Remember Ben Clayton (8 page)

He slipped the last letter she had written him out of the stack. He felt the weave of the paper with his fingertips. Proper stationery had been the first luxury she had allowed herself, back in his family’s brief one-year period of prosperity when they had moved from their tenement on Leroy Street to a townhouse on St. Luke’s Place. He had not had the steady means to provide quite that standard of living for her in her old age, but in addition to a nice apartment on Sullivan Street he had been able to keep her in stationery and in the paints and brushes and canvases she used to fill her lonely hours. It had been years since there had been any buyers for the religious art she used to paint to help support the family, the images of Saint Teresa of Ávila or Saint Catherine of Siena that were printed and distributed and passed out as holy cards to parishioners all across the country. But she had still sat at her easel producing variations of the portraits of the saints that had so entranced him when he was a boy.

To distract himself from these memories Gil sat back in his chair and fixed his eyes on the unfinished maquette of Ben Clayton standing next to his horse. He could see a hundred things wrong with it already: something awkward about the way the boy’s hand rested on the saddle, a thickness in the horse’s neck. This was only a preliminary sketch, of course. There was much research still to be done and more models to be made in varying scales until he set to work on the final full-size sculpture. But when he went back out to West Texas in the next few weeks to present this maquette to Lamar Clayton he wanted the old man to sense a power and fidelity in this beginning step.

He turned again to the letter on his desk, intending to put it back with the rest, lock the drawer, and get on with his work. Instead he opened it and started to read it again. With every word his eyes passed over he felt a sharp self-rebuke, the hurt of an elaborate deception that he was responsible for and now could never put right.

His mother had relayed no news of any direct importance in the letter. She wrote that her late sister’s son, a cousin almost unknown to Gil, had recently passed out at a lunch counter in Union Station in Chicago but was not believed to have suffered a heart attack. Monsignor Berney at the age of ninety was embarking at last on the trip to the County Carlow he had dreamed of taking since he was a boy. Mary Rose Conroy still went over to his mother’s apartment every night before bedtime to have a cup of tea and to say the rosary with her, and when the weather was decent the two of them—vigorous widows in their early eighties—would still venture forth from their building on Sullivan Street and walk across Sixth Avenue to Sheridan Square, and then make a visit to St. Joseph’s on the way back. They had finally finished the Seventh Avenue subway and you could tell the difference, she wrote. The horsecars were almost gone now—a shame, when you thought about it—and people were flooding in from other parts of the city with predatory curiosity. The old Elevated trestles still cast Sixth Avenue in their immemorial shade, but someday they would be gone too, torn down, and the people like her who had walked along the gloomy street for decades would be suddenly exposed to the sun like the bugs under a branch that somebody had lifted off the forest floor. And they were tearing down so many of the old buildings to make room for gleaming studio apartments for those uptown invaders. Yes, the tenements were old, of course, and filthy and crowded, no better than rookeries some of them, but still it hurt to see them go. The Italians were moving in everywhere. They were decent people for the most part and good Catholics, she supposed. She didn’t mean to sound superior, but it was just different here now. The movie theaters everywhere, the dance halls, the streets filled with young people caring about nothing except having a good time, barely thinking about their immortal souls.

Three pages of this, front and back, circling themes of lament, of loss, of puzzlement and subtle accusation. Like a schoolgirl, she had always written “JMJ” (Jesus Mary and Joseph) at the top of every sheet of correspondence, even sometimes at the headings of grocery lists. Her penmanship was gorgeous but the ink had been pressed hard into the paper, and Gil could not help but think of his mother alone at her desk, alone in the apartment whose rent and upkeep had been a large part of his financial burden, urgently forcing these vague words down.

“What are you reading?”

He hadn’t heard Maureen come in and her voice startled him. He jerked upward in his chair, in the same motion grabbing the letter and slipping it back in its envelope.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just Senator Grayson’s widow writing to ask how much it would cost to have another bust cast for her children.”

