The Reserve (17 page)

“I have no memory of that,” Vanessa declared. “None.”

“Daddy was always afraid that you did. You were so precocious a child, so intelligent, that he kept waiting for it to come out. He was afraid that somehow you knew I was your real mother, and it would become known to other people. And he didn’t want that.”

“But I
didn’t
know! I have no memories of any visits from Grandma and Grandpa way back then. All I remember of the orphanage are the big lawns and my room there. I remember the
bars of my crib and the lawns outside. Nothing else. No people. Not even other children. Except for my crib and the endless lawns, all my earliest memories are of you and Daddy and the house in Tuxedo Park and the apartment in the city and the Reserve. Were there other children?”

“At the home? There were only a few, maybe two or three. Little babies waiting to be adopted. It was very exclusive,” Evelyn said. “Vanessa, I really am thirsty. May I please have a glass of water?”

“As long as you stay in the chair where I can see you,” Vanessa said and went into the bathroom where, watching her mother in the mirror, she filled a glass at the sink and returned with it. She handed the glass to her mother, who drank it down and asked for another. When she came back with the second glass, Vanessa said, “But I don’t understand. Why didn’t Grandma and Grandpa let me be adopted when I was a little baby? Was there something wrong with me? Something that made it so nobody wanted me?”

“Lots of people wanted you. You were beautiful and intelligent and charming. They wouldn’t sign the papers.”

“Who? The people who ran the home?”

“Your grandparents. My mother and father. They would come back from North Carolina and tell me how beautiful you were, as if to punish me. Over and over. And how they were just waiting for the right people to come along and adopt and raise you. I think they meant that. Your grandparents were proud. Proud of their bloodlines. As you know. And even though no one knew for sure who your real father was, they knew he was at least a Williams boy. Which was something, I suppose. They wanted to be able to choose who would adopt you. So they just paid to keep you there and never signed the papers. I don’t know what they were thinking, what they were hoping would happen, because
nothing
could
happen. Except that you would grow older and eventually grow up there.”

“What about you? You could have signed the adoption papers.”

“No. I was only twenty when you were born, and I didn’t dare go against my parents. And then later, by the time I was of legal age, I was engaged to marry Daddy. By then I was so used to keeping it a secret that I didn’t want to think about it.”

“‘It.’ You mean
me
. So why did you and Daddy finally decide to adopt me? I mean, I was safely out of sight way down there in North Carolina, out of sight and, at least in your case, out of mind. You could’ve left me there to rot, if you’d wanted to.”

“It was your father’s idea. Well, no, it was my idea. Under his conditions. Once we realized that we weren’t going to have any children together, I begged him to let me take you from that place and raise you as our child. He agreed, but only if I promised to say that you were adopted and never revealed to anyone, not even to you, that I was your real mother. My parents were happy to go along with it. And so were the people who ran the home. In the end, everyone got what they wanted. Which was to save face. Everyone got to save face. Even me.”

“Even you.
Why
weren’t you going to have children together, you and Daddy? Was there something wrong with you?”

“No, not with me.”

“With Daddy, then. I never heard anything about that.”

“It wasn’t a physical thing with him. Not really. Your father was…a difficult man. Sexually, I mean. He didn’t…he didn’t like to make love. Also, he was very old-fashioned, and when he found out that I wasn’t a virgin…” She trailed off.

Vanessa said, “Keep talking, Mother.”

“Oh, I hate telling you all this!”

“It’s too late to stop now. Tell me the rest.”

“In the very beginning, when we first tried to make love, it went…badly, let’s say. The fact is, on our honeymoon he found out that I wasn’t a virgin, and he rejected me for a time. Later on, months later, when we tried to make love, he couldn’t. And then…well, then he wouldn’t. We were both pretty shy about it, about sex, and it was just simpler not to do it at all, and he never complained about it, and neither did I. Although it made me very lonely for a long, long time.”

“My
Christ
!” Vanessa said. “This is mad. I don’t know if I can take it all in. Or even believe it! It’s all so fruity and weak and pathetic. You disgust me, Mother. Truly. You amaze and disgust me. Both you and Daddy. And Grandma and Grandpa, too. But especially you!”

“Vanessa, please don’t be angry with us. We did the best we could.”

