At some point in all this, Beal realized that her life had changed in ways that she could not have imagined permitting just one year ago, before they landed in Le Havre, an anniversary that was approaching. This idleness. That young reporter back in Paris had asked her if she would find enough to occupy herself in the Midi, but what he had been asking was how she would replace the Louvre, the theater, the Bon Marché. That wasn’t the problem—wasn’t a change in her life that she noticed or cared much about at this point. It was this role, the mistress of St. Adelelmus. When had she ever supposed she would wake up in bed, the sun well up, husband gone, and have to ask herself what she might do that day. In her girlhood fantasies of joy and comfort there had been none of this, this flitting from relatively meaningless activity to trivial task. Yes, she had never seen Thomas so engaged, and she thanked God for that, as if it removed any wrong she had done him. But she could not help envying him. She could not help feeling supplanted.
So one evening—it truly was time, after all—as they were preparing for bed, Beal dropped off her underclothes and stood naked in front of Thomas. For the past month she had been careful not to do this, had been arranging her clothing to cover her stomach, had been joining him in bed in a long nightgown. “Thomas,” she said. His eyes were closed on his pillow. “Look at me.”
He rolled over. “You are beautiful,” he said.
“You see what is happening?” She turned sideways to give him the sharpest profile. “This isn’t me getting fat.” She didn’t know why she was doing this, why this had to be so abstruse. It was almost as if it were a test for Thomas, but it wasn’t. It was a desire to intrude in all this in the most physical way possible.
Thomas did as he was commanded, looked at her, following the bow of her belly down to the dark tuft of her pubic hair. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Is that all? Not blessed too?”
He got out of bed and came to her. “When?” he said.
“In March, I think.”
She could sense him counting off months, though she assumed that like her, his real understanding of gestation was a little imprecise. He stood back, gazed down her front, ran his hands down her sides, and held her in front of him by her hips. “You’ve been keeping this from me. You’ve known since Paris.” This was just him counting the days; there was no displeasure in his voice.
“I had to be sure I would not lose it. And you were busy.”
He brought her back into him, hugged her tight. Beal was satisfied by this; there was no need for him to say much more.
“Does anyone know? Have you written to Abel and Una?”
She said she had not yet written her parents, but she told him about Léonie guessing, almost a month earlier. “I guess every woman in St. Adelelmus has figured it out. Gabriella and la Señora. Mme Murat was nicer to me the last time I saw her.”
“A child,” he said. “A little dark child. He’ll look right at home here in the Midi.”
Beal realized that she’d always believed that their child would be somewhere between her skin color and his, but she didn’t want Thomas to assume it. “Hard to say what it will look like. You know those Hardys. Stephen could almost pass as white, and Luke and Tillie look like lumps of coal. No one would think they’re full brothers and sister, but they are. Zemirah would take a cane to anyone who suggested there had been some funny business in there.”
“Well, I don’t care.”
“And besides, it could be a girl.”
“Fine. Another beauty in the family.” She’d thought he might want to celebrate this moment by making love, but she was glad that he, like her, seemed to assume that her body was now on to other things. In fact, since they got to St. Adelelmus, they had not been making love with the desperate ardor of their last weeks in Paris. She finished getting dressed for bed and joined him under the down duvet. He blew out the lamp, and the moonlight took over the room. The moon followed you wherever you went, found you at night—the same moon, but still, so much had changed in its light. Another step along the way taken, she thought, another step in a life, in two—or three—lives. How odd, she thought; how ordinary it all seemed. She wished it weren’t so, but she was a little disappointed by Thomas’s reaction to her announcement. She didn’t know what more she wanted, only that she wanted more. How odd that seemed! To be in this position, where she had more of absolutely everything than she could ever have imagined—more love, more possessions, more power, and more freedom to make choices—where everywhere she went, everywhere she looked simply exploded with plenitude. The next morning she wrote, I now have so much, and Mama and Daddy, all they have, all they have gotten from their life and love, could go into a single chest of drawers. Yet they are so content with their ordinary happiness.
