The Reserve Page 4

The boys’ wing of the house—a shared bedroom, bathroom, and playroom—was separated from their parents’ private quarters by a long, railed walkway that looked over the vast two-story living room below, where an entire wall was taken up by a stone fireplace and hearth and an oversize cast-iron wood-stove. Between the two second-floor wings were a pair of guest rooms and a guest bath. Below, adjacent to the kitchen, was the dining room, where floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors gave onto a large brook-stone terrace that Jordan had constructed around a hundred-year-old oak tree and a head-high, three-ton, gray chunk of glacial rock with a deep split in it. Off the dining room was Jordan’s study, which resembled the library of a gentlemen’s private club that he had once visited in London—a male sanctuary reserved for reading, drinking fifty-year-old cognac, and smoking Cuban cigars. At least that was its intended use. The center of the house, the room most used by the family together, was the kitchen, designed after the large, open country kitchens Jordan had admired long ago in Brittany. From the kitchen a narrow, roofed-over breezeway led to Jordan’s studio. The breezeway was open to the elements, and in winter, to get from the house to the studio, he had to wear a coat and boots and kept them on until the fire in the studio stove got the building warm. It was a minor discomfort, but an inconvenience that Jordan liked, as if it were a daily test and proof of his willingness to work.

  The house was an attractive, sprawling, physically comfortable, but essentially masculine structure. Jordan had designed it, in consultation with Alicia, naturally, and had done most of the construction himself, in the process teaching himself basic plumbing, wiring, and masonry. Carpentry had been his father’s trade, and Jordan, an only child, had learned it working alongside him as an adolescent and, briefly, after he came home from the war. The unconventional layout of the house and the strict use of local materials and even the fine details of the interior—banister rails made from interwoven deer antlers, yellow birch cabinets with birch bark glued to the facing, hidden dressers built into the walls, and elaborately contrived storage units, with no clutter anywhere and minimal furniture—reflected almost entirely Jordan’s taste and requirements, not Alicia’s. None of the windows had curtains or drapes or even shades to block the light, and during the daytime the house seemed almost to be a part of the forest that surrounded it. And at night the darkness outside rushed in. On every wall of the house, framed prints and paintings and drawings by Jordan Groves mingled indiscriminately with pictures and small sculptures and carvings that had been given to him over the years by fellow artists—John Curry, Tom Benton, and Ed Hopper, and a Lake George landscape by Georgia O’Keeffe—usually in exchange for a work of his. Jordan believed that an artist should not have to purchase art. Exchanging artworks with your fellow artists was a way of honoring and being honored by your peers.

  Jordan had purchased the land—three hundred forested acres with a small mountain of its own and a half mile of frontage on the Tamarack—the year they were married, when his pictures and illustrations had begun to sell for large sums of money. He built the studio first, and they had lived in it for two years, until Bear was born and the house was ready to receive them. Then he put up a shed large enough to store his Studebaker truck and the Ford sedan and his tools and building supplies, and a few years later built the boathouse for his floatplane. Alicia had wanted to give their home a name and tried Asgaard on him and Valhalla, but Jordan said no, too pretentious. She tried north country names like Rivermede, Shadowbrook, and Splitrock. He shook his head no and grew impatient with her. The only people who gave names to their homes and put up fancy signs at the gate, he explained, were rich people with aristocratic pretensions. Summer people. People who wanted to distance themselves from the peasants. No one local gave a name to his house. “And all indications to the contrary,” he said, “we’re locals.”

  When the boys returned to the kitchen washed and dressed for the day, Alicia came down with them. At the sight of Jordan standing at the stove cooking bacon and eggs, she raised her eyebrows in mild surprise, filled a mug with coffee, and sat at the long table and watched him. Bear and Wolf slid onto the bench at their usual places and waited.

  “You want some bacon and eggs, too?” Jordan asked his wife without turning from the stove. “There’s plenty.”

  “Coffee’s enough. I’ll eat later.”

  They were silent for a moment. The boys looked from one parent to the other and remained silent also.

  Her voice rising slightly, Alicia said, “When did you come home, Jordan?”

  “Around ten. You were asleep already, so I didn’t wake you.”

