Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “Hey Beal,” he said. For years this was how they had greeted each other. Hey Beal, want to go to the river shore and collect shells? Hey Beal, want to go see the litter of piglets? Hey Beal, want to come sit with me on the bench? Hey Beal, want to go home?

  She nodded. “Hey Thomas,” she answered.

  17

  Many years later—after they had come home from Paris and restarted their marriage as adults, and they and their children began in earnest the life’s work that St. Adelelmus became for all of them; after the crisis of the wine lake that almost destroyed them, and the winemakers’ revolt of 1907, which made Thomas locally famous; after the Great War and the beginning of the Great Depression, after all that—Thomas and Beal received a visit from Edward Mason, the man upon whom his sister, Mary, had settled the Retreat before she died, in 1920. When Thomas and Beal escaped, in 1892, Thomas had renounced his rights to the place and never for one second looked back, and thus, as Mary was approaching her early death from cancer, she had bequeathed it to this Edward Mason. Their mother, Ophelia, who for many years had had nothing to do with the place or with either her son or her daughter, had died a decade earlier. Edward Mason was, as well as Mary could determine, in the direct line of descent from the immigrant Richard Mason, who’d arrived there in 1658. Over the years, Thomas had gotten several letters from Mason, the first one a gracious and humble letter of condolence; he seemed to be offering Thomas a chance to reverse Mary’s act. Just to make everything clear, Thomas replied that he supported all of Mary’s efforts to settle the place on a Mason heir, and he hoped Mr. Mason would find a good use for it.

  The next two or three letters remained reasonable and deferential. Mason had apparently bought some kind of manufacturing concern in England; the letters adopted a sort of bonhomie, a fellowship, businessman to businessman, suggesting that they might share insights as to the challenges of building a business on foreign soil. Thomas was noncommittal. Over time, the letters—with various return addresses in England—continued, perhaps one every other year, and their tone became a little more aggrieved, as if Thomas and Beal wouldn’t understand his difficulties; he was out in the modern world and they had retreated to a sort of fairyland. Mason appeared to have some wildly idealized vision of them, and he felt Thomas owed him something in return. Thomas and Beal discussed this. As far as they could figure, this odd affect had nothing to do with the Retreat. Beal’s sister Ruthie tended to send them a semiannual roundup of news of the Retreat, of Tuckertown, of births and deaths and the general level of hope and despair, and it seemed that from one year to the next, nothing was heard from, or about, the man who now owned the farm. To Thomas it seemed that this increasingly needy man wanted some kind of sympathy or support that Thomas, and Thomas uniquely, could provide; he opened Mason’s letters with increasing dread.

  The letter announcing that Mason, his wife, Edith, and their two young sons would be available to pay a call arrived in the spring of 1934. “He says he’d like to get a lay of the land,” said Thomas. “It sounds as if he’s planning to buy us out.”

  “Oh,” said Beal. “Ne sois pas si critique.” Somewhere along the line, maybe soon after they returned, they had started speaking to each other mostly in French, and then exclusively, except when they were quarreling. Without discussing it, they agreed that speaking in the language of international diplomacy, a language full of deference and indirection, reaffirmed their choices, their love, their hopes for the future; breaking into English for an argument signaled that the stakes of reverting, as always, were high.

  Thomas continued. “Il croit que…” He went on to describe Mason’s view that they had much to discuss. “Pour l’amour du ciel,” he exclaimed.

  Again Beal encouraged him to give the man a chance. “Mr. French and Daddy both said he meant well.” Just before Mary died, Mason had spent a memorable day on the Retreat, mostly with the farm manager and his wife, coincidentally named French. Over the years, Thomas had gotten the unwelcome impression that they spent most of the day discussing himself and Beal.

