Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  As if her thoughts had just come through the same pathway, Beal said, “I’ll do better, Thomas. I’ve just been so scared. I’ll do better by you.”

  “What do you mean? What says you haven’t done amazing things already?”

  “I says it,” she said. “I’ll show you.” And when she said that, they both knew what she was talking about.

  The porter reached his hand back along the side of the carriage and tapped on the glass. “Madame Bernault?” he called. She slept on until Thomas tapped her knee. “Madame Bernault,” the porter called again. “Nous allons au Lion d’Or?”

  The sister was still a little woozy.

  “The hotel?” said Thomas. “He’s asking about which hotel?”

  “Oh yes,” said Madame Bernault. “Good for you,” she said to Thomas, still the old teacher. She called out a longer, less intelligible set of directions or instructions and then leaned forward toward Thomas and Beal to point to her left. “The Hôtel Biron,” she said happily, and it was quite a building for a school, with a gate and towers with conelike roofs. Thomas had been tutored in a back room off the kitchen of the Retreat, and Beal had done most of her schooling in an old tobacco barn with her sister Ruthie as the teacher.

  “All that is just a school?” asked Beal. “That’s where you live?”

  “The best of it is for the girls. We live in the servants’ quarters and off the stables. Simplicity is in our vows.”

  Beal nodded. She knew about living in servants’ quarters, and she’d choose one of those cozy nests over a master bedroom any day.

  Madame Bernault continued. “When I was in Louisiana, we had nothing like this. I won’t say that everyone in our Society approves of the Hôtel Biron. It was an old aristocrat’s château before the Revolution.”

  “Hmmm,” said Beal. “My brother told me about the French Revolution. The people had risen up, they killed the king and took over the property of the rich.”

  “If it had happened in America, they would have killed all of us in the Mansion House and taken the Retreat,” said Thomas.

  Beal jabbed him in the side. “Oh now, don’t say anything as awful as that.”

  Madame Bernault seemed a little shocked at that turn, but it was the first time Beal had said anything more than yes and thank you, and she smiled at their play. “Thomas will see the Hôtel Biron tomorrow when he comes to talk to Mother Digby. Perhaps you’d like to come along, and I will show you around.”

  Thomas remembered the planned interview with Mother Digby. He expected the full grilling about his plans and intentions, and perhaps the exercise would be useful. Still, what could he say? His first intention was to learn some French, which had seemed to come easily for Mary and so might for him if he could find a good teacher. They would set up in the apartment Mary had found for them—it came with a cook, which Beal found hard to accept. Then, well, something to do. A life, really. And some kind of living. He did not have enough money to do nothing, but he wouldn’t want to do nothing anyway; during harvest at the Retreat he worked from dawn to dusk like everyone else. So farming was a possibility, maybe, but what did they grow in France? He’d seen vast apple orchards just outside Le Havre, but fruit trees seemed an unlucky choice for him. Before he entered into a panic, he reminded himself that they had set aside the winter to get established, and he had time. He’d read; he’d study. That’s what his father had done. But then, a new anxiety: What would Beal do during this time? Learn French also, he supposed. But what else?

  They arrived at the hotel a few minutes later. The door was heavy wood reinforced with iron, as if this were the gate of a castle, and above the doorway was some sort of beast—half lion maybe, but half goat—carved into the pediment. A small plaque to the left of the entrance announced it as the Lion d’Or, a respectable but modest place, nothing like the grand seaside hotels in Newport News and Norfolk. “The golden lion,” said Thomas. Now that it was deep gray dusk, all this stone was beginning to feel cold, almost medieval, but once they were inside, in the yellow light of the gas jets, Thomas felt a hospitable good cheer from the man at the desk, who seemed to know Madame Bernault well and to like her very much. They chatted away, and he could make out words like dîner and bagage, which seemed to refer to what they sounded like, and then he was surprised and almost shocked but finally amused when their conversation took on the sort of bawdy tone one used to hear from old Uncle Pickle, the mule skinner on the Retreat, and even Madame Bernault let out a nasal snuffle, which she stifled when she turned back to Beal and Thomas.

  “M. Richard has given you their nicest room, on the top floor. He wants to make sure you are”—she couldn’t help glance quickly back at him—“completely comfortable during your stay. From your balcony you will be able to see the river.” She added that they could come down to dinner as soon as they were ready, and that the carriage would come by at ten in the morning to take them to the Trente-Trois. “It has been my pleasure,” she said when Thomas thanked her. “It has been my honor.”

  “Mary said you would help us, but I really had no idea that you would do all this.”

  Madame Bernault seemed ready to accept this with a nod and to take her leave, but she lingered for a moment. “It has been God’s will that you two young people have had to do so much in order to come together.” There was no more bawdiness in her voice. “Your love will be tested; otherwise, how will you ever know its depths? None of us knows what lies ahead for us. But you are brave and in love, and perhaps that’s all you will need in the end.”

