The Reserve
Authors: Russell Banks
A Novel
For Chase, the Beloved
I am beautiful as a dream of stone.
—BAUDELAIRE
W
HEN FINALLY NO ONE WAS WATCHING HER ANYMORE, THE
beautiful young woman extracted herself from her parents and their friends and left the living room. She passed through the screened porch and crossed the deck and barefoot walked softly over the pine needles in front of the sprawling log building downhill toward the sheared ledges along the edge of the lake.
She knew that shortly the others would notice, not that Vanessa had left her father’s party, but that the light in the room had suddenly faded, and though it was still late afternoon and not yet dusk, they would see that the sun, because of the looming proximity of the Great Range, was about to slip behind the mountains. The Second Tamarack Lake was deep and long and narrow, like a Norwegian fiord, scraped by glaciers out of the north-and south-running Great Range of steep, granitic mountains, and the view from the eastern shore of the Second Lake at this hour in high summer was famous. Most of the group would take their freshened drinks in hand and, following Vanessa, would stroll from the living room down to the shore to watch the brassy edges of the clouds turn to molten gold, and then, turning their backs to the sky and lake, to compliment the way the pine and spruce woods on the slopes behind the camp shifted in the dwindling alpenglow from blue-green to rose and from rose to lavender, as if merely observing the phenomenon helped cause it.
After a few moments, when the alpenglow had faded, they would turn again and gaze at the lake and admire in silence the smooth surface of the water shimmering in metallic light reflected off the burnished clouds. And then at last they would notice Vanessa Cole standing alone on one of the tipped ledges that slipped into the water just beyond the gravelly beach. With her long, narrow back to her parents and their friends, her fingertips raised and barely touching the sides of her slender, pale, uplifted throat, Vanessa, gazing in dark and lonely Nordic thoughtfulness into the whole vast enclosed space between lake and forest and mountain and sky, would seem to be situated at the exact center of the wilderness, its very locus, the only meaningful point of it. For her parents and their friends, for an interesting moment, the drama of the disappearing sun would be Vanessa Cole’s.
There were nine people at the party, Dr. Cole’s 1936 annual Fourth of July celebration at the Second Lake—Vanessa and her parents, Carter and Evelyn Cole; Red Ralston and his wife, Adele; Harry and Jennifer Armstrong; and Bunny and Celia Tinsdale. The men had been classmates at Yale, Skull and Bones, class of 1908. Their wives, respectively, had gone to Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Mount Holyoke. All four couples had married young and had in their twenties borne their children, and their children, except for Vanessa, had in turn done the same. During the previous decades the men had made a great deal of money buying and selling stocks and bonds and real estate and from the practice of their professions—Dr. Cole was an internationally renowned, if somewhat controversial, brain surgeon; Red Ralston, Vanessa’s godfather, was a corporate lawyer who specialized in bankruptcies; Harry Armstrong owned a company that manufactured automobile tires; Bunny Tinsdale ran his father’s steel company—and husbands and wives both were old enough now to have found
themselves in the process of inheriting homes and family fortunes from their dying parents. They and their parents and their children and grandchildren had not been much affected by the Great Depression.
Every year on the Fourth of July—other than during the war years, when Dr. Cole and Bunny Tinsdale were army officers stationed in France—the four families gathered together here at Rangeview, the Cole family’s Adirondack camp, to drink and fish and hike in rustic splendor and to celebrate their loyalties to one another, to their families, and to their nation. This year, except for Vanessa, all the children and grandchildren were spending the holiday elsewhere—on islands, as someone in the group had noticed, Mount Desert Isle, Long Island’s North Shore, Martha’s Vineyard—which had somewhat diminished the occasion in importance and intensity, although no one said as much. They acted as if the absence of their offspring were both desired by them and planned and were not, as it appeared, a changing of the guard. The Coles so far had no grandchildren. Their only child, Vanessa, was adopted and at thirty had been married and divorced twice, but had remained childless—“barren,” as she put it.