  Once Thomas had written back saying that he and Beal would be delighted to welcome them at the bastide for as long as they liked, Mason turned over the finalization of the details to his wife, and in turn it was Beal who responded, and by the time the Masons arrived in mid-June—they would be staying only for the day—the two wives had formed a warm connection. It was “St. Adelelmus weather,” as Thomas thought of it, a light breeze fragrant with blossoms and sea air, the sunlight still yellow and soft. On days like this, even forty years later, he was still almost embarrassed to be showing off such a home to strangers. Just as Edith had promised, at about ten o’clock they heard the car chugging up the hill. From the sound of the gears crunching and the engine racing, it was clear that Mason was not an experienced driver, but these were not easy roads. The car, a massive, expensive Delahaye, roared into view, and when it stopped, it continued to rumble while the driver flayed around at the controls. By then Thomas and Beal were standing at their front door.

  When the engine finally died, Mason got out, stretched, and glanced back at the car as at some sort of adversary, a piece of junk unworthy of him. He was a big man; Thomas had had this impression from the letters, yet he seemed very young, over his head with this car, with all of life. Thomas expected this, but he was not prepared for the red hair, and it gave him a chill, this Mason hair, his mother’s hair. One of the themes of Thomas’s life.

  Mason finished his pantomime with the car and turned his attention to the farm and the view; he made everyone wait while he went through a complete audit of the mountain and the vines, all of which he pronounced exquisite. “Beggars belief,” he said.

  Thomas said he was pleased that they could finally visit, after all these years of correspondence. He hoped they’d had a good trip so far.

  “Splendid,” said Mason. “Superb.” They’d come down from Bordeaux. From Médoc, actually. A friend, Lord Belsen, owned a château there. This was his car. A terrible brute, the car, not Lord Belsen. Ha-ha. They’d spent the night at Carcassonne. Had Thomas and Beal been there? The Hôtel du Midi. It had seen better days. But this, St. Adelelmus, was lovely.

  Thomas was worn out already. “Thank you,” he said. “We have worked quite hard.” As he looked around, it was notable to him—this was not the first time he made such an observation—that from where they stood, one could see virtually no structure, no amenity, hardly even a cart or wheelbarrow that hadn’t been there the day he bought the place. The changes were within, in the caves they had built underground, in the roots of the vines deep into the chalk and schist, and in the bones of the domaine, where they mattered. His sister, at the Retreat, had basically razed the farm after Thomas and Beal left and built a whole new enterprise, a sanitary dairy. Which, if Thomas understood right, had proved to be only a slightly better bet than the peaches. If Mason ever took that place in his hands, they would be very full.

  The wife and children were getting out of the car now, brushing out wrinkles, taking in the view. Beal had told him that she liked Edith, Edith the letter writer; she was an unusual-looking woman, dark and secretive, with sharp eyes and cheekbones and a slender frame that would be called lanky if she weren’t just barely five feet tall. There were two children, an unhappy and vaguely untrustworthy-looking adolescent and another boy, a timorous lad of six or so.

  Thomas welcomed her, and she thanked him in return. “Edward has been so looking forward to meeting you. A cousin?” she said, finishing with a slight question.

  “Of some sort,” said Thomas. He watched Beal lead Edward and the older boy into the bastide. The younger boy stayed plastered to his mother’s side.

  “I have so enjoyed writing to Mrs. Bayly.”

  “Oh, Edith,” said Thomas, “if I may. It’s Beal.”

  “Yes. Beal. The legend.” She gave this last a nice ironic twist, meaning she understood the reasons that Beal—the negotiator, the deal maker—was known and admired in wine c
ountry, even in Bordeaux, as was Thomas of course, but she thought the idea of a legend was silly.

  “Beal said she enjoyed your letters. I hope they continue.”

  “She’s such a beautiful writer. I can’t express half of what’s on my mind. But she seems able to say things for me.”

  “That’s very sweet of you to say.”

  “I’ve been a little lonely,” she volunteered, but not as a dark truth, something she would say with lowered voice, but as a statement of fact.

  “Beal knows all about loneliness. And homesickness. Believe me.”

  “Yes,” said Edith with the kind of suppressed smile and secret strength in her eyes that showed she would keep any confidence. “She said something like that.”

