Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “You know very little of the world, but you do not need help. You are leaving the protections of our race and entering the white world, but you will not have difficulty in Paris. On the contrary. En garde, Paris. As Monsieur Balzac says, ‘À nous deux maintenant.’”

  Beal did not know who this Balzac was or what he had supposedly said, but she got the point. “That’s crazy talk,” she said.

  “Paris will lay itself down for you.”

  “For my husband, you mean.”

  “Not at all. I have observed your husband, and he is not a strong man. Paris will devour him. When you are ready to leave him, I will be waiting.”

  This time Beal came closer than ever to slapping him. “You are wrong. People been putting Thomas down since the day he was born, even his own daddy. What they don’t see is that when he sets his mind to something, he doesn’t let it go. I don’t know what he intends, but whatever he decides to do, I will be at his side. If you are waiting for my marriage to fail, you will be waiting until the end of your days.”

  She stood up during this, and when she finished, he stood up also. She stared her defiance into his eyes, but instead of anger or contrition, she saw an unnerving kind of patience. He took her hand, kissed it, and said, “À bientôt, Mademoiselle Beal.”

  When Beal got back Thomas was, as usual, still at dinner. She looked into his French–English dictionary and was not really surprised to learn that à bientôt meant see you soon.

  * * *

  They pulled into the great city just as the dusk light turned a sort of purple, the color of Lent, a solemn time, but not without the promise of joy. Years later, when Thomas thought about those days, it was the metaphor of Lenten light that came to mind first, so strongly that in his memory he’d get the dates wrong, thinking they arrived in midwinter rather than November. It got dark early in Paris, his sister Mary had told him that at some point; he remembered her saying that the city was on the same latitude as Newfoundland.

  At each high point of land or river bluff along the way, there seemed to be a town clustered around a steeple or two, but now the train had dropped onto a rather dismal plain, and as they approached the city, each town began to bleed into the next. When once again they crossed the Seine, perhaps for the fifth time—they had been slicing along and across its serpentine course all afternoon—Thomas caught the first full sight of the city, and if Eiffel’s tower immediately grabbed his gaze, the teeming city at its base is what held his interest. It was on a scale he had never imagined: the place Mary had described was largely confined to the convent and the commodious park around it. His impulse was to nudge Beal, to direct her attention, but maybe this daunting tableau was not something he wanted her to see. In the twinkling activity of dusk Thomas could imagine thousands, millions of people, all working at some purpose, or at cross-purposes, a crush of traffic on the boulevards, the exhausted march of dusk in the simple streets, a knife being wielded in a back alley. As vast as it was, the city seemed too small to contain all that must be happening there. The river itself up to then had seemed crammed with vessels, skiffs and dinghies, lighters loaded with coal or grain, and barges mounded with what appeared to be apples, but oddly, on this final approach, the traffic had disappeared and now the river appeared as a majestic, unsullied thread winding unhurriedly through the tumult. It was a month before Thomas got to the bottom of that mystery, discovering that Napoleon had ordered canals built through the northern part of the city in order to divert commerce from his beloved broad avenue of water.

  Thomas might have hoped that this first view of the arena he would soon enter would elate him, as if the roar of the crowd could be counted on to raise him up, but the fact was, he had never heard the roaring of a crowd and he did not expect to hear it now; no one but his harried sister and Beal’s bereft parents had dispatched him for this fight. If you must do this: that was Mary’s sole benediction; to make it complete, all she needed was a basin of water in which to wash her hands. Well, given all she had done for them, that was unfair. But forget his father, now dead, who had preferred Beal’s brother, Randall, to him from the day the two boys learned to walk. Why can’t you be more like Randall? was written on the banner under which he’d been raised. Thomas’s father had arranged for the two boys to do their schooling side by side in a back room on the Retreat, but once Randall was dead, murdered—no one except the murderer knew by whom or why—Thomas himself became even more unnecessary, a dangling sequela of an experiment gone awry.

