Remember Ben Clayton (6 page)

The odor of that moisture-saturated clay welcomed him as he walked through the door, along with the smell of lumber from the scrap pile that had accumulated at one end of the studio, where he kept the wood that he used in filling out his armatures. The high-ceilinged barn he had converted into his studio had been made higher by a four-foot-tall panel of north-facing windows installed on solid trestles that rested on the reinforced studwork of the barn walls—and it was through these windows that the moon shone now with such radiance that he could almost go to work by its light.

But it was daylight that mattered in a sculptor’s studio, daylight of a certain proportion and strength. The reflected light from the moon lent a distorting, golem-like glower to the pieces scattered around the studio. Gil’s full-size plaster of the Yellow Rose of Texas appeared especially ferocious, her eyes lost in shadow and her beautiful delicate brow looking, in this light, as thick as a caveman’s. The statue had been commissioned four years ago by the young men of a local civic organization dedicated to the memory of the young maiden (fictitious, Gil was almost sure) who had supposedly distracted Santa Anna while the Texan army marched up to attack his camp at San Jacinto. Unfortunately, the Knights of the Yellow Rose of Texas had never been able to find the funds to have it cast in bronze, and a grocery store had in the meantime been built on the spot where it was to have been erected.

The Yellow Rose was only one piece in what sometimes seemed to Gil a gallery of disappointment: maquettes to enter competitions for commissions that had been awarded to others, busts of bank presidents and board chairmen and the mayors of mid-size cities that he had undertaken purely for money, allegorical tablets commissioned by gas companies and department stores to honor their achievements in the annals of customer satisfaction and free enterprise.

It had been a long time since he stood in this studio with the sense of righteous creative purpose that he felt tonight, addressing a project that was not just remunerative but inspiring. He sorted through the scrap pile until he found a thick slab of pine that would serve as a base for the maquette, blew the dust off it, wiped it with a rag, and cleared off the worktable at one end of the studio. From a deep drawer filled with tangled pieces of thick wire he retrieved a twelve-inch human armature he had built for a previous model, and with a pair of pliers he set to work bending it into the internal skeletal shape of a boy Ben’s size. When it was more or less as he wanted it, he set it aside and started to work with more of the thick-gauge wire, fashioning another armature for the horse. At the end of an hour’s work he had the two armatures screwed down to the base and standing side by side, the schematic arm of the man resting upon the spine of the horse. That’s enough, he thought, though his imagination was racing, charged by the sight of these loops of pliable wire shining in the moonlight, the always exciting first step toward three-dimensional reality. That’s enough, he told himself: leave something for tomorrow.

SIX

M
onths earlier, in secret, Maureen had entered the competition for a city sculpture commission. The piece was to be placed on the Commerce Street bridge and called Spirit of the Waters in homage to the San Antonio River, which passed below. It had seemed natural not to tell her father, though it had been difficult to locate a space in which to model the piece and sometimes awkward to invent excuses to leave the house for the extended periods of work required.

In the end, she had been able to commandeer the studio of a friend who taught art at the Ursuline Academy. The studio was vacant only on Saturdays, but so far it had suited her schedule, and the bulk of the work was now finished and would be ready for the judging competition next week. Her father would not begin the Clayton piece in earnest for another few weeks or so and her presence in his studio was not yet in demand. She had told him this morning that she was going out to spend the day with Vance Martindale, which was not rigorously true but not false either, since Vance had written that he would be in San Antonio over the weekend and wanted to see her.

She had decided to hide her participation in the competition from her father because she knew she would not have been able to abide his enthusiasm. The congratulations, expressions of confidence, and unsought suggestions that would emerge from his interest would, she knew, quickly subsume her own uncertain ambition. She would be not just his daughter but his blood-bound protégée, a role to which her own authentic worth as a sculptor would forever be hostage.

It was a sense of that authentic worth that she was trying to recapture now. Back in New York, she had come close to achieving some sort of independent success. She had steadily applied for commissions, sometimes using a false name, carefully testing the waters to see if she would be taken seriously in her own right and not just politely accommodated as the daughter of a well-known sculptor. None of the commissions had come her way, but she had not really expected them to. She was a woman, which would have made rising to the top of the list unlikely in the first place, and she was young, with no reputation. But there had been enough encouraging comments on her work to make her believe she was being noticed and that with time and patience she might advance into a career.

