The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  To avoid keeping her mother bound and gagged during the long journey north to the Reserve, Vanessa convinced her—although it was untrue—that she had a gun in her purse, the same nickel-plated .38 she had been carrying at the Carlyle back when she wanted to shoot Count No-Count. She told her mother that if she tried to escape or called for help, Vanessa would shoot herself in the head immediately. “If you wish to be responsible for my death, Mother, if you wish to see me murdered before your very eyes and in effect by your hand, then all you have to do is give the guy at the toll booth a signal or whisper something to the man pumping gas or say a word to anyone at the Tamarack Club,” she declared. “I won’t hesitate for a second to blow my brains out in front of everybody, believe me,” she said, and her mother did believe her.

  Later, when she had her mother ensconced at the camp, she would not feel she had to bind and gag the woman—except when she left to chase down the artist Jordan Groves at his home in Petersburg and, of course, the following day, when he flew his seaplane to the Second Lake with Dr. Cole’s ashes and briefly visited the camp afterward and Vanessa almost succeeded in seducing him. She bound and gagged her then. “You can have the run of the camp as long as we’re here alone,” she said. “But you can’t go outside, Mother. And if someone comes up the lake in a boat or a hiker or someone from another camp stops by for a friendly chat, I’ll do all the talking. Otherwise, I’ll have to tie you up and lock you in the bedroom again and keep you there.”

  Vanessa’s plan was not a plan; it was closer to a wild desire than a strategy. She wanted simply to avoid being institutionalized again, and she wanted somehow to regain control of the very large trust funds left to her by her grandparents and father that she had so placidly, so stupidly, placed in the hands of her mother, Mr. Brodhead, and U. S. Trust. She believed that the first of these desires would be satisfied if she did not willingly go to Zurich and her mother were kept from committing her elsewhere. The second would be satisfied only when her mother died of natural causes, highly unlikely at her age, or removed herself, Mr. Brodhead, and U. S. Trust as executors, also highly unlikely. Especially now. Vanessa’s ultimate wish was that, until her mother died, no one except Vanessa herself would be allowed to see the woman or speak with her. For the time being, then, and for as long as possible, the two of them would stay here at the camp, not exactly unknown to the world, but in relative isolation and very difficult of access. After that…well, she’d figure out what to do when she actually had to do it.

  Rangeview, at the Second Tamarack Lake, was located as far from other people as Vanessa could presently imagine, but to stay there for more than a few days she needed supplies—fresh and tinned food, kerosene for the lamps, cigarettes, and liquor—and someone to deliver it on a regular basis. She thought first of the artist and his seaplane, but realized at once that he would refuse to help her, at least for now. Then she remembered Hubert St. Germain, the local guide who for decades had been attached as caretaker to Dr. Cole’s camp. Every July first, before the arrival of the Coles, Hubert opened the camp, stocked the larders, cut the firewood, and made the seasonal repairs to the roof and chimneys, tightened wind-loosened windowpanes and replaced torn screens, fixing whatever the hard Adirondack winter had broken. Vanessa liked and trusted Hubert St. Germain. He was very good looking, she thought, and shy and kept a discreet distance from his employers. You barely knew he’d been there, until you noticed a high stack of freshly cut firewood or saw that the broken steps to the deck had been replaced or opened the kitchen cupboard and realized that it had been restocked with oatmeal, soups, flour, sugar, and tinned beef, and in the icebox a large chunk of ice from the Tunbridge icehouse and a half-dozen freshly caught trout and a chilled bottle of Alsatian wine.

  She would have to get to Hubert somehow; she would have to induce him to make weekly deliveries without having to come inside or hang around the camp, without having to see or speak with her mother.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, but I’m going to lock you in the bedroom again.” They were seated at the kitchen table eating a breakfast of canned pork and beans. After two nights and one full day, it was the last of their food. “It’s going to be for four or five hours this time, so eat up. And you’d better use the bathroom before I leave.”

  “You won’t tie my hands and feet and cover my mouth again, will you? Please don’t. Please. It’s an awful thing to do, Vanessa. Just awful,” her mother said and began to cry quietly.

  “I know. And I hate doing it. But, Mother…,” she said and paused. “I can’t trust you, Mother. I just can’t. If I don’t keep you here, I know you’ll get the men in white coats to carry me off to the loony bin. It’s that simple. It really is. If Daddy were alive…well, if he were here, none of this would be necessary, that’s all.” She pushed her chair back and stood. “Ready?”

  “I’m an old woman, Vanessa. Please don’t do this. And I’m not well, you know that.”

  “You’re fifty-three, and you’re healthy as a horse. You’ll probably live another twenty-five years. By then I’ll be an old woman. Come on, I’ve got a lot to do today. We can’t live on canned beans and spring water.”

  AN HOUR LATER, VANESSA HAD CROSSED THE SECOND LAKE and had made her way over the Carry, as the quarter-mile land bridge between the two lakes was called. She rowed the length of the First Lake, tied the guide boat at the dock, and quickly walked the gentle sloping trail back through the forest along the Tamarack River to the clubhouse, two miles away. There she went straight to the office of the manager, Russell Kendall, and entered without knocking.

