Rodin's Debutante Read Online Free PDF

of them in turn, ending with Marie. Her face was in deep shadow, almost invisible. He sought her a moment but she was out of reach in the darkness.
    He said, Listen carefully. I don't like to repeat myself. I have decided to found a school. First class, everything first class all the way. A school for boys, midwestern boys of good family to show those bastards in the East what a real school looks like and how it conducts its affairs. That school will be located on this property, in this house, and of course the surroundings. It will accept boys who have had trouble fitting in elsewhere, boys of ability who had been unable to find their place in the world. Or put another way: boys who know perfectly well their place in the world but find it denied to them. I know what I'm talking about. I went to seven boarding schools, three in one year. I was said to be unruly, not a team player. A rotten apple, out of sync. I was out of sync wherever I went but I didn't mind because I've always been out of sync. We Ogdens are different, you see. We have a different metabolism. My father may have minded because he had to read the snotty letters from the headmasters, their bills of particulars. One headmaster—a minister of God, no less, a Presbyterian from Ipswich—called me mutinous, as if his god damned school was a vessel on the high seas and I was Fletcher Christian. I laughed in his face. I threatened him. I frightened him, as a matter of fact, because I was big for my age and did not respond well to criticism. Naturally I always had a firearm with me, my little peashooter, the .410. They frowned on that. They did not permit firearms in the dorm. No firearms, no whiskey, no cigarettes, no girls, no visitors. These schools were penitentiaries. I have no use for them. My school will have a fine, open-minded headmaster and an open-minded staff, men who well understand the way the world works and can communicate this knowledge. Tommy thumped his fist on the table and fell silent.
    What way is that, Tommy? Marie asked.
    It isn't a god damned sailing ship, Tommy replied.
    Yes, but explain how the world works. I've always wondered. Your view.
    Tommy moved his shoulders, glowering. He said, If you have to ask you'll never understand, exactly like jazz music. He had heard the remark from a musician Chez Siracusa, an apt lesson for so many things in life. Not that Marie would get it. Getting it was not her long suit. Marie preferred argument.
    I'm afraid I don't quite understand, Marie said with a little strangled laugh. She moved her head forward out of the shadow and into the bright bath of candlelight. Surely you can't be saying that your fine young men who've been cruelly denied their place in the world will be content with—enigma. That would never do, Tommy. You must do much, much better than that.
    And now Tommy foundered. Marie was a scourge, a plague upon the earth. She was an agent of discord. He glared at her, her glittering eyes and her half smile. She threw her head back, looking down her nose at him, and he supposed she was practicing her pose for Maître Rodin. Hard to recollect now, but there was a time when Marie was a sport, easy mannered, easy to get on with, easily amused, comfortable with silence. She loved the field and was an excellent wing shot, really a beautiful shot and wonderful-looking in her high leather boots and canvas pants. She wore a green British army—issue sweater and a black beret, a teal-blue ascot at her throat, yellow-lensed French aviator glasses on her nose. He watched her take two pheasants in one pass, clean shots both, one second apart. That was in Scotland, a shooting party of twelve. Tommy was the stranger but Marie made him feel welcome, proposing that they pair up together, an idea that horrified him until he saw her shoot. She shot like a man and drank like one too.
    Their first night together she told him that she preferred the company of men, their jokes and laughter, their rough edges,