Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “You have met the Señora,” said Thomas.

  “Oh yes. She’s already agreed to take over my life. We discussed my ethnicity. I think the word she used was judua, but I’d spot it in any language.”

  “That must be Basque,” said Beal. “Most people here don’t like Basques.” She had just come in with the soup.

  Arthur had eaten almost nothing on the entire train trip down, and he was light-headed.

  “Perhaps that’s why she liked me. Even lower in rank.”

  Arthur took a bowl of soup and dived in. Delicious. Thomas and Beal also took up their spoons, and Arthur slurped in the silence. He had not expected to be dining with them, wasn’t prepared to be a guest like this. He had eaten with Thomas and Beal in the avenue Bosquet only once, and Stanley had been there to carry the conversation, not that Stanley was much of a blabber. But now there was no one but him.

  “So,” he said. “This is quite a place.”

  “We’re just beginning to get to know our way around,” said Thomas. “I’ve been pretty much following along blindly.”

  “Is it going to work? This wine idea?”

  “Well, you can always make wine. All you’re doing is harnessing a little part of nature, the part where things rot and decay. The question is, can you make good wine?”

  Arthur was pleased that Thomas—only Thomas would have remembered such a thing about him—had made sure to serve him beer with dinner. He raised his glass to say that either way, he knew what he liked to drink. “You don’t make it sound very tasty.”

  “Thomas must work on that,” said Beal.

  Arthur turned to her, lovely in the dim light of this February evening, in this stone fortress on top of these summits and precipices. It felt medieval; she seemed like a character out of a fairy tale. He didn’t know whether to feel protected or entombed; maybe he had come here to bury or burn his dreams. Maybe Thomas, with all this new provincial gear, was holding aside the door to Hell. But the soup—the soup was pretty good.

  “He looks the part, anyway,” said Arthur.

  Thomas laughed. “You’ll be wearing clothes like this before you know it.”

  * * *

  Beal’s first son, named Randall after her dead brother, was born in March. She had gotten enormous, she thought; she was too big, or too top-heavy, to climb the spiral stairs safely. A few weeks before she gave birth, Thomas looked at her and said, as some sort of expression of sympathy, “I’m glad this is happening to you and not to me.” Her mother once told her that she had been a little runt, a tiny little thing that we wasn’t sure would last out the night. When she was growing up, Beal liked that—that she had fought back, prevailed, that she had begun life “in peril.” If the size of her pregnant belly meant anything, this baby was going to start healthy. The Señora was pleased, and even Léonie said it was a good sign, but she did add that she hoped the doctor could be there for the birth, if that was practical, if there was time. Beal wasn’t so sure about that: le médecin, Professor Cottard, was a pompous little man who was always making jokes and then immediately pretending he hadn’t meant to be funny. Of course, his jokes never were funny. He exhausted her. When he placed his handkerchief on her stomach before leaning over to listen to the baby’s heartbeat, he said, “Hello, my little monsieur,” but then he shushed Beal when she forced a slight laugh. Beal didn’t want him anywhere near her when she was doing something as important, as private, as giving birth.

  Beal knew her baby’s skin tone would be whatever the baby wanted it to be. She was not that dark—brown, she had always thought of herself—but she hoped for just a tiny shade lighter than she was, fawn, like her brother had been. She hoped this not because she thought there was anything wrong with her own color, but because, if it was a boy, she and Thomas had agreed he would be named Randall. And she knew that Thomas also hoped their baby would be a mix of them, his white skin and her black skin; she understood that fathers wanted to see a little of themselves from the very beginning, just to be sure that this person who came out of the woman’s body was a miracle they shared. That’s the way it seemed to her, for of course, this baby was something they had shared. Thomas’s body inside her body, somehow, even if that thought struck her as kind of monstrous.

  But if the baby was blacker than she? Well, that didn’t have to mean anything; her own father was very dark, mahogany—that’s all it would mean. Looks like his granddaddy. She told herself that, over and over: That’s all it would mean. That’s all it would mean. But she could not keep that other thought away. She could keep the memory of a certain June afternoon away, could keep the name away, but she could not keep the thought away. And what was this thought? That if her baby was black, if despite this huge pregnancy he was born long and scrawny, by age twelve he would be taller than even Thomas, and with adolescence his cheekbones would become sharper and his cheeks hollower, and instead of Thomas’s broad back he would remain narrow, and by eighteen this fine young man would look like a father no one had even imagined. No one but Thomas, that is. In the midst of all this, the baby was blameless; her baby would deserve nothing but love, protection. But would even her own love come with a question always attached to it? Could she ever be certain it would not?

