Rodin's Debutante (7 page)

LOOKING BACK
on my childhood I am surprised that our parents allowed Dougie and me to roam unsupervised down below the hill. My father spent his childhood in the house we lived in and I do know that he had fond memories of the wild terrain and unexpected encounters with animals. My air rifle was a hand-me-down from him. It was my proudest possession, though I did not have it with me that day we met Earl Minning, and I am certain it would have made no difference if I had. My father wanted to believe that New Jesper had not changed since his own untroubled youth. And it was true that the iceman arrived with blocks of ice on his horse-drawn wagon and some of the streets on the north side of town were still gaslit. Every Friday morning the cutler arrived to sharpen our knives. The Victorian courthouse was unchanged. My father occupied the same chambers as his father when he was a probate court judge, and many of the same photographs hung on the walls and my grandfather's law books crowded the oak shelves on the dark side of the room. A six-foot-high grandfather clock occupied one corner and a hat rack of deer antlers another. He wrote his serious opinions in longhand at a standup desk, his routine ones spoken into a Dictaphone and transcribed by his clerk.

My father was forty years old when he married my mother. She was barely twenty, a downstate girl in New Jesper visiting her aunt. The aunt gave a dinner party, invited my father, and he and my mother were married one month later and I followed nine months after that. My mother was called Melody, most apt because she was always humming a tune. My father was a profoundly conservative man, sober perhaps to a fault. He avoided excitement and believed that unpleasantness should be kept out of sight, especially from women and children. In a sense his greatest wish was that tomorrow be much like today, or, better still, yesterday. Like many conservatives he was a pessimist. His business, supervising wills and trusts, did not discourage him in this view. He had watched people try to control their money from the grave, their hands reaching up to grandchildren and beyond. There were only four or five truly rich people in New Jesper and they all wanted a say after they'd gone. They made the money, they had the right to determine its distribution, hence wills that were bewildering in their complexity and too often a contradiction of human nature. Now and again my father would receive a will from one of the North Shore rich and be astounded at its size and labyrinthine byways and spiteful codicils. Their Chicago lawyers learned soon enough that they required local counsel to navigate the heavy weather in the chambers of Judge Erwin Goodell. My mother was always amused at my father's droll accounts of proceedings in his courtroom. When I came to know him as a man as well as a father he was already deep in middle age. He believed in home rule, the town, the neighborhood, the second-floor bedroom. I am bound to say that this cast of mind led to innocence as to the dangers of the world. His courtroom was not the world.

I am sure that in some sentimental region of his mind my father believed it would be wrong to declare the area down below the hill as off-limits to his son. It would be the same as declaring boyhood itself off-limits, an admission that New Jesper had become unmanageable and somehow sinister, barbarians in charge. New Jesper would be no different from Chicago, gang-ridden, absent of civic virtue, altogether corrupt. Certainly no place to raise a family in comfort and safety. Certainly no place to grow old among neighbors you had known your entire life. New Jesper would not go to the dogs on my father's watch and therefore his son and his son's friend could roam down below the hill as much as they liked. Be watchful, Lee, my father said. Take care. There were tramps in his day too, though perhaps not so many. My father customarily delivered his lectures in the early evening, often while listening to Sidney Bechet on the phonograph in his study. He was a devotee of blues music. Colored music, he called it. Soulful music. The genuine article.

