Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  Thomas watched Malone take his napkin to his forehead and he supposed he might do more to diffuse the moment, to give Malone a break, but there was no opening for it; the best anyone could do was ignore what had happened. Thomas finished his translation and then gave Malone a small questioning nod.

  “Really?” he answered weakly. “Boars and brigands?”

  M. Richard laughed heartily at this reaction. “No,” Beal said from across the table. “M. Richard is making a joke. That’s the way many people in Paris feel about the Midi.”

  “Not much different from the way people in New York feel about Alabama,” said Arthur. “Or the way people in Newark feel about Hoboken,” he added.

  “Ah,” said Malone, hearing Arthur’s accent: a touch of home. But once he recovered, once aware that his gaffe would be allowed to fade, it was clear that Beal had entranced him. “Then what is the truth?” he asked Beal. “Are you going to Provence?”

  “Not Provence,” said Beal. “We are moving to a wine region far to the west of Provence. M. Richard teases us, but it’s an area that has been civilized since the Romans. My husband has bought a vineyard and we are moving there to farm it.” She shook Thomas’s hand—she had been holding it all this time. “This has been our plan since we landed.”

  “And you won’t miss Paris?” He was looking at Beal. A born journalist, he seemed to sense a fold in the fabric and put it right into a question. “Nobody returns to Ohio once they’ve left. Will there be enough there for you?”

  Beal let go of Thomas’s hand. She thought her little speech about Languedoc and farming had given this man everything and more than he should ask for, this uninvited guest. She glanced down at the girls, whom she had come to love dearly, who were beginning, at age eight, to seem like, well, the next generation of Parisian women. They were here for life, but that was because they belonged here. Paris was nothing so special to them or to their mothers or to all the people on the rue Cler, or to the Richards: it was just where they lived and worked. But Beal still had no place; everything she had done over the past several months began to waver and evaporate in front of her eyes, like memories being washed away one after another. If this kept up, her whole body would start to disassemble, and that would not do. She was a wife and, it seemed, about to be a mother. This was turning into a rather long pause; any second Thomas would break in in his loyal and dutiful way, spare the room and Beal especially any awkwardness, deflect this man Malone who obviously had no idea how correct he had been. To head Thomas off, she said, “Oh,” trying a gay little smile. She could not answer Malone’s question, but she did have to respond. She felt that the whole table, everyone they knew or cared about in France, was now waiting for her to answer. Will it be enough, Beal? Madame Bernault had leaned forward especially, as if at last the predictions of tests and trouble she had made in this very space nine months ago had now come to the moment of resolution. Stanley Dean, of Pittsburgh; everything began to sound as if Stanley, with the first stirrings of success, would not be going back home soon. Arthur, he had his own decisions to make, but they were his decisions; he had gotten himself here; something would come up. And Thomas, who had slightly leaned away so he could look at her more directly, he too was waiting for an answer. He’d been asking this question, in one way or another, for months. Will it be enough after all you have learned to love here, as far as you have come? Do you want to do this? The time has come to decide.

  “Oh,” she said again, “I expect so.” She retook Thomas’s hand and raised them both slightly, as if in a moment of victory. She felt Thomas resisting this gesture slightly, but she did it anyway. “I surely do expect so.”