  As hard as she tried, she could not make any of this go away. This was real loneliness, having life-altering thoughts you can share with no one, ever. Ever, ever. But it did work itself into her journals, in a code that would not be difficult to crack. Each time the baby kicked, these thoughts came; in her journal she called these thoughts “doubts.” Each time the Señora told her she must lie down, get off her feet, these thoughts arrived. How she envied Léonie, with little chubby Gustav an almost comical version, at four months, of his rather homely father. How she envied every pregnant woman, new mother, even new grandmother she saw at the market: You don’t know nothin’, she would think, dropping back into the safety of Tuckertown where, in truth, at the three shacks at the far end, parentage could be a little iffy, dropping further back into slave times, when being the father, or not, got nobody nothin’ a t’all.

  So it was that in these last few weeks, when, Beal supposed, women looked forward with anxiety about the delivery but undiluted joy about the child, she even went so far as to imagine that if she died in childbirth, no matter what the result was, she wouldn’t have to know it. In the code: the “event,” the “outcome,” the “release.” She wrote her parents the first truly candid—sort of—letter she’d been able to write that revealed anything at all about this new life she had been living, and Una, her mother, understood that there was trouble but missed what was really on her mind. She wrote back the sort of motherly reassurances Beal needed, and they helped. Una wrote that there was no reason to fear a child would have “anything wrong”; there’d been no such thing as far back in the family as Una could recall. They knew a lot about her family, which had been free since the middle of the last century, but about Abel’s, beyond Abel’s father, not very much. She wrote “barrow or gilt,” who would care which, just as long as the child was healthy. She wrote that all her deliveries had been quick, just a few hours, and that this was true also for Beal’s sister Ruth. “Don’t know why you’re being so morbid about it,” Una concluded. Morbid. Her mother had about four years of schooling but used a word Beal had to look up in her dictionary.

  Her labor started in the late afternoon, and though Thomas immediately sent for the doctor, the Señora had already arranged for the local midwife, who arrived with Gabriella not an hour after Beal’s water broke and pronounced everything tout normal. And then the next thing Beal knew, or that she remembered, was Thomas at her side telling her it was a boy and that he looked just like her.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s what the midwife said. Maybe she says that to everyone.”

  “I want to see him,” said Beal. “I want to see him now.”

  “They’re bathing him. The professor has arrived, and he is checking him
over.”

  “Oh, the professor…”

  “Shush,” said Thomas. “He’s a boy and his name is Randall and that’s all that matters.”

  Even flat on her back, ravaged by the most climactic physical event she’d ever had or ever would experience—there would be three more to come—she looked deep into Thomas’s eyes, almost wondering if he was signaling something, some acceptance, some forgiveness. But when Randall was brought to her, when the midwife laid his naked body on her bare breast, the baby seemed almost to disappear, so perfectly was his silken flesh matched to hers.

  “See,” said Thomas happily. “He’s all you.”

  “Oh,” she said. Darker, lighter; she’d never imagined that the baby would be right in the middle, just like herself, would announce no clues to anyone. That a baby was a person not made up of the bodily parts of his parents, but assembled out of his own image; that from the moment his head appeared between her legs, he was born with this fierce knowledge that he would be what he would be. He was no longer a problem, but a blessing. She almost laughed, a sort of drunken relief, like a secret kept.

  “Randall Terrell Bayly,” announced Thomas.

  “Yes,” she said, looking down at the little creature curled up on her chest, and the truth was, he looked like Randall, her brother, his eyes and nose.

  “Oh, Thomas,” she said, taking the tiny hand. “Do you love him? Do you love your brown son?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just like I love my wife.” He kissed her. “Get some rest. The Señora seems rather eager to take him off your hands.”

  “Really?” said Beal. They had already discussed what Gabriella had said: that her mother was possessive about babies; she seemed to think that newborns came into this world with messages from those who had died, messages that only certain people could understand. Gabriella had said not to worry, but it hadn’t been easy for her to tell this to Beal, and she had done it for a reason.

  Thomas apparently understood it all. “No. It’s good. Gabriella is there. You sleep.”

  By the end of the week Beal had taken Randall for a tour of St. Adelelmus, to show him to the families who worked there. The Señora came along to officiate. The women cooed, the men were mostly polite, the children made fun of his color—“un merle,” they called him before being shushed, which Thomas later translated as “blackbird.” Beal didn’t mind; the children weren’t being mean, and for the rest of her life she thought of Randall as her “blackbird son,” in part because the other three children were lighter in tone. The cooper, M. Esquivel, had carved Randall a little horse on wheels with a pull string, the weaver had made him a blanket, and the blacksmith made him a tin whistle. Beal paid a special, more formal call on Mme Murat and was received graciously but without warmth. Mme Murat gave her items for the baby’s layette that she had bought in Narbonne, which was quite unexpected, but she remarked that she had expected the baby to be lighter skinned; Beal only smiled. And finally, Léonie came over with her little pale-skinned Gustav, and when they placed these two boys side by side and stood back to admire them, Beal burst into tears.

