Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  TWENTY-ONE

  She had a name that was bewitchingly apt for a beautiful New Orleans widow: Therèse. Her grandfather had come to New Orleans as a young aide to General Butler during the Civil War. Her husband was a prominent lawyer who had dropped dead in his office four years ago. She was almost fifty but saw to it that she looked twenty years younger, and was so securely a part of New Orleans society that she cared not a thing about it or what it thought about her.

  She was the sole woman on the committee that had chosen him for the La Salle statue, and by far its most opinionated member. She knew quite a bit about art and was full of interesting prejudices about it, but during Gil’s get-acquainted meeting with the committee in the boardroom of a New Orleans bank, she said very little, letting the men expound on what an oversight it was not to already have a statue of La Salle standing on the bank of the Mississippi in the heart of the city that owed its existence to his explorations.

  “We want something grand,” one of the committee members said, a plump young man still in his twenties who was in a hurry to make his mark on the city, having just inherited his family’s bank. “La Salle standing there at the mouth of the Mississippi, his sword in his hand, his armor shining. Maybe a few of his men with him.”

  “That’s not my idea of the piece at all,” Gil told him.

  It seemed not to have occurred to any of the committee members that the sculptor might have his own opinions, and Gil’s blunt dismissal left them hanging in silence, their cigar smoke gathering weight in the room’s stultifying atmosphere. Therèse, however, shifted in her chair, interested.

  Gil told them he had no interest in depicting the Sieur de La Salle as the usual triumphant conqueror of the wilderness, or even less as the bewigged nobleman attired for his audience with the Sun King. He saw his subject as a gaunt and ravaged explorer staring at the Mississippi as much in wonder at the fact that he was alive as that he had finally discovered the river’s mouth.

  “Anything else would be a cliché,” he told them. “We must catch the human La Salle in this figure or it’s not worth doing in the first place.”

  It did not take much discussion for them to endorse his idea. Gil simply held back and answered the occasional question as they weighed the merits of his conception. He held firm and they came around, as he was pretty sure they would.

  “Well, that’s settled, then,” one of the older men, the committee chairman, said after a few minutes. “We’ll haggle with you on a price, and assuming we can reach an agreement, then you’re our man.”

  “Would you be willing to go to France?” Therèse asked him.

  “France?”

  “Yes, should have mentioned that,” the chairman said. “The man who’s putting up half the money, whose idea this statue was—celebrating American and French friendship after the war, that sort of thing—is this Monsieur something-or-other.”

  “Du Prel,” Therèse said.

  “He’s some sort of descendant of La Salle’s. Has some family portraits he wants to show you. It’s a formality, really. He probably just wants to get a look at you, talk your ear off about his famous ancestor. Of course it goes without saying your expenses would be entirely covered.”

  After the particulars of the deal had been ironed out and the letters of intent signed, the committee took him to a celebratory dinner at Commander’s Palace. When it was over, Therèse insisted on dropping him off at his hotel, but when they were alone in the car she told the chauffeur to head to Lamothe’s instead.

  “It’s a pity we’ve already had dinner,” she said, “since Lamothe has the best étouffée in town, but I insist on showing you at least a little of the interesting side of New Orleans before you go home. I don’t care how much you protest or how tired you are. Do you mind going all the way to France?”

  “No. I haven’t been overseas in years.”

  “They say Paris is livelier than ever. Funny to think it would be that way after all that’s happened over there. Half the young artists I know are already there and the rest are packing their bags.”

  They stood on a restaurant terrace overlooking the park. Therèse whispered to a waiter and he brought them manhattans. Prohibition apparently meant nothing here. She drank a lot and held it well. She pointed out several elegantly dressed prostitutes. From the terrace Gil could see her driver standing at the side of her touring car, patiently reading the paper in the tavern’s porch light.

  “You certainly spoke your mind today,” she said. “I’d heard that you do that.”

  “You must have done some checking up on me.”

  “Of course I did. It was I who found you in the first place. Do you think those men in that room know anything about sculpture? Why do you live in San Antonio, of all places?”

  “I like it there,” he said. “Why aren’t you living in Paris with all your artist friends?”

  “Oh, I’m far too old for cafés and nightlife. Can’t you see I’m ancient?”

  He knew where it was going with her. They left the restaurant and walked alongside Bayou St. John with the car following behind. The bayou docks were crowded with dilapidated houseboats and squatters’ shacks, and the lamps from the boats shone imploringly across the dark water. She told him amusing details about the committee members he had met, their sham marriages, the scandalous stories behind their wealth, their ties to the political ring that ran the city.

  After a while she waved for the driver to pick them up and they drove up to the lakeshore and then back along Old Shell Road to the center of town. It was one in the morning by then. The whole world must have known her at the St. Charles but she strode boldly through the lobby with Gil and then up to his room, and in the morning came down with him and they walked together to her waiting car.

