Time was on his mind so starkly tonight. He remembered standing here with Victoria two years ago, staring up at Saint Joaquin. On that night Victoria had silently brushed past him and walked into the interior of the mission church. She had sidestepped the rubble from the collapsed dome and bell tower and stood there in the open nave, looking up at the stars, the night flattering the stark planes of her face. She was entering her mid-fifties, her hair still not completely gray, though its luster had faded and it was shot through with silvery tendrils that he rather liked. They had been arguing, he remembered, but not with any particular bitterness. And whatever petty resentments he might have held toward her that night evaporated as he watched the starlight play across her face. The commonplace signs of age and decay that had begun to undermine his wife’s visage stirred him as deeply as her flawlessness had in her youth.
When he had first met her, he was newly home from Europe and sharing a grim little studio on West Fourteenth Street with a young painter fresh out of the Art Students League. The painter had the study during the day and Gil had it at night, after he had finished working at the Eden Musée wax museum, sculpting queens on the way to their executions and writhing victims of the Spanish Inquisition.
He won his first commission that year, an allegorical tablet that was the gift to itself of one of the smaller New York gas companies that was scrambling to secure a place in the electrical future. The tablet was to depict Womanhood Released from Drudgery, following the Spirit of Light toward the horizon of the new century. Gil needed daylight for serious paying work, so when he received his commencement money he quit his job at the wax museum and paid the painter an extra portion of the rent so that he could take the daytime shift.
She came to him on a Tuesday morning, entering his life with a hesitant knock. She allowed him a cautious smile and met his eyes only briefly; it occurred to him later that she must have habitually been wary of what she would find on the other side of a studio door. He knew she modeled at the league occasionally and the painter who shared the studio with him had friends who had used her from time to time, but he had never seen her before until she walked into the room and stood there at the north-facing window in midmorning light.
He explained the piece to her—the Spirit of Light gliding forth with arms raised, one hand supporting a gas flame and the other a stylized burst of electricity. She nodded briskly with professional comprehension. He had the feeling she knew what he wanted more clearly than he did. Her features were clean and sorrowful. Her manner was evasive. He had to struggle to meet her on the businesslike plane she had established, because he was already in love with her and when she began to remove her jacket and blouse and crisp blue skirt he fled to the other side of the room and took up his station behind his sculpting stand as if seeking protection from a blast.
He had a pair of old oars he had scavenged from the North River after a storm, and he gave them to her to support her upraised arms as she posed naked and striding for the better part of two hours. Her sense of privacy and reserve was as powerful as her bare flesh. As he openly studied her body, as he formed it in clay with his hands, he felt a thrilling intimacy with this unapproachable woman. She was entirely professional, holding the pose without complaint, anticipating his requests to shift position slightly as the changing light played across her bare skin.
He felt she trusted or respected him no more nor less than any other artist she had posed for. His lustful stupefaction had to have been plain to her, and perhaps that was part of the reason, in those first few sessions, that she deflected his solicitous questions—Was she cold? Was she thirsty? Did she need a break?—with a shake of her head and an unrevealing smile. It was only after three or four sessions that she finally felt comfortable enough with him to hold a conversation. He learned about how her father had died in a knife fight when she was twelve and the family was thrown onto the mercy of the Settlement Society. Her mother had gone to work in a shirtwaist factory and so had she, trimming off stray threads from the garments seven days a week, working till nine o’clock most nights, being paid for the overtime with a slice of apple pie. When her mother had fallen ill with tuberculosis she was taken to a poorhouse ward on Blackwell’s Island and Victoria never saw her again.
She did not expect much from life and it had been hard going at first to be in love with her. It had been hard going all along, as the weight of her grievances toward him began to accumulate. The grievances all sprang from the same poisonous source: his insistence that his mother never know of their marriage, or even of Victoria’s existence.
It was strange to think now that she had once loved him enough to agree to such a bargain. She had even listened with some sympathy when he had first explained the situation to her, when he told her that it would destroy his mother to learn that her only surviving son had married outside the Church and that his soul was condemned to hell. He could not think of doing that to her, not after everything she had already endured.
Gil thought he had a faint memory of his father before he went to the war, a hurried, balding man in an apron fussing with the shelves in his grocery store. Whatever patience and optimism there might have been in his nature had vanished at the Bloody Lane or in the slaughter fields below Marye’s Heights. He had survived both, and Fair Oaks besides, though shrapnel had badly scarred the nerves in both arms. He probably would have been a drunk anyway but maybe not so much of a tyrant if he had not been literally crazy with pain for the last twenty years of his life.
Gil’s mother sought refuge from his beatings in prayer, huddling with her two boys and whispering an Act of Contrition so that they would go to heaven in case he came against them with a knife. The dangerous rages did not happen that often, but often enough that clouds of terror loomed over them all even when Gil’s father stayed silent and tame. It was the threat of martyrdom, Gil supposed, that kept steadily raising his mother’s investment in the sheltering promise of the Church, that made the goal of preserving her sons’ souls for heaven even more compelling than saving their lives.
