Rodin's Debutante Read Online Free PDF Page B

their camaraderie, their effortlessness. When he asked her what she meant by that, she said that men were extemporaneous; not all men, of course, some were swine. Still, she said, men were fun to be with. He was delighted when she said that she liked the smell of men, sweat and musk whatnot, a song of the earth. That first year they had wonderful times shooting in Africa and the American Far West. At night they relaxed with a drink and gin rummy, at which she was adept. Marie had a phenomenal memory for cards and much else. She never forgot a slight. She told him about growing up in Tucson, where her father was a successful prospector. Her mother died when Marie was young and she missed her every day, a woman of the frontier with a wild streak. She never forgot a slight, either. At that time Tucson was the frontier or close enough to it, a violent country of stark beauty. Marie killed her first rattler at age fifteen, a specimen diamondback six feet long. She and her father spent weekends on horseback, shooting rattlers and gila monsters and the buffoonish and harmless javelina. Marie knew how to take care of herself from a very young age. She said she wanted to be cared for just enough but not too much. There was a line Tommy must not cross. She had always been independent and that was why they must keep their money separate, separate accounts, different banks. She would handle the household expenses and the rest was his. She knew he would never do anything to harm her and that was important. He understood that she would disappear from time to time, not for long; and he had the same privilege.
    Tommy listened to her with envy, this girl who was shooting rattlesnakes when he was shooting sparrows. What a life it must have been in the desert near Tucson, as unforgiving as any terrain on the face of the earth. They had driven through it on their way to Idaho, stopping once to walk into the desert at dusk. There was not a single plant that did not sport thorns or needles. Terrible country, dry and desolate, though not to Marie. After the wonderful time in Africa and the American Far West they returned to Jesper and Ogden Hall and things went sour because she never shut up about Tucson and the life she had led there, her heroic father and wandering mother fortified by the example of the noble yet put-upon redskin. Marie claimed her mother was part Apache. Marie's stories of her youth reminded him of Rudyard Kipling at his most florid, didactic, and hysterical. To Marie the West was a kind of Eden before the Fall. Tommy watched her now, tapping her finger on the tabletop as she awaited his reply.
    He ignored her and turned to Bert. He said, My school will have all the finest equipment, scientific laboratories, a gymnasium, a splendid library. I have a few thousand volumes already in place, complete sets of Balzac and Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson bound in leather. Why, the pages are uncut! The books are pristine, never read by anyone living or dead. You've seen the library, room enough for forty boys at least. There're rooms enough for thirty classrooms and an office suite for the headmaster. There's open land for football fields and a polo pitch, even a nine-hole golf course. Never cared much for golf myself but they say it's the coming thing in our area. The tennis courts are already in place. I'm thinking also of a regulation shooting range in the basement. I'll convert the useless stables into a dormitory. There isn't any good reason why a boy from Illinois or Indiana has to go to Massachusetts or New Hampshire to receive a brilliant education. I've thought it through, you see. And that's what I intend to do, establish the finest boys' preparatory school in the land. Assemble a faculty that's second to none. I mean men of the world who know the score. Men who've been through the mill themselves—and here Bert Marks and Harry Billington glanced at each other because the unspoken clause in the sentence was "as I have been."