But her rising confidence had coincided with her father’s deepening frustration at the direction his own career was heading in New York and his abrupt decision to move the family to San Antonio to take advantage of the new Texas commissions that kept falling into his lap after the success of his Alamo piece. Maureen could have refused to move, of course. She had even gently aired the possibility to her father, who had responded with reasonable words but with such a hurt and betrayed expression in his eyes that she was astonished at how strongly it was in her power to wound him. And she could not really leave her mother to face the Texas wilderness—as she imagined San Antonio to be—without a daughter’s support. If she had been in love it might have made a difference; she might have had the cruelty to remain in New York and abandon her parents to the edge of the known world. But she had not been in love, only mired in an indifferent half-courtship with a young newspaperman who, as it turned out, was interested in women only for propriety’s sake. Breaking up with him had involved no heartbreak at all—just more dispiriting evidence that her lifelong fear of being undesired was rooted in some sort of objective truth.

On a Sunday afternoon last summer Maureen had taken a solo San Antonio bicycling excursion, following the course of the river past the old missions, sketching all the way, trying to conjure up something for the Spirit of the Waters piece besides the sprites and maidens and various genii that she knew would be the starting point of most of the other contestants. She wanted to depict the river rather than to airily personify it, and as she studied the almost-finished clay model now, she thought she just might have succeeded.

She had created four tablets, one for each side of a short column, that re-created in relief the things she had observed from her bicycle: noble cypress trunks, moldering Spanish aqueducts, swooping herons, and perching kingfishers. As a New Yorker who had lived in San Antonio for only six years, she believed she had rendered these elements with an outsider’s reverence. The coziness of the little river, its spring-fed clarity, its exotic history of Indians and Spanish explorers and filibusters had unexpectedly stirred her. As she stared at the panels, she began to realize she had been drawn to something else as well: not just to the generative idea of the Spirit of the Waters but to the fetid over-abundance of the foliage, to the spectral menace of the cypress knees rising from the water and the loops of grapevine hanging from the trees like snares. Beneath the celebratory business was something darker, a homage to a mysterious and unwelcoming place, the place where her own compliant exile had begun and where her mother’s life had come to its end.

She heard bootsteps echoing in the empty hallway outside: Vance Martindale was here. She glanced at her reflection in the window glass and quickly began covering the four panels with a moistened cloth.

“Caught you,” he said when he swept into the room. “It must be something scandalous or you wouldn’t be covering it up.”

“It’s something you may not have an opinion about until it’s finished,” she said. “And maybe not even then.”

He took the crooked pipe out of his mouth with one hand and lifted his hat with the other as he stood there grinning at her. For all his natural bluster and confidence he was oddly shy with her, and she still did not quite know how to read him.

“I need to buy a new suit,” he said.

“You certainly do.” He was wearing a rumpled out-of-season white suit, the side pockets where he kept his pipe and keys and change bulging carelessly. The brim of his hat was floppy with abuse, and he needed a haircut. He was an inch shorter than she was, bowlegged from a boyhood of ranch work in South Texas, and had a proud hayseed grin, which Maureen suspected was a conscious foil for his brilliant mind.

The studied carelessness of his appearance had appealed to her from the first. It was maybe a little put on, but she didn’t mind. They had been conspicuously at ease around each other ever since they were introduced at the unveiling of her father’s memorial to the Defenders of the Alamo, a piece for which Vance had written a robust appreciation in the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
. Since Vance lived in Austin and she in San Antonio, their relationship had existed mostly as a fitful flirtation. But he was coming to San Antonio more and more lately, always on the excuse of some bit of academic business or other. If it was true—as she hoped it was—that the real purpose of these visits was to see her, he had not yet brought himself to admit it.

“I’m serious,” he said as she gathered up her things and locked her friend’s studio. “I’m going to Joske’s to buy a new suit and I need you to consult. I’ve decided to give those philistines in the English Department an opportunity to take me seriously. But if I’m going to look my dashing best I need a woman’s opinion.”

They walked along the river, following it downtown. Vance said he was in town to interview a Mexican boy healer for a book he was writing on Texas folklore. His scholarly enthusiasms were rooted in the culture and history of his own state, which made him a low-paid eccentric in the English Department of the University of Texas. The donnish professors there, believing the youth of the state should be taught their Shakespeare and Gibbon, had no great affection for someone who insisted on teaching them cowboy songs or tall tales of the open range.

He was extremely interested to hear about Maureen’s visit to Lamar Clayton’s ranch, and kept pumping her for answers about things she had not thought to notice—how much acreage he had, what variety of cattle he ran, whether he employed any Mexican vaqueros as hands, what his brand looked like.

“I could write a whole book on brands alone,” he said as they emerged onto Alamo Plaza. “Cortés, for instance, right after the conquest wasted no time in branding his cattle with Latin crosses. Of course, you could go all the way back to the pharaohs if you wanted to—”

“But I don’t really want to,” Maureen chided.

