Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  That's your desk, he said.

  We'll get you a good chair, Ellis said.

  And a telephone and a typewriter, Howard said.

  From the federal funds, Ellis said with a wink.

  THAT AFTERNOON, enduring a lecture on Leviathan, Lee remembered the long-ago evening at his house in New Jesper eavesdropping on his father and the other important men of the town discussing the assault on Magda Serra, her injuries and the terrible aftermath, willing themselves not to listen to the details of the assault, as if hearing them would be itself a contamination, too toxic to bear. But in the end they listened, and Lee remembered the stricken silence and the throat-clearing as attention turned to Alfred Swan and his newspaper. Swan's mulishness. Swan's responsibilities. Within a few days the story was all over the school, spoken in whispers, including the appalling particulars; and many of those, Lee knew, were invented. No one wanted to plead ignorance so the stories grew wilder as the days passed and then, lacking fresh information, they died away. What remained was an uneasy void. Lee was unable to say whether the community was better off not knowing than knowing. His father believed that it was. He was convinced of it. The word he used was morale, as if New Jesper were an army in the field facing a dangerous enemy. The judge did not give the enemy a name but his German forebears would—schrecklichkeit. Frightfulness. Ellis and Howard were similarly interested in discretion but not for the same reason. Howard said the police would not be helpful. In that he was surely correct. They would take care of the destitute woman in their own way, and that way was none of Lee's business because he was not of the community. Lee believed that Ellis and Howard were—abashed. Embarrassed by what they found with Lee as a witness. Something of that was present in New Jesper too.

  He wished he had pressed the point and angry that he hadn't: Call the police, call an ambulance. But Howard and Ellis were men three times his age and kindly in their own way. Lee was an outsider and in no position to insist on anything. Who was he to lecture anyone? Lecturing was not his métier, obsessed as he was with his hammer and chisel and the conscience of marble. He wondered if the remorseless pursuit of the frightful made you a better man. Maybe it only made you wised-up, another thing altogether. He wondered what Magda Serra would have to say in her own behalf. Her opinion was not known. She had gone away to another part of the country. Her mother had not been heard from. They were the ones directly concerned and certainly Magda would not have enjoyed seeing her name in the paper with all the relevant details, her reputation slandered. Yet her sense of outrage and, he supposed, violation would make a newspaper article beside the point. And if she were of a particular temperament she would want everything laid out, no detail too small or too intimate to be ignored. Do you want to know what happened? This is what happened. The public's right to know. Lee supposed that in New Jesper the story was a dead letter, forgotten along with the death of the anonymous tramp, and he had no idea how Magda would react to that. Perhaps not at all. Perhaps what New Jesper remembered or did not remember would be a matter of indifference to her. In that one sense the outrage committed upon her was strictly personal. Lee heard his name called and looked up to listen to a question about the ethics of Thomas Hobbes. He answered the question and went back to his recollections, to no good resolution. He wondered if events at the clinic would enlighten him. He suspected that his thoughts on the matter of Magda Serra were about to clarify. Lee realized that he had led a protected life growing up in the house on the hill, the vast lake beyond. When a tramp came to the door he was given an apple and sent on his way. The police protected the community and when there was a question, any question at all, the chief was summoned to discuss the way ahead with your father and his friends. A consensus was reached. The lid stayed on. Lee wondered if this protected life was the best preparation for Chicago's hard knuckles, but he knew the answer to that. There was no good preparation for Chicago.

  Remember Hobbes, the professor said. Kind, timid, and tall. Believed in the submission of the people to the state, be it king or parliament. On permanent sentry duty for the Establishment, friend and retainer to dukes and earls. First-rate mind. Played a keen game of tennis to the very end of his long, long life. Wrote his autobiography in Latin verse. I believe he was more sociologist than philosopher.

  But either way, he is very important.

  Next week, Goodell will explain why.

  THE FIRST FEW WEEKENDS at the clinic were slow and Lee was able to become acquainted with the staff, Dr. Petitbon and the nurses, Eloise and Pearl. They worked at Cook County General and Dr. Petitbon had a separate private practice in Kenwood. All three had signed on for six months, weekends only. They showed Lee the forms and taught him the routine, patient when he was slow to catch on. Pearl said, If they don't want to answer a specific question let it pass; just try to get the vital statistics. When Pearl asked him what he studied at the university and Lee replied Great Bookkeeping, she laughed and laughed.

  Dr. Petitbon said that business was slow because the neighborhood was suspicious of the intent of the clinic. They were reluctant even to give their names, worried that medical histories or other personal data would be collected and fall into the wrong hands, perhaps shared with the police, who already had more information than they needed or was healthy for them to have. Lee himself was the object of particular suspicion until Ellis and Howard reminded everybody that Lee had a basement room up the street and had lived among them for almost a year. There were no complaints about the young student, always polite and friendly but not too friendly. Most important, he kept to himself and did not ask idle questions. Neither did he volunteer information about himself.

