The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  “Why?”

  “Actually, the only sign she objected to was ‘Cinderella’s Suite.’ But she couldn’t complain about it without having to say why. So she made him take them all down. On the grounds of hilarity.”

  “Hilarity?”

  “She was against it. It gave her headaches.”

  “So why’d she object to calling your quarters Cinderella’s Suite?” Jordan asked. They had stopped in front of the closed door at the end of the hallway.

  “You ask too many questions, my prince,” Vanessa said and opened the door and entered.

  The room was large and like the rest of the house paneled with wide, carefully roughened boards sawn from first-growth spruce trees, made to look as if they’d been split off the tree trunk with a maul and a wedge. Light off the surface of the lake flooded the bedroom. A Navajo rug hung on the wall above the bed. Otherwise the room was bare of decoration and gave the impression of being an extra room, a guest room suited to anyone and everyone. It was neat and orderly, with no evidence of Vanessa’s having slept there—no clothing out, no cosmetics or perfumes, no keepsakes. Just a single bed, a reading chair and table and kerosene lamp, a narrow, waist-high, pine dresser, and a wood-stove. Off the room Jordan glimpsed a small dressing room with open shelves that held neatly folded towels and blankets and extra sheets, and beyond that a bathroom. All very plain and spartan. It surprised him. He felt that she was as much a visitor here as he.

  Vanessa sat on the edge of the bed and gazed out the wide window at the lake, its surface glittering like polished silver plate. The sky had turned milk white under high cirrus clouds, and the mountains were dark gray, almost black, in the distance. The two men fishing were still out there in their guide boat. Vanessa patted the bed beside her and said, “Come here and look. The fish must be biting.”

  Jordan sat a few inches from her and saw the fishermen on the lake and checked his watch. Three thirty-five. Another hour and a half, at least, before those two retreat to the clubhouse and I can fly out of here, he thought. He was as reluctant to go home, however, as he was anxious to leave this newly haunted house, haunted as much by the woman beside him as by the woman they had buried in the forest behind it. Vanessa was starting to spook him—her calm, slow-moving, slow-talking tour of the house, her placid deflection of his questions and barbs. He was no longer afraid that she would start to weep in grief and guilt and oblige him to comfort her. Quite the opposite now. He was afraid that she would not break into sobs and tears of anguished remorse, that she would simply continue this cold, playful repartee. It occurred to him that in fact she felt no grief, no remorse. No fear, even.

  She turned to him and pushed his jacket open. “You’re not wearing a shirt. Where is it?”

  “I put it to dry on the deck railing,” he said and remembered the bloodstains again and that he would have to burn the shirt or Alicia would ask him how he’d gotten it bloodied. He knew that Vanessa was not thinking of his shirt splashed by her mother’s blood, but of his naked torso. The idea that, despite everything, Vanessa was thinking about his body excited him. She pushed his jacket open further and looked at his chest and partially exposed shoulders, and he felt heat travel to his face and groin.

  “You will have to stay inside until nearly dark, probably,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t let anyone know that you’ve been here.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think they can see your airplane from out there?”

  “No. It’s anchored in a cove well out of sight. It’s behind a tree-covered spit of land. They’d have to come right up on it in the boat to know it was there.”

  “That’s good,” she said and slipped his jacket off his shoulders altogether and pulled first one cuff, then the other, and drew the jacket away from his arms and dropped it onto the floor. “You’re very beautiful,” she said.

  “You said something strange back there.”

  “What?”

  He reached down and retrieved his jacket and slipped it on. “About the sign, ‘Cinderella’s Suite.’ You said your mother objected to it, but didn’t want to say why, so she had all the signs taken down.”

  “I said that?”

  “Yes. Why did she object to it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do.” Jordan left the bed and sat in the chair facing her, his back to the window. Her equanimity scared him a little. He knew she wanted him to make love to her, but the calm ease with which she made that evident signified something other than physical desire, something more mental than of the body, as if her body were merely following orders.

  “I don’t want to talk about my mother or my father. Not now,” she said. “Maybe not ever,” she added. Then she suddenly said, “Jordan, did you know that my father was…that he performed lobotomies? Do you know what a lobotomy is?”

