Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “You speak of your father in so many contradictory ways,” said M. Fauberge. During these long days side by side their conversation had become more and more intimate, at least on one side.

  “He was a contradictory man.”

  M. Fauberge considered this for a few miles. This was another reason why Thomas was growing to trust M. Fauberge, to be so fond of him: for all his volubility, the wheels were always turning; you could almost hear them. He reminded Thomas of himself; the cadence of their conversation intermixed flawlessly.

  “Could I ask you something?” M. Fauberge asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I had gathered that your wife’s family were growers in the same region, but I’ve come to understand that they are workers on your farm.”

  “Yes. Her father was the head orchardist. He works for my sister now in the dairy.” Thomas had told M. Fauberge all about Mary’s trying one last time to give the Retreat a reason to be as a model sanitary dairy.

  “And most of the people who worked on your estate were Negroes?”

  Thomas gazed out on the surrounding sights. To one side, at a considerable distance, there was a town clustered around a single steeple, or a single keep—it was a little hard to tell which sometimes. On the other side, not far from them, was an elaborate walled cemetery in a grove of poplars, with crypts and mausoleums that seemed a miniature version of the town—a town for the living and a town for the dead.

  “Yes. That is correct.”

  “Ah,” said M. Fauberge. He let another mile go by and then said, “That is what I thought.” Another mile, and then, “Your love for your wife has seemed so protective.”

  Thomas could say nothing.

  “Only the love that has faced high barriers feels that way.” M. Fauberge paused, as if he were reflecting on his own marriage, to a daughter of a family that had come from Basque country. “I understand now.”

  “Does this make difficulty for you?” Thomas asked.

  M. Fauberge put his hand on Thomas’s arm. “There are few Africans in Languedoc, but as you have seen, we are all a little bit of everything else: Gauls, Basques, Jews, Arabs. We are all people of the Mediterranean. You will have difficulty because you are outsiders, because you are Americans, because even though you speak fine French, you have a Parisian accent. They will call you a parigot, which is not a nice way to refer to our countrymen to the north. But you will not have much difficulty simply because of your wife’s race.”

  It took them a week to get across these lands, which were the source of M. Fauberge’s “bread and butter.” Alternating between the rather tiresome repertoire of flatteries and bargaining ploys in French and in Occitan when doing business, he shared his real concerns in the privacy of the carriage: too many grapes here, the wrong kind, no good for Languedoc, they were filling a lake full of wine that would never be drunk, and it would ruin them. They should be planting wheat here; that’s what these plains were good for, wheat, animal feed, mulberry trees to feed the silkworms. But these lands, these holdings were bruised from the battles, and whatever side anyone was on, phylloxera was on their mind. M. Fauberge counted the losses like the old Confederates on the Eastern Shore: here, in this very sandy patch, the attack had not been so bad; here they had flooded the vineyards in the spring to good effect … for a year or two anyway. Here M. Imart went mad and killed his children; there, M. Delmas’s son had spent a decade trying to mix a recipe of poisons that would kill “the beast.” Here was a once quite adequate winery that the warring sons would let go for a few centimes.

  But there were hills in the distance, just as in Maryland there was always a finger of the bay reaching to your side, across your path. This was the garrigue M. Fauberge had promised, steep crags, arid, inhospitable disturbances on the earth’s surface, a tangle of rough life. Centuries ago this had all been forest, said M. Fauberge, but once it was harvested, the trees, except for the occasional stunted oaks and Aleppo pines, did not come back, and now it was land for vines and olives, for rosemary, thyme, juniper, and laurel. M. Fauberge found this all much to his liking.

  On one especially clear day Thomas caught the outlines of real mountains.

  “Oh yes,” said M. Fauberge happily. “Here is where it gets interesting.”

