Remember Ben Clayton (16 page)

In the kitchen, he chipped some ice out of the icebox, wrapped it in a dish towel, and pressed the heels of his hands against it. Restless, he walked back out to the studio. He lifted the moistened cloth off one of Maureen’s almost-finished reliefs. He turned on a desk lamp and held it close as he studied her work. It was excellent, and yet slightly lifeless. It depicted a bird in the foreground, a yellow-crowned night heron sailing on outspread wings, about to land on the branch of a cypress tree. In the distance a modern-day voyager with a pair of binoculars around his neck stealthily paddled a canoe. What worried Gil was the over-researched precision of the heron. Maureen had done her homework, he knew. She had taken the train up to Austin and spent time in the specimen collection at the university, sketching the bird in its inert form, and she had studied it in life as well, along the banks of the river.

The bird, and every other detail on the various panels, was more than competently rendered, and the overall idea was strong and unforced. He was quite sure the ladies who had commissioned it would be pleased. But in the end there was not much power in it, nothing that would stir you or confound you or command your attention as you glanced at it while walking across the bridge where it was to be placed.

As they had worked together in the studio, he on the Clayton model, Maureen on her relief sculptures, she had openheartedly sought his advice and criticism, and he had given it, and the work, he believed, was stronger for it. But there was no way he could advise her past the threshold between a sculpture that was competent and professional and one that somehow breathed with life. The pieces of his that were successful in this way were mysteriously so. He did not know how he did it, only that every so often he had managed to vault past the barrier of skill and technique into the realm of magic. It was painful to admit to himself—and unthinkable to suggest to his daughter—that she did not share his gift.

He had just finished replacing the cloth when Maureen walked into the studio. It was midnight. He could see just from the way she opened and closed the door that she was in a buoyant mood.

“Did you hurt your hand?”

“It’s just a little stiff.”

“Sorry to be coming home so late,” she said.

“You’re not a little girl, Maureen. It’s no business of mine what time you come home. Did you enjoy your drive with Mr. Martindale?”

“I wish you would call him Vance, Daddy.”

“All right. Of course I will.”

“Because ‘Mr. Martindale’ sounds a little frosty and disapproving, the way you say it, anyway.”

“I don’t disapprove of him. I don’t really know him.”

That wasn’t exactly true. Gil had met Martindale enough to gather more than a sketchy impression, and he had a sense of the man through his writing as well—not just the enthusiastic study of Gil’s own Alamo sculpture that had been published in the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
, but a number of other essays he had written for the publication. In print, Martindale seemed to be always spoiling for a fight, drawing scholarly lines in the sand, throwing down provocative challenges to the timid and conventional thinking with which he imagined he was surrounded. He chastised Texans for their grandiloquent insularity and pride even as he went about romanticizing and mythologizing the place himself, celebrating everything from the rapacious Spanish explorers to the lowly prairie dog.

Gil did his best to hold his reservations aside as he looked at his daughter. She was glancing around the studio, afraid to meet his eyes, afraid to break into the delighted smile he sensed she was suppressing for his benefit. He assumed something had happened with Mr. Martindale tonight. Vance. Something had gone right. Once more he was stung by Victoria’s absence, because it was impossible for him to be the maternal confidante that the situation called for. He could only do his best.

“Should I know him better?” Gil asked her.

“If you’d like to. He’s very interesting, you know.”

“There’s no need to convince me of that. It’s obvious he’s got a brilliant mind, that he’s ambitious. He could be a match for you.”

“Daddy, it’s hopelessly premature to even suggest such a thing.” But she was beaming when she said this. “Anyway, he’s very grateful that you allowed him to come along with us tonight. He got so much out of it.”

“I’m glad.”

She smiled again and looked past him, at the scale model of Ben Clayton and his horse. She walked up to it as if she were noticing it for the first time, instead of having been an intimate part of its creation.

“What do you think?” Gil asked Maureen, after a moment or two. “Will he like it?”

“I think so. He ought to, of course. But he’s unpredictable, as we well know. Did you do something to the mouth?”

“Tightened it a bit.”

She uttered a little grunt of approval, then made a sweep around the model, studying it from every angle.

