The Reserve (27 page)

“I want to touch you.”

“No touching,” she said. It was a child’s voice, high and thin, almost a plea.

Jordan took a step back and to the side and tried looking at her from a different angle, a three-quarter view, but it did not have the same mystery and sadness of looking at her from behind and above. It was merely a portrait now of a posed woman, a model instructed by the artist to sit naked in a large chair with a sheet draped across her lap. The woman he had seen before was gone.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Especially now.”

“No.”

“What will you do when they come tomorrow?”

“Whatever I have to.”

“What will you tell them?”

“Whatever I have to.”

“Will you tell them about me?” he asked. “That I was here?”

“No.”

“Will you be all right? Tonight, I mean. Alone.”

“I’ve never been anything but alone. I’ll be all right.”

He leaned down to kiss her, and she jerked away. “I said no touching.”

V
ANESSA HEARD HIM CLOSE THE OUTER DOOR AND CROSS THE
porch and deck. Then silence—except for the dry, whispering rattle of the fire. She turned in the chair and cupped in both hands the pale green glass bowl of the kerosene lantern on the table beside her and lifted it into the air. She stood, and the sheet fell away, and she was naked. She carried the lantern to the fireplace. The crackling fire warmed her belly and breasts and thighs,
its yellow light flickering across her pale skin like fingertips. She gently set the glass bowl onto the cut-stone mantelpiece, like an offering on an altar. Turning, she picked up a second lamp from a table and crossed the living room. Planes of orange light slid and skidded over the walls and high ceiling as she walked into the darkened hallway and turned from the hallway and entered the library.

“Everything you need to know is in the library.”

“Look in the library,” she had said to Jordan. He had questioned her claim to have graduated from college at sixteen, and she had told him to check the social register, even though she knew that the social register would neither confirm nor deny her claim. She was performing for him, mixing lies with truths, and he, naturally, was believing nothing. “Everything you need to know is in the library. Everything,” she had said to him, and a dreaded certainty, which until that moment had eluded her, came over her. Vanessa suddenly knew what to look for and where to look for it. There was no speculation or supposition about it; she knew that a thick, cardboard file folder tied with a black ribbon was located in a locked wooden cabinet built into the shelves behind her father’s reading chair. It had always been there, and she had always avoided looking at it, and it had become invisible to her. She set the lantern on the floor and pulled the heavy, leather-upholstered chair away from the wall. She yanked hard on the wooden knob of the cabinet, and it broke off in her hand. Grabbing a poker from the stand next to the corner fireplace, she proceeded with a half-dozen blows to smash the thin panels of the cabinet door to pieces. Inside the cabinet, she saw what she had known would be there. She removed the brown cardboard file folder from the cabinet and sat on the floor and held it flat on her lap and was about to untie the black ribbon and open it,
when it seemed suddenly to burn her bare skin with a dark heat. She pushed the folder off her lap, to the floor. Then she stood and picked up the folder again. It was cool to the touch, now that she no longer wanted to open it.

Vanessa left the library and carried the folder to the living room. There she held it against her breasts and stared at the fire for several seconds. The flames had begun to die, and she was shivering from the cold now. Kneeling, she placed the folder flat on the hearth. She reached behind her for the fallen sheet and draped it over her shoulders like a robe. On her knees, she stared at the file folder and reached one hand forward and nudged the folder a few inches toward the open fire, all the while murmuring and shaking her head from side to side as if arguing with herself. She pushed the folder another inch closer to the flames. She looked up at the mantelpiece. She could feel the heat of the flames against her face and throat.
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….

She stood then and slowly approached the mantelpiece, reached out and lifted the kerosene lantern off it. Holding the bowl in her two hands, she backed a few steps away from the fire. She hurled the lantern through the flaming mouth of the fireplace into the darkness beyond, and the entire room filled with a flash of hot light.

