The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  How they were different from each other was glaringly obvious to her. But until she had come to know the man intimately Alicia Groves could not have said how she and Hubert St. Germain were alike. There in his narrow bed in the furtive darkness of his small hand-built house, she learned that he was a man abandoned and lonely. She learned that he was a stoical man with low animal spirits, but one nonetheless eager to please in a sexual way and easy to please. And though essentially passive and trusting of all forms of authority, he was at bottom a man stubbornly independent of influence by others, especially in matters of right and wrong—ethical matters. And in that way she discovered that she, too, was all these things.

  For she was abandoned and lonely. She had not been widowed like Hubert and was not childless and therefore was not, of course, abandoned and lonely in the same ways as he. But she was married to a man who was driven by powerful needs and desires, a man who for years had moved through her life like a hurricane, as if she were a single, small island in a vast archipelago, unable to alter his direction or diminish his force. After his storm had passed over and on, she always found herself alone, awaiting its return. Abandoned and lonely, then.

  Also, her slow, gentle lovemaking with Hubert had taught her that she wanted to be held, not taken. She wanted to be touched with delicate precision by tongue and fingertip, not penetrated and lifted, awkward and off balance, unable to control her body herself, forced to give its leverage over to another. And she saw that, easy as she was to please, she was just as eager to give her lover pleasure back. She gave it, not as repayment, but as a gift outright, pure and simple, and the giving aroused and satisfied her.

  They met in the fall and did not become lovers until the following spring. And all that spring, into the summer months, whenever she could steal away for a few hours, they made love and afterward walked in the woods and mountain meadows up behind his cabin, and there she discovered that she enjoyed deferring to Hubert’s authority in matters where she was incompetent or ignorant, as in the names and natures of the trees of the forest that surrounded them and the Alpine flowers and the berries and bushes and the natural history of the land and the streams and the lakes. She admired his woodland skills, which to her were arcane, like hunting and fishing and building a house with little more than an ax, a splitting maul, and a buck saw. And she never lied to Hubert, never pretended to possess knowledge or experience that she lacked, the way she lied to her husband to keep him from instructing her. She did on occasion, however, give over to Hubert’s authority in matters where she herself happened to be expert, such as gardening and cooking—skills she had learned from her Viennese mother and refined over the years of her marriage—but she did not believe that this was the same as lying to him. In these ways she learned that she was not vain or a liar by nature, as she had thought; she saw that she merely disliked conflict.

  At the same time, when it came to matters of right and wrong, she believed that she was as stubbornly independent of Hubert’s opinions as he was of hers. They did not, therefore, discuss politics or religion or money. Those subjects did not yet concern them and might never concern them, although she knew that he had voted for Herbert Hoover, that he was a practicing Methodist, and that he owned little more than his cabin and his old car and his rifles and dog and lived for the most part outside the cash economy. And Hubert believed what the other villagers believed—that Alicia and her husband were probably Communists, atheists, and rich, for they were “from away,” as the locals said. Thus, when Alicia and Hubert spoke of right and wrong, ethical matters, they talked, not about their politics, religion, or money, but about the one thing more than any other that they shared—adultery.

  In his bed, their faces pressed together, their hands laced and bare thighs touching, she said, “I don’t believe in this, Hubert. Adultery. It’s wrong. I don’t mean the sex part, our secrets. I mean the lying. The deception. I’m scared of it.”

  “Why are you scared of it?”

  “Because we’ll pay dearly for this someday. Probably someday soon. It’s not the same as having secrets. Everyone has secrets. It’s like privacy. But whether Jordan finds out or not, lies and deception corrode your soul, Hubert. They turn you inside out and make you into a liar and deceiver. It’s not just what you do, Hubert, it’s who you become. Not to God, and not to other people, who don’t know you’re lying. To yourself. I don’t want to become that person, Hubert.”