  * * *

  Madame Bernault was looking, it seemed to Beal, more at her during this than at Thomas, and when she said they would be tested, she seemed to be addressing Beal exclusively, which seemed unfair. But yes, Beal was already being tested in some way by, well, that man from the boat. She was being tested for being an American Negro, the daughter of free blacks but the granddaughter of slaves; she was being tested for her ignorance of the history of her people and of her continent; she was being tested for being smart and for not having attended to her studies, to her reading and to history; she was being tested for marrying a white man—the “white devil,” as old, crazy Aunt Zoe had so often said. She was being tested, finally, for her beauty, which would open countless doors for her, including a few she would have preferred to remain closed. She and—she supposed—the wise Madame Bernault both knew that she would have to pass each one of those tests in due time and that thus far, she may not have been doing all that well. But before that, she would first have to become a wife, a grown woman.

  They ate in the small dining room off the lobby. For months, the idea of entering a restaurant had terrified her. That game on the boat about her being a maid … she’d gotten wind of that plan with nothing but relief: she’d eat with the help, where she belonged. She wished they could continue with it tonight; there must be a place back in the hotel kitchen where the waiters and maids ate. Why couldn’t she just get her supper there and then meet Thomas back in their room? She debated refusing to come with him, pretending she was sick or something, but there was now a new voice in this conversation, and that was the voice of Diallo Touré, and he had told her that she would encounter surprise, even shock, but that she would not be rebuffed. He told her she would prosper, and strangely enough, she had the feeling that she would, that this was all a kind of play, with roles that wouldn’t be so hard to figure out. A strange kind of self-confidence came upon her. That is, she would prosper, if she could just get through this evening, the restaurant, and bed with Thomas.

  The only other diners were an ancient French couple who seemed to be squabbling and a man not much older than Thomas who was probably American but was pretending he hadn’t noticed their arrival. Beal hardly tasted what they ate, though Thomas kept telling her how delicious it was. M. Richard served them and came by offering wine, and Beal couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to do that, drink wine with food, to have that smell in your face. The idea was faintly disgusting to he
r, and she was relieved when Thomas didn’t take any either. M. Richard did, it seemed, take slight offense with this, snatched up their wineglasses, and smacked them and the bottle down on the sideboard.

  As they were leaving, the other diner came up to them, a sandy-haired, freckled boy with a slight stutter. “I am Stanley Dean of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” he said.

  Thomas shrugged a bit at Beal and gave him a slight bow.

  “I am here studying painting at the Académie Julian. Previously I was a student of Thomas Eakins at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Miss Cassatt, as perhaps you know, grew up in Allegheny, just across the river from Pittsburgh.”

  Beal glanced at Thomas, and he shrugged again; neither of them understood much of what the young man had said, or why, but Thomas relented and introduced himself, introducing Beal as his wife and saying that they were both from Maryland. As Thomas finished, Beal realized that Stanley Dean was staring at her and was not really listening.

  “Yes, I assumed you were American, but I wasn’t sure about Mrs. Bayly.”

  Beal did not like what he was implying and didn’t like that he seemed to be studying her, his eyes darting across her features. He even took a step back so he could see her better. She wished they would get done with this person and move on, but he made no sign of letting them go.

  Thomas said that he had attended the University of Pennsylvania and knew Philadelphia passingly well.

  That seemed to force this man to break off his gaze at her and turn to face Thomas. “Well, then. We have a great deal in common. Don’t we?”

  Beal could feel the loneliness seeping out of him and grasping them in its needs. A weak emotion, thought Beal, really, not something to give in to even a little bit. Homesickness: yes, a yearning for something, but loneliness was just giving in to the emptiness, into fear. This was one thing she understood from the moment they put her in the carriage at the Retreat to begin this escape: if she gave in to fear, fear about anything at all, she would not survive. Besides, she wished Thomas would cut this off, get them free of this man. Wasn’t it their wedding night? She gave Thomas a slight nudge in the small of his back.

  “Yes,” said Thomas. “Well. Glad to meet you.”

  “You just arrived from Le Havre?”

  Thomas confirmed that they had landed in Le Havre, from New York, and were actually quite tired.

  “I have been here for three days,” said Dean. “I am planning on moving onto a fellow’s spare cot soon. There will be five of us. If I am careful with my money, I can last through next summer. As you know, we all leave in the summer. I eat very little, actually.”

  Beal glanced over at his table. There seemed to be only bread crumbs on the place mat in front of him, and a small tub of butter, scraped clean.

  “Be careful what you put on the hotel bill or they will charge you double.”

  “Thank you for that warning,” said Thomas, “but I still don’t have a single coin of French money in my pocket. We have been guests of some nuns.”

  “Yes. It seemed you were in the company of a nun when you arrived. I am a Presbyterian.”

  Beal could see that they would never be rid of Stanley without some exchange, which Thomas clearly understood as well. He tossed in a concession. “Tomorrow we hope to see a little of the neighborhood,” he said. “Maybe you could show us around a little.”

  Stanley Dean almost shouted his response. “Splendid,” he said. “Of course. The Latin Quarter is where we all live. It’s not too far. Here on the Left Bank. I can introduce you to so many fine fellows.”

