They were shown up a narrow flight of stairs, following a waiter in a white coat who navigated the tight turns with an enormous tray balanced on his fingertips. “Ah!” exclaimed the watchful Stanley from a long table over in a corner by the windows. The glass was foggy and frosted, and through it, the light from the street outside broke into more color, more ornament. Quite a few fine fellows seemed to have shown up, which made sense, as Hilary Devereux’s mother was paying for this, and little Stanley Dean, such a lonely sight a month ago, was ebullient. “We’ve saved you places of honor.”
One of the places of honor turned out to be at the center of the table, directly opposite the hostess. Thomas was placed there. A good choice, thought Beal. This woman, with her tight jaw and jewels, reminded her of Thomas’s mother, Miss Ophelia. No one at the Retreat, even Thomas, ever saw much of her, as she lived mostly in Baltimore, but still, he would know how to talk to people like that. Beal was placed toward the end, near the window, beside Stanley—naturally—but on the other side was a plump and unscary girl named Colleen Sullivan, sandy-haired and freckled, and across from her was Hilary.
Hilary jumped right in as soon as Beal sat down. “You,” she said. “Beal at last.” She turned to Colleen, as if she needed a cue. “Thomas and Beal,” she stage-whispered.
“Yes, Hilary. I can see that.”
Beal found this a little odd, to be spoken of like this, but there was nothing about it to give offense.
“We’ve all seen Stanley’s pastels,” said Colleen. She turned to look at Beal more directly.
Beal raised her hand to cover her mouth.
“They’re quite good,” said Hilary, her eyes slightly narrowed, a slight squint. “The best things he’s done.”
Stanley let out a small cough, but he did not dispute it.
“You inspired him,” said Colleen. “Actually, he’s talked a lot about you.”
“Oh now…” said Stanley, reddening.
“You have to forgive painters,” said Hilary. “We’re always looking for models. I’m tired of painting my mother.” She leaned her head toward the center of the table. Beal felt a slight tremor of fear, but the lady was engaged with Thomas, so perhaps all would be well. “Do you like portraits?” Hilary asked Beal. “Colleen doesn’t,” she added.
“Well,” said Colleen. “A sort of long discussion…”
Beal had seen plenty of portraits in her life, the portraits of Masons on the walls of Mason’s Retreat and the Lloyds at Blaketon, the estate on the other side of Tuckertown. Men in furrowed collars and women with lace in their hair; soldiers pointing behind them to the battlefield where they were killed; little white boys in silk suits with their pet dogs. In one or two family portraits a servant or slave was in the background, an arm out in the universal posture of service. Aunt Zoe used to talk about those pictures: White men, she said, slave drivers. What was they thinking while folks died in their fields?
“I guess I’ve never really seen the point of them unless they’re your kin,” Beal answered. “I don’t mean any disrespect.”
Colleen laughed, said that there was no offense taken; most people where she grew up, in Brockton, Massachusetts, thought art was a waste of time. “Shoes,” said Colleen. “Everyone in Brockton is in the shoe business. They think the reason the North won the war was because they had better shoes. My father thinks civilization began with the invention of shoes.”
“He might have a point,” said Stanley. He stamped on the floor as if to show off his boots.
“Yes, Stanley,” said Hilary. “I am sure Colleen’s papa would approve of your footwear.”
When this joke died, all three of them turned to Beal; she couldn’t imagine what to say. “I don’t know noth … anything much about shoes or art. Maybe a little about something in between,” said Beal, which everyone liked.
“Come with us to the Louvre tomorrow,” said Hilary. “It’s the museum,” she added with a shrug; Beal already knew what the Louvre was, but Hilary had said it in a way that did not imply that Beal was ignorant. “We go there to copy master paintings. It’s kind of silly.”
“I don’t think it sounds silly at all,” said Beal. “To be able to copy a famous picture. I can’t imagine such a thing.” She’d never been to a museum, though when she lived in Hampton, her employer insisted that all his staff go to the library at the Hampton Institute once a week.
