Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  In the years to come Lee had occasion to tell the story of the afternoon rendezvous with Tommy Ogden, Filthy-Rich Reclusive Sportsman. Lee had a good memory and found no need to embellish the details, the surly chauffeur, the open Cadillac, the silver flask, Ogden's cigarette holder beating a tattoo on the attaché case, the cryptic remark about the South Side, and the offer to help with an art gallery when Lee needed one. The newspaper swine and the need to keep your face to yourself. Of course Lee never mentioned the mysterious Chicago debutante as Rodin saw her and no need, either, to mention Marie. Lee wondered what there was about Tommy Ogden's life that he was so eager to conceal. Lee doubted he would ever know, and come to think about it, he had no claim. The old man would take that news to his grave.

  THE NEXT EVENING, the team gathered for a farewell meal in the dining hall. The occasion was subdued, as if all the energy and elation of game day had been no more than a distant illusion, not quite credible. The game was alive only in their memories, and the memories were wound down like an old clock, details fading in slow motion. Headmaster Weddle gave a listless speech. Hopkins was awarded the game ball. Lee was chosen by his teammates to give a response. He was tempted to describe the encounter with Tommy Ogden and his words of wisdom concerning the uselessness of defeat and the necessity of keeping any pleasure from victory to yourself because the world didn't give a shit. But in the end he said nothing of Ogden and gave the usual thanks to the usual people, specifically including Gus Allprice and the Packer Svenson. That night they organized a beer party at the gazebo well away from the Hall and the dormitories. Everyone got blind drunk and Hopkins had to be carried back to his room after he drove his Oldsmobile into a tree. The housemasters knew all about it but did not intervene. The beer party marked the definitive end of the undefeated season, and soon Christmas break arrived and the distant illusion became a very distant, very satisfying memory, one without any suggestion of regret or ambiguity. Lee knew without being told that there were few such experiences in life, at least in Illinois.

  The day before Christmas robin's-egg-blue boxes arrived by special messenger at the homes of the twenty-two members of the Ogden Hall football team. They were from Tiffany's, New York. Each box contained a three-ounce silver cup with the boy's name and jersey number and the year engraved on the inside rim. The mothers noticed the stamp on the bottom that indicated sterling silver and said in astonishment, Well! My goodness! There was no note with the box or any indication of who sent it, befuddling the mothers who insisted that their sons write a thank-you note at once; but there was no one to send it to. Lee Goodell knew, but he believed that Tommy Ogden was owed his anonymity, if that was what he wanted. He certainly did not want the old man to be inconvenienced, forced to read twenty-two notes of appreciation, all composed by hand in schoolboy script. The benefactor thus remained unknown. Lee was delighted by the gesture and wherever he went thereafter he took the silver cup with him in his shaving kit, wrapped in its yellow chamois sleeve. Whenever he had something to celebrate he filled the cup with whiskey or cognac and gave the old man a salute before he drank it off; the vessel was identical to Tommy Ogden's. At such times he remembered the final game, Hopkins's two touchdowns and his one, the missed point-after, the cheering all afternoon, long-haired Willa jumping, Mr. Svenson's tears, and Tommy Ogden's open Cadillac idling beyond the far goalpost. A beautiful day, a beautiful season, and a secret to wrap things up. Yet it was also true that the day was never anything more than itself. If there was a metaphor present Lee never discovered what it was. The lesson seemed to be that it was a handsome thing to have someone's grandmother own a house up near Fish Creek with a caretaker who had anchored the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers for five years and was willing to teach what he knew.

  FOR LEE, that was the last of Tommy Ogden. Lee never saw him again and within the year the old man was dead of natural causes, though the precise nature of the causes was not identified. Privacy even unto death, Lee thought. Tommy Ogden had controlled much in his life but he could not control the obituaries. All the Chicago papers carried obits in which "reclusive" and "rich" and "sportsman" and "eccentric" figured. The notice in the evening paper was particularly arch, sarcastic from start to finish. The composition of it caught Lee's attention. The piece seemed to Lee to reverse the principles of Alfred Swan's inch-wide, inch-deep notices. The facts were few, the suppositions plentiful, and the writing most vivid. Tommy Ogden's long life made quite a story, the more alluring for being utterly without verification. How much was true? About half, Lee guessed. And the difficulty was, no reader could know which half, and few of them would care.

