Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  That's a puzzlement, Howard said. I hardly know what to say to such a threat. Do you intend to get a gun?

  Lee said, No.

  Well then, Ellis said, that's a different story. Haven't we reached a meeting of minds? It's like Mr. Dawson's election, a peaceable affair, normal, without excitement. What I mean to say is, predictable. I suppose that's true, Lee said. You will not be bothered, Howard said. Those boys know they did the wrong thing and will not repeat it. They do not want to spend more time in the South. The neighborhood will see to it you are not disturbed so long as you keep things to yourself. We all mind our own business here and in that way we all get along.

  Bert Marks listened to Lee's story without saying one word. And when Lee finished, the old lawyer nodded slowly and offered a crooked smile.

  You've learned a valuable lesson, young man. Thing about Chicago is, it's generous. Live and let live. It's good you've found that out. Other cities, they tear themselves apart exacting revenge. Boston's like that, family rivalries, tribal rivalries. Boston's an old city. Why, at one time the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians were at each other's throats. Can you imagine it? I'm not saying that revenge is not a factor here too, but it's not dominant. It's recessive. We're a young city and we look ahead, not backward. We don't care about yesterday. Cities that care about yesterday are cities in decline. Boston's in decline. We work things out here, try to give everyone a slice of the pie. Even those boys. It's a small slice but still a slice and that's why the motto of our city is Can Do. And a new generation is on the rise. There's a man on the scene, an up-and-comer. You don't know his name. He's a behind-the-scenes man now but I suspect he'll run for mayor in a few years' time and he'll win because he's a fine Democrat and at the same time a realist. He loves the city, you see. And wants to make it prosper. And if you go along, you'll get along. Mr. Daley likes people who look forward. He understands the principle of the egg and the omelet and that's why we're entering a golden age in Chicago. I think you're mature beyond your years, Lee. I know about your meeting with my late friend Mr. Tommy Ogden. He spoke so highly of you. He asked me to do anything I could, and I'm doing that now. I've never asked your plans when you graduate from our great university. Have you ever thought of the practice of law?

  FOR LEE GOODELL the law would not do for a simple reason. It was not physical enough, the work done inside your own head during daylight hours in a drowsy office in a downtown building. Lee liked ground-floor space and a certain amount of disorder inside the space. He liked sweat, a reminder of football practice at Ogden Hall and his afternoon adventures down below the hill in New Jesper. He was not attracted to collaboration, a necessary feature of the legal life: associates, clients, judges, bailiffs, court reporters, juries. Its essence was a remorseless search for precedent, that which had gone before. What had gone before was the controlling conscience. If you were an artist, precedent was not the solution. Precedent was the problem. He thought of lawyers as an infantry surveying the battlefields of distant wars. He thought of them as buzzards picking over carrion and writing the results in a prose so opaque—well, it was double Dutch, the so-called brief, which was never brief but stretched like a wave in the open ocean, rising, collapsing, re-forming itself until it petered out on some foreign shore. He preferred the mallet and chisel and knowing that however hard he worked on the stone its interior would never reveal itself entirely. In that way it resembled an inspired musical figure and life itself.

  Besides, law was his father's trade.

  ***

  TO HIS SURPRISE, one year later Lee found himself something of a big man on the Chicago campus, someone to be looked up to and speculated about, the long scar on his face as distinctive as a black eyepatch or a top hat. He was often seen in the company of faculty, including the very senior, very eminent department chairmen who taught undergraduate classes, part of the Chicago tradition, "the deal." Evenings he was a regular at the long bar of the tavern on 57th Street drinking with junior faculty from the English and history departments, all of them engaged in animated discussions of the Great Books between drafts of German lager. Often they were drunk, their voices rising on the neap tide, the grand names sailing forth—Spinoza Wittgenstein Adorno Nietzsche and the Russian butterfly beavering away at Ithaca, Nabokov. Lee said little but listened hard, never more attentive than when the evening drew to a close with its ritual denunciation of the economics faculty, crypto-Republicans who would bring the American experiment to its knees unless steps were taken at once. Lee rarely stayed after ten o'clock.

