Remember Ben Clayton (27 page)

“It says he decided not to do the statue. Says it all calm and business-like, like it don’t matter a dime to him. Probably got a commission that paid him more and he just decided mine wasn’t worth the trouble. By God, I shook that man’s hand and looked him in the eye.”

“Well, that’s too bad but there ain’t nothing you can do about it. We don’t really need a statue of Ben anyway if you want my opinion on the subject.”

“Who the hell wants your opinion?”

Her jaw was throbbing too hard to take the insult personally. She just gave Lamar a dismissive wave and padded back to her room. He stood there in the parlor, too mad to sit down, not sure what to do with himself, just knowing he by god wasn’t going to stand for being treated that way by some self-important artist who couldn’t even keep his seat on a horse.

TWENTY-FOUR

S
how me your goddam gas mask!” the inspection officer was yelling in Arthur’s dream. It was night and mustard gas had pooled all around them in the shell craters, and the officer was staring down with disgust as Arthur tried to claw his way out of a putrid slurry of liquefied human remains. If he did not get his mask on in the next few seconds the mustard gas would kill him, but for some reason his fear of the officer’s disapproval was greater than his fear of a hideous death.

Then the officer was gone and Arthur was on another part of the battlefield, horribly alone now in the foul blackness, listening to the Boche machine gunners laughing at him from their lines, taking their time with him. His mother and father and brother had just arrived. They were part of a group of battlefield tourists that was picking its way across the craters with their Michelin guides. His mother was calling his name. He tried to call back but before he could open his mouth a German soldier grabbed him from behind and was squeezing his face so hard with his big hands that he couldn’t breathe. The man was breaking his face apart and the broken pieces were choking him.

Waking up did not stop the panic. The prosthesis had shifted in his sleep. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t totally blocking his breath and that if he was calm he could guide it back into place along the bone-grooves in his jaw. He decided, when he had stopped shaking, that he must have turned over on his side while he slept and knocked the prosthesis against the wooden frame of his cot.

It was cold but there was no wind blowing and he was too shaken by the dream and the treacherous prosthesis to stay in his hut. He put on his coat and gloves and walked outside. He lived alone in a little
abris
he had built himself out of scavenged wood and
tôle
. It was just down the street, or what used to be the street, from the old
mairie
that had been destroyed in the bombing. In its place was the
mairie-baraque
, the temporary city hall that was merely a grander version of Arthur’s own hut, and which he and the rest of the workers had hurried to finish for the visit of Poincaré the day before. The president had been traveling through the Devastated Zone, stopping at each destroyed town to marvel at the resiliency of the inhabitants and to promise that aid was on the way.

Much of the aid that the village had gotten so far, though, had come from America, where Lieutenant L’Huillier, who had grown up in Somme-Py, had been sent to raise funds. He had arranged some sort of fashion show in New York and enough money was starting to come in that in a few months they would be able to start building in earnest, not just
baraquements
but real stone buildings like they used to have before.

It was two in the morning, he supposed. He stood alone in the center of Somme-Py, his hand to his jaw, making sure he had worked the prosthesis back into place. It had been the worst dream he had ever had. The most horrible part had been his placid acceptance of the decaying human sludge in which he had been trapped as if it were quicksand. His mother’s voice, helplessly calling his name, was still echoing out of the dream. He could hear it now, and he had to convince himself not to try to answer it.

They had brought him up Baptist but he had never taken to any of it that much. He didn’t know about heaven but he had a pretty good idea that if there was one his mother would be waiting for him there and not looking for him in France like she had in the dream.

The night was moonless and the stars in their brightness only made it darker and caused him to feel more alone. The two hundred or so villagers who had moved back to Somme-Py to rebuild their homes were all asleep and so were the workers like himself who were being paid by the government to help them. There were still tables set out in front of the
mairie-baraque
from yesterday’s rally, and their emptiness heightened his desolation. He had stayed in his hut while Poincaré spoke, even though Madame L’Huillier and her husband had tried to talk him into attending, saying that people would be grateful for the chance to honor a young American soldier who had already given so much for France. Maybe even Poincaré himself would want to shake his hand.

But Arthur hadn’t wanted to shake the president’s hand, or to meet any of the people flooding into Somme-Py from other destroyed villages, people he did not know and whose horrified and piteous glances he would have to endure. He only wanted to be around people who were used to him. The thought of traveling even to another village, let alone to Reims, or to Paris, with its throngs of gaping strangers, or especially back home to Texas, was as much the material of a nightmare as the war memories that hounded him in his sleep.

