Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “A package deal? That’s what this is?”

  “Beal, I’m sorry I keep saying the wrong thing. The wrong words, I guess. But I meant what I said: an arrangement to sell directly in our own bottles to a store in America. I had never thought of such a thing. An extraordinary idea. That’s all I meant.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “But yes,” he said, answering the questions in the air. “I didn’t know about his family’s store.” From the moment he had first laid eyes on Lawrence Goodrum, he knew the man was taking them into new territory. There was no reason not to come out and say it. “I didn’t know that Negroes, well…” He paused, looked at her in an appeal for agreement. “That life for Negroes in Boston could be like that. You understand.”

  “No, Thomas. I don’t understand.” She was at her mirror, and her reflection glared at him. “There were very distinguished colored families in Hampton. Professors at the institute. Attorneys. You think we’re all just country people, and we’re not.”

  They finished dressing in the echo of this accusation, which Thomas wasn’t quite sure he deserved, at least entirely. They found their guest waiting in the parlor. This was the first time they had sat with anyone in this room, the first time they’d had a guest of any kind, if one did not count Arthur or the more informal hospitalities with the Milhauds. It was a fine, rose-colored evening, and this room, cold and unwelcoming in winter, was at its best with the windows and doors thrown open; they heard the magpies outside, noisily gathering for their evening roost. Gabriella brought Randall in to be shown, and Mr. Goodrum—“Please,” he said to Beal, “Lawrence”—took him readily into his arms.

  “Do you have children?” she asked.

  “Oh no. Nieces and nephews. I’m not married. I still travel too much to begin a family.”

  She asked him to tell them about Boston, and at first he demurred that Thomas had made it clear they had no connection to the city.

  Thomas smiled. “I didn’t mean to sound uninterested,” he said.

  Lawrence went on at some length, and Beal prompted him for more when he seemed to flag. His family had lived in the West End of the city, “Behind Beacon Hill,” he said, but had just three years ago moved to the South End, a fashionable neighborhood of handsome brick row houses, intimate leafy squares, and broad avenues. His father had been able to buy a fine, mostly furnished building for a surprisingly good price. Lawrence allowed that some people had built houses on the newly filled land in neighboring Back Bay, but that the South End, in its classic French high style, would surely endure as the premier district.

  At the end of this they moved to the dining room. As soon as they were settled, Thomas kept his distance while Beal prompted Lawrence anew. “Your family must be very busy,” she said.

  With the business, of course. His brother and his sister’s husband were both part of it. But there was time for more enlightened pursuits. The Goodrum family had recently joined Trinity Church, which was between the South End and Back Bay, in Copley Square. The building was a marvel; the best artists in America had contributed murals, stained-glass windows, pieces of sculpture. “It isn’t Chartres,” he said, “but it is without question the most beautiful church in America. And as perhaps you know, Bishop Brooks was rector there for many years.”

  “Catholic?” Thomas asked, to be polite, because it all sounded rather Catholic to him. His mother had always implied that everyone in Massachusetts was Irish, and therefore Catholic: Irish Catholic, as opposed to Roman Catholic, by which she meant English Catholic.

  “Oh, Lord no. Phillips Brooks was the greatest Episcopalian preacher, indeed the greatest preacher of any denomination, in America. We are Episcopalians. As I assume you are.”

  Thomas glanced at Beal. What would she have him say? He could imagine being faulted for any way he played this, and he waited for her to respond.

  “We are Catholic,” she said. “At least Thomas’s family is. Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore helped us get married, and we have been helped every step of our way by the Catholic Church. Perhaps you have heard of Cardinal Gibbons?”

  Lawrence coughed into his napkin. He was sorry to say that he had not heard of this Gibbons, but Thomas was quick to throw him a line. “We are not regular worshippers,” he said. “This dismays our housekeepers, who are Basques and rather strict Jansenists.”

  “Jansenists?”

  “Oh,” said Beal. “Just a lot of Catholic stuff. I was raised AME, if anything. We had a building, but we were burned out of it. Then we had services in our neighbor’s house, a woman who saw visions and spoke in tongues.”

