Rodin's Debutante (8 page)

As it happened, the word sodimmy was not in my father's dictionary. Dougie knew the meaning, though.

ONE MONTH LATER
, almost to the day, another calamity struck our town. My father called from his chambers to tell my mother not to wait dinner for him. He would be along later, bringing some friends with him for a private meeting in his study. My mother said his voice sounded strange on the telephone. At first she did not recognize it. Your father sounded as if he were underwater, she said. I think he had people with him in chambers.

I've never known him to have a meeting at home.

But he didn't want to meet in the courthouse. Too public, he said.

I don't like the sound of it, my mother concluded.

Promptly at nine my father arrived, accompanied by Mayor Bannermann, the police chief, the owner of New Jesper Dry Goods, the president of the First National Bank of New Jesper, the publisher of the
World,
the principal of the high school, and Walter Bing. The corporation counsel for the city would have been present but he was out of town. Six of these eight men, known informally as "the Committee," were the ones who made New Jesper go, whose approval was essential for any civic undertaking, from a new bond issue to the removal of a tree. With them, anything was possible; without them, nothing was. They were second- and third-generation residents, married with families, golf partners; two of them were godfathers to each other's sons. Of course there were rivalries. The mayor and the publisher were at arm's length owing to political differences. The banker and the merchant were at odds because the banker's son and the merchant's daughter had recently divorced, an ugly divorce that went on for months with the usual airing of dirty linen. Still, in any important matter affecting the town they stood together in order to present a united front when the matter, whatever it was, had to be explained to the public. The idea, as I understood it, was to present a fait accompli disguised as a consensus; or perhaps it was the other way around. My father was the de facto chairman, admired for his integrity, even-handedness, and devotion to the town. It has to be said that the police chief and the principal of the high school would not normally be invited to such a gathering. My mother had never met them and had to be introduced. That chore done, the seven grim-faced men were ushered into the study by my father, the door closed behind them.

The night was warm for mid-September. My father opened his windows to admit what night breeze there was. And I, perched in my bedroom window directly above, strained to hear each word. In our community, as in every community large and small, there were the scenes and the behind-the-scenes. The latter was infinitely more interesting, and I was an inquisitive boy.

My father offered coffee or a drink to anyone who wanted one.

They all took coffee except for the police chief, who said he was not thirsty.

I heard the scrape of my father's chair as he moved it from behind his desk, a tactful assertion that for the purposes of this meeting, all men were equal.

There was an awkward silence before my father cleared his throat and said, Perhaps the chief can bring us up to date. What is known and what is not known. The investigation so far. And then he lowered his voice and the few words that followed were inaudible.

Then Chief Grosza gave an audible sigh and said, The girl is in St. Vincent's Hospital, the emergency ward. She's not in good shape. Her wounds are very serious and beyond that she seems to have suffered a nervous collapse. Her mother is with her. The precise whereabouts of the father are unknown. The mother and father are separated and have been for some little while. Some time elapsed before the girl was discovered, perhaps several hours. The timeline is not yet established. Perhaps our principal can speak to that point. At that, Chief Grosza fell silent.

The attack took place in the gym, the principal said. I should say an equipment room just off the gym. A little-used equipment room. There is no cause for anyone to go in there. Question is, what was the girl doing there? We don't know. The principal spoke rapidly and now he was silent, and the conversation became general, several questions at once. Did the equipment room have a lock on the door? Was the door in fact locked? Where precisely was the equipment room located in relation to the gym itself? The answers came quickly and they were longer than they needed to be. Even I understood this was a kind of ballet, a wordy prelude to the heart of the matter.

My father had not spoken.

The president of the bank, known for his brevity, said, What about suspects, Chief?

Our investigation continues, Chief Grosza said.

Are there leads, Chief?

Nothing solid, the chief said. We were not notified until at least two hours after the attack, perhaps longer.

After the rape, you mean.

Yes, it was rape.

Has the girl said anything?

She has not, the chief said.

She is not cooperative?

She is unable to speak. She has not uttered one word.

What is her name?

I would hope we could keep her name out of this for the moment, the principal said, until I have a better fix on what happened.

Her name is Magda Serra, the chief said.

Magda? the banker asked.

The mother is Serbian. The father is Puerto Rican.

And the father's whereabouts are unknown?

He is believed to have returned to Puerto Rico. Earlier this year.

There was once again a confusion of voices, the identity of the father, his employment, his age, his reputation. No one in the room had met the father, who was working as a gas station attendant before his return to Puerto Rico, address unknown. But I was not listening carefully because I knew the girl, a cheerful tenth-grader who had been kept behind one year. Magda was in my freshman math class, not a good student. She was overweight but didn't seem to care. Magda had thinning hair and at the beginning of the term wore a bandanna but the bandanna was in violation of school rules so she was asked to take it off. She always had a smile on her face and a musical lilt to her voice. Lee, will you help me with these equations? I donna unnerstan' equations. And I would walk her through quadratic equations and she always caught on eventually, even as she made plain that she didn't care for the sphere of math, equations or any other part of it. The point was that Magda was foreign and I always suspected she hid inside her language and her Serbian—Puerto Rican background in order to get on from day to day, and in that sense part of her remained invisible. I tried to imagine her in a hospital emergency room, raped and frightened, silent. Who could do such a thing? Everyone liked Magda Serra, even the teachers. Downstairs they were still talking about Magda's father's whereabouts when I heard my father clear his throat.

Can we return to the leads? I cannot believe there are no leads at all. Can you explain, Chief?

We are only at the beginning of the investigation, Chief Grosza said.

Nevertheless, my father said.

We must wait to speak to the girl.

