Remember Ben Clayton (13 page)

She looked out the window at the corral, where a solitary night horse shivered in the cold. The pasture grass and the spindly mesquite branches shone with frost. She was cold, and still unsettled from her dream. When she looked at her travel clock she saw it was four thirty in the morning. She could try to go back to sleep but she did not like the idea of lying here alone in the dark, and she knew that in only a half hour or so the household would be stirring anyway, George’s Mary getting out the biscuit pan and Lamar Clayton clomping along the floorboards in his boots. So she dressed and walked out into the parlor and then into the kitchen for a glass of water. It was dark but there was moonlight enough to see, and what she saw was Mr. Clayton sitting alone at the little kitchen table, fingering the strap of rawhide that his sister had angrily hurled into the house two nights before.

Maureen whispered good morning and he looked up at her with a start. He set the bracelet aside and turned his attention to a little notebook that was sitting on the table.

“George’s Mary ain’t up yet but I put some coffee on,” he said.

“I don’t want to bother you if you’d rather be alone.”

“No bother.”

He stood up, scooted a chair back for her, and went over to the dish drainer to get her a cup. The coffee he set in front of her smelled strong and burnt. She could hear the wood crackling in the stove. She took a sip of coffee and watched him writing in the notebook with a pencil.

“What are you writing?”

“Nothing. Just figuring. I got a bunch of white-necked cows and a few linebacks and it ain’t easy to see what they’ll be worth, the way the market is right now. So I’m calculating it every which way.”

“Are these cattle a special breed?”

“Oh hell no, they ain’t nothing but throwbacks. I’ve been doing my best to work my way up to pure Hereford. You get a white neck, a line going down their backs, it means there’s a pretty strong strain of another breed. Buyers don’t care for that—they’ll downgrade those cows like they was in a beauty contest.”

He saw her looking at the rawhide bracelet on the table.

“I’m sorry you and your dad got caught up in that business the other night,” he said. “There’s a woman that pesters me from time to time.”

“Your sister.”

Clayton said nothing, just nodded.

“What does she pester you about?” Maureen asked.

“Oh, nothing worth talking about. You’re up pretty damn early.”

“Not as early as you.”

“That’s just me being an old man. Too agitated to sleep sometimes.”

“You must miss your son terribly.”

“I believe I do, yes ma’am.”

He closed the notebook and let his fingers stray to the sinew bracelet. There were six teeth dangling from the strap. They were as white as porcelain.

“I didn’t have the chance to shake his hand and say good-bye before he left for France. That troubles me a good deal.”

“Why couldn’t you say good-bye?”

“Oh, Ben and me was a little crossways around that time. The way parents and their children can get.”

Maureen wondered if he meant her to press him on this point, but something in her shied away from asking another direct question of this evasive man. She watched as he took up the bracelet and held it up to the window, closer to the moonlight.

“Those are buffalo teeth,” he said. The teeth were big and vaguely shovel-shaped, with a hole drilled at the root of each one through which a thin loop of sinew secured it to the bracelet.

“They’re beautiful.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “They’re just teeth. You and your father—you get along pretty fairly, looks like.”

“Most of the time.”

“You like working with him?”

“Yes. And not just because he’s my father. He’s a real artist, a great one maybe.”

“I wouldn’t have hired him if he wasn’t.”

He took a long sip from his coffee cup. It had been sitting unnoticed next to his elbow from the moment Maureen encountered him in the kitchen; no doubt the coffee had grown cold while he sat there turning over his secret thoughts.

“I always expected Ben and me would be working together too. I had this thought of the two of us. We’d be standing up there on that mesa, looking down at the cows in the big pasture yonder. We’d be talking about ranch work, when we planned to start the roundup this year, whether it’d be better to trail the stock to Abilene or to Albany, where the fences were sagging and where they needed fresh posts. We’d just be talking ranch talk between us, making decisions together. I don’t know why, but that would have felt like a big satisfaction to me. Now you want to know what I think about?”

Maureen nodded.

“I think about the same thing, only now him being a statue. I believe I’ll spend a lot of time up there, talking to a damn statue.”

