Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “I deserved it,” Fred answered. “I think she’ll be fine here. I think it will turn out all right for you. We’re a very long way from the Confederacy.”

  The next day, M. Richard helped them move into their suite of five rooms on the avenue Bosquet, just around the corner from their hotel. It was a simple and somewhat charmless place, but the avenue was broad enough to let in plenty of morning light, and the river was a short walk away. The apartment had fireplaces with marble mantels in the parlor and the bedroom. The parlor came furnished with a threadbare Oriental carpet, two equally worn chairs upholstered in red velvet, a love seat, and an upright piano. The cook, a Mme Vigny, seemed a disagreeable sort. There was a room for a live-in servant upstairs under the eaves, the quarters for all the domestics in the building, and Thomas blushed when the concierge insisted on showing it to them. Beal didn’t mind: Sure, she seemed to say, this is what a maid’s room looks like. The apartment was on the fourth floor, and the bedroom window opened onto a courtyard, where the concierge had a toolshed, and two little girls in rumpled white pinafores played games until their mothers called them in. The high voices echoed in this stone court, and Thomas and Beal learned their names one afternoon when they heard the little blonde say “Gilberte” in a very stern voice and heard the one with curly red hair answer shyly, “Oui, Monique.” They seemed very sweet, Gilberte and Monique.

  Once they had moved in and Beal turned her attention to getting settled, Thomas started in with his French lessons with M. Richard’s daughter, Céleste, sitting beside her behind the hotel desk; when she was doing business with guests, Thomas listened carefully, and after the business was done, Céleste found a way to tell Thomas what was being said. In that way Thomas’s first French lexicon was the language of the hotelier; what the guests wanted and needed was almost always predictable, and within a month he took over the desk when Céleste was needed elsewhere. This was a good family, M. Richard and his wife, Céleste and her sister, Oriane—a family Thomas envied, just as he envied Beal’s family, her parents Abel and Una, her sisters. He envied any family that seemed to be loyal to one another.

  Thomas had failed mostly disastrously in his three years at the University of Pennsylvania, and as the days and weeks began to pass, he assumed that the reason he was picking up things rather quickly was that Céleste was a phenomenally good teacher. His Latin helped, but as time went on, even Thomas had to admit to himself that he was good at this; and years later, as he reflected on his rocky youth, he recognized that learning French had been perhaps his first success, and that if this had not been so, all the other successes that followed might not have happened. Some afternoons Madame Bernault would drop in, find them both huddled in front of the array of heavy iron keys dangling in the pigeonholes, Thomas conjugating verbs. Madame Bernault always bustled in with great cheer, came around the desk to greet Céleste warmly and shake Thomas’s hand, and then took up the single chair in the lobby for the afternoon, often falling asleep and snoring loudly. Céleste had Thomas conjugate the regular verb ronfler, which meant to snore—je ronfle, tu ronfles, il ronfle, nous ronflons, vous ronflez, ils ronflent—and Madame Bernault woke up during this and asked, “Est-ce que je ronfle?”

  “Oui, Mère Lucy. Vous ronflez,” said Thomas.

  Beal visited Madame Bernault often at the Hôtel Biron; she was welcomed by the sisters and the kitchen staff, and many days she simply sat in the comforting bustle of the back halls. She could still not imagine that this mansion was a school, but she did observe that the girls and the teachers lived a simple and austere life in these halls. An unkinder life than she had lived growing up in Tuckertown, that was certain. Beal did not know very much about Mary Bayly, but from what she did know, it made sense that Miss Mary would fit in here, where everything was ordered, where everything seemed to have a top and a bottom. Two of the sisters were black: one from Brazil and one from Africa, but neither of them had any English, so all they could do for Beal was encourage her with their smiles.