THINGS CHANGED FOR GOOD
after two incidents that occurred within one month of each other. The year was 1946. They were unrelated incidents but always spoken of together as if they were somehow linked, and a forecast of disorder. My father called it breakdown. A tramp was found dead near the railroad tracks not a quarter mile from our house. The tramp was badly beaten and, it seemed, tortured. The police had no leads, and the chief was quoted in the newspaper as saying it was the worst crime he had ever seen or heard of and he had spent a harrowing year in Europe with the airborne and was no stranger to atrocity. I read the paper avidly but understood that some details of the killing were being withheld. Indeed there was no mention of torture, a word my father had used in private conversation with my mother. The report of the killing in the
New Jesper World
was nothing like the reports of crime in the Chicago papers, one lurid particular after another. The Chicago papers did not cover the tramp killing because he was, after all, only a tramp and not a socialite or gangster. His name was unknown. No one knew where he came from. His destination was unknown. All that was certified was that he was male, Caucasian, brown-eyed, middle-aged. Our police chief admitted there were no suspects while at the same time vowing to clear New Jesper of tramps. Tramps were no longer welcome in the city, he said, as if it were all but certain that the killer himself was a tramp and that tramps generally constituted a threat to the good order of the community. The first duty of civil authority was to keep the town safe from lawless elements.

The story made the afternoon edition of the
World.
My father came home to dinner that evening much subdued. I could discern his mood by the way he closed the front door, softly, with barely a click of the latch. He was dressed in his usual courtroom uniform: a doubled-breasted blue suit, white shirt, and foulard bow tie. He looked exhausted, his gray hair mussed as if he had passed his hand through it again and again. I thought also that he looked defeated by the events of the day but I believe now that I had misapprehended things. My father was seething with anger. He collapsed into his big wing chair and accepted an old-fashioned from my mother; they always had one cocktail before dinner, which was served precisely at six-thirty. That night six-thirty came and went while they drank their cocktail and then had another. I always sat with them as they recounted their days and asked me about mine. But that night they sat in uncomfortable silence until my father turned to me.

Go upstairs, Lee. Finish your homework.

I've done my homework. I saw the story in the paper—

Check it again, son.

Always when there was an unusual or unexpected event in town I could count on my father to explain it to me. He seemed to know everything about politics and government and therefore he knew the story behind the story. There always was one, and it was rarely the version printed in the
World.
His idea was that we had a government of laws, not of men. But the men made the laws so—was there a difference? But from the look on his face I knew this story-behind-the-story would remain mysterious, at least to me.

Yes, sir, I said.

But I left my bedroom door open and tried to listen as my father related the day's events to my mother, his voice barely above a whisper. The facts were too shocking to speak out loud. I did manage to hear my mother gasp at what she was told and declare, That cannot be. What a terrible thing! Oh, that poor man. I wondered if the dead man was one of the tramps Dougie and I had come across on our afternoon adventures—the
World
did not publish a photograph—but I had no way of knowing. Of course the name that came to mind was Earl Minning, from the encounter years before, but surely he would have moved on. Tramps still arrived at our back door, hat in hand, to ask for food. My father's voice rose in anguish. This sort of thing did not happen in New Jesper except rarely in the colored section, always described in the
World
as a domestic dispute. And then my father used the word "torture" and another word whose definition I did not know but resolved to learn as soon as I could discreetly consult the dictionary in my father's study downstairs. They were quiet now, sipping drinks in the living room. I heard the tinkle of ice as my father refilled his glass, something he rarely did. I thought it safe to return, so I made a noise in my room and more noise as I came downstairs.

My mother and father were staring bleakly at each other.

My father turned to me and said, I assume you saw the paper.

Yes, I said. There was a killing.

The report in the paper was not complete.

It wasn't?

No. There was more to it. Quite a lot more. Now listen to me, my father said and steepled his fingers as he often did when rendering a verdict from the bench. His words: "rendering a verdict." I came to know his steepled fingers as well as I knew my own, for he often asked my mother to bring me to court when an especially important case was at its conclusion. He thought it important that I see how justice was done in New Jesper, the procedures and the precedence of things, the special language, and his own role at the center of events, for surely that would be my life too when the time came. He said now, You are not to go down below the hill ever again except in the company of an adult. Is that clear?