He laughed before he could cry. “I believe I’ll have another cup of coffee, even if it tears my stomach all to hell. How about you?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Maureen said. She noticed that as he stood and turned to the stove he picked up his empty cup in one hand and the sinew bracelet in the other.

And she noticed that as he was standing with his back to her, pouring his coffee, he dropped the bracelet into the firebox.

TWELVE

B
efore he and Maureen left for home, Gil went out riding with Lamar Clayton and his hands twice more. It had been difficult to force his sore leg high enough to reach the stirrup, but once he was in the saddle and on the move the discomfort began to recede to the point where he could imagine himself at ease and competent, just one more cowboy out on the range. This was vanity, of course, nothing but his hopeful imagination at work. But if an artist began to allow himself to be embarrassed by his imagination he was through.

During those last few days on the ranch, he probed no further into the obviously complicated issue of Lamar Clayton’s relationship with his son or his estranged sister. There was no point in endangering the commission, and he had studied the boy’s face in those few Kodaks with such absorption, had taken so many measurements with his calipers, that he was certain he could produce a more than credible likeness.

He had turned his attention to horses—watching from the saddle as the heavy muscles in Poco’s neck and scapular regions shifted under his weight, observing and sketching the horses at rest in the pastures, and then when he was home poring over his anatomy books and studying photographs of equestrian statues, from Marcus Aurelius to Falconet’s Bronze Horseman to the familiar form of the horse that A. P. Proctor had modeled for Saint-Gaudens’ Sherman.

It was the horse he was working on now. Not in full scale, not yet, but a scale model a third the size of the finished statue. In this model, gesture and proportion and likeness had to be as accurate as his hands and eye could produce, since it would serve as the basis and reference for the larger-than-life-size final product, upon which all flaws would be stupendously magnified.

He had built the armature for the scale model of plumber’s pipe, T-joints, and heavy-gauge wire, and fastened it to a thick wooden base with a floor flange. Tacked to the wall of the studio all around him were the photographs that Maureen had taken of Poco on their visits to the ranch, showing the horse from every angle. Gil would not have the same crucial abundance of views when it came to the human subject of his grouping, but in the week since returning from West Texas he had once again recruited Rusty Holloway as a model, dressed him in Ben Clayton’s clothes, which fit well enough after all, and had him pose with his hand resting on the saddle horn of a horse he had rented for the afternoon from the stables in Breckinridge Park. As Gil sketched in clay, Maureen took photographs of Rusty and the horse, and when these were developed and enlarged at a downtown photographic studio they were tacked to the wall. He had borrowed Ben Clayton’s saddle; it sat off to the side on a sawhorse, ready to be consulted when it came to the detail work of the model. Near it was Ben’s low-crowned Stetson hat, another relic, whose battered, sweat-stained appearance Gil was eager to attempt to reproduce.

Maureen had spent the morning helping him with the armature and setting up the gallery of images that now enclosed him. In the afternoon she had seen to her own work, the Spirit of the Waters column she was modeling in full scale in her corner of the studio. She worked out of his line of sight and covered the piece with wet cloth whenever she was away from it for more than ten minutes—not just to keep the clay moist, he knew, but to keep her work private. She had not asked Gil to inspect her progress and he had decided not to ask. She had spent her life in her father’s studio; it was natural that she should have developed the desire to become a sculptor in her own right and on her own terms. But what Gil could not discern was how strong that desire was and how much she was willing to endure to satisfy it.

His own ambition was bold; at times it had been almost ungovernable. He could not recall a time when the first purpose of his imagination had not been to gauge the weight and heft of objects in his hands, to try to make them conform to some ungraspable template in his mind. He had stared at objects with an almost mystical hunger, trying to divine the forms they held within, or to factor out the ways they controlled his focus.