It was nearly silent there by the shore—low waves washing the rocks at Vanessa’s feet, a soft wind sifting the tall pines behind her—and she could hear her thoughts clearly, for they were cold and came to her in words and sentences, rather than feelings, as if she were silently reciting a list or a recipe she’d memorized years ago. She was not happy, Vanessa told herself, not one bit, and she wished that she had stayed in Manhattan. It was always the same here, year after year, her mother and father’s annual Fourth of July show, and though it was more her father’s show than her mother’s, that didn’t make it any better. Not for her. Everyone had a show, she believed, and this was not hers, not anymore,
if it ever had been, when she heard in the distance a low humming sound, a light, intermittent drone that rose and fell, surged and lapsed back almost into silence and then returned and grew louder.
She realized that it was an airplane. She had never before heard or seen an airplane at the Second Lake. Rangeview was the largest of only a half-dozen rough-hewn log camps, a few of which were elaborately luxurious, located in the forty-thousand-acre privately owned wilderness, the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve. Vanessa’s grandfather Cole had been one of the original shareholders. When shareholders in the Reserve—
members,
they were called—or their invited guests flew up from Boston or New York City in a private airplane, which they sometimes did, as it was a long, arduous day trip on the Delaware & Hudson train to Westport and by automobile from there, they came up the Hudson Valley and flew in from Lake Champlain north of the mountain called Goliath. They landed their airplane in a broad, mowed pasture over in the village of Tunbridge, three miles west, where they were met by a car sent from the Reserve clubhouse, so that an internal-combustion engine was never heard nor an airplane seen inside or above the Reserve itself or even above the Tamarack clubhouse and golf course. The mountains and forests and the lakes and streams were held for the exclusive use and enjoyment of members and their guests, most of whom, at least those who did not have their own camp on the Second Lake, stayed at the grand, hotel-like clubhouse and the cottages that surrounded it. The mountains and forests and lakes and streams were off-limits to strangers, tourists, and the inhabitants of the several hamlets in the region—except of course for the local people lucky enough to be employed by the members at their camps or at the associated clubhouse, cottages, and golf course as ser
vants, caretakers, cooks, caddies, and guides. They were allowed onto the Reserve and club grounds, but only to work, and not to fish or hunt or hike on their own.
Now Vanessa could hear the airplane clearly and steadily. Though she could not see it, she knew it was coming in from the north, flying low, tracing the Tamarack River to the First Lake and on to its headwaters here at the Second. Suddenly the airplane appeared in the northern sky just above a line of black silhouetted spruce trees. It was rising in the distance over the water quickly, its gleaming belly exposed to the waning sun, as if the pilot had decided to take in the view of the entire lake and surrounding mountains and the darkening sky, when she heard the engine cut back. The airplane—a pale gray biplane with scarlet trim and two open cockpits, a goggled, hatless pilot in the forward cockpit, the other empty—slowed there, seeming almost to pause in flight and hover, when it banked to the west, heading toward the mountain wall that plunged straight into the glittering water.
It was a seaplane with two large pontoons, and she thought she was watching a man about to crash his airplane deliberately against the thousand-foot vertical slab of gray granite, and she forgot her cold thoughts and grew almost excited, for she had never seen anyone kill himself and realized that in some small way she’d always wanted to and was surprised by it. The pilot seemed about to smash the airplane against the rock face of the mountain, when, less than a hundred yards from it, he banked hard to the left, dipped the wings back to horizontal, cut the engine speed nearly to stopping, and swiftly descended toward the water. The airplane touched down at the far side of the lake, broke the surface, and slid into the water, unfolding high fans of silver spray behind the pontoons. Vanessa was relieved, of course, but felt a flicker of disappointment, too.
Her parents and their friends stood smiling on the near shore in front of the camp. They clapped their hands appreciatively and gazed across in a welcoming way at the pilot of the airplane. Near them four Adirondack guide boats had been drawn up onto the bank and turned over to dry. Vanessa’s mother sat gracefully on one hull, her barefoot legs crossed at the ankles, and sipped champagne from a crystal flute. From her distance, Vanessa admired her mother’s gentle, slightly dreamy poise, and decided that it was the dress, a cream-colored, low-necked, beltless frock by Muriel King that hung straight from the shoulders. Her mother was in her early fifties, too old to look that good, Vanessa thought. It was the stylish designer dress and the simple gold bracelet, she decided. And the bare feet. The other women and the men, though they would no doubt dress more or less formally for dinner tonight, wore what they thought were north-woods hunting and fishing apparel—wool slacks, checked flannel shirts, rubber-soled boots: rugged Abercrombie & Fitch camp wear. Vanessa herself had on a pale blue sleeveless cotton blouse and a white pleated skirt that pointed nicely to her long, tanned legs and narrow feet. She wasn’t so much competitive with her mother’s appearance as wanting to distinguish it from hers, just as her mother, even if she had to wear dresses from Greta Garbo’s personal designer here at camp and go barefoot, seemed to want to distinguish her appearance from that of the other women, who were her oldest, dearest friends. More than either of them thought, however, or wanted to think, Vanessa Cole and her mother were alike.
