The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  “The famous artist.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Né…?”

  “Groves.”

  “Well, aren’t we something, then?” she said and came forward and, smiling up at him, hooked his arm with hers and walked him toward the others, who had waited for him by the shore until Vanessa seemed to have taken possession of the visitor and then they had moved away from the nearly darkened lake and were now making their leisurely way back up the piney embankment, returning to the camp.

  As they walked, Jordan Groves glanced at her bare arms and said, “Aren’t you a little cold?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am. Let me have your jacket until we get inside.”

  He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled gratefully and walked ahead of him, while he lagged a few steps behind and admired her long, confident strides and straight back and head held high as if she’d just done something to be proud of. A damned beautiful animal, he said to himself. But a woman to watch is all. Not to touch. Maybe to paint is all. Definitely a woman to be careful of. The way she walked reminded him of a woman he had met in Budapest many years ago, and her figure was like that of another he’d met in Toronto just last year. He hadn’t painted either woman and was glad of it, but he’d touched both, and both had left him feeling badly used—more by himself than by them.

  When they reached the camp, Vanessa hooked the artist’s arm firmly with hers, and once inside proceeded to introduce him to the people there one by one, even to her father, as if Jordan Groves were her guest and not her father’s.

  “Jordan Groves and I are practically old friends,” Dr. Cole said. “Am I right, Jordan?”

  “Yes. Practically.”

  There was a fire crackling in the huge stone fireplace. Mrs. Cole had lit the kerosene lamps and a few candles, and the room glowed in soft, rust-colored light. It was a large, handsome room, and the interior of the house smelled like the forest that surrounded it. Except for Dr. Cole and his wife, Evelyn, Jordan Groves forgot the names and faces of the houseguests as quickly as they were given to him. They each shook his hand and stepped away. Plutocrats, he decided at once. Leisure-class Republicans. People with inherited wealth and no real education and, except for the doctor, no useful skills. Not Groves’s sort, he knew, and they knew it, too, and were no more curious about him than he about them.

  A seaplane landing in the lake, however—that was fairly intriguing. Quite a sight, way out here. The fellow probably thinks the rules are made for other people, though, not him. Another of Carter’s left-wing artist types. Among his friends and colleagues, Dr. Cole was himself a left-wing artist type—although he was certainly no supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and his so-called New Deal and was not an artist, merely a man who, since college, appreciated art and enjoyed a little amateur sketching and watercolor painting and photography. They thought of their old friend as harmlessly creative.

  Mrs. Cole went to the bar to fix Jordan a whiskey. Dr. Cole said, “So glad you could make it, Jordan. Quite an entrance, I must say,” he said and laughed appreciatively. The doctor was nearly a foot shorter than Jordan, with the beginnings of a humped back that made him seem even shorter than he was. His pale face and round body were soft, jellied, but he had beautiful white hands with long, slender fingers. Of course, a surgeon’s hands, Jordan thought. The doctor’s grip was quick and careful, in and out, with no friendly squeeze or masculine shake. In another man, Jordan would have thought the handshake effeminate. With this man, merely careful. Protecting his tools.

  “Yes, well, sorry about that,” Jordan said and looked around the large, high-ceilinged living room for the Heldons. After Jordan Groves himself, the most famous artist residing in the region was James Heldon. In fact, the two were among the best-known living artists in the country, at least among Americans. In those years the truly famous artists, the painters and sculptors prized by museums and serious collectors, were European. Though often linked by critics and reviewers, mainly because they both were figurative artists and American and resided at least part-time in the Adirondack mountains of northern New York, Groves and Heldon, as artists, were very different. Heldon’s oils and pastels were mostly transcendental, expressionistic landscapes of the north country—the mountains, lakes, and skies that the artist had lived among part-time for decades—and blurred, etherealized nudes of his wife. He was very popular in New York City and Philadelphia art circles. His paintings, in spite of being rather small, for he painted in the forest and on the mountains en plein air, sold for many thousands of dollars. The tonier and more academic critics loved him. Jordan Groves, on the other hand, was valued and known mainly for his graphic work—woodcuts, etchings, prints—although he also, but only occasionally, painted in oils and pastels and had done a number of celebrated murals for the WPA. He had become known increasingly, both in the United States and the Soviet Union, notoriously here, lovingly there, for his politics. Thus he was often compared to the great Mexican muralists Orozco, Sequeiros, and Diego Rivera. In recent years, however, he had become famous for his commissioned illustrations of limited-edition books—classics like The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn and Aesop’s Fables—for which he was paid large sums of money. While Jordan Groves admired James Heldon’s work, he had a nagging suspicion that Heldon, who was nearly the same age as he and whom he had so far avoided meeting, did not consider him a serious artist and thought of him as merely an illustrator and left-wing propagandist. As Jordan saw it, the problem, the crucial difference between the two north country artists, was political, not aesthetic.

