Russell Banks - The Reserve

She stood next to him and put her hands on his shoulders and drew him to her. Leaning forward, she nestled her mouth next to his ear, and whispered something he barely heard, a slight hissing sound whose frequency rose and fell. Wordless, it sounded to him like a distress signal beamed through turbulence from a distant transmitter. He shoved her hands off his shoulders and pushed her away and raising his large right hand placed it hard against her chin and cheek, his fingers running all the way up her face to her brow, and he pressed it there for a moment, while she closed her eyes and pushed back and waited.

“I’m leaving now,” he said and abruptly withdrew his hand. He backed several steps away, turned, and walked from the room.

She stood by the fire with her eyes closed. She did not open them until she heard the roar of his airplane engine. A few minutes later, when she could no longer hear the engine and knew that he was airborne and gone from the lake, she walked to the door of her parents’ bedroom. Taking a key from her pocket, she unlocked the door, opened it, and peered in at her mother. The woman was sitting on the chaise, her hands and feet still tightly bound with rope, her mouth gagged with a white silk scarf, her blue eyes wild with fear.

Vanessa said, “If you promise to be quiet and not scream or shout at me anymore, I’ll remove the scarf.”

Her mother nodded her head rapidly up and down.

Vanessa reached around her and loosened the scarf. Pulling it free, she wound it carefully around her own throat, arranging the ends over the front of her shirt in a fetching way. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror and rearranged the scarf slightly. “And if you promise to stay here in the bedroom and not come out until I say it’s time, I’ll untie you.” Again her mother nodded, and Vanessa released the woman’s hands and feet and left the room, carrying the pieces of rope in her hands.

MILES AWAY, FLYING ON A NORTHEASTERLY HEADING, JORDAN Groves put the Reserve behind him and crossed above country villages and farms tucked into the valleys and clustered alongside the curling north-flowing streams. Shining in the distance, with the Green Mountains of Vermont humped up at the far horizon, was Lake Champlain, a glacial lake fourteen miles wide and one hundred twenty-five miles long — open water all the way to Quebec. Jordan was not ready to return home yet; to place himself in the bosom of his family again; to become the husband and father he had been this morning, before he backed his car from the garage and turned and discovered in the passenger’s seat the green Chinese jar with the ashes of the late Dr. Cole inside. He was not ready to let go of Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He wanted to get away from her and everything associated with her — the Reserve, the Tamarack Club, the Second Lake, her father’s camp, the people she came from and the people she ran with. But he did not want to let her go.

Yesterday’s Canadian front with its blowzy raw wind and rain had passed off to the southeast. The cloudless sky was deep blue, the temperature in the low sixties, even at altitude, and the forest a rich green blanket running all the way from the Reserve down to the pale, newly mown fields of the lakeside farms. A steady five-knot wind blew back from the direction the front had taken. No gusts. Perfect flying weather. He saw a hawk carving spirals in the air several hundred feet below him. A black Model T Ford like the one he owned the year he and Alicia first moved up from New York City crawled along the dirt road between the iron-mining village of Moriah and the lakeside shipping town of Port Henry.

At the southern end of the lake, he banked left, and cruised in a northerly direction over the bare bluffs of Crown Point and made his way along the scalloped western shoreline. Tiny white triangular sails dotted the dark blue waters and clustered in the coves and marinas of Port Henry and, a few miles farther north, the towns of Westport and Essex. Halfway across the lake a ferryboat the shape and, from this distance, the size of a shoe box made its slow way from New York state to Vermont. Off to his right a rocky islet no larger than a barn rose, as if from the deep, covered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds — swarms of gulls and petrels and loons. Jordan circled the rookery, wonder struck by its abundance, and when his gaze returned to the open water ahead, he looked up and was startled by what he saw. It was at least two miles away and a thousand feet above the surface of the lake — an enormous, round, silver object that appeared to be coming steadily toward him from the direction of Canada.

It was an aircraft — a dirigible, he quickly realized. One of those huge new zeppelins from Germany he’d been reading about. They fascinated him, and he’d been trying to figure a way to make a picture of one, a painting or even an etching that captured the enormity of the thing, without having to portray it tethered to the ground with tiny human beings standing nearby to show scale. He wanted to picture it in flight, nothing surrounding it but clouds and sky, the largest machine in the world. He swung off to the port side, out of the path of the oncoming monster, and cut his speed and dropped altitude for a better view as it approached. There were only two of these gargantuan aircraft in existence, the Graf Zeppelin , which kept to the European and South American routes, and the Hindenburg , which crossed the North Atlantic from Frankfurt to Lakehurst, New Jersey, by way of Montreal. For months, he had been hoping to catch sight of it, but, up to now, whenever the Hindenburg passed through the region, he had learned of it too late, days afterward, from the local newspapers or from a neighbor who was lucky enough to have been at Lake Champlain when the great shining airship plowed through the blue Adirondack sky. It was exciting to have caught sight of it, and what a break, he thought, to see the damned thing from the air!

It was enormous, over eight hundred feet long and shaped like a gigantic bomb. It was one hundred thirty-five feet in diameter, he remembered reading. Despite its incredible size and its speed, which Jordan estimated at eighty miles per hour, it seemed more animal than mechanical as it moved implacably through the air, more a living creature from another age than a twentieth-century man-made flying machine. He remembered a few more of its specifications — that it was powered by four huge 1,200 horsepower Mercedes-Benz engines, and that it was filled with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen. The airship was fitted out with formal dining rooms, lounges, luxurious staterooms, promenades, and even a smoking room, all located inside its shining hull instead of in an external gondola, as with conventional dirigibles. And he knew a little of its history — that the Zeppelin Company, threatened with bankruptcy, had accepted financial backing from the Nazi party. The United States was the only reliable source in the world for nonflammable helium, but Congress, mildly anxious over the rise of the Nazis, had forbade the sale of the gas to the Germans, forcing the Zeppelin Company to fill its airships instead with hydrogen. The Hindenburg had been fireproofed, he’d read, but even so, hydrogen was flammable, and this somehow made the dirigible all the more dangerously attractive to Jordan, all the more a living thing.

He drew close to the airship. Keeping several hundred yards off its starboard side, so as to avoid its powerful wash and wake, he flew his airplane along its length, a sixth of a mile. He was stunned by the sheer size of the machine. Stunned and moved. Its very scale was beautiful to Jordan, like a Greenland glacier seen for the first time — a thing too big for human beings to imagine, but, for all that, a natural and perfected part of the world that humans inhabit. Passengers peered from the windows and waved as he passed, and from the open cockpit of his tiny Waco biplane he waved back.