Rodin's Debutante (20 page)

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.

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.

That's a puzzlement, Howard said. I hardly know what to say to such a threat. Do you intend to get a gun?

Lee said, No.

Well then, Ellis said, that's a different story. Haven't we reached a meeting of minds? It's like Mr. Dawson's election, a peaceable affair, normal, without excitement. What I mean to say is, predictable. I suppose that's true, Lee said. You will not be bothered, Howard said. Those boys know they did the wrong thing and will not repeat it. They do not want to spend more time in the South. The neighborhood will see to it you are not disturbed so long as you keep things to yourself. We all mind our own business here and in that way we all get along.

Bert Marks listened to Lee's story without saying one word. And when Lee finished, the old lawyer nodded slowly and offered a crooked smile.

You've learned a valuable lesson, young man. Thing about Chicago is, it's generous. Live and let live. It's good you've found that out. Other cities, they tear themselves apart exacting revenge. Boston's like that, family rivalries, tribal rivalries. Boston's an old city. Why, at one time the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians were at each other's throats. Can you imagine it? I'm not saying that revenge is not a factor here too, but it's not dominant. It's recessive. We're a young city and we look ahead, not backward. We don't care about yesterday. Cities that care about yesterday are cities in decline. Boston's in decline. We work things out here, try to give everyone a slice of the pie. Even those boys. It's a small slice but still a slice and that's why the motto of our city is Can Do. And a new generation is on the rise. There's a man on the scene, an up-and-comer. You don't know his name. He's a behind-the-scenes man now but I suspect he'll run for mayor in a few years' time and he'll win because he's a fine Democrat and at the same time a realist. He loves the city, you see. And wants to make it prosper. And if you go along, you'll get along. Mr. Daley likes people who look forward. He understands the principle of the egg and the omelet and that's why we're entering a golden age in Chicago. I think you're mature beyond your years, Lee. I know about your meeting with my late friend Mr. Tommy Ogden. He spoke so highly of you. He asked me to do anything I could, and I'm doing that now. I've never asked your plans when you graduate from our great university. Have you ever thought of the practice of law?

F
OR LEE GOODELL
the law would not do for a simple reason. It was not physical enough, the work done inside your own head during daylight hours in a drowsy office in a downtown building. Lee liked ground-floor space and a certain amount of disorder inside the space. He liked sweat, a reminder of football practice at Ogden Hall and his afternoon adventures down below the hill in New Jesper. He was not attracted to collaboration, a necessary feature of the legal life: associates, clients, judges, bailiffs, court reporters, juries. Its essence was a remorseless search for precedent, that which had gone before. What had gone before was the controlling conscience. If you were an artist, precedent was not the solution. Precedent was the problem. He thought of lawyers as an infantry surveying the battlefields of distant wars. He thought of them as buzzards picking over carrion and writing the results in a prose so opaque—well, it was double Dutch, the so-called brief, which was never brief but stretched like a wave in the open ocean, rising, collapsing, re-forming itself until it petered out on some foreign shore. He preferred the mallet and chisel and knowing that however hard he worked on the stone its interior would never reveal itself entirely. In that way it resembled an inspired musical figure and life itself.

Besides, law was his father's trade.

***

TO HIS SURPRISE
, one year later Lee found himself something of a big man on the Chicago campus, someone to be looked up to and speculated about, the long scar on his face as distinctive as a black eyepatch or a top hat. He was often seen in the company of faculty, including the very senior, very eminent department chairmen who taught undergraduate classes, part of the Chicago tradition, "the deal." Evenings he was a regular at the long bar of the tavern on 57th Street drinking with junior faculty from the English and history departments, all of them engaged in animated discussions of the Great Books between drafts of German lager. Often they were drunk, their voices rising on the neap tide, the grand names sailing forth—Spinoza Wittgenstein Adorno Nietzsche and the Russian butterfly beavering away at Ithaca, Nabokov. Lee said little but listened hard, never more attentive than when the evening drew to a close with its ritual denunciation of the economics faculty, crypto-Republicans who would bring the American experiment to its knees unless steps were taken at once. Lee rarely stayed after ten o'clock.

