Rodin's Debutante (26 page)

The room began to empty, tables of well-dressed women side by side with tables of men in business suits, women looking into their purses and men consulting their wristwatches, an atmosphere of well-being, everyone mildly hilarious after such a fine lunch. A few of the men played dollar poker for the honor of picking up the check while the women meticulously counted out dollar bills and change, even-steven to the last penny. Lee thought there was a lesson to be found there somewhere. His father had introduced him to the dining room of the Drake when he was seven or eight years old, his birthday, dressed in short pants and a white shirt and jacket. Then as now his father had done most of the talking. The room had not changed over the years and his father had not changed either, except for deep lines in his face and the tremor in his fingers and his newfound enthusiasm for non sequiturs. The tables continued to empty and soon Lee and his father were alone but for two tables of men talking business, consulting documents, every few moments writing something in the margins. Their voices were inaudible and conspiratorial, though to anyone up from Hyde Park the North Side was conspiratorial as a matter of course. Hotel dining rooms were the Finland Stations of capitalist conspiracy. Lee watched this Kabuki with amusement until he heard his father clear his throat importantly.

That's what I wanted to talk to you about, his father said. This peculiar business I mentioned over the phone. Alfred Swan's part of it. He paused, evidently gathering his thoughts, and then he lowered his voice and said, Magda Serra's back in New Jesper. She arrived two weeks ago with her mother, apparently staying with friends. People have seen them here and there around town. One of the places they went to was the library, where they read old issues of the
World,
and you can guess which date they wanted. And when they found it they copied the article by hand. They were seen near the high school. They spoke to no one. Then, on Friday, Magda's mother called Alfred Swan and asked for an appointment. Alfred wasn't there—he and some friends had gone to Florida to play golf. The mother rung off without another word. And then she called me.

Lee had lit a cigarette and was listening hard.

Of course I told them to come over at once, my chambers. They wanted to know if there had been any progress on the case. I said I didn't think so, and if there had been I would have known. As you know, Chief Grosza died a few years ago. The high school principal moved to Decatur. Funny, it's not that long ago, really, but there's hardly anyone around from that time. Walter Bing, Alfred. The bank's been sold, you know, to a syndicate from Aurora. So there's a—I suppose you could say—loss of memory of that time.

Lee said, Who did the talking?

Mrs. Serra, the mother.

Not Magda?

A word here and there. But she was alert and certainly understood everything that was said. But she never smiled, not once, and sat quietly while her mother and I talked. Mrs. Serra was suspicious that Alfred was not in town. He seemed to have left the same time Mrs. Serra and her daughter arrived. I did assure her that Alfred was an avid golfer and was often away to play courses around the country. He spends more time on his golf game than he does his newspaper. His son's the publisher now, in name only. Alfred doesn't trust the boy. He thinks Alfred Jr. is unsound. He's right, too.

Did she believe you about the golf?

I don't know. I think so. It's the truth.

What else did Magda say?

I asked her if she remembered the events of that day, the—assault. The questioning by the police. The time she spent in the hospital. She took the longest time to answer, as if my questions were unfamiliar to her. I was sorry I brought the matter up. But she said finally that, no, she remembered nothing. She had amnesia for some time. And slowly she recovered her health and began to talk again and remembered her schooldays in New Jesper, the house she lived in, her friends. But of that day and the days following, nothing.

Lee was himself back in those days, a clear recollection of Magda and the classroom they shared, the various teachers. Lee said, Did Mrs. Serra say what she and Magda were doing in New Jesper?

I didn't want to pry, his father said. I didn't want it to appear as an interrogation. But it was the obvious question and when I asked it, Magda said her mother thought that if she returned to the scene of the assault she might remember something. She might remember who assaulted her and the circumstances, at least an idea of who it might have been. But the memory was locked away. Magda used an interesting phrase. She said her memory was asleep and would not awaken no matter what she did or what she saw or how hard she tried and she tried very, very hard. I remember you telling me she was a plump girl, always laughing, a mediocre student. But when I saw her she was slender. A pretty girl but she looked undernourished. She never smiled, and as they were leaving she said she had completed her studies and intended to become a teacher. She was working toward certification, grade school level.