* * *
When Thomas finished reading Beal’s journals that spring of 1937, the Civil War in Spain had started. Thomas was sixty-six years old, and still healthy—he lived for another fifteen years—but Beal’s death had taken the urgency out of everything he used to do, and their sons were now firmly in charge of St. Adelelmus and its many other properties. As he passed the hours in his study, he found that he was also writing a sort of memoir, or a story combining his own memories and Beal’s. He had other bits to go on: a collection of prayers from Mother Lucy, a set of reminiscences by Arthur Kravitz. More than enough to conjure some multifaceted version of what had happened to them. His life. Her life. He called what he was writing “Thomas and Beal in the Midi,” and on the first page he wrote the title and then added “by Thomas Bayly and Beal Terrell Bayly,” as if anyone would ever read it—and, if so, would ever care who wrote it.
11
Beal was entering the last month of her pregnancy when Arthur Kravitz arrived. Spending time in the South of France had never been his plan. For one thing, he wasn’t a landscape painter, was bored by all the plein air debates of the past two decades. He was a city boy and an urban man, and besides, this whole South of France thing stank of privilege. Gee, why not just keep going to Venice and spend the winter doing nothing but drinking and going to masked balls? Well, Arthur didn’t have the money for that; in fact, he was now coming to the end of his savings, and if this kept up, he wouldn’t even have the money to sail back to Newark. He’d gotten so used to spending next to nothing that he forgot that sooner or later, next to nothing would mean nothing at all. Which was the scariest thought? he wondered. Going back to Newark or not having enough money to do so. He’d stopped his lessons at the Académie, and it had been months since anyone asked about his portrait of Beal. If it weren’t for the reflected glory of Stanley’s recent success in the Salon—he still considered Stanley’s Pittsburgh, Winter Morning shallow and sentimental, but he was sincerely pleased for him—no one at the cafés would have a clue who he was, this dark, heavy Jewish figure at the corner table while the fresh-faced Boston Brahmins and pretty boys and girls with rich daddies occupied the center. Nothing new in all that. Impressionism was all played out. As for the Americans, it was still all about Sargent, who’d left Paris almost ten years earlier, and Cassatt, who was now painting nothing but fat little girls getting their toes dried by nursemaids. As for the French, Arthur still admired Caillebotte—a painter who understood cities, who could spend hours at a window, gazing at the delicious tangle of streets below—but from what he gathered, Caillebotte was now a full-time gardener who spent most of his leisure time sailing on the Seine. If all this kept up, Arthur figured he might as well give up painting altogether and buy a camera; each time he looked at one of Marville’s old prints, it was as if a world had been brought into his studio. Monet’s Haystacks: If Arthur never saw the color yellow ever again, it would be too soon.
So there didn’t seem to be much arguing against accepting Thomas’s offer to spend the winter in the South, and after a letter came, confirming that yes indeed, there did seem to be a stone dwelling that might suit, he began to think it could work. But inaction or lassitude or simple fear kept him
staying on in Paris through the fall. More probably it was that leaving Paris, this grand statement of his ambition—the boy from Newark, etc.—signaled defeat, but after Christmas he started packing up his things in earnest and crated his canvases. When he laid Beal into her nest of excelsior, he stopped and stared at the portrait in a way he had not done for months. He was struck, in his despair, with how bad it was but how true it was: this was a cul-de-sac from which no work of art, and perhaps no artist, could ever emerge. He was also struck by how much he missed Beal. She brought him out, that’s what she did, as if in talking to her, he was getting a second chance to be a better, and wiser, person. He didn’t pretend that seeing her again did not have a lot to do with his decision, and this portrait told him why. Or, for an instant, he thought that her portrait could tell him why. This was just a flash, a dart of light from the surface of the work that caught a crystal in his soul, and by the time he tried to investigate what he had learned, the light had dimmed. Still, it was as if Beal had come to him in that second, and now—as he completed the task, covering the front of the canvas with this terrible wood wool and banging home the top of the crate—it felt as if he were packaging a living thing, not so much a person but a little bit of news from the spirit of that person. Maybe that’s what a good painting is, he thought. Damned if he knew what a good painting was. He hadn’t planned to bring it with him—all this crating of canvases was simply about storing them safely in Stanley’s studio—but at that moment he decided to bring it along, although it would cost a fortune to have it shipped with the rest of his supplies.
