Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  Thomas had been in this strange land only a few hours and was hardly ready to take up its causes, but he acceded to M. Fauberge’s take on the matter. Yet he did this with enough diffidence to induce M. Fauberge to delve further into Thomas’s personal history.

  “Could I ask,” he said, “why you chose to leave America? At this time?”

  “Certainly,” said Thomas. “France seemed to offer a better opportunity for my wife and me.”

  M. Fauberge allowed some surprise, and relief, at hearing this. “Ah. Such a young married man. It’s good to be married. Is Mme Bayly with you in Narbonne?”

  “No. She is in Paris with friends. I’ll return with her when everything is settled.”

  Here M. Fauberge’s brow furrowed; it was remarkable how expressive his face was, how it brightened and darkened, how his mustache amplified his smiles and accented his concern. “A vineyard is a calling for an entire family. It needs children. But the wife must be prepared for the simple pleasures of work and hearth.”

  “Don’t be misled, M. Fauberge. My wife was raised on an orchard just as I was. We are used to, as you say, the simple pleasures.”

  “Well then. All is magnificent,” said M. Fauberge.

  Thomas had passed the several tests put before him, and at that they agreed that he would accompany M. Fauberge on his annual tour of the brokers and the vignerons with whom he did the bulk of his business. Between appointments, they would take such detours that allowed Thomas a survey of the more unusual opportunities. They would leave in perhaps a week’s time. M. Fauberge’s man Léon was already in Carcassonne with his carriage. “Must keep up appearances, especially in these times,” said M. Fauberge. They would take the train to Carcassonne. Thomas admitted to M. Fauberge that he had hoped to travel on a barque de poste on the Canal du Midi.

  “Oh, there hasn’t been passenger service on the canal for thirty years, but it could still be some use to you if you ship to Bordeaux. I’ll arrange for you to take a day on the canal while I prepare for our trip. A wonder of the world, of course.”

  Once they got to Carcassonne, they would head south, toward Limoux—“Saint-Hilaire, the abbey that invented Champagne, Blanquette de Limoux, as I’m sure you know,” said M. Fauberge—because M. Fauberge had immediate business there. “Fine hillsides in the upper valley of the Aude. There are some splendid nouveaux châteaux in various styles for sale there, but they would not be a suitable situation for a serious man.”

  On the way back north they would cross the alluvial plains, the heartland of the Languedoc winery. “Fine, rich soil, well-drained, somewhat resistant to mildew, excellent for our beloved Aramon grape,” said M. Fauberge at a heightened volume.

  After they had crossed the broad plains and visited the small number of growers who had survived the plague, they would work north and enter the garrigue, the rocky herbed hills of the Minervois region, where Thomas and his young bride would find their fortune. “Right under the shadow of la Montagne Noire. Eh?” he said. Thomas nodded. They would stay for a day or two at especially comfortable hotels in Caunes and La Livinière, maybe in Minerve itself, though the terrain around that little town was perhaps too dramatique. Thomas had seen photographs of Minerve, and even on the page the cliffs and gorges made him tremble. “Thin lands,” continued M. Fauberge. “Microlithic and pyroxenic. Very little depth. Calcareous fissures right up to the surface. The soil decides everything, after all. The yields are especially low, hardly worth all that work. A drop in the bucket, as you Americans say, but what a drop! Perfect,” he added. “We’ll see Carignan, Morrastel, Terret Noir, Aspiran. Even several hectares of Cinsault that survived the plague.” M. Fauberge was practically singing at this point. And finally, clearly a sentimental choice for M. Fauberge, they would complete the tour on the dunes and sands of the Agde coast, where they would have a chance to drink quantities of Piquepoul and gorge on les fruits de mer. “We shall have a splendid time … Armand,” he yelled to the waiter, “we will have lunch now.” Thomas was, indeed, famished from all this travel, all these dry soils and vast plains. “You will never forget me,” said M. Fauberge, giving his mustache a comb and a caress with the tips of both index fingers.

