But once again she was alone, sitting here with her café crème and Professor Curtis’ book about the Venus de Milo. She and her father had plans to see the Venus at the Louvre tomorrow. But Paris itself, for all its vivacity, seemed like a museum to her. You could walk through the crowded streets of Montparnasse without encountering any stark reminders of the war, unless all that frenetic eating and drinking and dancing and arguing had something to do with a collective release of tension. She had seen a few wounded soldiers but not many, and none as grievously damaged as Arthur Fry.
Though she had always yearned to see the Louvre, to stand face-to-face with the great works of art that she had seen only in books, the idea of it felt oddly hollow to her now. The errand she was on was more urgent and personal. Ben Clayton’s death, Arthur Fry’s shattered face, her father’s failure with the Clayton statue, and her role in that failure, and then the hurt and fury in Lamar Clayton’s expression when he learned the project was over, as if Gil Gilheaney’s artistic defeat was a personal affront—all of this was bound up together.
She was not entirely sure why she had decided she must come to France, but once she had declared it out loud to her father the idea had taken on an urgent logic of its own. She had written Arthur immediately and had received his surprised reply only a day or so before they sailed. Yes, he had said, of course she and her father were welcome to visit, though there was nothing to see in Somme-Py and nowhere to stay and he was nervous about anybody seeing him, especially her for some reason. He said he didn’t think there was any way to prepare her for what his face looked like. There was a tone of puzzlement in the letter, more puzzlement really than expectation.
She had written back immediately, full of reassurances and casual comments that she hoped would answer his unstated question of why she was coming at all. They would be in Paris, only a little more than a hundred miles away, it would be a shame to be that close and not have a chance to say hello in person. But she knew there was a deeper purpose; she just did not know what it was. Maybe she wanted to coax Arthur home somehow. Maybe she just wanted to visit the places where Ben had fought and died, so that she could be sure her father’s abandonment of the boy’s statue did not amount to a betrayal of his memory.
Through the window she saw her father striding down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. She could see the frustration on his face as he entered the café. He was an hour late and he apologized to her as if to a stranger, a symptom of the posturing civility that now seemed to define their interactions. They had established this polite distance as a way of tabling their resentments. They had kept it up on the long steamship voyage, and now they had brought it to Paris.
“As I expected, Monsieur Du Prel was a windbag,” Gil said, then turned to speak to the waiter in acceptable French. “I think he approves of me. He ought to. I sat there looking interested while he recited the whole family history through a hundred generations. It took him a long time to get around to showing me the stuff I wanted to see.”
“Was it worth seeing?”
“A couple of portrait sketches that might be of some help. And a bust. He says it was taken from life, after La Salle appeared at Versailles when he returned from his Mississippi expedition, but I doubt it. There’s some authentic period clothing at the Invalides I should see. He’s calling around to the director to arrange an appointment.
“I stopped in at the hotel on my way over here,” he said as the waiter brought his coffee. “This was at the desk for you.”
The letter he handed her was addressed in the handwriting they had both come to know as Arthur Fry’s.
Gil watched his daughter. Her face clouded over as she read, and finally she slipped the letter back in its envelope and put it on the table between them.
“He can’t bring himself to call me Maureen. It’s still ‘Dear Miss Gilheaney.’ ”
“May I read it?”
“You may if you like. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t want me to come after all. So that’s that, I suppose. More time at the Louvre. Do you mind if I go back to the hotel?”
“Of course not. I’ll knock on your door about seven and we’ll find someplace to have dinner.”
She nodded and walked hurriedly out of the café, meaning to outpace the tears that Gil saw were coming. She had left the letter on the table for him to read.
Dear Miss Gilheaney,
I sent this to the Hotel Printania. That’s where you said you were going to stay in Paris and I hope you get this.
I know you and your dad have come a long way but as you explained to me it was a business trip and you were coming anyway. I hope you don’t take this wrong but I decided maybe it would not be a good idea for you to visit Somme-Py. This is not because I don’t want to see you but I guess because I’m not ready for people to see me. We have gotten to know each other “through the mail” as they say and that is probably the best way to keep things for now. Maybe someday if I ever get used to the way I look I will come back to the States and say hello to you in person and we can have a good visit. Please do not be offended at this. I do not mean any offense. I am just “shy” about my appearance, and that is why I am writing this. Please don’t be mad at me either, although I understand if you can’t help it.
I’ve been thinking about Ben a lot since you told me about what happened to the statue and that your dad doesn’t plan to do it over again. I decided maybe that’s for the best. If Ben were still here he’d probably say he didn’t need a statue of himself. He was a hero that day if you ask me but I don’t think he felt like one. He was mostly just boiling over about something he found out. Well I guess that’s the same thing as courage but I don’t know. But the more I think about it the more I think he wouldn’t want his dad to turn him into a statue so I guess this all worked out all right.
I hope we can still be friends. I just don’t like people looking at me especially people who mean to be kind and I should have told you that earlier but I didn’t know it yet really.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur
“Boiling over about something he found out.”