  Nothing but good-bye needed to be said when she dropped him off at the train station. She patted his knee, a little wistfully, and straightened his necktie in a mock wifely way, but the night had been what it was and they parted cheerfully and with no expectations for the future.

  The legacy of his marriage to Victoria had haunted him during the evening, but in his rational mind he knew there was nothing to square and no point in looking back. Even so, on the long trip back to San Antonio, he wrestled with unsettling thoughts. The undemanding interlude with Therèse was of a piece in his mind with the commission he had just been handed by her and the rest of her committee, something that could engage him without the risk of defining him. The truth was that he didn’t care much about the La Salle statue. It was a fitting subject and his conception lifted it above the dutiful public monument that the committee had envisioned, but he had done enough explorers and statesmen and grandees by now. The La Salle would be a good strong piece of work, something that in a generation or two from now several passersby out of every thousand or so would look up at and admire and then go on with their day. But there would be nothing in it to shake them or startle them, and nothing in its creation to do the same to him.

  That was why he was so anxious to get back to the Clayton. He had been away almost five days, and the thought of the sculpture standing in his studio, only days away from completion, was intolerable. This was the piece that had captured him in a way that the La Salle never would, the work that would outlive him, and not just in the literal sense of bronze outlasting flesh. He thought of it the way physicists were now thinking about light, a steadily traveling beacon, carrying forth the boy’s memory, and along with it his own, through the darkness of time.

  The arthritis came again as he cut his steak in the dining car. He put Urrutia’s splints back on after lunch and tried to push away the fear that the disease brought to his thoughts. He would simply have to endure the pain while he finished the Clayton. After that he could give his hands a rest for a few months before he started modeling the La Salle.

  Another bitter norther had swept through San Antonio in his absence, but as he got into a taxi at the train station the temperature was steadily rising. There was slu
dge in the streets and the wintry tree branches were dripping with melted ice. Gil had the driver stop at the post office and he went inside to collect the mail. In his private post office box there were the usual church bulletins and Catholic newspapers, but also a package containing a small book so worn and leafed-through it was almost falling apart at the binding. The book was also searingly familiar to him at first glance: his late mother’s daily missal.

  The letter inside was from a Father Dewey, who said he had come across the missal while going through the effects of Monsignor Berney, who had recently died after serving as the pastor of St. Joseph’s parish for many decades. Father Dewey supposed that Margaret Gilheaney had given the missal to her great friend the monsignor as a keepsake before her own death, but now that he was gone as well it seemed fitting that it be given to her son, the renowned sculptor of whom she had always been so proud.

  He leafed through the ancient book on his way home in the taxi. It was as much a scrapbook or a diary as a missal. The paper on which the prayers were printed had been almost worn away by her hands as they had turned the pages, decade after decade in a life of unbroken daily communion and observance of the sacraments. Interleaved between the thin pages were dozens of holy cards, the holy cards she herself had painted, that he had watched her paint as a boy in the tiny parlor of their Leroy Street apartment. And for every holy card in the missal there was a faded newspaper cutting announcing the unveiling of one of his statues, or the awarding of a commission.

  He could not bear to look at it for long; he could not endure the innocent belief that rose from its musty pages. His mother had lived a hard life but she had managed to hold on to an untarnished faith in God’s purpose. And she had believed in her son with the same shining conviction, even as Gil had lied to her and sealed her out of his real life.

  He put the missal into his jacket pocket to hide it from Maureen when he got home. But Maureen was not there, nor was Mrs. Gossling. It was six in the evening, but there was no sign of anyone preparing dinner. He set his suitcase down on the floor. He was weary from the long trip and hungry, and was puzzled by Maureen’s absence.

  He walked out to the studio, but she was not there either. He took the missal out of his jacket pocket and set it on the desk while he unlocked the drawer where he kept his mother’s mail. In that moment something struck him as wrong, something to do with the temperature in the room. He walked over to the woodstove and felt the door. It was cold.

  He looked at the almost-completed full-scale clay statue of Ben Clayton and his horse and gave it closer inspection than he had when he had walked into the room. For a moment it seemed that there was nothing wrong with it. It was intact, still supported by the armature, the details of human face and animal musculature still sharply defined.

  If he stood there and did nothing he could still make himself believe that it had survived the cycle of freezing and thawing to which it had apparently just been exposed. But he could not sustain that hope forever. He took a few steps forward and put his trembling hand on the flank of the horse and watched as it began to crumble like a sand castle.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Maureen had planned to be back in San Antonio by late morning, well before her father’s scheduled return from New Orleans that afternoon. But the ice storm that swept through Austin during the night of Vance’s confession delayed her train for hour after hour as she sat miserably in the station, too shattered to do anything but stare vacantly at the advertisements on the walls.

