Gil had barely had a chance to absorb the devastation of the boy’s face. It was hard to train his eyes away from it, partly because he was as transfixed by horror and pity as any other mortal would be and partly because as a sculptor his instinct to shape and repair was so strong.
L’Huillier was talking about the fashion show that his friend Harry Collins had put on at the Willard Hotel in Washington for the Somme-Py relief fund.
“Jeanine and I were greeted with such great generosity,” he said. “So many people so eager to help our little village. And to walk through the streets of Washington, to see the monuments and the White House! Very emotional for me. And your President Wilson is not well. I’m very sad to hear this.”
He stood and raised his glass to Wilson. And then to America itself. His eyes were shining with emotion. He reached out and gripped Arthur by the shoulder.
“Monsieur Fry here, he is one of the Americans who helped save my country. Who is still saving it. Arthur, my friend, we in Somme-Py cherish you as one of our own. To us, you are a citizen of our village and of France. You have paid for this citizenship with your blood.”
He was crying openly when he sat down, smearing the tears away and whispering a few embarrassed words in French to Madame L’Huillier, who patted his hand in comfort. He took another sip of wine. He drank too much, Gil suspected, and he also suspected his host was in a great deal of pain from his wounds. L’Huillier seemed like a naturally reticent man whose emotions had come unanchored by the horrors of the war. He hid nothing, his tears flowed easily, explosive pronouncements of love and friendship were elements of ordinary conversation. Surviving the war had left him so raw and grateful that he dared leave no tender thought unsaid.
And then there was Arthur Fry, whose thoughts were secret, whose anchor chains were tight. He was naturally bashful, but his shattering wound made him incalculably more so, his face always subtly averted so that when you looked his way you could get only a glancing impression of him. He responded courteously when spoken to but waited for the conversation to come to him. When he spoke, his voice was obstructed by the brutal device that held his face together, and you could feel the pain that it cost him to form the words.
“And so, Monsieur Gilheaney,” L’Huillier declared, pronouncing his name “Zhil-ha-nay,” “you must be a remarkable sculptor.”
“You would have to see my work to judge, Lieutenant.”
“I see it in your face, Monsieur. In the way you move and talk. You reveal your genius.” He turned to Maureen. “He is a genius, I hope. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken.”
“You’re not mistaken,” Maureen said, smiling slyly at her father—a welcome reminder of the warm repartee they had shared until recently. But then her attention returned again to where it had been all evening, to Arthur Fry. Though he was crowded in with them at the table, he seemed to be in a room by himself.
Gil had intruded upon Arthur’s wary solitude because ever since abandoning the Clayton statue, he had felt his life going wrong, his work leveling out at a high level of craft that would never again rise to art. The clay crumbling off the armature had seemed to confirm the futility of his quest for greatness. The sight of that young man the other day in the Luxembourg Garden, the look of expectation in his eyes, had given him an idea of a way back in to the Clayton piece. But the door had opened only a crack. He needed to push it open, and his instinct told him that the place to try was here in the Devastated Zone, in the presence of this devastated boy who had been Ben Clayton’s friend.
But he had only half-guesses about what Maureen was looking for, why she had traveled so far and reached so far to make a connection with Arthur. Was she trying to prove herself against her father, to let him know that she sensed value and vitality in a project that a disappointed old man had cast aside? Or did she just feel so betrayed by Gil and by Vance Martindale that she needed to be in a place that was already foreign, where there were no established trusts that could be broken?
Madame L’Huillier whispered to her husband. Gil no longer considered himself fluent in French, but he caught what she was saying: “Ask them to tell us something about this young man.”
L’Huillier translated for Maureen, who was the only one at the table who did not speak French.
“My wife would like to know about the subject of your statue.”
“Arthur is the one who knows about Ben,” Gil said. He shifted his eyes to the young man at the end of the table. Arthur looked down at his plate. Everyone else had finished dinner, but eating was such a painstaking process for him that he had only made it through half his serving of cassoulet, and he seemed to regard the remaining portion as an unfinished chore.
