Rodin's Debutante

by Ward Just

  My father took me to the doctor. Mother couldn't bear it, she was so cross with me. Harold prides himself on being good in adversity. He was, too. She was silent a moment and then put her hand on Number Ten, patting it as if it were alive. She said, We went to him at ten o'clock at night. The doctor was a friend of my father's, not some Mister Buttonhook somewhere. He had a nurse who disapproved. He hadn't done many abortions and didn't like doing mine but agreed because Harold was a friend. It's quite painful, you know. Very painful.

  Maybe it always is, Lee said.

  Not always, Laura replied. According to reports.

  I don't know anything about it, Lee said.

  I hated the way the nurse looked at me. I was so ashamed. I still am.

  No, he said. Please.

  You're sure you don't mind? That it doesn't make a difference between us?

  It makes no difference, he said.

  My high school boyfriend, she said.

  I don't care who it was, he said.

  It wasn't Charles is what I want you to know, she said. We were in the back seat of a DeSoto. We had been to a dance and then parked at the planetarium, near the lake, a beautiful summer night. A million stars in the sky and the moon somewhere over Michigan, etcetera etcetera. Laura raised her arms and let them fall, a gesture of resignation. Things got out of hand. He never knew how far out of hand. What was the point? We broke up soon after, she said. He wanted to stay friends but I couldn't see the point to that, either. I wasn't thinking clearly. Maybe I wasn't thinking at all. Has that ever happened to you? Reaching a point where your mind's blank as slate, not a coherent thought in your head? Laura picked up the chamois cloth and began to polish the marble with brisk circular strokes, paying particular attention to the high-low scar. She stepped back from Number Ten, frowning. She said, Does it go high to low or low to high? I mean, upstroke or downstroke?

  High to low, he said.

  I guess it wouldn't make any difference.

  Everything makes a difference in sculpture.

  It does?

  Yes. The smallest thing.

  Okay, she said.

  Everything has a reason, he said.

  I understand, she said.

  You didn't have to tell me about the DeSoto, front seat or back seat. The etceteras didn't add much.

  I know. I'm sorry.

  It's a closed book, he said.

  Not entirely, she said.

  To me, I mean.

  Okay, she said. I never said anything about it to Charles or anyone else. Only you. Is that all right? What I mean is, something about your stone reminded me what happened when I was sixteen years old.

  He moved her slowly in the direction of the couch.

  Yes, she said. That's a good idea.

  And then we can go home, he said.

  Maybe I'd like to stay here for the night.

  We can do that. We can do anything you'd like.

  That's what I'd like.

  Laura sat on the couch in her underwear and looked up at him. She said, I didn't know what you'd think. When we first met I thought you were strait-laced, a small-town boy in a big city. She smiled broadly. From Bethlehem to Gomorrah in the blink of an eye, she said. Don't give me that smile. I know it's true. Charles told me once that you thought we were libertines. Libertines! I laughed and laughed because, truth was, I was charmed. I was charmed that you would take me for a libertine. You know, sometimes around here we make a fetish of tolerance. That's Hyde Park for you. But sometimes we do laugh at ourselves. Not often enough. I liked you the first time I saw you, that stupid touch-football game you organized. I liked the way you ran. I liked the way you looked when you ran, a boy's abandon. I wondered then if there was a possibility of something between us. Charles was already thinking about going back to London and that would mean the end of us, Charles and me. Not that I ever thought we would be permanent. Charles wasn't ready to settle down and I've been ready since I was sixteen.

  He watched her take one barrette out of her hair and then another, placing them carefully side by side on the table.

  She said, I told you about the DeSoto because I didn't want there to be anything mysterious between us.

  Even a DeSoto?

  Especially a DeSoto, she said.

