The Reserve Read Free Page B

Orozco, Sequeiros, and Diego Rivera. In recent years,however, he had become famous for his commissioned illustrations of limited-edition books—classics like The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn and Aesop’s Fables —for which he was paid large sums of money. While Jordan Groves admired James Heldon’s work, he had a nagging suspicion that Heldon, who was nearly the same age as he and whom he had so far avoided meeting, did not consider him a serious artist and thought of him as merely an illustrator and left-wing propagandist. As Jordan saw it, the problem, the crucial difference between the two north country artists, was political, not aesthetic.
    Even so, James Heldon was himself viewed as a man of the left—at least by the critics and general public. He had spoken out often in support of the workers and any number of Roosevelt’s domestic programs, but he had always been careful to avoid being connected with causes and positions taken up by the Communist Party, the Comintern. Which was not Jordan’s way. Though Jordan had refused to join the party—he was not a joiner, he often said, but as long as the battle was just, didn’t care who fought alongside him—he had donated a group of his most valuable pictures to the Soviet people and had painted several murals in Moscow honoring the workers’ heroic role in the revolution. He wondered where Heldon would come down on this Spanish thing. The Italians were in the war now, and in spite of getting thrashed in March by the Spanish Republicans at Guadalajara, they were spoiling for a second go-round. Bombing Ethiopia in May had bolstered their confidence and had probably improved their flying skills.
    Dr. Cole led Jordan Groves from painting to painting. Hanging on the varnished plank walls of Rangeview were more than a dozen small Heldon landscapes that he had purchased over the years from the artist himself, with a dozen more hanging in his Park Avenue apartment and their home in Tuxedo Park. Vanessafollowed the two men, but kept a few feet behind them, silent and watching and listening, like a reluctantly roused predator, operating more on instinct than need. She liked the artist’s hard concentration, how he stood before each painting and literally stared at it for long minutes, as if it were alive and moving and changing shape and color before his eyes; and she liked that he offered no comment, no praise, compliment, or critique; just looked and looked and said nothing and moved on to the next, until he had seen them all, then returned to three or four of the landscapes for a second long look.
    Her father, to his credit, did not ask Jordan’s opinion or evaluation of the pictures, although he was justly proud of having purchased them and proud of his personal friendship with James Heldon—who was, after all, practically an Adirondack neighbor and a fellow second-generation member of the Reserve—and confident of the long-term value of the pictures in the art market. Dr. Cole collected paintings that he loved to look at, but he also made sure that they were sound investments. He owned three John Marin watercolors that had been painted when Marin visited the region in 1912 and ’13, a large Jonas Lie, two very fine Winslow Homers, and a landscape by William Merritt Chase that he had inherited from his mother. They were the nucleus of a small, but tasteful and increasingly valuable collection. He insisted that his focus was solely on paintings of his beloved Adirondacks, but in Vanessa’s view her father collected art in order to collect artists, because he himself was not one and wished he were. And now, apparently, he was collecting Jordan Groves.
    She reached out and touched Jordan on the shoulder. “Do you want your jacket back?”
    “Thanks, yes,” he said and watched her slip it off her shoulders and allowed her to drape it over his. “Wouldn’t mind another whiskey, either,” he said and handed her his glass.
    She went to the bar, and he drifted