“Thomas could bring you to the entrance to the Pavillon Denon at ten,” Colleen announced. “And then he’ll go do whatever he does with his time.”
Waiters appeared with small plates of fish, and the one who served Beal reached down and placed the correct fork on her plate. She did not mind at all; she noticed that he did it for the others, except for Hilary, as if it was evident that she knew which from which. When another waiter came around and poured Beal some wine, she watched the glass fill with alarm. She glanced up and down the table to see if people were drinking it yet, and because they were, she raised the glass to moisten her lips. The pale, astringent drops took her breath away, and she put the glass down hastily. If anything, it tasted like spoiled milk.
“Don’t worry,” said Colleen. “I don’t like wine either. My father drinks whiskey.”
“We never drunk anything except some peach wine from time to time. There was an old lady in our village who made it,” said Beal.
“She was raised on a farm in Maryland,” volunteered Stanley.
“An orchard, actually,” Beal said.
“And now you’re here in Paris.”
“Yes. It still feels very strange to me.”
“That’s the thing about this city,” said Colleen. “We’re all from somewhere so different. See that boy up there with the red cravat?” She pointed down the table. “He grew up in Iowa. How did he even know Paris existed? To get here, he took a boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans and then a steamer to Portugal. It’s crazy.”
“None of us belongs here,” said Hilary. “I mean, look at Stanley. He’s from Pittsburgh.”
“Oh no, Hilary,” said Stanley. “You belong here. You act as if you own the place, and you probably do.”
This was the way the conversation went. Everything these people said was meant to be funny in a way that Beal had never encountered, a sort of joking about others, a teasing that would not have gone over very well in Tuckertown, or on the Retreat either. Hilary and Colleen: these were women with schooling, from wealth, people in her former life she might one day have been working for, but they acted as if nothing mattered all that much, that you could make fun of the thing you cared about most in life.
“Stanley! You have scored a point, I believe,” said Colleen in a sort of officious, deep voice. Her normal voice was quite high and squeaky. She reminded Beal of the little girl Gilberte in their building, and perhaps it was just the charm of this sweet little face passing before Beal’s eyes, but suddenly she felt her whole body relax. Her shoulders, her neck, her forearms and hands—all, it became clear, had been clenched with fear, and now she became light-headed with an obscure kind of joy: she could do this. It was as if, she thought, a miracle was working within herself, that she had recaptured a sense of being just herself, of being just a girl back at the Retreat, just a maid in Hampton, and now just a woman at dinner. She fought this as some kind of illusion, but then relaxed into it. For a second or two she worried that it was the wine, that she was drunk, but she looked at her glass and realized she’d had only that one sip, and surely it took more wine than that to make someone silly. Yes, she had settled in far more than she realized. She had found in this world a place that was good to her. She finished her fish, surprised by the succession of dishes to come, and felt she must finish it all despite the fact that Colleen and Hilary sent their plates back hardly touched. How strange life is, she thought. How can this be happening to me?
* * *
At the middle of the table, Thomas was having a very different experience. Mrs. Devereux—oh yes, he knew her well. Any one
of his mother’s friends would do: Mrs. Benton Lloyd, with her limp and her fear of hot weather; Mrs. MacAlistair in Baltimore, one of his mother’s Catholic pack, so determined to hold her high position. Thomas did not mind their pretensions, really; everyone has to make his or her way in the world. What he disliked about them was their frailty, an adopted manner that seemed designed to appear just slightly infirm, and Mrs. Devereux had lots of ailments; consulting famous physicians seemed to be a good bit of the reason for her winter sojourn here.
“But you have a family connection here?” she was saying to Thomas.
“Oh yes.” He snapped back to attention. “A small one. My sister went to convent school here ten years ago.”
“So I gathered. A Catholic school?”
What other kind of convent is there? Thomas wanted to say. He knew where this was going and tried to head it off. “My mother is very proud of the fact that our family is descended from the earliest Catholic immigrants in Maryland. ‘English Catholics,’ she would say.”