At the far side of the lake in the cool shadow of the overhanging rock wall, the pilot pushed his goggles to his forehead, squinted, and peered across at the cluster of people standing by the overturned guide boats and, half hidden in the ancient pines behind them, the wide deck and screened porch and outbuildings of the
camp. The airplane rocked gently in the water. The camp was a low structure made of barked, hand-sawn logs, a nice-looking place, larger and more lavish than he’d expected, and a lot less rustic. But he should have known: Dr. Cole was old New York and Connecticut money, piles of it. The pilot counted eight people—then, when he noticed the tall, slender figure of a woman standing a couple of hundred yards from the others, nine—and was surprised and a little downcast. When he’d accepted Dr. Cole’s invitation to come to the Second Lake and see his collection of Heldons, he had hoped for something a little more private. He hated having people watch him when he looked at pictures and wait expectantly for his remarks, which, despite his reluctance to say anything at all, he always felt compelled to make. Actually, what he hated was his inability to say nothing, simply to look at the pictures in thoughtful silence.
He saw Dr. Cole lift his cocktail glass in the air and extend it toward the airplane, and the pilot waved back. He inched the throttle forward, punched the pedal under his right foot and turned the pontoon rudders, bringing the airplane around to starboard. Gradually he increased engine speed and drove the aircraft out of the shade of the mountain into the twilight, thumping it through the low, dappled ripples and across the lake as if the aircraft were a motorboat. He knew it was forbidden to run a motorboat on the Tamarack Lakes—nothing allowed on the water but genuine, silent, handmade Adirondack guide boats—and wondered if there were rules against seaplanes. Not yet, but now that he’d flown his four-year-old Waco biplane in, give them a week and there would be.
The pilot scouted along the shore below the camp for a shallow beach and found it close by the young woman standing away from the others. She seemed lost in thought, in a blue mood, and
did not look at him, but did not seem to be avoiding him, either. She was like an exhibit, a piece of sculpture set at the edge of the lake—part of the view. She was very pretty, he noticed when he drew near shore. Beautiful, even. She had high, almost Andean cheekbones and sharp, precise features, bright blue eyes, and full lips. She wore no makeup, or none that he could discern, and her long, gingery hair hung loosely over her shoulders. Broad shoulders for a slender woman, he noticed. She must be an athlete, a swimmer or a serious canoeist. Maybe she’s an actress, he thought. She looks like an actress. Her face was vaguely familiar to him, and then he remembered who she was.
He pulled the throttle back, shoved the rudders full left, and brought the airplane around and into the wind to keep it from slithering while anchored and getting itself all weather cocked. It would be nice if the Coles had a dock to tie up to, but there were rules, of course, against lakeside structures, other than the camps themselves, which had to be built a certain distance from the water and be as invisible from the lake as possible, and strictly on the Second Lake. The illusion of wilderness was as important to maintain as the reality. The pilot’s wife sometimes called the Reserve a zoo for trees, but that was extreme, he thought, a particularly European point of view.
Cutting the engine, the pilot stood in the cockpit, took off his goggles altogether, and scanned the slate blue lake from one end to the other in the near dark, quickly memorizing its dimensions and the ins and outs of its shoreline. He had meant to get over here earlier in the day but had made the mistake of ducking into his studio after breakfast and by the time he checked his watch it was nearly four thirty. Alicia had been right, it was a national holiday, and he should have allowed himself to forget his politics for once and enjoy the holiday like everyone else in America today,
go down to the river with her and the boys for a Fourth of July picnic and then, while they were napping, fly over to the Reserve, see the doctor’s collection of Heldons, and be home before nightfall, in time to drive Alicia and the boys to watch the fireworks with the rest of the locals. But instead he’d worked late.
