be helped, people must first come to me, Otto. I cannot go to them.”

  Vanessa was well aware that she had done a terrible, probably irreversible thing. But she had done terrible, irreversible things in the past, and the consequences had not been fatal or even life-threatening. In time they had merely become part of her biography, episodes in the ongoing story of Vanessa Cole, which she later embroidered and elaborated upon, making of it a shifting, regularly revised tale filled with surprises and contradictions that shocked, amused, and perplexed those who heard it. From Vanessa’s perspective, this was the desired effect. Since hers was a story of ongoing beginnings, it was the best she could hope for. There were no necessary middles or inevitable endings to her life’s story. She wasn’t like other people, and she knew it. She hadn’t chosen this plight, exactly; it seemed to have been thrust upon her. It was as if her personal and public past and future were not real, as if her past could be constantly altered and her future indefinitely postponed. She was free to start her life over, again and again—daily, if she wished—but by the same token she had no alternative.