Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  * * *

  Back at St. Adelelmus, Thomas was at his desk. What a night! was what he was thinking: Lawrence Goodrum showing up unannounced and on foot, like the tramps in Maryland looking for harvest work; his intriguing propositions; Beal’s anger. Yes, Beal liked Lawrence, but why shouldn’t she? Thomas liked Lawrence well enough, and as he reflected on those recent events, what stuck with him was that vision of Beal coming out onto the terrace, her hat at her side. For perhaps the first time ever, their lives seemed settled, their choices proven correct. It was all good enough for him, and for her, for now.

  Gabriella brought in the mail and laid it on his desk, but then lingered, which was unlike her. Thomas asked her if there was something she needed.

  “People are talking,” she said.

  “About what.”

  She tried to say nothing more, as if presenting this fact that mouths were wagging would put some kind of process in motion that would take care of whatever it was that people were talking about, but Thomas kept his eyes on her, and finally she blurted out that people were wondering if the guest was here to buy St. Adelelmus. She became tearful. “I don’t want you to go,” she said.

  Thomas smiled; it made perfect sense, and why wouldn’t they think this—so often cast off, their livelihoods thrown into peril once again, the most beautiful winery in the region jilted once again. A bad idea to attach your hopes to the fate of a beautiful bride. “No,” he said. “I want you to go right out and tell every person you see that our guest was not here to buy the domaine, but to buy our wine. Go tell Mme Murat, if you can, to make sure it really sinks in.”

  “Oh,” she said, trembling a little at that final thought.

  Thomas wanted to hug her, but of course that couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be done. Instead, he thanked her for bringing this right to him, and when she left, he sat for a moment or two more, thinking of her, how in these few months he had known her she was beginning to lose her girlish round cheeks, now seemed to move with a kind of long-legged grace he hadn’t noticed before. Thomas knew so little about girls, young women, despite the fact that growing up, one of his two best friends was a girl; he’d married her, which skewed the lessons. Now that all hopes had been fulfilled with the birth of a son named Randall, he hoped for a household of girls, each as pretty as their mother, as mignonne as Gabriella.

  He turned to the mail, and as he flipped through the pile, he noticed that one letter was postmarked Bordeaux. He’d sent several inquiries to growers there about buying scions, and that’s what he figured this letter was about. He put it aside to read later until it came to him—sometimes the path from eye to brain is a long one—that the name Hardy was on the envelope. He reached over and snatched up the letter. It was in a man’s hand, and Thomas, still thinking about grapes and grafts, assumed that either through a large coincidence or in the more likely event that she had urged him, Eileen’s father was offering to do business with him; not many growers in Bordeaux were. As he was opening the letter, he did not have time to sift through his many shards of emotion, but what he understood was that he was pleased to have this connection to her and was relieved, overjoyed really, not to have done anything to her that a father could object to. And nothing, he hoped, that Beal could not readily forgive; besides, it would be the untruths he had spoken during that fateful conversation on their last day in Paris that would need to be forgiven, and not anything, he believed, that involved Eileen.

  From the first line, Thomas knew Eileen’s father was not writing about business. “Dear Mr. Bayly,” it started. “My daughter Eileen, who I understand you knew for a time in Paris last year, spoke of you and your venture in Languedoc quite often, and I came to understand that you had meant very much to her and perhaps then that she had meant something to you.”

  Thomas’s breath stopped; his hand started to shake. “Thus in great sorrow and grief, and in the hope that I am not intruding into your personal affairs, I write to you that my daughter died this past April 29.” The letter went on to describe her brief illness—Russian flu? Pneumonia? Her father didn’t say exactly what it was, because it didn’t matter what it was—and to say that neither a doctor’s round-the-clock care, nor the fondest hopes and prayers of family, nor any appeal to the goodness and fairness of Providence could slow the march to the end. Whatever had passed between Eileen and her father in the past few years, this was a letter wrenched with grief, with despair over losing her; her death was an insult to beauty, her beauty, a life simply stolen for no reason. “Nearly to her final hours she remained lucid,” he wrote, “and she fought her illness with a passion, but when it was too much, she let herself go, and I watched her being welcomed into death.” Thomas could feel the pause in the letter, the moment it took him to compose himself for his final thoughts. “When parents by their tender care and pains have raised a child to maturity, they expect to reap the joyful gains of their companionship. But then death appears and turns the joyful hopes to Sudden Grief. What thoughts can shield us or give us some relief?”

