Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  Beal’s mind was afire with questions that winter. She turned twenty-two, asking, Who am I? What have I done so far and why did I do it? She did not mind this turn; it was past due, maybe, and there was an ease even in the stony drafts of St. Adelelmus that encouraged meditation. Confession, even. To herself, anyway. But her thinking did surprise her from time to time; the questions that popped to her mind were usually far more troubling than the answers. Such as, what would have happened to me if I had married Lawrence Goodrum? She spent many hours on this one. How that might have happened, what possible sequence of events were necessary to have made it plausible, who indeed she would have had to be—well, no need to figure out all that. This was daydream, after all, speculation, a thought experiment. Maybe that was the way to put it. She’d be nursing Randall or sitting in the kitchen with Gabriella or marketing, and an uninvited voice would break in to these moments and inquire as to how her life would have been different if she were Lawrence Goodrum’s wife, living in Boston, Massachusetts. Yes, she did miss those city mornings, the sounds of the city coming to life, that massive machine, the markets, Les Halles, those hundreds of thousands of people. In their own way, each Paris morning was like a rebirth, when everyone took their last minutes of sleep and solitude before the engine began to rumble. In Tuckertown, everyone seemed to wake up shouting at the highest volume, and at St. Adelelmus it was the opposite, where the mornings in summer seemed so still, so silent that when she awoke, she could easily imagine that she was the only person on earth.

  On the day Lawrence arrived, Beal saw him and Thomas coming up the hill to the bastide, but she was busy helping Gabriella and her father, who were frantic with relief and alarm, and the Señora herself, who, utterly refreshed by her outing, was in the best of spirits, eager to get back to her labors. When Beal found Thomas and Lawrence on the terrace, Lawrence had changed into an open-necked shirt and rough, baggy trousers, the clothes of the workingman, and he looked remarkably handsome, much handsomer than Beal remembered, older, pleasantly weathered. “Mr. Goodrum,” she said. “You certainly look more comfortable than you did walking up the hill.”

  He took this with good cheer. He stood up for her arrival and made a slight show of modeling his costume. “I came prepared. I had to find a mean little shop in Montpellier. They couldn’t believe I was buying this for myself.”

  “I’m sorry things are so disorganized.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your cook. I remember that you were very fond of her.”

  “She gets restless,” Beal answered, and then considered mentioning Aunt Zoe and the “walkers” back home, but somehow this didn’t seem the kind of thing he would understand, or care to hear about.

  “I am eager to see what you have been up to,” he said to both of them. Thomas had brought out two bottles of Xavier’s blend, and in the sun they radiated a ruby light.

  “You’ll find out more than you want,” said Thomas. “M. Murat is set to show you all our new vines. Tomorrow will be a long day.” From here, Thomas went on into Terret and Mourvèdre and other cultivars, and Beal thought he was being boring. In fact, Lawrence didn’t look all that interested.

  “I’m sure Mr. Goodrum doesn’t need to hear quite so much about our grapes,” she said. She didn’t mean to sound so dismissive, but Thomas, cut off in mid-sentence, gave her a querulous look.

  “Certainly,” said Lawrence. “I look forward to it all.” He turned to Beal. “Thomas tells me that you might be persuaded to take me for a picnic in the mountains. Just like New England.”

  Beal had not heard of this, and she wasn’t pleased to have her services offered like this. To have her companionship offered by Thomas. She glanced up at him, and he signaled back an apology, a shrug that said What else are we going to do with him? Maybe, thought Beal. “I’ll see if Gabriella can come,” she said.

  “Lovely girl,” mused Lawrence.

  In the end, Gabriella worried about leaving her mother that day—it seemed the Senora’s moods had something to do with the phases of the moon—and Beal could not persuade Arthur to come. “I’m not going to be your chaperone,” he said. “If you’re concerned, you shouldn’t go. Why is that so hard to figure out?”

  Beal was stung. “I am not concerned about anything. I am just trying to be hospitable,” she said.

  “I don’t get why Thomas is permitting this.”

  “Permitting?” she said. “He arranged it.”

  “Hmmm,” said Arthur.

  Beal knew what that sound meant—it meant that her portrayal as an obedient little wife left out some relevant details—and she did not want to explore it with Arthur. Tests were being administered, it seemed, if not deliberately by Thomas—Thomas didn’t give tests, she had figured out in Paris, he simply gave people the freedom to figure out their own hearts, which was, in itself, the most rigorous kind of test—then Beal was testing herself, and testing Lawrence Goodrum. It had to come to this. She’d spent a year speculating about seeing him again, and maybe, just maybe all this would simply go away; maybe the proper would take over from the unseemly. He would treat her with indifference, would be slightly irritated to have to amuse the wife when he came to do business with the husband. Maybe he would tell her that he had gotten married over the winter; maybe he would spend the whole time talking boringly and embarrassingly about his family’s store and about the best people and that church and that music hall and all those people and places that seemed to mean so much to him. Maybe when they returned from the picnic, she would be free of him, of the idea of him, which was honestly the best part of him anyway.

