Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  Every year until he was twenty his father presented him with a firearm on his birthday, and when he turned twenty-one his father died and Tommy had no further need for anyone's largesse. Tommy bought the set of matched Purdeys at auction, staying dollar for dollar with a property developer who was twice his age but much less than half as rich. He asked his mother to come with him to the auction because he did not know the form of things, the signals, how the bidding progressed, and the percentage that went to the house. He did know enough to maintain a stony demeanor, the look that said to his competitors: I am in this forever if need be, so fold your hand now and save yourself the trouble. Lily Ogden explained the procedures and left him alone, moving to the rear of the chandeliered room to watch the bidding. And as she said later, it was thrilling to watch her son, a natural, natural aplomb, ice water in his veins, implacable. Chinoiserie, impressionist canvases, Fabergé eggs, Syrian carpets, and Biedermeier cabinets flew by as Tommy sat quietly, arms folded, his head bent forward as if he were stalking game, awaiting the presentation of the Purdeys. Quite frightening, Lily told a friend, how much her son loved the hunt—or, as he said, shooting and the game that made shooting worthwhile. He rarely spoke of his passion in company because it was no one else's business. The phrase he used was, It's nothing to do with them. I don't know where he came from, Lily said. He is nothing like his father and nothing like me. Then she laughed: Well, maybe a little like me and a little like his father, bless him, who always kept his cards close to his vest. I imagine shooting is what Tommy will do in his life and how fortunate he will never have to work for a living because he has no head for commerce.

  This was mostly true. Shooting was Tommy's vocation and everything else in his life seemed incidental, schoolwork, games, the news of the day, even girls. Like his drawing, shooting was personal and he would no more confess to it than a priest would confess to vice, though probably not for the same reason. He believed that people—anyone, anywhere—were eager to take from him what was rightfully his. He believed it as a boy and believed it more strongly as he aged, no doubt the legacy of his father, who maintained that anyone, anywhere was after his money. Friendships were suspect for that reason. The railroad was most presciently sold by his father in the months before the Panic of 1893, the old man explaining to his son that he was uneasy about the capital markets, an orgy of ill-considered speculation with dubious characters in the vanguard. They were scoundrels, connoisseurs of swindle. They would ruin the economy and take the railroad down with it. Lily and Henry Ogden were exceptionally close and when Henry explained his suspicions, Lily urged him to consult her psychic. The psychic was never wrong. Henry followed his wife's advice and when Madame Hauska advised him to sell the railroad at once, without delay, he did so and not long after the market crashed. The old man told the story again and again to his son, proposing that the psychic was evidence of the existence of a spirit world that trumped Wall Street; and he never failed to add that he had persuaded the buyers of the railroad to lease him his private car for a dollar a year, ten-year minimum. They were happy to do it because they thought they had a bargain, even though the terms were cash, no notes, no bonds. The psychic had insisted on it, knowing very well that Mr. Ogden cherished his car and would be unhappy without it.

