Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  He gave her a minute. “I have left nothing behind that claims a tear. No one would cry over Boston,” he said. “And no one would cry over Paris that way either. Maybe you don’t really know what you have lost.”

  She waved away his comment wordlessly, even as it grabbed her by the shoulders: What had she lost? What was she trying to forget?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am a fool. I have been complaining. I see you as living this perfect life.”

  “Not hardly. I don’t know if there is anywhere in the world where I really see myself. Maybe that’s stupid to say.”

  “No. It isn’t stupid. It’s what I was trying to say just now. That we are both people without a place.”

  “Last year you told me everything was perfect in Boston.”

  “Well, maybe the way is not quite as smooth as all that. If we stop rising, we plummet. But we have to be careful how high we get.”

  “Like Icarus?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, but it was so clear that she had astonished him with this reference that she had to go ahead and tell him how she knew the story.

  “He’s on a ceiling in the Louvre. Icarus falling. I’m afraid of heights,” she said, but then added the final bit of explanation. “I spent most of our winter in Paris at the Louvre.”

  They were almost back to the carriage, and when she said this, Lawrence took her hand and stopped them in the path. “It was fate that I met you,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “it may have been fate, but it got the timing wrong. I am married. You must let me live my life.”

  “I can give you everything. The city. The town. The wilderness. You could do so, so much more.”

  “Lawrence. Please. You must leave me alone. If it really was love that brought you here, stop trying to make my life impossible.”

  At dinner Beal let Lawrence carry the show, describing the outing, exclaiming about the savage beauty of the landscape, the wind, how grateful he was to Thomas for lending Beal to him for the day. She let him carry on, and he did in his most charming way—teasing her for her long lecture on the Canal du Midi but praising her for her making such a home in this overlooked region of the world—but she could barely listen. She could barely look at Thomas. This guest putting on such a fine show had just, a few hours earlier, all but asked her to run away with him, to leave Thomas and steal his son, along with a new child that she now firmly suspected was within her. And what had she done? She had said Please, Lawrence and Oh, you’re making my life difficult, and most important was what she had not said, to Thomas, which was This man is wooing me and he must be sent away now. And the next day, when Lawrence and Thomas went off on a trip he had planned to see the crushers and presses at another domaine, it made Beal sad. Whether or not Thomas figured it out now or later, this was not a friendship he should have anything to do with. Thomas had had so few friends in his life, nothing that came close to the intimacy he shared with Randall when they were boys, but even before Randall was killed, they had quarreled. Theo Milhaud was Thomas’s friend, sort of, but Theo was a moody man, often bristling about something; Beal had spent far more time in his presence than Thomas had, and in the end he was not someone she entirely trusted. Thomas and Arthur were devoted to each other, but they were not friends who had been drawn to each other in a crowd; they had been forced upon each other in ways Thomas did not suspect. They were like brothers, those sorts of wildly dissimilar siblings one encountered from time to time, two men who were as often at odds as they were at peace. In addition, Beal thought of Arthur as her brother, Thomas could make no special claim. No, Thomas had only one true friend in the world, and she was it.

  Lawrence had never said how long he would be staying with them, and neither Beal nor Thomas asked. He settled in, was often found at the stone table next to the figs, reading or writing letters or simply staring at the view. He took dinner with Thomas and Beal, though after several days he reached a level of comfort and ease and some evenings arranged with the Señora to take his supper in the kitchen. “He likes Gabriella,” said Thomas, though they could barely communicate.

  Beal wasn’t sure how she felt about that. In the course of his visit Lawrence had become a common sight in St. Adelelmus, though it was clear that people were wary of him, even if he was often in the company of their most beloved étranger, Arthur. The children teased him, made him say things in French and then howled with laughter. Beal learned from Gabriella that the year before, she had tried to quash the rumor that he was here to buy the place, but it persisted; she learned also that people were confused by his coloring and believed he was Algerian. Gabriella said that because Beal was the only American Negro they had ever met or even seen, they assumed they would all be her color. All this came out amid hesitations, diverted eyes, embarrassed pauses. But none of it mattered very much. Nothing had to be explained to anybody, although Thomas, a man running a business, did wonder about Lawrence’s obligations back in Boston. “For an importer on a buying trip,” he said during one of their dinners without their guest, “he certainly is taking a lot of time at a stop that has nothing to sell to him.”

  Beal said yes, it did seem a little odd.

  “Has he said anything to you about his plans?”

  “I get the impression that their business is having some trouble.”

  “Me too,” said Thomas. “Should I tell him it is time for him to think about moving on?”

  “I don’t know why. You seem to enjoy having him around.”

  “So do you.” Thomas did not say this without an edge, but his tone stopped short of jealousy. In the days since Lawrence’s arrival, Thomas had largely turned him over to her, and though she avoided as much as she could any time alone with him, those stray moments of encounter occurred all the time. He did not repeat any of his professions of love; now there was warmth between them in the place of unrequited desire, which Beal liked. “He’s been a good guest,” she said. “He tries to be helpful. And he’s talking to Arthur about buying some of his work. His photographs, actually.”

