Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  Beal could imagine what recollections and perceptions Mother Lucy might be talking about. The painful ones, the hours of her agitated meditations when she saw Beal wavering in her marriage. And at this very moment Mother Lucy could know nothing about Lawrence Goodrum, who had arrived in Paris earlier that week. He’d written Thomas, begging an invitation to St. Adelelmus, as he had threatened to do the previous summer, and Thomas had replied that he was welcome, but that Beal was in Paris attending the death of a friend, a nun. Beal did not know why Thomas did this; perhaps it was simply his way of putting Lawrence off, as there was nothing in the letter about wine. Or perhaps it was his way of belittling Lawrence, treating him as a child. Or, more likely, it was simply a way of putting the challenge where it belonged. There it was in his first letter to her, dropped in as a complete afterthought, something that hardly deserved any notice at all: “Lawrence has written that he would like to visit. I told him that you and the children were in Paris caring for Mother Lucy. I haven’t heard anything about his plans.”

  It had been sometime about the first of June that the concierge gave Beal a card and a short note from Lawrence. À nous deux maintenant. The note was quite correct, respectably addressing a wife accompanied by children and servants, separated from her husband while a friend—a nun, yet!—breathed her last. He had proposed that the next time she and Gabriella took the children to play at the Champ de Mars—she did not ask at that time how Lawrence knew this was something they did almost daily—they might meet for a lemonade. For his return address Lawrence had supplied not his hotel or other accommodation but a post office branch somewhere by the Panthéon, which seemed a little odd to Beal, but perhaps even safer. The last thing she ever wanted to know, for the rest of her life, was the address of the lodging of any man who was not her husband.

  * * *

  A day after he left his note at the rue Cler, Lawrence received her reply. Yes, she said, as he apparently had determined, when the weather was not too hot, they liked to walk at the Champ de Mars, to take an ice or lemonade at a little stand opposite the École Militaire, and she would look for him the next fine day. Lawrence had already seen them, from a spot behind one of the elms. What a vision! Beal looked perhaps a tiny bit heavier after her last pregnancy, but she still moved with grace—not catlike, really; more like a fox in a pasture. She would forever be a creature of the fields. The girl Gabriella had grown up as well, or maybe it was seeing her in this splendid park, so far from her life in Languedoc, that made her appear more mature, more worldly. When he first saw them, they were dusting and comforting Randall after he’d fallen on the pebbles. Together, with the two little children, they seemed a family almost too perfect to disturb. But onward.

  He had spent the morning composing his approach, considering his affect—be plain, he kept saying to himself, be yourself—his words, practicing a facial expression somewhere between warmth and irony, but as it was, they approached from a direction he didn’t expect, and they saw him first from behind. On hearing his name, he spun around practically in Beal’s face. “Mr. Goodrum,” she said, “here as promised.”

  It was not exactly the kind of greeting he’d hoped for, so proper, so chilly. He could do nothing but respond in kind. “Mrs. Bayly,” he said, thinking he might follow through with the playacting, but—be plain, be yourself—he did not restrain himself. “Beal,” he said, hoping the tremors he felt in his throat were not audible. He took her hand. She looked alarmed; it must be because of the girl, he thought, and let it go.

  “You look very well,” she said. “You look at home here in the city.”

  Something like this was what Lawrence was prepared to say—that she was even more beautiful here than at St. Adelelmus—so the best he could do was “You, too.” Even as these meaningless bits were escaping his lips he was asking himself, You waited a year and crossed the Atlantic to say this?

  She looked at him expectantly, as if he would do better, but when all he could do was smile blankly, she turned to reintroduce him to Gabriella. And then everything he had planned to say to Beal came rushing out to the girl. “How wonderful it is to see you and how marvelous you look. So far from St. Adelelmus, and as pretty as ever. I would recognize you anywhere.” Since he said all this in English, Gabriella understood very little of it, but she gave him a small, not totally friendly, perhaps even ironic curtsy when he had finished.

