The Reserve Read Free Page A

himself than by them.
    When they reached the camp, Vanessa hooked the artist’s arm firmly with hers, and once inside proceeded to introduce him to the people there one by one, even to her father, as if Jordan Groves were her guest and not her father’s.
    “Jordan Groves and I are practically old friends,” Dr. Cole said. “Am I right, Jordan?”
    “Yes. Practically.”
    There was a fire crackling in the huge stone fireplace. Mrs. Cole had lit the kerosene lamps and a few candles, and the room glowed in soft, rust-colored light. It was a large, handsome room, and the interior of the house smelled like the forest that surrounded it. Except for Dr. Cole and his wife, Evelyn, Jordan Groves forgot the names and faces of the houseguests as quickly as they were given to him. They each shook his hand and stepped away. Plutocrats, he decided at once. Leisure-class Republicans. People with inherited wealth and no real education and, except for the doctor, no useful skills. Not Groves’s sort, he knew, and they knew it, too, and were no more curious about him than he about them.
    A seaplane landing in the lake, however—that was fairly intriguing. Quite a sight, way out here. The fellow probably thinks the rules are made for other people, though, not him. Another of Carter’s left-wing artist types. Among his friends and colleagues, Dr. Cole was himself a left-wing artist type—although he was certainly no supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and his so-called New Deal and was not an artist, merely a man who, since college, appreciated art and enjoyed a little amateur sketching and watercolor painting and photography. They thought of their old friend as harmlessly creative.
    Mrs. Cole went to the bar to fix Jordan a whiskey. Dr. Cole said, “So glad you could make it, Jordan. Quite an entrance, I must say,” he said and laughed appreciatively. The doctor was nearly a foot shorter than Jordan, with the beginnings of a humped back that made him seem even shorter than he was. His pale face and round body were soft, jellied, but he had beautiful white handswith long, slender fingers. Of course, a surgeon’s hands, Jordan thought. The doctor’s grip was quick and careful, in and out, with no friendly squeeze or masculine shake. In another man, Jordan would have thought the handshake effeminate. With this man, merely careful. Protecting his tools.
    “Yes, well, sorry about that,” Jordan said and looked around the large, high-ceilinged living room for the Heldons. After Jordan Groves himself, the most famous artist residing in the region was James Heldon. In fact, the two were among the best-known living artists in the country, at least among Americans. In those years the truly famous artists, the painters and sculptors prized by museums and serious collectors, were European. Though often linked by critics and reviewers, mainly because they both were figurative artists and American and resided at least part-time in the Adirondack mountains of northern New York, Groves and Heldon, as artists, were very different. Heldon’s oils and pastels were mostly transcendental, expressionistic landscapes of the north country—the mountains, lakes, and skies that the artist had lived among part-time for decades—and blurred, etherealized nudes of his wife. He was very popular in New York City and Philadelphia art circles. His paintings, in spite of being rather small, for he painted in the forest and on the mountains en plein air, sold for many thousands of dollars. The tonier and more academic critics loved him. Jordan Groves, on the other hand, was valued and known mainly for his graphic work—woodcuts, etchings, prints—although he also, but only occasionally, painted in oils and pastels and had done a number of celebrated murals for the WPA. He had become known increasingly, both in the United States and the Soviet Union, notoriously here, lovingly there, for his politics. Thus he was often compared to the great Mexican muralists