  II

  Languedoc

  10

  Years later, when Thomas began to put down his own version of these events, he recalled their first autumn at St. Adelelmus as a descent, a falling into, a letting go. He didn’t mind this sense of submission; it was as if a change in the weather had at last shifted the wind to his back and was driving him where he wanted to go. Before, he’d rarely felt anything but thwarted—a thought that might have earned a good laugh, or worse, from his friend Arthur Kravitz, or from Mother Lucy or Randall Terrell. It’s just you, Thomas, puttin’ things in your own way, said Randall one day so long ago. Well, so what. However the thing got there, it was in his way, always something in his way; if it was his own self in the way, that just made it more inescapable. But his own self had no purchase on him here. From the moment they arrived on the property, from the moment Beal and he first walked into the bastide, they both felt a strange welcome, as if they were on a home ground they had previously known only in a dream. Señora Zabala, enormous in girth and enthusiasm, came forward, clucking happily in some combination of French, Occitan, Spanish, and Basque dialect, and took hold of Beal and dragged her off. Beal looked back helplessly; Thomas had no idea what this was about. For all her size—she was not just fat, but big, as tall as Beal—the Señora seemed never to come to rest; Thomas had already gotten used to her as a blur behind him, a figure darting, pouncing. No one of the perhaps thirty men, women, and children who lived at or in the orbit of St. Adelelmus was as loved as she.

  For a moment Thomas stood in that hall, with its welcoming fireplace and its oddly disproportionate staircase, both gestures toward a much grander dwelling, as if the masons laid the staircase first and the owner later decided to cut back. The house was dark and still with the window shutters closed tight, and the air was cool and slightly earthen, a fragrance that bespoke not ripeness, not rot, but a sort of drying out. This was the way of the garrigue, an arid land that gave up its moisture begrudgingly and at the end of the season took it back. To his left was a vast parlor, which the Belgians had left furnished in the most formal northern European manner, brocade and carved wood; Thomas wondered if that unhappy and hapless couple had ever gotten to the point of entertaining in this room. He wished it weren’t so, but the room reminded him of the Retreat, a place dressed for a party no one much wanted to attend. To his right, through an arched doorway under the staircase, was a similarly sized dining room with a fireplace big enough to roast a whole hog; just as formal, perhaps, but at least here Thomas could imagine some kind of fellowship, some joy. This was the main part of the house, these three large rooms in a line, but to the left of the archway was a tiny door, a sort of mouse hole, behind which was everything else—a warren of kitchens and pantries and sewing rooms and offices—and it was through this door that Señora Zabala had dragged Beal.

  Throughout the house were certain large pieces of furniture that seemed almost permanent fixtures, and in one of the offices behind the tiny door was a desk. During the times Thomas had been here as the sale was being completed, he had moved his work onto that desk. Through the room’s single small window he could look out over the expanse of drooping Aramon vines, and behind them, a hilltop of the more stalwart Carignan and the more interesting Grenache. At the other end of the house, with a window onto the terrace and fig arbor, was a room he had decided would be Beal’s, with a writing table and even an armchair if she wanted. Before they left Paris, he had told her about this room, and she wondered what in the world she was supposed to do in it. “Write,” he said, pointing at the notebooks, four of them she’d filled that winter.

  Yes, years later, after Beal had died and, at her long-standing request, he read her life’s work, her hundreds and hundreds of pages of journals. The earliest—the Paris months and the first few years at St. Adelelmus—were in English, and the rest in French, and as he read the story, its details came alive with extraordinary precision, a tone pinging on a tuning fork. She had captured every fragrance of that first fall, starting with the brown-sugar must of this moment of arrival. Perhaps her memories, her sensations so carefully noted, had now supplanted his own. He did not care. During the long winter after she died, Thomas rationed those pages, allowing himself just an entry or two each late afternoon, after the fire had been set for him in his study by his son Randal
l, or by the housekeepers, Nalara and Eztebe. He could just as well have rationed Beal’s writing sentence by sentence, so much memory was bound there, such long evenings of reflection occasioned. What is truth or lie, now or then, is simply not how one measures a life once it is done. There were episodes in those pages, recorded without varnish, that were painful, almost unbearable, but now at least he understood them with the sort of bruised but burnished wisdom we all hope for at the end. This was good news for the spirit, in place of the gathering storm all around him that winter when he read her journals. To the south, in Spain, the news had been getting worse and worse: by the following June, the fighting would begin. To the north, the Nazi machine was putting the finishing touches on a new Germany; to the east, the Italians were sending troops into Africa. But here, in the sanctuary of his beloved St. Adelelmus, Beal was reemerging to him like the child he (no more than a child himself) had married, and as he gazed head-on into his own past, for him the starting point was that arrival in Languedoc.