  From inside came the sounds of a tour in progress, and Thomas could easily have suggested they catch up, but he was drawn to this fragile but resolute person; everything that had happened to her seemed obvious to Thomas—unhappy marriage, lonely exile. These were fates he and Beal had avoided, but not without struggle. When they entered the hall, he could hear Beal and Mason trudging up the stairs after inspecting the basement. Thomas didn’t know why she was doing that—he didn’t want Mason prowling around the very foundations of his life—but Edith volunteered that Edward loved old houses. “We have lived in several old properties in England,” she said, not that happily.

  Thomas surprised himself by jumping to the one topic he had hoped to avoid. “Have you seen the Retreat? Have you been there?”

  She said she had not, but that lately it had been on her husband’s mind. “He describes it as quite grand,” she said. “From his one visit.”

  “The Mansion House is big. But I would never call it grand, even with whatever my sister did to it after I left.”

  “So you have never been back? Even before your sister died?”

  “No. We haven’t.”

  She seemed to be reflecting on all this deeply, and finally she let it all out in a surprisingly definitive manner. “I’ve gotten the impression that what you have done here and where you came from are all connected. That you did not come to France to turn your back on the Retreat, but to fulfill it. That’s why you have had such a success.” Thomas made some sounds of demurral and was trying to process the surprise he felt when she continued. “I am sorry to speak so forwardly, as if I presume to know you. But I have thought of you a good bit over the years.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Someone said something like that to me many years ago.” He stopped it at that, but she knew there was more to it.

  “Someone you cared about?”

  “Yes, cared about a great deal. A friend who died, but her parents became very important to us, to our family here in France.” They stood side by side, sharing what he had said, understanding that within this little tale there were turns and twists that didn’t need to be explained; it was all long gone, dust sprinkled onto the earth.

  She broke the moment. “But never back to Maryland. Not to visit Beal’s family? Might you have arranged to do that safely? You’re French citizens now, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes. Before they threw me in jail in 1907, they had to let me become a citizen.”

  She laughed. Thomas continued to be charmed. “Jail?” she said. “Not really?”

  “No. I never actually went to jail, but after they arrested Marcelin Albert, someone had to talk to Clémenceau. An American wouldn’t do, so they made me French.” This was all pouring out carelessly; he was hardly thinking of what he was saying, his mind still back on the moment of starting out, when Eileen Hardy had said How about grapes?

  “I’m sorry?”

  He snapped back. “I’m being extremely impolite. To us, all these events have a rather biblical importance, but there’s no reason you should know about any of it. In the wine world it was the second Revolution, the only difference is that everyone saw it coming. A big mess back then. But enough of this. Let me show you around.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  By now Beal and Mason seemed to have exited through the door onto the terrace, and Thomas was pleased to wander through the house with the young wife. He showed her his office, and when they turned to leave the room, she saw the portrait on the wall, behind the door.

  “Why, that’s Beal,” she said.

  “Yes. I hang it here because she doesn’t like to look at it. Our friend Arthur Kravitz did it, our first winter in Paris.”

  Edith studied it for a minute or two; she had narrow eyes, and she squinted at it as if following the path of each brushstroke. “She looks quite annoyed, doesn’t she.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not very good. Her hand is wrong.” She held her own hand up to her shoulder and showed that it couldn’t quite twist the way Arthur had painted it. She had spoken the truth but was about to apologize when Thomas laughed.

  “Good for you,” he said. “Arthur would agree. That was back when he thought art could uncover truths; now he thinks truth makes art. That’s why he makes photographs.”

  “I’ve read his book,” she said. “The Goat … Barn, was it? I liked it.”

  “The Goat Palace,” corrected Thomas. “A long-running joke. For years he was grateful to us for giving him a place to work. Then he woke up one morning and realized we had him in a goat shed.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, not exactly. Anyway, he hasn’t lived there for more than thirty years, but the building is still his. Some of his old equipment is still set up there. People come by to look at it.”