Arthur looked up at Maureen, as if asking for instructions.
“Please,” she said. “Unless it makes you uncomfortable.”
“No, I’m comfortable enough talking about Ben, I guess,” he said. He turned to Madame L’Huillier and spoke in French, apologizing for having to speak in English. She smiled patiently.
“I don’t know what exactly to say, though,” he told Maureen. “We were friends, that was pretty much it. I liked Ben better than most of the other boys in the company, and he got along with me fairly well, I guess. I remember we sat next to each other on the train almost all the way from Fort Worth to Hoboken, at least we did when we could get a seat. Some of the time we just had to lie on the floor, the train was so crowded. And of course we didn’t know we were going to Hoboken. They wouldn’t tell us anything and we couldn’t write home about where we were. We crossed through Arkansas. That was the first time either Ben or me had ever seen a pine tree. Some of the boys thought we were going to go to Mobile to ship out for France but then we changed trains and headed up north.”
Arthur paused and looked down again at his plate and then looked up again. His mouth was rigid and inexpressive. You had to look at his eyes to know he was smiling.
“But I guess you didn’t want to know all about me riding a train and seeing a pine tree. You wanted to know about Ben. We talked a fair amount on that trip. I was pretty homesick already, but he wasn’t, not that I could see. He’d already lost his mother and he didn’t get along too well with his dad.”
“Did he say why?” Gil asked.
“He mostly just said he was a sonofabitch.”
“Sonofabitch. One of my favorite American words,” L’Huillier said, and tried to translate it to his puzzled wife. L’Huillier laughed, but Arthur didn’t laugh along with him. He met Maureen’s eyes again. She could tell he knew more about Ben and his father than he was willing to disclose, but she wasn’t going to press him.
“He talked kindly about their housekeeper. She had some kind of funny name.”
“George’s Mary,” Gil said.
“Yes sir, now I recollect. George’s Mary it was.”
He paused and took a painful sip from his glass, carefully sluicing the wine into the side of his mouth.
“Ben knew a lot about how to do things. I guess it was growing up on that ranch. Nothing seemed to surprise him, he didn’t get excited about anything much. I grew up in town mostly and I guess you could say I was a little more nervous in general about things than he was. On that train we were all pretty excited but we were scared too. All of us trying to hide it one way or the other. With Ben, though, it seemed like nothing bothered him much, at least not at first.”
“Not at first?” Gil asked. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know what I mean. I was just saying that, I guess.”
Gil was about to press him on the point, but he felt Maureen’s touch on his arm, silently asking him to desist.
“I remember before we shipped out we had a day’s leave in New York City. Most of the boys wanted to go to Chinatown and go to the hop dens but Ben wanted to see the Brooklyn Bridge. He said his mother had told him if he ever got to New York he ought to stand on that bridge and look at the view. I don’t believe she ever got up that way herself but I understoo
d from him that she wanted to real bad. So I guess he did that for her. I was glad I went along. We stood up on that bridge for about two hours. It was windier than any place I’d ever been, even windier than West Texas, but it was a clear day and I don’t expect there’s a better view anywhere else in the world. We watched the troopships sailing down the river and knew in a couple days we were going to be on one ourselves and we started talking about what it would be like. What France would be like and what war would be like. We sure found that out before too long. I remember Ben said we oughtn’t to worry none because we were friends and would look out for each other and if we got killed then that would just be the way things turned out. I’d been a little scared and a little blue that day, being so far away from home, missing my folks, but Ben put my mind at ease. I reckon he always did that pretty well. If somebody was to give me back a day out of my life, I believe I might choose that one, ’cause I felt peaceful up there on that bridge with Ben.”
Madame L’Huillier began to gather up the dishes. Arthur spoke to her in French, complimenting her on the meal, apologizing that he was unable to finish his portion.
“I’d like to know something about how he died,” Gil said. He was aware of Maureen’s disapproval at his probing, but he also knew that if he didn’t probe, the possibility of learning anything of significance would be lost.
“Why do you need to know that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I thought you weren’t doing the statue anymore.”
