Chapter One
When finally no one was watching her anymore, the
beautiful young woman extracted herself from her parents
and their friends and left the living room. She passed
through the screened porch and crossed the deck and
barefoot walked softly over the pine needles in front of
the sprawling log building downhill toward the sheared
ledges along the edge of the lake.
She knew that shortly the others would notice, not that
Vanessa had left her father’s party, but that the light
in the room had suddenly faded, and though it was still
late afternoon and not yet dusk, they would see that the
sun, because of the looming proximity of the Great
Range, was about to slip behind the mountains. The
Second Tamarack Lake was deep and long and narrow, like
a Norwegian fiord, scraped by glaciers out of the north- and
south-running Great Range of steep, granitic
mountains, and the view from the eastern shore of the
Second Lake at this hour in high summer was famous. Most
of the group would take their freshened drinks in hand
and, following Vanessa, would stroll from the living
room down to the shore to watch the brassy edges of the
clouds turn to molten gold, and then, turning their
backs to the sky and lake, to compliment the way the
pine and spruce woods on the slopes behind the camp
shifted in the dwindling alpenglow from blue-green to
rose and from rose to lavender, as if merely observing
the phenomenon helped cause it.
After a few moments, when the alpenglow had faded, they
would turn again and gaze at the lake and admire in
silence the smooth surface of the water shimmering in
metallic light reflected off the burnished clouds. And
then at last they would notice Vanessa Cole standing
alone on one of the tipped ledges that slipped into the
water just beyond the gravelly beach. With her long,
narrow back to her parents and their friends, her
fingertips raised and barely touching the sides of her
slender, pale, uplifted throat, Vanessa, gazing in dark
and lonely Nordic thoughtfulness into the whole vast
enclosed space between lake and forest and mountain and
sky, would seem to be situated at the exact center of
the wilderness, its very locus, the only meaningful
point of it. For her parents and their friends, for an
interesting moment, the drama of the disappearing sun
would be Vanessa Cole’s.
There were nine people at the party, Dr. Cole’s 1936
annual Fourth of July celebration at the Second
Lake-Vanessa and her parents, Carter and Evelyn Cole;
Red Ralston and his wife, Adele; Harry and Jennifer
Armstrong; and Bunny and Celia Tinsdale. The men had
been classmates at Yale, Skull and Bones, class of 1908.
Their wives, respectively, had gone to Smith, Bryn Mawr,
Vassar, and Mount Holyoke. All four couples had married
young and had in their twenties borne their children,
and their children, except for Vanessa, had in turn done
the same. During the previous decades the men had made a
great deal of money buying and selling stocks and bonds
and real estate and from the practice of their
professions-Dr. Cole was an internationally renowned, if
somewhat controversial, brain surgeon; Red Ralston,
Vanessa’s godfather, was a corporate lawyer who
specialized in bankruptcies; Harry Armstrong owned a
company that manufactured automobile tires; Bunny
Tinsdale ran his father’s steel company-and husbands and
wives both were old enough now to have found themselves
in the process of inheriting homes and family fortunes
from their dying parents. They and their parents and
their children and grandchildren had not been much
affected by the Great Depression.
Every year on the Fourth of July-other than during the
war years, when Dr. Cole and Bunny Tinsdale were army
officers stationed in France-the four families gathered
together here at Rangeview, the Cole family’s Adirondack
camp, to drink and fish and hike in rustic splendor and
to celebrate their loyalties to one another, to their
families, and to their nation. This year, except for
Vanessa, all the children and grandchildren were
spending the holiday elsewhere-on islands, as someone in
the group had noticed, Mount Desert Isle, Long Island’s
North Shore, Martha’s Vineyard-which had somewhat
diminished the occasion in importance and intensity,
although no one said as much. They acted as if the
absence of their offspring were both desired by them and
planned and were not, as it appeared, a changing of the
guard. The Coles so far had no grandchildren. Their only
child, Vanessa, was adopted and at thirty had been
married and divorced twice, but had remained
childless-“barren,” as she put it.
It was nearly silent there by the shore-low waves
washing the rocks at Vanessa’s feet, a soft wind sifting
the tall pines behind her-and she could hear her
thoughts clearly, for they were cold and came to her in
words and sentences, rather than feelings, as if she
were silently reciting a list or a recipe she’d
memorized years ago. She was not happy, Vanessa told
herself, not one bit, and she wished that she had stayed
in Manhattan. It was always the same here, year after
year, her mother and father’s annual Fourth of July
show, and though it was more her father’s show than her
mother’s, that didn’t make it any better. Not for her.
Everyone had a show, she believed, and this was not
hers, not anymore, if it ever had been, when she heard
in the distance a low humming sound, a light,
intermittent drone that rose and fell, surged and lapsed
back almost into silence and then returned and grew
louder.
She realized that it was an airplane. She had never
before heard or seen an airplane at the Second Lake.
Rangeview was the largest of only a half-dozen
rough-hewn log camps, a few of which were elaborately
luxurious, located in the forty-thousand-acre privately
owned wilderness, the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve.
Vanessa’s grandfather Cole had been …
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Reserve
by Russell Banks
Copyright © 2008 by Russell Banks .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2008
Russell Banks
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-143025-1
