Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  He was a loner certainly and found repose Chez Siracusa. One of the girls compared Tom Ogden to a farm animal, content to remain at rest in a field chewing its cud until it felt hunger or some other manly urge. He would remain silent for hours at a time, deep in thought, often sketching—the roofline of the scientific library, the rooftops of the university high on the horizon, students in the street below, Claire, Monica, or Susanna reading or doing her toenails. The sketches were simple but took hours to complete because Tom was meticulous, never drawing a line until he had thought it out and the lines that would follow. He drew the way he shot, with patience and economy, and when he was finished he told the girls stories about his shooting adventures, the firearms he owned, and the correct manner to stalk game. Silence was the first trick, quick reaction the second. Third was composure, though surely composure was a function of silence. It's fair to say that the girls had never met anyone like Tom Ogden. Everything about him was a puzzle, including his courtesy in bed. He had only sporadic interest in knowing anything about them, and when Claire and Susanna moved on, he gave each girl a wad of money for whatever the future might bring. If asked, Tommy would have said that his happiest hours spent indoors were on the topmost floor of the brownstone, a view of the university rooftops beyond the scientific library across the street. In the autumn the colors were marvelous and in winter the roofs were stacked high with snow. Tommy had a massive lack of interest in the world around him, or that part of it unrelated to shooting, but he found consolation in the small-town feel of the South Side. Naturally he was most at home in the country, his firearms within easy reach, the fields always filled with game. He was never lonely in the great house with its forty-two rooms, listening to the echo of his footsteps wherever he went.

  He supposed that at some point he would marry. Most men did. Probably he would marry if he could find a suitable woman, a woman who liked her privacy as much as he liked his. When he asked Susanna what she thought about marriage she misunderstood—she was so startled by the question that she was unable to speak for a full minute—and thought he was proposing to her. Susanna's eyes grew wide and tear-filled and when she threw her arms around him he was obliged to say, No, not you, marriage in general. Marriage as an institution. Her feelings were hurt but Tommy did not grasp that; hurt feelings, his own or anyone else's, were not in his arsenal of sentiments. Susanna, furious, her mouth drawn in a thin line, said that in fact she believed in marriage despite appearances. She had a fiancé and in due course she intended to marry the fiancé and settle up near the Wisconsin Dells where the fiancé had business prospects. They aimed to have three children. Tommy had ceased to listen. He half suspected that marriage was a chore in the way that his father had decided that business was a chore and had visited the psychic Madame Hauska who gave sound advice, and his father never worked again. His father swore by her, maintaining that she was a wizard with a balance sheet along with being a prophet. Surely she would be no less deft with matrimony.

  Meanwhile, Tommy had iron-hearted Chicago, its fearless clamor, its no-nonsense way of going about things, its license, meaning contempt for civic virtue. He felt Chicago was a city with a curled lip and chips on both shoulders, a remark an infuriated schoolteacher once made about him. Tommy Ogden felt he knew Chicago in his bones; they were the same bones. At any event, for the remainder of his days he made the detested journey from his estate near Jesper to the South Side brownstone where he was most favored customer Chez Siracusa. He had furnished the top-floor room to his own taste—it had the leather quality of a shooting lodge—and caused a fireplace to be installed. In the heavy armoire below the mirror he kept shirts and a change of linen, pens and sketchpads and a revolver in the event of mischief. Everyone respected Tom Ogden. Never made trouble, never complained, paid handsomely, a perfect gentleman. All the girls liked him even as they tended to tune out his lectures, the monologues about shooting that went on for so many, many minutes. But he did not notice that, either, because he was not looking at them as he talked. He was deep inside himself, an inaccessible, perhaps barren, region to which only he possessed a map. It was always pleasant for Tommy to talk to someone who did not talk back.

