Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  As even more time went by, Maureen caught her father’s eye: should you say something? But he thought not. He thought it best just to wait.

  When Clayton finally did speak, he seemed to have forgotten all about what he had been staring at so raptly for so long. He looked around the studio for the first time, picked up a few of Gil’s tools and hefted them in his hands, inspected some of the busts and figure studies lining the walls. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away a line of sweat that had started to seep down from his hairline. His face looked flushed, but his features were composed and when he finally spoke his voice was eerily conversational.

  “So the next step is you build yourself one of these armatures and cover that up with clay.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do you know it’ll come out the same as this little one?”

  “Well, a lot of sculptors—most, I’d say—go to rather elaborate mathematical lengths to ensure that that’s the case. They build a kind of chassis for each piece, the model and the full-scale work, with corresponding measurements, so that when it’s time to model the larger piece it’s just a matter of adding so much more clay between the points you’ve marked. It’s very efficient and generally very accurate, but it doesn’t suit me. I build the armature to the correct proportions, of course, but when I cover it with clay I want to feel like I’m still sculpting, not just filling out spaces.”

  Clayton nodded. Gil didn’t know if he had quite understood, and perhaps it had been a mistake to explain himself so elaborately. He thought about sketching out the whole pointing process on a piece of paper and letting him see how it was about as creative as building a fence. But Gil knew that Clayton wouldn’t give a damn whether Gil felt creative or not when he was doing his job. All that would matter to him was that the job was done to his satisfaction.

  And this was where he was irritatingly impossible to read. Was he satisfied? It had been almost ten minutes; it was extremely odd not to express any opinion at all. Gil was about to press him when Clayton seemed to wobble a bit on his feet and his face grew even more flushed.

  “Is there something the matter?” Gil asked. “Would you like a glass of water?”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He turned and left the studio. Gil and Maureen went to the door and watched as he wandered out of the open yard behind the house and out into the street and headed east with a determined gait.

  “What’s he doing?” Maureen asked.

  “I don’t know. Going for a stroll to clear his head, I suppose. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  But an hour passed and he had not returned. Maureen cleared the table and did the dishes while Vance and her father waited in the parlor. She heard them talking about Ghiberti’s doors and arguing about Michelangelo, Vance maintaining that the Bruges Madonna was superior to the Pieta and that the Pitti Madonna was superior to both. When she came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel, her father was amiably holding up his end of the banter, but she could tell he was too distracted by Clayton’s disappearance to pay much attention to the conversation.

  “Something isn’t right,” Gil finally said. “He’s not the sort of man who just takes off walking. I’m going to get the car and look for him.”

  As he sprang out of his chair, he spoke to Vance. “Want to come?”

  “Of course.” Vance picked his hat up from the table and set it on his head, glancing with sly surprise in Maureen’s direction: her father was sizing him up.

  “You better stay here in case he comes back,” Gil said to Maureen.

  “Yes, obviously,” she replied. He probably didn’t even detect the annoyance in her voice as he headed toward the door. She didn’t mind him bolting off on his urgent business, and she didn’t mind him taking her guest along without consulting her. She just wearily minded how it had always been this way, all her life: her father making decisions, seizing on solutions, she and her mother automatically falling into their supportive places behind him.

  GIL DROVE NORTH, toward downtown, he and Martindale scanning the sides of Roosevelt Avenue, peering each way at every intersection.

  “Well, this is an odd damn thing to happen,” Martindale ventured.

  “He’ll probably be at home by the time we get back. But I can’t guess what got into him.”

  “He might have gotten a taxi somewhere and gone back to his hotel.”

  “Yes, that’s what I was thinking. I’ll go downtown and have a look there.”

  They drove on a few more blocks, Gil continuing to brake at each corner so they could inspect the side streets.

  “I take it that you and my daughter have gotten to be pretty good friends,” Gil said. “At least that’s the impression I’ve had from her.”

  “I’m pleased to hear she thinks so. It’s certainly true from my point of view. Turn here. I think I just saw him crossing the street.”

  But it wasn’t Lamar Clayton, it was a Mexican man in a suit and a straw hat, walking along the sidewalk with a bag of groceries, who glanced at them suspiciously as they cruised slowly by. Gil drove around the corner and then up the next block, back to Roosevelt.

  “How long have you been at the university?” Gil asked him, realizing as he spoke that the question had come out of his mouth like an interrogation. Oh, well, if Martindale didn’t know that Gil was trying to probe his background and character he was dim to begin with.

  “Seven years. They’ve rather enjoyed keeping me in limbo there.”

  “Oh?”

  “They don’t seem to know what to do with a man who won’t get a Ph.D.”

  “Out of principle?”

  “Out of a refusal to waste my time.”

  “Can you advance in a place like that without one?”

  “Oh, I’ll advance.”

