The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  Mrs. Cole looked over at Hubert St. Germain, the family’s longtime guide and caretaker, standing by the door, his hands hanging empty at his sides, Vanessa beside him, and the woman seemed to recoil from him, as if he had come to do something to her that Vanessa couldn’t bring herself to do alone. Mrs. Cole’s eyes widened in fear, and she shook her head wildly no, as if pleading with him not to do it.

  Barely two seconds passed, and Vanessa grabbed Hubert by the hand and pulled him away from the room and slammed the door shut on her mother and locked it.

  “Let me back in there, Miss Cole!”

  “No. I can’t,” she said and stood with her back to the door.

  “I got to help her!”

  “No!” She cried, “Help me, Hubert! Please, I’m the one who needs you.”

  “How? What’s going on here? Why is she like that, all tied up and gagged like that?”

  “I can’t explain. But you have to trust me, Hubert.”

  “Then you got to tell me the reason she’s like that.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then I’ll have to untie her and let her tell me.”

  Vanessa looked steadily at him for a moment, her lips pursed, as if she were taking the measure of the man. Finally, she said, “It’s not my mother who’s trapped. Believe me. It’s not my mother who’s a prisoner, Hubert. It’s me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mother…my mother wants to lock me away in a mental hospital. Where they’ll drug me. Or worse. Where they’ll give me a lobotomy or something. She’s taken my inheritance away from me. My mother wants me dead, or as good as dead!”

  “She can’t want you dead. She’s your mother.”

  “And that only makes it worse, Hubert. Don’t you see? When your own flesh and blood wants you locked away so she can take your money or wants you mindless or even dead, it’s so terrible that you don’t know what to do! I panicked, Hubert. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking, I was simply reacting. I just wanted to make it so she couldn’t put me into a looney bin for the rest of my life, or worse. I felt like a caged animal. I still do! She planned to ship me off to a hospital in Europe, where I was before. So I forced her to come here, to the Reserve. But I’ve only made it worse. If I let her go now, she’ll make me go into the hospital like she planned, the papers are all drawn up and signed, but now, to punish me for doing this, for forcing her to come to the Reserve and keeping her here against her will like this, she’ll let them give me a lobotomy. I know it. I just know it. Do you know what that is, Hubert? A lobotomy?”

  “I heard of it, yes.” He’d read about the new form of brain surgery that doctors were performing on mentally ill people nowadays. It was in all the news, and because Dr. Carter Cole, a distinguished summer resident of the Reserve, was one of the men who had invented the procedure, even the local papers had covered it. It was being called a miracle cure. Hubert didn’t think it was the sort of thing that should be done to Vanessa Cole, though. She was strange, yes, and eccentric, and by his lights maybe even a little weird, but Vanessa Cole wasn’t what you’d call mentally ill. Mostly, she was rich and spoiled was all. Which weren’t crimes, he knew, and didn’t necessarily make you crazy. Certainly not crazy enough to warrant a lobotomy.

  “So now that I’ve got control of her, I’m stuck with her. I can’t let her leave.” She laughed suddenly, a cold, mocking laugh. “If it weren’t so damned awful and she weren’t suffering, it’d be ridiculous. If the consequences for me weren’t so final, it’d be almost funny.”

  Hubert was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t see how I can help you, neither. Maybe the consequences aren’t so final,” he said, more a question than a statement.

  “Oh, Hubert, please! Don’t be naive! I know what’s waiting for me over there. If I let her go now, my life will be over. It’s as simple as that. I’ll never see the light of day again. I’ll be locked up and brain damaged for the rest of my life.”

  The guide tried to grasp the situation, get it clear in his mind. He was a problem solver, especially of other people’s problems. He knew he had to take a step back and take the thing apart as if it were a broken machine, lay all the parts out on the table, find the faulty gear or broken belt, replace it with a new one, and put the machine back together again.