  Thomas agreed that they would meet at two o’clock, and added that Beal—“Mrs. Bayly”—would be busy planning the move into their apartment, which they hadn’t discussed but did seem reasonable, even necessary. With that they were able to take their leave from Stanley Dean. Beal took Thomas’s arm as they walked up the five flights of stairs, and she waited patiently while he worked the heavy iron key in the lock. Their luggage had arrived, the covers on the two small beds had been turned down, and her nightgown and Thomas’s pajamas were draped on each pillow. Beal was not sure she was comfortable with anyone going through her things, though she herself had unpacked other people’s bags many times—guests of the colonel, the colonel’s nasty sister-in-law. The ceilings of this top-floor room were low, but the room felt airy enough, with two sets of tall glass doors opening onto narrow balconies. There was a small chaise and an armchair in front of one of the doors. On the walls were engravings of country scenes, distinguished-looking men in uniform, families gathered around the hearth. There was a sink and a washstand in a small alcove, and down the hall, they had been told, was a water closet and a bath.

  They stood at the door, which Thomas had not yet closed behind them, as if they could still back out of this conjugal chamber if they wanted. Beal didn’t want to, but she waited for Thomas to lead them into the room. At last he said, “This is it. This is what I dreamed of. This is what could never happen for us.”

  Beal laughed, a nervous giggle, an unthinking response. “This room is what you dreamed of?”

  “No. Not this room,” he said, slightly hurt. “But any room we could call ours.”

  “Yes,” said Beal. “This is ours for tonight.”

  “It’s just the first of our rooms, our beds, our pillows.”

  She smiled for him; this talk of rooms and beds, she had to admit, unnerved her but also aroused her. “You asked me once to believe this could happen, and I never did, not until this moment. But I wanted to. It just seemed there was too many rubs against us.”

  Beal wasn’t really sure why she was unburdening herself at this particular moment—nerves, a heart beating too fast to hear herself think—but Thomas turned a little darker, silent. He conveyed them both through the door and closed it behind them. She walked into the center of the room, which was lit only by the streetlamps and the moon, and after surveying what was in front of her, she turned to face him.

  “I’m sorry, Thomas. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “In Philadelphia I used to go crazy sometimes, thinking of you, thinking of losing you. I knew how much you liked Hampton, how you were moving away from the Retreat and into the world, and I was stuck. Every day we drew a little more apart. Every day I had to make myself believe, and it got harder to do. That’s what all those letters were about. If I had stopped writing for a single day, I think you would have left my life forever.”

  “Shhh. I never stopped wanting you. I never stopped hoping.” But Beal knew there was truth to what he was saying. Yes, once she had left the Retreat, the world seemed to open up for her, and if she hadn’t come back for Thomas’s father’s funeral last year, she very probably would have moved on. There were boys, college boys, in Hampton. But. Well, sometimes out of the greatest doubt grows the greatest certainty. “I’m sorry I didn’t write back. You know I feel bad about that. I just couldn’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, but Beal knew it mattered a lot then, knew it would take some years for him to get over it. She’d sit down to write a letter to him and find that there was no place in her world for this back-and-forth through the mail; she told herself it was what white people did, ignoring the fact that her mother wrote her weekly. That’s what she told herself at the time, but now it was very simple: he had overwhelmed her with all those words, and besides, she would have been a fake in those letters, she would have lied when she said, as she supposed she should, that she couldn’t live without him.

  Thomas threw the heavy bolt on the door; it landed with a thump Beal felt in her abdomen. “I waited for you,” she said. “I kept myself whole for you. All that is gone.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. You’re right. I love you,” he said. “All of that is gone,” he repeated. “It’s just us now.”

  “Just us.” She liked the sound of it, even if it still scared her, even if it didn’t seem like quite enough on her side, even as she depended on him to be more than half of
the “us.” She walked across the room to the windows and, with a little fumbling of the hardware, opened one of them and stepped out. Paris, France. It rumbled like a machine; there seemed no limit to its powers. She could see the top of the Eiffel Tower, the tallest structure in the world.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “That tower. Maybe these French people are some kind of genius race to be able to do that.”

  “We can ride a lift to the top if you want. You can see the whole city.”

  Beal kept her place on the balcony but turned her shoulders to look back at him. “Are you crazy?” she asked. “Ride up to the top of that thing? I bet people die all the time up there.”

  “Die of what?”

  “I don’t know, Thomas. Is there air up there? Something like that. The heat up so high, so close to the sun. Old Martin, he just died of the heat one day. Remember him?”

  “That’s silly. The government would never allow that.”

  Beal supposed that was true, but there had to be some danger; otherwise, why would they build it? She turned back to the street, resting her hands on the iron railing, tracing the filigree of grape leaves with her fingertips. The street below was dark and quiet, but at the end of it the boulevard was brightly lit with the yellow of streetlamps; she could see carriages crossing the opening at a lazy pace, and then suddenly—when it was gone, she could hardly recall what she had seen—an automobile darted past, leaving a trail of smoke. There seemed no real end of wonders here.