Remember Ben Clayton (23 page)

It would be several hours before the train arrived in San Antonio. Maureen excused herself to go back to the parlor car to finish the Sherwood Anderson novel she was reading. Gil stayed in the dining car, thinking about his statue of Ben Clayton. The trip to Clayton’s ranch, for all its unpleasantness, had been worth it. Now with the piece nearly finished and so strongly lodged in his imagination, it was almost as if it had already been in place when he stood again on that lonely summit. He had seen at once that by placing the statue six inches farther to the west than he had originally planned he could bring the whole landscape into conformance with it. The statue would in some mysterious way define the world that surrounded it. And he had also seen that a delicate shift of Ben Clayton’s eye line would make him appear to be looking not just at some distant hill but beyond the horizon itself, giving the piece an additional measure of sadness and lofty yearning.

He was glad he had made the trip, an extra step he would not have taken for a less crucial sculpture. And confronting Clayton had been necessary, both for his own pride and for the sake of the statue. The work was now his in a way it had not been before. He had claimed it as his own, he would fight for his vision of it. He owed Clayton nothing except the promise to toil in the service of his own imagination, to create a work that had a chance of transcending the demands of the client, perhaps even the vision of the artist.

What he had learned from Clayton in the dining room of the Grace Hotel, the anger and heartbreak and never-to-be-healed rift between father and son, would now work its way into the statue. He did not know how exactly, but it would. The new information residing in his mind would be transferred to his hands as he modeled the clay, and would be present in the final image of the boy’s face.

TWENTY

Dear Miss Gilheaney,

I am sorry to trouble you again by writing to you. I hope you don’t take it wrong I just have to talk to an American every now and then and though this is not talking but writing it feels kind of the same. You have been very kind to answer my letters and tell me about the statue and to give me news of the States. I don’t know what I think about prohibition, I guess it is all right. My uncle Cloyce was bad when it came to drinking and my aunt Verna had to live with it. When it got out of hand once, Cloyce got into a fistfight with his own son, my cousin Phil when Phil was about fifteen. He couldn’t live with his dad anymore after that and moved on down to the Concho country where he is presently working sheep. They could never have passed that law in France if you ask me. The French people drink a lot of wine and put a lot of store by it. I have drunk a lot of wine since I’ve been here but it seems a natural thing to do and I do not think I will end up like my Uncle Cloyce.

People here are asking about the treaty and when the Americans are going to sign it. I don’t know much more than they do though. I don’t see any American newspapers. Everything is pretty hard to get in Somme-Py but that is okay because I don’t need much and don’t really need to know about what the Reds are up to or what President Wilson has to say about this or that matter because when I am busy with my work the world doesn’t concern me too much.

Somme-Py you may remember from my previous letter is the name of the little town that is near St. Etienne where I was wounded and Ben was killed. I am not working with the Service des Travaux anymore. There is a man here in Somme-Py named L’Huillier and when he found out I was an American he said I had to help him rebuild the town and he hired me away just like that. L’Huiller is a lieutenant Colonel in the French Army. He was born in Somme-Py and was a big hero in the war and they sent him to the States to raise money for reconstruction. There is a lot of work to do, since there’s almost nothing left of the town, and decent pay. L’Huiller likes Americans and even wants to rename the place Somme-Py les Marines because the marines helped liberate it. I told him that was all right with me as long as he named it Somme-Py les Marines et La Garde Nationale because the Guard was in that fight too and we don’t care to be left out! He likes having me around to practice his english I think. Also he doesn’t mind the look of my face too much. He was wounded two or three times himself and has seen a lot of boys in my condition.

So I am not roving all over the Champagne anymore but am in one place Somme-Py and I will call it my home for now. People are moving back in and we are working hard to build a new town where the old one stood. We already built the church back. Well it is only wooden and just temporary but it is satisfying just the same to have built it and see the people go in there to worship.

Well I will close by thanking you for your patience in reading another letter from me and hoping you will write me back again even though you don’t have to. It is good to have an American friend. I know you don’t think we are friends because we have never met but maybe you don’t have to see somebody in person to get a good idea of who they are and whether that is a person you would like or not. Therefore I like you Miss Gilheaney. I think you are a good lady. You are welcome anytime in my new “home” of Somme-Py where I will show you the “sights.”

