Remember Ben Clayton (37 page)

Lamar sat there frozen in his chair as she told them how they’d killed her brothers and father and uncle and how they were about to kill her when some men who had been building a bandstand a mile or so away had heard the gunfire and come to the rescue.

She said she went to live with a neighbor family after her folks were killed but it didn’t take. She was determined to be a wild and willful child in order to punish the world and everybody in it for what had happened to her. She was sent to live with a schoolteacher in Decatur and after the schoolteacher had washed her hands of her she ended up in an orphanage in Fort Worth. She was told that her family’s land had been sold and the money put in trust for her, but when she tried to find out more about that they said she had been told wrong.

George’s Mary knew of course that Lamar had been taken by the Comanches and lived with them. He knew from the way people sometimes acted around him that it was common knowledge that he had done more than live with them, that he had been a wild Indian in his own right. And one of the things he remembered about that night on the porch was the way her eyes had kept darting to his face as she told the story, like she was trying to see if what she was saying showed up somehow in his reaction. As best he knew, he had not revealed anything to her. He had kept the panic inside, and had carried it there ever since.

There wasn’t any reason to bring it out. There wasn’t any reason to confess to her. It wasn’t like she would be grateful to him for telling her, or more at ease with herself. It would just stir things up more than either of them would be able to stand.

Before he went to bed he looked out the window and he could see the smoldering fire in the darkness where Poco was burning. He saw coyotes start to come in and lick at the grease and so he got his rifle and went down there and stood guard, for no practical purpose he could think of. What did it matter if the coyotes got to his son’s burned-up horse? They would sooner or later; that’s what they were put on earth to do.

He sat there senselessly in the dark, holding his rifle in the crook of his arm, sensing the coyotes with their intolerable excitement pacing back and forth just out of sight.

If he had any sense he would write back to Gilheaney and tell him to go to hell. Ben was gone and now Poco was gone and a statue wasn’t going to change that. But he and Gilheaney were alike in one way, maybe. Once they got an idea in their heads, it didn’t seem to come easily to their nature to let it go.

It occurred to him he might take that sixteen thousand dollars he was paying Gil Gilheaney and give it to George’s Mary instead. But she wouldn’t take it, and if he told her the reason he offered it she would turn her face away from him and be gone the next day. She would go away fuming with resentment, just like Ben had. Just like Jewell too, once he’d run her off. Maybe that’s what he had been trying to do all along, just drive people off his property and out of his life.

THIRTY-THREE

T
he hackmen were all gone. The avenues of New York were jammed with the motor taxis that had replaced them, and crossing the street in the middle of the block was now as hazardous as it was illegal. Women smoked brazenly in the restaurants, the old Elevated still clattered overhead, adding to the traffic and subway noise, and the money the war had brought to the city was visible everywhere, from the streetside demonstrations of expensive cooking ware to the vibrant display windows of the department stores and groceries, to the well-dressed young people with time on their hands queuing up for chop suey or swarming giddily into the wicky-wicky clubs.

He had not been home to New York for five years, not since he had come back alone to his mother’s funeral. He realized he was looking upon all the changes with the sort of reflexive disapproval he had always despised in others. Once again he had the sense of the world surging forward, leaving him stranded behind.

Gil had not bothered to notify any of his old friends to tell them that he would be in New York for the casting of his statue, and he had made a point of avoiding the Algonquin or any of the other hotels or watering holes where he was likely to encounter someone he knew. He was not in hiding but he was not in a mood to catch up with people; he didn’t know where to begin. He had booked Maureen and himself into a small tourist hotel a few blocks from Madison Square Park, where Saint-Gaudens’ Farragut still stood with its foursquare brilliance—no allegory, no sculptural business, just a statue of a determined man modeled with quiet fidelity.

He and Maureen had arranged to meet in the park today at eleven, but he had woken at five a.m., unable to sleep, unable to be still. He had set out walking through the dead streets, all the way down to Battery Park. After so long in Texas, he felt a nostalgic freedom in being a New York pedestrian again, ranging through a cityscape that had been built for walking.

Now it was sunrise and he was standing quayside at the Battery, looking out toward the bay. There was no wind, the water lay flat. The ferries were coming in from Brooklyn and Staten Island, and because it was still so early and the day so calm he could hear the ploshing of the vessels as they neared the quayside and even the voices of passengers bounding across the taut water. He could hear the barking of seals from the aquarium.

The rising sun struck the breastplate of Ettore Ximenes’ statue of Verrazano, whose dedication Gil had attended years earlier. Hartley’s John Ericsson statue caught the sun as well, though not as dramatically, and across the park at the entrance to the Customs House Dan French’s muscular tribute to the continents of America, Africa, Asia, and Europe sat there taking on the morning light with a magnificent indifference to the firefly span of human life. Good for Dan, Gil thought as he stood in front of the sculptures. The sculpture groupings were a little busy and the sinuosity of the minor figures was rather sinister, but they held the eye with honest force and the perspective from below was commanding.

