It was a seaplane with two large pontoons, and she thought she was watching a man about to crash his airplane deliberately against the thousand-foot vertical slab of gray granite, and she forgot her cold thoughts and grew almost excited, for she had never seen anyone kill himself and realized that in some small way she’d always wanted to and was surprised by it. The pilot seemed about to smash the airplane against the rock face of the mountain, when, less than a hundred yards from it, he banked hard to the left, dipped the wings back to horizontal, cut the engine speed nearly to stopping, and swiftly descended toward the water. The airplane touched down at the far side of the lake, broke the surface, and slid into the water, unfolding high fans of silver spray behind the pontoons. Vanessa was relieved, of course, but felt a flicker of disappointment, too.
Her parents and their friends stood smiling on the near shore in front of the camp. They clapped their hands appreciatively and gazed across in a welcoming way at the pilot of the airplane. Near them four Adirondack guide boats had been drawn up onto the bank and turned over to dry. Vanessa’s mother sat gracefully on one hull, her barefoot legs crossed at the ankles, and sipped champagne from a crystal flute. From her distance, Vanessa admired her mother’s gentle, slightly dreamy poise, and decided that it was the dress, a cream-colored, low-necked, beltless frock by Muriel King that hung straight from the shoulders. Her mother was in her early fifties, too old to look that good, Vanessa thought. It was the stylish designer dress and the simple gold bracelet, she decided. And the bare feet. The other women and the men, though they would no doubt dress more or less formally for dinner tonight, wore what they thought were north-woods hunting and fishing apparel — wool slacks, checked flannel shirts, rubber-soled boots: rugged Abercrombie & Fitch camp wear. Vanessa herself had on a pale blue sleeveless cotton blouse and a white pleated skirt that pointed nicely to her long, tanned legs and narrow feet. She wasn’t so much competitive with her mother’s appearance as wanting to distinguish it from hers, just as her mother, even if she had to wear dresses from Greta Garbo’s personal designer here at camp and go barefoot, seemed to want to distinguish her appearance from that of the other women, who were her oldest, dearest friends. More than either of them thought, however, or wanted to think, Vanessa Cole and her mother were alike.
At the far side of the lake in the cool shadow of the overhanging rock wall, the pilot pushed his goggles to his forehead, squinted, and peered across at the cluster of people standing by the overturned guide boats and, half hidden in the ancient pines behind them, the wide deck and screened porch and outbuildings of the camp. The airplane rocked gently in the water. The camp was a low structure made of barked, hand-sawn logs, a nice-looking place, larger and more lavish than he’d expected, and a lot less rustic. But he should have known: Dr. Cole was old New York and Connecticut money, piles of it. The pilot counted eight people — then, when he noticed the tall, slender figure of a woman standing a couple of hundred yards from the others, nine — and was surprised and a little downcast. When he’d accepted Dr. Cole’s invitation to come to the Second Lake and see his collection of Heldons, he had hoped for something a little more private. He hated having people watch him when he looked at pictures and wait expectantly for his remarks, which, despite his reluctance to say anything at all, he always felt compelled to make. Actually, what he hated was his inability to say nothing, simply to look at the pictures in thoughtful silence.
He saw Dr. Cole lift his cocktail glass in the air and extend it toward the airplane, and the pilot waved back. He inched the throttle forward, punched the pedal under his right foot and turned the pontoon rudders, bringing the airplane around to starboard. Gradually he increased engine speed and drove the aircraft out of the shade of the mountain into the twilight, thumping it through the low, dappled ripples and across the lake as if the aircraft were a motorboat. He knew it was forbidden to run a motorboat on the Tamarack Lakes — nothing allowed on the water but genuine, silent, handmade Adirondack guide boats — and wondered if there were rules against seaplanes. Not yet, but now that he’d flown his four-year-old Waco biplane in, give them a week and there would be.
The pilot scouted along the shore below the camp for a shallow beach and found it close by the young woman standing away from the others. She seemed lost in thought, in a blue mood, and did not look at him, but did not seem to be avoiding him, either. She was like an exhibit, a piece of sculpture set at the edge of the lake — part of the view. She was very pretty, he noticed when he drew near shore. Beautiful, even. She had high, almost Andean cheekbones and sharp, precise features, bright blue eyes, and full lips. She wore no makeup, or none that he could discern, and her long, gingery hair hung loosely over her shoulders. Broad shoulders for a slender woman, he noticed. She must be an athlete, a swimmer or a serious canoeist. Maybe she’s an actress, he thought. She looks like an actress. Her face was vaguely familiar to him, and then he remembered who she was.
He pulled the throttle back, shoved the rudders full left, and brought the airplane around and into the wind to keep it from slithering while anchored and getting itself all weather cocked. It would be nice if the Coles had a dock to tie up to, but there were rules, of course, against lakeside structures, other than the camps themselves, which had to be built a certain distance from the water and be as invisible from the lake as possible, and strictly on the Second Lake. The illusion of wilderness was as important to maintain as the reality. The pilot’s wife sometimes called the Reserve a zoo for trees, but that was extreme, he thought, a particularly European point of view.
Cutting the engine, the pilot stood in the cockpit, took off his goggles altogether, and scanned the slate blue lake from one end to the other in the near dark, quickly memorizing its dimensions and the ins and outs of its shoreline. He had meant to get over here earlier in the day but had made the mistake of ducking into his studio after breakfast and by the time he checked his watch it was nearly four thirty. Alicia had been right, it was a national holiday, and he should have allowed himself to forget his politics for once and enjoy the holiday like everyone else in America today, go down to the river with her and the boys for a Fourth of July picnic and then, while they were napping, fly over to the Reserve, see the doctor’s collection of Heldons, and be home before nightfall, in time to drive Alicia and the boys to watch the fireworks with the rest of the locals. But instead he’d worked late.
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.