He walked behind the waist-high wall of a bombed-out house to piss. Dogs were barking, but at each other, not at him. The village dogs all knew him and he liked their company because they did not try to cheer him on or encourage him. He liked speaking to them in French.

Except for the barking dogs the silence in the village was consuming, not an absence of noise but the presence of some aggressive deadening force. In the bombardment before the attack on Saint-Étienne he had felt something like it, all that unbelievable commotion reaching at its most intense pitch a crescendo of nothingness, the ruling silence of the universe bearing down, taking control.

Standing alone tonight in the center of the village, in the cold air, he felt the horrors of the dream slowly dissipating. But the darkness all around him and the foreign cosmos overhead greatly amplified his loneliness, and finally he had to retreat back into his
abris
so he wouldn’t be exposed any longer to that crushing emptiness. He put a few more sticks of wood into the stove. He was still too scared and too alone to sleep, so he lit his lantern and pulled out the letter he had received that afternoon from Maureen Gilheaney. He had read it three times already but he had not yet memorized it like he had the others. It was still new enough that he felt a sense of keen anticipation as he slipped it out of its envelope.

Dear Arthur,

Please, Maureen from now on. “Miss Gilheaney” makes me feel old, and this has been the sort of week when I don’t care to feel any older than I already am. Some rather puzzling and painful things have happened—personal things which fortunately are much too complicated to explain, so you are hereby spared the spectacle of my self-pity. (Sorry—I just realized I’m sounding breezy and dismissive, and that’s not a tone I mean to strike. I don’t know what sort of tone I mean to strike, in fact. Honesty, I suppose, but not if that means detailing my trivial troubles to someone who has suffered so much
real
pain.)

There is one disappointing piece of news about the statue I must tell you. Almost at the moment of its completion, before it was to be cast in plaster and then sent off to the foundry to be finally cast in bronze, the piece was destroyed. The stove in the studio went out and the clay froze. There was quite a discussion in our house about whose fault this was, though neither my father nor I is in a mood to accept the blame, and it doesn’t matter anyway. The point is that the statue of Ben won’t happen now. I’m not sure my father has the will anymore to start all over again. When he was younger this would have been a terrible setback but he would have gotten over it soon enough, in fact it might even have invigorated him. But he’s not as resilient as he was. He’s sixty now. His hands are hurting him, arthritis I think—though he doesn’t talk about it and I’m sensible enough not to ask.

I know you were enthusiastic about seeing the statue of your friend and I’m sorry. Daddy told me that he wrote Mr. Clayton to tell him that the deal is off and to return his money. Fortunately there is another commission so the bills will be paid, although I don’t think my father has much interest in the subject, not the sort of interest he had in portraying Ben.

Yesterday a delivery truck pulled up to the house and unloaded four big wooden crates from the Coppini Foundry in New York. I think I told you about my “Spirit of the Waters” sculpture. Well, here it was, or at least the four panels—the granite base is still to be contracted for and manufactured. I know I should have been thrilled when I looked at the finished bronze but I just felt terribly flat instead. Maybe it’s just because of the last few weeks, but I wonder if it’s something more, the idea that nobody cares about this kind of thing as much as we pretend they do. I’ve done a nice decorative piece but that’s all it is, just decoration. Just something to relieve the plainness that would be there without it. But maybe we’re all mistaken in thinking that plainness—or even emptiness—is something that needs to be relieved. I suppose you could even say that about the statue of Ben. It could be that Ben’s absence is memorial enough and that the best thing you could have said about my father’s statue, even if it was a great work of art, was that it was beside the point.

Well, it’s very late—I can’t sleep tonight—and I see that Miss Gilheaney is making no sense. Is it very cold there? Do you need anything that we could send you, like a warm coat or gloves? Now I’m sounding like your mother instead of your friend, but I’d like to send you something. Something that could be useful to you in your new life in France or remind you—in a good way—of your life back here in the States, in Texas. I know you said you aren’t ever coming home but you’re very young and sometimes young people think that when they decide something they’re bound to it for the rest of their lives. I guess that’s an example of the cheap unasked-for advice you get from someone who managed to set a trap for herself but hasn’t quite managed to find the way out.

I shouldn’t even mail this but I probably will.