  In the mornings she often joined Mme Vigny for the trip to the markets on the rue Cler. Thomas had no idea what this rather disagreeable woman thought of it, but it was clear from the beginning that the shopkeepers and merchants were very taken with Beal. They called her “Mademoiselle Beal” and also “la belle noire,” and she didn’t mind; it all sounded like poetry to her, she said, and besides, their protector M. Richard was often there at the same time, and he roundly cussed out—so it sounded to Beal—anyone who tried to give her anything that was less than pure or fresh. The chatter and commerce of the market were well known to Beal, well known to any domestic in America. Any young black woman could be at the grocer at six in the morning or on the pier at Hampton at five in the evening buying a nice fat rockfish and no one would pay it any mind, but here on the rue Cler, they knew she was buying this food for herself, for her husband. They teased her about Thomas, Beal told him, pantomimed him sleeping on flattened hands, and when she took him there for the first time after a week or so as they were closing up their stalls, the men—the fishmonger, the butcher, the greengrocer—winked at him lustily, and the women, the baker’s wife, the cheesemaker, patted and stroked Beal on the back and arm, saying that this was how he must treat her. “Comme ça, M. Thomas,” they said.

  A few weeks later, after they had begun to acclimate themselves to Mme Vigny’s comings and goings, to the unfamiliar rhythms of city life, to their own slightly numb disbelief that all this was happening, Thomas and Beal sat at the window balcony overlooking the avenue, saying very little, holding hands. The sun had set over the rooftops and spires, and the calm of twilight was settling all around them like dust. Up and down the street, people were opening their shutters for the evening; before he understood the French custom with these shutters, Thomas had assumed that most of these buildings were closed up for the winter or abandoned. Mme Vigny had lit the gas jet in the kitchen behind them, but there was still a gleam of dusk on the teapot in front of them, and Thomas was in no hurry to break the charm of this restful Paris evening. Beal felt warm and precious at his side.

  “It really is beautiful, don’t you think?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t even want to tell you what I thought it would be like.”

  “You always said you had no idea, that you’d just have to see.”

  “Well…” she said.

  Thomas laughed and gave her arm a jiggle. “What? You have to tell me.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought it would be too dangerous to be outside without soldiers to protect us. I thought we would be robbed, killed maybe. That’s all I’d ever heard about France, that the roads were unsafe because of robbers.” The truth was, she wasn’t entirely over that fear. “I thought there would be factories everywhere—I mean, that it was a city of factories making iron things and stuff. And perfume. I couldn’t imagine what all these people would be doing here if not working in factories. Of course, I still don’t know what people do here.”

  “They go for walks, it seems.”

  “Yes. I thought the only people we’d see outside, besides robbers and policemen, would be old widows and men missing legs from wars.”

  They sat quietly for a few more minutes as the last of the evening dusk withdrew from the room. All around them were the flavors of cooking; neither of them had ever imagined that food would be attended by such fragrances. On the streets the smells were far less agreeable, but up here at the rooftops, everything seemed to have the fragrance of wildflowers, even in winter.

  “This afternoon I walked to the river,” she said. “I sat on a bench and watched. So much going on, so many people walking by, the boats in the river. Monique and Gilberte were there chasing each other around a fountain. The girls call their Mamas Maman,” said Beal, forcing the m sound through her sinuses. “One of the Mamans spoke to me, but of course I didn’t know what she said.”

  “Well, did it seem she was saying something nice?”

  “Not really nice or not
. Not anything really. I think she was asking whether the girls playing in the courtyard bothered us. I just smiled. The girls seem sort of afraid of me. Maybe they’ve never seen a colored person before.”

  “They seem like very polite girls. I think here in France people don’t talk to strangers on the street. People are polite, but not friendly.” As if to cast doubt on this thought, a clang came from the kitchen and then the sound of something being pounded.

  “Did you find that library?” Beal asked. That’s what he had set out to do that day, to find an English-language reading room on the rue de Rivoli that Fred Shippen had told him about.

  “Yes, a library, but also sort of a bookstore—I think it will be useful to me.”

  She gave a murmur of assent and he watched her reflect for a moment on the word useful. Yes, some sort of utility, which meant some way to begin to pierce this land, to find beneath the sheen of beauty and monument something firmer to latch a life onto.