  That first day, Thomas found Beal upstairs in what was designated as their master suite. After the modest bedroom on the avenue Bosquet, a room that required nothing of them, this was the real thing, the sort of room parents occupy, patriarchs and matriarchs. Thomas wasn’t sure they were ready for it. Beal had gotten up there via a cramped back staircase that Thomas had not noticed before; he could hardly imagine Señora Zabala threading her girth up this spiral, but it did explain how she was able to loom into a room as if by magic. The girl Gabriella was there helping Beal unpack; she had black hair, full red cheeks, and a chin with a slight cleft: the face of a doll. She was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, not that many years younger than Beal. She and Beal were twins in some ways; perhaps they could be friends, girlfriends. When Thomas came in, Beal was at the window, looking out at the ravine and the brook bed, which was dry. From this window one could imagine St. Adelelmus as a castle, strategically placed at the high point, but in fact, on the other side, to the north, the Black Mountain range rose restlessly above them.

  “Well?” said Thomas. “What do you think?”

  “You said you weren’t going to keep asking me that question,” she said, but it was in good cheer. Still, what else could she say?

  When they left Paris, he had booked them onto the mail train from the Quai d’Orsay, with full amenities, and had arranged to spend a night in Bordeaux and a night also in Narbonne for his last bit of paperwork, as if this stepping down through a lesser rival of Paris and then through a small provincial capital might insert Beal by degrees into the Midi. She had never been in such a place, a place of crags and rocks, of deep ravines and high dry meadows, here thick stands of oak and chestnut, there blasted prairies relentless in their dips and heaves. The tiny train they took from Narbonne, skirting along the border between the plain and the foothills, passed into a new vista with almost every turn. What a place to put farms, no matter what the crop! Beal had lived her first sixteen years on the flat, low banks of the Chesapeake and then had traveled down to the sandy bitter end of Cape Charles to catch a ferry for her job in Hampton. That was it for her, that and the otherworldly Paris, her life atlas: what a strange mélange of place and landscape.

  It was on the bustling Place de la Comédie in Bordeaux that she asked him to stop questioning her at every point of interest. “Please, Thomas,” she said. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” She had been doing her best to act cheerful, but it was hard for Thomas to tell what this brave front was attempting to suppress; there was too much in the air between them for him to parse. Beal could feel it too, Thomas knew that perfectly well, and when she said this—a very minor complaint—it was as if a hole in the arid plaza opened in front of them and they fell in. Maybe they could not do this, any of it—their marriage, this move. Perhaps it was here, in the middle of this brutal expanse of stone, that they were left finally defenseless and exposed; perhaps, years later, Thomas and Beal would agree that here, at this very moment in Bordeaux, was where it had begun to fall apart. Yes, remarked Thomas, reading these pages years later: Beal had felt it too.

  He answered, “I guess I don’t know what I want you to say either. I’m trying to make this easy for you. Maybe I should just stop.”

  She tugged on his arm. “No. Don’t give up. You can’t.” She meant: you brought me here and to abandon me here is not an option.

  They continued their walk down to the river, where the lighters floating past were loaded with wine casks and mounds of grapes; les vendanges were coming, earlier here in Bordeaux than in Languedoc, where most of the grapes ripened in what Thomas had learned was the “last period.” Thomas knew all about such things, the earlies and the lates; he’d grown up where the weeks of the summer and early fall were divided not into months, but into varieties of peaches. But so what?

  “I’m trying,” she said. “I’m trying so hard,” and there, on the banks of the Garonne, she stopped in her tracks and burst into tears. She reached into her handbag for a handkerchief, but Thomas already had his out. Her shoulders heaved with such despair that Thomas forgot everything he was thinking, every angry or fearful thought, and drew her in. “What?” he said. “What have I done that hurts you so much?”

