The Reserve

by Russell Banks

  Though Hubert St. Germain was an Adirondack guide, a type of man much admired in the region by the locals as well as by the wealthy visitors who hired him, Alicia knew that nonetheless he was in fact little more than a servant to those wealthy visitors. He was a man whose only power in the world came from his intimate knowledge of his immediate environment and from his quiet, dignified acceptance of his powerlessness. In that sense, Hubert, as a type, was like those Inuits and cane cutters and the Spanish peasants. She could imagine Hubert joining one of the Communist or anarchist brigades of workers and farmers, marching off to wage war against Franco and the Fascists. Well, not Hubert himself, exactly, but as a type of man. The type of man her husband envied. The type of man she had fallen in love with, she suddenly realized, and to whom, for nearly five months, once and twice a week and more, she had given her body and all its secrets.

  She went through her day as she normally would, tending to the boys and her gardens and the house, to all appearances the calm, competent, organized wife and mother she had been for over a decade now—ever since her one most self-defining act of defiance, when she’d disobeyed her parents by dropping out of Pratt to elope with the artist, her professor, the suddenly celebrated Jordan Groves. She was filled today with the same fear and uncertainty she had felt those long years ago. Her parents had forgiven her—once she was pregnant—and had reluctantly come to accept their daughter and son-in-law’s bohemianism, as they saw it, and leftist politics and atheism. At least she hadn’t gone to America and run off with a Jew or a Negro. The artist could always change his way of life as he grew older and wiser, unlike a Jew and a Negro, who could never change who they were, and besides, he was financially successful and famous and interestingly eccentric in a very American way. Alicia’s Viennese parents liked and admired self-made Americans for their energy and confidence almost as much as they liked and admired their Prussian neighbors to the north.

  All day Alicia’s stomach felt tight and light, like a helium-filled balloon, and her arms and legs were weak and watery. Her hands trembled, as if she’d drunk too much coffee. Standing on the threshold of a life whose shape and details she could not imagine terrified her. Whatever happened or did not happen over the next few days or weeks, she knew that her life would never again be the same as it had been. By nature, Alicia did not like surprises. It was one of the reasons she had so easily adapted to her husband’s willful and impulsive nature. He was free to go and come, to make all the big decisions regarding the overall shape of their life together, so long as from one day to the next, year after year, she was allowed to play the unwobbling pivot. She was free neither to act nor react, and while other people, especially women, felt sorry for her and wondered why she so placidly accepted her husband’s outrageous public behavior (he wrote about it in his books, for heaven’s sake, for all the world to read), she had not felt sorry for herself. Lonely, perhaps. But there had been a useful and satisfying trade-off: her stability and commonsensical maintenance of the everyday and her tolerance of her husband’s waywardness had endowed her with a capacity for making him feel guilty. And now she had lost that capacity, perhaps for the duration.

  A little after three o’clock, Hubert St. Germain knocked at the kitchen door. Alicia hadn’t heard him arrive or knock. She was in the library playing Jordan’s Jimmie Rodgers records on the cabinet-size Victrola, teaching Wolf and Bear to memorize and sing the songs, a gift to Jordan when—or was it if?—he came home. All three were sitting on the floor together singing “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride” along with Jimmie Rodgers, when Alicia heard the dogs bark and looked out the window and saw Hubert’s Model A in the driveway.

  “Stay here, boys. Someone’s here,” she said and told them to keep practicing the songs. “But be careful handling the records. You know what they mean to Papa. No scratches or fingerprints.” She went through the kitchen to the door, roiled by anxiety mingled with anger. What on earth was he thinking, coming here like this? Was this his response to her letter? Or had Jordan confronted him somehow, threatened him or even physically attacked him? Or maybe Jordan had simply told him, Go ahead, you want her, she’s yours.

  It didn’t matter. It was too late for that now.

  She hushed the dogs, opened the door, and was relieved that the guide had a downcast expression on his face, shoulders slumped. A defeated man, she thought, though his face showed no signs of having been attacked by her husband. Defeated by her letter, then.

  “You read my letter, Hubert,” she said. “Oh, Hubert, why did you come here?”

  “No, no. What letter? I…I haven’t been home. Not since yesterday, actually. Not since right after you left my place. I…I need to talk with you, Alicia.”

  “Jordan could come home any minute, Hubert. You shouldn’t be here. He knows…about us. I told him last night. I didn’t mean to, but I thought he’d already found out about…about us, and it just came out.”

  “Yes, he told me. I know where he is. He won’t be back till after dark.”

  They were silent for a moment, as if registering the visible changes that had occurred in each other’s face in the past twenty-four hours. They weren’t the same man and woman they had been yesterday afternoon, and it showed. Their faces were drawn and tightly held. They looked years older.

  Finally Alicia said, “Hubert, I wrote you a good-bye letter. I put it in your mailbox, and Jordan saw me. He flew over, and I thought he knew about us. Because of that girl, and—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he interrupted. “I just need to talk with you,” he said again. “About us, yes. But something else.”

