She was musing a bit on this when she noticed that the couple following Thomas and Beal had held back far more than necessary to give them room; indeed, men and women above them were craning their necks around the line to get a look at the young couple, and it was not difficult for Madame Bernault to figure out why. The same was true of the passengers who had preceded them onto the pier and now turned to gape. At best they were surprised, but one man, red-faced, with white whiskers, was mouthing his contempt to his own proper, plump wife: Outrageous! Immoral! Americans, certainly, or perhaps British, it hardly mattered which. Neither Thomas nor Beal seemed to notice. They prepared to march toward the customs desk, but right then Thomas’s eyes caught Madame Bernault’s and there was the double take of recognition. He approached the barrier. “Madame Bernault?” he said with some relief in his voice. “I’m Thomas Bayly.”
Whether he would have any French was one of the unknowns that Madame Bernault had discussed with the Mother General. Mary was still remembered by all as an American with extraordinary, even musical fluency in the language, but her elegant letters had warned the ladies that Thomas was not, well, the student she had been, and that his Greek and Latin might be passable, but he would have very little French. Of Beal, it went unsaid that she would have none. This was one of the reasons that Madame Bernault had been requested and sent; when Mary knew her, her English was still very good. But ten years had passed.
“Thank you,” said Madame Bernault, these first words of English feeling like a fish bone in her throat. “I give you welcome.” She said this first to Thomas, but then turned on the last syllable to Beal. Oh yes, the fear Madame Bernault had anticipated was there, but she—well, both of them—appeared undaunted. Beal seemed strangely vacant, almost as if she had floated down the gangplank and onto the pier, but she was darting her glances around with birdlike curiosity—these strange sights, sounds. Her strikingly pale eyes were like opals; her dark skin was absolutely flawless, without freckle or pock or scar, as fine-grained as silk. Her features were flatter than Thomas’s, and she was almost as tall as he and perhaps even more broad shouldered, but there was no mélange of gender here: this was a beautiful young woman. Thus, the sentence about her in the letter, quoted from Mary Bayly herself, was now fully confirmed: “Please tell Madame Bernault that my brother’s wife is a Negro, 19 years old, well raised on our farm by accomplished and reasonably educated parents, of extraordinary appearance and grace.” Mary had also added, as a postscript for Madame Bernault, “She and my brother fell in love as children amid great danger to themselves and their families, and nothing any of us could do could break their commitment to each other.”
“Welcome to you, Mrs. Bayly,” said Madame Bernault, and with that the opal eyes winced. What Madame Bernault did not know was that during the passage, even to the moment of her taking his arm at the top of the gangplank, they had maintained the fiction that got them boarded in New York without controversy, which was that she was his maid. Not that a single man under any normal circumstance would travel with a maid, but it was the best they could do, and besides, when he took meals in the main salon, he dined alone, and he slept alone, and this “maid” was almost invisible, dining in the lower decks presumably, even if her tiny inboard servant’s cabin was just down the corridor from Thomas’s stateroom. Thomas and Beal had been married by a priest in a Catholic place of worship in Virginia just a few days before the ship departed, but it was, at last—in the eyes of everyone, perhaps even including God—on the gangplank that they finally became husband and wife.
The girl did not meet Madame Bernault’s eyes, but thanked her with a very respectable pronunciation of her name.
Madame Bernault was getting ready to ask her how the voyage had been—her own, fifteen years earlier, had been terrifyingly stormy—but a customs official was coming over to break this up, and Thomas himself, clutching his papers, was pulling Beal toward the desks. Madame watched them go, noting that he sat Beal down in a chair in front of the desk but remained standing himself, and she observed finally that the douanier paid the girl not the slightest notice, neither her race nor her beauty, stamped their passports, ruffled through their papers, passed the packet back to Thomas without looking up—nothing to see—which must have been the best welcome of all.