  Thomas trembled as he lowered the letter after reading these last, ancient-sounding lines, an accidental piece of verse. What thoughts indeed. When he picked it up again to read the ending and the signature, he noticed that the ink was a slightly different color, and he realized that just as he had paused in his reading, the letter had sat for a day or several because her father—Alan, his name was: Alan Hardy—thought he might say more. But there was nothing more to say. This unbearably raw outburst to a stranger, a stranger who had, if not broken, perhaps wounded his daughter’s heart. Had she told him about Beal, about her coming to Galignani’s to look at her? Had she told him about the peach walls of Montreuil, which she had once hoped to show to Thomas, back when she thought he was a nice, somewhat aimless young man looking for a life? Had she admitted to him that this young man went to Languedoc because of what had seemed her contempt for Bordeaux, this place where she had died and was presumably now buried? But of course, was anything she might have said to her father Thomas’s business?

  He stood up from his desk, sat down to read the letter again, and then left his office. He went out to the terrace and sat at the stone table, where he had written letters to Beal more than a year ago and where he had thought he should write to Eileen, but had not. He pictured her red hair, the sight of it through the bookshelves the last time he saw her, and then he pictured it splayed out on a pillow, dank with her fevered sweat, tied aside with a ribbon by the nurses caring for her; or, much worse, pictured it as a tangle of snakes on the linen, this hair. It seemed to Thomas that it had been a talisman, something that would protect her. Why would God give it to her for such a brief span? As her father had said, what relief was there from this, and what kind of lonely grief for Thomas, lonely because he realized even from the instant he read the first few lines that he could not tell Beal that his friend Eileen had died. How would he even raise the subject? He could tell no one that if he hadn’t married Beal, a woman whom he might have wanted to marry was dead. He couldn’t bear the thought of this beautiful person closed in her casket, and thus he began to weep, at how unfair it was that her last year or two had been so … unsettled: a quarrel with her father, a lonely sojourn in Paris where her hopes had been dashed, and then this move to Bordeaux. It was presumptuous of Thomas, conceited, that he could imagine her happy only when she was with him, having tea, even … that one time quite successfully forgotten until this moment, when, upon leaving the tearoom, she had casually taken his arm as they walked under the arcade of the rue de Rivoli and he had held hers tight to his side.

  13

  On Christmas Day, Xavier Murat reflected that 1894 had been a good year. Why annual plants like tomatoes and string beans would, year after year, produce vegetables of uniform characteristics, yet ancient vines could produce fruit in certain years that was all but unrecognizable … well, this was part of the mystery of the vine. Some years, people who liked a warm and fruity beverage were happy; other years favored thos
e who wanted something as thick as ox blood and approaching fifteen percent alcohol—although that didn’t mean that when the pichet was drawn from the cask, they wouldn’t drink whatever was brought to them, good or bad. Whether gras et vigoureux, or flasque et boueux, they’d drain the glass. No one would remember that 1894 had been a good year or a bad year, except the people who grew the grapes.

  So 1894 had been a pretty good harvest, the Aramon as usual heavy with clusters, the Carignan a little more sparse but fine. The little bit of Grenache was a nice surprise; he’d planted it over the objections of the Belgians and was pleased that the new monsieur approved. Approved rather heartily, in fact. Xavier agreed with the monsieur that Syrah should be next, but he wasn’t sure about restoring Mourvèdre: too many disappointments in the grafting shed for that. Still. There had been no oidium to speak of; a little dusting of Bordeaux mixture in one corner of the Carignan had been all it took. Good pruning, once again, had limited the damage from the butterflies. As for the wine, Xavier had blended the Grenache and Carignon in two casks, and he liked the result—nice color, good size, a little more fruit. M. Bayly seemed to have opinions and plans in that regard and had even suggested that if blending was indeed in the future, they might hire someone to help them. A university boy from Montpellier, perhaps. Which was just fine with Xavier, who was a man of the soil, a man of the cask and not of the bottle.