Sincerely,

Arthur Fry

I
t was the third letter she had received from Arthur Fry in three weeks. She read it sitting on the bed in her room with the door closed. Her father was gone to New Orleans and she had the house to herself, but the habit of reading her mail in solitude, in her own private space, had taken root when she was a girl and had grown to be an imperative for a young woman living in a house with her parents. When she was finished reading she sat at her desk and answered the letter immediately, haunted by the thought of this boy as he waited plaintively in his bombed-out village for the appearance of the postman. She did not want to keep him waiting, did not want to disappoint him. It had become her responsibility somehow to keep him from succumbing to despair in a strange land.

She told him about the full-size clay statue of Ben Clayton that was now finished and waiting for the plasterers to come take the molds, which would then be carefully packed and shipped to the Coppini Foundry in New York, one of the few foundries in the country still employing the venerable lost-wax technique her father insisted upon. There it would be cast in bronze, the pieces welded together, the patina applied. Her own work—the Spirit of the Waters—was there already, waiting to be cast, a far simpler job than that of a monumental statue.

Arthur would be very impressed with the statue of Ben, Maureen ventured. He would recognize his friend but he would also surely recognize something much larger. As she was about to name this larger something—the futility of war, the stolen promise of a generation, irrecoverable youth—she hesitated. She did not want to burden Arthur Fry with her own somber speculations about the statue’s meaning, nor did she want to lecture him like an art professor. She wanted him to hear her genuine voice, her plain thoughts.

But her thoughts, as usual, were far from plain. As much as she was moved by what her father had accomplished with the Clayton, she was still furious about what he had said about Vance, and this fury had quietly grown in the weeks since. They had not discussed the issue further; she did not care to. But in the meantime letters from Vance continued to arrive, erudite and lively, sometimes with copied-out poems or bizarre newspaper cuttings—a boy being struck in the foot by a meteorite, the wife of the director of the New York Aquarium waking in the middle of the night with an octopus next to her in the bed—for which he charmingly offered no commentary at all. And each letter repeated his plea that she come visit him in Austin.

She was irritated by her father’s absence and by his overbearing assumption that, for propriety’s sake, she should stay in place. Men in general and her celebrated father in particular had no such restrictions on their freedom. No doubt at this moment he was being lionized in New Orleans, and finding his creative energy renewed by the promise of a new commission. The destruction of the Pawnee Scout had been a great wound but it was behind him now, receding in the face of new accomplishments and new opportunities.

This sort of dynamic renewal was a man’s birthright; it was his to lose. But a woman had to fight every day to escape the narrow domestic stasis that threatened to utterly define her. Maureen was unmarried, childless, stranded in a widening pool of uncertainty. Her most ambitious work—her Spirit of the Waters—was admired by the Arts and Beautification Committee of the San Antonio Women’s Club but not really by herself, and clearly not by her father, the towering artist she could not help measuring herself against, the sole critic she could not help being desperate to please.

With the modeling on the Clayton finished, her own work off to the foundry, and her father out of town, she had little to do in the next few days except to pay the bills and look after the studio, putting things in order after the months of disruptive work on the statue and keeping an eye open for sudden shifts in temperature that might damage the clay. But the weather was clear and the temperature mild again after the passage of the last winter storm, and it occurred to her, as she was finishing her letter to Arthur Fry, that Mrs. Gossling could certainly watch over things for a night or two.

What was holding her back from picking up the telephone and dictating a telegram to Vance? There were boardinghouses and hotels and probably even university facilities for visiting women in Austin. There was no reason to feel self-conscious about abruptly accepting Vance’s invitation. Concern about her father’s approval was something she could no longer allow herself to feel. If she felt a hint of hesitation on her own behalf about Vance’s sincerity or suitability—well, that was just another argument for traveling to Austin to find out once and for all.

She picked up the telephone and arranged for the telegram, asking if it would be convenient to visit tomorrow on short notice, and three hours later the Western Union boy came to the door with the one-word reply: Yes!

Vance was grinning and waving his hat when the train pulled into the Austin station the next morning, and he grabbed her suitcase before she could step down onto the platform.

“I’ve found you a very good hotel near the campus,” he said as he led her to his friend’s car, which she saw was packed with a picnic lunch. “The woman who owns it is a raging suffragist, so of course she is appalled by the idea of a curfew. You can be as scandalously late as you like, and you may consider me your accomplice.”