  Lee was an excellent student but did not look much like a student, roughly dressed, his books and papers carried in an old Boy Scout knapsack; his cigarette was a giveaway, however. He was understood to be a prep school boy—a graduate of that very peculiar institution near Jesper downstate, Ogden Hall, scandal-ridden but still surviving—but he didn't look like a preppie, with the long scar and an unruly mop of coal-black hair and a musclebound gait that suggested a rodeo rider or a middleweight wrestler, a young man who could take care of himself. It was known that most every night he went to his basement studio in the dangerous neighborhood away from the campus to sculpt—and here the rumors varied widely because no one had seen his work, not even Charles or Laura or the sisters from New York City or the foreign student from New Delhi. Sculpture was not an unusual avocation at Chicago, known for its eccentric student body—fencers, young communists, Arctic explorers, bridge fanatics, game theorists, astronomers, motorcycle enthusiasts, phrenologists, and here and there a scapegrace. Even so, it was remarkable that Lee was rumored to keep a loaded revolver in the studio. He was not a participant in campus life, not that the university was much celebrated for organized activities outside the classroom. There was a baseball team but games were sparsely attended, the bleachers a fine place to read a book on a fine spring afternoon, game or no game. Athletics in general were frowned upon as something more compatible with the wretched Big Ten, specifically Northwestern or the University of Illinois. In any case there were no cheerleaders in short skirts twirling batons, nor raucous homecoming weekends.

  Lee did not know what to make of his notoriety except that he liked it. The university encouraged individuality. A refusal to conform was seen as virtuous, though there were objections that the near-religious pursuit of nonconformity was itself conventional, business as usual. Hegel was revered on the Midway: for every thesis, an antithesis. Lee was having the time of his life.

  AT DAWN OR A LITTLE LATER Lee would venture from his studio with a mug of black coffee, leaning against the railing that led to the basement, and watch the neighborhood come alive, a few pedestrians going to work, a few more coming home, cars motoring slowly down the street. Cats and a few dogs prowled the neighborhood. The morning light was always pale and dusty and for a few moments it was as if time had ceased. Lee was deep into his thoughts of the marble and what it was yielding. He was leaning against the railing but his mind was still in the studio and remained there until he heard music from the storefront church across the street, voices foreground and a piano behind. He sipped coffee and listened to the music, which trailed off now and again into the purest blues. The lead voice was a soprano who belonged in Orchestra Hall but he doubted that Orchestra Hall was much in her thoughts just then. The rattle of a garbage truck obscured the music but when the truck turned the corner the soprano came back and the chorus joined in, everyone taking a closer walk with thee. Lee noticed ash in the air but when the ash touched his hand it disappeared, snow flurries from the lake. He wondered how it would be to start the day with hymns and readings from scripture. He had never been to a morning church service in his life. There was no religious study at Ogden Hall and his parents were secular people, not even church on Easter or Christmas.

  Then the street was filled with children, some escorted by their mothers, others by their older brothers and sisters. Their reedy voices filled the street and Lee was reminded of his own schooldays in New Jesper, down Chestnut St
reet to Hawthorn and across Hawthorn to Oak. The school, a red brick pile, sullen in aspect, was on the corner. They were like fish, the girls in one pod and the boys in another. They always slowed a little before they got to school, thinking there might be a cancellation and they could go home. Those were the best times, when he and Dougie Henderson would spend the day down below the hill. Snow was the promise of a day off, a kind of gift. The advantage of a small town was that there was always one forbidden place and everyone knew where it was. Small town, small world. In cities there were many such places and no one person could know them all and some were truly dangerous. It had been years since he had visited New Jesper. Dougie had moved away and was living in Denver, selling cars. Lee wondered if the town had changed and if neighborhood boys still defied their parents to prowl along the railroad tracks. Of course they would—unless the memories of the murdered tramp and the assault on Magda Serra were still fresh, and that was doubtful. The children he saw now were hurrying to catch up, to get to school before the bell. The door of the church opened suddenly and parishioners spilled out. They were mostly middle-aged women in hats, bundled against the cold. Through the open door he could hear the piano, a recessional, and it too had the tone and timbre of the blues.

