Remember Ben Clayton (24 page)

“Bourbon and branch water,” he announced as he poured some in a cup. “Thrillingly illicit, as of last month.”

She drank it down, recoiling a little at the taste but savoring the way it seeped into her body and made her just that much more alert to the steely beauty of the clouds coming in from the north. A cold wind began to sweep across the summit and Vance gathered up the remaining picnic things and led her back down to the car.

They spent the rest of the afternoon in the parlor of the little house he rented on Nueces Street, lying in each other’s arms on his tattered sofa while he read aloud T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock poem.

“Let us go then, you and I,” he almost whispered, her head resting against his soft belly while he stroked her hair with his free hand. She scanned the room as he read, the hatrack by the door filled with artfully battered hats, the longhorn skull with its horns spreading above the mantelpiece, the cheap portrait busts of Shakespeare and Tennyson, the books spilling out of the warped shelves and stacked against the walls, his pipes secured in their circular rack like war implements, his cowboy boots on the floor, their worn leather tops sagging toward each other. “And indeed there will be time,” he went on, reading the poem now into her ear, as if he were making up these words on the spot just for her. “Time for you and time for me.”

They went to a party that night at another professor’s house. The house was on the edge of a park near the campus, and despite the cold the party spilled outside almost at once. Maureen had the impression that most of the guests were renegade faculty members like Vance, disgruntled at this or that stifling dictum of the administration. There were students as well, the worldly coeds all smoking, wearing bobbed hair and gunboat shoes, the men in sweaters and patched jackets, their hair spilling into their eyes as they passed around their flasks with outlaw abandon. There were poets and sullen bolsheviks and a visiting professor from Serbia who said he was sick of people asking him about the assassination of the archduke, and a young folklorist who had spent last summer traveling through South Texas collecting cowboy songs and
corridos
. He had brought his guitar and set up shop against the drooping limb of a live oak. Ten or twelve of the partygoers, entranced with the idea of hearing authentic working songs, sat in the grass to hear him out, but he had no idea how bad a singer he was, and the louder he attacked the choruses the more of his audience members he drove away.

Vance dropped her off at her hotel past midnight and the owner handed her the room key without comment. They spent the next day strolling in the bracing winter air, all the way from the main building of the university through the rotunda of the Capitol and along the downtown streets to the river. They had no agenda, no one to meet, nothing to discuss except what occurred to them. He took her to dinner at an open-air beer garden that now sold only what it called bone-dry beer and afterward they walked into an adjacent room where a German singing club had built a bowling alley. He knew everyone there. He insisted on teaching her how to bowl. The bone-dry beer had no alcohol in it but she felt intoxicated anyway, and disturbed by her own happiness. Could all this really be happening to her at last, or was it some sort of cruel delusion?

When they left the beer garden they walked north, toward the university. She was leaving tomorrow. It was time for him to take her back to the hotel, but she did not remind him to do so and he did not propose it. They walked on beside a meandering creek, her arm in his as she huddled close to him. The wintry tree limbs creaked above them, every now and then a car passed on the street that bordered the campus. They were walking toward his house and she said nothing. She let him take her there. They fell onto the sofa again, though she was willing—she was expecting—to be guided into his bedroom. He kissed her and she kissed him ardently back, wordlessly complying, not just with where his desires were leading them but with some new and long-delayed envisioning of herself.

But after a few minutes the pitch of their lovemaking did not seem to be progressing. They were stalled, and she realized it was him, not her. He pulled away from her and sat against the arm of the sofa, his suit still on, his boots still on. There were no lights on in the room but there was moonlight from the uncurtained window and she could see his eyes gleaming as he looked away from her toward a blank wall.

“Well,” she said, hurrying to salvage her dignity, “I should go. No matter how progressive you say that woman is, she won’t like me coming in at three in the morning.”

“All right,” Vance said.

She was thunderously confused. It was ridiculous to think that he was appalled at her loose behavior, but his usually open face was so blank and so unrevealing as to be hostile.

She would be damned if she would demean herself by asking what was wrong. She stood up, straightened her clothes, and thanked him for the evening with a bitter tremor of laughter she could not suppress.

