Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “Mademoiselle Beal. What a pleasure to see you.”

  “Go away.”

  He ignored this. “But you have come as I directed.”

  “We didn’t. I was walking with my husband.” She looked nervously in the direction Thomas had gone and realized that even that was a mistake.

  He smiled. “I see,” he said. “Perhaps you will come back another time, and we can continue our discussions at more leisure.”

  She did not respond to this, and by the time Thomas had returned, Touré was gone, almost as if he had disappeared.

  * * *

  Thomas had gone back to Galignani’s the day after his first visit. He’d had a dream about those book stacks. In the dream they were numberless, slightly terrifying, and then, of course—who else?—his father appeared at the end of a corridor, wagging a disapproving finger. The person who might have appeared as another member of this stacked jury was Mother Digby—he woke almost daily with her contempt for him on his mind—but in this case his father needed no help. In the dream, Thomas could not discern exactly what he was being scolded for: selecting the wrong volume or, well, just being his own feckless self. What could a son do with a father like that? In almost any way that counted, Wyatt Bayly had been without flaw, a visionary, a reformer, a person driven by the quest for scientifically proved certainties. He’d married Thomas’s mother at the very end of the war and taken on her moribund Eastern Shore farm, had led that whole part of the state into a booming peach industry in which everyone got rich only to watch it all die twenty years later. The “yellows” is what they called it, the blight that wiped them out, an unstoppable and malevolent force of nature, a cyclone that ravaged the county, and not with the suddenness of catastrophe but with the slow accretion of despair. There had been times during his earlier youth that Thomas took pleasure in the way his father’s plans were falling apart, but in the end it was all just too ghastly, too soul-destroying to do anything but sympathize. Thomas would find him late at night in his study, staring not into, but at the large microscope sitting on his desk amid a jumble of roots and leaves, gnarled pieces of twig, and rotting bits of fruit, staring at it in a rage for not producing the answers he sought. The brilliant brass microscope became the centerpiece of Wyatt’s resistance, a line in the sand from the first day the yellows arrived on the Eastern Shore. They had been chasing the poor peaches from the Hudson River Valley down through New Jersey and into Delaware and Maryland; each time the industry moved south, the yellows followed, and as far as Thomas had been able to tell, the whole doleful caravan was now marching through North Carolina.

  The microscope had taken over the room, but the whole thing started with the books. Thomas knew this because his father had sermonized to him on the subject of books, of research, of knowledge. In the months before he and Ophelia married, Wyatt had conducted exhaustive research into the possible uses—crops, resources, amenities—of Mason’s Retreat and had decided, first, that grain had no future, for the revived Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would soon be shipping in wheat from Ohio, but that fruit, especially the fragile little peach, could not be shoved onto a railway car as if it were a bag of grain. Wyatt knew about the yellows before he even started, but here he made the fatal mistake—here is where, so Thomas believed, the books had led him fatally astray because there was something in there that made Wyatt believe he knew how to stop the yellows. And he didn’t. The books didn’t, as it turned out, have a clue.

  But here, years later, was Thomas heading off after lunch to confront the bookcases of Galignani’s. He walked down the Quai d’Orsay and crossed the river on the Pont de la Concorde, marching tout droit, as they say, toward the Obelisk and the Madeleine. The French loved things that lined up—that had been clear to him from the first day. The Baron Haussmann had simply obeyed the will of the people. Thomas half hoped that this trip to Galignani’s would turn out to be a pointless and useless gesture—books!—but the thing about books was that they were often the last chance, the last stop along the way to the abyss. What other option did he have? In the months to come he would make this trip many times—at first just to Galignani’s but later to the library on the rue Tronchet, and even in the bitterest weather he enjoyed this half hour along the banks of the Seine. In his waterborne youth he’d gotten used to the rivers of the Chesapeake as highways of commerce; during harvest the steamers called at the Retreat every afternoon and swept the peaches to market. But here in Paris, at this point in the mighty river’s flow, except for the laundry and bathing barges and an occasional lighter with some high-priority cargo, the passage was reserved for the bateaux-mouches or the barges of the rich; even as Thomas admired the French for making this sacrifice to beauty, it did seem wasteful to him. His father’s son, he did not think that utility was ugly. Nor did he know then that in years to come, he would once again rely somewhat on a watery highway—the Canal du Midi in Languedoc—but at this point in his research he’d never even heard of the Canal du Midi or, for that matter, the whole region of Languedoc.

