Remember Ben Clayton (29 page)

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. I could write back and ask him, but what’s the point?”

“I think we should go see him.”

“Arthur? You read the letter, Daddy. He asked us not to.”

“He was probably just in a bad mood when he wrote it.”

“Well, if his mood improves, maybe he’ll write again and invite us.”

“We’ll be gone by then.”

Maureen looked up from her turbot and out the window toward the congested carrefour. They had stopped for dinner at La Rotonde, which had been a mistake. Everyone from their fellow passengers on the
Caronia
to the desk clerk at the hotel had recommended it as the place to be in Paris, but it was just a noisy hangout for Americans, the tables jammed together, the air foul with smoke, long-haired intellectual provocateurs insulting one another at the crowded bar.

“Why are you so interested in seeing him all of a sudden?” Maureen asked Gil.

“I had an idea for the statue today.”

“You’re not doing the statue, remember?”

There was no point in trying to continue a discussion in this echoing café. They ate their meal in silence and Gil paid the bill and they walked down rue Vavin on the way to their hotel on Notre-Damesdes-Champs. It was chilly but there was no wind and the static cold felt good. As the noise from the cafés on the corner receded, they could hear their footsteps on the pavement and the lazy clopping sound of the horse cabs.

“It’s possible I might want to take another crack at it,” Gil said.

“Well, take another crack at it, then, Daddy. Do whatever you want. I don’t care.”

It just came out. She had not planned to say such a thing, but after weeks of strained civility between them the raw words just erupted.

He paused for a moment in surprise, then kept walking beside her. She thought of him now as brooding and self-absorbed, almost a stranger. Trust in her father, in his love and consequential strength, had been part of the organic basis of her self. Walking down the avenues of Paris, she thought of the New York streets where she had grown up, like Montparnasse a teeming world of artists and writers and students and all sorts of in-between characters with big opinions. She remembered the colliding cooking smells from the narrow streets off Sixth Avenue, newsboys hawking the afternoon editions, and the haggard poets trying to hand-sell their fiery literary manifestos; the apartment where she had grown up, the sole adored child of her father and mother; the studio on Washington Square South with its wonderful light, especially in winter, where her childhood companions had been the bronze heads of business leaders and politicians who had commissioned busts of themselves from Francis Gilheaney; the patient voice of her father cautioning her to be careful with his tools, but to be heedless with the clay he set before her to model; the statue of Farragut in Madison Square Park that he took her to see again and again, declaring that in its deceptive foursquare simplicity resided all the beauty and mystery of art; the Italian restaurant Renganeschi’s, on West Tenth Street, where her father would take her and her mother to celebrate his finishing an important piece, where the owners and waiters would toast his success and present her with a special dessert; the sense of somehow being chosen to be this great man’s daughter, as if of all the children in the world he trusted her alone to share the secret space of his studio, to learn the magic of giving permanent physical form to people who for the most part had already vanished from the earth.

He had lied to her not just about her grandmother but, it seemed to her, about all of this as well. Her whole life felt like an illusion that he had spun, that he was still spinning.

“I don’t know what else to say to you,” he said wearily. “I’ve admitted I was wrong, I’ve apologized as sincerely as I know how.”

She looked away, tears filming her eyes, quietly accepting this declaration for what it was as they walked into the hotel and got their keys from the clerk. They climbed the winding stairs. Both of their rooms were on the sixth floor and she watched how her father climbed ahead of her with even strides, each firm footstep lending strength to the next. By the time they reached the top she was winded but he was not. In the dim electric light his face had a shadowy, stricken look.

“As far as the statue goes,” he said, “I declared it to be a dead issue, so I suppose it should stay that way. But I think I gave up too soon.”

She hefted the heavy key and opened the door to her room. She lingered for a moment in the hallway.

“Even if you decided to start over with the statue, what would be the point of seeing Arthur?”