He put the letter into one of the unlocked drawers in as matter-of-fact a way as he could manage. He would have to wait until Maureen left to transfer it to the locked drawer where he kept the rest of her correspondence.

He looked up at his daughter. She was standing on the other side of the desk. She was wearing her best dress, crisp blue poplin with subtle embroidery along the scoop of the neck. She was smiling, grinning really, her eyes radiant.

“What’s going on?”

“You’ll never guess so I’ll just have to come out and tell you. I’ve just come from a tea at the Saint Anthony’s roof garden.”

“You didn’t tell me anything about going to a tea.”

“It’s not necessary for you to know everything I do, Daddy, but that’s a separate issue. The tea was a meeting of the Women’s Club of San Antonio, the Arts and Beautification Committee. Headed by this very stout, very formidable woman, Mrs. Toepperwein. Her grandfather was a messenger from the Alamo or something, and of course in this city the Alamo trumps everything, so her word is law.”

“And the word is what exactly?”

“That I have a commission.”

Gil looked at his daughter, still puzzled, but beguiled by the look on her face, by the idea that this moment might at last be the harbinger of her happiness and independence. “Daddy, my design was chosen! For a project on the Commerce Street bridge. And they’re paying me a thousand dollars!”

She told him about the Spirit of the Waters competition, how she had entered it without telling him and modeled the piece in the studio of the Ursuline Academy when he thought she was out shopping or was simply too busy with his own work to notice she was gone.

“But why on earth in secret?” Gil asked her. “Did you think I would object?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve tried anything on my own. And I didn’t want you to be deflated if I didn’t win. But now I
have
won and so everything is out in the open. Of course, there’s still a lot of work to be done. The panels I’ve made so far are just scale models. But it won’t interfere with the real work, Daddy, I promise. I’ll just need a tiny corner of the studio. And anyway, the deadline is ages away. The Clayton will probably already be at the foundry before I have to start the full-scale work.”

His daughter’s anxious expression unnerved him a little. It was as if she was frightened that he would freeze with disapproval and order her to abandon the project before she began, as if she expected him to be jealous.

He did his best to put her at her ease, standing up at last and kissing her cheek in congratulations, proposing that they break out a stowed-away bottle of soon-to-be-contraband champagne to celebrate, demanding to see the models. They sipped their champagne and then before dinner Maureen went into her room and brought out the clay sketches, setting them on a long table and then pretending to stand there with no grave concern as he studied them.

“Marvelous,” he said. The work was better than adequate but so strongly did he want to believe that it was extraordinary that he uttered this compliment with an explosive enthusiasm that surprised him—and caused tears of pride to form in the corners of Maureen’s eyes.

Maybe it really was the beginning of something for her, he thought. She was intelligent and reasonably talented, she had always worked hard and diligently. She was a woman, but that wasn’t so a great a liability for an artist as it used to be.

And if his suspicions were correct and there was something of substance brewing with Vance Martindale, he might be able to put aside at least some of his guilt for moving his family to Texas.

EIGHT

T
hey had been told that the Bois des Vipères was clear, but you could not count on anything being clear. The German prisoners of war who were supposed to mark the unexploded shells, so that they could be carted away and destroyed by the Service de Désobusage, were paid only forty centimes a day, and as often as not when they saw a shell they simply gave it a wide berth and left it lying there.

Vipers Wood was not a forest, it was just a remnant strip of vegetation where the landscape dipped a few feet below a rocky shelf. A mile or so of tangled brush, thirty or forty yards in width. Something you wouldn’t even notice unless you had been under fire from the machine-gun nests hidden within it. It was strange to be back here, just over a year later. The forest, and the German trench across the road, had already been taken by the time Arthur’s regiment had marched this way toward Saint-Étienne. It had been other units of the 36th, along with the marines in the Second Division, who had been shot apart by the machine guns hidden in these woods. They were the ones who had taken Blanc Mont Ridge. Climbing up the long slope of the ridge a day later, Arthur and Ben and the rest of his company had passed their bodies, shredded and buried in the mud of the shell craters, part of the stinking detritus that had poisoned what had once been farmers’ fields. He remembered how the company had paused at the summit of Blanc Mont Ridge. They could smell the dead all around them, and they could see the distant steeple of Reims Cathedral.