  Except that something none of them expected had happened: he had fallen in love with Beal, and for years the Retreat and the little enclave of Tuckertown had revolved around this immutable fact. It was odd that this surprised anyone, not just because she and Thomas had become almost inseparable as friends, and not just because Randall, for one, had been warning people that this was happening, but also, when Thomas considered the state of the game as it now stood on the Retreat, his falling in love with Beal was about the only thing that made sense, the only solution, the only path forward for any of them. Even now, as he glanced over at her, sitting expectantly beside him, lost in her own thoughts, Thomas’s devotion to her was so absolute that he could not begin to articulate why he loved her, why she and she alone gave him comfort and joy he’d never experienced before, why it had seemed to him foreordained, why there had been nothing—nothing—that anyone could have done to convince him to end it. Thomas was not stupid; he was not unaware. He understood all the arguments against it, it pained him to cause hurt and fear to her parents, he had earned loathing on the streets of town, and he cut himself off from almost every comfortable path that his privilege offered. Every path except for the one that would always be open to him: the privilege of his white skin. It would be some years in his life with Beal before he recognized fully what a privilege that was. He, finally, simply cast aside his own free will and mortgaged it in full to a love affair. It was unseemly, not very manly, when he thought about it, to be so helpless in the face of mere passion—like Aeneas falling for Dido, Thomas recalled from his days at the university (“if you will not shoulder the task for your own fame”). Men, his father would have said, understand that their calling and their fulfillment lay in the great designs they forge with other men. To his sister, Mary, his love for Beal was just selfishness, as she had pointed out again and again and again. As if falling in love could ever not be a selfish act; it was either an act of courage or of cowardice, a supreme show of strength or a pathetic display of weakness, but it belonged only to him.

  The train was now scuttling through the dark streets, like a rodent with business of its own. There was no going back. With each rattle of the train carriage he was both leaving everything farther behind and conjuring something to take its place. Madame Bernault was stirring, gathering in her cloak, and Thomas had to admit that he was extremely grateful she was there to guide them. Paris had been useful as a place to head toward; otherwise, they were simply heading to the edge of the earth. But this was only the first stop, just a portal to their new lives, not a destination. He’d reminded Beal of this every chance he’d had since their wedding, as if all the challenges they faced were bundled onto these streets, as if once they got through this trial, the rest would be easy. He had no idea what that “rest” might be. None. Not even the shadow of a plan—even a vague interest; Beal had been his young life’s sole focus. It was almost indefensible, most especially what he was making Beal do. He had made, silently, a solemn vow that whatever this city threw at them, he would protect her. He’d throw himself in the path of any oncoming runaway coach; he would ease her way through the mysteries here because, by default, maybe only by default, this was his world and not hers.

  Which would have been fine if Thomas had been a man of this world. He had money enough, but in no way was he raised in this manner. Yes, the fiction on the ship that she had been his servant was disgraceful, loathsome, except … except that it made things simpler. No, said Thomas to himself, I must admit the trut
h: it was a tremendous relief. It was as if they had taken the cloister of the Retreat, of that bench by the stable under the pecan tree, along with them; the lie was the wall they used to protect themselves. The first night on board, she had already left to find her supper in the deep tub of the ship and he had dressed as he knew he must and found himself with no difficulty in the first-class dining salon, where he was greeted with relative indifference by the waiters and the five other passengers assigned to his table, and as he lowered himself into his seat, he had one of the most unwelcome thoughts of his life: Thank God Beal isn’t here. He would never have dreamed of subjecting her to this, but even so, the thought had come to him in a more selfish guise. Thank God he could slide in under the cover of these incurious gazes, confront all the forks and knives and glasses, and listen to the first of eight days’ worth of complaints about the service, the food, the weather. God, why didn’t they just swim to Europe, or fly, if that’s how they were going to behave. But imagine how they would have scattered if he had shown up with Beal on his arm.

