Jordan nodded without answering. He grabbed the carton and hustled the boys out of the store to the car. From town he drove south on the road to the Reserve and turned up the steep incline at the entrance to the clubhouse grounds and pulled in behind a tan Packard sedan parked in the oval driveway in front of the wide veranda. Several other cars were parked there also, all with their motors running, their cloth-capped drivers — men Jordan recognized as out-of-work local men hired for the occasion, his neighbors — loading suitcases and golf bags and specially encased, custom-made fly rods and tackle boxes or standing idly by, waiting to carry their passengers to the train at Westport. On the veranda Jordan saw Vanessa and her mother and some of the people he had met the night before. He recognized the Tinsdales and the Armstrongs, but couldn’t remember their names.
Russell Kendall, the manager of the club, a small, almost delicate-looking man wearing a seersucker suit and bow tie and white shoes, was talking to the group, with large gestures and exaggerated facial expressions, as if in a stage play. Jordan knew Kendall only vaguely, having seen him a few times at the open-house cocktail parties that people tossed at their summer homes, parties attended by nearly everyone not considered strictly local. He’d also caught him having a recreational drink alone at the bar of the Moose Head Inn in Sam Dent. Slumming, as it seemed to Jordan. He had large red lips half covered by a drooping blond mustache, and Jordan believed that he was a homosexual. Each time they met, Jordan Groves had to be freshly introduced to Kendall, which irritated the artist.
Although the artist knew that he would enjoy the clubhouse facilities of the Reserve — the tennis courts, the dining fit for a luxury cruise ship, the comfortable bar with a bartender from Ireland who made a first-class martini, the golf course, and the hiking trails and trout-filled lakes and streams that ran through the vast holdings of the Reserve — Jordan was not a member, nor had he ever wanted to join. One night a few years ago he’d ended up drinking late at the Moose Head with a pair of members wearing dinner jackets, flush-faced fellows his age who’d undone their ties and gone into town after the club bar had closed, and they had naively offered to put him up for membership. He was a celebrity, after all. Known for being somewhat eccentric and temperamental and thought to be politically suspect, Jordan Groves was nonetheless a famous artist. He could obviously afford the fees, and he held his liquor like a gentleman. He had said, “No, thanks, fellows. I don’t want to be the first Jewish member of the Tamarack club.” His sponsors said they hadn’t realized he was Jewish. “I’d also be the first Negro member,” he added, and they saw that he was joking and knew not to press him any further on the subject. His visit to Dr. Cole’s camp yesterday was the first time that he’d actually set foot on the Reserve, and today was the first time he’d parked his car in the clubhouse driveway.
He shut off the motor and sat there for a few seconds and watched Vanessa. She was in a group of perhaps ten people, but he saw no one else. She wore a calf-length black skirt and a dark gray silk blouse with billowing sleeves and over her broad shoulders a black crocheted shawl, and she looked even more beautiful to Jordan today than when he’d seen her yesterday in the fading, late-afternoon sunlight standing alone by the shore of the Second Lake. She had on bright red, almost scarlet lipstick, and mascara, and though she was pale and her face full of sorrow, she was luminous to him, enveloped by a light that seemed to emanate from inside her. He did not think that he had ever seen a woman with a visible field of light surrounding her like that, a gleaming halo wrapped around her entire body.
He told the boys to wait for him and got out of the car and walked toward the veranda. As he approached the group, the people ceased speaking and looked at him, and then, except for Vanessa, abruptly turned away. Russell Kendall took Evelyn Cole gently by the arm and led her along the veranda toward the steps at the far end of the long, open structure, past the Adirondack chairs and wicker settees and gliders, and the others followed, although Vanessa did not. She waited with a puzzled expression on her face, as if Jordan Groves were only a vaguely remembered acquaintance approaching.
He said to her, “I just now heard about your father. I want to say I’m sorry.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“What?”
“Say that you’re sorry.”
“I’m sorry. I am.”
He was filled with an unfamiliar longing. He wanted to reach up and touch her and realized that not once yesterday had he actually touched her skin. Though she had whispered in his ear, their cheeks had not brushed. He remembered extending his hand to help her when she stepped from the water to the airplane, and a few seconds later, when she got into the cockpit, reaching again to assist her, but she had ignored his offers and not even their fingertips had touched. He had only seen and heard her.
“Yes, well, you have much to be sorry for,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. She knew without looking that at the far end of the veranda her mother and Mr. Kendall and the others had turned and were watching her. She could see over Jordan’s shoulder that even the drivers were watching her. She decided not to slap him, although she wanted to, and he deserved it. But a slap would not create a scene so much as end one. No one could hear them, but everyone could see them, and she didn’t want the scene to end just yet.
“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “I do. I do have much to be sorry for. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I’m afraid that I do.”
“Then tell me, please,” he said, and meant it. He wanted to know what he had been thinking last night when he’d left her up there at Bream Pond, and he believed her, believed that she knew what he had been thinking.
“You wanted to make love to me. And couldn’t.”
He inhaled sharply. She stepped down from the veranda and walked toward him, and as she swept past he smelled her perfume, the faint odor of a rose. He had seen her and heard her, and now he had smelled her. But he still hadn’t touched her. “Wait,” he said and reached out and took her left hand into his.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but I have to leave. I have to arrange for my father’s funeral.”
She tried to pull her hand free. He wouldn’t release it. He held it tightly, but carefully, as if her hand were a small, captured bird, terrified and fragile, struggling to escape his powerful grip without injuring itself. He felt the delicate bones and tendons turning beneath the cool, smooth skin of her hand.
“You may be right,” he said. “About what I was thinking.”
She looked up at him. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Does it?”
“Yes, it matters. A lot. It matters to me.”
He could not help himself, and meant no disrespect or mockery: he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly and released the bird into the air.
For a split second Vanessa glared at him, as if he had indeed mocked her. Then she turned and quickly strode toward the tan sedan parked in front of his Ford. She called her mother sharply to come along and got into the rear seat of the car. The driver — a man Jordan knew, Ben Kernhold, who had once owned a now defunct machine shop over in Tamarack Forks and had made polished aluminum picture frames for him — closed the car door, cast a quick glance at Jordan, and went around to the other side, where he waited for Vanessa’s mother. One by one, Evelyn Cole and the others came down the far steps of the veranda and got into their vehicles.