TWENTY-FIVE
The outright anger between Gil and Maureen had lasted no more than a day. It had quickly shifted to a tone of heartsick civility. They spoke to each other, they ate their meals together. Mrs. Gossling was not yet back, since she had to sort through her dead brother’s belongings and deal with his many creditors. Gil had written to her to take as long as she needed, had sent her a week’s wages, and had not mentioned what had happened to the Clayton statue because of her abrupt departure. The poor woman was distressed enough.
He would sail for France in two weeks and he and Maureen would have a respite from each other’s company, each other’s silent resentment and despair. She had never told him exactly what had happened with Vance Martindale, except to say he had turned out to be married and for complicated reasons had not been able to tell her so. The complicated reasons, Gil assumed, had amounted to nothing more than his selfish wish to take advantage of her ignorance, but there was no point in railing against him. She knew now the kind of man he was, she had suffered enough from that knowledge without her father driving the point home.
He wanted to comfort her somehow but of course that was out of the question. She was too proud and too hurt, and his own angry and wounded spirit was still in the way of his truly reaching out to his daughter. Gil knew no other cure for despair than to work himself through it, but even as he made his preliminary sketches for the La Salle he was losing faith in the old remedy. He was closing in on the end of his career with no works to his name that he thought would truly last, nothing visible in the future but dispiriting works for hire.
She had many questions about her grandmother and he answered them as clearly as he could while they cleaned the brittle clay off the armatures of the man and the horse. Much of what Maureen had learned as a girl about Margaret Gilheaney still applied. She had been a talented, loving, enterprising woman of great intelligence and conviction, independent in her thoughts except for her inflexible fidelity to the Church and its teachings. She had been married to a failed and damaged man, had raised two boys, one of whom had died. Gil had misled Maureen only about the date of her grandmother’s death, but he could not pretend that this strategic falsehood had been anything other than a poisonous lie, a lie that had shaken her own identity and shattered her trust in the father she had once worshipped.
When the armatures had been cleaned they shoved them to one side of the studio to clear space for the La Salle armature he would build when he returned from France. It would have made more sense to simply dismantle the Clayton armatures but he did not have the heart to do that right now.
He went into the house to eat a sandwich. Maureen said she was not hungry. When he came back to the studio he found her standing in front of her Spirit of the Waters panels, silently and ruthlessly appraising their worth.
Gil had been very favorably surprised when they had first lifted the panels from their packing crates, and his initial reaction still held. Something had happened to Maureen’s images in their journey from clay, then to plaster, then to bronze. He had seen it many times before, the depth of the bronze and the luster of the patina imparting an authority that had not been there before. He had not expected it to happen in this case, but it had. The forced movement he had seen before in the flights of the birds and the rush of the water now felt more natural, and the draftsmanlike figures were more dynamic. There was some other new dimension as well, something that must have resided in the piece all along. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the sculptor was a woman. The subjects were not framed or pushed or defined, there was no statement made, no artistic agenda promoted. The artist had nothing to prove, no interest in testing herself against the expectations of the viewer. The piece was simply about what her eye had seen and what her hands had rendered.
He continued to watch Maureen as she silently regarded the panels. There was more scrutiny than worry on her face, so perhaps she had given herself a break. He was cautious about praising her work in front of her now. After the bitter words that had passed between them, she would read his praise as false encouragement, or as a pathetic bid for forgiveness.
“How do you feel about them?” he decided to ask her.
She didn’t speak, didn’t turn her head to look at him. She just shrugged. Gil went to his modeling stand and back to work on a preliminary clay sketch for the La Salle, though he would not begin working in earnest on the piece until he had met with Monsieur Du Prel in Paris.
“I suppose it will look all right on the bridge,” Maureen said after a moment.
“I suppose it will too.”
“It was a mistake to do it in four separate panels. If I’d been thinking, I could have made a big relief that—”
She had abruptly broken off because Lamar Clayton had just opened the door.
“I knocked on the door of your house, but there wasn’t nobody there,” Clayton said.
“Come in,” Gil told him. His fingers were moist from working the clay and he wiped them with a rag before offering his hand to his surprise guest.
Clayton cast his eyes around the studio. He nodded to Maureen. He was wearing the same suit he had worn to the Old Time Trail Drivers banquet and in the daylight it looked too big for him, hanging rather than draping on his rangy stockman’s body. His shirt collar was a size too large as well, gaping at his sunburned neck. He had lost a little weight, his hair was grayer.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Gil said.
“Didn’t know I was either till I got your letter saying you weren’t going to live up to your part of the bargain.”