  The fourth week was very busy and marked by a terrible incident. A fourteen-year-old boy was brought to the clinic by his mother. In the waiting room he suddenly dropped to the floor, unconscious. He was thin as a rail and seemed to fall slowly in pieces, bone by bone beginning with his ankles. He was a tall boy, well over six feet, with enormous eyes. Lee saw him fall and shouted for the doctor, who came at once but could do nothing. The boy was dead, no visible marks, no signs of illness. He was standing quietly with his mother when he closed his eyes and fell. The mother was too horrified to speak and when she did open her mouth the waiting room was filled with a high-pitched wail, a ululation. When the doctor put his arms around her, she shrugged him off. When Lee fetched a sheet from the examination room and attempted to cover the boy, the mother snatched it from his hands and threw it into a corner. She took her son's head in her arms and rocked to and fro, and still the primal wail, as if she had infinite breath and would wail as long as she lived. Dr. Petitbon called for an ambulance, and when the ambulance arrived two policemen arrived with it and entered the clinic first, guns drawn.

  No, no, the doctor said, there's no need for that here.

  Who are you? the sergeant asked.

  I am the doctor in charge.

  What did he die of?

  I'm not sure. But there was no violence here. The boy walked into the clinic with his mother, fell unconscious, and died.

  Can you get her to shut up? The sergeant pointed at the mother.

  No, the doctor said.

  I'll have to make a full report.

  An autopsy will be performed. The coroner will be notified.

  Are you the only witnesses?

  As of right now, yes.

  I'll need to take your statements.

  Lee said, No crime was committed, Officer.

  Who are you? the sergeant asked.

  He is my assistant, Dr. Petitbon said.

  He's a kid, the sergeant said.

  A student at the university, yes.

  The sergeant raised his eyebrows in mock respect. What's your name?

  Lee Goodell, Officer.

  The sergeant looked at him a long moment, his hand on his chin. That name's familiar. You ever been in trouble with the police?

  Lee smiled winningly. No, sir.

  When the police left at last they ha
d interviewed each patient—there were only two of those, the others having departed when the boy was pronounced dead—along with the doctor, the two nurses, and Lee. They left with the ambulance containing the boy's body and the mother, the mother continuing to ululate. When the door closed behind them Dr. Petitbon left the room and came back with a bottle of scotch and four glasses. The nurses demurred but Lee nodded his head.

  They sat drinking scotch a moment or two, no one speaking. I know that boy, the doctor said suddenly. His name is Ernest Tullis, and never was a boy better named. He rarely spoke, rarely changed expression. He knew what was in store, all right. I saw him a year ago or more when his mother brought him in for a checkup. She knew perfectly well that her son was not healthy. Her manner was guarded. The truth was, she was terrified. I made the usual tests and discovered that he has, had, what we call a hanging heart. It's congenital and very bad news and there's no real treatment for it. And this evening his heart gave out with no warning as it was bound to do sooner or later. A year ago I tried to explain that to Mrs. Tullis but she was not interested and I did not press the matter. I gave the boy a death sentence and what use to her were the details? There was nothing to be done, not then and not now.

  Dr. Petitbon refilled Lee's glass and his own and said no more. The room was quiet. The nurses said good night. Lee set about tidying up the reception room and was still at it when Dr. Petitbon said good night and departed for his home in Kenwood. But in a moment he was back for a final word.

  He said, You don't have to do this, you know.

  I don't mind, Lee said. It'll take me five minutes.

  I mean the job, Lee. You don't have to stay. I can get someone else.

  Why would I quit? Lee said.

  Suit yourself, Dr. Petitbon said and closed the door, this time for good.

  Ten minutes later Lee let himself out and walked in the direction of his basement studio, thinking he could put in a few hours on his marbles. At the corner he heard a racket of conversation from a first-floor apartment. There was a piano also and the window curtains were drawn tight. Lee paused, listening to the piano and the laughter. It was an after-hours club, called in Chicago a blind pig, the phrase dating from Prohibition. The party would last until dawn, perhaps beyond. Lee continued across the street but then changed his mind. He was not in the mood for a hammer and chisel, and he could never remember not being in the mood. He turned toward the campus. The night was cold and no one was about. Here and there in apartment windows were Christmas lights and one with a white-bearded Santa Claus with a crimson cap but otherwise no sign of life. Lee hurried along, thinking of the boy with the enormous eyes and the hanging heart. One second he was there and the next second he wasn't. Lee could tell by the way he fell that he was dying, surely dead before his body struck the floor. The life went out of him in an instant and Lee tried to understand how he was so certain of that. He had never seen a dead person. But he knew at once and so did the doctor. The boy was as still as a block of marble and nothing moved within, either. He passed two more Christmas-lit windows before he entered Hyde Park and heard a commotion ahead, music and loud voices, another blind pig. Through the first floor window he saw an enormous Christmas tree, filled with lights and ornaments, a winged angel at the summit. The tree reminded him of the ones in the living room at New Jesper, piles of presents stacked under it. The tree in the window blocked any view of the inside but the laughter and the music were cheerful. He heard women's voices. Then Lee noticed the brass plaque beside the door, the size of a calling card.