  When he returned that second time to Galignani’s, he was disappointed not to see the Irish girl at the desk. He’d wondered about her the night before, why she was in Paris, why she had this job. It didn’t seem very jolly. He’d overheard her speaking French, and even to his ears she wasn’t very good. But on the way over he had composed—why he thought he might need it was another question—a small explanation of his interest in the collections: He was relocating, he would be making a study of certain industries, did his two-franc-per-month membership allow him to withdraw unlimited volumes? But it was a dour, dyspeptic middle-aged Frenchman at the desk, and therefore only the last topic seemed worthy of effort and Thomas figured he’d face the issue later. Instead he wound through the reading room, where men of all stripes—maybe the presence of a rougher sort explained why, as Thomas had learned, the English and American ladies tended to prefer the reading room at The New York Herald up the street at l’Opéra—studied their newspapers and periodicals, smoked and dozed.

  He stood facing the first of the stacks. A wall of books, and there happened to be some groups of lighter-colored volumes that stared back at him like two eyes. Thomas had fun, for a second, placing his father’s face over them, but the joke quickly paled, followed by a moment of panic: What did he think he was doing here in this library, here in France, following this doomed strategy? His spirits flagged. Yesterday this wall of books seemed full of the future for him, a trove of possibilities; today the whole thing seemed a last stop on the way to Hell. He wandered a bit through the stacks, his eyes darting over the prominent section labels: GLASS, PERFUME, CERAMICS, TEXTILES (“see: fibres”). Why not just go straight to STEEL and learn how to make a Bessemer furnace? He returned to his original spot, feeling his heart race: yesterday this had seemed like salvation, but today perhaps it was all just a near miss, as good as a mile, as Hattie’s Mary, the woman who had largely raised him, often used to say.

  He must have stood there for quite a long time, as the next thing he heard was a pleasant voice from behind saying, in a thick Irish accent, “Are you all right, Monsieur?”

  He turned and without doubt revealed far too much—his state of fear, his pleasure—when his eyes settled on Eileen Hardy. “Miss Hardy!” he said.

  “I thought that was you.” She was quite short, but that hair! Remarkable. She took a step back so she could address him better. “You seemed quite excited yesterday.”

  It rushed to Thomas’s mind to say all sort of things to her—that his mother in America had copper hair like hers, was famous throughout the county for it, and other things. He might also have said that there was a large family of Hardys in his town at home, and in fact he had just that second been remembering one of them, Hattie’s Mary Hardy, but then he would probably have to explain the reason for her odd—to European ears—name, and he didn’t want to do that. The lines he had composed on his walk over about relocating seemed idiotic now. He pondered all this long enough for he
r to repeat her first question.

  “You seem,” she said, “quite … well”—she pursed her freckled brow, searching for the word—“confused.” It was a slightly forward thing for this woman to say to a library patron, but it was delivered with a mordant twist, a sly humor, which Thomas liked.

  “Yes. Perhaps that is so,” he said, making sure to sound rueful and not in full-blown panic. He went on to say that he had some research in mind but wasn’t entirely sure where to begin.

  “Can I help?” she asked. “Is this research in a certain industry?”

  Thomas glanced back at the case in front of him: it went from AGRICULTURE (“see: crops”) to CERAMICS. “I’m not quite sure yet.”

  She looked at him with appealing disbelief; she might well have thought he was crazy, disturbed, but instead she took it all for a game of sorts. “Well then, I’ll leave you to it,” she said, as if it were the opening gambit.