  “We waited for you, and then it was too late.”

  “You should’ve gone without me. I got talked into giving someone a flying lesson. Over at the Reserve. Cole’s daughter,” he said and served the boys their food. “That famous socialite. Or debutante. You know the one.”

  “Yes. I know the one.”

  Alicia had met Jordan in New York City when she was nineteen and had come to America to study art curatorship at the Pratt Institute and he had been teaching a course in printmaking. Ten years older than she, long divorced, and a onetime student of the famous Charles Henri, he was broke and unknown. Alicia was the only child of a wealthy Viennese manufacturer of glass-ware and his doting wife. The girl was nearly six feet tall, with a creamy complexion, blue eyes that were strikingly blue, the eyes of an Alpine goddess, Jordan had thought, and white blond hair cut fashionably short, like a flapper’s. She was the most beautiful girl at the institute, perhaps the most beautiful girl Jordan had ever met, and her accented English was like lieder to him. Halfway into Alicia’s second year at Pratt, Jordan held his first one-man show at the Knoedler Gallery, and at the crowded opening, with nearly every picture in the show already sold, he asked her to sleep with him. When she refused, he at once proposed marriage to her. Certain he was joking, she accepted his proposal, and later that same night, drunk on champagne and Jordan’s new celebrity, Alicia went with him to his Greenwich Village studio and slept with him. The next day he quit his job at Pratt. To the consternation of her parents, Alicia dropped out of school and moved in with him, and three months later, to their dismay, she and Jordan eloped to Edinburgh, where it was easy for a divorced American man to marry again and where he had long wanted to make pictures of the scoured landscapes and winter skies of the ancient Gaelic north.

  Jordan brought his own plate from the stove and sat opposite the boys and, head down, began to eat. He hated these morning-after conversations, when he felt judged and convicted of a minor crime, but couldn’t name exactly the thing that he had done wrong and therefore could not properly apologize and get it behind them. He was good at apologizing, as long as he knew what for, and thus he almost welcomed accusations. But he was rarely given the chance. Over the years there were times, indeed many times, when he had committed minor crimes against her, but he was almost never accused of these. He was not even sure they were crimes. Nearly everything he had done that ended up hurting or depriving her, he had done with her permission and full knowledge, and therefore he could not apologize for it. The months alone in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland; his solo excursions to Cuba and the Andes; his trip to Louisiana and Mississippi; his long stays in Manhattan, London, and Paris: for his work, he insisted. On these expeditions and trips he took care not to fall in love with other women. Therefore he did not believe that he should feel guilty—except for having drunk too much, for talking too loosely to people he regarded as fools and knaves, and for indulging himself in what he regarded as harmless flirtations and brief sexual liaisons that never went anywhere dangerous. These were minor crimes, yes, but only against himself, he felt, not her. They did not threaten the status quo. They did not oblige him to feel guilty. Ashamed, perhaps, but not guilty.

  “You’re not working today, I take it,” she said. She rolled a cigarette, a practice she’d borrowed from him years ago, and lighted it.

  “No, not this morning. I’ve got a pa
ckage of materials from Sonnelier that’s waiting at Shay’s in town. Thought I’d drive in with the boys and pick it up and maybe go swimming with the dogs at Wappingers Falls. Make up for last night,” he added weakly.

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “Feel like joining us?”

  “No,” she said, a little too quickly. “So what did you think of the famous socialite?”

  “A spoiled bitch.”

  “A beautiful spoiled bitch?”

  “You could say that.”

  “And her father’s paintings? The Heldons? Were they beautiful, too?”

  “Not really. Little altars,” he said. “Altars to nature. Not nature itself.”

  She nodded and looked away. “Nature itself” was what Jordan painted and drew. He rarely made pictures of scenery, however, and never without evidence of the dynamic presence of human beings. To Jordan, history and politics and economics were all parts of nature. Sex, work, play: it didn’t matter. To him, human beings were no less a part of the natural world than the mountains and lakes and skies that enveloped them.

  “What’s on your program today?” he asked.

  “I want to walk,” she said. “And work in the garden. And I want to think, Jordan. I need some fresh thoughts. You know what I mean?”