  The year 1894 had been good for his family. His mother was becoming more and more of an invalid, and more demanding every year. This was true, but what could one do? Besides, Françoise took care of her most of the time. The boys were well launched; the oldest, Bruno, was sweet on a nice girl from the village, and the younger, Antoine, was a little dim-witted, it had to be said, but a hard worker. Xavier and Marceline were aging well enough; at times they drove each other crazy, but neither could imagine any other life, any other partner. And on the domaine there had been no accidents, dismemberments, knife fights that he knew of, conflicts of the blood or heart, significant deaths in any of their usual forms: childbirth, weakness of lungs, wasting away, protracted declines, painful entries into the great beyond.

  And it had been a good year, all things considered, with the new owners. It could have been so much worse—had, in the past, been so much worse. Thomas Bayly had arrived with a decent idea or two and was a quick learner; the visit during the summer by that rich American—well, there had been talk about that—seemed to have accelerated some of his thinking. There were nice little holdings all around the village to be had for sadly reasonable prices, but if they harvested so much as a single additional grape, they would need a new press. Bottling: a nightmare all its own. Pasteurization! Xavier’s mind might begin to spin, and Marceline sniffed loudly, but neither of them would trade this sense of the future for the slow death of the phylloxera years. The young madame was much liked, and her little brown baby was still a source of amusement throughout the district, le pitchoun with that perfect chocolate nose and ears. And even that lumpy Jewish artist. This very morning he had stunned every family in St. Adelelmus by presenting them with photographs; he’d been posing people, whole families when he could, dogs and cats, all summer and fall, but no one ever dreamed he would give them copies; the very idea that they had disappeared into his camera was enough for them, but the gift of the photographs brought unspeakable wonder and joy. Xavier looked down at the one Arthur had given him, which he was holding in his hands: He wished Maman had been willing to appear, but that was perhaps asking too much of her, with her arthritis and rheumatism and thin blood.

  But for all this, changes were under way; that’s what Xavier was thinking about on Christmas Day. He and the monsieur could understand as well as anyone—better than most people in fact—that the wine lake was growing, the price was falling, and the authorities were doing nothing about the fraudeurs, and if this kept up, the triumph over phylloxera would be nothing more than a delay on the road to ruin. As soon as the harvest was complete, they hired laborers from the village to pull up almost five hectares of Aramon. This was not a popular decision: Aramon, with its enormous yield, had saved Languedoc after the blight. Everyone agreed on that. So why would anyone exchange a plant that produced so abundantly and reliably with a new one that at best would produce half the fruit and require twice the fuss, the pruning, the dressing. A delegation, led by M. Cabrol, came to Xavier to protest.

  “There is no reason to do this,” he said. Cabrol was a man of reason; he and Xavier had grown up together, lifelong friends.

  “Friends,” Xavier said, “M. Bayly and I believe that we must separate our prospects from the rest of Hérault and Aude. They will keep growing Aramon until they drown in its juice. We must look to the future.”

  They left, grumbling, but there was never any question of a revolt; they only wanted reassurance. By the middle of October they had begun replanting with Terret, an ancient vine that had evolved over the centuries into a fine dark-skinned fruit. And once again, the delegation was back. They were planting all wrong: the rows were too narrow, the space between plants too crowded. “This will not allow each vine to produce a sufficient quantity of fruit,” M. Cabrol said, and he was right. These were good workers; grape juice ran in their blood, but times had changed.

  “Romieu, my dear friend, we want better fruit, not more fruit. We must crowd the vine, eh? We must make him uncomfortable. Not let him strut his stuff for the ladies.” There was a round of laughter; Romieu, true to his name, always had an eye out for the ladies.