Gil’s brother, Michael, left as soon as he could, apprenticing himself to a fossil hunter in the New Jersey marl pits, then a year later dying of appendicitis on the train on his way to the bone beds of Wyoming to hunt for thunder lizards. The fossil hunters had been a rough bunch, and Gil’s mother was tortured by the thought that Michael might not have had a chance to make a good confession before he died. In her grief she prayed incessantly for his soul in Purgatory and could not utter her fears that he might have died in a state of mortal sin.
Gil’s father felt the pain of his son’s death too, though he was intolerant of the religious ravings of his wife. He himself mourned in drink, in a deepening hostility over the Germans, or the blacks, or the goddam Republicans. As his anger widened, his targets narrowed, to his shaken wife and remaining son. When Gil was thirteen he noticed the malicious look building in his father’s eye and stood up against him as he heaved drunkenly across the parlor toward his wife. His father tried to swat him out of the way and when Gil held his ground he threw him hard across the room, sending him smashing against his mother’s easel and smearing her half-finished portrait of Saint Catherine of Siena with the blood spouting from his torn forehead. Gil got back to his feet and there was an ugly, clumsy melee that ended with his father running out of the room weeping with shame.
The shame was strong enough to send his father straight to confession, and with the guidance of the parish priest he was able to remake himself for a time. He was a good businessman when he was sober and for several years the grocery store thrived, but he had a glowering nature even when he wasn’t drinking, and anyway it was too late for Gil to feel any affection for him, or confidence enough in his continued sobriety to ever let down his guard. When the storm broke again, Gil was older and stronger and the shoving match went his way. After that his father was an increasingly bitter and weakened figure in the household, no longer seeking reprieve in the Church but instead shunning the
sacraments and mocking his wife’s devotion. He died at forty-eight of a heart attack on the floor of the Golden Swan Saloon.
There was enough money from the sale of the grocery to keep them from immediate distress, though they were soon gone from the apartment on St. Luke’s Place and much of the money Gil earned from his talent went to the support of his mother—as it would for many decades to come. She moved to Chicago to live with her sister at about the same time that Gil began attracting notice in New York and winning his first commissions. With his mother at such a distance, the deception he had proposed to Victoria seemed sustainable. And it was vital, of course, to his mother’s well-being. He believed this at the time and he believed it still. Victoria was a non-Catholic, a term that in his mother’s world was an all-consuming negative. To marry her, to marry outside the Church, was to live in sin, and to live in sin was to die outside salvation. He did not believe this, he never had. But his mother did, with a fervor that only grew more rigid as her life’s misfortunes compounded.
To preserve the illusion that his soul was not condemned he had few options. He could end his connection with Victoria and seek out a wife who was Catholic or who at least would convert, which Victoria was too proud and offended to consider. And it was Victoria’s defiance, her provocative disdain of convention, that stirred him as much as her beauty. She was unlike other women he had known. She was subservient to nothing, unafraid of God and uninterested in commands of conduct that did not arise from her own heart. But that did not make her like the morally confused and ready young women who swarmed around the New York art scene. She was wonderfully grave. There was a sense of purpose and direction about her that heartened Gil as he embarked on his own trackless quest for artistic greatness. He could not consider giving her up.
So the only other option was to conceal all knowledge of her from his mother. It was not difficult at first. The deceit grated on Victoria and tested her patience, but she went along with it, trusting in her husband’s belief that it was an act of kindness. But when Maureen was born the whole thing began to seem more cruel than kind. It was no longer an innocent secret to deny to both grandmother and granddaughter the knowledge of one another’s existence.
But what could he do? By that time the deception had already been in place, setting down intricate roots, for years. It was the worst decision he had ever made, could have ever made—he understood that now, but there was no going back. Even at the time he had astonished himself. He had not known until then that he could ever be capable of such a blatant, breathtaking falsehood. And there was never a moment when revealing everything to his mother would not have meant expanding and deepening the original betrayal. So he continued to conceal everything meaningful in his life from her, everything but his work, sending her newspaper accounts whenever a new statue was unveiled, and letter after letter detailing how his furiously paced but deeply satisfying career left him no time for thoughts of marriage. He did not talk about his mother to his circle of friends and they assumed without asking that she was dead. The lie to Maureen had been more direct: her grandmother had died before her birth, killed by a sudden brain hemorrhage as she walked home one Sunday after Mass.
Gil remembered the disgusted, tight-lipped forbearance with which Victoria had allowed this lie to claim their lives. They had argued about it for years on end, and he could see in her filmy, red-streaked eyes that she was edging from grudging complicity to something like hatred. She could never forgive him now, but there was no tolerable way to stop the branching deceit.
When the sister she was living with in Chicago had died, Gil’s mother had decided to come home to New York. To continue the subterfuge in such close proximity would have been difficult and damaging, and part of the reason he had agreed to move to Texas was so that the elaborate deception could go on.
