The Reserve (2 page)

He eased himself from the cockpit and stepped onto the left pontoon, tossed his mud-hook anchors into the water, tugged at the lines until he knew they were snagged in the lake bottom, and kneeled and tied the lines tightly to cleats. The woman had turned and was watching him, still with the same distant, broody expression on her exquisite face. She had very smooth, white skin that shone. He glanced up at her. A world-class beauty who knows it, he thought. Nothing but trouble. He had recognized her face from photographs he’d been shown by Alicia. He knew she was Dr. Cole’s daughter, Vanessa, the one-time Countess de Moussegorsky or something like that. For years, ever since she’d been presented to society, both in New York and in Washington, she had been the subject of much gossip, local, national, and international, although the pilot was more familiar with the local than the rest, except for when Alicia from time to time called his attention to a piece in one of the glossy women’s magazines or
Vanity Fair
or the
New Yorker
or the society pages of one of the New York papers. Her celebrity was of a type that mattered more to Alicia than it did to him. The woman was nothing more than a socialite, for God’s sake. A parasite. Come the revolution, no more socialites.

He eased himself down from the pontoon into the shallow water and strode ashore, wetting his boots and his trousers to the knees and seeming not to care. Vanessa smiled and brought her hand to her mouth to cover it. The pilot’s easy, unselfconscious directness was a sudden relief to her, and all her gloom lifted. He
wore a collarless leather jacket with ribbed cuffs and waistband and under it a white dress shirt open at the throat. The pilot was a large man, in his early forties, tall and broad, with big, square hands, and moved with the grace of a man who liked the feel and appearance of his own body, although he did not seem to be vain. His black straight hair fell loosely forward over his brow and gave him a harried, slightly worried look. Because of the goggles he wore when flying and his permanently tousled hair, his fair skin was unevenly tanned. He had very dark, almost black, deep-set eyes, and a prominent, long arc of a nose, and his face was wide, with a jutting chin, slightly underslung. He was not a remarkably handsome man, but to Vanessa—because of his size, his physical grace, intense coloring, and prominent, symmetrical features—an extremely attractive one nonetheless.

He stamped his boots on the ground and said hello to the woman, turned to the others in the distance and waved in a loosely friendly way and started walking toward them.

“Who are you?” the woman asked. Her voice was low and husky, a smoker’s voice.

He turned back to her and smiled. “Jordan Groves. From over in Petersburg. Who are you?”

“I’m not sure you’re allowed to bring an airplane in here,” she said.

“Me neither. Your father invited me over. He and I met on the train the other day coming up from the city.”

“So you know who I am.”

“Yeah, sorry.” He hesitated. “You’re Vanessa…”

“Von Heidenstamm.”

“Von Heidenstamm. Née…Cole.”

“Right. And you’re…”

“Jordan Groves.”

“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 he 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.