Lee was an excellent student but did not look much like a student, roughly dressed, his books and papers carried in an old Boy Scout knapsack; his cigarette was a giveaway, however. He was understood to be a prep school boy—a graduate of that very peculiar institution near Jesper downstate, Ogden Hall, scandal-ridden but still surviving—but he didn't look like a preppie, with the long scar and an unruly mop of coal-black hair and a musclebound gait that suggested a rodeo rider or a middleweight wrestler, a young man who could take care of himself. It was known that most every night he went to his basement studio in the dangerous neighborhood away from the campus to sculpt—and here the rumors varied widely because no one had seen his work, not even Charles or Laura or the sisters from New York City or the foreign student from New Delhi. Sculpture was not an unusual avocation at Chicago, known for its eccentric student body—fencers, young communists, Arctic explorers, bridge fanatics, game theorists, astronomers, motorcycle enthusiasts, phrenologists, and here and there a scapegrace. Even so, it was remarkable that Lee was rumored to keep a loaded revolver in the studio. He was not a participant in campus life, not that the university was much celebrated for organized activities outside the classroom. There was a baseball team but games were sparsely attended, the bleachers a fine place to read a book on a fine spring afternoon, game or no game. Athletics in general were frowned upon as something more compatible with the wretched Big Ten, specifically Northwestern or the University of Illinois. In any case there were no cheerleaders in short skirts twirling batons, nor raucous homecoming weekends.

Lee did not know what to make of his notoriety except that he liked it. The university encouraged individuality. A refusal to conform was seen as virtuous, though there were objections that the near-religious pursuit of nonconformity was itself conventional, business as usual. Hegel was revered on the Midway: for every thesis, an antithesis. Lee was having the time of his life.

AT DAWN OR A LITTLE LATER
Lee would venture from his studio with a mug of black coffee, leaning against the railing that led to the basement, and watch the neighborhood come alive, a few pedestrians going to work, a few more coming home, cars motoring slowly down the street. Cats and a few dogs prowled the neighborhood. The morning light was always pale and dusty and for a few moments it was as if time had ceased. Lee was deep into his thoughts of the marble and what it was yielding. He was leaning against the railing but his mind was still in the studio and remained there until he heard music from the storefront church across the street, voices foreground and a piano behind. He sipped coffee and listened to the music, which trailed off now and again into the purest blues. The lead voice was a soprano who belonged in Orchestra Hall but he doubted that Orchestra Hall was much in her thoughts just then. The rattle of a garbage truck obscured the music but when the truck turned the corner the soprano came back and the chorus joined in, everyone taking a closer walk with thee. Lee noticed ash in the air but when the ash touched his hand it disappeared, snow flurries from the lake. He wondered how it would be to start the day with hymns and readings from scripture. He had never been to a morning church service in his life. There was no religious study at Ogden Hall and his parents were secular people, not even church on Easter or Christmas.

Then the street was filled with children, some escorted by their mothers, others by their older brothers and sisters. Their reedy voices filled the street and Lee was reminded of his own schooldays in New Jesper, down Chestnut Street to Hawthorn and across Hawthorn to Oak. The school, a red brick pile, sullen in aspect, was on the corner. They were like fish, the girls in one pod and the boys in another. They always slowed a little before they got to school, thinking there might be a cancellation and they could go home. Those were the best times, when he and Dougie Henderson would spend the day down below the hill. Snow was the promise of a day off, a kind of gift. The advantage of a small town was that there was always one forbidden place and everyone knew where it was. Small town, small world. In cities there were many such places and no one person could know them all and some were truly dangerous. It had been years since he had visited New Jesper. Dougie had moved away and was living in Denver, selling cars. Lee wondered if the town had changed and if neighborhood boys still defied their parents to prowl along the railroad tracks. Of course they would—unless the memories of the murdered tramp and the assault on Magda Serra were still fresh, and that was doubtful. The children he saw now were hurrying to catch up, to get to school before the bell. The door of the church opened suddenly and parishioners spilled out. They were mostly middle-aged women in hats, bundled against the cold. Through the open door he could hear the piano, a recessional, and it too had the tone and timbre of the blues.

Lee lit a cigarette and finished his coffee, comfortable in the cold, his thoughts turning again to the mallet and chisel and the block of marble and what it would yield or if it would yield anything. Not today. He was finished for today. At times he felt the marble had a life and mind of its own but that was tomorrow's business. He wanted to speed things up but it seemed he worked to a slow-paced clock. Lee felt someone stir nearby and turned abruptly, dropping the cigarette, his fists up.

Ellis and Howard stepped back, alarmed.

You'll catch your death, Ellis said. It's cold. That cotton shirt's not enough.

I didn't notice, Lee said.

How have you been getting on? Howard asked. Everything all right?

Fine, Lee said.

No trouble?

No trouble, Lee said.

You're part of the neighborhood now, Howard said.

I guess that's right.

You understand, it's unusual. Except for the locksmith around the corner and the other one, we don't know his name, the fat one on the run, white people don't live here. And when one moves in, that excites curiosity. But you, you keep to yourself, don't ask questions, and that helps a little bit so far as curiosity's concerned.