  The two said nothing while Hubert pondered the situation. He asked if she minded if he smoked, and she said no, and he pulled out his pack of Luckies and lighted one and smoked. Vanessa took his pack from him and lighted one for herself. Finally he said, “Maybe the first thing is to make it so she isn’t suffering like that, all tied up and gagged and all.”

  “No! You’ll help her escape, and she’ll come back with the sheriff, and they’ll haul me off in a straitjacket!”

  Hubert promised Vanessa that he would not help her mother escape. He just didn’t want the woman to suffer unnecessarily. Also, he pointed out, if Vanessa released her mother temporarily, so to speak, and in exchange got her to cooperate in her own confinement here at the camp, they might have a chance to make her understand why Vanessa had done this, and her mother might change her mind then about the mental hospital and the inheritance and so forth. At worst, it would buy Vanessa a little time to come up with some idea of what to do with her. “If you keep her hog-tied like that, she’s going to believe you actually are crazy. And you’re right, she’s going to want revenge.” He wasn’t urging her to free Mrs. Cole completely, he said. Just enough so the three of them could sit down and talk to one another about the situation and why Vanessa had reacted the way she had. Maybe that way a solution would come to them, he told her. “But in the process we shouldn’t hurt her in any way,” he said. “No need to keep her tied up and all. We can just keep her locked in the bedroom and bring her food there. I’ll shutter the windows so she can’t climb out.” He told her that if Vanessa wanted, since he wasn’t at the moment working for anyone else, he would bring the second load of supplies back before dark and stay here at Rangeview tonight, so they could take turns guarding her mother, while all three of them tried to come up with a resolution to this. “There’s got to be a way out of this that works for both of you.”

  “You promise?” Vanessa asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t lie, Miss Cole. And I don’t make promises I can’t keep. I think that together we can work this thing out.”

  She sank down on the sofa and with her head resting in her hands stared straight ahead at the dead fireplace. “All right, then. Go ahead and untie her,” she said without looking at him. “And, please, call me Vanessa.”

  Returning to the bedroom, Hubert knelt beside Mrs. Cole and undid the scarf covering her mouth. In as soothing a voice as he could manage, he said to her, “Now don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you, Mrs. Cole. I’m just trying to find a way to fix this mess. You understand, Mrs. Cole?”

  She nodded and, lips trembling, asked him for water. The glass Vanessa had filled earlier was on the dresser, and Hubert retrieved it and gave it to her. She drank quickly. “Vanessa…my daughter wants to kill me, Hubert! My own daughter! She wants to kill me.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “What does she want, then?” Her voice was dry as sandpaper.

  “Well, that’s what we’re going to find out,” Hubert said, helping the woman to her feet. She staggered when he let go of her. He steadied her for a few seconds, then helped her from the chaise to the bed. He sounded and looked like a calm, rational man, but he was confused and turbulent and scared. I’m in way over my head here, he thought. I wish I could talk this thing out with Alicia. Alicia would know what I should do. She would know if what I am doing is wrong or just plain dumb. Or both. I need to think about what Alicia would do in my place, he said to himself, and then concluded that she would do exactly as he was doing, and immediately he felt better about it and plunged ahead.

  WHEN ALICIA GROVES RETURNED HOME, SHE WENT STRAIGHT inside the house. Passing
through the dining room on her way to the kitchen, she glanced out the French doors to the terrace with the big cleft rock in the center and beyond to the grassy bluff above the wide bend in the river. In the shade of the tall oak tree her husband was pushing Bear on the tire swing in long, swooping arcs while talking to Wolf, who stood at his side, smiling. A few feet away the two red dogs lay asleep in splotches of sunlight.

