Remember Ben Clayton (7 page)

“I’ve got the rest of the day to kill,” Vance said when he tracked her down. He was wearing his old suit and his proudly abused hat. “What shall we do?”

She was irritated at his assumption that she was perfectly free for the rest of the day as well, free to serve as his companion and verbal sparring partner. But she was not irritated enough to deny herself the rare pleasure of spending the day with a man of her own age, a man whose blustery sense of himself she rather liked. She dared not hope too aggressively that he was really interested in her, that he had something more in mind than a lively, bantering friendship. It was up to him to reveal himself.

She took his arm again as they walked out of the store and into the sunlight. She was still obscurely stirred up, still thinking about the war and the way its effects were coming to rest in her soul.

“Tell me about France,” she said to Vance. “What was it like for you?”

“No tales of valor, I’m afraid. I might have had some to tell if our boat had been a little faster, but as it was we got there just before the armistice. All that training, and I didn’t have the honor of firing even one volley at the evil Hun. But I very much admired the landscape—those hedges in Breton—and there were times when the battery was doing horse maneuvers and I was galloping up and down the column shouting orders that I felt like some exalted version of myself.”

“So it was fun?”

“My shameful little secret. And thanks to the beneficence of the AEF I was able to stay on in Paris for three months studying at the Sorbonne. The finest time of my life. You should see Paris, Maureen.”

She would very much like to see Paris, to live there as her father had when he was young, but she left this obvious fact unexpressed.

They went to the pictures. Vance found her a seat and then went out to the popcorn wagon in front of the theater, leaving her to read the deflating introductory title card on her own. “To these Women, and their pitiful hours of waiting for the love that never comes, we dedicate our story.”

The picture was called
True Heart Susie
. It billed itself as the story of a “plain girl.” But Lillian Gish wasn’t plain, not in the way Maureen understood the word. She was a woman you would certainly notice on the street. Her figure was slim, her small face was soft in profile but radiant and beseeching when she looked straight at the camera or into the face of the smug and oblivious boyfriend whose college education she had financed by selling her family’s cow.

It was a ridiculous story, of course, as so many of them were. Vance whispered wisecracks into her ear all the way through it. Maureen smiled at his wit, but she couldn’t deny that every once in a while Lillian Gish’s simpering emoting brushed against a chord of real feeling. Here was Susie in the pew, watching as the love of her life married another; saying nothing of her disappointment to anyone, just collapsing afterward all alone in theatrical sobs. Maureen recognized that element of uncomplaining muteness in herself. It was not pride, as it seemed to be with True Heart Susie—it was just a deflated acceptance, something she had had to fight against all her life.

It was night when they walked out. He suggested dinner. They strolled along Commerce Street all the way past the cathedral and on to Haymarket Plaza, where the Chili Queens had their booths and long picnic tables set up, and where the music from the mariachis blasted forth into the still night air. It was warm, like a summer night back home in New York. The plaza was filled with Mexican families and with Anglo visitors like themselves drawn by the easeful, exotic atmosphere of a more ancient Texas.

“I hear Rosa has the best enchiladas,” Vance said, guiding her to one of the rude wooden tables. The trumpets of the mariachis sounded with such piercing force that it seemed to her that the colored lanterns overhead swayed in reaction to the notes muscling their way through the air. Vance had to shout over the music to give their order to Rosa, a sharp-featured, good-humored woman with an entrepreneurial demeanor.

As they ate their enchiladas, Maureen told Vance all about the Pawnee Scout and her father’s fruitless expedition to Omaha to save it.

“What a horrifying ordeal,” he said. She appreciated the way he could swerve from irony to full-hearted warmth and sincerity. “To lose something like that, something you’ve given your soul to. I can’t think of a similar case, a statue lost before the sculptor’s eyes. How is he managing?”

“He was in his studio when I left this morning. When he’s in his studio he’s usually happy enough.”

“I admire your father,” Vance said. “In fact, being a poor cowhand turned professor, I’m in awe of the very idea of being able to capture someone’s likeness in sculpture.”

“You needn’t necessarily be in awe,” she said. “A lot of it is just technical.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true. On a normal human body, the legs are half of the overall height. The average human figure is eight heads tall. The ear is just behind the midline of the vertical axis of the head, and so on. You can get a long way with just basic knowledge like that.”

“But not all the way.”

“No,” she said.

“I’d be in awe of your work too if you wouldn’t cover it up when you hear me coming.”

“I have to. You’re a natural critic.”

“Not of you, Miss Gilheaney.”