“Well, I have a feeling there’s more to learn. Don’t you agree? More to learn about Ben.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
hey went to a branch office of Thomas Cook near the Opera. Gil told the agent he did not want a conventional tour of the battlefields but wanted to hire a car and a driver who knew the Champagne region and was familiar with the condition of the roads in the Devastated Zone. The agent had to consult with his manager about this out-of-the-ordinary request, but they determined there was a car available, along with a reliable guide-interpreter, and the trip could be arranged for six hundred francs. Gil and Maureen were asked to sign a waiver and warned against touching grenades, shells, or loose wire in the war area. They would also do well to bring mackintoshes and wear strong boots, as the battlefields offered unsound footing. They were given tickets for the morning train to Reims, where the car and driver would be waiting for them at the station.

After making these arrangements they went to the Louvre. In the sculpture galleries they stood before the Venus de Milo, Gil for the twentieth time, Maureen for the first. She read aloud to him from her book about the conflicting theories of Furtwängler and Reinach, about whether the statue was truly meant to be of Venus or, as Reinach contended, the wife of Poseidon.

Gil stood staring at the statue, pestered just as he had been as a young man by its ungraspable beauty. How exactly had the unknown sculptor pulled it off, that gorgeous torsion of the body, the near-blankness of the face, which somehow provoked an idea of ageless serenity and self-possession?

He left Maureen in front of the Venus to wander through the galleries, pausing before the massive Melpomene, and then the Diana with her fawn, and the running figure of Atalanta, both of which he had studied in his Paris days when his own work had been rather stiff and he had been vexed by the mystery of how to convey movement. And once more he stood in front of the thrilling Winged Victory of Samothrace, amazed anew by the drape of its garments, by its bold and urgent momentum, the dynamism with which the weight of the body was shifting in mid-stride from the left foot to the right.

After a few moments Maureen joined him there at the top of the grand staircase. The two of them stood staring up at the Victory without feeling the need to speak about it, just bound in appreciation. It was the first time in weeks there had been an easy silence between them.

They took the train from Gare de l’Est early the next morning and reached Reims before lunchtime. Their guide was waiting for them in the station. His name was Stuart. He was a middle-aged Englishman with owlish spectacles. He briskly took their bags and led them outside, where he tied the luggage to the top of the touring car as Gil and Maureen stared in amazement at the rows of houses hollowed out by bombs and at the piles of rubble that had still to be cleared away.

“As you can see,” Stuart said, “Reims was rather knocked about.”

“And the cathedral?”

“Quite the worse for wear, sir. Do you know it?”

“I haven’t seen it for many years.”

“We’ll have a look on our way out of town.”

The trip from Paris had been mostly unremarkable: fields, winter foliage, country lanes, towns huddled against the railroad siding. The war that had consumed the world and destroyed a generation seemed to have receded before them like a mist. But in Reims it was different.

Here it is, Maureen thought, as she looked out at the shattered streets. Here is the war. Stuart piloted the big touring car around the shell craters as they passed one ruined block after another, half the buildings, it seemed, roofless and empty.

“Good God,” she heard her father say as the car turned onto a central street and brought them in sight of the shattered cathedral. “Stop the car.”

Stuart pulled over on the torn-up square facing the cathedral’s facade. Hotels and government buildings on either side of the square were almost completely destroyed. The cathedral itself still stood, but the facade was blackened by fire, some of the carvings shorn away by blasts, the great rose window above the main doorway empty of its stained glass.

Gil got out of the car and Maureen followed him. He stared at the facade of the cathedral and then turned in a slow circle, taking in the destruction. When he spoke to Maureen, his voice was steady but his eyes were filmy.

“I came here once when I was a student,” he told her. “To see the carvings mostly. Just stood here and looked at them for hours. Feeling a kind of rapture, I suppose, as young people that age do.”