  “Are you all right?” said Léonie, her hand on Beal’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” said Beal. “I don’t know what that was about.” But actually, she did: it was Thomas and her brother she saw in front of her, the two boys of the Retreat, in that period when almost all the children on the farm were girls. Surely at some point those two infants had been placed side by side just like this, and they had grown into best friends, brothers, until they quarreled over Thomas and Beal’s love for each other. On the day Randall returned from his first year at Howard University, he was murdered, his body left in a pile of straw in the mule barn. And the body she saw in the straw at this moment was not her brother’s, but her son’s. All this was what Beal saw, but she couldn’t go into it now.

  Léonie looked worried. “You be careful,” she said. “You tell me if you start to feel too sad.”

  Yes, thought Beal, there was a little something of sadness here, but nothing to worry about. Still, after all this, what next? She was twenty-one years old, a mother. Was it all over? Much as she admired Léonie—would, in years to come, love her and distrust her in equal measure, like a sister—Beal wondered whether she was quite ready to live the way Léonie did. Spring had started, and Thomas had told her that the vines were “bleeding,” which seemed to be what they were supposed to do, and now, as she cast her eyes over the hectares of grapes that surrounded them, she could see that the buds had started to break and tiny shoots of green were beginning to show. Which promise of new life would mean more to him, his grapes or his son? A silly question, but she knew that in the weeks and years to come, the grapes would get more of his attention, if far less of his love. The chestnuts, les marronniers, would soon blossom, a show of red and white that everyone much admired, but, well, it wouldn’t be April in Paris. The cherry blossoms, the forsythia and lilacs, the little borders of primrose and cowslip—the magic of those colors and fragrances had taken over Beal’s senses just a year ago. The Parisians worshipped spring as a sort of godly visitation, but here, as on the Retreat, spring was little more than the signal to start fretting: late frosts, early droughts. The almighty tree and vine. Except for the odd flash of memory, a sudden tableau across her eyes, she hadn’t thought about Paris at all since they’d come to rest here. Even having Arthur here, in every way the conscience of her months in Paris, she had thought of any life outside St. Adelelmus as something held in reserve. She’d been busy, after all, and fixed on this great ordeal and the change to come. Now that it had arrived, she wondered how to fill the space.

  * * *

  A few weeks after the birth, in early April, she went to visit Arthur in his studio, the first time she had done so since he’d gotten settled. He ate with them two or three evenings a week; he rarely showed a smudge of paint or smelled of turpentine, but they had all gotten used to him sketching in pencil and pastel throughout the domaine. For the past few weeks he had been talking to Thomas about photography and had just spent what was for him a good bit of money on a new Kodak folding camera.

  Whatever the confused jumble of thoughts in Beal’s head these days, she shuddered to recall those weeks, those hours and hours she spent sitting for the portrait in Arthur’s studio in Paris. Of all the places she had visited there, including—she could admit this to herself—that apartment in Les Halles, Arthur’s studio was the dingiest, smelliest, most vile, yet it had been a kind of refuge for her. Perhaps at the time she should have reflected more on that odd truth. Now, standing before the handsome ancient doorway of this stone house, she felt relieved that he was out of the place that in the end had seemed so miserable for him.

  “Ah,” he said, opening the door to her knock. “The new mother.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” he said, opening the door all the way.

  She walked in, observed that the portrait was still in its crate, but then noticed a number of his works on paper pinned to the walls. She recognized several of the subjects; from the look of it, he had concentrated on M. Esquivel, the cooper, and on the activity in the line of shops down by the brook bed. “May I look?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “They’re nice.” They were mostly scenes of people at work, bodies twisted in the slightly awkward postures of their trades—the moment when the blacksmith cocks his hammer above his head and his shoulder looks ready to dislocate; the women sewing, their whole bodies scrunched into a ball over their hands. He had spent time with the shepherds before they departed to the high meadows, and he drew them precariously balanced on their stilts. But even if he made them appear vaguely deformed, anyone could tell that the artist admired these people, the work they did, the lives they were living.

  “I’ve had a good time with them,” he answered when Beal remarked on this. “They remind me that I like being around people who make things and fix stuff. Maybe that’s what I should have done with
my life.”

  “It already is,” said Beal, surprising herself with this kind of assertiveness. “You already work with your hands. You make pictures.”

  He nodded a thanks. “It’s almost as if in recording this, my drawings do something useful, if you can imagine that.”

  She said she could easily imagine it, even if the subjects might not be able to.

  “Well, they like them, anyway.”

  She heard this with slightly hurt feelings and glanced at the crate. “You let them see their portraits, but not me.”

  “Right,” he said. He moved some supplies off a chair and beckoned her to sit. “Nice of you to visit. How are you and young Randall getting on?”

  “Oh, we’re fine. The Señora isn’t quite as frantic about him as she was.”

  “And Thomas?”

  “He’s a wonderful papa. Not that he says it in this way, but I think he is determined to be everything for Randall that his parents weren’t for him. If you understand,” she said. The truth was, since the last days of her pregnancy, her thinking and her speech seemed to have gotten a little garbled.