  But that was not to be. The stableman Ibarra was the driver for the day, and he spoke nothing but Basque, and as soon as they mounted the carriage, the lunch basket was secured, and they were a few feet beyond the last fence post, Goodrum turned to her and told her that he had been looking forward all year to seeing her again, and she knew the test was on.

  “We weren’t quite sure why you came. You must have much more important business than inspecting vines that won’t bear fruit for years.”

  “I do. It was you. I came to tell you I love you.” It was all too clear that this was not a blurted-out indiscretion, but something he had planned for months to say in exactly this naked way.

  She considered responding with a startled or perhaps bemused Moi? but instead she jumped right to it. “I am a married woman,” she stated. “You are a guest in my husband’s house. Thomas expects to do business with you. I have a child. If you persist in this, I will tell Ibarra to turn the carriage around.” Beal had never spoken to anyone in her life in quite this tone, and she was pleased that it stopped him for the moment.

  “Ah,” he said. “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps what?” she snapped.

  “Perhaps I misunderstood.” In other words, he was leaving it to her to name the indiscretion, which she would not do for him. When she did not pick up on this, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll behave.”

  Beal was silent, too busy trying to figure this out. There it all was once again. Why this instant onslaught? What had happened in those hours a year ago that could be “misunderstood”? Why, in spite of the breathtaking list of reasons she had just enumerated, did he promise only to “behave”? If she could have simply stopped time for a second or two and asked him to step aside and explain what he had just done, she would have. A plea: Tell me, because I really want to know. Am I an unfaithful person, so faithless that none of the facts of my life can protect me from anything?

  They reached the fork in the road, with its shrine and its three branches. The year before, she had remarked only on the two choices, the far left down to the village, and the middle to La Fontaine, but this time they were there to take the overgrown far right up the side of the mountain. Ibarra turned around, as if to make a plea for the horse’s sake that they not take this road, but Beal beckoned him onward. “La Montagne Noire,” said Beal to Lawrence. “Montanha Negra, as they say in Occitan. They call it that, but
it’s really a whole mountain range. The Pic de Nore is the highest point. There are all sorts of stories about it. Tales. Superstitions.”

  “Is that so?”

  She ignored this tepid response and pushed on, describing the fact that all the water for the Canal du Midi came from the mountain, from a vast reservoir on the western slope. “It was built by a mad genius in the seventeenth century. The canal was his idea, connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, feeding it with water from the mountain. He died before it was opened. The whole thing bankrupted his family. One of those ideas that seemed to kill anyone who touched it.”

  This time Lawrence’s response had shifted from mocking her to a sudden stab of reflection. “Yes. It makes one wonder why you try to put anything in the world.”

  “I’m sorry?” Beal was just trying to fill the air a little—the canal, after all, was one of the technological and economic wonders of France—but she could no longer ignore his bored, and now glum, responses. “Mr. Goodrum. Lawrence. What are you saying? If you’re just going to pout, let’s go back.”

  Her tone brought him up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s hard to run a business. That’s what your story about the canal builder says to me. There is always uncertainty, even for those as well established as we. And maybe we aren’t as well established as we thought. The key to it is quality, even if others want to relax standards. This is what your husband understands, and I hope we will both be right.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” said Beal. In fact, she did believe this: a store like that in Boston? What trouble could there be?

  “Let’s stop talking about all this. Tell me about yourself. How did a beautiful woman of our race come to be married to an American living on a vineyard in France? I am dying to hear it from you.”

  “You have heard other versions?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much all that interesting in it. When we were children, we weren’t even aware of the differences between us, or we didn’t think they mattered, and by the time we’d grown up enough to notice them, we’d fallen in love. Or he had fallen in love with me.”

  “Not you with him?”

  She heard the hungry uptick in his voice and might have wanted to quell it, but this thought, which came out of her mouth before she understood what she was saying, knocked her back. “It didn’t quite work that way,” she said. “He chose me, and nothing in the world makes me happier, but now I am trying to learn what that means.” She avoided his avid look. “My brother Randall would not have liked to hear me say it this way, but that’s the way it was.” Yes, it was—is—the way it was. He started to speak but she cut him off. “Maybe none of this is easy, but there’s nothing more to say and there is nothing in my story that is worth dying about.”