“Well, they’re all dead, Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa. So I can’t get back at them for what they did. But you’re not dead. And look at you, you’re trying to put me out of the way again, like you did when I was born. Like Grandma and Grandpa did when I was a baby.” Vanessa took the glass from her mother, set it on the dressing table, and pulled her arms behind the chair and tied her wrists. “Where are all those photographs Daddy took of me when I was a little girl?” she suddenly demanded. “You know the ones.”

“I don’t…I don’t know.” Her mother looked up, wide-eyed and frightened, at Vanessa. “Those photographs? What photographs? They’re in Daddy’s albums, I suppose,” she said. “In the library here, where he kept them stored. And on the walls, framed. And at home.”

“No. You know what I’m talking about, so don’t play dumb. Photographs of me. Naked. I want them.”

“Naked! What do you mean? He took hundreds of photographs
of you back then. He loved photographing you. He had his own darkroom and everything, where he developed and printed them. But I never saw any pictures of you naked. What are you talking about? Please don’t put the scarf over my mouth, Vanessa. It makes me feel like I’m suffocating.”

“From before the war. From when I was four or five. Or maybe I was only three and recently ‘adopted.’ You were there, Mother. You knew! You knew he was taking those pictures.”

“No. Daddy was very shy about that. He didn’t like to see you naked, ever.”

“If you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going to tie the scarf over your mouth. I don’t want to listen to your lies anymore.”

“Vanessa, it is the truth! Daddy always made me or Hilda make sure you were properly covered before he went into your room, and he never bathed you or even saw you being bathed. Some things I don’t remember from those years before the war, you know, because of my bad nerves back then. And the medicines. But I do remember that.”

Vanessa sighed heavily. “Oh, God, Mother, you’re still lying to me. Or else you’re lying to yourself and believing it. Either way, it’s a lie. Because you were there, and you know where those pictures are. Daddy was very orderly and never threw anything away. I’m sure you’ve gone through all his files since he died and know exactly where those pictures are. You said you remember being present when he took them.”

“No, no! He wasn’t like that, Vanessa. He wasn’t.”

“I’ll bet I’m not the only naked little girl he took photographs of.
Wasn’t
the only naked little girl, I mean.”

“Your father wasn’t the kind of man who—”

Vanessa cut her off with the silk scarf, tying it tightly this time so it wouldn’t slip down. “No more lies, Mother. No more
lies,” she said, walking to the open window, which she shut and locked. Then she pulled down the shade, dropping the room into darkness. “I’ll come back for you after Hubert’s been here and gone. Maybe then you and I will go through those albums in the library together. Won’t that be nice? Just the two of us. What fun. Mother and daughter leafing through the family albums. Maybe then you’ll tell me everything.”

She locked the bedroom door behind her and walked from the living room to the porch. From the deck she saw a guide boat a half mile out on the lake. It was Hubert St. Germain—smoothly, expertly, his oar blades barely making a ripple in the water—rowing toward the camp.

The doctor shook the young woman’s hand and said, Good-bye, Vanessa, and bon voyage. Your luggage will be in your stateroom, he added, and she nodded as if agreeing. He turned her toward the other passengers, and she followed them onto the bus. When the bus had departed, the doctor walked into the hotel bar and ordered a schnapps and filled his pipe with tobacco and lighted it. A half hour later, in a soft, drizzling rain, the passengers arrived at the airfield and were taken inside a cavernous hangar, where they were inspected a second time for matches, lighters, and batteries. Beyond the hangar, tethered by its nose to a mooring mast, the enormous zeppelin floated in the air, ten feet from the ground. The silver ship was nearly a sixth of a mile long, shaped like a gigantic whale. An open staircase extended from its gleaming belly to the ground. One by one, the passengers climbed the stairs and entered the leviathan. A steward escorted the American woman to her room on Level B and left her alone there. She removed her hat and veil, exposing a single red spot above each eyebrow, tiny circular wounds recently healed. After a few moments, she stepped to the large rectangular window and looked down at the crowd of well-wishers and officers on the ground. A uniformed brass band played “Muss I Denn?” and a choir of Nazi youth sang the “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland Über Alles.” Gradually, the crowd below—the brass band, the Nazi youth contingent, the Zeppelin officials and groundsmen, and the govern
ment officials and SS officers—began to diminish in size. Without a ripple of felt movement, the airship was silently rising. At about three hundred feet the muffled sound of the diesel engines penetrated the silence of the stateroom, and the great zeppelin slowly turned northwest and in the gathering dusk headed toward the lights of Koblenz, following the Rhine to the sea.