  When he got back to his stateroom, she was in her little inboard cabin. He knocked, and she yelled through the door, “I’m okay,” and he thought that maybe it was better to leave her be, even though he wasn’t sure that she wasn’t crying. He didn’t want to have to describe dinner in the first-class salon, and she wouldn’t have to tell him anything about steerage, so he yelled back, “Me too. Good night,” before tiptoeing to his own room. Yes, this had all been Mary’s idea—“Think, Thomas,” she had said, “what it would be like. It’s a French ship, but most of the passengers will be American. I don’t even know if they would let her in the dining salon”—but maybe not a bad one after all.

  The days had passed with roles all nicely laid out, and Thomas had become aware that Beal was slowly becoming more comfortable at meals and on deck; the whole fiction required that they show themselves topside alone, and Beal seemed to like that, being up in the weather, and there seemed to be people, families, whoever, who had welcomed her. Thomas was passing the time in these insipid and boring conversations about people in New York he knew and cared nothing about, and she was acquiring whole packets of hints and facts about France, which she spilled out to him in his stateroom. “Sou is the word they use for a penny,” she said. And then, “The clocks in railroad stations are kept five minutes slow all over France, so people won’t miss the trains.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. When is it ever real time?”

  “When you’re in Paris,” she answered, and then later that same day she said, “People take baths in barges that float in the river.”

  “I think we’ll have a bath in the hotel,” he said.

  “I don’t know about that,” she answered. “That’s just what someone said.”

  “Who was that?” The fact was, his own dining companions directed almost nothing to him, certainly nothing about clocks and baths or life counted out in dollars and cents.

  “Oh, just a man at our table,” she said, and volunteered nothing more.

  So that was the way the days passed, and by the time they’d arrived in Le Havre, Thomas was sufficiently bored with his fellow first-class passengers—all Americans, at his table—not to care what they thought of him, and Beal was sufficiently reassured that in some way she could survive the next few days. The assurances he had been giving her seemed, finally, to sink in, to the point that Thomas almost wished he believed them as unconditionally as she did. When it came time to debark, they approached the gangplank with her walking a pace or two behind, but he stopped at the top, waited for her to catch up, and offered the loop of his arm to her. She slid her hand through it, and they joined amid gasps of shock and dismay, and in part because Beal stumbled a bit stepping up off the deck, they marched down together as one. Thomas had never felt so proud; he wished his sister had been there to see them, but her nun would do.

  And tonight, tonight, in a little hotel on a quiet street, after years of waiting, years of nighttime dreams and daytime fantasies, he would share a bed with his Beal as husband and wife, he would make love to her, she would make love to him. He was grateful, and he knew Beal was too, that their week on the ship had provided this other kind of transition, a slow approach to intimacy, but now it was upon them, their unlikely wedding night. He could not imagine what it would feel like when she opened her body for him, but she would, and they would never again be apart. The breath fluttered in his chest, a cause for wonderment.

  When they departed the station, the glow of purple had given way to a grayer sky, but the air had not yet turned cold. The evening reminded him of Novembers at home, when the fall warmth lingered before the wind off the bay became steely and unforgiving. It seemed a shame that it was a landau sent to pick them up—the Paris convent’s worldly effects were several steps up from Le Havre’s—but once they were seated, he appreciated the comfort and privacy, and he put his arm around Beal. Madame Bernault had closed her eyes the instant she reentered the protections of her Society, and worn out by everything, she had fallen fast asleep. Her veil was squashed against the seat back, her mouth open, and Thomas smiled at Beal: a nice lady. “No wonder Mary liked her so much,” Thomas whispered.

  “She has been right sweet to us.”

  “More than that. Imagine if we had to do all this ourselves.”

  “Thomas, you would have done fine without her. You would have got us here just fine. You’re a strong man, and I trust you.”