  Lee lit a cigarette and finished his coffee, comfortable in the cold, his thoughts turning again to the mallet and chisel and the block of marble and what it would yield or if it would yield anything. Not today. He was finished for today. At times he felt the marble had a life and mind of its own but that was tomorrow's business. He wanted to speed things up but it seemed he worked to a slow-paced clock. Lee felt someone stir nearby and turned abruptly, dropping the cigarette, his fists up.

  Ellis and Howard stepped back, alarmed.

  You'll catch your death, Ellis said. It's cold. That cotton shirt's not enough.

  I didn't notice, Lee said.

  How have you been getting on? Howard asked. Everything all right?

  Fine, Lee said.

  No trouble?

  No trouble, Lee said.

  You're part of the neighborhood now, Howard said.

  I guess that's right.

  You understand, it's unusual. Except for the locksmith around the corner and the other one, we don't know his name, the fat one on the run, white people don't live here. And when one moves in, that excites curiosity. But you, you keep to yourself, don't ask questions, and that helps a little bit so far as curiosity's concerned.

  I don't live here, Lee said. I work here.

  Oh, yes, we know, Ellis said. He looked thoughtfully at the sky and sighed heavily. I believe we'll have real snow by the end of the day. Cold too, that wind from the lake. Comes all the way from Minnesota. Beyond Minnesota. Sometimes I wonder what made us settle here, my God it's a long train ride. But I know the answer to that. You should get a nice warm coat.

  Lee said, What's the answer?

  Jim Crow, Ellis said. You see, we're from Mississippi. That's where Jim lives. He's here too, but not quite so much.

  What does that mean? Lee said. Jim Crow.

  Ellis looked at Howard and they both smiled. Trouble, Ellis said. It means trouble. But you don't have to worry about it. So let's return to the matter at hand.

  Lee blinked. He was unaware that there was a matter at hand.

  Everyone wonders what you do here, Howard said.

  I carve things, Lee said. I carve marble. I'm here because the basement's cheap, thirty-five dollars a month. The heat works.

  That's good. It's good to be warm in the Windy City.

  Steam heat, Lee said.

  Even better, Howard said.

  We want to ask you a question, Ellis said.

  Go ahead, Lee said.

  It's in the nature of a favor, Howard said. Ellis will explain.

  We have some money from the city, Ellis said. As you know, there's an election just around the corner and City Hall thought they should make a contribution to the neighborhood so's to make certain that things go well at ballot time. And thanks to our fine congressman there'll be a little federal money because the election concerns them too, up there in that Washington. And a generous contribution from folks who work at the university. This is our plan. We intend to have a clinic on this street, next block over. Open nights and weekends so when people are sick they have a place to go. A place where injuries could be treated. Of course serious cases would be forwarded at once to County Hospital, where they have facilities, an emergency room and so forth and so on, x-ray machines, and the like. We wondered if you could help us out, Mr. Goodell.

  Lee, he said.

  We thought you could help us out, seeing as how you're part of the neighborhood.

  I don't have any money, Lee said.

  Howard smiled and shook his head, murmuring, No, no.

  I don't know anything about medicine, Lee said.

  You don't have to, Howard said. We have trained professionals. Doctors who volunteer their time and registered nurses and so forth and so on.

  We have to have someone who can keep records, Ellis said. Log people in and log them out. Make sure the files are maintained. Take their insurance cards if they have insurance, which most of them won't. Our community distrusts insurance companies and doesn't have money for the premiums if they did trust them, so they'll need help with the forms. That's what we need.

  Keeping records, Howard said. We thought you would be good at that.

  Why? Lee said.

  You're up there at the university. That's what they teach you, isn't it? Those professors we read about. And I'll bet you're a fine student, Lee. You must be, to spend so much time here in the neighborhood. We already have a volunteer for the weeknights. So we're only talking about two nights a week, Saturday and Sunday. I'll bet you'd have time for that.

  I wouldn't be good at it, Lee said.

  How do you know? You haven't tried!

  Some things you know, Lee said. Instinct.