Mrs. Devereux didn’t see much in this distinction. The only Roman Catholics she knew in Boston were her maids and servants. “And you went to such a school in Maryland?”
No, Thomas said, he had studied at home. His father had been a technical man and had overseen Thomas’s schooling, an experiment that included Beal’s brother, Randall. Mrs. Devereux recoiled at this.
“I would have thought there would be something more suitable for old families. If not, you could have been sent away. To Phillips Academy, perhaps.”
Thomas shrugged.
“You have heard of Phillips Academy, of course.”
“No, I haven’t,” he answered, but he had; one of his classmates at the University of Pennsylvania had gone there.
“I would suppose not. It is a school for Protestant boys, after all.”
The conversation died there, which seemed more than fine to Thomas, except that it would soon become awkward, and she was staring at him. He tried a less controversial tack. “My mother spent most of the year here when my sister was in school, as I remember. She lived on the Quai d’Orléans.”
“How fascinating. I have also taken a large flat on the Île Saint-Louis. I find it quite primitive.”
Thomas glanced down at Beal; she was laughing. She had rarely looked so beautiful. The men, the painters, at the other end seemed lost in ambitious talk: the Salon, la vie moderne. His spirits crashed; maybe here, in the middle, talking to this awful hag was the place he belonged.
“My wife and I are very satisfied with our quarters on the avenue Bosquet,” he said. He wished he were there at this moment.
“I’m sure your mother never imagined that her son would be here in—well, your circumstances.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean—‘in my circumstances.’”
“You left America because of your marriage.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand it, myself,” she said, lowering her voice only slightly. Out of the corner of his eye Thomas saw a sudden alertness on the face of her daughter, who had clearly been monitoring this conversation with one ear.
“My marriage?” he asked.
“It seems like an unnecessary risk.” She waved away a waiter offering a lemon ice. “You could never be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“Well, they can’t be trusted, can they now? It’s not their fault. Everything was provided for them.”
“Mother,” said Hilary. Between Hilary and her mother was a young Englishman, one of the few at the Académie. He had only a vague idea of what she was talking about, but he understood that he was caught in the middle of something unpleasant.
“I can’t imagine a Christian vow means all that much to them. How could it?”
“Mother,” said Hilary again.
“I’m not saying anything so scandalous, am I?”
Thomas had his napkin poised to be flung down; the artists at their end had stopped their conversation and had all their eyes on him. Fred Shippen, Thomas’s friend from Virginia … in his heart, he probably would have agreed with this woman, at least before he got to know Beal a little. The maître d’ had caught a tremor from the corner table and was angling over to see whether trouble was brewing. Only Beal and Stanley and the other girl had heard nothing of this and were still talking, laughing. Thomas wasn’t sure he’d seen Beal laugh like this since they were children.
He could picture how it might go if he flung down the napkin—the hasty departure, the apologies at the top of the stairs from Hilary, the assurance that they would get together soon despite all this misunderstanding, though they never would. A cold and tearful cab ride back to their flat. Or … Or Thomas could do what he’d seen Beal herself do a hundred times: take it. Take it for her as she had been doing for him. Look through it, beyond it. Protect her dignity in a world that was determined not to let her have any. Go home the victor. Oh, how much Beal could teach this woman and her ilk about bearing and carriage. Such integrity was not something others gave you, it was something others—like this woman—tried to take away, for sport or out of fear and hatred. Thomas returned his napkin to his lap. Mrs. Devereux still wore that wounded little look, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine what all this stir was about, but the delicious pleasure of it, so ripe in her eyes, faded as she observed Thomas relaxing his arms, leaning back, taking a sip of water.
Hilary appealed to him one last time, and he waved her off reassuringly. “I’m sure you will be relieved to hear that my wife is a person of the strongest moral caliber. Perhaps in Boston you are not aware of what being freed from slavery can do.”