  “Not here. Not in the house. Come down by the garden,” she said and led the way, the big red dogs bounding ahead, and as they walked, Hubert began telling Alicia what had happened at the Coles’ camp at the Second Tamarack Lake. He told her everything.

  She heard him out without stopping him and was first shocked and then dismayed, and then frightened—frightened for him and also for her husband. They sat in the shade of a large maple tree in the Westport-style Adirondack chairs Jordan had copied from one he’d first seen several years back on the porch of a Westport summer cottage on the shore of Lake Champlain. He had rented a barn and organized a crew of local unemployed carpenters to manufacture the chairs and sell them to tourists. But the tourists never materialized, and the project, like so many others, had fallen apart, leaving Jordan with a dozen of the wide-board chairs to distribute around the grounds and porches of his own house. Jordan had loved the clean, geometric simplicity of the design and their ease of construction and comfort, and couldn’t understand why so few other people, especially people with the money to buy them, had the same appreciation.

  “Do you realize what you and Jordan have done?”

  “Well, yes,” he answered. “It was illegal. But it wasn’t wrong. Was it? Like hunting off-season on the Reserve, that’s illegal, too. It’s against the rules. But I do it. Lots of folks do it. They have to, most of them.” Hubert was exhausted. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt this many strong, conflicted emotions. He wanted to disappear into the woods and stay there alone for as long as it took until he and everyone else had forgotten all about Dr. Cole’s widow, Evelyn Cole, who had mysteriously disappeared way back in the summer of ’36, and the secret love affair he’d had those many long years ago with the wife of the artist Jordan Groves.

  “Yes, it is wrong,” Alicia said, her accent growing more noticeable as she spoke. Even she could hear it, but when her feelings ran high she couldn’t do anything about it. “You didn’t have to do it, you know. Bury that woman out there and make it so that now you have to lie about it, lie about how she died and what you did afterward, just to protect the daughter. How did she convince you to do it?” she asked, incredulous. “Especially Jordan. How did she talk him into going along with this scheme?”

  “What do you mean, ‘especially Jordan’?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that he’s more skeptical of people than you are,
I guess. Less trusting. Particularly of women. Rich women.”

  “You think I trust rich women?”

  “You trusted me.”

  Hubert was silent for a moment. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Oh, Lord, Hubert, I don’t know.”

  “What will you tell Jordan?”

  “Jordan? Nothing. Unless he first tells me what you and he did today. And he won’t do that.”

  “No, I guess not. He wouldn’t have any need to do that,” he said. “I’m the one who needed to tell you. Is he going to leave you, Alicia? Because of us?”

  “I don’t think so. Not as long as we stop seeing each other, you and I. And we will stop, Hubert. This has to be the last time we can be together.”

  “I know.” He shook his head slowly from side to side, as if saying no with great reluctance. “Everything’s a damned mess, isn’t it? Everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Is that why you came here today, to ask me what you should do?”

  “No, I came…I came because I love you. And I trust you to tell me the truth. I need to know the truth, Alicia, because it’s the only way for me to tell right from wrong. For maybe the first time in my life since I was a kid, I don’t know if what I’ve done is right or wrong.”

  “You know what I think, don’t you?”

  He was silent for a moment. “Yes, I suppose I do,” he said. “I guess I knew all along what I should do. I just needed to hear it from you. You think I should go and tell Russell Kendall what happened, and show him where we buried the body.”

  She didn’t answer him.

  He stood slowly, like a tired old man. With his back to her, he said, “I should leave now.”

  “Oh, Hubert, I’m so sorry that it all came down to this. I wish I had known back…back when it first started.”

  “Would you have turned me away, if you’d known it was going to end like this?”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Good-bye, Hubert. I loved you very much.”

  “I love…I loved you, too. Very much.”

  He walked alone up the stone steps to the back of the house, and when he passed by the kitchen door on his way to his car, he saw the two little boys standing there, somber and worried looking. He was a stranger to them. Alicia’s sons. They were Jordan Groves’s sons, too. And this was the house that Alicia and Jordan Groves had built together, the life they had made together, man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother and children, and the evidence of all their years of work together was here in front of him. It came home to him then—the foolish, deluded thing that he had done these months with Alicia, the strangely passive state of mind it had gradually induced in him, transforming him without his knowledge into a man made foolish and deluded by no one but himself. The love affair with Alicia Groves was why he had agreed to help Vanessa Cole keep her mother a prisoner. It was why he had ended up this morning struggling over the gun with the woman. It was what had caused her death. It was why he helped bury her on the Reserve.

  The boys were very serious, as if they could read the guide’s thoughts. The older one said, “Hi,” and the younger boy tried a small smile.