Arthur pushed the branches out of the way with his thick work gloves, careful with every step. In only a few yards he came across coils of barbed wire hidden in the underbrush, and beyond it a rusted sheet of the corrugated iron the French called
tôle ondulée
, along with a few broken clay bottles of Dutch schnapps and scattered picket posts that marked where a machine-gun position had been. The shallow trench leading out of the position would have to be filled in, and the
tôle
dragged off and reported to Dervaux, the
chef du travaux
. Here in the Devastated Zone, where all of the villages had been blasted away and the fields ripped apart, where nothing existed anymore except for a few indomitable crows, a piece of corrugated iron was a commodity.

Arthur unhooked the heavy clippers from his belt and knelt down to cut away the wire. The German wire was stout and cunningly designed, with clusters of barbs that grabbed you everywhere at once. It was hard work to cut it up but it gave him satisfaction. It was right that he was here, working for the Service des Travaux de l’État, undoing in some small way what had been done. By an accident of logistics he was with a crew that was moving across the same country in which he had fought. Two weeks ago they had been on the Navarin Farm Road. Then they had come here, just outside the ruins of the village of Somme-Py, and in the weeks ahead they would sweep up to the summit of Blanc Mont and down toward Saint-Étienne, where he and Ben had charged the Germans in their cemetery stronghold. Sometimes Arthur imagined he was rolling up the past, tucking it tightly away where it would never have to be seen again.

It was a pleasant thought and it might have given him comfort if every present moment did not contradict it. Even if there had been no pain from the ragged hollows of his sinuses, where infections were constantly brewing, or from the ill-fitting vulcanite prosthesis biting into always-tender gums and raw bone, an awareness of his face and its effect on others would still reign over every thought. Over every thought, he knew, until the end of his life.

He dragged a tangle of cut wire away from the trees and out onto open ground, beginning a pile for the camion drivers to pick up. German POW crews were at work on the long slope leading up to Blanc Mont. Arthur wondered what that slope might have once looked like but could not picture it. The image of unmolested fields, of woods and flocks of birds, would just not come into his mind. Beyond the Bois de Vipères there were no trees, there was no color except for the green uniforms of the German prisoners. There was no level ground, only shell holes and blown-up trenches, and twisted phalanxes of picket posts and rebar to tear into your legs if you tried to walk across it. And no sound—that was the strangest thing. Just the crows cawing to each other, and the pumping of a tractor engine, and maybe once in a while the barking of a dog from somewhere beyond the moonscape. But nothing soft, no birdsong, no wind passing soothingly through the leaves. The leaves were all gone, except those that scraped against what remained of his face as he hauled more wire from Vipers Wood.

It took him most of the morning to remove the wire in front of the machine-gun position and then he started in on the picket posts, unscrewing them from the chalky rock. While he was doing so he heard Dervaux arguing beyond the margin of the trees with an angry
sinistré
. They were talking rapidly and excitedly and Arthur’s French was still not good enough to make it all out. He thought the
sinistré
was telling the
chef du travaux
that his fireplace had been stolen and that he blamed the men of the Service. It made sense, but of course Dervaux could not acknowledge it.

Arthur glanced through the leaves at the man. He was middle-aged, gaunt and defeated, his patched-up clothes sagging on his frame. He was close to tears. He was telling Dervaux that he had once been a respected man in this village until the war had come and forced him to flee the home he had built with his own hands, and when he came back he had found nothing left of his house but his fireplace, and now that was gone too.

