by Ward Just
You mean, A thing's better not known than known.
It depends on what you fear most, the known or the unknown.
She offered a ghost of a smile. Do you have to choose?
I imagine it's chosen for you, Lee said.
That's what I think too.
You must have thought about this a hundred times, Lee said.
More than that, Magda said and gave a little wave and walked off down Sac Street, the Victorian eaves of the courthouse visible in the distance. There were few pedestrians in the heat of midafternoon. Ahead of Magda was the World building with its brass Elgin clock that gave the date and the time and beyond that the First National Bank of New Jesper. The Dry Goods was a little farther on. Magda walked slowly in the heat, the damp spot on her blouse revealing the straps of her bra. Had she known that, she would have been embarrassed. Mortified.
THEY CORRESPONDED FOR A TIME, Christmas cards at first and then letters, two or three a year. He never went back to New Jesper after the lunch at Carl's so he had no news from there. Lee always sent Magda invitations to his Chicago openings, and she always replied that she would try to come, but never did. Magda replied to his letters with news of her own, written in the smallest script he had ever seen. She had a new apartment that overlooked a park near the river. In her school she had moved on from the classroom to become an administrator, assistant principal. She enjoyed the work. Also, she was a daily communicant at Mass. Her church gave her solace. She had come to love the music and the Latin prayers, the communion and the profound privacy of faith and the essential mystery of it. At one time she had considered joining a holy order, but in the end, on reflection, she did not pursue the matter. Lee tried to read between the lines but was unsuccessful. Of course he considered the obvious reason, but the obvious reason was not always the true reason, so he remained in the dark. He hoped she had not had a crisis of faith and wrote a letter to that effect but when she replied, some months later, she avoided the issue. She wrote that she had found a cat at the local shelter and she and the cat had become great friends. Lee was fearful that he had been too direct, a meddler. Her faith was not his business. At length the letters both ways became fewer and finally stopped altogether and their only contact now were the cards at Christmastime, hers a religious card depicting the Virgin Mary and the child, and his a color photograph of him, Laura, and their two boys on vacation—Cape Cod, Williamsburg, London, Naples. Magda signed her card "Love and Prayers, Magda Serra." Lee decided to take the card as evidence that her faith was intact.
One Christmas there was no card from her. Lee worried that she had met with misfortune, so he called Information in St. Louis but she was not listed. He called the St. Louis newspaper to see if there had been an obituary or death notice but there was nothing. Magda Serra was not in their files. On a sudden inspiration he called Information in New Jesper but there was no listing there, either. So she had vanished, moved away somewhere in Missouri or elsewhere, no forwarding address. Was the cause the weight of memory or its absence? He knew in his heart he would not hear from her again. He had the idea she was on the run, a step ahead of the shadow that would be with her always. Lee wanted to believe that she was living simply in a place of repose where her prayers, whatever they were, would be answered.
HE HAD GIVEN UP the basement studio in the dangerous neighborhood and was now located in Hyde Park proper, not far from the Midway, the top floor of a building that housed a delicatessen and a bicycle repair shop on the ground floor and a dentist's office on the second. Lee's studio was on the third floor, the windows facing north, admitting a hard wilderness light filled with Chicago dust. Lee had never been a fast worker but over the years had become ever more deliberate, long hours devoted to scrutiny of his wood blocks. He had exhausted the possibilities of marble, or the marble had exhausted him, he was never sure which. At some point he would return to it but for the time being he was in thrall to the internal enigma of wood, wooden torsos, wooden faces. It was there on a Wednesday morning in the autumn of 1963 that the telephone rang, one sharp ring and a few seconds of silence before a ringing in earnest. That was Laura's emergency signal, so seldom used that Lee looked up in alarm and answered at once. However, the caller was not his wife but his old schoolmate Hopkins, saying he had gotten the number and the signal from Laura and sorry for the interruption but he knew Lee would want to hear the news. Lee, angry at being disturbed, said impatiently, What news?
Hopkins said, Ogden Hall has burned to the ground. Total loss. Nothing left except a few of the outbuildings.
My God, Lee said. When did this happen?