Gil read the line again, puzzled by it, stirred by it somehow. Then he put the letter back into its envelope and slipped it in his pocket and left some centimes on the table.
He must have already walked five miles that afternoon, from Monsieur Du Prel’s flat near the École Militaire into the heart of Montparnasse. He still remembered all the streets—avenue de la Motte-Picquet, rue de Grenelle. He still remembered himself here as a young man, staying long past dark in the studios of the École both because he was in a feverish working mood and because there was plenty of heat, which was not the case in the dingy apartment in rue Saint-André-des-Arts he had shared with two other students. He had had a patron of sorts, the rich son of a Tammany ward boss who had been an early believer in Gil’s promise and proposed to pay for his crossing, tuition, and board in exchange for busts of himself and his wife and annual commemorative medallions of his four children. Even with his patron’s stipend, he had been hungry much of the time, but gloriously so, a feeling that his body was a raging furnace and that there was not enough fuel in the world to feed it. He had felt that about his work too, which had raged as well, demanding all of him, all of his strength and spirit. He had stared into the windows of the artists’ supply shops in the rue de la Grande-Chaumière with as much hunger as when he passed the oyster shuckers outside the restaurants along Boulevard Raspail. There had been love affairs, blazingly brief but remembered now, almost forty years later, in hypnotic precision and detail. He had learned French and part of the intoxication of that time had involved the invention of a new self in a new language.
He walked now toward the Place de l’Observatoire and the Luxembourg Garden. Streetcars and horse cabs passed him by, and though it was cold, young people were scurrying along the street, chattering with each other, alive with energy and expectation, a new crop of human material sprouting up to replace his own gen
eration, which would soon be ploughed under and forgotten. He was an aging, unfulfilled man. The world had changed without consulting him.
The fountain at Place de l’Observatoire had been only a few years old when he came to France, and like most of the other students he had viewed it with disdain. Carpeaux’s contorted female figures had seemed hackneyed even then, and Frémiet’s horses, rearing from the water in such fury that they seemed to be trying to claw their way out of the fountain, were just more overwrought allegory. The pointless symbolic weight of the whole affair was heavier than the bronze from which it was made.
He was more forgiving of it now—now that he was older and less forgiving of himself. The fountain had been here for decades and would be here for many decades and even centuries more. The nudes standing above the rearing horses, holding aloft a hollow sphere, did not seem quite as awkward to him today. He had once felt free to regard this sculpture with contempt, but now he was not all that sure he could do better. Where were the works of his own that would endure, the works he had so confidently envisioned long ago? All he could think about were his losses, his destroyed masterworks.
He walked past the fountain and along the tree-lined street into the park, listening to his shoes tread upon the gravel paths in the wintry silence. Two women sat bundled in shawls on one of the benches. He could hear fragments of their conversation as he passed; they were talking about their sons who died in the war as they watched a solitary girl and her father push a toy boat on the margins of the shallow lake.
On the far side of the palace Gil noticed a young man in a brown suit, with longish, wayward hair and a cap pulled down on his forehead. He stood alongside the Medici Fountain, his hand resting lightly on the trunk of a horse chestnut tree. The young man was squinting slightly, looking for someone or something in the distance. This trivial act somehow gave his face a look of dawning expectation. It was not just the look in his eyes, it was his posture too. If Ben Clayton were standing like that, Gil speculated, with that slight bend in his right knee, his head notched down a little, it would bring the whole body into a different alignment, a different relationship with the unseen something out there on the prairie horizon.
As Gil watched, the man removed his hand from the tree and called out to someone on the far edge of the park. Then he walked off. He had ceased to be interesting. But for a moment he had been Ben Clayton himself, alive, settled into the future whose arrival he had been glimpsing, the future that never came.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK he means?” Gil asked Maureen at dinner that night. “What was Ben ‘boiling over’ about? What did he find out?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. I could write back and ask him, but what’s the point?”
“I think we should go see him.”
“Arthur? You read the letter, Daddy. He asked us not to.”
“He was probably just in a bad mood when he wrote it.”
“Well, if his mood improves, maybe he’ll write again and invite us.”
“We’ll be gone by then.”
Maureen looked up from her turbot and out the window toward the congested carrefour. They had stopped for dinner at La Rotonde, which had been a mistake. Everyone from their fellow passengers on the Caronia to the desk clerk at the hotel had recommended it as the place to be in Paris, but it was just a noisy hangout for Americans, the tables jammed together, the air foul with smoke, long-haired intellectual provocateurs insulting one another at the crowded bar.
“Why are you so interested in seeing him all of a sudden?” Maureen asked Gil.
“I had an idea for the statue today.”
“You’re not doing the statue, remember?”
There was no point in trying to continue a discussion in this echoing café. They ate their meal in silence and Gil paid the bill and they walked down rue Vavin on the way to their hotel on Notre-Damesdes-Champs. It was chilly but there was no wind and the static cold felt good. As the noise from the cafés on the corner receded, they could hear their footsteps on the pavement and the lazy clopping sound of the horse cabs.