  “I’m trying too,” she repeated between gulps of air. Two men in bowlers were walking by when she said this, and they paused to express some sort of disapproval, though for exactly what Thomas couldn’t tell. Maybe they were simply scolding him for causing this hurt to a pretty girl.

  “I know you are. You’ve been trying so hard ever since we landed. You have been so brave. I could never have done what you have done. I know that.”

  “But you’re still so mad at me. You’ll never stop being mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” said Thomas.

  “I didn’t know what to do about that man. He made me feel alone, so apart from you. From the moment I met him on the boat, that’s the way he made me feel. That’s why I went to find him, to tell him that not for one second could he ever come between us. But he wasn’t there. I told you that. Nothing happened.”

  “I understand. We’ve put that all behind us. Haven’t we?”

  She seemed to not even hear him. “He tried to turn my whole life upside down. He said I was ignorant. He said I’d never understand myself unless I went to Africa. That I was full of white blood. As if I should hate my own body.”

  “Yes. I understand. You know I forgive everything that happened.”

  “You can’t just forgive me; you have to believe me.”

  “I do believe you,” he said, which might have been a lie, since he could not dispel all the suspicious thoughts that had been roiling his brain over the past few days, but he realized in that instant that he could in fact believe her even while these suspicions plagued him. It was a strange equation, but it seemed to work, because he wanted it to work. Doubts, shards of tales of infidelity, these all could exist deep in the mine of one’s life without really meaning anything in the light of day. Telling her that he believed her made him feel better, offered a sort of psychic truth going forward into their lives, a state of suspension, and so he said it again.

  She had composed herself, but they were still standing at the end of the plaza, overlooking the piers, the bustle of river traffic. It was a comforting sight to Thomas; his own wine, from St. Adelelmus, could end up here on the Garonne via the Canal du Midi.

  “I promise I won’t ask you again.”

  “Ask me what?” she said with some alarm.

  He realized that he could have meant many things, but he was saying that he wouldn’t keep probing her for what she was thinking, whether she liked a view, whether the omelet was too dry, whether she was happy or cold or hot. If she wanted to comment on the sights to come, that was fair, he was saying, but he wouldn’t keep chasing her. He explained this to her, and she smiled and accepted the arrangement, and so it was that now, here in their new bedroom in St. Adelelmus, he had broken his word.

  “Sorry,” he
said.

  She walked over to him and gave him a kiss, which seemed to both embarrass and please the girl Gabriella. “It’s so beautiful here,” Beal said to Thomas, answering his question at last, but she said it in French to include the girl, who, like the boys on the domaine—but not the other girls—had been going to school in the village, where the primary objective seemed to be the eradication of Occitan.

  “Oui, Madame,” said Gabriella, in her somewhat stiff schoolgirl French. “Nous sommes très heureux que vous soyez venus ici.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” said Thomas, back in English.

  “What might have happened to me? Attacked by boars and brigands?”

  “No. Nothing, I guess.”

  Thomas went back downstairs to await a visit from M. Murat, the régisseur, the stage manager for the entire enterprise; from what Thomas could tell from his brief experience, the actors in this drama were an expressive lot, but the drama itself seemed a work of improvisation. Last month he had hoped, expected, to find daybooks, accountings, records of the farm—some clues as to what worked and what did not, the sort of thing his father, his grandfathers, and all Masons back to the days of Lord Baltimore had done on the Retreat, but he found nothing. He asked M. Murat if he had any such records for him to peruse, but he responded with a Gallic shrug and a pfft, all of which led Thomas to understand that in the commonly held view, nothing that had happened in the previous two thousand years of wine making in Languedoc held any real relevance for the year now upon us. History offered a certain context, an indispensable referent, but no firm guideposts; science, with its causes and effects, its inductions, could only lead one astray, could only obscure the faint signals, the pulse given off by the terroir, by the fruit, by the year at hand, by subtle tremors indicating that the pests and blights were about to attack, or not to attack.