Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  They sat without speaking for a minute or two. “Why do you have that cloth across the window?” she asked.

  He got up and took it down. He pointed. “Those mountains. They make me nervous. They kind of overwhelm the frame.” He traced around the four sides of the window, and yes, now that he mentioned it, there did seem a lot of rock and rill for that small opening.

  “It’s the Black Mountains. La Montagne Noire. Meadows where hundreds of Cathars were burned. People say there is a Cathari treasure up there, but no one knows what it is. Something sacred,” she added.

  “Great,” said Arthur, putting the cloth back. “Now I’ll have nightmares about it.” He sat down, and again, they fell silent.

  “So,” said Arthur. “What brings Miss Beal here to my humble goat shed?”

  “Can’t I just come to see you, to see your new work?”

  “Of course you can. But that isn’t the real reason you’re here.”

  She smiled. “Something is happening for you here. Thomas was so certain this was the right thing for you, and I hoped he was right, but I know it would be hard for you to admit. Feeling good, I mean.”

  “Yes,” he said guardedly.

  “Settled, is maybe what I mean. You’ve been here for six weeks and you’re already settled.” She waved back at the wall of drawings, as if that were all the evidence that might be needed.

  Beal knew what he was going to say before he said it. She loved Arthur; she depended upon him because he would never miss an opening, because he would require her to bring the whole thought out of the depths, not just dangle this little strand, which was something Thomas would never, ever do. “But you?” he said.

  Still, she resisted; it was part of the dance. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Arthur said nothing more; he didn’t need to. He looked at her with the same neutral, appraising gaze she had witnessed from behind his easel those many months.

  “Well, I’m just feeling a little up and down,” she said.

  He continued to stare at her.

  “Ladies do this after delivering,” she added.

  “Oh,” said Arthur, the equivalent of refusing to enter into the discussion.

  Beal ignored this. She told him what Léonie had said, what even Mme Murat had said, that the first baby changed everything, and sometimes it was hard to get used to.

  Arthur was unmoved, uninterested in all this motherly chitchat; she couldn’t imagine anyone who would be less interested. Beal had known, since her first awful contact with Arthur, that he liked women but didn’t care so much for the female in them.

  “But?” he said. “It’s that and something more, isn’t it.”

  He’d capitulated; she’d counted on it. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me,” she said. “Do you think? Who ever thought this is where I’d end up, la maîtresse du domaine?”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother you. I see the way you pay your calls. You’re the people’s queen. You know all about the life they are living because you lived it yourself. Being royalty with them seems to sit pretty naturally on you, if you ask me.”

  Beal didn’t know whether to feel flattered or insulted. Yes, she did try to treat everyone with respect; yes, she had picked up some Occitan, even a word or two of Spanish. “That’s not what I mean,” she answered.

  “I know.”

  She let out a troubled, raspy breath, ending with a little flutter of her lips.

  “Beal, you’re at your worst when you have too little to do, you know that.”

  “Yes. But I have so much to do.”

  “I guess you don’t, really. Or you don’t like what you have to do. Something like that. It seems.”

  “My Mama and Daddy, they went through so much, losing Randall, losing the peaches. Back home, Thomas’s sister gives Daddy something to do, but it’s way beneath him. I sometimes imagine that if he had been born up North, went to college the way some of those fancy Negroes in Massachusetts do, he’d be a lawyer, a professor. But still, they are happy. They are filled with gratefulness.”

  “And you’re not.”

  “Oh, I’m grateful. I know what I have.”

  “What about Thomas? He knows your soul better than anyone. What does he think you should do?”

  “Thomas is consumed by this farm. He has earned every second of his joy. You have no idea how much he has earned it. I love him too much to intrude.”

  “Hmmm,” said Arthur.

  “I have to go. Randall will be waking soon.” She reached for her hat, a deep straw bowl with a black band.

