Remember Ben Clayton (25 page)

TWENTY-TWO

M
aureen had planned to be back in San Antonio by late morning, well before her father’s scheduled return from New Orleans that afternoon. But the ice storm that swept through Austin during the night of Vance’s confession delayed her train for hour after hour as she sat miserably in the station, too shattered to do anything but stare vacantly at the advertisements on the walls.

She did not arrive in Austin until after dark. It had seemed important once that she return before her father did, so that he would never have to know she had gone to visit the man he distrusted. It gave her no comfort, of course, to know that her father had been right. It only made the wound deeper. And since she was past caring about pretty much everything, she was also past caring whether he knew about her trip. Maybe she would tell him everything, maybe she would tell him nothing, just declare that her life and her whereabouts were her own business and close the door to her bedroom. None of it mattered. She had no more interest in being comforted by her father than in being lectured by him. She missed her mother rather desperately but all her mother could have offered in this case would have been soothing lies.

She should get out of San Antonio, away from Texas and its heat and cold and corrupting mythology, and go back home to New York. Her mother was dead and she was tired of her own deadening life as her father’s prized assistant. But her deadening life now seemed to spread out everywhere in front of her. She wished she could summon more anger toward Vance, a liberating energetic fury, but instead she felt queasy and smothered, her soul buried under something that was as static as a fogbank. Escaping to New York or anywhere else would mean willing her body to move, and she was not sure she would ever be able to bear the weight of her own existence again.

When she walked into the house her father was sitting in the front room. Except for the light from the lamp beside his chair, the house was dark. His suitcase was on the floor. He had not unpacked, and he was still wearing his suit jacket and tie.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Where were you?”

“What’s the matter?”

He handed her a folded note. “I found this on the entry hall table. It’s from Mrs. Gossling. Her brother died yesterday. She says she’s very sorry she had to leave in such a rush and hopes we can look after ourselves for dinner.”

“Well, of course we can.”

“Yes, of course we can.”

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Well, as it happens, dinner was only one of the things she wasn’t able to get around to doing.”

It took her a moment. Then she remembered the freezing night and morning in Austin, the steadily warming afternoon as she had waited for her train.

“The stove,” she said.

But before he could answer she had already raced out the back door of the house and into the studio. She turned on an electric light and saw the magnificent sculpture that would have been her father’s greatest work cracked into hardened pieces, some of them still clinging to the armature, some crashed to the floor. She had been explicit with Mrs. Gossling when she left for Austin. If it grew cold, she was to be sure to light the stove in the studio to guard against the danger of the clay freezing. But in the shock of her brother’s death Mrs. Gossling had clearly forgotten.

“It’s pretty remarkable sometimes, this Texas weather,” her father was saying from behind her in a dead voice. “It can be freezing in the morning and in the afternoon you’re sweating through your clothes.”

“I never thought anything like this would happen.”

“Obviously not. I’m not saying you did it on purpose.”

She turned to look at him, understanding in a glance that she and her father were pretty much at the same pitch of despair.

“But you are saying I did it.”

“I’m saying nobody was here to light the stove. I suppose you left that to Mrs. Gossling while you went to wherever you went. Austin, I suppose, to visit your cowboy professor.”

He walked up to the ruined statue and peeled a piece of hardened clay off the horse’s nose, then shook the dust off his hand.

“It’s interesting you felt you had to do that in secret.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Yes, I know you’re sorry. And if you were still a little girl, saying you were sorry might even have been enough, as colossal as this loss is. But by God, Maureen, you’re not a little girl and I counted on you.”

“You have no right to speak to me that way!” she declared, surprising herself with the force of her resentment. “I made arrangements with Mrs. Gossling. I did nothing wrong. I had as much right to go to Austin as you did to go to New Orleans. You needn’t act like a child by looking for someone else to blame.”

“Act like a child?” He was too stupefied by her defiance to say anything more. He looked away from her, perhaps silently accepting her argument, though too wounded and proud to say so.

“We can start over,” she suggested, in a much softer voice.

“We?”

The sarcastic laugh that escaped from him was a terrible sound to her. She had never heard it before in her life.

“And, by the way, do you think I have
two
of these in me? Do you think I can just order up a copy?”

“No, but—”

“It might seem like a mechanical enterprise to you. It might seem like re-creating a statue you’ve poured every bit of yourself into is no more of a problem than replacing a sewer line or rebuilding a collapsed porch.”

She seized on his hectoring, belittling, self-pitying words and threw them back in his face. She couldn’t help herself, though she didn’t know where her anger was coming from or whether or not she even had a right to it.

“Well, I think it
is
somewhat similar. As a matter of fact, I think it’s exactly like replacing a sewer line. It’s just work. You always told me you had contempt for artists who sat around and waited for inspiration. Isn’t that what you’re talking about all of a sudden?”

But he was paying no attention. “You have no conception of what it is to be sixty years old,” he said, “and to see your work come to nothing.”

“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.