Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  They introduced themselves, Ellis and Howard. They were up the street on the corner when the attack took place but arrived too late to do anything. The boys had run away. They were no longer in the neighborhood and the rumor was that they had left Chicago and gone to relatives in the South. No-good boys, Howard said. Lee listened and made no comment. There was a lot of interest in you, Ellis said, working all hours in that basement there. No one knew what you were up to, university boy and all. We don't see people like you in the neighborhood. So there was discussion. That's where I work, Lee said. But he saw they were unconvinced so he added, I'm an artist. I carve things.

  They were silent a moment, listening to the music from a second-floor room across the street. Howard said, The police were rough when they shook down the neighborhood after your accident. It wasn't an accident, Lee said. After you were hurt, Ellis said. They picked up some boys on suspicion, took them to the station house, just beat the hell out of them. So there's some resentment in the neighborhood as you can understand. I'm saying to you, be careful. Lee nodded and thanked them. We don't like to see folks hurt, Howard said. We aim for a peaceable neighborhood but lately things have gone out of control, you understand? We're glad you got everything attended to, your face and hand. That's a nasty cut. Most nasty. They shook hands with Lee and walked off. In a moment he heard them laughing, some private joke.

  He was surprised to find his door unlocked. He'd no doubt failed to lock it before the boys jumped him. Lee eased open the door with his foot, despairing of what he would find inside. Unlocked doors did not go unnoticed in the neighborhood. He stepped inside, the room in darkness. When he switched on the floodlights he saw that everything was as it had been, his tools in their places, the block of marble on the table. The oversize photograph of Rodin's Balzac looked down at him from one wall. Nothing had been disturbed, and he found that hard to believe. Still, something was amiss. The room had undergone a subtle change but he could not see what it was, and wondered if the change was only the passage of time, the room unsettled and not as welcoming as it once was. But everything important was accounted for, so he did not worry. Lee closed the door firmly and locked it and began a slow transit around the marble, fearing it had lost consciousness. He watched it as he would watch a sleeping friend. He did believe, on this inspection, that it had a faint pulse of life.

  The room was warm. He removed his jacket and sat on the big stool in front of the table. He kneaded his right hand with his left, flexing his fingers, noticing how stiff they were, the hands of a plumber. His right hand was weaker than it had been. Lee knew what he wanted to do but did not know how to go about it, meaning where to begin. With a chamois cloth he rubbed down the black marble so that he could see the veins and sat quietly looking at them, thinking they resembled rivers as seen from a distant mountaintop. He had a sudden idea that a pot of tea might move things along so he put the pot on to boil and waited. On the wall next to Balzac was a mirror and he fetched that and placed it at an angle to the marble. He sipped tea and tapped the chisel against the leg of the stool, looking at the reflection of the marble in the mirror. This put him at a remove from the material. Concentrating on the mirror's image he made a scratch on the stone, so slight it was barely visible. Lee squinted at it, worried that one hasty move would spoil everything that had gone before. Really, he was afraid to proceed because the marble seemed to be looking back at him and daring him to get on with it. He wondered if the mugging had made him fearful, loath to take the next step. He had always been able to hold his own but he had never been in a street fight and was uncertain whether for the rest of his life he would look over his shoulder expecting the worst; and the boys remained at large. Lee did not move, remembering something he had read to the effect that if you were a writer the most dispiriting sight in the world was a blank sheet of paper.

  He looked again into the mirror, concentrating hard. He and the marble were side by side in the glass. He placed the chisel at midpoint on the marble and in a series of mallet blows brought it down. His right hand hurt but he did not pause, knowing that to hesitate was to lose the feel of it. He did not know how long he was at it, thirty minutes, perhaps longer. He knew at once when to stop, intuiting the moment when the form was complete. His arms and hands were covered with marble dust. He rose and stepped back from the high stool, looking at what he had done. He did not move for many minutes. When the piece was lit properly it would be stunning. The marble was open now and breathing. He moved his damaged hand over it as a seer might do with a crystal ball, so pleased with what he had done that he wanted to cry out. His eyes moved back and forth from the table to the mirror, his face and the marble side by side, a double portrait. Lee had made a slash in the marble, curved like an archer's bow, the color and width of a twopenny nail. What was it that Tommy Ogden had said to him? You don't learn a god damned thing from defeat. Tommy Ogden, wrong again. Bless him all the same. Lee stepped back and then, looking left, he saw what he had missed when he entered the dark room from outdoors. In brilliant red pencil someone had drawn a scar on the right cheek of Monsieur Balzac. A souvenir from the neighborhood. An obscenity was scrawled beside the scar.