  Thomas was left alone, and it did not take him long to recognize that he must start with what he knew—sage advice, after all—and as if guided by the most self-destructive of urges, he sought out and found a section on peaches. It did not surprise him that there were twenty or so volumes on the subject—his father had liked to say that peaches were the fruit preferred by Louis XIV—and furthermore, he recognized most of the titles from his father’s own fateful collection. But as he thumbed—it was necessary, it seemed to him, to show some focus before Miss Hardy really did dismiss him as a fou—he found one volume on walled orchards right here in Paris, in a neighborhood called Montreuil. He quickly became lost in this fascinating tale, how the murs à pêches absorbed the sun’s heat and sheltered the trees from the winds, which meant that Louis XIV himself could enjoy thin-skinned beauties from June to November. The walls would probably do nothing to slow down the blight, but the yellows was an American disease anyway.

  “Well, now,” said Miss Hardy, who had come to tell him that the establishment would be closing soon, “you have found a place to start.”

  He was sitting at one of the tables, with four or five books on peaches arrayed in front of him. He held up the one he was reading for her to see. She cocked her head sideways in order to read the title.

  “Oh, yes. The orchards at Montreuil. They used to be quite something, I am told. I live not far from Montreuil.”

  “Used to be?”

  “I think more peaches are now shipped here from the Midi.”

  “The Midi? The South? The middle, or something like that?”

  Yes, she said, as far as Parisians were concerned, the Midi was anywhere south, a sort of uncivilized center. She added, “Are peaches of interest to you?”

  The question was so innocent, yet so grotesque to Thomas that he couldn’t help laughing, laughing quite hard. She was used, it seemed, to offering up her own brand of cheek, but this laughter took her aback and clearly hurt her feelings.

  “No,” he said as she began to walk away. “No, please. You don’t understand.” And in order not to lose her, he began the briefest possible version of his family’s story, of the Retreat, which ballooned a bit into the catastrophe of the yellows, his father’s desperate and doomed attempts to find a cure, and before he knew it, he had admitted to her that he was now living in France and hoping that this library could help him decide what to do with himself—how, really, to start over again. He said nothing about Beal; he did not say he was married.

  He had remained seated during this blighted tale, and she had remained standing next to the table, with her hand on the chair back opposite him, and as he was winding down, she looked behind her to see that the reading room was now empty and her disagreeable superior was glaring at her. “Well,” she said. “Perhaps not peaches then. We Irish know all about blight, after all.” A polite smile, for a moment, disappeared into a flutter of pain. “Apples?”

  “This may surprise you,” he said. “But there are certain rivalries among orchardists. My father thought apples were a crude and uninteresting plant. Apples would be disloyal to my father’s memory. He doesn’t have much else, to tell the truth.” She flinched a little on that. Thomas had not wasted much time on the family dynamic during his quick history, so perhaps this mean note surprised her, but in fact, he took her reaction to suggest that there was plenty of family drama in her own story: people came to Paris for all sorts of reasons, but of the Irish, of whom there were many in Paris, Thomas had gotten the impression that most had fled here, escaped here, not unlike himself. “My father is an even longer story,” he said.

  “They usually are.” She gathered up the books in front of him and was heading to the stack when she stopped and turned. “Then how about grapes?”

  “I’m sorry?” Thomas was busy speculating about her story and had to be reminded of what they had been talking about.” You mean, growing grapes?”

  “Yes. You’d be right at home.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, for one thing, they’ve been almost wiped out by blight, but they are coming back. It’s your chance to succeed where your father failed.”

