So she was not surprised, as she walked through the house shutting off the lights, dropping the house room by room into darkness, that she did not, as usual, leave a light burning at the kitchen door for him. She passed through the library, where barely twenty-four hours ago, she and Jordan had last held each other and wept over the damage they had done alone and together to their marriage, and she stood a moment beside his desk as if he were still seated there and she were waiting for him to turn to her and say All is forgiven, and All our lies and betrayals belong to the past now. Her glance fell on the wicker basket beside the desk, and she saw in it a sealed and stamped letter torn in half and half again, Jordan’s cream-colored personal stationery with his familiar logo for the return address and letterhead — a river, the River Jordan, he had once explained to her, represented by three parallel, waved lines rippling below a grove of three pines. It was his mark, his stamp, his signature. She reached into the basket and picked up the four pieces of the torn letter and envelope and saw that it was addressed to John Dos Passos. She knew then where her husband would go when he left her. She did not read what he had written to Dos. She didn’t have to — he had written it before learning of her betrayal and the months of deception. He had written it when he thought he knew who she was. Everything was different now. And then she heard the high, nasal hum of the airplane in the distance, its tone dropping and volume steadily increasing as it followed the river north toward home.
The young American woman stood alone at the wide window on the promenade of Level A, ignored now by the other passengers, for they had given up trying to engage her in conversation. Shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, the steward announced that it would soon be possible to see the coast of Newfoundland. Below, the warm waters of the Gulf Stream merged with the cold North Atlantic Drift. For the first time since leaving Frankfurt, the sky had cleared, and the passengers on the promenade peered down from the Hindenburg and watched its long shadow cross the turquoise water. In the distance, looking like tiny sailboats, icebergs cast off by the glaciers of Greenland floated southeast on the Labrador Current. Soon the airship passed close enough to one of the icebergs for the passengers to take its measure. It was a mountain of ice gleaming in the sunlight, its enormous pale green base visible below the surface of the sea. A double rainbow circled the white peak. There was a sudden noise, a rumble and then a loud crack that could be heard inside the airship, and the mountain of ice seemed to break apart. A third of it split away and slid slowly into the sea. Calving, they call it, said a man standing beside the young woman. She turned quickly. It was the short man whose Dresden doll, his gift for his daughter, had been inspected at the hotel in Frankfurt. The man smiled. It’s the mother iceberg giving birth to the baby iceberg, he added. Cute, eh? She said, Yes. Will your daughter be meeting you when we arrive tomorrow? she asked. He said that he hoped so, and the woman closed her eyes for a second and smiled warmly, as if picturing in her mind the happy reunion of father and daughter. She said, Your daughter will love the doll that you’re bringing to her. He said again that he hoped so, and she said, Oh, I’m certain of it. She turned back to the window, and the shadow of the gigantic airship crossed over the iceberg below — now two icebergs, a mother and a daughter — dissolving the double rainbow and dimming the white glare of the ice to gray.
9
OVERNIGHT THE WIND GREW STRONGER, A WIND OUT OF THE north that blew the smoke south in the Reserve, away from the village of Tunbridge and the Tamarack Club, driving smoke deeper into the forested valleys and slopes of the Reserve and up the steep sides of the southern tier of the Great Range, across the peaks there and on to the rolling farmlands and villages, where the smoke dissipated finally into a haze, then rose into the dark sky, undetected by humans anywhere, within the Reserve or without, making it the private knowledge only of the animals and birds residing in the Reserve, the deer and bears and coyotes, the bobcats and fisher cats, the foxes, martins, and mink, the hawks and eagles and ravens on the rock-topped peaks, and, on the lakes below and in the cold streams tumbling into the lakes, the beavers and the loons and the lingering Canada geese, and, standing in the muskegs and shallows of the headwaters of the Tamarack River, the herons and cranes, and the owls returning from their nocturnal hunts to roost in the high branches of the spruce and pine trees, where, still higher and in among the crags, the solitary cougar lifted its heavy head from sleep and smelled the smoke drifting downwind from the Second Lake, and the great cat moved off the rocky ledge and made its way down through the conifers to the open birch forest below and loped still farther down to the bands of oak, hickory, maple, and poplar that crossed the lower valleys that lay between the mountain ranges of the Reserve: all the animals and birds in steady, uniform migration from north to south, an instinctual response to the smell of smoke, a felt command registering in their collective brain to track the smoke, not to its source, as humans do, but to where it grew faint and they could no longer see or smell it, even though obedience to the command drove them from the safety of the wilderness toward villages and farms beyond the southern boundaries of the Reserve, to where humans lived, where the forests had been cut and roads laid down and life for the wild animals and birds of the Reserve was a dangerous enterprise and food was scant and often protected by loud, barking dogs and men and boys with guns.
Consequently, it was nearly dawn, an hour before daybreak, with the wind shifting from the north around to the south and building to ten knots and steady, that the first early rising residents of Tunbridge, the village nearest the Reserve, woke and stepped outside to let their dogs run or trundled to the barn to feed the livestock and milk the cow or went to the henhouse to fetch the breakfast eggs, and they smelled wood-burning smoke floating down the Tamarack Valley from somewhere inside the Reserve. At the Tamarack clubhouse, Tim Rooney, the lone night watchman, a tall, sharp-shouldered man who people said looked like a young Abe Lincoln, made his last round along the long, dimly lit hallways of all three floors of the building and passed through the dark, cavernous dining room, where the stuffed moose head hung from the wall above the six-foot-high brook-stone fireplace, and checked the several members’ lounges and cocktail bar, the library and game room, the kitchens, the nursery, strolled past the locked door of the manager’s office and the greeting desk, and stepped out the main entrance of the clubhouse onto the open porch carrying two folded flags, the red, white, and blue American flag with its forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes and the green Tamarack Wilderness Reserve flag with the interlocking white TWR.