  THE CANDLES GUTTERED. The Billingtons were on their feet, saying good night to Marie, such a lovely evening, we must do it again very soon. Sorry things got so out of hand, Susan Billington whispered to Marie, who only smiled and winked as if to say that the show was far from over. The worst was yet to come. Bert Marks yawned and touched Tommy's shoulder by way of farewell but Tommy did not respond except to nod in the direction of Bert's chair. Sit down a minute, Bert. I want you to hear this. Give me the benefit of your experience, let me know what you think about my plans. He did not look at the lawyer as he spoke, staring instead at the blank ceiling high above.

  It's so damn late, Tommy—

  Won't take long. Sit.

  Bert returned wearily to his seat, knowing that he had one more hour at table. That was the minimum once Tommy got up a head of steam. Tommy's mind resembled a ponderous locomotive, the train of thought that went on for miles and miles, switchback following switchback with no end in sight. The Billingtons and the van Hornes—joined now by daughter Trish, yawning, a cigarette in her fingers until her mother told her to put it away, tobacco disallowed at Ogden Hall—took their seats once again. Why was dinner at the Ogdens' such a trial? It took so long to get there from the city and the way back was even longer.

  Tommy poured a glass of whiskey and looked at each of them in turn, ending with Marie. Her face was in deep shadow, almost invisible. He sought her a moment but she was out of reach in the darkness.

  He said, Listen carefully. I don't like to repeat myself. I have decided to found a school. First class, everything first class all the way. A school for boys, midwestern boys of good family to show those bastards in the East what a real school looks like and how it conducts its affairs. That school will be located on this property, in this house, and of course the surroundings. It will accept boys who have had trouble fitting in elsewhere, boys of ability who had been unable to find their place in the world. Or put another way: boys who know perfectly well their place in the world but find it denied to them. I know what I'm talking about. I went to seven boarding schools, three in one year. I was said to be unruly, not a team player. A rotten apple, out of sync. I was out of sync wherever I went but I didn't mind because I've always been out of sync. We Ogdens are different, you see. We have a different metabolism. My father may have minded because he had to read the snotty letters from the headmasters, their bills of particulars. One headmaster—a minister of God, no less, a Presbyterian from Ipswich—called me mutinous, as if his god damned school was a vessel on the high seas and I was Fletcher Christian. I laughed in his face. I threatened him. I frightened him, as a matter of fact, because I was big for my age and did not respond well to criticism. Naturally I always had a firearm with me, my little peashooter, the .410. They frowned on that. They did not permit firearms in the dorm. No firearms, no whiskey, no cigarettes, no girls, no visitors. These schools were penitentiaries. I have no use for them. My school will have a fine, open-minded headmaster and an open-minded staff, men who well understand the way the world works and can communicate this knowledge. Tommy thumped his fist on the table and fell silent.

  What way is that, Tommy? Marie asked.

  It isn't a god damned sailing ship, Tommy replied.

  Yes, but explain how the world works. I've always wondered. Your view.

  Tommy moved his shoulders, glowering. He said, If you have to ask you'll never understand, exactly like jazz music. He had heard the remark from a musician Chez Siracusa, an apt lesson for so many things in life. Not that Marie would get it. Getting it was not her long suit. Marie preferred argument.

  I'm afraid I don't quite understand, Marie said with a little strangled laugh. She moved her head forward out of the shadow and into the bright bath of candlelight. Surely you can't be saying that your fine young men who've
been cruelly denied their place in the world will be content with—enigma. That would never do, Tommy. You must do much, much better than that.

  And now Tommy foundered. Marie was a scourge, a plague upon the earth. She was an agent of discord. He glared at her, her glittering eyes and her half smile. She threw her head back, looking down her nose at him, and he supposed she was practicing her pose for Maître Rodin. Hard to recollect now, but there was a time when Marie was a sport, easy mannered, easy to get on with, easily amused, comfortable with silence. She loved the field and was an excellent wing shot, really a beautiful shot and wonderful-looking in her high leather boots and canvas pants. She wore a green British army—issue sweater and a black beret, a teal-blue ascot at her throat, yellow-lensed French aviator glasses on her nose. He watched her take two pheasants in one pass, clean shots both, one second apart. That was in Scotland, a shooting party of twelve. Tommy was the stranger but Marie made him feel welcome, proposing that they pair up together, an idea that horrified him until he saw her shoot. She shot like a man and drank like one too.

