Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  The story made the afternoon edition of the World. My father came home to dinner that evening much subdued. I could discern his mood by the way he closed the front door, softly, with barely a click of the latch. He was dressed in his usual courtroom uniform: a doubled-breasted blue suit, white shirt, and foulard bow tie. He looked exhausted, his gray hair mussed as if he had passed his hand through it again and again. I thought also that he looked defeated by the events of the day but I believe now that I had misapprehended things. My father was seething with anger. He collapsed into his big wing chair and accepted an old-fashioned from my mother; they always had one cocktail before dinner, which was served precisely at six-thirty. That night six-thirty came and went while they drank their cocktail and then had another. I always sat with them as they recounted their days and asked me about mine. But that night they sat in uncomfortable silence until my father turned to me.

  Go upstairs, Lee. Finish your homework.

  I've done my homework. I saw the story in the paper—

  Check it again, son.

  Always when there was an unusual or unexpected event in town I could count on my father to explain it to me. He seemed to know everything about politics and government and therefore he knew the story behind the story. There always was one, and it was rarely the version printed in the World. His idea was that we had a government of laws, not of men. But the men made the laws so—was there a difference? But from the look on his face I knew this story-behind-the-story would remain mysterious, at least to me.

  Yes, sir, I said.

  But I left my bedroom door open and tried to listen as my father related the day's events to my mother, his voice barely above a whisper. The facts were too shocking to speak out loud. I did manage to hear my mother gasp at what she was told and declare, That cannot be. What a terrible thing! Oh, that poor man. I wondered if the dead man was one of the tramps Dougie and I had come across on our afternoon adventures—the World did not publish a photograph—but I had no way of knowing. Of course the name that came to mind was Earl Minning, from the encounter years before, but surely he would have moved on. Tramps still arrived at our back door, hat in hand, to ask for food. My father's voice rose in anguish. This sort of thing did not happen in New Jesper except rarely in the colored section, always described in the World as a domestic dispute. And then my father used the word "torture" and another word whose definition I did not know but resolved to learn as soon as I could discreetly consult the dictionary in my father's study downstairs. They were quiet now, sipping drinks in the living room. I heard the tinkle of ice as my father refilled his glass, something he rarely did. I thought it safe to return, so I made a noise in my room and more noise as I came downstairs.

  My mother and father were staring bleakly at each other.

  My father turned to me and said, I assume you saw the paper.

  Yes, I said. There was a killing.

  The report in the paper was not complete.

  It wasn't?

  No. There was more to it. Quite a lot more. Now listen to me, my father said and steepled his fingers as he often did when rendering a verdict from the bench. His words: "rendering a verdict." I came to know his steepled fingers as well as I knew my own, for he often asked my mother to bring me to court when an especially important case was at its conclusion. He thought it important that I see how justice was done in New Jesper, the procedures and the precedence of things, the special language, and his own role at the center of events, for surely that would be my life too when the time came. He said now, You are not to go down below the hill ever again except in the company of an adult. Is that clear?

  I was crushed. No more adventuring with Dougie Henderson. No more express trains thundering north. No more air rifle and, especially, no more inspections of the factory beyond the chain-link fence where secret work was still being done. For me at that moment New Jesper became like any other small midwestern town, a cliché—tiresome, narrow-minded, and boring. I said to my father, Yes, sir.

  Ever, my father said again.

  What happened? I said. I was miserable. I think I was near tears.

  One of the tramps was killed, he said.

  But I knew that. I said, How?

  Murdered, he said. Never mind how.

  It was a terrible killing, my mother said.

  I spoke with Dougie's father this afternoon, my father said. We are in agreement. You boys are forbidden to leave the neighborhood. And if you see a tramp anywhere nearby you are to call me at once. I doubt that will happen. The tramps have been sent a message. This outrage has changed everything.

  What message? I asked.

  They are not welcome here, my father said.

  But—where will they go?

  Away, my father said. Not here.

  I waited for him to say more, but he fell silent. My mother slipped away into the kitchen to finish dinner preparations. I could not see what any of this had to do with Dougie and me, but it was obvious that my father had said all he was prepared to say. The subject was closed. I asked him if he wanted to listen to the radio as we often did in the evenings. He liked to hear the political news from Lowell Thomas and Gabriel Heatter. But he only shook his head. We sat in silence a minute or more, my father pulling slowly at his drink. The ice had melted.

  I know how much it means to you, he said at last.

  Yes, it does.