  “Ah,” said Lawrence. “I of course meant no offense.”

  * * *

  Beal took no offense, and she knew that Thomas would not either. What did either of them care about Catholics? Or Episcopalians. Or bishops. But she felt sorry for Lawrence Goodrum that this bit about the church had worked out badly; he was laying down his cards here, and he thought he needed every one of them to count. From the moment she laid eyes on him, she understood him to the core—the way, quite deliberately, he was overbuilding his story. She had never seen this version of the game, this urban, high-society version, but it was all the same to her. She knew all this talk of culture was meant to impress Thomas, and she knew it was having the opposite effect, but surprisingly, she didn’t mind that either. Thomas was being irritating. She wanted him out of the picture tonight: Lawrence Goodrum was hers; he’d come to St. Adelelmus, she believed, to meet her. He was handsome, Beal thought; a true American with his light skin and ready smile. Everything Diallo Touré would despise. She knew that their guest would never have bothered to go on like this just for her benefit; he’d say, Do I really have to play like this with you? Which was a game within a game that she was enjoying playing with him.

  But as dinner went on, with its talk of travel and Paris—where Lawrence’s visits to Europe all started and ended—and more about Boston, a yearning Beal thought she’d outlived returned with an empty thud in her gut; that place in her body where Paris had so comfortably lodged had not gone away. She felt like a landlocked boy hearing tales from a sailor returned from afar; she felt like an exile, not from America, but from all higher things. She felt a desire that was not unlike homesickness, but without the pain. What was roiling in her as Lawrence went on was an ache but also a hunger; it felt good even if the desire was unconsummated. This was the backdrop for romance—city squares and promenades, music from the public bandstand and nights at the opera, images of closed carriages clattering on the way to some private affair, to some intimacy. She had this once, and it had slipped from her grasp. As if trying to overwhelm the pangs, she kept asking him questions, and each answer came like a message sent to a place deep in her soul, and each answer simply inspired more need. It seemed hardly possible that his America was an America that anyone, anyone at all, could actually aspire to, but here was this man as proof. Thomas was wrong—see, see?—but then, after quite a few minutes of this, the wave of her craving crested. She regained control a bit and quickly recognized that she had been the one overplaying, that her infatuation was showing to Thomas, so she tried to withdraw, pretend that it was simply dinnertime talk, absent chatter. Is that a fact? Just a short walk from Symphony Hall. Sounds right nice. “In Paris we lived on the avenue Bosquet,” she said, trying to sound a little bored.

  “Le Faubourg,” said Lawrence. “How nice.”

  “There were two little girls in our building whom Beal quite loved,” said Thomas.

  Why was Thomas talking about them? she wondered. “So you have lived your whole life in the city?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Lawrence said, except for his years at college, a small college in Maine called Bowdoin.

  “Maine,” said Beal. “It sounds like the North Pole to me.”

  “Well then, you and Thomas should come for a visit. You might say New England looks not unlike Languedoc, with more trees.”

  After dinner they took a tour of St
. Adelelmus. It was a beautiful evening, the rocks still warm from the hot August sun, though the air, as nightfall approached, was already chilly. The families were mostly indoors by now, half withdrawn, half lingering for a final word or two. From the washhouse came a few strains of a song: it was Mme Esquivel, Beal knew, who always did her laundry at night when she knew she would be alone. The few men still at boules in the dusk touched their caps as the three of them passed by. They stopped at Arthur’s house, but it was too dark to see any of his works. Thomas let Beal show the way, though when it came to the wine operation, Lawrence directed all his questions to him, and each detail Thomas provided led to a small discussion of alternatives. Beal was proud to hear Thomas speak with such authority; yes, he was definitely allowed to talk about the business here, a sort of practical voice from the rear.