  * * *

  In Paris, the morning after Thomas left, Beal awoke in an unearthly quiet—she had never before slept in an empty home, which thrilled and frightened her. Imagine being alone, waking up like this for the rest of your life. Yes, these were the sort of stakes that seemed to be attending her thoughts these days—never this, forever that. She recalled the extremely rushed and completely irregular process of her conversion to Thomas’s Catholic faith, and the one session of discussion and counseling prior to marriage with Father Langlois back in Newport News before he married them and sent them clattering down the road for their escape to … here. To France. There had been so many momentous aspects of her marriage to Thomas, so many legal considerations, so much secrecy, that the more ordinary questions, the more ordinary assumptions and commitments about the future, about the future until Death, did not come up. Not really, until now.

  Beal stayed in that day, tried and failed to write a letter to be mailed somehow to Thomas, tried and failed to write in her notebooks, which had now become a diary, a journal, something. She stayed in the next day, took the little girls to the Champ de Mars in the afternoon, and ate dinner with Céleste and her family at the hotel, and when she awoke the following day, she knew that she was supposed to spend these days and weeks of her husband’s absence in just such a manner. It had a comfortable and simple rhythm and would be the proper way to protect herself from distrust, but she was not living a simple life, and she had to venture forth into the heart of her confusions.

  So after lunch she went back to the Louvre, where Arthur found her. “Am I some sort of devil?” he asked. “Did the Jew need to be cast out?” After Thomas had gotten on the train, Madame Bernault had made it clear to Arthur that he was to go his own way.

  “Oh,” said Beal. “Mother Lucy is just a hen guarding her chicks. This isn’t about religion.”

  “That’s good,” said Arthur. “If it were, I’d be shtook.”

  “Shtook?”

  “Oh, I keep forgetting who I am dealing with here. I’d be in deep trouble.”

  Beal laughed. Thomas’s friendship with Arthur had at first terrified her—what would Arthur tell Thomas?—and then confused her, as they seemed to have nothing in common but herself, which did not seem enough for a manly relationship. But through Thomas’s eyes she had begun to see a different kind of man, an honest and guileless sort of man whom Thomas would indeed like, and with that new image in mind she found she could forgive Arthur for the way he had treated her.

  “So,” he said. “Am I going to have to keep my eye on you, as Thomas said?”

  She was sitting in a window well in the portrait gallery; she had been looking out at the courtyard in front, at the Tuileries down to the left, as a way of avoiding all these faces of worthy people, of dutiful wives—all these eyes already on her. She sighed.

  “You know I will do anything to help you. That was our deal anyway, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe. If that’s the way you think of it now.”

  Arthur dropped his eyes in a moment of shame. “This guy. Nothing about this makes you feel good. You’re happy when you’re with Thomas, isn’t that right?”

  “Thomas is the miracle of my life. You’d have a better idea than most people how miraculous the change is. Less than a year ago I was a maid in an army colonel’s home.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Then why do you let this guy, whatever his name is, come between you?”

  “Because he is between us. Because he’s in my way. Because he’s asking questions I have to answer. Just because a Jew might fall in love with and marry a Methodist, does everything that stood in their way just disappear? I don’t think Thomas made the mistake of thinking this way about us, but I did.”

  Arthur had nothing to add, but Beal was grateful th
at he knew as much as he did; if he knew nothing, he would not know that she needed him at her side. In secret wars there are no allies, just casualties.

  “I’ve been working on the painting. It’s almost done. Will you want to see it?”

  Except for some glances quickly pulled away, in the whole process of sitting for him she had seen nothing of the portrait. More than anything, she was afraid it would embarrass her, though in exactly what way she didn’t know. Maybe she was afraid that it wouldn’t be good, that it would look nothing like her. That was what a portrait was supposed to do, wasn’t it? Or was it? Arthur’s insistence that a portrait of her by Stanley or Colleen would be “a waste” made her wonder what would be wasted, what would be missed or dropped along the way.

