The Reserve (4 page)

“Observe!” he yelled and pointed at the notch, a cleft between the pine-topped bluff and the cliffs on the south side of Bream Pond.

She righted the airplane and brought it slowly around, flashing through the notch and missing the trees below by barely a hundred feet. Suddenly they were flying over the still, moon-silvered waters of Bream Pond. Jordan tightened his grip on the controls and took over the aircraft.

“Hey!” she shouted. She tried to turn the wheel left and right, pushed it forward and back. Nothing happened. The airplane was his again. “I’m not
through
yet!” she yelled.

“Yes, you are,” he said, and he slowed the plane to ninety knots, then seventy, and looped around at the far end of the pond, and came back up its length, where he dropped it into the water a few hundred yards from shore. He taxied back to a short, sandy beach and let the airplane drift to a halt in shallow water, and shut down the engine. The world was suddenly silent, except for the dying waves from the airplane’s wake lightly slapping the pontoons.

“This is a good place to watch the fireworks,” he said to her and pointed back the way they had come. “You can sit here and see them through the notch.”

“Brilliant!” she exclaimed. “But better from the shore,” she said, and hitching her skirt to her long white thighs, she climbed out of the cockpit and splashed to the beach. “Come on! Follow me!” She made her way quickly up the slope, to where an over
grown lumber road passed the pond, and waved to him from there. “C’mon! There’s a grassy clearing I know just down the road where the view is truly splendid. I walk up here lots to swim in the pond and picnic and get away from the family. We can lie on our backs and see the whole valley and sky from there!”

Jordan watched her as she disappeared behind a stand of white birches gleaming in the moonlight. She reappeared seconds later on the far side of the trees, striding down the narrow dirt road toward the opening to the valley and the clear view of the Tamarack clubhouse and golf course below. He watched her walk out of moonlight into darkness, and he knew what would happen if he followed. He started the engine, and the airplane drifted down shore a ways, where he brought it around to face the wind and open water.

“Hey! Where the hell are you going?” she hollered.

“Home! It’s late!”

“What? You’re leaving me here?”

“You left me, remember? Once you abandon ship, there’s no getting back aboard!”

“You
bastard
!”

He didn’t answer. He shoved the stick forward and quickly moved across the smooth water, hit the step, and accelerated across the skin of the pond as if on skids on ice. Then the airplane lifted free of the water and rose with a roar into the darkness. He was flying through the notch at about twenty-five hundred feet, still climbing, and prepared to make the long, rising turn to the northeast, to pass over Goliath and on to Petersburg and the Tamarack River and his home, where he was late and his wife and sons awaited him, when he looked off to his left and saw the sky light up. A battery of hissing rockets sent long, fiery arcs of red, yellow, green, and blue into the blackness, like thunderbolts cast
against the gods. High in the sky above the Reserve, the rockets finished their ascent, lost their force and floated for a second, and one after the other exploded with a luminous flash—gigantic flowers of light that instantly faded, crumpled, and dissolved in the night. Trails of sparks floated back to earth like brightly colored petals. A thunderous boom echoed across the valley, and the sky filled with darkness again.

Shortly after midnight on Monday, May 3, 1937, the night train from Zurich left Switzerland, passed through Liechtenstein, stopped at Bregenz in Austria, and traveled on to the eastern shore of Lake Constance, where Switzerland, Austria, and Germany converge. At 3:30
A.M
. eastern European time, as the train rounded the lake, the sky brightened, and the passengers, those who were awake, turned in their seats and admired the glistening white peaks and the blue water. The train was not crowded. Most of the passengers were Swiss businessmen traveling to initiate or complete transactions with German manufacturers and government procurement agencies. Among the passengers were a Swiss doctor in his midthirties wearing a gray wool suit and white shirt and knotted silk necktie, indistinguishable from the businessmen, and a young American woman who slumped sleeping in her seat beside him. They were alone in their first-class compartment. The man had been reading a book and now gazed intently out the window. The woman wore a tailored, brown tweed jacket and skirt and a black, wide-brimmed, Lilly Dache hat with a veil that covered her forehead and half covered her pale face. She wore no jewelry or makeup, and her long auburn hair was disheveled and needed brushing. The man nudged the young woman and pointed out the window at the lake and the mountains. Very beautiful, he said in English. The woman opened her eyes and sat up straight in the seat. She squinted and peered
out the window as instructed. Where are we? she asked. We are in Germany, he answered. The town of Friedrichshafen. He indicated the three most prominent mountains south of the lake and said, Hoher, Churfirsten, and Santis. After a few seconds she said, Oh, and slumped back in her seat again and closed her eyes under the veil. In seconds the woman appeared to be sleeping. The train followed the glittering waters of the Rhine north and west into the German heartland. At exactly 7:14
A.M
. central European time, as scheduled, the night train from Zurich arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt.

