She was in this distracted mood when she opened the door, and at first she did not notice that Thomas was standing stiffly in front of the fireplace, a pose so unlike him, so melodramatic, that she thought he was making a joke of some kind. But then, after their eyes met, she realized that his expression was like nothing she had ever seen in him: not hurt—she’d seen hurt in him as a child many times before—not anger, nor surprise or confusion, but instead she saw in the set of his jaw and brow a mortal sadness, as if there were things wrong in the world that could not be set right. She glanced again at him and saw in his hand a crumpled piece of paper, and though as soon as she noticed it he quickly put it into his pocket, she knew what it was. Come to me. She tried to remember where she had left it when she came back that day; it was tattered because she had carried it with her like a key she needed to gain entrance to Diallo’s flat. Perhaps Mme Vigny had found it and left it somewhere for Thomas to find; perhaps she’d put it into Thomas’s hand. Beal could believe this was true. Mme Vigny had no English, but three words written in an elaborate but very male hand … what else could it be but a billet-doux? But French, English, whatever they spoke in Senegal … none of these languages could help her.
“Thomas,” she said. She was clawing at her hat and gloves. She wanted these damn things off. “That note.”
Reluctantly, it seemed, he took it out of his pocket and peered at it, as if there might be some new message on it, then shook his head at the thought that they would now have to decipher it together, a moment he had been avoiding. “It was given to you, right?”
Beal nodded.
“You know who it is from? A man?”
For a moment Beal thought she might be able to say that it came from Arthur, or even Stanley, or that she might be able to invent some entirely different correspondent. A clerk at the store telling her the items she ordered were ready for her to inspect? Come to me? Hardly what a clerk would say to a customer. “Yes,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“Thomas,” she said. Her stomach, her lungs, her whole body gulping and leaping, she sat down on the love seat and looked up at him. “It’s nothing. It’s nobody. Nobody you know.”
“That African? The one from the boat. The one with the hat. The one you talked to in that café last fall?”
The last detail was the one that knocked everything she was planning to say out of kilter. If he knew so much, why hadn’t he said anything earlier? Another test? Tests and tests and tests that everyone knew she was going to fail. How could she not, this ignorant little farm girl from dirt-poor Queen Anne’s County, Maryland? Who’d have bet on her? And that was the problem at this moment, because for all his abuse, the one person who had never doubted her, never felt she had to be babied, the person who told her that Paris would lay itself down in front of her, was Diallo Touré.
“Is that who it is?”
“Yes,” she answered finally. “He was a diplomat or something from Senegal.” She told him about the first night on the ship, about sitting for supper in steerage, and she told him that over the days of the voyage he had pursued her, had told her that she was African, not American, that she would have to come to Africa in order to understand her true past, her true fate. “I told him I was married to you. He was the only person on that boat who knew we were married. I told him so he would leave me alone.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No,” she said with a small heave in her throat.
Thomas said nothing for a few minutes. In a few hours they would have to get ready for a farewell dinner M. Richard had planned for them. He’d invited everybody, Mother Lucy, the elderly Tallents, Arthur and Stanley, even the little girls and their mothers. It had sounded sweet, but now, who knew? “Please, Thomas. Please forgive me. I wasn’t being untrue to you. I was so confused. Each time I thought I had taken care of it, he came back at me in some other way. He pestered me at the Louvre once or twice. I was too embarassed to say anything to you. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t send me back to the Retreat. Please, Thomas.” She’d leaned forward out of the seat and onto her knees, and with each plea she inched forward until she was right in front of him. If he didn’t reach out for her, gather her in, she thought she would collapse into the puddle of her skirts. She didn’t try to look up at him, to meet his eye; she couldn’t have borne whatever it was that she would see there. She waited and then felt his hand, not touching her, but skimming along the ends of her hair, as if a touch would be too painful. Her scalp and neck tingled; it was enough.
“Did you?”
“Did I go to him? I went to that café.” She said that he had told her earlier that he was going back to Senegal and she believed that he wanted to say goodbye to her, that she thought this was fair because he had helped her, really. He had shown her some of the ways of France, and his assurances that she would be treated like any normal person had made her first weeks here tolerable.
“And?”
“He wasn’t there. The waiter told me he had already left. It’s all over.” Oddly, whatever lies and shadings of the truth were in what she said during all this now seemed rather simple. Yes, the end of it. He’d written, she’d gone, he wasn’t there. All that was God’s truth. C’est fini. She felt unburdened; it seemed that everything could now go back to where it was before. They would survive this; she had survived it, she thought. She was still on the floor in front of him. His hand, which had been hovering over her, brushing her hair, idly teasing her sleeve, fell firmly upon her shoulder. Perhaps his arm had gotten tired and he was just resting; perhaps that’s all it was, but she felt it like a flow of current from him to her, like a sort of promise to give her another chance.
“I understand,” he said, a large statement delivered very quietly. Whispered, mostly just air with enough sound to make it intelligible. He was saying that he had heard enough, and even though he knew only half of the story, the trivial half, perhaps what he was saying was that the untrivial half didn’t matter. “I understand,” he repeated.