  He lifted his hand to her face and traced her lips with his fingertips and said, “You’re wrong. It’s not a terrible thing. Come on, now, it’s a damned beautiful thing we’re doing. A good thing, not a bad one. I loved only one other woman, Alicia, and she died. And now you. And to tell the truth, I didn’t love her the same way as you. I loved her because I knew her so long and so well. It was love, yes, but it was different. It was like love. So nothing you say will make me think it’s not a beautiful and good thing, Alicia. Nothing.”

  “Nothing, my darling? But it will come to nothing. It can’t go on, and you know that as well as I.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t think like that.” And he kissed her again, and she closed her eyes and opened herself to him again.

  AT THE BOTTOM OF BEEDE MOUNTAIN, ALICIA DROVE THE FORD past the Clarkson farm and made a wide, distracted turn onto the unpaved road and headed north toward the village of Tunbridge. The road wound through the valley of the Tamarack River, whose headwaters rose deep in the rugged mountains of the Reserve, among the brooks and muskegs that fed the Second Lake. Here below, surrounded by the peaks of the Great Range, the valley was broad and flat, with wide green meadows—a rich floodplain granted shortly after the Revolutionary War to New Hampshire and Vermont veterans of the war as payment for their services. For generations, in spite of the harsh climate, the inhabitants of the valley had managed until recent years to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families through careful use and management of the region’s few natural resources—soil good enough to support family farms and modest herds of livestock, a surplus of tall timber for export to Albany and Troy, and fast-running streams for powering small mills. For generations, the people of Tunbridge had been farmers, woodcutters, and mill workers.

  Hubert St. Germain was one of the few local men who regarded themselves, not as simple working people, but as professionals. The guides were gruff, no-nonsense men whose skills and knowledge of the mountains, forests, lakes, and streams were essential to and much admired by people from the cities whose desire for a wilderness experience, starting in the mid-1800s, brought them north to the Adirondack region in increasing numbers. For many years, the visitors were paying guests at local farmhouses, eating homegrown produce and fresh game at the farmers’ tables, playing cards and checkers in their parlors after supper, and swapping stories on their front porches. During the long summer days the people “from away” followed the hired guides into the forest and shot at deer and bear and other wild animals, killing them by the hundreds, and fished where they were told along the streams and on the lakes, where they caught trout by the thousands, and scrambled behind the guides up the steep, rocky, root-tangled trails to the bare mountaintops, there to quicken and refresh their sooty, urban souls with transcendental views of nature unadorned spreading out below to every horizon, as far as the human eye could see. The visitors were for the most part an educated, genteel lot, and many of them painted pictures of these scenes; others wrote pastoral poetry; still others wrote long letters and kept copious journals in which they extolled the harsh beauty of this wild terrain and praised the warm generosity and independence of the people who lived in it year-round.

  Late in the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, however, with the creation of the Reserve and the construction of the Tamarack Club and cottages and the large, elegantly outfitted wilderness camps like Dr. Cole’s Rangeview on the Second Lake, the visitors no longer boarded in the homes of the residents. Instead, they hired the local people as caretakers, cooks, and
cleaners, used them as waiters and gardeners and golf caddies at the club, so that the near equality of summer visitor and year-round resident began to disappear. A mutual parasitism based on a rigid set of class distinctions very much to the advantage of the outsiders took its place.

  Then, when the stock market collapsed and the Depression took hold, one by one the small textile, shoe, and paper mills owned and managed by corporations based elsewhere shut down; and the downstate market for timber shrank and soon disappeared altogether. With the flow of outside capital gone dry, local people could no longer pay their debts. The banks downstate started calling in outstanding loans, and farms and homes, many of them heavily mortgaged, were repossessed or sold for back taxes, and land that had been in families for generations was sold off for a few dollars an acre, some of it to summer people, the rest to the Reserve. Gradually, by the mid-1930s, most of the year-round residents of the region found themselves out of necessity surviving solely as the seasonal, part-time, underpaid employees of the summer people. In two generations a class of independent yeomen and yeowomen had been turned into a servant class, with all the accompanying dependencies, resentments, insecurity, and envy.

