The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  He told the boys to wait for him and got out of the car and walked toward the veranda. As he approached the group, the people ceased speaking and looked at him, and then, except for Vanessa, abruptly turned away. Russell Kendall took Evelyn Cole gently by the arm and led her along the veranda toward the steps at the far end of the long, open structure, past the Adirondack chairs and wicker settees and gliders, and the others followed, although Vanessa did not. She waited with a puzzled expression on her face, as if Jordan Groves were only a vaguely remembered acquaintance approaching.

  He said to her, “I just now heard about your father. I want to say I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  “What?”

  “Say that you’re sorry.”

  “I’m sorry. I am.”

  He was filled with an unfamiliar longing. He wanted to reach up and touch her and realized that not once yesterday had he actually touched her skin. Though she had whispered in his ear, their cheeks had not brushed. He remembered extending his hand to help her when she stepped from the water to the airplane, and a few seconds later, when she got into the cockpit, reaching again to assist her, but she had ignored his offers and not even their fingertips had touched. He had only seen and heard her.

  “Yes, well, you have much to be sorry for,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. She knew without looking that at the far end of the veranda her mother and Mr. Kendall and the others had turned and were watching her. She could see over Jordan’s shoulder that even the drivers were watching her. She decided not to slap him, although she wanted to, and he deserved it. But a slap would not create a scene so much as end one. No one could hear them, but everyone could see them, and she didn’t want the scene to end just yet.

  “Yes, you’re right,” he said. “I do. I do have much to be sorry for. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I’m afraid that I do.”

  “Then tell me, please,” he said, and meant it. He wanted to know what he had been thinking last night when he’d left her up there at Bream Pond, and he believed her, believed that she knew what he had been thinking.

  “You wanted to make love to me. And couldn’t.”

  He inhaled sharply. She stepped down from the veranda and walked toward him, and as she swept past he smelled her perfume, the faint odor of a rose. He had seen her and heard her, and now he had smelled her. But he still hadn’t touched her. “Wait,” he said and reached out and took her left hand into his.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but I have to leave. I have to arrange for my father’s funeral.”

  She tried to pull her hand free. He wouldn’t release it. He held it tightly, but carefully, as if her hand were a small, captured bird, terrified and fragile, struggling to escape his powerful grip without injuring itself. He felt the delicate bones and tendons turning beneath the cool, smooth skin of her hand.

  “You may be right,” he said. “About what I was thinking.”

  She looked up at him. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Does it?”

  “Yes, it matters. A lot. It matters to me.”

  He could not help himself, and meant no disrespect or mockery: he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly and released the bird into the air.

  For a split second Vanessa glared at him, as if he had indeed mocked her. Then she turned and quickly strode toward the tan sedan parked in front of his Ford. She called her mother sharply to come along and got into the rear seat of the car. The driver—a man Jordan knew, Ben Kernhold, who had once owned a now defunct machine shop over in Tamarack Forks and had made polished aluminum picture frames for him—closed the car door, cast a quick glance at Jordan, and went around to the other side, where he waited for Vanessa’s mother. One by one, Evelyn Cole and the others came down the far steps of the veranda and got into their vehicles.

  Slowly, like a cortege, the vehicles pulled out of the clubhouse driveway in a line and departed. Jordan stood by his car and watched them go over the hill and down, until they had disappeared from sight. Finally, he turned and, startled, saw that the manager of the club, Russell Kendall, was standing next to him.

  “Oh, hello, Kendall,” he said.

  “Mr. Groves, you should leave now.”

  “So you remember my name after all.”

  “Yes. And I know all about last night. You and your airplane at the Second Lake. You are not welcome here, sir. You should leave at once.”

  “I should leave at once, eh?” He could hear his blood roaring in his ears and knew that trouble was coming. “Well, you know, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to leave yet. I’ve got my two little boys here, and I was thinking of showing them this grand historic structure and taking a good look at it myself. I’ve never been up here before. I might want to become a member someday, you know.” He swung open the rear door of his car and said to his sons, “C’mon out, boys. We’re going to take the tour.”

  The boys, sensing something wrong in their father’s voice, hesitated. The dogs, Dayga and Gogan, did not. They scrambled over the boys’ laps, leaped from the car, and happily took off across the broad lawn. Like hounds in wild pursuit of a fox, they galloped in ever widening, intersecting loops through flower beds, across the manicured bowling green, and onto the adjacent eighth fairway of the golf course, where last night half the town had sat on the grass waiting to watch the fireworks when Vanessa flew Jordan’s airplane across the night sky above and aimed it at Sentinel Mountain and Goliath.

  Kendall shouted at Jordan, “Call those dogs! We can’t have unleashed dogs!”