  When Thomas had arrived at the library, he was shown to what a young Irish girl called “the den,” and in this rather musty space he found newspapers and guidebooks and illustrated magazines in English, and before he could stop himself, he was hungrily devouring those homey sounds and words. After about an hour of this, he began to wander around the edges, into the book stacks. The Irish girl took him for a quick tour, pointing out that this was one of the most complete libraries in English on French culture and industry, with sections—she pointed to some as she mentioned them in alphabetical order—on ceramics, steelmaking, textiles, wine. Thomas thanked her; her name was Eileen Hardy, and on first glance she was a bit sad-faced, but she was pretty and as copper-haired as Thomas’s mother—a favorite, not surprisingly, of the male clientele.

  Thomas stood in front of the tall bookcases, eyes darting, as if this were a magic maze of sorts, a labyrinth of ideas; he had, for a moment, a hallucination of these shelves of books opening like a door, each section of volumes a path, a future, and him stepping through. Could he read himself into his own life? The idea quite shook him; this was the way his father and his sister had confronted the world—worlds of peach trees and dairy cows—and it was a way he had roundly rejected because, at least for his father, the results had been tragic. But on the way out, the girl smiled a lovely smile at him—she seemed to dart from sunshine to shadow—and said she hoped he’d be back. Oh yes, he said, he would be back the next day.

  Thomas had momentarily lost himself in this recollection—he felt a slightly elated tremor in his chest at the thought that he had the beginnings of a plan—and Beal brought him back. “For us,” she said. “Useful for us.”

  “Yes,” said Thomas, but he kept the slight tremor of elation to himself, as if he doubted that she would take comfort in a future got out of a book. He did not want to say that a very pretty red-haired girl had shown him around.

  “The strangest days of my life,” he said in order to change the subject. “So happy and so strange at the same time. Don’t you think?”

  “There’s nothing strange about us,” said Beal.

  “No,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze. “We’re just ordinary. Ordinary love.”

  “That was my point.”

  “Everyone keeps saying we will be happy here,” said Thomas. “That people won’t be mean to us.”

  “Yes. There was a man on the boat who told me that, and he was right—” She stopped quickly.

  Thomas knew she hadn’t meant to say this, but it had come out in the lazy pleasure of this moment. “Who was that?” he said.

  “Oh. Just nobody. Someone I ate with in steerage.”

  “That tall, African-looking man?”

  “Thomas, I don’t remember who it was who said it. That African man, he helped me get settled that first night. There were other colored on the boat. African men look all the same to you, I bet.”

  The last of the light was fading now, and whether they wanted it or not, Mme Vigny would soon come in with a taper and ruin the mood. Everything had to happen just so with her; she seemed to be the guardian of all things French, perhaps not a bad thing as they tried to get used to this life.

  “You’re really getting on here, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Oh. I’m not doing so much. You’re learning French. You’re planning our lives. Besides, maybe it’s easier for women. Even for a little colored girl like me.”

  * * *

  To Beal’s relief, Stanley Dean had found his cot in the Latin Quarter very soon after they moved into their apartment, but before he moved from the hotel, he asked if he could draw her picture. Beal didn’t know exactly what was being asked of her, and he explained that all she would have to do was sit in a chair someplace and let him copy her. “Just pastels,” he said, holding up a chalky-looking crayon. “On paper. Just a sketch.”

  The whole thing struck her as odd, but Thomas told her that Stanley had already mentioned it, and it seemed all right to him. Stanley sat her in a chair in the lobby and then set up a little stool he had brought with him. He lay the pad across his knees, and even though he was drawing her likeness, it seemed that he quickly forgot she was there. Céleste’s sister, Oriane, came to run the front desk, and she giggled. Stanley finished one and held it up to the light. “No,” he said. “No. No.”

  “Why no?” Beal asked. “Did I do it wrong?”