  She did not arrive in Austin until after dark. It had seemed important once that she return before her father did, so that he would never have to know she had gone to visit the man he distrusted. It gave her no comfort, of course, to know that her father had been right. It only made the wound deeper. And since she was past caring about pretty much everything, she was also past caring whether he knew about her trip. Maybe she would tell him everything, maybe she would tell him nothing, just declare that her life and her whereabouts were her own business and close the door to her bedroom. None of it mattered. She had no more interest in being comforted by her father than in being lectured by him. She missed her mother rather desperately but all her mother could have offered in this case would have been soothing lies.

  She should get out of San Antonio, away from Texas and its heat and cold and corrupting mythology, and go back home to New York. Her mother was dead and she was tired of her own deadening life as her father’s prized assistant. But her deadening life now seemed to spread out everywhere in front of her. She wished she could summon more anger toward Vance, a liberating energetic fury, but instead she felt queasy and smothered, her soul buried under something that was as static as a fogbank. Escaping to New York or anywhere else would mean willing her body to move, and she was not sure she would ever be able to bear the weight of her own existence again.

  When she walked into the house her father was sitting in the front room. Except for the light from the lamp beside his chair, the house was dark. His suitcase was on the floor. He had not unpacked, and he was still wearing his suit jacket and tie.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Where were you?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  He handed her a folded note. “I found this on the entry hall table. It’s from Mrs. Gossling. Her brother died yesterday. She says she’s very sorry she had to leave in such a rush and hopes we can look after ourselves for dinner.”

  “Well, of course we can.”

  “Yes, of course we can.”

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  “Well, as it happens, dinner was only one of the things she wasn’t able to get around to doing.”

  It took her a moment. Then she remembered the freezing night and morning in Austin, the steadily warming afternoon as she had waited for her train.

  “The stove,” she said.

  But before he could answer she had already raced out the back door of the house and into the studio. She turned on an electric light and saw the magnificent sculpture that would have been her father’s greatest work cracked into hardened pieces, some of them still clinging to the armature, some crashed to the floor. She had been explicit with Mrs. Gossling when she left for Austin. If it grew cold, she was to be sure to light the stove in the studio to guard against the danger of the clay freezing. But in the shock of her brother’s death Mrs. Gossling had clearly forgotten.

  “It’s pretty remarkable sometimes, this Texas weather,” her father was saying from behind her in a dead voice. “It can be freezing in the morning and in the afternoon you’re sweating through your clothes.”

  “I never thought anything like this would happen.”

  “Obviously not. I’m not saying you did it on purpose.”

  She turned to look at him, understanding in a glance that she and her father were pretty much at the same pitch of despair.

  “But you are saying I did it.”

  “I’m saying nobody was here to light the stove. I suppose you left that to Mrs. Gossling while you went to wherever you went. Austin, I suppose, to visit your cowboy professor.”

  He walked up to the ruined statue and peeled a piece of hardened clay off the horse’s nose, then shook the dust off his hand.

  “It’s interesting you felt you had to do that in secret.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  “Yes, I know you’re sorry. And if you were still a little girl, saying you were sorry might even have been enough, as colossal as this loss is. But by God, Maureen, you’re not a little girl and I counted on you.”

  “You have no right to speak to me that way!” she declared, surprising herself with the force of her resentment. “I made arrangements with Mrs. Gossling. I did nothing wrong. I had as much right to go to Austin as you did to go to New Orleans. You needn’t act like a child by looking for someone else to blame.”

  “Act like a child?” He was too stupefied by her defiance to say anything more. He looked away from her, perhaps silently
accepting her argument, though too wounded and proud to say so.

  “We can start over,” she suggested, in a much softer voice.

  “We?”

  The sarcastic laugh that escaped from him was a terrible sound to her. She had never heard it before in her life.

  “And, by the way, do you think I have two of these in me? Do you think I can just order up a copy?”

  “No, but—”

  “It might seem like a mechanical enterprise to you. It might seem like re-creating a statue you’ve poured every bit of yourself into is no more of a problem than replacing a sewer line or rebuilding a collapsed porch.”

  She seized on his hectoring, belittling, self-pitying words and threw them back in his face. She couldn’t help herself, though she didn’t know where her anger was coming from or whether or not she even had a right to it.

  “Well, I think it is somewhat similar. As a matter of fact, I think it’s exactly like replacing a sewer line. It’s just work. You always told me you had contempt for artists who sat around and waited for inspiration. Isn’t that what you’re talking about all of a sudden?”

  But he was paying no attention. “You have no conception of what it is to be sixty years old,” he said, “and to see your work come to nothing.”