  Lee thought often about the encounter with Tommy Ogden and concluded that the founder of Ogden Hall was an enigma. Everyone wears a false face from time to time and motives are always a mystery but Tommy Ogden was sui generis. He seemed to be one of those men who lived entirely inside himself, the world at large of no special account except as a playground, his for the taking. In that one sense Tommy Ogden could be said to be thoughtless—except for the blue boxes that arrived one month after the final game of the undefeated season, the day before Christmas, a beau geste, and the more beau for being anonymous. Similarly the business card he so casually handed to Lee that afternoon, the name of a gallery that might be of use someday. Lee wondered who was left to mourn Mr. Ogden when he died. His wife was long dead. Everyone who knew him well was dead except for the lawyer Bert Marks. Surely there would be friends somewhere, shooting friends, drinking companions. Lee himself would have gone to the funeral but by the time the obituaries appeared the funeral had already been held, in a chapel north of Boise, burial private, no eulogies. Lee had many odd encounters in his long and productive life and savored them all but in its strangeness and incompletion none ever matched Tommy Ogden in his Cadillac. Lee decided at last that the old man's life resembled the leather-bound edition of Old Goriot, the one in the library of the Hall on a shelf near Rodin's superb bust, its pages uncut. No one would ever know the whole truth of him. Of course it was also possible that there was much, much less to Tommy Ogden than met the eye.

  Part Three

  TWO YEARS INTO his studies at the University of Chicago Lee found a basement room a six-block walk from his apartment. It was in a dangerous neighborhood but the room was perfect, solidly built, spacious, not soundproof but close enough. His neighbors were night people and rowdy at all hours and would not notice whatever noise he made. They made enough of their own. The basement's windows were curtained so that no one could see in. Lee finished classes in the late afternoon, went home for a makeshift dinner and two hours of study, and when that chore was done walked to the basement room to work on marble. He bought two floodlights so that the stone could be seen in its smallest detail. Lee carved blocks of marble twenty inches high, ten wide, severe in their verticalness, heavy. He had an idea that the dimensions of the marble, and an unexpected irregularity, perhaps more than one, would give a hint as to its interior, what spirit resided within. One might almost say what the marble was thinking, except now it presented a blank face to the world. Lee worked deliberately with chisel and mallet and soon enough found himself in a kind of trance, fully focused until well into the early morning and beyond. It was not at all unusual for him to work through the night and be unsurprised when he looked at his watch to find the time nine A.M., his English seminar already in progress. He knew it was late because his arms and hands ached. His back ached from the constant bending. Sweat burned his eyes. But still Lee was unable to leave the basement apartment, now dense with cigarette smoke. He slumped on the bench between the floodlights and looked hard, assaying what he had done and how well he had done it. Where were the flaws? A block of marble, once carved, could never be restored.

  Lee thought of his heavy objects as conscious, teeming with thoughts and emotions. For the moment they were inscrutable. Lee sat for many minutes looking at his work and attempting to see inside it. He believed that in time he would find a means to
penetrate its skin like an x-ray. He knew he would make a beautiful object but it was as yet undefined, an enigmatic block of black marble. There was more to it, as there was more to a human face than its surface features. He knew he was on to something but was uncertain what the something was. He had somehow to scale his marble as a mountaineer scaled a rock face, searching for a hold no wider than a fingertip. He knew very well that he did not have forever. Time was short. Lee believed that the stone was losing consciousness, knowing this was absurd but knowing also that absurdity was no barrier to a thought felt strongly. Disharmony was the way in. The stone was dying and would expire unless he finished his carving on time. He had a deadline.

  One morning round about six, Lee stepped through the basement door into a pale winter sunrise. His work had not gone well but he was sweating just the same, thinking that failure was as arduous as success, whether or not anything was learned. He stood a moment, breathing deeply the cold air, the sharp beery smell of the street in early morning. No one was about and he did not move, thinking of the marble that refused to take shape. He wondered if it ever would or if he was on a fool's errand. Desire alone was never enough. They said that inspiration came from desire but that hadn't worked so far. He was looking at a beautiful girl who would be forever out of reach, one step ahead. The bleakness of the street, broken glass and bits of paper in the gutter, a mongrel dog nearby, threw a shadow on his spirit.

  He stepped up the stairwell to the sidewalk, felt movement behind him, and was suddenly on the pavement. Someone was rifling his pockets and someone else was removing his shoes. Lee swung his foot hard and got one of them in the knee, causing a howl of pain. Lee was stronger than they were and felt them hesitate, looking at each other. They didn't appear to be much older than twelve or thirteen. He heard a string of obscenities and next a hand was on his chest and he was looking at a knife's blade. He had the boy's wrist in his grip but a sudden thrust caught him below his right eye, going deep, the blade working lower to his chin as if it were slicing through rubber, blood everywhere, the boy grinning. Cold air and blood were in Lee's mouth. He heard his own voice cry out and knew his strength was ebbing. In one violent maneuver he managed to wrap his arm around the throat of the one with the knife, a slender boy, stronger than he looked, remorseless. He stank of stale beer. Lee reached for him but his hand fell away and his vision fractured. He put his arms over his face as one of them laughed, a high-pitched giggle. Then they were gone and he was lying shoeless on the basement steps, blood on his shirt, blood on his hands and pooling on the sidewalk. He had recognized the one with the knife, a soft-faced neighborhood boy habitually dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket. He never saw the face of the other one.