  “Wrong?” Stanley wasn’t really listening, but he finally took note. “Wrong? You? No. Your skin tone’s too dark in this one.” He let it saw back and forth to the floor. “I’ve never done a Negro.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “More red in your skin than I thought,” he mumbled, mostly to himself, and went back to work. A few minutes later he laughed faintly to himself. “Your hair is fun,” he said, moving his crayon wildly. Beal wondered what kind of crazy person he’d make her look like. When he was done, she expected him to give the pictures to her, at least to show them, but he did not; instead, he rolled them up and tied them with a piece of black ribbon.

  “Did they come out well?” she asked, but now that he had put away his crayons, his paper, the tools of his trade, he became once more the awkward bumbler she was familiar with.

  “Oh. Gee. I don’t know,” he said. He clutched the roll to his side protectively. “I never know until I live with them for a few days. Especially…” He trailed off.

  “Especially what?”

  “Well, I’m sorry, because you’re so pretty.”

  Beal didn’t know exactly how she felt about Stanley’s saying that, but what of it? It was as if, for Stanley, there were three people in the room: herself, him, and the version of her he had put on paper, a version that treated her beauty as nothing but a layer, like her clothes. Stanley still seemed pretty silly to her, but she saw that there was something firm in him; the awkward boy who sets out on an arduous quest has to have special sturdiness within. A couple of times she and Thomas had sat with his group at the café, and it struck her that the other boys, especially that scary Virginian whom Thomas liked, had seemed to recognize this about Stanley too. All except for the dark presence who was always there, the man named Arthur, always in the same seat, never joining the conversation but instead sniping in from the side whenever it pleased him.

  As the December afternoons became shorter and shorter, Thomas and Beal took long walks on routes that crisscrossed the river on the innumerable bridges. Beal was surprised that walking was such a pastime for so many different types of people; at home, no one would walk anywhere unless they had somewhere to get to. But here, there was so much to see—the people, of course, but more oddly, each time they strolled along the quai or entered a boulevard or square, it looked different; it was the light, the color and height of the sun, the way shadows played down the facades of these stone monuments, the way the streetlamps fluttered in the fog, the way the bridges seemed to float when the air was slack. It seemed to Beal that she could live here for decades and still not see these scenes in every one of their costumes.
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  Often they boarded an omnibus and got off randomly in some other neighborhood, going as far as the Île de la Cité, crossing the river on the Pont-Neuf and landing on the Right Bank, and one day they found themselves at the edge of the great market, Les Halles, where, Beal had learned, all the shopkeepers and stalls got their wares, their produce and meat and fish. A writer had called it “the belly of Paris,” Beal had been told by Diallo Touré. And as they stared across the vast ground under the iron-and-glass roof of the market, which was mostly deserted at this hour, Beal remembered—she’d never forgotten—that Touré had said his apartment was in this district and that he often went to a café right at the edge of the market called … Well, she couldn’t remember what it was called until she looked up and saw a frosty door etched with the words CAFÉ SALY. The words brought back the memory of him speaking to her, how mean he was to her sometimes, how he liked to belittle her, how he insinuated himself on her, and Beal thought at this moment that if she walked into this favorite spot of his on Thomas’s arm, if Touré were there and could see that she had no fear of him, that she and especially Thomas were doing right good here in this Paris, then that would be the very last of Diallo Touré.

  All of this was wrong, beginning with what Beal told herself were her intentions. She recognized that as soon as they walked in, with Thomas slightly surprised by her insistence that they stop and then slightly discomfited to see that almost everyone else in the café was colored, black like Africans or brown like Arabs, and that all the waiters were taller than Thomas, giants, really. With all that, there was no mistaking M. Touré sitting in a corner, unmoving, like a cat. Their eyes met, and he let out the same smile she’d seen through the railway car window in Le Havre as she and Thomas and Madame Bernault rushed past to first class; it felt like a slap, this meeting of the eyes, and she staggered enough so that Thomas thought she had tripped. Instantly she realized that she had fallen into the trap Touré had laid for her; in horror it came to her that if she had not come here, she would never have laid eyes on him again, but that now she would never be rid of him. Thomas found them a table, but as soon as he headed off to find the WC, there was Diallo Touré, standing above her.