“I’m not sure of that either.”
“For some men,” L’Huillier explained to Gil, breaking into the silence that had now settled over the dinner table, “it is not a problem to talk about the war. For others it is.”
Gil nodded but kept looking at Arthur, who finally spoke.
“He was hit by machine-gun fire in the chest. It was in the town. We’d mostly taken it by then but there were still Germans on the other side of the Arne, this little river they got over here. He got killed and that’s about all there is to it.”
“I don’t think that’s all there is to it,” Gil said. “You said in your letter to Maureen there was something Ben was upset about, something that he’d just found out.”
“Daddy!” Maureen said.
“If I said that I don’t recall what I meant,” Arthur told him. “I don’t see what difference it would make to anybody anyway.”
“I’d like to know.”
Arthur lifted his head and faced Gil full-on for the first time that evening, as if consciously challenging him with the sight of the wound that had taken away almost half his face. Gil could hear him breathing through the prosthesis, a laboring wheeze that was louder just then than the wind beating against the canvas walls of the house.
“It’s pretty late,” Arthur said at last, and stood up to go.
WHEN THEY LEFT the L’Huilliers’ house Arthur walked alone down the dark main street of Somme-Py. Maureen followed him, not bothering to answer her father when he asked where she was going, just swiping away the question with a backward wave of her arm. She felt her father’s eyes on her, the bitter recognition that she had passed out of his control, and then heard him turn and walk back in the other direction, toward the mairie, where they were to spend the night.
She caught up with Arthur just before he was about to enter a small wooden hut.
“I know you’re angry with us,” she said. “You should be. We had no right to come here.”
She tried to look him in the eyes but his face was averted again.
“You look pretty cold,” he said. “I’ve been here long enough I’m used to it, but you ought not to stand out here in the wind at night if you’re not.”
“Are you inviting me in?”
The question seemed to startle him. He didn’t know what to do other than open the door to his hut for her.
“Don’t go more than about a couple feet,” he told her as she entered the dark room. “You’re likely to bump into something.”
He closed the door and brushed past her and lit a kerosene lamp. He opened the stove and threw a few more scraps of lumber onto the coals that were already glowing there. The room was warm and mostly bare: a cot to sleep on, a patched-up wooden chair to sit on, a few planks of wood to serve as shelves. Tacked to the wall was a wrinkled photo of a stern-looking couple in Sunday clothes staring at the camera lens as if it was something they were trying to identify.
“Are those your parents?”
“Yes ma’am. I carried that in my wallet all the way from Camp Bowie. Glad I did, ’cause they’re gone now. Don’t know if I told you that.”
“Yes, you did. I’m sorry.”
“I had a picture of my brother too but I lost that somewhere along the way.”
She sat down on the chair while he remained standing against the wall.
“What was your brother’s name?”
“Franklin. We called him Little Frank, though. I’d offer you some coffee or something to drink but I don’t have any.”
“That’s all right. I just wanted to talk to you. My father and I have both been very forward, coming here when you asked us not to. And I’m afraid he was rude to you tonight.”
“I don’t think he meant to be.”
“It’s just that this statue has gotten under his skin. I’m worried about him. I’m worried about what will happen to him if he doesn’t complete it.”
“Looks like it’s got under your skin too,” Arthur said.
“You’re right. It has.”
She looked once again around the tiny bare room. The ceiling was low, so low that Arthur’s head almost touched it. A toothbrush in a glass, a can of tooth powder, a pitcher for washing, a trunk at the foot of his cot that held his clothes, that plaintive crumpled picture of his parents, posed so sternly in life and now dead: the room was as empty as the future he seemed to be expecting. He was so heartrendingly solitary and self-sufficient.
“Aren’t you very unhappy here?” she asked him.
“Not any unhappier than I’d be anywhere else. I like it here pretty much.”
“Turn your face to me, please.”
He did as instructed, still enough of a child to respond automatically to a teacher’s tone.
She stared at him deliberately. She knew it made him anxious but she did it anyway.