“Do you really?” She sat back onto her calves, and he sat down on the stiff, faded side chair next to the hearth. She could not help thinking that she had gotten off too easy, but he did not answer her question because he had already spoken what he believed. Instead he said nothing, remained silent. Seconds, then minutes, ticked by; her thighs began to hurt. She could bear it no longer. “Thomas?”
“We thought our love would make everything easy, didn’t we?” he said. “We had no idea, did we, of what we would face.”
Maybe, thought Beal. Maybe that is what he had believed, anyway. But she would not prolong this, and she realized from the tone of his voice that he was now going to move on to the subject that had been hanging in the background of her thoughts, had formed the beginnings of a slight protest even at this hour of her greatest peril. He was going to apologize or explain or confess about the red-haired girl, even though Beal had no evidence, no misplaced note, to incriminate him. That is what he did, but it went a little differently from what she expected.
“You know about the librarian, my friend at Galignani’s. I saw her a few days ago. I was saying goodbye to her. She said you came in while I was gone.”
Saw her a few days ago: impossible, but true, that she was hurt to hear of this. “Yes,” she said. But now that the subject had shifted, she was breathing better, thinking clearly enough to be both hurt and surprised. “But how did she know it was me? We didn’t talk or anything.”
“She just figured it out, I guess.”
“Well, there aren’t many girls in Paris that look like me, are there?”
“No. And maybe not that many who look like her.”
None of this was quite lining up for Beal: that look she had gotten from the girl seemed to have more in it than simply recognizing the only colored girl in Paris. They had exchanged something that day; it was hard to tell what it was, but there had been, indeed, something to exchange. But Beal didn’t want to probe this. For one thing
, she didn’t want Thomas to ask And how did you know to go looking for the red-haired girl?
“Her name is Eileen Hardy,” he said. “Isn’t that sort of funny?”
Beal had to think for a moment what he was saying, about the Hardys at home. “Oh, I don’t know. What do family names on the Retreat mean to us anyway? They’re never our family.”
Thomas nodded and went on to say everything that Beal had already figured out: that Eileen had helped him in his studying about wine, about Languedoc. Maybe, for that, she was an enemy, but so what? “She was just a friend, but I should have told you. I should have told you that a few times we took tea together. That wasn’t right.”
“Thomas. There’s no need to go into it. We were both just trying to get on, right? There’s no need to apologize.”
“But there is. Because I never told her I was married.”
Beal wanted to reflect on this a little, as it put a very different slant on her confrontation with the girl; her head spun a little. Then how did she know I had anything to do with you? Another unasked question. Who knew what when? There was more to this, she knew; scales were starting to hang in a more balanced manner.
“You and me,” he said.
“Me and you?” Now he was talking in riddles; his guilt was making him do that. She wished he’d stop, leave it at that rather comforting equilibrium she had just spied.
“That’s the reason for everything. People have worked so hard for us. Mary, Mother Lucy, even Arthur, for God’s sake. And look what we have been doing.”
“What have we been doing?”
“Being disloyal to each other.”
Beal’s thoughts took a sudden turn at that, a resistance at a moment when she had felt she had no standing, that she could be blown away like a pile of dead leaves. She had never, never been disloyal to Thomas. That was the one thing in all this that she was sure of. It was all for him, and for them. If she had been trying to grow up, to learn who she was, to understand her own skin and body, it was for Thomas. The thought arrived like a sudden parting of branches in a dense wood: She had done what she had to do to survive, but she had never been disloyal to him, treated him carelessly, had a mean thought. Never.
“But I have not been unfaithful to you,” he said. “The word should not need to be spoken, but I haven’t.”
This presented a different problem: by his account he had been disloyal, but not unfaithful; by her account she had been loyal, but unfaithful. She did want to tell him the truth; she realized that this was a moment when anything could be said, that even though it might seem their lowest point, perhaps it was a pinnacle. So she did want to say that she’d given her body to Touré, once, but she could not, because that same body had a small being clamped within it and wasn’t going to let it go. And that child was Thomas’s, of course it was Thomas’s, there could be no other way. But he would have no way of knowing it: only a chaste marriage could offer that certainty to a man, a chaste marriage or a lifelong lie. So instead of taking the conversation back to where it belonged, to her, instead of taking advantage of this priceless chance to confess, she stayed on him. “Do you care for her? Do you want to be with her and not with me?”
“No!” They had been almost whispering, but this he shouted so loud it scared her. “I have never cared for her like that. She was just an acquaintance I should have told you about. There was nothing more to it. I’m not sure even now that I would recognize her on the street.”
“Then if that’s all it was, why should you tell me about it now?”
“Because I have asked you about this,” he said, and surprising them both, it appeared that the note was still crushed in his palm.