Dervaux listened without saying anything and kept his expression blank and his lips squeezed around his pipestem. He was a fair man and a sympathetic one, but his job was to put the ravaged earth back together and he could not solve the problems of every brokenhearted refugee. He told the man to go find the
maire
and complain to him, and the
sinistré
finally staggered away across the broken ground, yelling curses over his shoulder whose precise meaning Arthur could not understand.

Arthur worked in solitude the better part of the afternoon. There were other crew members in the woods, men with whom he lived in flimsy workers’ barracks that had been erected for them outside Suippes, but the thick tangle of trees hid them from view and imposed a meditative silence that suited Arthur’s mood. He needed to practice his French as much as possible, but talking was awkward with the prosthesis, and with half of his upper palate destroyed his voice had a parched and slurry sound that embarrassed him almost as much as his appearance.

When everything in front of the sheet of
tôle
was clear he grabbed it and tried to drag it away as well, but the iron was too heavy and unwieldy and the brush too thick. He was about to call out for help to Jérôme, who was working a few dozen yards away, when he noticed that in moving the
tôle
he had exposed an unexploded stick grenade and, just beyond it, a pair of hobnailed boots attached to the legs of a dead German soldier.

Arthur found a stick, tied a ribbon to it, and marked the grenade. Then he gently tugged the sheet of corrugated iron a little more until he had exposed the rest of the soldier’s body. He was lying on his back in the little scrape trench, staring upward, his jaw hinged open as if his last act had been to gasp in wonder at something he saw revealed in the sky. There was not much skin left on the skull, and as a result the helmet that still covered his head looked absurdly oversized.

Arthur left the body lying there and went to tell Dervaux. When he came out of the trees he saw the
chef
at the edge of the road fifty yards away, talking to somebody through the passenger window of an auto-truck.

“Ah! Fry! Come here!” Dervaux called when he caught sight of Arthur. “These women, they want to talk to you!”

Dervaux took a step to the side and now Arthur could see through the windows of the truck two young women staring in his direction.

Arthur stopped. He looked off to his left, hiding the grotesque half of his face from their sight. From this peculiar stance, he called to Dervaux in French.

“There is a body in the woods. And a grenade. I’ve marked it with a handkerchief.”

“Yes, yes. Very good,” Dervaux answered indifferently. “Why are you standing there? Come here.”

Arthur walked over to the truck, still holding his head awkwardly to the left, a habit that was as instinctive to him now as putting one foot in front of the other. Of course, he knew he could disguise nothing. They would see soon enough. Everyone who looked at him would see soon enough.

“They say you’re an American!” one of the women said, stepping out of the truck and smiling at him. “So are we!”

She was young and bold and righteous. She looked into his eyes with an uncomfortable intensity. People did that, he had noticed, because they thought it made them look unafraid and accepting.

“My name is Missy,” she said. “And this is Gwendolyn.”

Gwendolyn sat in the cab next to the French driver. She slid across and walked out behind Missy. She smiled as well, but less forcefully, and her eyes moved discreetly from his face to the swell of Blanc Mont.

“We’re from the Smith College Relief Fund,” Missy said.

They were twenty or twenty-one, Arthur guessed. Close to his age. He didn’t know anything about clothes but he supposed they were expensively dressed. Their coats were tightly woven and the blue one that Missy wore looked oddly sumptuous in this landscape where color and texture no longer existed. Some of the girls he had known back in Ranger had been pretty but none of them had been so in this way, with this sweeping, shining confidence. The second one—Gwendolyn—was not as beautiful as Missy in the face, but he could see by the way her slender arms reposed so elegantly at the sides of her body, the elbows bent, the hands clasped lightly in front of her waist, that she possessed a physical refinement that was more commanding than beauty.

“We were in Suippes,” Gwendolyn said, her voice as low and lazy-sounding as Missy’s was excitable, “and they said there was an American working out in this sector for the STE.”

Arthur nodded blankly, his face still turned away, though out of politeness he kept shifting his eyes back in their direction. He had always been bashful around girls but the need he felt now to get away was intolerable. They were trying not to stare but whenever their eyes landed on his face he felt they were scouring him with horrified scrutiny.