J
ORDAN
G
ROVES MADE HIS WAY WITH RELATIVE EASE ALONG
the rocky shore. The full moon above the lake was like a gigantic eye looking in on the earth. He pushed through brushy undergrowth and splashed across the mouths of small, rock-strewn brooks to the hidden cove a mile south of the camp, where his airplane was anchored. Stepping onto the near pontoon, he pulled the anchors
free of the lake bottom and climbed into the cockpit and started the engine. He hit the rudders, and brought the airplane around to the south, facing the soft wind. A broad streak of moonlight crossed the water in front of him like a brightly lit, rippled runway, and his takeoff along it was quick and smooth and straight, a gracefully rising arc drawn from the surface of the lake into the cloudless, star-filled sky above. As he passed over the camp buildings, he kept his gaze fixed on the stars above and ahead of him and did not see the living room windows of the camp suddenly change color—dark orange flaring to bright yellow.

A
LICIA MOVED SLOWLY THROUGH THE HOUSE, SHUTTING OFF
the lights one by one. The boys had finally fallen asleep—all day and into the evening they had been anxious and somber, as if they knew that something was about to change their lives irrevocably, even though Alicia had made every effort to demonstrate to them that today was just another ordinary summer day in the life of the Groves family. Papa was gone someplace in his airplane but would be back in a day or two, she told them, maybe even tonight. Where has Papa gone? they wanted to know. She wasn’t sure, it was business, it had come up suddenly, and he had left early before any of them was awake and didn’t give her the details. They’d memorized and rehearsed singing the Jimmie Rodgers songs, and in the afternoon, after Hubert came and left, she asked the boys to keep helping Papa’s new assistant learn everything she could about the studio, told them to go on teaching the girl the names and places of the different tools and materials the same way Papa had taught them, by making an inventory of all the inks and paints and pastels and pencils, all the blocks and plates and even the sheets of paper organized by weight and size, and the rolls of canvas and stretchers and the brushes,
knives, chisels, gouges—reminding Wolf and Bear that Frances had never been inside a real artist’s studio before yesterday and that by helping her they were helping Papa, because when he got back he would have lots of new work to do and would not have the time to train her himself.

With Frances and the boys safely ensconced in the studio, Alicia had continued to behave as if it was just another normal late July afternoon—weeding the garden, gathering the first summer squashes and cucumbers, restaking the branches of the tomato plants that were about to break under the weight of the clusters of new green tomatoes. And later she’d taken Wolf and Bear to swim in the river, and the dogs, as anxious and somber as the boys, for the first time refused to go into the water. They stood on the sandy shore and watched, as if protecting the boys, who dutifully practiced their strokes a short ways beyond, and when the boys came out of the water and Alicia toweled them down, the dogs lay on the warm sand of the short beach and continued their watching, as if something strange was happening, when, in fact, everything was normal, life as usual, just another afternoon and evening at the Groveses’.

But it was not life as usual, and they all knew it, even Frances, Jordan’s new assistant, who at the end of the day came to Alicia and asked if maybe she should stay home tomorrow and wait for Mr. Groves to telephone before she came back to work. Alicia said yes, that was a good idea, since she wasn’t sure exactly when he would be back, and there was no point in her hanging around in the studio when he wasn’t here to tell her what to do. Unless, of course, she needed more time to familiarize herself with the artist’s tools and materials. The girl said no, the boys had taught her real good, she said. She said they were amazing, the boys. So smart and helpful and well behaved. Alicia thanked her and
gave her some money for her two days’ work and sent her on her way, believing that she would not see this girl again, at least not here. She’d bump into her in town, maybe, see her by accident at the grocery store, and the girl would ask after the boys, politely avoiding any mention of Mr. Groves or her brief employment as his studio assistant. For he would no longer be there, working in his studio, managing his household, raising his sons, sharing his life with his wife. Alicia did not yet know where in fact he would be or what he’d be doing there or whom he would be sharing his life with, but from the moment she woke at dawn to the sound down by the river of his airplane engine starting up and heard the plane take off and fly over the house and up the valley, gone, she had known that he would return only to organize his permanent absence from this house and from her, and from now on his sons would at best be mere visitors in his life, his unhappy guests on holidays and school vacations.