  LEE'S ROOMMATE was an Englishman whose parents had been killed in the Blitz. Charles Fford had been sent to Chicago to live with American friends and ended up at the university, having no desire to return to London. London was crowded with ghosts and still in the shadow of the war and its privations. His family was gone and he had come to like Chicago's clamor. He had a girlfriend who lived off-campus and most nights he spent with her until he found it convenient to move his things to her place, openly living with her as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Lee was scandalized, believing the girl's reputation would be ruined forever. He thought they were libertines, Charles and Laura—and then he remembered that Gus Allprice had precisely the same arrangement with Anjelica and he had not been scandalized but beguiled. That was something to think about. In any case, when Charles and Laura invited Lee to dinner along with other friends, he found the evenings unselfconscious and hilarious.

  The other friends included a senior from New Delhi and two sisters from New York City, all of them uninhibited and well traveled. Lee had the idea that the two went together, along with the money to pay for them, the travel and the uninhibitedness. The Englishman and the senior from New Delhi argued all the time about British rule in India, a subject Lee had never contemplated. Colonialism was not one of his interests, though all the time he was in grade school the world maps were mostly colored red to indicate the holdings of the British Empire. Charles and the Indian had a mutual Irish friend who disliked Britain almost as much as the Indian did. They would have furious rows but always made up at the end of the evening after many rounds of drinks. Lee often found himself the peacemaker, having no stake whatever in either the British Raj or the Irish Question, although it did seem to him an error for one nation to occupy another. Hadn't the American colonists settled the issue? Not quite, Charles replied. Americans opened the issue but did not close it and so there is residue.

  Late on these evenings the talk turned to sex and the evident necessity for Lee to find himself a girlfriend, someone who would fit in, either of the New York sisters or some other unattached female of their circle. Lee had had two girlfriends while he was at Ogden Hall but neither of them worked out; they were summer girlfriends and in the fall they returned to their schools in the East, and the romance, if that was what it was, continued by mail. These suburban girls were very different from his schoolmates at New Jesper High School, something prim about them, but they were worldly too, like Hopkins's Willa. Lee was not successful at figuring out the suburban scheme of things, where so much transpired around the swimming pool at the country club. Nothing happened around the pool of his father's club except towel-snapping and mothers discussing their golf scores. There was nothing prim about the girls at the university, many of them from small towns like himself and dedicated to schoolwork when they we
ren't investigating the big city—or so it seemed; Lee had little firsthand knowledge, since he spent his nights in his studio.

  He was bemused listening to Charles and Laura and the others discuss his prospects as the various attributes of young women flew by: humorous, not humorous, game, not so game, blond, brunette, redhead, fast, slow, bohemian or bourgeois, self-assured or shy. "She doesn't drink but she smokes and she has a nice smile." His friends felt that Lee spent too much time in his basement studio trying to make something out of nothing, meaning the blank blocks of marble, and all he had to show for it was a five-inch scar and a hand that seized up in cold weather, and the solution to that was a willing girlfriend in whose pursuit Lee had to make an effort, however small, and deign to spend one night a week outside the studio. None of Lee's friends had seen his work because Lee was not prepared to allow them inside. Them or anybody. What if they hated his marbles? For the time being his work was for himself alone. He doubted whether anyone else would admire it or even understand it, and he had staked everything on it, this private dream. Vocation, obsession, in whose name he had neglected his studies and was falling behind. He liked the idea of a girlfriend, though, and decided not to spend every night in the studio and perhaps be a bit more forthcoming on what he was doing there. When he spoke about his sculpture he called it "my line of work," usually adding, from some region in his memory, "quite straightforward." To anyone who didn't know him he might have been a telegraph operator or a bond salesman or, given the livid scar on his cheek, a mob henchman.

