Rodin's Debutante (21 page)

I don't live here, Lee said. I work here.

Oh, yes, we know, Ellis said. He looked thoughtfully at the sky and sighed heavily. I believe we'll have real snow by the end of the day. Cold too, that wind from the lake. Comes all the way from Minnesota. Beyond Minnesota. Sometimes I wonder what made us settle here, my God it's a long train ride. But I know the answer to that. You should get a nice warm coat.

Lee said, What's the answer?

Jim Crow, Ellis said. You see, we're from Mississippi. That's where Jim lives. He's here too, but not quite so much.

What does that mean? Lee said. Jim Crow.

Ellis looked at Howard and they both smiled. Trouble, Ellis said. It means trouble. But you don't have to worry about it. So let's return to the matter at hand.

Lee blinked. He was unaware that there was a matter at hand.

Everyone wonders what you do here, Howard said.

I carve things, Lee said. I carve marble. I'm here because the basement's cheap, thirty-five dollars a month. The heat works.

That's good. It's good to be warm in the Windy City.

Steam heat, Lee said.

Even better, Howard said.

We want to ask you a question, Ellis said.

Go ahead, Lee said.

It's in the nature of a favor, Howard said. Ellis will explain.

We have some money from the city, Ellis said. As you know, there's an election just around the corner and City Hall thought they should make a contribution to the neighborhood so's to make certain that things go well at ballot time. And thanks to our fine congressman there'll be a little federal money because the election concerns them too, up there in that Washington. And a generous contribution from folks who work at the university. This is our plan. We intend to have a clinic on this street, next block over. Open nights and weekends so when people are sick they have a place to go. A place where injuries could be treated. Of course serious cases would be forwarded at once to County Hospital, where they have facilities, an emergency room and so forth and so on, x-ray machines, and the like. We wondered if you could help us out, Mr. Goodell.

Lee, he said.

We thought you could help us out, seeing as how you're part of the neighborhood.

I don't have any money, Lee said.

Howard smiled and shook his head, murmuring, No, no.

I don't know anything about medicine, Lee said.

You don't have to, Howard said. We have trained professionals. Doctors who volunteer their time and registered nurses and so forth and so on.

We have to have someone who can keep records, Ellis said. Log people in and log them out. Make sure the files are maintained. Take their insurance cards if they have insurance, which most of them won't. Our community distrusts insurance companies and doesn't have money for the premiums if they did trust them, so they'll need help with the forms. That's what we need.

Keeping records, Howard said. We thought you would be good at that.

Why? Lee said.

You're up there at the university. That's what they teach you, isn't it? Those professors we read about. And I'll bet you're a fine student, Lee. You must be, to spend so much time here in the neighborhood. We already have a volunteer for the weeknights. So we're only talking about two nights a week, Saturday and Sunday. I'll bet you'd have time for that.

I wouldn't be good at it, Lee said.

How do you know? You haven't tried!

Some things you know, Lee said. Instinct.

We were hoping you could help us out, Ellis said. He smiled, most friendly, most ingratiating, and not giving one inch. The street was mostly empty now, the children in their classrooms. A bus lumbered by, filled with women. A very old man emerged from the church, looked at the sky, and waved at Ellis and Howard. He shouted something unintelligible and Ellis and Howard both laughed. A private joke, Lee surmised. And a private language for the private joke. He lit a cigarette and watched the snow fly, imagining himself as a clerk at the clinic, logging people in and logging them out, keeping track of medical histories, making sense of private language, all-night affairs surely. He had no desire to clerk and no particular wish to devote his weekend evenings to sick people, none of them known to him. He supposed he lacked civic spirit. Something perverse about it, Lee thought. He drew a breath and saw the labyrinth in front of him and knew there was no escape. Ellis and Howard were clever men.

Come with us, have a look at our clinic, Howard said.

It's only up the street a little, said Ellis.

Five minutes, Howard said.

You'll have to forgive the looks of it, Ellis said.

The cleaners are due next week, said Howard.

