“You’re right,” she said. “The truth is, the great, beloved Dr. Carter Cole was not the man everyone thought he was,” she said. “Not in private, not in secret. Not when he was alone with Mother and me. And alone with me…” She trailed off. “Well, let’s just say he was different. A different man. He was not a nice man, Jordan.”
“No one’s the same when he’s alone with his wife or his children. It’s where you let your guard down, especially if, like your father, you’re more or less a public figure.”
She moved closer to him on the sofa. “You’re a public figure, Jordan, and I know you’re different when you’re with your family alone. In private. I can tell from a single visit to your home that Jordan Groves in private is a nice man.” She laughed lightly. “Actually, it’s in public, with the whole world watching, that you’re not a nice man. A brawler. You’ve punched critics in the jaw and given reviewers black eyes. You’re an opinionated, drunken Red. And a famous womanizer. Oh, you have such a dangerous reputation, Jordan Groves! While you’re up here in the mountains holed up in your studio and your sweet wife bakes bread and your sons study the local flora, people in New York City are talking. Or when you’re off on one of your famous adventures in the Arctic or wherever it is you go alone for months at a time to paint and where it’s clear from your pictures and writings that you sleep with the native women and probably participate in horrid native rituals, all the while, back here and in the cafés of Manhattan, tongues are wagging. No,” she said, suddenly serious, “you’re the opposite of my father.” She reached out and brushed his cheek with her fingertips. “You didn’t shave this morning, did you?”
He swiped at her hand and shoved it away and scowled. “Yes, I shaved.”
“Why are you so violent with me?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.
“What makes you think you know me?”
“You’re answering a question with a question, Jordan,” she said softly and touched his cheek a second time.
“Once I would have eaten you whole,” he said and took her hand gently away from his face. “Right down to your beautiful white fingertips,” he said, and he put her fingers into his mouth and held them there and touched them with his tongue.
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. After a moment, he withdrew her hand and placed it on her lap. “But not now,” he said. “Not anymore.” He put his glass on the table beside him and stood. “I know what people say about me. I know my reputation, and mostly I don’t give a good goddamn. Listen, Vanessa, somebody once asked me in one of those dumb magazine interviews what I wanted out of life, and I told him the truth, I said, ‘I want all of it.’ And until recently that’s pretty much how I’ve lived my life.”
“‘Until recently.’”
“Yes. But now…now I’m starting to realize that I can’t have all of it.” He paused and looked above her and out the window at the lake and the mountains and the sky. “Some of the things we want cancel out other things we want. I’m not going into details,” he said, “but I want my wife and my boys to be happy. I want them to be proud of me. And I want that more than I want certain other things,” he said and turned back to her. “Even you.”
“And you believe that? If you can have me, you can’t have them? And vice versa, that if you can’t have me, then you can have them? Are you sure?” she said. “Because I’m not.”
“Look, you’re not some pretty little Chilean dance hall girl showing me her tits, or a smiling round-faced Inuit girl lying naked under a bearskin blanket, or some doe-eyed model from the Art Students League dying to sleep with the famous artist. You’re not one of those Fifth Avenue society hostesses looking for a discreet tumble in the maid’s room after the party’s over and the other guests have gone home. No, you’re like me, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. And people like you and me, we leave a lot of wreckage behind us. I don’t want my family to be part of that wreckage. That’s all I’m saying.”
She stood next to him and put her hands on his shoulders and drew him to her. Leaning forward, she nestled her mouth next to his ear, and whispered something he barely heard, a slight hissing sound whose frequency rose and fell. Wordless, it sounded to him like a distress signal beamed through turbulence from a distant transmitter. He shoved her hands off his shoulders and pushed her away and raising his large right hand placed it hard against her chin and cheek, his fingers running all the way up her face to her brow, and he pressed it there for a moment, while she closed her eyes and pushed back and waited.
“I’m leaving now,” he said and abruptly withdrew his hand. He backed several steps away, turned, and walked from the room.
She stood by the fire with her eyes closed. She did not open them until she heard the roar of his airplane engine. A few minutes later, when she could no longer hear the engine and knew that he was airborne and gone from the lake, she walked to the door of her parents’ bedroom. Taking a key from her pocket, she unlocked the door, opened it, and peered in at her mother. The woman was sitting on the chaise, her hands and feet still tightly bound with rope, her mouth gagged with a white silk scarf, her blue eyes wild with fear.
Vanessa said, “If you promise to be quiet and not scream or shout at me anymore, I’ll remove the scarf.”
Her mother nodded her head rapidly up and down.
Vanessa reached around her and loosened the scarf. Pulling it free, she wound it carefully around her own throat, arranging the ends over the front of her shirt in a fetching way. She looked at herself in the dresser mirror and rearranged the scarf slightly. “And if you promise to stay here in the bedroom and not come out until I say it’s time, I’ll untie you.” Again her mother nodded, and Vanessa released the woman’s hands and feet and left the room, carrying the pieces of rope in her hands.
MILES AWAY, FLYING ON A NORTHEASTERLY HEADING, JORDAN Groves put the Reserve behind him and crossed above country villages and farms tucked into the valleys and clustered alongside the curling north-flowing streams. Shining in the distance, with the Green Mountains of Vermont humped up at the far horizon, was Lake Champlain, a glacial lake fourteen miles wide and one hundred twenty-five miles long — open water all the way to Quebec. Jordan was not ready to return home yet; to place himself in the bosom of his family again; to become the husband and father he had been this morning, before he backed his car from the garage and turned and discovered in the passenger’s seat the green Chinese jar with the ashes of the late Dr. Cole inside. He was not ready to let go of Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. He wanted to get away from her and everything associated with her — the Reserve, the Tamarack Club, the Second Lake, her father’s camp, the people she came from and the people she ran with. But he did not want to let her go.
Yesterday’s Canadian front with its blowzy raw wind and rain had passed off to the southeast. The cloudless sky was deep blue, the temperature in the low sixties, even at altitude, and the forest a rich green blanket running all the way from the Reserve down to the pale, newly mown fields of the lakeside farms. A steady five-knot wind blew back from the direction the front had taken. No gusts. Perfect flying weather. He saw a hawk carving spirals in the air several hundred feet below him. A black Model T Ford like the one he owned the year he and Alicia first moved up from New York City crawled along the dirt road between the iron-mining village of Moriah and the lakeside shipping town of Port Henry.
At the southern end of the lake, he banked left, and cruised in a northerly direction over the bare bluffs of Crown Point and made his way along the scalloped western shoreline. Tiny white triangular sails dotted the dark blue waters and clustered in the coves and marinas of Port Henry and, a few miles farther north, the towns of Westport and Essex. Halfway across the lake a ferryboat the shape and, from this distance, the size of a shoe box made its slow way from New York state to Vermont. Off to his right a rocky islet no larger than a barn rose, as if from the deep, covered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds — swarms of gulls and petrels and loons. Jordan circled the rookery, wonder struck by its abundance, and when his gaze returned to the open water ahead, he looked up and was startled by what he saw. It was at least two miles away and a thousand feet above the surface of the lake — an enormous, round, silver object that appeared to be coming steadily toward him from the direction of Canada.