She told him about the full-size clay statue of Ben Clayton that was now finished and waiting for the plasterers to come take the molds, which would then be carefully packed and shipped to the Coppini Foundry in New York, one of the few foundries in the country still employing the venerable lost-wax technique her father insisted upon. There it would be cast in bronze, the pieces welded together, the patina applied. Her own work—the Spirit of the Waters—was there already, waiting to be cast, a far simpler job than that of a monumental statue.
Arthur would be very impressed with the statue of Ben, Maureen ventured. He would recognize his friend but he would also surely recognize something much larger. As she was about to name this larger something—the futility of war, the stolen promise of a generation, irrecoverable youth—she hesitated. She did not want to burden Arthur Fry with her own somber speculations about the statue’s meaning, nor did she want to lecture him like an art professor. She wanted him to hear her genuine voice, her plain thoughts.
But her thoughts, as usual, were far from plain. As much as she was moved by what her father had accomplished with the Clayton, she was still furious about what he had said about Vance, and this fury had quietly grown in the weeks since. They had not discussed the issue further; she did not care to. But in the meantime letters from Vance continued to arrive, erudite and lively, sometimes with copied-out poems or bizarre newspaper cuttings—a boy being struck in the foot by a meteorite, the wife of the director of the New York Aquarium waking in the middle of the night with an octopus next to her in the bed—for which he charmingly offered no commentary at all. And each letter repeated his plea that she come visit him in Austin.
She was irritated by her father’s absence and by his overbearing assumption that, for propriety’s sake, she should stay in place. Men in general and her celebrated father in particular had no such restrictions on their freedom. No doubt at this moment he was being lionized in New Orleans, and finding his creative energy renewed by the promise of a new commission. The destruction of the Pawnee Scout had been a great wound but it was behind him now, receding in the face of new accomplishments and new opportunities.
This sort of dynamic renewal was a man’s birthright; it was his to lose. But a woman had to fight every day to escape the narrow domestic stasis that threatened to utterly define her. Maureen was unmarried, childless, stranded in a widening pool of uncertainty. Her most ambitious work—her Spirit of the Waters—was admired by the Arts and Beautification Committee of the San Antonio Women’s Club but not really by herself, and clearly not by her father, the towering artist she could not help measuring herself against, the sole critic she could not help being desperate to please.
With the modeling on the Clayton finished, her own work off to the foundry, and her father out of town, she had little to do in the next few days except to pay the bills and look after the studio, putting things in order after the months of disruptive work on the statue and keeping an eye open for sudden shifts in temperature that might damage the clay. But the weather was clear and the temperature mild again after the passage of the last winter storm, and it occurred to her, as she was finishing her letter to Arthur Fry, that Mrs. Gossling could certainly watch over things for a night or two.
What was holding her back from picking up the telephone and dictating a telegram to Vance? There were boardinghouses and hotels and probably even university facilities for visiting women in Austin. There was no reason to feel self-conscious about abruptly accepting Vance’s invitation. Concern about her father’s approval was something she could no longer allow herself to feel. If she felt a hint of hesitation on her own behalf about Vance’s sincerity or suitability—well, that was just another argument for traveling to Austin to find out once and for all.
She picked up the telephone and arranged for the telegram, asking if it would be convenient to visit tomorrow on short notice, and three hours later the Western Union boy came to the door with the one-word reply: Yes!
Vance was grinning and waving his hat when the train pulled into the Austin station the next morning, and he grabbed her suitcase before she could step down onto the platform.
“I’ve found you a very good hotel near the campus,” he said as he led her to his friend’s car, which she saw was packed with a picnic lunch. “The woman who owns it is a raging suffragist, so of course she is appalled by the idea of a curfew. You can be as scandalously late as you like, and you may consider me your accomplice.”
They drove down Congress Avenue and skirted the Capitol building and the university campus that stretched behind it and then headed out west toward open country, Vance rambling on excitedly all the way about their plans for the day.
“I canceled all my classes when I heard you were coming,” he said.
“You can just do that? Won’t you get in trouble?”
“Who cares what some top-lofty dean thinks? I work three times as hard as most of the men in the department already. Anyway, are you in the mood to scale our local Alp?”
The local Alp was called Mount Bonnell. It took them only five minutes to climb up to the summit but when they arrived the view was sumptuous, the Colorado River cutting its way through a deep limestone valley below them, tree-covered hills swelling and subsiding toward the horizon on the opposite bank, and to the west the gleaming granite dome of the Capitol rising in isolated splendor from the heart of the town. Austin was more emphatically scenic than San Antonio. This view from Mount Bonnell of rocky declivities rising above water, of wild primeval mystery, stirred homesick memories in her of the Hudson River Valley, where her father would take her sometimes when she was a girl to visit his artist friends in New Paltz or Peekskill.
The day was brisk and clean, a little cold, with a cloud front gathering in the north. Vance spread a blanket out for them and dug into the picnic hamper for the lunch he had ordered from the wife of a colleague in the Classical Languages Department who baked and cooked for pin money: chicken sandwiches on thick-sliced bread and bean salad and sugar cookies almost as big as dinner plates.