  “Come. Let’s have an ice at those tables,” Beal said, pointing to the spot where he’d seen them before. When they reached their iron table and sat, he could think of nothing innocent to say; maybe the girl had picked up some English over the winter. The baby was asleep in the pram, but fortunately, the little boy began to tug at Beal’s arm. Beal appealed to Gabriella, and off they went to chase pigeons. Lawrence saw the girl shrug a little, absolve herself as she walked away.

  He turned to Beal. “You can’t imagine the joy it gives me to see you. Here. In Paris. The city of light, the city of monuments. It seems like fate.”

  “That’s what they used to call Baltimore.”

  “What?” Lawrence wasn’t sure he heard right.

  “The monumental city. That’s Baltimore.”

  “Oh, Beal, for God’s sake. Don’t do this to me. Aren’t you surprised to see me?”

  “Thomas told me that he told you we were here,” she said. “I don’t know why he did that.”

  “And you’re not glad he did, for whatever reason?”

  “I don’t know. It’s nice to see you, Lawrence. I meant it when I said you looked well. Very handsome. Once again in France on your business?”

  This wasn’t exactly right. This time he was officially off the books, against his father’s wishes. But in the end all he cared about was seeing her; he would travel thousands of miles just to post a few new images in his scrapbook of memory. He would travel like a penitent, book himself in steerage, and stay at some shabby lodging. He would pay for this without a cent of support from Goodrum & Sons. With each indignity, each fallen rung, he would further plight his love; he would stand before her a man without pretensions, without baggage of any kind. Just himself. He would invent his own path and, in so doing, become free, responsible, without excuse. That was his plan, and so far he had followed it; the boardinghouse he was staying in was indescribable.

  “No,” he answered. “This time I have come only to see you.”

  She let out a small puff of exasperation, but it was small enough for him to ignore; perhaps she was just doing it for show.

  “You and the girl look very happy together. I’m sure you don’t notice it, but your ménage gets looks from everyone who passes.”

  “We are having fun. How could we not be?”

  “I thought you were here because this nun was dying,” he said.

  “We thought Mother Lucy was going to be slipping away, but actually she’s getting stronger. I think Gabriella is offering her one more project, her last student. It makes me weep.”

  “But happily?”

  “Yes. Of course. The things she says. The way she sees her life. She’s my conscience, and she is with me all the time, showing me a good path.”

  “Which you don’t always take?” Lawrence pushed himself to say this. It was stupidly forward, but this might be his single chance, and he had resolved that he would not go away wishing he had said more.

  Again she ignored his subtext. “Mother Lucy is not rigid. She understands that people sometimes need to wander.”

  They sat for a minute. Beal jiggled Céleste’s pram. It was a hot day, and all the women and girls were perched around the edges of the park, adjusting their parasols, fanning themselves idly. Across from them, the sentries in their boxes in front of the École looked like they were wilting. The parade ground in the middle shimmered like the Sahara, but the boys were all in the shimmer, playing tag, chasing, running.

  “Boys,” said Lawrence.

  Beal laughed. “I spent all my childhood around boys. Were you this kind of boy, or were
you more”—she hesitated—“shy?” In fact, Lawrence was more than shy as a child; even as his younger brother Randolph headed out into the fray, Lawrence hung back. But he saw no reason to apologize for himself as a child; Randolph, he thought, had become a dumb brute. As he reflected, Gabriella and the boy came back. The waiter brought them their ices, and Beal fussed a little with Randall’s hat before she put a spoonful into his mouth. “Mmmm. C’est bon,” he said.

  “He speaks no English?” Lawrence asked. Beal and the girl shared a look, and the girl smiled obscurely, a wordless exchange full of confidences and shared experience; Lawrence couldn’t compete with that, he knew.

  “Gustatzen zaizu?” said Gabriella to Randall.

  “Ona da,” he said, laughing.