Maureen

When he’d first read the letter, he hadn’t known what she was so upset about and he still didn’t. Something seemed to have gone wrong between her and her father. He was pretty sure there was more to it than just what had happened to the statue. She had never sent him a photo so he couldn’t picture her one way or the other. But he had a sense of her through her letters, somebody who was unhappy and lonesome, who was too proud to come out and say it but needed somebody to know it just the same. It was odd that he was the person she had chosen to tell, somebody she had never seen and would probably never meet, somebody she would look away from in horror if she ever saw his face.

It was funny to think she was the only person in the whole United States he wrote letters to and got letters from. Somebody he didn’t even know. He felt that if she were here he could talk to her in a way he couldn’t talk to those girls from Smith College. Maybe it was because she was old, in her thirties; maybe it was the way something was gnawing at her, something that she wouldn’t say or maybe couldn’t even name. Nothing seemed to have been gnawing at those college girls. It was like they had been born into the world already knowing what it was all about and how to make their way through it.

He didn’t want to try to go back to sleep after that dream. He took out one of the school tablets that had come in the boxes of supplies from the States and sharpened a pencil with his pocketknife over the stove, watching the tiny shavings flare up as they hit the fire. He sat at the edge of his cot with his jacket still on and a piece of scrap lumber for a writing desk and wrote Maureen Gilheaney back.

He said he was sorry to hear about what had happened to the statue and sorry to hear she was out of sorts. He said he had been having a bad night himself, starting with the dream about his folks. Now he was sitting here afraid to go to sleep again and feeling pretty lonesome. He told her it was like he could see all at once the emptiness of the Champagne fields and the rest of France beyond it, and past that the whole dark ocean. All of it seemed to exist just to separate him from the home he had once had and the person he had once been. He understood what she said about setting traps for yourself but he still didn’t think there was any point in ever going back to Texas. He’d had some childhood friends in Ranger, and he’d had some other friends he’d made in the army, but it couldn’t be the same with them now and he knew it. All of them looking at him, or trying not to, and remembering how he had been. She was his only friend now. He didn’t mean that like it sounded, like he was feeling sorry for himself, it was just true. And he’d never even talked to her or seen a picture of her. He asked her would she please just keep writing even if she felt bad like she had when she wrote that last letter. It made him feel like somebody was really talking to him, not just trying to be kind.

TWENTY-FIVE

T
he outright anger between Gil and Maureen had lasted no more than a day. It had quickly shifted to a tone of heartsick civility. They spoke to each other, they ate their meals together. Mrs. Gossling was not yet back, since she had to sort through her dead brother’s belongings and deal with his many creditors. Gil had written to her to take as long as she needed, had sent her a week’s wages, and had not mentioned what had happened to the Clayton statue because of her abrupt departure. The poor woman was distressed enough.

He would sail for France in two weeks and he and Maureen would have a respite from each other’s company, each other’s silent resentment and despair. She had never told him exactly what had happened with Vance Martindale, except to say he had turned out to be married and for complicated reasons had not been able to tell her so. The complicated reasons, Gil assumed, had amounted to nothing more than his selfish wish to take advantage of her ignorance, but there was no point in railing against him. She knew now the kind of man he was, she had suffered enough from that knowledge without her father driving the point home.

He wanted to comfort her somehow but of course that was out of the question. She was too proud and too hurt, and his own angry and wounded spirit was still in the way of his truly reaching out to his daughter. Gil knew no other cure for despair than to work himself through it, but even as he made his preliminary sketches for the La Salle he was losing faith in the old remedy. He was closing in on the end of his career with no works to his name that he thought would truly last, nothing visible in the future but dispiriting works for hire.

She had many questions about her grandmother and he answered them as clearly as he could while they cleaned the brittle clay off the armatures of the man and the horse. Much of what Maureen had learned as a girl about Margaret Gilheaney still applied. She had been a talented, loving, enterprising woman of great intelligence and conviction, independent in her thoughts except for her inflexible fidelity to the Church and its teachings. She had been married to a failed and damaged man, had raised two boys, one of whom had died. Gil had misled Maureen only about the date of her grandmother’s death, but he could not pretend that this strategic falsehood had been anything other than a poisonous lie, a lie that had shaken her own identity and shattered her trust in the father she had once worshipped.

When the armatures had been cleaned they shoved them to one side of the studio to clear space for the La Salle armature he would build when he returned from France. It would have made more sense to simply dismantle the Clayton armatures but he did not have the heart to do that right now.

He went into the house to eat a sandwich. Maureen said she was not hungry. When he came back to the studio he found her standing in front of her Spirit of the Waters panels, silently and ruthlessly appraising their worth.