  It was already interesting to Thomas, and not just as a matter of business. As these languid days passed into a third week, with the skin of his hands and arms darkening in front of him, his neck—despite the broad-brimmed straw hat and neckerchief M. Fauberge had provided—becoming dry and tough, Thomas could feel Paris receding, as if it were being shed. He wrote to Beal every night, but each time he sat down, he felt he had taken another step away—not from her, but from a chapter in which she had been, he thought, happy. All he wanted was to give Beal a home, that’s what he said to himself, but it wasn’t true, and he didn’t really think it was. This land he was in was wilderness. Early in the trip, the vision of the Great Plains and the foothills of the Rockies had come to him and had remained on his mind ever since; this land seemed wide-open and savage, maybe even dangerous. M. Fauberge had told him that Roussillon, the last region before Spain, was full of brigands and highwaymen. But it was full of life, and Thomas had decided that he could, if he worked hard, make a mark here; he could, finally, amount to more than the sum of his inherited parts. His strength, on these gigantic uplands, would spring from being small and focused and free.

  On the sixteenth day of the trip, they at last arrived, as if finally reaching the summit of an Alp, in the bustling foothill village of Azay-sur-Cesse. In their final approach they had left the verdant plain for the steepening hillsides, for the stony ground and dried gullies, but the village itself occupied an easy promontory, with a broad, sunny view. The hotel was opposite the mairie, and the public space between was full, at this hour, with men playing boules and children playing hide-and-seek behind the ancient, massive plane trees. There was a letter awaiting M. Fauberge at the hotel, and over dinner—they had fallen into a routine of dining together every two or three days—he said that what he had been hoping all along was that the owners of a property just outside the town, on a northeasterly slope in front of la Montagne Noire, would be interested in entertaining a bid from the young American. “The moment your letter arrived in January, M. Thomas, I thought of this for you, the Domaine de St. Adelelmus.”

  “Then why,” said Thomas, “didn’t we go there directly?” He was thinking, in part, of all the hotel bills he had been paying.

  “Because I had to make sure you were to be trusted. After all…” He didn’t need to elaborate.

  “And?”

  “You are a serious young man,” he answered.

  As always, the dinner was accompanied by several wines—M. Fauberge could go nowhere without people pouring from a pichet or opening a bottle for him, and he was always polite, even if some of the wine was pointedly left undrunk. All these grapes, the varieties—Thomas’s head was spinning, but each evening he recorded the new cépages with growing satisfaction, like a birder maintaining a life list. He had even begun, he believed, to understand some of the vocabulary of taste and sensation involved in this trade, the full experiences of time and tongue that transpired with every sip. “Taste the minerals here, but also that surprising little pincée—should I say—of nutmeg?” said M. Fauberge, handing him a glass.

  As they sat down, M. Fauberge had warned him that there was no lack of alcohol in the wine of the Minervois, unlike—he could not help himself from adding—the thin, insipid wines of the plains, but in the course of this meal, here at the end of the trip, he ignored his own warning. “You are a serious man,” he said, picking up the earlier thread and speaking with a candor that Thomas now recognized as entirely un-French. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have come here. But here is my question. Are you too serious, M. Thomas? Not all Americans are like you.”

  “Well, yes. I would assume they aren’t.”

  “You are often lost in thought.”

&n
bsp; “There’s much for me to learn. I’m trying to take it in.”

  “Hmmm,” said M. Fauberge, not buying the answer. “If you come here, you must work hard. I know you will do that, but you must also take your pleasures. An unhappy man makes unhappy wine.” He took another sip of what must have been wine made by a happy man, wiped away the droplets in his mustache with a forefinger, but he could not resist touching his finger to his tongue. “You are marked by la mélancolie, but that does not mean you must be triste. Tomorrow you will be given a great opportunity. I think this will be a good turn for you.”

  The Minervois, Thomas had learned, was a semicircle facing south, with the center hard against the slopes of the Black Mountain and the lands at either end limited by the mountains of Hérault and Aude. Every one of the soils M. Fauberge had rattled about in Narbonne these weeks earlier was to be found here. In the morning, M. Fauberge was full of joy, as if he were still drunk, exclaiming on each geologic transition as if—which, of course, turned out to be true—he could taste the difference. As the carriage worked its way up the mountainside, M. Fauberge called out greetings to all they passed, most of whom acknowledged him with a slight tip of the cap and some of whom came to the side of the carriage to converse.