Did she say where she was studying?

She did not.

Lee said, I remember those days as if they were yesterday. I remember the math teacher, Mr. Salmon, and the civics teacher, Mrs. Wool. The walls of the classroom were painted light green. Mrs. Wool had a world globe on her desk, lit from the inside. Magda sat next to me in Mrs. Wool's class. Always giggling, Magda.

You were listening to our meeting, weren't you?

Some of it. Most of it, I guess.

We were doing what we thought best for the town.

Yes, that was evident.

You shouldn't have eavesdropped.

Lee smiled and said, I'm afraid it was irresistible.

Listening to the grown-ups.

Being on the inside of things, Lee said.

I knew you were there, his father said. I could hear the floorboards creak, and as you'll discover one day, you always know when your own flesh and blood is nearby. It's almost a sixth sense. I thought of raising hell with you and decided not to. What was the point? Your introduction to the real world, I suppose. His father shrugged and pushed his chair back from the table. The dining room was empty now, the time past three o'clock. The waiter was hovering with the check, and when he saw the old man's chair move he placed the check on the table and stepped back. The judge nodded but did not otherwise acknowledge the waiter.

The judge steepled his fingers and stared off into the vast silence of the dining room of the Drake Hotel. He did not speak for a full minute, his demeanor reminiscent of the courtroom. He said at last, I guess that's a fortunate thing, your good recall of those days. You've always had a good memory, Lee, and now you can put it to account. Magda wants to see you and my guess is that she wants to go over that ground, her school days in New Jesper. Magda remembers you in a fond way. She says you helped her in her studies, homework and the like. She says you were kind to her and not everyone was. Magda sends her best wishes and said she'd be in touch.

T
HE WEDDING WAS POSTPONED
indefinitely owing to June Nieman's pneumonia, a virulent strain that kept her in the hospital for a month with another two months at home in bed. She very nearly died. Laura was inconsolable for much of that time, spending part of every day at the hospital, though her mother was in quarantine and unable to see any visitors, even her family. Laura and her father played chess in the waiting room, suspending the game every half hour or so to appear at June's door to assure her they were there and looking after her. June was usually unconscious and motionless in her bed. Laura came home in the afternoon in tears, saying how small her mother looked in the bed, small and so thin she looked weightless. The lightest breeze could carry her away. Most evenings Laura would return to the hospital to sit in the waiting room and look in on her mother, believing that her mere presence would make some difference, of reassurance or confidence. As often as not her father would be there too, and they would resume their games of chess. Once she came across her father praying, his hands folded at his chin, his eyes closed. Laura had never seen him pray; they were not a religious family. The sight of her father at prayer unnerved her.

After her second week in the hospital June was awake but her fever was still high and she was hallucinating, one day conversing with circus acrobats, the next a much-loved aunt who had been dead for years. One afternoon June insisted Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was in the room, advising her on a case she had been researching before her illness. The doctors assured Laura and her father that hallucinations were a common side effect of pneumonia and its high fever but Laura was not convinced; she thought her mother was slipping into another world altogether, a world from which she might not be retrieved. When the hallucinations passed, June was apathetic, eating poorly, and barely able to muster a smile when Harold and Laura made their visits, Harold passing on amusing university gossip. One of the history instructors had taken up with a sophomore, and why not, since his specialty was the medieval papacy. One of the assistant deans had defected to Harvard, and it served him right. June took all this in listlessly. Her doctor said her morale was rock-bottom and no wonder. She had no defenses and seemed unable to imagine a future for herself and her family. This will take time, the doctor said. Have patience. Be of good cheer. Laura later told Lee that her mother's illness changed her outlook on life. The disease struck with no warning whatever, and would this always be the way of things? She was terrified during the worst of her mother's ordeal, never having been in the presence of serious illness. An arrested pregnancy was not an illness.

That time I visited you in the hospital, she said, your face wrapped in bandages. You had trouble speaking, remember? You were out of it, not yourself. I had never been in a hospital before, the antiseptic smell, the nurses so brusque. You had the pallor of a prison inmate. I hated it. That was the worst until now.