  He stood up abruptly, red faced, as if she had caught him doing something illicit. “I’d appreciate it if you knocked first, Vanessa. I could be having a confidential conversation with a member, you know.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “No. Not at the moment.” He wished he could make this girl just go away. The mother, too. These women, Evelyn and Vanessa Cole, or whatever she called herself now, were demanding and imperious. They were like a showgirl and her stage mother, he thought, and admired the thought. He was sorry the father had died. He had rather liked Dr. Cole, a gentle, gregarious man from an old Reserve family who liked to talk about Art and Nature. A man with a philosophical turn of mind. He tipped the staff well, and at Christmas, when the Tamarack Club was closed and Russell Kendall was in Augusta and the Reserve was the furthest thing from most members’ minds, Dr. Cole always remembered to send Kendall a hundred-dollar holiday bonus, ten times a club cook’s weekly pay.

  “What can I do for you, Vanessa?” he asked.

  “You can tell me how to get in touch with Hubert St. Germain. I need him to bring supplies up to Rangeview. Mother and I expect to be staying for longer than we had planned.”

  “Oh. How long? I thought you were here for only a few days,” he said. “What happened with your father’s…his ashes? I hope you didn’t—”

  “Don’t worry,” she interrupted. “I dumped them in the Tamarack River, but way over at Wappingers Falls. Not on Reserve property. By now Daddy’s doing the backstroke in Lake Champlain, heading north to the St. Lawrence and on to the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.”

  “Vanessa, please,” Kendall said. “He’s your father.”

  “Was. But you’re right,” she said, suddenly shifting intent and tone. “I’m sorry. It’s just…it’s just that Mother and I are both terribly upset by his death. Especially Mother. We’re mourning together. We’re grieving over him at the camp. The Reserve was Daddy’s most sacred place in the universe, you know. It was his true church. Somehow, even though we were forbidden by you to scatter his ashes at the Second Lake, we feel closer to him at the camp. So we’ve decided to stay for as long as his spirit lingers there. Possibly the rest of the summer. Possibly into the fall. It’s why I need to speak with Hubert St. Germain. I hope he hasn’t gone and arranged to take care of other camps and completely abandoned us. I know how popular he is, but he’s always worked for us, and Daddy was
very fond of him. I’d hate to lose him…now that my father’s no longer here.” She brushed away a tear.

  Kendall sat down at his desk and drew a ledger from a drawer, opened it, and went down the list of guides and their assignments. “No, Hubert’s free. He hasn’t worked since you left for New York on July fifth. At least not here at the Club or for any of the other Second Lake camps. Of course, he may have found work elsewhere by now. I mean, among the locals. Unlikely, though, given the way things are. And given the way guides are,” he added and smiled ruefully. “All the guides want is permission to hunt and fish in the Reserve, and they can’t do it unless they’re hunting or fishing for a member. Of course, they do it anyhow. In the off-season when we’re not here. Honestly, I don’t know how these people survive.”

  She asked him how she could contact Hubert, but it turned out he had no telephone. Very few local people had telephones, Kendall explained. She would have to drive into the village and go to his house, which was out beyond the old Clarkson farm, a log house he’d built himself and where he lived alone, with no one but his dog for company since his wife died—a nice enough young woman, very plain, but quite pleasant when she worked at the Club, killed a few winters ago in an automobile accident. “Most of us expected Hubert to remarry, as he hadn’t been married long and had no children. But no. He is quite the ladies’ man, if you know what I mean. At least the local ladies seem to think so, the housekeepers and kitchen help. They practically swoon when he comes around,” Kendall nattered on. He was trying to sound like an intimate female friend, an equal, but it was hard for Kendall to be more than merely polite to Vanessa Cole. “Hubert is handsome, I suppose, in a rustic way. And very quiet. But you know what they say about the quiet ones,” he said.

  “No. What do they say?”

  “Oh, still waters and all that.” Kendall hoped he wouldn’t have to see much of the Cole girl this summer, or her mother, either. But if the two women did end up staying at their camp till the end of August or even longer, Hubert St. Germain would help keep them out of the manager’s hair. St. Germain was competent, independent, and discreet, a guide who kept things from getting complicated, and when he worked for one of the camps he made sure the owners didn’t have reason to come to the clubhouse complaining to management. “I’ll draw you a map to his house. It’s a little hard to find. It’s stuck over there beyond the village north of the Tamarack River, in the woods below Beede Mountain,” he said and pulled out a sheet of club stationery and began to draw.

  JORDAN GROVES’S NEW STUDIO ASSISTANT ARRIVED EARLY FOR her first day of work, surprising the artist and irritating him, for she had interrupted the start of a silly, sexually explicit fantasy, a detailed continuation of his most recent encounter with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, revealing for his delectation what surely would have happened had he not turned away from the woman at the last possible second. Turning away was not unusual for Jordan Groves. He was good at it. Several times a year, sometimes more, he walked to the very edge of a precipice, looked over and down the cliff with a longing to step off it, then backed away, later to enjoy from a safe mental distance the terrible consequences of a near leap into domestic disaster. The fantasies gave him an ache that was oddly satisfying and provided a sexual charge that he believed enlivened him without endangering him or anyone else. The only women he actually made love to, other than his wife, of course, were women he was incapable of loving, and he never had sex with them more than once and almost never saw them again. The others he visited like this, in fantasy, telling himself little sex stories, over and over. In this way—perhaps it was the only way—he had managed all these years to avoid falling in love with anyone other than his wife, and, except for the fact that he knew it was an indulgence and would certainly not have wanted his wife to enjoy a similar indulgence, it left him guilt free.

