FOLLOWING THE CLUB MANAGER’S MAP, VANESSA DROVE QUICKLY through the village of Tunbridge to the Flats, turned onto the rutted dirt lane known locally as Clarkson Road, and wound uphill toward Beede Mountain. It was a bright sunshiny day with white towers of cumulus clouds stacked at the western horizon. Halfway up the mountain, a narrower, rougher lane split off to the left, ending five hundred yards farther at a single-story log structure, more a cabin than a house, with a wide stone chimney at one end and an open porch across the front. The yard was potted with tree stumps, and most of the forest downhill from the house had been clear-cut, leaving heaps of brush and tree scruff for burning. The place resembled the forest home of an early American pioneer.
She was greeted by a large dog, a butterscotch Labrador that careened off the porch and charged the driver’s-side door of her car and stood there barking ferociously. Vanessa waved the dog off as if brushing away cobwebs and got out of the car. She ignored the dog, and it cringed and backed off and, with ears and tail lowered, went silent. Vanessa seemed not to notice its existence one way or the other. She walked past the animal and marched up the steps of the front porch, where she turned for a second and looked back at the entire Adirondack Great Range. It was a spectacular view of the mountains, running from Goliath and Sentinel all the way around to the south and then west to Mt. Marcy—180 degrees of unbroken wilderness, millions of forested acres spreading south and east almost to the suburbs of Albany and Utica. As she raised her hand to knock on the rough-hewn door, she glanced at the battered Model A Ford coupe parked next to the cabin, a large wooden box in its trunk converting the vehicle from a car to a pickup, and then saw and recognized, half hidden in the pines just beyond, Jordan Groves’s black Ford sedan.
Well, well, well, she thought.
She knocked on the door with freshened authority. The artist would be tempted to shove the guide aside and offer himself instead, she thought, once he saw her asking another man for help. Men were like that. She knocked a second time. Then called, “Hello! Hubert St. Germain! Are you there?”
The door opened a few inches and no farther. It was dark inside, but she could make out the guide’s somber, craggy face. His shirt was unbuttoned and his suspenders dangled at his sides, and he was tousled and unshaven, as if just awakened. “Hello, Miss Cole,” he said. “Sorry…I was doing something in back and must not’ve heard you right off.”
She said, “I’m sorry for coming unannounced. But I need to ask a very special favor of you, and it can’t wait. May I come in?” Placing her hand flat against the door, she pushed lightly, intending to speak with Hubert St. Germain, but only in the immediate presence of Jordan Groves.
Hubert pushed back from the other side. “Is something wrong up at the lake, Miss Cole?” he asked, his face nearly expressionless—unreadable to Vanessa, but not mysterious. For her, there was no mystery to the man. He was compact and muscular, like most of the guides, and of average height, his hands and neck darkly tanned. Vanessa had never really thought of him as someone with a life of his own and therefore had never thought of him as someone who was unknowable. For years he had merely been the coolly detached, competent, always available guide, efficient and attractively designed, like one of those fine Adirondack guide boats he built and handled more expertly than any but the old legendary guides from her grandfather’s day.
In the near darkness behind him she saw a silhouette of a person slip out of her line of sight into a bank of shadows deeper in the room. Hubert moved to come out onto the porch and close the door behind him.
“May I come inside?” Vanessa asked. The dog had followed her onto the porch and now stood beside her as if ready to escort her into the cabin. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I do need to speak personally with you.” She wanted Jordan Groves to hear her plea and volunteer to help her in Hubert’s place, and she resented to a small degree the artist’s obvious avoidance of her. She intended to press herself on him, to make it impossible for him to ignore her specific need and rising desire. Confident since yesterday’s encounter at the camp that his need and desire matched hers, she felt entitled, even invited, to risk being rejected by him. He was trying to run from that fact, and she had no intention of letting him.
Hubert said, “It’s all a mess inside. We can talk out here on the porch. I…I’ve got a…,” he stammered uncomfortably.