  Even so, James Heldon was himself viewed as a man of the left—at least by the critics and general public. He had spoken out often in support of the workers and any number of Roosevelt’s domestic programs, but he had always been careful to avoid being connected with causes and positions taken up by the Communist Party, the Comintern. Which was not Jordan’s way. Though Jordan had refused to join the party—he was not a joiner, he often said, but as long as the battle was just, didn’t care who fought alongside him—he had donated a group of his most valuable pictures to the Soviet people and had painted several murals in Moscow honoring the workers’ heroic role in the revolution. He wondered where Heldon would come down on this Spanish thing. The Italians were in the war now, and in spite of getting thrashed in March by the Spanish Republicans at Guadalajara, they were spoiling for a second go-round. Bombing Ethiopia in May had bolstered their confidence and had probably improved their flying skills.

  Dr. Cole led Jordan Groves from painting to painting. Hanging on the varnished plank walls of Rangeview were more than a dozen small Heldon landscapes that he had purchased over the years from the artist himself, with a dozen more hanging in his Park Avenue apartment and their home in Tuxedo Park. Vanessa followed the two men, but kept a few feet behind them, silent and watching and listening, like a reluctantly roused predator, operating more on instinct than need. She liked the artist’s hard concentration, how he stood before each painting and literally stared at it for long minutes, as if it were alive and moving and changing shape and color before his eyes; and she liked that he offered no comment, no praise, compliment, or critique; just looked and looked and said nothing and moved on to the next, until he had seen them all, then returned to three or four of the landscapes for a second long look.

  Her father, to his credit, did not ask Jordan’s opinion or evaluation of the pictures, although he was justly proud of having purchased them and proud of his personal friendship with James Heldon—who was, after all, practically an Adirondack neighbor and a fellow second-generation member of the Reserve—and confident of the long-term value of the pictures in the art market. Dr. Cole collected paintings that he loved to look at, but he also made sure that they were sound investments. He owned three John Marin watercolors that had been painted when Marin visited the region in 1912 and ’13, a large Jonas Lie, two very fine Winslow Homers, and a landscape by William Merritt Chase that h
e had inherited from his mother. They were the nucleus of a small, but tasteful and increasingly valuable collection. He insisted that his focus was solely on paintings of his beloved Adirondacks, but in Vanessa’s view her father collected art in order to collect artists, because he himself was not one and wished he were. And now, apparently, he was collecting Jordan Groves.

  She reached out and touched Jordan on the shoulder. “Do you want your jacket back?”

  “Thanks, yes,” he said and watched her slip it off her shoulders and allowed her to drape it over his. “Wouldn’t mind another whiskey, either,” he said and handed her his glass.

  She went to the bar, and he drifted along behind, enjoying that particular perspective, and Dr. Cole followed him. Without looking at him, Jordan said to the doctor, “Those are fine pictures. Heldon is a lousy painter, you know, but a wonderful artist. It’s probably lucky for him that he can’t paint,” he said, and instantly regretted it. He knew that he was showing off for the girl. He should have said nothing, but once begun, it was hard to stop. “If he could paint, he’d be a lousy artist and merely a wonderful painter. Lucky for him he can’t. Lucky for you, too. Since you’ve bought so many of them,”

  “What do you mean, ‘If he could paint, he’d be a lousy artist’?” Dr. Cole asked.