A religious in Louisiana in the years Madame Bernault had been there had to get used to the idea that sexual relations between the races—between white men and women of almost any ancestry: African, Indian, mulattoes, Creoles, even Orientals!—was occurring and would continue to occur all the time. Each year a few of the girls under her instruction in the pensionnat were of mixed blood, some of whose tuition was quietly paid by prominent families. Perhaps this tolerance was never as rooted in the states settled by the English, and Madame Bernault gathered that it was no longer the case even in Louisiana. But here in France … Well, she understood that there was no law against marrying outside your race, and that there were those who argued that such métissage refreshed the blood of all those who professed themselves citizens. But who could say what trials awaited Thomas and Beal? Who could say they would not encounter scorn—even, Madame Bernault feared, within the Society that had taken this couple under its wing, beginning with the Mother General herself. Mother Digby, so newly installed as superior, was an English convert, after all. Yesterday, as she read Mary’s letter to Madame Bernault, her lip had curled inside out with distaste when she was forced to speak the word Negro.
When Thomas and Beal were allowed to pass through the final cordon, Madame Bernault came forward. She went straight to the matter of their bagage, lapsing into French.
“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “Are you asking about our luggage?”
“Excuse me. Yes, luggage.”
“We have arranged to have it shipped to our hotel in Paris while we get settled. We understood we would be heading straight there tonight.”
“Oh yes,” answered Madame Bernault almost giddily. “The train to Rouen and then to Paris,” she informed them. Following the Seine. Napoleon had said that Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre were all one city, of which the main street was the Seine. Perhaps they didn’t know that. They would be at the station in Paris by six o’clock. Remarkable, wasn’t it, how fast one traveled these days! Their hotel was a lovely establishment not far from the Hôtel Biron. Mother Digby would send a carriage tomorrow if it would be convenient to meet with her then. Yes? I’ll tell her you will come by at ten. They would enjoy the train ride. There were many charming vistas on the trip. They would pass by Caillouville, where the water of a fountain was said to have miraculous powers. The tunnel at Rolleboise was more than two thousand meters long. Too bad they could not stop in Rouen to visit the cathedral. “I’ve never seen it,” said Madame Bernault, and then she realized that she had been carrying on. She was relieved to discern, from the way they had been reacting, that at least she had stayed in English.
“It all sounds very nice,” said Thomas. “Don’t you think, Beal?”
The girl nodded; Madame Bernault could hardly imagine what she would think of any of this. They were standing a few feet from where Madame Bernault had waited for them, just under the iron lattice of the vast pier shed. The first-class passengers had long departed in their waiting carriages, leaving the porters and their servants to claim and load their steamer trunks, hatboxes, gun cases, and escritoires; the last second-class passengers were filing in by now, preparing to locate their own more modest baggage. Madame Bernault noticed that Beal had been looking at them with some interest, counting them off as if she knew them, and then suddenly, at the top of the gangplank, appeared an extremely tall African man. Was everyone in this story a giant? wondered short, squat Madame Bernault. He stepped with the assurance of one who had done this all before, and about halfway down, he scanned the crowd in a confident manner and found what or whom he had been looking for, displaying no emotion when he found her, simply settled his eyes upon her. Beal turned away in a sudden jolt, took her husband
’s arm. “Yes,” she said, the trip on the train sounded “right nice.”
“Do you have the necessities for the trip?” asked Madame Bernault, feeling that she should keep her engaged in the conversation, because the man was now on the pier just paces behind her, and behind Thomas. Beal said she did, holding up her handbag, but Madame Bernault wasn’t listening. It was odd: from the way this man stared openly at Beal, it seemed that he had no idea that anyone else, Madame Bernault herself most probably, would notice, or that he didn’t care if they did. In his suit and clean white collar and his rather bizarre embroidered hat, he was far better dressed than any of the other passengers in steerage, an imposing-looking man. To Madame Bernault’s eye, he was of pure African heritage—which would account for the hat—undiluted by life, willing or unwilling, in the New World. West African, if Madame Bernault was right. She wondered what his business might have been in America.
Now it was her turn to have lost the drift of the conversation. She heard Thomas invoking the name of his sister, and she snapped back to attention.
“In your dormitory? In the Hôtel Biron?” he was saying.
“Oh yes. We all remember her very well. Mary and her cousins.”