  Alicia stopped by the window and lay both hands on the sill, as if to steady herself. She was sure that Vanessa Cole had already told Jordan that she had seen his wife at Hubert St. Germain’s cabin, when she was supposed to have been at the medical center in Sam Dent, probably adding a few lurid details in the telling. Had she buttoned her blouse correctly when she came out of the cabin to the deck? Had she smoothed her skirt? Alicia couldn’t remember. When you lie you forget the truth. Alicia knew that she had been seen by Jordan from the air. He had been out looking for her, obviously, flying over Hubert St. Germain’s cabin in search of his straying, lying wife, and he had found her exactly where Vanessa told him he would. And now, while he seemed to be playing contentedly with his sons, he was merely awaiting the return of his wayward wife and more lies and denials. She couldn’t put herself through that, not anymore. Regardless of the consequences, she decided, she would no longer lie to her husband.

  Throughout the remainder of the afternoon, and later, while she prepared supper for the four of them and Jordan in his studio studied his new assistant’s inventory, and all through the evening meal and afterward, as she washed the dishes and got the boys through their baths and into bed, Alicia anxiously watched her husband and waited for him to confront her.

  But he said and did nothing out of the ordinary. If anything, he was more affable and relaxed than usual. He seemed downright affectionate toward her, and at one point, passing behind where she stood at the kitchen sink washing the supper dishes, he placed one big hand on her left shoulder and the other on her right buttock and slid it down along her thigh like a promise. It was a thing he had not done in months. Involuntarily, she stepped away from his hand, and he moved on.

  Finally, when the boys were in their beds and slipping into sleep, Alicia went looking for her husband. She found him in the room they called the library, but which over time had become the artist’s office, for no one other than he ever used the room. It was where he wrote letters, paid bills, kept all his files and archives, and where late at night he read and listened to his beloved jazz records and smoked cigars and sometimes drank old whiskeys neat.

  He was typing out a letter to the writer John Dos Passos, whom he had befriended during the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti way back in 1922. Dos had been writing about the trial, and Jordan had made a limited-edition wood engraving to help raise money for the defense fund. Later, after the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, Dos and his wife, Katie, on several occasions had visited the artist and his family in Petersburg. They had worked together in ’31 and ’32 to help free the Scottsboro boys, and recently the two men had become collaborators in the effort to raise money for medical supplies for the republicans in Spain. Dos had been urging Jordan to join him in Spain and make a series of pictures based on Goya’s famous engravings of the Napoleonic War. Until now, Jordan had not turned him down. But tonight he wrote, Too much work to do here, too many commitments, too many family obligations keeping me here….

  Alicia sat on the leather sofa and smoked a cigarette while her husband typed at the desk. When he finished, he folded the letter and put it into an envelope, addressed and stamped the envelope, and swiveled around in his chair to face her.

  “I’ve just told Dos to forget about the Spanish thing,” he said and smiled. “I’m not going over.”

  Alicia nodded somberly. “That’s good, if it’s what you want. To stay here instead, I mean.”

  “It’s exactly what I want. From here on out, I’m a homebody,” he said and paused. “And I’m not going to Greenland, either.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess that’s good, too. If it’s what you want.”

  “Alicia, listen. There’s something I need to talk about with you. Something serious. About us.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Before you say anything more, Jordan, I have to tell you that it’s over.”

  “What is?”

  “I ended it,” she blurted.

  “Ended what?” He leaned forward in his chair, as if he hadn’t heard her correctly.

  “What happened…between Hubert and me.”

  “Between you and Hubert? Hubert St. Germain?”

  “It’s in the past now. I wrote him today and told him that it’s over. When you saw me out there this afternoon I was putting the letter in his mailbox. By now he’s read it, so he, too, knows that it’s finished.”

  “Hubert? Hubert St. Germain? What the Christ are you talking about, Alicia?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Don’t make me say it. Please, Jordan. I’m so sorry it happened, and so ashamed. I don’t know what I was thinking, I must have been crazy. But I promise you, it’s in the past now. And I swear, I’m profoundly sorry.”

  “You’re sorry.”

  “Yes. Please, forgive me, Jordan.”