  “Sure. It’s brain surgery for psychos. It was in all the papers a year or so ago.”

  “Daddy invented the procedure, you know.”

  “I thought some Portugese quack developed it. Sounds medieval to me, like a pseudoscientific surgical exorcism. I can’t believe your father fell for that.”

  “Oh, he more than fell for it. He was working with some people at Yale doing experiments on chimpanzees and monkeys, and then he was in Portugal, where he assisted in a dozen lobotomies, and last year he got permission to do it on human beings at the clinic in Zurich, where Mother was so set on sending me.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, it’s the truth. He taught the doctors there how to do it, because it’s not been approved here in the States. It’s brain surgery, but you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to do it. You just drill a couple of little holes in the front of the skull, insert this cutting instrument that Daddy invented himself. He actually showed it to me, a long, thin steel shaft with an L-shaped blade at the end. You twiddle it back and forth a few times, remove, and presto! No more demons. No more troublesome behavior. No more bad daughter.”

  Jordan just smiled. He didn’t believe a word she was saying. But why on earth would she tell such a story? Was it to cover her disappointment that he had rejected her overtures? He hadn’t really rejected her, anyhow; he had merely backed away from her first touch and changed the subject, changing it only temporarily, perhaps. In matters of seduction, Jordan Groves was passive. Never the initiator, he let the woman come to him, giving her the responsibility for the invitation to the dance, and only then, when the dance had begun, would he take the lead. That’s all he was doing here, he thought—foisting on to Vanessa the obligation to declare her intent to have him make love to her, so that afterward he could tell himself that he had merely been complying with her wishes, fulfilling her needs, not his, slaking her lust, not his. Though, naturally, he well knew that he had met his wishes, too, had fulfilled his needs and slaked his lust as much as the woman’s.

  That it was a pattern he knew, but he had never examined the causes. In every other action in his life, he was the initiator, the prime mover, but when it came to sex, he let the woman come to him. Or rather, he made the woman come to him. Even his wife, Alicia—except for that first time, way back when they left the gallery party drunk on champagne and new fame and went to his studio downtown, and he asked her to marry him and she said yes, and to celebrate they took off their clothes and made stormy love the entire rest of the night, until dawn broke and gray New York winter light drifted through the high windows and skylight of the studio and fell onto the two of them lying asleep in each other’s arms. From then on, though, he had waited for Alicia to come to him. For Jordan Groves, a man’s sexual favors were precisely that, favors. A woman’s were something else—a request, perhaps, a statement of need or of desire strong enough to require explicit expression by the woman. In a small way, it comforted his vanity and assuaged any residual guilt afterward that, in order to have sex with a woman, he had not been obliged to
overcome her objections by any means fair or foul. And he never risked being rejected.

  He surprised himself, therefore, when he stood up and took off his leather jacket again and crossed to the bed and sat next to Vanessa and put his bare arms around her. He kissed her on the mouth, softly, and then, as he felt his passion rise, with force this time.

  Vanessa pulled away and pushed him back and said, “Wait. You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m lying.”

  “Lying? You mean about your father? No, not exactly.”

  “That means you think I’m lying.”

  “It means you sometimes say things that are not exactly false and not exactly true, and it’s hard for me to know where they fall between the two.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, was your father interested in lobotomies? Yeah, sure. Why not? He was a brain surgeon, after all. Did he perform them himself? Maybe he did, maybe he only wanted to, or intended to. But did he go to Europe and do it at that private clinic in Zurich and teach the doctors there how to do it? It’s possible, I guess, but unlikely. I’m sure you believe he did. But based on what? And was your mother setting you up for a lobotomy by sending you to Zurich? Again, I’m sure you believe she was, but based on what evidence? She never said that to you, did she?”