  Not Hubert St. Germain, though. The son and grandson of Adirondack guides, Hubert had no such diminished sense of himself as had his neighbors, or he never would have become the secret lover of Alicia Groves. Neither servant nor boss, the Adirondack guides were throwbacks to men of an earlier era, when the region had not yet been settled by white people—solitary, self-sufficient hunters and trappers and woodsmen who thought of themselves as living off the land, regardless of who owned title to it. They were viewed by locals and outsiders alike as independent contractors—somewhat the way the artist Jordan Groves was viewed. Thus, late one Saturday afternoon in October, when all the summer people had left the region to shift for itself once again and Jordan Groves met Hubert St. Germain for the first time at the Moose Head Inn in Sam Dent, after drinking a half-dozen bottles of beer with him and losing at arm wrestling to him—a thing that rarely happened to Jordan Groves—the famous artist felt easy about inviting the local guide home to eat with him, and the guide felt no discomfort in accepting. It was late at night by then, and the family was asleep. The men cooked steaks in a cast-iron skillet and drank whiskey and continued arm wrestling at the kitchen table until finally, at midnight, the artist was able to put the guide’s arm flat to the table.

  Alicia lay in bed upstairs and listened to the two men laugh and talk. Something in the voice of the stranger attracted her. It was not his north country accent. Alicia was not especially fond of the way the local people spoke; she sometimes had difficulty understanding their flattened, brisk English. But she liked listening to this man—his tone was sweet and unbroken, pitched lower than her husband’s. She could not hear their words very well, even though the door to the hallway was open, but she knew that they were talking about cars, she could make out that much, comparing the virtues and limitations of Model T, A, and B Fords, agreeing that for this climate and these roads the Model A was the best vehicle. The stranger called them that, “vehicles,” not cars.

  She heard the stranger say that he ought to be getting home, adding with an odd wistfulness that he hated going back to his house at night now. Alicia got out of bed and put on her robe and walked to the doorway of the bedroom.

  “Why’s that, Hubert?” her husband asked.

  The stranger said, “On account of the house being empty now. My wife got killed a year ago last November,” he added in a flattened, expressionless voice, as if he were too used to speaking these words, and people’s sympathy only made him feel worse and this was a way to deflect their sympathy. Even so, he felt obliged, despite his full knowledge of the inadequacy of his words, to let people know of his pain and loss, because they were real and inescapable, a part of who he was, and people who did not know of his wife’s death often unintentionally said things or asked questions that squeezed his heart in an iron fist, bringing back full-blown his memories of that cold late-autumn night when the state trooper came to his door and told him that his young bride, his wife of three months, a passenger in a car driven by her older sister, had been killed. The car had hit a patch of black ice on the old Military Highway in West Tunbridge and had slid sideways off the road, gaining speed as it slid, crashing into a maple tree as thick as a man, hurling his bride from the car onto the frozen bare ground, a blow that crushed her skull and broke many of the large bones in her body. Now he got to the subject early, volunteering the information in a rehearsed, efficient, unemotional way, as if his wife had been someone else’s wife.

  Alicia made her way down the narrow back stairs to the kitchen and heard the stranger say to her husband, “Mostly I’m over it. But it comes back hard sometimes when I go home late like this.”

  Alicia’s husband said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Hubert, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. And I apologize for bringing it up.”

  “You didn’t bring it up. I did. You would’ve liked her, probably. Sally was good. A good person.”