  It was always a special place, the railroad and the marsh. In my day there were muskrats, ugly animals. There was a herd of deer also, and pheasant. Johnnie Regan and I made the path that's there to this day, took us all fall and half the winter. It was a wilderness. I guess to Johnnie and me it represented the outside world, so mysterious and dangerous, although we could not have said what the danger was. All my life I've lived near the railroad tracks, the train whistles as familiar to me as an ambulance siren is to someone who lives in the city and come to think about it both the whistle and the siren gave a kind of warning. Watch out. Take care. My father smiled suddenly, a looking-backward smile that was almost boyish. Johnnie and I used to pretend there were panthers in the underbrush, huge black creatures that had escaped from a circus. They were so fleet that they appeared only as shadows. They were something, our imaginary panthers. Whenever we came across a dead animal we knew the panthers had killed it. And I'll tell you something else, Lee. Johnnie Regan and I used to smoke cigarettes down below the hill. We had a particular place we went to, near the—

  Old root cellar, I said.

  Things don't change much, my father said with a grunt.

  We once saw a tramp sleeping in there.

  You didn't bother him?

  No, we went away. And when we came back he was gone.

  Riding the rails, my father said.

  I guess so. We met another tramp once, asked us for cigarettes and then he asked for money. We gave him a cigarette but we didn't give him the money.

  What happened then?

  He was angry. He came after us.

  You should have told me, my father said.

  We outran him. He was mean-looking, though. He told us his name and said he had children living down south. He needed money to see his children.

  Did you believe him?

  Yes I did. His name was Earl Minning.

  When was this? my father asked.

  A few years ago. We never saw him again. I'm going to miss our travels down below the hill. Dougie, too. I sure wish you'd change your mind. You had your panthers and we had Japanese spies. There's this, though. We don't go down there as much as we used to. But it's good knowing it's there. You once called New Jesper closed in.

  Did I? Well, it is.

  Everybody knows everybody else, I said.

  They certainly do, he said.

  Down below the hill you can be yourself.

  Unsupervised, he said.

  Yes, I said.

  We had a nice town to grow up in, my father said after a moment. Nice for me and your mother, nice for you. I thought
New Jesper would be nice also for your children, my grandchildren when they came along. Your mother and I have often spoken of it, the advantages of a small town where everyone was acquainted and things are on an even keel. Your family's nearby. You didn't have to lock your doors at night. You left the keys in the car. And if your neighbor was in distress you helped him out with a hamper of food or a donation. If there was illness you took the kids for a while, happy to do it. We had an expression, "Safe as houses." Now we're no better than that goddamned Chicago. I'm sick at heart that this sort of thing can happen here in New Jesper. My God, what have we come to?

  As it happened, the word sodimmy was not in my father's dictionary. Dougie knew the meaning, though.

  ONE MONTH LATER, almost to the day, another calamity struck our town. My father called from his chambers to tell my mother not to wait dinner for him. He would be along later, bringing some friends with him for a private meeting in his study. My mother said his voice sounded strange on the telephone. At first she did not recognize it. Your father sounded as if he were underwater, she said. I think he had people with him in chambers.

  I've never known him to have a meeting at home.

  But he didn't want to meet in the courthouse. Too public, he said.

  I don't like the sound of it, my mother concluded.

  Promptly at nine my father arrived, accompanied by Mayor Bannermann, the police chief, the owner of New Jesper Dry Goods, the president of the First National Bank of New Jesper, the publisher of the World, the principal of the high school, and Walter Bing. The corporation counsel for the city would have been present but he was out of town. Six of these eight men, known informally as "the Committee," were the ones who made New Jesper go, whose approval was essential for any civic undertaking, from a new bond issue to the removal of a tree. With them, anything was possible; without them, nothing was. They were second- and third-generation residents, married with families, golf partners; two of them were godfathers to each other's sons. Of course there were rivalries. The mayor and the publisher were at arm's length owing to political differences. The banker and the merchant were at odds because the banker's son and the merchant's daughter had recently divorced, an ugly divorce that went on for months with the usual airing of dirty linen. Still, in any important matter affecting the town they stood together in order to present a united front when the matter, whatever it was, had to be explained to the public. The idea, as I understood it, was to present a fait accompli disguised as a consensus; or perhaps it was the other way around. My father was the de facto chairman, admired for his integrity, even-handedness, and devotion to the town. It has to be said that the police chief and the principal of the high school would not normally be invited to such a gathering. My mother had never met them and had to be introduced. That chore done, the seven grim-faced men were ushered into the study by my father, the door closed behind them.

  The night was warm for mid-September. My father opened his windows to admit what night breeze there was. And I, perched in my bedroom window directly above, strained to hear each word. In our community, as in every community large and small, there were the scenes and the behind-the-scenes. The latter was infinitely more interesting, and I was an inquisitive boy.

  My father offered coffee or a drink to anyone who wanted one.

  They all took coffee except for the police chief, who said he was not thirsty.

  I heard the scrape of my father's chair as he moved it from behind his desk, a tactful assertion that for the purposes of this meeting, all men were equal.