  Lee did not mind being pressed by his friends. He was fond of all of them, including the Englishman's girlfriend Laura, a dark-haired beauty born and bred on the South Side, a shy, often distracted girl who had the softest voice he had ever heard and for that reason, among other reasons, rarely participated in the nightly arguments. Laura did tell Lee that Charles had no vital stake in colonialism but felt that someone should stand up for the British Empire, and he was nominated owing to his nationality—just like you feel about that town you grew up in, what's its name, New Jesper, a sentimental attraction. She felt the same way about the South Side. Also, Laura said, Charles liked to argue in front of an audience, as if their apartment were the House of Commons at Question Time. She was sure that at some point Charles would stand for Parliament and that would mean returning to Britain, something she had no stomach for. What would she do there? Her life was the university community, the Midway, Hyde Park and Kenwood and the dangerous neighborhoods that surrounded it. Now and then junior faculty members came by their apartment, lending the evening an adult aura—though it had to be said that Charles was one of those Englishmen who seemed to be born old, a man much too elegant to be surprised by anything under the sun.

  The junior faculty were often the last to leave, the worse for wear from drink and arguing who would take the babysitter home. They were rich with university gossip, who was on the way up and who on the way down in the various departments, chiefly the English department, which was eternally in a prerevolutionary condition. But they were mostly concerned with their own projects—the novel in the desk drawer or the grant that would allow them to visit the Left Bank or the Lake Country or if the cards fell right the Soviet Union, as inaccessible and perilous and exciting as the African Mountains of the Moon. How important it was to see things at first hand, refuse to swallow the propaganda. And you had to be awfully careful how you went about it; Joe McCarthy's people were everywhere in Chicago, aided and abetted by the reactionary press. Even the South Side was under surveillance—well, Charles amended, especially the South Side. Lee was enthralled by these conversations but had little of value to add. He had never been political. One night when they were discussing the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet he did think to mention the Committee in New Jesper but did not. Who would care? Who cared about New Jesper?

  Are you really going to the Soviet Union? Lee asked Charles one night.

  I expect so, Charles said. I may go into politics. Know thy enemy.

  What about Laura?

  She'll come too. Won't you, luv?

  Nix, Laura said.

  Lee was startled at these plans. It never occurred to him to visit the Left Bank or the Lake Country or the Soviet Union either but now these places and others were in his mind. All that he required was a passport and money for boat passage and the desire. He imagined a summer in Europe, beginning in a small hotel in Montparnasse—or was that Montmartre? He had the idea he would take a year off when he finished school, travel the continent with no fixed itinerary but Paris and the atelier of Maître Rodin would be at the top of the list. Perhaps there were photographs of Rodin at work on the bust of the Chicago debutante. Come to think of it, he didn't have to finish school. He could devote himself exclusively to his line of work, take it as far as he could, and then embark on the voyage. The boat would be filled with girls as eager for adventure as he was and interested in sharing the room at the hotel in Montparnasse.

  Suddenly Lee had another angle of vision as to what surprises life might bring. He realized that he, like his father, had always lived within sight of Lake Michigan. The vast horizons of the Middle West did not bring the world closer; the world was out of sight, somewhere back of the rolling prairie. He felt himself in the world when he was in his studio in the dangerous neighborhood well into the night and early morning, carving marble. In his infatuation with the South Side he had grown apart from his parents and their milieu, the long trek to the North Shore made less and less frequently. They were puzzled by him, disconcerted when he met them at the country club for Sunday lunch wearing a long red scarf and smoking a French cigarette, regaling them with stories of Charles and Laura, the prerevolutionary condition of the English department, and much else. The Goodells' friends had warned them of the socialist influence of the university, too many Great Books, too few fraternities, one more reason why Lee, who did seem to be such a nice boy, so well-mannered, so bright, so motivated, would be much, much better off at Northwestern. Of course his parents and their friends had no inkling of the sculpture studio, though the five-inch scar was an unhappy reminder that the South Side had its wild aspect. They wondered what else besides talk their son was up to in his new life among intellectuals. When Lee called it an introduction to the modern world his father was only too happy to agree, though without enthusiasm.