  CHEZ SIRACUSA

  BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

  The apartment was empty, Charles evidently spending the night at Laura's. Lee looked in the refrigerator and brought out a can of beer and went to the living room to drink it. The time was late, near two A.M. He sipped beer and looked at the clutter in the apartment, stacks of newspapers on the couch and laundry in the kitchen, dust balls in the corners of the room, empty beer cans in the wastebasket. A Christmas tree would improve things, give a sense of the holiday season, good will toward all men and so forth. Lee picked up Leviathan, read a page, and put it down, much too heavy a text for so heavy a mood, backbreaking in the circumstances. He sipped more beer and decided he was living the wrong kind of life, one divided between the classroom and his studio with the clinic on weekends. The clinic was threatening to overpower the other two. Ernest Tullis was not the last dead boy he would see—and then he understood why he knew the boy was dead. The giveaway was his eyes, a dull gray film had covered them, and looking at his eyes he knew the worst without being told. The boy's last image was Lee himself, a stranger. Something obscene about that.

  He was acquiring experience, all right. He doubted Thomas Hobbes knew as much at his age, timid as he was. It seemed to Lee that he was witnessing things he had no right to witness. He had neither the right nor the desire. The truth was, he was an impostor. He would have to ask Charles when he came home: Have you ever seen a dead man? How did you know he was dead? Then he could say, I know. Do you want to hear? Probably if he stayed around the clinic long enough he would become a first-rate amateur diagnostician. He had already seen one broken leg and a burned left hand and a teenage girl with a temperature of 104. He had administered the thermometer himself and given the girl a gingersnap afterward but she did not appear to appreciate the gesture, snarling something about good-for-nothing white boys. Of course she was out of her head with fever. Pearl told her to shush but she didn't feel like shushing so she repeated what she said, adding, Why don't you go fuck yourself, white boy, but quietly enough so that Pearl did not hear.

  Lee did thrive in his studio and tolerated the classroom but the clinic was another order of experience altogether, one of those wars of choice the tyrants of the Middle Ages were so eager to wage. Wasn't it Alexander who wept bitter tears because there were no more worlds to conquer? Yet when Dr. Petitbon had asked if he wanted to give it up, Lee refused without a second thought. He supposed it was pride. Lee yawned deeply. God, he was tired. He couldn't get the clinic out of his mind, the shabbiness, the smell of it, the fear in the eyes of the patients. It held a fascination. Fascination was the right word too. Fascination implied that the clinic was a kind of urban circus put on for his benefit, a grisly minstrel show for the white boy. Lee pulled another beer from the refrigerator and contemplated the idea of fun. Where in the Hyde Park scheme of things did fun come in? He wondered if Thomas Hobbes had ever written about that, and if not why not. Leviathan did not mention fun, at least the parts Lee had read. Of course Thomas Hobbes had his tennis. Often the idea of fun came with a girl. In order for real fun to happen a girl had to be involved. Lee fell asleep holding a half-empty beer can.

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT a month later, near midnight, they were closing the clinic when the door flew open and three boys rushed in. Two of the boys were half carrying, half dragging a third, who was unconscious. The unconscious boy was covered with blood, his shirt soaked with it. Pearl and Eloise had gone home and Dr. Petitbon motioned at once for Lee to assist him. The moment they had him on the examining table the boy's eye-lids opened and he struggled to sit upright. Lee pushed him down and ordered the two others to leave the room and wait outside. They loudly refused until the doctor barked at them, threatening an unspecified telephone call if they did not leave. Then he shut the door behind them.

  Lee fetched bandages while the doctor used scissors to cut away the boy's shirt and trousers. He had wounds in his chest and both arms and his body was scraped raw from being dragged on pavement. The arm wounds were deep but not serious. The doctor applied a tourniquet to both arms and fixed bandages to the wounds, blood staining the bandages but not leaking through. Next he turned his attention to the chest wound and told Lee to call an ambulance, they had an emergency; and in the meantime they would do what they could. Hearing this, the boy began to struggle again until the doctor told him to stop it. For the first time Lee looked the boy full in the face and saw that he was the one who had cut hi
m, who had taken such pleasure drawing the knife from his right eye to his chin. Lee smiled maliciously and saw the look of recognition. Lee tightened the tourniquet without being especially gentle about it and the boy sighed. He did not appear to have the strength to cry out. The doctor was bending over the boy's chest, examining the wound, and then he began to probe, not deeply but in an exploratory way. The boy did cry out then, weakly and without conviction. Terror was everywhere on his face and he no longer looked at Lee unless he was forced to. The overhead lamp was bright in his eyes.

  Loosen that tourniquet, the doctor said.

  Of course, Lee said.

  I need another bandage, the doctor said and held out his hand until Lee put a bandage in it. Did the ambulance people give a time?

  Soon, they said.

  Have you ever given an injection?

  Once, Lee said. Eloise showed me.

  I'll do it then. Hold this bandage to his chest. Gently.