  He didn't reply but couldn't help a smile because where he came from secrets were treasured. They were the coin of the realm. If it wasn't a secret it wasn't serious. Shared, a secret lost its magic. The definition of a secret was knowledge worth keeping to yourself and remembering, the privacy that held a community together. A neighborhood, a city, a whole nation even, and most of all a marriage. Secrets were both sweet and sour, and disclosed were devalued: gossip. Lee turned the idea this way and that and decided finally that it was another of his half-baked thoughts, subject to revision. Even so, it was hard to imagine a society without secrets, everything aboveboard and straightforward, a parking lot filled with DeSotos. Why, even the socialists said that was the problem with capitalism, too many secrets held by a banker cabal—yet that would seem to make Laura's case, wouldn't it?

  Lee said, Promise to keep it to yourself now.

  The cat's out of the bag, Laura said with a sly smile. Stay where you are.

  Later, near dawn, they were walking to her apartment. Lee carried her philosophy book and an umbrella against the cold drizzle. No one was on the street and the street seemed to go on forever, bounded on either side by three-story houses with porches and lawns, no light in the eastern sky, the houses dark. They seemed to be at the limits of the known world. The moon was out of sight and he doubted it was anywhere near Michigan.

  Laura laughed suddenly and said she had important news, she'd saved it. She had been offered a teaching fellowship in the philosophy department and she thought she would take it. The department chairman, Altschuler, told her she would make a fine philosopher, maybe a better philosopher than her father was an economist—that last said with a sly smile, the chairman and her father were great friends. Of course Chairman Altschuler had a caveat. She had to be prepared for resistance from her colleagues in the department, who believed that women's brains were wrongly wired for consecutive thought on, say, the nature of virtue or the essence of language or naturalness. Also, women's emotions were unfortunate, dominated as they were by blood and dark rhythms. Women were at a disadvantage. Could a woman have written the Tractatus? Altschuler laughed when Laura said she hoped to God not, the Tractatus being essentially a mind scrutinizing itself—a normal thing in the community, witness Descartes—but a futile enterprise surely, of scant practical value and a text so difficult it was said to be more obscure in the original German than in English translation and all that quite apart from the lurid speculation that Wittgenstein was insane. In any case, Laura went on, anyone who could write so obscurely and yet so brilliantly—here and there flashes of tremendous originality amid the darkness—is not a philosopher but a prophet, and deserves to be read as such. So, yes, she thought she could handle whatever her colleagues dished out so long as she didn't have to wash them—the dishes.

  When Altschuler stopped laughing he said fine, it was settled, and informed her they wanted to publish the paper she had written, original work, he thought, and, ah, prophetic in its own way. However, it would be a very, very good idea if she brushed up on her German, as department colloquies were often conducted in that language. She had wanted to tell Lee before, but then she looked at Number Ten and was moved to tears and there was the matter of the DeSoto and the consecutive couch sex following the DeSoto and what with that and one thing and another she forgot about the fellowship and the paper they wanted to publish.

  So, she said, what do you think?

  Take it, he said. I've always thought it would be wonderful to have a philosopher for a wife—the loaded word arriving spontaneously, unbidden and unexpected, but in the circumstances most natural. Still, he was alarmed at it.

  A what? she said.

  Isn't that where this is leading?
>
  I think it is, she said.

  You're my darling, he said.

  You too, she said. You very much too.

  We can scrutinize ourselves, he said.

  Every minute, she agreed.

  They moved along through drizzle and gathering fog, the street as dark as he had ever seen it. Laura was full of plans, the wedding, the reception following the wedding—and should the honeymoon come now or later? She spoke so softly he had to dip his head in order to hear her, and he had the clear idea she had been thinking of these plans for some time. Lee was thinking of marathon sessions in his studio, finishing three new pieces to make his baker's dozen, and then he could arrange for a show. He had never thought much about money but he was thinking about it now, calculating what he and Laura would need to live decently. He hoped his parents would approve of her. They had met but once and the evening had been mostly successful until his father made a remark about Adlai Stevenson, causing Laura to color; the governor was Hyde Park's idea of a living God and worshiped accordingly. Laura's voice was softer than usual in reply. His father, grown hard of hearing, pretended to understand and smiled warmly. Of course he assumed Laura agreed with him. He was accustomed to agreement and Laura tactfully declined to set him straight. The meal ended lamely but Lee's mother did manage to take him aside after they left the restaurant to whisper, She's lovely.

