Rodin's Debutante (2 page)

WHEN HE TURNED TWELVE
years old his father gave him a side-by-side twenty-gauge shotgun, cherrywood stock, a British-made Boss, beautifully balanced and as light as a walking stick. He came to appreciate shooting in bad weather, in the hours following an electrical storm, the ground sodden underfoot, thick with leaves, the air carrying a scorched odor. Nothing moved in the dampness. Tommy stepped with caution, waiting for the stray target. Some creatures were obtuse and impatient, careless in their habits. Tommy was never impatient and sooner or later his discipline was rewarded with a sighting of a squirrel or mallard alone and defenseless, disoriented in the heavy silence. He often stood motionless for an hour at a time waiting for a creature to show itself, and it was in the stand of pines, one afternoon in the late fall, that he had a revelation. Something in his eyesight did not look quite right, a color he had never seen before in the woods. He was standing in the shadows of the white pines and staring dead ahead at a tawny patch where the woods gave onto a cornfield. With his usual deliberation he raised his binoculars to his eyes and found the tawny patch dissolving into a hunter's cap, the bill pulled low; and the cap moved, revealing a bearded face. No one was allowed on Ogden property, for hunting or for any other reason. Tommy believed his domain had been violated. There was no excuse for trespassing. When he raised the Boss he saw the hunter move his shoulders, and then the barrel and telescopic sight of a rifle came into view. So the trespasser was waiting for deer. Then Tommy saw a plume of smoke, indistinct in the gray air. The fool was smoking a cigarette, the one thing above all the other things that was forbidden when stalking deer. A deer would smell tobacco a mile away. The hunter rose to full height, the cigarette in his mouth, the rifle resting barrel-forward on his shoulder. Tommy had a clean shot if he wanted to take it. The range was fifty yards, too far for a twenty-gauge load to be fatal. But the wound would hurt and hurt badly and would not be forgotten, and that would put an end to trespassing.

The hunter's neck might as well have had a bull's-eye drawn on it. Tommy sighted the Boss, then paused at a distant rattle from the trestle followed by the shriek of a whistle, his father's train. When he looked again the trespasser had broken from cover and was running through the cornfield and in a moment was gone. Tommy began to laugh, the scene somehow reminiscent of a vaudeville act. He waited another minute before he turned to work his way through the copse to the great house, dark at dusk, a long Georgian silhouette against the black oaks beyond, trees that had first seen daylight when General Washington was a boy. Ogden Hall had forty-two rooms, including a vast library and a solarium, a garden room and a kitchen nearly the size of a tennis court; and there were two of those next to the swimming pool and the flagstone terrace at the rear of the house where the lawn rolled away to a muddy stream. The railroad had been very good to the Ogden family. Tommy entered by the front door, the house silent, dark within. His mother was somewhere about, knitting or writing letters. Standing in the foyer with its grand piano and six cane-backed chairs for the ensemble that gathered on Sunday for musical evenings, Tommy felt an inhabitant of an antique world that had begun long ago but was vital still, with breath to last at least until tomorrow or the day after. The hush of the room was spoiled only by the hiss of the radiators and the smell of beeswax.

Tommy took off his coat and dropped it on the piano bench and took the stairs two at a time to the second floor and went down the long corridor to his room, the Boss resting on his shoulder. Inside, the door closed, he cleaned and oiled the shotgun and returned it to its case in the corner. Then from his desk he took out the heavy sketchpad and sat on the window seat and began to draw, heavy black lines that described vegetation and soon a bearded face among the branches, difficult to see unless you looked closely and perhaps had an idea what you were looking for. The face had a furtive look, someone who was in a place he ought not to be. Present also was a rifle with a telescopic sight and in the far distance a railroad trestle. Tommy Ogden went long minutes without drawing anything at all, staring at his composition, then making one, two erasures. Twice he dropped the paper to the floor and began again. When the buzzer sounded for dinner he had almost finished the piece but put it aside now. He never hurried his work. He returned the sketchpad to the top shelf of his closet, put the sketch on top of it, and the pens and charcoal pencils on top of that, then closed and locked the door. No one knew of his fascination with drawing. He believed that to share it would be to lose it. Like so much in his life, Tommy's drawing was private.