So she was not surprised, as she walked through the house shutting off the lights, dropping the house room by room into darkness, that she did not, as usual, leave a light burning at the kitchen door for him. She passed through the library, where barely twenty-four hours ago, she and Jordan had last held each other and wept over the damage they had done alone and together to their marriage, and she stood a moment beside his desk as if he were still seated there and she were waiting for him to turn to her and say
All is forgiven
, and
All our lies and betrayals belong to the past now
. Her glance fell on the wicker basket beside the desk, and she saw in it a sealed and stamped letter torn in half and half again, Jordan’s cream-colored personal stationery with his familiar logo for the return address and letterhead—a river, the River Jordan, he had once explained to her, represented by three parallel, waved lines rippling below a grove of three pines. It was his
mark, his stamp, his signature. She reached into the basket and picked up the four pieces of the torn letter and envelope and saw that it was addressed to John Dos Passos. She knew then where her husband would go when he left her. She did not read what he had written to Dos. She didn’t have to—he had written it before learning of her betrayal and the months of deception. He had written it when he thought he knew who she was. Everything was different now. And then she heard the high, nasal hum of the airplane in the distance, its tone dropping and volume steadily increasing as it followed the river north toward home.

The young American woman stood alone at the wide window on the promenade of Level A, ignored now by the other passengers, for they had given up trying to engage her in conversation. Shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, the steward announced that it would soon be possible to see the coast of Newfoundland. Below, the warm waters of the Gulf Stream merged with the cold North Atlantic Drift. For the first time since leaving Frankfurt, the sky had cleared, and the passengers on the promenade peered down from the
Hindenburg
and watched its long shadow cross the turquoise water. In the distance, looking like tiny sailboats, icebergs cast off by the glaciers of Greenland floated southeast on the Labrador Current. Soon the airship passed close enough to one of the icebergs for the passengers to take its measure. It was a mountain of ice gleaming in the sunlight, its enormous pale green base visible below the surface of the sea. A double rainbow circled the white peak. There was a sudden noise, a rumble and then a loud crack that could be heard inside the airship, and the mountain of ice seemed to break apart. A third of it split away and slid slowly into the sea. Calving, they call it, said a man standing beside the young woman. She turned quickly. It was the short man whose Dresden doll, his gift for his daughter, had been inspected at the hotel in Frankfurt. The man smiled. It’s the mother iceberg giving birth to the baby iceberg, he added. Cute, eh? She said, Yes. Will your daughter be meeting you
when we arrive tomorrow? she asked. He said that he hoped so, and the woman closed her eyes for a second and smiled warmly, as if picturing in her mind the happy reunion of father and daughter. She said, Your daughter will love the doll that you’re bringing to her. He said again that he hoped so, and she said, Oh, I’m certain of it. She turned back to the window, and the shadow of the gigantic airship crossed over the iceberg below—now two icebergs, a mother and a daughter—dissolving the double rainbow and dimming the white glare of the ice to gray.

