Remember Ben Clayton (28 page)

TWENTY-SIX

T
hey 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 her 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.

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 generation, 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?”