I was crushed. No more adventuring with Dougie Henderson. No more express trains thundering north. No more air rifle and, especially, no more inspections of the factory beyond the chain-link fence where secret work was still being done. For me at that moment New Jesper became like any other small midwestern town, a cliché—tiresome, narrow-minded, and boring. I said to my father, Yes, sir.

Ever, my father said again.

What happened? I said. I was miserable. I think I was near tears.

One of the tramps was killed, he said.

But I knew that. I said, How?

Murdered, he said. Never mind how.

It was a terrible killing, my mother said.

I spoke with Dougie's father this afternoon, my father said. We are in agreement. You boys are forbidden to leave the neighborhood. And if you see a tramp anywhere nearby you are to call me at once. I doubt that will happen. The tramps have been sent a message. This outrage has changed everything.

What message? I asked.

They are not welcome here, my father said.

But—where will they go?

Away, my father said. Not here.

I waited for him to say more, but he fell silent. My mother slipped away into the kitchen to finish dinner preparations. I could not see what any of this had to do with Dougie and me, but it was obvious that my father had said all he was prepared to say. The subject was closed. I asked him if he wanted to listen to the radio as we often did in the evenings. He liked to hear the political news from Lowell Thomas and Gabriel Heatter. But he only shook his head. We sat in silence a minute or more, my father pulling slowly at his drink. The ice had melted.

I know how much it means to you, he said at last.

Yes, it does.

It was always a special place, the railroad and the marsh. In my day there were muskrats, ugly animals. There was a herd of deer also, and pheasant. Johnnie Regan and I made the path that's there to this day, took us all fall and half the winter. It was a wilderness. I guess to Johnnie and me it represented the outside world, so mysterious and dangerous, although we could not have said what the danger was. All my life I've lived near the railroad tracks, the train whistles as familiar to me as an ambulance siren is to someone who lives in the city and come to think about it both the whistle and the siren gave a kind of warning. Watch out. Take care. My father smiled suddenly, a looking-backward smile that was almost boyish. Johnnie and I used to pretend there were panthers in the underbrush, huge black creatures that had escaped from a circus. They were so fleet that they appeared only as shadows. They were something, our imaginary panthers. Whenever we came across a dead animal we knew the panthers had killed it. And I'll tell you something else, Lee. Johnnie Regan and I used to smoke cigarettes down below the hill. We had a particular place we went to, near the—

Old root cellar, I said.

Things don't change much, my father said with a grunt.

We once saw a tramp sleeping in there.

You didn't bother him?

No, we went away. And when we came back he was gone.

Riding the rails, my father said.

I guess so. We met another tramp once, asked us for cigarettes and then he asked for money. We gave him a cigarette but we didn't give him the money.

What happened then?

He was angry. He came after us.

You should have told me, my father said.

We outran him. He was mean-looking, though. He told us his name and said he had children living down south. He needed money to see his children.

Did you believe him?

Yes I did. His name was Earl Minning.

When was this? my father asked.

A few years ago. We never saw him again. I'm going to miss our travels down below the hill. Dougie, too. I sure wish you'd change your mind. You had your panthers and we had Japanese spies. There's this, though. We don't go down there as much as we used to. But it's good knowing it's there. You once called New Jesper closed in.

Did I? Well, it is.

Everybody knows everybody else, I said.

They certainly do, he said.

Down below the hill you can be yourself.

Unsupervised, he said.

Yes, I said.

We had a nice town to grow up in, my father said after a moment. Nice for me and your mother, nice for you. I thought New Jesper would be nice also for your children, my grandchildren when they came along. Your mother and I have often spoken of it, the advantages of a small town where everyone was acquainted and things are on an even keel. Your family's nearby. You didn't have to lock your doors at night. You left the keys in the car. And if your neighbor was in distress you helped him out with a hamper of food or a donation. If there was illness you took the kids for a while, happy to do it. We had an expression, "Safe as houses." Now we're no better than that goddamned Chicago. I'm sick at heart that this sort of thing can happen here in New Jesper. My God, what have we come to?