  Arthur stood up, walked her to the door. It was a brilliant day, mineral white, but she felt a little reluctant to step out into it. She hoped Mme Murat mère hadn’t seen her go in or go out, but she was sure she had; the windows in her bedroom commanded almost every vista on this hilltop, and often when she saw something she thought was irregular, she sent her daughter Françoise to investigate. Last week it had been the appearance of an unfamiliar dog that had come along with the lumber dealer.

  “Beal,” said Arthur. “Just now, you have to let it happen.”

  “Let what happen?”

  “Right. That’s what I mean. I say ‘let it happen’ and you want to know, in advance, what will happen.”

  “Well, what if what happens is bad?”

  “Happens to whom?”

  “To anyone. To me. To Thomas. To Randall. To you.”

  Arthur shrugged. Really, it was obvious to her that he wanted to get back to work, which made this whole visit a terrible mistake. “I don’t think you realize how much you have changed in the past year,” he said. “As far as you’re concerned, your circumstances have changed, but you’re still just Beal. Being ‘just Beal’ is no longer enough. For you. For anybody.”

  12

  In midsummer, Arthur returned from one of his drawing and photography trips—he seemed to do both interchangeably these days—with a handsome, formally dressed young man. The man’s light brown skin made him rather indistinguishable in this region of many hues, but as soon as he spoke, Thomas knew that he was American, with an accent Thomas recognized as New England, Boston probably. He’d gone to college at the University of Pennsylvania with some boys from Boston, and he hadn’t much liked them, but this little echo of home was not unwelcome, and the intriguing guest had come to do business.

  Thomas was in his office when Gabriella knocked with the news that M. Arthur was there with a stranger. It was early August, “the month that makes the harvest,” as he heard from almost every mouth on the domaine, in the village, as if it were a private piece of wisdom. C’est août qui fait la récolte. This was not said with affection for this most devious month, but rather with fear. It was always thus on farms: the stakes are always the highest at the end, when the fruit is set, the grain is golden, the corn has tasseled, and the farmer has nothing to do but wait. For grapes, extremes of any kind were always a threat, but the catastrophe everyone spoke of was hail; in one hour a year’s work could be lost and a winter of hunger would follow. Naturally, the kind of weather that brings hail—hot and wet—is the very kind that is best for a good harvest. Not long ago it had come to Thomas that everything he was doing, everything his father and Mason ancestors had done on the Retreat, everything M. Murat and his forebears had done here on St. Adelelmus was rather like fishing: you dropped a hook into the murky depths and if the depths and if the fish obliged, you had a catch; if not, you had nothing. Imagine having your whole livelihood depend on the whims of fish.

  The man’s name was Frederick Lawrence Goodrum. He gave Thomas a slight bow and handed him his card. GOODRUM & SONS, it read, FINE VICTUALLERS. On the card there was a small engraving, a remarque, of a rather impressive-looking city building. A Boston address. “Well,” said Thomas. “Welcome to St. Adelelmus.”

  “Mr. Kravitz was kind enough to let me accompany him,” he said, and explained that he had come on the train from Narbonne, and Arthur had overheard him asking directions�
��in loud English—to St. Adelelmus.

  “Lucky break,” said Thomas. They were standing in the hall, and Thomas realized this would take some time. “Go sit on the terrace,” he said to Arthur. “I’ll ask the Señora to bring some tea.” When he caught up to them, he and Arthur were standing at the edge of the terrace and Arthur was describing the buildings below with a sort of proprietary pride. Even more surprisingly, it seemed that Arthur took to this stiff and pompous, but also apparently prosperous, man; Thomas couldn’t help but compare this warmth to the snarls and insults he’d gotten from Arthur the first time they met.

  “So,” said Thomas. “What brings you here?”

  “It’s very beautiful,” said the guest. “One of the most beautiful wineries in the region, I am told.”

  Thomas hated it when people began with this. “It’s really just about wine,” he said. He hoped he wasn’t being curt.

  “Yes, of course. Which is why I am here.”

  “Ah. How did you hear about us?”

  “From M. Fauberge, in Narbonne.”

