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.
“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.”
Remember Ben Clayton Page 7