“Then we are all done,” said Beal. “This chapter is over, and I am ready to move on. To St. Adelelmus.” It seemed to her that it was the first time she referred to this future by name, pronounced it right, and not in one of her bitter anonyms, adelypuss, addled mush, or, the simplest, moo-moo. “I’m ready to go. I’ve told you that. The dream of Paris is over. If you will still let me come. If you still want to be married to me…” Speaking this last horrible question made her begin to weep at long last, and as he raised her up, she could see the tears in his eyes. In this second, it seemed their love had grown. Yes, a pinnacle. Yes, the trees parting in the woods. Yes, nine months of life, every day of which, every hour of which had served up new tests for both of them, not just for her, yet here they were, weeping into each other’s arms. She wanted to shout this out but at the same time wanted to whisper the moment so that it would remain so deeply embedded that they would never have to speak of it again, never have to live it again. He said he loved only her, and she said she loved only him, and that was that.
Two hours later they were walking on the avenue back to the hotel where this sojourn had begun. It had been a dry summer, and they crunched through the first of the fallen chestnut leaves. A motorcar appeared, and everyone stopped and gaped as it churned down the avenue and across the Pont de l’Alma. Beal felt completely spent. At the end of the afternoon, while she hid in their bedroom, Thomas had discharged Mme Vigny, handing her an envelope with, Beal assumed, a too-generous tip. Mme Vigny—well, she’d played her own role in this drama, probably played it quite well. A sort of nasty, obscure subplot. Beal never wanted to see this woman again; she said this to herself, even though there was no reason on earth that she ever would.
They each allowed a slight smile, hesitating at the door of the Lion d’Or, both recalling the same moment months ago. Maybe Thomas was recalling an earlier, unblemished age, and maybe Beal was smiling back with chagrin at the frightened, ignorant child she had been a mere nine months ago, but either way, this was who they were now. When they opened the door, they found the full dinner party waiting in the lobby. As promised, Céleste and Oriane were there with M. and Mme Richard; Mother Lucy and Arthur and Stanley, now surprisingly reconciled, were there; their friends from the neighborhood were there, the Tallents, and as a treat, because Beal had asked especially, the girls Gilberte and Monique accompanied by one of their mothers, though which one Thomas couldn’t be sure. The girls were dressed in similar white dresses with pale blue sashes, and they were both so crazy with delight to be there that they could hardly walk. The only outlier in the group was a young man, an American writer from Boston named Morris Malone, who happened to be staying at the hotel that night and mistook the gathering for boardinghouse seating. And why wouldn’t he, given the motley group?
M. Richard seated them, with Thomas at the center along the wall, Beal at his right and Céleste at his left. The little girls and the mother and the Tallents were at one end; Oriane, Madame Bernault, Arthur, and Stanley at the other. A chair was brought without noticeable fuss for Mr. Malone, directly opposite Beal. “I’m afraid I have made a mistake,” he said in very poor French. The little girls giggled and were shushed.
“Pas du tout. Pas du tout,” said Thomas, but then broke into English. “Not at all. You’re welcome to join us.” He introduced the table to Malone.
“I just landed in Le Havre this morning,” he said. Beal glanced at Thomas: this was an almost spooky circumstance. “I need to find a flat, and as you can tell, I need to learn some French.”
“Several of us here,” said Thomas, “had our first meal in France in this very room. Stanley among them,” he said, nodding down the table. “So you are another American who has landed in the best of company.” This he repeated in French for the Richards, who took the compliment happily. “In the lobby is where I learned my French,” he said, turning to give Céleste a quick hug, as if it were obvious to all why he did that. Céleste reddened slightly—the arm around her shoulder, the implied credit for Thomas’s fluency. Thomas would miss her; he wanted her to fall in love and marry, and the slightly illogical thought that she would marry this man, Morris Malone, came into his head. Oriane was the darker daughter, the prettier daughter, but if Céleste wasn’t beautiful looking, neither was Malone, with a pasty American-Irish comp
lexion and a small cluster of warts on one cheek. “The Lion d’Or is where Americans come home to France,” Thomas concluded.
“And how did you find it?” Beal asked him. Malone looked slightly surprised, as if he hadn’t suspected that Beal could speak English, or that she was American, from the South even. Yet he’d been stealing glances at her since he sat down.
He smiled broadly. “My mother found it in a guidebook. She said it was right near the station, but of course it was the wrong station.”
“She did well by you, even so,” said Beal.
“So if I have forced myself upon all of you, could I ask what the occasion is for this party?” asked Malone.
Thomas said he would allow their host to answer this, and translating back and forth across the language divide, he told Malone that M. Richard had said that a young couple very dear to his heart was forsaking Paris for the South.
“And who is that young couple?” asked Malone, full of good spirits, glancing coyly at Thomas and Céleste.
“Why. It’s us,” said Beal, taking Thomas’s hand.
Malone’s mouth fell open; Thomas understood Malone’s mistake before he did, and really, he could be forgiven for it. “Oh dear,” Malone said helplessly. He was a nice man, it seemed, a most progressive person on his first assignment in Europe, but there it was on his face, the rictus of America. A look of horror and disbelief, followed instantly by a crimson blush of embarrassment, like being caught gaping at a veteran’s war wound. Beal saw it, Madame Bernault saw it, Arthur saw it, but M. Richard and Stanley and the other guests had missed it, and M. Richard continued his hostly speech to say he hoped that this young couple would not get eaten by boars or be beset by brigands in the Midi. He laughed, pausing for Thomas to translate.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 23