“Perhaps not,” Mrs. Devereux said. She was already turning to the Englishman at her side, who looked like a mouse being eyed by a cat. Thomas glanced back at Hilary, who in turn glanced at Beal, still engaged, unsuspecting, and then mouthed a thank you. Thomas smiled at her; he shrugged, meaning he’d heard worse, much worse, worse indeed from his own mother—yes, he felt the shrug communicated even that—that he could handle this, that this was a small price to pay for his happiness.
On the way home in the cab, with Beal snuggled at his side in her thin pelisse, she asked about the commotion she thought she’d heard, something that happened while that funny girl Colleen was telling a story about her brother being chased by a pig.
“Oh,” said Thomas. “Hilary’s mother is a real specimen.”
“Was it about me?”
“No. Of course not. It was about me. It was about Catholics, I think. And about the South. Hilary was a little embarrassed.”
“I liked Hilary. She can’t be anything like her mother, then.”
“No. All of us here in Paris are trying to become something new, something our parents might not be able to imagine.”
“Yes. We are,” said Beal.
4
Arthur Kravitz did not like her. The reason he didn’t like her was that he believed he understood her. She could claim no privilege of discrimination with him. Not that she would, but that was the point: she wouldn’t. She and her husband could escape the bigotry and hatred of America, but he had news for them: France was no Eden. He knew. He was a Jew in France, not a great place to be in 1892. He didn’t have to understand a word of French to get the drift of the headlines in certain papers he saw almost daily, juif this, juif that. He’d sit at a café and he’d hear, blah, blah, blah, juif, blah, blah. That the juifs were hatching something was one thing the monarchists and republicans, the Catholics and the anti-clericists could all agree on quite nicely. The question was, What Jews were behind all this? And, of course, what was this? Well, nobody actually knew what this was, but that’s the nature of the Jewish conspiracy: fingers into the banks, shipping, the military, all ready to be clenched into a fist when the time came.
Arthur had first seen her at the Café Badequin a few weeks after they arrived, and now that she was coming to the Louvre with the girls, he saw her quite often. He wasn’t sure what she was doing there,
and this did, in fact, intrigue him, but probably she was just trying to take on a little of the sheen. Arthur hated sheen. He had seen Stanley’s pastels, and yes, they weren’t bad in a sloppy, Renaissance sort of way—that’s the way he thought of them—but Arthur had no interest in angels, even if they were black. Besides, she had poor old Stanley well wrapped around her finger; they all knew that this was absolutely the worst possible situation for a portraitist. Dislike, disdain, contempt, that was better; why else had Sargent made Madame Gautreau look like a whore? Okay, maybe not everyone would agree that he had done this. The women, Colleen, Hilary, Vivian, just couldn’t get enough of the romance of the girl and her boy husband, the two child lovers escaping in the dead of night, carriages with the curtains down, something out of penny dreadfuls, something about female beauty, but Arthur had no interest in romance, and no interest in female beauty, as a subject for his work anyway. If that was all portraiture had to work with, to express, Arthur would have been on the first boat back to Newark, back to his father’s dry goods business, where he’d worked on and off since he was twelve. If his father would have him back, that is, which he doubted. Arthur was thirty now, though he looked even older because of his balding head, his dark, sagging skin.
Arthur lived alone in a single room on one of the more squalid back alleys in the Quarter; if Haussmann’s remaking of Paris hadn’t been cut short by the arrival of the Prussians twenty years ago, this would have been the next block to be demolished, Arthur was sure of it. His room was freezing cold, but for all that, it was a big space and had top-floor light. If he had had more money, he would have rented this room only as a studio, but as it was, his tiny cot and small chest of drawers took almost no space away from his paints and supplies, his easel, and the one chair in the room that sat empty but waiting for someone, for some kind of human being from whose body—head and face, trunk, two arms, two legs—his brush could nurse out every truth, every shred of anger, every secret yearning for love that had been bottled up in Arthur Kravitz since he was old enough to hold a pencil. He’d been trying for more than a year, bringing home half-finished canvases from the Académie and working and reworking those boring and bored female figures until the paint was so thick it cracked, but there was no truth to be had, just flesh. This was the injustice of painting. You had to wait for a subject. It was like fishing but far less restful.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 9