“The sculptor’s hand can only break the spell to free the figures slumbering in the stone.” His mother had known Michelangelo’s famous dictum and quoted it to him when he was a young boy, and he had grasped its meaning at once. It confirmed what he already knew and already felt. At eight or ten years old, he had carved faces out of turnips, figures out of blocks of wood. He knew how to do it; it came to him. As a young man he had earned his keep by cutting cameos. He had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and had later worked for six months at a sculpture studio in Rome, where he carved miniature knockoffs of famous statues for tourists. Carving pleased him, it was elevated and heroic, but it was working with clay—the haptic art—that finally claimed him. It meant more to him to create something that had not been there before than to chip away at a piece of marble to discover what might have been there all along. He liked the feel and smell of clay, the resistance of it, the idea that his medium was the abundant, alluvial matter of the earth itself. But he still worked with Michelangelo in mind. Whether you labored with a chisel to uncover a shape or modeled it with your hands out of pliant material, sculpting was still an act of discovery, a drive to reveal something hidden, something lurking below the surface of the artist’s imagination.

At five o’clock Maureen covered her work again and went back into the house to see Mrs. Gossling off and to answer the mail and pay the bills. The full light of day was past, but Gil kept working. When it grew darker he turned on the electric lamps, his experienced eye compensating for their imperfect illumination. Whatever he got wrong this evening he could fix tomorrow when daylight flooded his studio once again. He did not want to stop, now that he had covered the armature with clay and was sketching out the form of the standing horse. The imperative to keep working until it was finished was almost intolerable, and as a young man he had surrendered often enough to this blinding, accelerating need, staying awake for days at a time, working so feverishly it felt as if he was racing against some looming catastrophe that could destroy everything he had accomplished. Age had tempered that anxiety to some degree. He no longer feared that the world would end before he could finish his sculpture, only that his life would.

It was time for dinner, time to step away. He had mastered his creative appetite as he had mastered all the others; it was crucial that he remain in command of the rhythms of his art. But he gave himself a few more minutes to build up the mass of the hindquarters of the horse. He had just grabbed a handful of unworked clay and was squeezing it to make it pliant when the pain struck, an out-of-nowhere jolt at the base of both thumbs. It had not happened for a while and he had half convinced himself that working with clay, continually exercising the muscles and tendons of the hands, did not contribute to arthritis but instead held it at bay.

The theory was not holding up, however. The pain in his thumbs tonight was sudden and intense, and it flared up again whenever he flexed his hand against the clay. He sat down, irritated—no, terrified, the way another man might be terrified of a heart attack.

He walked into the house and opened a cabinet and took down a jar filled with gin-soaked raisins, the ancestral arthritis cure propounded by his father’s family, most of them drunkards but none of them, so far as he knew, crippled in the hands. He ate ten or twelve of the raisins and tried not to think about the twinges of pain that still shot through the meat of his hands whenever he rotated his thumbs.

At the dinner table he was preoccupied with worry, both over the pain in his hands and over certain vexing problems with the horse that he had yet to solve. Maureen did not press him for conversation. She had eaten innumerable meals at the family dinner table in deferential silence, aware of the mighty aesthetic struggles raging in her father’s imagination.

“I think I’ll take a stroll,” he declared as she was clearing the table.

Maureen turned to him and he saw the surprise in her expression. It had been his and Victoria’s custom to walk after dinner on the neighboring grounds of the old mission, their private time together during which they had confided to each other and conducted their marital debates and negotiations. The walks had been Victoria’s idea and her demand, her way of ensuring that his preoccupied mind would not thoughtlessly seal itself shut against her and the concerns of their domestic life.

He had forsaken these strolls after her death, out of grief perhaps, or something more complicated: a reluctance to locate himself in the irrecoverable past when his dreams for the future were still raging. But he remembered what a confidante his wife could be sometimes, how much her quiet, grounded presence meant to him when he was stirred up or confounded by his work.

“You could use the air,” Maureen told him as she scraped a dish into the kitchen trash bin. “You’ve been cooped up in the studio all day.”

“Want to come with me?”

“No, you go ahead. I’ll just do the dishes.”

What she meant to tell him, Gil understood, was that she had no plans to become his surrogate wife as well as his daughter by taking her mother’s role in a nightly ritual that had meant so much to her. He sensed that Maureen’s decision to enter the sculpture competition had something to do with escape, a subtle probing of just how tightly her own life had become ensnared in her father’s needs.