  Tommy came to know every tree and trail on the estate, a monotonous terrain where the horizon was invisible. In that part of Illinois, well beyond the city's monstrous clamor, the land was flat as a plate, an anonymous kingdom of farms, small-holdings, and the one market town nearby that contained a restaurant, a movie house, and the station that served the Ogden railroad. A hardware store and a barber shop completed the ensemble. Ogden Hall was the only estate of note in the vicinity, the site deliberately chosen by Henry Ogden for its distance from the glitter of the horse country west of the city. He disliked horses almost as much as he disliked glitter. The Ogdens were seldom seen except for the boy Tommy—an impolite boy, badly mannered, abrupt—who stopped by the hardware store every few weeks to buy ammunition. Never a pleasantry. Never a hello, never a goodbye. He spoke two words only: Charge it. As time went by, his logbook filling up with his precise recording of creatures shot dead, the date and time, mallards, geese, deer, muskrats, squirrels, rabbits, and one German shepherd he had mistaken for a wolf, Tommy wondered what shooting would be like in the mountains or the high plains of the West or the equatorial jungles, dangerous ground, dangerous animals, perhaps a fairer test of the shooter's skills and nerve. But that was the future. For the time being he was content on the estate, familiar ground. At night you could see Chicago's sulfurous glow to the east. The market town, Jesper, had a rustic appeal, slow-moving, people going about their business normally. The barber gave an honest cut. The people in Jesper talked too much but that was a rural conceit and easily ignored. There were other small towns round and about, Hilling to the south and Quarterday to the north. Hilling was home to the German taxidermist, an old-world figure who spoke little English but was a wizard with fur and feathers. In Hilling the sidewalks were deserted at dusk. There was one peculiar attraction a few miles north of Jesper, a nightclub called Villa Siracusa. Incongruous place for a nightclub, in a cornfield an hour's drive from Chicago. The parking lot was crowded with black Packards and Cadillacs, many of them chauffeur-driven. In the spring and summer and early fall, when the weather was benign, the chauffeurs sat at an outside table that was reserved for them. A waiter was on call to fetch drinks. Patrons crossed a humpback bridge—an unsuccessful attempt to replicate the Ponte dei Sospiri in Venice—over a pond to reach Villa Siracusa, named for the ancestral city of the family that owned it. The façade was a gaudy marriage of stucco and steel and lit by red and yellow spotlights that could not be seen from the main road a half mile distant. Inside, the loggia gave way to a lounge with tables and a long oak bar. Villa Siracusa was notorious in the neighborhood, something mysterious and surreptitious about it, and one evening early in their acquaintance Bert Marks explained. Bert was an occasional patron. I'll call ahead, he said, let them know you're coming. The Villa is a kind of club and like most clubs they're suspicious of strangers. The bartender's name is Ed and he'll want a moment or two of conversation before he clues you in. Give him some money. The action doesn't start until ten or eleven and for God's sake eat before you go. The food's terrible. So at eleven on a Thursday night in October, Tommy Ogden installed himself at the long bar and waited for Ed to finish his conversation with a sheriff's deputy at one of the tables. The deputy was in uniform, a pearl-handled revolver in a holster on his hip. Ed was talking and the deputy was listening and nodding without enthusiasm; and when he saw Tommy at the bar he nodded stiffly and smiled, saying something to Ed. Tommy continued to stare at the deputy's back until he pushed his chair away from the table and hurried from the room. There were a dozen customers, all of them men, a few of them even larger than Tommy. However, none of them were dressed in a soft tweed Norfolk jacket and gray flannel trousers, tattersal vest, bow tie. None of them had blond hair and blue eyes. When Ed made his way at last to Tommy he found a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. Tommy said, Bert Marks sent me.

  Ed said, You know Deputy Ralph?

  I know him, Tommy said. We meet now and then on the highway.

  That's what he said, Ed said.

  My car is faster than his but sometimes I let him catch up.

  Yes. That's what Ralph said.

  In a moment Tommy was through the inconspicuous door at the far end of the room and inside the casino, tables of craps and blackjack, baccarat and roulette. The gaming tables were crowded with players, their conversation raucous and punctuated by the ka-thump of slot machines arrayed along one wall. Next to the slot machines was a caisse where chips were bought and cashed in. When Ed turned to leave, Tommy said, I don't want this room. I want the other room. You know the room I want. When Ed hesitated he found another twenty dollars in his palm and presently a curtain parted and Tommy found himself in a parlor, a trio of musicians playing qu
ietly in an alcove. A bartender polished glasses behind a shiny steel bar. Young women were seated here and there on sofas and overstuffed leather chairs that looked as if they belonged at a downtown men's club. The women were staring at Tommy and smiling. He looked as if he had just arrived from a golf course or a racetrack and they knew at once that he could pay the freight, whatever the freight turned out to be.