  Lawrence assumed that this crazy language—whatever it was—was part of a joke between them, and he let it go. The children finished their goûter, what he knew they called a snack, and the girl took Randall back off to play at the edge of a fountain. He watched them go, and he could see the quais along the river and the buildings of the Right Bank through the spread palm of the Eiffel Tower. He was struck, even in this white heat, with how lovely it was, this moment. “I meant what I was saying. This city is the only city on earth that is your equal.”

  “Not Boston?” She smiled.

  Lawrence took a start. He couldn’t tell if she was teasing him or playing the coquette. But the mention of Boston, with all its stresses and uncertainties, dampened his mood. “Oh,” he said.

  “All is not well in Boston? That seemed to be what you were saying last year.”

  “No,” he said. “Our prospects have never been brighter.” He could tell that she didn’t believe him, but she understood that he simply wanted to move on. He asked her about St. Adelelmus and the weather so far, about how Thomas and M. Murat saw things this year. She answered as well as she could. “But you’ll see for yourself, maybe. I think Thomas may still be interested in working with you. That may be why he told you I was here.”

  Lawrence could stand this no longer, and the idea of going back to St. Adelelmus, where Thomas was master and where, Lawrence had every reason to believe, he would soon be leaving a brilliant mark … well, the idea of all that finished him.

  He took her hand. “Beal. You know why I am here. You know what you mean to me. You know how I feel.”

  She did not try to remove her hand. “Yes, Lawrence. I do.”

  “I am not here to compromise you,” he said.

  “I understand that. I think.”

  “Then?” he said. He knew this was unconscionable, to thrust this question back at her, to make her define everything about where they were. In business, he had learned to manipulate suppliers to make the first offer, and he was doing that here. He was pleased, after a moment’s reflection, that she didn’t fall for it. She withdrew her hand and put it in her lap.

  “Then what?” she said.

  “Will you let me court you? For these few days. Here in this magical city. May I press my case?”

  “Even if you have no chance?”

  “Well, that’s why you court someone. Because you have to win against long odds.”

  “I suppose,” she said. She glanced toward the fountain where the children were playing.

  Lawrence had never seen her look more Parisian, more desirable, more unassailable. “No one has ever courted you properly, the way you deserve,” he said.

  “That’s what someone else once said to me.”

  “The same man who you said had shown you the ropes here in Paris?” Lawrence asked this innocently—there had seemed to be something there when she let this drop last year, but he made little of it at the time.

  She snapped at him, a surprising snarl from her, something he had not seen before. “Lots of people ‘showed me the ropes,’ as you say.”

  Lawrence knew now that he had an opening; she had been wooed, it seemed, if not courted, and by someone other than her husband. He waited for her to compose herself. “Well?” he said.

  She was still a little angered, and she responded forcefully, as if rising to a challenge. “Yes. You may. For these few days. In this magical city.” She had finished by mocking one of his phrases again, but he had the answer he had come three thousand miles hoping to get.

  * * *

  Beal was not going to overthink any of this. The fact was, she was getting a little tired of this cramped domestic scene, the visits to Mother Lucy, the walks on the Champ. Even Gabriella, sent off to find herself, was having more fun than she was. Gabriella had found the quarter where some Basques lived, and there was maybe a boy she liked; Beal had spied them meeting up on the Pont de l’Alma. Charming, lovely, and, with Céleste in her pram as cover, innocent. Maybe Beal was getting tired of innocence; Paris was supposed to be decadent, wasn’t it, but actually it seemed strangely ordinary to her. Bread is bread wherever you eat it, so maybe bread itself is the problem. When she left Paris, it had seemed as if something had been ripped out of her body, but here now, she felt larger than the city and thus could not imagine what had been taken from her; it had seemed so tangible, this missing thing, but it was nowhere to be found. The Richards were as hardworking and good-hearted as she remembered, but for them, everything, every thought revolved around their hotel. In her first week she paid a call on the avenue Bosquet, and the girls Gilberte and Monique were no longer friends, had no interest in Beal. One of the mothers—whichever mother it was—was just a snob, the sort of person who would last two minutes in the Midi. It took moving there for Beal to see this, which struck her as disappointing. Who was I, back then? she found herself wondering. Do I really want to know?