He did not say what else had contributed to that rapturous feeling—a young woman named Maryse who worked in one of the artists’ supply shops near the École. She had been a few years older than Gil, effortlessly slender, a small, watchful face under a towering crest of hair. Breezy and optimistic, she had disapproved of his solemn ambition, his sense that life was a forced march toward a fixed goal, and that an idle hour represented crucial ground lost. What was the point of being an American, she had asked him, if you don’t allow yourself the freedom that is your birthright?

She spoke a little English but they talked mostly in French, and though she held forward-thinking and even strident political views it was gossip that truly animated her. She had been for a time the mistress of one of his professors, and she was still fond of him and greatly amused when Gil told her about the man’s continuing helpless flirtations with students and shopgirls.

“You must take me to Reims,” she told Gil one day. “People tell me my portrait is there.”

He took her there. He did not think she looked at all like the famous smiling angel on the facade of the cathedral. The carved angel had a simpering, secretive expression, far from the open delight that animated Maryse’s face. But she was amused by the fact that people told her there was a resemblance, and at odd moments while they were in Reims she would do her best to mimic the angel’s mysterious and self-satisfied smile.

They had pooled their few spare francs for the train fare and a bare room in a small hotel off the rue Voltaire. They had hardly anything left over for food. They had no meals, just bread and cheese and a bottle or two of wine they had brought from Paris. He had meant to see everything, study everything, but he stayed in bed with her for most of the two days they were there, hungry, drowsy, drained of all earnest curiosity about the world.

On the second morning he left her sleeping and stood alone in front of the great cathedral, staring at the carvings on the western facade as the sun rose behind the twin bell towers. There were so many carvings of saints and angels and bishops and gargoyles, all of it so hectic and dense, that at first he had been repelled. It was too much art. But he made himself look at each portal, at the action represented: an infant Christ touching the forehead of a hermit, demons being cast out, heads being chopped off, the damned being led to hell, a multitude of seated figures with their hands raised in benediction. He was hungry for breakfast, hungry for the life to come, feeling as the sun rose that he was content and confirmed in his calling.

They had gone back to Paris and she had taken up with an ancient painter in his fifties with a spacious atelier. She had broken Gil’s heart so cleanly and sweetly he felt almost grateful. The loss of Maryse was another thrilling sensory deprivation that set him on a higher plane and led him deeper into his art.

He stood now staring at the facade of the cathedral, wondering if she was still alive, trying to picture her at sixty-three or sixty-four.

He thought he noticed something and walked closer, scanning the tight rows of saints and angels, some of them intact, some not, that were crowded above the doorways.

“If you’re looking for the smiling angel, sir,” Stuart said, “I’m sorry to say it was decapitated in the first bombardment, in ’fourteen. But they found the pieces of its head and it’ll be back together soon enough.”

Gil turned back to the empty plaza.

“There was a statue of Joan of Arc here.”

“She came through unscathed. They moved her before the worst of it started.”

“It was by Paul Dubois,” Gil explained to Maureen. “The Joan of Arc wasn’t his best work, in my opinion, but I’m happy to hear it’s survived.”

Gil walked into the cathedral and Maureen followed, passing below the gables and buttresses thick with their sculpted figures and on into the nave. The floor had not yet been cleared. There were still piles of rubble, some of it made up of fallen pieces of statuary. Light flooded in from the broken vault, and through the open roof far above they could see the winter clouds streaming by.

They walked solemnly through the vast space, down the aisles where great tapestries had once hung, past broken tombs and pulpits and burned walls. As they walked, Stuart narrated in a reverent whisper, telling them which damage had been rendered in which years of the war; the terrible bombardments of 1917 were the worst, he said, with shells raining down on the cathedral for seven hours without a letup, a sustained and targeted assault.

From the expression on her father’s face, from the way he nodded courteously but distractedly as Stuart kept up his monologue, Maureen thought she understood what was going through his mind. He was a monument maker confronted once again with the death of monuments, with the annihilating human contempt for what was supposed to be sacred and therefore safe.

For her part, Maureen was stirred by a sense of scale that was new to her. Her own unhappiness, her bitterness toward Vance, her anger at her father, were like some memory from another life. Nothing like that could register here. The cathedral was vast, but the destruction it pointed to had no limit. She had the sense that she and her father had left their world behind.