  “Of course. Then you know that M. Fauberge has everything to do with the fact that we ended up here.” Thomas also assumed that the négociant had told this colored man about Beal.

  “Yes,” he said with obvious fondness. “He thinks we could work together.” He went on to describe Goodrum & Sons as one of the finest specialty groceries in Boston. “If you haven’t heard of us, you might have heard of our great rivals, the Pierce family.” Thomas knew of neither, but he explained that he knew nothing about Boston, had never been there. Yes, Goodrum continued, their store was on Tremont Street, a prime location, and it offered a great variety of the fine foods and sundries from the world over. He mentioned wine, but then listed a dizzying array—Russian cigarettes got Thomas’s attention. Why would anyone in Boston want Russian cigarettes? Goodrum explained that their customers were the best families on Beacon Hill, in the South End, and in Back Bay, and that they delivered as far away as Brattle Street. “In Cambridge,” added Goodrum when Thomas didn’t react. “Almost in Watertown.”

  Thomas didn’t bother to protest again that all these place-names meant nothing to him, but as Goodrum continued talking about their importing business and his own role as the son who went abroad periodically to find new suppliers, Thomas slowly realized that he was wrong about one thing: he had assumed that the “best families,” the clientele of this store, were Negroes, the most prosperous, no doubt, of the colored who live there, that the neighborhoods he kept mentioning were where the wealthy colored lived. But the more Goodrum talked, the more it became clear to Thomas that “the best families” were indeed the upper crust, the white Brahmins, that most of the Goodrums’ many employees were white: Italian butchers, Irish clerks, French Canadian delivery drivers. Thomas wished it weren’t so, but he’d never heard of such a thing, a Negro business with white customers and white employees. This stiffness, this too-formal dress, this dropping of names—the man had a difficult role to play; a single misstep, a muffed line, and the show folded. And yet there was nothing fake about him that Thomas could discern; he didn’t doubt for an instant that what he was hearing was mostly the truth.

  Goodrum paused. He had come to the end of the introductions, and probably because he knew that Beal was black, it was time to speak of race. “You should understand that Boston is not the South,” he said. “Many of our customers don’t know who owns the store, and the rest don’t care.”

  “I’m sorry,” Thomas said, in defense against what might have been some sort of imputation. “I wouldn’t care either.”

  “I didn’t think you would. But at home we forget how it is in the rest of the country. Boston is not free of hatred, but the best families do not discriminate. There is no law against intermarriage in Massachusetts,” he added pointedly.

  “During the war, when the Federal troops occupied my family’s farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, it was a Massachusetts regiment. They delivered my grandfather to prison in Fort McHenry.”

  Goodrum didn’t know quite what to say to this. “I hope—”

  Thomas interrupted. “He deserved it. From what I heard, he was a complete, vicious bastard. He died before I was born.”

  There was no need for Goodrum to continue with his interrupted sentence. “We all have our private histories,” he said, and Thomas liked this remark, liked the way he said it, but more, liked that he said it. They sat quietly for a few moments, enjoying this meeting of minds.

  Arthur finished his tea and excused himself. They watched him as he walked down the long flagstone stairway off the back end of the terrace, stopping when he reached the bottom for a second or two while two small children and a dog chased each other around his legs. Suddenly he raised his arms in the classic pose of monstrousness, his hands clenched into claws, and he roared; the children and the dog ran off. Thomas wasn’t entirely sure whether Arthur did this to delight them or just to scare them out of his way.

  “An artist,” stated Goodrum.

  “Yes. A friend from our days in Paris. He’s doing extraordinary work. We’re very proud of him.”

  “And your wife?”

  Thomas explained that Beal was visiting their friends on a neighboring farm. They both had infant sons, he said, and the two mothers enjoyed each other’s company while the children amused each other. “It’s our friends’ third child, but our first, and my wife gets a good deal of comfort from a woman who knows the ropes. At times like this she misses her own mother, of course.”

  “It must be quite difficult for her to be away from her family.”