“Why do you think he invited us to go to that dinner with him tonight?” she said as she made her inspection. “It wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of people there he knew already.”

“He was just being polite, I suppose.”

“I think he wanted to impress you. To let you see that there are people who know him and like him. Maybe he’s a little in awe of you.”

“Are you serious? Clayton?”

“Why shouldn’t he be? Everyone’s a little bit in awe of you, Daddy. Didn’t you know that?”

She kissed his cheek and went inside to bed. He lingered for a moment more in the studio, savoring his daughter’s happiness, wishing Victoria were here to witness it.

FIFTEEN

H
e arrived exactly on time in a chauffeur-driven car he had hired through the hotel.

“I thought we’d have lunch first and give you a chance to inspect the model at your leisure afterwards,” Gil suggested when he met Clayton at the door.

“Well, leisure don’t have much to do with it but that sounds all right to me.”

He shook hands with Vance, who was dressed in the new suit Maureen had helped him pick out, his thick, wayward hair respectfully plastered down. A notebook and pencil peeked touchingly from his jacket pocket, and helped to frame in Maureen’s mind what she liked about him. He had a passion for recording and cataloging these old-time tales that was as strong as her father’s passion for modeling in clay.

Mrs. Gossling did not work on Saturdays, so Maureen had gotten up early to prepare the meal herself, drawing from a dozen or so recipes that her mother had, at Maureen’s urging several years ago, finally written down on file cards. She decided on pot roast with potatoes and onions and carrots and a devil’s food cake for dessert. From the time spent on his ranch and the fare served at his table, Maureen had guessed Clayton would not be a hard man to feed. Plain food would do just fine.

He was far more talkative than he had been when presiding at his own table. As they ate, Vance peppered him with questions about his experiences on the cattle drives and he rambled on pleasantly, impressed and, despite himself, maybe even a little flattered by the younger man’s precise interest.

“I didn’t care for that country up around the Stinkingwater,” Clayton said, in answer to one of Vance’s questions about the land north of Dodge City to Ogallala. “The creek had a safe bottom but that’s about all I can say for it. Nothing but bad grass and sandhills and ever now and then a little bitty pond about the size of a teacup. I remember when we finally got through that country we come to a ranch where a little girl was waiting for us. She’d been milking the cows all morning and had that milk cooling there in the spring waiting to sell it to us. You never did see a happier bunch of cowboys than when we got to drinking that milk.”

Vance was writing as fast as he could, shoving a bite into his mouth when there was a pause, occasionally looking up and grinning at Maureen like he could not believe his good fortune.

“You must have been a young man on that drive,” Maureen said to Clayton as Vance scribbled to catch up.

“Oh, yes, ma’am, just a kid, though I don’t recall thinking of myself that way. They say people grew up faster in those days but I don’t know if that’s true or just something you hear. There’s a lot of boys buried over there with Ben in France that grew up pretty fast if you ask me.”

In the subdued silence that followed this comment, he ate the last bite of his cake and then looked at Maureen and said it was as fine a cake as he’d ever eaten. He toyed with the silverware a moment and then set his napkin on top of his plate.

“Well, I expect I better take a look at what you done,” he said to Gil.

VANCE INSISTED
on staying behind in the dining room, sensitive enough to appreciate the fact that the rancher’s encounter with a sculpture of his dead son ought to be a private moment, off-limits to his curiosity and note-taking.

Maureen smiled at him in gratitude as she followed her father and Mr. Clayton into the studio. When they entered, the midday winter light was strong. The model stood in the center of the room, hidden by a simple cotton drape.

“As I believe I explained to you,” Gil said, standing in front of the draped model, “this is a scale model, a third the size of the final sculpture. Assuming you approve it, I’ll then begin to build the armature and model the statue in full size. It will look very much like this, so if you have any hesitations or concerns it’s important that you make me aware of them now.”

Clayton nodded. Gil pulled back the cloth to reveal the model. Clayton took a step toward it and then stood there sweeping his eyes across it.

