“I have a conception of what it is to be thirty-two years old and to be trapped in this house with you with no hope of escape. I have a conception of what it is to see my life come to nothing.”
She had shocked him, and was glad.
“What happened with Martindale?”
“I don’t want to tell you. I don’t need to tell you, because in your superior wisdom you already know.”
“Did you and he—”
“Leave me alone!” She was almost screaming now. “I’m sorry about your statue, it’s my fault. But just please leave me alone, Daddy, please!”
Without quite realizing it, she had ordered him out of his own studio. He left, slamming the door behind him. She was alone in the studio, in her father’s sanctum, the place that had been her refuge as well as his. Here she had always felt wanted, had always felt herself working toward the goal of not just pleasing her father but becoming an artist in her own right.
Now she saw the studio only as a prison, where without ever quite realizing it she had settled more deeply day by day into a life that was too careful and too dependent. When her heart had been broken in the past it was here she had come, after she had purged herself of tears in her mother’s arms. It was here she had put herself back together, working in concert with her father to create the great works that would stand through time. But it was not just her heart that was broken now, it was her judgment, her purpose, her worth. Coming back here now, settling into the once-comforting routines—the physical labor of building armatures and hauling clay, the clerical satisfactions of cataloging, invoicing, and correspondence—would mean nothing but the final surrender of her spirit.
But where should she go? What could she make of herself? Would she live here the rest of her life in defeat, trying to make some sort of peace with the knowledge that no man had ever really wanted her and never would?
She stared at the ruined statue, the armature showing through in places like the bones of a decaying corpse, the powdery clay gathering in piles on the floor. Beneath the weight of her own pain and anger she could not help feeling pity for her father. To have this happen to him in a year when he had already lost the Pawnee Scout, the work of which he was the proudest and which he had thought would endure the longest. She knew that dying in obscurity was his greatest terror, greater than the loss of his wife, greater she was quite sure than the loss of his daughter. He was one of those men who were born to look beyond the horizon of his own existence, who instinctively valued his legacy more than his life. She was not like that. She wanted happiness. She wanted love. She could give up her own artistic aspirations for just the normal things that people had.
If she had not left for her secret trip to Austin she would have kept the stove going in the studio and it would not have mattered if Mrs. Gossling had been called away. But she had too much justifiable anger toward her father at the moment to feel guilty. She looked away from the statue and her eyes settled over his desk, his fountain pen, his reading glasses, his sketch pads, ledger books, his old anatomy books with their spines cracked from decades of use. Among the familiar objects was something she had never seen before, an old prayer book with cracked leather covers, stuffed with holy cards and newspaper cuttings. She picked it up and thumbed through it—puzzled, increasingly puzzled. When she put it back on the desk she saw that the drawer her father had always kept locked was half open. In her current mood she did not feel the need to ask herself if she had the right to take advantage of this oversight. The drawer was full of letters, her father’s name and address written in a woman’s careful hand. The return address read “Mrs. T. L. Gilheaney.” She slipped the most recent letter out of its envelope and read: “My dearest son.”
GIL KNEW his accusations were unjust, and the anger and hurt that had ruled him a moment before were now smothered in a blanket of shame. He had not been able to stop himself from lashing out at her about the statue, when it had been clear to him as soon as he saw her that something was desperately wrong. Something had happened in Austin with Vance Martindale. Now the possibility of her confiding her own sorrows to him, of him being able to stand by her at a difficult time as a father should, was gone. She had turned away from him and he could give her nothing.
He went for a walk in the dark streets. The neighborhood dog that usually lunged at his car tires when he drove by trotted out and walked alongside him with silent complicity, as if the two had previously agreed to meet. The temperature had dropped a little and Gil kept his hands in his jacket pockets. He had still not changed his clothes or eaten. He was too agitated to do either.
He knew what he should do: set things right with Maureen as best he could, and in the morning pry the rest of the clay off the armature and start all over again. But he could not start all over again. He knew it; it wasn’t there anymore. He was sixty years old. He had come from nothing, had escaped from the tenement streets of New York, from the violence and iron strictures of his upbringing, and had made a brilliant start. His talent had been recognized by important people, he had studied and worked in Paris and in Rome, he had been poised more times than he could remember on the cusp of greatness, one statue away from being ranked with Saint-Gaudens or Ward. Now he was a minor celebrity in San Antonio, Texas, his two best works destroyed, his wife embittered and then dead, his daughter apparently betrayed by a deceitful suitor and blaming Gil for his cruel foresight.
When he walked back into the house it was ten o’clock at night. He had not eaten since his lunch on the train. His hunger seemed out of keeping with his deflated spirit, but that was no reason not to eat something. He found a box of graham crackers in the pantry and took them over to the kitchen table. He broke each cracker into four pieces along the perforated lines—even that simple action summoned the arthritic pain in his thumbs, a mocking pain that foretold the hastening end of his career. He ate each section of graham cracker in one bite, shoveling them into his mouth as if he was feeding a machine. He tried not to think as he ate, but he could not stop his mind from reminding itself of the months of work he had spent on the Clayton piece and the decades-long hopes he had poured into it.