Maybe you could answer a question for me, Lee said.

Certainly, Howard said.

The boy who cut me. What was his name?

Oh, Howard said, that's in the past. That's old news.

All the same, Lee said, I'd like to know.

That's information that could cause trouble, Ellis said.

No trouble, Lee said. I wouldn't tell anyone.

You would keep the name to yourself?

I would, Lee said.

The boy's name is Topper, Ellis said.

Last name? Lee said.

The name he goes by is Topper, Howard said.

Give me a minute, Lee said.

He went back inside, put a chamois cloth over the marble, picked up his coat, locked the basement door, and joined Ellis and Howard for the walk up the street. They were animated, describing plans for examining rooms and a small operating room for emergencies. Someone had given them a four-foot-high Mosler safe to store dangerous drugs. The women of the neighborhood were especially enthusiastic at the prospect of a place to go for aches and pains, arthritis and diabetes, problems with their bowels; and for the younger ones, prenatal examinations. They hoped the clinic would be friendly and comfortable, unlike the industrial medicine practiced at County Hospital downtown, in and out in fifteen minutes and they were not polite about it. You had to wait hours before being seen and the staff was always rushed. Somehow they were always at the end of the line.

Ellis, Howard, and Lee paused in front of the building, constructed of clapboard, two stories high, conspicuously vacant. Two of the front windows were broken and trash had accumulated on the stoop. Two cats fled at once. It had begun life as a two-bedroom house but Lee guessed it had had many lives. Ellis produced a key and they stepped inside a dark room, the broken windows so narrow they admitted little light. The prospective waiting room was the size and hexagonal shape of a country parlor, peeling wallpaper, a small chandelier fixed to the ceiling. The room could hold no more than ten or twelve people. In one corner was a plain wooden desk of the sort schoolteachers were issued. All the room lacked was a pencil sharpener and a blackboard.

In a dark corner was a pile of rags, including a threadbare blanket that moved as Lee looked at it. A bare foot showed itself, then an ankle, a languorous movement, and as quickly withdrew. Ellis stepped to the blanket and carefully pulled it back, revealing first an empty bottle of gin and a ragged pair of hands and at last a woman of indeterminate age sleeping soundly. Howard took a good long look and sighed. The woman's face was badly scratched, her hair a wiry thicket. Ellis pulled at the blanket again, then quickly put it back. She appeared to be bare above the waist. Ellis looked at Howard and shook his head, murmuring something unintelligible. Howard said, Poor soul. Ellis said, We'll let her sleep. He stepped to the closet door and looked inside. Then he opened the door to the corridor and looked up and down, no sign of life. The woman said something in her sleep, a kind of croon. Ellis moved the blanket again so that she could breathe more easily. They both stood quietly a moment. Lee said, Shouldn't we get help? It's hard to know where help would come from, Howard said. The police, Lee said. The police would not be helpful, Howard said. We'll think of something. Meanwhile, we have to get these windows repaired. Really, Lee said, shouldn't we call someone? But that question went unanswered. Howard stepped to the desk and rapped it twice with his knuckles.

That's your desk, he said.

We'll get you a good chair, Ellis said.

And a telephone and a typewriter, Howard said.

From the federal funds, Ellis said with a wink.

THAT AFTERNOON
, enduring a lecture on
Leviathan,
Lee remembered the long-ago evening at his house in New Jesper eavesdropping on his father and the other important men of the town discussing the assault on Magda Serra, her injuries and the terrible aftermath, willing themselves not to listen to the details of the assault, as if hearing them would be itself a contamination, too toxic to bear. But in the end they listened, and Lee remembered the stricken silence and the throat-clearing as attention turned to Alfred Swan and his newspaper. Swan's mulishness. Swan's responsibilities. Within a few days the story was all over the school, spoken in whispers, including the appalling particulars; and many of those, Lee knew, were invented. No one wanted to plead ignorance so the stories grew wilder as the days passed and then, lacking fresh information, they died away. What remained was an uneasy void. Lee was unable to say whether the community was better off not knowing than knowing. His father believed that it was. He was convinced of it. The word he used was morale, as if New Jesper were an army in the field facing a dangerous enemy. The judge did not give the enemy a name but his German forebears would—
schrecklichkeit.
Frightfulness. Ellis and Howard were similarly interested in discretion but not for the same reason. Howard said the police would not be helpful. In that he was surely correct. They would take care of the destitute woman in their own way, and that way was none of Lee's business because he was not of the community. Lee believed that Ellis and Howard were—abashed. Embarrassed by what they found with Lee as a witness. Something of that was present in New Jesper too.