O
VERNIGHT THE WIND GREW STRONGER, A WIND OUT OF THE
north that blew the smoke south in the Reserve, away from the village of Tunbridge and the Tamarack Club, driving smoke deeper into the forested valleys and slopes of the Reserve and up the steep sides of the southern tier of the Great Range, across the peaks there and on to the rolling farmlands and villages, where the smoke dissipated finally into a haze, then rose into the dark sky, undetected by humans anywhere, within the Reserve or without, making it the private knowledge only of the animals and birds residing in the Reserve, the deer and bears and coyotes, the bobcats and fisher cats, the foxes, martins, and mink, the hawks and eagles and ravens on the rock-topped peaks, and, on the lakes below and in the cold streams tumbling into the lakes, the beavers and the loons and the lingering Canada geese, and, standing in the muskegs and shallows of the headwaters of the Tamarack River, the herons and cranes, and the owls returning from their nocturnal hunts to roost in the high branches of the spruce and pine trees, where, still higher and in among the crags, the solitary cougar lifted its heavy head from sleep and smelled the smoke drifting downwind from the Second Lake, and the great cat moved off the rocky ledge and made its way down through the conifers to the open birch forest below and loped still farther down to the bands of oak, hickory, maple, and
poplar that crossed the lower valleys that lay between the mountain ranges of the Reserve: all the animals and birds in steady, uniform migration from north to south, an instinctual response to the smell of smoke, a felt command registering in their collective brain to track the smoke, not to its source, as humans do, but to where it grew faint and they could no longer see or smell it, even though obedience to the command drove them from the safety of the wilderness toward villages and farms beyond the southern boundaries of the Reserve, to where humans lived, where the forests had been cut and roads laid down and life for the wild animals and birds of the Reserve was a dangerous enterprise and food was scant and often protected by loud, barking dogs and men and boys with guns.

Consequently, it was nearly dawn, an hour before daybreak, with the wind shifting from the north around to the south and building to ten knots and steady, that the first early rising residents of Tunbridge, the village nearest the Reserve, woke and stepped outside to let their dogs run or trundled to the barn to feed the livestock and milk the cow or went to the henhouse to fetch the breakfast eggs, and they smelled wood-burning smoke floating down the Tamarack Valley from somewhere inside the Reserve. At the Tamarack clubhouse, Tim Rooney, the lone night watchman, a tall, sharp-shouldered man who people said looked like a young Abe Lincoln, made his last round along the long, dimly lit hallways of all three floors of the building and passed through the dark, cavernous dining room, where the stuffed moose head hung from the wall above the six-foot-high brook-stone fireplace, and checked the several members’ lounges and cocktail bar, the library and game room, the kitchens, the nursery, strolled past the locked door of the manager’s office and the greeting desk, and stepped out the main entrance of the clubhouse onto the
open porch carrying two folded flags, the red, white, and blue American flag with its forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes and the green Tamarack Wilderness Reserve flag with the interlocking white TWR.

The watchman stood on the porch for a few seconds and studied the slowly graying eastern sky and observed that it might rain later in the day. He wrinkled his nose and inhaled and smelled wood smoke and wondered why on a late July dawn one of the members residing in the cottages attached to the Club would want a fire in his fireplace. An evening fire was nice, regardless of the season, to take the chill off and cheer the company, but an early morning fire in July, the hottest July on record, was more trouble than it was worth, a waste of good wood. He looked down the line of bungalows facing the golf course to see which chimney was giving off smoke, but it was still not quite light enough for him to see clearly, so he took a stroll along the lane and studied each of the six cottages close up with his flashlight beam. All the chimneys were cold, and all the windows were dark; the members and their families and guests were still asleep.

Puzzled, he walked back to the flagpole and hooked the American flag to the line and hoisted it and followed with the TWR flag and stood back a ways and watched them flutter prettily in the steady south wind. It was a morning ritual, the watchman’s last act before signing out and walking to his house in Tunbridge three miles north of the clubhouse. It was a way for him to check the direction of the coming weather. Last night, under a full moon, when he took the flags down, the light wind had been out of the north, driving clouds down from Canada. Sometime during the night the clouds had erased the moon, and now this morning’s wind was coming from the south, promising change—lower temperatures, and rain, probably, which Tim
Rooney hoped would not fall before he got home to eat his breakfast with his wife and children and sleep for an hour and return here by noon to commence his day job tending the greens at the golf course. He felt lucky to have two jobs, even though they were only seasonal. Most people he knew barely had one.