  About this time Thomas became aware that there was interest being shown in him, and it dawned on him that the word had gone out that the distant and not very well liked owner of the Domaine de St. Adelelmus was investigating a sale and that an American was coming to look it over. More than a few of these well-informed souls gaped at Thomas, his slender face and delicate features, and then turned away, as if this callow youth was not the savior they had hoped for. The carriage continued, and then Léon brought them to a stop on a ridge above the most beautiful hillside Thomas had ever seen, a perfection of textures and shades of green and yellow, where pasturage and vineyards interwove as the land bucked and heaved, and where the usual but now impossibly lovely assemblage of barns and dwellings occupied the slight hillocks at the center.

  “St. Adelelmus,” announced M. Fauberge, unnecessarily.

  Thomas hardly heard him. There was a slight wind, a distant clang of cowbells, the barest aroma of rosemary and lavender. The deep thickets of scrubby oaks and mulberry trees were broken here and there by red and white horse chestnut blossoms. They drew closer, passed by the bustle and activity of the central farmyards, and continued a few hundred yards farther to the house, not a fake château, but, as M. Fauberge had referred to it, a “bastide,” a grand but in no sense elegant home for a “serious” family. It was a solid two-story building, the same hues of yellow as the surrounding buildings, but it was built of quarried limestone blocks and not the rubble and mortar of the barns and more modest workers’ dwellings. The house was bigger than it looked from the ridge, with appendages at both ends, and a gravel drive to a circle in front of a green door gave it just the suggestion of stateliness. The shutters were closed, as they always were in the daytime, but it had been long enough since they were opened that vines had grown onto them. As deserted and abandoned as the house looked as they drew closer, Thomas’s heart beat wildly. It felt to him as if he had drawn up to this entrance a thousand times before, as if he had done it as a baby in a mother’s arms, as a child, as if it would happen in the future thousands of times more. He felt this place closing over his life, occupying spaces left empty until now. He got out, gave the green door a shove, and walked into a large hall with an enormous fireplace to one side and a surprisingly grand stone staircase on the other. The air was cool—mineral and vegetable, marble and sage. Slats of sun showed through the shutters on the other side of the room.

  His search was over. At that moment he knew that falling in love with Beal and being forced to leave Maryland was simply part of a plan to bring him here; when Eileen Hardy nudged him south, across the mountains, this was where she wanted him to go. To land in this stone hallway, listening to a primordial drip-drip of water somewhere deeper within. Thomas knew that this hallway was the center of his center, that this was where he wanted to be, and if Beal would come with him, it could be their heaven on earth.

  7

  In Thomas’s latest letter he wrote, “I have seen a farm in Languedoc”—he had started to write another word, but then crossed it out and wrote “farm”—“that seems workable for us, and I am in the process of purchasing it.” Beal wondered what the other word could have been—maybe it was something in French—but it probably didn’t matter. In any language, a farm was a farm. She knew it was going to be a farm, that’s what Thomas had been saying, that’s where they both came from, that’s what they did. But though she could not admit it even to herself, when she read that word, she felt the dull thud of hope dying, as if her luck had just run out, as if she were being reeled back to a former life. She could imagine none of the freedoms she had enjoyed as a young woman in Paris being available to her on a farm. She still missed her family, she missed the pleasures of her youth, but the Retreat was an unlucky place. Its plagues and blights and thwarted dreams seemed to be recompense for its histories, not that Beal knew all that much about them. Compared with Tuckertown, the little settlement where she grew up, compared with anything Beal had ever known, the Mansion House was like an unfriendly world, with each room its own continent.

  “The house is simple,” he wrote, “but commodious, and the dependencies seem in excellent shape.” A farm. Her thoughts went back to the first day she woke up in Hampton, Virginia, in Colonel Murphy’s house and looked out her little third-floor window onto the shady street, where even the deliverymen and domestics doing their early-morning chores looked elegant, even the Negro maids looked sophisticated. She’d been sent there to get her away from Thomas, and the separation had had its way with her. She felt she could be someone new there, someone she could never be on the farm, and she was. On holidays she went with her friends to the park along the river to listen to the music, and men who were too old for them pulled up in wagons and carts and flirted with them. In Hampton she wasn’t the only pretty girl, the only pretty black girl; everyone else seemed beautiful and full of romance. A silly boy named Hiram, a student at Hampton, often called on her on Sundays, presented himself at the kitchen door; at the end of the year he went back to Roanoke to read law. Hiram was so polite and so innocent that he never even tried to kiss her—which she would have allowed, and perhaps more, because her friends talked of almost nothing but lovemaking. She had been thinking of him from time to time lately, how her life might have turned out with him: a lawyer’s wife in Roanoke? This was all to play out in the future, but that first morning in Hampton she knew, whatever else happened in her life, that she was never, ever going back to the farm.