He put on his hat and coat and walked up the street to the vacant lot he and Victoria had used to cut across to the grounds of the old mission. It did not feel so odd without her. He was used by now to her being gone, and anyway he was accompanied by the echoes of the old conversations he had had with his wife, conversations that inevitably fell back onto two themes: her distress at living so far away from home and her continuing worry about her daughter.

“It’s just that your mind is always so full of wonderful distractions,” he remembered Victoria saying one night as they walked together. “Your work. Your clients. The foundry. What grade of clay to use. And the only hope I have of distraction is her happiness.”

It was a beautiful night tonight, no trace of the oppressive South Texas humidity, the temperature at a sharp sixty degrees or so, Spanish moss clinging picturesquely to the limbs of the live oaks and the collapsed remnants of the old mission walls, overgrown with grass, giving the illusion of ancient hedgerows.

He made his way across the weedy plaza of the mission to stand in front of the crumbling church. The great doors of carved oak that must once have been here were gone, stolen or taken away for safekeeping or splintered into nothing by time and neglect. He had not stood here for a while, and he craned his head upward to reacquaint himself with the saints in their niches: Saint Francis, Saint Dominic, the usual cohort of cherubim, the parents of Mary on either side of the doors, Saint Joaquin rendered in a strangely insouciant pose, his hand cocked on his hip. Acanthus leaves, pomegranate leaves, and other forms of sculptural spinach vined around the ledges, columns, and abutments. All of it carved by hand from raw limestone in actual scale. The height at which the statues were set, and the moonlight streaming down upon them, rendered their imperfections—chipped-off noses, eroded chins—in grotesque relief. People thought of stone as ageless, but nothing lasted as long as bronze, nothing stood so strong against the tide of time.

Time was on his mind so starkly tonight. He remembered standing here with Victoria two years ago, staring up at Saint Joaquin. On that night Victoria had silently brushed past him and walked into the interior of the mission church. She had sidestepped the rubble from the collapsed dome and bell tower and stood there in the open nave, looking up at the stars, the night flattering the stark planes of her face. She was entering her mid-fifties, her hair still not completely gray, though its luster had faded and it was shot through with silvery tendrils that he rather liked. They had been arguing, he remembered, but not with any particular bitterness. And whatever petty resentments he might have held toward her that night evaporated as he watched the starlight play across her face. The commonplace signs of age and decay that had begun to undermine his wife’s visage stirred him as deeply as her flawlessness had in her youth.

When he had first met her, he was newly home from Europe and sharing a grim little studio on West Fourteenth Street with a young painter fresh out of the Art Students League. The painter had the study during the day and Gil had it at night, after he had finished working at the Eden Musée wax museum, sculpting queens on the way to their executions and writhing victims of the Spanish Inquisition.

He won his first commission that year, an allegorical tablet that was the gift to itself of one of the smaller New York gas companies that was scrambling to secure a place in the electrical future. The tablet was to depict Womanhood Released from Drudgery, following the Spirit of Light toward the horizon of the new century. Gil needed daylight for serious paying work, so when he received his commencement money he quit his job at the wax museum and paid the painter an extra portion of the rent so that he could take the daytime shift.

She came to him on a Tuesday morning, entering his life with a hesitant knock. She allowed him a cautious smile and met his eyes only briefly; it occurred to him later that she must have habitually been wary of what she would find on the other side of a studio door. He knew she modeled at the league occasionally and the painter who shared the studio with him had friends who had used her from time to time, but he had never seen her before until she walked into the room and stood there at the north-facing window in midmorning light.

He explained the piece to her—the Spirit of Light gliding forth with arms raised, one hand supporting a gas flame and the other a stylized burst of electricity. She nodded briskly with professional comprehension. He had the feeling she knew what he wanted more clearly than he did. Her features were clean and sorrowful. Her manner was evasive. He had to struggle to meet her on the businesslike plane she had established, because he was already in love with her and when she began to remove her jacket and blouse and crisp blue skirt he fled to the other side of the room and took up his station behind his sculpting stand as if seeking protection from a blast.