Last night, Hopkins said. No injuries. As you'll remember, the Hall is basically vacant at night, not even a watchman. Apparently the blaze could be seen for miles around. The Jesper firemen took forever to arrive, and when they did arrive there was nothing for them to do except stand around and watch. The fire was too hot to approach. It's early days but they think it was the wiring. Most of it has been around since before the turn of the century. The place went up like kindling. So it's a hell of a mess and my question is: Shall we go and take a look at the wreckage?
THEY AGREED TO MEET at Ogden Hall at three, while afternoon light remained. The day was warm enough that Lee could smell the acrid odor of charred wood through the open windows of his car miles before he got to the school's entrance. He had not been back in years, his school days not lost in his memory but much neglected. And they returned in a rush when he saw the railroad trestle and the stand of white pines and the football field with its goalposts and bleachers. He remembered the exact spot where Tommy Ogden sat in his open Cadillac drinking whiskey from a silver flask. Their conversation returned to him word for word. He wondered if anyone remembered the undefeated season. That too returned vividly, but he did not dwell on it.
Lee pulled his car off the road and turned off the engine, looking at the football field's white stripes and the goalposts and the big scoreboard beyond the goalposts. The scoreboard and the bleachers were in need of paint. Lee had no idea how the team was doing this year or any of the recent years. He did not follow football at Ogden Hall or anywhere else. He wondered if old Svenson was still alive and living in Fish Creek, caretaker of a country house. Lee had heard a strange story involving Gus Allprice, an accident at sea. The waters were calm but Gus fell overboard and was rescued by the athletic Anjelica. Which sea, northern or southern, was not specified. But Gus was said to be unharmed. This was some years back. Lee had no idea if Gus Allprice and his Anjelica were still together in Patagonia or some other place. The Marquesas. Cape Cod. Maybe they were in Tahiti reading Omoo together. Surely wherever they were, Omoo was with them. If something untoward had happened to them he would have heard, though on second thought perhaps not. So many faculty had come and gone over the years and four headmasters since Gus. The alumni bulletin, published at irregular intervals over the years, was routinely inattentive and uninformative, mostly concerning itself with appeals for money and unspecified "support." Under a program called Continue the Legacy, alumni were urged to enroll their children at birth, acceptance virtually assured. Now and then in the bulletin there were indications that the school was succeeding, enrollment steady year to year with graduates often going on to respectable colleges and universities, though Chicago was never one of them. The year before, one of the senior boys had won a national science prize, a first for Ogden Hall. Still, the money appeals were so abject that Lee wondered if the Ogden millions had dried up at last, lacking Tommy Ogden's magic touch and Bert Marks's supervision. Lee was conscious of being pressed on all sides by ghosts.
He watched two boys wander onto the field and begin throwing a football, long spiral passes thrown lazily into the damp and sour air. They were decent athletes, skylarking, throwing high and low, leaping for the catch. One of them reminded Lee of Hopkins, a rangy boy, conscious of form, drifting forward as graceful as a dancer. Then Lee noticed two girls sitting in the top row of the bleachers. A few years befo
re, Ogden Hall had gone coed, to the indignation of the alumni, if letters to the editor of the bulletin were any guide. Preposterous. Unacceptable. Unmanly. I am revising my will at once. And Lee remembered thinking that it took some confidence to publish the letters, all but one of them negative. The girls were dressed in red sweaters, a splash of color against the gray of the sky and the shabby bleachers. They were laughing as they watched the boys at play, a scene that could have been replicated at any school in the country except for the foul smell of smoke that hung in the air. Lee found reassurance in the quietness of the moment, an ordinary autumn day when time stopped. He waited awhile, watching the boys play throw and catch as the red-sweatered girls looked on. They paid him no attention whatever. He could have been invisible.