  “She didn’t have to. But think about it, Jordan! What a publicity coup for the famous psychiatrist, Dr. Theobold, if he were able to say he miraculously cured the daughter of the equally famous American brain surgeon, Dr. Carter Cole, of an incurable mental illness by using the surgical techniques and tools invented by the late Dr. Cole himself. Rich parents and husbands from all over the world would be shipping their troubled and troublesome children and wives to Zurich. For a half-hour’s surgery and with only a few days needed for recovery, he could charge whatever he wanted, ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars a head! Remember, Jordan, I know these people, Theobold and Reichold and the others. They’re Nazis, Jordan. Very ambitious and greedy Nazis. And I know my father.”

  “You’re not suffering from an incurable mental illness.”

  “Of course not! I’m not even mentally ill. I’m suffering from something, though.”

  “What? Other than the sudden, unexpected loss of your parents.”

  For a long moment they both remained silent, gazing out the window. Finally, in a voice barely above a whisper, Vanessa said, “Secrets. Secrets kept from me, and secrets I’ve kept from everyone else. Secrets aren’t like lies. They’re more like brain surgery. They kill your soul. Lying is only a technique for keeping secrets. One of the techniques. Lies and silence and…and storytelling, which is nothing more than changing the subject in an interesting way. All those clever diversionary tactics. Like bad behavior in public. Reckless behavior in public. Or like this,” she said, and she put her arms around him and drew him to her and kissed him and softly moaned. She whispered into his ear, “I want you to take me, now, here,” and ran her hand down his chest and began loosening his belt. He kissed her on the mouth and throat and began unbuttoning her shirt—her father’s flannel shirt, although he did not note that.

  FAR OUT ON THE LAKE, THE TWO FISHERMEN SLOWLY REELED in their lines and lay their fishing rods in the boat. The man who was the guide, Sam LaCoy, dipped the oar blades into the still water and began to row the boat slowly back toward the Carry. The other man, whose name was Thomas Smith, a retired diplomat, once ambassador to the Court of St. James, turned in the bow and looked back across the lake at the Cole place, Rangeview. The log buildings glowed in the late afternoon sunlight.

  “Do you know the Coles?” Smith asked the guide.

  “Can’t say I do. Not personally.”

  “Damned good people, Dr. Cole and his wife. He’ll be missed around here.”

  “Expect so.”

  “I wonder what she’ll do with the camp, now that he’s gone. The widow. It’s hard to imagine she or the daughter will want to hold on to it. Carter Cole was a lifelong Adirondacker, a real true Reservist, you know. His father was one of the original shareholders. Not the wife, though. And certainly not the daughter.”

  “You plan on making ’em an offer on the place?”

  “It’s a thought.”

  “Be good to have a camp of your own up here on the Second Lake. Instead of boarding all the time down to the clubhouse cottages.”

  “Yes. The Coles got in the Reserve early. My father was a little slow to realize the value of a camp at the Second Lake.”

  “The daughter, she must be third generation, then.”

  “Right. She’s got quite a reputation, the daughter, Vanessa. You ever meet her?”

  “I’ve seen her. From a distance,” the guide said and pulled once on the oars, hard, driving the boat alongside the dock to where Ambassador Smith could step directly from the boat without wetting his boots or trouser cuffs. “Sorry about the fish not biting,” the guide said.

  “My fault, Sam, not yours. We’d have caught a string of trout, I’m sure, if I’d been ready early and didn’t have to get back to the clubhouse before dark. Oh, look!” he said and pointed out a ways where ring-size ripples in the flat black surface of the water spread in widening circles, as if someone were dropping pebbles into the lake. “Now they’re feeding.”

  The guide said, “If you owned that Cole place, you’d have yourself a couple more hours to catch your supper before going in.”

  “You’re right about that,” Ambassador Smith said. “I’ll have to give the matter some thought.”

  The guide took up their gear and pack basket, and the two men headed into the woods of the Carry on to the First Lake, where another boat awaited them.