  THE FINAL TWO MONTHS of the spring term Lee studied conscientiously and earned fine grades. That led to a summer internship in the law offices of Bert Marks & Son, a reward offered to especially promising Ogden Hall graduates. The job was worthwhile not only for the money but for the after-hours conversations with old Mr. Marks, whose knowledge of the municipal life of Chicago was encyclopedic. Lee had come to cherish the South Side and the university community, finding it an island of sanity and civic virtue inside Chicago's irrational rough-and-tumble.

  Bert Marks looked at it the other way around. To him, the fastidiously beleaguered spirit of the South Side could exist only because of Chicago's rough-and-tumble, which was not, as a matter of strict fact, as irrational as Lee seemed to think. It was corrupt—another thing surely—and corrupt on a scale so lavish that it took your breath away even as you howled with laughter. The exquisite sensibility of the South Side could exist in no other city, not even New York. Look on our great metropolis as a laboratory, my boy. Watch the rats in their cages. Keep your eye on the head rat, the one who gets to the food first. The one who pushes the other rats aside. The one who gets the girl. The one who, push comes to shove, eats the other rats and any other animal within reach. Chicago's alive, you see. Chicago doesn't wait for permission. It takes what it wants when it wants it. South Side's alive also, Bert Marks concluded, but perhaps not so much. Fact is, the saint needs the devil more than he thinks he does. Without the devil, the saint's just another old fart standing on a soapbox talking to himself.

  I've been meaning to ask you, Lee. Where did you get the scar?

  Neighborhood boys, Lee replied.r />
  I'd say you were in the wrong neighborhood. You crossed a boundary. It's important in Chicago never to go where you're not invited.

  It was the wrong neighborhood then, Lee said. But it's my neighborhood now.

  When the old lawyer looked at him doubtfully, Lee offered to tell him the story. The short version, he added, and the lawyer nodded. A month ago he had been in the neighborhood—Lee saw no reason to speak of his basement studio and what he did there—and was stopped by two of the old men who were always about, Ellis and Howard. They looked him over and observed that the scar seemed to have healed nicely, hardly noticeable—untrue but a considerate thing to say. They went on about this and that, the weather, the White Sox, the chances of Congressman Dawson winning his seat in the fall—that last accompanied by a smile since the congressman was accustomed to running unopposed. Ellis and Howard said the boys who cut him were back in the neighborhood. They did not care for the South where they had gone to stay with relatives. The boys had no interest in cotton farming. The girls were country. Everyone was poor. And here Ellis offered Lee a cigarette and took one himself, lit them both, and remarked on the fine June weather, not a cloud in the sky. Howard said, The boys aren't looking for trouble. In the way of things in such a large and turbulent city Lee's knifing, unfortunate as it had been, was largely forgotten. The newspapers had not paid much attention at the time and there was no follow-up beyond the innocent boys who were taken into custody and slapped around.

  I believe we mentioned that to you, and the resentment in the neighborhood.

  Yes, Lee said. You did.

  Ellis said, There's so much work for policemen to do we believe they've just let your case go. It's on the books but they're not paying attention, do you see what I mean? And so we're wondering what you would do if you saw those boys back here in the neighborhood quietly minding their own business same's the rest of us getting along from day to day. Ellis and Howard stepped back, looking at the cloudless sky, listening to jazz music drifting down from a second-story window, a piece played adagio with just a bass, piano, traps, and alto sax. Lee thought a moment and said, I would shoot them. Howard said, Do you have a gun? Lee said, No.