He was pleased that he did not feel the envy and sense of injustice he had felt when he had stood here in the past, surrounded by the works of men who had made more of a mark than he had. The Clayton statue was almost done, it was at the foundry across the river in Brooklyn. It was the equal of anything here, anything in New York. He had no idea if it would ever even be displayed. If Lamar Clayton didn’t want it for his desolate hilltop it would be difficult to find another place for it. But he would try. He would never stop trying.

He flexed his hands, just to feel the pain. The arthritis, which had been tentative for so long, was now solidly established. He was not sure if he could ever really work again, not in the same way, not without assistants to take over the greater part of the modeling. It was his own fault. He had worked too heedlessly, unable to stop himself. The voyage home from France had been a kind of torture, all that static time on the ship trying to burn up his energy on the promenade deck, trying to read in the library, politely listening to the talk of strangers in the dining room. He had been desperate to work, to pack clay onto the armature again, to bring to this new version of Ben Clayton’s likeness all that he had learned about his subject from Arthur Fry.

When he was finally in his studio again he had worked almost without pause, his mind flaring with urgent inspiration even in sleep. When his hands began to hurt again, he still kept up the pace, attacking the clay in short bursts, using the heels of his hands when the pain in his fingers was too great. Maureen worked alongside him, the two of them hardly speaking, both because they had so little to say to each other now and because the primacy of the task superseded conversation. He had tried to spare his hands as much as possible for the detail work, trusting her with the gross contours of the human and horse figures. But toward the end, when his hands were so inflamed he could barely move them, he could only stand there and watch and instruct as Maureen used his own cherished tools to make the delicate additions and elisions that would spell the difference between a credible likeness and a work of art.

And so it was she who had put the finishing touches on Ben Clayton’s face, and in doing so had brought something to it that Gil was quite sure he could not have brought on his own. He had watched her work, he had seen every adjustment she made, but he could not say at what point the piece’s defining quality—its shifting tones of heartbreak, and anger, and loneliness—had entered the portrait. All he knew was that it came from his daughter’s hand.

HE WALKED
back up Broadway to Madison Square Park. Maureen was already there, standing by the Farragut holding a mixed bouquet of spring flowers.

“Shall we go?” he asked, and she nodded. She did not ask him how he had spent the morning and he did not dare ask the question of her. The experience in France had bound them together in a different kind of way. They had walked the Saint-Étienne battlefield together and shared in hearing Arthur’s secret story of Ben Clayton’s death. Upon their return home they had spent six weeks in the studio together, working so swiftly and harmoniously there had barely been any need for discussion. The flush of power and independence that Gil observed in Maureen seemed to be predicated upon a kind of fluid silence. She was polite, judicious, companionable—but no longer quite his daughter. Or maybe he was no longer quite her father. The balance between them had shifted; a little girl’s unquestioning admiration had been replaced by a woman’s calculated respect.

They got into a cab at the edge of the park and rode up Fifth Avenue, leaving the Farragut behind only to pass by another of Saint-Gaudens’ great works twenty-five blocks farther north, his gleaming Sherman riding A. P. Proctor’s horse.

“Proctor has nothing on you,” Maureen said, with a hint of the old admiration in her voice. “Your horse is every bit as good.”

“I think I’d like it even better if you said Saint-Gaudens had nothing on me,” he told her.

“Well,” she said, smiling, “why don’t we just let history decide that?”

It was as strong a compliment as she could have given, a cool acknowledgment that his Clayton statue deserved to be judged in the courts of history alongside the works of the master. He looked at her but she was turned away from him, staring at the buildings of Marble Row. The scent of the flowers she held in her lap filled the cab and in some odd way seemed to increase the distance between them. She needed that distance today, had been declaring it for some time now, most emphatically on that night in Somme-Py when she had disappeared from the
mairie
before midnight and did not come back until a few hours before dawn. Where she had gone, whom she had seen—common sense pointed only in one direction. He knew she would never tell him what had happened between her and Arthur Fry that night, that she had no more reason to confide in him about Arthur than he did to tell her the story of his night with Therèse at the St. Charles Hotel. He knew that his daughter’s quiet self-sufficiency was in part an indictment of himself, of his own failure as a father. His deceit had liberated her.

They crossed the East River on the new Queensboro Bridge and ten minutes later passed through the gates of Calvary Cemetery. The driver took them to the side of a sloping hill from which the buildings of New York were vibrantly visible across the river. Gil had designed his mother’s tombstone himself, a simple granite marker upon which he had hand-carved her name and dates, and above them a detail he had taken from a holy card she had painted of the Thirteenth Station of the Cross.