A
T SIX, WELL BEFORE THE REST OF THE FAMILY WOKE,
J
ORDAN
Groves left his bed. He shaved and dressed for work in loose, paint-spattered dungarees and sweatshirt and came down the wide front stairs to the living room and went into the kitchen and let the dogs out and the cats in. Most days he carried a chunk of cheese and some bread directly to his studio and made a pot of coffee there and sat contemplatively for an hour in front of yesterday’s picture before setting to work on it. It was the best time of the day for him, best for thinking, best for work. Today, however, he lingered at the house. He built a fire in the kitchen stove, let the two dogs back inside and fed them and the four cats, and reloaded the wood box—normally Alicia and the boys’ morning chores—and waited for the others to come down.

Around seven thirty Wolf, still in pajamas, padded down the back stairs from the children’s wing and headed straight to the icebox for milk, when he realized that his father sat in the rocker by the bay window, looking out. Characteristically somber, the boy said good morning, and Jordan Groves smiled, said, “Hello, son,” and, continuing to look out the window, resumed his thoughts. He was replaying the events of the previous evening, trying to recall exactly what was said and done and by whom and why. He was pretty sure he understood Dr. Cole and knew what his intentions and needs were. And the others he didn’t linger over:
they were all who and what they seemed to be. The girl, though, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, was pretty much a mystery to him. She was not who and what she seemed. But the one who was most mysterious to him, the one whose intentions and needs and behavior he understood not at all, was the man himself, Jordan Groves. Why had he taken her up in his airplane and let her fly it so dangerously close to the mountains at night? And why had he left her there at the pond, left her to walk alone back to her family’s camp at the Second Lake?

The view from the window gave on to the Tamarack River where it swerved away from the house and grounds into a broad oxbow and widened and ran north for three hundred yards of smooth, slow-running, deep water—more a pond here than a river. Directly in the artist’s line of sight was the wooden riverside hangar he had built the summer he bought his airplane. Four years later, he still liked the sturdy, wide, four-square look of the structure. He had come in last night by moonlight reflected off the river. He had winched the airplane out of the water and onto the ramp and into the boathouse, and by the time he got up to the house, Alicia and the boys were already in bed asleep. Jordan stayed downstairs in his study for a while and read the new Steinbeck,
In Dubious Battle,
and, as was his habit, didn’t go up to bed himself until midnight, and when he slid in next to her, Alicia did not appear to waken, which relieved him.

Wolf was the younger of the boys, just turned six. His brother, whose name was Bear, was eight. When his sons were born, Jordan had insisted on naming them for animals he admired—despite considerable resistance from their mother and her Austrian family, who said it might be all right for red Indians to name their children after animals, but not for white people. If Bear had been a girl, Jordan would have named her Puma. Wolf
he would have named Peregrine. He said he wanted his children to be inspired all their lives to live up to what they were called, and since he was a devout atheist he wasn’t going to name them after saints. “No Christian names,” he declared, and no family names. Aside from Jordan himself and Alicia, there was no one in either family worth emulating. If when they became adults his sons wished to go by their middle names, which as a compromise had been drawn from Alicia’s and his genealogies, that would be all right with him. But he was sure it wouldn’t happen. By then they will have
become
their names, he said. Just as, for better or worse, he had become Jordan, and their mother had become Alicia.

Wolf drank from the chilled jug of milk, put it back in the icebox, and crossed the large, open kitchen and climbed onto his father’s lap. He nuzzled against Jordan’s chest and inhaled deeply the familiar smell of turpentine and paint and chemicals from the studio, his father’s own smell, as comforting to the boy as his father’s face and voice. Jordan wrapped his arms around his son and held him there.

“Did you see the fireworks, Papa?” Wolf asked in a faraway voice.

“I saw them from the air. On my way home.”

“That must have been great, to see them from the airplane.”

“Yes. It was. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back in time for you to see the fireworks,” Jordan said. “I got talked into giving someone a flying lesson.”

“Oh. That’s okay. We had fun anyhow.”

Jordan eased the boy off his lap and set about making breakfast for him. A few minutes later Bear made his way down the steep, narrow back stairway to the kitchen. He gave his father a friendly wave and made for the icebox and like his brother slurped milk
straight from the jug. Kittens, Jordan thought. Cubs. They know exactly what they want, and it’s the same as what they need.

“Hey, how come you’re making breakfast, Papa?” Bear asked.

“How come you’re not?” Jordan answered and smiled.

“I don’t know.”

“Go get washed up and dressed, boys. Then come back and eat. We’ll do something special together today,” he said, and the boys quickly disappeared up the stairs.

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 morn
ing-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 package 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.”