  “Ah. Then someone is doing some business with him.”

  That was where they left it, and Thomas had turned to other things. At some point in the past few days it was as if a small bell had rung—Beal could hear the sound—something as tiny but clear as the ping of a triangle, an invocation, and a farm that was deep in the summer doldrums suddenly recognized that a harvest would soon be upon them, and the trips to the vines took on new meaning, new questions. Each afternoon shower was looked upon with anxiety, and everyone walked a little straighter, with more purpose. Les vendanges!—even the small children felt it. For these two months all eyes, all their parents’ eyes, were on the grapes; the children too would put in their hours in the harvest, but around the edges of the days, out of the main line of sight, freedom! Thomas said little about the crop—no farmer ever, ever wanted to be asked about the crop, the season, before it was in the barn—but Beal inferred from M. Murat’s few remarks that they all thought it was going to be very good, that the concentrated fruit from the radically pruned vines would win over a doubter or two, that Saint Vincent and Saint Martin and Bacchus and Osiris too were considering being good to them.

  Lawrence was in for all of it. Beal thought, actually, that he was being rather silly, tagging along like a toddler, almost pathetically eager to help, doing most of it wrong. Thomas indulged him, but he was spoken to sharply more than once by M. Murat, and one afternoon Beal found him under the figs, holding his beret in his hand. “I assume idiot means what it sounds like,” he said. “Someone else called me un pec. Not nice either, I suspect.”

  “No. But really, they’re just having their fun with you.”

  “That’s not what it sounds like.”

  Beal sat down; with Thomas deep into the harvest preparations, the two of them were together more than not. “Lawrence, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “You’ve told me I cannot say what I am doing here.” He waited for her t
o reaffirm that prohibition, a mere nod or an exasperated groan would have done, but she gave no sign. “If you want me to go, come away with me.”

  “Don’t be foolish.”

  “I am not being foolish,” he said.

  “Just pack up and leave my husband, my son?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t leave Randall. He would come with you, to Boston.”

  “And Thomas?”

  “Thomas would not put any obstacle in the way. You know that. He is a strong man, an extraordinary man, but he lacks the will to fight for you. He doesn’t believe in the human heart, he doesn’t trust it. He expects to be alone in the end.”

  “How can you say that? He gave up everything for me. What have you ever sacrificed for another?”

  Lawrence held his hands out to indicate himself, his body, his rural clothes, his presence. “I should have been on a steamer out of Le Havre two weeks ago. Our business is suffering. My father is furious with me. He says that if I do not come home immediately, he will send my brother after me.”

  Beal could well believe all that; the poor telegraph boy in the village had worn himself out trotting up the hill to deliver cables to Lawrence. “Why?” she asked. “What is it that makes you do this? Whatever I have said or done to invite it, can it not just be forgotten?”

  He reverted to his former position. “You have told me not to say.”

  “I am asking you now.”

  He did not answer. He didn’t have to; instead, he turned it all on her. “You have chosen a course that requires you to be absolutely certain of your desires. But you don’t really know what those desires are.”

  This hit deep; sometimes she felt as if she were being invented from above, that a unique sun bore down on her wherever she was. But then she also recognized that the most unyielding scrutiny on her was brought by herself, the hazard of all this writin’. “And you do?” she asked. “You think you know my desires better than I do?”

  “Yes. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

  “I have made mistakes, but I am certain about Thomas and the family we hope to build.”

  “Then if that is so, I will just say that out of every human being in this entire world, on every continent, there is no one like you. I have already told you this. If you came with me back to Boston, you would be crowned queen. All those proper ladies would simply pale away into nothing around you. You are the next in line to carry us to the levels we deserve to occupy.”

  “I don’t want to be no queen,” Beal answered, with the almost hallucinatory feeling that none of this was real, that once again she was being pursued like a prize. “Enough. You must leave. Today. I’ll tell Thomas you got urgent news.”

  “Whatever you command. But I will be back next year, and I will ask the same questions. If your husband will not invite me here, I will take a room in the village.”

  * * *

  Thomas was not blind. He had been a little slow, but not blind about that African either, and when he’d discovered that note, it was not surprise that hurt him, but a feeling that the inevitable had happened. He faulted everyone—the way of the whole world—for what had happened, but he did not fault Beal; she was just trying to get by, and he knew it. Nor did he blame her for Lawrence Goodrum as the man lingered, quietly tried to charm, pressed his suit. Beal’s response to him—Thomas could see this—was simply not to respond one way or the other. Lawrence was caught, and if Thomas read him right, even he had begun to recognize that he was merely getting in line and rounding out the cohort of her current admirers. Lawrence might realize that he was acting the fool, but he didn’t seem to care. There were a couple of unused huts and sheds on St. Adelelmus. What if Thomas filled the place with suitors, opened the spaces of the bastide for their jousts and brawls?