“Y
OU NEEDN’T CARRY IT TO THE HOUSE,”
V
ANESSA
C
OLE SAID
to the guide and smiled winningly. “Just unload everything here by the shore.” She placed her hand lightly, like a fallen leaf, on his thick shoulder and continued to hold the smile. She was the same height as he, Hubert noticed for the first time, tall for a woman, but not as tall as Alicia. It had somehow pleased him from the start that Alicia was taller than he, as if there were a rightness to it, a legitimacy. It was an observation that he had never carried to its logical conclusion: that if she had been shorter than he it would have been somehow wrong, illegitimate. He did notice now, however, that it also seemed right to him that Vanessa Cole was tall, even if not as tall as Alicia, and for a second he wondered if people from away, especially the women, ran taller than local people.

“You sure? I don’t mind lugging it up to the house, Miss Cole. Most of it goes to the pantry anyhow,” he said.

She said she was grateful to him for coming out on such short notice and didn’t want to keep him at the camp any longer than necessary. Besides, her mother was napping on the living room sofa, and Vanessa didn’t want to disturb her. She glanced down at the four cardboard boxes of food and other supplies the guide had unloaded from the boat and saw that certain items were missing. “I guess you’ll be making a second trip out anyhow. Can you do that today?”

“Probably not. This here’s mostly the food. It’s getting a little on, so I figured to bring the rest tomorrow and maybe use what’s left of today to cut you some wood and tend to whatever else needs tending to.” Hubert grabbed a box and hefted it to his shoulder. “I’ll take it into the pantry the back way, real quiet. So’s not to disturb Mrs. Cole.”

“No! Here, let me have that.” She took the box from him and set it back on the ground. “I…I’m sorry. Is there any way you can make that second trip this afternoon? You could just bring it out and drop it here on the shore for me. Don’t worry about the wood or anything. I can do that myself. I…I just need you to bring the rest of the supplies and leave them here on the shore. Please?”

Hubert looked closely at the woman’s face. She was strangely agitated, he thought, more than usual, that’s for sure. She was almost always wound a little tight, but in a fluttery, flirtatious way that put him off, like she was playing him for a rube or something. This was different, as if she was scared of having him go up to the house. Or somehow scared of him on a more personal level, like she thought he might be going to hit her or try to seduce her against her will, both of which were the furthest things from his mind. He liked her better this way than the other, however. He stepped back and looked at her face directly, and she lifted her chin slightly and stared back. For the first time he saw how truly beautiful she was and understood what all the fuss was about. For years he’d heard the rumors and the gossip—the high-society marriages and divorces, the love affairs with rich, famous men and even with local men not so famous and not in the slightest rich and with married members of the Tamarack Reserve and Club, at least one every summer and sometimes more than one. No man, young or old, could resist her, that was the word locally. But up
to now Hubert had not understood why. Up to now, however, her full gaze had never really fallen on him. He had never felt
seen
by her and thus had never experienced the intense, diamond-hard clarity of her need before. It was not sexual need strictly, but a little like that. This was something beyond desire. It was an urgent need to be seen by
him,
to be made real by
his
gaze. And along with it came a silent but clearly felt declaration that he, Hubert St. Germain, was the only person on the planet who could do the job, the only person who was capable of truly seeing her and thus the only person who could make her existence a reality.

He asked her if she was all right.

She shook her head like a horse tossing its mane from side to side and gave him that sorrowful, scared, needy look again. “I’m not…,” she began, and then said, “Yes, I’m okay. I think I’m okay. You’re kind to ask.”

“I imagine it’s been hard on you, losing your father like that. So suddenly and all. And being here. Where he died, I mean. I remember when my father died it was a long time before I could go back to where it happened, to where they found the body.” This was more than he had ever said to her at once, and it surprised him, and surprised him even more when he continued. “I guess it was because he died unexpectedly, sort of by accident. It was different with my mother, because she was sick for a long time first. And with Sally, my wife, it was different then, too, because I never had to go back to where she had died. Although I remember the first time I drove past where the car crashed, I got all weak in the knees and couldn’t look at the tree she’d hit. It wasn’t so bad the second time, because by then the road department had come out and cut the tree down, in case somebody else might go off the road and hit it the same as Sally’s sister did.”