  Alicia stepped into the kitchen and saw Hubert St. Germain for the first time and was startled and felt her throat tighten. She felt herself go out to him and was astonished by the speed and force of it. This had never happened to her before. There seemed to be a light in his face, as if someone in the room were shining a flashlight onto it. She couldn’t tell if it emanated from her fixed gaze and was reflected back by his sun-burnished face or if his face somehow gathered light on its own. Though she had never seen him before, even at a distance or in a crowd, he seemed strangely familiar to her. She had the uncanny feeling that he could have been her long-lost brother, taken from the family before her birth and raised in the forest by peasants as their own and now suddenly, unexpectedly, placed here before her. He was a squarely built man of average height and wore a denim shirt buttoned to the throat and tan trousers and leather boots. His brown felt hat was pushed back on his head, and when Alicia Groves entered the room, he stood and removed his hat, and a shock of sandy hair fell across his forehead. His skin was smooth and fair, his eyes bright blue with pale, almost white eyebrows that gave him a look of innocent surprise. She guessed he was in his middle thirties, a few years older than she, a few younger than her husband.

  “Please…please, sit down,” she said, and he complied.

  His words slightly slurred, Jordan Groves said, “Sorry we woke you. This’s Hubert St. Germain. He’s a guide over at the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve. Hubert, this’s my wife, Alicia.”

  “Yes, ma’am, really sorry about waking you up,” Hubert said. “And pleased to meet you, for sure. I was just leaving,” he added and stood again and squared his hat.

  “I overheard the last part of your conversation. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. St. Germain. That’s a terrible thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am, it is. Thank you.”

  “You should stay the night here,” she said. “We have plenty of room. It’s late, and you shouldn’t be driving anyhow. I know you boys have been drinking. And I can understand how difficult it must be to go home to an empty house. Please,” she said. “Stay.”

  “Yes, Hubert, spend the night here and go home in the morning,” Jordan said.

  “Really,” Alicia said. “I want you to stay.”

  The guide hesitated a moment, then accepted their invitation, grateful for it. Too many nights through the hard year and a half since his wife’s death he had ended up drinking late with strangers at the Moose Head until the place closed or drinking in a stranger’s kitchen like this and finally having to make his way back to his cabin, driving drunkenly over narrow country roads, his Model A coupe drifting from one side of the road to the other, the headlights of oncoming vehicles doubling in his blurred vision, until at last he pulled up in front of his cabin and staggered inside, where, still fully clothed, he dropped onto his bed and, before losing consciousness, let himself be crushed by the weight of his loneliness, and wept. And then he blacked out,
and the next morning remembered only the sad fact of his weeping and the feeling of his chest being pressed by a stone the size of the room itself. And with each day’s waking his loneliness and sorrow were worsened by his fear that neither was due to the death of his wife, that both had been in him all along.

  Alicia lay in the darkness with her husband sleeping next to her. He had come to bed only minutes earlier and was snoring already and smelled of alcohol and meat and sweat. She heard the bed in the guest room creak and imagined the guide turning in his sleep, dreaming of his lost bride. Or perhaps, she thought, lying in bed in the room next to hers, he, too, was awake and listening for some indication that she was thinking about his presence in her house, and perhaps he was as eager as she for them to talk to each other with no one else present. And though Alicia soon fell asleep, when she woke in the morning her mind was instantly filled with this thought. And when the guide woke in the Groveses’ guest room bed, his loneliness and sorrow seemed mysteriously to have fled. When the artist, Jordan Groves, woke, he was mildly irritated by how late he had slept and hurriedly washed, shaved, and pulled on his clothes, so that by the time Hubert St. Germain and Alicia Groves were sitting down opposite each other at the breakfast table, the artist was already at work in his studio.

  NOW THAT THE AFFAIR HAD BEEN DISCOVERED BY THAT DAMNED socialite, Alicia decided that she could not go on seeing Hubert any longer. She knew that she could have stayed hidden from the woman’s sight; Hubert could have insisted on speaking to her outside, and she would have gone away; Alicia must have wanted to be seen by her, to be discovered, uncovered, revealed—not so much to the rest of the world, but to herself. She would break it off immediately and wait for the Cole girl to tell Jordan what she had seen, and Jordan would draw his own conclusions: simply, he would know at once that his wife had been lying to him all these months. She had not been playing visiting nurse at the medical center in Sam Dent at all, had she? She had been with Hubert St. Germain those afternoons. He would bring those conclusions to Alicia, and she would have no choice but to confess everything.