  Tommy took his time, inspecting each of the women in turn, attractive women, well turned out, big-boned country girls. Bert had told him that most of the girls were from farming communities in the immediate vicinity, two towns in particular that had been hard hit by falling prices and mediocre yields of corn and soybeans. The Midwest had been in a half drought for most of the past decade and in thrall to the brokers of the Board of Trade in Chicago. The towns were depressed, without life, and the girls were looking for a way out. Their parents had grown listless, worn down by hard work and discouraged at the prospects. All the boys had left home seeking work elsewhere, far downstate or in the West, the army. The way of the world, Bert said, not a damned thing to be done about it. One girl, almost thirty, was a sort of supervisor and talent scout for Villa Siracusa. She was from one of the distressed towns and had recruited others, friends from high school. Word had gone around and before long girls from the farming towns were sending messages asking if there was work "where you are." They always sent photographs of themselves, often in gowns made by their mothers for graduation day and the prom that night. Anything to get away from the farm. Many of them sent money home, like immigrants from Ireland or Italy, claiming they had found work as shop girls at Field's or Montgomery Ward and that business was good in Chicago. Tommy looked at them now, eight round-faced girls and one tall brunette in a black floor-length gown, a rope of pearls around her slender throat, smoking a cigarette and smiling nicely. She had a beautiful clear complexion, one Lily would have called peaches-and-cream. She looked city rather than country, not because of the dress and the pearls but because of the way she stood and the frankness of her look.

  Tommy nodded at her and she was at his side at once, her arm through his. She said, Champagne? He said, You have champagne, I'll take whiskey. She stepped to the bar and returned bearing a tray with two glasses, an ice bucket, a bottle of champagne, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. She indicated the stairs and preceded him to the second floor, where she paused. She asked Tommy if he would prefer the third-floor room, the best room in the house, most comfortable. It had been furnished by a client, a gentleman of the old world. Tommy said fine, it didn't matter to him. They continued up the stairs and through a soundproof door and into a spacious, dimly lit bedroom with three chairs, a sofa, a cocktail table, and the bed, appointed with red sheets and a white duvet and plump pillows. The furniture looked as if it had been assembled from the German-speaking world, Vienna or Berlin, bowed blond wood and steel, not a straight line anywhere you looked. The drawings on the wall were vaguely pornographic, big-haired women in corsets, their breasts exposed. Tommy was offended, he was no friend of the Hun, whether Austrian or German. The Kaiser was a scoundrel.

  She said, Do you like it?

  He said, I'll have to get used to it.

  She poured a glass of whiskey for him and a glass of champagne for herself and gave her name as Claire, twenty-one going on twenty-two, working her way through the university seeking a degree in art history. Claire was well-spoken but nervous, perhaps daunted by Tommy's size and forbidding glower. Tommy, himself nearly thirty-five years old, guessed she was more like eighteen than twenty-one and perhaps younger than eighteen. He introduced himself as Tom Ogden, the closest he had ever come to assuming an alias. No one had ever called him anything but Tommy. They had one drink and another while, in a rare inquisitive moment, he asked her about herself. Was she one of the girls from a farm? No, she had never been on a farm. She came from downstate near Kankakee. Her father was a salesman but now he was gone, caught the flu and died, her mother too. Would you rather have a girl from a farm? No, Tommy said, I like you. Claire looked around the room and said it was her favorite. The client who furnished it was not her client but sometimes in the afternoon when it was quiet she and one of the other girls came up to listen to the phonograph and smoke.

  Do you mind if I smoke? she asked.

  Yes, Tommy said. I don't like tobacco.

  Anyhow, Claire said, being in the third-floor room was like being in another world. It's far from Kankakee, Tommy said. No kidding, Claire replied. They sat quietly and then she began to describe her studies, utterly fascinating. Did he know that art authorities had drawn a direct line from Rembrandt to the French impressionists? Everybody steals from everybody else, Tommy said, and fifty years from now everyone will be stealing from the impressionists. Claire blushed and turned from him to hide her confusion. She giggled and admitted she knew nothing of art history. But the client who furnished this room had become a friend. He owned an art gallery and liked to talk about painters, how they were derivative of each other. Rembrandt was his specialty. Also, she went on, the university was a fiction. She was saving her money to buy a beauty parlor. She intended to return to Kankakee and open a beauty parlor, a place of her own where she was the boss. Later, telling the story, Claire said she had no idea what caused her to lie and then retract the lie. Probably she felt that Tom Ogden would find out somehow and be displeased. She had never met this Tom Ogden before and had no idea what he was capable of, but from the look of him he could break her neck with his bare hands. He had a tremendous stillness about him, as if there were no moving parts beneath his skin. He was very direct. Her own work had taught her to go slowly with clients and reveal nothing of her personal life. She had said Kankakee but actually her home was Moline and her late father was not a salesman but a druggist. Somehow Tom Ogden inspired trust, otherwise she would not have retracted her lie. He didn't seem to care, only asked her the name of the art dealer. When she hesitated he said to her that he had need of an art dealer, so she gave up the name. When Claire asked Tommy what he did for a living, his business, he said he didn't do anything for a living. He was not in business. He had no interest in business. She should not speak to him of business. He was a shooter, and when he saw the look of alarm in her eyes he sneered and assured her, not that kind. He shot animals. Pheasant, deer, duck, squirrel. Whatever animal was available. Elk. Tigers and lions. Elephant.