“I’m sorry. I regret having to cancel the commission. There was no way for me to continue.”
“Why?”
Gil directed his guest’s attention to the armatures shoved up against the wall of the studio. “There was an accident. The clay froze. I lost months of work.”
“So you need more money. Why didn’t you tell me that instead of just saying you quit?”
“It’s not a question of money.”
“What is it a question of?”
“Of my strong feeling that I don’t have it in me to do it all over again, to get it right, as I had it the first time.”
“You’ll get it right in a different way.”
“No, it would be a second-rate work.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know it.”
Clayton turned to Maureen. “Is that what you think too?”
“It’s what he says, Mr. Clayton, and so I believe it.”
It was true, she had come to believe it. Her father was working on the La Salle sketches without heart, without excitement. She had never seen him work that way. At first she had mistaken his despair for an uncharacteristic bout of self-pity, but it ran deeper than that, deep into his broken sculptor’s heart.
“I said in my letter I could recommend another sculptor,” Gil said to Clayton. “I would be happy to do that. There are a number of excellent—”
“I don’t need you to recommend another sculptor. If I wanted another one I would’ve found him myself. I’m going to hold you to this contract, Gilheaney.”
Gil stared at him, seeing not the bereaved father who had wanted to memorialize his son but the angry, unbending man who had driven that son away.
“You’re not going to hold me to anything,” he said.
“By God, you try me and you’ll find out.”
“Let’s go into the house,” Maureen said, “and discuss it there.”
“No, Miss Gilheaney, I believe we better discuss it right here.”
Gil stormed across the room to his desk, pulled open a drawer, hastily thumbed through a file of contracts, withdrew the one for the Clayton and slammed it on the desk.
“If you would read this, you’d see that each party has the right to withdraw from the deal at any time. The clause is standard in all my contracts. It’s there for your protection as well as mine.”
Clayton grabbed the docu
ment and swept his eyes across it. He set it back down on the desk, silently conceding the point.
“You’re right, it’s here in the contract, but I never thought you’d use those words to quit on me. I thought I had a better sense of what kind of man I was dealing with.”
“You’re dealing with a man who doesn’t want to deliver to you an inferior product, and for that you should thank me. You should thank me and now that you’ve had your say you should leave my studio.”
Clayton’s face was so inflamed with anger that for an absurd moment Gil wondered whether they were going to come to blows after all. But as the standoff wore on, the tension started to drain from Clayton’s face and posture. He did not back down, he just looked away and shrugged his shoulders and seemed to decide the hell with it.
“You said it was going to be your best work.”
“That’s right. I did.”
“And you’re just going to walk away from it?”
“The piece was destroyed, Clayton. You may not know what a devastating thing that is to an artist, but you’ll have to take my word for it. The statue was in my grasp once; it’s not anymore. If I continued I’d be taking your money under false pretenses. The only thing I can do is to let it go.”
Clayton looked to Maureen, as if she could explain this to him. But there was nothing she could say, or was willing to say, and she saw that he took the blank look she gave him in return as a rebuke.
He turned back to her father.
“This statue’s got you scared, ain’t it?”
“I don’t know what you mean. And if that’s what you wanted to tell me, I’m sorry you felt you had to come all this way to do so. Maureen will see you out.”
“The hell anybody will see me out,” Clayton said.
THE DOOR slammed shut, Clayton was gone, and Gil went back to his La Salle sketch, angrily squeezing the clay onto the miniature wire armature. After five minutes of his industrious silence Maureen couldn’t take it anymore.
“Are you pretending that just didn’t happen?”
“I’m not pretending anything. I’m simply working.”
“I don’t understand why you had to be so defiant.”
“The man accused me of—I don’t even know what. Duplicity. Cowardice. Do you suppose I’d let someone talk to me like that in my own studio?”
“He was giving you another chance.”
“I didn’t want another chance. Haven’t I made myself plain enough on that point? Are you as thick as he is, Maureen?”
“Yes, Daddy, I’m terribly thick. I must be, since I’m so easy to deceive.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about. The man came in and—”
“It is what we’re talking about. We haven’t even started to talk about it!”
He went back to work. He didn’t bother to give her the courtesy of firing back. She watched him as he narrowed his eyes, focusing all his attention on his sketch, creating a little clay figure. All at once his mighty vocation seemed absurd, a child’s pastime.
“You’ve thrown this commission away,” she told him. “You’re unbending and prideful. All you care about is dominating your clients, not satisfying them. That’s why we had to leave New York, because of your pride. You made us move to Texas. You made us move here and look what happened.”
“Look what happened. I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“Yes, you do.”