“Mary wouldn’t want to be remembered in the same breath as Cecile and Dolly,” said Thomas with a laugh. He turned to Beal. “Our cousins. Neither of us ever liked them.”
“Poor girls,” said Madame Bernault. “They were not, how would you say, at the same level as your sister.”
“No one ever was,” said Thomas. “Except for Beal’s brother, Randall.”
“Ah,” said Madame Bernault. She took this opportunity once more to search out the African man. He was at the customs desk, showing, if Madame Bernault could tell from this distance, none of the anxiety most people of lesser means displayed when confronting authority, certainly none of the fear any American Negro might suffer in this situation. He was now engaged with the customs official, and at this moment Beal turned slightly to look at him over her husband’s shoulder. His hat was a head taller than the top hats in the crowd. Beal’s full lips parted slightly, and she released a breath, as if she had been holding it since he appeared on the gangplank, but Madame Bernault had no idea what emotion she might be expressing with this: A desire to speak to him? Fear that he might find her? When she looked up the last time, the hat was gliding toward the street, and in a moment it was gone. Relief or regret?
Enough of this. Madame Bernault returned to her mission, which was now only half discharged. “We should make our way to the station. We’ll be able to catch the twelve o’clock train. The sisters have sent their porter in the carriage to take us.”
Out on the street, she steered the couple through the tangle of men, carriages, horses, cargo, and luggage to the alley where M. Marain had been waiting for them. M. Marain was a tiny, perhaps mentally compromised man who had a habit of spitting at the end of every brief sentence. The sisters had warned Madame Bernault about it, one of several deep and long-standing complaints, but this was typical: convents always had porters they longed to be free of but couldn’t function without.
“Thank you for waiting, Monsieur,” said Madame Bernault. “Here are the new arrivals.”
M. Marain pulled the brim of his cap to them and spat. He spat again after he had helped the couple into the carriage, and Madame Bernault realized that this spitting was not just about speaking, but was a concluding punctuation mark for any gesture. A demon forced him to do this, she thought. She kept this little point on her mind as M. Marain helped her into the carriage, spat, and set off for the station, and it suddenly occurred to her that this marriage of Thomas and Beal could itself be the work of one of these demons. This couple sitting across from her, such lovely young people, she with her gloved hand on his, he with his interested face and gaze, they had been put here in this time and place by a demon bent on putting God’s favorite creations through their paces. They had been given no choice in this. Perhaps they would fail the test. Perhaps this child would be abandoned by her husband in favor of a more suitable femme du monde. Perhaps she would return to her homeland in Africa. Yet what great works were being offered to them, to make a life together in such unusual circumstances. Madame Bernault tried again to catch Beal’s eye, this country girl here in the métropole, and would have offered an encouraging smile, but Beal did not give Madame the favor of her attention; instead, she kept behind that innocent face the secrets of this moment.
Some years later, in one of Madame Bernault’s last hours, when she was too frail to be moved even to nearby Conflans from the Hôtel Biron after it was seized by the government, too much lost in her own thoughts to notice the turmoil around her, she thought of this day, the first time she met Thomas and Beal, the beginning of her last vocation, the girl and the boy whose lives and trials on earth grew to matter more to her than almost any other mortal events. In the years to come, after the couple had left Paris, they returned only once, and it happened to be a difficult period for them, but as much as Madame Bernault could, she followed their lives closely, and whenever she learned something of interest, she passed it along to Thomas’s sister, Mary Bayly, back in Maryland raising cows. Madame Bernault and Mary Bayly were not the only people watching Thomas and Beal. Sometimes it seemed that the whole world had these blameless young people in its sights.
