Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “I don’t think it was a deliberate choice,” said Thomas.

  “Of course not. She took him because he was friendly and willing to let her draw close. He waddled over, and she grabbed him by the neck. Next stop: the oven. A lesson here.”

  “Arthur, what’s happened to you? You used to be such a fine misanthrope; now even the geese like you. You’re a regular Saint Francis around here.”

  “You mean the guy with the birds and bunnies?”

  “Right.”

  At the end of the meal, in the slanting light of later afternoon, Beal left to attend to Randall, to help in the kitchen. The Señora had resisted this help, this intrusion, from the beginning, but now, after almost three years, she seemed to realize that Beal was never going to stop, that she did this work because she enjoyed it, that the community of women in the kitchen was something she wouldn’t be giving up. Often there were more women than just the Señora and Gabriella, wives and daughters from St. Adelelmus taking a moment to themselves, enjoying a small glass of wine with this woman who spoke all the languages of the domaine and none of them. Sometimes there would even be a tiny drop of absinthe in a glass of water.

  Thomas and Arthur remained at the table. “Beal and I are so happy for you,” said Thomas. “Proud of you, if I can say that.”

  “If you can say that? Yes, you can say that. You saved my life, so I think you can claim almost anything you want.”

  Thomas deflected this. “What was I going to do with an old goat shed?”

  “What you did has nothing to do with real estate.”

  They sat companionably for a few minutes. “So,” said Thomas. “Is 1896 going to be the year you finish Beal’s portrait?”

  Arthur smiled; if the portrait was still on his mind, it had nothing to do with a career as a portraitist, as a painter in fact—which Arthur had now abandoned. He wasn’t even drawing very much these days, giving his all to photography. That autumn he had bought a pretty good horse and a small depot carriage, with shelves and brackets for his equipment, and now he was off for days at a time. “That portrait was always more about me than about Beal. It was about what I wanted back then. I haven’t taken it out of the crate since I got here.”

  “Or is Beal herself too unfinished?” said Thomas.

  “That’s not like you, Thomas,” Arthur said, the smile gone.

  “Doing what?”

  “Asking a leading question. She seems happy to me. She seems to have made her choices. She’s said nothing to me that would make me doubt that.”

  The noise from the kitchen was cheerful; the bastide, Thomas reflected, was filling up nicely. He’d come to that conclusion in the course of the fall, and though his boyhood and his family’s life in Maryland were now happily further and further into the past, he could not help—as if to give one last kick—comparing this bustle to the Retreat, which had become emptier and emptier as the years passed. And now, he reflected sadly, it was just Mary there, sleeping alone in their father’s bed.

  “Beal’s pregnant,” he said. “Due sometime in March.”

  “Yeah,” said Arthur. “That’s what she said.”

  “She told you? I should have guessed.”

  “Yeah,” said Arthur again.

  Thomas would not ask another leading question. Arthur was like her journals, a source that could not be tapped. In the fading light and now, in the quiet from the kitchen, they sat for a few more minutes. This whole thing, his life, was moving forward, obeying its own laws, and even if those laws were somewhat unknown to him, they represented order and goodwill. For now, it was the best he could hope for.

  15

  In early May, Madame Bernault took a bad fall in the hallway outside the kitchen at the Hôtel Biron. Suddenly she was flying through space, and as she landed, she marveled at the firmness of the stone meeting her face; God had put us on this earth to learn certain lessons, she thought, and the reality of the firmament was one of them. There was charity in such hard knocks. She heard herself say “Ooompf,” and the next thing she knew, the lay sisters and the baker, M. Jolly, were propping her head up on a pillow and debating whether she had broken any bones. Word had been sent for the doctor, and as they all waited, she lay there, surprisingly comfortable, sort of elevated, with a series of restful images passing before her eyes, images of Quebec mostly, of the attic where she and her three brothers slept, but a few of her years here in Paris. Among them an image of tall, awkward, austere Mary Bayly standing at the curtain of her cubicle, expecting praise. Mother Lucy did not think she was dying—it was possible, of course, and no problem if that was so—but what seemed more likely was that she was en état de choc. Madame Bernault’s conceptions of life and death, and of the rebirth and afterlife, favored what was plain, what was likely, what was small. If a modest and unassuming religious of the Society of the Sacred Heart was to be lifted in order to observe her own passing, then this was fine, but until that was proved, choc it was. Still, she knew as she lay there that she was in a very different realm from all the faces around her—somewhere between here and there.