  A gray wash was visible in the eastern sky. Here and there lights winked on in the neighborhood. Lee and Laura paused at the corner, disconcerted by piano music and raucous laughter that drifted from an upstairs window of the brownstone opposite. A woman was singing "Ain't Misbehavin'" in a voice coarse as sandpaper. Lee remembered the place, remembered also the little brass plaque beside the door:

  CHEZ SIRACUSA

  BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

  Lee turned to Laura. I've seen that house before, he said.

  Oh, she said, that dreadful place. We've tried for years to shut it down. We've signed petitions. We've marched, sent delegations to the city council. No use. They have protection downtown.

  Blind pig, he said.

  Cathouse, she replied. It's been there for years and it'll be there forever. It's what we have in Hyde Park instead of Marshall Field's. It's disgusting.

  The singer had swung into "Fine and Mellow," singing parlando, the music smothered for a moment by a burst of applause. Lee saw sinuous movement behind the open window on the first floor. He had never visited a cathouse, did not know how you went about it, making the appointment. There was said to be a cathouse in New Jesper, but it was only someone burning a red light in an attic window of a house in the colored part of town. As they listened to "Fine and Mellow" the door of the brownstone opened and an elderly gentleman moved slowly down each step. He was unsteady on his feet but not so unsteady that he couldn't turn his head and blow a kiss to the woman holding the door for him. Once on the sidewalk he adjusted his fedora and stood quietly in the rain. Presently a black sedan arrived and he eased himself into the rear seat. Then the sedan moved off at a stately pace, turned the corner, and was gone. Lee said nothing to Laura but he was all but certain that the gentleman in the fedora was Bert Marks. Of course that was impossible, inconceivable really. Bert Marks lived on the North Side. Why, Bert Marks was seventy-five years old at least.

  Something in Lee's manner, the little involuntary whistle he gave, caused Laura to ask, Do you know that man?

  Lee said, That is the chairman of the board of trustees of Ogden Hall, my old school.

  She said, That is appalling.

  Lee sighed. Yes. All but inconceivable.

  MONTHS LATER Lee took the train up from the South Side to have lunch with his father at the Drake. The old man wanted to know about wedding plans and there was one other thing he wanted to discuss, something peculiar, and he said no more. Lee arrived an hour early because he liked to walk along Oak Street Beach, especially on calm days when the great lake was flat as a plate and the color of dishwater, the sun glowing dully in the Chicago haze. When he was a boy he liked to watch the pocket aircraft carriers maneuver on the horizon, plane after plane landing on the decks, pilots fresh from flight school learning to land on a platform about the length of a football field. Now and again a pilot would misjudge the wind or the speed of the carrier and make a poor approach and crash the plane or send it wheeling off the deck, where it would drop like a stone to the bottom of the lake, taking the pilot with it. They were only boys, many of them, some as young as seventeen, and when their training was done they were sent to the Pacific where the carriers were twice the size with names like Enterprise and Hornet. The accidents were never reported in the newspapers but his father always knew about them, the type of aircraft, the age of the pilot, and what went wrong. That was the closest the war came to Chicago but it was close enough. Lee had nightmares, the pilot trapped in the aircraft as it sank, quickly at first, then slowing and drifting in the underwater currents, the plane ghosting along like a silver manta ray, the water opaque, the bottom invisible. In Lee's version the plane drifted for an eternity, a kind of watery purgatory neither here nor there, the pilot alive and conscious owing to his oxygen mask. Every effort he made to extract himself was useless. Lee woke in a cold sweat.