“I am married,” he said.

“Oh.”

“It’s hardly much of a marriage.”

“I didn’t ask you to what degree you were married.” The rage she was feeling now was better than the stupefaction she had felt a moment ago. There were, at least, words to employ.

“It was a mistake to marry her in the first place, but I was only twenty and didn’t know anything. We didn’t have that much in common, and then she got sick with some sort of stomach thing they’ve never been able to figure out. Couldn’t travel, couldn’t do anything, resented me because I could—and because I just couldn’t condemn myself to spending the rest of my life on her parents’ farm in Falfurrias. I know that would have been the noble thing but I couldn’t do it. We send each other letters every now and then—very proper and careful letters. That’s about all there is to it. I can’t divorce her because she’s sick, you see. Some of my friends know about her, some don’t.”

She hated the way he looked now, the tense satisfaction in his face, as if he thought he was explaining himself perfectly well and was congratulating himself for being patient while she absorbed what he had just told her.

“Why did you wait till now to tell me?”

“Well, we were crossing the Rubicon, so to speak. I couldn’t leave you in the dark about it any longer. I know you’re questioning my character right now, but I couldn’t very well do that.”

“No, you very well couldn’t, could you? I’m going to the hotel.”

He insisted on walking her. It was very late, so she let him, but she walked with her arms tightly folded in front of her and she would not look at him. She half listened as he besieged her with explanations and excuses, but all his words were like water swirling around the base of a great ragged boulder of betrayal. It was colder now and the sky was overcast and sleet was collecting on the tree-buckled sidewalks.

“So there have been other women, I suppose,” she said, “who didn’t mind that you were married.”

“Let’s not talk about that sort of thing.”

“All right. It’s rotten of me to make you feel uncomfortable.”

“Stop it.”

“My father was right about you. I hate to admit it, but he was. What sort of game were you playing?”

“It wasn’t a game. I wish you could believe me about that.”

She stopped and turned to him, her tears brimming on her cold face.

“So why me?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did you see in me? Why did you even bother?”

“Do we have to talk about this like it’s completely a thing of the past? I know it’s a shock, but the idea we would never see each other again is—”

“Did you just want to hurt me?”

“Please don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then what was it? I know I’m not beautiful. I’m not even pretty. Why bother with me?”

“Because I like you. Because you interest me. You don’t bore me. Because you’re intelligent and serious and funny. And I happen to find you attractive no matter what you say about yourself.”

“But you didn’t love me.”

“I wasn’t in a position to love you or anybody.”

He tried to reach out to her, but she took a step back and batted his arms away before they could envelop her. He begged her forgiveness and she could see that it genuinely troubled him to hurt her so much. But his discomfort was nothing, something he would recover from, learn from, and leave behind. Her hurt, by contrast, was something final, so deep and so defining it seemed to nail her in place on the street. If he had told her that he had loved her, she might have gone back to his house and begun something scandalous with him. In this new age after the war when everything was upside down anyway it would not have mattered so much. She would not have minded people talking about them, not if he had loved her. But he didn’t love her and she had guessed it all along—or should have allowed herself to guess it—and now there was nothing to do but let him continue to escort her through the sleet back to her hotel.

TWENTY-ONE

S
he had a name that was bewitchingly apt for a beautiful New Orleans widow: Therèse. Her grandfather had come to New Orleans as a young aide to General Butler during the Civil War. Her husband was a prominent lawyer who had dropped dead in his office four years ago. She was almost fifty but saw to it that she looked twenty years younger, and was so securely a part of New Orleans society that she cared not a thing about it or what it thought about her.

She was the sole woman on the committee that had chosen him for the La Salle statue, and by far its most opinionated member. She knew quite a bit about art and was full of interesting prejudices about it, but during Gil’s get-acquainted meeting with the committee in the boardroom of a New Orleans bank, she said very little, letting the men expound on what an oversight it was not to already have a statue of La Salle standing on the bank of the Mississippi in the heart of the city that owed its existence to his explorations.

“We want something grand,” one of the committee members said, a plump young man still in his twenties who was in a hurry to make his mark on the city, having just inherited his family’s bank. “La Salle standing there at the mouth of the Mississippi, his sword in his hand, his armor shining. Maybe a few of his men with him.”

