Russell Banks - The Reserve

But then she stopped smiling. No, she thought, nothing good or useful could come of what she had done. The undeniable truth was that her husband, her marriage, had used her badly, and she had rebelled against that abuse by convincing herself that she had fallen in love with Hubert St. Germain so that she could commit adultery with him. She had used Hubert as badly as her husband had used her. But that was not the problem she faced now. That was merely the truth. The problem she faced now was that except for her children she was alone in the world. Her marriage was ruined, and the man for whom she had ruined it was not a man she could love and live with. Hubert St. Germain, the guide, the man of the woods, a taciturn, stoical, mildly sensual man, a man who had let her be his envelope, his perfect companion and lover: Hubert St. Germain was dull and unimaginative and provincial. She saw clearly for the first time that he was not capable of knowing who she was. And he was not ignorant enough to pass for innocent. She might have learned to love him if he had been innocent. She had brought down on herself an unexpected darkness, and she could not blame him, and she could not blame her husband. She could only blame herself, and that did not matter, because it did not change anything.

What will she do now with the rest of her days? She knows the answer. She will raise her sons, and when they become men she will cling to them and want to ask constantly of them if they love her, but she will hold her tongue. Instead, over and over she will ask herself, and now and again will dare to ask her sons, if she did badly by them, and they will sigh and reassure her one more time that she did not do badly by them and they are grateful. She will not ask them if she had been wrong to betray their father after he had so many times betrayed her, because they will never know of that. Their father will have died in Spain in April 1937. Shot down by the Fascists. In their eyes and in the eyes of most of the western world who cared about that war or cared about art or both, he will have died a hero. Only Alicia, his widow, will know what took him to Spain in the first place, and even she won’t know the whole story.

From the long veranda of the clubhouse, Hubert watched her drive away. She had not seen him, he knew. Then he heard the distant rattle of an airplane engine, Jordan Groves’s airplane flying from the Second Lake over the Carry and the First Lake, tracing the lane to the clubhouse, and there it was in the night sky, bringing Vanessa Cole in from the Reserve. The plane flew low across the clubhouse grounds, as if it bore a load that was too heavy for it and was struggling to gain altitude. And then, as it passed beyond the clubhouse grounds, it rose up and over the tall trees and soared into the dark sky, aiming for the notch between the two mountains in the east, Goliath and Sentinel. The airplane was quickly gone from sight, and a few seconds later Hubert could no longer hear it.

Slowly, he stepped down from the porch and walked around the clubhouse to the back of the building and headed for the parking lot where he had left his truck. As he neared the truck, he saw the same fireflies dancing over the dark meadow that Alicia had seen, and at first for a moment his heart, like hers, filled with freshened gladness. I will see her again, he thought. He was sure of it. And it will be very soon, he thought, and in time we will marry, and someday we will have a child of our own.

But when he got into his truck and closed the door and sat there for a moment in the silent dark, suddenly, without reasoning his way to it, he realized that he was a fool. A goddamned fool! What had he been thinking! He felt his face heat up from embarrassment. It was ridiculous even to hope that he and Alicia would marry and have a child together. Ridiculous and arrogant. He did not know what was in Alicia’s mind or heart; he couldn’t. Any more than she knew what was in his. All she knew of his mind and heart was what he had been able to show her of himself. And very little of what he had shown her corresponded to who he really was. He knew it was the same for her. For months it had been as if they were both asleep and dreaming each other into existence, and now they were awake. Or at least he was. He did not know if she was awake yet or still dreaming. He couldn’t. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. It didn’t really matter. He would not see her again, except at a distance, and when he did catch sight of her he would immediately retreat or change direction so that they could not meet. Hubert St. Germain will live alone in his cabin until a very old age, and he will become legendary. A guide of the old school, people will say, a gruff throwback to an earlier era when the Adirondack guides were viewed as true woodsmen. Those who knew Hubert St. Germain when he was young will say that he was one of those twentieth-century men who resembled in every way the first Europeans to enter this vast, unsettled forest, men who learned from the Indians how to hunt and trap the beasts that lived here, men who marked the steep, switchbacking trails to the mountaintops and crossed the lakes in their guide boats and descended the rivers and streams that tumbled from the icy headwaters to the mighty Hudson River in the south and the broad St. Lawrence in the north. Those men were the true Adirondack guides. They were not the mere caretakers of the grand old summer camps and the servants of the members of the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.

The author wishes to thank his assistant, Nancy Wilson, for her invaluable help with research. The author also wishes to thank his friends, who happen to be his neighbors, Charlie Segard and Tom Smith, for the flying lessons.

RUSSELL BANKSis the founding president of Cities of Refuge North America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He lives in upstate New York and is the New York State Author.

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