“They say that Bigfoot Wallace met with some Indians up here and—”
“Oh, please stop,” she told him. “I don’t think I can stand another lecture about Texas history.”
“All right,” Vance said, shearing off half of his sandwich in one bite, “I’ll intrude upon your ignorance no more.”
They sat close together on a limestone rock that had been carved into a bench. She felt the wind on her face and his rough hand touching hers as they ate. They were not the only people here. Twenty yards away some students from the university were taking turns standing on the edge of the precipice, standing there with their arms outstretched, the girls’ skirts filling with wind.
A young mother stood holding the hand of her two-year-old son as he stared at the students. The little boy watched their raucous antics with such total innocent absorption that it almost moved Maureen to sudden tears. Noticing this, perhaps, Vance squeezed her hand. There was some sort of message in this gesture, she thought, some attempt on Vance’s part to reassure her that his character ran deeper than its witty and blustery surface.
She felt she had to believe this, otherwise she might just as well sweep away the whole idea that it was not too late to fall in love and be married and have children, to join at last the world that existed beyond her father’s studio. From her early girlhood she had been aware that boys tended to treat her with kindly indifference, and that her father’s steadfast love might be all that the world would allow her. She trained herself to accept the idea that she was undesirable, to accept it with a wounded pride. Her life would find a higher purpose. The nights of her youth that might otherwise have been thrown away to bohemian abandon had been defiantly spent in her father’s studio, helping him with the thousands of last-minute sculpting details of some piece that absolutely had to be ready the next day for the mold-makers, or the foundry, or the patron’s inspection.
He had not pressed her into his service;
she convinced herself she had been called to it. From the cocoon of her father’s studio she would emerge someday as a full-fledged artist in her own right.
But that had not happened. She was a skillful sculptor but not a blazingly intuitive one like her father. She now understood that the years of monastic apprenticeship had been for nothing, that they had been years not of focused advancement but of craven withdrawal.
Maybe it had been Arthur Fry’s letters from France, with their portrait of a young man so much more justifiably paralyzed by self-consciousness and faint prospects than she. Maybe it was her father’s blithe dismissal of Vance, which implied such poor judgment on Maureen’s part that it was at the same time a dismissal of her.
It would end here, on this trip, with this man. There were strictures to violate but she was happy to violate them. They were not so strong. Her common sense told her that it was an insult to nature to remain a virgin at her age. Her father had feigned outrage that she wouldn’t be traveling with a chaperone, but he himself had long ago forsaken conventional propriety by becoming an artist and marrying his nude model. Maureen’s mother had grown far cooler than her husband to risk and new horizons, but she had been up-to-date and matter-of-fact on the issue of sex, and it was this practical attitude that Maureen now seized on as a legacy.
“Shall we break the law?” Vance said after he had finished off his gigantic cookie and half of hers. He looked around—the young students and the young family had trailed off along the sloping summit—and withdrew a flask from his jacket pocket.
“Bourbon and branch water,” he announced as he poured some in a cup. “Thrillingly illicit, as of last month.”
She drank it down, recoiling a little at the taste but savoring the way it seeped into her body and made her just that much more alert to the steely beauty of the clouds coming in from the north. A cold wind began to sweep across the summit and Vance gathered up the remaining picnic things and led her back down to the car.
They spent the rest of the afternoon in the parlor of the little house he rented on Nueces Street, lying in each other’s arms on his tattered sofa while he read aloud T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock poem.
“Let us go then, you and I,” he almost whispered, her head resting against his soft belly while he stroked her hair with his free hand. She scanned the room as he read, the hatrack by the door filled with artfully battered hats, the longhorn skull with its horns spreading above the mantelpiece, the cheap portrait busts of Shakespeare and Tennyson, the books spilling out of the warped shelves and stacked against the walls, his pipes secured in their circular rack like war implements, his cowboy boots on the floor, their worn leather tops sagging toward each other. “And indeed there will be time,” he went on, reading the poem now into her ear, as if he were making up these words on the spot just for her. “Time for you and time for me.”
They went to a party that night at another professor’s house. The house was on the edge of a park near the campus, and despite the cold the party spilled outside almost at once. Maureen had the impression that most of the guests were renegade faculty members like Vance, disgruntled at this or that stifling dictum of the administration. There were students as well, the worldly coeds all smoking, wearing bobbed hair and gunboat shoes, the men in sweaters and patched jackets, their hair spilling into their eyes as they passed around their flasks with outlaw abandon. There were poets and sullen bolsheviks and a visiting professor from Serbia who said he was sick of people asking him about the assassination of the archduke, and a young folklorist who had spent last summer traveling through South Texas collecting cowboy songs and corridos. He had brought his guitar and set up shop against the drooping limb of a live oak. Ten or twelve of the partygoers, entranced with the idea of hearing authentic working songs, sat in the grass to hear him out, but he had no idea how bad a singer he was, and the louder he attacked the choruses the more of his audience members he drove away.
