Russell Banks - The Reserve

But she was not cured. Dr. Theobold confided to his assistant, Dr. Reichold, that the girl was probably incurable, at least by conventional means. He would not be surprised if before long she was back. Within weeks of taking up residence in her parents’ apartment, she was arrested at the Carlyle Hotel for refusing to leave the hallway outside the penthouse suite where her ex-husband, Count Von Heidenstamm, lived when in New York. The count, who had recently remarried, was in Monte Carlo on his honeymoon. Though there was no reason to think the newlyweds would return for months and the nickel-plated revolver found in her purse suggested otherwise, Vanessa insisted to the police that she only wanted to be there to congratulate the couple when they returned to New York.

Days later, she wrecked her father’s Packard in Westport, Connecticut, driving home drunk at 3:00 A.M. from a party, given by the members of a secret society at Yale, where she had been the only female guest. She was arrested and spent the rest of the night in jail. The following morning Dr. Cole rushed by train to Westport. He posted bail for his daughter, purchased a replacement Packard, and drove her back to New York, relieved to learn that the party had been given by Wolf’s Head, not Skull and Bones.

She told her friends and her parents and their friends and a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune that she had been asked by the American Olympic Committee to solo all forty-four national anthems in their native tongues at the upcoming winter Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, after which she would be doing a series of programs for the BBC on the “New American Opera.” Later, she attributed her absence at the winter games to the Nazi party’s insistence on having a German operatic soprano sing the national anthems. The BBC series, she claimed, was canceled when it was learned that Vanessa had once been a friend of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée whose attachment to the new king Edward VIII was scandalizing all Britain. “Attractive American women need not apply,” she explained.

At the Stork Club one night she told Walter Winchell that she was sleeping with Ernest Hemingway and had been invited to join him on safari in Kenya, and Winchell reported it in his column the following day, although he did not reveal her name or Hemingway’s, merely referring to her as a “Gorgeous Gotham Gadabout” and the author as a “Titan of the Typewriter.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, there’s nothing to it,” Vanessa said when her parents challenged her on these and other outlandish stories. “It’s only a goddamn joke. I’m tweaking their noses, that’s all. Giving bored people something interesting to talk about.”

But her dangerous, erratic behavior and wild exaggerations and outright lies kept Dr. and Mrs. Cole in a state of constant anxiety and dread — which did not altogether displease Vanessa. She enjoyed keeping them in that state. Consequently, when after a few months her parents began to ignore her reckless and threatening ways, as if they’d grown accustomed to them, she would suddenly turn into the good daughter again — a calm, lucid, sociable, and controlled young woman of the world. Soon the three Coles, father, mother, and daughter, were seen going out to dinner together again, spending weekends at the house in Tuxedo Park, entertaining friends and colleagues and distinguished New Yorkers from the worlds of art, medicine, and commerce at their apartment, and in early July heading north to the Adirondack wilderness for the annual Independence Day gathering of ’08 Bonesmen and their families at Rangeview, the Cole camp on the Second Tamarack Lake.

But as soon as her parents appeared content, Vanessa found a new way to alarm or, better yet, embarrass them. Flying off in a seaplane that Fourth of July night with the artist Jordan Groves was hardly alarming to them and certainly was not embarrassing, but it may have raised Dr. Cole’s blood pressure sufficiently to have contributed to his fatal heart attack. And when, five days later, at his funeral in Greenwich, Connecticut, Vanessa delivered an oration over his ashes that scandalized her mother and everyone else who had ever loved and admired Dr. Cole — a strange, tangled account of her relationship with her father, suggesting, but not stating explicitly, that when she was a little girl he had sexually abused her — her mother was both sufficiently alarmed and embarrassed that, after consulting Whitney Brodhead, the family attorney, and exchanging a series of cables with Dr. Theobold, she decided that she had no choice but to have Vanessa institutionalized a second time.

It took Evelyn Cole most of two weeks to make the arrangements. Finally, under the pretense of meeting at the Wall Street offices of Brodhead, Stevens, and Wyse to discuss Dr. Cole’s will, and in the presence of Whitney Brodhead and Dr. Otto Reichold, Dr. Theobold’s nice young assistant, Evelyn Cole informed her daughter, Vanessa, that she had become a danger to herself and others. The necessary papers had already been drawn up, she said. She hoped that Vanessa would see the wisdom and necessity of this decision and would cooperate.

Vanessa sat back in the leather chair and sighed heavily and closed her eyes. Her mother reached across from the chair beside her and patted her hand. No one said a word. The large, dim conference room was decorated with portraits of the firm’s founders and furnished with oak tables, glass-fronted bookcases filled with law books, heavy leather-upholstered chairs, standing ashtrays, and a tufted leather sofa with gleaming brass trim. The only sound was the loud ticktock of the antique, burled-maple clock posted by the door.

Dr. Reichold, flaxen haired, handsome, sturdy, stood by the window on the other side of the room. He slowly filled his pipe with tobacco from a small round leather pouch and looked down from the tall window at the bowlers and umbrellas of the lunch-time throng of pedestrians ten floors below. He was eager to get home to Zurich, but if the girl did not go along willingly and sign the commitment papers, if she resisted, then the mother might want to take the case to court, which Dr. Theobold had instructed him to avoid at all costs. The institute was not recognized in the United States as a legally licensed mental institution; no American court would approve of sending Vanessa to Zurich against her will. And Dr. Theobold did not want the girl committed to one of those terrible American lunatic asylums where, he wrote to Mrs. Cole, she would be driven to suicide. If anyone was going to cure the daughter of Dr. Carter Cole, it would be he, Dr. Gunther Theobold.

“Don’t you think it would be nice and okay for enjoying the autumn in Zurich, Vanessa?” Dr. Reichold said.

Seated at the end of the long conference table with a sheaf of papers in front of him, Mr. Brodhead, round as a medicine ball and hairless except for a curling shoal above his ears and a thick white mustache, scrutinized his navy blue pin-striped lapel and plucked a tiny white hair from it and set it carefully to the side, as if saving it for later. “It’s really for the best, Vanessa,” the attorney said without looking at her. An unpleasant piece of business, this. He hoped it would end quickly, without a scene. He hated scenes, especially when significant family estates were involved.

Vanessa opened her large blue eyes, and they were filled with tears. She said to her mother, “I suppose you have everything ready for me to sign. Like last time.”

“Yes, dear. It’s really only a formality.”

“‘Only a formality.’”

“Essentially, all we’re doing here is giving your mother power of attorney while you’re in the care of Dr. Theobold,” Mr. Brodhead said. “And naming your mother, myself, and U. S. Trust as executors of the several trust funds established for you by your grandparents and your late father. And, of course, a statement certifying that you’re putting yourself in Dr. Theobold’s care of your own free will, et cetera.”