“Yes, I heard about that. I’m sorry for that, Hubert. For your loss. It must have been awful.”

“For a spell it was. We weren’t married long, but we’d been together a long time. High school sweethearts, sort of.”

For a few seconds they were silent. Then she said, “What about you, Hubert? Are you all right? I mean now, today.”

“Well…no, not exactly.” He surprised himself by answering honestly.

“What do you mean?” She reached out and touched his sleeve lightly, holding it between thumb and forefinger, reinforcing her plea to go ahead, Hubert, tell the truth.

“I guess…yes, I am kind of upset. Actually, I’m kind of worried about you coming to my place. When Alicia, Mrs. Groves, was there. In case you got the wrong idea,” he added, preparing to lie, knowing he would not be believed anyhow, and hating it, the lying, regardless of whether she believed him. He was a man with secrets, perhaps, but he did not lie.

“There was no wrong idea to get, Hubert. I mean, your private life is your own. It’s no business of mine. I don’t know Mrs. Groves, anyhow. Not personally. But she seems like a good person. And I do know you’re a good person.”

“This is sort of a strange conversation for us to be having. Isn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess it is.” She was still holding his sleeve. “I wish…I wish you could be the one to help me. I need someone to help me.” Her eyes opened wide and turned dark.

He heard himself say that he would help her. She wasn’t going to make him lie about Alicia, she was changing the subject for his sake, so maybe he was in her debt for that. “What do you need me for?”

Vanessa said, “I’ve done something…something wrong.
Wrong, and very rash. And I don’t know what to do about it, Hubert. I’m confused, and I’m in trouble. A lot of trouble.” She let go of his sleeve and pressed the flat of her hand against the side of his upper arm. It was a friendly, trusting, comforting gesture, as if he and not she were the one asking for help and were receiving it from her touch. “Oh, God, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“What have you done?” Their faces were drawn close together now, their eyes locked, and he could smell her hair. It was like fresh-cut grass. Or maybe tea leaves, he thought. A woody, clean smell.

“You must promise to tell no one. It has to be a secret. No one else must know.”

“You can trust me.”

“You can’t tell anyone. Promise me.”

“All right. I won’t tell anyone,” he said, and meant it.

“I’ve done…I’ve done something bad to my mother.”

“Your mother? Mrs. Cole? What do you mean, ‘something bad’? I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s just, I got trapped in…a situation, trapped by her, and to escape it I did something very…rash. And now I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t undo it. And I can’t keep doing it, either. Because…well, because she’s my mother. And it’s wrong.”

“Tell me what you’ve done. It can’t be but so bad. I’ll help you,” he said again. “Have you accidentally hurt her or something?” Maybe they had a quarrel that turned violent, he thought. It happens sometimes in families, even families like the Coles. It had happened in his.

“No, I haven’t hurt her, not physically.”

“Well, it can’t be so bad, then.”

“Oh, yes, it’s bad, Hubert.” She took her hand away from his arm and held his hand in hers and told him to come with her to the house. “I shouldn’t be doing this, involving you, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have anyone to turn to, Hubert.”

“It’s okay, Miss Cole. You can trust me.”

Vanessa turned and walked quickly toward the house, Hubert following a few feet behind. They crossed the wide deck, passed through the screened porch, and entered the living room. He checked the sofa—Mrs. Cole wasn’t there, asleep or awake. He looked around the room and said to himself, So she lied about that. He wondered what else she’d lied about. Maybe everything. Maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to help her. She was capable of tricking him into behaving in a way that he’d be sorry for later, sorry and humiliated. Something ugly was going on. Maybe a thing has been done here that only rich people do, he thought, and he wished that he were not here in this house alone with this woman, wished that he were by himself in the deep woods tracking a deer instead of following this nervous, frightened woman who lied all the time. If he could not be alone in the woods, he wished he were with Alicia in the mountain meadow up behind his cabin, showing her the new-blooming pasture roses, the black-eyed Susans, and the pink yarrow. Alone in the deep woods; and with Alicia: they were the only times he had been happy in years. Maybe since he was a small child. Maybe always. Even with Sally, his wife—whom he believed he had loved, at least until he met Alicia—even with Sally he had not been happy and had preferred being alone. Secretly, he knew that his grief over his wife’s death had been eased and tempered by the sudden solitude that had followed it.

