“Please…please, sit down,” she said, and he complied.
His words slightly slurred, Jordan Groves said, “Sorry we woke you. This’s Hubert St. Germain. He’s a guide over at the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve. Hubert, this’s my wife, Alicia.”
“Yes, ma’am, really sorry about waking you up,” Hubert said. “And pleased to meet you, for sure. I was just leaving,” he added and stood again and squared his hat.
“I overheard the last part of your conversation. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. St. Germain. That’s a terrible thing.”
“Yes, ma’am, it is. Thank you.”
“You should stay the night here,” she said. “We have plenty of room. It’s late, and you shouldn’t be driving anyhow. I know you boys have been drinking. And I can understand how difficult it must be to go home to an empty house. Please,” she said. “Stay.”
“Yes, Hubert, spend the night here and go home in the morning,” Jordan said.
“Really,” Alicia said. “I want you to stay.”
The guide hesitated a moment, then accepted their invitation, grateful for it. Too many nights through the hard year and a half since his wife’s death he had ended up drinking late with strangers at the Moose Head until the place closed or drinking in a stranger’s kitchen like this and finally having to make his way back to his cabin, driving drunkenly over narrow country roads, his Model A coupe drifting from one side of the road to the other, the headlights of oncoming vehicles doubling in his blurred vision, until at last he pulled up in front of his cabin and staggered inside, where, still fully clothed, he dropped onto his bed and, before losing consciousness, let himself be crushed by the weight of his loneliness, and wept. And then he blacked out, and the next morning remembered only the sad fact of his weeping and the feeling of his chest being pressed by a stone the size of the room itself. And with each day’s waking his loneliness and sorrow were worsened by his fear that neither was due to the death of his wife, that both had been in him all along.
Alicia lay in the darkness with her husband sleeping next to her. He had come to bed only minutes earlier and was snoring already and smelled of alcohol and meat and sweat. She heard the bed in the guest room creak and imagined the guide turning in his sleep, dreaming of his lost bride. Or perhaps, she thought, lying in bed in the room next to hers, he, too, was awake and listening for some indication that she was thinking about his presence in her house, and perhaps he was as eager as she for them to talk to each other with no one else present. And though Alicia soon fell asleep, when she woke in the morning her mind was instantly filled with this thought. And when the guide woke in the Groveses’ guest room bed, his loneliness and sorrow seemed mysteriously to have fled. When the artist, Jordan Groves, woke, he was mildly irritated by how late he had slept and hurriedly washed, shaved, and pulled on his clothes, so that by the time Hubert St. Germain and Alicia Groves were sitting down opposite each other at the breakfast table, the artist was already at work in his studio.
NOW THAT THE AFFAIR HAD BEEN DISCOVERED BY THAT DAMNED socialite, Alicia decided that she could not go on seeing Hubert any longer. She knew that she could have stayed hidden from the woman’s sight; Hubert could have insisted on speaking to her outside, and she would have gone away; Alicia must have wanted to be seen by her, to be discovered, uncovered, revealed — not so much to the rest of the world, but to herself. She would break it off immediately and wait for the Cole girl to tell Jordan what she had seen, and Jordan would draw his own conclusions: simply, he would know at once that his wife had been lying to him all these months. She had not been playing visiting nurse at the medical center in Sam Dent at all, had she? She had been with Hubert St. Germain those afternoons. He would bring those conclusions to Alicia, and she would have no choice but to confess everything.
But at least she could tell him that she had ended the relationship. She would say that she had ended it so that their marriage, however broken and betrayed, could continue in some form. And she would tell him that she was ashamed and remorseful, even though she was not ashamed of what she had done and was not remorseful, regardless of the damage it had done to her marriage. She would humbly accept her husband’s righteous wrath and stoically endure the license he had now — license to conduct, without guilt and probably not even secrecy or discretion, an affair with Vanessa Von Heidenstamm. Alicia would be almost relieved by that, however. If he were openly having an affair, Alicia would no longer have to deal with his secrets and the lies that went with it and the rumors and gossip, which for years had afflicted the marriage, making it sullen and suspicious and sexually tepid.
When Alicia arrived home, Jordan was not there, and his new assistant, Frances, was taking care of the boys, amusing them in the studio. They were teaching her the names of the artist’s tools and equipment, the girl explained brightly, so that she could make an inventory.
“Frances is very smart, Mama,” Wolf said.
“And she’s nice, too,” Bear added, and the girl reddened.
“I’m sure she is. Where did Mr. Groves go?”
“I don’t know. He said he had some business to attend to. He took his airplane. That’s a swell thing to have, your own airplane that you can land on water.”
“He’ll take you for a ride, if you want,” Wolf said. “Papa likes taking people for rides in his airplane.”
“There are brownies on the kitchen counter by the stove, and milk in the icebox. Help yourself when you’re ready. I’ll be upstairs, so just holler if you need me,” Alicia said and went into the house. She would write to Hubert now and tell him of her decision. Alicia was glad that Jordan was not at home, so that she could write the letter before she had a chance to change her mind; and she was glad that he had taken his airplane, because she could hear its engine a half mile upriver and could hide the letter before he came into the house.
Upstairs in the bedroom, sitting at the writing desk, Alicia took out a vanilla-colored envelope and a sheet of stationery, and she wrote,
Dear Hubert, this is the first and last letter I will write to you. What happened today has brought me to my senses. I will always treasure the love that we shared with each other, but we cannot continue this any longer. You are the only man other than my husband whom I have ever loved or ever will love. I am grateful to have had that. Before I knew you I was content and, though I did not know it, unhappy. You made me very happy, but with it came a terrible discontent. It cannot go on. The costs to my children and to my marriage are too great. When that woman came to your house today, I was forced to look at myself through her eyes, and I realized that I have been swept up in a kind of madness. Please forgive me for allowing it to happen. Forgive me for loving you.
And signed it, Always, A.
She folded the letter, sealed it in the envelope, and wrote Hubert’s full name on the envelope and put it into her purse. Tomorrow she would drive to town and stop at the turnoff by the Clarkson farm where Hubert’s mailbox was located, and she would leave the letter in the box.
No, she would do it now, she decided, before Jordan returned. Before she understood fully what she was giving up. Before she could change her mind.
JORDAN GROVES FLEW HIS AIRPLANE FROM THE SECOND LAKE south over the headwaters of the Tamarack River into the wilderness and then around to the west and across the Great Range, the same way he had come in, so as not to be seen by anyone fishing the First Lake or hiking in from the clubhouse. Shortly, he was on the other side of the Great Range, beyond the Reserve and flying high above the broad valley. He was on his usual route now, following the river home, headed downstream from the outskirts of the village, flying over the scattered roadside farms and the green meadows and cornfields and the clusters of maple and oak and elm trees. There were crosswinds in the valley at this altitude, churning the air slightly, and rather than climb out of the turbulence, he dropped down until, at about twelve hundred feet, cupped by the surrounding mountains, the air smoothed, and he was able to see the freshly oiled road that ran like a scorched ribbon alongside the widening river, and he could even make out individual cows in the fields and people working in their gardens and yards. Only a few vehicles were visible — a dump truck trundling into town, then Darby Shay’s delivery van carting the week’s groceries over to the poor farm in Sam Dent, and then, headed in the opposite direction, he saw the tan Packard sedan that he recognized as Vanessa Von Heidenstamm’s and, following close behind, the modified Model A Ford coupe that he knew belonged to the guide Hubert St. Germain.