  Their first night together she told him that she preferred the company of men, their jokes and laughter, their rough edges, their camaraderie, their effortlessness. When he asked her what she meant by that, she said that men were extemporaneous; not all men, of course, some were swine. Still, she said, men were fun to be with. He was delighted when she said that she liked the smell of men, sweat and musk whatnot, a song of the earth. That first year they had wonderful times shooting in Africa and the American Far West. At night they relaxed with a drink and gin rummy, at which she was adept. Marie had a phenomenal memory for cards and much else. She never forgot a slight. She told him about growing up in Tucson, where her father was a successful prospector. Her mother died when Marie was young and she missed her every day, a woman of the frontier with a wild streak. She never forgot a slight, either. At that time Tucson was the frontier or close enough to it, a violent country of stark beauty. Marie killed her first rattler at age fifteen, a specimen diamondback six feet long. She and her father spent weekends on horseback, shooting rattlers and gila monsters and the buffoonish and harmless javelina. Marie knew how to take care of herself from a very young age. She said she wanted to be cared for just enough but not too much. There was a line Tommy must not cross. She had always been independent and that was why they must keep their money separate, separate accounts, different banks. She would handle the household expenses and the rest was his. She knew he would never do anything to harm her and that was important. He understood that she would disappear from time to time, not for long; and he had the same privilege.

  Tommy listened to her with envy, this girl who was shooting rattlesnakes when he was shooting sparrows. What a life it must have been in the desert near Tucson, as unforgiving as any terrain on the face of the earth. They had driven through it on their way to Idaho, stopping once to walk into the desert at dusk. There was not a single plant that did not sport thorns or needles. Terrible country, dry and desolate, though not to Marie. After the wonderful time in Africa and the American Far West they returned to Jesper and Ogden Hall and things went sour because she never shut up about Tucson and the life she had led there, her heroic father and wandering mother fortified by the example of the noble yet put-upon redskin. Marie claimed her mother was part Apache. Marie's stories of her youth reminded him of Rudyard Kipling at his most florid, didactic, and hysterical. To Marie the West was a kind of Eden before the Fall. Tommy watched her now, tapping her finger on the tabletop as she awaited his reply.

  He ignored her and turned to Bert. He said, My school will have all the finest equipment, scientific laboratories, a gymnasium, a splendid library. I have a few thousand volumes already in place, complete sets of Balzac and Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson bound in leather. Why, the pages are uncut! The books are pristine, never read by anyone living or dead. You've seen the library, room enough for forty boys at least. There're rooms enough for thirty classrooms and an office suite for the headmaster. There's open land for football fields and a polo pitch, even a nine-hole golf course. Never cared much for golf myself but they say it's the coming thing in our area. The tennis courts are already in place. I'm thinking also of a regulation shooting range in the basement. I'll convert the useless stables into a dormitory. There isn't any good reason why a boy from Illinois or Indiana has to go to Massachusetts or New Hampshire to receive a brilliant education. I've thought it through, you see. And that's what I intend to do, establish the finest boys' preparatory school in the land. Assemble a faculty that's second to none. I mean men of the world who know the score. Men who've been through the mill themselves—and here Bert Marks and Harry Billington glanced at each other because the unspoken clause in the sentence was "as I have been." And what mill, exactly, would that be? If Tommy Ogden had ever experienced one misfortune in his life, they had never heard of it. Tommy Ogden had always done just as he pleased. The world's machinery had always been his for the taking, and when he chose a drill that displeased him he put it back or threw it away without hesitation or apology. Viewed dispassionately, Marie would qualify as a drill, and in time she too would find herself replaced. Not, from the look of things, that she would care overmuch. And not that she would fail to exact revenge. Marie was fed up with her dyspeptic husband, his selfishness and his eternal animal gloom. He so rarely appeared to be having a good time but that was difficult to know for certain because so much of that time was spent inside himself, a place that he, if no one else, evidently found a fascinating country. Of course Marie was aware of Tommy's situation Chez Siracusa. She was aware that he was well liked there, liked by the girls and by the management and not only for his generous wallet. Tommy had always been generous with money. But surely that was another matter entirely, the exception that proved the rule. Still, when she had first met him in Scotland he had been attractive. She was drawn to him at once. She found him quite shy and open to possibility. He was beautifully built. He moved with assurance. Other men made way for him, and Marie had liked that. But he had not aged well.