  Lee brought his hand to his cheek and saw that the hand too was cut and bleeding. This was his right hand, his mallet hand. If they had ruined his hand he would kill them. He thought of the ways the killing might be done but his mind wandered, refusing to concentrate, the street in and out of focus. For a moment he did not know where he was. A crowd had gathered around him but when he tried to speak to them, to ask for help, his voice did not work. He opened and closed his mouth but no sound came and he thought of himself as a beached fish. He saw lights and heard a siren, and the crowd, six or seven old men and a young girl, moved out of his vision. Lee tried to stop the bleeding with his good hand but that was unsuccessful and he began to lose consciousness and only then did he feel the sharp pain in his face and everywhere else.

  THE WOUND WAS CURVED like an archer's bow and was the color and width of a twopenny nail. No one missed it, eyes locking on and suddenly averted; even the nurses were alarmed. His father was the exception, looking hard and tracing the line of stitches from right eye to chin with his forefinger, sighing and saying it could have been worse. He could be dead. A half-inch north and he would have lost his eye. As it was, his father said, you have a mark but that's all. His mother could not bear to look at him and left the hospital room to stand by herself in the corridor, her eyes filled with tears. She did not believe her son to be a careless boy. His wound was a consequence of the place he was living, the South Side. The South Side, in its insecurity and disorder, was no better than New Jesper. She thought they were done with it, her family safe. But now she felt herself pressed on all sides, as if she herself were a fugitive. Her son was safe in the hospital and she wanted nothing more than to return to the quiet of the North Shore, its lawns and ordered streets and her work at the library. Melody peeked back through the door. The nurse was rebandaging Lee's wound and saying they would release him in a day or two and meanwhile he should take it easy, not return to class right away. Blood loss had left him weak, and of course there was the shock of it, and he could expect it to take weeks before he was himself again. Melody did not believe that. Her boy would never be the same. He was marked for life as surely as if someone had touched his flank with a branding iron. She slipped back into the room, feeling like an eavesdropper.

  Speaking in a half whisper, his words slurred, Lee told his father that the police had been by to visit. He had identified the two boys, the one with the black leather jacket and the other one whose face he never saw but did notice a deformed thumb on his left hand. He was thirteen years old, that one. The police knew who they were. They had been in trouble before but nothing this serious. It was a mistake for him to put up a struggle; all they wanted was his wallet and shoes. The police promised quick arrests but nothing had turned up so far. Lee said, How do I look? His father peered closely, smiled, and said, Better than Frankenstein, but not by much. The nurse smiled at that, packed away her bandages, and left the room.

  His parents went away and Lee lay back, exhausted. He was unable to forget the knife cutting his skin below the eye and moving to his chin and the geyser of blood. The boys had given him a souvenir all right, and then he remembered that souvenir in French meant "memory." Probably his whole life people would look at him and then look away, wondering at once what had happened and concluding, automobile accident. Flying glass from a windshield. He raised his heavily bandaged right hand to look at it, as if there were anything to see. The bastard had sliced tendons but they had been repaired, no permanent damage according to the doctors. In a month or so he would be able to use the mallet and meanwhile he must do nothing to aggravate the wound. Some physical therapy, not much, would come later. His hand distressed him more than the damage to his face because his marble was losing consciousness and he had to return to it as soon as possible or lose the work altogether. He could not use his left hand because it had no touch. In his left hand the mallet was as useless as a baseball bat or a hatchet. He wondered if accomplished sculptors used both hands. Painters didn't. He wondered if ambidextrous writers used both hands, one to write dialogue and the other to write description. The right hand would be the dialogue hand because it moved faster. But poets would be the only writers to compose in longhand. The others would have a typewriter. Probably Michelangelo was ambidextrous with mallet or brush, either one. Lee had asked the doctors if there were exercises he could use to strengthen his right hand, and they said there weren't and any such maneuver on his part could damage the hand for good. What difference does it make? one of them asked. Your work will still be there when your hand is healed. No, it won't, he said but did not explain about the marble's lost consciousness.

  He heard a noise at the door and looked up to see his roommate, Charles, and Charles's girlfriend, Laura, hesitant to enter. Lee raised his hand in greeting and fell asleep at once.

  ON AN OVERCAST DAY a month later, Lee made his return to the basement studio. The day was mild and he heard jazz music from one of the buildings opposite his own, a jam session at three in the afternoon. A block from the studio he was stopped by two of the old men who were always about, telling stories and looking after things generally. They said they were sorry for what happened. They used to have a fine peaceable neighborhood but in recent years it had gone to hell, too many youngsters with time on their hand
s and no police protection. How are you feeling? They were looking at his scar and shaking their heads. Lee said he was much better, thanks, but the scar was painful in cold weather. And your hand? Lee shrugged, the jury was still out on his hand.