  We were hoping you could help us out, Ellis said. He smiled, most friendly, most ingratiating, and not giving one inch. The street was mostly empty now, the children in their classrooms. A bus lumbered by, filled with women. A very old man emerged from the church, looked at the sky, and waved at Ellis and Howard. He shouted something unintelligible and Ellis and Howard both laughed. A private joke, Lee surmised. And a private language for the private joke. He lit a cigarette and watched the snow fly, imagining himself as a clerk at the clinic, logging people in and logging them out, keeping track of medical histories, making sense of private language, all-night affairs surely. He had no desire to clerk and no particular wish to devote his weekend evenings to sick people, none of them known to him. He supposed he lacked civic spirit. Something perverse about it, Lee thought. He drew a breath and saw the labyrinth in front of him and knew there was no escape. Ellis and Howard were clever men.

  Come with us, have a look at our clinic, Howard said.

  It's only up the street a little, said Ellis.

  Five minutes, Howard said.

  You'll have to forgive the looks of it, Ellis said.

  The cleaners are due next week, said Howard.

  Maybe you could answer a question for me, Lee said.

  Certainly, Howard said.

  The boy who cut me. What was his name?

  Oh, Howard said, that's in the past. That's old news.

  All the same, Lee said, I'd like to know.

  That's information that could cause trouble, Ellis said.

  No trouble, Lee said. I wouldn't tell anyone.

  You would keep the name to yourself?

  I would, Lee said.

  The boy's name is Topper, Ellis said.

  Last name? Lee said.

  The name he goes by is Topper, Howard said.

  Give me a minute, Lee said.

  He went back inside, put a chamois cloth over the marble, picked up his coat, locked the basement door, and joined Ellis and Howard for the walk up the street. They were animated, describing plans for exam
ining rooms and a small operating room for emergencies. Someone had given them a four-foot-high Mosler safe to store dangerous drugs. The women of the neighborhood were especially enthusiastic at the prospect of a place to go for aches and pains, arthritis and diabetes, problems with their bowels; and for the younger ones, prenatal examinations. They hoped the clinic would be friendly and comfortable, unlike the industrial medicine practiced at County Hospital downtown, in and out in fifteen minutes and they were not polite about it. You had to wait hours before being seen and the staff was always rushed. Somehow they were always at the end of the line.

  Ellis, Howard, and Lee paused in front of the building, constructed of clapboard, two stories high, conspicuously vacant. Two of the front windows were broken and trash had accumulated on the stoop. Two cats fled at once. It had begun life as a two-bedroom house but Lee guessed it had had many lives. Ellis produced a key and they stepped inside a dark room, the broken windows so narrow they admitted little light. The prospective waiting room was the size and hexagonal shape of a country parlor, peeling wallpaper, a small chandelier fixed to the ceiling. The room could hold no more than ten or twelve people. In one corner was a plain wooden desk of the sort schoolteachers were issued. All the room lacked was a pencil sharpener and a blackboard.

  In a dark corner was a pile of rags, including a threadbare blanket that moved as Lee looked at it. A bare foot showed itself, then an ankle, a languorous movement, and as quickly withdrew. Ellis stepped to the blanket and carefully pulled it back, revealing first an empty bottle of gin and a ragged pair of hands and at last a woman of indeterminate age sleeping soundly. Howard took a good long look and sighed. The woman's face was badly scratched, her hair a wiry thicket. Ellis pulled at the blanket again, then quickly put it back. She appeared to be bare above the waist. Ellis looked at Howard and shook his head, murmuring something unintelligible. Howard said, Poor soul. Ellis said, We'll let her sleep. He stepped to the closet door and looked inside. Then he opened the door to the corridor and looked up and down, no sign of life. The woman said something in her sleep, a kind of croon. Ellis moved the blanket again so that she could breathe more easily. They both stood quietly a moment. Lee said, Shouldn't we get help? It's hard to know where help would come from, Howard said. The police, Lee said. The police would not be helpful, Howard said. We'll think of something. Meanwhile, we have to get these windows repaired. Really, Lee said, shouldn't we call someone? But that question went unanswered. Howard stepped to the desk and rapped it twice with his knuckles.