  Thomas was a little surprised at the vehemence with which she spoke—this seemed to be part of some wider conversation—but she’d always believed in him just a little more than anyone else had. That was one of the many reasons he loved her; he was two years older, and as children, it was natural that she looked up to him, but even as they became young adults she still defended him against all his detractors. But yes, if he’d had to, he would have gotten them off the ship and to Paris without any help whatsoever.

  He glanced over at her. Her tight waves of black hair, uncontained by her hat, seemed to caress her cheeks; her thick eyebrows seemed an impossible luxury above her pale eyes. From the moment they entered the carriage in Le Havre, people had been gaping at her; maybe they thought she was Andalusian, or a Creole from the West Indies, or a tribal princess from Africa. Thomas had seen this happening all his life. The first careless glance from the white man, or even a white woman, that saw only her blackness, and then, as if a deeper truth suddenly landed in that dim brain, the second helpless gape that watched her face move for a second or so, a moment of surprise, or disbelief, and then the stare, from the men, that settled despite itself into a hunger. The pretty nigger girl of the Retreat, that’s what they said in Queen Anne’s County, but that’s because they couldn’t account for her beauty. The truth was—as Thomas figured out later—as a child, Beal was beyond race. Anyone could see in her looks what they wanted to see; no one had to think of her as anything but a child. And now that she had matured, she was in every way a woman of African descent, but to the lover, the beloved’s features remain unplaceable, they were born with her. Those eyes, sure, Beal’s eyes adorned her face like jewelry, but there was also something sculptural about her profile, her brow, her chin; something joyous about the broad smile that came and went in an instant. Thomas would never tire of looking at her with a kind of wonderment.

  It was dark now, but the streetlamps were bright and there were a surprising number of people out walking in the chilly evening air.

  “I am in the place I really want to be,” he said. “I only ever wanted to be with you. Isn’t that what you feel?”

  She squeezed his hand, gave him a nudge with her shoulders, which meant, you don’t need words from me.

  “Look,” he said, pointing out the glass. “See up there?” She leaned over his lap and looked up the glittering avenue toward the towering stone arch at the top. The traffic proceeding up and returning down the hill were like twin rivers of light, their lamps twinkling as they passed under the bare
branches of the horse chestnuts. “The Arch of Triumph,” he said.

  “Gee,” she said. “Is that a house? Do people live in there?”

  He tried not to laugh, but did. “No. It’s just a monument. Like the Washington Monument.”

  She heard the suppressed laugh. “I don’t know about no monuments,” she snapped. “People could live there. People live in lighthouses,” she said, but when she righted herself, she took a place even more curled up at his warm side. Yes. She had never expected in her life to be in France; neither did he. A better place for her? Maybe. Farm girl. Maid. Answers to the name of Beal. Strong and reliable. Cuffee. Nigger. A long way from all that, maybe. That’s what Thomas had been promising her, but really, none of that had ever seemed to bother her so much; it was just the way things were. They were here for other reasons than that. Who cares? Beal would say. Don’t matter to me. Maybe it mattered more to him; his whiteness, not her blackness.

  Once again they were crossing the Seine. This seemed a city of bridges, and again Thomas could not help taking notice of this river; he would not call it broad and powerful but something of its appeal, or its myth, came to him. The way it hollowed through the heart of the city between its ancient stone walls—it seemed a thing, a being that had been captured. Still, the river seemed to permit the city, as crazy as that seemed. Once on the other bank, they were driving the length of a park, and to the right was an enormous gilded building with a dome that seemed to float over the whole district. Though down some alleys they could see and smell the humble foundations of this city, Thomas began to understand a bit of the grandeur. The greatest city on earth. At every street corner there was something remarkable, a church, a bridge, a park; the top of the Eiffel Tower seemed to be tracking them everywhere they went. For a moment, with this neighborly sleeping nun across from them, with a melodic chatter from the driver and porter coming from the seat above them, with Beal now pressed against him, Thomas thought that things would turn out all right. Life had a way of turning out right, if one trusted the hours, if one trusted tomorrows.