Gil had been very favorably surprised when they had first lifted the panels from their packing crates, and his initial reaction still held. Something had happened to Maureen’s images in their journey from clay, then to plaster, then to bronze. He had seen it many times before, the depth of the bronze and the luster of the patina imparting an authority that had not been there before. He had not expected it to happen in this case, but it had. The forced movement he had seen before in the flights of the birds and the rush of the water now felt more natural, and the draftsmanlike figures were more dynamic. There was some other new dimension as well, something that must have resided in the piece all along. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the sculptor was a woman. The subjects were not framed or pushed or defined, there was no statement made, no artistic agenda promoted. The artist had nothing to prove, no interest in testing herself against the expectations of the viewer. The piece was simply about what her eye had seen and what her hands had rendered.

He continued to watch Maureen as she silently regarded the panels. There was more scrutiny than worry on her face, so perhaps she had given herself a break. He was cautious about praising her work in front of her now. After the bitter words that had passed between them, she would read his praise as false encouragement, or as a pathetic bid for forgiveness.

“How do you feel about them?” he decided to ask her.

She didn’t speak, didn’t turn her head to look at him. She just shrugged. Gil went to his modeling stand and back to work on a preliminary clay sketch for the La Salle, though he would not begin working in earnest on the piece until he had met with Monsieur Du Prel in Paris.

“I suppose it will look all right on the bridge,” Maureen said after a moment.

“I suppose it will too.”

“It was a mistake to do it in four separate panels. If I’d been thinking, I could have made a big relief that—”

She had abruptly broken off because Lamar Clayton had just opened the door.

“I knocked on the door of your house, but there wasn’t nobody there,” Clayton said.

“Come in,” Gil told him. His fingers were moist from working the clay and he wiped them with a rag before offering his hand to his surprise guest.

Clayton cast his eyes around the studio. He nodded to Maureen. He was wearing the same suit he had worn to the Old Time Trail Drivers banquet and in the daylight it looked too big for him, hanging rather than draping on his rangy stockman’s body. His shirt collar was a size too large as well, gaping at his sunburned neck. He had lost a little weight, his hair was grayer.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Gil said.

“Didn’t know I was either till I got your letter saying you weren’t going to live up to your part of the bargain.”

“I’m sorry. I regret having to cancel the commission. There was no way for me to continue.”

“Why?”

Gil directed his guest’s attention to the armatures shoved up against the wall of the studio. “There was an accident. The clay froze. I lost months of work.”

“So you need more money. Why didn’t you tell me that instead of just saying you quit?”

“It’s not a question of money.”

“What is it a question of?”

“Of my strong feeling that I don’t have it in me to do it all over again, to get it right, as I had it the first time.”

“You’ll get it right in a different way.”

“No, it would be a second-rate work.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know it.”

Clayton turned to Maureen. “Is that what you think too?”

“It’s what he says, Mr. Clayton, and so I believe it.”

It was true, she had come to believe it. Her father was working on the La Salle sketches without heart, without excitement. She had never seen him work that way. At first she had mistaken his despair for an uncharacteristic bout of self-pity, but it ran deeper than that, deep into his broken sculptor’s heart.

“I said in my letter I could recommend another sculptor,” Gil said to Clayton. “I would be happy to do that. There are a number of excellent—”

“I don’t need you to recommend another sculptor. If I wanted another one I would’ve found him myself. I’m going to hold you to this contract, Gilheaney.”

Gil stared at him, seeing not the bereaved father who had wanted to memorialize his son but the angry, unbending man who had driven that son away.

“You’re not going to hold me to anything,” he said.

“By God, you try me and you’ll find out.”

“Let’s go into the house,” Maureen said, “and discuss it there.”

“No, Miss Gilheaney, I believe we better discuss it right here.”

Gil stormed across the room to his desk, pulled open a drawer, hastily thumbed through a file of contracts, withdrew the one for the Clayton and slammed it on the desk.

“If you would read this, you’d see that each party has the right to withdraw from the deal at any time. The clause is standard in all my contracts. It’s there for your protection as well as mine.”

Clayton grabbed the document and swept his eyes across it. He set it back down on the desk, silently conceding the point.

“You’re right, it’s here in the contract, but I never thought you’d use those words to quit on me. I thought I had a better sense of what kind of man I was dealing with.”

“You’re dealing with a man who doesn’t want to deliver to you an inferior product, and for that you should thank me. You should thank me and now that you’ve had your say you should leave my studio.”