“That I killed your mother? Is that what you mean?”
But she wouldn’t let herself go that far. She watched him in silence as he continued to work, shutting her out, shutting out what she was saying. He squeezed another fistful of clay onto the armature but he felt such a jolt of pain from his arthritic thumb that he had to pull his hand away as if from an electric wire.
He gave the pain a moment to subside and then went back to the sketch.
“You should give your hands a rest if they’re hurting you,” Maureen said.
He ignored her advice. Almost at once, his hands were hurting again, but he forced himself to keep working, as if it was the pain he was trying to dominate and not the clay. When he could stand it no longer he pulled away again.
“You’re making it worse, Daddy. Please stop working.”
“I’ll stop working when I want to.”
He stared at the sketch with cold-blooded scrutiny, decided he hated it, and began ripping the clay off the armature.
“What about the boy?” Maureen said.
“What boy?”
“Ben Clayton. Did you even care about him?”
“You’re not making any sense. Ben Clayton was a subject. I didn’t know him, you didn’t know him. And he’s dead, so it won’t matter to him in the slightest if there’s a statue of him or not.”
Three hours later the two of them sat down to dinner at the kitchen table. Maureen had made potato soup. Gil wore the splints that Urrutia had prescribed for his hands. It was awkward for him to wield his soup spoon, but the effort gave him something to concentrate on as they sat in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes. They both seemed to recognize there was no reason to talk anymore about the day’s poisonous topics, no point in bringing their seething resentments back to the surface.
“I’m going to France with you,” Maureen announced.
“What?”
“You may not care anything about Ben Clayton, but I do.”
“I don’t understand you. How will going to France make any difference one way or the other?”
“I want to meet his friend. This village he lives in, Somme-Py, it’s not far from Paris. There are even tours you can take to the battlefields. I want to go there and meet him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have to give you a reason. I don’t know the reason. I just have this idea I can be of help to him somehow. I don’t have to go with you. I can book my own passage on another ship. I have money from my commission. It’s mine to do with as I see fit.”
“Go some other time. We’ll be terrible company for each other. Why now?”
“Because unlike you I can’t just move on to the next thing and forget all about Ben Clayton.”
TWENTY-SIX
They sailed from Galveston on the San Jacinto, stopping first at Key West and then four days later in New York, where they embarked on a Cunard liner, the Caronia, for Liverpool and at last Le Havre. So soon after the war, with so many passenger ships still out of service, the voyage had been the most direct the agent could arrange, but they had still been almost two weeks at sea, two weeks of awkward small talk with her father in dining salons and on promenade decks. But now that Maureen was sipping a café crème in Paris on a fiercely cold afternoon, the act of getting here seemed to have telescoped into nothing. It was as if she had simply awakened one morning, blinking with wonder, into a new world.
She sat at an inside table in the Cloiserie des Lilas, studying without much admiring Rude’s statue of Marshal Ney on the corner outside. Her father had told her to wait for him in the cafe, which he remembered from his days as a young man subsisting on nothing while he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. It was still full of artists and writers, solitarily drawing in their sketchbooks, composing stories in their blue notebooks, or huddled together in dynamic argument as the platters piled up on their tables. Some of the arguing voices belonged to Americans, holding forth about this or that in their stridently accented French.
Vance had probably come here, she thought, during his little sabbatical after the war. She could picture him as the center of attention at one of the tables, everyone galvanized by his energetic opinions boldly delivered in imperfect French. It just now occurred to her that while he had been lingering in Paris as a young man mostly untouched by the war, his invalid wife might very well have been wondering why it was taking him so long to come home.
She tried to push the thought away, along with all the anger and futility that went with it. Vance had been thoughtful enough to let a few weeks pass before he wrote h
er a long letter, apologizing, explaining, castigating himself, hitting all the proper notes, baring his heart with eloquent precision. But he had been a little too enthusiastic in owning up to all the wrongs he had done her. She could feel his satisfaction as he composed his lines, his conviction that she would be moved and stirred by his searing self-criticism. It had taken all her will not to answer him. What could she do? Accept his apology and pick up things where she had left them, on the verge of becoming an occasional mistress to an inconstant married man?
Her bitterness toward him could not quite erase the longing she still felt, particularly now that she had crossed the ocean and had a sense of what it might have been like to be in Paris with Vance. Laughing, licentious Americans were everywhere, with all the time in the world to kill lounging in the cafés or dancing at the Bal Bullier. It would have taken no great effort to convince Vance to run off to Paris, to leave his wife and his job behind. They could have been just another scandalous pair running from convention, and all the more interesting, all the more accepted, for their crimes.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 29