  Now he looked up to see sailboats on the horizon, a promise of summer just one month away. Still, Lee shuddered at the memory of his childhood nightmares and wondered whether aircraft remained at the bottom of Lake Michigan a mile or so offshore from the Outer Drive and all the way up the North Shore and beyond. Then he thought, Enough of that; the day was fine. He continued to stroll, the Near North Side another world altogether from bohemian Hyde Park, the men in suits and ties, the women in stylish dresses and high heels, purposeful of gait. Lee watched a flight of starlings wheel overhead, its formation changing in the blink of an eye, giving the illusion of a helix, then a hesitation and the starlings were gone, swarming north. The date was the twentieth of May, not warm but comfortable enough that people were sitting on benches, their faces upturned to the pale sun. He stood with his back to the gray lake, scrutinizing the apartment buildings on Lake Shore Drive, great vertical fortresses of granite and concrete. From their summits you could see almost as far north as New Jesper, and with the aid of a telescope to Milwaukee and northeast to the steel mills of Gary. At least that far, he thought, though he had never visited a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Many of them were constructed in the 1920s, the golden age of lofty living in Chicago. Fifteen Hundred was the address the girl had given him at the party the night before. When he looked at her without comprehension she smiled and added, Lake Shore Drive. The girl was a friend of Laura's. Her family were art collectors, always on the lookout for fresh talent from Chicago.

  Be nice to her, Laura said. You never know. Maybe you're the talent they're looking for.

  Fifteen Hundred was there before him now, five black limousines arrayed nose to tail under the porte-cochère. At some mysterious signal the doors flew open and chauffeurs alighted to stand at attention as the entranceway filled with well-dressed women, all wearing furs and hats, waiting a moment in the spring sunlight before dispersing to the limousines. Lunch, Lee thought, and then the Art Institute or the opera or theater, one matinee or another. The limousines glided away, leaving the doorman in his silver-gray uniform standing as straight as a sentry, importantly shooting his cuffs, then clasping his hands behind his back and moving into the shade of the awning. A model for Degas, Lee imagined; or, if you wanted to be rough about it, George Grosz.

  The girl's name was Jill White, a forceful girl who had matched him drink for drink at the party. Probably her mother was one of those in a fur and a hat bound for the Loop. He tried to imagine Jill in a cloche hat and a fox fur but could not, though Degas would. They had argued about the future of socialism in America, disagreeing but not unpleasantly. She insisted that the internal contradictions of capitalism would bring Wall Street to its knees, the revolution at hand at last, and he replied that there were inter
nal contradictions to everything under the sun, even human beings, even God, and perhaps God most of all. The truth was, Wall Street was an abstraction to him and the capital markets were as unfamiliar as a Havana casino.

  Jill White was lost in thought a moment, then asked him if he believed in God. Not yet, he said, and that brought a smile. You're not from Chicago, she said. The accent's wrong. Where are you from? Lee hesitated two beats and said, New Jesper. Jill laughed merrily and said she knew all about New Jesper. New Jesper was the town their maids came from, arriving each morning at eight via the North Shore trolley. Her family couldn't live without them, Tish and Lorraine, gems both. Tish was related in some obscure way to the singer, what was his name? Jill had forgotten the name but he was well known to anyone who listened to popular music. He was the one with the silky voice, often singing on Your Hit Parade and other radio programs. So I'm au courant with New Jesper, Jill said. Of course, Lee said quickly, I can see that. It's well known that New Jesper was a supplier of maids. If you wanted a steel worker you went to Gary and if you wanted a brewmaster you went to Milwaukee but if you wanted a maid, a professional, you went to New Jesper. In fact the city's motto was "New Jesper, City of Maids," though to people who lived there it looked like any other small Illinois town with the usual internal contradictions, au courant in its own way. Naturally in New Jesper the maids were required to believe in God whether they wanted to or not. Jill made a face and after a pause said, Ouch.

  Bitch, Lee said to Laura later. Who does she think she is?

  She's a deb, Laura said. I was watching. I think you frightened her.

  Nothing will ever frighten that woman. Rosa Luxemburg bomb-throwing from her penthouse at Fifteen Hundred.

  Jill and her parents are on the outs, Laura said. That's the reason, if you're interested in reasons. Jill speaks her mind.

  Maybe I worried her a little, Lee said. But not enough. Jill invited me—us—to the cocktail party her parents are giving, Saturday night.

  Did you accept?