  Sport, she said.

  I suppose so, he replied.

  Claire relaxed then and they undressed as if they had known each other for years. He was not rough at all, as she expected, but rather formal. He was limber for so large a man, and fit. The word for him was considerate and she was surprised at that. She could not say it was the most exciting evening of her life—there were few enough of those in any case—but she was not frightened, either. There was but one pause in the play that followed. Round about dawn Tom Ogden sat straight up in bed, turned his head, told Claire to shush, and put his palm to his ear in order to clearly hear the plaintive faraway sound of a train's whistle. Tom was silent a long moment and then began to laugh. When Claire asked him what was so funny he said that his father had paid them a call, first time he had heard from the old man in years and years.

  What do you mean?

  My father is dead, he said and made no further comment.

  Tom Ogden did not leave Villa Siracusa until Sunday morning. Food and drink were brought to them. The arrangements were everything Bert Marks had promised and more. Claire was good-natured and willing. She never complained. Each morning around dawn Tommy heard the sound of the train's whistle, a signal of approval from his even-tempered father. And no wonder. Tommy was the happiest he had been and the amazement of it was the absence of complications. He made a date with Claire for the following Thursday, and the Thursday after that, and before long Thursday through Sunday was a permanent appointment unless Tommy was away shooting. A productive conversation with Herr Mackel, the owner of the gallery, transferred the lease of the third-floor room to
Tommy; he became a silent partner in the Mackel Gallery, the better to display his sketches. He thought it time to move into the world a little bit, and Herr Mackel turned out to be a considerate German.

  A year or so later, Villa Siracusa was raided by the sheriff's department, some question about the monthly stipend. After that was straightened out, federal agents arrived to close the place for good, a complaint about unpaid income taxes. The Siracusa family moved the business from its location north of Jesper to a more sympathetic jurisdiction but five years later there was more trouble from the county sheriff, who had been bought but refused to stay bought, a chronic problem in Illinois, though rarely in Chicago. At last, acknowledging defeat, the family returned to the big city, where the rules, once set, were scrupulously adhered to. Villa Siracusa—now Chez Siracusa—was established in a handsome brownstone on a tree-lined street on the South Side not far from the university. Once again Tommy was provided with a room of his own, furnished as before with a nice view: a private library of a scientific nature was situated across the street and over the rooftop of the library could be seen soaring church towers and the spires of the university and there was so little traffic you could believe you were in a small town downstate. Papa Siracusa himself assured Tommy that the trouble had gone away, vanished, because so many aldermen were clients. Chicago was a difficult environment, unforgiving, rough-edged. Costs were higher all around, he said, but there was peace of mind too, knowing that the rules, once set, were scrupulously adhered to. Tommy listened and concluded that the old man was losing his mind, believing he was back in Sicily. Rules endured only so long as they were convenient for everyone concerned, and when they ceased to be convenient they bent like giraffes in a hurricane. Watch yourself, Tommy, Bert Marks said, to which Tommy replied, Why should I? Susanna followed Claire, and Monica followed Susanna. Papa Siracusa died and was succeeded by his eldest son and everyone agreed that the apple had fallen far from the tree, the boy but a shadow of his father, a gentleman of the old school. The atmosphere Chez Siracusa became rowdier. One night a doctor was summoned to see to one of the girls who had become hysterical and on another night shots were fired and police actually entered the premises, weapons drawn. Tommy remained in his room on the top floor, well away from the unpleasantness, not that he cared.