They talked for another twenty minutes while Maureen went inside to pack their things. When it was time for them to leave, Clayton lifted the resentful dog off his lap and rose to shake hands.
“You going to be coming back along with your father, Miss Gilheaney?” Clayton asked Maureen, as Ernest was cranking the balky motor of the car in the dusty driveway.
“If he invites me, Mr. Clayton.”
“If I’m doing the paying, I guess I can do the inviting,” he said, meeting her eyes for only a moment before looking away shyly. “You come back.”
ERNEST HAD JUST DRIVEN off the ranch property onto the main road leading to Abilene when he turned to Gil in the front seat.
“You suppose I could see that drawing you did?”
Gil took the sketch out of his pocket and handed it to him. Ernest steered with one hand as he studied it, lifting his eyes back and forth to the mostly empty road.
“Well, that’s Ben all right,” he said.
“It’s only a preliminary likeness.”
“I know, but it’s still him.”
He gave the sketch back and drove on, not speaking but clearly working something over in his mind. Gil glanced back at Maureen, who sat quietly in the backseat, staring out at the countryside with the borrowed duster buttoned to her throat. The frail magic of the landscape could not stand up to the hard glare of midmorning. It was tangled and dusty again, a spreading rangeland with no tantalizing shadows or contours, just the foundational blankness of the earth itself.
“It’s strange,” Ernest finally said to Gil, “to think about lookin’ at a statue of Ben. Like he was the president or something.”
“It won’t be so imposing as that. That’s my hope, anyway. I want it to feel natural.”
“Well, I hope it’ll cheer the old man up. He’s been pretty daunsey since Ben died. We all have, I reckon.”
“What can you tell us about Ben?” Gil asked him. Maureen, hearing this question, leaned forward in her seat to listen.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ernest said. “It’s hard to know where to start talkin’ about somebody you knowed all his life. I still think of him mostly as a little boy. I was just gettin’ used to him bein’ grown.”
He lifted his hand off the steering wheel to wave to the driver of a car heading in the opposite direction.
“Ben was an intelligent boy. Even when he was a little kid, there weren’t no way to outsmart him. He was always ahead of what you were thinkin’. He looks a bit like his daddy but I think he come by his nature, the better part of it anyway, through Mrs. Clayton. She was a kind lady. She had a quiet way that drew people in. Kept her thoughts to herself mostly but saw everything that went on around her. Ben had that quality too. When he was pretty young, twelve or so, he’d be out nighthawkin’ with us on the roundups. You could surely trust that boy to watch those cows at night.”
Ernest shifted his eyes to Gil. “If what you were askin’ was how he ought to look in the statue, I guess that’s what I’d say: quiet.”
Gil nodded, glad to have the vague impressions of Ben Clayton he had been forming confirmed to at least some degree, and glad to know that the attitude of calm he had proposed for the statue was on the mark.
“What is this we heard,” Maureen asked, pitching her voice above the motor noise, “about Mr. Clayton living with the Indians?”
They could both see that the question surprised Ernest. He didn’t answer for a moment, taking advantage of a low-water crossing to pretend his full attention was needed in working the reverse pedal to slow the car. When he finally spoke again, his loquaciousness had deserted him.
“Mr. Clayton don’t like to talk about that much,” he said.
“SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT,” Gil said to his daughter in the dining car that afternoon. They had changed trains in Fort Worth and were now on the long home stretch to San Antonio.
Maureen sprinkled a meager teaspoonful of sugar into her coffee.
“What’s not right?”
“You’d think the boy would have written home. There were no letters, only a few postcards.”
“Maybe Mr. Clayton burned them. Out of grief. People do that.”
“Yes, I’m sure they do, but I don’t think that’s the case here. There’s just a natural scarcity of information. I don’t like the sense of there being something missing. I’m not a detective.”
“You don’t have to be, Daddy. You have enough to go on.”
“Maybe,” he said.
Gil folded his napkin and set it beside his empty plate, contemplating the pleasing sway of the dishes and utensils on the table as the train rattled south out of Fort Worth.
“I think I need to go back,” Gil mused. “Not just to show him the maquette, but to stay around a while. I need a better sense of the place. I need a better sense of my subject.”
“How long a time were you thinking?”
“I don’t know. A week or so. If Clayton can stand the sight of me that long.”
“It will add to the expense.”
Gil waved the observation away, though she had a fair point. The way to get rich and stay rich was to knock out one big statue after another, as fast as possible. He had already caught the mood of this piece, he had already formulated the concept. But he could sense a hidden richness in this statue, an opportunity for greatness.
“A week is nothing,” he told her. “If it will improve the quality of the work—and it will—then we’ll afford it.”
She smiled. “You liked it out there, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. Your father’s a cowboy at heart.”
IT WAS well past dark when the taxi pulled up to their house off Roosevelt Avenue. Above the rooftops of this low-lying neighborhood southeast of downtown San Antonio, the full moon hung starkly in the sky, illuminating the crumbling bell tower of Mission San José. What a strange world I’ve come to live in, Gil confided to himself as he paid the driver. It was a thought that visited him often enough. How could it not? For all of his life he thought he would come to ground among the teeming opportunities of New York, or perhaps find a picturesque exile in Europe, surrounded by intoxicating ruins and statues of antiquity for inspiration. The thought of living on the edge of an old Spanish mission field in Texas, among breweries and lumberyards, would never have found an excuse to enter his mind.