  She was barely aware of the time passing, of the doctor arriving, of the sisters carrying her into her room and putting her into her nightgown, and once again, with an almost ecstatic warmth circulating through her body—maybe she was already dead after all!—she felt bathed with kindness from all around her. She basked in their concern. She could not imagine that all these people would do so much for her—little, nondescript Lucy Bernault of Lac Fermat, Quebec. Then she slept—she had no idea how long—and this time when she awoke, the comfort was gone and her entire body felt as if she had been stoned, which wasn’t far from the truth; one eye seemed swollen shut, and though her tongue found all her remaining teeth, her jaw felt as if it had been shattered. She knew then that she’d gotten all this attention because she needed it.

  “Well, Mother Lucy,” said the doctor, who seemed to have appeared instantly, “you had quite a fall.”

  She tried to agree, but couldn’t get her mouth and lips to cooperate.

  “It would seem that you have broken no bones. Luckily, the strongest bone took the brunt of the fall.”

  She was able to raise her eyebrows, or one of them, high enough to indicate that she wondered what bone that was.

  “Why, your skull, of course.” He said this happily. He was a young man, freshly minted from medical school, but for all his high spirits, he couldn’t avoid taking things to a darker place. “It will take a while for you to recover. You will feel very, very sore. I hope it is bearable.”

  “Yes,” she mouthed. Was unbearable an alternative available to her?

  He asked her what had happened, and since she could not answer, he told her: she had not tripped on anything; her balance, which had been getting worse, was simply no longer reliable and she could no longer live as she had; honestly, it would be best if she kept to her bed from here on out. “You are so fortunate to be here in the hotel, where you can be looked after. You have earned this care,” he said. “I hope you will accept it without complaint.”

  Which she did, because she had no ability to complain at that point, no real capacity to reflect on being told that she should remain bedridden until she died. Episodes like this conversation with the doctor passed in review before her eyes, but they seemed completely unrelated; they floated in time without context. As the days passed, the pain of her injuries slowly diminished, and with help she could get herself to the water closet, but she had no desire to do anything more than that, returning to her bed thankfully. Her thoughts, her memories, were now her vocation, and she had no problem with this; one must accept. To do otherwise was to deny God’s grace. She reflected that their Blessed Foundress, Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat, had spent her last years confined, at least during the winter months, and that some of her most beautiful letters came out of this period. The illnesses and fevers of winter had been God’s way to slow her down, which was good because the end had come swiftly. Her last words ha
d been rather prosaic: “My head. My head,” she said on that morning in May 1865, falling face-first onto the breakfast table.

  Mother Lucy had no way to keep track of the days, and she rarely asked. One of the priests would come in to celebrate the Eucharist from time to time, and she figured those times were Sundays, but she had no way and no need to keep track of how many Sundays had added up. She had never been much of an intellectual, but she recalled what Saint Augustine had said about the nature of time: “If no one asks me, I know what it is.” Any of these man-made ways of keeping track of time began to seem completely pointless, which amused her when she thought of her lifetime of adhering meticulously to the canonical hours and the daily schedules in the various pensionnats where she had taught. These schedules carved something human out of time, and she had served as a foot soldier in that good fight but was now willing to surrender. The hours rushed in like the hordes at the gates, pell-mell, unmarked, unchallenged. Death was the only clock that seemed relevant now.