He smelled that smoke again and caught sight of two of the women from town who worked in the kitchen, Florence Pease and Katie Henson, walking up the long hill from the road to the clubhouse. He waited for them out behind the clubhouse at the service entrance to the kitchen, and when they arrived there he said good morning and asked them if they smelled smoke or was he imagining it? Both women assured him that he wasn’t imagining it, they had smelled it all the way from town. But it wasn’t coming from anywhere in town or from the clubhouse grounds, it seemed to be coming from someplace inside the Reserve, they said. He asked if anyone had rung the fire bell. Like most able-bodied men and older boys in Tunbridge, the watchman was a member of the volunteer fire department, and if the big cast-iron bell on top of the firehouse had been rung, he’d be obliged to get back to the firehouse in town as fast as he could, catch breakfast where and when he could, and forget about his morning nap.

But the women said no, no fire bell, not while they were in hearing range.

If the fire was inside the Reserve, the watchman told the women, and it evidently was, then someone would have to climb a mountain, Goliath or Sentinel, for a look-see. They agreed. But they had work to do, they had to prepare breakfast for over a hundred members and their families and guests staying in the cottages and clubhouse bedrooms and suites, so maybe he should be the one to scoot up Goliath or Sentinel, where a view of the whole forty thousand acres of the Reserve could be easily obtained.

Goliath, seven hundred feet higher than Sentinel, provided the better view—there was talk of the CCC building a fire tower on the summit next year—and Tim Rooney, who was strong and young and fit, managed to reach the top of the mountain in less than an hour. By then the sky was covered by a rippled white blanket of high clouds from Canada, and the Tamarack Valley and village of Tunbridge north of the mountain and the entire broad expanse of the Reserve south of it sprawled below in full daylight. The watchman peered from his perch on top of the bare gray peak and traced the Tamarack River back upstream from the village, over the meadows of the outlying farms and into the woods that surrounded the clubhouse grounds and golf course, and saw no smoke. He looked through the woods, past waterfalls and gorges along the narrow lane that led from the clubhouse to the First Lake, across the First Lake to the Carry, and over the Carry to the Second Lake, where the half-dozen much-prized, privately built lakeside camps were situated on lakeside land leased from the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve, and saw no smoke. Then, halfway down the eastern shore of the Second Lake, the watchman located the source of the smoke. One of the camps was burning, or it had already burned to the ground, he couldn’t tell from this distance; and the fire was no doubt going to spread to the nearby forest, or it had already spread into the forest and was burning its way up the wooded slopes behind the camp. It was too far for him to see with his naked eye, but there was the strong likelihood of a forest fire, if not the reality of one.

Descending as rapidly as he could, the watchman ran to the clubhouse and found the manager in the dining room eating breakfast alone at a corner table, anxious and puzzled by the faint burning smell that had greeted him when he’d left his cottage a half hour earlier. The manager received the watchman’s
news from the mountaintop with sober equanimity, almost as if he’d expected it, although it was only the
sort
of thing he’d been expecting since his little talk the evening before with Hubert St. Germain. He folded his napkin and sighed audibly and told the man to drive to town in the Club’s one vehicle, a wood-sided International Harvester truck that had been fitted out with bench seats for up to ten members and their luggage. Raise the alarm, he instructed the watchman, if it hasn’t already been done, and call out the volunteer firemen. He himself would ring the clubhouse dinner bell and rouse as many of the members and guests as were willing to help fight the fire and he would outfit them with shovels and buckets and lead them into the Second Lake.