As instructed, he had taken the train from Narbonne to Azay-sur-Cesse, and he dreamed but dared not hope for one second that Beal herself would meet him. He disembarked onto a pleasant square in front of the town hall, and in the center there were wagons and carts twisted in friendly knots. She was standing there in a carriage, a Winged Victory with arms, which she was waving madly. Arthur had never seen her look so beautiful, that’s what he told himself, though from his distance he couldn’t see her very clearly; he’d gotten a letter from Thomas telling him that Beal was pregnant, which might have been part of it.
By the time he worked himself through the animals and the vehicles, she had climbed down and was standing alongside the carriage, a simple open four-wheeler, a country vehicle. The horse was enormous and dumb-looking, a true beast of burden. As Arthur got closer, he was surprised to see that the driver was a girl, a teenager. When finally he stood in front of Beal, he was, as usual, a little discomfited by how much taller she was. And she was very pregnant. She held out her hand to him, and he took it. “Arthur,” she said. “How lovely.”
He wouldn’t have expected that word, lovely; he remembered her the first day he saw her, spied on her actually, and she was not awkward—never awkward—but completely without affect, socially invisible. That person wouldn’t have said “lovely,” would have said “right fine,” maybe, or wouldn’t have felt the social impulse to characterize the moment at all. “Yeah,” said Arthur, taking her hand and holding on to it for a second. She looked a little disappointed, so he added, “Long trip.”
“Not happier than that to see me?” There was no coquettish little smile connected to this; it suddenly seemed possible to Arthur that the word lovely had been a joke, an acknowledgment of their special bond on the fringes. This time he did look her in the eyes, and he did not see unhappiness or discontent—which would have been the last thing he wanted—but he did see need, maybe even some kind of chaste desire. He saw in her eyes what he hoped was not so evident in his.
“Oh … Beal—” He still found it hard to call her Beal, a given name that had always seemed too intimate, a name only family should use. “You have no idea how much I have looked forward to this day. To seeing you. You don’t want to know how much, believe me.”
At that she smiled. She turned to introduce him to the girl and to ask about his luggage. He held up his carpetbag and shrugged.
The day was fine despite the steady dry wind—cold, but not piercing, as it was in Paris. On the train from Narbonne, when they had left the city limits they were on a flat plain, but soon he could see mountains to the north, and as they wound their slow way into this arid high terrain, he realized that he had been picturing this countryside as if it were the farmland of New Jersey, which could not have been more wrong. They had passed mountainous crags that turned Arthur’s hands white with terror and then, at the next bend, a fragrant meadow dotted with winter blossoms. But now, in this open wagon with Beal and the girl, the land seemed milder, as if one could bail out before the whole equipage went over the edge; he was grateful that the old nag—named Philippe, apparently—was a plodder.
Beal wanted to hear every snippet of news from Paris, and he did his best, although he couldn’t tell her much about the new clothes for fall. He told her he had been to visit the Richards with Stanley and he understood that Madame Bernault had taken a fall.
“Yes, we heard. She’s been moved to the first floor, which she doesn’t like. I hope it isn’t too much of a shock for her.”
“Pretty tough old battle-ax, no?”
Beal wagged her head. “Not tough, I think. Maybe stout.” Sure, sure, thought Arthur; either way, the nun still didn’t approve of him. “Tell me about Stanley,” Beal said, and he did, telling her that his notices and entrées were piling up.
“Here’s the thing about Stanley,” said Arthur. “He’s earnest, but not stupid. There’s always a little subtext, a kind of anger going on in his work. It took me quite a while to figure that out, to see it. Stanley would probably have done a better portrait of you than I did.”
Beal waited for him to continue, and he wondered whether she would pick up on this reference to the portrait. When he added nothing, she said, “Arthur, anger is not something you lack.”