He did this for a long time, a very long time. Gil had been in this anxious position many, many times in his career, waiting silently for approval. People were different. Some were over-effusive, some were embarrassed or strategically disinclined to register a reaction, some—a very few—were disappointed. Usually the person assessing the work was a member of a board or committee, sometimes they had known the individual whose likeness they were studying, but most often not. Once or twice he had silently withdrawn as an old lady had wept at the image she had commissioned of her long-dead father. But he did not know what to expect from a grieving, complicated man studying the face and form of his son.

As even more time went by, Maureen caught her father’s eye: should you say something? But he thought not. He thought it best just to wait.

When Clayton finally did speak, he seemed to have forgotten all about what he had been staring at so raptly for so long. He looked around the studio for the first time, picked up a few of Gil’s tools and hefted them in his hands, inspected some of the busts and figure studies lining the walls. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away a line of sweat that had started to seep down from his hairline. His face looked flushed, but his features were composed and when he finally spoke his voice was eerily conversational.

“So the next step is you build yourself one of these armatures and cover that up with clay.”

“That’s right.”

“How do you know it’ll come out the same as this little one?”

“Well, a lot of sculptors—most, I’d say—go to rather elaborate mathematical lengths to ensure that that’s the case. They build a kind of chassis for each piece, the model and the full-scale work, with corresponding measurements, so that when it’s time to model the larger piece it’s just a matter of adding so much more clay between the points you’ve marked. It’s very efficient and generally very accurate, but it doesn’t suit me. I build the armature to the correct proportions, of course, but when I cover it with clay I want to feel like I’m still sculpting, not just filling out spaces.”

Clayton nodded. Gil didn’t know if he had quite understood, and perhaps it had been a mistake to explain himself so elaborately. He thought about sketching out the whole pointing process on a piece of paper and letting him see how it was about as creative as building a fence. But Gil knew that Clayton wouldn’t give a damn whether Gil felt creative or not when he was doing his job. All that would matter to him was that the job was done to his satisfaction.

And this was where he was irritatingly impossible to read. Was he satisfied? It had been almost ten minutes; it was extremely odd not to express any opinion at all. Gil was about to press him when Clayton seemed to wobble a bit on his feet and his face grew even more flushed.

“Is there something the matter?” Gil asked. “Would you like a glass of water?”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

He turned and left the studio. Gil and Maureen went to the door and watched as he wandered out of the open yard behind the house and out into the street and headed east with a determined gait.

“What’s he doing?” Maureen asked.

“I don’t know. Going for a stroll to clear his head, I suppose. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

But an hour passed and he had not returned. Maureen cleared the table and did the dishes while Vance and her father waited in the parlor. She heard them talking about Ghiberti’s doors and arguing about Michelangelo, Vance maintaining that the Bruges Madonna was superior to the Pieta and that the Pitti Madonna was superior to both. When she came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel, her father was amiably holding up his end of the banter, but she could tell he was too distracted by Clayton’s disappearance to pay much attention to the conversation.

“Something isn’t right,” Gil finally said. “He’s not the sort of man who just takes off walking. I’m going to get the car and look for him.”

As he sprang out of his chair, he spoke to Vance. “Want to come?”

“Of course.” Vance picked his hat up from the table and set it on his head, glancing with sly surprise in Maureen’s direction: her father was sizing him up.

“You better stay here in case he comes back,” Gil said to Maureen.

“Yes, obviously,” she replied. He probably didn’t even detect the annoyance in her voice as he headed toward the door. She didn’t mind him bolting off on his urgent business, and she didn’t mind him taking her guest along without consulting her. She just wearily minded how it had always been this way, all her life: her father making decisions, seizing on solutions, she and her mother automatically falling into their supportive places behind him.

GIL DROVE NORTH
, toward downtown, he and Martindale scanning the sides of Roosevelt Avenue, peering each way at every intersection.

“Well, this is an odd damn thing to happen,” Martindale ventured.

“He’ll probably be at home by the time we get back. But I can’t guess what got into him.”

“He might have gotten a taxi somewhere and gone back to his hotel.”

“Yes, that’s what I was thinking. I’ll go downtown and have a look there.”

They drove on a few more blocks, Gil continuing to brake at each corner so they could inspect the side streets.

“I take it that you and my daughter have gotten to be pretty good friends,” Gil said. “At least that’s the impression I’ve had from her.”

“I’m pleased to hear she thinks so. It’s certainly true from my point of view. Turn here. I think I just saw him crossing the street.”