  A disdain for institutional propriety, an independent mind, the unswerving pursuit of a personal ambition: all of these traits in Martindale should have appealed to Gil, since they all corresponded with his own outlook and the way he had fashioned his own life. But it was one thing to be the way he was and another to think a similar sort of man would make a worthy husband for his daughter. He had never allowed himself to examine what kind of husband he had truly been to Victoria, what kind of father he was to Maureen. Selfishness, maybe even ruthlessness, was one of the starting places of art. He had not been a bully like his father, but he had made sure without ever saying so directly that the overriding work of his family would be the viability of his career, the furtherance of his vision. It was possible that this Vance Martindale was just as quietly imperious.

  He didn’t dislike the man, but he didn’t quite trust him. Martindale had been the picture of confidence and ease until now, but alone in the car with Gil he seemed nervous. Gil asked him where he had grown up and he said on a small ranch in South Texas, but as soon as Gil started to ask more questions about his background, Martindale called out that he thought he saw Lamar Clayton again, walking into a bank on Commerce Street. Gil parked the car and ran into the bank, but Clayton was nowhere in evidence.

  When he left the bank, he pulled in front of the Gunter. He sent Martindale to check out the downtown streets while he went inside and had the desk clerk call Clayton’s room. There was no answer. He asked a few of the Old Time Trail Drivers who were checking out of the hotel if they had seen him in the last couple of hours. None had, but with the hale attitude that seemed to distinguish the men of this convention they assured Gil that he would turn up.

  “I haven’t seen him,” Maureen said when he telephoned home. “He seems to have just vanished. I’m a little worried, Daddy.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Gil said. “Maybe he just felt pressured for a reaction and wanted to get away to settle his mind.”

  “He’s been gone a long time for somebody who’s just settling his mind.”

  Gil hung up the phone in the hotel lobby and went around to the garage, hoping to talk to the driver wh
o had taken Lamar Clayton to his house. The driver was out, but his supervisor told him they had received no calls from the old man asking to be picked up.

  “No sign of him out on the street,” Martindale reported when he joined Gil in the lobby.

  “Well, let’s just head back home. Maybe we’ll come across him on the way.”

  They drove away from downtown in the general direction of Gil’s house, veering off the main thoroughfares onto side streets, now and then stopping at places of business—a feed store, a hardware store—that he speculated might possibly have attracted the curiosity of a visiting rancher. Gil didn’t bother to continue his fatherly interrogation as they drove back to the house—both because Martindale’s artful evasiveness had started to irritate him and because by now his puzzlement over Clayton’s whereabouts had turned into real worry.

  The more he searched without result, the greater his agitation grew. Had Clayton somehow been so offended by the model that he had just thrown up his hands and disappeared? He had not seemed angry before he took off on his mysterious walk. He had been shaken, perhaps: in the best case by a reaction to the disturbing fidelity of his son’s image; in the worst by a contemptuous realization that Gil had failed. In either case he might very well be disinclined to carry on with the project. The lost revenue would be bad enough, but even worse would be the abandonment of a commission that Gil had come to recognize as a work of art, a piece that would not be ignored or dismissed this time by the arbiters of fame, even though it would reside forever in a remote location far from the salons of New York. The Clayton statue was what he had always silently believed he had come to Texas to create—a work that would have its own power, that owed nothing to proximity and critical jabbering but would simply announce its presence to the world as steadily and quietly as a beacon.

  When they got home and heard from Maureen that Clayton had still not returned, the sense that something was really wrong began to take hold.

  “Maybe we should have checked the train station,” Martindale said.

  “Not likely. Would he have gone to the train station without his luggage? Without checking out of his hotel first? Of course, there’s nothing likely about this whole thing.”

  He grabbed the hat he’d set down on the table only moments before. “You’re right, I should check the train station. And the hospital too.”

  “Want me to come again this time?” Martindale asked.

  “No, you stay here with Maureen.”

  Maureen knew there was no point in suggesting that he telephone the hospital instead. He was already out the door again, desperate for any active gesture.

  “I have the feeling I’m in your father’s way,” Vance said when Gil had driven off.

  “There’s nothing going on for you to be in the way of. We’re just sitting here. What did you two talk about?”

  “Nothing. Just small talk. Trying to solve the case of the fugitive patron. Listen, as long as you’re not going to kick me out, do you mind if I take a look at the work in question that’s causing all the anxiety?”

  SHE TOOK VANCE into the studio and the two of them stood staring at the scale model. Maureen tried to see it through Lamar Clayton’s eyes—how it had moved him, how it had failed him. But she could only see it through her own. It was her father’s most assured work in many years. It was even better than the Pawnee Scout. His own heart was revealed in it. In the posture of the young man’s body, in his focused gaze, in the unforced mysterious comradeship between him and his horse, there was a welling sorrow. The sorrow came from nowhere that she could discern, from no particular detail. It came instead from the sculptor, from her father.

  “What a gift he has,” Vance said.