“Yes. But my anger is wholesale. Stanley’s is retail. It makes it more interesting because it is selective. He’s getting back at all the bullies.”
Beal took this in. Arthur could see the thoughts churning, could almost imagine her applying this simple test to herself. The truth was, he understood that defending, even liking Stanley Dean was a sign that he himself had softened. But Beal was not thinking so abstractly. “Yes,” she said. “He must have been teased.”
Arthur hesitated for a moment. “Well, he’s a little awkward, and he’s got his secrets. Me? I’m just what you see. No subtext.”
“Oh, Arthur. Enough of that. Your baggage arrived. And a canvas in a crate, I guess. Is it me?”
“Yes. I’m not sure why I brought it. Maybe I’ll work on it a little. I still don’t want you to see it.”
She jabbed her shoulder into his, a classic girlish Beal gesture, something he loved, something no other girl or woman he had ever known would do to him. Arthur had never invited warmth, only heat or room temperature. There were other mannerisms he loved, all of which seemed to be little windows into her soul. She held her hand in front of her mouth sometimes as a sort of whisper, which made her completely inaudible. She shook her feet restlessly when she was bored, which had been a problem while she sat for her portrait. In some ways, the times Arthur loved best were when she was completely at ease with Thomas, and with him and their friends, and she let her English slide into the cadences and grammar of the farm and her sentences became long and musical. How funny she could be, but then, when it was over, when she snapped back into the present, there was always a momentary look of sorrow, of loss and forgetting. Arthur had lost and forgotten nothing about his childhood that he wasn’t eager, in fact, to lose, so he envied her grief.
When they got to St. Adelelmus, Thomas was standing on the stoop. At least, from a distance, Arthur assumed it was Thomas, if he was this large, imposing, brown-skinned figure dressed in clothes that could only be called peasant wear—a loose, big-sleeved, all but homespun shirt, a pair of trousers gathered at the waist with a brown sash or something. A floppy hat of some sort, a beret, Arthur had heard it called.
Thomas looked like an extra in the theater, in Carmen perhaps. When Arthur stood next to him, he seemed taller than ever. Perhaps, thought Arthur, I’m shrinking. Thomas gave him a hearty handshake, none of this “lovely to see you,” but the heartiness was in every way a comparable act. His friend Thomas, once seeming so uncertain, so retiring, had landed with a firm thump and had settled in for the duration. This whole apparition took Arthur’s words away. “Phew,” he said. “Gosh.”
Thomas took no notice. “We’re glad you have come at last. We hope it will be good for you. We’ve prepared a studio. It used to be a goat shed. You’ll have a fine view of the Black Mountain.”
“The goats must have appreciated the view,” said Arthur. In fact, once he got settled in this little building, he draped a cloth over the window with the viewiest of the views; the mountains seemed as if they were trying to bury him, or eat him. The living quarters that had been prepared for him made his old apartment in Paris seem like an outhouse; as far as Arthur could tell, these must have been the best-cared-for goats of all time. It was a palace for goats, with its arching loft above, its expanse of light from the west and the south, its almost overpowering stove, and, of all unexpected things, a WC. Surely not for the goats. He wondered where the goats were living now.
He ate dinner with Thomas and Beal in their house—in, excuse me, la bastide. Arthur didn’t really know what he was doing here, but it had begun to feel a bit like fate, that his choices and his chances had become intertwined with Thomas and Beal’s. Perhaps more than anyone else in the world, he knew that their future, just like his, was anything but fixed. So here he was, sitting at the table in a small room Thomas described as “the chapel.” Arthur had encountered la Señora earlier in the afternoon—she had come over to his studio to help him light the fire—and here, finally, after all these cold concierges, judgmental nuns, disapproving art matrons, and desperate grisettes, he had found a Frenchwoman he could relate to. Or a Spaniard. He couldn’t tell. He could discern that her speech was in a tongue all her own, but what she said was as clear to him as if she were speaking English. She reminded him of home, those Middle European mothers with uncertain English he’d fled from so long ago. By the time he came up to dinner, cleaned, scented, and monstrously hungry, most of his resistance was gone.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 27