  “Staying with our families was not an option for us, as you already know.”

  Goodrum nodded.

  “So, what’s on your mind about wine?”

  Goodrum talked for an hour or so, about everything from Boston’s Puritan resistance to alcohol of any type; the belief expressed by the châteaux of Bordeaux that Americans would never really be interested in wine; the fine wine they produced anyway; the glut of table wine that was clearly coming to the Midi and the threat of fake wines confusing the palates of the ordinary Frenchman; the feasibility of domaine bottling, even here in Languedoc; the potential for the diverse soils and exposures of the hillsides to make wines of exceptional size and color if only … if only they could be made with some finish. Thomas was impressed; he recognized in Goodrum—Lawrence, as he was now calling him after erring the first time by asking whether he could call him Frederick—the careful researcher, the autodidact he knew in himself.

  Beal arrived as this was winding down. They heard her carriage clatter up the stone road, heard the bustle of arrival, the cries of an overtired baby, the to-and-fro of the Señora and Gabriella, and at length, Beal came through the door onto the terrace. She was unwinding the light scarf that held her hat in place, and when she removed it, she waved it at her side like a schoolgirl. She stood in a ray of sun dappling through the chestnut leaves, and Thomas could not help feeling proud of her—of her beauty, the moment, the gesture with the hat, her smile in the sun: not an artificial hour but an instant, a sample of their real lives. Having a guest made this all seem both ordinary and miraculous. The two men stood up as she came out, and Thomas made the introductions. Taken with the moment, he did it up perhaps more than he needed to, as if to make sure that she would not be as skeptical as he had been, as if to head off the guest’s impulse to self-promote.

  Beal ignored his last bits of introduction; she turned to Goodrum before Thomas was finished, cutting him off in mid-sentence. “I hope you’ve been having a nice trip,” she said. “Down here. Off the beaten path.”

  “Oh yes. I have never come this far south. In Bordeaux they speak of Languedoc as not entirely safe.”

  “Boars and brigands,” said Thomas.

  Beal took no notice of this old joke. “You will be able to have dinner with us?” she asked.

  “Oh no. I couldn’t. I must be getting back,” he said.

  “To Narbonne
?” said Thomas. “You’ve missed the last train.”

  Lawrence explained that he had already taken a room in the hotel in the village, and indeed, he was planning the next day to visit another local winery. “La Fontaine. Have you heard of it?”

  Thomas and Beal both laughed, and Beal allowed Thomas to explain that this was where she had been that day, the Milhauds were their very good friends. It was decided that they would send to the village to collect Lawrence’s things and that he would spend the night with them at St. Adelelmus and be dropped at La Fontaine early the next morning, giving him plenty of time to meet with the Milhauds and catch the two o’clock train back to Narbonne.

  “Well,” said Lawrence. “If I refused such a reasonable plan, anyone would wonder why.”

  * * *

  As she and Thomas were getting dressed for dinner, Beal asked, “Thomas, was that all really necessary?”

  “Was what necessary?”

  “All that talk about his store. About what an expert he is.”

  “I just thought you would be interested. He knows far more about wine than I do.”

  “A lot of people know more about wine than you do.”

  “As I am the first to admit.”

  “We see all sorts of experts, and you do not feel you have to carry on like that.”

  Thomas understood well what Beal was saying, but there was a point to be made on the other side. “I just liked him. I was impressed. I wanted you to know that, and I guess I wanted him to know that. Did he look as if he minded?”

  “Hmmm,” she said. They went back to their preparations. They did not normally dress for dinner as much as freshen up, but they had no doubt that now that the luggage had been retrieved, their guest would appear formally attired.

  “An intriguing prospect for us,” said Thomas, starting anew after Beal finished at the washstand. “Of course,” he continued, “we wouldn’t be ready to ship anything bottled for three or four years at least, but I never dreamed we would sell anything in America, especially in this sort of package deal. The wine has to be first-rate, sturdy enough to make the voyage…” He noticed that Beal was glaring at him. “What?”