Every year until he was twenty his father presented him with a firearm on his birthday, and when he turned twenty-one his father died and Tommy had no further need for anyone's largesse. Tommy bought the set of matched Purdeys at auction, staying dollar for dollar with a property developer who was twice his age but much less than half as rich. He asked his mother to come with him to the auction because he did not know the form of things, the signals, how the bidding progressed, and the percentage that went to the house. He did know enough to maintain a stony demeanor, the look that said to his competitors: I am in this forever if need be, so fold your hand now and save yourself the trouble. Lily Ogden explained the procedures and left him alone, moving to the rear of the chandeliered room to watch the bidding. And as she said later, it was thrilling to watch her son, a natural, natural aplomb, ice water in his veins, implacable. Chinoiserie, impressionist canvases, Fabergé eggs, Syrian carpets, and Biedermeier cabinets flew by as Tommy sat quietly, arms folded, his head bent forward as if he were stalking game, awaiting the presentation of the Purdeys. Quite frightening, Lily told a friend, how much her son loved the hunt—or, as he said, shooting and the game that made shooting worthwhile. He rarely spoke of his passion in company because it was no one else's business. The phrase he used was, It's nothing to do with them. I don't know where he came from, Lily said. He is nothing like his father and nothing like me. Then she laughed: Well, maybe a little like me and a little like his father, bless him, who always kept his cards close to his vest. I imagine shooting is what Tommy will do in his life and how fortunate he will never have to work for a living because he has no head for commerce.

This was mostly true. Shooting was Tommy's vocation and everything else in his life seemed incidental, schoolwork, games, the news of the day, even girls. Like his drawing, shooting was personal and he would no more confess to it than a priest would confess to vice, though probably not for the same reason. He believed that people—anyone, anywhere—were eager to take from him what was rightfully his. He believed it as a boy and believed it more strongly as he aged, no doubt the legacy of his father, who maintained that anyone, anywhere was after his money. Friendships were suspect for that reason. The railroad was most presciently sold by his father in the months before the Panic of 1893, the old man explaining to his son that he was uneasy about the capital markets, an orgy of ill-considered speculation with dubious characters in the vanguard. They were scoundrels, connoisseurs of swindle. They would ruin the economy and take the railroad down with it. Lily and Henry Ogden were exceptionally close and when Henry explained his suspicions, Lily urged him to consult her psychic. The psychic was never wrong. Henry followed his wife's advice and when Madame Hauska advised him to sell the railroad at once, without delay, he did so and not long after the market crashed. The old man told the story again and again to his son, proposing that the psychic was evidence of the existence of a spirit world that trumped Wall Street; and he never failed to add that he had persuaded the buyers of the railroad to lease him his private car for a dollar a year, ten-year minimum. They were happy to do it because they thought they had a bargain, even though the terms were cash, no notes, no bonds. The psychic had insisted on it, knowing very well that Mr. Ogden cherished his car and would be unhappy without it.