Then a woman spoke from the darkness behind him. “I’m just leaving, if you want to have a private conversation,” she said, and suddenly, standing in the doorway beside the guide, was Alicia Groves. “Hello, Miss Von Heidenstamm,” the artist’s wife said and pushed past them onto the porch. The dog backed out of her way, but otherwise made no fuss over her presence. Clearly, the animal was used to her.
Vanessa stepped out of her way, too, and watched in silence as Alicia Groves crossed the porch, hurried down the stairs, and walked from the yard to the pine grove where the Ford sedan was parked. Alicia’s bright blond hair, Vanessa noticed, had been freshly brushed. Without looking back, Alicia got into the car and drove quickly down the hill and away.
Vanessa said to Hubert, “Well, I believe that now we can talk out here on the porch, if you like.”
The guide gazed down the slope to the bend in the rough lane where the car had disappeared behind a stand of spruce trees, almost as if he expected Alicia Groves to return. “What is it you want me to do for you, Miss Cole?” he said without looking at her.
JORDAN BROUGHT HIS AIRPLANE INTO THE RESERVE FROM THE west this time, cutting a wide arc to avoid the clubhouse and the First Lake altogether, flying instead above the forested spine of the Great Range and coming in low over the swampy headwaters of the Tamarack River, where, except for a few solitary mountain climbers, he was least likely to be seen. A mile north of Dr. Cole’s camp, he cut his speed as much as he dared and put the airplane into the water gently and taxied slowly along the shore. He anchored it in a shallow, protected inlet a mile or so above the beach where he had first seen Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He came ashore there and went into the woods, making his way through low scrub alongside a small, rock-filled brook.
Soon the trees and brush thinned out, and he saw the roofs of the camp woodshed and the caretaker’s shack. Avoiding the open ground in front of the camp, he walked through tall pines toward the guest quarters and approached the main building from the side. He passed the big stone fireplace chimney and was a few feet from the steps leading up to the deck when he stopped suddenly and stood stock-still, as if to hear the breeze stroking the high branches of the pine trees.
This is crazy, he thought. I’m a goddamn lunatic doing this, coming out here in the middle of the afternoon. I’m like a hound chasing a bitch in heat. It was his first conscious thought since he’d put Frances Jacques in charge of the boys. Alicia was in town, he knew, doing her thrice-weekly volunteer work at the little medical center there and picking up groceries afterward and would be home by three or so. He’d told Frances to inventory all his tools and brushes and to let the boys help her. That way she would learn where everything was located in the studio and what it was called. Just as his own father had done when he was a small boy, Jordan had taught his sons the names of the tools of his trade. It was the first step toward teaching them the trade itself. He gave the girl a pad and pencil and said that if she found a tool or a piece of equipment that neither she nor the boys could name, she was to make a drawing of it, and he would tell her later what it was called. He wanted her to memorize the location and name of every tool he owned, so that he could be like a surgeon and she his nurse, and all he’d have to do was ask for a particular brush or chisel, and she’d place it in his hand. He instructed her to go through all the drawers and look on every shelf and into the cabinets. He had nothing to hide. No secrets, he told her. He wanted her as familiar with every square inch of the studio as he was. Today was tool day, he said. Tomorrow they would inventory materials. Then he had left the studio for the hangar and his airplane, and until this moment, when h
e found himself in the Reserve at the Second Lake and about to step up onto the deck of the late Dr. Cole’s camp, Rangeview, and quietly knock on the front door, he had no thoughts about what he was doing or why. He simply did it.
He realized that his silly sexual fantasy, not the woman herself, had gotten the best of him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was beautiful and provocative and intriguingly unpredictable, but she was flawed, terribly flawed, as if something inside her, a crucial, defining part of her mind, were permanently broken and made her dangerous to anyone foolish enough to get close to her. It wasn’t a matter of liking or disliking Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. You were magnetically attracted to her or you were repelled, and in his case it was both. He glanced down the slope in front of the camp to the glittering water and noticed that the guide boat was not there. So she was gone, then.