Lee put his car in gear and drove away slowly through the stand of white pines toward the Hall. Smoke in the air thickened and he could feel the heat. There were a dozen or more cars parked off the road and people standing in groups looking at the rubble, and a vast pile of rubble it was, with a free-standing brick chimney to announce the location of the library and its treasure of books and their guardian, Rodin's Chicago debutante. Lee wondered if any of the Ogden books had remained uncut and guessed that there were quite a few. Ogden's was a library from the century before, after all. No one read Robert Louis Stevenson anymore, or Balzac or Melville either, especially Omoo. One glance at Tommy Ogden's domain gave the verdict: a total loss, nothing salvageable. Then Lee noticed fumaroles amid the debris, as if a near-extinct volcano lay deep in the earth. Beyond the smoke Lee could see the tennis courts, the nets melted into crispy spaghetti. The great oak back of the courts was scorched and its bony branches still smoldered. Ogden Hall looked as if it had been hit by a bomb, some sort of incendiary device dropped at low altitude with malice aforethought. London, Hamburg, Dresden. Unless you were familiar with the size and shape of the building you would have no idea what had been there. It could have been a barn or a warehouse or anything else. It occurred to Lee that Ogden Hall School for Boys was not yet fifty years old.
With the charred hulk of an automobile as the backdrop, a television crew was setting up for an interview. The lights were garish in the smoke, the scene itself similar to a film set. A four-man hook-and-ladder was stationed nearby, two firemen sitting on the running board smoking cigarettes. All of this was framed in the camera. Lee saw to his surprise that Hopkins was the one being interviewed, the camera five feet from his face and the microphone up close too. Hopkins was speaking casually, as if to a personal friend, as practiced as an actor. The interviewer was wearing a safari jacket and desert boots, as though he had only now emerged from the bush somewhere. The interviewer looked less practiced than Hopkins, his expression moving from funereal to vivacious and back again. Hopkins worked at one of the Chicago exchanges and was sometimes called upon to comment on price fluctuations of commodities like corn and soybeans, wheat and gold. He was difficult to understand sometimes but always fluent and optimistic, except when discussing government regulations. Now Hopkins went on and on, explaining something, the interviewer nodding sympathetically. And then the lights went out and the interviewer put the microphone aside and shook hands with Hopkins, himself incongruous in a dark business suit and striped tie. Meanwhile, the cameraman reloaded film. Then Hopkins stepped away and the interviewer consulted his notes. In a moment the lights blinked on, the camera rolled, and the interviewer commenced his summing up.
Lee and Hopkins shook hands and Lee said, Where did you find him?
He found me, Hopkins said. I told him a little bit about the history of the school and what a tragedy this is. He wanted to know about my feelings, so I said something about them. Boo-hoo. He asked me about prominent alumni, so I mentioned Peter Price, our downstate judge, and Pirelli, the restaurant guy in Wheaton, and you. He drew a blank on all three—sorry about that. It's the lead of the evening news, according to him.
Say anything about Tommy Ogden?
He wanted to know about Ogden but I brushed him off. He's done his homework, so my guess is that he'll mention Ogden, Great White Hunter, blah blah blah. Damned if I was going to help him out. Ogden's a distraction.
Lee gestured around him. He said, What a mess.
Hopkins said, It's only a building. Buildings can be rebuilt.
They spent some time pointing here and there, identifying the dining hall and the kitchen and the various offices, the headmaster's and the dean's and the others. They were pointing at vacant spaces. Hopkins told the story of being called before Gus Allprice and warned that he was on thin ice, thin ice, Hopkins, Gus barely able to suppress a smile. Hopkins couldn't remember the infraction, whatever it was, probably drinking or absent without leave. Maybe something to do with Willa. He said, The only way to get thrown out of Ogden Hall was to commit murder with an ax. But that's finished. We don't do business that way now. There's no more of that. That's yesterday.
What a shame, Lee said.
Back then, you said Ogden Hall and you were laughed at. I didn't like it. I still don't.
They began a slow transit around the Hall, taking particular note of the space where the garden room was, floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, boiling hot in summer and frigid in winter. Hopkins remembered the garden room was occupied by the librarian, the woman who always wore her hair in a bun and a rose in the lapel of her jacket. She was a human Dewey Decimal System, knew the location of every book in the library. She'd never read one but she knew where they were.
She liked Virginia Woolf, Lee said.
Nonsense, Hopkins said.
And Victor Hugo, Lee said.
I doubt that very much, Hopkins said.
Mrs. Haines, Lee said. Mrs. Haines liked to quote Hugo to the effect that a just government encouraged the rich and protected the poor. A line from one of his novels. She was quite well read, actually.
