The Reserve (24 page)

“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.

V
ANESSA’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 thought 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.”

“Why?”

“Actually, the only sign she objected to was ‘Cinderella’s Suite.’ But she couldn’t complain about it without having to say why. So she made him take them all down. On the grounds of hilarity.”

“Hilarity?”

“She was against it. It gave her headaches.”

“So why’d she object to calling your quarters Cinderella’s Suite?” Jordan asked. They had stopped in front of the closed door at the end of the hallway.

“You ask too many questions, my prince,” Vanessa said and opened the door and entered.

The room was large and like the rest of the house paneled with wide, carefully roughened boards sawn from first-growth spruce
trees, made to look as if they’d been split off the tree trunk with a maul and a wedge. Light off the surface of the lake flooded the bedroom. A Navajo rug hung on the wall above the bed. Otherwise the room was bare of decoration and gave the impression of being an extra room, a guest room suited to anyone and everyone. It was neat and orderly, with no evidence of Vanessa’s having slept there—no clothing out, no cosmetics or perfumes, no keepsakes. Just a single bed, a reading chair and table and kerosene lamp, a narrow, waist-high, pine dresser, and a wood-stove. Off the room Jordan glimpsed a small dressing room with open shelves that held neatly folded towels and blankets and extra sheets, and beyond that a bathroom. All very plain and spartan. It surprised him. He felt that she was as much a visitor here as he.

Vanessa sat on the edge of the bed and gazed out the wide window at the lake, its surface glittering like polished silver plate. The sky had turned milk white under high cirrus clouds, and the mountains were dark gray, almost black, in the distance. The two men fishing were still out there in their guide boat. Vanessa patted the bed beside her and said, “Come here and look. The fish must be biting.”

Jordan sat a few inches from her and saw the fishermen on the lake and checked his watch. Three thirty-five. Another hour and a half, at least, before those two retreat to the clubhouse and I can fly out of here, he thought. He was as reluctant to go home, however, as he was anxious to leave this newly haunted house, haunted as much by the woman beside him as by the woman they had buried in the forest behind it. Vanessa was starting to spook him—her calm, slow-moving, slow-talking tour of the house, her placid deflection of his questions and barbs. He was no longer afraid that she would start to weep in grief and guilt and oblige him to com
fort her. Quite the opposite now. He was afraid that she would
not
break into sobs and tears of anguished remorse, that she would simply continue this cold, playful repartee. It occurred to him that in fact she felt no grief, no remorse. No fear, even.

She turned to him and pushed his jacket open. “You’re not wearing a shirt. Where is it?”

“I put it to dry on the deck railing,” he said and remembered the bloodstains again and that he would have to burn the shirt or Alicia would ask him how he’d gotten it bloodied. He knew that Vanessa was not thinking of his shirt splashed by her mother’s blood, but of his naked torso. The idea that, despite everything, Vanessa was thinking about his body excited him. She pushed his jacket open further and looked at his chest and partially exposed shoulders, and he felt heat travel to his face and groin.

“You will have to stay inside until nearly dark, probably,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t let anyone know that you’ve been here.”

“No.”

“Do you think they can see your airplane from out there?”

“No. It’s anchored in a cove well out of sight. It’s behind a tree-covered spit of land. They’d have to come right up on it in the boat to know it was there.”

“That’s good,” she said and slipped his jacket off his shoulders altogether and pulled first one cuff, then the other, and drew the jacket away from his arms and dropped it onto the floor. “You’re very beautiful,” she said.

“You said something strange back there.”

“What?”

He reached down and retrieved his jacket and slipped it on. “About the sign, ‘Cinderella’s Suite.’ You said your mother
objected to it, but didn’t want to say why, so she had all the signs taken down.”

“I said that?”

“Yes. Why did she object to it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.” Jordan left the bed and sat in the chair facing her, his back to the window. Her equanimity scared him a little. He knew she wanted him to make love to her, but the calm ease with which she made that evident signified something other than physical desire, something more mental than of the body, as if her body were merely following orders.

“I don’t want to talk about my mother or my father. Not now,” she said. “Maybe not ever,” she added. Then she suddenly said, “Jordan, did you know that my father was…that he performed lobotomies? Do you know what a lobotomy is?”

“Sure. It’s brain surgery for psychos. It was in all the papers a year or so ago.”

“Daddy invented the procedure, you know.”

“I thought some Portugese quack developed it. Sounds medieval to me, like a pseudoscientific surgical exorcism. I can’t believe your father fell for that.”

“Oh, he more than fell for it. He was working with some people at Yale doing experiments on chimpanzees and monkeys, and then he was in Portugal, where he assisted in a dozen lobotomies, and last year he got permission to do it on human beings at the clinic in Zurich, where Mother was so set on sending me.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, it’s the truth. He taught the doctors there how to do it, because it’s not been approved here in the States. It’s brain surgery, but you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to do it. You just drill a couple of little holes
in the front of the skull, insert this cutting instrument that Daddy invented himself. He actually showed it to me, a long, thin steel shaft with an L-shaped blade at the end. You twiddle it back and forth a few times, remove, and presto! No more demons. No more troublesome behavior. No more bad daughter.”