  So the next day, as Beal was dressing for luncheon with Lawrence in the Bois de Boulogne, she couldn’t help feeling a small sparkle of pleasure. And why not, when there was no danger? The problem was Gabriella, as Beal had known it would be. They were talking in Beal’s room, and she was looking out the window onto the rue Cler for Lawrence to arrive in a cab. Their argument was almost sisterly. “I have not complained when you have gone off for the day. Many days,” said Beal.

  “Madame knows that it is not my place to comment on how she behaves.”

  “Mr. Goodrum is a friend. There is nothing improper in my having lunch with him.”

  Gabriella gave her a pouty, disapproving look.

  “Don’t be impatient with me. You’re acting jealous.”

  “That is not possible,” said Gabriella in an almost haughty tone. “A servant does not feel such things about her mistress.”

  All this was especially irritating, or hurtful, to Beal, because over the years she had told Gabriella much—perhaps too much—of her life as a maid for the Lloyds at Blaketon, and then in Hampton, and about how she was supposed to behave and what she was supposed to notice and what she was supposed to ignore, and none of this, all these petit bourgeois airs, was how they lived in Languedoc. Neither Beal nor anyone else considered Gabriella a servant; there was work to be done in the house, a job, or jobs, and she did them.

  She appealed for understanding. “Untxi,” she said, using the pet name, Rabbit, that the girl’s parents used. “Please.”

  The name helped, and Gabriella relented. “Oh, Beal. Don’t go out with that man. I don’t trust him. What are you doing this for?”

  Each of these words caused Beal a slight jolt, but at that moment she heard the ringing of the cab’s bell below, and she did not want to let Lawrence announce himself to the concierge. Putting on her hat and gloves, she took Gabriella in her arms, kissed her, and kissed the children on the way out.

  Lawrence had arranged a picnic on the banks of the lower lake in the Bois; he seemed to have scouted out a place that was secluded enough for privacy but open enough to the paths and lanes to reassure her. Beal recognized this calculation as soon as she saw the spot. She waited while Lawrence spread the blanket, and after they settled, they sat for a minute enjoying the vista of the lake and the massive cedars, chestnuts, and lin
dens on the rise above the opposite bank. Families and young lovers paddled by.

  “I was thinking of renting a boat, but I remembered that you don’t like the water.”

  It was true; she recalled that she had said something like that to him. “I don’t know how to swim.”

  “At college I had to pass a swimming course in order to graduate. The tests were held in a pond next to campus, and they waited until late October, when the water was as cold as it could get before it started to freeze. The cold was part of the test. And of course, we swam naked.”

  What a thought, all these naked boys in the freezing air. “Rich people, white people,” Beal said, “they have to invent hardships to overcome. Wasn’t so for us.”

  “No. But you have lived a charmed life. It seems that way to me. Your parents spoiled you?”

  His last comment was raised to a question, but Beal turned her head sharply to face him; this was going a few steps too far, and her first impulse was to demand how he claimed to have any knowledge of her parents. But then she figured out where all this came from. “Oh, I get it,” she said, relaxing back on her elbows a bit. “Arthur’s theory about me. He has enough of them to fill a book.”

  “And he has written some of it down? Part of a study?” Lawrence was reacting to all this in a lighthearted tone, banter about serious things.

  Beal was silent long enough for Lawrence’s bemused expression to fade, but at that moment she was thinking about her own writing, and now there was this thought: “Arthur’s portrait is like a book of theories about me.”

  “And you have never seen it.”

  “That’s right. It’s not from a part of my life I really want to remember.” As she was saying this, all the confusion of those few months rushed back in a jumble, a collage of unwelcome visions: Arthur’s studio, stripping naked in front of him, Touré, Les Halles, the Louvre. For a second she wondered how she had survived any of it. These, then, were the missing things. Why wasn’t it past time to admit that she did not want them back? “I mean, it was from a difficult time, but I made it through.”