That may take a while, my father said.

Yes, it may.

And in the meantime, you do have leads.

One lead, the chief said.

It would be helpful if you could discuss that lead with us, my father said.

But the chief did not reply. I leaned out the window and saw a yellow shaft of light on the lawn, my father's desk lamp. Now and again a car passed in the street and I heard music from the radio, the normal sounds of a summer night. Magda's face came to me again, round-cheeked, bright blue eyes. Her skin was brown. She was baffled by equations and always seemed to be laughing. Downstairs they knew none of this.

We're trying to help out, Chief, my father said.

The investigation has only just begun, Judge.

Nothing remotely like this has ever happened in New Jesper, my father said. Nothing even close...

The tramp, somebody said. Only weeks ago.

The tramp is not
this.
Something altogether different,
this.
In our own high school. The one I attended and most of us here attended, the one my son attends now. My father's voice rose in indignation. A girl goes to school in the morning and ends up raped in the afternoon. This is outrageous. So I would like to know what progress you've made, if any.

Tell him, the mayor said.

But still the chief was silent.

Or I will, the mayor said.

We have an interview, the chief said, and that was all he said.

With whom? my father asked.

A student, the chief said.

A
student?

A classmate of the girl's, the chief said.

And what did the interview reveal?

The chief was silent a long moment, and when he spoke it was with obvious reluctance. He and the girl had been seeing each other. What he knows is unclear at this time.

Is he in your custody?

He is not.

And why not?

I have nothing to hold him on, the chief said.

So he is free.

Correct, the chief said.

Something in Chief Grosza's tone of voice, perhaps his guardedness, perhaps the look in his eyes, caused my father to pose an unexpected question: Is this boy represented by counsel?

In a manner of speaking, the chief said.

Well, is he or isn't he?

Tell him, the mayor said.

The boy's father is a lawyer, Judge.

Good lord, my father said.

I'll tell you something else, the chief said. The boy didn't do it. I don't think he knows who did do it. He does know the girl. They have been on dates, the movies, that sort of thing. Now you're going to ask me his name and I'm not going to give it. We have pretty much established that this boy was nowhere near school at the time of the attack. My chief of detectives is working that angle. The boy is very upset but has been cooperative. His father has been cooperative. And that's the end of it.

There was another long silence as the men in the room shifted in their chairs.

I'm sorry I pressed you, Chief.

You should be, the chief said.

People did not talk to my father in that tone of voice, and certainly no city employee would think of doing so. I imagined my father's face reddening as he struggled to control himself. It was evident also that the chief of police was furious that he had been led in a direction he did not want to go, bullied first by my father and then by the mayor. But they were the ones who ran things in New Jesper. Chief Grosza was an unusual choice to head the police department, a decorated airborne officer in the war who, at the end, led an interrogation unit in Berlin. He was rumored to have had a difficult war, a survivor of the D-day landing and, later, the Bulge. The chief was tightly wound, slender of build, fit, unsmiling most of the time. He had married a New Jesper girl and when he was discharged he came home to her and applied for the chief's job, then vacant. He was hired, not without misgivings, and grumbling began at once that he ran the police force like an army unit, perhaps too spit-and-polish for a small town police force where years would go by without an officer discharging his weapon or even unholstering one. Still, any chief had to be aware of the various personalities important to the town's welfare, meaning who was related to whom and so forth. Tact was an asset. It took Chief Grosza time to understand the subtleties of law enforcement in New Jesper. The mayor had to explain to him that when a patrolman arrested the son of the bank president for speeding and discovered liquor on his breath he did not arrest the boy for drunken driving. The boy was driven home for parental discipline. The same courtesy was extended to the bank president himself, although in that instance discipline was more or less waived. Chief Grosza understood very well what he was told and did not appreciate it but like any good soldier he saluted and obeyed. My father insisted that the chief was efficient and hard-working and honest in his dealings with the mayor and the city council and his own patrolmen. Still, his personality was unfortunate. He was a difficult man.

Apologize to the judge, the mayor said.

Go to hell, said the chief.

Just a damn minute, my father said.

Hold on, the bank president said. He was hard of hearing and spoke in a voice that could have been heard in the street. Back off right now, Chief. We're working uncharted territory here. We're feeling our way. All we're trying to do is get to the bottom of this awful crime. Find the son of a bitch who did it and put him away. It's not personal, Chief. We all admire your service in the war and the job you've done here. So give us some room. We're all on the same team.

For what it's worth, I agree with the chief. This was the principal of the high school, his reedy voice in unfortunate contrast to the banker's baritone. He had been principal for thirty years, due for retirement. He said, The boy in question is not at all the sort of boy to be involved. In something like this.

My father cleared his throat yet again. He said, So the long and the short of it is that we do not have a suspect.

Correct, the chief said.

And we are unlikely to have one unless and until the girl speaks.

Yes, the chief said.

So the question is, my father went on, what do we do right now? What are the steps we must take? I believe we must take account of our community. The effect of this. The shock of it, frankly.

My father went on in that vein for a minute or more and then the others joined in, everyone except Chief Grosza, the principal, and Walter Bing. I was thinking about the boy being questioned, Joel Dexter. It was surely him. His father was a trial lawyer and he and Magda sat next to each other in math class, often passing notes back and forth. Joel was as hopeless as she was with numbers. That he could have attacked her was preposterous, if only for the reason that he was half her size and a weakling. Also, he was the class clown and had been since the second grade. Magda was the one who laughed loudest at his lame jokes. I remembered reading somewhere that given the proper circumstances anyone is capable of anything. But Joel Dexter was not capable of rape, never in a hundred years.