“You won’t tie my hands and feet and cover my mouth again, will you? Please don’t. Please. It’s an awful thing to do, Vanessa. Just awful,” her mother said and began to cry quietly.
“I know. And I hate doing it. But, Mother…,” she said and paused. “I can’t trust you, Mother. I just can’t. If I don’t keep you here, I know you’ll get the men in white coats to carry me off to the loony bin. It’s that simple. It really is. If Daddy were alive…well, if he were here, none of this would be necessary, that’s all.” She pushed her chair back and stood. “Ready?”
“I’m an old woman, Vanessa. Please don’t do this. And I’m not well, you know that.”
“You’re fifty-three, and you’re healthy as a horse. You’ll probably live another twenty-five years. By then I’ll be an old woman. Come on, I’ve got a lot to do today. We can’t live on canned beans and spring water.”
AN HOUR LATER, VANESSA HAD CROSSED THE SECOND LAKE and had made her way over the Carry, as the quarter-mile land bridge between the two lakes was called. She rowed the length of the First Lake, tied the guide boat at the dock, and quickly walked the gentle sloping trail back through the forest along the Tamarack River to the clubhouse, two miles away. There she went straight to the office of the manager, Russell Kendall, and entered without knocking.
He stood up abruptly, red faced, as if she had caught him doing something illicit. “I’d appreciate it if you knocked first, Vanessa. I could be having a confidential conversation with a member, you know.”
“But you’re not.”
“No. Not at the moment.” He wished he could make this girl just go away. The mother, too. These women, Evelyn and Vanessa Cole, or whatever she called herself now, were demanding and imperious. They were like a showgirl and her stage mother, he thought, and admired the thought. He was sorry the father had died. He had rather liked Dr. Cole, a gentle, gregarious man from an old Reserve family who liked to talk about Art and Nature. A man with a philosophical turn of mind. He tipped the staff well, and at Christmas, when the Tamarack Club was closed and Russell Kendall was in Augusta and the Reserve was the furthest thing from most members’ minds, Dr. Cole always remembered to send Kendall a hundred-dollar holiday bonus, ten times a club cook’s weekly pay.
“What can I do for you, Vanessa?” he asked.
“You can tell me how to get in touch with Hubert St. Germain. I need him to bring supplies up to Rangeview. Mother and I expect to be staying for longer than we had planned.”
“Oh. How long? I thought you were here for only a few days,” he said. “What happened with your father’s…his ashes? I hope you didn’t—”
“Don’t worry,” she interrupted. “I dumped them in the Tamarack River, but way over at Wappingers Falls. Not on Reserve property. By now Daddy’s doing the backstroke in Lake Champlain, heading north to the St. Lawrence and on to the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.”
“Vanessa, please,” Kendall said. “He’s your father.”
“Was. But you’re right,” she said, suddenly shifting intent and tone. “I’m sorry. It’s just…it’s just that Mother and I are both terribly upset by his death. Especially Mother. We’re mourning together. We’re grieving over him at the camp. The Reserve was Daddy’s most sacred place in the universe, you know. It was his true church. Somehow, even though we were forbidden by you to scatter his ashes at the Second Lake, we feel closer to him at the camp. So we’ve decided to stay for as long as his spirit lingers there. Possibly the rest of the summer. Possibly into the fall. It’s why I need to speak with Hubert St. Germain. I hope he hasn’t gone and arranged to take care of other camps and completely abandoned us. I know how popular he is, but he’s always worked for us, and Daddy was very fond of him. I’d hate to lose him…now that my father’s no longer here.” She brushed away a tear.
Kendall sat down at his desk and drew a ledger from a drawer, opened it, and went down the list of guides and their assignments. “No, Hubert’s free. He hasn’t worked since you left for New York on July fifth. At least not here at the Club or for any of the other Second Lake camps. Of course, he may have found work elsewhere by now. I mean, among the locals. Unlikely, though, given the way things are. And given the way guides are,” he added and smiled ruefully. “All the guides want is permission to hunt and fish in the Reserve, and they can’t do it unless they’re hunting or fishing for a member. Of course, they do it anyhow. In the off-season when we’re not here. Honestly, I don’t know how these people survive.”
She asked him how she could contact Hubert, but it turned out he had no telephone. Very few local people had telephones, Kendall explained. She would have to drive into the village and go to his house, which was out beyond the old Clarkson farm, a log house he’d built himself and where he lived alone, with no one but his dog for company since his wife died — a nice enough young woman, very plain, but quite pleasant when she worked at the Club, killed a few winters ago in an automobile accident. “Most of us expected Hubert to remarry, as he hadn’t been married long and had no children. But no. He is quite the ladies’ man, if you know what I mean. At least the local ladies seem to think so, the housekeepers and kitchen help. They practically swoon when he comes around,” Kendall nattered on. He was trying to sound like an intimate female friend, an equal, but it was hard for Kendall to be more than merely polite to Vanessa Cole. “Hubert is handsome, I suppose, in a rustic way. And very quiet. But you know what they say about the quiet ones,” he said.
“No. What do they say?”
“Oh, still waters and all that.” Kendall hoped he wouldn’t have to see much of the Cole girl this summer, or her mother, either. But if the two women did end up staying at their camp till the end of August or even longer, Hubert St. Germain would help keep them out of the manager’s hair. St. Germain was competent, independent, and discreet, a guide who kept things from getting complicated, and when he worked for one of the camps he made sure the owners didn’t have reason to come to the clubhouse complaining to management. “I’ll draw you a map to his house. It’s a little hard to find. It’s stuck over there beyond the village north of the Tamarack River, in the woods below Beede Mountain,” he said and pulled out a sheet of club stationery and began to draw.
JORDAN GROVES’S NEW STUDIO ASSISTANT ARRIVED EARLY FOR her first day of work, surprising the artist and irritating him, for she had interrupted the start of a silly, sexually explicit fantasy, a detailed continuation of his most recent encounter with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, revealing for his delectation what surely would have happened had he not turned away from the woman at the last possible second. Turning away was not unusual for Jordan Groves. He was good at it. Several times a year, sometimes more, he walked to the very edge of a precipice, looked over and down the cliff with a longing to step off it, then backed away, later to enjoy from a safe mental distance the terrible consequences of a near leap into domestic disaster. The fantasies gave him an ache that was oddly satisfying and provided a sexual charge that he believed enlivened him without endangering him or anyone else. The only women he actually made love to, other than his wife, of course, were women he was incapable of loving, and he never had sex with them more than once and almost never saw them again. The others he visited like this, in fantasy, telling himself little sex stories, over and over. In this way — perhaps it was the only way — he had managed all these years to avoid falling in love with anyone other than his wife, and, except for the fact that he knew it was an indulgence and would certainly not have wanted his wife to enjoy a similar indulgence, it left him guilt free.