“It’s possible I might want to take another crack at it,” Gil said.
“Well, take another crack at it, then, Daddy. Do whatever you want. I don’t care.”
It just came out. She had not planned to say such a thing, but after weeks of strained civility between them the raw words just erupted.
He paused for a moment in surprise, then kept walking beside her. She thought of him now as brooding and self-absorbed, almost a stranger. Trust in her father, in his love and consequential strength, had been part of the organic basis of her self. Walking down the avenues of Paris, she thought of the New York streets where she had grown up, like Montparnasse a teeming world of artists and writers and students and all sorts of in-between characters with big opinions. She remembered the colliding cooking smells from the narrow streets off Sixth Avenue, newsboys hawking the afternoon editions, and the haggard poets trying to hand-sell their fiery literary manifestos; the apartment where she had grown up, the sole adored child of her father and mother; the studio on Washington Square South with its wonderful light, especially in winter, where her childhood companions had been the bronze heads of business leaders and politicians who had commissioned busts of themselves from Francis Gilheaney; the patient voice of her father cautioning her to be careful with his tools, but to be heedless with the clay he set before her to model; the statue of Farragut in Madison Square Park that he took her to see again and again, declaring that in its deceptive foursquare simplicity resided all the beauty and mystery of art; the Italian restaurant Renganeschi’s, on West Tenth Street, where her father would take her and her mother to celebrate his finishing an important piece, where the owners and waiters would toast his success and present her with a special dessert; the sense of somehow being chosen to be this great man’s daughter, as if of all the children in the world he trusted her alone to share the secret space of his studio, to learn the magic of giving permanent physical form to people who for the most part had already vanished from the earth.
He had lied to her not just about her grandmother but, it seemed to her, about all of this as well. Her whole life felt like an illusion that he had spun, that he was still spinning.
“I don’t know what else to say to you,” he said wearily. “I’ve admitted I was wrong, I’ve apologized as sincerely as I know how.”
She looked away, tears filming her eyes, quietly accepting this declaration for what it was as they walked into the hotel and got their keys from the clerk. They climbed the winding stairs. Both of their rooms were on the sixth floor and she watched how her father climbed ahead of her with even strides, each firm footstep lending strength to the next. By the time they reached the top she was winded but he was not. In the dim electric light his face had a shadowy, stricken look.
“As far as the statue goes,” he said, “I declared it to be a dead issue, so I suppose it should stay that way. But I think I gave up too soon.”
She hefted the heavy key and opened the door to her room. She lingered for a moment in the hallway.
“Even if you decided to start over with the statue, what would be the point of seeing Arthur?”
“Well, I have a feeling there’s more to learn. Don’t you agree? More to learn about Ben.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
They went to a branch office of Thomas Cook near the Opera. Gil told the agent he did not want a conventional tour of the battlefields but wanted to hire a car and a driver who knew the Champagne region and was familiar with the condition of the roads in the Devastated Zone. The agent had to consult with his manager about this out-of-the-ordinary request, but they determined there was a car available, along with a reliable guide-interpreter, and the trip could be arranged for six hundred francs. Gil and Maureen were asked to sign a waiver and warned against touching grenades, shells, or loose wire in the war area. They would also do well to bring mackintoshes and wear strong boots, as the battlefields offered unsound
footing. They were given tickets for the morning train to Reims, where the car and driver would be waiting for them at the station.
After making these arrangements they went to the Louvre. In the sculpture galleries they stood before the Venus de Milo, Gil for the twentieth time, Maureen for the first. She read aloud to him from her book about the conflicting theories of Furtwängler and Reinach, about whether the statue was truly meant to be of Venus or, as Reinach contended, the wife of Poseidon.
Gil stood staring at the statue, pestered just as he had been as a young man by its ungraspable beauty. How exactly had the unknown sculptor pulled it off, that gorgeous torsion of the body, the near-blankness of the face, which somehow provoked an idea of ageless serenity and self-possession?
He left Maureen in front of the Venus to wander through the galleries, pausing before the massive Melpomene, and then the Diana with her fawn, and the running figure of Atalanta, both of which he had studied in his Paris days when his own work had been rather stiff and he had been vexed by the mystery of how to convey movement. And once more he stood in front of the thrilling Winged Victory of Samothrace, amazed anew by the drape of its garments, by its bold and urgent momentum, the dynamism with which the weight of the body was shifting in mid-stride from the left foot to the right.
After a few moments Maureen joined him there at the top of the grand staircase. The two of them stood staring up at the Victory without feeling the need to speak about it, just bound in appreciation. It was the first time in weeks there had been an easy silence between them.
They took the train from Gare de l’Est early the next morning and reached Reims before lunchtime. Their guide was waiting for them in the station. His name was Stuart. He was a middle-aged Englishman with owlish spectacles. He briskly took their bags and led them outside, where he tied the luggage to the top of the touring car as Gil and Maureen stared in amazement at the rows of houses hollowed out by bombs and at the piles of rubble that had still to be cleared away.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 30