  There was an awkward silence before my father cleared his throat and said, Perhaps the chief can bring us up to date. What is known and what is not known. The investigation so far. And then he lowered his voice and the few words that followed were inaudible.

  Then Chief Grosza gave an audible sigh and said, The girl is in St. Vincent's Hospital, the emergency ward. She's not in good shape. Her wounds are very serious and beyond that she seems to have suffered a nervous collapse. Her mother is with her. The precise whereabouts of the father are unknown. The mother and father are separated and have been for some little while. Some time elapsed before the girl was discovered, perhaps several hours. The timeline is not yet established. Perhaps our principal can speak to that point. At that, Chief Grosza fell silent.

  The attack took place in the gym, the principal said. I should say an equipment room just off the gym. A little-used equipment room. There is no cause for anyone to go in there. Question is, what was the girl doing there? We don't know. The principal spoke rapidly and now he was silent, and the conversation became general, several questions at once. Did the equipment room have a lock on the door? Was the door in fact locked? Where precisely was the equipment room located in relation to the gym itself? The answers came quickly and they were longer than they needed to be. Even I understood this was a kind of ballet, a wordy prelude to the heart of the matter.

  My father had not spoken.

  The president of the bank, known for his brevity, said, What about suspects, Chief?

  Our investigation continues, Chief Grosza said.

  Are there leads, Chief?

  Nothing solid, the chief said. We were not notified until at least two hours after the attack, perhaps longer.

  After the rape, you mean.

  Yes, it was rape.

  Has the girl said anything?

  She has not, the chief said.

  She is not cooperative?

  She is unable to speak. She has not uttered one word.

  What is her name?

  I would hope we could keep her name out of this for the moment, the principal said, until I have a better fix on what happened.

  Her name is Magda Serra, the chief said.

  Magda? the banker asked.

  The mother is Serbian. The father is Puerto Rican.

  And the father's whereabouts are unknown?

  He is believed to have returned to Puerto Rico. Earlier this year.

  There was once again a confusion of voices, the identity of the father, his employment, his age, his reputation. No one in the room had met the father, who was working as a gas station attendant before his return to Puerto Rico, address unknown. But I was not listening carefully because I knew the girl, a cheerful tenth-grader who had been kept behind one year. Magda was in my freshman math class, not a good student. She was overweight but didn't seem to care. Magda had thinning hair and at the beginning of the term wore a bandanna but the bandanna was in violation of school rules so she was asked to take it off. She always had a smile on her face and a musical lilt to her voice. Lee, will you help me with these equations? I donna unnerstan' equations. And I would walk her through quadratic equations and she always caught on eventually, even as she made plain that she didn't care for the sphere of math, equations or any other part of it. The point was that Magda was foreign and I always suspected she hid inside her language and her Serbian—Puerto Rican background in order to get on from day to day, and in that sense part of her remained invisible. I tried to imagine her in a hospital emergency room, raped and frightened, silent. Who could do such a thing? Everyone liked Magda Serra, even the teachers. Downstairs they were still talking about Magda's father's whereabouts when I heard my father clear his throat.

  Can we return to the leads? I cannot believe there are no leads at all. Can you explain, Chief?

  We are only at the beginning of the investigation, Chief Grosza said.

  Nevertheless, my father said.

  We must wait to speak to the girl.

  That may take a while, my father said.

  Yes, it may.

  And in the meantime, you do have leads.

  One lead, the chief said.

  It would be helpful if you could discuss that lead with us, my father said.

  But the chief did not reply. I leaned out the window and saw a yellow shaft of light on the lawn, my father's desk lamp. Now and again a car passed in the street and I heard music from the radio, the normal sound
s of a summer night. Magda's face came to me again, round-cheeked, bright blue eyes. Her skin was brown. She was baffled by equations and always seemed to be laughing. Downstairs they knew none of this.

  We're trying to help out, Chief, my father said.

  The investigation has only just begun, Judge.

  Nothing remotely like this has ever happened in New Jesper, my father said. Nothing even close...

  The tramp, somebody said. Only weeks ago.

  The tramp is not this. Something altogether different, this. In our own high school. The one I attended and most of us here attended, the one my son attends now. My father's voice rose in indignation. A girl goes to school in the morning and ends up raped in the afternoon. This is outrageous. So I would like to know what progress you've made, if any.

  Tell him, the mayor said.

  But still the chief was silent.

  Or I will, the mayor said.

  We have an interview, the chief said, and that was all he said.

  With whom? my father asked.

  A student, the chief said.

  A student?

  A classmate of the girl's, the chief said.

  And what did the interview reveal?

  The chief was silent a long moment, and when he spoke it was with obvious reluctance. He and the girl had been seeing each other. What he knows is unclear at this time.

  Is he in your custody?

  He is not.

  And why not?

  I have nothing to hold him on, the chief said.