“There’s nothing you have to hide from me,” she said. “I’m your friend, at least I think I am. If you still want me to be.”
“Yes ma’am, I do.”
“Maureen.”
“I keep forgetting to say that.”
She laughed and stood up and tightened her scarf around the neck of her coat. He opened the door for her and escorted her back down the street to the mairie.
“The place where Ben died ain’t but a few miles from here. You tell your dad that if he wants me to I’ll take the two of you over there tomorrow and show you what that fight was like and what happened. I don’t know how that would help him with the statue but if it would I’m happy to do it.”
“It wouldn’t be hard for you?”
“Doesn’t matter. You talk to your dad and tell him I’ll meet up with you right after breakfast.”
TWENTY-NINE
The gusting wind had swept itself away during the night. The sun was out, presiding over a day of brilliant cold. It was seven in the morning and already the noise of hammering was echoing all over Somme-Py, everyone impatient to rebuild their homes and their village and for the world to return to some semblance of its former reality. Arthur had grown to love the sound, a call to industry as solemn and stirring as the ringing of a church bell.
He shaved at the basin under the glassless window of the abris, the crude shutters open, the cold pouring in. He had no mirror. The remaining skin on the left side of his face had been stretched and reconfigured during his surgeries and his beard grew differently there now, like the grass around a stock tank. He shaved by touch. He had not looked at his face on purpose since he had bee
n wounded and did not intend to. Every once in a while, passing a barrel full of water or a window sitting on the ground ready to be framed into one of the new wooden buildings, he would catch an accidental reflection and it would unnerve him for days. The gaping nothingness he saw was even worse than the picture he had constructed in his imagination. He knew it would be better to have a mirror after all, to confront himself with his appearance every morning so there would be no more danger of being taken by surprise. He knew it would be better but he was a long way from finding the strength to do it.
He finished shaving and got dressed and sat down on his cot to eat a piece of bread and sip some of the weak American cocoa that had come in the aid packages. It was during his solitary breakfasts that he gave himself permission to think. If he got the thinking over with before he set out for work he could tell himself that any meddlesome thoughts that came to him during the long hours of the day would just have to wait until the morning. It worked more or less. Sometimes he assigned himself a topic and mostly the topic was painful. He had to remember his parents and his little brother. He had to remember his childhood and the life he had lived in Ranger. It would be easier to let himself forget about all of that, but he knew it wouldn’t be right. And sometimes when he bore in on something that he thought was going to be painful it turned out not to be. One morning he sat there thinking he ought to remember the taste of what his mother had called dream bars. They were a sort of cookie with a thick sugary crust and chopped nuts in the middle and shredded coconut on top. Remembering the taste of something he would never taste again had started out as an exercise in punishing himself, but it hadn’t turned out that way. It ended up that the dream bars felt more like something he’d recovered than something he’d lost.
Today the topic was Ben, since he’d offered to take the Gilheaneys over to Saint-Étienne and show them the place his friend had died. So he sat there on his cot drinking his cocoa and thinking of him and Ben on the Lenape. They had both gotten seasick right away. Almost everybody had, crammed in the hold of the troopship with hardly any air to breathe and no space to move, the bunks four-deep, hanging from an endless three-dimensional maze of iron pipes. They didn’t eat anything or get out of their bunks for two days, but one night they were showing a Fatty Arbuckle picture on deck and Ben said he was going up to see it even if it killed him. Somehow Arthur managed to follow him up the ladder. When they got up to the deck they vomited over the side and then watched the picture, an eerie square of movement that looked like it had been scissored out of the black mid-ocean sky. There was no orchestra, but after a time the surge of the water against the ship’s bow seemed to accompany the action of the story and to add emphasis to the laughter of the seasick audience. The open air made him and Ben feel so much better that they hid themselves behind a coal cart and slept on deck. They woke just at dawn. There was no wind and no noise except for the rhythmic shushing of the ship ploughing endlessly forward. They could see the whole convoy, the transports and subchasers spread out over the ocean like playing tokens in some board game as vast as the world itself.
Remember Ben Clayton Page 32