“That’s not my idea of the piece at all,” Gil told him.

It seemed not to have occurred to any of the committee members that the sculptor might have his own opinions, and Gil’s blunt dismissal left them hanging in silence, their cigar smoke gathering weight in the room’s stultifying atmosphere. Therèse, however, shifted in her chair, interested.

Gil told them he had no interest in depicting the Sieur de La Salle as the usual triumphant conqueror of the wilderness, or even less as the bewigged nobleman attired for his audience with the Sun King. He saw his subject as a gaunt and ravaged explorer staring at the Mississippi as much in wonder at the fact that he was alive as that he had finally discovered the river’s mouth.

“Anything else would be a cliché,” he told them. “We must catch the human La Salle in this figure or it’s not worth doing in the first place.”

It did not take much discussion for them to endorse his idea. Gil simply held back and answered the occasional question as they weighed the merits of his conception. He held firm and they came around, as he was pretty sure they would.

“Well, that’s settled, then,” one of the older men, the committee chairman, said after a few minutes. “We’ll haggle with you on a price, and assuming we can reach an agreement, then you’re our man.”

“Would you be willing to go to France?” Therèse asked him.

“France?”

“Yes, should have mentioned that,” the chairman said. “The man who’s putting up half the money, whose idea this statue was—celebrating American and French friendship after the war, that sort of thing—is this Monsieur something-or-other.”

“Du Prel,” Therèse said.

“He’s some sort of descendant of La Salle’s. Has some family portraits he wants to show you. It’s a formality, really. He probably just wants to get a look at you, talk your ear off about his famous ancestor. Of course it goes without saying your expenses would be entirely covered.”

After the particulars of the deal had been ironed out and the letters of intent signed, the committee took him to a celebratory dinner at Commander’s Palace. When it was over, Therèse insisted on dropping him off at his hotel, but when they were alone in the car she told the chauffeur to head to Lamothe’s instead.

“It’s a pity we’ve already had dinner,” she said, “since Lamothe has the best étouffée in town, but I insist on showing you at least a little of the interesting side of New Orleans before you go home. I don’t care how much you protest or how tired you are. Do you mind going all the way to France?”

“No. I haven’t been overseas in years.”

“They say Paris is livelier than ever. Funny to think it would be that way after all that’s happened over there. Half the young artists I know are already there and the rest are packing their bags.”

They stood on a restaurant terrace overlooking the park. Therèse whispered to a waiter and he brought them manhattans. Prohibition apparently meant nothing here. She drank a lot and held it well. She pointed out several elegantly dressed prostitutes. From the terrace Gil could see her driver standing at the side of her touring car, patiently reading the paper in the tavern’s porch light.

“You certainly spoke your mind today,” she said. “I’d heard that you do that.”

“You must have done some checking up on me.”

“Of course I did. It was I who found you in the first place. Do you think those men in that room know anything about sculpture? Why do you live in San Antonio, of all places?”

“I like it there,” he said. “Why aren’t you living in Paris with all your artist friends?”

“Oh, I’m far too old for cafés and nightlife. Can’t you see I’m ancient?”

He knew where it was going with her. They left the restaurant and walked alongside Bayou St. John with the car following behind. The bayou docks were crowded with dilapidated houseboats and squatters’ shacks, and the lamps from the boats shone imploringly across the dark water. She told him amusing details about the committee members he had met, their sham marriages, the scandalous stories behind their wealth, their ties to the political ring that ran the city.

After a while she waved for the driver to pick them up and they drove up to the lakeshore and then back along Old Shell Road to the center of town. It was one in the morning by then. The whole world must have known her at the St. Charles but she strode boldly through the lobby with Gil and then up to his room, and in the morning came down with him and they walked together to her waiting car.

Nothing but good-bye needed to be said when she dropped him off at the train station. She patted his knee, a little wistfully, and straightened his necktie in a mock wifely way, but the night had been what it was and they parted cheerfully and with no expectations for the future.