  “I don’t want to promise too much, but it is a savage and beautiful landscape, mountainous and dry, and some of the vineyards are planted in fields of white chalk stones. Even on hot days it is cool under the branches of the olive trees, and the air is scented with rosemary and thyme.” She knew that Thomas was telling her that where he proposed to move them was nothing like the Eastern Shore, for that had seemed to be his one certainty. He would never return to those flat lands and tepid waters, that rich black loam soaked in blood. “I believe there is much that a person of ambition can do here. Until now it seems that few winegrowers have approached this challenge with sufficient regard for science.” Science, thought Beal; science ended you up under a gravestone at the Retreat like Thomas’s father. Scientist: that was the one word of identification or praise that he had decreed for his own epitaph. “The purchase is taking longer than I want, but if all goes well, I will be back in a fortnight, and we can move on to this next part of our adventure together.”

  Beal put the letter down. It had arrived two days earlier, along with another letter. Two letters, one addressed to Mrs. Thomas Bayly, the other to Mlle Beal Terrell. One mailed from Narbonne, France, and the other hand-delivered. It was June now, unexpectedly bright and hot; she had gotten used to Paris as a chilly and rainy pla
ce, and the dry, dusty early-summer heat wave came as a surprise. She was sitting at the little writing table they had borrowed from one of the rooms at the hotel; in the winter, from where she sat, she’d seen these rooftops covered in gray snow and smoke, a monochrome display relieved only by the red of the chimney pots. It was a cold, almost primeval memory, but today she looked through the fresh leaves of the lindens and chestnuts, and every balcony seemed to have its own pot of begonias, poppies, roses. From three or four rooftops, flags were flying, though she did not know what they celebrated or signified. It seemed impossible to her that she had been here only eight months.

  She was pretending to write, but she was only counting down the hours. She had pulled her skirt above her knees and was fanning her face and neck with the Chinese fan Thomas had given her at Easter. Mme Vigny clanged away in the kitchen; she was a noisy cook, unlike Beal’s mother, always so silent, so strong. Beal couldn’t bear to think of her mother, couldn’t shake the idea that somehow she was looking over her shoulder still. Beal had learned that Mme Vigny’s husband was in the army and had been stationed in Algeria for the past ten years, that he had another family with an Arab woman; she seemed to warm up after Thomas left, as if wives on their own were the proper order of things, a sisterhood that understood the challenges and temptations of a marriage where the husband had gone missing.

  In all Beal’s months at the Louvre, she had never picked up a paintbrush, which she had no interest in doing. More and more it was clothes she thought about, wrote about in her journals, and toward the end of her Louvre visits it was the dresses, the simple Roman tunics and the Elizabethan monsters that she concentrated on. She liked to think of the painters painstakingly rendering the textures and patterns as if they were weaving them anew. If she thought anything about sitting for Arthur—and it wasn’t something she liked to think about—it was that she regretted what she’d been wearing. She often found herself wandering through the aisles and galleries of the Bon Marché, where everything that happened in the parks and boulevards seemed instantly to find expression; that was what she loved about clothes, how subtly they expressed. Recently a whole new department selling cycling clothes had sprung up. Just the day after Thomas left, there had been a gigantic sale at the Bon Marché; the whole vast central gallery had been swathed and shrouded with linen, like a Persian tent. Floating in these airy spaces, hovering like dandelion thistles, were hundreds of umbrellas and parasols of the strangest colors. All through that spring these Bon Marché colors were the rage. Beal wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but all those months at the Louvre had not given her the thrill, the visual delight that these floating umbrellas hanging by the handles in midair had offered.