  He didn’t answer. He did know what she meant. Her thoughts—and his, too—were growing old fast. Something big was coming their way. Something uninvited and unwanted was silently approaching them. Something unavoidable. And though they didn’t know what it was, they both knew it was coming. The boys had finished their breakfast and stood at the soapstone sink rinsing their dishes under the pump. Jordan told them to meet him at the car as soon as they were done and got up from the table. He called the dogs and, without touching his wife or saying anything more to her, went outside.

  IT WAS A COOL, CLOUDLESS MORNING, THE AIR SO DRY IT FELT like all the moisture had been wrung from it—what Jordan enjoyed calling a perfect Adirondack day, referring not to the season or the temperature, but to the brilliant light. Winter or summer, on days like this, under a cobalt blue sky, everything in his sight was sharply detailed, as if etched with acid, making him feel he could see and touch each and every leaf on each and every tree, every patch of lichen on every rock, every boulder glistening in the stream. He drove the Ford over Balsam Hill and down the long slope to the grassy pastures of Tunbridge below, and his vision felt microscopic. Who needs the forest, when you can see the individual leaves of the individual trees? he said to himself. Who needs the mountains, when you can see the very rocks that make them? In light this clear and bright, it was all there, the entire universe, no matter where in it he looked.

  Now that he was out of the house and away from Alicia’s hard gaze and driving to town in the rowdy company of his sons and the dogs, he felt exhilarated—he felt restored to himself. He told the boys to crank down the rear windows and let the dogs put their heads in the wind. They were Irish setters, littermates he’d bought as pups three years ago from a breeder of champion show dogs in Saratoga Springs. The boys had been begging for a dog for months, and one spring night when he came back from a week in the city, he showed up at the door with a pair of dark red male puppies in his arms, which, during the solitary three-hour train ride north from Saratoga Springs, he’d named himself. They were to be called Dayga and Gogan, named after two of his favorite artists, Degas and Gauguin, he explained to his sons.

  He pulled in at Shay’s, the combined general store and post office at the center of the village, and went inside, followed by his sons, who ran to examine the jars of penny candy.

  “Good morning, Darby,” Jordan said. “You’ve got a package from France for me?”

  The man behind the counter was both storekeeper and postmaster, a balding, middle-aged man with a face pointed like a fox’s and a blotched, rust-colored complexion to match. He nodded and cast a cold glance at the boys, as if to urge the father to keep a suspicious eye on them while he was away from the candy counter, then ambled into the little room at the back of the cluttered store where the mail got sorted and distributed. He lugged the carton up to the counter and set it in front of Jordan and had him sign for it. “What’ve you got in there? French cheese?” Darby asked.

  “Art supplies.”

  “Americans must make good art supplies, I’d think.”

  “They do. Just not as good as the French.” Jordan slid a dime across the glass and said, “Give ’em each a nickel’s worth of what they want.”

  “Gum balls! The red ones! Make mine all red ones!” Bear said.

  “What about you?” Darby said to Wolf.

  “Half licorice sticks and half gum balls. Any color.”

  “That’s four for a penny, y’ know,” Darby said. “Ten cents worth of candy. That’s quite a lot for just two kids.”

  “It’ll last a while, I guess,” Jordan said.

  The storekeeper bagged the candy slowly, as if reluctant to sell it, and passed the sacks to the boys. Without looking at Jordan, he said, “Heard you flew that seaplane of yours into the Second Lake last night.”

  “You did?” Jordan said. “Well, news gets around fast, I guess.”

  “Small town.”

  “How’d you hear it?”

  “Bunch of fellows from town had to go up there and bring out Dr. Cole from his camp.”

  “What? Why?”

  “One of his friends that was staying with him, the man come all the way out in the dark by himself to get help. Lucky most of the volunteer boys was already up to the Tamarack clubhouse with the fire truck, on account of having to run the fireworks. So they got into the lake pretty quick. Not that it made much difference.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Heart attack, I guess. He was a goner by the time they got out to the camp. The daughter, Countess whatzername, they come up on her walking in from the clubhouse just when they got the old man back down from their camp. She didn’t know about her father yet, so they had to tell her. For a while there they thought they was going to have to haul her over to the hospital instead of the old man, the way she was carrying on. But like I said, he was a goner. She was the one told about you flying in,” he added. “The daughter. Claimed you set her down and left her up at Bream Pond,” he said and chuckled.