  “Will I like it?” she asked.

  “What a question,” he said.

  “I don’t see why it’s so strange to ask that. It’s supposed to be me, right?”

  “Well, I think it captures who you were when you were sitting for it.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Someone with a whole lot more strength and power than she dreamed.”

  “At home they’d call it uppity.”

  “There’s you in the portrait, but no home.”

  “Then I hope I never see it.”

  “No. You’re wrong. You don’t need to cling to ‘back home,’ and you know it.”

  Beal left him with the answer that she might look at it when the time came, or she might not. That was the way she felt about almost everything. She was bored by the Louvre. The truth was, she had been bored for the past few weeks, months maybe, had turned her attention inward in her notebook. Colleen had gone home, and Stanley was still hurt by her betrayal—and why wouldn’t he be?—and the few of the new crop of painters she met she didn’t much like. It was a beautiful afternoon, beautiful outside. This city life—so much of it inside houses, in rooms, in one’s own head. Not that she really objected, but sometimes, like today, she wanted to be in the air and the light. She walked home wondering when she could expect a letter from Thomas. He’d showed her where he was going and explained all about why he had picked this region off the map of possibilities, but as she had no way of knowing what the place looked like, she could only imagine Thomas floating somewhere barely out of her reach. There was so much about him she did not know. Those years when he was in college in Philadelphia—he’d tried to tell her about them, about the rooming house he lived in, about the table he sat at night after night, writing forbidden letters to her that he could not mail, about the boys he had been friends with, sort of. But Thomas himself, in Philadelphia, didn’t make that much sense to her. The only place she could truly fix him in her mind was on the Retreat, so that’s what she did, but it didn’t help to remember that the Retreat was the one place he had given up—that he could probably not return to—because of his love for her.

  * * *

  Thomas never got his day trip on the famous Canal du Midi, but the train to Carcassonne followed the same route from time to time, and in this flat terrain the miles and miles of linden trees on the banks were never out of sight for very long. He’d gotten used to seeing lines of women hunched over their laundry on the banks of the canal, the towropes passing over their heads, or in towns, side by side in long sheds, lavoirs with stations where they could set up their tubs. This path between two seas, the invention of a seventeenth-century visionary, or crackpot—entrepreneur was the term they used at the time, though the source of his fortune was the less savory tax farming—climbed mountains, crossed rivers and gullies on aqueducts, tunneled through solid rock, bisected towns, and overcame the last hurdle to the Mediterranean with a massive seven-lock ladder at Béziers. Listening to his late father or his erstwhile professors at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas might have believed that Americans invented civil engineering on the Erie Canal and the Union Pacific Railroad, but that seemed not to have been the case. While his Mason family forebears huddled in pestilent shacks in the tidal swamps of the Chesapeake, dying of the fever by the hundreds, the French were building this canal.

  Thomas had spent the morning on the train writing a letter to Beal. How far away she seemed, in Paris, miles and years away. M. Fauberge was sitting across from him with his account books and his escritoire; as he had promised, they were heading into a different life. It was perhaps, as he had said, all a matter of the soil, and what they were passing through seemed to bear no relation to the heavy black beast that was the top mantle of the land in Maryland. At a stop at a station by the edge of a village Thomas walked out into a field. Even the sound of his footsteps on this land was different; this soil seemed to crumble, at worst to crack. This was a world made of stone: the buildings and the towns could seem like nothing more than elaborate outcroppings of yellow limestone and white schist; except for the clay tile of the roofs, everything was the color of this stone, even the cattle and the sheep.