  Jordan gazed at the sky, as if half expecting to see his airplane return. What a pretty sight it must have been from here, he thought. He wished he could keep thinking about that and could ignore what was happening here. He wished he could somehow avoid what he knew was about to happen.

  “Mr. Groves, call those dogs!”

  “Daddy, we’ll get them,” Bear said and got out of the car. He called, “C’mon, Wolf!” and his younger brother followed, and the two boys ran up the slope of the fairway after the dogs. A party of golfers waved angrily at the dogs and the boys and shouted at them and sent their caddies loping over the grassy bluffs after them, which only kept the dogs happily running in more elaborate and widening circles. On the veranda a half dozen of the clubhouse staff—waiters and the two desk clerks—had stepped outside to see what was happening, several with barely concealed smiles on their faces, cheered by the slightest sign of disorder. A groundsman came around from the rear of the building, stopped, folded his arms, and took in the scene.

  Jordan recognized most of the crew—local folks. Friends of his, neighbors. And they recognized him. It was the artist, Jordan Groves, from over in Petersburg in a row with Mr. Kendall. They liked the sight of the artist towering over the manager, seeming cool and calm and apparently unfazed by the little man’s rage. They were used to Kendall’s tirades. The artist they believed was a good man and meant well. But he was a troublemaker and didn’t seem to be aware of it. They hoped he wasn’t trying to organize some kind of workers’ union again, not here at the Tamarack club, like he did a year ago at the paper mill in Tamarack Forks. It was Roosevelt’s Wagner Act that had given him the idea that it was legal. Two months later the mill closed its doors and moved to one of those states down South. The Tamarack Club was practically the only private employer left in the region, and if you got hired here for the summer—despite the low wages, the long hours, and the rough treatment by the members and management—you counted yourself lucky. Except for the eight weeks of July and August when the Club was open, most people in town, unless they were able to hook on to one of the WPA projects or the Civilian Conservation Corps, stayed unemployed year-round and, as much as you could in this climate, lived off the land.

  Kendall turned to his staff and ordered them to catch those damned dogs, and a pair of busboys and a waiter obeyed, jogging across the lawn and onto the golf course. Then, a moment later, Jordan’s sons came over the
rise, each boy leading a dog by its collar, with the three club employees and the golfers’ caddies trooping along behind. The boys led the dogs to the car, opened the door on the far side and put them into it, and got in themselves.

  Jordan, still standing a few feet from the manager, put a feeble smile on his face and tried to appear amused by the whole thing. But he was not amused. He was very angry. He could not quite say yet what had angered him, however. Not Vanessa, certainly. And not the dogs. And not even Kendall, who was only doing his job, enforcing the rules of the Reserve.

  “If you don’t leave the grounds at once,” Kendall said to Jordan, “I’ll have you physically restrained. I’ll have you arrested.”

  “For what? I’m not doing anything illegal.”

  “For trespassing!”

  Jordan leaned in on him. “I’m not sure you can have me physically restrained. Not you, certainly, and not these fellows here, whom I know. These men are friends of mine. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you somehow manage to have me restrained. Then you’d be holding me against my will, and I’d hardly be guilty of trespassing. No, I’ll leave in my own good time.”

  Kendall turned to the waiters and the groundsman, who stood a few feet behind him, listening. They were unsure about what was expected of them. They were only waiters and a groundsman, after all, not security officers or bouncers. “Put him in his car,” Kendall ordered. “I’m going inside to call the sheriff.” He turned and stalked up the wide veranda steps and disappeared into the clubhouse, leaving four men and a teenage boy to face Jordan Groves, who gave no sign of moving.

  The groundsman, Murray Bigelow, said, “Prob’ly oughta do like he says, Groves. We got nothing against you, but…” He shrugged helplessly and shoved his hands into his pockets and looked away, as if embarrassed. Bigelow was a ruddy, ex-lumberjack in his fifties who had worked all his life for the Brown Paper Company. Three years ago the company had sold most of its eastern Adirondack holdings to the Reserve, and Bigelow had come in from the woods and gone to work for the Club.

  “When Kendall goes off like that, he makes it hell for the rest of us, Jordan,” a second man, Buddy Eastman, said. He was one of the waiters and had once been a plumber and five years ago had helped the artist put in his well. “Do us a favor and go home.”

  “Fellows, there’s no way I’m going to let Kendall or anyone else talk to me that way.”

  “That’s just how he is,” Eastman said. “He talks to everyone that way.”

  “I doubt it,” the artist said. “Look, if out of ignorance I broke one of his Club rules by landing my plane on his goddamn lake water, or my dogs got loose and ran across his goddamn golf course, then I’ll say sorry and pay the fine or whatever. But that’s it. It doesn’t give him the right to talk to me like I’m a bum and put me off the place. You agree with that?”