  “Hello,” Hubert said and moved on. When he got into his car, he saw the gun lying on the passenger seat, Dr. Cole’s Belgian shotgun, still wrapped in his jacket. That, too, he thought. I’ll have to tell the truth about the gun, too. And how I came by it.

  VANESSA’S BEDROOM, HERS SINCE CHILDHOOD, WAS IN A SEPARATE wing of the main building, with a wide view of the lake and the Great Range, and when Jordan asked to see the rest of the house she led him there in a roundabout way.

  “You won’t find any James Heldon paintings anywhere but in the living room. Daddy liked prominent display.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m interested in how people lay out their houses. Tells you a lot about them. It’s a form of behavior, like a painting. You can learn from it. What to emulate, what to avoid.”

  They passed from the living room into a windowless hallway, and off the hallway to a small room with a corner fireplace and rough-cut floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with books—complete sets of Kipling, Cooper, and Trollope, the entire Harvard Classics and the Yale Shakespeare in twenty-eight volumes—and on tables slabs of large, illustrated books on hunting and fishing. One long shelf held the entire set of Little Blue Books. Jordan pulled down two at random and leafed through them: number 562, Sophocles’s Antigone, and number 200, Voltaire’s The Ignorant Philosophers.

  “Your father’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not exactly light reading.”

  “No. This was the nursery,” she told him. “Until I was four. Then it became Daddy’s library.”

  She spoke slowly and deliberately now, somewhat out of character, Jordan thought. He was waiting for her to crack and come apart. Any minute now what has happened will hit her, and she’ll become a different person, he thought. A sad and sorrowful woman filled with guilt will replace the incandescent, tough-talking woman filled with smooth, fast-running anger. He didn’t want that transformation to occur, but knew that it was inevitable and that once it did occur he would be transformed, too. He would return to his senses. Or, more accurately, he would return to being the man he had been when he’d first arrived here this morning. When she became sad, he in turn would be obliged to acknowledge that what he had helped her do today was not just illegal, it was wrong, inhuman, and probably stupid as well. And then he would be obliged to face once again the fact of his wife’s adultery, weighing it against the fact of his own adulterous indulgences and infatuations, trying to balance his anger and fear against his regret and guilt. And Hubert would no longer be merely his partner in crime, but also his rival.

  Jordan Groves had no philosophy for this task, no ethical system with sufficient rigor and discipline to give him a coherent, self-sustaining style. As long as Vanessa kept her cool, however, he could keep his. He tried to help her hold on to the glittering mixture of warmth and brittleness, of humor and anger, that resisted dissolving in sarcasm or superficial irony. It was sexy to him, and he liked it—two can play at that game—and now he needed it. The last thing he wanted from her was sad sincerity. He thought of those Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy and My Man Godfrey with Powell and Carole Lombard and The Petrified Forest with Bogart and Bette Davis. He thought of Ernest Hemingway’s stories and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. That was the style he needed, and he felt that if he could keep on affecting it, he could become it, and she would become it, too.

  “I assume he bought these books by the foot and had them shipped from New York. Carried in by backpack.”

  “More or less. But he read them. They’re from the house in Tuxedo Park. After the nursery became the library. He was the one who taught me to read. Every summer until I was sixteen and had graduated from college he made a list of books in the library that I had to read and report on.”

  “Sweet sixteen and already a college graduate? Come on. Am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Check the social register.”

  “Can’t say I own one.”

  “Look in the library,” she said. “Everything you need to know is in the library. Everything.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He ambled from the room out to the hallway, where two rows of framed photographs hung on the walls—lakes, rivers, mountains. No people or other animals. “Daddy’s?”

  “But of course.”

  “He had good equipment.”

  “The best. He had Alfred Stieglitz as his adviser.”

  “Stieglitz takes pictures of people, though.”

  “He only advised Daddy on technical matters,” she said quickly and changed the subject. “Coming up is my bedroom, dressing room, and bath. Cinderella’s Suite.”

  “Cinderella had sisters, as I recall. Stepsisters.”

  “I always thoug
ht of her as adopted. It was a screwy family, anyhow. No father, just a stepmother and a fairy godmother. And, of course, Prince Charming,” she said and placed her hand on his forearm and curtsied.

  “Your feet are not exactly tiny.”

  “I beg your pardon!” She kicked off her moccasins and extended one foot for him to observe and admire. “Long and narrow and perfectly arched. A dancer’s feet,” she declared and walked on ahead of him, stepping lightly, like a ballerina.

  “Why’d you call it ‘Cinderella’s Suite’? I don’t picture you sweeping the hearth.”

  “I didn’t call it that. Daddy did. His and Mother’s quarters he called Olympus. The dining room is Mead Hall. The guest quarters is the Lodge, the library is the Beinecke, the kitchen is the Scullery, and so on. The living room is Valhalla. All very mythic. All quite hilarious. In a Yale-ish way. He even had wooden signs made and hung them over the doors. Until Mother made him take them down.”