  There's not a moment to lose! Tommy shouted. He took a swallow of whiskey and sat back in his chair, Marie forgotten. He was remembering the dinner table when his father and mother were alive, the identical china and Tiffany flatware and centered silver candelabrum, the heavy crystal. Dinner proceeded in a standoffish silence until his father made a comment about his day, something to do with business usually, the railroad, and when that was gone his many investments, the shape and disposition of the capital markets, their natural rhythm. Who was selling short and who was buying long and why. That was the reason he was leaving for New York in the morning. New York City was where the decisions were made, the customary processes of consultation among bankers in London and Boston as well. Money moved like the mysterious ocean currents and that knowledge was not available in Chicago. We are a colony, you see. We are Hong Kong or India and we do the bidding of others because we do not control our own assets. They are held in trust, as it were. Our assets are controlled for us and if we desire a slice for ourselves we can have it so long as fees and interest are paid; and that rate is set also in New York and London and, depending on the size and shape, in Boston. Here in our region we manufacture things, automobiles and heavy machinery and the food that feeds the nation. We do not own it, however. They own it, because they own the banks that supply the credit. Frequent visits to Wall Street were necessary in order to know who was buying long and who was selling short and why. Well, his father would add, you never knew why, precisely, beyond the obvious: someone invented a new machine or discovered a mine rich with ore. Someone identified a fad, the hoop skirt or the tulip. The way of things was that someone met someone else in the men's room of the yacht club or at a wedding or funeral and received a tip, bullish or bearish, it scarcely mattered which. But we do not have that information at the Chicago Club or that golf course out in Lake Forest.

  Tommy remembered his father's gruff voice in the thi
ck silence of the dining room, candles guttering then as they were now. Much of what his father said was swallowed up in that vast whale of a room; a tree crashed and no one heard. He spoke often of the mysteries of the balance sheet, numbers assigned arbitrarily to the left-hand column or the right, depending on whether you wanted to show assets or liabilities, mumble mumble, for the taxman or your shareholders or for other reasons. Depreciation was a black art. Then there was the psychology of the thing, the mood of the day, what the headlines said. What the headlines didn't say, mumble mumble. As for himself, he believed it wise to keep all his cards close to his vest until the specific moment when it was advantageous to allow someone a peek. One card only and usually not the relevant card. Keep that in mind, Tommy. You'll never go wrong. Money moves on the tide. Identify the tide quickly. Don't be the last boat launched or you'll be ruined.

  And Tommy listened, without comprehension, his father's words somehow soothing even with the undertow of anger and resentment; he seemed to take such pleasure in explanation, and if the explanation was opaque, that was part of its charm. The fact was, his father knew things that other men did not and that gave him authority. He wished to pass along this authority to his son and that was why he was so patient; alas, everyone had a cross to bear. Meanwhile, Lily would be picking at her food, her mind far away, to come awake only when her husband commenced to complain about school, why Tommy couldn't do better, why Tommy was eternally on the wrong side of the headmaster. With just the slightest effort ... Henry, his mother said, leave Tommy alone. Tommy's fine. We simply haven't been able to find the right place, with a congenial atmosphere among boys like himself and instructors who know how to give individual attention. Those schools are so cloistered, they're nunneries for boys. No wonder Tommy can't get on there. Who could? And what difference does it make? It isn't as if he has to go out and earn a living, starting off as a clerk somewhere. Tommy has his own métier. Tommy will find his way. I'll see to it.