  They remained silent for a moment, Jordan staring at his wife, who looked down and away, shamefaced. He took out his tobacco and papers and slowly rolled a cigarette and lighted it. Finally, he said, “Are you telling me that you’re having an affair with Hubert St. Germain?”

  “Yes. No! I’m telling you that it’s over. I’ve ended the affair. I won’t see him again, ever. And I’m asking you to forgive me. I know it won’t be easy, and I don’t deserve it. Please, Jordan.”

  Jordan’s face had clouded over and darkened. This had never happened to him before. In every married couple, he believed, one was a liar and the other a truth teller. Alicia had always been the truth teller. Now, suddenly, the poles were reversed, a circumstance that shocked and confused him even more than what Alicia was actually confessing. As long as he knew that he was the one who lied, the one who kept secrets and generated elaborate deceptions, then he knew who he was and how that man behaved. And as long as he believed that Alicia never lied or kept secrets or deceived him, he knew who she was and how she behaved.

  But forgive her? He was the one who had always needed forgiveness. He had never been asked to forgive her for anything before. He wasn’t sure he knew how. What did it feel like, anyhow, to forgive someone? Jordan Groves bore grudges; he had enemies and knew who they were and enjoyed keeping them identified as such: Jordan Groves was a son of a bitch who didn’t mind the reputation, because it kept at bay people who were capable of hurting him. But he had never found it necessary to forgive anyone. Not even his parents. Forgive and forget might be how it went for most people, but not for Jordan Groves. Thanks to his optimistic egoism and self-confidence, Jordan had little trouble forgetting; it was easy for him; but once a lie or a deception was forgotten, what was the need for forgiveness? If you truly forgot the offense, how was forgiveness even possible? Had he been raised Catholic like Alicia, he might have been able to conflate the two, but his parents had been strict Presbyterians, and Jordan Groves’s atheism was founded on that immovable Protestant rock. Thus, while he knew that deep down, like all human beings, he was an irredeemable sinner, he was hard-hearted.

  “Well now. So you’ve been fucking my friend Hubert St. Germain.”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “Since mid-March. But not—”

  “No ‘buts,’” he said, cutting her off. “And no greasy details. Right now all I want is to know the facts.”

  “All right.”

  “Where?”

  “At…at his cabin. Nowhere else.”

  “How often?”

  “Only sometimes. Not often. Oh, Jordan, don’t do this, please!”

  “How often? Twice? Twenty times? Since mid-March, it must be hundreds of times.”

  “W
e met a few times a week, sometimes once. Sometimes not at all.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “No one, Jordan. I swear it. Except for that woman…Vanessa Von…whatever. Vanessa Cole.”

  “Vanessa? How the hell does she know?”

  Suddenly Alicia understood her mistake. She felt herself blush with shame. She realized that she could have lied. She should have lied. But it was too late now. She had no choice but to go on telling the truth. “Oh, God. I…I’m so stupid. She came to Hubert’s cabin today, and she saw me there. I thought…I assumed that she knew, and that she told you. And when you flew over the cabin and saw me stopped at Hubert’s mailbox, I guess I assumed that you had seen her. Or she had telephoned you. Or something. Oh, God!” she cried.

  Jordan shook his head sadly. “You certainly have been a fool. But not as much a fool as I’ve been. Are you in love with him?”

  She hesitated before answering. “I…I thought I was. I was unhappy, Jordan. For a long time I was very unhappy.”

  “I don’t care about causes! There are a thousand reasons why a woman commits adultery. And a thousand and one why a man does it. Right now all I care about is getting the material facts. I don’t even care if it was good sex or bad sex or anything in between. That’s your private business and will only disgust me anyway. I want the facts. So I can…so I can know what to do next.” He studied his hands and saw they were shaking, and he was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you in love with Hubert St. Germain? Are you still in love with the son of a bitch?”

  She hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “But I have closed my heart to him.”