  In all of five minutes Thomas had fallen for Edith Mason, this surprisingly tough little doll, not that much older than their youngest, Marie, who was twenty-five. He wondered about this blustery, impatient, and probably doomed man she was married to; why would a sharp woman like this, all edges, marry such a doughy person? He reminded Thomas of their daughter Marie’s new beau, who was a law student in Montpellier and seemed just as mismatched.

  “So,” she said. “St. Adelelmus. What ghastly torture awaited him at the end?”

  “Actually,” said Thomas, “as far as I can tell, he died comfortably in his sleep at a ripe old age. He was canonized for being a very sweet guy.”

  “Well,” said Edith. “I think that’s probably worth sainthood.” She laughed grimly.

  They were turning to go, but he wanted to give her one last thing, a gift he was sure she would understand. “She was angry, actually,” he said. “Beal. In the portrait. Up until that point she’d never been allowed to be herself. Arthur caught her at the time when she was just figuring that out.”

  They joined Edward and Beal at the stone table under the chestnut tree. One of the two sisters who now worked for them in the house brought tea, and lemonade for the children. The older boy was nowhere to be found, had peeled off the tour, bored by his father’s questions and comments, eager to run. As seemed often to be the case, Edith went off to retrieve him.

  “Well, Mr. Bayly,” said Mason in her absence, “I am impressed, sir.” He seemed not all that comfortable sitting with Beal.

  Thomas had no impulse to propose that they use first names. “It has suited us. Forty years ago a very wise man told me that running a vineyard was a calling for an entire family. Many times I might have given up without Beal and our children.” He said this in part because Mason obviously had no idea what he had in his own young wife; indeed, the idea that one’s wife is one’s partner flew a mile over his head.

  Many times during that summer when Beal was in Paris, while Thomas raced around Languedoc in order to avoid simply waiting for a sign of some sort, he had asked himself, What am I doing this for? Who am I doing it for? He asked those questions not because he didn’t know the answers, but to remind himself that he was blessed to have answers. And then he brought her home. They returned, riding together with the children and Gabriella up the last climb to St. Adelelmus, and he had never seen such joy and relief and gratitude on Beal’s face; she consecrated each rock and rill,
each structure and person as she passed. He knew then that as painful as it had been for him, he had done right to let her go, to really release her, and that now she was ready. For the first time, her commitment seemed equal to—no, greater than—his. Maybe that’s the only way to see love from another, to trust it: when it is greater than your own. Maybe when love is only equal to yours, it hides, it gets eclipsed. Perhaps she had finally caught up to her vows enough to understand these vows not as promises, but as dreams, dreams that could become hard fact only if one were willing to make them so. Yes, their time at St. Adelelmus really dated from that day, the day when Beal said, in so many words, I do.

  The return from Paris had not turned out so well for Gabriella. That morning, the Señora had alternately flown from one end of the bastide to the other, getting things ready, and had sat at the table in the kitchen, weeping. Then, when the carriage pulled up and Gabriella ran to greet her, she seemed stunned, confused, unable to speak. It soon became clear that she didn’t immediately recognize her own daughter, and from that point on she began the steep decline that ended with her in the hospital at Béziers. It was her size, her strength that was the problem: a normally jolly person, when she needed to move, she could overpower her husband, her daughter, the Sisters of Saint Theresa who tried to take her in. Thirty years after she was taken away, people still shook their heads in sorrow over her.

  Thomas looked over at Beal as this journey made its passage in his mind. A little bit of gray hair, a little heavier. Sixty-two years old and not a wrinkle to be seen, not a blot, the face of an angel. His skin: God, what a mottled wreck! Nothing that day would have suggested that in only a year he would be sitting here alone in this cherished spot, and she would be dead.

  “We have been blessed by our children,” said Beal. “We have been lucky. I won’t even try to warn you who will be at lunch with us. Your boys will be right at home with our mob.”

  Mason didn’t have anything to say on the subject of children.