  “He’s religious. Heldon is a forest Christian.”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  “If he could paint, he’d lose his religion, and he wouldn’t have anything to replace it with, except technique. And technique alone won’t hold value.”

  “Daddy,” Vanessa said, “you shouldn’t expect one artist to praise another. Especially when he’s afraid the other artist is better than he is. You are, aren’t you, Mr. Groves? A little?”

  “What?”

  “Afraid.”

  “Afraid of you, maybe. But not James Heldon.”

  “Come, come, Vanessa,” Dr. Cole said. “Don’t get started. Here, while you’re doing that for Mr. Groves, refill my drink, too, will you?” He handed her his empty glass and stepped between his daughter and his guest.

  Vanessa obeyed, but glanced back at Jordan like a cat who’d been interrupted at her meal and would soon return.

  Timidly, a little reluctantly, the others in the group, once the artist had taken a seat by the fire and appeared to open himself to them, gathered near him and one by one made a polite effort to draw him into light conversation. Red Ralston’s suggestion that he ought to paint the early sunset, catch the alpenglow here at the Second Lake, went nowhere, and Ralston slipped off to the porch to smoke a cigar in the gloaming. Jennifer Armstrong asked Jordan if he’d ever been to the Second Lake before, and he said no, and she offered him a canapé, which he accepted. “But isn’t it lovely?” she asked him.

  “What?”

  “The Second Lake.”

  He agreed, the Second Lake was lovely.

  “What about the Reserve?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Isn’t it lovely?”

  He said yes, the Reserve was lovely.

  “We’re damned fortunate Carter’s held on to the old family homestead,” said Harry Armstrong.

  Dr. Cole laughed at that. “Yes, the ‘homestead’! Not quite, Harry. That’s still the family farm in Greenwich, and as soon as my mother goes, it goes, too.”

  “Carter, really,” Mrs. Cole exclaimed.

  Harry Armstrong said to Jordan, “I mean, we’re lucky because, even though we’re members, we can’t build our own camps out here on the lake. Not anymore. Got to preserve the Reserve, I guess. But at least we get to use Carter’s Rangeview. The Reserve’s put a freeze on any new construction up here, you know.”

  Jordan said that he didn’t know.

  Bunny Tinsdale was curious about Jordan’s airplane, was it his own?

  “It’s a 1932 Waco,” Jordan told him. He’d bought it new at the factory in Troy, Ohio, four years ago and had flown it to Lake Placid, where he’d had it fitted out with pontoons. Then he had flown to his home on the Tamarack River, where he’d landed on water for the first time. “Nearly dumped the damned thing.”

  “Interesting,” Tinsdale said. And how long had he been flying?

  “Since I was a kid,” Jordan said. He took a sip from his drink. He didn’t want to talk about flying with this crowd.

  “And where did you learn to fly?”

  “Well, I took the army flying course at Ashburn Airport on Chicago’s South Side.”

  “So you were in the war?”

  “Yes. Late. In 1918. I was in the Ninety-fourth Aero Squadron.”

  “You flew under Eddie Rickenbacker?” Dr. Cole said.

  “Briefly.”

  “Did you shoot down any Germans?” Vanessa asked and smiled.

  “Yes. Two. Both on the same day.”

  “And what day was that?” she asked.

  “April 4, 1918.”

  “Must have been quite a day,” she said.

  He didn’t answer, and she smiled.

  Bunny Tinsdale wanted to know about flying a plane with pontoons. “Is it harder than flying a regular plane? You know, with wheels?”

  In the air the pontoons were deadweight and slowed the airplane down, Jordan explained, but in the water it wasn’t much different from running a motorboat. Once you got the hang of it.

  “Where the heck do you actually fly?” Jennifer Armstrong wondered. “I mean, with those things on it, pontoons. What do you actually use it for?”

  “Transportation,” Jordan said. He flew it mainly here and there in the north country.

  “Interesting.”

  But he was thinking of taking a trip to Greenland soon, Jordan told them, and would fly it there. He wanted to make some pictures of the glaciers to illustrate a book. An account of his previous travels there.

  “Your own book? One you wrote yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting,” Jennifer Armstrong said and got up to make herself another drink.