  They left it there for the moment, as the wagon had reached the end of the road, and Ibarra turned to suggest that whatever frivolous and time-wasting thing they had in mind, it was going to start now. They descended and started clambering on foot up to a crag with flat ground and a good view. Lawrence carried the picnic basket, looking the part: healthy, rugged. That is, until she heard him trying to catch his breath and felt the softness of his palm when he took hers to help her crawl over a boulder. They found a flat spot, and Beal spread out the blanket. She took out the food that had been packed for them, and they ate quietly. She had been too agitated about this day—this “adventure,” as Lawrence had said on bidding her good night the evening before—to eat any breakfast, and she was hungry. So it seemed, was he. It amused Beal that he, like her, seemed to avoid the cheese: cheese and wine, France’s great accomplishments, and she liked neither. She still shuddered with horror at the gobs of Camembert Mme Vigny tried to smear on everything: meat, bread, chocolate.

  “Tell me about this”—he pretended he was looking for the word, but only pretended—“Tuckertown. It sounds very beautiful to me. I see that look you get when you talk about it. You’re an exile pining for home.”

  “Really?” she said. “We were just surviving in Tuckertown.”

  “You would be surprised how many of us in the North look to the South as our real home.” He ignored her look of surprise, then horror. “Georgia, maybe,” he mused. “Not Mississippi, not even Virginia. But Georgia. Not that anyone would admit to it, but that yearning for a simpler place is there. It’s crazy.”

  “It is crazy,” she said. “Do you have any idea what you are saying?”

  “Of course I do. But…”

  “You wouldn’t want to trade Tuckertown, much less Georgia, for what you had, I can promise you that.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” he answered.

  “You. A college boy. You’d be pretty out of place in Georgia.”

  “College,” he said, with some bitterness.

  Beal didn’t know what to do with that tone, so she went on. “My brother went to college, but I never got a chance to talk about it with him. One of my sisters spent a year at the normal school. But I was just a silly girl, and I went to work instead.”

  Lawrence paused, then continued haltingly. “Yes. I read Latin and Emerson and studied chemistry and was never so cold, so lonely, so miserable, in my life. Every night that I went to sleep in the mean, frigid little room in the only boardinghouse in Maine that would have me, I cursed my father for sending me there. It was as if he thought it would purify me—the weather as much as anything—but in the snow I was coal black. Even if I force my mind to forget those years, my body remembers.”

  Beal could say nothing about this; instead, she put her hand on his forearm, he clasped it there with his other hand, and they remained joined like this for a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  “I would have been happier in Georgia,” he answered.

  There was a breeze coming from the valley; there was always a breeze from the south in the summer, a dry and cleansing wind off the garrigue, fragrant with the herbal perfumes of this land. “Don’t that feel good,” she said. “That breeze.”

  “Feels right special to me,” he answered, laying on his version of a southern accent, which was about as convincing as his French.

  She smiled; a stupid joke, but she liked it anyway. “In the winter the wind comes from the north,” she said. The mistral, they called it in Provence, all the air in a semicircle of southern France being sucked into the Mediterranean, as if it were being pulled out of your lungs. “It’s an Occitan word,” she said. “It means ‘master,’ because of the way it howls. They say the winds off the mountains could drive you crazy enough to kill your wife. Some poet said that.”

  Below them Beal could see Ibarra harnessing the horse, Philippe, such an immense and unquestioning beast, nothing but horsepower; Beal appreciated him but was not interested in him. “I miss the mules,” she blurted out. “You’d never guess what personalities they have. Their soft noses. How they love their jokes. They look at you, and their eyes laugh. Did you know that?”

  Lawrence knew nothing of mules and therefore said he didn’t; they didn’t use mules in Boston.

  Once Beal started on this, she couldn’t stop. “I miss corn. Isn’t that crazy? Sweet corn on the cob, your chin and cheeks slippery with butter. I miss eating it that way, not caring about the mess. And you’re right,” she said, “I miss the sound of Tuckertown, lying in bed on a hot, hot night and hearing the grown-up voices, just barely, from the porches, as if all over Maryland people were speaking simple truths in the darkness. You tell me our people are rising in Boston, but I’ll say this: I don’t think our people, any people, have ever been wiser, more honest about themselves, than they are on those porches in the South.” She gulped back the emotion in her throat. “I miss those women who called me ‘child’ and drew me into the pillows of their big, soft breasts, comforted me from time to time. And I miss my Mama and Daddy.” She turned away so he would not see the tears on her cheeks, and as she packed up the picnic supplies, she quickly dabbed her face with a napkin.
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