He searched the lake for a moment and saw only a deer with her fawn stepping cautiously from the woods on the far side to drink. A pair of loons floated offshore a ways, bobbing in the low waves, disappearing abruptly underwater, reappearing a minute later fifty yards farther on, and Jordan wondered if, like swans, loons mated for life. Then suddenly the artist felt very foolish. He felt foolish and exposed, like a lovesick adolescent boy caught standing below the window of an inaccessible woman, a nobleman’s young wife or daughter, and he merely the carpenter’s son. Turning, he walked back along the side of the main building of the camp and into the woods and made his way downstream along the brook to the inlet where he had anchored his airplane.
The new American flyers flew formation drills at Los Alcázares twice a day for a week. The rest of the time they amused themselves pitching coins with their Spanish mechanics, tossing five peseta pieces the size of silver dollars. The tall American, the one they called Rembrandt, mostly kept himself apart from the others and made drawings of the blond hills. Finally one morning in early February, after they had been checked out and approved by their Spanish commander and a Russian colonel, they were sent to Valencia aboard an old Fokker trimotor transport. The Fokker landed at a half-constructed airfield in Manises, just outside the city, shortly after noon, and the Americans took a taxi to the Hotel Ingles, where they dropped their luggage and strolled to the nearby Vodka Café. They went there to meet the other foreign pilots based in Valencia, men who had been in Spain most of the fall of ’36 and now the winter of ’37. They were Allison and Koch and Brenner from the United States, and the Englishmen, Fairhead, Papps, and Loverseed. The three new arrivals were known to each other by their nicknames, taken earlier when they’d first arrived in Los Alcázares—Whitey, because of his pale hair, Chang, because of his round face and flat features, and Rembrandt, because back in the States he was a well-known artist—but they introduced themselves to the veteran pilots by their last names instead, Richardson, Collins, and Groves, as if somehow here in Valencia where there was a war on, nicknames seemed frivolous. Groves, the artist, asked, What’ve they got us flying out of here? All we had in Los Alcázares were a couple of old Polish Cojo-Jovens. Real clunkers, barely held together with tape and baling wire. Fairhead, who was the squadron commander, smiled and said they’d be flying even older 1925 Breguet 19s. Groves scowled. Christ, that crate was obsolete the day it came out of the factory, he said. The Englishman laughed. Oh, you’ll get so you can squeeze enough out of it. It’ll always get you home. Or nearly always. Every airplane has its virtues, Groves. Like women. You just have to learn how to locate them. Their virtues, I mean. And then how to get the bloody most out of them. Do you read me, Groves? he asked. Do you read me? The Englishman seemed drunk, and the American didn’t answer. He moved away from the group and after a while left the café and went back to the hotel. The rest of the flyers kept drinking, and as the afternoon wore on they grew very loud and raucous, the veterans because they felt lucky to be still alive, the newcomers, Whitey and Chang, because they were afraid.
TREMBLING AS IF SUDDENLY CHILLED, ALICIA GROVES DROVE rapidly downhill from Hubert St. Germain’s cabin and said to herself that she hated this, lying like a child and hiding like a common criminal. And most of all, she hated having been exposed this way. Though it was probably a good thing, she thought. The exposure would allow her to end the deception. But not the guilt. No matter what Jordan did when he found out, the punishment would not be severe enough to end the guilt. And he would find out. And he would punish her. That girl will make sure he knows. She wants him for herself, Alicia thought, although she’s probably already had him. Vanessa Von Heidenstamm was the kind of woman who takes a man away from his wife and children just because she can and then leaves him behind and moves on to steal another. Alicia hadn’t known women like that, not personally, but she had read about them in novels and magazines.
It wasn’t that way with Hubert. It was different with him, wasn’t it? It had to be. That difference, however, was the source of her guilt. For she believed that she loved Hubert and he loved her, and she believed that Hubert had made her happier to be who she truly was than her husband ever had. In fact, it was Hubert who had shown her who she truly was. But there was a price to pay. A high, ongoing price. Regardless of what happened now, Alicia’s happiness and freshened knowledge of who she truly was had corrupted her marriage, had tainted it forward and backward, from its beginning to the eventual end of it. It was as if she had been false to her husband all the years they were married and now was condemned to be false to him for the rest of her life. That’s what Alicia believed.
