Russell Banks - The Reserve

Flying along the river, he glanced ahead and saw the Clarkson farm coming up on his right, and then he saw what appeared to be his own car stopped at the lane that led up Beede Mountain to where Hubert St. Germain had built his cabin. He banked hard to the right and circled back over the mountain and the guide’s log cabin and down, and, yes, it was his own black ’34 Ford sedan all right, and there was Alicia standing beside the mailbox posted at the side of the road, and she turned and gazed up at him as he flew low and passed overhead. He banked left, crossing over the river, and circled back a second time, dropping the airplane down to just under a thousand feet, and when he flew over Alicia, who stood by the car now with the driver’s door open, he leaned from the cockpit and waved to her, and Alicia, looking sad and lonely even from this distance, slowly, almost hesitantly, as if she wasn’t sure who he was, waved back.

And then he was gone, homeward bound, thinking, No, not this time. No more journeys. No more months away from Alicia and the boys, traveling to exotic, far-flung lands, living like the natives among the natives in order to reinvent himself and coming back to tell the world how he had done it and whom he had done it with and what it was like there. The Greenland book would have to remain unfinished, and any future books would be about his life in the Adirondacks in the bosom of his family. From now on he would find his inspiration at home. And any solitary reinventing he did would be done in daylight, inside his studio.

A few moments of following the Tamarack River, and then he was above the fork where it joined the Bouquet River and doubled its width and depth, and he had entered the township of Petersburg and could see among the distant trees the chimneys and the black-shingled roof of his house. He began his descent, and for the first time in nearly a week he thought again about the war in Spain and the fight to save the republic from the Fascists, for that week the republic had begun issuing arms to civilians in Madrid, and when the airplane touched down and the pontoons sprayed high fantails of water behind it, Jordan Groves brought back to his mind the American men who were signing up for the Lincoln Brigade, many of them his friends and longtime political allies, and for a few seconds, as he taxied along the riverbank and brought the airplane up to the hangar ramp, he envied those men. But when he looked over to the side yard where the girl, Frances Jacques, was pushing Bear on the tire swing that hung from a high branch of the big oak, while Wolf at her side patiently waited his turn, the artist all at once ceased to envy the men who were enlisting to fight Fascism in Spain, and he concentrated instead on the promises he would make to his wife tonight. This time he would change his life right here at home. The war in Spain would have to be fought without him.

IN TOWN, HUBERT ST. GERMAIN SLOWED AND PARKED IN FRONT of Shay’s General Store and watched Vanessa Cole’s Packard continue on, speeding past the roadside lines of towering elms, headed for the clubhouse, where she would leave her car and walk the mile-long trail into the First Lake. It was a simple but somewhat arduous way to get from what passed for civilization to what passed for wilderness. You needed to be fit enough to make the hike into the boathouse at the First Lake, row a mile and a half across it to the Carry, where you took a different guide boat and rowed two more miles to the camp. In his shirt pocket Hubert had the list of supplies that Vanessa had written out for him at his cabin. It will take two trips, he thought, studying the list. Maybe three. He’d try to lug half the supplies in this afternoon, mostly the food, and bring in the rest tomorrow.

It looked from the list that she was planning to stay awhile, at least two weeks. Or even longer, she had implied, telling him to check at the clubhouse on the first of August, where, if she decided to stay on, she would leave a new list with Mr. Kendall. Hubert was not to come out to the camp unless she arranged for it beforehand. She wanted to be alone with her mother to share their grief over the tragic loss of her father at Rangeview, the one spot on earth that was sacred to him. Although Hubert did not think that the death of Dr. Cole was particularly tragic — Dr. Cole had enjoyed a good long life, after all, and his heart attack had killed him quickly — he was just as happy to stay away from the two women, so long as they didn’t need him for anything specific, because otherwise they tended to turn him into a generalized servant, a rustic houseboy, expecting him to stay out there at the camp and do for them all sorts of things that they could easily do themselves, without adding anything to the monthly retainer they paid him.

Dr. Cole had always been more respectful of the guide than his wife and daughter were, more aware that the guides and caretakers were specialists whose wilderness skills and knowledge, handed down over generations, had taken many years to acquire. In some ways, Dr. Cole was like Alicia, Hubert thought. They both enjoyed having him teach them as much as he could of what he knew and they did not — the names of the native flowers and plants and insects and the habits of the animals and the fish and the birds. They both wanted him to tell them who in town was related to whom and how. They even wanted to learn the histories of the houses and farms of Tunbridge and who had once owned the land. Dr. Cole had treated Hubert St. Germain as an equal, when, of course, in the eyes of the world he was not the doctor’s equal. No, the death of Dr. Cole by heart attack was not tragic. But Hubert would miss him nonetheless. Especially since from now on he would have to deal directly with the wife and the daughter.

It was not clear to him what Vanessa Cole had concluded back there at the cabin, but it was enough that she suspected he and Alicia were lovers. They would have to keep from seeing each other for at least as long as Vanessa Cole stayed at the camp. When she left the Reserve and returned to the city, he and Alicia could take the measure of any damage done and decide what to do then. But he knew they could not be together again the way they had been before.

In any event, he decided, until Vanessa Cole was gone from the Reserve, they would not be able to meet as they had. He was unsure of how to communicate this decision to Alicia. He did not want to write her a letter. He and Alicia had communicated only in person, never in writing. From the beginning, he had simply counted on her appearing at the door of his cabin three afternoons a week, except for when he was up at the lakes. All spring and into the summer, over and over again, she had knocked softly on his door and entered his life, making it seem suddenly large to him and precious and exciting. Before then it had felt small, nearly worthless, dull. And sorrowful. And lonely. Which was how it would have to be now, for a month, perhaps longer, possibly forever — depending on what Vanessa Cole did with her suspicions.

That’s all they were, though — suspicions. What could Vanessa Cole care if her hired guide and caretaker was having a love affair with a woman who happened to be the wife of a man she barely knew? The artist Jordan Groves wasn’t part of the Coles’ circle; he wasn’t even allowed on the Reserve or at the clubhouse, not since he’d landed his airplane at the lake and had that fight with Kendall. Also, Hubert had heard that Vanessa Cole was angry with the artist for flying her up to Bream Pond on the Fourth of July, the same night her father died, and leaving her there to walk back alone. If she was still angry with him, then she’d probably enjoy suspecting that the artist’s wife was sleeping with her family’s hired guide and caretaker. She’d like that. She wouldn’t want to do anything that helped end the affair. She’d want to keep her suspicions to herself.