  Madame Bernault would not have been surprised to learn that the young doctor had announced that her end was drawing near and that word should go out to her many friends that the time to say goodbye was upon them. But she was surprised when people began to appear, made manifest, it seemed, out of her memories and dreams. They would come in and talk for a bit, mostly about years passed, and Mother Lucy knew that most of these visitors were in the flesh, but she also assumed that some of them were not. One day, about ten of the girls she had taught in Louisiana arrived, all in their frocks, none of them aged a bit, which was not possible. They sang her a little folk tune that she realized she herself had taught them, probably illegally. Her father paid a nice visit. She had last seen him more than sixty years ago, a kind if taciturn man, of a sort of which she’d known many. She was certain that this one was her father, as he was missing three fingers from his left hand. He asked her how it had all gone for her, and she answered that it had gone quite well, that she had risen far, much higher than could have been expected. This hurt his feelings about the humble circumstances he had provided for his family, and she spent the rest of his visit praising his goodness, his constancy, his intentions.

  So Mother Lucy was not surprised one day to see Beal enter the room. It was a warm day, perhaps the first day hot enough to be called summer. She was not surprised, or she would not have been if there weren’t two Beals entering the room side by side; this was a new wrinkle for her, as if, in her condition, she could now see the soul’s shadow. One or the other, or both, must be an apparition. Of course, when she looked more closely, focusing her eyes, she realized that the other Beal was actually a different person, a younger, lighter-skinned version of Beal, a very beautiful girl.

  “Mother Lucy,” said Beal. “How are you?” She had come to her bedside and taken her hand.

  The mental effort required to make sense of this dual apparition had sharpened Mother Lucy’s awareness of the moment, and she was conscious of her own responses, that she was speaking out loud. “I am very well, my dear,” she said. “I am so happy to see you. I have thought about you so often.”

  “Did M. Richard tell you I was coming?”

  Now that Beal mentioned it, perhaps he had. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he had forgotten. Or perhaps he had asked Céleste—she visited often, of this Mother Lucy was certain—and she had forgotten. There were simply too many permutations, and Mother Lucy’s brain no longer worked quickly enough to give any sort of response. Beal waited for a few seconds, then turned to indicate the girl with her. “This is Gabriella Zabala,” she said. “I have told you about her in my letters.”

  The girl came forward, took her hand, and said how pleased she was to meet her after all Mme Bayly had said about her.

  Mother Lucy was now quite in the moment, remembering well that this was the daughter of the couple who helped them in the Midi, that she had become Beal’s almost constant companion. Her accent and dialect made her hard to understand, but Mother Lucy was raised speaking québécois, had come to maturity among the Creoles of Louisiana, and had long ago acquired the ability to focus not on the blossoms of language, but on the roots.

  “Of course,” she said. She reached up a hand to Gabriella’s face, proving to herself once and for all that this was not a mirage. The face was warm; the girl leaned into her hand like a cat.

  “Gabriella has come with me to help with the children. We have taken an apartment on the rue Cler for the summer in order to be with you.”

  The mention of the rue Cler threw Mother Lucy’s grasp of time out the window once again; after all, a place could be anywhere in time. What children? Those two little girls, what are their names? She decided she would have to take all this in slowly, and indeed, when she next looked up, Beal was gone and in her place was a charmless novice. Perhaps, after all, Beal’s visit had been one of those otherworldly ones, but this was a part of her life she was determined to keep straight to the very last breath, and she asked her sitter whether she had had guests earlier in the afternoon.

  “Yes, Mother Lucy,” she said.

  “Two young women? There were two of them?”

  “Yes, Mother Lucy. A Negress and an Occitane.”

  Oh, what joy. To see Beal again before she died. She hadn’t even prayed for such a thing; faith is the assurance of things not seen, she knew that, but still, it seemed wrong to pray for anything in this life that you don’t believe can ever come to pass.