The manager had no doubt as to which camp up there was burning. Rushing from the dining room to ring the bell, he glanced at his watch—a quarter to eight—and nearly bumped into the guide Hubert St. Germain, coming in. The guide quietly told him what he already knew, that there was a fire at the Second Lake, and added that fire bells were ringing all over the county, calling out the volunteers. They needed permission from the manager to drive the fire trucks and other vehicles onto clubhouse grounds in order to get into the First Lake. They also needed permission to use the guide boats there for transporting the firefighters over the lake to the Carry and on. The manager nodded his approval and told Tim Rooney, the watchman, to ring the dinner bell out on the porch steadily until he had everyone who was willing and able to help fight the fire out of bed and gathered here on the porch. He said to give them as many shovels and buckets as he could find in the gardeners’ sheds and carry them in the truck up to the First Lake boathouse, where he would meet them and lead them the rest of the way in. There were guide boats in the boathouse for no more than fifty firefighters, the manager said, and
the volunteers from town had first claim on them, so the members and guests would have to be prepared to hike the whole way in to the Second Lake by way of the East Shoreline Trail, which was seldom used and thus was much overgrown with brush and blowdown.

By now fire trucks from Tunbridge and the nearby villages of Sam Dent, Mascoma, and Petersburg were arriving full speed at the clubhouse, along with cars and pickup trucks filled with volunteer firemen in their fire helmets and knee-length waxed coats. One by one, the long line of vehicles drove quickly past the clubhouse and into the Reserve.

No one knew yet what the firefighters would find when they finally got up to the Second Lake. It would be nearly midmorning by then. They might find a single camp or outbuilding partially or wholly destroyed by a fire that could be easily contained and extinguished by a bucket brigade hauling water from the lake; or they might find the beginnings of a forest fire, which they could capture and control with trenches and limited burns until it burned itself out; or they might come out of the Carry and look across the lake and see half the eastern forest in flames, in which case they could only pray for rain.

H
UBERT
S
T.
G
ERMAIN WAS AMONG THE FIRST GROUP OF FIREFIGHTERS
the Tunbridge Volunteers, to cross the Carry. Coming along right behind the Tunbridge contingent were the Petersburg men and boys. Though he was a member of the Petersburg Volunteers, Jordan Groves was not among them. The distant tolling of the bell had penetrated his dream-tossed sleep and had accompanied his dream for a long while, and when at last he woke, it took him several minutes to clear his head of the dream and determine where he was and what he was actually hearing.
He was in his studio, where late last night, after finishing off half a bottle of Cuban rum, he had fallen asleep in his chair. He telephoned the firehouse and learned that the fire was in the Reserve, at the Second Lake, and the Petersburg trucks had already left. If he wanted to join them, he could drive his own car to the clubhouse and go in from there, or he could fly his airplane in. The artist pointed out that there were rules against landing a seaplane in the Reserve lakes. The dispatcher at the firehouse told him to forget the rules, they might need the airplane up there today.

Like Russell Kendall, Jordan Groves had no doubt as to where exactly the fire was located, and he put his plane down on the lake a short ways out from the Cole camp at about the same time as the boats arrived carrying the rest of the Petersburg firefighters and Hubert St. Germain and the men and boys from Tunbridge. Among them were Ben Kernhold and Darby Shay and his son Kenny and a batch of Kenny’s teenage friends—they’d joined the Tunbridge Volunteers with the hope of getting to fight a forest fire while school was in session, but not like this, when school was out—and Buddy Eastman and Rob Whitney and Carl James. Sheriff Dan Peters and three of his deputies from Mascoma, the county seat, were there, along with thirty or thirty-five more men and boys, even including the reclusive artist James Heldon, who owned a house and studio in the village of Sam Dent. He, like Jordan Groves, spent a great deal of time in New York City and elsewhere, advancing his art, and thus was only a part-time member of the Sam Dent Volunteers. Finally, making their way slowly through the tangled brush and cumbersome rocks of the eastern shore—led by the intrepid manager of the Tamarack Club, Russell Kendall, and his lieutenant, the night watchman, Tim Rooney—came the members and guests of the Club who had volunteered to fight the fire, ten or twelve of them, including Dr.
Cole’s old friends from Yale, Red Ralston and Harry Armstrong, and Ambassador Thomas Smith, all of them determined to save their ancient, beloved Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.