  “That’s only about half right,” Jordan said.

  “I expect so. Say, is she really a countess? I mean, do you get to keep the title and all after you divorce the count?”

  “I don’t know,” Jordan answered. He asked Darby if Dr. Cole’s daughter and wife were still at the clubhouse, but Darby wasn’t sure. The doctor’s body had been taken over to Clarkson’s Funeral Home in Sam Dent, ten miles away, so he thought maybe they were still staying close by, either at the Moose Head Inn in Sam Dent or over here at the clubhouse. “You know, to make preparations and all, for getting the body back down to New York City. For the funeral and all. That’s where they come from, isn’t it?”

  Jordan nodded without answering. He grabbed the carton and hustled the boys out of the store to the car. From town he drove south on the road to the Reserve and turned up the steep incline at the entrance to the clubhouse grounds and pulled in behind a tan Packard sedan parked in the oval driveway in front of the wide veranda. Several other cars were parked there also, all with their motors running, their cloth-capped drivers—men Jordan recognized as out-of-work local men hired for the occasion, his neighbors—loading suitcases and golf bags and specially encased, custom-made fly rods and tackle boxes or standing idly by, waiting to carry their passengers to the train at Westport. On the veranda Jordan saw Vanessa and her mother and some of the people he had met the night before. He recognized the Tinsdales and the Armstrongs, but couldn’t remember their names.

  Russell Kendall, the manager of the club, a small, almost delicate-looking man wearing a seersucker suit and bow tie and white shoes, was talking to the group, with large gestures and exaggerated facial expressions, as if in a stage play. Jord
an knew Kendall only vaguely, having seen him a few times at the open-house cocktail parties that people tossed at their summer homes, parties attended by nearly everyone not considered strictly local. He’d also caught him having a recreational drink alone at the bar of the Moose Head Inn in Sam Dent. Slumming, as it seemed to Jordan. He had large red lips half covered by a drooping blond mustache, and Jordan believed that he was a homosexual. Each time they met, Jordan Groves had to be freshly introduced to Kendall, which irritated the artist.

  Although the artist knew that he would enjoy the clubhouse facilities of the Reserve—the tennis courts, the dining fit for a luxury cruise ship, the comfortable bar with a bartender from Ireland who made a first-class martini, the golf course, and the hiking trails and trout-filled lakes and streams that ran through the vast holdings of the Reserve—Jordan was not a member, nor had he ever wanted to join. One night a few years ago he’d ended up drinking late at the Moose Head with a pair of members wearing dinner jackets, flush-faced fellows his age who’d undone their ties and gone into town after the club bar had closed, and they had naively offered to put him up for membership. He was a celebrity, after all. Known for being somewhat eccentric and temperamental and thought to be politically suspect, Jordan Groves was nonetheless a famous artist. He could obviously afford the fees, and he held his liquor like a gentleman. He had said, “No, thanks, fellows. I don’t want to be the first Jewish member of the Tamarack club.” His sponsors said they hadn’t realized he was Jewish. “I’d also be the first Negro member,” he added, and they saw that he was joking and knew not to press him any further on the subject. His visit to Dr. Cole’s camp yesterday was the first time that he’d actually set foot on the Reserve, and today was the first time he’d parked his car in the clubhouse driveway.

  He shut off the motor and sat there for a few seconds and watched Vanessa. She was in a group of perhaps ten people, but he saw no one else. She wore a calf-length black skirt and a dark gray silk blouse with billowing sleeves and over her broad shoulders a black crocheted shawl, and she looked even more beautiful to Jordan today than when he’d seen her yesterday in the fading, late-afternoon sunlight standing alone by the shore of the Second Lake. She had on bright red, almost scarlet lipstick, and mascara, and though she was pale and her face full of sorrow, she was luminous to him, enveloped by a light that seemed to emanate from inside her. He did not think that he had ever seen a woman with a visible field of light surrounding her like that, a gleaming halo wrapped around her entire body.