They walked on in uncomfortable silence, and when Lee wondered if it was worth the effort to rebuild Ogden Hall, that perhaps its day had come and gone, Hopkins snorted. He said, Think again. Fund-raising begins tomorrow, a full-court press on the alumni. We'll expect you to ante up, Goodell.
What will it take?
Look around you. Millions. Two million at least to get things squared away.
Hopkins was a member of the board of trustees, much the youngest member but the most active. He described the board meetings, always held at the Tavern Club downtown. Fine group of fellows, lawyers, property developers, advertising executives. Substantial men, Hopkins said. He had been on the telephone—"the blower"—all morning, gathering support. That was one of the things I told that idiot with the microphone. Rebuilding begins right now. The truth is, this fire is a blessing in disguise. The buildings needed renovation and we're short on the sports facilities that parents expect now, swimming pools and the like. Squash courts, a decent infirmary, and it would be good too if the girls had a locker room of their own. The place is rundown, neglected. And your next question is: What happened to Ogden's endowment? And the answer is: Bad investments. Instead of airlines they bought rails. Refused to trade in commodities. We got rid of the old board two years ago, a nicely orchestrated coup d'état. All of them were friends of the mouthpiece Bert Marks. They were Marks's people. Too old, stuck in the past. Gus Allprice thought Ogden Hall had a curse on it and maybe he had a point. Something was out of whack all right. You'll not be surprised to learn that they all remembered our undefeated season. They all remember the final game. They remember you. They remember me. They even remember old Svenson—he's part of the mythology too. That seemed to have been the high point of Ogden Hall. Nothing before, nothing much since. They liked it that way. Also, they all knew Tommy Ogden when they were more or less middle-aged and he was very old. They told stories about him. Everyone had a story. They liked him. But that's finished now. We're in charge.
I liked him too, Lee said.
You never met him.
Oh, but I did.
Nonsense, Hopkins said
.
I met him near the football field, the final game. The one everyone seems to remember. He watched the game from his car and that's where I met him. He and his chauffeur Edgar. He gave me some pointers on life. I can't think what they were, but there were a lot of them. It was Tommy Ogden who sent the silver cups.
Hopkins shrugged, eager to be gone. Tommy Ogden bored him. He had heard all too much of Tommy Ogden over the years, a rake and a gambler, altogether reckless. He was unsavory, never worked a day. Only worthwhile thing he ever did in his sorry life was to found Ogden Hall, and that was because he lost a bet to his wife and was forced to pay up. The bust in the library was part of the settlement and now the bust was gone for good, entombed in the rubble, and good riddance to it, an unwholesome legend. Well, Hopkins said, there was every possibility that they would be unable to raise the two million. The trustees agreed to make best efforts. But if best efforts failed they would sell the land. Two trustees, property developers, thought it would fetch a good price. Why, they themselves might be interested. Form a consortium, keep the deal in-house. But first, best efforts...
HOPKINS WENT AWAY. The TV crew gathered its gear and vanished. Dusk came on and soon Lee was the only spectator save for the firemen who had retreated to the truck's cab and a few boys gathered around the burnt-out car, suitcases and athletic gear gathered at their feet, waiting for a ride home. Authority was nowhere visible and the boys were passing around cigarettes. Lee stepped closer to the heat of the rubble, fumaroles secreting gray smoke. Debris seemed to extend to the limits of Lee's eyesight, in places ten feet high and more. Sparks collected and spun like fireflies. He moved as close to the free-standing chimney as was safe to do and remembered that the fireplace was big enough for a man to stand full height. Lee stepped back, his eyes burning from the smoke. They would never rebuild Ogden Hall. Ogden Hall was a vanished civilization. Somewhere in the incinerated ruins were homely items from the kitchen and dining hall and the transcripts of a thousand students and the remains of two thousand leather-bound books and deep in the ashes Rodin's beautiful debutante, the marble scorched but surely intact. Lee imagined her excavated years from now, sometime late in the next century, recognizably a bust from Rodin's hand—and the story would end there. Lee remained the longest time, remembering the Chicago girl in the alcove as the Illinois seasons changed, dark to light to dark once again.