Victoria had not wanted to go. She wept at the thought. She would be greeted in this new life only by loneliness while he would be welcomed as the world-famous sculptor who out of all the fair places he could have settled chose San Antonio.
And this fraudulent triumph that he had insisted upon for himself had brought her, as she predicted, nothing but homesickness and isolation and, in the end, a very real death.
Gil walked into the mission church, following the ghost of his wife. The memory of the way she had stood here that night two years ago was still so strong that he had an urge to rush back to his studio and sculpt it, just as he remembered: Victoria standing alone staring up yearningly through a church’s broken vault. Her expression that night had looked untroubled and accepting, the worry and anger smoothed away in a wash of moonlight. It was the way he would like to remember her, but he sensed that capturing her like that would amount to nothing more than another betrayal.
THIRTEEN
Dear Mr. Clayton,
My name is Arthur Fry and I served with your son in the 36th or as it is known by us Arrowhead Division over here in France. Ben and I were good friends. We met at Camp Bowie our first day there while waiting in line to fill these empty bed-sacks they gave us from a big pile of oat straw. Ben made a joke that when we went to bed that night we would hit the hay for sure. I trained with your son all the way through at Camp Bowie and sailed with him to France on the Lenape. It was an unpleasant trip, a lot of us were sick most of the time, and we were worried we might get sunk by a U-Boat. But Ben had a way of putting everybody at ease and everybody liked him and wanted to be around him and I told myself when we stepped onto the pier in Brest “I believe I’ll stick with Ben.”
I don’t know if he mentioned my name in any of his letters home to you but we were good friends. I come from Ranger over in Eastland County where my late mother taught school and my late father worked for the County Clerk’s office. I liked to hear Ben talk about growing up on the ranch. I grew up in town mostly. He said you had driven cattle up to Kansas back in the old days and I was always interested to hear about that and other adventures you had in pioneer times.
I was there at St. Etienne when Ben was killed and will tell you more of that battle if it is something you would care to learn. I know you have delicate feelings toward your son and may not want to hear the details of his death but I will just say here that it might be a comfort for you to know that it was quick and I do not think he suffered very much. Write me with your questions if you care to using this address. We move around a lot but this French outfit I work for—the STE—is pretty good about getting letters to me, though I don’t get much mail and don’t care that much about it.
I got wounded pretty bad in the same fight that Ben got killed in. I don’t think I’ll be coming home to the United States anytime soon. I like it in France well enough and my wound is such that people might get upset to see me. If I were coming home I would come to see you and bring you this in person, but as it is I will put it in this letter and hope it arrives safely. It is something that Ben made out of a mess-kit lid. I guess you could say it is a kind of charm or the like. As you can see there is a picture of a horse on it. Ben told me that the horse’s name is Poco and where he is standing is a place on the ranch that Ben said he felt particular affection for.
Ben was looking at this picture he had made of his home place just before we jumped off for the attack on St. Etienne. He put it in his pocket and I guess it fell out when the stretcher bearers lifted up his body. It laid there in the dirt for a year or more until I came across it when I was doing reclamation work for the French government. This part of France is called The Devastated Zone and that is the right name for it because hardly anything is there anymore except shells and barbed wire and blown-up towns. It is a miracle I came across this little piece of tin but I did and I thought you ought to have it to remind you of your son. I hope that seeing it does not add to your grief but subtracts from it instead.
Please write to me if I can be of service to you. For now I will close with my best wishes to the father of my friend Ben Clayton.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Fry
Lamar Clayton folded the letter back into its envelope. It was the fourth time he had read it, and for some reason this time it made him angry. He goddam well did not want to know the details of how his son had died. Maybe other people would, that was their own business. But he didn’t have to be thinking about such things at his age. He had seen enough killing of one sort or another in his life and there wasn’t a thing in the world productive about looking back on it.
It was bad enough, holding this little square of tin in his hand, having to think about Ben scratching the image of the ranch and his horse onto it, probably eaten up with homesickness in the very hours before he died. Lamar kicked out hard at the baseboard of the parlor with the toe of his boot, and then rocked irritably in his chair as hot tears came to his eyes. Goddam it to hell. Had the boy even thought of his father in those last hours? Had he thought of him with hate?
Peggy woke up with a whimper in her little basket, startled awake by his kicking the wall. She looked up at him with a bewildered, entreating expression, her left front leg bandaged and swollen up double. He had tied a little tourniquet above the bandage to keep the poison from traveling up to her heart, but he didn’t know if it would have any effect. He figured it was just wait and see. Everybody had their own ideas about how to treat snakebite and Lamar’s was to swab the wound with kerosene and then to bind to it the head of the snake that bit you. That was how the Quahadas had taught him over fifty years ago and it worked well enough except when it didn’t. He didn’t see much point to start cutting on Peggy and he didn’t care to suck the blood out of a dog anyway. He’d once met a doctor in a Fort Griffin saloon who told him with drunken authority that when a rattlesnake hit you with his poison it was like ink spreading into a wet sponge. You could suck all you wanted but there was no way that poison was coming back out.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 15