Tommy came to know every tree and trail on the estate, a monotonous terrain where the horizon was invisible. In that part of Illinois, well beyond the city's monstrous clamor, the land was flat as a plate, an anonymous kingdom of farms, small-holdings, and the one market town nearby that contained a restaurant, a movie house, and the station that served the Ogden railroad. A hardware store and a barber shop completed the ensemble. Ogden Hall was the only estate of note in the vicinity, the site deliberately chosen by Henry Ogden for its distance from the glitter of the horse country west of the city. He disliked horses almost as much as he disliked glitter. The Ogdens were seldom seen except for the boy Tommy—an impolite boy, badly mannered, abrupt—who stopped by the hardware store every few weeks to buy ammunition. Never a pleasantry. Never a hello, never a goodbye. He spoke two words only: Charge it. As time went by, his logbook filling up with his precise recording of creatures shot dead, the date and time, mallards, geese, deer, muskrats, squirrels, rabbits, and one German shepherd he had mistaken for a wolf, Tommy wondered what shooting would be like in the mountains or the high plains of the West or the equatorial jungles, dangerous ground, dangerous animals, perhaps a fairer test of the shooter's skills and nerve. But that was the future. For the time being he was content on the estate, familiar ground. At night you could see Chicago's sulfurous glow to the east. The market town, Jesper, had a rustic appeal, slow-moving, people going about their business normally. The barber gave an honest cut. The people in Jesper talked too much but that was a rural conceit and easily ignored. There were other small
towns round and about, Hilling to the south and Quarterday to the north. Hilling was home to the German taxidermist, an old-world figure who spoke little English but was a wizard with fur and feathers. In Hilling the sidewalks were deserted at dusk. There was one peculiar attraction a few miles north of Jesper, a nightclub called Villa Siracusa. Incongruous place for a nightclub, in a cornfield an hour's drive from Chicago. The parking lot was crowded with black Packards and Cadillacs, many of them chauffeur-driven. In the spring and summer and early fall, when the weather was benign, the chauffeurs sat at an outside table that was reserved for them. A waiter was on call to fetch drinks. Patrons crossed a humpback bridge—an unsuccessful attempt to replicate the Ponte dei Sospiri in Venice—over a pond to reach Villa Siracusa, named for the ancestral city of the family that owned it. The façade was a gaudy marriage of stucco and steel and lit by red and yellow spotlights that could not be seen from the main road a half mile distant. Inside, the loggia gave way to a lounge with tables and a long oak bar. Villa Siracusa was notorious in the neighborhood, something mysterious and surreptitious about it, and one evening early in their acquaintance Bert Marks explained. Bert was an occasional patron. I'll call ahead, he said, let them know you're coming. The Villa is a kind of club and like most clubs they're suspicious of strangers. The bartender's name is Ed and he'll want a moment or two of conversation before he clues you in. Give him some money. The action doesn't start until ten or eleven and for God's sake eat before you go. The food's terrible. So at eleven on a Thursday night in October, Tommy Ogden installed himself at the long bar and waited for Ed to finish his conversation with a sheriff's deputy at one of the tables. The deputy was in uniform, a pearl-handled revolver in a holster on his hip. Ed was talking and the deputy was listening and nodding without enthusiasm; and when he saw Tommy at the bar he nodded stiffly and smiled, saying something to Ed. Tommy continued to stare at the deputy's back until he pushed his chair away from the table and hurried from the room. There were a dozen customers, all of them men, a few of them even larger than Tommy. However, none of them were dressed in a soft tweed Norfolk jacket and gray flannel trousers, tattersal vest, bow tie. None of them had blond hair and blue eyes. When Ed made his way at last to Tommy he found a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. Tommy said, Bert Marks sent me.

Ed said, You know Deputy Ralph?

I know him, Tommy said. We meet now and then on the highway.

That's what he said, Ed said.

My car is faster than his but sometimes I let him catch up.

Yes. That's what Ralph said.

In a moment Tommy was through the inconspicuous door at the far end of the room and inside the casino, tables of craps and blackjack, baccarat and roulette. The gaming tables were crowded with players, their conversation raucous and punctuated by the
ka-thump
of slot machines arrayed along one wall. Next to the slot machines was a caisse where chips were bought and cashed in. When Ed turned to leave, Tommy said, I don't want this room. I want the other room. You know the room I want. When Ed hesitated he found another twenty dollars in his palm and presently a curtain parted and Tommy found himself in a parlor, a trio of musicians playing quietly in an alcove. A bartender polished glasses behind a shiny steel bar. Young women were seated here and there on sofas and overstuffed leather chairs that looked as if they belonged at a downtown men's club. The women were staring at Tommy and smiling. He looked as if he had just arrived from a golf course or a racetrack and they knew at once that he could pay the freight, whatever the freight turned out to be.

Tommy took his time, inspecting each of the women in turn, attractive women, well turned out, big-boned country girls. Bert had told him that most of the girls were from farming communities in the immediate vicinity, two towns in particular that had been hard hit by falling prices and mediocre yields of corn and soybeans. The Midwest had been in a half drought for most of the past decade and in thrall to the brokers of the Board of Trade in Chicago. The towns were depressed, without life, and the girls were looking for a way out. Their parents had grown listless, worn down by hard work and discouraged at the prospects. All the boys had left home seeking work elsewhere, far downstate or in the West, the army. The way of the world, Bert said, not a damned thing to be done about it. One girl, almost thirty, was a sort of supervisor and talent scout for Villa Siracusa. She was from one of the distressed towns and had recruited others, friends from high school. Word had gone around and before long girls from the farming towns were sending messages asking if there was work "where you are." They always sent photographs of themselves, often in gowns made by their mothers for graduation day and the prom that night. Anything to get away from the farm. Many of them sent money home, like immigrants from Ireland or Italy, claiming they had found work as shop girls at Field's or Montgomery Ward and that business was good in Chicago. Tommy looked at them now, eight round-faced girls and one tall brunette in a black floor-length gown, a rope of pearls around her slender throat, smoking a cigarette and smiling nicely. She had a beautiful clear complexion, one Lily would have called peaches-and-cream. She looked city rather than country, not because of the dress and the pearls but because of the way she stood and the frankness of her look.