He looked at her across the picnic table, the paper lanterns swaying above them, the music swelling as the mariachis headed in their direction. If this were a picture like
True Heart Susie
it would be the moment he moved the greasy dinner plates out of the way and leaned across the table to kiss her. He wanted to, she could tell that. He held her eyes unashamedly, making her feel admired, appreciated, almost beautiful.

But he did not kiss her. Instead he distracted himself with a big grin, rose from the table, said, “Nos vamos, Señorita?” and led her across the plaza. They passed the mariachis, who were blasting forth some Mexican folk song at top volume, their singing punctuated with all sorts of yips and trills. Vance handed them a few coins as he and Maureen walked by.

“I’m pretty sure that was one of Pancho Villa’s songs,” he said as they waited for the streetcar to arrive. “I guess you could say it’s an insult to Pershing, but after all, San Antonio is really Mexico, don’t you think?”

It was still early, only eight o’clock, but he insisted on accompanying her home. As they rode down Roosevelt Avenue he begged her pardon and pulled out a pad and pencil to jot down some questions he’d just thought of for his interview tomorrow with the boy healer. He told her if he gained the confidence of the boy and his formidable mother he might be coming back to San Antonio two or three times this fall, and it would be a great delight if she would agree to see him again.

“Of course,” she said.

“Good. I like you, you see. People tell me I’m rather a blowhard but I’m a good judge of character. And you have caught my attention, Miss Gilheaney.”

He insisted on getting off the streetcar with her and walking her to her door. The house was dark.

“Your father isn’t home?”

“He’ll be in the studio. Out back.”

“Well, I’ll give you into his keeping, then.”

He took her hand, squeezed it for a moment in both of his, and walked back in the night toward the streetcar stop.

SEVEN

E
l Gran Escultor!”

Dr. Aureliano Urrutia called out from the darkness of the Menger Hotel Bar. Gil blinked as he closed the door to give his eyes a chance to adjust from the blinding afternoon sun. The bar was a replica of the taproom of the House of Lords Club in London. Apparently it had once been somebody’s idea of high culture to model a San Antonio saloon on a posh London watering hole.

Urrutia sat with Walter Sutherland in a booth of polished cherry under the gallery. Sutherland toasted Gil’s arrival with an empty scotch glass and signaled the waiter with the same gesture. He was five years older than Gil, a wily enthusiast who had made his fortune in the grocery business and now spent his leisure hours buying up pre-Columbian art and puzzling aloud over the mysteries of antiquity.

“Do me a favor and have a real drink,” Sutherland said to Gil as the waiter appeared. “They’re tearing down the bar, you know?”

“Tearing down the bar?”

“If this goddam prohibition bill passes they sure as hell will. Ain’t that right, Otto?”

The waiter nodded wearily and asked for Gil’s order. Gil compromised with a beer. Having watched his father and his uncles drink themselves into early deaths, he had long ago seen to it that he developed into an abstemious man, moderate in all things except for a wild pursuit of glory.

“What the hell good is a bar anyway when the dries run the world?” Sutherland went on. He could be lively and full of striking opinions until his third or fourth drink, when he had a tendency to degenerate into a resentful boor.

“So, my friend,” Urrutia said to Gil, “you’re in mourning once again. We heard the news about your statue.”

“Awful damn sorry about it,” Sutherland said.

Urrutia dismissed Sutherland’s condolences with an impatient wave. “He’s sorry, of course, but he’s a philistine and doesn’t understand that a good statue matters more than a hundred human lives. A thousand.”

Gil had had a superstitious aversion to directly meeting Urrutia’s gaze ever since he had heard the rumor that the doctor had killed General Frederick Funston with the evil eye in the lobby of the Saint Anthony Hotel. It was one of many wild stories that surrounded the mysterious physician, who apparently saw no advantage in disputing them.

Urrutia’s eyes were in fact mild, not lethal at all. There was something sagging and wistful in his demeanor, the look, perhaps, that once-powerful men develop when they’re in exile. It was said that back in Mexico, Urrutia had been Huerta’s henchman, that he had surgically removed the tongue of one of the president’s rivals, and that it was Funston who had finally arrested him and thrown him out of the country.

About the only thing Gil knew for sure about the doctor was that he was passionate about sculpture, to the point that he was planning a sculpture garden, centered around a replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, for the mansion he was building on River Road.

“Don’t worry,” Gil said. “I’ve recovered. In fact I’ve just begun a new commission. A very interesting piece, a sort of memorial to a boy killed in the war.”

“What’s the difference between a memorial and a ‘sort of memorial’?” Sutherland asked.