  “You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you, Mr. Groves?” Evelyn Cole said. “We have a dozen lake trout from this morning’s expedition. Our boys are very good providers.”

  The pilot felt suddenly physically fatigued, as if he’d been running. He took a few seconds to answer, then said, “I don’t think so. It’s getting dark, and I’m expected at home. But thanks.” He wondered if her “boys” were the doctor and his friends, or the local men working in the kitchen shack out back. His friend, Hubert St. Germain, was the regular guide and caretaker for the Coles. He wondered if Hubert was the good provider.

  Maybe he ought to stay for dinner, Jordan thought. He was as aware as Vanessa that the good doctor collected artists, but the man also collected art, and Jordan had a few small, unsold Adirondack landscapes and a dozen woodcuts that he wouldn’t mind placing in Dr. Cole’s collection. They might make the doctor reconsider his passion for James Heldon. Jordan was conscious of Vanessa standing behind him, and he waited for her to say something that he would have to defend himself against without at the same time alienating her father. It was not easy for him to be polite to these people.

  But Vanessa said nothing. It amused her to see the degree to which her parents and their friends bored and slightly irritated the artist and the ways he did the same back to them. She left the room for a moment and returned wearing a pale linen jacket over her blouse. She made herself a martini and again took up her position behind Jordan, who was slumped in a wide, cushioned chair made of wrist-thick branches of a birch tree with the bark left on for rustic effect. It was an uncomfortable chair, and she could tell from his glum expression that to Jordan it was also ugly and pretentious, and so it was to her now, too. Most of the furniture was of that type—it was the desired style, meant to look handmade, cumbersome, rough, as if built by a local woodsman with ax and adze, which was in fact the case—but up until this moment she had seen it only through her parents’ and their friends’ admiring eyes.

  She leane
d down and placed her face next to Jordan’s and whispered, “I won’t be happy until you take me for a ride in your airplane.” Her cheek nearly brushed his, then pulled away. The others seemed not to notice. They were discussing the annual fireworks display at the Tamarack clubhouse tonight, which they could not see from the camp unless they rowed out to the far side of the lake in the guide boats around nine o’clock and faced the northeast sky above the distant clubhouse and golf course. They wondered whether it would be worth the effort.

  “When?” Jordan asked her.

  “Now,” Vanessa said.

  Jennifer Armstrong said, “I hate to complain, but every year I’m rather disappointed. The fireworks are really mostly for the locals, I think.”

  “Good public relations,” Bunny Tinsdale said. “Bread and circuses for the hoi polloi.”

  Jordan stood and declared that he had to leave. He thanked the doctor for his hospitality and for showing him the Heldons, nodded to the group, and quickly departed from the room. The sun had disappeared entirely behind the Great Range, and the lake was black, and the temperature was dropping fast. Outside on the deck he stopped to roll and light a cigarette and checked the wind. In the west, above the sooty mountains, the sky had faded from lemon to silken gray. The air was still smooth, he noted. The blue-black eastern sky was clear, with swatches of stars already visible, and over the treetops behind the camp a half-moon was rising. The pilot smoked his cigarette and made his way in the gathering darkness down the path to the lake and walked along the shore to his anchored airplane.

  She was waiting for him when he got there. She stood barefoot on the rocky beach in her white skirt and linen jacket, looking eager and elegant and brave. Jordan said nothing to the woman, and she said nothing to him. He stepped into the water and she followed. Grabbing a wing strut with one hand, he swung himself onto the nearer pontoon, turned, and extended his other hand to her. Refusing his help, she stepped gracefully onto the pontoon and made her way along the lower wing to the aft cockpit and situated herself there.

  Jordan untied and retrieved first one anchor, then the other, and quickly seated himself in the forward cockpit. He switched on the ignition, double-checked fuel and oil-pressure gauges, and started the large radial engine. The propeller rotated feebly for a few seconds, then the engine coughed, grumbled, and came to life. Jordan cut the float rudders to starboard, bringing the airplane around, facing it into the light northeast wind. He nudged the throttle forward, and the aircraft began to accelerate, bumping across the low ripples of the lake on a bearing that took it gradually away from shore, toward the farther side of the narrow lake.