Russell Banks - The Reserve

Toward the aft of the airship, where the hull narrowed slightly, four gigantic fins emerged, a dorsal fin and a fin on either side and a keel-like fin from the belly, and as Jordan flew past them he saw the enormous red-and-black swastikas emblazoned on the fins. He had not expected that. At once the zeppelin lost all its beauty. It became an ugly thing. He peeled sharply away from the airship, cut speed, and dropped down toward the surface of the lake, heading slowly, as if with shoulders hunched, for the shoreline, where he flew up and over the low wooded hills and put his airplane on a heading toward home.

The man ordered breakfast at the Hauptbahnhof restaurant for the young woman, and when she had been served, he left her alone at the railroad station and arranged to have her trunk and her two Mark Cross suitcases sent by taxi to the Frankfurter Hof hotel. She was to present her passport and her ticket at the hotel later in the afternoon and retrieve her luggage after it had been thoroughly inspected by the officials of the Zeppelin Company. They are very much afraid of sabotage, the man explained. For the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon, the two behaved as tourists, visiting the Museumsufer along the embankment of the river Main and the Palmengarten and St. Bartholomew’s Gothic cathedral. The man seemed to enjoy explaining the history and importance of the sites to the woman, in spite of her apparent lack of interest or curiosity. At 4:00 P.M. they arrived by taxi at the Frankfurter Hof and were directed to the main dining room, which had been commandeered by the Zeppelin Company. The room was crowded with the thirty-eight other passengers and numerous family members and friends, all carefully watched by Waffen SS men. The SS men stood in pairs at parade rest along the four sides of the dining room, while Zeppelin security officers in dark blue uniforms weighed luggage and purses and briefcases, then opened and examined the contents of each piece. A line was forming before a long table at the farther end of the room, where an inspector collected the passengers’ matches, cigarette lighters, batteries, flashlights, even photographic equipment and flashbulbs. A second inspector placed the items into small cloth bags tagged with the owner’s name. The passengers were assured that when the trip was over their property would be returned. They could keep the bag as a souvenir. One of the passengers, a very short, compact American man with black dyed hair that came to a point at his forehead, was arguing with the inspector. He clutched a package the size of a shoe box and did not wish to submit it for examination. I had it specially wrapped! the man protested. Two of the SS officers came forward and stood behind the inspector, and the American gave in with no further argument. The inspector removed the bright wrapping paper, taking care not to rip it, and opened the box. Inside was a Dresden china doll. It’s for my daughter, the American said. One of the SS officers stepped forward and removed the doll from the box and put it through the X-ray machine and returned with it. The inspector took the doll from the officer, lifted the dress, and smiled. It’s a girl, dummkopf, the American said. So I see, the inspector said and handed the doll back. The young woman in the plain brown suit and black hat and veil had watched the argument and the examination of the doll, and the man accompanying the woman had watched her. He took her purse from her and placed it on the table. We must hurry, he said. Soon the buses will come to take everyone to the hangar for the departure. She asked him if he had seen the doll. He nodded yes. She was pretty, wasn’t she? the woman said. Yes, very pretty, he said, and, taking her by the arm, he moved her down the table, away from the man with the doll.

VANESSA’S MOTHER, EVELYN COLE, HAD LONG FEARED THAT her daughter was insane, but Dr. Cole would not hear of it. For years they had fought over whether to have Vanessa committed: Mrs. Cole arguing that it would save not only their daughter’s life but their marriage as well; Dr. Cole insisting that Vanessa’s periodic threats and occasional attempts to kill herself and her wildly reckless behavior — the flagrant sexual involvements with married men, the arrests for public lewdness, the spending binges on clothes and jewelry and the shoplifting that often accompanied them, the drug and alcohol abuse, even the two sudden elopements and the divorces that quickly followed — were high drama designed mainly to gain attention.

“Attention from whom ?” Evelyn would angrily demand.

“From us,” he would say. And sigh, “Mainly from me, I suppose,” confessing once again that he had failed Vanessa when she was a child, that he had been consumed in those years by his work and consequently had neglected his daughter. “Though she’s brilliant and talented, a trained musician and actress, and a gifted writer, too, if she wanted to apply herself to it, mentally she’s still a child,” he explained to practically anyone who would listen, but especially, when they were alone, to his wife, who seemed determined to blame Vanessa’s behavior on Vanessa herself.

As if invoking a higher authority, he would say to her, “People who are deprived of certain emotional necessities in childhood often remain stuck there.” And then confessing yet again, as if it gave him hope, “When she was very young, I was mostly absent, physically and emotionally. Even you know that. Then, during the war, when she was only eleven and twelve, I was off in France and left her in your care. And you, my dear, were often ill yourself. You were drinking heavily then, as you’ll recall. No, the servants raised our daughter. We were both off in our separate worlds. And you know it, and I know it. Nannies and housekeepers and babysitters raised Vanessa. First servants and then boarding school headmistresses and then college deans. And now there’s no one left to raise her but us. And because she’s an adult, it’s too late. The difference between you and me is that you won’t admit it. We reap what we sow, Evelyn.”

But he insisted that he did not blame his wife; he blamed himself. Dr. Cole was not one to shrug off responsibility. Evelyn, as he liked to say, had her own problems, of which alcohol was only one. As a young woman in her twenties and thirties, Evelyn Cole had suffered from what was called nervous exhaustion and was subject to fainting spells and long periods of lassitude and depression, hypochondria and extreme mood swings, which her husband, the doctor, treated with small doses of paregoric and other drugs, and she treated with gin. It wasn’t until four years ago when she was approaching fifty and on an extended European family vacation and could not stop weeping and could not leave her Zurich hotel room that she put herself in the care of Dr. Gunther Theobold, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst, who took her off all forms of medication, including alcohol. It was he who finally convinced Dr. Cole that Mrs. Cole was correct. For their sake and hers, he told them, their daughter should be institutionalized. “Not confined like a prisoner, but psychoanalyzed. She will of course be required to reside at the institute for at least a year,” he explained.

Dr. Cole warned Dr. Theobold that Vanessa’s accounts of her childhood would doubtless sound bizarre and were likely to be wholly invented, but the psychoanalyst smiled and said that he had been told all kinds of fairy tales and listened not for the facts but for the truth. “When the patient learns the truth, the emotional truth, she will be freed of her delusions and will cease the behavior that has been based on those delusions.” They followed his advice and committed her then and there to the Theobold Institute, where Vanessa was indeed confined, kept behind high brick walls until, after meeting with her daily for thirteen months, Dr. Theobold pronounced her cured, no longer a danger to herself or others, and sent her home to New York, bearing what she said were the manuscripts of a surrealist novel and a Shakespearean sonnet sequence that she had written at the institute.