  At breakfast on the morning of April 5, 1937, the big American, the one they called Rembrandt, announced to the others that today’s mission would be his last. He told them he’d had enough. Tomorrow he was going to Madrid. He intended to stay at the Hotel Florida with the American journalist Matthews and the novelists Hemingway and Dos Passos and the photographer Capa. He claimed they were friends of his. He said that he wanted to make pictures of the war to help raise money back in the States. He was an artist, he said to them, not a soldier, and could do more for the anti-Fascist cause with his pictures than by machine-gunning men in trenches from the air, which he said was like shooting ducks in a barrel. Anyone could do that. They didn’t need him for it. The other pilots said nothing. He told them he didn’t care if he was breaking his contract with the Republic of Spain, the government could keep his back pay and whatever signing bonus they still owed him, he’d had enough and wanted to be able to sleep at night without seeing bodies exploding in the air. The others seemed not to mind. They went on eating breakfast. The big American was the least popular man in the unit and had been from the start. Finally Fairhead spoke. He said if this was to be Groves’s last mission he might as well lead it himself. An hour later they were in the air in a V of V formation, with the departing American leading the point patrol. They had their Russian monoplanes now, the Polikarpov I–16s that the Spanish called Moscas. There were heavy rain squalls and a low ceiling of about fifteen hundred feet. They crossed the line at Brihuega where the Italians had attempted to cut their way to Torija and began their bombing run against the lines of tanks parked alongside the valley road. The big American dropped his bombs on the tanks, and the rest of the pilots did the same, and they destroyed many of them. Then Fairhead, who led the right patrol, waggled the wings of his aircraft and pointed up and to their left, where there was a squadron of Fiat single-seat CR 32s, no match for the speed and armaments of the Russian monoplanes. The pilots put their Moscas into a sharp right echelon and began climbing, closing fast on the Fiats. There were seven of the Italians and then, still higher, another five. When the airplanes engaged, formation flying was no longer possible. They broke into one-on-one dogfights, making passing side shots mainly as they tried to position themselves behind their targets. The Moscas began to take advantage of their superior maneuverability and climb
ing speed. The big American got himself in on the tail of the lead Fiat and fired his 20-millimeter cannons for fifteen seconds straight, sending the Italian spinning downward, spilling a trail of water, gasoline, and black smoke. The American quickly dove after a second target a thousand feet below, but the Italian saw him coming and turned away and dove in the opposite direction. The American curled back in pursuit, but after a few moments the Fiat managed to elude him in the low clouds. When the American broke through the clouds at about five thousand feet, he looked up and saw five Fiats diving toward him. He plunged back down into the clouds again and with the Fiats close behind carved a sharp left vertical bank and completed a 360-degree turn, bringing him in behind his pursuers, firing both machine guns steadily and scattering all five of the Fiats in different directions. A few moments later when he emerged below the clouds again, he found himself in unfamiliar territory, mountainous, with the tops of the mountains in clouds. He was alone in the sky. He dropped down into a valley, hoping for some sign, a river or a road or a village that would help him read his map. As he moved along a rough valley cut with arroyos and narrow dry stream-beds, he spotted too late an antiaircraft gun emplacement in among the trees. At that instant, before he heard the sound of the gun or saw the white puff of smoke in front of his airplane or the second off to his right, a third shell struck his airplane. It hit the left side of the fuselage behind the cockpit, and he could no longer fly the airplane. He was bleeding badly from his shattered left thigh and ankle, and then another shell hit the airplane, this time in the cowling, smashing the engine, igniting the fuel, and instantly the airplane flipped onto its back and began its spiraling plummet to the ground.

  HUBERT HAD HOPED TO FIND RUSSELL KENDALL ALONE IN HIS office. But when he approached the corner room at the far end of the greeting desk, as it was called, the office door was open, and standing outside the door like a valet was the guide Sam LaCoy, looking at the floor as if lost in thought, wicker backpack at his feet, a pair of fishing rods in his hands. Hubert heard the manager’s barking laugh and noted the trouser cuffs and shoes of someone seated just inside—Ambassador Smith, he assumed, joshing with the clubhouse manager. The English girl who greeted the guests coming and going and guarded the dining room and bar and other clubhouse facilities from intrusion by nonmembers stood at the desk, leaning on her elbows with a book open before her. It was always an English girl, because of the accent. She looked up from her book, a novel called Caddie Woodlawn, marked her place with her index finger, and studied Hubert for a second. The guides rarely came this far, unless in the company of a member.