But it wasn’t Lamar Clayton, it was a Mexican man in a suit and a straw hat, walking along the sidewalk with a bag of groceries, who glanced at them suspiciously as they cruised slowly by. Gil drove around the corner and then up the next block, back to Roosevelt.

“How long have you been at the university?” Gil asked him, realizing as he spoke that the question had come out of his mouth like an interrogation. Oh, well, if Martindale didn’t know that Gil was trying to probe his background and character he was dim to begin with.

“Seven years. They’ve rather enjoyed keeping me in limbo there.”

“Oh?”

“They don’t seem to know what to do with a man who won’t get a Ph.D.”

“Out of principle?”

“Out of a refusal to waste my time.”

“Can you advance in a place like that without one?”

“Oh, I’ll advance.”

A disdain for institutional propriety, an independent mind, the unswerving pursuit of a personal ambition: all of these traits in Martindale should have appealed to Gil, since they all corresponded with his own outlook and the way he had fashioned his own life. But it was one thing to be the way he was and another to think a similar sort of man would make a worthy husband for his daughter. He had never allowed himself to examine what kind of husband he had truly been to Victoria, what kind of father he was to Maureen. Selfishness, maybe even ruthlessness, was one of the starting places of art. He had not been a bully like his father, but he had made sure without ever saying so directly that the overriding work of his family would be the viability of his career, the furtherance of his vision. It was possible that this Vance Martindale was just as quietly imperious.

He didn’t dislike the man, but he didn’t quite trust him. Martindale had been the picture of confidence and ease until now, but alone in the car with Gil he seemed nervous. Gil asked him where he had grown up and he said on a small ranch in South Texas, but as soon as Gil started to ask more questions about his background, Martindale called out that he thought he saw Lamar Clayton again, walking into a bank on Commerce Street. Gil parked the car and ran into the bank, but Clayton was nowhere in evidence.

When he left the bank, he pulled in front of the Gunter. He sent Martindale to check out the downtown streets while he went inside and had the desk clerk call Clayton’s room. There was no answer. He asked a few of the Old Time Trail Drivers who were checking out of the hotel if they had seen him in the last couple of hours. None had, but with the hale attitude that seemed to distinguish the men of this convention they assured Gil that he would turn up.

“I haven’t seen him,” Maureen said when he telephoned home. “He seems to have just vanished. I’m a little worried, Daddy.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Gil said. “Maybe he just felt pressured for a reaction and wanted to get away to settle his mind.”

“He’s been gone a long time for somebody who’s just settling his mind.”

Gil hung up the phone in the hotel lobby and went around to the garage, hoping to talk to the driver who had taken Lamar Clayton to his house. The driver was out, but his supervisor told him they had received no calls from the old man asking to be picked up.

“No sign of him out on the street,” Martindale reported when he joined Gil in the lobby.

“Well, let’s just head back home. Maybe we’ll come across him on the way.”

They drove away from downtown in the general direction of Gil’s house, veering off the main thoroughfares onto side streets, now and then stopping at places of business—a feed store, a hardware store—that he speculated might possibly have attracted the curiosity of a visiting rancher. Gil didn’t bother to continue his fatherly interrogation as they drove back to the house—both because Martindale’s artful evasiveness had started to irritate him and because by now his puzzlement over Clayton’s whereabouts had turned into real worry.

The more he searched without result, the greater his agitation grew. Had Clayton somehow been so offended by the model that he had just thrown up his hands and disappeared? He had not seemed angry before he took off on his mysterious walk. He had been shaken, perhaps: in the best case by a reaction to the disturbing fidelity of his son’s image; in the worst by a contemptuous realization that Gil had failed. In either case he might very well be disinclined to carry on with the project. The lost revenue would be bad enough, but even worse would be the abandonment of a commission that Gil had come to recognize as a work of art, a piece that would not be ignored or dismissed this time by the arbiters of fame, even though it would reside forever in a remote location far from the salons of New York. The Clayton statue was what he had always silently believed he had come to Texas to create—a work that would have its own power, that owed nothing to proximity and critical jabbering but would simply announce its presence to the world as steadily and quietly as a beacon.