They drove down Congress Avenue and skirted the Capitol building and the university campus that stretched behind it and then headed out west toward open country, Vance rambling on excitedly all the way about their plans for the day.

“I canceled all my classes when I heard you were coming,” he said.

“You can just do that? Won’t you get in trouble?”

“Who cares what some top-lofty dean thinks? I work three times as hard as most of the men in the department already. Anyway, are you in the mood to scale our local Alp?”

The local Alp was called Mount Bonnell. It took them only five minutes to climb up to the summit but when they arrived the view was sumptuous, the Colorado River cutting its way through a deep limestone valley below them, tree-covered hills swelling and subsiding toward the horizon on the opposite bank, and to the west the gleaming granite dome of the Capitol rising in isolated splendor from the heart of the town. Austin was more emphatically scenic than San Antonio. This view from Mount Bonnell of rocky declivities rising above water, of wild primeval mystery, stirred homesick memories in her of the Hudson River Valley, where her father would take her sometimes when she was a girl to visit his artist friends in New Paltz or Peekskill.

The day was brisk and clean, a little cold, with a cloud front gathering in the north. Vance spread a blanket out for them and dug into the picnic hamper for the lunch he had ordered from the wife of a colleague in the Classical Languages Department who baked and cooked for pin money: chicken sandwiches on thick-sliced bread and bean salad and sugar cookies almost as big as dinner plates.

“They say that Bigfoot Wallace met with some Indians up here and—”

“Oh, please stop,” she told him. “I don’t think I can stand another lecture about Texas history.”

“All right,” Vance said, shearing off half of his sandwich in one bite, “I’ll intrude upon your ignorance no more.”

They sat close together on a limestone rock that had been carved into a bench. She felt the wind on her face and his rough hand touching hers as they ate. They were not the only people here. Twenty yards away some students from the university were taking turns standing on the edge of the precipice, standing there with their arms outstretched, the girls’ skirts filling with wind.

A young mother stood holding the hand of her two-year-old son as he stared at the students. The little boy watched their raucous antics with such total innocent absorption that it almost moved Maureen to sudden tears. Noticing this, perhaps, Vance squeezed her hand. There was some sort of message in this gesture, she thought, some attempt on Vance’s part to reassure her that his character ran deeper than its witty and blustery surface.

She felt she had to believe this, otherwise she might just as well sweep away the whole idea that it was not too late to fall in love and be married and have children, to join at last the world that existed beyond her father’s studio. From her early girlhood she had been aware that boys tended to treat her with kindly indifference, and that her father’s steadfast love might be all that the world would allow her. She trained herself to accept the idea that she was undesirable, to accept it with a wounded pride. Her life would find a higher purpose. The nights of her youth that might otherwise have been thrown away to bohemian abandon had been defiantly spent in her father’s studio, helping him with the thousands of last-minute sculpting details of some piece that absolutely had to be ready the next day for the mold-makers, or the foundry, or the patron’s inspection.

He had not pressed her into his service; she convinced herself she had been called to it. From the cocoon of her father’s studio she would emerge someday as a full-fledged artist in her own right.

But that had not happened. She was a skillful sculptor but not a blazingly intuitive one like her father. She now understood that the years of monastic apprenticeship had been for nothing, that they had been years not of focused advancement but of craven withdrawal.

Maybe it had been Arthur Fry’s letters from France, with their portrait of a young man so much more justifiably paralyzed by self-consciousness and faint prospects than she. Maybe it was her father’s blithe dismissal of Vance, which implied such poor judgment on Maureen’s part that it was at the same time a dismissal of her.

It would end here, on this trip, with this man. There were strictures to violate but she was happy to violate them. They were not so strong. Her common sense told her that it was an insult to nature to remain a virgin at her age. Her father had feigned outrage that she wouldn’t be traveling with a chaperone, but he himself had long ago forsaken conventional propriety by becoming an artist and marrying his nude model. Maureen’s mother had grown far cooler than her husband to risk and new horizons, but she had been up-to-date and matter-of-fact on the issue of sex, and it was this practical attitude that Maureen now seized on as a legacy.

“Shall we break the law?” Vance said after he had finished off his gigantic cookie and half of hers. He looked around—the young students and the young family had trailed off along the sloping summit—and withdrew a flask from his jacket pocket.