Vance dropped her off at her hotel past midnight and the owner handed her the room key without comment. They spent the next day strolling in the bracing winter air, all the way from the main building of the university through the rotunda of the Capitol and along the downtown streets to the river. They had no agenda, no one to meet, nothing to discuss except what occurred to them. He took her to dinner at an open-air beer garden that now sold only what it called bone-dry beer and afterward they walked into an adjacent room where a German singing club had built a bowling alley. He knew everyone there. He insisted on teaching her how to bowl. The bone-dry beer had no alcohol in it but she felt intoxicated anyway, and disturbed by her own happiness. Could all this really be happening to her at last, or was it some sort of cruel delusion?
When they left the beer garden they walked north, toward the university. She was leaving tomorrow. It was time for him to take her back to the hotel, but she did not remind him to do so and he did not propose it. They walked on beside a meandering creek, her arm in his as she huddled close to him. The wintry tree limbs creaked above them, every now and then a car passed on the street that bordered the campus. They were walking toward his house and she said nothing. She let him take her there. They fell onto the sofa again, though she was willing—she was expecting—to be guided into his bedroom. He kissed her and she kissed him ardently back, wordlessly complying, not just with where his desires were leading them but with some new and long-delayed envisioning of herself.
But after a few minutes the pitch of their lovemaking did not seem to be progressing. They were stalled, and she realized it was him, not her. He pulled away from her and sat against the arm of the sofa, his suit still on, his boots still on. There were no lights on in the room but there was moonlight from the uncurtained window and she could see his eyes gleaming as he looked away from her toward a blank wall.
“Well,” she said, hurrying to salvage her dignity, “I should go. No matter how progressive you say that woman is, she won’t like me coming in at three in the morning.”
“All right,” Vance said.
She was thunderously confused. It was ridiculous to think that he was appalled at her loose behavior, but his usually open face was so blank and so unrevealing as to be hostile.
She would be damned if she would demean herself by asking what was wrong. She stood up, straightened her clothes, and thanked him for the evening with a bitter tremor of laughter she could not suppress.
“I am married,” he said.
“Oh.”
“It’s hardly much of a marriage.”
“I didn’t ask you to what degree you were married.” The rage she was feeling now was better than the stupefaction she had felt a moment ago. There were, at least, words to employ.
“It was a mistake to marry her in the first place, but I was only twenty and didn’t know anything. We didn’t have that much in common, and then she got sick with some sort of stomach thing they’ve never been able to figure out. Couldn’t travel, couldn’t do anything, resented me because I could—and because I just couldn’t condemn myself to spending the rest of my life on her parents’ farm in Falfurrias. I know that would have been the noble thing but I couldn’t do it. We send each other letters every now and then—very proper and careful letters. That’s about all there is to it. I can’t divorce her because she’s sick, you see. Some of my friends know about her, some don’t.”
She hated the way he looked now, the tense satisfaction in his face, as if he thought he was explaining himself perfectly well and was congratulating himself for being patient while she absorbed what he had just told her.
“Why did you wait till now to tell me?”
“Well, we were crossing the Rubicon, so to speak. I couldn’t leave you in the dark about it any longer. I know you’re questioning my character right now, but I couldn’t very well do that.”
“No, you very well couldn’t, could you? I’m going to the hotel.”
He insisted on walking her. It was very late, so she let him, but she walked with her arms tightly folded in
front of her and she would not look at him. She half listened as he besieged her with explanations and excuses, but all his words were like water swirling around the base of a great ragged boulder of betrayal. It was colder now and the sky was overcast and sleet was collecting on the tree-buckled sidewalks.
“So there have been other women, I suppose,” she said, “who didn’t mind that you were married.”
“Let’s not talk about that sort of thing.”
“All right. It’s rotten of me to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“Stop it.”
“My father was right about you. I hate to admit it, but he was. What sort of game were you playing?”
“It wasn’t a game. I wish you could believe me about that.”
She stopped and turned to him, her tears brimming on her cold face.
“So why me?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did you see in me? Why did you even bother?”
“Do we have to talk about this like it’s completely a thing of the past? I know it’s a shock, but the idea we would never see each other again is—”
“Did you just want to hurt me?”
“Please don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then what was it? I know I’m not beautiful. I’m not even pretty. Why bother with me?”
“Because I like you. Because you interest me. You don’t bore me. Because you’re intelligent and serious and funny. And I happen to find you attractive no matter what you say about yourself.”
“But you didn’t love me.”
“I wasn’t in a position to love you or anybody.”
He tried to reach out to her, but she took a step back and batted his arms away before they could envelop her. He begged her forgiveness and she could see that it genuinely troubled him to hurt her so much. But his discomfort was nothing, something he would recover from, learn from, and leave behind. Her hurt, by contrast, was something final, so deep and so defining it seemed to nail her in place on the street. If he had told her that he had loved her, she might have gone back to his house and begun something scandalous with him. In this new age after the war when everything was upside down anyway it would not have mattered so much. She would not have minded people talking about them, not if he had loved her. But he didn’t love her and she had guessed it all along—or should have allowed herself to guess it—and now there was nothing to do but let him continue to escort her through the sleet back to her hotel.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 25