Clayton’s face was so inflamed with anger that for an absurd moment Gil wondered whether they were going to come to blows after all. But as the standoff wore on, the tension started to drain from Clayton’s face and posture. He did not back down, he just looked away and shrugged his shoulders and seemed to decide the hell with it.

“You said it was going to be your best work.”

“That’s right. I did.”

“And you’re just going to walk away from it?”

“The piece was destroyed, Clayton. You may not know what a devastating thing that is to an artist, but you’ll have to take my word for it. The statue was in my grasp once; it’s not anymore. If I continued I’d be taking your money under false pretenses. The only thing I can do is to let it go.”

Clayton looked to Maureen, as if she could explain this to him. But there was nothing she could say, or was willing to say, and she saw that he took the blank look she gave him in return as a rebuke.

He turned back to her father.

“This statue’s got you scared, ain’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean. And if that’s what you wanted to tell me, I’m sorry you felt you had to come all this way to do so. Maureen will see you out.”

“The hell anybody will see me out,” Clayton said.

THE DOOR
slammed shut, Clayton was gone, and Gil went back to his La Salle sketch, angrily squeezing the clay onto the miniature wire armature. After five minutes of his industrious silence Maureen couldn’t take it anymore.

“Are you pretending that just didn’t happen?”

“I’m not pretending anything. I’m simply working.”

“I don’t understand why you had to be so defiant.”

“The man accused me of—I don’t even know what. Duplicity. Cowardice. Do you suppose I’d let someone talk to me like that in my own studio?”

“He was giving you another chance.”

“I didn’t want another chance. Haven’t I made myself plain enough on that point? Are you as thick as he is, Maureen?”

“Yes, Daddy, I’m terribly thick. I must be, since I’m so easy to deceive.”

“That’s not what we’re talking about. The man came in and—”

“It
is
what we’re talking about. We haven’t even started to talk about it!”

He went back to work. He didn’t bother to give her the courtesy of firing back. She watched him as he narrowed his eyes, focusing all his attention on his sketch, creating a little clay figure. All at once his mighty vocation seemed absurd, a child’s pastime.

“You’ve thrown this commission away,” she told him. “You’re unbending and prideful. All you care about is dominating your clients, not satisfying them. That’s why we had to leave New York, because of your pride. You made us move to Texas. You made us move here and look what happened.”

“Look what happened. I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“That I killed your mother? Is that what you mean?”

But she wouldn’t let herself go that far. She watched him in silence as he continued to work, shutting her out, shutting out what she was saying. He squeezed another fistful of clay onto the armature but he felt such a jolt of pain from his arthritic thumb that he had to pull his hand away as if from an electric wire.

He gave the pain a moment to subside and then went back to the sketch.

“You should give your hands a rest if they’re hurting you,” Maureen said.

He ignored her advice. Almost at once, his hands were hurting again, but he forced himself to keep working, as if it was the pain he was trying to dominate and not the clay. When he could stand it no longer he pulled away again.

“You’re making it worse, Daddy. Please stop working.”

“I’ll stop working when I want to.”

He stared at the sketch with cold-blooded scrutiny, decided he hated it, and began ripping the clay off the armature.

“What about the boy?” Maureen said.

“What boy?”

“Ben Clayton. Did you even care about him?”

“You’re not making any sense. Ben Clayton was a subject. I didn’t know him, you didn’t know him. And he’s dead, so it won’t matter to him in the slightest if there’s a statue of him or not.”

Three hours later the two of them sat down to dinner at the kitchen table. Maureen had made potato soup. Gil wore the splints that Urrutia had prescribed for his hands. It was awkward for him to wield his soup spoon, but the effort gave him something to concentrate on as they sat in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes. They both seemed to recognize there was no reason to talk anymore about the day’s poisonous topics, no point in bringing their seething resentments back to the surface.

“I’m going to France with you,” Maureen announced.

“What?”

“You may not care anything about Ben Clayton, but I do.”

“I don’t understand you. How will going to France make any difference one way or the other?”

“I want to meet his friend. This village he lives in, Somme-Py, it’s not far from Paris. There are even tours you can take to the battlefields. I want to go there and meet him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have to give you a reason. I don’t know the reason. I just have this idea I can be of help to him somehow. I don’t have to go with you. I can book my own passage on another ship. I have money from my commission. It’s mine to do with as I see fit.”

“Go some other time. We’ll be terrible company for each other. Why now?”

“Because unlike you I can’t just move on to the next thing and forget all about Ben Clayton.”