  * * *

  Beal had never for a moment doubted that someday she would have to return to Paris, to finish with it one way or the other. Eons ago Diallo Touré had predicted that she and the City of Paris would be in a duel to the death—and since then she had read Père Goriot, horrified when she got to the end to find the words he had quoted to her: À nous deux maintenant. As in almost everything else, he had not been entirely wrong. So here she was. From the instant she and Thomas heard from the Richards that Mother Lucy had fallen and would probably not live much longer, they had agreed that she and the children would go to Paris and stay as long as it took for Lucy to recover, or depart; Thomas would join them when and if he could. Gabriella’s going with them seemed obvious; introducing that beautiful girl to this beautiful city had been such a sweet thought, but Beal herself rejected it as soon as it came to her: she knew that Gabriella would never leave her mother. A rare visit from Gabriella’s father, Señor Zabala, had made the difference. He was a wiry and slightly bruised man; if he weren’t married to the Señora, he would have been invisible on the domaine. Beal was surprised when he sent his wife to her study to announce him, and he entered holding his cap and told her that there were no riches he ever could have hoped for, no blessing he could have imagined equal to his daughter being lifted to Paris, and if that happened, he could die tomorrow a happy man. For Beal, this was not Gabriella’s father speaking this way about a daughter; it was her own mother, Una, begging her to seek a new life.

  The apartment on the rue Cler that Thomas had taken for them was much smaller, much more modest than the generous spaces of the avenue Bosquet, but there was a nursery for the children and a small room for Gabriella with a window on the inner courtyard. Beal’s bedroom opened right on top of the bustle of market days, which other tenants might have objected to, but Beal did not. There was no Mme Vigny this time, just the two young women and the two babies, and when it was hot, they would cook their fish or make their soup and then eat as a family at a little table by the window in Beal’s room, watching as the spindly shadow of the Eiffel Tower marched down the street, their own perfect way to mark the hours.

  Years later, Thomas treasured this image of them. Beal and Gabriella—he imagined them as a couple, though not as lovers. In her letters to Thomas, Beal scolded herself for spoiling the girl, buying her things at the Bon Marché, sending her off in the morning to wander as she herself had done, and then impatiently waiting for her to return with stories of wonder. As Beal had described in her journals, he imagined their sleeping arrangeme
nts in those brutal nights—a hot summer, one of the hottest in memory—as Randall and little Céleste fussed and had to be taken from one bed to another, Beal and Gabriella passing in the night in a swoosh of nightgowns, and by morning they’d all be in Beal’s bed, not because all these hot bodies nose-to-toes made it more comfortable, but because their intimacy made discomfort more bearable.

  Nearly every day, one of them, one or the other, went to visit Mother Lucy, and after a few weeks she seemed to have stabilized, to have become more lucid, at least when she wasn’t tired.

  “I have no gift for words, as you do, as Mary Bayly does,” she said one day in the midst of a discussion of chestnut blossoms. “I was very simply educated.”

  By now, Beal was used to these sudden swings in Mother Lucy’s conversations. “As was I. If you could call what schooling I had an education of any kind. But you can’t be taught wisdom.”

  “Well yes. That is perhaps the point. But here is what I know: Before God, we can always speak from the deepest reaches of our souls.”

  Beal did not know quite where Mother Lucy was going. She said she supposed what she said was true.

  “These past few weeks I have been trying to recall my prayers, my meditations before God. To remind myself what God, in His mercy, spoke through my body. This is something those who do not live a life of faith and devotion do not understand about prayer. They think we are just asking for favors.”

  Beal allowed that she felt her prayers were so often unworthy, were just about silly things. Mother Lucy said that when she reflected on this prayer life, by far the most important topic over the past four years had been Beal herself.

  “Me? Mother Lucy, why me? What could you have said about me? You have bothered yourself too much about me. There are so many people, so many other young girls who need the light of your care.”

  Mother Lucy answered as if Beal had not spoken. “Some of it might be painful for you to hear, if such a thing could ever happen, but that is the nature of grace.”