  When they returned from the tour, they ended up on the terrace, enjoying the last few minutes of dusk, the mountain looming in its blackest form behind them, but the plain was more purple in the darkness and the Mediterranean air that rose from it was gentle. Thomas announced that it was time to retire, and Beal said that she and Gabriella would make sure Lawrence was settled and then join him. She was not prepared for the instant release of tension when he left, as if the officer had left the enlisted men to their mess. She didn’t evince anything, she felt, but Lawrence leaned back in his chair, tipped one arm over the seat back, and crossed his legs, as if he wasn’t going anywhere very soon.

  “A remarkable man,” he said. “I mean that. Your husband is a rare combination of humility and self-assurance. We don’t see a lot of that in our customers.”

  In our rich white customers, Beal thought, but did not say. “His reticence is his power and his gift. His problem is that he doesn’t know it; he doesn’t trust it.”

  “Your husband has a problem? That’s a rather odd thing to say to a stranger like me. Another man,” he added.

  Beal took a start: she realized she said that because she was still angry at Thomas, though just now she couldn’t recall why. But worse, she hadn’t recognized Lawrence as a man, and now he had offered himself as “another” man. “Oh. Ain’t nothin’ to it,” she said. “We all have our problems.”

  “What, then, are yours?” Lawrence was enjoying himself immensely, skirting within these confidences; he settled even farther back in his chair.

  Beal supposed she had problems, but what could they be? What was wrong with any of this? Well, where to start? In Paris or back at the Retreat, or back in Africa? “Oh,” she said finally, “maybe I have too little on my mind to have problems.”

  “Too little to do?”

  “That’s what Arthur says about me. Thomas keeps saying he wants me to work with him, but what would I contribute? I don’t know anything.”

  “Is that really the way you think of yourself?”

  Once again she was thrown, but now she was saved by Gabriella’s coming to the door and asking whether Beal needed anything from her before she went to bed. “We’ll take Mr. Goodrum up,” Beal answered, but instead of following Gabriella back through the rabbit door—that’s what they called it, mostly because Rabbit was Gabriella’s nickname—she led Lawrence to the front staircase that they almost never used. She climbed to the top and then looked back and saw him hesitating at the bottom, standing in the moonlight that came through the window at his back. He’d watched her climb from below. He looked slightly ghostly in this light, as if he had always been there but had never been noticed, a Moorish presence. She was holding a lamp, and he read her quizzical look, responding with an equally obscure shrug. Beal had no idea what any of this meant. He took a few steps up and stopped. “I have one question,” he said.

  Oh Lord have mercy, thought Beal, what’s he going to say now? “Sure,” she said.

  “Who was Saint Adelelpuss, anyway? Some guy fed to the lions?”

  When she reached their room, Thomas was sitting at her dressing table with one shoe on and one shoe off. He took off the other and gave her the seat. “What was all that laughing about?”

  “Lawrence was making a joke about our namesake. He doesn’t know how to pronounce it.”

  “Well,” he said. “Full of surprises. Trinity Church, don’t you know,” he mimicked. “But I like him. This could be good for us.”

  * * *

  The next morning, after Thomas and Lawrence spent an hour or so in his office and after Lawrence had insisted that he would walk, Beal drove him to La Fontaine. It was a fine morning. They’d brought up the gig, hitched to Reza, their young, not entirely trustworthy gelding. What Beal really wanted was a motorcar, but that still seemed a good bit in the future. The seat was narrow for two persons, especially for a man and a woman, but Beal noticed that Lawrence was making not much effort to keep to his side as they jolted down the St. Adelelmus hill.

  “Extraordinary landscape,” said Lawrence. “Savage, really.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it. All these rocks and stones. I’m beginning to feel settled on them.”

  “It didn’t sound like that last night.”

  Beal glanced over at him; his expression was smug, his tone bold. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I was just making conversation.”

  “Of course,” said Lawrence with a maddening smirk, as if he had drawn a high card out of the deck.