And yet here he was: home. Or what was supposed to be home. His wife had been dead for a year, but at moments like this he felt the confirmation of her absence with crushing force. He knew that Maureen felt it too. As they entered the house, she hurriedly switched on the light in the parlor, as if the darkness and emptiness of the house made up some sort of an active threat.
Mrs. Gossling, the housekeeper, had left a pot roast for them that afternoon. After unpacking, Maureen heated it up and then the two of them sat at the kitchen table, eating their late dinner while they skimmed through the newspapers that had accumulated in their absence. Neither felt the need to talk much after the long train journey together, but Gil could not stop thinking about the conversation that would have taken place at this homecoming if Victoria were still alive.
The news of a major commission had always made her beam with relief, since it was she who had borne the burden of managing their accounts, scanning the mail for promised payments or an unexpected check from the sale of a gallery piece. Gil had always had a high tolerance for financial anxiety; it was a necessary trait for a man in his line of work. But the suspense had worn on Victoria, and he missed the opportunity to reward her with the news of a project that would ensure their continued solvency for a year or more. And he missed just talking to her, telling her about the old man who had seemed as poor as he was sad but who had not even blinked at the price Gil had proposed, and about the lonely primacy of the site that made him confident that this statue would be a work of heartbreaking impact.
“I might use the Holloway boy again,” he said to Maureen.
She looked up from the Evening News, w
ith its screaming headlines about Bolsheviks and railroad strikes.
“He might be a little too slender.”
“Maybe a little. We’ll see how the clothes fit him.”
Rusty Holloway was the young man whom Gil had used as the model for one of Crockett’s men in his Defenders of the Alamo grouping. He was the son of a well-known Texas Ranger captain, though he himself was an unadventurous postal worker who had a Class 3 deferment and had missed the war. And despite his father’s iconic occupation, Rusty was not much of a horseman, something that Gil would have to take into account, since the human figure would need to imply an easy conformance with the horse next to him.
They talked for a few moments more, about whether he should lease or buy a horse to serve as the model for Poco, and where it could be stabled, and then they each silently went back to the newspapers again until Maureen announced she could no longer stay awake. She kissed him good night and retreated to her room, leaving him alone in the kitchen in a dim pool of electric light.
He turned off the light and walked to his own room, the sound of his footfalls combining with the ticking of the mantel clock to create a lonely recessional tattoo. The haunted stillness of his own house made it that much harder to purge the gloom of Lamar Clayton’s lonely ranch house from his mind.
He brushed his teeth and changed into his pajamas and went to bed. The trip to West Texas, as trips tended to do, had broken the continuity of his acceptance of Victoria’s death, and he felt her once again beside him, sleeping on her back, her profile looming as sharp as a mountain range. Thirty-three years of marriage had never eroded the fascination he found in staring at that unforgettable face, which still embodied for him everything that was beautiful and heroic and mournful in the female soul. Before she had gotten sick she had begun to put on weight, the broad planes of her face sagging a bit with the added flesh, but even at fifty-four she could have still served as a model for a ship’s figurehead.
Her heroic features had implied so strongly an internal fearlessness that it had taken Gil many years to fully perceive how uncertain she could be, how deeply her morale could be shaken when tensions were in the air or prospects were on the wane. The move from New York to San Antonio had been a new start for Gil, but for Victoria it had amounted to a plummet out of a familiar world, a descent caused by her husband’s tyrannical artistic pride. She had gamely tried to start anew here, to follow him into the social embrace that greeted an eminent sculptor from New York, but the attentions of all these kind strangers had done nothing to buoy her up. They had sent her, instead, on a slow slide into solitude. Along with Maureen, she had done her share of volunteer work during the war, rolling bandages and putting together relief packages, but she had made no real friends in the process, and after the armistice she was more alone than ever, spending her days in more or less solitary management of the household while Gil and Maureen worked together in the studio. When she was stricken by the Spanish flu—a disease that had mostly attacked vigorous young people—Gil had not been able to banish the thought that the vaporous gloom of her new life in San Antonio had added to her vulnerability.
There was no point in trying to sleep now, not when he was turning over once again in the middle of the night his responsibility for Victoria’s lingering unhappiness and shockingly swift death. He got up and put on his working clothes. He made his way through the moonlit hallway to the kitchen to drink a tumbler of limeade from the icebox. (Embracing the Mexican preference for limes over lemons had been one of the easiest adjustments to life in San Antonio.) His throat was dry and he drank the cool limeade in several long swallows while standing at the window looking out at the October night. He washed the glass out in the sink and quietly slipped through the kitchen door. His studio was only fifty or sixty feet away but in the unseasonable nighttime humidity beads of sweat were already forming at his hairline by the time he reached it. Gil did not much mind the humidity, though it had tormented Victoria. It kept the clay moist, for one thing. And it added to an overall vivifying sense of living in a strange and secret place.
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
Months 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 i
n 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.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 6