He said nothing and stood back while—for the second time in a little over two months—Maureen set down flowers on the grave of a person she had never met. He watched her read the wording carved into the granite, saw her lips move as she did so, as if she were muttering a prayer.

“How many people were here?” she asked. “When she was buried?”

“Twenty or so. Most of her old friends were dead. People she knew from church mostly.”

“And Mother and I were in San Antonio?”

He nodded. “She died just after the plaster molds for the Crockett had been shipped. I was planning to come up here to supervise the foundry work anyway.”

“Yes, I remember you leaving. So there was no need for any great subterfuge? Not that time?”

“Not that time.”

“Was it a lonely feeling, to be here by yourself, burying your mother?”

“Yes. I missed you and your mother terribly.”

She knelt down and traced the carving of her grandmother’s name with her fingers, plucked away at the unruly grass at the marker’s base. Then she stood and looked at him, not crying but with such a burden of sorrow and disappointment on her face that it took all his nerve not to look away.

FOR ALMOST A WEEK
Gil had anxiously watched the plasterers at work in his San Antonio studio, making molds of the finished clay statue. It was a delicate business and there was always the chance it could go wrong, ruining the original work while at the same time making a useless impression of it. But under Gil’s demanding supervision the plasterers had done their job well, and a negative plaster impression of the statue had been shipped to the Coppini Foundry in Brooklyn in eleven pieces that, when cast in bronze, would be welded back together.

At the foundry, the hollow plaster impressions were filled with liquid wax. When the wax cooled and the plaster shells were pried off, Gil was relieved to see the pieces of the sculpture once again in their positive form, though in wax this time, not clay. He spent most of the day at the foundry, as was his custom when an important piece was being cast. He consulted with the workers on the system of hollow sprues that needed to be added to each wax piece of the sculpture through which heated air could escape and liquid bronze could be channeled. He tracked each piece as it was dipped into a silica slurry until it was covered with yet another mold, this time a hard ceramic shell. The process of casting was the process of repeatedly obscuring the original sculptural form, then liberating it from this new chrysalis, each time in a different material: clay to wax and finally to immortal bronze.

Now, on the afternoon after Gil and Maureen’s visit to the cemetery, the time had come for the final decisive moment. The ceramic molds had been baked in a kiln, burning out the wax inside, and now they were set in beds of sand as two foundry workers in fireproof gloves and aprons carefully stepped forward from the furnace, sharing the weight of a glowing crucible suspended on an iron frame.

Gil and Maureen stood watching. It seemed impossible to him that that bucket could contain the molten bronze within it, since it was itself so superheated as to be nearly transparent. But the crucible was more solid than the brilliant sludge it held, and as the workers tipped it forward into the first mold the bright lava flowed and flared into the now-empty cavity that, once cleaned and chased and trimmed, would become the bronze hind leg of Ben Clayton’s beloved horse.

He could feel the furnace heat on his skin as the pour continued, and see the glow reflected on his daughter’s face. They had watched this hypnotic process before, the two of them, back in the old days when she was a girl and her mother was alive and his pride had not yet exiled them from New York. But now they stood together in a new configuration, no longer artist and child but collaborators, as united in accomplishment as they were divided in spirit.

The first piece he inspected, two days later when the ceramic shells were sandblasted away, was the bronze plinth upon which the human and horse figures would stand. The base was as shallow as he could practically make it. It would not be a pedestal, just a utilitarian platform. He wanted the Clayton to be perceived as the heartbroken memorial it was, not a heroic monument.

Maureen was not with him today. She had stayed in Manhattan, preferring to wait to see the statue when it was fetted and assembled, not caring to watch her father fuss over every ongoing detail.

It was one in the afternoon and the foundry workers were returning from lunch. He asked several of them to help him and they built up a waist-high stack of wooden skids. When it was in place Gil joined with four other men in hoisting the heavy bronze plinth onto the top. He pulled up a chair and borrowed a hammer and a point chisel and then—just below where he had incised his name into the pliant clay—he began to add the letters he realized he had left off.

“WELL,” HE WROTE
, “before it is all over and done with I guess you will be calling me a ‘Frenchman.’ That seems to be the direction I am headed, as I am off to Paris to see a man Lieutenant L’Huillier knows who says he wants to meet me. This man is trying to put together an outfit of people he calls Gueules Cassées. It’s a kind of club or society I reckon. ‘Gueules Cassées’ means broken faces. I don’t know what this man’s got in mind exactly but it seems like he figures the more people see us the less horrible we’ll look to them and they’ll give us jobs and the like. I don’t know about that but I guess I’ll give it a try as I suppose I have been ‘hiding out’ a little bit in Somme-Py and should ‘show my face’ as the expression goes, though as you know it is a poor face to be parading around. But I guess I will do it. Maybe because you didn’t mind so much that I looked like a monster it could be that other people won’t either.”