The legacy of his marriage to Victoria had haunted him during the evening, but in his rational mind he knew there was nothing to square and no point in looking back. Even so, on the long trip back to San Antonio, he wrestled with unsettling thoughts. The undemanding interlude with Therèse was of a piece in his mind with the commission he had just been handed by her and the rest of her committee, something that could engage him without the risk of defining him. The truth was that he didn’t care much about the La Salle statue. It was a fitting subject and his conception lifted it above the dutiful public monument that the committee had envisioned, but he had done enough explorers and statesmen and grandees by now. The La Salle would be a good strong piece of work, something that in a generation or two from now several passersby out of every thousand or so would look up at and admire and then go on with their day. But there would be nothing in it to shake them or startle them, and nothing in its creation to do the same to him.

That was why he was so anxious to get back to the Clayton. He had been away almost five days, and the thought of the sculpture standing in his studio, only days away from completion, was intolerable. This was the piece that had captured him in a way that the La Salle never would, the work that would outlive him, and not just in the literal sense of bronze outlasting flesh. He thought of it the way physicists were now thinking about light, a steadily traveling beacon, carrying forth the boy’s memory, and along with it his own, through the darkness of time.

The arthritis came again as he cut his steak in the dining car. He put Urrutia’s splints back on after lunch and tried to push away the fear that the disease brought to his thoughts. He would simply have to endure the pain while he finished the Clayton. After that he could give his hands a rest for a few months before he started modeling the La Salle.

Another bitter norther had swept through San Antonio in his absence, but as he got into a taxi at the train station the temperature was steadily rising. There was sludge in the streets and the wintry tree branches were dripping with melted ice. Gil had the driver stop at the post office and he went inside to collect the mail. In his private post office box there were the usual church bulletins and Catholic newspapers, but also a package containing a small book so worn and leafed-through it was almost falling apart at the binding. The book was also searingly familiar to him at first glance: his late mother’s daily missal.

The letter inside was from a Father Dewey, who said he had come across the missal while going through the effects of Monsignor Berney, who had recently died after serving as the pastor of St. Joseph’s parish for many decades. Father Dewey supposed that Margaret Gilheaney had given the missal to her great friend the monsignor as a keepsake before her own death, but now that he was gone as well it seemed fitting that it be given to her son, the renowned sculptor of whom she had always been so proud.

He leafed through the ancient book on his way home in the taxi. It was as much a scrapbook or a diary as a missal. The paper on which the prayers were printed had been almost worn away by her hands as they had turned the pages, decade after decade in a life of unbroken daily communion and observance of the sacraments. Interleaved between the thin pages were dozens of holy cards, the holy cards she herself had painted, that he had watched her paint as a boy in the tiny parlor of their Leroy Street apartment. And for every holy card in the missal there was a faded newspaper cutting announcing the unveiling of one of his statues, or the awarding of a commission.

He could not bear to look at it for long; he could not endure the innocent belief that rose from its musty pages. His mother had lived a hard life but she had managed to hold on to an untarnished faith in God’s purpose. And she had believed in her son with the same shining conviction, even as Gil had lied to her and sealed her out of his real life.

He put the missal into his jacket pocket to hide it from Maureen when he got home. But Maureen was not there, nor was Mrs. Gossling. It was six in the evening, but there was no sign of anyone preparing dinner. He set his suitcase down on the floor. He was weary from the long trip and hungry, and was puzzled by Maureen’s absence.

He walked out to the studio, but she was not there either. He took the missal out of his jacket pocket and set it on the desk while he unlocked the drawer where he kept his mother’s mail. In that moment something struck him as wrong, something to do with the temperature in the room. He walked over to the woodstove and felt the door. It was cold.

He looked at the almost-completed full-scale clay statue of Ben Clayton and his horse and gave it closer inspection than he had when he had walked into the room. For a moment it seemed that there was nothing wrong with it. It was intact, still supported by the armature, the details of human face and animal musculature still sharply defined.

If he stood there and did nothing he could still make himself believe that it had survived the cycle of freezing and thawing to which it had apparently just been exposed. But he could not sustain that hope forever. He took a few steps forward and put his trembling hand on the flank of the horse and watched as it began to crumble like a sand castle.