Russell Banks - The Reserve

Hubert walked up and down the aisles of the store, followed by Kenny Shay, the owner’s son, who carried the items the guide selected back to the counter and stacked them there — tinned beef, bacon, eggs, cheese, oatmeal, spaghetti, bread, butter, canned vegetables and fruit, sugar, and condensed milk, and hard goods, too, like candles and kerosene and soap — a long list of supplies that Hubert would lug into the lakes on his back and take across to the camp in his guide boat, where he knew Vanessa and her mother would need him to cut enough firewood to last them two weeks or longer. No doubt he would have to make some small repairs on the place as well, and, depending on their mood, he might have to go back to the clubhouse and bring in fifty pounds of ice from the icehouse and before dark catch them a pack basket full of trout and clean the fish for them, cooking a half dozen tonight and putting the rest on ice. He would not get home until late. But it was work for which he would be fairly paid, according to his old agreement with Dr. Cole, and there was no other paying work anywhere in the region for him right now, not without taking away the job of one of the other guides. Still, he was not looking forward to doing it.

AS VANESSA NEARED THE CAMP, THE PACE OF HER ROWING picked up. She glanced over her shoulder at the shore, looking to avoid the rocky outcrop that extended into the water on either side of the landing, then scanned the deck and grounds, hoping for a few seconds that somehow she had hallucinated this or dreamed it, all of it, and she would see her mother and maybe even her father standing on the deck, dressed for dinner, cocktails in hand, anxiously awaiting her return. Ever since the meeting in New York at the lawyer’s office, Vanessa had felt that she was having one of those frightening dreams with no beginning or end, where you know you’re dreaming — you must be, because everything is out of control and unpredictable, and you feel guilty of some dark, unnamed crime — but you’re unable to wake from it.

She prayed that she would wake from this dream. And then she did. Her mother sat gracefully on the hull of an overturned guide boat, her barefoot legs crossed at the ankles. She sipped champagne from a crystal flute. She wore a simple gold bracelet on her wrist. From her distance, Vanessa admired her mother’s gentle, slightly dreamy poise, the way she looked down at the rocky shoreline as if she were remembering something privately amusing, and Vanessa decided that it was the dress that made her look so lovely, a cream-colored, low-necked, beltless frock by Muriel King that hung straight from the shoulders. It was the dress, but even more it was the unselfconscious privacy of her thoughts. What a beautiful woman, Vanessa said to herself. I will look that beautiful someday. I will know how to dress like that someday. I will know how to have thoughts like that someday. Then she saw her father. He was standing on the deck. He was dressed for dinner. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he was rocking ever so slightly on his heels, looking with pride and good-natured satisfaction at his wife down at the shore, as if he had created her, a painting or a photograph he had made. There was nothing impatient about him, nothing distracted — he had taken a moment to stop and look fondly and with profound appreciation at his wife without her knowing or posing or worrying about pleasing him.

But the deck was deserted, there was no one at the shore, there was not even a guide boat, and there was no one walking among the tall pines that surrounded the camp. She had not been dreaming. Her father was dead. And she had indeed committed a dark, unnameable crime. For the first time since forcing her mother to Rangeview and imprisoning her there, Vanessa was truly terrified of what she had done.

Up to this moment, whenever she saw what she had done, she had justified it to herself, rationalizing her rash acts, telling herself that she had no choice, none, they had trapped her, Mother and the lawyers and the doctors, and now they wanted to put her in a cage and keep her there for the rest of her life. Or worse. Those were facts. Everything else was speculation or memory, febrile and unreliable. Since childhood, Vanessa had felt trapped by her parents, as if they were predators and she their intended prey — trapped and then put in a cage for later, when they would have the time and occasion to devour her properly. As a small child, Vanessa could not listen to those old fairy tales being read to her without crying and begging whoever was reading to stop, stop. Those old stories of children put into ovens by stepmothers and wicked witches. Children climbing sky-high bean stalks to the giant’s lair. Children being led by a piper into a mountain cave, never to be seen again. They terrified Vanessa. She could not bear to say or even hear nursery rhymes without feeling her chest tighten and her legs go all watery, making her cry to her nanny Hilda or to the child reciting the rhyme, “Stop! Stop saying that! I hate that! It’s nasty and scary. You’re only doing it to scare me!”

People — her nanny Hilda and the babysitters, other children and their parents, and her own parents and their friends — were impressed by Vanessa’s exquisite sensitivity and smiled down at her and praised it, as if she were the most delicate flower of all and therefore the most precious. But she knew, even as a very young girl of five and six, that her inability to listen to the fairy tales and nursery rhymes that other children loved had its origin someplace else, because the tales and verses made her feel the way she felt when she almost remembered being naked and lifted high in the air by a big man and placed up on the fireplace mantel with a scary hot fire burning below, the big man turning into her father, who disappeared suddenly behind his camera box, covering himself with a black hood, when something made a whooshing sound and a flash of light so bright that for a few seconds she couldn’t see anything and only knew that she was being lifted again by a big man and carried to a sofa that was hard and scratchy on her bare bottom and back, where she was placed just so, her naked legs and arms arranged just so, her head turned just so. She remembered the diamond shapes in the carpet on the floor, dark red against a field of green. And then another whooshing sound and flash of light that made her close her eyes tight, and she kept them closed tight, clenching them like fists, wrinkling up her nose and crinkling her forehead, making herself ugly, until her father carried her to her crib, where he put her nightie back on her and kissed her on the cheek. And then her mother, led to the crib by her father, leaned down and stroked Vanessa’s hair slowly, dreamily, with eyes half closed, smiling, as if she’d never felt anything so soft and lovely before.

At her father’s funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, when it was Vanessa’s turn to speak, she started to talk about what her father was like as a young man, before he went off to war, when she was the very little girl that Dr. and Mrs. Cole had recently adopted, but somehow she got away from what she’d planned to say. She had meant to describe him as heroic and wise and all-knowing, the way little girls are supposed to remember their fathers, but instead she found herself describing him the way she actually remembered him. She said that he was cold and detached and that he saw people, including his own daughter, as objects to be examined and cut open and repaired, as a thing to be photographed and privately exhibited for his exclusive, secret pleasure. What began as a loving daughter’s eulogy ended as a turgid, blurred accusation that so upset everyone that afterward no one would speak to her. Until the morning two weeks later when her mother announced that she had scheduled a meeting for that afternoon with Whitney Brodhead to discuss her father’s will. When they entered the lawyer’s conference room and Vanessa saw Mr. Brodhead seated at the head of the long table with a sheaf of papers spread before him and Dr. Reichold standing at the rain-sopped window looking down at the street, Vanessa knew that she was just as trapped now as she had been all those years ago, lifted into the air by a big man and placed naked up on the mantel with the fire burning somewhere below, and her father, behind the camera box and hidden under his black cloak, saying, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again….”