Maureen appeared at the door and pushed in the light switch, flooding the kitchen with harsh illumination.
“I thought you were in bed,” Gil said.
She didn’t answer. Her face was pale and he could see a pulse beating in her throat above the neckline of her dress. She seemed so unsteady that he stood in alarm, took her elbow, and guided her to a seat across from him at the table. It was not until then that he noticed the envelopes she held in her trembling hand.
“You said she died when you were in your twenties. Before I was born. But these letters, the postmarks, the things she writes about …”
She did not say anything more, just stared at him with a question in her eyes that he had no option but to answer. But it took him a moment to find his own voice, to understand that the reckoning he had dreaded for all of her life had finally come.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, but the volume of what he had to apologize for now was so huge, its appearance so sudden and unexpected, that the words came out in a muttering way as if he was talking to himself.
“Sorry about what, Daddy? So it’s true that you’ve been lying to me all my life?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He stared down at the surface of the kitchen table, moved a silver napkin ring around like a chess piece.
“I’ve told you a little bit about her,” he said. “About my mother. Very Catholic. Very, very Catholic. Guardian angels, feast days, novenas, always saying the rosary, always—”
“You said she was dead!”
He nodded. The graham cracker box sat absurdly on the table in front of them.
“In her world, marriage outside the church was a mortal sin. I was in love with your mother. She was a Protestant. You have to understand, my mother wouldn’t have been able to accept it. It would have destroyed her. I had to protect her.
”
“You had to protect yourself!”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
An odd buzzing started up in Maureen’s head. She felt like a machine that had fallen off a track and was now senselessly grinding its gears.
“I don’t even know what questions to start asking. I don’t understand how it was even possible—all these years, to keep it a secret.”
“I had to work at it. I had to think ahead, all the time. It was cruel, I know that. But I had to think of her and what it would do to her if she found out.”
“If she found out that I existed? That she had a granddaughter?”
She stood up, walked around the kitchen in agitated circles, not knowing what to say, torn between her angry desire never to set eyes on her father again and the flooding curiosity that only he could satisfy.
“It’s late,” Gil said after a few moments. “And we’ve both had a terrible day. Maybe it would be better if we talked about all of this tomorrow.”
“No, it would not be better! Putting off talking about it will just make everything easier for you.”
“There are reasons I did what I did. They may not make sense to you. They may not make sense to me anymore, I don’t know, Maureen, but I was thinking of my mother, of how to protect her so that—”
“And what about my mother? She had to know about this, didn’t she?”
“You shouldn’t blame her for anything. She wanted to tell you. We had terrible arguments about it.”
“You made her lie to me.”
“Yes.”
In one brisk stride Gil’s daughter walked up to him and struck him across the face. He had never been slapped by a woman, had only seen it in the moving pictures, and the theatricality of the gesture astonished him more than the blow itself. It was so out of keeping with his daughter’s temperament, so out of keeping with everything.
She was gone now, down the hallway and into her room. He had nowhere to go so he stayed where he was at the kitchen table, gripping its enamel sides in his powerful sculptor’s hands.
TWENTY-THREE
Lamar Clayton sat in a corner booth of the Manhattan Cafe on First Street, eating soup and crackers while he read the Abilene Daily Reporter. The news was about the treaty and the Lansing business and the Reds threatening to take over Eastern Europe, all the confusion left over from the war that nobody was ever going to settle. Especially not Wilson, who Clayton hadn’t ever thought was worth a damn. He remembered the craziness when the war ended, people bursting out in tears, the paper full of blather about everything the boys had accomplished. It was like people really believed the world had been put back together and everything was going to make perfect sense from now on. It had made him sick, all those furniture stores and tire dealers taking out ads with poems welcoming the soldiers home, all those illustrations of women in flowing gowns holding torches and olive branches hailing the victors and blessing the noble fallen. He hated that goddam word “fallen.” Like they’d just slipped to the ground instead of being blown into pieces by shells or getting their guts ripped out by machine-gun bullets. There had been one illustration that had really torn at him, an advertisement for Farmers and Merchants Bank showing a boy in uniform running through the front door of his parents’ house, his arms extended, his mother sitting in a chair, surprised in her knitting, gasping in joy, the boy’s father standing behind his wife, about to drop his newspaper in astonishment. The wondrous reunion, all the tests passed and all the trials behind them. You could look at that picture and imagine the boy sleeping in his old room for a day and a night, wrung out, bursting with stories yet to be told, woken at last by the smell of his mother’s cooking, the morning sun streaming through the window.