  “Yeah, I suppose I do. But, hell, Jordan, give us a break here,” Eastman said.

  The artist leaned back against the fender of his car and folded his arms across his chest. A number of members and guests had gathered on the veranda to watch, and more were coming from the dining room and from the tennis courts as word of the quarrel spread.

  Inside the car, Bear moved close to the open window and said, “Papa, can we go now?”

  “In a few minutes. I’ve got to settle something first.”

  “Please, Papa?”

  “In a few minutes, I said.”

  Kendall came back out of the clubhouse and stood glowering at the top of the steps. “You men!” he called to them. “I told you men to put him in his car!”

  Murray Bigelow stepped close to the artist and in a lowered voice said, “Look, Groves, this is getting complicated. Make it easier on all of us by just letting it go. It ain’t worth it, fighting with Kendall. Let it go. Believe me, we know what he’s like when he’s crossed.”

  “I’m not afraid of crossing him,” Jordan said.

  “You don’t work for him,” the groundsman said.

  “C’mon, Jordan,” Eastman said, and he took the artist’s arm. The artist shoved the man’s hand away and gave him a hard look. The others came forward then and surrounded Jordan Groves—Murray Bigelow and Rob Whitney, another of the waiters, a man Jordan’s age who had lost his dairy farm to the bank, and Carl James, a onetime traveling salesman, soft and pink and in his early sixties, and the teenage boy, Kenny Shay, the skinny blond son of the storekeeper Darby Shay. By their squared, open stance and their hands held loosely at their sides they made it clear that they weren’t physically threatening the artist so much as trying merely to herd him peacefully into his car.

  Jordan Groves looked from one to the other and said, “Don’t do this, fellows.”

  From the veranda Russell Kendall shouted, “I can’t reach the sheriff, so you’ll have to put him off the property!”

  Carl James turned and said, “That’s not really our job, Mr. Kendall.”

  “If you want a job, you’ll do what I tell you!”

  “Be reasonable, Jordan,” Buddy Eastman said. “You ain’t helping anybody this way. We got no choice but to do what he says.”

  The artist looked from one to the other—the three waiters, the groundsman, and the teenage boy—and slowly shook his head. “Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to do what he says. If you’re able.”

  Buddy Eastman grabbed Jordan by his left wrist and pulled him forward and threw an arm around his neck, and Murray Bigelow and the others jumped in. They wrestled Jordan around to the front of the car, cursing at him, while he cursed back and struggled to get free. He managed a sharp head butt across Bigelow’s face, sending him staggering backward, blood spurting from his nostrils, and he disabled Rob Whitney by kneeing him hard in the groin. Whitney grabbed his crotch, let out a howl of pain, and sat on the ground like a sack of potatoes. The teenage boy, Kenny Shay, let go of Jordan and quickly danced away. Fighting with a very large, very angry grown man was not something the boy was ready for.

  That left Buddy Eastman and the remaining waiter, Carl James, to handle Jordan Groves alone, and they were not up to it. The artist got one arm free of Carl James’s grip and shoved the man off him. He threw two quick punches that landed on James’s ear and throat, and the man, nearly falling, backed away, dropped his hands to his sides, and watched from a safe distance. Taller and heavier than his remaining opponent, the artist swung Buddy Eastman around and got his other arm free. He moved into a trained boxer’s stance and said, “I’ll take you apart, Buddy, if I have to!”

  Eastman put up his fists for a second, glared at Jordan Groves, then lowered his hands and said, “Groves, for Christ’s sake, get some sense! Go home!”

  Both men were panting and red faced. Slowly the artist brought his fists down. He walked around the front of his car and opened the driver’s door. For a few seconds he stood there and looked across the broad, mint green lawn to the clubhouse veranda, crowded now with gaping spectators, and he saw what a foolish, harmful thing he had done to these men, four men and a boy who were his neighbors and whom he regarded as friends. What kind of man was he? A common brawler? Fighting with men who were his friends and neighbors in front of his sons. It was a shameful thing to have done. He blamed the woman, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, for it. It was her fault. He blamed what she had said to him and what she thought she knew about him. Most of all he blamed her because she had turned her back on him. That was what had made him act this way.

  He got into the car and started the motor. Then he drove slowly away from the clubhouse. Halfway down the hill to the main road, he looked into the rearview mirror and saw the ashen faces of his sons in the backseat, both of them sucking furiously on candy. He said, “Let’s go swimming at Wappingers Falls, boys.”

  “That’s okay, Papa,” Bear said. “We want to go home now.”

  “Home? Okay, we can go swimming at home instead.”

  “We don’t need to go swimming or anything, Papa. We just want to go home.”

  �
�What about you, Wolf?”

  “Yes. Let’s go home,” Wolf said.