  He began his letter to Beal trying to express some of the wonder of this, the dislocation but also the fascination; for all its unfamiliarity, Thomas was—he hesitated with his pen—“drawn” to this life so far removed. It didn’t take many sentences for him to realize that he was choosing his words more and more carefully: “if” we come here, “oddly appealing,” “not uncomfortable.” Far too cautious for a husband supposedly recounting a business journey to his wife at home. As he watched his pen struggle, the whole effort began to anger him, anger not directed at Beal—oh, this slow wooing of her would have to continue, he felt sure of that—but at all the times in his past when he thought dissembling in this way was required of him. These past several months, so filled with joy, had taught him how lightly he had landed anywhere in his life so far. It was something Beal’s brother, Randall, once Thomas’s best friend, had challenged him on: Don’t you care, Thomas? Don’t any of it matter to you? That had hurt, hurt deeply; of course things mattered to him. As a child, he had cared so much, but he had so little way or reason to express it that he thought he would explode in his bed. It was as if he were always in the doorway, with Beal in the center of the room, and she was looking back to him with love, beckoning him to come in and join the fun, even if all the people standing around her were all men.

  “We shall be coming into Carcassonne soon,” said M. Fauberge. On the evening before their departure Thomas had worried that M. Fauberge’s enthusiasms and hyperboles might make him an exhausting traveling companion, but they had been reading and writing together all day in the most companionable way. “You will be amazed, I think, by the restorations.”

  Thomas shared with him the thought he had had on the train several days earlier, about this being built and torn down, and now being built up again in an endless process.

  “Interesting,” said M. Fauberge, giving Thomas a Gallic shrug. “I’ve never thought such matters of history were in any way remarkable. Two empires. Three republics. A restoration. A war.” M. Fauberge could hardly shrug and pfft enough to express how insignificant this recent political history was, how distant such Parisian matters were here in Languedoc.

  Just as he finished speaking, they rounded a bend, and there, as if magically transported from the library at the Retreat, were the walled ramparts, turrets, and towers of a castle right out of Waverley. “We have arrived,” said M. Fauberge as they slowed for the station at the base of the hill leading up to this extraordinary vision. The hotel in Carcassonne—in the modern city, below the walls of the restored castle—seemed fine to Thomas; he was not there for hotels, and besides, especially when he was paying for his own room and, by agreement with M. Fauberge, for Léon’s more modest quarters and, of course, for the horses in the stable.

  In the morning they started on the route M. Fauberge had described, on the first day stopping for lunch at one of those large farms Thomas had seen through the train window, with their massive stone barns, their dwellings arranged like fortresses that showed blank walls to all who passed. M. Fauberge paid no attention to the buildings.
“Mauzac, mostly. Very nice grapes. Late ripening,” he said to Thomas with the affection reserved for a hardworking but dim nephew. “They make pleasant sparkling wines. Did I mention that we will be visiting the abbey where double fermentation was discovered a hundred years before Dom Pérignon claimed credit for it?”

  He had, but Thomas did not say so; even if M. Fauberge repeated himself a dozen times, even if Thomas’s hasty scribbles in his notebook were legible, he worried that he would understand or retain only a fraction of what the man said. The world of grapes and soil: Thomas felt as if he were standing at the portal of Western civilization.

  As M. Fauberge had promised, in the days to come they worked north, and after they had recrossed the canal, they were on the plains. These were mostly small, single-family farms, a vigneron and two sons in the vineyards, women working in the mas, the ancient quotidian drama. Much of this life had been destroyed by the “beast”; fallow sections dotted the land like missing teeth. But what Thomas also gathered was that the area was reawakening quickly, with more and more vines being planted. Here and there were a few fields of wheat, but clearly these farmers were now all in for a single crop, which hadn’t worked so well back home. Thomas could begin to identify the cultivars, especially the Aramon of this region, with its bulging clusters and weeping vines, and he had begun to share M. Fauberge’s disdain. “Disgusting,” whispered the négociant as he chatted in the most flattering and complimentary tones with the growers. “These aren’t vignerons,” he said, getting back into the carriage, “they’re fruit growers. Might as well be growing apples.” But then he apologized to Thomas, remembering that orcharding was where he had come from.

  “No apologies to me, but my poor father would fight you for saying it.”