Free Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan Page B
Authors: Stephen Harrigan
presence in his studio was not yet in demand. She had told him this morning that she was going out to spend the day with Vance Martindale, which was not rigorously true but not false either, since Vance had written that he would be in San Antonio over the weekend and wanted to see her.
She had decided to hide her participation in the competition from her father because she knew she would not have been able to abide his enthusiasm. The congratulations, expressions of confidence, and unsought suggestions that would emerge from his interest would, she knew, quickly subsume her own uncertain ambition. She would be not just his daughter but his blood-bound protégée, a role to which her own authentic worth as a sculptor would forever be hostage.
It was a sense of that authentic worth that she was trying to recapture now. Back in New York, she had come close to achieving some sort of independent success. She had steadily applied for commissions, sometimes using a false name, carefully testing the waters to see if she would be taken seriously in her own right and not just politely accommodated as the daughter of a well-known sculptor. None of the commissions had come her way, but she had not really expected them to. She was a woman, which would have made rising to the top of the list unlikely in the first place, and she was young, with no reputation. But there had been enough encouraging comments on her work to make her believe she was being noticed and that with time and patience she might advance into a career.
But her rising confidence had coincided with her father’s deepening frustration at the direction his own career was heading in New York and his abrupt decision to move the family to San Antonio to take advantage of the new Texas commissions that kept falling into his lap after the success of his Alamo piece. Maureen could have refused to move, of course. She had even gently aired the possibility to her father, who had responded with reasonable words but with such a hurt and betrayed expression in his eyes that she was astonished at how strongly it was in her power to wound him. And she could not really leave her mother to face the Texas wilderness—as she imagined San Antonio to be—without a daughter’s support. If she had been in love it might have made a difference; she might have had the cruelty to remain in New York and abandon her parents to the edge of the known world. But she had not been in love, only mired in an indifferent half-courtship with a young newspaperman who, as it turned out, was interested in women only for propriety’s sake. Breaking up with him had involved no heartbreak at all—just more dispiriting evidence that her lifelong fear of being undesired was rooted in some sort of objective truth.
On a Sunday afternoon last summer Maureen had taken a solo San Antonio bicycling excursion, following the course of the river past the old missions, sketching all the way, trying to conjure up something for the Spirit of the Waters piece besides the sprites and maidens and various genii that she knew would be the starting point of most of the other contestants. She wanted to depict the river rather than to airily personify it, and as she studied the almost-finished clay model now, she thought she just might have succeeded.
She had created four tablets, one for each side of a short column, that re-created in relief the things she had observed from her bicycle: noble cypress trunks, moldering Spanish aqueducts, swooping herons, and perching kingfishers. As a New Yorker who had lived in San Antonio for only six years, she believed she had rendered these elements with an outsider’s reverence. The coziness of the little river, its spring-fed clarity, its exotic history of Indians and Spanish explorers and filibusters had unexpectedly stirred her. As she stared at the panels, she began to realize she had been drawn to something else as well: not just to the generative idea of the Spirit of the Waters
She had decided to hide her participation in the competition from her father because she knew she would not have been able to abide his enthusiasm. The congratulations, expressions of confidence, and unsought suggestions that would emerge from his interest would, she knew, quickly subsume her own uncertain ambition. She would be not just his daughter but his blood-bound protégée, a role to which her own authentic worth as a sculptor would forever be hostage.
It was a sense of that authentic worth that she was trying to recapture now. Back in New York, she had come close to achieving some sort of independent success. She had steadily applied for commissions, sometimes using a false name, carefully testing the waters to see if she would be taken seriously in her own right and not just politely accommodated as the daughter of a well-known sculptor. None of the commissions had come her way, but she had not really expected them to. She was a woman, which would have made rising to the top of the list unlikely in the first place, and she was young, with no reputation. But there had been enough encouraging comments on her work to make her believe she was being noticed and that with time and patience she might advance into a career.
But her rising confidence had coincided with her father’s deepening frustration at the direction his own career was heading in New York and his abrupt decision to move the family to San Antonio to take advantage of the new Texas commissions that kept falling into his lap after the success of his Alamo piece. Maureen could have refused to move, of course. She had even gently aired the possibility to her father, who had responded with reasonable words but with such a hurt and betrayed expression in his eyes that she was astonished at how strongly it was in her power to wound him. And she could not really leave her mother to face the Texas wilderness—as she imagined San Antonio to be—without a daughter’s support. If she had been in love it might have made a difference; she might have had the cruelty to remain in New York and abandon her parents to the edge of the known world. But she had not been in love, only mired in an indifferent half-courtship with a young newspaperman who, as it turned out, was interested in women only for propriety’s sake. Breaking up with him had involved no heartbreak at all—just more dispiriting evidence that her lifelong fear of being undesired was rooted in some sort of objective truth.
On a Sunday afternoon last summer Maureen had taken a solo San Antonio bicycling excursion, following the course of the river past the old missions, sketching all the way, trying to conjure up something for the Spirit of the Waters piece besides the sprites and maidens and various genii that she knew would be the starting point of most of the other contestants. She wanted to depict the river rather than to airily personify it, and as she studied the almost-finished clay model now, she thought she just might have succeeded.
She had created four tablets, one for each side of a short column, that re-created in relief the things she had observed from her bicycle: noble cypress trunks, moldering Spanish aqueducts, swooping herons, and perching kingfishers. As a New Yorker who had lived in San Antonio for only six years, she believed she had rendered these elements with an outsider’s reverence. The coziness of the little river, its spring-fed clarity, its exotic history of Indians and Spanish explorers and filibusters had unexpectedly stirred her. As she stared at the panels, she began to realize she had been drawn to something else as well: not just to the generative idea of the Spirit of the Waters