Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just Read Free Book Online Page A

house.
    Bert Marks heard her and looked up to see Tommy Ogden standing alone on the porch of his vast domain. He seemed to savor the evening air, so soft, so seductive. The owl cried once again, a kind of swoon. Tommy cocked his head as if listening to distant gunfire. And then he wheeled and stepped inside, leaving the door ajar. Bert remained alone in the driveway, waiting for the denouement that was soon to come. He was thinking of Antietam but listening to the raised voices inside Ogden Hall, Tommy and Marie having at each other. Tommy's bass rumble, Marie's screech.
    And the next sound was an explosion of splintered glass and a moment later Marie's wild laughter, rising and falling and rising again, laughter that went on and on. Bert did not linger. He had heard it before.

Part Two
    T HE TOWN OF New Jesper was located on the western shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago, named for the same eighteenth-century French missionary who had founded the smaller Jesper downstate. A megalomaniacal missionary and sensualist, according to my father, probate judge and civic leader, and self-described amateur historian. The Abbé Jesper left his name wherever he went and he was widely traveled: farther west was Jesperville and other variations north into Wisconsin and Minnesota. Haut Jesper and Lac du Jesper were fashionable fishing camps north of Green Bay. Most of the settlements had long vanished. There was not much history in our New Jesper or around it for my father to explore. Indian tribes had roamed the region for a thousand years, but of them little was known. The Fox and the Sac were peaceable for the most part but after an uprising in the early nineteenth century were expelled from the territory, pushed west and north—and the trail ended there. They were not industrious Indians, leaving little account of themselves; or perhaps they were only discreet and suspicious, clannish like the Roma. They had no written language. They left no high art or architecture of the sort characteristic of the more flamboyant southwestern tribes. Nor had they any military skill. Here and there were burial grounds and odd bits of sculpture from religious sites, not much that was notable or collectible. The Sac and the Fox were presumed to have a nomadic civilization but evidence was scant; at least, not much came down. One thousand years of traveling but no souvenirs.
    My father was not sentimental about the Indians—"damned savages"—but he was perplexed, spooked, as he said, by their mysterious history, how they organized themselves, their family life and religious beliefs, how they got on from day to day. Were there courts of law? My father had a fine appreciation of ambiguity, eccentricity, love, ambition, and spite, having dealt with wills and trusts for most of his adult life, but he could not figure out the Indians. In our part of Illinois they had left virtually nothing of themselves, only now and again an arrowhead or skull discovered in a farmer's field—and who knew if the skull was Sac or Fox or one of the violent pioneer homesteaders, even Abbé Jesper, whose fate was also unknown, though communities in both Wisconsin and Minnesota claimed him.
They were here first,
my father said—and he said it with the awe and respect a scientist might express in reference to a groundbreaking colleague, a Pasteur or a Newton. They were here first yet almost nothing was known for certain. Where is their Stonehenge? My father was a practical man, no way a romantic or friend of the occult. But he did believe that the wandering souls of the Indians were present in New Jesper and the surrounding countryside. The souls were not malevolent. They did not cause grief or misfortune. But they were disappointed and most watchful, especially in the autumn, Indian summer. My father believed they were souls in turmoil, unreconciled with themselves or their territory. This led him to suppose that New Jesper was like a game board with a piece missing,