Hubert said, “Your mother’s not here, I guess.”

“No. She’s…she’s in her bedroom.”

“Maybe I should take a look at her,” he said. “Make sure she’s okay.”

“No! She’s all right. She’s fine. It’s just…she’s indisposed.”

“I believe I need to see her, Miss Cole. You said some things outside that make me think I need to see her. Just to make sure she’s okay.”

“Yes, I guess I did,” she said and sighed. “All right. You can see her. But you mustn’t talk to her. You mustn’t. And you can’t tell anyone that she’s here. You said I could trust you. And you said you’d help me, remember?”

“I did,” he said, but he did not promise her anything more. He was a man who tried not to make promises that he might not be able to keep; yes, he had told Vanessa that she could trust him and he’d help her; those were promises he could keep. But he was not sure that he would not talk to Vanessa Cole’s mother or tell someone she was here at Rangeview. Not until he had seen the woman first with his own eyes and had determined what Vanessa had done to her. For that was what she’d said, wasn’t it? That she had done something bad to her mother.

Vanessa unlocked and opened the door to her parents’ bedroom. She stepped aside, and motioned for him to enter. He walked to the doorway. Looking past Vanessa into the bedroom, he saw the woman. It was Mrs. Cole. Her name was Evelyn, he remembered, but he had always called her Mrs. Cole. Dr. Cole had long ago told Hubert to call him Carter. The guide had liked that. The woman’s hands and ankles were bound, and there was some kind of cloth over her mouth, and Hubert did not know what to think. Whatever he had expected to see, it was not this.

Mrs. Cole looked over at Hubert St. Germain, the family’s longtime guide and caretaker, standing by the door, his hands hanging empty at his sides, Vanessa beside him, and the woman
seemed to recoil from him, as if he had come to do something to her that Vanessa couldn’t bring herself to do alone. Mrs. Cole’s eyes widened in fear, and she shook her head wildly no, as if pleading with him not to do it.

Barely two seconds passed, and Vanessa grabbed Hubert by the hand and pulled him away from the room and slammed the door shut on her mother and locked it.

“Let me back in there, Miss Cole!”

“No. I can’t,” she said and stood with her back to the door.

“I got to help her!”

“No!” She cried, “Help
me,
Hubert! Please,
I’m
the one who needs you.”

“
How?
What’s going on here? Why is she like that, all tied up and gagged like that?”

“I can’t explain. But you have to trust me, Hubert.”

“Then you got to tell me the reason she’s like that.”

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll have to untie her and let her tell me.”

Vanessa looked steadily at him for a moment, her lips pursed, as if she were taking the measure of the man. Finally, she said, “It’s not my mother who’s trapped. Believe me. It’s not my mother who’s a prisoner, Hubert. It’s me.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mother…my mother wants to lock me away in a mental hospital. Where they’ll drug me. Or worse. Where they’ll give me a lobotomy or something. She’s taken my inheritance away from me. My mother wants me dead, or as good as dead!”

“She can’t want you dead. She’s your
mother
.”

“And that only makes it worse, Hubert. Don’t you see? When your own flesh and blood wants you locked away so she can take your money or wants you mindless or even dead, it’s so terrible
that you don’t know what to do! I panicked, Hubert. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking, I was simply reacting. I just wanted to make it so she couldn’t put me into a looney bin for the rest of my life, or worse. I felt like a caged animal. I still do! She planned to ship me off to a hospital in Europe, where I was before. So I forced her to come here, to the Reserve. But I’ve only made it worse. If I let her go now, she’ll make me go into the hospital like she planned, the papers are all drawn up and signed, but now, to punish me for doing this, for forcing her to come to the Reserve and keeping her here against her will like this, she’ll let them give me a lobotomy. I know it. I just know it. Do you know what that is, Hubert? A lobotomy?”