“So why the STE?” Missy asked, with a burst of nervous laughter. There was something in her tone he didn’t like, as if he was supposed to share her assumption that an American working to clear the French battlefields was somehow comical.

And now he had to answer, had to use his horrible wheezing, smacking voice, had to feel the vulcanite prosthesis move up and down in his ruined face like the hinged mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“I’m not sure I could tell you, ma’am,” he said. “I just reckoned I would stay on in France, I guess.”

“Well,” Gwendolyn said, “it doesn’t matter. We’re delighted to meet a fellow countryman. And we’ve talked to Monsieur Dervaux, and he’s given his permission for you to come to dinner with us tonight in Suippes.”

“It won’t be anything fancy,” Missy assured him. “Just spaghetti, probably. But one of the girls with us turns out to be a divine cook, and there’s even a rumor we’ll have some fresh fruit.”

Arthur stood there for such a long time, not answering. He was sorry to embarrass them but he couldn’t think of a polite way to say no.

Finally he said, “Well, I thank you for the invitation but I guess I’d better not.”

“But why—” Missy started to say, but Gwendolyn put one of her sculpted hands on her friend’s shoulder to silence her.

“Just think of it as an open invitation,” she said. “We’ll be in the sector for a couple of weeks at least. I’m sure all the girls would like to meet you, and we have a doctor with the unit too, Dr. Ford. He’s very busy, of course, but he’s very kind and would certainly want to make time to see you.”

“That’s all right,” Arthur said. “I ain’t sick.”

“Well, I didn’t mean that you—” She stopped herself, and then took a step forward and reached out and touched his arm just below the elbow. He could feel the pressure of her slender fingers through his heavy cotton jacket. And he knew that this would be the way women would always touch him from now on, with an over-attentive kindness, with a look in their eyes that said they understood and wanted so very much to be able to help.

“We just wanted you to feel welcome. We thought you might enjoy some American company. Please think about it, Mr. Fry.”

She knew his name. It occurred to him that nobody had ever called him mister before.

He glanced at her sideways again and saw she was trying not to cry.

“I reckon I better not,” he said again.

ALL THAT NIGHT
, lying on his cot in the temporary barracks room in Suippes, with a cold wind outside charging across the Champagne, he thought about the two girls from Smith College. He wondered where Smith College was. It had been strange to speak to them in English.

He wondered what it would have been like to accept their invitation and sit in a warm intact house somewhere eating spaghetti and maybe drinking wine with them, Missy and Gwendolyn and the rest of the young women who had come to France out of a virtuous duty to help a ravaged country. They probably would have brought the latest sheet music from back home and one of them would have played the piano while the others sang, doing their best to make their guest feel comfortable and whole. But Arthur knew, with the same casual certainty that a cow knows it can’t cross a cattle guard, that he could never be at ease in anybody’s company again.

The Service des Travaux de l’État was as close as he could come to that, he thought, at least for now. The anonymity of the Service suited him. He did not know or care where most of these men came from. Jérôme, sleeping in the cot beside him, was the closest he had to a friend. He was a skinny boy who patiently corrected Arthur’s French as he smoked an enormous pipe that had belonged to his grandfather. Jérôme had been gassed at Navarin Farm and there was something wrong with his bowels and usually twice a night he would have to rise in pain from his cot and go to the latrine, and he would remain there for a long time. But he was uncomplaining and cheerful and did not think Arthur’s own grotesque wound was in any way remarkable. Many of the other men were veterans as well, poilu who had somehow survived the war and come home to nothing. Some of their towns, like Somme-Py, had simply been blasted from the earth until hardly a stone remained and a person who had lived there all his life could not even tell where the main street had been. Most of the workers were French, but there were Russians as well, and of course the German prisoners of war, and Chinamen and Mohammedans from the French colonies who were even farther away from home than he was.