It would not have been like that if Ben had come home, he knew. There had been no mother for him to come back to, just George’s Mary. He had left for Europe without a word to Lamar and he would have come back agitated and resentful and scarred, with new grievances to take up with his father. But there might have been a moment at least, a welcome-home moment not too far off from that illustration in the paper. Lamar had imagined it often enough while Ben had been overseas. A simple tight-gripped handshake at the train station, him saying “Welcome home, son,” and Ben looking off to the side so his father wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes. Maybe they would have sat out on the porch after dinner, neither of them saying much, Lamar making a point not to quiz him about what he’d seen over there, Peggy asleep in Ben’s lap, George’s Mary opening the door with her hip and bringing out two big dishes of cobbler.
Lamar finished the last of his watery soup and looked around the diner. It was two o’clock and most of the customers had left by now. The waitress had a pan of biscuits just out of the oven and was about to put them in a warming tray. It seemed odd they would be making a new batch of biscuits after lunch was over but it was no business of his.
“Bring me a few of those before they get cold,” Lamar called out to her.
She put a couple of the biscuits on a plate and walked over to him and plunked it down. She was about sixteen, skinny and homely and no life to her at all. There was a waitress over at the Ideal he liked better, but it was closed on Tuesday and it didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t come to Abilene often enough for the waitresses to remember him. He had a few friends here in the cattle business but he saw them mostly at stock shows and the like. He didn’t generally visit people just to pass the time. He wouldn’t have been in Abilene at all today if George’s Mary hadn’t taken a dislike to the dentist in Albany and insisted on being driven all the way to the city just to get a few teeth out. Lamar would have left the business of driving her to Ernest or Nax but there was a fence down in one of the far pastures and he was feeling his age this week. There was a stabbing pain in his knee that came and went and a creak in his hipbone. He figured he’d rather be in a motorcar than on board a horse, but it aggravated him that he had to drive so damn far because George’s Mary was squeamish about dentists.
He ate the two biscuits while they were still hot and then paid his bill and walked next door to a dry goods store and bought six new shirts, for seventy-nine cents apiece. They were all the same, khaki work shirts with flaps on the front pockets. He disliked buying new clothes and didn’t care for the feel of them until George’s Mary had washed them six or eight times, but the rest of his shirts were worn out and needed to be replaced. He looked around the store to kill time, but there wasn’t anything else he needed. He thought about buying something for George’s Mary, just to cheer her up after getting her teeth out, but he didn’t know anything about women’s clothes or what size she was.
A half hour later he picked her up in front of an office building on Pine Street. She was standing there looking miserable with her mouth swollen and full of bloody cotton swabs. She gave Lamar a cross look and held up four fingers when Lamar asked her how many teeth the dentist had taken out. He got irritated with himself for not thinking of having that waitress pack up some soup for her, since she wasn’t going to be eating anything that needed much chewing for a while.
“Don’t you worry about cooking dinner tonight,” he told her, doing his best to feel generous. “We can open a can or two of chili.”
“I already cooked your dinner ahead,” she mumbled. “Think I don’t have the sense to do that?”
“I was just trying to make things easier on you,” he said. “No reason to bark at me about it.”
She took one of the blood-soaked cotton wads out her mouth, inspected it for a moment, and threw it out of the car before replacing it with a fresh one from a paper bag she had on her lap.
“Hurts like hell,” she said.
“He didn’t give you any aspirin or anything?”
“He did, but it still hurts like hell. Is my mouth all caved in now?”
“I can’t tell,” he said. “It looks all swole up to me.”
“I hate losing my teeth,” she said. She was silent and glum for another ten miles, until the
left front tire went flat and Lamar, cursing, pulled over to the side of the empty road. When he looked over at George’s Mary, she was crying.
“Take some more aspirin if it hurts that bad,” he said.
“It ain’t that it hurts.” She could still barely open her mouth when she talked and her words were slurry and hard to catch. “Maybe I don’t like it that I’m an old ugly toothless woman.”
“Well, I can’t fix that and fix this tire both,” Lamar said. He got out of the car to get out the tire irons and the air pump. Fortunately there was a spare tube, so he didn’t have to patch the damn thing, but it was hard work all the same, bad on his knee to bend down and harder still on his scarred and stiff hands as he pried the tire off the rim. As he worked, George’s Mary got out of the car and walked off a little ways to be by herself, which suited him fine as well. The only good thing he could say about anything was that it was a warm enough day, over fifty degrees. He’d hardly needed his coat when they started out and now as he squeezed the new tube back into the tire there was sweat in his eyes just like it was August instead of February.
He pumped up the tire and put the old tube and the tire irons back into the toolbox, and then he was ready to go. But George’s Mary was still off by herself, sitting on a rock and looking out over the open land that stretched off from the road. He started to yell at her to come and get back in the car, but he decided he’d be more gentlemanly about it. He walked over to join her. She was watching an armadillo root around in a shallow little draw about twenty feet away. The creature hadn’t caught their scent and was too deaf even to hear Lamar’s boots shuffling through the rock chips that covered the ground.
“You get back in the car and we’ll get you home,” he told her.
She didn’t say anything in reply and didn’t move. Lamar decided what the hell and sat down on the rock bench next to her. She threw another bloody cotton swab down onto the ground and said she missed Ben.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 27