  This was all about love, about finding a person in this world. Thomas could remember the astonishment he felt, at age seventeen, when he began to believe that Beal, at fifteen, would seek out time alone with him because she loved him, that she would take his side in the petty squabbles—and then, increasingly, the deep conflicts—with Randall because she had made a choice between her brother and the boy she loved. At night, in bed at the Retreat, he could recount to himself what had happened with her during the day, fun things, and feel them as a warmth in his blood, a tingling of possibilities, a small whispering voice from deep in the feathers of his pillow. He had never felt anything like it, anything remotely like it, being chosen—winning, he might even say—though back then, there didn’t seem to be any others in the race for her. They were just children, yet who would argue that a child could not understand that he was being offered a gift. Who would argue that a boy or girl had no ability to confer such a blessing.

  After his seventeenth summer, everything began to change. Beal went to work as a maid for the Lloyds, Randall began to turn away from him, and later they were sent to college and Beal to Hampton, and through it all Thomas understood that what Beal had given him that summer could never be taken away, even if, as seemed likely, Beal herself would turn in a different direction and he would slowly succumb to the pressures applied upon him by his sister, Mary. Thomas had not expected Beal to remain true to him over the years, and if it was on the day of his father’s funeral that she finally reaffirmed her love, it was on that day that her commitment to him was most ready, once and for all, to be forgotten. Aside from her love for her parents, there was nothing at home for her—her mother, more than anyone, argued this point—now that the peaches were gone, now that her father had taken his place once again as a mere farmhand.

  Thomas had often wondered what might have happened if his father had died a mere month later. It took no effort at all, not a single fillip of imagination for Thomas to play out a completely different conversation with Beal, a conversation that would end with a handshake, with You been a right good friend all these years, or I surely am sorry about Mr. Wyatt, or Well, I gotta be gettin’ along before Aunt Zoe comes huntin’ me up. So easily what happened could not have happened. If it had been a rainy day and they couldn’t have devised a way to meet; if her parents or his sister had prevailed and left one of them, either of them, sitting at the meeting place alone. Humans are strong, they live whether they want to or not; love is the reed, the weakest of nature. Could all that uncertainty really be washed away by a single yes? Believe me, said Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. This had been one of Thomas’s father’s favorite sayings, though in his father’s life there had been few battles won.

  After Lawrence left—it seemed to be a rather abrupt departure, though that required no explanation—Thomas descended deep into the harvest, the pressing and casking, into the first few assays of what they had got, always anticipating the ailments that might, overnight, render the entire year a loss. But at odd hours he thought a good bit of Lawrence Goodrum as a lost soul, a sad man but a good man, and perhaps, as Thomas pondered this years later, he had been too quick to dismiss the threat. Yet he simply could not regard the man as a rival as much as one of the legion of the lost in love.

  Late in October, Beal sought him out in the vatting room. “Well,” she said, with a small smile on her face, “it’s got to be true.”

  Thomas excused himself from M. Murat. “What has to be true?”

  “I’m pregnant. Four months. Something like that.”

  “Damn,” he said, feeling dumb, searching for something better to say. “Four months,” he repeated, thinking this put conception somewhere back in July. Not that it mattered, he supposed.

  “Aren’t you happier than that?” she asked.

  “Of course I am.” He made a show of being happy, eyes bright, arms raised. “But for a man, it just seems sort of far away. It’s going to happen to me, but it isn’t yet.”

  She laughed; she really was happy about this. So much happier, on the surface, than on that late night two years ago.

  “You waited five months to tell me th
e last time,” he said.

  “I wanted you to know before everyone else figured it out.”

  He gave her a hug and then drew her away. “You’re not afraid? Women don’t think of pregnancy with some fear?”

  “No. Of course not. Why would you ask that? I think it’s unlucky to ask a pregnant lady that.”

  He apologized with a guileless shrug. “It just seemed that with Randall, you got more and more nervous. Even Arthur noticed it, if you can imagine such a thing.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You try to give birth, then tell me it’s nothing to be nervous about.”

  The wine was now doing its work in the casks, aging in its own private juice; they’d bottle some of it in March, but for now, there was nothing to do but wait. They had pulled up the last of the Aramon, and unless Thomas was kidding himself, the domaine was not sorry to see it go. In September he had purchased the hillside across town that M. Murat had in mind for Mourvèdre; Mourvèdre and Grenache and Syrah, such an obvious blend. He had been trying to figure out why it was so hard to graft. Yes, he was his father’s son, but he made no backward glances; he thought only of grapes, dreamed of grapes.

  Arthur joined them for Christmas dinner, complaining that his mother would never forgive him if she knew he had marked this awful holiday, and then he complained further when he realized that the roast goose being placed on the table was his favorite from the flock. “There are so many nasty geese,” he said. “Why did the Señora take him?”