Twice she felt the car begin to shudder and bump off the corrugated, switchbacking lane and had to yank the wheel and pull the vehicle away from the steep ditch at the side. And twice, lost in her thoughts, overwhelmed with guilt—and now dread, too, for she had seen herself through the calculating eyes of the other woman—she let the car coast almost to a stop before suddenly realizing it and accelerating back to a normal speed. Alicia had not intended to become involved with Hubert. Or with anyone else, for that matter. She told herself that she had not been looking for love outside the marriage, and she believed it. She and Jordan had often quarreled, of course, as all couples do, coming sometimes closer to violence, however, than most husbands and wives; and they had endured long periods of sullen detachment from each other, for Jordan was a difficult, demanding man with a roving eye and a permanent wanderlust and a need for constant forgiveness. But she had accommodated herself to his sharp, selfish ways, accepting them as an even trade for all the other ways in which he was large and exciting. Alicia believed that Jordan Groves had given her a bigger life than she ever could have acquired on her own or with a lesser man. Consequently, until she met and fell in love with Hubert St. Germain, Alicia had thought that, given her unique personality and desires, she was a happily married woman.
Over the years she had on several occasions been tempted to sleep with a man other than her husband—many men, usually friends or colleagues of Jordan’s, had made themselves available, especially when Jordan was off on one of his extended painting treks. But she had always turned them away with a gentle, appreciative smile, glad for the attention, but unwilling to break her marriage vows. Alicia had been raised a strict Catholic, and though she had not been to confession or mass since arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, and had said of herself in the intervening years that she was, like her husband, an atheist, and also like him was a Marxist, yes, but not a Communist, a Trotskyite, maybe, but not a Leninist, she still took vows of any kind seriously. It did not matter that she had made her marital vows in a civil ceremony performed by a Scottish justice of the peace with witnesses pulled in from the street. A sworn vow was a promise that, regardless of changed circumstances, one kept.
Thus, even though throughout her marriage to Jordan Groves there had been the usual crushes and flirtations, brief infatuations with men who resembled her husband not at all—short-lived fantasies generated by mild sexual curiosity—they had never come to anything. A few mixed signals and Alicia had quickly backed off, relieved, her curiosity doused, her
fantasies fading fast and no longer able to excite her. In that way she had learned, to her surprise, that she was attracted to quiet men, self-contained, intelligent men who were modest about their accomplishments, men whose small, compact bodies were not at all like her husband’s Viking body. She discovered that she was attracted to men who knew things she didn’t, who possessed skills she lacked, and whose background and social status were radically different from hers. Knowing this, she was able to stand slightly outside her attractions and observe them dispassionately, even with mild amusement, for she was married to and, as far as she knew then, was still deeply in love with and made adequately happy by an entirely different sort of man—a man physically large and energetic and known to all the world for his turbulence and his frank outspokenness and egoism and his unquestioning belief in the importance of his life and work. A belief she had no difficulty in sharing with him.
In many ways they were, after all, a natural pair, Alicia and her husband, Jordan Groves. Jordan was educated in the arts, as she was, and like her was an only child raised by religious, politically conservative parents against whom he had rebelled early on—although his parents, of course, were American working class, Midwesterners, very blue collar, while hers were from the European haute bourgeoisie. And though they had made their home in a small farm village at the edge of the northern wilderness, Jordan and Alicia Groves were both cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated people. And they were rich. Together, but independently, and almost without trying—he by virtue of the immense early popularity of his work, she by virtue of being the daughter of well-to-do parents and the wife of Jordan Groves—the couple had become wealthy, renowned members of the haute bourgeoisie themselves. Thus she found it surprising and amusing and faintly ironic that, while she loved her husband for all the ways he and she were alike and in spite of the few ways they were different, she was periodically attracted to men like Hubert St. Germain for all the ways they were different and in spite of the few ways they were alike.