  “Lower yield, higher quality. This is our owner’s plan. Thirty, maybe thirty-five hectoliters,” and even as Xavier said that, arousing a chorus of anxieties, he had trouble not wincing. It seemed rather extreme to him. With Aramon, in almost any year, they could expect at least seventy hectoliters per hectare.

  The men looked from one to the other; there were five of them. During the harvest there might be fifty or sixty day laborers, some of them prix-faiteurs who helped with pruning and cultivating, but these five vignerons were the heart of the domaine, as their fathers had been, as their grandfathers had been. Patrici Sardou, the oldest and often the wisest of them, spoke the real anxiety. “That is all fine,” he said. “But how can thirty-five hectoliters support all of us, all our families?”

  “Don’t worry,’” said Xavier, and he tried to follow his own advice. “Better wine, higher price.” He knew that once they started pruning in the new year, the delegation would be back, complaining that they were leaving too few shoots and too few buds per shoot. A sort of madness, perhaps, but as Xavier finished his quiet Christmas Day reflection—the goose was ready to carve, Françoise needed help getting Maman down the stairs—he concluded that M. Bayly—he had insisted that Xavier call him Thomas, but that would take some time—was giving them a plan for a future, and for the first time since the day the vines started dying on St. Adelelmus, he reflected that the year just past had been good and the year to come might be better.

  As had been the custom for many centuries, the new wine year began on January 22 with the Feast of St. Vincent. To mark this event, as always, long tables were set up the length of the pressing room; families from the village, merchants, even some of the many traveling artisans of the region—coppersmiths, match sellers—started arriving in the morning. After the blessing of the vines was complete, the men prepared for the beginning of pruning with a groaning table and last year’s wine by la grosse cruche. M. and Mme Bayly and their brown baby sat at the center, along with M. Arthur, now a great favorite of everybody. The women served them and then retired to the stove—warmer there anyway—to serve the children and have their own dinners, and when the eating was over, the tables were pulled back and everyone gathered for the pageant about the saint and the donkey, which was put on by the children. This year Gabriella Zabala played Saint Vincent—or was it Saint Martin? Xavier could not be sure, but this was tradition at St. Adelelmus, this acting out of the famous story on this day of the year. The saint was always played by a
girl because saints, after all, were kind of efféminé —but the lead role was the hungry donkey, always played by the domaine’s freshest, wisest boy, a child who could be depended on to ham it up. Bartolomieu Pujol, a bêcheur, a gros malin if there ever was one, did a fine job: he snorted, he butted Gabriella, he rolled his big brown eyes and shook his tail, and by the time he finally took his first fateful nibble of the vine shoots—so the story went, the donkey had demonstrated that a pruned vine grew better fruit—the younger children in the audience were screaming with excitement.

  After the explanations given to the previous delegations, and after this reenactment of custom, there was no real voiced complaint about the pruning, which started the next day. If the men believed they were slashing into their own livelihoods, they did not say so. The pruning would go on until early March, and it was challenging but meticulous work; each man had his own style, and Xavier could walk down the aisle and name the man who had pruned each vine. Depending on the weather in the months to come, one style could do better than another, but who knew about the weather? There was little for Xavier to do during this time; once the broad objective had been laid out, supervising another’s pruning too closely would simply not be tolerated.

  In the beginning of March they sold the last year’s vintage to M. Fauberge—the price they received was not encouraging—but not before he and M. Bayly had put up a few dozen bottles of Xavier’s Carignan/Grenache blend for their own purposes. Xavier had no real idea of the proportions—he just mixed it roughly half and half—but whatever he had done seemed to live up to Bayly’s expectations. M. Fauberge was pleased; his business, like Xavier’s, lived by the cask, but his heart was in the bottle. “Fine color,” he said, holding a bottle up to the light. It had a little purple—a little eggplant, but redder, more like cherries. Like a pomegranate, M. Fauberge had said, but Xavier thought that was getting a little fussy. “No more than thirteen percent,” Bayly added. M. Fauberge took a sip, sloshed it around his mouth, and spat it out. “If I am right,” he said, “a year in the bottle will soften it.”