  She walked him around to the section on grapes, an entire wall of books. Thomas stood back. Grapes, wine: he could imagine absolutely nothing that seemed more French and therefore more impossible for him to pierce. The sight should have been overwhelming; the old Thomas would have been halfway home by now, but a strange new sensation had been creeping into him these past weeks. He looked up at the challenge of these books and said to himself, this is big enough to bother with. How remarkable to recognize in a single instant that he had been going about everything in his life, everything but his love for Beal, with exactly the wrong objectives. Not small enough for me to succeed, but large enough to keep my interest. His fingers tingled, as if they wanted to begin pulling volumes from the shelf. How extraordinary. Eileen was looking at him intently; clearly some of the scale of this stranger’s moment was evident to her, and she seemed pleased that, as a good librarian should, she had nudged him into a new topic. From behind them monsieur le directeur was complaining at a high pitch. Thomas looked at Eileen and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll look at grapes next time.”

  * * *

  It was now a few days before Christmas, and Stanley had arranged for Beal and Thomas to be invited to a dinner with a few of his fine fellows and two of the women students, Hilary Devereux and Colleen Sullivan, who studied in the separate wing at the Académie Julian. Hilary’s mother had moved over from Boston for the winter to accompany her daughter, but Colleen was in Paris on her own, living in a “most respectable”—said Stanley—establishment for female students run by two maiden sisters, the Mesdemoiselles Rostand. They would be dining at a restaurant called Prévost’s, on the river. The only problem, said Stanley, was that Hilary’s mother would be there. “A terrible snob,” said Stanley. “But Hilary is loads of fun.”

  Beal had been dreading this turn, this public outing, but Thomas was pleased. “I’m glad you will be meeting some girls,” he said. “Maybe you could be friends.”

  Beal could not imagine this. Artists? White girls? Not people who would likely want her as a friend. Almost every time she and Thomas went out for a walk, they attracted some sort of attention—looks of scorn from large, buxom dames or some sort of mingled rebuke and curiosity from men of almost any age. Maybe recently it had been happening less, or maybe Beal was noticing less, but it was still there. They had dined out only at the Lion d’Or, where any complaint about them would have been stifled by the effusive warmth of M. Richard, his wife, or Céleste and Oriane. The cafés, in the afternoon, tended to serve the same clientele; if there were those at the nearby Café du Pont who still found them objectionable, most had given up paying them any notice at all. Except, of course, if an American happened to drop in. Yes, Beal could always spot the Americans, the “missionaries,” as Touré had called them, and lately she had taken to flaunting her relationship with Thomas—putting a hand on his arm, leaning her head into his—just to irrita
te them. But she and Thomas knew nothing of this place, Prévost’s, and of these girls, and of this mother.

  “You should go,” she said.

  “And not you?”

  “Thomas, they don’t want me.”

  Thomas simply laughed at that, and Beal, stung, waited for him to explain himself. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “Stanley’s pastel pictures are posted on the wall at their school. Stanley says they all want to meet you. I bet that’s the real reason for this dinner. I’m the afterthought here, not you.”

  Beal could not argue against that, because it seemed to be true; not the “afterthought” part, but the way Stanley, embarrassingly, fixed on her every time they met. She knew that people tried to sit beside her the few times she had visited the Café Badequin; this wasn’t very subtle. And so it seemed to her that this dinner was worth a try, and if she was turned away at the door or if there was a terrible scene, then Thomas would never again be able to ask her to do something like it. It was a wedding night all over again, but, as with her wedding night—as she counted off the days before this dinner with dread—she also could not still a tiny flame of interest. Imagine! she said to herself. Well, I’ll be!

  The night was cold; neither Thomas nor Beal had winter coats yet, but when they arrived at Prévost’s they were greeted by a blast of heat and light, conversation and instructions among the staff. Beal had seen this welcoming bustle many times in restaurants as Thomas and she walked by—voices and laughter, colors and stylish clutter, lamps pouring out light. In truth, she had from time to time wished they might go in, and here she was. She stood at Thomas’s side as he announced them to the maître d’, and she looked around for the disapproving looks, the stares, and didn’t see any. No one seemed to notice them or care about them; this was a sort of raucous place anyway, perhaps not totally respectable, a place where artists might mingle with bankers, where older men could entertain younger women, actresses, even.