  Jordan sighed. “All right.” Then, after a few seconds, he said to his sons, “What happened back there, it was bad, I know. Really bad. I’m sorry you had to see it. But when a person insults you, you can’t put your tail between your legs and act like you deserve it.”

  “I know, Papa,” Bear said.

  “So I can’t promise you that it won’t happen again.”

  “I know, Papa,” the boy repeated.

  In the east, the Spanish border crossing was located a few miles northwest of the Catalan village of Portbou. On January 2, the daily train from Paris arrived at the crossing at 4:15 P.M., right on time. It was the winter of 1937, and the train from Paris was not much, a stubby six-wheel locomotive and tender and two rickety passenger cars. The sky above the leaden sea was mottled gray and the air was damp and cold, which was unusual here, even for January. There were only four passengers, four rumpled unshaven men. They stepped from the second car to the platform one after the other and stood there for a moment. One of the men was Spanish looking, in his early thirties, and wore a dark suit and necktie and snap-brim felt fedora. He carried a briefcase and a single suitcase, as if he were returning from a minor diplomatic mission. A second passenger had a shock of pale blond, nearly white hair across his forehead. He was in his midthirties and wore a brown corduroy sports jacket and dark blue shirt open at the throat. He carried a large, much-scuffed leather suitcase. The third man, also in his midthirties, was short and square shouldered and had a pie-shaped face. He wore a trench coat and beret. His baggage consisted of a small black foot-locker, which he handled with difficulty. The fourth passenger was noticeably taller than the others and a few years older. He lugged a large canvas duffel down the steps to the platform. He walked a few steps with it and stopped and swung the duffel onto his shoulder and carried it there. Compared to his three companions, he was a big man, big overall, and though he was as dark as the fellow in the suit and fedora, he did not look Spanish, and unlike the other two would not have passed for European. He wore a short, fleece-lined leather jacket, plaid flannel shirt, and tan slacks, and he was hatless. More so than the others, his relaxed, self-assured demeanor and his clothing marked him as an American or possibly Canadian or Australian. In recent months there had been many such men crossing from France into Spain at this place, and while they stood out they were no longer unexpected. The four walked to the end of the platform where the conductor from the train directed them into the railroad station. The waiting area was empty and there was no one behind the ticket seller’s cage. There was only the conductor and the four passengers. In the near corner of the high-ceilinged room a coal fire in a round-bellied iron stove gave off a faintly sulphurous smell. The conductor led the men to a closed door next to a filigreed tin sign: ADMINISTRATION DES DOUANES. The conductor opened the door to a small, nearly dark room beyond and stepped aside and let them enter. There was a scarred desk at one end of the room. Behind the desk a bleary-eyed customs official with a long, narrow face smoked a cigarette and in the weak light from a single high window read a day-old copy of Le Temps. He slowly folded his newspaper and turned to the four travelers and held out his hand, palm up. One by one, they placed their passports into the customs officer’s hand. All four passports had been issued by the government of the Republic of Spain—three of them by the ministry of foreign affairs in Madrid. These three the customs officer quickly stamped and returned to their owners. The fourth passport, the one belonging to the tall man in the leather jacket, had been issued at the Spanish embassy in Washington, D.C. It had been issued to Juan Fernandez Carreja. The customs officer studied the photograph for a moment and measured it against the face of the traveler. C’est vous, monsieur? The traveler said, Oui. C’est moi. The officer rubbed out his cigarette and lighted a fresh one and continued to examine the passport. Finally, he asked, Quel est votre nom, monsieur? The traveler said, Je m’appelle…Juan…Juan Carreja. The officer pursed his lips and shook his head no. That was not his name. Quickly, the Spaniard in the fedora stepped forward and whispered in the traveler’s ear, and the traveler said, Juan Fernandez. Je m’appelle Juan Fernandez. The officer nodded. Yes, that was indeed the correct name correctly stated. He stamped the passport and gave it back to the man, who slipped it into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. The customs officer kept his hand out, palm up. The traveler looked at the man’s hand for a few seconds, then reached down and shook it. Merci beaucoup, monsieur, he said. The customs officer said nothing, just swung his head from side to side, no again, and caught the eye of the Spaniard. Avez-vous quelque chose pour moi, messieurs? the officer asked him. The Spaniard nudged the traveler, who suddenly understood. He reached for his wallet and took out an American twenty-dollar bill. He folded it twice and shook the man’s hand a second time, leaving the bill behind. Then the four carried their luggage outside to the platform. From there they crossed into Spain on foot. They walked along the railroad tracks a distance of one hundred yards to a second platform and train station and customs officer, Spanish this time instead of French. Here they were greeted with broad smiles and embraces by a small party of uniformed military officers and half a dozen civilians.