  This practice over the years had made the artist sexually incandescent to certain women. It made him behave in an invitational way, indicating that he was clearly available, even eager, to bed them, but would not do it. He was dangerous, and yet was unavailable, off-limits, safe. It did not hurt that he was a famous artist and handsome and healthy, a legendary adventurer and sportsman, a roistering world traveler with a loving family, leftist politics, and a lot of money. It did not hurt that he was the subject of much idle gossip. Certain women enjoyed having people think they were sleeping with Jordan Groves. The artist was aware of the source of his attractiveness to these women—he knew that his fantasies invoked theirs—and did nothing to discourage it.

  Vanessa Von Heidenstamm had entered today’s dreamy narrative so vividly that she had displaced everyone else. It was as if all those other women Jordan Groves could have fallen in love with, had he only let himself make love to them, in a flash had been completely forgotten, erased from memory. This was different. In the past, whenever mundane reality intruded—as in the early arrival of Frances Jacques, his newly hired studio assistant—he could simply put his little story down without feeling frustrated or deprived, the fictional dimension of his life blending easily with ordinary reality. But no longer. Closing the book on Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, even temporarily, made him cross.

  “What the hell are you doing here now!” he barked at the girl. “I told you to come at noon. You’re supposed to be here twelve to five, not eleven to four.”

  Frightened and embarrassed, the girl stood in the doorway and wrung her hands. “I thought, it being the first day and all, I thought I’d get here early, you know, to kind of get used to where things were and all. Gosh, I’m sorry, Mr. Groves,” she said. “I’ll go away and come back later.” She was a local kid just out of high school, teachable, he had thought, though he’d been disappointed when she showed him the portfolio of awkward, amateurish drawings and paintings she’d made in art class. Not much talent there. But her teachers had spoken highly of her intelligence and character, and she seemed good natured and alert and physically strong, and besides, all she needed to do was keep the studio clean, take care of his tools and materials, stretch the occasional canvas, and when necessary pack and ship his work for him, most of which she could learn in a week. And she was from a poor family, the father jobless, the mother at home with four younger kids, and so on. That was in the girl’s favor. Her job would at least put food on the family’s table.

  “No, forget it. Come in, I’ll get you started,” he said and waved her into the studio.

  She was small but wiry, a farm kid used to physical labor. Her hair was a dark brown mass of thick curls, cut short more for ease of maintenance than appearance, and she wore no makeup or jewelry. She had dressed too carefully for the job, the artist noticed, like a secretary come to take dictation.

  “Really, Mr. Groves, I’ll go away and come back later,” she practically pleaded.

  He softened toward her then and smiled and apologized for being so grouchy. He liked her large dark eyes and rosy complexion and her sinewy forearms, unusual in a girl her age, and he wanted her to be happy and excited to be working for him. “Let’s start over,” he said. “Okay? You go back outside and knock on the door, and we’ll take it from there.”

  Relieved, the girl smiled and did as she was told. She knocked, and the artist said, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Frances!”

  “C’mon in, Frances!”

  She opened the door and stepped inside, smiling broadly.

  “Hey, Frances, good to see you. Came a little early, eh? To get the lay of the land before starting?”

  “Y-yes. Is that all right? I can come back later if you like.”

  “No, no, that’s fine. Usually I like to work alone till noon, but this morning I got in early myself. I was thinking of taking a break now anyhow.”

  “Oh, that’s good!” she said, genuinely pleased and believing him.

  “Before you do anything, though, you better get into some proper work clothes. I don’t want you to ruin that pretty dress.”

  “Oh, dear. But…I didn’t b
ring anything else.”

  “That’s all right. Go to the house, and tell my wife that I need her to loan you some overalls and a sweatshirt. She’s a bigger size than you, but it won’t matter. You can roll up the sleeves and cuffs.”

  “She won’t mind? You’re sure?”

  “Of course not, she’ll be delighted. It’s all boys around here, so she never gets to loan her stuff.”

  Frances said, “Thank you, Mr. Groves,” and almost curtsied and quickly left the studio.

  As soon as the door closed behind her, Jordan Groves returned to the story he had been telling himself when the girl had first knocked. He opened it at the page he’d marked. It was where he imagined Vanessa Von Heidenstamm sitting beside him on the sofa in the living room at Rangeview, the room lit by the golden light of the sun slipping behind the mountains across the lake. She places her glass down on the coffee table and looks up at him and says, “This must always be our secret, Jordan. We must never tell anyone that we have shown each other our scars….” He is unsure of his answer. What would he say if she said that? What scars?