  “I know.”

  He got out his pipe and was about to light it, then seemed to remember he was in another man’s working sanctum. He slipped the pipe back into his pocket and regarded the Ben Clayton model again.

  “How old was he?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Here. Help me cover it.”

  She handed him a wet cloth and together they draped the model again so it would not dry out. Then he gestured to her little corner of the studio, where the panels for the Spirit of the Waters were likewise hidden beneath layers of moist cloth.

  “Is this your piece here? May I see it as well?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not happy with it. And because even if I were I wouldn’t want you to judge my work after looking at my father’s. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I wasn’t planning to ‘judge’ it. Anyway, you’re not in a contest with him, so why should it matter?”

  “I don’t know why it should, but it does. And your nosiness is unbecoming.”

  “I agree that it’s a character flaw. One of my favorites.”

  He walked up to her and kissed her, but the moment didn’t feel right to her and neither did the place. She kissed him back and briskly patted his lapels.

  “We should get back to the house in case he calls.”

  Her father did call, fifteen or twenty minutes later, with the news that Mr. Clayton wasn’t in the hospital.

  “Maybe we should tell the police,” she told him over the phone.

  “All right. I’ll go over to the station now. While I’m there, maybe you and Vance should take over the search. I don’t want to let any time go by without somebody looking for him.”

  “I BELIEVE this is the first time in my life I’ve ever been enlisted into a posse,” Vance declared as they drove away from the house in his friend’s Chevrolet, with neighborhood dogs sprinting out of their yards and snapping at the tires.

  They drove slowly up and down Roosevelt, passing ramshackle cafés and boardinghouses, dry goods stores and warehouses. It was as drab a commercial strip as San Antonio had to offer, and reminded her once again how far she was from the places in the world where things that mattered to her were happening.

  “By the way,” Vance said, as they peered down alleys and side streets, “I got out my copy of Wilbarger the other night to see if your friend might be in it.”

  “Wilbarger?”

  “Indian Depredations in Texas. The Bible for this sort of research. You said it was on the Salt Fork, didn’t you, where Clayton’s housekeeper lost her family?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “It seems to have been a fairly famous massacre, at least to the folks in Stonewall County. Do you think she’d talk to me about it?”

  “George’s Mary? She’d probably hit you over the head with a skillet if you pried into her private life. Or maybe I would.”

  “Too bad. It would have made a good article for the Quarterly. But I suppose it’s for the best. It would only give my overlords another reason not to take me seriously.”

  He drifted into a monologue about his endless travails at the university. “A lot of these professors, they’re intimidating, all right. A farm boy from Waxahachie or someplace will take one look at some crusty old medievalist in his bow tie and think he’s face-to-face with God. But the truth is half of them don’t have enough brains to fry an egg in. And when it comes to being open to new ideas—”

  He braked, inspecting a group of men gathered at an icehouse, but Clayton was not among them.

  “A host of golden daffodils!” he went on. “Fine! No complaints. Everyone should know their Wordsworth. But when I gently suggest that poetry can also be written about mesquite beans and turkey buzzards, that it can come from the native soil, out of the old rock, so to speak, well, that’s when they look at me like—”

  “Slow down!” Maureen said. It was dusk now and they were passing a garage where in one of the open bays she could see two mechanics in coveralls sitting at a table. There was a third man at the table wearing a suit and a white stockman’s hat: Lamar Clayton.

  “There he is,” she told Vance. “Stop the car.”

  She approac
hed them carefully, Vance following a few discreet steps behind. Mr. Clayton had not seen them and was engaged in a leisurely conversation in Spanish with the two mechanics. They were all drinking orangeade and the table was covered with butcher paper, upon which sat a pile of greasy barbecued meat and stacks of tortillas.

  Clayton was not eating, just sipping his orangeade while the two mechanics helped themselves to the food. They were the ones who saw her first, and she heard one of them say, “Señor.” Clayton turned to look at her and said nothing and the expression on his face was blank. He remained seated while the two mechanics stood and offered her a chair.

  She turned to Vance.

  “Would you please drive back to our house and let my father know that we’ve found him? He’ll probably be home before too long.”

  “You’ll be all right here?”

  “Of course.”

  He gave her hand a warm squeeze and then got in the car and drove away.

  Maureen took a seat. The mechanics offered her some of the meat but she politely waved it away and they gathered it up in the butcher paper and went inside to the office so that she and Clayton could be alone.

  “They’re both from Chihuahua,” Clayton said. “They don’t say it but I bet you a dime the older one there rode with Villa.”

  “We’ve been looking for you all afternoon, Mr. Clayton.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “I don’t need people looking for me. You want to do that, that’s your business.”

  “We thought something had happened to you.”

  “I told you I was just going to go out for a minute. I ran into these men here and we got to talking and I went next door to that barbecue place and bought them some dinner. So if anything happened to me that’s about what it was.”