The Hyde Park community rallied round, bringing books, bringing meals, looking after the cat, cleaning the house. The Niemans and Lee were invited to dinner any time they wanted to come. Colleagues taught Harold's classes. Laura was given the semester off, her fellowship postponed until she felt able to take it up. Still, Laura believed things were out of control. She and her father had managed to survive the tempest but only barely, and who knew when it might return and carry them all away.

Laura was living in a steady state of uncertainty, even peril. For a time she visited one of the many Hyde Park psychoanalysts, this one trained by Herr Freud himself, but the psychoanalyst was mainly interested in her dreams whereas Laura was interested in her mother's dreams. Where in the world had the acrobats come from? And who summoned Mr. Justice Holmes? Nothing Laura had read in four years of inquiry into the work of philosophers had prepared her for the emotional turmoil caused by her mother's illness, not even the great Stoics. And, she added with something approaching contempt, especially the great Stoics. The truth was, no one knew anything of value. The philosophers, in their preoccupation with the mind, had neglected unruly emotions. Her life had been turned upside down and she had no idea when it would right itself, if it ever did. She had lived in a beautiful world and now that world was gone and replaced by something ugly, menacing, and negligent. The doctors were no more help than the philosophers.

In the last analysis, she said to Lee, you have only yourself and your family to rely on when you're waltzing with the unknown. You've been wonderful. I feel closer to you than I ever have. You have such patience. You're never rattled. Does that come from working with heavy stone? Maybe that's why you work with marble.

You bet, Lee said.

Only promise me one thing. You'll never get sick.

I promise.

You've got to mean it, she said.

I'll never get sick, Lee said.

I couldn't bear it, Laura said.

You could. But you won't have to.

How do you
know?
she demanded, suddenly near tears.

Goodells know, he said. It's a family trait like blue eyes or a clubfoot. We Goodells have second sight. Lee was smiling as he said this and when he was finished Laura was smiling too. That night she turned a corner. Soon after, her mother did also and by Christmas her health returned for good and life resumed its normal pace, more or less.

NEW JESPER AND OGDEN HALL
were much with me at this time. I was conscious of having entered a wider world, Chicago and Hyde Park and the university together with my studio. There were many like me at the university, small-town boys good at studies, very good at examinations, not experienced in the world. The world was the classroom, its maps and histories, its novels and poems and plays, its sciences and religions, the facts written in chalk on a blackboard. Shakespeare, Copernicus, Hegel, Luther. Master Shakespeare and you mastered the world, at least the British part of it. Reading Shakespeare, you knew where you stood in the Elizabethan scheme of things, the specific identities of the rulers and the ruled. How difficult it was translating Shakespeare to New Jesper, where the rulers were identified only as "they."

I understand they're floating a new bond issue. Sewers, I hear.

Have you seen the new stoplight up New Jesper Street? When did they decide to do that?

They're not saying much about it but there was a bad situation at the high school the other day. Some poor girl assaulted. They're expecting an arrest any day now...

I was different in my view of the order of things, owing to my father's position in our town. To me, they were not "they" but something approaching "we." I was an accomplice of "we." I think at a very early age I understood the American system, the country so various, so large and unruly, poised to fly apart at any moment. The system was founded on compromise and reconciliation, an infinity of checks and balances but always the willingness to look the other way until the world forced close focus. The states passed a constitutional amendment. The nation went to war. The small towns of America played no role in this except to supply the votes and the armies. Really, the decisions were made elsewhere, by others who were better educated and better informed. They were authorities. They held the high cards. I thought of them as Homer thought of the Fates, entitled to make any decree they wished (and in due course a notice appeared in the
World).
Laura said to me once, You have such patience. You're never rattled. You—she laughed here—never give instructions. I suppose she was correct. I think I never wanted to make the choices my father was obliged to make—indeed was eager to make—to keep the lid on lest, lidless, the pot boiled over with unforeseen consequences. People had to be protected from themselves, and my father along with the publisher and the bank president and the others were the self-appointed protectors. They had tremendous confidence in themselves and a shared view of the world, its surfaces and undercurrents, its caprices. Someone had to decide. They decided, for the good of the community, its morale. Of course at the bottom of it, the foundation of it, lay the enigma of class in America. But of that they never spoke.