2
Beal felt the nun trying to catch her eye, and she did not know exactly why, but she refused to give it to her. Beal, she was thinking over and over, as if calling out to herself. What is a Beal? Am I Beal? Am I still, was I ever, will I ever be again? Why am I riding in this carriage with Thomas and this nun through these streets of France, where everything is made of stone, where the sun doesn’t shine on the streets? She heard the chatter from the people walking single file between the carts and carriages and the building fronts, and she knew it was a ridiculous thought, but still, she wondered if she was the only one who realized they were just mouthing made-up sounds that didn’t mean anything, that they were just pretending to understand one another. She tried to calm herself: I am riding in this carriage with my hand on my husband’s hand, and this is the same hand I used to take at home on our bench by the stable, this same white hand that seemed so pale in mine. She looked down at her gray gloves: these soft gloves were crazy. Why were they ever invented? Why did every inch of her skin have to be covered? She was heading into some kind of panic. She focused on the picture of the two of them on that bench, passing the time under the honey locusts and pecans, looking down the creek and into the broad mouth of the Chester River. She tried to recall what they might have talked about all those hours, in those years when they were still children on the Retreat, when they were just friends, and suddenly the thought she had been suppressing all morning came out in a desperate Why? Why did I marry Thomas when I knew what was going to happen to us, even though, of all that I dreamed, I never thought what would happen is this—me, Beal, in France? Couldn’t she just go back, back to the Retreat, or better still back to Hampton, Virginia, where she had a good job as a maid in Colonel Murphy’s house? Why did she have to pretend she was a lady in a carriage, with grown men on the streets tipping their hats before they really looked at who was in it, and then letting their jaws drop. Why not just be a colored girl in a farm wagon that no one paid no notice of at all, that people just looked through? Now weren’t that a kind of freedom! Why not still be that girl? Beal.
The carriage broke into a large square around a fountain, and though the sun finally found its way to them, it was just another acre of stone, the iron-rimmed carriage wheels scraping and clattering on the uneven pavers. She looked up at the driver as he hunched over the reins, and she couldn’t help wishing that if she blinked three times, she’d open her eyes the last time to see her father’s strong back and massive bald head up there, not this little weasel. Her Daddy driving a team of mules back on the Retreat, and if she blinked again, she’d see her Mama and maybe her sisters Ruth and Ruthie on their
porch at Tuckertown, waving to her as if at a homecoming. She’d have to stop loving Thomas, or he would have to stop loving her, for this dream to come true, but right now she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t make that choice. She had been told that if she and Thomas went forward in this, if neither of them would call it off for the good of the other, they would have to leave, and she would never see her mother and father and sisters again. The whole thing had been spelled out to her by older and wiser people, and she had ignored them. Now that this thought was in her mind, she knew why she wouldn’t meet this nun’s eyes; if she did, she would burst into tears and the nun would throw the look back upon her, saying, Well, what did you think was going to happen?
“Encore plus vite, s’il vous plaît, M. Marain,” said the nun when a clock tower suddenly broke into view, and in any language Beal could understand, she was asking the driver to speed up. He gave a slight jiggle to the reins and leaned over the side to spit.
On that boat, in that windowless closet she slept in, she’d cried and cried. In the middle of this lie they were living for the voyage, neither of them could think of intimacies—those would come, she supposed, soon—but Thomas came in one night in his pajamas and lay down beside her on that tiny bunk and held her. “Shush now, Baby,” he said, and he knew her mother used to say that, Shush now, which meant there wasn’t anything that could be done now, but things would work out in the end. It was the kindest thing Thomas had ever done, to try to give her back a piece of her mother when he was the reason Beal would never see her again. “I know,” he said. “I feel it too.” Beal asked what it was that he felt, and he answered, “Homesick.” And when he said it, she remembered that he had given up his whole life too, that even if his own father was dead and neither his father nor his mother had ever shown him an ounce of real love, and even if now he had nothing to do with his mother, which Beal would never understand for a second, and the best friend he had ever had, her brother Randall, was dead, still, for her he had given up what had sustained him through all that unhappiness—the farm, the land, the Retreat, which would have been his and his alone when his mother died. What Beal had given up—the love of a family—Thomas had never had; what Thomas had given up—family wealth—Beal couldn’t imagine. So there they were, huddled like lost children, Beal against the bulkhead in her white nightgown and Thomas curled up behind her in his blue pajamas while the vibrating engines of the ship powered them, mile after mile, ever farther from home.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 2