He laughed and offered his arm as they crossed the plaza and it felt good to take it, to adopt the pose of a normal woman strolling with a winningly eccentric man, a man who might this very day finally kiss her, who might someday declare he loved her.

Cars were parked up and down the streets and around the perimeter of the little plaza in front of the Alamo. There were palm trees everywhere, a sight that had always been more alien to her than the strange revered ruin itself. In front of the open door of the old mission, a family was posing for a snapshot, the young children squirming and protesting as their perfectionist father stalked about with his camera, searching for the best angle. Other families were lined up behind them, waiting for their chance to record their presence at this great inexplicable shrine.

“Would it embarrass you if I tipped my hat?” Vance said as they walked past the ancient church.

“Yes, very much.”

He tipped his hat to the Alamo anyway, to annoy her.

At the edge of the plaza they passed her father’s monument to the heroes of the Alamo, four bronze figures crouched behind a palisade wall, Davy Crockett in the foreground urgently priming the pan of his flintlock rifle. The piece had taken three contentious years to complete. At first her father had to counter the charges that an Alamo statue could not be entrusted to anyone but a native Texan, and then he had to convince the city fathers that his conception—a dynamic tableau of frightened men in a desperate fight—would be far more memorable than the stolid portraiture they had originally envisioned. Then of course there had been the all-consuming work itself. Maureen had spent almost a year in research, gathering rifles and powder horns and haversacks from the attics of old pioneer families, consulting with historians about the structure of the palisade wall that Crockett and his men were said to have defended, examining moth-eaten frock coats and beaver hats from the period in order to present her father with authentic options for the clothing the figures would wear.

She paused now in their walk to stand before the statue for a moment, pretending to Vance to be concerned about a shiny spot on one of the defenders’ knees where the patina was starting to rub off, but really to admire the feeling and skill that her father had brought to the work. Crockett was depicted as the middle-aged man he had been. There was a fatalistic resolution in his face as he stared down at his rifle. But one of the defenders next to him, the figure Rusty Holloway had posed for, was only a boy, and though his face was proportionately correct it seemed to be elongated with terror, almost as if the sculptor who prided himself on realism had found it necessary to make a concession to the modernist distortion he distrusted. It was the face of a young man who knew with certainty he was about to die, and in staring at it now Maureen could not help but think of Ben Clayton, and wonder if his last moments had been this fearful and frenetic.

“Strong work,” Vance said. “Maybe a little too sincere for the twentieth century.”

“My father has no use for artistic fashions.”

“Nor do I. I write about cowboy songs, remember? Shall we get my suit?”

Joske’s department store was at the end of the block. She accompanied Vance as he clomped rapidly on his booted feet through the women’s department, past autumn suits and coats, the new blouses of georgette crepe. The end of the war had brought forth a flowering of goods everywhere, and nowhere more abundantly than on the display tables of the department stores. In passing, she fingered the material of a light-blue poplin suit, coveting it despite the certainty that it would not come close to draping as elegantly on her full figure as it did on the slender mannequin.

Vance was not so slender himself, but he was immune to that sort of self-consciousness. She stood there listening as he described exactly what he wanted to a sales clerk in the men’s ready-to-wear department. Then he sought Maureen’s opinion on various gray or plaid or brown worsteds that the clerk brought forth for him to try on.

Together they decided on a suitably rustic brown check—he said it reminded him of the color of a Nueces River cutbank—and while the tailor marked it for alterations Maureen wandered idly through the busy store, surveying the new belted men’s suits, the wider lapels, the straw hats that were back in fashion after the war. She remembered the moment last year when she had been shopping with her mother and a somber bell had rung at noon and everyone—the customers, floorwalkers, elevator boys, cash girls with their hands full of bills—had stopped in mid-action. “May we all take a silent moment,” the manager had proclaimed from the top of the stairs, “to pray for victory, and for our young men far away in France and on the seas.”

The memory came back to her now with chastening force. During the war she had done volunteer work for the Lone Star Hospitality Service, serving doughnuts and passing out magazines at the train station to anxious, high-spirited soldiers being shipped overseas. Along with the rest of the customers that day in Joske’s she had inclined her head and mumbled her prayers for the boys’ safekeeping. But somehow the emotional gravity of the war itself had bypassed her. After that moment of silence, she had returned to the concerns of her daily life, fretting about her future, worrying about her mother’s unhappiness in San Antonio, calculating her own odds for ever escaping into something resembling her own life.

When had that been? September? October? Could it have been the very day when Ben Clayton was killed in France?

In any case, it had not been long after that day when the city sirens finally wailed in honor of the armistice, when Maureen and her family had joined the rally in front of the Alamo, thinking that not just the war was over but the influenza crisis as well. And it had been that next morning that her mother had woken with a fever.