As they drove out of town Stuart continued his discreet narration: the German invasion, the French offensives that followed, Ludendorff’s desperate but failed counterattack, finally the great push that broke the German line that took place after the Americans arrived in the summer of 1918.

“I’m a bit of an amateur military historian,” he told them cheerfully. “Just off to the right, you see the great massif of Moronvilliers. Terrible fighting all along here. May I ask, sir, what brings you to Somme-Py?”

“We’ve come to locate a friend.”

“Ah, well, first we’ll have to locate the town, I’m afraid. Terrible fighting around there too, as you know. Somme-Py was one of the towns—a thousand of them altogether—that the Germans just wiped off the map. No place to stay there, of course. Nearest proper up-and-running hotel is in Verdun. I believe the company wired ahead for a reservation.”

Gil nodded. He stared out at what used to be the landscape: dead fields, dead forests, old women pushing wheelbarrows full of scavenged lumber and wire, families camped out in the cellars of houses that had been blown away down to their floors. Men were at work everywhere in the scattered villages they passed, tearing down teetering walls, building back ancestral stone dwellings out of raw lumber. The dirt road was uneven and in places it simply disappeared, vanishing into massive shell craters that had not yet been filled. They swerved around the craters onto cropless fields, through rows of fruit trees with greasy black limbs, killed by fire or by poison gas. The winter sky was gray and the earth below was unnaturally devoid of color. The clothes of the people they passed were brown or black, or so old and worn that the color had faded into nothing. The only relief in this chromatic dead zone was the red roofs of the warehouses and dispensaries built by the French Red Cross.

The world they were driving through was sobering enough that even Stuart, their chatty, history-loving guide, finally gave up his commentary and fell into silence. They passed other cars going in the opposite direction, more war tourists with their Michelin guides to the battlefields and their box lunches, sightseers swarming over the vast open wound of the front.

He couldn’t be too hard on them, Gil thought. Their curiosity was no more naked than his own. Maybe some of them had come to see where their sons or brothers had fallen, to lay a wreath on the ravaged ground. He himself was coming against the wishes of a young man he had never met, but who might hold some secret that would allow him to begin anew the work he had abandoned.

In another hour and a half Stuart announced they were arriving at Somme-Py, the village where Arthur Fry had told them he was living. Where exactly the village was—or had been—was hard to reckon. There was nothing left of it but a few teetering walls that rose above the debris-strewn ground like hoodoos in a desert. Some people were squatting in the cellars of their vanished houses, others were in thrown-together shacks with corrugated metal roofs, others in neatly built wooden shelters. They stared blankly at the passengers in the touring car as it made its way to what Gil guessed had once been the center of town, a crossroad in front of an imposing municipal ruin.

“That’s the
mairie,”
Stuart said. “Of course it’s nothing now. The new one is just there.”

He pointed to a barnlike building made of new lumber twenty yards away, from which a young man in a kepi and blowsy blue coveralls was striding forward to greet them.

Maureen saw the man’s welcoming smile and asked herself: could it be Arthur? But almost as soon as the thought formed she knew to dismiss it. This young man’s face was whole, and though when he greeted them he spoke in courtly English he had a thick French accent.

“Welcome to Somme-Py. My name is André L’Huillier. You’re Americans?”

“Yes,” Gil said, returning his handshake, which in the French manner was brief and precise. “Francis Gilheaney. My daughter, Maureen.”

“Are you from New York? Are you friends of Harry Collins?”

“We’re from New York originally. At present we live in Texas. No, I’m afraid we don’t know Mr. Collins.”

A brief look of puzzlement crossed L’Huillier’s face. “Please forgive me for assuming. Monsieur Collins is Somme-Py’s great friend in the States. Last spring he was kind enough to host a fashion show there to raise money for our village. Several of his friends have come here to see the work for themselves.”