He wished he had pressed the point and angry that he hadn't: Call the police, call an ambulance. But Howard and Ellis were men three times his age and kindly in their own way. Lee was an outsider and in no position to insist on anything. Who was he to lecture anyone? Lecturing was not his métier, obsessed as he was with his hammer and chisel and the conscience of marble. He wondered if the remorseless pursuit of the frightful made you a better man. Maybe it only made you wised-up, another thing altogether. He wondered what Magda Serra would have to say in her own behalf. Her opinion was not known. She had gone away to another part of the country. Her mother had not been heard from. They were the ones directly concerned and certainly Magda would not have enjoyed seeing her name in the paper with all the relevant details, her reputation slandered. Yet her sense of outrage and, he supposed, violation would make a newspaper article beside the point. And if she were of a particular temperament she would want everything laid out, no detail too small or too intimate to be ignored. Do you want to know what happened? This is what happened. The public's right to know. Lee supposed that in New Jesper the story was a dead letter, forgotten along with the death of the anonymous tramp, and he had no idea how Magda would react to that. Perhaps not at all. Perhaps what New Jesper remembered or did not remember would be a matter of indifference to her. In that one sense the outrage committed upon her was strictly personal. Lee heard his name called and looked up to listen to a question about the ethics of Thomas Hobbes. He answered the question and went back to his recollections, to no good resolution. He wondered if events at the clinic would enlighten him. He suspected that his thoughts on the matter of Magda Serra were about to clarify. Lee realized that he had led a protected life growing up in the house on the hill, the vast lake beyond. When a tramp came to the door he was given an apple and sent on his way. The police protected the community and when there was a question, any question at all, the chief was summoned to discuss the way ahead with your father and his friends. A consensus was reached. The lid stayed on. Lee wondered if this protected life was the best preparation for Chicago's hard knuckles, but he knew the answer to that. There was no good preparation for Chicago.

Remember Hobbes, the professor said. Kind, timid, and tall. Believed in the submission of the people to the state, be it king or parliament. On permanent sentry duty for the Establishment, friend and retainer to dukes and earls. First-rate mind. Played a keen game of tennis to the very end of his long, long life. Wrote his autobiography in Latin verse. I believe he was more sociologist than philosopher.

But either way, he is very important.

Next week, Goodell will explain why.

THE FIRST FEW WEEKENDS
at the clinic were slow and Lee was able to become acquainted with the staff, Dr. Petitbon and the nurses, Eloise and Pearl. They worked at Cook County General and Dr. Petitbon had a separate private practice in Kenwood. All three had signed on for six months, weekends only. They showed Lee the forms and taught him the routine, patient when he was slow to catch on. Pearl said, If they don't want to answer a specific question let it pass; just try to get the vital statistics. When Pearl asked him what he studied at the university and Lee replied Great Bookkeeping, she laughed and laughed.

Dr. Petitbon said that business was slow because the neighborhood was suspicious of the intent of the clinic. They were reluctant even to give their names, worried that medical histories or other personal data would be collected and fall into the wrong hands, perhaps shared with the police, who already had more information than they needed or was healthy for them to have. Lee himself was the object of particular suspicion until Ellis and Howard reminded everybody that Lee had a basement room up the street and had lived among them for almost a year. There were no complaints about the young student, always polite and friendly but not too friendly. Most important, he kept to himself and did not ask idle questions. Neither did he volunteer information about himself.