“I’m not sure I know myself,” Gil admitted. He took a sip of the Menger’s house beer, soon to be banished from the earth. “I’m doing it for the boy’s father, a rancher in West Texas. He’s a grieving man, very private. I doubt that he means for anyone but himself to even see the thing.”

“Grief,” Urrutia said, contemptuously waving away the word he had just pronounced. “I’m tired of hearing about grief. Grief is holding the world back precisely when it must—I am searching for the English word—
roar
forward.”

The doctor expressed himself with such cold authority on this subject that Gil wondered if it might really be true after all that he had cut out that man’s tongue. He felt unmoored, as he often did during these sociable afternoons. Could it be that this theatrical, perhaps shady man was among those that he now counted as his friends?

Urrutia and Sutherland were part of the civic group that had originally lured Gil to San Antonio for the Alamo piece, and that had ultimately convinced him to stay. The members of the group were direct-speaking men of business for the most part who knew nothing of the poisonous political currents of the New York art world and were happy to steer commission after commission his way, usually without the charade of a competition. They had taken his talent as a wonder from the first, assessed him as a man who knew his business, and were generally too awed or too busy to argue with him about his ideas for a particular statue.

How different it had been in New York, where the announcement of every commission uncovered a seething pit of artistic competition and self-regard. He had seethed in the pit along with the rest of them, of course, until he could bear it no more. He might have had the USS
Maine
Monument if he had been a little more amenable to the commissioners’ demand for rearing hippocampi and lounging river gods, but he would rather have starved (so he theatrically declared to poor Victoria) than surrender to the sculptural cliché of yet another shovel-hooved aquatic horse. Piccirilli, of course, had set no such barriers for himself, and so it was his indecipherable sculptures and ponderous allegorical nudes that now stood forever at the entrance to Central Park.

For the international competition to erect a statue of General Gómez, he had sailed to Cuba at his own expense and put himself up at a hotel for weeks while he and fifty other men displayed their clay models in a humid and crumbling exhibition hall. When he saw that the competition was rigged, when it became plain that the commission was to go to a well-connected blowhard who knew nothing about proportion and was ridiculously reliant on enlarging machines, he had packed up his model and embarked for home before the award was announced.

Gil did not have the boiling temper that was tolerated and even cultivated in so many of the monumental sculptors he had known. When he walked away, he did so quietly. Anger was one thing; everybody knew it would cool sooner or later. But an inflexible artistic vision was, he had discovered, a chronic liability. After the
Maine
and the Gómez, word got around about him, but it did not travel as far south as San Antonio, where he had been greeted on his arrival with a banquet in his honor and a band playing an original composition titled “The Gilheaney March.”

“What rancher?” Walter Sutherland was asking now, as he peered down with dismay into his empty glass.

“His name is Lamar Clayton.”

“The hell you say.”

“You know him?”

“Goddam, Gil, of course I know him. Everybody in Texas knows him. Back when I used to dabble in the cattle business I’d see him every year at the stock show in Fort Worth. Hardly said a word to anybody, but after what he went through I guess you can’t blame him.”

“You mean losing his wife?”

“Losing his wife? Hell, people lose wives every day, and they’ll still talk your ear off. You don’t know about Lamar?”

Gil shook his head.

“I don’t either,” Urrutia said.

“Goddam Indians stole him when he was a boy. Him and his sister. Killed their daddy out in the fields, scalped their poor mother right in front of their eyes. Then rode off with the kids. He was raised Comanche, ol’ Lamar was.”

So that was what George’s Mary’s mysterious reference to “living with the Indians” had been about. Gil had imagined some quaint interlude, the sort of thing he himself had dreamed of doing as a young man, voluntarily removing himself from the stifling city to seek adventure and wisdom among the uncorrupted natives. This was quite a different thing, and in some way that Gil could not consciously calculate, it explained an air of stillness and sadness in the old rancher that seemed to reach further back in time than the recent death of his son.

“How splendid,” Urrutia declared. “Like something you’d see in the pictures.”

“They got him home somehow when he was sixteen or seventeen,” Sutherland went on, “but he wasn’t much good for a long time after that, drinking and so forth.”

“He seems sober now.”

“Hell, he’s been sober thirty years or more now, I’d guess. Ain’t no fun to be around but he’s a good businessman for sure. Because he’d been a wild Indian when he was a boy he got some nice grazing leases pretty cheap from the Comanches, from Quanah Parker himself is what I hear. That’s how he made his money. He don’t like to part with it neither. I hear he lives in a sod house, almost.”