  They clopped along; the horse wanted to run and kept testing Beal’s hands on the reins, which irritated her; she kept yanking back. Thomas would have scolded her for such awful driving. She’d gone to bed the night before in fine spirits but woken up scratchy, finding fault. Everything seemed not quite right; Randall had been fussy in the morning and she was shocked at how angry that made her. She could not quite figure it out, but the arrival of this guest had ever so slightly skewed the comfort they had slowly worked into at St. Adelelmus. “You’ve got such a fine life. We’re just country here,” she said.

  “You may mock me,” said Lawrence. “I’m proud of what we have but, hey”—this “hey” came from a coarse new place: he’d picked up her mood and was willing to throw it back at her—“it’s not as if you’ve got nothing. Your husband owns a whole village.”

  “Yes, and the livelihood of each family is on his shoulders.”

  “That’s why I am here. Because of our employees.”

  Again, the skittishness of the young horse, startled by a hedgehog or some other beast of the shrubs, provided a diversion. “All right,” she said. “I’m being unfair.”

  He did not respond, which made her realize that he agreed, and then, to her surprise, she blurted out, “You really have all these rich white customers?”

  Lawrence laughed. Laughter for him, alone with her, was easy, even after they had snapped at each other. Maybe it was because they had snapped at each other. The odd phrase “our first quarrel” came into Beal’s head; she had no idea where it had come from, or why.

  “Yes. We do. Some, anyway. We are making a new world. You should come to Boston to see it for yourself.”

  Beal heard this echo of Diallo Touré with a jolt. They had come to the crossroads on the flat, where there was a shrine to some saint, though not to their saint. On her travels the Señora often stopped here to pray, and sometimes she went no farther. They were in a field of boulders, a tumble of rocks green with moss and lichen; over the next rise toward town, they’d be in fields rich with grain. This landscape made no sense at all. God had just thrown dice when He got to Languedoc. To the left, the road continued down to Azay; to the right, up to La Fontaine. Beal stopped to give the horse a chance to chew at the sparse stalks within his reach.

  “It seemed like things were getting better for our people after the war,” she said. “But I don’t know now. The promise hasn’t come true.”

  “My grandfather dealt in secondhand clothes, but even as he peddled rags, he saw the opportunity ahead.”

  “Well,” said Beal. “The times can help us, and they can hurt us.”

  “Yes,” said Lawrence.
“But once one has achieved a certain level, it can’t be taken away.”

  Beal wasn’t sure of that; a position, a profession, had been taken away from her father. For all his talents, he needed a boom to succeed; in a bust he had nowhere to go. She shook the reins, gave Reza a slight tap with the whip, and he took the turn to the right. The horse knew that La Fontaine offered a cool drink and a handful of hay, even some grain if he was lucky.

  “I had heard of you in Narbonne,” Lawrence said. “I admit, as much as anything, that was the reason I came up to see St. Adelelmus. It was an impulse. I had no idea your husband was so ambitious.”

  “Then I hope you liked what you found.”

  “Well, yes. I did. You are quite remarkable.”

  “Our wine,” she said quickly. “I meant the possibility of our wine.”

  “Yes. That too. Don’t worry. Your husband is very solid. But when I come back, I will be thinking about more than the wine,” he said.

  “You plan to come back?”

  “Yes. My father and brother don’t really approve, but I think we can make a good business in wine. No one else in Boston is trying.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right, but really, I think wine is kind of awful. I’ll never get to like it, I think.”

  Lawrence laughed again, but clearly he wanted her to respond to the little intimations he had made about returning. “I hope you don’t take offense to hear me say that I will look forward to seeing you again.”

  I should be taking offense, Beal said to herself. I should not be listening to any of this. I should not. He was being forward—their thighs had been touching the entire drive—but she did not mind. “I wouldn’t take offense if you didn’t mean to offend me,” she said.

  “I meant the opposite.”

  The opposite of what? she wondered. Too many ways to take what he said. “Please. Let’s drop this,” she said. He said nothing as they jolted around the last bend in the steep road. “It doesn’t matter what you meant,” she added. La Fontaine, the tops of its roofs, came into view. “We are arriving,” she said, and without much further chatter or polite parting remarks, she dumped him in the center of the farmyard and drove off.