“Not that bad,” Gil said. “But it’s not the house of a rich man.”

“So ol’ Lamar’s son got killed in the war? I’m damned sorry to hear it.”

“Make sure you do a good job on the statue,” Urrutia said, “or this Indian man might—what’s the word for when you rip away the hair?”

“Scalp,” Sutherland said.

“Exactly! Or he might scalp you.”

WHEN GIL LEFT
the Menger he walked across the plaza to the post office. He kept a box here for his business correspondence, and the mail today was mostly bills: from Star Clay Products for the ton of clay that had been delivered to his studio last month, from his foundry in New York for the balance due on the casting of a half-dozen portrait busts. There were several letters from friends in New York, though the tide of incoming personal mail had long since slackened. He did not get back home as often as he should, and it was natural for people to fall out of touch with a distant friend whose life in faraway Texas they could not imagine.

He closed the box and his eye fell on the one next to it, his box as well, that he had not opened for several weeks. He had rented it in secret, when they first arrived in San Antonio, for the sole purpose of receiving mail from his mother. She had died five years ago but he had not given the post office box up, partly because it was also the address through which he still received correspondence relating to her affairs—small checks, mostly, from the firm that had published her paintings of martyred saints as holy cards or as illustrations in missals—but also because of a guilty reluctance to finally close off the last secret threads of communication between mother and son.

He should do it today. Give up the box and switch the address. But the line at the counter was gratifyingly long; he would do it next week. Instead he took out his other key and opened the box and gathered up the stray pieces of mail that had accumulated since he last checked it. There was a parish bulletin from St. Joseph’s, the old church on Sixth Avenue where Gil had made his first communion and to which his mother in her later years had increasingly devoted her life. There was also a Catholic newspaper with stories about the latest miraculous cures at Lourdes and the Blessed Mother’s pleas at Fatima for the conversion of Russia. His mother had subscribed to these periodicals in his name. He did not know why they kept coming, five years after her death. Maybe she had bought some sort of extended subscription, so that she could be sure her influence would reach beyond the grave.

When he got home, Mrs. Gossling was quartering potatoes and dropping them into the soup well of the stove.

“I’m leaving you three meals,” she said without turning around to greet him. “You do remember I have to go to Castroville to visit my poor brother?”

“Of course I remember,” Gil said. And he did remember, if vaguely. Mrs. Gossling never stopped talking about her baby brother, a good man but a hopeless drunkard who was always dying but then not dying of various ailments. When she first came to work for them, after Victoria’s death, Gil and Maureen had felt obligated to pause in the kitchen and listen intently to her catalog of grief, but after a month or so they had both come to the conclusion that Mrs. Gossling was more interested in hearing herself talk than in eliciting pity from them.

“I’ll be off in a half hour then,” she said, sweeping up potato and carrot peels with the heel of her hand. “This will need to simmer until six o’clock or so. I’ve set out the bowls for you to put the leftovers in.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Gossling,” he said.

She replied with a curt nod and he went to his studio, thinking of Victoria’s cooking—now mostly lost to them, except for the dishes Maureen had learned at her mother’s side—and of Victoria’s presence in the kitchen, which even in her homesickness and melancholy had been so much more warming and welcoming than Mrs. Gossling’s.

But he also remembered the times when Victoria had glanced at him as he was entering the house and seen an envelope in his pocket from his secret post office box, an envelope with his mother’s handwriting. On these occasions her welcoming smile would instantly disappear. She would not say anything; the argument between them on this point was ancient and irresolvable. She would just turn back to the stove and tell him in a polite voice when dinner would be ready.

He went into the studio and got out the key to the always-locked drawer where he stored his mother’s letters. There was no reason to hold onto the parish bulletins and newspapers that kept arriving but he could not make himself throw them out, so he unlocked the drawer and slipped today’s additions under the rubber bands that held the growing stacks of back issues.

And then there were the rubber-banded collections of his mother’s letters, dozens of them in this drawer, probably a hundred more locked away in a file cabinet. His name was written on the envelopes in his mother’s beautiful hand: Mister Francis Gilheaney, the “Mister,” he knew, less a form of address than a mother’s assertive declaration of her son’s worldly success. The letters were typically long, full of boilerplate exhortations for him to make a good confession, to attend Mass, to offer up a prayer now and then to Saint Jude, along with effusive declarations of love and pride and occasional bafflement. He had carefully answered every one of them, taking hours sometimes to compose his replies, groping for language that would be evasive but not dismissive, that would satisfy her hungry curiosity to some small degree without revealing more about his life than he could afford to.